Desire of the Soul (2 page)

“No that is a lie, but yet I already know your answer, your real one. Whatever, that is of no point here. I just would like you to know, that you have nothing to worry about. It will make sense soon enough,” he replied, and suddenly I couldn’t move.
 

As I stood there, still as a statue, Duke started to change. His top canines grew long, and his before grey eyes started to glow a bright red.

Slowly, I felt extreme terror as my brain realized what this person was. Before I could even begin to try to react though, Duke bit into me and my world faded into blackness and pain.

Rebirth

Days, months, even years could have passed, but I could not tell time. I could not feel, but one feeling. Pain. Pain so raw, so terrible, I drowned in it. I could tell my body was changing, growing increasingly more durable. Increasingly more indestructible. My world was no longer filled with a multitude of colors. It was only filled with one. Red.

Just seeing the red, gave off waves of even more pain, and I wanted to fold into myself. I wanted to do anything; I would do anything, to soothe the pain.

Was I alive? Was I dead? Is this what Hell felt like? Was I such a bad person in life that I deserved this torture? Yeah, I was mean to a few people every now and then, but nothing that deserved pain of this multitude! Or maybe that was just my opinion.

Even more time passed, and slowly the pain started to fade into something more bearable. Colors started to come back to me, and with the colors, memories. Memories of my family, my friends. Memories that pushed away the red. Pushed away the pain. They rooted me to reality and life.
 

“It is time for you to awake,”
 
a voice bellowed, cutting through the thick fog between me and the world. It was a familiar voice, very familiar, and sent shivers down my back. When the words reached like tentacles into my brain, my eyes snapped open.
 

I could tell it was night, and yet the room was bright. I could see the cracks in the white ceiling, and every stroke of light blue paint on the walls. Everything was visible to me, from the large bed I was lying on, to the microscopic bugs crawling in the carpets. The smells though, they were the most prominent. There was the dank, foul scent of trash, and the sweet citrus scent of oranges.
 

“Welcome Tammy, to your new life.”
 

The voice was quiet, and yet it pierced my ears as though the person was screeching right into my eardrums. Instantly, my body went into a crouch. I snarled at the voice, looking left and right to try to find the speaker.

“Good God, try to act at least a little civilized! You are part of my kind now, and we are not animals!”
 

A person materialized from what appeared to be thin air, and I started snarling again. My mind recognized who the person was immediately, but my body acted of its own will. I pounced on Duke, my teeth elongating as a hunger took hold onto my body. A red haze started to fill my vision, and my thoughts mushed into one another. My body moved at a speed that should have been impossible, but somehow felt natural. I could not think but one thing, I was hungry.

The pain that the hunger brought was like a slow burn in my throat that kept getting worse and worse as the red haze got brighter and brighter. Before I could get to Duke, get to my meal, he disappeared.

“Tammy, I am quite sure that is not the right way to treat your maker. Now, I can see that you are hungry so I brought you a meal. If you want it, you have to calm yourself down,” Duke said, his voice again quiet but piercing.
 

I forced the redness away, and walked backwards onto the bed. The burning in my throat was still there, but for the time being it had lessened into something that was hard to ignore but not impossible.
 

As before, Duke appeared out of the air. This time I was ready for it though, and my body didn’t react. All though instead of it just being him, he brought another person along.
 

The person was a white homeless guy, who smelled like crap. He was wearing a T-shirt black with dirt, and long pants just as gross. His face was full of zits, and his eyes were glazed over. All over his arms were bite marks, and I started to salivate as I thought of how soon one of my bite marks would be on him, and his blood would be in me.

“Sorry I could not bring a better meal. But since this is your first time, I can almost guarantee this one will not last long. So eat up. When you are done, feel free to nap on the bed. Good bye, and I will come back soon,” Duke said, and with a sigh dropped the homeless man to the ground and left.
 

I felt the red haze start to creep over my eyes again, and so I quickly shook it away. If I was going to do this right, I had to at least attempt to be myself.
 

I grabbed a part of the man’s arm that was unbitten, and opened my mouth. My canines were still long because of being frightened before, and they tingled in anticipation. I bit into him, and my body automatically moved closer and closer to him. The man moaned, and my eyelashes fluttered.
 

The taste was addicting, it was sweet like chocolate, melting onto my tongue and sliding down my throat. It filled me with warmth, and made me feel almost connected with the homeless man. I wanted more, and more, but a voice in my mind started yelling at me to stop.

I forced my mouth from his arm, and immediately felt coldness where the warmth was before. The guy shuddered, and his eyes opened.
 

“Keep going....please,” he slurred, and reached toward me.
 

I threw his arm away from me, slamming it onto the floor. A crack sounded from his arm, and the guy screamed. The glaze that was in his eyes before cleared away and he started to back away from me.

“Shit... I’m sorry. I did not mean to do that. Um... How do I fix this?” I whimpered, and folded my arms around myself. He had started to bleed where I had broken his arm, and my body started to move of its own accord.
 

I felt the red haze hit me full on, and my eyes focused on the blood. I was hungry again. So, so hungry. My eyes closed, and when they opened I was the predator and the man was the prey.
 

Memory

I opened my eyes sleepily, and stretched on the bed.
 

“Finally, you awake. Your meal was satisfactory I assume?” Duke asked me, and I nodded slowly. “Good. I came in here, and you were passed out on the bed.”

