CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I am glad Jason returned. Him and Marabeth have unfinished business and I like seeing them talk. That was a bit of a cliffhanger at the end in the past! I eagerly await more in a few days! Great writing!
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The Blood: A Denoument
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
YES, you're right. I did leave you cliffhung (hanged) but it can't quite be helped. There is Dan at the end of his human life, but I bet you know what happens even if you dont know HOW it happens yet. More of that son. And Marabeth and Jason certainly have shit tons of unfinished business and its good to see them getting back to it.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT OUR STORY CONTINUES
“Do you want to see England?”
“Yes.”
The camera swooped over a general scene of limestone townhouses, grey sky and black cabs, skyscrapers and then back to Dan’s face.
“I was hoping for a little bit more than that,” Loreal said, sitting on her bed in Long Lees.
“Loreal,” Laurie’s face came into Skype picture “We will take you to England. The three of us can come here. For fun. Not on a vampire spying mission.”
“Vampire spying missions sounds like so much fun.” Loreal said.
“Do they really?” Laurie looked at Dan who looked doubtful.
“Well, it sounds like a band from the 90’s, now that I think of it,” Loreal reflected.
“Are you still talking to Loreal?” Loreal heard Tanitha’s voice in the background. “You should have just brought her.”
Laurie frowned and said, “Wait a second…”
He got up.
“Did you fly?” Loreal asked Dan while Laurie was talking to Tanitha, “or did you… fly?”
“What?” Dan screwed up his face, and then he laughed.
“Oh, no, we took a plane. The Atlantic Ocean is a lot of flying any other way.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“With not too many places to stop.”
“Where are you all? Now?”
“They’re about to leave me in this fancy townhouse,” Dan said, rolling on his back. “They are going to… Rosamunde’s castle.”
“You came all the way to England to be left in a townhouse?”
“Not alone. Myron is staying,” Dan turned on his side and poured another glass of champagne... um prosecco. “I’m not complaining. Apparently after what happened with Evangeline, they thought I might kill Rosamunde.”
“Because she was your maker?”
“Yes. I… I haven’t seen her since I escaped her. Myron feels responsible. He wants to meet her. I think he’d try and kill her, and Tanitha wasn’t having any of that, so she made us stay back.”
“And you obeyed.”
“You don’t not obey when Tanitha says something.”
Loreal grinned and she said, “I wondered if the reason they kept you back was Evangeline too.”
“I think it was, actually. Evangeline changed me.”
“But didn’t Kruinh order you to kill Evangeline?”
“It wasn’t exactly an order, and I wasn’t exactly unwilling, and they say that once you’ve done a thing you get a taste for it.”
“Is that true?” Loreal said. “When you kill you get a…. well, that’s dumb. I mean, you’re a vampire, you must be good at it. Both of you. But Evangeline. Did you like killing her?
“Like is a funny word,” Dan finished his glass of prosecco and reached for the cheese.
“But did you?”
After a moment, Dan said, “Yes.”
“Did it take you so long to answer because you didn’t know it, or because you didn’t want to admit it.”
“Maybe… a little of both. You know, I’ve only been a vampire for fa few years? So much of what I am surprises me. Scares me a little. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my old self and becoming…”
“A monster.”
“Yes. Yes, actually. Maybe I’m already a monster.”
“Well, luckily, I’m a witch, so I’m not that afraid.”
Dan sighed and tossed a grape across the room before moving so fast he caught it, and returning to the bed.
“Fuck, I’m not really joking, Loreal.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Neither am I.
Daniel Rawlinson had come into his second birth screaming, and there were hands on him, holding him down as his veins pounded with a burning fire and his heart raced. His body was at once more hungry than it had ever been and stronger than had ever known. He felt its strength in the resistance of stronger arms.
“Are you simply going to stand there?” A man’s voice demanded, “or are you going to help?”
While he struggled, only dimly remembering what had happened before he’d lost consiousness, the red headed woman, now in a long gown, her red hair swinging free down her back, looked upon him with a wicked smile. He’d never thought that wickedness was a real thing, and then, lifting the back of her hand, she savagely smacked him and he knew no more.
When he awoke the man was there again, and he said, “Listen to me, she likes to see suffering in the new ones she has made.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Carter,” the man said. He was of average height with a sharp, thin face, brown hair, ordinary enough looking, “And she, your maker, is Rosamunde.”
“I’m so thirsty,” Dan grasped at his throat. “I’m so thirsty. Please… Can I have some water?”
He was hungry now, desperately hungry, and not that stomach hunger, but the deep body hunger where temper flared and wooziness began, where your stomach meant nothing. But the thirst was greater.
“Water…” he rasped. “Please.”
There would be time to think of everything later, but this came first, and the man called Carter, unsmiling, stood up and rolled up his sleeve placing his wrist in Dan’s mouth.
Dan did nothing and Carter said, “Drink, already, before she comes back. It’s as I said, she likes for her men to suffer.”
“I’m,” Dan said spitting Carter’s wrist out though, for some reason he wanted it, “I want… Water..”
“Don’t be stupid” Carter said. “If you know what she is, and how could you not by now? Then you know what you are.”
He did, he realized, and as he realzed it, horror crept over him. He had died. It was not untrue. He had been killed by a vampire and now he lived again. Carter pressed his wrist to Dan’s mouth and said, “Drink.”
The moment his jaws sank into Carter’s wrist was the most joyous moment he had ever know. It was the moment of becoming absolutely himself, of quenching hunger in a way he’d never done before. There was not even taste in his memory, simply fulfillment, simply drinking and drinking like drinking light until Carter said, “Enough,” and then, again, “Enough!” sitting back.
“It’s not enough,” Dan said, licking his lips and lying back, panting for more.
“Of course it isn’t. You would have to kill me to have enough. You will have to learn to kill.”
Dan Rawlinson realized before he understood what he had been told, that he was naked, and lying on something like a table. He looked around and started. There were other bodies.
“We are in a mortuary,” the man said simply. Stenger and Stenger’s. German town.”
Dan turned his face in horror from the man who lay on the tray not far from him, and Carter said, “Why are you horrified? A few moments ago you were as dead as he was. You were not merely sleeping, you were a corpse, my good Daniel. Have been one for the better part of a day.”
Dan nodded his head and he felt, suddenly, wise,. There was no time to be scared. There was only time to learn, and certainly to not let on how much he learned.
“Who made me?” he said. “Who is she?”
“Rosamunde Court,” Carter said. “And you are part of her court now. She will tell you all. She has come to the land of Ohio to meet her uncle and his court and defeat them. You have been enlisted to her side and, I believe, will make a very good soldier.”
Dan was going to leave it alone, but chanced on more question.
“And who is her uncle? Another vampire I assume? I just… didn’t think of vampires as having family.”
“Drinkers,” Carter corrected. “And I doubt you ever thought of vampires at all. Her uncle is the Lord Kruinh. He keeps a house on an ancient site of power in a town now called Glencastle. With his bitch of a daughter, Tanitha. But soon all shall be set to rights, and you will be one of those who help set it.”
MORE IN A VERY FEW DAYS
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story and find out what happened in Dan’s past. It sounds like with how his maker was he was lucky to survive. Excellent writing and I look forward to more in a few days!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Oh, she's a real bitch. Of course you will remember she is also Sunny's Maker. How will Dan survive? Well, you'll see in a few days.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT WE RETURN TO THE BLOOD, AND THE LEGEND OF THE OLD GHOST SLAVE SHIP. MEANWHILE KRIS MOURNS MISSING OUT ON HIS INHERITANCE
…Tor behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein.
-The Book of the Law
This land is no man’s land, a place easy to be lost in. There was no greater predator than the white one, and all who wished to escape him, fled into these marshes, into these islands which disappear and reappear, connect and disconnect. When the English, both greedy and lazy came, all along the Carolina and the Georgia coasts, they settled their few cities but believed that death lay in the marshes and low country. Plantations they established, but they left them to Africans they had enslaved. Now and again the white men came to reassert their dominance, and this always resulted in trouble.
History is written by white men and their disgraceful deeds they had washed away, and so most of their relationships with us were washed away. Alongside those the defeats done to them by us have also been forgotten, and so the blood of the English that was spilled in these lands, the uprisings of Black men, have long been silenced and then forgotten.
In the days when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were fretting about their slavery to England while putting a lash to the backs of the Negroes who made them money, the Harrowing of the Dark and Light occurred. It was called this because many people who fled to the wet lands and the hidden lands for peace. Indians and white men, white men who were pirates, and Negroes as well, and in those days, the white families at the heads of the plantations became to much to take and so, behind one called the Black Witch, the Negroes, the pirates, the poor white men, the Indians all rose. They slaughtered all the planting white families. They killed, it is said, three hundred and seventeen Anglo souls.
In 1803 at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, on the coast of Georgia there was grounded a slave ship called the Wanderer filled with Igbo and other West African captives from what is now Nigeria were taken to the Georgia coast. In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained Igbo were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons.
But the flying folk kept their power, although they shed their wings. All the time they were on that ship, They had felt the snarl of the driver's whip around their legs. They all felt the skin being torn to rags, and they all felt the ship and so, when their King called for them to do so, they rebelled, approximately 75 Igbo, and they took control of the ship, drowned their captors, but they were not sailors, and it was in that process the ship was grounded in Dunbar Creek. Grounded in this place, he learned the legend of the Black Witch who had led other African souls to freedom forty years before. By his magic, it is said, he called out to that Witch.
That very day, the King of the Igbo declared, "the time is come." He raised his arms out to the others. And he sighed the ancient words that were a dark promise. He said them all around to the others in the field under the whip, "...kum yali... kum tambe...." He raised his hands and sang to Ala and Amadioha, Ikenga God of Strength, Idemmili, Ogbunabali, and especially Legba, who conceals.
They gave a great outcry and the Black Witch joined them with his tribe. They had taken their name from the Harrowing of the Black and the White, for when darkness and light combine, is it is often called Dun, and so the Dunharrow and the Igbo straightened their bent backs and stood like spears. Old and young who were called slaves joined hands. Freed of their chains, one by one, they marched from the ship and leapt into the water, coming to shore and disappearing into the marshes. The head of the Dunharrow was called, as you have guessed, Augustus, and that Igbo king was Niwala. Niwalla’s daughter married the son of my brother, Octavian, from them come most of the Dunharrow family, even you.
Rather than admit that living Black men were free in the hidden land, the white people said the Igbo were ghosts because Africans could not swim.
And so, the Negroes could fly. White men, lazy and murderous as they were, did not understand the marshes and feared them anyway, while the Africans understood the heat and the land very well, so when white men dared the marshes to drag back the Igbo, the ones Niwalla could not kill, I did, and the spells he could not make, I raised, so that the white men who rarely came into these lands, in time, could not even find them.
After Kristian strauss had gone into the house, the others turned to go back inside as well, but as Jim was heading back, Seth caught his arm. The blond man looked at him and Seth shook his head.
“We’re going to walk a bit,” Jim said, clearing his throat, and he was conscious that the great pelt was still rolled up under his arms.
Lewis and Loreal nodded, but their faces revealed nothing, and it was Marabeth who smiled stangely as she went back into the house, and then the two young men were together on the great porch, and presently, they headed down into the green, and kept walking silently, Jim feeling Seth’s hand in his as they disappeared into the trees where Seth turned quickly, but gently, and pulled h im forward to kiss him.
They kissed for a long time, the blood rising in Jim, and Seth parted from him.
“When you came back from the woods it was still on you,” Seth said. “The wildness. The wolf. You even moved like a wolf, and I can smell the earth on you, and the grass… And the animal you killed. The wolf is on you.”
Jim responded by kissing Seth savagely, and they undressed in the trees, and lay on the pelt, their bodies moving togther roughly. Jim didn’t need to ask Seth if he would accompany him when he changed again. He knew Seth would be at his side, and whie Seth pulled Jim into his arms and inhaled the fragrance of him, Jim’s musk, he understood suddenly what Lewis and Chris had found in each other, the companion who understood their wild nature, who wasn’t afraid of it, who, in fact, rejoiced in it, for he had rejoiced when the gold white wolf came out, rejoiced when he had seen the lamp eyed wolf that was James Strauss trotting beside the night dark one that was Marabeth. He rejoiced in the new way his lover walked.
“You don’t have to hide anymore,” Seth murmured.
Jim parted from him, his eyes hooded, and Seth brushed his unshaven cheek.
“You thought… I thought it too, that being out there was no hiding left. But the fact that you liked men wasn’t the only thing about you, about either of us, and everything else you did, being pleasant, being sweet, hiding your pain so that Kris envies you because he thinks you don’t know pain, was you hid the wolf.”
“Pamela, my… grandmother, she said I should be careful of the wolf. I didn’t know what she meant.”
Jim leaned on one elbow, and there was a leaf in his hair, but it hardly mattered.
“Be careful of it, James,” Seth said, tenderly, “but don’t deny it.”
He drew Jim down, the heat of his body hotter in the warm night. They moved together, kissing hungrily, and Jim sucked on Seth’s shoulder until he bit him. Seth felt the tearing of skin the way he had the first time he’d been with Chris, and almost by instinct, he sank his fingernails into Jim’s back like claws.
They were still for a moment before, deliberately, almost with a curiosity, as if another hand were doing it, Seth caressed the smoothness of the soft skin of Jim’ ass, and then, just like that, with the sharp nail of his little finger, he drew blood, and Jim winced, his buttocks clinching as Seth took his finger to his mouth and tasted Jim’s blood.
“Fuck me,” Seth said, his voice quiet. “Don’t hold back. Don’t be gentle. Fuck me as hard as you want. I need it. I need you to hurt me. A little at least.”
Jim sat up, kneeling, and he made a hocking noise and let a long thread of thick saliva trail from his mouth to his cock, which was thick and arched up toward him out of the darkness.
In the night, under the trees, the darkness was filled with the low, intense sounds of two men fucking, and when Jim had groaned and shouted and come, he turned around and demanded Seth do the same to him They had been so tender with each other in the past, and in need of this tenderness, but now they needed this roughness, and when the roughness was done with them, they lay together exhausted. The night, full of their jarring cries and deep groans and touched by the sounds of young bodies slamming together was quiet now, and the radiating sounds of crickets filled their ears, the tiptoeing of night creatures, the fluttering of wings and the chirp to chirp of birds risen before the morning. In the night the growing moon shone on their bodies, limbs muddied by dirt and grass and smudged of blood, sprawled in contentment past exhaustion, Jim’s head in Seth’s arms, Seth caressing his golden hair.
Jim kissed the bloodied place on Seth’s breast and said, “I love you so fucking much.”
Instead of speaking, Seth lay still while his body was overtaken by emoton, and he responded to Jim one a deep sobbing that rose from the pit of him as he pulled Jim closer and continued to run his hands over Jim’s shoulders.
For a long while Lewis lay in Chris’s arms and he did not wish to move.
“I feel that…” Chris murmured.
“What?”
“Something’s going on in your head.”
“I want to sleep,” Lewis explained, but things are not right.”
Chris waited for an explanation.
