ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I am. I am catching up on much needed rest
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The Wicked: A Love Story
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
In the hotel room, Chris held out a glass of water to Sunny and said, “Sorry about—”
“Trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
Sunny took the water.
Chris held out his hand.
“What the hell is that?”
“A handshake. A peace offering.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Sunny said,
Sunny drank the water and looked to Kruinh. “Who the hell are you? You show up at my restaurant, tell me where I can feed and feed happy. And then the next thing I know you’ve got these two assholes trying to kill me.”
“I would say it’s not as simple as all that except it almost is,” Kruinh said. “As I just said, I wasn’t thinking clearly or else I would have been on the lookout for you. I would have told Chris and Lawrence to save you. The way they were able to save—well, that’s another story. Drink your water.”
“You killed my…” Sunny began.
“Family?” Kruinh lifted an eyebrow.
“No, but… Those guys were as innocent as I was. And you killed them.”
“I read the thoughts of two of them,” Chris said. “They had taken to killing anyone in order to live. One killed a homeless girl last night.”
“So you killed him because… you enforce the law?”
“Not that law,” Chris said. “I’m just telling you, none of us is innocent. Not really.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Sunny said dismally.
“I will explain it to you, then,” Kruinh said. “And I do not expect you to respect the explanation, but here it is. I am a blood drinker. I am what you would call a vampire. As are you. Because Rosamunde and Carter took you and made you. That is a forbidden thing. We all, all blood drinkers exist in houses, in clans, and each clan has a rule about how to kill, who can be killed and who cannot, who is allowed to make a knew drinker and who is not. It stops us from murdering the whole world indiscriminately. A drinker at full maturity can go without killing for a long time, but a young one cannot. If one does not kill—”
“They go mad,” Sunny said.
“Yes?” Kruinh looked at him strangely.
“Itr was done to me. I went mad and they … They made me do things,” Sunny said.
Kruinh nodded, and Sunny could tell that he was not the sort of person who pried.
“Also,” Kruinh said, “Only the head of a clan can make a new drinker. It is forbidden for someone not the head o a clan to make drinkers without the head of the clan’s permission. In the past, enemies went about dragging people off the streets, creating new vampire clans to rival their old families. Wars began this way. People unprepared, which are most people, were made into drinkers. Human life was wasted. And so now, if one attempts to create a renegade clan, then that renegade clan is destroyed and so is the one who made it.”
“That’s what you were doing,” Sunny said.
“Yes,” Kruinh said. “It is a hard law, but hard laws tend to be obeyed. Rosamunde is my niece, so I cannot kill her. But she made Carter. Carter is no blood to me, so he is dead. And so are the others.”
“But you could kill me.”
Chris spoke now.
“No. You could give fealty to out house,” Chris said. “and then be part of us.”
Sunny looked to Chris then looked ot Kruinh.
:”Ordinarily,” Kruinh said.
“That is… medieval.”
“But I am medieval,” Kruinh said. “Literally. And Chris is over three hundred years old.
“However,” Kruinh said. “There are older laws. You proved yourself. You proved your nobility. You survived two vampires older and stronger. I have no need for your fealty. But you must learn from me for a time. I must know you know how to live and know the rules, know our history, before allowing you to go out into the world on your own. You could be a danger to yourself as much as to others. As much as to us.”
Sunny understood this, when Kruinh spoke h understood everything.
“Stay with us for a time,” Kruinh said.
Sunny he heard Stay with me. Everything in his body vibrated with the words in his mind. If Laurie and Chris were not in the room, he would have gone immediately to Kruinh. He saw his beautiful brown face, in his composed body and hands the same trembling. Could that Laurie and Chris even tell.
Sunny only nodded.
Because he couldn’t say, Go to bed with me, he said, sullenly, “I still don’t think oyu should have killed them.”
“If I hadn’t, someone else would have,” Kruinh said. If I had not taken care of it another clan or a member of mine would have, and it would have been my responsibility. And if I had not taken care of it or we had not, then they would have, in time, ruined themselves. One reason drinkers cannot be made willy nilly is because most do not live very long. It is hard for a human to become a blood drinker. Most who are made die quickly, or at least in the first century. Most make a really miserable time of it.”
Chris Ashby tired to speak again and hoped he wasn’t about to be sworn at again.
“Stay with us,” he said. “Help us to help you not make a shit time of it, alright?”
“Fine,” Sunny said. “fucking fine.”
They left for Lassador the next day. Sunny came a day behind them. Neither Laurie or Chris said anything, but Kruinh had made one and was the maker of the maker of the other, and so he knew they were thinking Sunny had lied to them and gone his own way.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Kruinh said.
“Master?”
“Do you think after all my time my mind is slipping?”
Laurie had cleared his throat while driving.
“Kruinh, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
The vampire was seized with a sudden desire to knock Lawrence Malone in the back of his head, and probably, Laurie already knew this. They drove on in relative silence.
When they arrived back at the old Victorian, Dan Rawlinson was the first down, though it was Tanitha who first embraced her father and then the others.
“So Rosamunde is put down?” Dan said, eagerly.
“She has been put down,” Tanitha said. “I gave her into the hands of Miriamne, and I’m sure she’s been very creative.”
Miriamne was Kruinh’s older sister and that was all that needed to be said.
“And you ended the clan they had been making?” Tanitha said as if a bad weed had been dug out.
“Mostly,” Chris reported.
“Mostly?” Tanitha raised an eyebrow above one blue eye.
When Chris looked to Kruinh, whose face was impassive, and then told Tanitha everything about Sunny, it was Dan who said, “Well, that’s great.”
“How is it great?” Laurie eyed him with disgust.
“Because they were people just like us,” Dan said. “And in case you forgot, I was made by Rosamunde. I was made like that. And you were too, though you like to forget it.”
“I don’t forget anything.”
“Do you forget that you were made by a lesser vampire and should have been put down by the old laws as much as me, or tbis Sunny?” Dan said.
When Chris looked at him, Dan said, “I meant your sister who gave Laurie the death blow, not you when you saved him. But still, both of you are a lesser vampires than Rosamunde.”
“Well,” Chris considered before being insulted, “that is true.”
“We don’t even know if this guy is going to show or not,” Laurie said. “He could have given us the slip.”
Kruinh, who had hung up his great jacket, headed up the stairs, still well dressed, murmuring, “You’re just mad because he hit you.”
“I’m telling you,” Laurie almost stage whispered to Tanitha, “this guy has some sort of hold over Kruinh.”
Before sunrise the next morning, making its noisy growling entrance into the neighborhood of 4848 Brummel came an old Harley Davidson, Easy Rider style, with he strong wheels so far out it reminded Dan Rawlinson of a woman with outstretched legs, and off of it hopped a guy in a studded leather jacket and dark shades, chomping gum as hecame up the walk. He pulled off his helmet and he was great looking, great looking but in a funny way, sort of like Laurie, where you could see the traces of an individuality and ethnicity that made him more than common. His eyes were wide under a heavy brow, and his blond hair was curly and pale as he pushed it out of his face. He, Dan realized, wasn’t pretending to be anyone. As Dan opened the door, the newcomer looked mildly surprised.
“You’re Sunny!” Dan held out his hand.
Sunny burst out into a smile, which was the first time in a while he had, and when he did, Dan understood his name.
“You’re the one who didn’t try to kill me.”
“I’m Dan,” Dan Rawlinson said. “Com on in.”
“I had to do some of it on my own,” Sunny was saying when the others were coming into the kitchen. “I had to know I wasn’t completely helpless, and after all, how could I be? We being what we are?”
“But when did you travel?” Dan asked.
“I thought about testing out the sun thing, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I know!” Dan said.
“Can you?”
“I can now,” Dan was saying as Chris and Laurie entered the kitchen. “But it was a while.”
Dan realized that if he were newly made he would want to know how long a while was and said, “You have to be feeding all the time, and it actually took me about a year. I’m sorry about that. It drives some people crazy. As time goes by you can start testing the waters. Sort off like you did by showing up at sunrise, but…”
“And that actually means you’re pretty strong,” Chris added, holding out his hand.
When Sunny looked at it, Chris said, “There isn’t a way to make up for what happened, and if it happened again and I didn’t know you, I don’t know how the situation would have changed. I was there to do a job, Sunny.”
Sunny nodded, but still didn’t shake his hand.
“I’m understanding that,” he said. “I have done several jobs in the last few nights, and I know I probably saved a woman from being raped and strangled, and stopped a few other things from happening, but I also know there are some children who have no fathers and spouses who are now widowed.”
Chris nodded.
“Just understand,” Sunny continued, “I came because Kruinh asked me to, and if I remain with you all, then the day may come when I have to follow orders, or give them, and when they affect you, I will give as little apology to you as you are now giving to me.”
TOMORROW NIGHT THERE WILL BE NO POST OF ANYTHING AS THE EASTER HOLIDAY BEGINS
“Trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
Sunny took the water.
Chris held out his hand.
“What the hell is that?”
“A handshake. A peace offering.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Sunny said,
Sunny drank the water and looked to Kruinh. “Who the hell are you? You show up at my restaurant, tell me where I can feed and feed happy. And then the next thing I know you’ve got these two assholes trying to kill me.”
“I would say it’s not as simple as all that except it almost is,” Kruinh said. “As I just said, I wasn’t thinking clearly or else I would have been on the lookout for you. I would have told Chris and Lawrence to save you. The way they were able to save—well, that’s another story. Drink your water.”
“You killed my…” Sunny began.
“Family?” Kruinh lifted an eyebrow.
“No, but… Those guys were as innocent as I was. And you killed them.”
“I read the thoughts of two of them,” Chris said. “They had taken to killing anyone in order to live. One killed a homeless girl last night.”
“So you killed him because… you enforce the law?”
“Not that law,” Chris said. “I’m just telling you, none of us is innocent. Not really.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Sunny said dismally.
“I will explain it to you, then,” Kruinh said. “And I do not expect you to respect the explanation, but here it is. I am a blood drinker. I am what you would call a vampire. As are you. Because Rosamunde and Carter took you and made you. That is a forbidden thing. We all, all blood drinkers exist in houses, in clans, and each clan has a rule about how to kill, who can be killed and who cannot, who is allowed to make a knew drinker and who is not. It stops us from murdering the whole world indiscriminately. A drinker at full maturity can go without killing for a long time, but a young one cannot. If one does not kill—”
“They go mad,” Sunny said.
“Yes?” Kruinh looked at him strangely.
“Itr was done to me. I went mad and they … They made me do things,” Sunny said.
Kruinh nodded, and Sunny could tell that he was not the sort of person who pried.
“Also,” Kruinh said, “Only the head of a clan can make a new drinker. It is forbidden for someone not the head o a clan to make drinkers without the head of the clan’s permission. In the past, enemies went about dragging people off the streets, creating new vampire clans to rival their old families. Wars began this way. People unprepared, which are most people, were made into drinkers. Human life was wasted. And so now, if one attempts to create a renegade clan, then that renegade clan is destroyed and so is the one who made it.”
“That’s what you were doing,” Sunny said.
“Yes,” Kruinh said. “It is a hard law, but hard laws tend to be obeyed. Rosamunde is my niece, so I cannot kill her. But she made Carter. Carter is no blood to me, so he is dead. And so are the others.”
“But you could kill me.”
Chris spoke now.
“No. You could give fealty to out house,” Chris said. “and then be part of us.”
Sunny looked to Chris then looked ot Kruinh.
:”Ordinarily,” Kruinh said.
“That is… medieval.”
“But I am medieval,” Kruinh said. “Literally. And Chris is over three hundred years old.
“However,” Kruinh said. “There are older laws. You proved yourself. You proved your nobility. You survived two vampires older and stronger. I have no need for your fealty. But you must learn from me for a time. I must know you know how to live and know the rules, know our history, before allowing you to go out into the world on your own. You could be a danger to yourself as much as to others. As much as to us.”
Sunny understood this, when Kruinh spoke h understood everything.
“Stay with us for a time,” Kruinh said.
Sunny he heard Stay with me. Everything in his body vibrated with the words in his mind. If Laurie and Chris were not in the room, he would have gone immediately to Kruinh. He saw his beautiful brown face, in his composed body and hands the same trembling. Could that Laurie and Chris even tell.
Sunny only nodded.
Because he couldn’t say, Go to bed with me, he said, sullenly, “I still don’t think oyu should have killed them.”
“If I hadn’t, someone else would have,” Kruinh said. If I had not taken care of it another clan or a member of mine would have, and it would have been my responsibility. And if I had not taken care of it or we had not, then they would have, in time, ruined themselves. One reason drinkers cannot be made willy nilly is because most do not live very long. It is hard for a human to become a blood drinker. Most who are made die quickly, or at least in the first century. Most make a really miserable time of it.”
Chris Ashby tired to speak again and hoped he wasn’t about to be sworn at again.
“Stay with us,” he said. “Help us to help you not make a shit time of it, alright?”
“Fine,” Sunny said. “fucking fine.”
They left for Lassador the next day. Sunny came a day behind them. Neither Laurie or Chris said anything, but Kruinh had made one and was the maker of the maker of the other, and so he knew they were thinking Sunny had lied to them and gone his own way.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Kruinh said.
“Master?”
“Do you think after all my time my mind is slipping?”
Laurie had cleared his throat while driving.
“Kruinh, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
The vampire was seized with a sudden desire to knock Lawrence Malone in the back of his head, and probably, Laurie already knew this. They drove on in relative silence.
When they arrived back at the old Victorian, Dan Rawlinson was the first down, though it was Tanitha who first embraced her father and then the others.
“So Rosamunde is put down?” Dan said, eagerly.
“She has been put down,” Tanitha said. “I gave her into the hands of Miriamne, and I’m sure she’s been very creative.”
Miriamne was Kruinh’s older sister and that was all that needed to be said.
“And you ended the clan they had been making?” Tanitha said as if a bad weed had been dug out.
“Mostly,” Chris reported.
“Mostly?” Tanitha raised an eyebrow above one blue eye.
When Chris looked to Kruinh, whose face was impassive, and then told Tanitha everything about Sunny, it was Dan who said, “Well, that’s great.”
“How is it great?” Laurie eyed him with disgust.
“Because they were people just like us,” Dan said. “And in case you forgot, I was made by Rosamunde. I was made like that. And you were too, though you like to forget it.”
“I don’t forget anything.”
“Do you forget that you were made by a lesser vampire and should have been put down by the old laws as much as me, or tbis Sunny?” Dan said.
When Chris looked at him, Dan said, “I meant your sister who gave Laurie the death blow, not you when you saved him. But still, both of you are a lesser vampires than Rosamunde.”
“Well,” Chris considered before being insulted, “that is true.”
“We don’t even know if this guy is going to show or not,” Laurie said. “He could have given us the slip.”
Kruinh, who had hung up his great jacket, headed up the stairs, still well dressed, murmuring, “You’re just mad because he hit you.”
“I’m telling you,” Laurie almost stage whispered to Tanitha, “this guy has some sort of hold over Kruinh.”
