Sweet Blooded

Nine: Disassociated

The next time I opened my eyes, I was alone, still on the couch in the study. The flesh along my jawline ached faintly, and the base of my skull was throbbing from the blood loss. I brought my hands up, covering my face with my arms.

Stupid. How could I be so stupid?

I looked to my left, at the coffee table. As I predicted, the rat poison was gone. There was a sure guarantee that I would never see it again. 

Judging from the screaming protests in my joints as I climbed to my feet, I hadn’t been moved in a while. I must have been out of it for a long time. My feet dragged as I walked across the plush rug, over to the mantle,  so that I could peer into the mirror mounted above the fire. I tilted my chin and brushed my jawline with the tips of my fingers, wincing, as I examined the flesh there. 

The bruises looked just as bad as they felt, if not worse. A thick line of black and purple covered most of my jaw, almost looking like a high collar. The bruising extended a good inch or so on either side of the bite marks which were surprisingly still faintly visible.

I scowled when I made eye contact with my reflection, turning away quickly. 

When Markus came to find me for dinner, he acted strangely, making a point to not make eye contact with me. Gabriel and Lukas were not present when I sat at the table. When I began to eat, Lukas left me alone. I wondered if this was part of my punishment as well, an attempt to make me feel more isolated than I already did.  

My dinner was a large bowl of plain broth. I soon learned it was to help with the pain that I hadn’t been prepared for. Merely opening my mouth brought on an awful ache. 

This proved especially problematic when I was woken from a dead sleep and had to rush to the bathroom in the middle of the day to empty the contents of my stomach.  While it was painful, the sickness had at least interrupted a particularly dreadful nightmare.  

When my stomach felt properly hollow, I carefully rinsed my mouth of the sour taste, then glared at the mirror.

I hate him, I told my reflection silently. 

He was gone the next night as well, and I was glad to not have to face him.

I dressed silently when I awoke. I drank the bowl of broth left on my dresser, and exited my room, padding down the hallway to the study. A sigh of relief left me when I found it empty.

Feeling brave, I pushed the study door closed behind me, and turned my attention once more to the shelves. It took several minutes of searching, but I finally came across a shelf with only four books that were both in my language, and something of a story rather than a history. I must have skipped over the shelf the countless other times I’d gone searching.

I took one of the books, the thickest one, toward the fireplace, pulling the armchair closer to the flames, before I sat down and began reading. 

Books had been my escape long before the night of the auction. They were another world I could disappear into when I couldn’t stand to face reality- which ended up being the majority of my life. In the dorms, books had been a scarce commodity. I hadn’t had a book to read in a long while, and I found myself flipping the pages at a much slower rate than I once had. 

Nonetheless, my consciousness was pulled away from my angry mind and sucked into a sweeter fantasy. I didn’t even hear when the door opened. When his figure crossed my peripheral, I nearly threw the book into the fire in surprise. I fumbled with it, catching it awkwardly by the pages, as I stared up at Gabriel who had come to a stop at my right. 

He looked down at me for only a second before he crossed the room to his desk. 

“You’re not to close that door when you are in here alone, understood?” he ordered as he sat down in his chair.

“Yes,” I replied, opening my mouth only a little to utter the syllable. I continued to watch him warily, waiting for him to walk over and demand my wrist as he normally did. Or would he begin feeding from another spot, as a continued form of punishment? The bite marks on either side of my jaw began to ache dully at the thought.

“Can I help you, Evelyn?” he called, not looking up from his work.

I bristled slightly before answering, “No.”

He looked up then, his expression blank, but cold. “Then quit staring at me. Go back to reading your book.”

I blinked at him, my eyes widening a bit. His stare darkened a bit when I didn’t look away, so I looked down before he could open his mouth again. I stared at the pages of my book for a long while before I realized I was now holding it upside down. At this realization, I flipped it back around, trying to find my place that I’d lost. I could have sworn I heard a quiet chuckle, but didn’t want to chance a glance at him again. So I shook my head, diving back into my escape. 

Gabriel gave me three more days of rest before he resumed his normal feedings. I couldn’t find it in me to even be grateful.

On a particularly cold night a couple weeks after my punishment, I was sitting closer to the fire than normal, curled up with a new book. My speed had improved in the days I’d finished the first book. 

Where he had been absent before, Gabriel was suddenly standing just behind me. I was getting used to looking up while flipping a page to find Gabrel waiting near the arm of my chair, watching me passively. While I still had to fight to keep a scowl off of my face every time I saw him, the worst of my anger had faded, lying dormant within once again. Somehow, I mustered up the courage to initiate a conversation this time. 