“If you could have seen him, if you could have seen the look on Kris Strauss’s face when Marabeth and Jim made the transformation.”
“I imagine it was nice for them, if nice is the word.”
“But not exactly helpful for him. Not one step closer to…”
Lewis sat up in bed, and Chrir watched him sitting on the side of the mattres, nude, smooth skinned and all brown like velvet, and then Lewis stood up and Chris watched him pull on the hooded housecoat, mourning the robing of coffee colored flesh, rounded ass, tender sex so dear to him, but he did say, “Now you look like the witch you are.”
“Don’t just look at me you beautiful vampire,” Lewis said. “Come.”
The two fo them went down the hall and knocked on Kris’s door. They never thought he might beasleep, and he wasn’t. The large room was full of the smell of cigarette smoke, and before he was offered one, Lewis took a Marlboro for himself, and then held out his hand for the lighter.
He had smoked half the cigarette when he said from the windowseat he had invited himself to, “Don’t think we’ve forgotten. we still don’t know what we came for.”
“Mara gets journals and a pelt and Jim does too, but I get nothing. I get these files, these histories, interesting enough but telling me nothing.”
` Lewis refrained from saying that he should be fair, that he should remember what Marabeth had told Lewis, that Kris had refused to read the journals. But Kris probably did not know that Marabeth had shared this confidence, and he would not have appreciated Lewis bringing it up.
“We didn’t come here so Jim and Marabeth could learn to turn into wolves and have fun putting on skins. We came here so I could learn to stop turning into something every time the moon was full.”.
“You came here,” Chris Ashby said, flatly, while Lewis was still thinking of something politic to say, “to learn what you were, and you are learning, slowly.”
Kris opened his mouth, but Christopher Ashby held up a hand.
“Once, I was a man and a very plain one, and one night I was attacked—“
“By a vampire.”
“By French soldiers. Kruinh gave me the choice to die right then or live forever, and I chose life and woke to something I never planned on being. These gifts given by the Dark Hand of God,” Chris shook his head, “we must learn how to live with them.”
“I don’t want to learn to live with them,” Kris Strauss said. “I want to be rid of them.”
“And what I am saying to you,” Chris Ashby said, his voice taking on a very different tone, Lewis noted, “is that there may be no getting rid of them. There may be only learning to live with them.”
“I’ve lived with mine for over twenty years.”
Lewis did not speak, because he saw that his platinum haired lover was not done.
“You have not lived with it. You have lived against it. That is what the medicine did. Now you must learn to live as you are, the same as I do. Jim and Mara made their first kills tonight, but I made one in a long list of kills earlier, going out into the towns to find the life that I would end. We must make our peace with such things, or lose our minds.”
Though his face failed to show it, Kris was grateful for the visit of the witch and the blood dirnker. Even when Lewis had ceased talking there was something as old and as powerful, as inhuman in him as there had been in the vampire, and as Kris gazed form one to the other he knew he had as little to do with the regular human world as did they. He had forgotten this.
He was surprised to hear himself singing Johnny Flynn songs, the words in his ear as he slipped off his sandals and left his room to wander through the great mansion. What had happened in this witches’ house, where Pamela had once stayed, making it her refuge, where, apparently, Delia had been born and where, in the end, his own father had come for answers. He wandered through the darkness aware that he should not have been able to see as well as he had always taken it for granted that he could. Jim, his cousin, had transformed into a wolf before him, but as he thought of them all, Myron, Cyrus, Deborah, Amy, Peter, and Marabeth, yes Marabeth, it seemed they were a ring of wolves, staring at him, only thinly veiled beasts in the clothes of Midwestern white people, the savagery waiting to burst out. He approached the solarium doors to the back gardens but was just barely startled to see in the moonlight coming through, Jim and Seth entering. They were messy haired and bare chested, grimy, smelling of the outside, smelling of, yes, fucking, Seth carried their shirts and Jim the great pelt.
Jim stood before him, looking like he’d rolled in dirt and been beat up and strangled. Yet he looked like a god. There was wild hot energy in his cousin, and for the first time Kris longed for it, wasn’t afraid of the wolf. Jim, more like a animal than a man, his eyes blazing, embraced Kris tenderly, inhaled him, rubbed his back and the back of his head and kissed him on the cheek roughly, rubbing his cheek against him. Ut was almost sexual, but it was not that, not quite. It was fatherly, like Nathan’s embraces, and Kris’s heart cracked at theat feeling, And also, he realized, what Jim had done, and what Nathan had done was animal, and the arousal Kris felt was for the animal. As his cousin and Seth linked handed and departed down the hall, they were silent and trotting as animals and Jim’s smell remained on Kris. He had been marked. He would always know his cousin’s odor.
He felt blessed and wild and strange as he continued outside in the opposite direction of the woods his sister and Jim has gone to. He went toward the pool, singing.
“Gotta get out, gotta shout, gotta sing
Gotta dance, gotta jump, gotta run
Think I'll fight a war, I don't know what for
But I'll learn when I get my gun
Well, I left home three days ago…”
He stood before the pool that was lit from within by the shimmering blue and green light, and slipped off his sandals and then removed tee shirt, shorts, watch, ring, laying them on the shirt, pulled down, at last, his underwear, and was surprised and only mildly embarrassed by his erection and the slick bead at the tip of his arching cock.
He stretched out his arms to break the water as he leapt into the warmth of the pool.
His eyes were closed, and he swam through the warm water,, doing deep breast strokes, going up and down in laps before he plunged himself to the bottom and stayed as long as he could, rocketing to the surface where he lay naked on the water, arms stretched out looking up at the night, eyes counting the stars and the half moon as it made its progressing toward the west.
Kris blinked, but he was not embarrassed at knowing two people were watching him on the other side of the pool. He opened his eyes to behold upside down what would turn out to be Marabeth or maybe Loreal, possibly Augustus. Instead he saw, clearly, a chisel jawed man with white gold hair and an arm band on his bicep, a great wolfheaded cloak hanging over his shoulders. Beside him now, stepped a tall cloaked woman with long golden hair who placed her head on Hagano’s shoulder, for he had no doubt that this was Hagano, and as the woman smiled down, or upside down at him, he saw that her cloak, lined with wolf fur as it was, was hooded, and deep red.
Gasping, Kris spun around to look at them directly, and wiped the water from his eyes, but when he looked where they had been, there was no one there, and he floated in the pool alone.
MORE TOMORROW
…Tor behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein.
-The Book of the Law
This land is no man’s land, a place easy to be lost in. There was no greater predator than the white one, and all who wished to escape him, fled into these marshes, into these islands which disappear and reappear, connect and disconnect. When the English, both greedy and lazy came, all along the Carolina and the Georgia coasts, they settled their few cities but believed that death lay in the marshes and low country. Plantations they established, but they left them to Africans they had enslaved. Now and again the white men came to reassert their dominance, and this always resulted in trouble.
History is written by white men and their disgraceful deeds they had washed away, and so most of their relationships with us were washed away. Alongside those the defeats done to them by us have also been forgotten, and so the blood of the English that was spilled in these lands, the uprisings of Black men, have long been silenced and then forgotten.
In the days when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were fretting about their slavery to England while putting a lash to the backs of the Negroes who made them money, the Harrowing of the Dark and Light occurred. It was called this because many people who fled to the wet lands and the hidden lands for peace. Indians and white men, white men who were pirates, and Negroes as well, and in those days, the white families at the heads of the plantations became to much to take and so, behind one called the Black Witch, the Negroes, the pirates, the poor white men, the Indians all rose. They slaughtered all the planting white families. They killed, it is said, three hundred and seventeen Anglo souls.
In 1803 at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, on the coast of Georgia there was grounded a slave ship called the Wanderer filled with Igbo and other West African captives from what is now Nigeria were taken to the Georgia coast. In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained Igbo were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons.
But the flying folk kept their power, although they shed their wings. All the time they were on that ship, They had felt the snarl of the driver's whip around their legs. They all felt the skin being torn to rags, and they all felt the ship and so, when their King called for them to do so, they rebelled, approximately 75 Igbo, and they took control of the ship, drowned their captors, but they were not sailors, and it was in that process the ship was grounded in Dunbar Creek. Grounded in this place, he learned the legend of the Black Witch who had led other African souls to freedom forty years before. By his magic, it is said, he called out to that Witch.
That very day, the King of the Igbo declared, "the time is come." He raised his arms out to the others. And he sighed the ancient words that were a dark promise. He said them all around to the others in the field under the whip, "...kum yali... kum tambe...." He raised his hands and sang to Ala and Amadioha, Ikenga God of Strength, Idemmili, Ogbunabali, and especially Legba, who conceals.
They gave a great outcry and the Black Witch joined them with his tribe. They had taken their name from the Harrowing of the Black and the White, for when darkness and light combine, is it is often called Dun, and so the Dunharrow and the Igbo straightened their bent backs and stood like spears. Old and young who were called slaves joined hands. Freed of their chains, one by one, they marched from the ship and leapt into the water, coming to shore and disappearing into the marshes. The head of the Dunharrow was called, as you have guessed, Augustus, and that Igbo king was Niwala. Niwalla’s daughter married the son of my brother, Octavian, from them come most of the Dunharrow family, even you.
Rather than admit that living Black men were free in the hidden land, the white people said the Igbo were ghosts because Africans could not swim.
And so, the Negroes could fly. White men, lazy and murderous as they were, did not understand the marshes and feared them anyway, while the Africans understood the heat and the land very well, so when white men dared the marshes to drag back the Igbo, the ones Niwalla could not kill, I did, and the spells he could not make, I raised, so that the white men who rarely came into these lands, in time, could not even find them.
After Kristian strauss had gone into the house, the others turned to go back inside as well, but as Jim was heading back, Seth caught his arm. The blond man looked at him and Seth shook his head.
“We’re going to walk a bit,” Jim said, clearing his throat, and he was conscious that the great pelt was still rolled up under his arms.
Lewis and Loreal nodded, but their faces revealed nothing, and it was Marabeth who smiled stangely as she went back into the house, and then the two young men were together on the great porch, and presently, they headed down into the green, and kept walking silently, Jim feeling Seth’s hand in his as they disappeared into the trees where Seth turned quickly, but gently, and pulled h im forward to kiss him.
They kissed for a long time, the blood rising in Jim, and Seth parted from him.
“When you came back from the woods it was still on you,” Seth said. “The wildness. The wolf. You even moved like a wolf, and I can smell the earth on you, and the grass… And the animal you killed. The wolf is on you.”
Jim responded by kissing Seth savagely, and they undressed in the trees, and lay on the pelt, their bodies moving togther roughly. Jim didn’t need to ask Seth if he would accompany him when he changed again. He knew Seth would be at his side, and whie Seth pulled Jim into his arms and inhaled the fragrance of him, Jim’s musk, he understood suddenly what Lewis and Chris had found in each other, the companion who understood their wild nature, who wasn’t afraid of it, who, in fact, rejoiced in it, for he had rejoiced when the gold white wolf came out, rejoiced when he had seen the lamp eyed wolf that was James Strauss trotting beside the night dark one that was Marabeth. He rejoiced in the new way his lover walked.
“You don’t have to hide anymore,” Seth murmured.
Jim parted from him, his eyes hooded, and Seth brushed his unshaven cheek.
“You thought… I thought it too, that being out there was no hiding left. But the fact that you liked men wasn’t the only thing about you, about either of us, and everything else you did, being pleasant, being sweet, hiding your pain so that Kris envies you because he thinks you don’t know pain, was you hid the wolf.”
“Pamela, my… grandmother, she said I should be careful of the wolf. I didn’t know what she meant.”
Jim leaned on one elbow, and there was a leaf in his hair, but it hardly mattered.
“Be careful of it, James,” Seth said, tenderly, “but don’t deny it.”
He drew Jim down, the heat of his body hotter in the warm night. They moved together, kissing hungrily, and Jim sucked on Seth’s shoulder until he bit him. Seth felt the tearing of skin the way he had the first time he’d been with Chris, and almost by instinct, he sank his fingernails into Jim’s back like claws.
They were still for a moment before, deliberately, almost with a curiosity, as if another hand were doing it, Seth caressed the smoothness of the soft skin of Jim’ ass, and then, just like that, with the sharp nail of his little finger, he drew blood, and Jim winced, his buttocks clinching as Seth took his finger to his mouth and tasted Jim’s blood.
“Fuck me,” Seth said, his voice quiet. “Don’t hold back. Don’t be gentle. Fuck me as hard as you want. I need it. I need you to hurt me. A little at least.”
Jim sat up, kneeling, and he made a hocking noise and let a long thread of thick saliva trail from his mouth to his cock, which was thick and arched up toward him out of the darkness.
In the night, under the trees, the darkness was filled with the low, intense sounds of two men fucking, and when Jim had groaned and shouted and come, he turned around and demanded Seth do the same to him They had been so tender with each other in the past, and in need of this tenderness, but now they needed this roughness, and when the roughness was done with them, they lay together exhausted. The night, full of their jarring cries and deep groans and touched by the sounds of young bodies slamming together was quiet now, and the radiating sounds of crickets filled their ears, the tiptoeing of night creatures, the fluttering of wings and the chirp to chirp of birds risen before the morning. In the night the growing moon shone on their bodies, limbs muddied by dirt and grass and smudged of blood, sprawled in contentment past exhaustion, Jim’s head in Seth’s arms, Seth caressing his golden hair.
Jim kissed the bloodied place on Seth’s breast and said, “I love you so fucking much.”
Instead of speaking, Seth lay still while his body was overtaken by emoton, and he responded to Jim one a deep sobbing that rose from the pit of him as he pulled Jim closer and continued to run his hands over Jim’s shoulders.
For a long while Lewis lay in Chris’s arms and he did not wish to move.
“I feel that…” Chris murmured.
“What?”
“Something’s going on in your head.”
“I want to sleep,” Lewis explained, but things are not right.”
Chris waited for an explanation.
“If you could have seen him, if you could have seen the look on Kris Strauss’s face when Marabeth and Jim made the transformation.”
“I imagine it was nice for them, if nice is the word.”
“But not exactly helpful for him. Not one step closer to…”
Lewis sat up in bed, and Chrir watched him sitting on the side of the mattres, nude, smooth skinned and all brown like velvet, and then Lewis stood up and Chris watched him pull on the hooded housecoat, mourning the robing of coffee colored flesh, rounded ass, tender sex so dear to him, but he did say, “Now you look like the witch you are.”
“Don’t just look at me you beautiful vampire,” Lewis said. “Come.”
The two fo them went down the hall and knocked on Kris’s door. They never thought he might beasleep, and he wasn’t. The large room was full of the smell of cigarette smoke, and before he was offered one, Lewis took a Marlboro for himself, and then held out his hand for the lighter.
He had smoked half the cigarette when he said from the windowseat he had invited himself to, “Don’t think we’ve forgotten. we still don’t know what we came for.”
“Mara gets journals and a pelt and Jim does too, but I get nothing. I get these files, these histories, interesting enough but telling me nothing.”