Before sunrise the next morning, making its noisy growling entrance into the neighborhood of 4848 Brummel came an old Harley Davidson, Easy Rider style, with he strong wheels so far out it reminded Dan Rawlinson of a woman with outstretched legs, and off of it hopped a guy in a studded leather jacket and dark shades, chomping gum as hecame up the walk. He pulled off his helmet and he was great looking, great looking but in a funny way, sort of like Laurie, where you could see the traces of an individuality and ethnicity that made him more than common. His eyes were wide under a heavy brow, and his blond hair was curly and pale as he pushed it out of his face. He, Dan realized, wasn’t pretending to be anyone. As Dan opened the door, the newcomer looked mildly surprised.
“You’re Sunny!” Dan held out his hand.
Sunny burst out into a smile, which was the first time in a while he had, and when he did, Dan understood his name.
“You’re the one who didn’t try to kill me.”
“I’m Dan,” Dan Rawlinson said. “Com on in.”
“I had to do some of it on my own,” Sunny was saying when the others were coming into the kitchen. “I had to know I wasn’t completely helpless, and after all, how could I be? We being what we are?”
“But when did you travel?” Dan asked.
“I thought about testing out the sun thing, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I know!” Dan said.
“Can you?”
“I can now,” Dan was saying as Chris and Laurie entered the kitchen. “But it was a while.”
Dan realized that if he were newly made he would want to know how long a while was and said, “You have to be feeding all the time, and it actually took me about a year. I’m sorry about that. It drives some people crazy. As time goes by you can start testing the waters. Sort off like you did by showing up at sunrise, but…”
“And that actually means you’re pretty strong,” Chris added, holding out his hand.
When Sunny looked at it, Chris said, “There isn’t a way to make up for what happened, and if it happened again and I didn’t know you, I don’t know how the situation would have changed. I was there to do a job, Sunny.”
Sunny nodded, but still didn’t shake his hand.
“I’m understanding that,” he said. “I have done several jobs in the last few nights, and I know I probably saved a woman from being raped and strangled, and stopped a few other things from happening, but I also know there are some children who have no fathers and spouses who are now widowed.”
Chris nodded.
“Just understand,” Sunny continued, “I came because Kruinh asked me to, and if I remain with you all, then the day may come when I have to follow orders, or give them, and when they affect you, I will give as little apology to you as you are now giving to me.”
TOMORROW NIGHT THERE WILL BE NO POST OF ANYTHING AS THE EASTER HOLIDAY BEGINS
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Sunny is a very strong character and I enjoy getting to know him. It is cool to see him interact with characters we know so well. Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days! I hope you have a wonderful Easter holiday!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Oh, yes, I am looking forward to the whole thing and nervous about cooking my first Easter dinner.Sunny is, of course, one hell of a character and I wish there was more of him. I am with you in that it really is fun to see him interacting with Chris and Laurie and Dan and really, sort of making the first two look like chumps.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CONCLUSION OF
ABOUT ALEXANDER
“I had to do some of it on my own,” Sunny was saying when the others were coming into the kitchen. “I had to know I wasn’t completely helpless, and after all, how could I be? We being what we are?”
“But when did you travel?” Dan asked.
“I thought about testing out the sun thing, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I know!” Dan said.
“Can you?”
“I can now,” Dan was saying as Chris and Laurie entered the kitchen. “But it was a while.”
Dan realized that if he were newly made he would want to know how long a while was and said, “You have to be feeding all the time, and it actually took me about a year. I’m sorry about that. It drives some people crazy. As time goes by you can start testing the waters. Sort off like you did by showing up at sunrise, but…”
“And that actually means you’re pretty strong,” Chris added, holding out his hand.
When Sunny looked at it, Chris said, “There isn’t a way to make up for what happened, and if it happened again and I didn’t know you, I don’t know how the situation would have changed. I was there to do a job, Sunny.”
Sunny nodded, but still didn’t shake his hand.
“I’m understanding that,” he said. “I have done several jobs in the last few nights, and I know I probably saved a woman from being raped and strangled, and stopped a few other things from happening, but I also know there are some children who have no fathers and spouses who are now widowed.”
Chris nodded.
“Just understand,” Sunny continued, “I came because Kruinh asked me to, and if I remain with you all, then the day may come when I have to follow orders, or give them, and when they affect you, I will give as little apology to you as you are now giving to me.”
Before they’d left Ohio, Chris Ashby had gone to Kruinh’s house to see Sunny Kominsky. He was in black that day. He looked good like that, the burst of golden hair against a snug black turtleneck, fitted, faded jeans. The truth is that Sunny always looked right. He was quick to laugh, but sober faced, and seemed as even handed and capable of anything in swimming trunks with surfboard as he did in leather on a motorbike, or right now where he looked steadily at Christopher.
“Can I help you, Chris?”
If Sunny was anything, officially, he was Kruinh’s accountant, or attaché, or... prime mister? That seemed right, and now Chris said, “Eell, I’m just going to come out and say it.”
Alright,” Sunny nodded.
There was no real youth to him, or at least no boyishness. Sunny greeted Chris as if he were an equally old vampire though, truthfully, Sunny was Dan’s age, maybe younger.
“I know Kruinh didn’t kill my sister.”
“Kruinh ordered her death,” Sunny said, “and so she died.”
“You said that eventually the day would come when you had to do something that caused me pain and that when it happened you would offer me as little apology as I did for trying to kill you, for following Kruinh’s orders.”
“And you think that I was the one who killed Evangeline?” Sunny said.
His face was expressionless.
“You think that after all these years I waited and waited, and when I finally could I convinced your sister to attack us, and I then I killed her? Just to get back at you?”
Sunny said this tonelessly, his blue eyes looking on Chris’s. In fact, the two of them looked like they might have been cousins.
“No,” Chris Ashby said, feeling like a fool.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sunny said. “If Kruinh had asked me to do it, I would have done it. If he had not asked me to do it, I would have done it. She threatened all of us. It had to be done. But do you really mourn her?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “She was my sister.”
“She would have killed you too.”
“I know.”
Sunny shook his head.
“Then I’m glad you weren’t around,” Sunny said. “And now it appears if you had been I would have had to step over you and end her.”
Chris understood why Kruinh loved Sunny. Sunny was his Lewis, a man so uncommonly strong, and confident that they could meet as equals. He had no doubt that if Alexander Kominsky had decided on Evangeline’s death there was nothing he could have done about it.
Neither one of them spoke for a while, and then Sunny said, “Chris, I’m sorry you lost your sister.”
“I’m sorry she still matters ot me,” Chris said.
“No,” said Sunny. “That’s the way it should be. I’m sorry for a lot of things.”
“I’m sorry for that day,” Chris said. “I have thought about it. The two times I had to put down a clan that way. Had to. Chose to. “
Sunny nodded.
Chris Ashby said, “I should have said something a long time ago.”
“And what did you think to gain by asking him if he killed her?” Lewis wondered.
Chris did not answer. Instead he asked, “If worse came to worse between you and Evangeline?”
“I would have killed her without blinking.”
“Why doesn’t that bother me? I would have gone mad if she tried to lay a hand on you. She never could have.
“I just wanted to know who killed her in the end. And because of the way I met Sunny, I imagined he was the one. I should have known better.”
“He didn’t say he wasn’t the one.”
“No,” Chris said, “but I doubt he is, and even if if he was, it wouldn’t matter. Sunny would have just done what he thought was wise. All those years ago when I attacked him, and I was much older than him, Laurie and I were, we were just following orders—the same as Nazis. We weren’t thinking about what was wise. Sunny is a prince, that’s why Kruinh made him his consort.”
MORE AFTER EASTER
ABOUT ALEXANDER
“I had to do some of it on my own,” Sunny was saying when the others were coming into the kitchen. “I had to know I wasn’t completely helpless, and after all, how could I be? We being what we are?”
“But when did you travel?” Dan asked.
“I thought about testing out the sun thing, but I couldn’t do it.”
“I know!” Dan said.
“Can you?”
“I can now,” Dan was saying as Chris and Laurie entered the kitchen. “But it was a while.”
Dan realized that if he were newly made he would want to know how long a while was and said, “You have to be feeding all the time, and it actually took me about a year. I’m sorry about that. It drives some people crazy. As time goes by you can start testing the waters. Sort off like you did by showing up at sunrise, but…”
“And that actually means you’re pretty strong,” Chris added, holding out his hand.
When Sunny looked at it, Chris said, “There isn’t a way to make up for what happened, and if it happened again and I didn’t know you, I don’t know how the situation would have changed. I was there to do a job, Sunny.”
Sunny nodded, but still didn’t shake his hand.
“I’m understanding that,” he said. “I have done several jobs in the last few nights, and I know I probably saved a woman from being raped and strangled, and stopped a few other things from happening, but I also know there are some children who have no fathers and spouses who are now widowed.”
Chris nodded.
“Just understand,” Sunny continued, “I came because Kruinh asked me to, and if I remain with you all, then the day may come when I have to follow orders, or give them, and when they affect you, I will give as little apology to you as you are now giving to me.”
Before they’d left Ohio, Chris Ashby had gone to Kruinh’s house to see Sunny Kominsky. He was in black that day. He looked good like that, the burst of golden hair against a snug black turtleneck, fitted, faded jeans. The truth is that Sunny always looked right. He was quick to laugh, but sober faced, and seemed as even handed and capable of anything in swimming trunks with surfboard as he did in leather on a motorbike, or right now where he looked steadily at Christopher.
“Can I help you, Chris?”
If Sunny was anything, officially, he was Kruinh’s accountant, or attaché, or... prime mister? That seemed right, and now Chris said, “Eell, I’m just going to come out and say it.”
Alright,” Sunny nodded.
There was no real youth to him, or at least no boyishness. Sunny greeted Chris as if he were an equally old vampire though, truthfully, Sunny was Dan’s age, maybe younger.
“I know Kruinh didn’t kill my sister.”
“Kruinh ordered her death,” Sunny said, “and so she died.”
“You said that eventually the day would come when you had to do something that caused me pain and that when it happened you would offer me as little apology as I did for trying to kill you, for following Kruinh’s orders.”
“And you think that I was the one who killed Evangeline?” Sunny said.
His face was expressionless.
“You think that after all these years I waited and waited, and when I finally could I convinced your sister to attack us, and I then I killed her? Just to get back at you?”
Sunny said this tonelessly, his blue eyes looking on Chris’s. In fact, the two of them looked like they might have been cousins.
“No,” Chris Ashby said, feeling like a fool.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sunny said. “If Kruinh had asked me to do it, I would have done it. If he had not asked me to do it, I would have done it. She threatened all of us. It had to be done. But do you really mourn her?”
“Yes,” Chris said. “She was my sister.”
“She would have killed you too.”
“I know.”
Sunny shook his head.
“Then I’m glad you weren’t around,” Sunny said. “And now it appears if you had been I would have had to step over you and end her.”
Chris understood why Kruinh loved Sunny. Sunny was his Lewis, a man so uncommonly strong, and confident that they could meet as equals. He had no doubt that if Alexander Kominsky had decided on Evangeline’s death there was nothing he could have done about it.
Neither one of them spoke for a while, and then Sunny said, “Chris, I’m sorry you lost your sister.”
“I’m sorry she still matters ot me,” Chris said.
“No,” said Sunny. “That’s the way it should be. I’m sorry for a lot of things.”
“I’m sorry for that day,” Chris said. “I have thought about it. The two times I had to put down a clan that way. Had to. Chose to. “
Sunny nodded.
Chris Ashby said, “I should have said something a long time ago.”
“And what did you think to gain by asking him if he killed her?” Lewis wondered.
Chris did not answer. Instead he asked, “If worse came to worse between you and Evangeline?”
“I would have killed her without blinking.”
“Why doesn’t that bother me? I would have gone mad if she tried to lay a hand on you. She never could have.
“I just wanted to know who killed her in the end. And because of the way I met Sunny, I imagined he was the one. I should have known better.”
“He didn’t say he wasn’t the one.”
“No,” Chris said, “but I doubt he is, and even if if he was, it wouldn’t matter. Sunny would have just done what he thought was wise. All those years ago when I attacked him, and I was much older than him, Laurie and I were, we were just following orders—the same as Nazis. We weren’t thinking about what was wise. Sunny is a prince, that’s why Kruinh made him his consort.”
MORE AFTER EASTER
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great conclusion to this section. I am enjoying getting to know Sunny. I don’t have much else to say other then great writing and I look forward to more next week! I hope you are having a nice night!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AND SO TONIGHT, WE RETURN TO THE WICKED
T E N
LOREAL
AND
LAWRENCE
AND ESPECIALLY
DAN RAWLINSON
Take your fill of love.
-The Book of the Law
She stood before Laurie and came to him, kissing him on both cheeks. When Dan had come in, before Laurie had seen them, he could see how boylike, boylike as Laurie had never been, Laurie was, his hand tenderly holding Loreal’s, his eyes full of her. But then, how could your eyes not be full of her? The scent of her hair that was candy and that was spice. That was like a flower, Dan settled on, yes a flower, because there was thyme in that hair and in that skin, the flesh of a twenty three year old that would one day be the flesh of a fifty year old, flesh that was not locked in time.
“You’re here!” Loreal fairly squealed, going and hugging Dan.
Dan was not sure if he loved Loreal because Laurie did, or if he loved her on his own, and it didn’t really matter. There was no separating him and Laurie, at least not now,
“Does it ever end?” Dan had asked Chris.
“Not if you don’t want it to,” he said. “It doesn’t have to. Do you want it to?”
“No,” Dan said. “I’ve just … never felt like this before.”
“Neither has he,” Chris said. “Look at him.”
Laurie was in jeans and a sweatshirt that almost looked appropriate, joking and laughing and Chris said, “He was bound with me, but I’m not a fun person.”
Dan snorted.
“I think you’re pretty fun.”
Chris shrugged.
“But I am older, much older. When you were bound together, he became younger, gentler, happier. More like you. It’s a nice thing to see.”
But Dan, blood drinker that he was, was still not used to the feeling. He was happy, but stood aside from the happiness wondering at it. Since that first night after he had killed Evangeline and taken her blood, after he had fed from Kruinh and come back high on old blood, and he and Laurie had made love, things had changed for him. He had never thought of being with another man, not seriously, and from that night, all he thought about was making love to Laurie. All he thought about was the look of love in Laurie Malone’s dark eyes and what his older brother felt like leaning over him, kissing him tenderly. It was strange to feel this way, very strong, for they were strong, Laurie feeding on the ancient blood Dan had gained, and then Dan feeding on Laurie’s. Dan was immensely powerful as he had never been, but so vulnerable, so soft, so protected in Laurie’s arms.
He was still surprised by how he had given himself to another man, given himself to Laurie, and then Laurie had given himself to him. He was surprised by the entry where he never thought an entry would be. There was a wonder, a terror. Was he homophobic? Was everyone a little homophobic at core, and wasn’t this surrender, this being entered, worthy of a little fear?
But beyond all that, stranger than this, was Loreal.
Dan could not pretend to have ever, in his mortal life, have been in anything but a normal relationship. He knew that once he’d loved a girl and then that girl and a friend had ended up together and he had felt betrayed. There was nothing complicated in that and, indeed, Daniel Rawlinson thought this appropriate.
But Dan had known all about Loreal already, seen this girl, no this witch, in Laurie’s apartment in Chicago. Even teased Laurie about her, but the night he had come to Laurie, Loreal had not been on his mind, and all that night when he had been with Laurie, nothing else had been in his mind but being with him. In the morning, however, he had thought of her, and when he thought of her, he tried to think of her with pity, as the girl who had been cheated on. But that moment seemed false, and all he could think of was how lovely she was, see her the way Laurie saw her. He had no intentions of keeping Laurie or, if he did, no intention of keeping him from Loreal.
