you're too young & eager to love

Session three! ... three? Three, I think. Session # __ of AWS!
Needless to say, I am much happier with this week's results compared to last week's.

Some context: I wanted to keep this on Hadassa so that she's witnessing the event and thus does not know what's happened or what's going on in Orson's head. As a result, I think it can read like Orson just murdered poor Despina and is having a breakdown, but it's really that he's coming to terms with desiring her and struggling with his sense of self. So what do all good vampires do during times of existential crisis and blood lust? They go on a murder spree! While countless of victims may have died here, one of them was not Despina. Not yet.

I've read this like five times and I feel like I still missed some grammar issues. Tread lightly, I was under a time crunch, okay!

--

“Truthfully, I love you so much that I will defend you even from me.”
- Elías Nandino (1900-1993), from “Don’t Come Near Me“ translated by Don Cellini




Her dreams wake her before dusk. They are not good dreams, have not been good dreams for eons, and she comes to consciousness like a drowned victim struggling for air.

The house is silent or as silent as old houses can ever be; houses this old have a personality, a presence. They murmur and creak and whisper. The doors contain secrets, and the windows unlock memories. Still atop her mattress, a corpse except for the languid feline blinking of her eyes, Hadassa can sense rather than hear the noises of her home–the old floorboards and how they shift, the flaking of the gilded wallpaper, the rasp of the stairs, the rats scurrying inside the mostly empty pantry, the caretaker on the porch who waters the violet flowers lining the property. The sun is still a threat outside her barred windows with their heavy curtains, but she throws back her sheets anyway and slips into a silken robe the color of jade, belting it about her waist.

The sleep is still heavy on her. She rests one hand against her bed frame, fighting it, and eventually she can leave the room. Her steps are quiet and slow; she keeps to the shadows although all the windows are shuttered and the curtains drawn. The hallway is a mausoleum, the house a crypt. None of the candles have been lit, and there is no music from the victrola in the parlor. Outside, Linemell bustles and heaves, a booming crush of bodies and smells that dangerously beckon.

Hadassa is too old to be fooled by the punch-drunk promise of hearts or the temptation of veins. She ignores the hint of her hunger and steps more lightly now that the last urge to sleep dissipates from her bones. It is a privilege of her age, this ability to fight what comes most naturally to them, to protest against the organic call of her body and its desire to avoid the daytime hours. Passing closed doors, she can feel her children in those rooms, still dead to the world, so like statues in their stillness, but for a moment her heart overflows from their proximity. She has not had such a full house ever before, and there is a contentment settling over the estate now.

It is not until she reaches the bottom of the stairs that Hadassa becomes aware of a change, a difference. It is not a realization so much as a feeling. She turns her head to the left, waiting, some keen animal instinct making her alert. There is not a noise around her, but still she knows. Curious rather than afraid, she follows her intuition and is surprised to find Orson in the empty, unlit dining room. The windows here are covered by the same thick curtains as the rest of the ones in the house, but she cautiously eyes the hazy glow surrounding them. A sliver of the curtain has been left open, and the sun slices through the darkness, leaving a sliver of light across the floor.

With his head in his hands, Orson looks like a human again. Hadassa stands in the doorway, unnoticed, and studies him. He’s hunched at the edge of his seat, his elbows on the ebony dining table, his fingers gripping at his tousled dark hair. He’s closer than she likes to the light, and there’s an odd rawness to his right hand, the skin there the smooth redness of a fresh burn. She can see the long line of tension that is his curved back, the knotted, rigid muscles of his shoulders. He stinks of the city, of old blood, and his usually clean hands and clothes are dirty, stained. He has the scent of the grave around him, the kind of rot that’s internal and festering.

“Blood of my blood,” she says with her golden-amber voice.

Her voice startles him so much that he overturns his chair, and it clatters to the floor as he whirls to face her. His wolfish eyes are wild and dark, storming, and there’s blood in those eyes, blood on his cheeks. When he wipes his tears away, he leaves grit behind and stains his fingers more.