` Lewis refrained from saying that he should be fair, that he should remember what Marabeth had told Lewis, that Kris had refused to read the journals. But Kris probably did not know that Marabeth had shared this confidence, and he would not have appreciated Lewis bringing it up.
“We didn’t come here so Jim and Marabeth could learn to turn into wolves and have fun putting on skins. We came here so I could learn to stop turning into something every time the moon was full.”.
“You came here,” Chris Ashby said, flatly, while Lewis was still thinking of something politic to say, “to learn what you were, and you are learning, slowly.”
Kris opened his mouth, but Christopher Ashby held up a hand.
“Once, I was a man and a very plain one, and one night I was attacked—“
“By a vampire.”
“By French soldiers. Kruinh gave me the choice to die right then or live forever, and I chose life and woke to something I never planned on being. These gifts given by the Dark Hand of God,” Chris shook his head, “we must learn how to live with them.”
“I don’t want to learn to live with them,” Kris Strauss said. “I want to be rid of them.”
“And what I am saying to you,” Chris Ashby said, his voice taking on a very different tone, Lewis noted, “is that there may be no getting rid of them. There may be only learning to live with them.”
“I’ve lived with mine for over twenty years.”
Lewis did not speak, because he saw that his platinum haired lover was not done.
“You have not lived with it. You have lived against it. That is what the medicine did. Now you must learn to live as you are, the same as I do. Jim and Mara made their first kills tonight, but I made one in a long list of kills earlier, going out into the towns to find the life that I would end. We must make our peace with such things, or lose our minds.”
Though his face failed to show it, Kris was grateful for the visit of the witch and the blood dirnker. Even when Lewis had ceased talking there was something as old and as powerful, as inhuman in him as there had been in the vampire, and as Kris gazed form one to the other he knew he had as little to do with the regular human world as did they. He had forgotten this.
He was surprised to hear himself singing Johnny Flynn songs, the words in his ear as he slipped off his sandals and left his room to wander through the great mansion. What had happened in this witches’ house, where Pamela had once stayed, making it her refuge, where, apparently, Delia had been born and where, in the end, his own father had come for answers. He wandered through the darkness aware that he should not have been able to see as well as he had always taken it for granted that he could. Jim, his cousin, had transformed into a wolf before him, but as he thought of them all, Myron, Cyrus, Deborah, Amy, Peter, and Marabeth, yes Marabeth, it seemed they were a ring of wolves, staring at him, only thinly veiled beasts in the clothes of Midwestern white people, the savagery waiting to burst out. He approached the solarium doors to the back gardens but was just barely startled to see in the moonlight coming through, Jim and Seth entering. They were messy haired and bare chested, grimy, smelling of the outside, smelling of, yes, fucking, Seth carried their shirts and Jim the great pelt.
Jim stood before him, looking like he’d rolled in dirt and been beat up and strangled. Yet he looked like a god. There was wild hot energy in his cousin, and for the first time Kris longed for it, wasn’t afraid of the wolf. Jim, more like a animal than a man, his eyes blazing, embraced Kris tenderly, inhaled him, rubbed his back and the back of his head and kissed him on the cheek roughly, rubbing his cheek against him. Ut was almost sexual, but it was not that, not quite. It was fatherly, like Nathan’s embraces, and Kris’s heart cracked at theat feeling, And also, he realized, what Jim had done, and what Nathan had done was animal, and the arousal Kris felt was for the animal. As his cousin and Seth linked handed and departed down the hall, they were silent and trotting as animals and Jim’s smell remained on Kris. He had been marked. He would always know his cousin’s odor.
He felt blessed and wild and strange as he continued outside in the opposite direction of the woods his sister and Jim has gone to. He went toward the pool, singing.
“Gotta get out, gotta shout, gotta sing
Gotta dance, gotta jump, gotta run
Think I'll fight a war, I don't know what for
But I'll learn when I get my gun
Well, I left home three days ago…”
He stood before the pool that was lit from within by the shimmering blue and green light, and slipped off his sandals and then removed tee shirt, shorts, watch, ring, laying them on the shirt, pulled down, at last, his underwear, and was surprised and only mildly embarrassed by his erection and the slick bead at the tip of his arching cock.
He stretched out his arms to break the water as he leapt into the warmth of the pool.
His eyes were closed, and he swam through the warm water,, doing deep breast strokes, going up and down in laps before he plunged himself to the bottom and stayed as long as he could, rocketing to the surface where he lay naked on the water, arms stretched out looking up at the night, eyes counting the stars and the half moon as it made its progressing toward the west.
Kris blinked, but he was not embarrassed at knowing two people were watching him on the other side of the pool. He opened his eyes to behold upside down what would turn out to be Marabeth or maybe Loreal, possibly Augustus. Instead he saw, clearly, a chisel jawed man with white gold hair and an arm band on his bicep, a great wolfheaded cloak hanging over his shoulders. Beside him now, stepped a tall cloaked woman with long golden hair who placed her head on Hagano’s shoulder, for he had no doubt that this was Hagano, and as the woman smiled down, or upside down at him, he saw that her cloak, lined with wolf fur as it was, was hooded, and deep red.
Gasping, Kris spun around to look at them directly, and wiped the water from his eyes, but when he looked where they had been, there was no one there, and he floated in the pool alone.
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story! So much going on but I am enjoying it and especially got a lot out of the start of this portion. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
You're right. There is a lot going on, and I forgot how much. i guess little simple stories are a thing of the past. At least for now.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT WE RETURN TO DAN RAWLINSON'S STORY AS, IN ENGLAND, HE REMEMBERS
Daniel Rawlinson had come into his second birth screaming, and there were hands on him, holding him down as his veins pounded with a burning fire and his heart raced. His body was at once more hungry than it had ever been and stronger than had ever known. He felt its strength in the resistance of stronger arms.
“Are you simply going to stand there?” A man’s voice demanded, “or are you going to help?”
While he struggled, only dimly remembering what had happened before he’d lost consiousness, the red headed woman, now in a long gown, her red hair swinging free down her back, looked upon him with a wicked smile. He’d never thought that wickedness was a real thing, and then, lifting the back of her hand, she savagely smacked him and he knew no more.
When he awoke the man was there again, and he said, “Listen to me, she likes to see suffering in the new ones she has made.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Carter,” the man said. He was of average height with a sharp, thin face, brown hair, ordinary enough looking, “And she, your maker, is Rosamunde.”
“I’m so thirsty,” Dan grasped at his throat. “I’m so thirsty. Please… Can I have some water?”
He was hungry now, desperately hungry, and not that stomach hunger, but the deep body hunger where temper flared and wooziness began, where your stomach meant nothing. But the thirst was greater.
“Water…” he rasped. “Please.”
There would be time to think of everything later, but this came first, and the man called Carter, unsmiling, stood up and rolled up his sleeve placing his wrist in Dan’s mouth.
Dan did nothing and Carter said, “Drink, already, before she comes back. It’s as I said, she likes for her men to suffer.”
“I’m,” Dan said spitting Carter’s wrist out though, for some reason he wanted it, “I want… Water..”
“Don’t be stupid” Carter said. “If you know what she is, and how could you not by now? Then you know what you are.”
He did, he realized, and as he realzed it, horror crept over him. He had died. It was not untrue. He had been killed by a vampire and now he lived again. Carter pressed his wrist to Dan’s mouth and said, “Drink.”
The moment his jaws sank into Carter’s wrist was the most joyous moment he had ever know. It was the moment of becoming absolutely himself, of quenching hunger in a way he’d never done before. There was not even taste in his memory, simply fulfillment, simply drinking and drinking like drinking light until Carter said, “Enough,” and then, again, “Enough!” sitting back.
“It’s not enough,” Dan said, licking his lips and lying back, panting for more.
“Of course it isn’t. You would have to kill me to have enough. You will have to learn to kill.”
Dan Rawlinson realized before he understood what he had been told, that he was naked, and lying on something like a table. He looked around and started. There were other bodies.
“We are in a mortuary,” the man said simply. Stenger and Stenger’s. German town.”
Dan turned his face in horror from the man who lay on the tray not far from him, and Carter said, “Why are you horrified? A few moments ago you were as dead as he is. You were not merely sleeping, you were a corpse, my good Daniel. Have been one for the better part of a day.”
Dan nodded his head and he felt, suddenly, wise,. There was no time to be scared. There was only time to learn, and certainly to not let on how much he learned.
“Who made me?” he said. “Who is she?”
“Rosamunde Court,” Carter said. “And you are part of her court now. She will tell you all. She has come to the land of Ohio to meet her uncle and his court and defeat them. You have been enlisted to her side and, I believe, will make a very good soldier.”
Dan was going to leave it alone, but chanced one more question.
“And who is her uncle? Another vampire I assume? I just… didn’t think of vampires as having family.”
“Drinkers,” Carter corrected. “And I doubt you ever thought of vampires at all. Her uncle is the Lord Kruinh. He keeps a house on an ancient site of power in a town now called Glencastle. With his bitch of a daughter, Tanitha. But soon all shall be set to rights, and you will be one of those who help set it.”
“I chose you because you longed for death and your old life was at an end,” she said.
Rosamunde lay on a great chaise lounge piled high with cushions, in a richly appointed room. For some time she or better her servants, had dug a tunnel into the morgue of Stenger and Stengers and kept apartments underground and in the old building next door. When it was time to leave she would take them down and be on her way, but right now, in the land of night, amidst curtains and stain glass Tiffany lamps, she lived in luxury.
“I know I am not wrong. Rosamunde said. “I have a feeling for such things.”
She said she always had this feeling. That she had made a few drinkers before, but now she would make a large household of them. She even said that this was not normally done, but there was no time to waste. She had made Carter.
“But he wanted it. He was done with his earthly life. You were done, but you didn’t know it.”
“How do you know I was done?”
“You said it. You talked freely. You came to me willingly, more willing than you know. Eileen cheated on you with Craig. Myron was so successful and had a family. He made life work, you’d been trying for almost thirty years and it still wasn’t working. You were done with that old life, so I gave you a new one and for that,” Rosaumnde bowed her red head, “you are heartily welcome.”
He could scarcely believe her, but rather than be enraged, he listened to everything she said. He learned how, like Carter, and like Martin the other one who was out now, he would go out and kill every night and return in the day. If her expectation that he return at the end of the night seemed far fetched, then he had to account for the fact that he would not be able to survive without killing or in the daylight, Young drinkers were like children, and the only hope for them at the beginning was other drinkers.
Graciously, like a queen, she allowed him to drink from her. He was still naked and had not even noticed it.
“Leave, Carter,” she told him and Carter did.
“You may come to bed with me,” Rosamunde said,
Looking back it only seemed practical that he obliged her. He spent the rest of the night learning the intensity of vampire sex, expending his fury on her, and they passed out toward the morning.
“Carter was never a very good lover,” Rosamunde murmured, stroking Dan’s hair.
“You are handsome and wild, and you will do quite well. Tomorrow night you will go out on the hunt, and learn how good the true kill feels.”
As he fell asleep he knew he’d loved the sex. He knew he’d had sex with women he didn’t partuclarly like before and he knew he had gained, by fucking her, something like trust. In that vampire night that was the day, he fucked her several more times, understood what he would understand later which was that, even though she had killed him, he was hypnotically attracted to her. When he left that night, supposedly to go on the hunt, he knew he could not come back for the simple reason that if he stayed he would be her slave and forget himself entirely.
The flaw in Rosamunde’s plan was her great confidence. The next flaw was that she had no idea that Dan knew Germantown, or that he could walk the next seven blocks to Myron’s house. Myron’s wife was as excited to see Dan as Myron, and they both loaded him down with questions.
“Are you in trouble?” Jen demanded, looking at him.
“Yes,” Dan said, “but I won’t be if I can just get to Glencastle before the night is over. I left my car at the Midland Hotel.”
Myron and Jen were not the sort of people to ask wearisome questions, and Jen pointed out, “If you left it there, then it’s been towed, and we can figure that out later. Myron, take Dan to Glencastle.”
Myron questioned nothing. The kids were curious, but he just kissed them on the heads and said, “Later. Daddy loves you.”
If Dan had known what Myron was, or if Myron had known it himself, then Dan would have told him about the last night, but when Myron said, “Is it something to do with that girl?” all Dan said was, “Yes.”
“She’s not dead is she?” Myron asked levelly, as they zoomed down Buren headed for the state road.
“No. But she’s bad news, and… there’s really only one way I can do anything about her.”
Myron nodded, rubbing his finger under his nose and squinting into the night.
“I got you, buddy.”
Dan had a sense that, as they were approaching Brummel Street, that Myron understood something of what Dan was trying to do, that he remembered that day almost fifteen years ago when they had tried to find that house. He didn’t know how many times Dan had looked for it on his own, and right now Dan thought, I need you, I need you to be here, and then he was surprised by the ordinariness with which he saw, between 4846 and 4850, a tall purple Victorian, its lights on through the buses and trees. 4848 Brummel.
“Thank God! Wait for me,” Dan said, and Myron, who did remember not being able to find this housei, nodded and watched as Dan ran up the path.
He banged on the door rapidly, and it was opened by a tall, brunette vampire with dark Mediterranean features and wide dark eyes, a look of both concern and suspicion on his face. Dan stood blinking at him, and he said, “Can I... help?” Then… “Who are you? I know you are not human?”
“I’m as human as you,” Dan said. “Please, I need Kruinh or Tanitha.”
The elegant vampire and shirt who looked as if he was on his way to a business meeting eyed him cautiously, but said, “Come in.”
Dan was aware of Myron outside waiting, when this austere vampire closed the door, and he wondered if Tanitha and Kruinh would even remember him and then moments later, Tanitha came down the stairs into the foyer, her shawl wrapped around her but her eyes were wide as she looked Dan up and down.
She flung out her hand and terrified Dan, pronouncing, “Tazi kŭshta da bŭde vidyana zavinagi i nikoga da ne e skrita ot teb. Zashtoto si krŭv ot moyata krŭv!” *
And then she said, “From now on this house is always open to you, Daniel. What has happened to you? You have been…” she came nearer, passing the other vampire, and grasping Dan’s chin, “made.
“Who did this?” she wondered. There were, after all, not that many vampires.
“Rosamunde—”
Before he finished both she and the dark haired vampire hissed, and Tanitha swore, “Kuchka ot yamata na ada!
“Lawrence,” Tanitha said, her voice regaining some of its composure, “take Daniel upstairs and get him a room. Daniel, did you come with that man, waiting outside the house?
How had she seen that? But, nevermind.
“Yes.”
“First tell him you are with us now. That will take care of this business. Oh, that whore, I will rip her fangs out with my bare hands,” Dan heard Tanitha saying as he went out of the door, but even as he told Myron that he was safe and that he would tell him all later, he knew he would only tell him some of it, and when Dan was walking back up the to the house, he was still surprised that 4848 Brummel remained and would continue to remain in his vision, and never be hidden from him again.
“Dan,” the tall, brunette business vampire offered his hand as Dan closed the door behind him, “you can call me Laurie.”
He placed a hand on Dan’s shoulder.
“Let’s find you a room.”