“Why do you stand there watching me when you can just interrupt if you want my…” my voice trailed off. For some reason, I couldn’t utter the word blood.

He held out his hand and I begrudgingly gave him mine so that he could pull me out of the chair. Rather than take from my wrist right then and there, as he was prone to do very often, he sat down in my chair, moving my book to the floor near his feet, considerate enough to mind the pages so I wouldn’t lose my place. 

“‘I’ve never had a human from the auction house that could read,” he admitted, and he guided me back so that I was perched on his knee, my back to him. “It’s interesting.”

A frown pulled my lips down slightly. Interesting how? I shivered, a sudden wave of nausea washing over me, when I felt his fingers moving my hair to front of my shoulder, baring the back of my neck. 

“How many humans have you purchased from the auction house,” I wondered, my mouth dry. It was more of a stall tactic than a genuine question. 

I gasped in surprise when he bit down on the skin of my shoulder at the back of my neck. My hands clenched and unclenched as I fought to keep still.If I could force myself to keep still, I learned that he usually wouldn’t restrain me. I squeezed my fists into the fabric of my dress, curling and uncurling it around my fingers. 

He finished several minutes later, healing the wound before grasping my upper arms to hold me steady, or keep me from slumping forward, as if he knew my head had begun to spin. 

“Cattle aren’t taught to read,” he continued, still carrying on his line of indirect questioning. “Yet you can read, albeit slowly.”

I frowned slightly, staring into the dancing flames before me. “I wasn’t always cattle,” I admitted.

“That isn’t what your papers say,” he commented.

I hummed lightly in response offering a one shoulder shrug. “The paperwork is wrong.” 

He turned me slightly to the side, as though to get a good look at my face to judge whether I was lying or not. “Where did you come from then?”

“I was born free.”

“A free family?” he questioned.

“Yes. My parents provided a service to the royal family. In return we were allowed to live a little more freely. Like the doctor that came when I first arrived, I guess.” 

“What did your parents do?”

“They never told me.” 

“And how did you end up at the auction house?”

“Maybe the royal family changed their minds. Maybe my parents did something wrong. I never found out what it was for certain. But the vampires came one night. They slaughtered my family and left me at the auction house.” I spoke stiffly, the now dormant anger being stoked once again. But the anger was just a blanket I’d thrown over the painful wound that had never healed properly.

Gabriel was silent for a long moment before speaking again. “Were you the only child?”

“No…” I whispered. 

“What happened to the other children?”

I didn’t answer this question as freely. The anger died down immediately, leaving only the tears swimming just along the bottom of my vision. I didn’t even breathe for fear that they might start falling. 

“Answer me, Evelyn,” he prodded, his voice stern but also...gentle.

I exhaled a long breath, closing my eyes and willing the tears away before I spoke. “I only had a sister. She was left at the auction house as well. But she didn’t last long. She was a lot younger. She got sick and died just a year in.”

A longer silence followed those words. It gave me time to wrestle with the emotions that I hadn’t faced in years. I had built up a sturdy barrier around my mind and left those memories on the outside. I never faced the past. It was as though that night, I had died to myself. I still had my memories, but I’d always been able to shut out the pain as though it weren’t even mine. As though I wasn’t the one who had watched the vampires stalk into our living room and snap the necks of my parents who hadn’t even had time to wonder if they should be fearful. I lived as though that were someone else’s past, not mine.

“How old were you when you were left at the auction house?”

“Eleven,” I whispered. My voice was more strained than I realized. .

I jumped at his touch in my hair. When I looked to the side slightly, I could see he’d begun wrapping and unwrapping a lock of my hair around his fingers, as though it were his own hair. He didn’t seem to be aware he was doing it, either.

In the silence, I looked down at the book resting on the floor. “Do you have more books like these?” I ventured, nudging the book lightly with my toe.

He leaned down to pick the book up, examining the cover and the spine. “This book isn’t even a part of my library,” he informed me, placing it into my hands. “It was left behind by a...family member or other guest at some point in time.”

My lips formed a silent ‘oh’ as I held on to it tightly in my lap. I would be fine rereading the same few books for a while, I guess.

I wanted to just get up and leave, but he’d always dismissed me or been the one to leave me alone. I didn’t want to risk his temper by offending him. I was so unsure of the rules.The powerful, Original vampire kept me perched on his knees for a long time after that. I eventually went back to reading my book, tuning him and whatever he was doing with my hair out of my mind.