Corben's Thirst: The Thirst Within Part 1.5 (5 page)

Charlotte met me just outside in the garden and gently threw her arms around me without a word. Her arms were forgiving, nurturing, and so full of love that it broke my heart. My body shook against hers. She hugged me tightly and tried to calm me.

“Shh,” she said, in a soothing tone. “Do not be distraught. I have you.”

“But I must tell you,” I said. “You have the right to know.”

“Tell me,” she said.

We went inside and locked ourselves in our bedroom. My voice broke as I told her. The shame finally shattered me—it wasn’t just that my brother had found out; it was the indignity of explaining to my beloved wife that I had had an affair with my sister-in-law. It killed me to confess the transgression, even as I explained that after that September two years before I had never sought her again, that I had tried to put the past behind me.

“I assumed she had tried to move on, as well,” I concluded miserably. “But I did not foresee that the want of happiness in their marriage would prevent her from doing so. I cannot even ask for your forgiveness.”

To my utmost surprise, I felt a soft pair of lips on my forehead. Strong arms enveloped me. “You have not injured me or yourself in my eyes. The greater blame must fall on
her
, because she was the one who sought you out while being married to your brother.”

“But surely you must admit, you cannot deny, that I also carry a large portion of the blame. I let her in.”

“Very little. She took advantage of you. You were young, and she was a married woman. She initiated the affair. But blame yourself as you desire—in my heart you are clear of fault. But perhaps my feelings for you may be preventing me from wounding your image. Tell me something. Do you love me?”

Her question took me by surprise. “More than I love myself,” I said without hesitation.

“And do you love
her
?”

“No, never,” I replied, again taken aback at her question. “I feel a friendly regard for her. Or I used to, before… all of this.”

“Then,” she said as she kissed my temple again, “what else can I do but love you as I have loved you since I met you?”

***

An emotionally unstable Madeleine showed up at our door twenty minutes later. Her cries roused the entire house, but we instructed the servants to leave us alone, assuring them that we would handle it. Charlotte answered the door. Angry, hurt and embarrassed, Madeleine lashed out at my petite wife, still a teenager, blaming Charlotte for her woes.

But Charlotte was no small child.

“You brought this upon yourself. Have you no shame?” Charlotte asked her.

“Corben!” Madeleine yelled over Charlotte’s head, pretending to ignore her. “He will not see me! You must allow me to remain here. Else I will tell
everyone
.”

She tried to step past Charlotte, but Charlotte grabbed her arm and addressed her in a stern voice. “Madam, behave yourself. Attempt to save your reputation and your family’s. How many more people must find out the kind of woman that you are by you acting this way?”

Madeleine looked shocked and outraged. Without a second’s notice she slapped Charlotte across the face.

But Charlotte’s face didn’t even
move
.

My wife’s eyes darkened, and before I could reach out to her, before I could even demand Madeleine to apologize, Charlotte returned the slap so hard that I heard a sickening crack as Madeleine’s neck twisted beyond its range of movement, and her entire frame followed, flying sideways. I froze, but Charlotte didn’t stop there. She pounced, then slashed her nails across Madeleine’s neck.

I saw the blood flow down her neck for only a second before Charlotte’s mouth viciously curled around it. And then I couldn’t see anymore.

***

“
Madame
is locked in the washroom and does not answer,” Charlotte’s voice drifted to my ears through our bedroom door as I hurried to dress the next morning.

Thierry had finally come looking for Madeleine in the morning after announcing a sudden end to his visit at Brunsfield. My housekeeper, Gulya, roused me to announce him, and a minute after I woke up I was horrified and afraid as the memories from the previous night came rushing back. I hastily got out of bed, noticing that Charlotte was not by my side, and that I looked terrible glancing at my reflection in the mirror on the way out of my room. I had a broken nose, a swollen jaw and bags under both eyes. By the time I was ready to meet Thierry he had already made his way inside my home and was pounding on the door to the guest bathroom, a concerned-looking Charlotte at his side.

“Open the door, Madeleine!” he yelled.

“I am deeply sorry, Monsieur,” she told him. “I should not have allowed her to stay the night, but she was visibly distressed.”