* “This house be forever seen and never hidden from thee. For thou are blood of my blood.”
MORE TOMORROW
Daniel Rawlinson had come into his second birth screaming, and there were hands on him, holding him down as his veins pounded with a burning fire and his heart raced. His body was at once more hungry than it had ever been and stronger than had ever known. He felt its strength in the resistance of stronger arms.
“Are you simply going to stand there?” A man’s voice demanded, “or are you going to help?”
While he struggled, only dimly remembering what had happened before he’d lost consiousness, the red headed woman, now in a long gown, her red hair swinging free down her back, looked upon him with a wicked smile. He’d never thought that wickedness was a real thing, and then, lifting the back of her hand, she savagely smacked him and he knew no more.
When he awoke the man was there again, and he said, “Listen to me, she likes to see suffering in the new ones she has made.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Carter,” the man said. He was of average height with a sharp, thin face, brown hair, ordinary enough looking, “And she, your maker, is Rosamunde.”
“I’m so thirsty,” Dan grasped at his throat. “I’m so thirsty. Please… Can I have some water?”
He was hungry now, desperately hungry, and not that stomach hunger, but the deep body hunger where temper flared and wooziness began, where your stomach meant nothing. But the thirst was greater.
“Water…” he rasped. “Please.”
There would be time to think of everything later, but this came first, and the man called Carter, unsmiling, stood up and rolled up his sleeve placing his wrist in Dan’s mouth.
Dan did nothing and Carter said, “Drink, already, before she comes back. It’s as I said, she likes for her men to suffer.”
“I’m,” Dan said spitting Carter’s wrist out though, for some reason he wanted it, “I want… Water..”
“Don’t be stupid” Carter said. “If you know what she is, and how could you not by now? Then you know what you are.”
He did, he realized, and as he realzed it, horror crept over him. He had died. It was not untrue. He had been killed by a vampire and now he lived again. Carter pressed his wrist to Dan’s mouth and said, “Drink.”
The moment his jaws sank into Carter’s wrist was the most joyous moment he had ever know. It was the moment of becoming absolutely himself, of quenching hunger in a way he’d never done before. There was not even taste in his memory, simply fulfillment, simply drinking and drinking like drinking light until Carter said, “Enough,” and then, again, “Enough!” sitting back.
“It’s not enough,” Dan said, licking his lips and lying back, panting for more.
“Of course it isn’t. You would have to kill me to have enough. You will have to learn to kill.”
Dan Rawlinson realized before he understood what he had been told, that he was naked, and lying on something like a table. He looked around and started. There were other bodies.
“We are in a mortuary,” the man said simply. Stenger and Stenger’s. German town.”
Dan turned his face in horror from the man who lay on the tray not far from him, and Carter said, “Why are you horrified? A few moments ago you were as dead as he is. You were not merely sleeping, you were a corpse, my good Daniel. Have been one for the better part of a day.”
Dan nodded his head and he felt, suddenly, wise,. There was no time to be scared. There was only time to learn, and certainly to not let on how much he learned.
“Who made me?” he said. “Who is she?”
“Rosamunde Court,” Carter said. “And you are part of her court now. She will tell you all. She has come to the land of Ohio to meet her uncle and his court and defeat them. You have been enlisted to her side and, I believe, will make a very good soldier.”
Dan was going to leave it alone, but chanced one more question.
“And who is her uncle? Another vampire I assume? I just… didn’t think of vampires as having family.”
“Drinkers,” Carter corrected. “And I doubt you ever thought of vampires at all. Her uncle is the Lord Kruinh. He keeps a house on an ancient site of power in a town now called Glencastle. With his bitch of a daughter, Tanitha. But soon all shall be set to rights, and you will be one of those who help set it.”
“I chose you because you longed for death and your old life was at an end,” she said.
Rosamunde lay on a great chaise lounge piled high with cushions, in a richly appointed room. For some time she or better her servants, had dug a tunnel into the morgue of Stenger and Stengers and kept apartments underground and in the old building next door. When it was time to leave she would take them down and be on her way, but right now, in the land of night, amidst curtains and stain glass Tiffany lamps, she lived in luxury.
“I know I am not wrong. Rosamunde said. “I have a feeling for such things.”
She said she always had this feeling. That she had made a few drinkers before, but now she would make a large household of them. She even said that this was not normally done, but there was no time to waste. She had made Carter.
“But he wanted it. He was done with his earthly life. You were done, but you didn’t know it.”
“How do you know I was done?”
“You said it. You talked freely. You came to me willingly, more willing than you know. Eileen cheated on you with Craig. Myron was so successful and had a family. He made life work, you’d been trying for almost thirty years and it still wasn’t working. You were done with that old life, so I gave you a new one and for that,” Rosaumnde bowed her red head, “you are heartily welcome.”
He could scarcely believe her, but rather than be enraged, he listened to everything she said. He learned how, like Carter, and like Martin the other one who was out now, he would go out and kill every night and return in the day. If her expectation that he return at the end of the night seemed far fetched, then he had to account for the fact that he would not be able to survive without killing or in the daylight, Young drinkers were like children, and the only hope for them at the beginning was other drinkers.
Graciously, like a queen, she allowed him to drink from her. He was still naked and had not even noticed it.
“Leave, Carter,” she told him and Carter did.
“You may come to bed with me,” Rosamunde said,
Looking back it only seemed practical that he obliged her. He spent the rest of the night learning the intensity of vampire sex, expending his fury on her, and they passed out toward the morning.
“Carter was never a very good lover,” Rosamunde murmured, stroking Dan’s hair.
“You are handsome and wild, and you will do quite well. Tomorrow night you will go out on the hunt, and learn how good the true kill feels.”
As he fell asleep he knew he’d loved the sex. He knew he’d had sex with women he didn’t partuclarly like before and he knew he had gained, by fucking her, something like trust. In that vampire night that was the day, he fucked her several more times, understood what he would understand later which was that, even though she had killed him, he was hypnotically attracted to her. When he left that night, supposedly to go on the hunt, he knew he could not come back for the simple reason that if he stayed he would be her slave and forget himself entirely.
The flaw in Rosamunde’s plan was her great confidence. The next flaw was that she had no idea that Dan knew Germantown, or that he could walk the next seven blocks to Myron’s house. Myron’s wife was as excited to see Dan as Myron, and they both loaded him down with questions.
“Are you in trouble?” Jen demanded, looking at him.
“Yes,” Dan said, “but I won’t be if I can just get to Glencastle before the night is over. I left my car at the Midland Hotel.”
Myron and Jen were not the sort of people to ask wearisome questions, and Jen pointed out, “If you left it there, then it’s been towed, and we can figure that out later. Myron, take Dan to Glencastle.”
Myron questioned nothing. The kids were curious, but he just kissed them on the heads and said, “Later. Daddy loves you.”
If Dan had known what Myron was, or if Myron had known it himself, then Dan would have told him about the last night, but when Myron said, “Is it something to do with that girl?” all Dan said was, “Yes.”
“She’s not dead is she?” Myron asked levelly, as they zoomed down Buren headed for the state road.
“No. But she’s bad news, and… there’s really only one way I can do anything about her.”
Myron nodded, rubbing his finger under his nose and squinting into the night.
“I got you, buddy.”
Dan had a sense that, as they were approaching Brummel Street, that Myron understood something of what Dan was trying to do, that he remembered that day almost fifteen years ago when they had tried to find that house. He didn’t know how many times Dan had looked for it on his own, and right now Dan thought, I need you, I need you to be here, and then he was surprised by the ordinariness with which he saw, between 4846 and 4850, a tall purple Victorian, its lights on through the buses and trees. 4848 Brummel.
“Thank God! Wait for me,” Dan said, and Myron, who did remember not being able to find this housei, nodded and watched as Dan ran up the path.
He banged on the door rapidly, and it was opened by a tall, brunette vampire with dark Mediterranean features and wide dark eyes, a look of both concern and suspicion on his face. Dan stood blinking at him, and he said, “Can I... help?” Then… “Who are you? I know you are not human?”
“I’m as human as you,” Dan said. “Please, I need Kruinh or Tanitha.”
The elegant vampire and shirt who looked as if he was on his way to a business meeting eyed him cautiously, but said, “Come in.”
Dan was aware of Myron outside waiting, when this austere vampire closed the door, and he wondered if Tanitha and Kruinh would even remember him and then moments later, Tanitha came down the stairs into the foyer, her shawl wrapped around her but her eyes were wide as she looked Dan up and down.
She flung out her hand and terrified Dan, pronouncing, “Tazi kŭshta da bŭde vidyana zavinagi i nikoga da ne e skrita ot teb. Zashtoto si krŭv ot moyata krŭv!” *
And then she said, “From now on this house is always open to you, Daniel. What has happened to you? You have been…” she came nearer, passing the other vampire, and grasping Dan’s chin, “made.
“Who did this?” she wondered. There were, after all, not that many vampires.
“Rosamunde—”
Before he finished both she and the dark haired vampire hissed, and Tanitha swore, “Kuchka ot yamata na ada!
“Lawrence,” Tanitha said, her voice regaining some of its composure, “take Daniel upstairs and get him a room. Daniel, did you come with that man, waiting outside the house?
How had she seen that? But, nevermind.
“Yes.”
“First tell him you are with us now. That will take care of this business. Oh, that whore, I will rip her fangs out with my bare hands,” Dan heard Tanitha saying as he went out of the door, but even as he told Myron that he was safe and that he would tell him all later, he knew he would only tell him some of it, and when Dan was walking back up the to the house, he was still surprised that 4848 Brummel remained and would continue to remain in his vision, and never be hidden from him again.
“Dan,” the tall, brunette business vampire offered his hand as Dan closed the door behind him, “you can call me Laurie.”
He placed a hand on Dan’s shoulder.
“Let’s find you a room.”
* “This house be forever seen and never hidden from thee. For thou are blood of my blood.”
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great insight into Dan’s past! I am enjoying this story quite a bit. Great writing and I look forward to learning more soon.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
It will prove important when we come back to present day Tanitha, Dan and Rosamunde.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
WITH A LITTLE BACKTREADING WE RETURN TO DAN RAWLINSON
IN HIS PAST STORY, DAN HAS JUST ESCAPED ROSAMUNDE AND MET UP WITH MYRON WHO IS HELPING HIM TO ESCAPE HIS NEW MASTERS
Myron questioned nothing. The kids were curious, but he just kissed them on the heads and said, “Later. Daddy loves you.”
If Dan had known what Myron was, or if Myron had known it himself, then Dan would have told him about the last night, but when Myron said, “Is it something to do with that girl?” all Dan said was, “Yes.”
“She’s not dead is she?” Myron asked levelly, as they zoomed down Buren headed for the state road.
“No. But she’s bad news, and… there’s really only one way I can do anything about her.”
Myron nodded, rubbing his finger under his nose and squinting into the night.
“I got you, buddy.”
Dan had a sense that, as they were approaching Brummel Street, that Myron understood something of what Dan was trying to do, that he remembered that day almost fifteen years ago when they had tried to find that house. He didn’t know how many times Dan had looked for it on his own, and right now Dan thought, I need you, I need you to be here, and then he was surprised by the ordinariness with which he saw, between 4846 and 4850, a tall purple Victorian, its lights on through the buses and trees. 4848 Brummel.
“Thank God! Wait for me,” Dan said, and Myron, who did remember not being able to find this housei, nodded and watched as Dan ran up the path.
He banged on the door rapidly, and it was opened by a tall, brunette vampire with dark Mediterranean features and wide dark eyes, a look of both concern and suspicion on his face. Dan stood blinking at him, and he said, “Can I... help?” Then… “Who are you? I know you are not human?”
“I’m as human as you,” Dan said. “Please, I need Kruinh or Tanitha.”
The elegant vampire and shirt who looked as if he was on his way to a business meeting eyed him cautiously, but said, “Come in.”
Dan was aware of Myron outside waiting, when this austere vampire closed the door, and he wondered if Tanitha and Kruinh would even remember him and then moments later, Tanitha came down the stairs into the foyer, her shawl wrapped around her but her eyes were wide as she looked Dan up and down.
She flung out her hand and terrified Dan, pronouncing, “Tazi kŭshta da bŭde vidyana zavinagi i nikoga da ne e skrita ot teb. Zashtoto si krŭv ot moyata krŭv!”
And then she said, “From now on this house is always open to you, Daniel. What has happened to you? You have been…” she came nearer, passing the other vampire, and grasping Dan’s chin, “made.
“Who did this?” she wondered. There were, after all, not that many vampires.
“Rosamunde—”
Before he finished both she and the dark haired vampire hissed, and Tanitha swore, “Kuchka ot yamata na ada!
“Lawrence,” Tanitha said, her voice regaining some of its composure, “take Daniel upstairs and get him a room. Daniel, did you come with that man, waiting outside the house?
How had she seen that? But, nevermind.
“Yes.”
“First tell him you are with us now. That will take care of this business. Oh, that whore, I will rip her fangs out with my bare hands,” Dan heard Tanitha saying as he went out of the door, but even as he told Myron that he was safe and that he would tell him all later, he knew he would only tell him some of it, and when Dan was walking back up the to the house, he was still surprised that 4848 Brummel remained and would continue to remain in his vision, and never be hidden from him again.
“Dan,” the tall, brunette business vampire offered his hand as Dan closed the door behind him, “you can call me Laurie.”
He placed a hand on Dan’s shoulder.
“Let’s find you a room.”
On a day bed, in a high walled, well appointed chamber sat a languorous woman with rich, red hair, backlit by the sun that coming through sheer drapes that gave a gauzy view of the green lands beyond. Lawrence Malone noted that climbing up these very high walls like vines were stacked one over the other, paintings of people who could have no relationship to this creature. The woman lounging on the day bed had ivory skin, glowing skin, and deep green eyes, and she lifted the glass of blood to her pretty lips and drank slowly. She was in a light gown open at her chest with breast too firm to threaten to spill out by accident, though she seemed like the sort of person who might just intentionally reveal one.
But Tanitha’s eyes settled on a young Black woman sitting by the bed and as Laurie’s nostril’s flared, Tanitha said, “Eve Moreland!”
The young witch blinked, disconcerted.
“I’ve heard so much about you, my dear. You’re a long way from Long Lees. Are you hiding from your grandfather’s wrath?”
Stiffly, the black hiared beauty said, “Both I and my brother have already felt my grandfather’s wrath. And I’d rather not discuss it.”
“If it’s anything like my wrath,” Tanitha said, “for your sake I’d rather not hear it.”
Eve Moreland rose and slipped her purse over her shoulder.
“I’ll give you all some privacy.”
“That’s vety courteous of you,” Tanitha smiled at her.
As Eve left, Tanitha said, “And you needn’t fear Mr Malone, he hasn’t any heads in bags for you today.”
When the door shut behind Eve, Tanitha said, “You’re hiding exiled witches in your house, now?”
“Ethan and Eve were… left homeless by association with me,” Rosamunde said, “and so with me they will stay, which is a great imposition, for stripped of any power as they have been, I’m sure Augustus Dunharrow can see into my house just by his blood being in it.”
