The Vampires of Soldiers Cove (12 page)

When the very last one had made its way into its self-imposed grave Samuel lowered his hands to his side and took a deep satisfying breath of the
sweet night air.  His face contorted as he caught a scent he did not expect.

Knowing exactly where to look he spotted me on my perch.
He met my gaze with such ferocity that I was paralyzed. With incredible speed he zipped up into the tree, bared his fangs, unhinged his jaw and ripped out my throat.

              I woke with a start.  Sleep had not provided the escape from reality I had hoped for. I made my way into the shower and started the water. Turning the hot water up as high as high as it could go, I stood there as it pelted down on me. After a few moments I was able to get a grip on myself and began to clean up.

I sat in front of the mirror some time later in a black silk robe and slowly worked on getting the tangles out of
the curtain of my long curly hair. Looking at myself in that mirror I didn’t know who I was anymore. My hair was darker and thicker than it ever had been, my lips were a beautiful shade of blood crimson and my eyes were beginning to deepen, not back to brown but to a more liquid black. Some might have looked at me in that moment and thought I was beautiful.  I, however, could only look at my altered appearance and curse my new life along with my stupidity in accepting it.

But there was no going back now.
What Gavin had done to me could not be undone and I silently cursed him too. He had given me a gift of immortality and a million complications to go along with it. I knew from the story he had told me of the Acadians refusing to feed that it had been looked upon by the others as being ungrateful, but I began to think it might be a useful means of suicide. I found myself wondering if there was a way to stake myself through the heart or use my new found fire starting skill on myself.

My thoughts of self-pity were interrupted by a soft knock at the door.
Right now the last thing I wanted was to see Gavin, but I couldn’t very well pretend I wasn’t here when he knew damn well I was. I went to the door and opened it a tiny crack to see Holly standing there. For a moment I was actually disappointed it wasn’t him, even though I wanted nothing to do with him right now.

“Can I come in?” she said.  I opened the door fully and motioned for her to come inside. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Fine, why do you ask?” I said.
Holly gave me a look that said she knew I was lying.

“You know,” she began
, “when you are in a bad state your maker feels it too. Your blood is one and you are connected. My brother seems to have disappeared. Are things ok between you?” She liked to cut to the chase I’ll give her that.

“We had a fight,” I admitted.
“I’m not sure I want this life and if someone else is going to try to kill me I think I’d prefer to die by my own hand.”

“Someone wants to kill you?
  Angus made it clear that you were to be left alone,” she said.

“Your other brother James is not too fond of me, and that monster
yesterday seemed to want me dead too.” I left out the attack by James. I heard the words coming out of my mouth and realized I sounded like I was whining.

“I’m sorry Holly,” I said
. “But it’s how I feel. I need to ask you something. If I were to stop feeding how long would it take before it would kill me.”

Her mouth dropped open
in horror at the suggestion. “Look, I know you’re going through some changes right now. The transition is never an easy one at the best of times, but you’ve been brought over under difficult circumstances.

You’ve been asked to do things in a short period of time that most of us have taken decades or centuries to do.”

She paused, “and you don’t have the support of all of us, I know that, and for that I am sorry. But you must not end your life. You must be mentally strong for the sake of us all; even the ones who curse you now will need and revere you if you have patience. You’ll see.”

Through the haze of my sadness her words fell on me, but I didn’t want to hear them.
“How long though?” I pressed her.

“At the young age you are now you could last without blood a
week, maybe two.” She looked at the floor trying not to tear up. “You have to understand though, that it would kill Gavin. It would tear him apart.”

“That’s crazy, he doesn’t even know me.”

“He’s your maker.  The loss of the blood bond would render him almost helpless.  It is a thousand times worse than the worst depression you could ever know.  And besides, he knows you better than you think he does.”

“What are you talking about?
What do you mean by that because there seems to be something going on here that nobody is telling me.”

Holly sat there for a long time in a silent debate with her conscience. “I’m
going to tell you some things.  Gavin was going to tell you everything when the time was right, but I’m going to go against his plans and tell you now seeing as how you are not thinking clearly at the moment.”   I had a feeling I should sit. I took the empty spot on the bed next to her.

“One
night, about five years ago, Gavin was out roaming through the woods at night like he always does when he’s at war with himself. A lot of us who are residing at the sanctuary don’t come out during the day; we keep a low profile because we’ve been declared legally dead and being recognized, of course, would create problems. Gavin never wanted to be vampire and if it weren’t for his accident he never would have had this life. He hardly spoke for the first few years, grieving for what might have been.” 

“
One night he went into the woods to keep himself away from the humans while he awaited his death when he came across a young girl who was lost. He caught her scent because she had been out walking and was bleeding from a severe injury to her leg. She was distressed and disoriented. He hadn’t fed in a long time and she would have been an easy kill.”

As she was telling the story I vaguely remembered my mother mentioning to a psychiatrist that I had left the house during the middle of the night and become lost.
They found me the next day asleep in the woods. I had no memory of it at all for some reason but it was around the time I had begun to hear voices and so it was all blamed on the illness.

“It was me wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” she smiled warmly. “You were helpless on the ground with your leg bleeding. He could have killed you but he said you looked into his eyes and you weren’t afraid of him.  You reached for his hand and held it. It was the first real human contact he had since his transformation that didn’t end in violence.”