This had been explained to him before, the sharing that happened between two Drinkers, how sometimes it meant they were lovers in the usually sense, but sometimes it meant something else. This had been explained to him, yes, but he had never experienced it first hand. He needed to be with Laurie, but, no, that was not so. It was not like that young and codependent love.
When he was seven he’d been given a guitar, but by the time he was eleven, he knew it mattered, and he knew to make the having of it worthwhile, to understand it, for music to happen, his fingers and the guitar to become one, he must go back to it over and over, and this was how it was with Laurie, not some confusing guilt ridden thing, but something he was committed to. They had to go back to each other. In the day, in their conversations, gentle gestures and understandings of one another, and in the night, they had to sleep together and the more it happened, the more he loved Loreal.
“I have to meet her,” Dan had said in the dark. “I can’t just keep loving her through you, all three of us must meet. We have to get together.
And so had come the night when he had arrived at her room with Laurie, and though sometimes he could read the minds of mortals, her mind flowed into his and he saw himself the way she did, tall, dark complexioned, sexy, chocolate eyed and chocolate haired, a white guy who was half Arab with the desert dusk in his creamy skin.
Late into the night she had been making a fried chicken sandwich, and when she came back she sat in the chair across from them. At first Dan had been nervous, but she just kept eating while Laurie and he talked to each other and at each time, when Laurie had touched him, Dan had been slightly embarrassed. When Laurie brushed Dan’s hair from his face, Loreal said, as she put a kettle chip in her mouth, “I see it now. I get it.”
“What?” Dan almost looked stupid.
“You’re married.”
“We…” Dan began. “But…” Dan said, “No…”
“Yes,” Loreal said.
“It’s different with us, with blood drinkers. And—” Dan began.
“It may be a little different, but it’s not that different. Not for you,” Loreal said. “It’s plain to me the two of you must have always felt something for each other.”
“Well, that’s true,” Dan went on. “Because as blood drinkers we—”
“You and Laurie are married,” Loreal continued.
Dan didn’t know what to say. He frowned.
After a while he said, “You’re not angry.”
Loreal said, “They explained to me that you and Anne and Sunny are not old vampires. That Anne was an old woman, but you are a young man. You’re actually not that much older than me,” Loreal said.
“Yeah,” Dan nodded, frowning, looking at her and wondering where she was going with this.
“So in a way, everything happening to you is as strange to you as it is to me. But,” Loreal said, “It is happening. No doubt about it. I was never one to stop things that were happening from happening.”
That night, Laurie gently slugged Dan on the cheek, and he looked so sweet with his mildly monkey face and his sticky out ears.. His dark eyes were mellow.
“Get your guitar our like we were before.”
Dan went to get his and Laurie got his and Loreal said, “You play a guitar?”
Or maybe, somehow, being with Dan had made him able to play it.
“I used to,” Laurie said. “Back in one of the wars. With my mates. And I loved it. And then I stopped it.”
So, Loreal thought, it was somewhere between what she had thought and what he had said. Most likely, she thought, as Dan began to strum, being with Dan had reawakened a gift Laurie, who never took vacations and always wore fitted suits and good cologne, had put away.
Dan began:
“If you're travelin' in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine.”
And she was surprised when Laurie began to sing, when the two of them, leaning over their guitars looking into each other, and then to her, traded lines.
“If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see if she's wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howlin' winds…”
“But I have not been honest,” Loreal said when they were together and Dan was gone.
“You’re always honest,” Laurie said.
She stood before him and held his face in her hands.
“I said I was never one to stop things from happening. But I did. I have.”
“Whaddo you—?” Laurie began.
She pulled his face to her and kissed him. She held his shocked face until he hungrily kissed her. Her hand did not rise to his face. It slipped down to his thin trousers and cupped him. He moaned low and she stroked him, feeling him grow thick and large in her hands, feeling him rise.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long
If it rolls and flows all down her breast
Please see for me if her hair hangs long
For that's the way I remember her best
“Are you…?” he began
Light, and free, young and proud of all she had to offer, she lifted up her dress and let it fall to the floor. He looked on her, transfixed, and then she reached for his pants and unbuttoned them. She pulled them down, while he unbuttoned his shirt.
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
As his heart thumped against his chest, and she pulled his black briefs from him, letting his thick cock spring out like a diving board, she said, “I have never been more sure.”
A true love of mine…
The first time Dan Rawlinson saw the house he was feeling lonely. It was Halloween. He was fifteen and he and his friends had drive down to Glencastle in Will Bonney’s dad’s car. They left from the south end of Lassador, traveled about forty five minutes southwest, a tang in the blue air when they rolled down the windows, and now were on a street lined in flame colored October trees.
The house with its turrets and large diamond shaped windows, its wrap around porch and the great cupola looking down on him was deep purple and green, shuttered, and no one else seemed to notice it. He and all his friends leapt out of the car with their bags and their half ass costumes, and Jack said, “This rich old neighborhood is the best candy in town.”
“And we’re not really even in town,” Will Bonney said.
“Divide and conquer and beat up kids if you have to,” Jack said. “See you guys in… synchronize watches… two hours.”
As they split up, Jack suddenly turned around and said, “I was joking about the whole beating up kids thing. You know that… right?”
They just looked at him, plastic bags hanging from their hands, and then they all split up to see how much of the candy of Glencastle, Ohio they could make their own. The looks on peoples’ faces often said, “Aren’t you kind of old to be trick or treating?” and one Black woman simply said it, even though she gave Dan candy anyway. They were right of course. It would have actually been ten times easier to go to the store, buy candy and just eat it. So it must not have been about the candy. It must have been about something else. The sky was going that strange bruised color that only happened in October, and Dan was standing at the top of a hill seeing the river, wide and silver blue threading through the trees that were losing their leaves, and from this point he looked down on the block they had come to and saw that house.
` “That’s what I’m looking for. That’s the different thing I’m looking for.”
He made his way to the street where the car was. Dan noticed that, among the old Victorians there were a few houses where kids did not go. And why didn’t they go? But he would go. He would go to that very house he had first seen. There was no gate, and he just went up the brick path and to the great wrap around porch, and he came to the large wooden door with lights shining through the cut glass window and the lace curtains, and he knocked.
It was opened by a Black woman, and Dan hoped she wouldn’t say something withering like the woman he’d seen before. But any sort of hope didn’t matter because she was so beautiful, and so strange. Her eyes were blue as her skin was dark, and black hair fell down her back like, he felt stupid for thinking it, an Indian princess. She was exactly as tall as he was, and would always be that way, and he wondered if she wasn’t in a costume, for she stood in a red dress with a great dark blue shawl around her shoulders.
And she was still looking at him.
“Trick or treat!” he said.
“Who is it?” a voice came from down the hall.
The woman opened the door, turned around and called, “Trick or treaters! One,” she modified, “Trick or treater.”
There was silence, and then laughter, and then the voice said, “Well, then you have to bring him in.”
The woman nodded and did so, closing the door behind Dan.
The foyer was of paneled and polished wood, and he could see a large old timey living room off to his right, and Dan sniffed the air. “Is that coffee?”
“We’re just getting up,” the woman said. “Would you like a cup?”
“I…” Dan looked at his watch.
“You will not be late to meet your friends again,” she said, gently. “Come. I am Tanitha.”
“I’m Dan.”
“We’ve been waiting for you,”
“Really?”
Tanitha had sounded so mysterious.
She threw back her head, laughing, and Dan was convinced that she wasnot only the most beautiful woman in the world, but the lightest and happiest woman he’d ever seen.
“Of course not! Sit, I’ll cut the coffee cake.”
In a moment, a man came down the stairs, and he was dressed well and looked like he could have been Tanitha’s brother except that he did not have the blue eyes. They were dark, but Dan could not tell if they were brown=or black because that would have entailed staring at someone who was generally well dressed, and that’s how Dan always thought of him, because at first he could not look at this man for long, and he only gave off a series of strong impressions.
“We have a guest,” the man said, and his voice was elegant, but again, Dan could not say how, could not place the accent. It wasn’t foreign, but it wasn’t exactly American, As the man smiled broadly at him, Dan gave up trying to figure these things out. He knew it would be rude to ask.
“Happy Halloween,” the man said. “I guess that’s why you came by?”
“Yes,” Dan said. As he spoke he was surprised by the disappearance of teenage haltings, the “ums” and the “likes”. In the presence of these strangers, he was possessed of a maturity, and evenness of voice, a certainty about himself that he never possessed even as Tanitha cut the warm coffee cake and handed him a slice.
“Thank you,” Dan said, and the man poured him coffee and said, “It’s never been a big night for us. Creamer is over there. I suppose it’s a big night for witches, though, but not for us.”
Dan gave a half laugh because he was only half sure this man was joking, and he spooned a great deal of sugar into his coffee.
“I’m Kruinh by the way,” the man said, extending his hand. It was a long hand, but Kruinh was not a large man, as tall as Tanitha, and as tall as Dan. Dan looked around this kitchen with its hanging herbs and copper pans looking so peaceful and old timey and not old timey, but…
Out of time.
He said, “Are you married?”
Kruinh laughed and Tanitha shook his head.
“Kruinh is my father,” Tanitha said.
Dan looked quickly at Kruinh and tried to assess how that could be possible. There were, to be sure, well preserved adults, and everyone had heard the phrase “Black don’t crack.” But this man was visibly young, not youthful or youngish, but young, and his daughter was a full grown woman.
“I think,” Kruinh said, sipping his coffee, “that you have questions.”
“None of them are really polite,” Dan said.
“Daniel Rawlinson, you are a very polite young man,” Kruinh said.
Dan nodded, and then even as something came to his mind, Kruinh continued, “And of course, at this moment you are wondering how I knew your name, and so I will tell you mine. I am Kruinh Kertesz and this is my daughter Tanitha. Sometimes she is Kertesz, but sometimes she is Tzepesh. You are welcome into our home anytime you can find it. I am a great believer in fate, in things being…. Meant. I believe in destiny.”
And Dan found himself asking, found himself because it seemed like he had been meant to ask it, and he wanted to resist this, “Why is that?”
Kruinh said, cheerily, “You would never have found this house otherwise.”
Dan blinked at him.
“No one else did,” Kruinh said. “Did you see anyone running to this door asking for candy? Did any of your friends even see it? No. You were meant to find us.”
“Are you witches?”
“Well, you already know we aren’t,” Tanitha said.
“Then,…” Dan felt at a loss, “what are you?”
“You are the on who came here and knocked on the door with that lame line,” tanitha said, “knowing full well there’d be no candy here tonight. And yet you came, so the better question is who are you? And what did you come here for?”
“I…” Dan started. “I… Came to find… I dunno.’
“you do know,” Kruinh said, softly.
“Something more,” Dan said. “I came to find something more.”
Kruinh nodded.
“That is what we are,” he said. “We are that something more. Or part of it..”
Dan did not say anything else because he didn’t know what else to say. He had a strong feeling that whatever came out of his mouth might be foolish, and there was a consciousness in him that had never been present before, and it was saying Enjoy this moment. Enjoy these people, this cake, this coffee. This is one of the only times you’ve had coffee. This is one of the only times you have been…
There was no worry about meeting his friends on time. He knew that he would. He knew that in this moment he was in an alright place, that he would never have been here if he wasn’t supposed to be.
This is one of the only times you have been…
“This is a good… dinner,” Dan started.
“You know it isn’t that,” Kruinh said without raising his eyes.
“Laurie brought a frittata,” Tanitha noted. “We could have that.”
“Um,” Kruinh began, swilling coffee, “I thought you’d made it.”
“You most certainly did not,” Tanitha said.
“Tanitha does not have,” Kruinh began, “should we say it, cooking skills.”
“That’s what the servants are for,” Tanitha said, grandly, and though she laughed, Dan thought she was only half joking.”
“This is breakfast for you?” Dan said.
“That it is,” Tanitha answered, “and you should be glad that we woke up early tonight. I don’t know,” she turned to her father, “Maybe there is something about this night. For all of us. I can feel it.”
This is one of the only times you have been… Yourself.
Tanitha rose to take the frittata out of the oven, and Kruinh, taking out a silver case and pulling up a cheroot lit it. As the sweet smoke drifted to Dan’s nostril’s, Kruinh said, “and tell us about Dan Rawlinson.”
“There isn’t much to tell.”
“No?”
“Maybe,” Tanitha said, setting the frittata on the table, “there isn’t much to tell… yet.”
“I hope there is,” Dan said. “One day. Eventually. Me and my friends are trying to start a band. It never comes together.”
“Maybe you should get better friends,” Kruinh suggested.
The frittata was deicious, and Dan said so. He said, “You all can’t… predict the future or anything.’
“Not anything like that,” Kruinh said. “We are distinctly unmagical.”
“Then why does this night feel magical?” Dan said.
“A witch would say the whole world is magical,” Tanitha said.
“But—” Dan began.
“I am no witch,” Kruinh said. “Nor have I ever met one.”
“I did, once,” Tanitha said, and then she looked at his empty plate and looked to the clock.
“It’s time. You’re friends must be on their way back to the car.”
She rose pulling the shawl that had fallen from her shoulder and Dan, after shaking Kruinh’s hand, left with her through the great living room that was filled with old sofas and fat chairs, homely tables and a great stainglass hooded lamp looking from the yard onto the street. There, on the other side of the hedge and past the trees was Will’s Dad’s car with Will leaning against it, tapping his foot, and here were Jack and Riley coming down from the right with plastic bags swinging.
“Thank you so much,” Dan said. He did not say her name. It seemed too forward.
“Be safe Daniel Rawlinson,” Kruinh called as Tanitha led him to the door.
At the great heavy door, suddenly Tanitha took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead.
“That’s a protection,” she said. “And in the end, it will guide you back.”
“Wha?” Dan began, put Tanitha opened the door and shoved him out saying, “Go, before they leave you.”
Dan ran off the porch steps. At the bottom he stopped and memorized the metal numbers 4848. 4848 Brummel Street. Well, then. And he ran down the walk and onto the the sidewalk, and Will looked up and said, “Where were you?”
When Dan opened his mouth, Will said, “Never mind. We need to be heading back.”
The moon was fat and white, and the street was lit by few lamps. When he hopped in the backseat and took one last look at the house of Tanitha and Kruinh, he could not tell which one it was. Was it that one, or the one next to it? But hadn’t there been a cupola? Ah, but for now there was no time to look. He would look again. He would return, but for now they were headed back to town.
MORE TOMORROW
T E N
LOREAL
AND
LAWRENCE
AND ESPECIALLY
DAN RAWLINSON
Take your fill of love.
-The Book of the Law
She stood before Laurie and came to him, kissing him on both cheeks. When Dan had come in, before Laurie had seen them, he could see how boylike, boylike as Laurie had never been, Laurie was, his hand tenderly holding Loreal’s, his eyes full of her. But then, how could your eyes not be full of her? The scent of her hair that was candy and that was spice. That was like a flower, Dan settled on, yes a flower, because there was thyme in that hair and in that skin, the flesh of a twenty three year old that would one day be the flesh of a fifty year old, flesh that was not locked in time.