Augustus, Laurie thought. Eve. Ethan. My Loreal’s brother and sister.
“Tanitha,” Rosamunde, continued, never acknowledging Laurie, but the dark brown, black haired woman who stood before her, “what can I do for you, or have you come to rip more of my teeth out?”
Rip more of her… there was a story there.
But Tanitha Kertesz resisted stories. She was the very opposite of her cousin the Lady Rosamunde Court,. She stood elegant in a smoke blue gown, but over it was a great black, man’s coat, and her black hair fell down her back. Her impossibly blue eyes smiled with deceptive mildness. So when Rosamunde asked if Tanitha had come to rip out any more of her teeth, Tanitha simply said, “Not today.
“But,” her cousin lifted a finger and came to sit on the day bed, gesturing for Laurie to sit down in a Chippendale chair while Lady Rosamunde frowned, “I did want to know about other things.”
“Are you still holding court in that dingy house in America?” Rosamunde asked. “You could do so much better? Have some real influence, even in that backward land.”
“You have to understand,” Tanitha said to Laurie, “Rosamunde still thinks it’s 1700. And,” Tanitha looked back at her cousin, “she still evades my questions.”
Fingering her sleeve, Rosamunde said, “You haven’t really asked a question.”
“The Strauss family.”
“The who?”
“The werewolves. German. You and Evangeline—”
“Don’t bring that bitch’s name up!”
“She’s dead,” Laurie said.
“Really?” the first time Rosamunde had paid him any mind. “At Uncle Kruinh’s hand, doubtless. Or at her brother’s.”
“At Dan Rawlinson’s.”
“Dan? My Daniel?”
“He’s actually in London,” Tanitha said. “We kept him back because we didn’t want him to kill you.”
“At least not today,” Laurie murmured, and Rosamunde raised a hateful eyebrow at him.
“I know the jug eared one with the silly face is is a werewolf,” Rosamunde said, “But who is this monkey faced Irishman you’ve brought with you? He isn’t young. There is power in him.”
Myron interrupted, saying, “How did you know what I was?”
“Because I have seen several of you. Both in Europe and in America.”
“Strausses? Kellers?”
“Yes,” Rosamunde said, “but I mean werewolves. Surely you didn’t think you were the only ones?”
Myron blinked. He hadn’t really thought about werewolves at all.”
“Even in ancient times,” Rosamunde said, “your family was divided into two branches. We had no relations with them though.”
“A second branch?” Myron said.
“They were French,” Rosamunde said with a shrug. “Last I heard they went to America the same as your household. But this business bores me now. Back to the Irishman.”
“Lawrence Malone, madam.”
“Lawrence…” Rosamunde’s face changed. “Oh!” she looked gleeful.
“Evangeline had plans for you. But,” she tilted her face and smiled, “So did my Daniel. I can smell him all over you. He was my favorite kill. You say he’d kill me, but last time he was in my presense he fucked me so I could hardly stand. I can still feel him inside me.”
Rosamunde gave a low groan of contentment, sinking deeper into her day bed.
“Is that the way he fucks you?” she asked.
“Rosamunde!” Tanitha snapped. “The Strausses!”
“Oh we killed them,” Rosaumnde said, negligently.
“Not as thoroughly as you thought,” Tanitha said. “They are very much alive. But why did you try to kill them in the first place?’
“They were becoming too powerful. We had made compact with them. We had a distaff clan.”
“You had a distaff clan? A renegade clan.”
“If you must call it renegade…”
“We didn’t know anything about it,” Tanitha said, “so it was renegade.”
“Well, then fine, But we were in Bavaria, controlling… oh, a great number of things…and the Strausses were our partners. Enforcers? Well, we enforced each other. In fact, some of them even fed off of us, becoming stronger than most of their kind. It would have done funny things to them. It did a few fuinny things to us. I had Evangeline in control of that clan. And, when they got above themselves, we went to war.”
“You killed them all.”
“Tanitha, you know better than anyone, when Drinkers go to war, it is total war. Believe me, no one stepped in to save them, no mortal was sad to see them go. However, with them gone, we also had to be gone.”
“So yes, we attempted to destroy them all. I thought we had,” she said, and this was the only moment Laurie noted regret in her voice.
“But how were you even in league with them?” Tanitha demanded. “How did you even know about them.”
“You could say we shared blood.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Myron demanded.
“Peace, Mr. Werewolf, peace. It means what it means. We shared blood. They benefited from things that did not benefit me. I thought the alliance would mend that. It did not. We killed them.”
“But, as you now know,” Tanitha reminded her, “not all of them. They had the help of witches.”
“Oh!” Rosamunde said. “Well, we never could do much against witches.”
“Why is that?” Laurie asked.
“Why is what?” Rosamunde seemed as bored as ever. “Work against the witches? Oh,” she chuckled, “he doesn’t know.”
“Well, if you’re going to be an ass,” Tanitha said, “then I’ll tell him.”
“Because they made us,” Rosamunde said, quickly.
Laurie blinked.
”I know,” Rosamunde said,. “Werefolk can change into different beasts, and we have immortality. We have great speed, can enter into each others minds while witches remain distinctly mortal and often unmagical. Magical to us because they can do things to us, but around other humans, very often very human. And, of course, even the longest lived one of them is mortal. But it was they who made us, and so they have the last word on us. This is why no blood drinker can lay hands on a true born witch.”
Lawrence Malone stood there absorbing this. Laurie had certainly known he had no power over any of the Dunharrows, and he had seen Levy expel Evangeline’s crew with a mere command. But this bit, why Levy Berringer was able to do it, and yet not save himself from an abusive stepfather, was unknown to him.
And yet, Chris and Lewis came at the very moment the guy was beating on him, so who says Levy didn’t save himself? The ways of witches…
But Tanitha was not dwelling on the ways of witches. She was dwelling on her cousin.
It was Tanitha who asked, “Is there anything else you know?”
“Oh, yes,” Rosamunde said, sitting pretty and smiling as she smoothed her gowns.
“There’s a great deal I know.”
“Excellent,” Tanitha said, a beatific smile spreading across her face, “because, as entertaining as I’ve always found you, unless you tell me everything, and leave out nothing, I will kill Eve Moreland, her brother, your entire staff, and lastly yourself. And then, I will burn this house down.”
MORE TOMORROW
IN HIS PAST STORY, DAN HAS JUST ESCAPED ROSAMUNDE AND MET UP WITH MYRON WHO IS HELPING HIM TO ESCAPE HIS NEW MASTERS
Myron questioned nothing. The kids were curious, but he just kissed them on the heads and said, “Later. Daddy loves you.”
If Dan had known what Myron was, or if Myron had known it himself, then Dan would have told him about the last night, but when Myron said, “Is it something to do with that girl?” all Dan said was, “Yes.”
“She’s not dead is she?” Myron asked levelly, as they zoomed down Buren headed for the state road.
“No. But she’s bad news, and… there’s really only one way I can do anything about her.”
Myron nodded, rubbing his finger under his nose and squinting into the night.
“I got you, buddy.”
Dan had a sense that, as they were approaching Brummel Street, that Myron understood something of what Dan was trying to do, that he remembered that day almost fifteen years ago when they had tried to find that house. He didn’t know how many times Dan had looked for it on his own, and right now Dan thought, I need you, I need you to be here, and then he was surprised by the ordinariness with which he saw, between 4846 and 4850, a tall purple Victorian, its lights on through the buses and trees. 4848 Brummel.
“Thank God! Wait for me,” Dan said, and Myron, who did remember not being able to find this housei, nodded and watched as Dan ran up the path.
He banged on the door rapidly, and it was opened by a tall, brunette vampire with dark Mediterranean features and wide dark eyes, a look of both concern and suspicion on his face. Dan stood blinking at him, and he said, “Can I... help?” Then… “Who are you? I know you are not human?”
“I’m as human as you,” Dan said. “Please, I need Kruinh or Tanitha.”
The elegant vampire and shirt who looked as if he was on his way to a business meeting eyed him cautiously, but said, “Come in.”
Dan was aware of Myron outside waiting, when this austere vampire closed the door, and he wondered if Tanitha and Kruinh would even remember him and then moments later, Tanitha came down the stairs into the foyer, her shawl wrapped around her but her eyes were wide as she looked Dan up and down.
She flung out her hand and terrified Dan, pronouncing, “Tazi kŭshta da bŭde vidyana zavinagi i nikoga da ne e skrita ot teb. Zashtoto si krŭv ot moyata krŭv!”
And then she said, “From now on this house is always open to you, Daniel. What has happened to you? You have been…” she came nearer, passing the other vampire, and grasping Dan’s chin, “made.
“Who did this?” she wondered. There were, after all, not that many vampires.
“Rosamunde—”
Before he finished both she and the dark haired vampire hissed, and Tanitha swore, “Kuchka ot yamata na ada!
“Lawrence,” Tanitha said, her voice regaining some of its composure, “take Daniel upstairs and get him a room. Daniel, did you come with that man, waiting outside the house?
How had she seen that? But, nevermind.
“Yes.”
“First tell him you are with us now. That will take care of this business. Oh, that whore, I will rip her fangs out with my bare hands,” Dan heard Tanitha saying as he went out of the door, but even as he told Myron that he was safe and that he would tell him all later, he knew he would only tell him some of it, and when Dan was walking back up the to the house, he was still surprised that 4848 Brummel remained and would continue to remain in his vision, and never be hidden from him again.
“Dan,” the tall, brunette business vampire offered his hand as Dan closed the door behind him, “you can call me Laurie.”
He placed a hand on Dan’s shoulder.
“Let’s find you a room.”
On a day bed, in a high walled, well appointed chamber sat a languorous woman with rich, red hair, backlit by the sun that coming through sheer drapes that gave a gauzy view of the green lands beyond. Lawrence Malone noted that climbing up these very high walls like vines were stacked one over the other, paintings of people who could have no relationship to this creature. The woman lounging on the day bed had ivory skin, glowing skin, and deep green eyes, and she lifted the glass of blood to her pretty lips and drank slowly. She was in a light gown open at her chest with breast too firm to threaten to spill out by accident, though she seemed like the sort of person who might just intentionally reveal one.
But Tanitha’s eyes settled on a young Black woman sitting by the bed and as Laurie’s nostril’s flared, Tanitha said, “Eve Moreland!”
The young witch blinked, disconcerted.
“I’ve heard so much about you, my dear. You’re a long way from Long Lees. Are you hiding from your grandfather’s wrath?”
Stiffly, the black hiared beauty said, “Both I and my brother have already felt my grandfather’s wrath. And I’d rather not discuss it.”
“If it’s anything like my wrath,” Tanitha said, “for your sake I’d rather not hear it.”
Eve Moreland rose and slipped her purse over her shoulder.
“I’ll give you all some privacy.”
“That’s vety courteous of you,” Tanitha smiled at her.
As Eve left, Tanitha said, “And you needn’t fear Mr Malone, he hasn’t any heads in bags for you today.”
When the door shut behind Eve, Tanitha said, “You’re hiding exiled witches in your house, now?”
“Ethan and Eve were… left homeless by association with me,” Rosamunde said, “and so with me they will stay, which is a great imposition, for stripped of any power as they have been, I’m sure Augustus Dunharrow can see into my house just by his blood being in it.”
Augustus, Laurie thought. Eve. Ethan. My Loreal’s brother and sister.
“Tanitha,” Rosamunde, continued, never acknowledging Laurie, but the dark brown, black haired woman who stood before her, “what can I do for you, or have you come to rip more of my teeth out?”
Rip more of her… there was a story there.
But Tanitha Kertesz resisted stories. She was the very opposite of her cousin the Lady Rosamunde Court,. She stood elegant in a smoke blue gown, but over it was a great black, man’s coat, and her black hair fell down her back. Her impossibly blue eyes smiled with deceptive mildness. So when Rosamunde asked if Tanitha had come to rip out any more of her teeth, Tanitha simply said, “Not today.
“But,” her cousin lifted a finger and came to sit on the day bed, gesturing for Laurie to sit down in a Chippendale chair while Lady Rosamunde frowned, “I did want to know about other things.”
“Are you still holding court in that dingy house in America?” Rosamunde asked. “You could do so much better? Have some real influence, even in that backward land.”
“You have to understand,” Tanitha said to Laurie, “Rosamunde still thinks it’s 1700. And,” Tanitha looked back at her cousin, “she still evades my questions.”
Fingering her sleeve, Rosamunde said, “You haven’t really asked a question.”
“The Strauss family.”
“The who?”
“The werewolves. German. You and Evangeline—”
“Don’t bring that bitch’s name up!”
“She’s dead,” Laurie said.
“Really?” the first time Rosamunde had paid him any mind. “At Uncle Kruinh’s hand, doubtless. Or at her brother’s.”
“At Dan Rawlinson’s.”
“Dan? My Daniel?”
“He’s actually in London,” Tanitha said. “We kept him back because we didn’t want him to kill you.”
“At least not today,” Laurie murmured, and Rosamunde raised a hateful eyebrow at him.
“I know the jug eared one with the silly face is is a werewolf,” Rosamunde said, “But who is this monkey faced Irishman you’ve brought with you? He isn’t young. There is power in him.”
Myron interrupted, saying, “How did you know what I was?”
“Because I have seen several of you. Both in Europe and in America.”
“Strausses? Kellers?”
“Yes,” Rosamunde said, “but I mean werewolves. Surely you didn’t think you were the only ones?”
Myron blinked. He hadn’t really thought about werewolves at all.”
“Even in ancient times,” Rosamunde said, “your family was divided into two branches. We had no relations with them though.”
“A second branch?” Myron said.
“They were French,” Rosamunde said with a shrug. “Last I heard they went to America the same as your household. But this business bores me now. Back to the Irishman.”
“Lawrence Malone, madam.”
“Lawrence…” Rosamunde’s face changed. “Oh!” she looked gleeful.
“Evangeline had plans for you. But,” she tilted her face and smiled, “So did my Daniel. I can smell him all over you. He was my favorite kill. You say he’d kill me, but last time he was in my presense he fucked me so I could hardly stand. I can still feel him inside me.”
Rosamunde gave a low groan of contentment, sinking deeper into her day bed.
“Is that the way he fucks you?” she asked.
“Rosamunde!” Tanitha snapped. “The Strausses!”
“Oh we killed them,” Rosaumnde said, negligently.
“Not as thoroughly as you thought,” Tanitha said. “They are very much alive. But why did you try to kill them in the first place?’
“They were becoming too powerful. We had made compact with them. We had a distaff clan.”
“You had a distaff clan? A renegade clan.”
“If you must call it renegade…”
“We didn’t know anything about it,” Tanitha said, “so it was renegade.”
“Well, then fine, But we were in Bavaria, controlling… oh, a great number of things…and the Strausses were our partners. Enforcers? Well, we enforced each other. In fact, some of them even fed off of us, becoming stronger than most of their kind. It would have done funny things to them. It did a few fuinny things to us. I had Evangeline in control of that clan. And, when they got above themselves, we went to war.”
“You killed them all.”