“Haddie,” he says, his smile shaking and feeble, and for a moment she sees a shadow of fear dance across his face before he veils it.

“What’s the matter?”

He shakes his head, and there is torture even in that smallest of movements.

“Has something happened?”

Again, he shakes his head but then gives a miserable laugh. “I am unwell, I think.”

“Unwell? Nonsense.”

Hadassa rights the chair and watches as he steps away from her, as he follows the curve of the dining table to the antique bar cart with its gold chrome finish. Orson has always been her least melancholic, her most fearless, her third progeny and in many ways her favorite after Nayeli, but Nayeli has been unbound for some time after leaving the fold many years ago. She has loved him for his viciousness, for his charming cruelty, for his selfishness that mirrors her own and teaches her justification and forgiveness. She has almost never seen him cry, never seen him tempted by madness or a desire for despair. He has been stalwart in this way, as inclined to this blood-life as any other natural born predator. It unnerves her, then, when he pours from the communal crystal decanter with a shaking hand. The blood he pours is old, fetid, the caretaker hasn’t yet replaced the previous night’s portion, but Orson drinks it anyway. He gags but upturns the glass, catching the last sluggish drops in his mouth.

“Tell me,” she says, her voice stern. “Tell me what has happened.”

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His fingers are trembling. There’s a crooked desperation to the way he grins, and he gestures with his empty red-stained glass, flourishing it above his head like a drunkard in a tavern. “You told me once that we are most like gods, do you remember? We kill indiscriminately. We live long. We die only from foolishness or by our own choosing. Do you think we tempt fate, being what we are?”

“Who is to say what is natural and what is not? We could be the natural progress of evolution or an anomaly or perhaps the fates made us to act as a balance to the order of things.”

“Natural,” he murmurs.

“Do you think I have the arrogance to assume that I know any of this? I was not told our secrets. I know no more than what I know, which is that I am what I am.”

“And what if you regret what you are?”

This, more so than anything else he has said, concerns her. She hides it, however, and crosses the room to him. He lets her take his face between her hands and closes his eyes with a choked sigh when she sweeps her fingers across his eyes, the dark fine hair of his eyebrows, down his angled cheeks. She presses her mouth to his tear stains. “You have to tell me what has happened. I cannot help otherwise.”

His hands cling to her waist, knotting the silk of her robe, and he dips his head to her shoulder. He peppers kisses up her neck, breathes in the familiar scent of her dark hair, trembling while she strokes her cold fingers across the back of his skull.

“Orson.”

He shakes his head and clutches at her.

She pushes too far. When he can sense her inside of him and surrounding him, her blood calling to his, her will asserting itself, he pulls away. “No,” he snarls, feral suddenly. “Not that, Hadassa. Get out of my head!”

For a moment, she wants to press him. She could do it. He is strong, but she is stronger, and he has inside of him, at the core of him, only that which she gave away from herself all those years ago; she can always best those who are still bound to her. It is her love for him that she acquiesces to after a moment; she apologizes for the invasion by guiding him back into her arms.

“You must sleep,” she says finally. “You are tired. You cannot fight the day and not expect to suffer from it.”

“Yes,” he agrees reluctantly, weakly, but he’s pressing his mouth against her neck again, over her collarbone, pushing his face into the folds of her robe, trying to nuzzle her shoulder. The affection is tepid, automatic, a desolate condolence for his behavior, and she untangles herself from him with a scowl of revulsion.

“Let’s speak tomorrow then, when you are more rested.”

When he slinks away, it is with stooped shoulders and a bowed head. So like a fallen hero, his clothing crumpled and stinking of human sweat and human blood and human death, his hands and face still dirty with gore. Hadassa watches him leave, folding her arms across her chest to fight against the chill that runs down her spine. Watching him fade into the shadows of the house is like watching a ghost retreat to hell.