Nightmare (The Noctalis Chronicles 2)

Two weeks later she brought me a street urchin. Up until then, she had brought me adults. Mostly male, mostly drunks she had fished from the street. People who didn't have a life to begin with. Who wouldn't be missed.

But then she brought a little boy with a filthy face and sooty hands, perhaps from coal dust from one of the factories. His nose ran clear liquid that he didn't bother to wipe. The boy couldn't have been more than eight or nine, and he looked at Di as if she was an angel. She smiled at him and shoved him toward me. The boy looked scared for a moment and that was it. A memory came back to me. Of my sisters, being put in the lifeboat. Saying goodbye to my mother. I pushed him away, letting my wings rip from my back. The boy fell to the ground.

“Are you an angel?” He gazed up at me with an open face and clear blue eyes. I took one more look at him, but didn't answer.

I left Di then. Turned and walked away. She did not follow me as I expected her to.

Cal found me three days later, lying in a river in upstate New York, trying to drown myself.

“That is entirely useless, you know.” I opened my eyes to look at him through the water that made his form slide and shimmer. As if he wasn't real.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Cal.” He lay down in the river beside me. I could feel the water, but I didn't know if it was cold or not. I couldn't remember cold.

“You can't die, you know.” Di had explained to me what I was. That I would live forever. But this wasn't living. This was an existence. And I didn't want it.

“I know.”

“What is your name?”

“Peter.”

“Nice to meet you.” He was cordial, at least. “How long has it been?”

“How long has what been?”

“Since you consumed human blood.”

“I don't know.” I had lost track of days. Lost track of sun and moon and sky.

Lost, lost, lost.

“You look healthy enough. But I know a place, if you would like to come with me.”

I met his eyes, one a bright blue that was almost the color of the sky, the other a rich brown like fresh earth. “I want to die.”

“You already have.”

“I want to die again.”

“You can't.” He stood up, water dripping from the back of his perfectly-tailored suit. Someone I knew wore suits like that. My father. Yes, my father wore suits like that.

I stood up and went with him. I had no other place to go.

While we walked, he talked. He told me of the weather and the history of the area. Nothing about himself. Nothing about why he was here. Why he had found me. Why he was being nice to me.

It didn't concern me enough to ask.

I wasn't aware that I should ask. My existence had narrowed to two things.

My need for blood and sun.

I'd lost everything else in the transition. Cal reminded me how to talk again. How to form words with my mouth and carry on a conversation. We walked for miles upon miles, never seeing a human. I started talking. The words were large and hard to hold onto at first. My mouth had forgotten how to be used for anything other than a weapon.

Slowly, Cal brought me back to myself. Not my human self, but he helped me find pieces and start to put myself together. It was not easy, crafting this new person. In some ways I was a newborn, able to walk and talk, but unable to discern what things were. He showed me the world again.

Cal taught me about balance. About not interfering with humans. To take the ones society would not miss.

Di was never far from my thoughts. Her face was the only constant thing in my mind. I clung to the image of her as if it would float away and I would be lost. As much as I said I wanted to die, the actual thought of it did scare me. Perhaps not scared. I wasn't scared of anything anymore.

It was more that I would continue on in this existence as a thing. A thing that didn't do anything but exist. If was going to live, I wanted it to mean something. Even then, I thought there must have been a purpose to what happened to me. A reason for me to become what I was. A higher plan. We had always gone to church, and I had prayed every night before I went to bed.

The memories were thin, transparent things that slid from my grasp as I tried to catch hold of them. Cal told me not to worry. That they would return in time.

Time passed and Cal and I made our way from New York to Canada and back down into Minnesota. We spent our days in the sun and our nights hunting. I grew better at it, grew to love the trill of chasing, catching, feeding. My whole existence centered on that. I didn't worry about killing.

I never took a child. Only adults. Mostly men who waiting in dark alleys for girls to come buy. Or people who lived alone.

Weeks passed. I thought about Di so much that it nearly drove me mad. I never mentioned her to Cal. We never talked about things like that. I didn't meet any other noctali.

It wasn't until we met up with Di in California that I started to think something was not right. She expressed her surprise at seeing me again and was delighted with Cal. She showed no concern that we hadn't seen one another in a while. She reminded me that she loved me. I told her that I loved her back. I did. Of that one thing, I was certain. It was not a passionate love, or a romantic love. It simply was and would always be.

I started to wonder if that was it. If that would be my existence. Sun, blood and killing. Forever. One night while Di and Cal were finishing off some drifters from a railroad car, I watched from the shadows. I looked up at the sky, as if remembering it was there. My new vision made the stars so bright. One shot through the sky. A fallen star.

One of the men Di had taken moaned before she ripped his throat out. I glanced back at them. And walked away.

They let me go. At first I wondered if they would follow me. Call me to come back. But they didn't. I wandered back to New York. I found my family.

They were still in our brownstone. My mother looked thinner, but not haggard. She could never look haggard. Her face was hollow with grief. My sisters were sullen. All except little Lucy, who clutched her doll and smiled at each one of them in turn, hoping for a smile in return. There weren't many.

I put my palm to the glass, realizing that wasn't the only barrier that separated us. I could smell their blood, even though the cold windowpane. I tried to tell myself that I didn't want them, but I did.

I wanted the blood that pulsed in their skin. If given the chance, I would take them. In a cruel twist, their blood called to me more so than any I had smelled yet. It stared me in the face and I had to blink. And turn away.

I went back once or twice. Watched my mother give piano lessons, her delicate fingers dancing across the keys like little birds. Tucking my sisters into bed at night and singing them a lullaby. The sweet notes of her voice reached out to me. Pulled the memories out. I remembered more in those few visits than I had wandering around on my own. I needed them as a connection to my past. A connection to who I was, even if I wasn't that person anymore.