“Tanitha, you know better than anyone, when Drinkers go to war, it is total war. Believe me, no one stepped in to save them, no mortal was sad to see them go. However, with them gone, we also had to be gone.”
“So yes, we attempted to destroy them all. I thought we had,” she said, and this was the only moment Laurie noted regret in her voice.
“But how were you even in league with them?” Tanitha demanded. “How did you even know about them.”
“You could say we shared blood.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Myron demanded.
“Peace, Mr. Werewolf, peace. It means what it means. We shared blood. They benefited from things that did not benefit me. I thought the alliance would mend that. It did not. We killed them.”
“But, as you now know,” Tanitha reminded her, “not all of them. They had the help of witches.”
“Oh!” Rosamunde said. “Well, we never could do much against witches.”
“Why is that?” Laurie asked.
“Why is what?” Rosamunde seemed as bored as ever. “Work against the witches? Oh,” she chuckled, “he doesn’t know.”
“Well, if you’re going to be an ass,” Tanitha said, “then I’ll tell him.”
“Because they made us,” Rosamunde said, quickly.
Laurie blinked.
”I know,” Rosamunde said,. “Werefolk can change into different beasts, and we have immortality. We have great speed, can enter into each others minds while witches remain distinctly mortal and often unmagical. Magical to us because they can do things to us, but around other humans, very often very human. And, of course, even the longest lived one of them is mortal. But it was they who made us, and so they have the last word on us. This is why no blood drinker can lay hands on a true born witch.”
Lawrence Malone stood there absorbing this. Laurie had certainly known he had no power over any of the Dunharrows, and he had seen Levy expel Evangeline’s crew with a mere command. But this bit, why Levy Berringer was able to do it, and yet not save himself from an abusive stepfather, was unknown to him.
And yet, Chris and Lewis came at the very moment the guy was beating on him, so who says Levy didn’t save himself? The ways of witches…
But Tanitha was not dwelling on the ways of witches. She was dwelling on her cousin.
It was Tanitha who asked, “Is there anything else you know?”
“Oh, yes,” Rosamunde said, sitting pretty and smiling as she smoothed her gowns.
“There’s a great deal I know.”
“Excellent,” Tanitha said, a beatific smile spreading across her face, “because, as entertaining as I’ve always found you, unless you tell me everything, and leave out nothing, I will kill Eve Moreland, her brother, your entire staff, and lastly yourself. And then, I will burn this house down.”
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story! Tanitha seems like a tricky person to deal with and hopefully they can tell her what she wants to know to prevent more deaths. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well since Tanitha is threatening Rosamunde, and she's come with Dan and Myron to help, I'm okay with who she kills.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER FIVE
Marabeth brought down the books to her brother and her cousin and Seth.
“Jason arrives tomorrow, and I need my rest. I deserve my rest.”
“You’re going to tell him everything,” Kris said.
“What if I told you I already have?”
She waited for Kris to be angry, but he showed no emotion, and so she continued while he and Jim looked at her.
“He helped me…. When I dreamed. He… For some reason he was able to speak to Hagano.”
Kris’s eyes lit up.
“We… saw Hagano being made. He was a soldier, in a village…”
Marabeth began to describe seeing through the other woman’s eyes, seeing the sorcerer who had come from Byzantium it seemed who was going to make him into a wolf, and then Jim continued. He told of his dream with Seth, of how Hagano’s sister had been a wolf, how she had killed all of their family, and the Sorcerer had said, plainly, that the only way for Hagano to become the Wolf was not only to wear the skin she had worn, but to kill her.”
“But we didn’t kill anyone for the skins to work,” Marabeth said.
“Maybe because it’s…” Kris guessed, “a family spell. Done once and for all. And we’re covered by it? Maybe?”
“Hagano looked like he didn’t want to kill her, so who knows if he did?” Jim said.
“Last night,” Kris said to Jim, “after I saw, when I was feeling…. I had been feeling frustrated, truthfully, I was swimming. I was feeling better about things, and in the middle of it I knew I was being looked at. I thought it was you, Mara. But when I looked up, I knew it was Hagano. He had the descriptions you’ve given.”
Jim and Marabeth were looking at Kris is surprise and he continued.
“But he was not alone. He was with a woman, with gold hair, a wolf fur cloak, only it was red and I thought, is this her, the Red Rose. The Rose of the world.”
“Rosamunde,” Jim said.
“Like that bitch that Loreal said her friends were going to see. I wonder if there is a connect—but nevermind.”
She turned her full attention on Kris.
“Naturally,” he continued, “I wondered what you are wondering now? Is poor Kris Strauss jealous of getting no dreams and no wolf cloaks and no resolution. Is he making this shit up?”
“No!” Jim protested.
“You thought it,” Kris said. “You both thought it. And that’s fine. The two of them appeared to me when I was on my back and half conscious. As soon as I spun around to see them they were gone. I was more happy than afraid. When I got out of the pool and got dressed I saw something glimmering where they had been.”
Kris reached into his jacket pocket.
It was heavy and gold, old and neither Jim nor Marabeth dared to touch it, a heavy arm ring of gold,
“I have only seen it on his arm,” Marabeth breathed. “Never up close.”
The shapes were geometric, fluid and almost Norse, wolves chasing each other, tails wrapping about, mouths open, the arm ring of Hagano.
All this time Seth had said nothing and now he said, “Have you tried it on?”
“No,” Kris said.
“Maybe you should.”
“I’m tired of being afraid,” Kris said. “You’re right, I will.”
. Marabeth kissed him on the cheek, and then Jim, and then Seth for good measure, and turned from the study to head up the stairs.
“She still has Uncle Nate’s journal, though,” Jim noted.
“She’s probably screening it and seeing if we can take what she finds,” Kris said running his hands over the heavy arm ring while he opened the big binder with the list of names.
As he took out a cigarette Kris said, “I have to admit, I’m okay with her doing that.”
They looked down the list and read the names.
Leinghelde 496
Stedefelde 515
Rosamunda 537
Wulffaxa 563
Wulfstan 598
Chlodomar 620
Lodovicis 647
Karloman 667
Tentaman 698
Ettomar 721
Theodaran 757
Ereleuva 785
Hadrian 805
Clovis 832
Wensis 860
Audofleda 890
Amalasunta 913
Athalaric 940
*Athalaric married Wodolfa in 971 and became the Earl of Chlotane of the border of the Kingdom of the East Franks, that is Germany. Here be the Earls of Chlotane who were called also, Wulfmann or Kinderwulfe.
“Well, can’t get much plainer than that,” Kris Strauss murmured, almost smiling.
Otto 973
Alvin 1001
Otto 1028
Myre 1052
Myron 1080
Peter 1106
Kristoffer 1137
Alvis 1170
Frederick 1198
Frederick 1220
Ingrid 1250
Marabeth 1272
Swinda 1295
“But look, there are all of our names,” Jim said. “Do you think that the family saved them, remembered them through all these years?”
“Not intentionally,” Kris said. “Maybe Pamela. But it seems like even she didn’t really know that much about where we came from.”
Calfredo* 1315
It is a great misfortune that Calfredo, born to the Italian branch of the family suffered as many of our line did, for in having two female generations, the Wolf Gift died in most of his line. His daughter, however wed the grandson of Marabeth, thus restoring the wolf Gift to the Great House.
“Italian branch?” Jim said.
“During the Holy Roman Empire much of Italy was controlled by Germany. It was one huge place and people came and went between borders. Or what we call borders.”
“Then… does this mean that there were lots of us, and after a while we just became… normal?”
“Seems so,” Kris said. “And what’s more, it seems like our ancestors wanted us to be what we are. They were sad when the trait died. They called it—”
“The Gift,” Jim said. “And look here,” he said, “all the way back here.”
He scrolled up and read off:
“Leinghelde 496, Stedefelde 515, Rosamunda 537.”
“Yeah?” Kris looked at him, waiting for an explanation.
“But don’t you understand?” Jim said. “the story. Little Red Riding Hood, who was called Rosamunde in the other story, who went to Grandmother’s house. Look.”
“Rosamunda. And she is Leinghelde’s granddaughter. Then, you think Leinghelde is the original grandmother.”
“Yes,” Kris said, “the Grandmother who made the wolf cloak and who was eaten by the wolf and then who was eaten by Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Who was also eaten by the Wolf.”
“Yes,” Kris said. “I still don’t get what it means, but…”
“Another question,” Seth said. “Who wrote the book? Did your Aunt Pamela write this, or someone else?”
“Let’s just keep reading,” Jim said. “Keep reading.”
Claire 1345
Ignito 1362
Louis 1390
Charles 1413
Maximillian 1455
Sigismund 1478
Frederick 1501
Charlotte 1525
During Charlotte’s time, because of the Wars of Religion, her children fled into France and into Bavaria. Both under much reduced circumstances. We are descended from her Bavarian line which settled first in Wurzburg and then later, to the south. This line begins with:
“Well, if we’re descended from the Bavarian line,” Jim said, “then there’s another line.”
“There must be several lines,” Kris said. “We’ve already that.”
“But,” Jim said, “we can’t be the only line that…”
“Say it,” Kris said.
“Some people lost the Gift. The records say that clearly. But not all of them, and not this other group. We can’t be the only descendants of Hagano who are like him. We can’t be the only werewolves.”
With Jim’s words in his head, Kris read on.
Ursula 1542
Maria 1568
Rudolph 1595
Ferdinand 1619
Leopold 1649
Russell 1675
Geneva 1698
Russell 1720
Frederick 1747
*Under Frederick we entered into compact with Der Blutsauger
Setentho 1773
Shastino 1800
Marie 1830
Nicholas Wilhelm Strauss 1851
Friederich Wilhelm Strauss, June 19th,1880, Studlitz Bavaria,
James Nicholas Friederich Strauss, September 25th, 1928.
Nathan Freiderich James Strauss, January 18th, 1956
“Der Blutsauger,” Jim said.
“This is what Marabeth told us about, the league of our ancestors with the vampires.”
“Der Blutsauger. The Bloodsuckers,” Jim realized.
“Yes,” Kris said. “Whatever went wrong, Evangeline and her bunch killed Friederich’s family. Only he survived. I wonder if that’s why Friederich was settled so far from where he came from. It certainly tells us why Pamela didn’t know anything.”
“We know some things,” Kris said. “But not all things.”
“But we’ve seen so much of the story,” Jim said. “In the visions.”
“I haven’t, though,” Kris said.
“I’ve been so hung up on the wolf business, on wanting to get rid of that, I forgot about Frau Eva, and that blood. Maybe, if I can’t learn to make sense of being the wolf, I can do something by being the witch.”
MORE IN A FEW DAYS
TOMORROW.... WE RETURN TO BOOK OF THE BROKEN
Marabeth brought down the books to her brother and her cousin and Seth.
“Jason arrives tomorrow, and I need my rest. I deserve my rest.”
“You’re going to tell him everything,” Kris said.
“What if I told you I already have?”
She waited for Kris to be angry, but he showed no emotion, and so she continued while he and Jim looked at her.
“He helped me…. When I dreamed. He… For some reason he was able to speak to Hagano.”
Kris’s eyes lit up.
“We… saw Hagano being made. He was a soldier, in a village…”
Marabeth began to describe seeing through the other woman’s eyes, seeing the sorcerer who had come from Byzantium it seemed who was going to make him into a wolf, and then Jim continued. He told of his dream with Seth, of how Hagano’s sister had been a wolf, how she had killed all of their family, and the Sorcerer had said, plainly, that the only way for Hagano to become the Wolf was not only to wear the skin she had worn, but to kill her.”
“But we didn’t kill anyone for the skins to work,” Marabeth said.
“Maybe because it’s…” Kris guessed, “a family spell. Done once and for all. And we’re covered by it? Maybe?”
“Hagano looked like he didn’t want to kill her, so who knows if he did?” Jim said.
“Last night,” Kris said to Jim, “after I saw, when I was feeling…. I had been feeling frustrated, truthfully, I was swimming. I was feeling better about things, and in the middle of it I knew I was being looked at. I thought it was you, Mara. But when I looked up, I knew it was Hagano. He had the descriptions you’ve given.”
Jim and Marabeth were looking at Kris is surprise and he continued.
“But he was not alone. He was with a woman, with gold hair, a wolf fur cloak, only it was red and I thought, is this her, the Red Rose. The Rose of the world.”
“Rosamunde,” Jim said.
“Like that bitch that Loreal said her friends were going to see. I wonder if there is a connect—but nevermind.”
She turned her full attention on Kris.
“Naturally,” he continued, “I wondered what you are wondering now? Is poor Kris Strauss jealous of getting no dreams and no wolf cloaks and no resolution. Is he making this shit up?”
“No!” Jim protested.
“You thought it,” Kris said. “You both thought it. And that’s fine. The two of them appeared to me when I was on my back and half conscious. As soon as I spun around to see them they were gone. I was more happy than afraid. When I got out of the pool and got dressed I saw something glimmering where they had been.”
Kris reached into his jacket pocket.
It was heavy and gold, old and neither Jim nor Marabeth dared to touch it, a heavy arm ring of gold,
“I have only seen it on his arm,” Marabeth breathed. “Never up close.”
The shapes were geometric, fluid and almost Norse, wolves chasing each other, tails wrapping about, mouths open, the arm ring of Hagano.
All this time Seth had said nothing and now he said, “Have you tried it on?”
“No,” Kris said.
“Maybe you should.”
“I’m tired of being afraid,” Kris said. “You’re right, I will.”
. Marabeth kissed him on the cheek, and then Jim, and then Seth for good measure, and turned from the study to head up the stairs.
“She still has Uncle Nate’s journal, though,” Jim noted.
“She’s probably screening it and seeing if we can take what she finds,” Kris said running his hands over the heavy arm ring while he opened the big binder with the list of names.
As he took out a cigarette Kris said, “I have to admit, I’m okay with her doing that.”
They looked down the list and read the names.
Leinghelde 496
Stedefelde 515
Rosamunda 537
Wulffaxa 563
Wulfstan 598
Chlodomar 620
Lodovicis 647
Karloman 667
Tentaman 698
Ettomar 721
Theodaran 757
Ereleuva 785
Hadrian 805
Clovis 832
Wensis 860
Audofleda 890
Amalasunta 913
Athalaric 940
*Athalaric married Wodolfa in 971 and became the Earl of Chlotane of the border of the Kingdom of the East Franks, that is Germany. Here be the Earls of Chlotane who were called also, Wulfmann or Kinderwulfe.
“Well, can’t get much plainer than that,” Kris Strauss murmured, almost smiling.
Otto 973
Alvin 1001
Otto 1028
Myre 1052
Myron 1080
Peter 1106
Kristoffer 1137
Alvis 1170
Frederick 1198
Frederick 1220
Ingrid 1250
Marabeth 1272
Swinda 1295
“But look, there are all of our names,” Jim said. “Do you think that the family saved them, remembered them through all these years?”
“Not intentionally,” Kris said. “Maybe Pamela. But it seems like even she didn’t really know that much about where we came from.”