“You’re here!” Loreal fairly squealed, going and hugging Dan.
Dan was not sure if he loved Loreal because Laurie did, or if he loved her on his own, and it didn’t really matter. There was no separating him and Laurie, at least not now,
“Does it ever end?” Dan had asked Chris.
“Not if you don’t want it to,” he said. “It doesn’t have to. Do you want it to?”
“No,” Dan said. “I’ve just … never felt like this before.”
“Neither has he,” Chris said. “Look at him.”
Laurie was in jeans and a sweatshirt that almost looked appropriate, joking and laughing and Chris said, “He was bound with me, but I’m not a fun person.”
Dan snorted.
“I think you’re pretty fun.”
Chris shrugged.
“But I am older, much older. When you were bound together, he became younger, gentler, happier. More like you. It’s a nice thing to see.”
But Dan, blood drinker that he was, was still not used to the feeling. He was happy, but stood aside from the happiness wondering at it. Since that first night after he had killed Evangeline and taken her blood, after he had fed from Kruinh and come back high on old blood, and he and Laurie had made love, things had changed for him. He had never thought of being with another man, not seriously, and from that night, all he thought about was making love to Laurie. All he thought about was the look of love in Laurie Malone’s dark eyes and what his older brother felt like leaning over him, kissing him tenderly. It was strange to feel this way, very strong, for they were strong, Laurie feeding on the ancient blood Dan had gained, and then Dan feeding on Laurie’s. Dan was immensely powerful as he had never been, but so vulnerable, so soft, so protected in Laurie’s arms.
He was still surprised by how he had given himself to another man, given himself to Laurie, and then Laurie had given himself to him. He was surprised by the entry where he never thought an entry would be. There was a wonder, a terror. Was he homophobic? Was everyone a little homophobic at core, and wasn’t this surrender, this being entered, worthy of a little fear?
But beyond all that, stranger than this, was Loreal.
Dan could not pretend to have ever, in his mortal life, have been in anything but a normal relationship. He knew that once he’d loved a girl and then that girl and a friend had ended up together and he had felt betrayed. There was nothing complicated in that and, indeed, Daniel Rawlinson thought this appropriate.
But Dan had known all about Loreal already, seen this girl, no this witch, in Laurie’s apartment in Chicago. Even teased Laurie about her, but the night he had come to Laurie, Loreal had not been on his mind, and all that night when he had been with Laurie, nothing else had been in his mind but being with him. In the morning, however, he had thought of her, and when he thought of her, he tried to think of her with pity, as the girl who had been cheated on. But that moment seemed false, and all he could think of was how lovely she was, see her the way Laurie saw her. He had no intentions of keeping Laurie or, if he did, no intention of keeping him from Loreal.
This had been explained to him before, the sharing that happened between two Drinkers, how sometimes it meant they were lovers in the usually sense, but sometimes it meant something else. This had been explained to him, yes, but he had never experienced it first hand. He needed to be with Laurie, but, no, that was not so. It was not like that young and codependent love.
When he was seven he’d been given a guitar, but by the time he was eleven, he knew it mattered, and he knew to make the having of it worthwhile, to understand it, for music to happen, his fingers and the guitar to become one, he must go back to it over and over, and this was how it was with Laurie, not some confusing guilt ridden thing, but something he was committed to. They had to go back to each other. In the day, in their conversations, gentle gestures and understandings of one another, and in the night, they had to sleep together and the more it happened, the more he loved Loreal.
“I have to meet her,” Dan had said in the dark. “I can’t just keep loving her through you, all three of us must meet. We have to get together.
And so had come the night when he had arrived at her room with Laurie, and though sometimes he could read the minds of mortals, her mind flowed into his and he saw himself the way she did, tall, dark complexioned, sexy, chocolate eyed and chocolate haired, a white guy who was half Arab with the desert dusk in his creamy skin.
Late into the night she had been making a fried chicken sandwich, and when she came back she sat in the chair across from them. At first Dan had been nervous, but she just kept eating while Laurie and he talked to each other and at each time, when Laurie had touched him, Dan had been slightly embarrassed. When Laurie brushed Dan’s hair from his face, Loreal said, as she put a kettle chip in her mouth, “I see it now. I get it.”
“What?” Dan almost looked stupid.
“You’re married.”
“We…” Dan began. “But…” Dan said, “No…”
“Yes,” Loreal said.
“It’s different with us, with blood drinkers. And—” Dan began.
“It may be a little different, but it’s not that different. Not for you,” Loreal said. “It’s plain to me the two of you must have always felt something for each other.”
“Well, that’s true,” Dan went on. “Because as blood drinkers we—”
“You and Laurie are married,” Loreal continued.
Dan didn’t know what to say. He frowned.
After a while he said, “You’re not angry.”
Loreal said, “They explained to me that you and Anne and Sunny are not old vampires. That Anne was an old woman, but you are a young man. You’re actually not that much older than me,” Loreal said.
“Yeah,” Dan nodded, frowning, looking at her and wondering where she was going with this.
“So in a way, everything happening to you is as strange to you as it is to me. But,” Loreal said, “It is happening. No doubt about it. I was never one to stop things that were happening from happening.”
That night, Laurie gently slugged Dan on the cheek, and he looked so sweet with his mildly monkey face and his sticky out ears.. His dark eyes were mellow.
“Get your guitar our like we were before.”
Dan went to get his and Laurie got his and Loreal said, “You play a guitar?”
Or maybe, somehow, being with Dan had made him able to play it.
“I used to,” Laurie said. “Back in one of the wars. With my mates. And I loved it. And then I stopped it.”
So, Loreal thought, it was somewhere between what she had thought and what he had said. Most likely, she thought, as Dan began to strum, being with Dan had reawakened a gift Laurie, who never took vacations and always wore fitted suits and good cologne, had put away.
Dan began:
“If you're travelin' in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine.”
And she was surprised when Laurie began to sing, when the two of them, leaning over their guitars looking into each other, and then to her, traded lines.
“If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see if she's wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howlin' winds…”
“But I have not been honest,” Loreal said when they were together and Dan was gone.
“You’re always honest,” Laurie said.
She stood before him and held his face in her hands.
“I said I was never one to stop things from happening. But I did. I have.”
“Whaddo you—?” Laurie began.
She pulled his face to her and kissed him. She held his shocked face until he hungrily kissed her. Her hand did not rise to his face. It slipped down to his thin trousers and cupped him. He moaned low and she stroked him, feeling him grow thick and large in her hands, feeling him rise.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long
If it rolls and flows all down her breast
Please see for me if her hair hangs long
For that's the way I remember her best
“Are you…?” he began
Light, and free, young and proud of all she had to offer, she lifted up her dress and let it fall to the floor. He looked on her, transfixed, and then she reached for his pants and unbuttoned them. She pulled them down, while he unbuttoned his shirt.
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
As his heart thumped against his chest, and she pulled his black briefs from him, letting his thick cock spring out like a diving board, she said, “I have never been more sure.”
A true love of mine…
The first time Dan Rawlinson saw the house he was feeling lonely. It was Halloween. He was fifteen and he and his friends had drive down to Glencastle in Will Bonney’s dad’s car. They left from the south end of Lassador, traveled about forty five minutes southwest, a tang in the blue air when they rolled down the windows, and now were on a street lined in flame colored October trees.
The house with its turrets and large diamond shaped windows, its wrap around porch and the great cupola looking down on him was deep purple and green, shuttered, and no one else seemed to notice it. He and all his friends leapt out of the car with their bags and their half ass costumes, and Jack said, “This rich old neighborhood is the best candy in town.”
“And we’re not really even in town,” Will Bonney said.
“Divide and conquer and beat up kids if you have to,” Jack said. “See you guys in… synchronize watches… two hours.”
As they split up, Jack suddenly turned around and said, “I was joking about the whole beating up kids thing. You know that… right?”
They just looked at him, plastic bags hanging from their hands, and then they all split up to see how much of the candy of Glencastle, Ohio they could make their own. The looks on peoples’ faces often said, “Aren’t you kind of old to be trick or treating?” and one Black woman simply said it, even though she gave Dan candy anyway. They were right of course. It would have actually been ten times easier to go to the store, buy candy and just eat it. So it must not have been about the candy. It must have been about something else. The sky was going that strange bruised color that only happened in October, and Dan was standing at the top of a hill seeing the river, wide and silver blue threading through the trees that were losing their leaves, and from this point he looked down on the block they had come to and saw that house.
` “That’s what I’m looking for. That’s the different thing I’m looking for.”
He made his way to the street where the car was. Dan noticed that, among the old Victorians there were a few houses where kids did not go. And why didn’t they go? But he would go. He would go to that very house he had first seen. There was no gate, and he just went up the brick path and to the great wrap around porch, and he came to the large wooden door with lights shining through the cut glass window and the lace curtains, and he knocked.
It was opened by a Black woman, and Dan hoped she wouldn’t say something withering like the woman he’d seen before. But any sort of hope didn’t matter because she was so beautiful, and so strange. Her eyes were blue as her skin was dark, and black hair fell down her back like, he felt stupid for thinking it, an Indian princess. She was exactly as tall as he was, and would always be that way, and he wondered if she wasn’t in a costume, for she stood in a red dress with a great dark blue shawl around her shoulders.
And she was still looking at him.
“Trick or treat!” he said.
“Who is it?” a voice came from down the hall.
The woman opened the door, turned around and called, “Trick or treaters! One,” she modified, “Trick or treater.”
There was silence, and then laughter, and then the voice said, “Well, then you have to bring him in.”
The woman nodded and did so, closing the door behind Dan.
The foyer was of paneled and polished wood, and he could see a large old timey living room off to his right, and Dan sniffed the air. “Is that coffee?”
“We’re just getting up,” the woman said. “Would you like a cup?”
“I…” Dan looked at his watch.
“You will not be late to meet your friends again,” she said, gently. “Come. I am Tanitha.”
“I’m Dan.”
“We’ve been waiting for you,”
“Really?”
Tanitha had sounded so mysterious.
She threw back her head, laughing, and Dan was convinced that she wasnot only the most beautiful woman in the world, but the lightest and happiest woman he’d ever seen.
“Of course not! Sit, I’ll cut the coffee cake.”
In a moment, a man came down the stairs, and he was dressed well and looked like he could have been Tanitha’s brother except that he did not have the blue eyes. They were dark, but Dan could not tell if they were brown=or black because that would have entailed staring at someone who was generally well dressed, and that’s how Dan always thought of him, because at first he could not look at this man for long, and he only gave off a series of strong impressions.
“We have a guest,” the man said, and his voice was elegant, but again, Dan could not say how, could not place the accent. It wasn’t foreign, but it wasn’t exactly American, As the man smiled broadly at him, Dan gave up trying to figure these things out. He knew it would be rude to ask.
“Happy Halloween,” the man said. “I guess that’s why you came by?”
“Yes,” Dan said. As he spoke he was surprised by the disappearance of teenage haltings, the “ums” and the “likes”. In the presence of these strangers, he was possessed of a maturity, and evenness of voice, a certainty about himself that he never possessed even as Tanitha cut the warm coffee cake and handed him a slice.
“Thank you,” Dan said, and the man poured him coffee and said, “It’s never been a big night for us. Creamer is over there. I suppose it’s a big night for witches, though, but not for us.”
Dan gave a half laugh because he was only half sure this man was joking, and he spooned a great deal of sugar into his coffee.
“I’m Kruinh by the way,” the man said, extending his hand. It was a long hand, but Kruinh was not a large man, as tall as Tanitha, and as tall as Dan. Dan looked around this kitchen with its hanging herbs and copper pans looking so peaceful and old timey and not old timey, but…
Out of time.
He said, “Are you married?”
Kruinh laughed and Tanitha shook his head.
“Kruinh is my father,” Tanitha said.
Dan looked quickly at Kruinh and tried to assess how that could be possible. There were, to be sure, well preserved adults, and everyone had heard the phrase “Black don’t crack.” But this man was visibly young, not youthful or youngish, but young, and his daughter was a full grown woman.
“I think,” Kruinh said, sipping his coffee, “that you have questions.”
“None of them are really polite,” Dan said.
“Daniel Rawlinson, you are a very polite young man,” Kruinh said.
Dan nodded, and then even as something came to his mind, Kruinh continued, “And of course, at this moment you are wondering how I knew your name, and so I will tell you mine. I am Kruinh Kertesz and this is my daughter Tanitha. Sometimes she is Kertesz, but sometimes she is Tzepesh. You are welcome into our home anytime you can find it. I am a great believer in fate, in things being…. Meant. I believe in destiny.”
And Dan found himself asking, found himself because it seemed like he had been meant to ask it, and he wanted to resist this, “Why is that?”
Kruinh said, cheerily, “You would never have found this house otherwise.”
Dan blinked at him.
“No one else did,” Kruinh said. “Did you see anyone running to this door asking for candy? Did any of your friends even see it? No. You were meant to find us.”
“Are you witches?”
“Well, you already know we aren’t,” Tanitha said.
“Then,…” Dan felt at a loss, “what are you?”
“You are the on who came here and knocked on the door with that lame line,” tanitha said, “knowing full well there’d be no candy here tonight. And yet you came, so the better question is who are you? And what did you come here for?”
“I…” Dan started. “I… Came to find… I dunno.’
“you do know,” Kruinh said, softly.
“Something more,” Dan said. “I came to find something more.”
Kruinh nodded.
“That is what we are,” he said. “We are that something more. Or part of it..”
Dan did not say anything else because he didn’t know what else to say. He had a strong feeling that whatever came out of his mouth might be foolish, and there was a consciousness in him that had never been present before, and it was saying Enjoy this moment. Enjoy these people, this cake, this coffee. This is one of the only times you’ve had coffee. This is one of the only times you have been…
There was no worry about meeting his friends on time. He knew that he would. He knew that in this moment he was in an alright place, that he would never have been here if he wasn’t supposed to be.
This is one of the only times you have been…
“This is a good… dinner,” Dan started.
“You know it isn’t that,” Kruinh said without raising his eyes.
“Laurie brought a frittata,” Tanitha noted. “We could have that.”
“Um,” Kruinh began, swilling coffee, “I thought you’d made it.”
“You most certainly did not,” Tanitha said.
“Tanitha does not have,” Kruinh began, “should we say it, cooking skills.”
“That’s what the servants are for,” Tanitha said, grandly, and though she laughed, Dan thought she was only half joking.”
“This is breakfast for you?” Dan said.
“That it is,” Tanitha answered, “and you should be glad that we woke up early tonight. I don’t know,” she turned to her father, “Maybe there is something about this night. For all of us. I can feel it.”
This is one of the only times you have been… Yourself.
Tanitha rose to take the frittata out of the oven, and Kruinh, taking out a silver case and pulling up a cheroot lit it. As the sweet smoke drifted to Dan’s nostril’s, Kruinh said, “and tell us about Dan Rawlinson.”
“There isn’t much to tell.”
“No?”
“Maybe,” Tanitha said, setting the frittata on the table, “there isn’t much to tell… yet.”
“I hope there is,” Dan said. “One day. Eventually. Me and my friends are trying to start a band. It never comes together.”
“Maybe you should get better friends,” Kruinh suggested.
The frittata was deicious, and Dan said so. He said, “You all can’t… predict the future or anything.’