“He closed up your wound and
it was the first time he tasted blood without killing. Before that he couldn’t restrain himself and killed every time he fed.  Over the years he killed a great many. He lay with you all night and protected you from the animals who were circling around. They had smelled the blood too.”

“In the morning you were found safe and sound by your parents who carried you out and took you away.
You were gone for about two weeks and in that time he...suffered.”

“He wanted to see you again so badly. When you returned he spent every night under your bedroom window keeping watch over you. He just wanted to be close to you, to protect you.”

“Sometimes in the summer you would sit on your back steps at night and look up at the stars.
He would always try to get a glimpse of you on those nights and when he did it made him so happy. He begged Angus to turn you but of course he was refused because of who you are.”

“You mean my heritage don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, as crazy as that must sound to you. You have to realize that for a lot of us the expulsion is not just a chapter in history, we were there and we know it from memory.”

“
Anyway,” she continued, “he knew you were suffering greatly from what you thought was an illness. Over time he figured out it wasn’t an illness at all and begged again to have you turned for your own sake. Finally when the situation with Samuel came to the point that it has Angus agreed. Gavin convinced him we could use you.”

“I see,” I said.
I sat there quietly not knowing what to say.

“He loves you so much.
Your death would kill him. What can I say to make you understand? What can I do to get you to change your mind?”

“Take me to meet with the others,” I said
. “I want to meet with the vampires outside of Soldiers Cove and tell them about Samuel and see if they can help us.”

“That would ha
ve serious consequences Rachel.  This is considered clan...”

“Clan business?
I’ve already heard that. I want to do it anyway. Honestly Holly, with everything I’ve seen and felt I don’t think just the small number of us here can defeat Samuel on our own. I have a feeling he is coming with an army. We’ll be outnumbered.”

“An army? Are you sure?”

“I’ve seen them, Samuel has control of them. They were burrowing into the ground just on a wave of his hand.”

Holly’s skin paled as she ran her small and slender hands through her hair in distress
. “Alright, I know somebody we can talk to. We’ll have to slip out and go to St.Peters and both of us will be in for a world of hurt if we’re caught. You’re not supposed to leave without Gavin.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.
But I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

“Alright,” she sighed
, “I’ll take you to meet with the contact for the St.Peters clan but I can’t promise anything.”

“I just want to know that we tried,” I said.
I dressed quickly and we crept out of the sanctuary as quietly as we could. We held onto our vials and closed our eyes. Upon opening them again we were in the clearing.

“We’ll have to go get my Dad’s car,” she said.
I felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house, but for the first time in a while I also felt some hope. Someone was at least willing to entertain the idea of working with the other vampires.

We walked to the old farmhouse and got into the car which was sitting at the end of the driveway.
Holly produced a key from her pocket and turned the engine over.

St.Peters
, a small but busy place, is about a fifteen minute drive from Soldiers Cove. It’s a hub of activity considering that the grocery store, banks, restaurants and schools serve most of the tiny outside communities like Soldiers Cove.

St.Peters was also, according to Gavin, a good place to feed due to the a
mount of tourists in the summertime. There were museums, a couple of small hotels and of course the canal which was a big tourist draw.

The main street of the town
, with its pretty little lamp posts and neatly lined stores, takes about a minute to drive through from one end to the other. On the edge of the village just before the town ended was a large, beautiful brick house. The owner of this house was a man who had at one time also owned most of this little place. A smart and savvy business man named Malcolm MacIver. I laughed to myself as we pulled up the long driveway. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to be here.

Malcolm was an ‘old man’ now, although he never seemed to age.
People always remarked how good he looked, similar to Gavin’s parents. Now that I think about it there are quite a few people I’ve known over the years that don’t seem to age. Little did I know that all of the little communities around me were chalk full of vampires.

“We’re here,” Holly said.
We made our way up the stone steps to the decorative glass door. It must have been about two o’clock in the morning but our knock was answered right away. Malcolm was up and showed no signs of having been sleeping.

“Holly!” he exclaimed
, “nice to see you.” He hugged her warmly. “Are you finally coming out of the sanctuary to be among the living?” he asked her.

“Not quite yet,” she said, “I have a few loose ends to tie up and then we are taking over our old farmhouse in Soldiers Cove again.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said motioning for us to come in. He led us downstairs to a rec room complete with a pool table and mini bar. I had heard he was well off but his house was semi modest. The rec room looked like it didn’t really live up to its full potential.

“Will you have more children?” he asked
.

“Oh yes, I hope to have at least five more this time
,” she smiled.

“What’s the grand total now?”

“Sixty one,” she said.  Did she say sixty one? Could I have heard that right? This young woman who physically looked no more than eighteen or nineteen years old had
sixty one
children?

“How nice,”
he said. “You still have a ways to go before you catch up with us though. Our grand total now is eighty eight.” My head was about to explode. I knew he had six because I had gone to school with some of them, but eighty eight? That didn’t even seem possible.

“I’m getting ready to go to
sanctuary in a couple of months,” he said lowering his head. “It’s that time again. I plan to be back out just as soon as I can though.”