Calfredo* 1315
It is a great misfortune that Calfredo, born to the Italian branch of the family suffered as many of our line did, for in having two female generations, the Wolf Gift died in most of his line. His daughter, however wed the grandson of Marabeth, thus restoring the wolf Gift to the Great House.
“Italian branch?” Jim said.
“During the Holy Roman Empire much of Italy was controlled by Germany. It was one huge place and people came and went between borders. Or what we call borders.”
“Then… does this mean that there were lots of us, and after a while we just became… normal?”
“Seems so,” Kris said. “And what’s more, it seems like our ancestors wanted us to be what we are. They were sad when the trait died. They called it—”
“The Gift,” Jim said. “And look here,” he said, “all the way back here.”
He scrolled up and read off:
“Leinghelde 496, Stedefelde 515, Rosamunda 537.”
“Yeah?” Kris looked at him, waiting for an explanation.
“But don’t you understand?” Jim said. “the story. Little Red Riding Hood, who was called Rosamunde in the other story, who went to Grandmother’s house. Look.”
“Rosamunda. And she is Leinghelde’s granddaughter. Then, you think Leinghelde is the original grandmother.”
“Yes,” Kris said, “the Grandmother who made the wolf cloak and who was eaten by the wolf and then who was eaten by Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Who was also eaten by the Wolf.”
“Yes,” Kris said. “I still don’t get what it means, but…”
“Another question,” Seth said. “Who wrote the book? Did your Aunt Pamela write this, or someone else?”
“Let’s just keep reading,” Jim said. “Keep reading.”
Claire 1345
Ignito 1362
Louis 1390
Charles 1413
Maximillian 1455
Sigismund 1478
Frederick 1501
Charlotte 1525
During Charlotte’s time, because of the Wars of Religion, her children fled into France and into Bavaria. Both under much reduced circumstances. We are descended from her Bavarian line which settled first in Wurzburg and then later, to the south. This line begins with:
“Well, if we’re descended from the Bavarian line,” Jim said, “then there’s another line.”
“There must be several lines,” Kris said. “We’ve already that.”
“But,” Jim said, “we can’t be the only line that…”
“Say it,” Kris said.
“Some people lost the Gift. The records say that clearly. But not all of them, and not this other group. We can’t be the only descendants of Hagano who are like him. We can’t be the only werewolves.”
With Jim’s words in his head, Kris read on.
Ursula 1542
Maria 1568
Rudolph 1595
Ferdinand 1619
Leopold 1649
Russell 1675
Geneva 1698
Russell 1720
Frederick 1747
*Under Frederick we entered into compact with Der Blutsauger
Setentho 1773
Shastino 1800
Marie 1830
Nicholas Wilhelm Strauss 1851
Friederich Wilhelm Strauss, June 19th,1880, Studlitz Bavaria,
James Nicholas Friederich Strauss, September 25th, 1928.
Nathan Freiderich James Strauss, January 18th, 1956
“Der Blutsauger,” Jim said.
“This is what Marabeth told us about, the league of our ancestors with the vampires.”
“Der Blutsauger. The Bloodsuckers,” Jim realized.
“Yes,” Kris said. “Whatever went wrong, Evangeline and her bunch killed Friederich’s family. Only he survived. I wonder if that’s why Friederich was settled so far from where he came from. It certainly tells us why Pamela didn’t know anything.”
“We know some things,” Kris said. “But not all things.”
“But we’ve seen so much of the story,” Jim said. “In the visions.”
“I haven’t, though,” Kris said.
“I’ve been so hung up on the wolf business, on wanting to get rid of that, I forgot about Frau Eva, and that blood. Maybe, if I can’t learn to make sense of being the wolf, I can do something by being the witch.”
MORE IN A FEW DAYS
TOMORROW.... WE RETURN TO BOOK OF THE BROKEN
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to Marabeth and co. They are discovering even more of their family history and I am enjoying learning all about it. Excellent writing and I look forward to more of this in a few days and Book Of The Broken tomorrow.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AND NOW, AT LAST, WE RETURN TO THE BLOOD, AND TO THE BOOK OF NATHAN STRAUSS
S I X
T H E B O O K
O F
N A T H A N
S T R A U S S
They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.
-The Book of the Law
In her room, Marabeth Strauss continued to read.
I told her today. I told her about the shadow. I suppose that’s a metaphor, but it’s the thing that matters. I told her how sometimes it swamps me so much I almost can’t go on. And the reason for this honesty is because we were making out all night in that little dive in Florida. Her hair was smelling so good and she’s going back to college, and she said something about me looking like Rock Hudson. I wanted her to know what she would really be getting if she was going to get me, Before we can go anywhere else, before we can move forward she’s got to know I’m crazy as a loon.
It was when Marabeth read this that she started looking at the dates.
Until this moment she hadn’t realized her father was telling her a story. He had not simply given her his journals, he had given her what he thought was important out of his journals, and cobbled them together into something. But why in the world was his desire for Delia and the weird things she had done to him, or vice versa, part of her journal? And, of course, Marabeth had to remember, her father hadn’t read Pamela’s journal. He didn’t know that Delia was not only Steiger’s daughter, but Steiger’s sister and his daughter by Pamela. He did not know that Delia was the granddaughter of Friederich as well as her great-granddaughter, or that he was, in fact, linked to her by all of those ways. Presumably, Delia did not know either, and if Pamela had known anything about Delia’s liaisons with the cousins she didn’t know were cousins, then that certainly had not been brought up. Even though Nathan had not retyped all of these words out, and he had cut out with a knife bits and pieces from old books he’d written through over the years, he was telling her a story as much as Pamela had, and so when she read the next note, she was not surprised that it was some time later and Nathan reported:
She has agreed to marry me! But she has said she won’t do it until she comes home with me. I told her I have a great secret and she said she has to see it. I have stopped taking the pills. We must arrive in Ohio before the full moon. We will go to Grange’s house. He’s married a girl, and apparently she knows what he is. She must. How could you not tell your wife? But Granger will help to bind me so I can show Becca. She has to know or there is no happiness for us. She cannot not know what she is getting into.
Seeing Lassador through someone else’s eyes is an education. I say I’m seeing it through Rebecca’s eyes, but maybe I’m seeing it through my own after being in Florida so long. Down south everything was so full of color. It was almost too much color, too much heat, here everything is muted like a dirty watercolor, and Germantown is shabby, the streets need to be paved and the sidewalks are covered in trash. A few old places try to look proud. Every year, one of Mom’s brothers comes to paint the shutters on 1948 Dimler, and I have to say, no matter how ragged everything else looks, our old house is still in shape.
The house looks like it needs to be aired out. Not that it smells like it does, but it looks like it does. It’s just so old, and it hasn’t been redecorated since 1945. Pamela is living back in the house, upstairs, the carriage house is empty. Byron seems mad as ever. Mom seems suspicious of Rebecca, suspicious of a strange person coming into this house, and of course that makes sense. The best way to desctibe her is protective. Pamela is always hard to describe, but she doesn’t seem afraid. Not ever.
Becca says, “This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to meet the rest of your family.”
I think she’s nuts.
It happened. Of course I told Grange that if he said a word to my mother, I would kill him, and I told him there was no help for it, I had to be bound.
You could do it at your house he told me. The bonds are there too.
I could not I told him, because my mother and aunt and my sister are there also.
On the full moon, in the basement of this house, behind the steel doors he has added he binds me, and when he says to Rebecca, “You can stay upstairs” she says, no, she’ll stay right down here with me. I want to tell her no. I’m afraid too. But the look in her eyes that I know very well by now says that this is not going to be an option.
She’s seen me naked before, but not bound, and after a while, as the night comes on, I feel the madness and the wildness coming.
When I wake up the next morning, she is asleep on the other end of the room. Whatever terror she had, did not last. Did I stop my howling, stop barking? I see that I finally ate the bloody meat set before me. Only the bones remain, cracked by the strong jaws I can’t remember.
“Did it terrify you?” I asked her.
“It did. I was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though. If I had died in your jaws I wouldn’t have minded.”
She remained with me for the next two nights, and on the fourth we went to the house and announced our plans to marry.
When Mother looked at us, looked at Rebecca, Rebecca only said, “There is nothing that Nathan has hidden from me. Nothing.”
R&N
Together with their Parents
Rebecca Susan Cunningham
&
Nathan Friederich Strauss
Request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their union
Saturday the Fifth of October, Nineteen-Hundred and Seventy-Eight
At three o’clock in the afternoon
The Cathedral of Saint Ursula, Lassador, Ohio,
Reception to Follow
Rebecca works more than me. I just can’t always do it. I’ve started the temp agency thing cause these are jobs for a small time, and they come to an end, and then I do something else. This seems to be what I’m good for. I was tired of the way Becca looked at me when I kept on getting fired, and today when I get home Becca says, “There’s a call from your mom.”
I know I’ll call her later, but I know Rebecca wants to tell me what they discussed.
“She says she doesn’t know why you don’t just come back home. Grange’ll set you up in his office, and you won’t have to worry about money. We’ll have the house, so you won’t have to worry about rent. Or anything. Which is good for you. Good for us?’
And I ask her if she means it’s good cause I can’t hold down a job, and Rebecca doesn’t say anything.
I don’t want to live in my mom’s house, in my grandmother’s house I tell her. I’d be as big a failure as Byron.
“You should call your mother,” is all Becca says.
I do, and Mom says I should come home.
“Kristin wants you back too, and so does Pamela.”
I can’t tell if that’s the truth. It’s not that Pamela doesn’t care, but I can’t imagine her saying, “I want Nathan back.” Or that she wants anyone back. And I tell mom I don’t want to have to come back and live under her roof.
“It’s not my roof,” is all my mom says.
And then she says that when my great grandfather died, the house and much of the business went to Grandfather, and under his will it would have gone to Dad, but Dad died and so, the day Friederich died, the house and half of the beer factory went to me.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” I asked her.
She said, “Because you wanted to be free and independent,” but I said I wanted to see that will, and that it was shitty not to know this until now. And then I said, “Well, does Rebecca know?”
“I told it all to her, so she’ll probably be asking you to come home, and I think you should.”
When I sat there not saying anything, Mom also said, “And Rebecca told me she’s pregnant. You all are expecting. So the days of pleasing yourself are through.”
I am not entirely sure how I feel that my mother, the woman who saved my life once, didn’t tell me about my inheritance, but did tell me about my child before my wife had the chance to. There is no help for it. I am hopeless at making money, but then I don’t really need to spend it, so I should be okay. I was surprised that my grandmother or mother never owned the house, but apparently my great grandfather left my grandmother Katherine a substantial inheritance anyway. I’ve got half a mind to come back, take the deed, sell that huge fucker and then chuck out all those old bitches onto the street and come back to Florida with the money. I know that I won't.
MORE TOMORROW
S I X
T H E B O O K
O F
N A T H A N
S T R A U S S
They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.
-The Book of the Law
In her room, Marabeth Strauss continued to read.
I told her today. I told her about the shadow. I suppose that’s a metaphor, but it’s the thing that matters. I told her how sometimes it swamps me so much I almost can’t go on. And the reason for this honesty is because we were making out all night in that little dive in Florida. Her hair was smelling so good and she’s going back to college, and she said something about me looking like Rock Hudson. I wanted her to know what she would really be getting if she was going to get me, Before we can go anywhere else, before we can move forward she’s got to know I’m crazy as a loon.
It was when Marabeth read this that she started looking at the dates.
Until this moment she hadn’t realized her father was telling her a story. He had not simply given her his journals, he had given her what he thought was important out of his journals, and cobbled them together into something. But why in the world was his desire for Delia and the weird things she had done to him, or vice versa, part of her journal? And, of course, Marabeth had to remember, her father hadn’t read Pamela’s journal. He didn’t know that Delia was not only Steiger’s daughter, but Steiger’s sister and his daughter by Pamela. He did not know that Delia was the granddaughter of Friederich as well as her great-granddaughter, or that he was, in fact, linked to her by all of those ways. Presumably, Delia did not know either, and if Pamela had known anything about Delia’s liaisons with the cousins she didn’t know were cousins, then that certainly had not been brought up. Even though Nathan had not retyped all of these words out, and he had cut out with a knife bits and pieces from old books he’d written through over the years, he was telling her a story as much as Pamela had, and so when she read the next note, she was not surprised that it was some time later and Nathan reported:
She has agreed to marry me! But she has said she won’t do it until she comes home with me. I told her I have a great secret and she said she has to see it. I have stopped taking the pills. We must arrive in Ohio before the full moon. We will go to Grange’s house. He’s married a girl, and apparently she knows what he is. She must. How could you not tell your wife? But Granger will help to bind me so I can show Becca. She has to know or there is no happiness for us. She cannot not know what she is getting into.
Seeing Lassador through someone else’s eyes is an education. I say I’m seeing it through Rebecca’s eyes, but maybe I’m seeing it through my own after being in Florida so long. Down south everything was so full of color. It was almost too much color, too much heat, here everything is muted like a dirty watercolor, and Germantown is shabby, the streets need to be paved and the sidewalks are covered in trash. A few old places try to look proud. Every year, one of Mom’s brothers comes to paint the shutters on 1948 Dimler, and I have to say, no matter how ragged everything else looks, our old house is still in shape.
The house looks like it needs to be aired out. Not that it smells like it does, but it looks like it does. It’s just so old, and it hasn’t been redecorated since 1945. Pamela is living back in the house, upstairs, the carriage house is empty. Byron seems mad as ever. Mom seems suspicious of Rebecca, suspicious of a strange person coming into this house, and of course that makes sense. The best way to desctibe her is protective. Pamela is always hard to describe, but she doesn’t seem afraid. Not ever.
Becca says, “This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to meet the rest of your family.”
I think she’s nuts.
It happened. Of course I told Grange that if he said a word to my mother, I would kill him, and I told him there was no help for it, I had to be bound.
You could do it at your house he told me. The bonds are there too.
I could not I told him, because my mother and aunt and my sister are there also.
On the full moon, in the basement of this house, behind the steel doors he has added he binds me, and when he says to Rebecca, “You can stay upstairs” she says, no, she’ll stay right down here with me. I want to tell her no. I’m afraid too. But the look in her eyes that I know very well by now says that this is not going to be an option.
She’s seen me naked before, but not bound, and after a while, as the night comes on, I feel the madness and the wildness coming.
When I wake up the next morning, she is asleep on the other end of the room. Whatever terror she had, did not last. Did I stop my howling, stop barking? I see that I finally ate the bloody meat set before me. Only the bones remain, cracked by the strong jaws I can’t remember.
“Did it terrify you?” I asked her.
“It did. I was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though. If I had died in your jaws I wouldn’t have minded.”
She remained with me for the next two nights, and on the fourth we went to the house and announced our plans to marry.
When Mother looked at us, looked at Rebecca, Rebecca only said, “There is nothing that Nathan has hidden from me. Nothing.”