Thierry ignored her and continued to pound on the door, calling his wife’s name in vain. I knew Madeleine would not answer.

After witnessing Charlotte’s attack, I had turned away from the gruesome scene. I had no idea what Charlotte had done with the body afterwards; whether Madeleine was indeed in the bathroom or buried in the woods behind our house. And even if her body was in the bathroom, how were we to explain the ghastly wound in the neck?

“Thierry,” I started to say cautiously behind him. But then I stopped because I had no idea what I could say to him.
Get ready to see something
shocking
?
My wife ripped the neck off of yours
? Thankfully he ignored me as well, and I didn’t have to say anything anymore.

Tired of knocking, Thierry threw his weight against the door a few times until it cracked, and then entered the bathroom. Past his figure I immediately saw a pool of blood… and next to it was the crumpled form of my sister-in-law. He gasped and ran to her while Charlotte pretended to be surprised and screamed hysterically, quite convincingly.

Madeleine was on the floor, half undressed with her eyes open, her head in a pool of blood. A bloody smudge was found on the rim of the bathtub. Charlotte must have tried to make it look like Madeleine had slipped and cracked open her head on the tub porcelain edge. Still, that wouldn’t explain the neck, I thought—but when I saw the body I had to do a double-take. Madeleine’s neck appeared smooth and untouched. There was no wound on her neck. Yet I wouldn’t question my memory—I remembered too clearly what I had briefly seen the night before.

And then I finally realized how Charlotte claimed to drink from random villagers’ necks and have them be ignorant of it the next day. She must have been able to heal the wound, somehow.

While I processed this, Thierry had rushed to his wife and knelt beside her, all the time calling her name as if to wake her, making small sniffling noises. He picked up the upper part of her motionless body and touched her head wound. A dry sob escaped his throat and he pulled her into his arms, cradling her. Charlotte had stopped screaming and now sobbed quietly, and we remained still for a few minutes while Thierry rocked his wife’s body. Finally he got up and carried her body outside, never questioning why, or how.

For hours there was commotion in the Great House and throughout the grounds. My mother summoned me alone, and at first I was afraid, not knowing what she wanted, but I quickly figured out that she was only trying to learn more information. She didn’t seem to know anything about what had transpired between Madeleine and me. Thierry had not said anything to her. In fact he had not said a word to anyone and remained locked in his old room. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t see me.

The following morning we were all summoned to Madeleine’s services. She was laid to rest in the Brunsfield graveyard where three previous generations of Ashbys were buried. Thierry remained somber during her funeral and burial. He didn’t speak; he was in a daze, and I saw his pain evident in his eyes.

But he didn’t weep for his wife.

Days passed, and Charlotte and I never talked about what happened. I never brought up her lapse in control. She didn’t seem repentant, and I was rather embarrassed to admit that I was, even if a small part of me,
relieved
that Madeleine was dead. Then I would catch myself and I’d
try
to be sad.

We tried to return to our normal lives, and took an entire week off from our regular employments to mourn our lost “sister”. But at the end of the week my chest was still in pain. I was sure my brother had broken a few ribs when he assaulted me.

Finally I talked to Charlotte and addressed what happened that awful night, but not to discuss her questionable morals—no, something else had been plaguing my mind all that time.

“How did you close her wound?” I asked casually.

“I knew you would ask me that question,” was her reply.

I paused. “You can read my mind now?”

“No.” She sighed. “I knew because I know you.”

I smiled at her, tentatively. “Well?”

She returned my half smile. “
Mon coeur
, a few drops of my blood in the wound, and it heals itself.”

“How?”

“I am not sure. Argus simply told me to do it, and I have been doing it.”

“Directly in the wound?”

“Yes, I gather.”

“What do you think would happen if you poured a few drops of your blood over my ribs?”

She gasped and her face lit up. She had been so saddened at my broken body and her inability to help. She had been taking care of me, but even the best nurse can only do so much for a broken rib.

“Let us see! Lie down!” she said excitedly.

I did as she asked, and she pulled up my shirt. She bit her finger and squeezed a few red drops over my bruised ribs, rubbing the blood over my skin like an ointment. Then she sat back while we both watched with groundless anticipation. But nothing happened. Her blood barely penetrated my skin.