“Not anything like that,” Kruinh said. “We are distinctly unmagical.”
“Then why does this night feel magical?” Dan said.
“A witch would say the whole world is magical,” Tanitha said.
“But—” Dan began.
“I am no witch,” Kruinh said. “Nor have I ever met one.”
“I did, once,” Tanitha said, and then she looked at his empty plate and looked to the clock.
“It’s time. You’re friends must be on their way back to the car.”
She rose pulling the shawl that had fallen from her shoulder and Dan, after shaking Kruinh’s hand, left with her through the great living room that was filled with old sofas and fat chairs, homely tables and a great stainglass hooded lamp looking from the yard onto the street. There, on the other side of the hedge and past the trees was Will’s Dad’s car with Will leaning against it, tapping his foot, and here were Jack and Riley coming down from the right with plastic bags swinging.
“Thank you so much,” Dan said. He did not say her name. It seemed too forward.
“Be safe Daniel Rawlinson,” Kruinh called as Tanitha led him to the door.
At the great heavy door, suddenly Tanitha took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead.
“That’s a protection,” she said. “And in the end, it will guide you back.”
“Wha?” Dan began, put Tanitha opened the door and shoved him out saying, “Go, before they leave you.”
Dan ran off the porch steps. At the bottom he stopped and memorized the metal numbers 4848. 4848 Brummel Street. Well, then. And he ran down the walk and onto the the sidewalk, and Will looked up and said, “Where were you?”
When Dan opened his mouth, Will said, “Never mind. We need to be heading back.”
The moon was fat and white, and the street was lit by few lamps. When he hopped in the backseat and took one last look at the house of Tanitha and Kruinh, he could not tell which one it was. Was it that one, or the one next to it? But hadn’t there been a cupola? Ah, but for now there was no time to look. He would look again. He would return, but for now they were headed back to town.
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story with lots of revelations! I like Dan so it was cool to read about some of his past. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Dan is a very dear character, and there will be a lot more about him.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT WE CONCLUDE OUR SHORT, BUT IMPORTANT LITTLE CHAPTER
Dan Rawlinson was not a fighter. He was not confrontational, and he had never expected to find himself in the dean’s office of Saint John’s high School. Sitting across from him with a bruised cheek was the silliest kid in this school, Myron Keller, and what a stupid name was that?
Dan still doesn’t know how the fight had happened. Jack had gotten involved and then Kris Strauss had gotten involved, though reluctantly and Dan had to get involved once Will did. You had to be loyal, and it wasn’t really that big of a deal, but Myron did get hit in the face with a tray and Dan had punched Mike Linder, though by accident, and it hardly mattered because in the end the ones that Dean Shep had seen where him and Myron and so here they sat.
Myron crossed his arms over his chest. He was an annoying kid, tall and skinny. He wore a turtleneck all the time and a blue blazer, and had a bulging Adam’s apple along with a big nose bordered by eyes like headlamps in a big round head that sported a shitty page boy haircut.
“You should have stayed out of it,” Myron told Dan, his big eyes now forming blue slits.
“You shouldn’t have started it.”
“I didn’t started it.”
“But here we are.”
“Here we are,” Myron echoed.
Then Myron screwed his face up and said, “Why did you paint your fingernails black last year?”
“Why did you parents name you Myron?”
“It’s a family name, and no one calls me that.”
“Yeah they do.”
“My friends call me Myre.”
“The friends who you ended up in this office because of?”
“Same way you ended up here.”
“Maybe,” Dan said.
Then he said, “You all walk around like you’re so stuck up. Swim team, polo and all that.”
“I’m not stuck up,” Myron said. “It doesn’t make you stuck up to know your own worth.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means—”
“It means you’re rich,” Dan said.
“I am not rich.”
“That’s not true. Your family owns Schiller beer, and a bunch of other stuff.”
“They own it, I don’t. Myron said.
“But you do have money,” Dan said.
“So what?” Myron turned red and looked visibly upset.
“I think Mike and Jeff and all those assholes you hang out with use you cause you’re rich and you buy them shit. That’s what I think.”
“You sure do have a lot of opinions for someone who doesn’t really know me.”
“I don’t have that many opinions,” Dan said, “but I’ve got that one.”
“Well,” Myron said. “You know I’m not stupid, right?”
“I guess.”
“I know why some people hang out with me. I’m not dumb.”
Dan shrugged.
“It’s just not right,” Dan finally said.
“Why do you care?”
“Because your friends should stick by you and be your friends because of you, not …use you.”
“Well, maybe I’m not lucky as you with friends.”
“Maybe you should make better friends and tell everyone else to fuck off.”
Myron looked at Dan, and then he burst out laughing.
Dan tried to stop himself, but as Myron continued laughing, Dan laughed too.
“That’s not like me,” Dan said. “That’s not the kind of thing I say.”
“Is it true you’re starting a band?”
“I’ve been trying to start a band all year,” Dan said.
“Me too,” Myron said.
“Oh?”
“Well, not starting so much as thinking. I’ve been trying to get my cousins in on it.”
“That’s lame,” Dan said.
“I know, that’s what they think too.”
“A band,” Dan said.
“Yep,” Myron said. “A band.”
One morning in college it had happened, a joy in herself that was beyond pride, and an exultation in being alive. Loreal had always seen those girls who walked so easily, seemed so very sure of themselves, and she had liked herself well enough, but she had never tossed her hair, or felt a bounce in her walk. Maybe it had to do with her very first magics. Maybe it had to do with going out and night and standing in the midst of the trees, her hands out, fingertips touching the air, her feet rooted to the Mother Earth. Whatever it had been, she came out of the shower and stood in her room naked, and gloried in her body, her hips, her breasts, firm and high and round, her sex, the triangle of soft reddish dark hair, the cinnamon of her soft her. She delighted in her dark eyes, her smiling face. She threw up her hands, laughed and turned in a circle, and right then she knew she was beautiful, and that could not be taken away from her.
But the exultation could fade. That much could pass. But this night. She had felt it again. This night she knew that she had put up a virgin wall between herself everything, and she had believe in that wall Now, freed form it, she was delighted in herself again. She was the goddess, the great mistress, the maiden, the mother, the lover. The whore? No, such creatures were bought and used and she did not use and she was not used. She delighted.
In the great bed, to her left lay Laurie on his back, his mouth open in sleep as if he was any ordinary man, though he had tasted her blood and she had felt his bite and knew different. She examined the hollow of his unshaven jaw, the waves in his almost black hiar, his sticky out ears, those strong features of the Irish Italian dockworker turned into charismatic high flying business man. His body, so tense so often lay relaxed before her, and her hand strayed across the hair radiating over his strong breast and making a dark linedown to his stomach. She touched the pit of his belly and looked with protective love over his penis, soft, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, rising and hardening when she brushed her hand across the head, and she gazed with love on the cloud of black hair where it rested.
“And that was how you first met Kruinh,” Loreal said, turning to her left.
Dan was half asleep, and Loreal was not sure when he had been speaking and when his mind had entered hers. He looked so much softer than Laurie, his cheeks rounded and soft, the dim candlelight on his hair turning it almost bronze. He clutched the pillow and his warm side was pressed to hers. She followed the small of his back to the gentle double curve of the cheeks of Dan’s ass, saw the dim light on his long naked legs.
“And how you met Myre.”
Dan nodded.
Loreal lay down and she pressed her breasts against her his side.
“It could not have been an accident. Not entirely. Your meeting Kruinh and Tanitha.”
“Kruinh thought it was meant.”
“But,” Loreal’s soft voice was interrupted by a yawn, “to be meant, someone had to mean it. Who, I wonder? Whom?”
Dan turned on his side and pulled Loreal close to him, twining his thighs with hers.
“But you did not share with me how you became what you are now. How you became a Drinker.”
Dan was thinking of this rare and strange intimacy, where he and both of the people he loved were all in the same bed, making love, sleeping and getting ready to make love again. As Loreal’s hand had strayed over Laurie, Dan’s in spirit made that same journey and if it weren’t for the lack of rest that had been in Lawrence Malone for so long, and how contented and at peace he seemed now, Dan would have waken him so they could all be together again.
But when Loreal asked him about being made, his mind went to those moments not long ago, after Laurie had slept, when he and Loreal had been together, and her nails had clutched his back, and he had felt like he was ripped into while he spurted inside of her and his body corkscrewed in the shelter of her thighs. The moment of his making was too intimate, and too intimate to talk about in the midst of this intimacy.
He smiled at Loreal and kissed her knowing, as he ran a hand over her shoulder she was not fooled by his lightness of speech.
“That, my Loreal, I’m afraid, is a story for another night.”
WE WILL RETURN TO THE WICKED IN A FEW DAYS, BUT TOMORROW WE WILL CONCENTRATE ON FELIX, SCOTT AND JOEY IN BIRD CAME DOWN.
Dan Rawlinson was not a fighter. He was not confrontational, and he had never expected to find himself in the dean’s office of Saint John’s high School. Sitting across from him with a bruised cheek was the silliest kid in this school, Myron Keller, and what a stupid name was that?
Dan still doesn’t know how the fight had happened. Jack had gotten involved and then Kris Strauss had gotten involved, though reluctantly and Dan had to get involved once Will did. You had to be loyal, and it wasn’t really that big of a deal, but Myron did get hit in the face with a tray and Dan had punched Mike Linder, though by accident, and it hardly mattered because in the end the ones that Dean Shep had seen where him and Myron and so here they sat.
Myron crossed his arms over his chest. He was an annoying kid, tall and skinny. He wore a turtleneck all the time and a blue blazer, and had a bulging Adam’s apple along with a big nose bordered by eyes like headlamps in a big round head that sported a shitty page boy haircut.
“You should have stayed out of it,” Myron told Dan, his big eyes now forming blue slits.
“You shouldn’t have started it.”
“I didn’t started it.”
“But here we are.”
“Here we are,” Myron echoed.
Then Myron screwed his face up and said, “Why did you paint your fingernails black last year?”
“Why did you parents name you Myron?”
“It’s a family name, and no one calls me that.”
“Yeah they do.”
“My friends call me Myre.”
“The friends who you ended up in this office because of?”
“Same way you ended up here.”
“Maybe,” Dan said.
Then he said, “You all walk around like you’re so stuck up. Swim team, polo and all that.”
“I’m not stuck up,” Myron said. “It doesn’t make you stuck up to know your own worth.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means—”
“It means you’re rich,” Dan said.
“I am not rich.”
“That’s not true. Your family owns Schiller beer, and a bunch of other stuff.”
“They own it, I don’t. Myron said.
“But you do have money,” Dan said.
“So what?” Myron turned red and looked visibly upset.
“I think Mike and Jeff and all those assholes you hang out with use you cause you’re rich and you buy them shit. That’s what I think.”
“You sure do have a lot of opinions for someone who doesn’t really know me.”
“I don’t have that many opinions,” Dan said, “but I’ve got that one.”
“Well,” Myron said. “You know I’m not stupid, right?”
“I guess.”
“I know why some people hang out with me. I’m not dumb.”
Dan shrugged.
“It’s just not right,” Dan finally said.
“Why do you care?”
“Because your friends should stick by you and be your friends because of you, not …use you.”
“Well, maybe I’m not lucky as you with friends.”
“Maybe you should make better friends and tell everyone else to fuck off.”
Myron looked at Dan, and then he burst out laughing.
Dan tried to stop himself, but as Myron continued laughing, Dan laughed too.
“That’s not like me,” Dan said. “That’s not the kind of thing I say.”
“Is it true you’re starting a band?”
“I’ve been trying to start a band all year,” Dan said.
“Me too,” Myron said.
“Oh?”
“Well, not starting so much as thinking. I’ve been trying to get my cousins in on it.”
“That’s lame,” Dan said.
“I know, that’s what they think too.”
“A band,” Dan said.
“Yep,” Myron said. “A band.”
One morning in college it had happened, a joy in herself that was beyond pride, and an exultation in being alive. Loreal had always seen those girls who walked so easily, seemed so very sure of themselves, and she had liked herself well enough, but she had never tossed her hair, or felt a bounce in her walk. Maybe it had to do with her very first magics. Maybe it had to do with going out and night and standing in the midst of the trees, her hands out, fingertips touching the air, her feet rooted to the Mother Earth. Whatever it had been, she came out of the shower and stood in her room naked, and gloried in her body, her hips, her breasts, firm and high and round, her sex, the triangle of soft reddish dark hair, the cinnamon of her soft her. She delighted in her dark eyes, her smiling face. She threw up her hands, laughed and turned in a circle, and right then she knew she was beautiful, and that could not be taken away from her.
But the exultation could fade. That much could pass. But this night. She had felt it again. This night she knew that she had put up a virgin wall between herself everything, and she had believe in that wall Now, freed form it, she was delighted in herself again. She was the goddess, the great mistress, the maiden, the mother, the lover. The whore? No, such creatures were bought and used and she did not use and she was not used. She delighted.
In the great bed, to her left lay Laurie on his back, his mouth open in sleep as if he was any ordinary man, though he had tasted her blood and she had felt his bite and knew different. She examined the hollow of his unshaven jaw, the waves in his almost black hiar, his sticky out ears, those strong features of the Irish Italian dockworker turned into charismatic high flying business man. His body, so tense so often lay relaxed before her, and her hand strayed across the hair radiating over his strong breast and making a dark linedown to his stomach. She touched the pit of his belly and looked with protective love over his penis, soft, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, rising and hardening when she brushed her hand across the head, and she gazed with love on the cloud of black hair where it rested.
“And that was how you first met Kruinh,” Loreal said, turning to her left.
Dan was half asleep, and Loreal was not sure when he had been speaking and when his mind had entered hers. He looked so much softer than Laurie, his cheeks rounded and soft, the dim candlelight on his hair turning it almost bronze. He clutched the pillow and his warm side was pressed to hers. She followed the small of his back to the gentle double curve of the cheeks of Dan’s ass, saw the dim light on his long naked legs.
“And how you met Myre.”
Dan nodded.
Loreal lay down and she pressed her breasts against her his side.
“It could not have been an accident. Not entirely. Your meeting Kruinh and Tanitha.”
“Kruinh thought it was meant.”
“But,” Loreal’s soft voice was interrupted by a yawn, “to be meant, someone had to mean it. Who, I wonder? Whom?”
Dan turned on his side and pulled Loreal close to him, twining his thighs with hers.
“But you did not share with me how you became what you are now. How you became a Drinker.”
Dan was thinking of this rare and strange intimacy, where he and both of the people he loved were all in the same bed, making love, sleeping and getting ready to make love again. As Loreal’s hand had strayed over Laurie, Dan’s in spirit made that same journey and if it weren’t for the lack of rest that had been in Lawrence Malone for so long, and how contented and at peace he seemed now, Dan would have waken him so they could all be together again.
But when Loreal asked him about being made, his mind went to those moments not long ago, after Laurie had slept, when he and Loreal had been together, and her nails had clutched his back, and he had felt like he was ripped into while he spurted inside of her and his body corkscrewed in the shelter of her thighs. The moment of his making was too intimate, and too intimate to talk about in the midst of this intimacy.
He smiled at Loreal and kissed her knowing, as he ran a hand over her shoulder she was not fooled by his lightness of speech.
“That, my Loreal, I’m afraid, is a story for another night.”