R&N
Together with their Parents
Rebecca Susan Cunningham
&
Nathan Friederich Strauss
Request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their union
Saturday the Fifth of October, Nineteen-Hundred and Seventy-Eight
At three o’clock in the afternoon
The Cathedral of Saint Ursula, Lassador, Ohio,
Reception to Follow
Rebecca works more than me. I just can’t always do it. I’ve started the temp agency thing cause these are jobs for a small time, and they come to an end, and then I do something else. This seems to be what I’m good for. I was tired of the way Becca looked at me when I kept on getting fired, and today when I get home Becca says, “There’s a call from your mom.”
I know I’ll call her later, but I know Rebecca wants to tell me what they discussed.
“She says she doesn’t know why you don’t just come back home. Grange’ll set you up in his office, and you won’t have to worry about money. We’ll have the house, so you won’t have to worry about rent. Or anything. Which is good for you. Good for us?’
And I ask her if she means it’s good cause I can’t hold down a job, and Rebecca doesn’t say anything.
I don’t want to live in my mom’s house, in my grandmother’s house I tell her. I’d be as big a failure as Byron.
“You should call your mother,” is all Becca says.
I do, and Mom says I should come home.
“Kristin wants you back too, and so does Pamela.”
I can’t tell if that’s the truth. It’s not that Pamela doesn’t care, but I can’t imagine her saying, “I want Nathan back.” Or that she wants anyone back. And I tell mom I don’t want to have to come back and live under her roof.
“It’s not my roof,” is all my mom says.
And then she says that when my great grandfather died, the house and much of the business went to Grandfather, and under his will it would have gone to Dad, but Dad died and so, the day Friederich died, the house and half of the beer factory went to me.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” I asked her.
She said, “Because you wanted to be free and independent,” but I said I wanted to see that will, and that it was shitty not to know this until now. And then I said, “Well, does Rebecca know?”
“I told it all to her, so she’ll probably be asking you to come home, and I think you should.”
When I sat there not saying anything, Mom also said, “And Rebecca told me she’s pregnant. You all are expecting. So the days of pleasing yourself are through.”
I am not entirely sure how I feel that my mother, the woman who saved my life once, didn’t tell me about my inheritance, but did tell me about my child before my wife had the chance to. There is no help for it. I am hopeless at making money, but then I don’t really need to spend it, so I should be okay. I was surprised that my grandmother or mother never owned the house, but apparently my great grandfather left my grandmother Katherine a substantial inheritance anyway. I’ve got half a mind to come back, take the deed, sell that huge fucker and then chuck out all those old bitches onto the street and come back to Florida with the money. I know that I won't.
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I liked getting back to this story. Marabeth sure is learning a lot about family history, especially about her father. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
She's learned some things, but the big things still remain. See you tomorrow.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT, AS NATHAN'S JOURNAL BECOMES MORE CONTEMPORARY, MARABETH MEETS HERSELF, AND LEARNS FAR MORE ABOUT HER FATHER THAN SHE EVER WISHED.
We have named her Marabeth. Actually Pamela named her. She said it was an old family name from a time when we were lords and ladies. I don’t believe we were ever lords and ladies and I think old Pam is half cracked.
When Me and Becca came back to the house it was only a few days before, at the dinner table, she announces, “If this is really going to be our house, it’s going to be our house,” and she started renovating everything, taking down old curtains, getting rid of furniture, having the walls repainted. I don’t know how Mom felt about it, and Pamela said nothing. Kristin and Byron never have opinions on anything. All this is to say Becca went into labor while she was painting the dining room, and a bucket of eggshell paint spilled all over the old floor. Even in the hospital bed with this little bitty baby, she is talking about the renovations.
“It hardly matters, because those floors are going to be stripped,” she says. “But I won’t be doing it. That’ll be so much turpentine, and that can’t be good for the baby.”
So many people are coming in and out of the hospital to visit, Grange and his wife Vanessa and their kid Peter, who just keeps reaching out to play with Mara. You can tell they’re going to be best friends! Cousin Mary Anne comes from the convent. Claire and Maris congratulate Mom on her first grandchild. Kristin and Byron are always there, but so is Pamela, who is more tender than I could imagine, and who looks on Mara with a sort of hunger.
“This will be an amazing girl,” she insists in that throwback German accent I always tried to make fun of, but that has really just scared me. It’s strange she says such things about Marabeth because Pamela has several nieces and two sisters, and I’m sure she never said that about any of them.
And then, on the day Becca is being discharged, in a short skirt, with her red hair flying away, in comes Delia Frye, and she rushes on Becca, kisses her and says, “I’m Delia, I’m home, and we’re going to be best friends.”
Steiger has been back for some time, but he stays over on East Street, down from the Cathedral, where his people have always been. Delia has been gone since she left almost ten years ago, and where the witch has been roving, who knows? I never understood how much Pamela cared about her, but Pamela is elated to have her, and Delia is just as glad to be with Pamela.
“Pamela is like my mother. And like a grandmother too,” Delia tells Becca. “She is fiercesome, but you mustn’t be afraid of her.”
Rebecca, who was so fierce about owning her house and putting her stamp on it, doesn’t mind Delia at all, is with her every moment, and when I come to see my wife and Mara, Becca’s head is pressed against Delia’s and both of them are playing with the baby. The two of them are inseparable except at night. Marabeth sleeps with us downstairs.
One night I awaken from sleeping because of the thudding above. Rebecca sleeps right on through it, but I get up and walk through the house, listening for mice or possums or something that creeps in old walls. When I get upstairs, even though Kristin stays up here, I hear loud, frantic sounds and Byron’s bedroom door is open. His little hurricane lantern is on. He lies on his back, looking stupid, his mouth wide open, and Delia, is kneeling on him, naked, red hair swirling about her as she rides him.
I don’t stop watching. I only realize how engrossed I am when I feel someone else’s presence. Kristin is there, watching, and tears are streaming from her eyes.
“Krista…”
I take her by the hand and lead her back to the room. We can still hear Delia and Bryon going at it.
“He said that he loved me,” she says.
“What?”
“He said that he loved me,” Kristin said again. “He said I was the one.”
“Who said?”
My sister banged her fist against her head and when I pulled them apart, she said, “Byron!”
“Byron! He’s…. He’s our brother.”
“He said he loved me,” Kristin said again. “And look at you?” she accued me. “When you watched them you were hard as a rock?”
“I…”
“You still are. Hanging out of your trousers.”
She was crying on the floor in her dark room, and just like that, she pulled down my pajamas. At first I didn’t know what she was doing, but as Delia and Byron fucked in the next room, Kristin sucked my cock until I came in her mouth.
I pulled up my trousers not entirely sure what I’d just done, or let be done to me, and then she began to cry, her mouth full of—of me—“Neither one of you loves me.”
“Get out, Nate,” she wept.
I didn’t know what else to do. I obeyed.
THIS PART IS TOO MUCH. CUT IT OUT. REMEMBER TO CUT IT OUT!!!!
B&D
Together with their Parents
Byron James Friederich Strauss
&
Delia Catherine Frye
Request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their union
Saturday the Thirteenth of June, Nineteen-Hundred and Eight-Five
At four o’clock in the afternoon
The Cathedral of Saint Ursula, Lassador, Ohio,
Reception to Follow
********************
STRAUSS
Kristin Marie
Left this world on November 4, 1986
aged 34 years.
Beloved Sister to Byron and Nathan
Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Katherine’s
funeral to be held at The Cathedral of Saint Ursula
.
With Requiem Mass
commencing at 11 am
on November 11, 1986
No one talks about the cache of pills found in Kristin’s bedroom.
After the funeral I am sitting in the mausoleum all alone, in the little chapel when Delia comes in all glamourous and in black. She always looks glamourous and her hair is so dark and red, and Byron is always pale beside her. She says how sad it is and how sad I must be, and I just nod and say yeah and yeah, and we’re standing looking at each other in this crypt and she says, “There’s always one way to defy death.” And then she says, “And I never even got to know my mother.’
And she gets down to pray, or so I think, for a minute, and then before I realize Delia never got on her knees to pray a day in her life, she’s unzipping my pants, and then she’s sucking my dick right there in the crypt the same way my dead sister did just a few months ago. And let me just say, I loved when Kristin sucked my dick. I hated her and I hated myself, but in that moment, in the dark, I thought about fucking her. All these fucking sluts in this family, seducing guys. They need to learn their fucking lesson!
And Byron and Becca are on their way back to the house with the rest of the family.
“I told them I’d come back and make you feel better,” Delia says, and then she lays down on the floor and pulls me to her, and I fuck her on the floor of the mausoleum. I haven’t fucked her since I was sixteen and it feels so damn good, and I don’t feel guilty about it at all. It just feels right and I keep saying, you take that, you take that like a slut, and the dirtier I am the more she likes it. It feels even better than it’s ever felt with Becca and I almost pass out coming inside of her.
I don’t want to feel guilty again. I’m not. Life is crazy and awful. I just had sex with my sister in law in a crypt in front of my sister’s dead body. I feel like a monster, but the truth is a monster is what I am.
When we’re done I say, “Kristin was fucking Byron.”
And she says, “Tell me something I didn’t know.”
MORE TOMORROW
We have named her Marabeth. Actually Pamela named her. She said it was an old family name from a time when we were lords and ladies. I don’t believe we were ever lords and ladies and I think old Pam is half cracked.
When Me and Becca came back to the house it was only a few days before, at the dinner table, she announces, “If this is really going to be our house, it’s going to be our house,” and she started renovating everything, taking down old curtains, getting rid of furniture, having the walls repainted. I don’t know how Mom felt about it, and Pamela said nothing. Kristin and Byron never have opinions on anything. All this is to say Becca went into labor while she was painting the dining room, and a bucket of eggshell paint spilled all over the old floor. Even in the hospital bed with this little bitty baby, she is talking about the renovations.
“It hardly matters, because those floors are going to be stripped,” she says. “But I won’t be doing it. That’ll be so much turpentine, and that can’t be good for the baby.”
So many people are coming in and out of the hospital to visit, Grange and his wife Vanessa and their kid Peter, who just keeps reaching out to play with Mara. You can tell they’re going to be best friends! Cousin Mary Anne comes from the convent. Claire and Maris congratulate Mom on her first grandchild. Kristin and Byron are always there, but so is Pamela, who is more tender than I could imagine, and who looks on Mara with a sort of hunger.
“This will be an amazing girl,” she insists in that throwback German accent I always tried to make fun of, but that has really just scared me. It’s strange she says such things about Marabeth because Pamela has several nieces and two sisters, and I’m sure she never said that about any of them.
And then, on the day Becca is being discharged, in a short skirt, with her red hair flying away, in comes Delia Frye, and she rushes on Becca, kisses her and says, “I’m Delia, I’m home, and we’re going to be best friends.”
Steiger has been back for some time, but he stays over on East Street, down from the Cathedral, where his people have always been. Delia has been gone since she left almost ten years ago, and where the witch has been roving, who knows? I never understood how much Pamela cared about her, but Pamela is elated to have her, and Delia is just as glad to be with Pamela.
“Pamela is like my mother. And like a grandmother too,” Delia tells Becca. “She is fiercesome, but you mustn’t be afraid of her.”
Rebecca, who was so fierce about owning her house and putting her stamp on it, doesn’t mind Delia at all, is with her every moment, and when I come to see my wife and Mara, Becca’s head is pressed against Delia’s and both of them are playing with the baby. The two of them are inseparable except at night. Marabeth sleeps with us downstairs.
One night I awaken from sleeping because of the thudding above. Rebecca sleeps right on through it, but I get up and walk through the house, listening for mice or possums or something that creeps in old walls. When I get upstairs, even though Kristin stays up here, I hear loud, frantic sounds and Byron’s bedroom door is open. His little hurricane lantern is on. He lies on his back, looking stupid, his mouth wide open, and Delia, is kneeling on him, naked, red hair swirling about her as she rides him.
I don’t stop watching. I only realize how engrossed I am when I feel someone else’s presence. Kristin is there, watching, and tears are streaming from her eyes.
“Krista…”
I take her by the hand and lead her back to the room. We can still hear Delia and Bryon going at it.
“He said that he loved me,” she says.
“What?”
“He said that he loved me,” Kristin said again. “He said I was the one.”
“Who said?”
My sister banged her fist against her head and when I pulled them apart, she said, “Byron!”
“Byron! He’s…. He’s our brother.”
“He said he loved me,” Kristin said again. “And look at you?” she accued me. “When you watched them you were hard as a rock?”
“I…”
“You still are. Hanging out of your trousers.”
She was crying on the floor in her dark room, and just like that, she pulled down my pajamas. At first I didn’t know what she was doing, but as Delia and Byron fucked in the next room, Kristin sucked my cock until I came in her mouth.
I pulled up my trousers not entirely sure what I’d just done, or let be done to me, and then she began to cry, her mouth full of—of me—“Neither one of you loves me.”
“Get out, Nate,” she wept.
I didn’t know what else to do. I obeyed.
THIS PART IS TOO MUCH. CUT IT OUT. REMEMBER TO CUT IT OUT!!!!
B&D
Together with their Parents
Byron James Friederich Strauss
&
Delia Catherine Frye
Request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their union
Saturday the Thirteenth of June, Nineteen-Hundred and Eight-Five
At four o’clock in the afternoon
The Cathedral of Saint Ursula, Lassador, Ohio,
Reception to Follow
********************
STRAUSS
Kristin Marie
Left this world on November 4, 1986
aged 34 years.
Beloved Sister to Byron and Nathan
Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.
Relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend Katherine’s
funeral to be held at The Cathedral of Saint Ursula
.
With Requiem Mass
commencing at 11 am
on November 11, 1986
No one talks about the cache of pills found in Kristin’s bedroom.
After the funeral I am sitting in the mausoleum all alone, in the little chapel when Delia comes in all glamourous and in black. She always looks glamourous and her hair is so dark and red, and Byron is always pale beside her. She says how sad it is and how sad I must be, and I just nod and say yeah and yeah, and we’re standing looking at each other in this crypt and she says, “There’s always one way to defy death.” And then she says, “And I never even got to know my mother.’
And she gets down to pray, or so I think, for a minute, and then before I realize Delia never got on her knees to pray a day in her life, she’s unzipping my pants, and then she’s sucking my dick right there in the crypt the same way my dead sister did just a few months ago. And let me just say, I loved when Kristin sucked my dick. I hated her and I hated myself, but in that moment, in the dark, I thought about fucking her. All these fucking sluts in this family, seducing guys. They need to learn their fucking lesson!
And Byron and Becca are on their way back to the house with the rest of the family.
“I told them I’d come back and make you feel better,” Delia says, and then she lays down on the floor and pulls me to her, and I fuck her on the floor of the mausoleum. I haven’t fucked her since I was sixteen and it feels so damn good, and I don’t feel guilty about it at all. It just feels right and I keep saying, you take that, you take that like a slut, and the dirtier I am the more she likes it. It feels even better than it’s ever felt with Becca and I almost pass out coming inside of her.
I don’t want to feel guilty again. I’m not. Life is crazy and awful. I just had sex with my sister in law in a crypt in front of my sister’s dead body. I feel like a monster, but the truth is a monster is what I am.
When we’re done I say, “Kristin was fucking Byron.”
And she says, “Tell me something I didn’t know.”
MORE TOMORROW
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