I looked around, and the homeless man from last night was nowhere in sight. I had no memory of what happened after the red took over, but I hoped I had not harmed the man any more than the broken arm. I didn’t ask though, because I knew if I asked I would get an answer I did not want.

“Um... Thank you,” I stammered, and bit my lip. My canines were flat and dull when they touched my lips, instead of being sharp as they were before.
 

Duke smirked, and looked me up and down. “You are still wearing your clothes from before when you were...human.” He said the word human like it was the plague, and I looked down at myself.

I was wearing a pair of pink Victoria Secret sweatpants, and a thin white T-shirt. There were splotches of blood and holes on my shirt, and I felt bile rise in my throat. What did I do last night?

“How long have I been...out?” I asked softly, noticing how my voice was like velvet. It held restrained power and was alluring, unlike my before high, bell-like voice.
 

Duke looked down at a watch on his wrist and shrugged. “Well, probably seven hours. All though, if you are talking about how long you were ‘out’ during the change, well that was about three days.”
 

My mouth dropped, and I shot up from the bed. “Three days? Everyone probably thinks I’m dead!” I yelled, my fingers raking through my hair.
 

Duke looked at me with an amused smile on his face and chuckled softly. “Trust me, no one thinks you’re dead. They think you have gone away for a few days to visit your parents. I am quite good at convincing people,” he said, and strode toward me. “Soon you will be very good at convincing people too. And that will not be the only thing you will be able to do, there are many more advantages to being one of my kind.”

I backed away from him, my back hitting the bed I had just seconds ago been lying on. “I do not want to be what you have made me,” I spit out, and immediately knew that was a mistake.
 

Duke’s eyes blazed a fiery red, and he grabbed my wrist tight enough to make me gasp with pain. “I have made you more powerful than the world itself. I am the King of all Amatores Sanguinis. I have not made one of us in more than a thousand years, and I have chosen you. But you do not want to become what I have made you?” He shouted, and I flinched away from him.
 

The red disappeared from Duke’s eyes, and he stepped away from me, looking down at the ground with his hands held tight within one another. “You said Amatores Sanguinis. What does that mean?” I asked softly, wanting to calm him down as quickly as I could.
 

“Amatores Sanguinis means lovers of blood in Latin. That is our kind’s name. We are lovers of blood.” Dukes’ voice was sweet, as though his before craziness had never happened.
 

“I thought we were called vampires?” I asked, biting my nails as I thought.
 

“Stop that at once. We do not bite our nails, that is a human habit and you are no longer a human. And to answer your question, some call us vampires, which in some way is true. We do drink the blood of humans with long pointed canine teeth. But we are as alive as them, not reanimated corpses,” Duke answered back, and I pulled my hand away from my mouth to put it on my chest.

My heart was beating, although not even close to as fast as when I was a human. “Do we have to drink the blood of humans?” I asked softly, looking at Duke with wide eyes.

He thought for a moment, and then looked at me slowly. “Yes. You can try to drink only animals, but that will be like only eating salad. It does not fill you up, nor will it ever. So you will end up starving yourself, and inevitably killing off the parts of you that make you, you.” Duke looked so lost and so sad, that I knew something like that must have happened to someone he had loved. But before I could ask him about it, his face turned expressionless and he looked away.
 

“I have to go. I will come back later to check on you. The TV has cable, and there are many other things to keep you busy. Good bye.” Without another look at me, Duke was gone.

---

Hours passed agonizingly slowly, and still Duke had not come back. I had spent the time watching the TV, cleaning myself up, and thinking. Why had Duke seemed so sad? What had happened?
 

Just as I was beginning to worry though, Duke stepped through the doors into my room, looking as cold as ever.
 

“Are you hungry?” he asked, his voice betraying no emotions.
 

I thought for a moment, and then shook my head no. “Thank you though,” I whispered, biting my lip.

“That is a lie. You are a newborn. They are always hungry. Therefore, you are hungry.” Duke’s eyes burned red for a moment, before going back to their normal grey color. “I have decided that I will take you out tonight, so you can find a meal that you think is satisfactory.”

I nodded, afraid to anger him anymore. Something was not right with Duke, and I decided that if I wanted to figure out what it was, I would need to do what he said without any questions. “Okay, thank you. When are we leaving then?” I asked slowly, and tried to not wince as I heard the excitement in my voice.
 

“We will leave now. Do not worry though; I have an idea of where we will eat. You will find many...tasty treats. They are of the richer blood. But do not kill, because killing will bring the police onto us,” Duke said, a cruel smile on his face.

I nodded once, and followed him out the door. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face, and that made me more scared than anything else. It made me scared of who I might be becoming. If I was turning into a monster, or something even worse. Because I knew deep inside me, that I shouldn’t be afraid of monsters. They’re not as scary as the things that lurk in the dark. They’re not as scary as the things that get excited at the prospect of eating people.
 

---

The night was dark as Duke and I walked down the street, yet I could see everything. I could smell everything too, and had to force myself to stop breathing, because each breath brought in more and more smells, some bad enough to make me gag.
 

My throat had started to burn again, just heat at first, then a full on fire. Instinctively my hand went up to my neck, trying to claw out the pain.

“It’s okay, young newborn. You will eat soon enough,” Duke murmured, taking my hands off my throat and holding them in his. “We will eat here. Pick a house, and remember you cannot kill these humans. We are not to be noticed.”
 

I nodded once, and then ran to the nearest home. But I could not get in. It was like an extremely thick invisible door was in front of the thin wooden door, too thick for me to get close enough to go inside.