WE WILL RETURN TO THE WICKED IN A FEW DAYS, BUT TOMORROW WE WILL CONCENTRATE ON FELIX, SCOTT AND JOEY IN BIRD CAME DOWN.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great end to this chapter! I am still enjoying more Dan and his history. He must be getting comfortable with Loreal to tell her about that. Excellent writing and I look forward to more of your other story tomorrow! I hope you are having a nice week! 
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Glad you enjoyed. We'll have to talk soon.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
In light of certain adventures which have taken place, only one story is being posted tonight and tomorrow we will post Bird Came Down. Now, it is time to return to the Wicked!
E L E V E N
NIGHT READING
Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many
& the known.
-The Book of the Law
He had thought of calling Marabeth. She had simply told Jim, “Tonight, when you read, you’re going to find some interesting stuff.”
And Marabeth never put irony into her voice when she said the word “interesting.” Jim Strauss just knew that when she used certain words she meant certain things, and from what he had already read, he understood what was about to come.”
THE BOOK OF PAMELA STRAUSS
WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, there was a tenseness that settled over us. No one said anything, but we all drew together. Germantown consisted of many different people, the Catholics, the Lutherans and yes, the Jews, not to mention the black population that spanned us and the area some called Little Hungary. We waited, and often Mr. Keller and Friederich spent nights in the large living rooms of the house on Dimler or the house on Williams, loading their guns, and calling their sons and the men who worked for them to form into mini militias.
But the riots did not come. The police came. The government came. They took the Grubers and Schweitzers away. They took the first generation families, and I wondered if they would try and take us. I was not worried for myself and certainly not for Friederich, though he was no longer young. But what if they tried to take Claire or Maris or Jimmy? And now that we had found what we were politely calling “the medicine” for Jimmy, what if he should get off of that, be separated from it? What untold horrors could happen?
But as usual, I need never have worried about the things I feared, and the things worth worrying about, I could never have foreseen.
I had begun observing my brother and Steiger, and in the house they made movements and gestures, strange, but familiar, as if they were playing at joining the military. When, one night, Friederich made some comment about both the boys being more orderly, I assumed that this meant they truly were headed for the military, after all, they were going off to secret meetings and returning with a mixture of giddiness and manly pride I had never seen. One night, after they had left, I looked down from my window and decided to follow them.
I went up Dimler, then turned down Hull, which used to be Holstein and which people in the neighborhood had begun calling Holstein again no matter what the street sign said, and then, in the shadow of Saint Ursula, reaching Noble Street, I saw that there were others, mostly very young men, going into Youth Hall. It wasn’t a place for women and certainly not middle aged, as you would call it now, women, so I’d had no use for it. But with caution and an invisibility taught to me by Frau Inga and helped by Augustus, I made my way across the street and to the side of the building, climbing onto a crate to look into the windows, and feeling foolish.
Deutschland, wach auf aus deinem Albtraum!
Nein, der Ort für fremde Juden in deinem Königreich!
Wir wollen für deine Auferstehung kämpfen!
Arisches Blut wird nicht zugrunde gehen!
Zu all diesen Heuchlern werfen wir sie aus,
Juda: verlasse unser deutsches Haus!
Wenn das Terroir gelöscht und sauber ist,
wir werden vereint und glücklich sein!
Wir sind die NSDAP-Kämpfer
fällt deutsch im Herzen
im festen und hartnäckigen Kampf.
Wir haben uns dem Hakenkreuz geweiht.
Sei gegrüßt, unser Fahrer: Heil Hitler!
Now, it was German, my Marabeth, but you do not have to be German to understand what was being said, and as these boys, for they were boys, removed their coats, they were all wearing red armbands with that nasty little symbol the chancellor in Germany loved so much. I had seen them before. To be sure, we all had, and there were Jimmy and Steiger, singing away, in German, though I will translate:
Germany awaken from your evil dream!
Do not give room to foreign Jews in your kingdom!
We want to fight for your resurrection!
Aryan blood should not be lost!
All these hypocrites, we throw them out,
Judah escapes from our German house!
Once the floe is cleared and clean,
we will be united and happy!
We are the fighters of the NSDAP
oath of loyalty in the heart, firm in the fight and tough.
We surrender to the swastika.
Hail our guide, Heil Hitler!
I had counted on Jimmy being weak. I had counted on him being frail. I had counted on him being, yes, a werewolf. And I had counted on being able to cure it. I had not counted on my little brother being a Nazi.
TELLING FRIEDERICH can only make it worse. The truth is, I have no idea what the old man would say. So Jimmy goes on with his meetings, but I am more troubled by Steiger. After all, Jimmy was always a fool, but Steiger falling in with him is a source almost of anger to me. And then there was the hypocrisy of it all, and I do not claim to be any sort of saint, but the Nazis hated everyone. They hated the Blacks they had never met as much as they hated the Jews, and I, in my own way, had come to have a great love and reverence, for Augustus Dunharrow, the man who had taught me so much, and for the people from whom he came. Like many a white person in that time, while Jimmy and Steiger openly espoused what in this time is called racism but in those days was just the order of things, they went together to the jazz clubs, sneaking in and out of parties on the other side of Main Street where most of the Negroes lived.
They were always together.
The war seemed as if it would never end. At first we hoped it would be over in a matter of months, but it continued, and by 1944, Jimmy and Steiger were both talking about joining the army. Maris and Claire were weeping at the table every night because the Keller brothers, their sweethearts, had gone off to fight. We all had it in our heads that no one we knew would be harmed, but then Abel Steiglitz’s son was shot down in France, and we began to walk more carefully, be a little more brittle, light more candles at church.
And speaking of candles, and of church, 1944 was the year that Forger’s Row caught fire. It isn’t far from the river, and now it is a lovely neighborhood with large stylish houses, but back then it was rows of old factories, and many of them had been co opted for the making of ammunitions. It was surrounded by tenements, and the fire blazed for days. But it was not only the tenements and factories which exploded and painted the sky red. Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral burned, exploded and collapsed in on itself.
Instantly the diocese was in an uproar. What would they do? There was no money to rebuilt Saint Pat’s. They would have to name an extant church, and so the Polish suggested their Saint Stanislaus, and the Irish suggested another one of their churches, Saint Mary’s. This was promptly shot down, though it was more a matter of racial politics than anything. Saint Mary’s, in all honesty, would have been the best church. The Italians suggested Saint Francis and we put up Saint Ursula’s while the Blacks never even suggested Saint Agatha. Sometimes I feel it was because they knew politics was against them, but other times I think, especially since the power of the Dunharrows was behind that church, that they simply wanted Agatha to remain theirs. The rest of us did not have as much sense, and the debate went on for not as long as you might think. The bishop was a cousin of the Dashbachs, and he had grown up in the northern part of Germantown, closes to downtown. Before the year was over, it was declared that Saint Ursula would be the new cathedral until later, after the war, when they would build a new one.
That never happened.
Saint Ursula was beautiful, but in a way also far from my mind and, at any road, Saint Agatha had come to mean more to me, so as excited as my younger sisters were about the event, my mind turned to other things. It was one day while I was in the house and thinking I was alone, that I pricked my ears, listening to the settling of floorboards. But, no, not the settling of floorboards at all. Something else. A sighing. I rose and I felt the settling of age in my hips. This wasn’t the first time. I was not young anymore. Slipping off my shoes, I went out of my room, and slid down the darkened hallway. It was late afternoon, and I heard sighing and moaning, and I knew, but did not know what I heard. I knew the sound, but did not know how it could be. There were only so many people in the house. For a moment I thought of how, years ago, there had been servants in the empty top floor, and how those days were gone. But today, the top floor was not empty, and so I went up. Perhaps lust was in me, and coming down the hall, I quietly pushed open the door of the room nearest the little kitchenette.
My eyes observed it all, bodies writhing together, twisting, striving, hands in hair, kissing rubbing, sighing in the dim pale light of the dying day. I stood there and watched in mingled pleasure and horror as they grasped each other, making love, as Jimmy’s hands were like claws on Steiger’s back, as Steiger rose up and tried to be quiet while he stifled his orgasm. They were lovers. I imagined they always had been.
Heart racing I turned away and pressed my back to the wall, listening to them whisper, listening to the bed creak as their bodies shifted. Now, I have seen many things, and as I grow older and the world changes, I see in our own neighborhood men and men, women and women, happy. But I now know what the ancient fear was, what the hatred has been. For I felt a very simple fear at that moment. If they continued on this way, then the Strauss line would die. So I resolved to find a way to cure Jimmy of Steiger, to take Steiger from his friend as quickly as possible. It would require my greatest magic, and up until then, my greatest sacrifice.
Jim stopped reading.
He had stopped several times before, but the truth was he didn’t know any of these people. Pamela had been old and almost dead when he was just a little boy. He had never known his grandfather Jimmy ,and certainly Friederich was nothing more than a picture on the wall. But here, this was his grandfather. This was saintly old Steiger Frye, and Pamela was saying… well, first that he had been a Nazi.
Jim turned in bed and saw Seth sleeping beside him, curled up close, and he wanted to snuggle back down into the covers with him, only he knew if he tried it, he’d have no real sleep. His grandfather had been a Nazi. Oh, well, then, he had only been a boy. People changed. And, yes, the real Nazis who had done the damage had been in Germany. He knew that there were eugenicists and Nazis in America, that a lot of all American church going good hearted white people had been perfectly fine with shit like that. But that he was related to such good hearted white people, that his own grandfather, whom he loved, had believed this…
And fighting with that, also the revelation… Steiger was… My grandfather was my other grandad’s… boyfriend? They were lovers?
What happened?”
Jim had never told his grandfather or his grandmother Natalie for that matter about his sexuality. It was something more or less known but never stated. But that years ago, before he had had been born, his grandfathers had been lovers, and everyone just called them best friends…
Jim cleared his throat and pushed his brass rimmed spectacles up his nose. He got closer under the lamp and further from Seth, though he longed to touch him.
“Grandad was gay.”
Then, Jim almost hit himself.
“Grandad IS gay.”
He took a breath and turned back to the book.
“That’s really the only reason I’m reading this shit.”
E L E V E N
NIGHT READING
Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many
& the known.
-The Book of the Law
He had thought of calling Marabeth. She had simply told Jim, “Tonight, when you read, you’re going to find some interesting stuff.”
And Marabeth never put irony into her voice when she said the word “interesting.” Jim Strauss just knew that when she used certain words she meant certain things, and from what he had already read, he understood what was about to come.”
THE BOOK OF PAMELA STRAUSS
WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, there was a tenseness that settled over us. No one said anything, but we all drew together. Germantown consisted of many different people, the Catholics, the Lutherans and yes, the Jews, not to mention the black population that spanned us and the area some called Little Hungary. We waited, and often Mr. Keller and Friederich spent nights in the large living rooms of the house on Dimler or the house on Williams, loading their guns, and calling their sons and the men who worked for them to form into mini militias.
But the riots did not come. The police came. The government came. They took the Grubers and Schweitzers away. They took the first generation families, and I wondered if they would try and take us. I was not worried for myself and certainly not for Friederich, though he was no longer young. But what if they tried to take Claire or Maris or Jimmy? And now that we had found what we were politely calling “the medicine” for Jimmy, what if he should get off of that, be separated from it? What untold horrors could happen?
But as usual, I need never have worried about the things I feared, and the things worth worrying about, I could never have foreseen.
I had begun observing my brother and Steiger, and in the house they made movements and gestures, strange, but familiar, as if they were playing at joining the military. When, one night, Friederich made some comment about both the boys being more orderly, I assumed that this meant they truly were headed for the military, after all, they were going off to secret meetings and returning with a mixture of giddiness and manly pride I had never seen. One night, after they had left, I looked down from my window and decided to follow them.
I went up Dimler, then turned down Hull, which used to be Holstein and which people in the neighborhood had begun calling Holstein again no matter what the street sign said, and then, in the shadow of Saint Ursula, reaching Noble Street, I saw that there were others, mostly very young men, going into Youth Hall. It wasn’t a place for women and certainly not middle aged, as you would call it now, women, so I’d had no use for it. But with caution and an invisibility taught to me by Frau Inga and helped by Augustus, I made my way across the street and to the side of the building, climbing onto a crate to look into the windows, and feeling foolish.
Deutschland, wach auf aus deinem Albtraum!
Nein, der Ort für fremde Juden in deinem Königreich!
Wir wollen für deine Auferstehung kämpfen!
Arisches Blut wird nicht zugrunde gehen!
Zu all diesen Heuchlern werfen wir sie aus,
Juda: verlasse unser deutsches Haus!
Wenn das Terroir gelöscht und sauber ist,
wir werden vereint und glücklich sein!
Wir sind die NSDAP-Kämpfer
fällt deutsch im Herzen
im festen und hartnäckigen Kampf.
Wir haben uns dem Hakenkreuz geweiht.
Sei gegrüßt, unser Fahrer: Heil Hitler!
Now, it was German, my Marabeth, but you do not have to be German to understand what was being said, and as these boys, for they were boys, removed their coats, they were all wearing red armbands with that nasty little symbol the chancellor in Germany loved so much. I had seen them before. To be sure, we all had, and there were Jimmy and Steiger, singing away, in German, though I will translate:
Germany awaken from your evil dream!
Do not give room to foreign Jews in your kingdom!
We want to fight for your resurrection!
Aryan blood should not be lost!
All these hypocrites, we throw them out,
Judah escapes from our German house!
Once the floe is cleared and clean,
we will be united and happy!
We are the fighters of the NSDAP
oath of loyalty in the heart, firm in the fight and tough.
We surrender to the swastika.
Hail our guide, Heil Hitler!
I had counted on Jimmy being weak. I had counted on him being frail. I had counted on him being, yes, a werewolf. And I had counted on being able to cure it. I had not counted on my little brother being a Nazi.
TELLING FRIEDERICH can only make it worse. The truth is, I have no idea what the old man would say. So Jimmy goes on with his meetings, but I am more troubled by Steiger. After all, Jimmy was always a fool, but Steiger falling in with him is a source almost of anger to me. And then there was the hypocrisy of it all, and I do not claim to be any sort of saint, but the Nazis hated everyone. They hated the Blacks they had never met as much as they hated the Jews, and I, in my own way, had come to have a great love and reverence, for Augustus Dunharrow, the man who had taught me so much, and for the people from whom he came. Like many a white person in that time, while Jimmy and Steiger openly espoused what in this time is called racism but in those days was just the order of things, they went together to the jazz clubs, sneaking in and out of parties on the other side of Main Street where most of the Negroes lived.
They were always together.
The war seemed as if it would never end. At first we hoped it would be over in a matter of months, but it continued, and by 1944, Jimmy and Steiger were both talking about joining the army. Maris and Claire were weeping at the table every night because the Keller brothers, their sweethearts, had gone off to fight. We all had it in our heads that no one we knew would be harmed, but then Abel Steiglitz’s son was shot down in France, and we began to walk more carefully, be a little more brittle, light more candles at church.
And speaking of candles, and of church, 1944 was the year that Forger’s Row caught fire. It isn’t far from the river, and now it is a lovely neighborhood with large stylish houses, but back then it was rows of old factories, and many of them had been co opted for the making of ammunitions. It was surrounded by tenements, and the fire blazed for days. But it was not only the tenements and factories which exploded and painted the sky red. Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral burned, exploded and collapsed in on itself.