She looked at me with fierce determination in her eyes. And without a word she grazed her wrist against her teeth, making a small gash. She brought it to my lips, but I moved back, instinctively.

“Drink,” she commanded.

“But I….”

“Please. You will be not be harmed, I promise.”

Again I followed her command. I closed my lips around the wound on her wrist and lapped up the blood that had started to pool there already.

The taste was unpleasant, but not unbearable. Certainly not as bad as I expected. I drank slowly. In the next minute the temperature in my chest started to rise. The heat felt nice, taking over the pain. I could feel my body healing. And something else. Dimly, almost too faintly to be certain, I could feel
her
.

“Ahh…” I moaned.

“What do you feel?”

“Something pleasant.”

I felt the pain dissipate. My wounds were healing. In less than five minutes the heat and the pain were gone. And I couldn’t feel her anymore.

“The pain is no more,” I announced.

“
Mon Dieu
,” she whispered, and her eyes brimmed with tears. As I looked closer I noticed they were tinged with pink. “I can heal you,” she said excitedly. “I can heal. Anyone. Sick children, the men, the women of the village….”

“But how will you heal them without them finding out what you are?”

She thought about this for a moment. “I shall bring them medicine, or herbal teas, and persuade them that it is the medicine what has cured them. Then I shall make them forget, like I do when I drink blood. I put them in a trance. Argus taught me that as well.”

At first I was skeptical, but I was happy for her because the thought of helping the townsfolk made
her
happy. But I shouldn’t have doubted. It turned out she could indeed heal them, and heal them she did. She went around the neighborhood healing the sick. She first healed a worker that had typhoid, of whom she had heard through her maid. She healed men, women, and children.

Spending time with the poorest of our village, her heart swelled with empathy towards their problems. She gave money where she thought it was needed, she ended disputes, she relocated people to where she thought they might do better. She became too involved in their affairs.

But not too long after her new self-appointed vocation as town savior she started to change. I only noticed it months later. Helping the town as she did, it had filled her head with an idea of power—the power of being able to bring strength to the frail as her will dictated.

Its counterpart was to take life.

When she came across a person she didn’t deem worthy of healing, she would choose not to help, even if she knew it meant the person’s death. And if, along the way, she encountered a man committing a crime, she killed him.

The first one was a man that worked for me who was a renowned thief. He had been caught stealing from my father’s land in the past many times, and had been demoted to work in Brunsfield Cottage instead. He wasn’t a bad man, although no one seemed to like him. Charlotte the least of all. One day she caught him abusing a horse, so she killed him. It was the first time I spoke against her.

“You should not have killed him for abusing his own beast.”

“A man who tortures his horse is not a good man at his core,” she countered. “Who would be next? His wife? His children?”

“He had a
family
?”

“No—but he might have in the future.”

She became a sort of magistrate in her mind, and started killing everyone she thought was doing something wrong. The more she killed, the less she seemed to care when she killed. I never said anything again. Because as much as I hated to admit it, while I didn’t approve of taking a person’s life, I had to agree that deep down I also thought some people deserved to die.

***

A year passed. I was twenty years old and my wife still looked seventeen, or even younger. But despite her young appearance, she was well-respected in our neighborhood. The people loved her and trusted her. Her “herbal remedies” were magical and could cure most illnesses. She was generous and selfless when it came to the town. She had a purpose and it fit her well.

But she wasn’t truly happy.

Even though it had been more than a year since the loss of Alexandra, Charlotte had never quite gotten over it. In fact, the more time that passed, the more apparent was the wound. Each time a new baby was born in the neighborhood she would briefly become either sad or irritable. She would cry at random times, and when I asked she would say something had reminded her of our lost baby.

I didn’t know exactly when, but sometime later her sadness seemed to go away. It was replaced with an intense resolve. She started spending more time with her maid, Sara. Sara had remained Charlotte’s maid, and she dressed Charlotte and fixed her hair each evening. She did not know about Charlotte’s transformation and remained loyal to her mistress, proud to work for the one that the town called their savior. She would do anything for Charlotte.

Anything
, I found.

Our third winter together was rather cold and desolate. One night towards its end, Charlotte hypnotized Sara and brought her to me.