Instantly the diocese was in an uproar. What would they do? There was no money to rebuilt Saint Pat’s. They would have to name an extant church, and so the Polish suggested their Saint Stanislaus, and the Irish suggested another one of their churches, Saint Mary’s. This was promptly shot down, though it was more a matter of racial politics than anything. Saint Mary’s, in all honesty, would have been the best church. The Italians suggested Saint Francis and we put up Saint Ursula’s while the Blacks never even suggested Saint Agatha. Sometimes I feel it was because they knew politics was against them, but other times I think, especially since the power of the Dunharrows was behind that church, that they simply wanted Agatha to remain theirs. The rest of us did not have as much sense, and the debate went on for not as long as you might think. The bishop was a cousin of the Dashbachs, and he had grown up in the northern part of Germantown, closes to downtown. Before the year was over, it was declared that Saint Ursula would be the new cathedral until later, after the war, when they would build a new one.
That never happened.
Saint Ursula was beautiful, but in a way also far from my mind and, at any road, Saint Agatha had come to mean more to me, so as excited as my younger sisters were about the event, my mind turned to other things. It was one day while I was in the house and thinking I was alone, that I pricked my ears, listening to the settling of floorboards. But, no, not the settling of floorboards at all. Something else. A sighing. I rose and I felt the settling of age in my hips. This wasn’t the first time. I was not young anymore. Slipping off my shoes, I went out of my room, and slid down the darkened hallway. It was late afternoon, and I heard sighing and moaning, and I knew, but did not know what I heard. I knew the sound, but did not know how it could be. There were only so many people in the house. For a moment I thought of how, years ago, there had been servants in the empty top floor, and how those days were gone. But today, the top floor was not empty, and so I went up. Perhaps lust was in me, and coming down the hall, I quietly pushed open the door of the room nearest the little kitchenette.
My eyes observed it all, bodies writhing together, twisting, striving, hands in hair, kissing rubbing, sighing in the dim pale light of the dying day. I stood there and watched in mingled pleasure and horror as they grasped each other, making love, as Jimmy’s hands were like claws on Steiger’s back, as Steiger rose up and tried to be quiet while he stifled his orgasm. They were lovers. I imagined they always had been.
Heart racing I turned away and pressed my back to the wall, listening to them whisper, listening to the bed creak as their bodies shifted. Now, I have seen many things, and as I grow older and the world changes, I see in our own neighborhood men and men, women and women, happy. But I now know what the ancient fear was, what the hatred has been. For I felt a very simple fear at that moment. If they continued on this way, then the Strauss line would die. So I resolved to find a way to cure Jimmy of Steiger, to take Steiger from his friend as quickly as possible. It would require my greatest magic, and up until then, my greatest sacrifice.
Jim stopped reading.
He had stopped several times before, but the truth was he didn’t know any of these people. Pamela had been old and almost dead when he was just a little boy. He had never known his grandfather Jimmy ,and certainly Friederich was nothing more than a picture on the wall. But here, this was his grandfather. This was saintly old Steiger Frye, and Pamela was saying… well, first that he had been a Nazi.
Jim turned in bed and saw Seth sleeping beside him, curled up close, and he wanted to snuggle back down into the covers with him, only he knew if he tried it, he’d have no real sleep. His grandfather had been a Nazi. Oh, well, then, he had only been a boy. People changed. And, yes, the real Nazis who had done the damage had been in Germany. He knew that there were eugenicists and Nazis in America, that a lot of all American church going good hearted white people had been perfectly fine with shit like that. But that he was related to such good hearted white people, that his own grandfather, whom he loved, had believed this…
And fighting with that, also the revelation… Steiger was… My grandfather was my other grandad’s… boyfriend? They were lovers?
What happened?”
Jim had never told his grandfather or his grandmother Natalie for that matter about his sexuality. It was something more or less known but never stated. But that years ago, before he had had been born, his grandfathers had been lovers, and everyone just called them best friends…
Jim cleared his throat and pushed his brass rimmed spectacles up his nose. He got closer under the lamp and further from Seth, though he longed to touch him.
“Grandad was gay.”
Then, Jim almost hit himself.
“Grandad IS gay.”
He took a breath and turned back to the book.
“That’s really the only reason I’m reading this shit.”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Lots of revelations in the book of Pamela Strauss! Quite a bit to ponder. Great writing and I look forward to more soon! This story gets more and more interesting and I hope you are having a nice weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
So many revelations tonight, yes, but not so many about Pamela herself. Tomorrow night your hair will turn white as Pamela's journal continues.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AS JIM CONTINUES TO READ, PAMELA'S SECRETS CONTINUE TO ASTOUND...
Steiger stayed at the house so often, and always in Jimmy’s room. Never had we questioned it. Now, at night, I came into their room while they slept, naked, lithe, beautiful truly. Steiger was curled up in Jimmy’s arm and I thought how fair he was, how, in some ways, he was a much more fitting heir to the family Strauss than my brother, whom I now had to protect. Leaning down, while they barely stirred, breathing so gently, with silver sheers I cut a bit of Steiger’s hair. I had given them strong wine and I pricked him with a needle. It hurt me to prick him, He winced a little in his sleep. I wiped up his blood with the tip of my finger and mixed it with the hair before moving out of the room.
The next morning I came into the dining room and said, “Father I need a word with you.”
The way I stood at the door, Friederich knew this was a private matter and he looked at Katherine, her blond hair long greyed, and at my sisters, and said, “Leave.”
They said nothing, not even Katherine, and as they left he commanded, “Close the doors behind you.”
The French doors were pulled close and Freiderich said, “What is it, Pamela?”
“Jimmy is weak.”
“He was always weak. We should drown him and adopt Steiger.”
He barked out a laugh, but I knew he wasn’t entirely joking.
“I want to bring him a woman.”
“A woman? A whore?”
“He won’t know what to do with Natalie unless he’s with a woman.”
“Ah,” Friederich leaned back in his chair, smirking at me. I wondered was he angry because I was no longer in his bed or because I had moved so far away from him in these last years?
“But you know I am right,” I said.
“So you would bring my son a whore?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
It was after nine o clock, and Katherine and the girls had gone to bed. This was when I brought her. She was an American, dark haired, a little too plump, with that displeasing accent my sisters had, and I brought her upstairs to my room first.
“We should talk about what I charge,” she said.,
“No,” I said, turning away from her to go to my dresser. “We won’t do that. You will take this.”
I handed her money.
“More than you’ve ever seen, and you will leave these clothes and that perfume and take mine.”
She did not argue. I left her in the room to change, and when she was gone I began the magic. I had learned some things from Augustus and some from Inga. There is some work which only a true witch can do, and then there are things which those with witch blood can always do, even if their training is small. And then there are even those things which one with no gift can do it only they listen. Augustus had told me there were many times when he had to be someone else. He told me that, as I was by my nature a shapechanger, this spell would be easy for me.
“Now your family turns to wolves, but of old you were simply changers. All changers could change to anything.”
I easily became the wolf, but whatever I might be able to change into or not, with some skill, at last, I looked in the mirror and saw, in place of a fifty year old woman who had once been beautiful, a twenty something year old plump prostitute smelling of cheap cologne and wearing too much rouge. It was in this guise that I went down the hall. Steiger had stayed at home this night. I had told Jimmy a surprise was coming. I tapped on the door and his thin voice called, “Steiger.”
But I opened the door and he said, “Excuse me. Who are you, ma’am?”
“Your father sent me,” the whore said. I said.
“My…” Jimmy’s voice croaked
I closed the door behind me. I set the lock. He kept a night lantern and I turned it to the lowest light. He still sat on the bed, paralyzed with fear and perhaps something else. Out from the opening of his pajamas, his penis rose. He must not have even known he was erect. I knelt, and pushed the fabric of his pajamas away from it.
“Ma’am… his voice was still thin, and a little desperate. I could feel his heart pounding against his chest. “What are you doing?”
I bent down quickly, choosing not to think, and took my young brother’s cock in my mouth, sending him into rapture. He stifled his pleasure or fear or both. I could feel his body tensing as I moved up and down on him. Soon, much too soon, there was a hot shower of his semen in my mouth. I swallowed it and was surprised by my pleasure, by my own excitement. Could it be that I had wanted to do this?”
“Undress me.” I commanded.
Jimmy did so, and then buried his face in my breast, sucking on my nipples like a young wolf cub. Though he had already spent himself, quickly he was erect again. I opened my legs and he buried himself in me, fucking me savagely, with no tenderness, sweat running down his frail, sixteen year old body. I had never known this, how I had wanted to be battered by this frail boy, this boy I considered so unworthy, Friederich’s son, and in some ways, Hagano’s too, the newest generation of their family. We both screamed as he came, my arms purpled with the bruises of his fingertips. That night we slept together exhausted, and early in the morning I crawled out of that bed, redressed and crept back to my room. My cunt ached. After the celibacy, after no longer feeling beautiful, after, in truth, never having been with a young man, not even when I was young, my cunt ached for Jimmy again, and I knew I would go to him, not simply for his good, whatever that meant, but for my pleasure.
“Jim?” Seth stretched and looked up, concerned, at Jim who was sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, the lamp above fully on him.
“I didn’t want to wake you so I just moved into the chair.”
Seth stretched, turned over and said, “Good Lord, it’s so… do you have any idea what time it is?”
“No,” Jim said, yawning. “And my eyes hurt, but I just can’t stop. Not yet.”
“What have you learned about your family?”
“That they we’re a sick bunch of fucks.”
“Well,” Seth said after some some consideration, “I imagine that’s what everyone learns about their family somewhere down the line.”
“My great aunt had sex with her father.”
“Oh,” Seth said, distastefully. He lay on his side and scrunching up like a child shuddered.
“And apparently she slept with my grandfather Jimmy, Marabeth and Kris’s granddad. She slept with him because he was gay and she wanted to make him straight.”
“That is the absolute extreme end of conversion therapy,” Seth observed, and suddenly James laughed, and then Seth began laughing, and then Jim laughed harder and then they were both laughing and, at last, Seth said, “But how did your aunt… Pamela?”
“Yes?”
“How did she know your grandfather was gay?”
“Oh. Because she found him in bed with my other grandfather.”
You mustn’t believe that I felt bad about the turn things had taken or, at least, I did not feel as bad as one would expect. My main feeling was surprise, surprise that I could have such feelings for Jimmy, or for what I encountered with him in the night. Friederich, in his increasing old age and meanness, did not ask many questions. Katherine knew nothing. In the course of time I brought four other women to the house, making with them the same trade as I had with the first. So I had five forms into which I changed, though the transformations were not full, and after a while they were only little more than glamours. In the early morning I felt a special and indescribable way about Jimmy, but he was still Jimmy, my sixteen year old brother, though I could see traces of the man in him. I reminded myself that, in the end, he thought he was with a whore, with several whores. He had no idea as he made love to me with increasing skill, that I was his austere older sister he had always half feared. In the nights that went on for three years, as I surrendered to his mouth sucking my nipples, sucking me, his hands tracing the sides of my aging body, as he began to teach me things, burying his face between my thighs and pleasuring me in ways that had been gone for me for so long, I reminded myself that, in no real sense were we lovers.
Almost as soon as the war ended, and the Keller boys were home, my sisters married. Claire said, a little ungraciously, that since Maris was the oldest, she should marry first. To be sure, Maris was only twenty-two at the time, but in those days people thought this was approaching spinsterhood. She had enrolled in Wallington College, partially, I know, because she thought she might be an old maid and she wanted a profession. She did what I had never done, and dropped out without even earning her degree. Even with the beer factory closed, the Strausses were still a family of means, Katherine Dashbach’s fortune had seen to that, and the early spring of 1946 saw a lavish wedding at Saint Ursula’s for Maris and Peter Keller. Later that year, near the autumn, Claire married Peter’s brother Andrew and Katherine said, looking meaningfully across the church to young Natalie and her sisters, “Well, three is not a crowd in this case. Three is exactly how it should be.”
I did not see the look on Steiger’s face. Once I had begun coming to Jimmy, I did not wonder about his relationship to his old friend. It was not that I believed that the sex I gave Jimmy had driven him from Steiger. It was only that, now that he could be with a woman, would be with a woman, whatever happened between him and Steiger did not matter. Perhaps I told myself they grew out of it. I didn’t know, but as it had always been almost set in stone that Jimmy would marry Natalie, I thought it best to go about finding someone for Steiger.
“You are a very nosey woman, Pamela,” my father said. “It is enough we find someone for Jimmy.”
But Katherine said, “Pamela is kind, and she is right. I have a cousin. It would be a nice thing if we made it official, you know, Steiger’s tie to the family.”
Friederich, though, was so concerned about Natalie marrying Jimmy, that I didn’t have to worry about it. In 1946, Jimmy was just turning eighteen. He was tall, handsome in a very slender way, golden in skin and hair, with a part down his scalp. He was still inseparable from Steiger, who had a more robust and golden beauty beside Jimmy’s bronze and boylike looks. We had invited Natalie over for tea and Katherine set up white gardenias in the living room. The curtains were open to bring in sunlight from Dimler Street, and there she was, at the door, her hair almost black, her eyes wide and always a little, not sarcastic, but careful. She reminded me not so much of Frau Inga, as a wolf, as someone with Inga’s blood. Looking at this American girl, I thought of the old bent over witch in the woods in Bavaria, her great grandmother who had loved and nursed me so long ago.
MORE TOMORROW
Steiger stayed at the house so often, and always in Jimmy’s room. Never had we questioned it. Now, at night, I came into their room while they slept, naked, lithe, beautiful truly. Steiger was curled up in Jimmy’s arm and I thought how fair he was, how, in some ways, he was a much more fitting heir to the family Strauss than my brother, whom I now had to protect. Leaning down, while they barely stirred, breathing so gently, with silver sheers I cut a bit of Steiger’s hair. I had given them strong wine and I pricked him with a needle. It hurt me to prick him, He winced a little in his sleep. I wiped up his blood with the tip of my finger and mixed it with the hair before moving out of the room.
The next morning I came into the dining room and said, “Father I need a word with you.”
The way I stood at the door, Friederich knew this was a private matter and he looked at Katherine, her blond hair long greyed, and at my sisters, and said, “Leave.”
They said nothing, not even Katherine, and as they left he commanded, “Close the doors behind you.”
The French doors were pulled close and Freiderich said, “What is it, Pamela?”
“Jimmy is weak.”
“He was always weak. We should drown him and adopt Steiger.”
He barked out a laugh, but I knew he wasn’t entirely joking.
“I want to bring him a woman.”
“A woman? A whore?”
“He won’t know what to do with Natalie unless he’s with a woman.”
“Ah,” Friederich leaned back in his chair, smirking at me. I wondered was he angry because I was no longer in his bed or because I had moved so far away from him in these last years?
“But you know I am right,” I said.
“So you would bring my son a whore?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
It was after nine o clock, and Katherine and the girls had gone to bed. This was when I brought her. She was an American, dark haired, a little too plump, with that displeasing accent my sisters had, and I brought her upstairs to my room first.
“We should talk about what I charge,” she said.,
“No,” I said, turning away from her to go to my dresser. “We won’t do that. You will take this.”
I handed her money.
“More than you’ve ever seen, and you will leave these clothes and that perfume and take mine.”
She did not argue. I left her in the room to change, and when she was gone I began the magic. I had learned some things from Augustus and some from Inga. There is some work which only a true witch can do, and then there are things which those with witch blood can always do, even if their training is small. And then there are even those things which one with no gift can do it only they listen. Augustus had told me there were many times when he had to be someone else. He told me that, as I was by my nature a shapechanger, this spell would be easy for me.
“Now your family turns to wolves, but of old you were simply changers. All changers could change to anything.”
I easily became the wolf, but whatever I might be able to change into or not, with some skill, at last, I looked in the mirror and saw, in place of a fifty year old woman who had once been beautiful, a twenty something year old plump prostitute smelling of cheap cologne and wearing too much rouge. It was in this guise that I went down the hall. Steiger had stayed at home this night. I had told Jimmy a surprise was coming. I tapped on the door and his thin voice called, “Steiger.”
But I opened the door and he said, “Excuse me. Who are you, ma’am?”
“Your father sent me,” the whore said. I said.
“My…” Jimmy’s voice croaked
I closed the door behind me. I set the lock. He kept a night lantern and I turned it to the lowest light. He still sat on the bed, paralyzed with fear and perhaps something else. Out from the opening of his pajamas, his penis rose. He must not have even known he was erect. I knelt, and pushed the fabric of his pajamas away from it.
“Ma’am… his voice was still thin, and a little desperate. I could feel his heart pounding against his chest. “What are you doing?”
I bent down quickly, choosing not to think, and took my young brother’s cock in my mouth, sending him into rapture. He stifled his pleasure or fear or both. I could feel his body tensing as I moved up and down on him. Soon, much too soon, there was a hot shower of his semen in my mouth. I swallowed it and was surprised by my pleasure, by my own excitement. Could it be that I had wanted to do this?”
“Undress me.” I commanded.
Jimmy did so, and then buried his face in my breast, sucking on my nipples like a young wolf cub. Though he had already spent himself, quickly he was erect again. I opened my legs and he buried himself in me, fucking me savagely, with no tenderness, sweat running down his frail, sixteen year old body. I had never known this, how I had wanted to be battered by this frail boy, this boy I considered so unworthy, Friederich’s son, and in some ways, Hagano’s too, the newest generation of their family. We both screamed as he came, my arms purpled with the bruises of his fingertips. That night we slept together exhausted, and early in the morning I crawled out of that bed, redressed and crept back to my room. My cunt ached. After the celibacy, after no longer feeling beautiful, after, in truth, never having been with a young man, not even when I was young, my cunt ached for Jimmy again, and I knew I would go to him, not simply for his good, whatever that meant, but for my pleasure.
“Jim?” Seth stretched and looked up, concerned, at Jim who was sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, the lamp above fully on him.
“I didn’t want to wake you so I just moved into the chair.”
Seth stretched, turned over and said, “Good Lord, it’s so… do you have any idea what time it is?”
“No,” Jim said, yawning. “And my eyes hurt, but I just can’t stop. Not yet.”
“What have you learned about your family?”
“That they we’re a sick bunch of fucks.”
“Well,” Seth said after some some consideration, “I imagine that’s what everyone learns about their family somewhere down the line.”
“My great aunt had sex with her father.”
“Oh,” Seth said, distastefully. He lay on his side and scrunching up like a child shuddered.
“And apparently she slept with my grandfather Jimmy, Marabeth and Kris’s granddad. She slept with him because he was gay and she wanted to make him straight.”
“That is the absolute extreme end of conversion therapy,” Seth observed, and suddenly James laughed, and then Seth began laughing, and then Jim laughed harder and then they were both laughing and, at last, Seth said, “But how did your aunt… Pamela?”
“Yes?”
“How did she know your grandfather was gay?”
“Oh. Because she found him in bed with my other grandfather.”
You mustn’t believe that I felt bad about the turn things had taken or, at least, I did not feel as bad as one would expect. My main feeling was surprise, surprise that I could have such feelings for Jimmy, or for what I encountered with him in the night. Friederich, in his increasing old age and meanness, did not ask many questions. Katherine knew nothing. In the course of time I brought four other women to the house, making with them the same trade as I had with the first. So I had five forms into which I changed, though the transformations were not full, and after a while they were only little more than glamours. In the early morning I felt a special and indescribable way about Jimmy, but he was still Jimmy, my sixteen year old brother, though I could see traces of the man in him. I reminded myself that, in the end, he thought he was with a whore, with several whores. He had no idea as he made love to me with increasing skill, that I was his austere older sister he had always half feared. In the nights that went on for three years, as I surrendered to his mouth sucking my nipples, sucking me, his hands tracing the sides of my aging body, as he began to teach me things, burying his face between my thighs and pleasuring me in ways that had been gone for me for so long, I reminded myself that, in no real sense were we lovers.
Almost as soon as the war ended, and the Keller boys were home, my sisters married. Claire said, a little ungraciously, that since Maris was the oldest, she should marry first. To be sure, Maris was only twenty-two at the time, but in those days people thought this was approaching spinsterhood. She had enrolled in Wallington College, partially, I know, because she thought she might be an old maid and she wanted a profession. She did what I had never done, and dropped out without even earning her degree. Even with the beer factory closed, the Strausses were still a family of means, Katherine Dashbach’s fortune had seen to that, and the early spring of 1946 saw a lavish wedding at Saint Ursula’s for Maris and Peter Keller. Later that year, near the autumn, Claire married Peter’s brother Andrew and Katherine said, looking meaningfully across the church to young Natalie and her sisters, “Well, three is not a crowd in this case. Three is exactly how it should be.”
I did not see the look on Steiger’s face. Once I had begun coming to Jimmy, I did not wonder about his relationship to his old friend. It was not that I believed that the sex I gave Jimmy had driven him from Steiger. It was only that, now that he could be with a woman, would be with a woman, whatever happened between him and Steiger did not matter. Perhaps I told myself they grew out of it. I didn’t know, but as it had always been almost set in stone that Jimmy would marry Natalie, I thought it best to go about finding someone for Steiger.
“You are a very nosey woman, Pamela,” my father said. “It is enough we find someone for Jimmy.”
But Katherine said, “Pamela is kind, and she is right. I have a cousin. It would be a nice thing if we made it official, you know, Steiger’s tie to the family.”
Friederich, though, was so concerned about Natalie marrying Jimmy, that I didn’t have to worry about it. In 1946, Jimmy was just turning eighteen. He was tall, handsome in a very slender way, golden in skin and hair, with a part down his scalp. He was still inseparable from Steiger, who had a more robust and golden beauty beside Jimmy’s bronze and boylike looks. We had invited Natalie over for tea and Katherine set up white gardenias in the living room. The curtains were open to bring in sunlight from Dimler Street, and there she was, at the door, her hair almost black, her eyes wide and always a little, not sarcastic, but careful. She reminded me not so much of Frau Inga, as a wolf, as someone with Inga’s blood. Looking at this American girl, I thought of the old bent over witch in the woods in Bavaria, her great grandmother who had loved and nursed me so long ago.
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
More surprises from Pamela. This family definitely has a sordid past! I am glad Jim is reading this but I hope it doesn’t depress him too much. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
As, so in addition to Pamela having sex with her father, now she is having sex with her brother as well, only disguised as a whore! And what of Steiger? What about to happen with him and all the others? No wonder this story is called the Wicked!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AS WE COME TO THE END OF CHAPTER TWELVE, JIM LEARNS MORE ABOUT HIS FAMILY AND SEEKS COMFORT FROM MADNESS IN THE ARMS OF SETH
“I’m told we’re supposed to be married,” Natalie said as she put a cake onto her plate.
You could have heard a pin drop as she sat there, in her chair on the other side of the parlor table from Jimmy.
“Of course,” Natalie spread jam on the cake, “I don’t really even know you.”
She looked around the high walls of the living room, eyed the cornices, openly assessed the lace curtains. “I don’t even know if I like you, James Strauss.”
“Ah… no,” Jimmy said. “That’s true.
“Do you know ,we’ve never even spent any time alone together,” Natalie continued, and then she said, “Alone together. Now, that is what they call an oxymoron.”
“Oxymoron.”
“A long word for things that don’t fit together. I’m at Wallington right now.’
“Do you like it?’
“I like it a lot,” Natalie said. “I’m going to be an English teacher.”
“You could always get your degree and then get married,” Katherine said.
“I could,” Natalie admitted, sipping her tea, “and depend on a man for the rest of my life.”
“All women depend on men,” Friederich almost snapped.
“Do they?” Natalie said, unimpressed.. “I don’t think Miss Strauss does,” she nodded to me. “And I don’t think I will either.”
Friederich frowned over this, and I imagine he was reassessing the value of his son marrying Natalie Keller when, suddenly, she said to Jimmy, “Can you drive?’
“A little.”
“I drove over here.”
Ah, Grandma! And she’s just like Grandma. And I can hardly stay awake. My eyes are like rocks. God, they itch. Grandma! The one bright thing about all this shit.
“I DROVE OVER HERE.”
“You drove?” Friederich said.
“Yes,” Natalie said. “It can be done. My car, well, it’s my father’s car, is on the corner. What if we were to go driving? Would you like that?”
“Can I drive?” Jimmy asked, eagerly.
“Not if you’re no good,” Natalie told him. “My father would kill me if you ruined his Roadmaster. I’m not afraid of any man in this world, but I do fear Peter Keller.”
She took him out, certainly not the other way around, and they were gone for several hours, and when Jimmy returned he was flushed with excitement. How Natalie felt, who could say?
That night when I went to Jimmy, he held me down fiercely, and as he fucked me with more earnestness than I’d ever felt, he kept growling, “Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!” Until her name melted into a growl and an exclamation, and he flooded me as he collapsed and passed out.
The courtship of Natalie Keller had begun that day, but my affair with Jimmy did not end. Natalie had very definite ideas about life, and she was going to finish college before she married. Not only that, but she insisted Jimmy go as well. Jimmy was lacking in ambition, and he did not travel very far. He and Steiger both went to Ancilla, the little Catholic College started by the Jesuits that was just on the far north of town, near the suburbs. Natalie finished up her four year degree and wanted to go onto graduate school, but was willing to wait until after her marriage. Jimmy did his two years, though Steiger stayed on. The day came when Jimmy went down on one knee and Natalie accepted his proposal. She seemed happy, but not surprised and not grateful, the way my sisters had been. This was the wedding the Strausses and Kellers had been waiting twenty years for, Some might even say the wedding I had been waiting for since we’d first come to America thirty years ago. Natalie’s train went down the entire aisle, and was born by Keller and Dashbach and Steiglitz cousins. Steiger was best man in his black tuxedo. The maid of honor was Caroline Dashbach, Katherine’s younger cousin, but also the girl I had found for Steiger, and if his eyes were not exactly on her, then hers were on him. She had her own money, and we would make sure Steiger had his. The marriage of James Strauss and Natalie Keller was a success, and soon after, in 1950, though it was a smaller affair, so was that of Steiger and Caroline Dashbach.
More or less in the present, now, in regards to the history of his family Pamela was composing, reading about people he had known, or at least people he almost knew, Jim was too red eyed to read on, and every time things began to be somewhat normal, Pamela entered in all of her madness and her incest, and so, eyes red and aching, James B. Strauss stretched, closed the book and, flicking out the light, moved for bed, and the comfort of Seth Moore.
MORE ON WEDNESDAY
“I’m told we’re supposed to be married,” Natalie said as she put a cake onto her plate.
You could have heard a pin drop as she sat there, in her chair on the other side of the parlor table from Jimmy.
“Of course,” Natalie spread jam on the cake, “I don’t really even know you.”
She looked around the high walls of the living room, eyed the cornices, openly assessed the lace curtains. “I don’t even know if I like you, James Strauss.”
“Ah… no,” Jimmy said. “That’s true.
“Do you know ,we’ve never even spent any time alone together,” Natalie continued, and then she said, “Alone together. Now, that is what they call an oxymoron.”
“Oxymoron.”
“A long word for things that don’t fit together. I’m at Wallington right now.’
“Do you like it?’
“I like it a lot,” Natalie said. “I’m going to be an English teacher.”
“You could always get your degree and then get married,” Katherine said.
“I could,” Natalie admitted, sipping her tea, “and depend on a man for the rest of my life.”
“All women depend on men,” Friederich almost snapped.
“Do they?” Natalie said, unimpressed.. “I don’t think Miss Strauss does,” she nodded to me. “And I don’t think I will either.”
Friederich frowned over this, and I imagine he was reassessing the value of his son marrying Natalie Keller when, suddenly, she said to Jimmy, “Can you drive?’
“A little.”
“I drove over here.”
Ah, Grandma! And she’s just like Grandma. And I can hardly stay awake. My eyes are like rocks. God, they itch. Grandma! The one bright thing about all this shit.
“I DROVE OVER HERE.”
“You drove?” Friederich said.
“Yes,” Natalie said. “It can be done. My car, well, it’s my father’s car, is on the corner. What if we were to go driving? Would you like that?”
“Can I drive?” Jimmy asked, eagerly.
“Not if you’re no good,” Natalie told him. “My father would kill me if you ruined his Roadmaster. I’m not afraid of any man in this world, but I do fear Peter Keller.”
She took him out, certainly not the other way around, and they were gone for several hours, and when Jimmy returned he was flushed with excitement. How Natalie felt, who could say?
That night when I went to Jimmy, he held me down fiercely, and as he fucked me with more earnestness than I’d ever felt, he kept growling, “Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!” Until her name melted into a growl and an exclamation, and he flooded me as he collapsed and passed out.
The courtship of Natalie Keller had begun that day, but my affair with Jimmy did not end. Natalie had very definite ideas about life, and she was going to finish college before she married. Not only that, but she insisted Jimmy go as well. Jimmy was lacking in ambition, and he did not travel very far. He and Steiger both went to Ancilla, the little Catholic College started by the Jesuits that was just on the far north of town, near the suburbs. Natalie finished up her four year degree and wanted to go onto graduate school, but was willing to wait until after her marriage. Jimmy did his two years, though Steiger stayed on. The day came when Jimmy went down on one knee and Natalie accepted his proposal. She seemed happy, but not surprised and not grateful, the way my sisters had been. This was the wedding the Strausses and Kellers had been waiting twenty years for, Some might even say the wedding I had been waiting for since we’d first come to America thirty years ago. Natalie’s train went down the entire aisle, and was born by Keller and Dashbach and Steiglitz cousins. Steiger was best man in his black tuxedo. The maid of honor was Caroline Dashbach, Katherine’s younger cousin, but also the girl I had found for Steiger, and if his eyes were not exactly on her, then hers were on him. She had her own money, and we would make sure Steiger had his. The marriage of James Strauss and Natalie Keller was a success, and soon after, in 1950, though it was a smaller affair, so was that of Steiger and Caroline Dashbach.
More or less in the present, now, in regards to the history of his family Pamela was composing, reading about people he had known, or at least people he almost knew, Jim was too red eyed to read on, and every time things began to be somewhat normal, Pamela entered in all of her madness and her incest, and so, eyes red and aching, James B. Strauss stretched, closed the book and, flicking out the light, moved for bed, and the comfort of Seth Moore.
MORE ON WEDNESDAY
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was an excellent end to the chapter! I am glad Jim has Seth to comfort him while reading his fascinating to put it mildly family history. Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days!
