Hunted in Darkness

In Dreams they come

At some point sleep overtook me and despite the smells and the strange newness of this place, I dreamed. In my dream there were people sacrificing children to a god, an Aztec god, of anger and blood and feathers. Then the god reached out and ripped my heart out. I stood there gazing at my heart in the god’s hand as he turned into a serpent and swallowed it. I screamed, but it only looked down on me with a smile, sharp teeth glinting against an unforgiving sun, as my body and blood blistered and boiled I felt hands shaking me and heard my name.. “Kat...Kat...please wake up.” I opened my eyes and looked into two deep blue pools, they cooled me instantly. I tasted copper on my lips. More blood....his blood....Emile’s familiar blood...our eternal bond....and felt myself slipping back to sleep, his arms wrapping tightly around me, protecting me from the dark god who demands my heart as tribute. Before the sleep takes me completely, I feel his lips brush my cheek softly. Emile the monster, my monster, who loves me eternally. Life is complicated sometimes. 

I wake to the sound of breathing against my ear, groggily I try to recall where I am, the dim surroundings I can make out involve a man’s arm around my waist. Panic and realization crowd into my foggy brain. Memories of the night spent with the man I swore I’d never see again, fragments of the nightmare pieced themselves together in my brain. The house with boarded windows, the bus, all of it surreal in the twilight. What about my job? My apartment? The life I’d built? What would become of those things now that he was back in my world? What of him, for that matter? Was he going to hurt me, once everything was settled? Why was this awful thing hunting me anyway, after I’d been off the grid for so long? I had all these questions swirling around my brain as I laid there with his body spooned tightly against mine. My own body betraying me by how comfortably it fit against his, like two halves made whole. I studied his hands, delicate with long fingers. He once knew how to play the piano with those long fingers. Had I imagined tasting his blood last night, after the dream or had I fed on him, after all this time drinking him in? I gently lifted his arm, looking for the telltale mark on the soft underside of his wrist. They hadn’t had time to heal and fade, what I had tasted was him, copper, iron, dark chocolate, Emile. 

He stirred for a moment, his hands pulling my hips against him, nuzzling his face in my hair. I could feel him relax again and drift back to sleep once he realized I was still there, safely next to him. I closed my eyes and centered my mind, imagining his blood coursing through my veins, I tried to isolate it, flowing inside of my body. I wanted it to remember where it came from and to show me what I was facing, what his intentions were, but it was too diluted by my own and kept its secrets from me.

I drifted back into sleep and the haunting memory of my dream returned, only this time, the god spoke to me, a voice filled with violence and hate, it hissed out “ You will all be destroyed, my children where meant to cleanse the earth of its sins, but you failed, and I shall destroy you. You will offer your heart as tribute to cleanse the land now that I have been awakened.” I saw in my dream vision, men in an old temple, removing mummies, stirring up the dead and damned in a distant jungle. The bodies of sacrificed, and the body of a god, who fed for generations on the blood of those who worshiped him, until invaders came and the people who worshiped the dark god hid him in a cave below their temple and as the invaders shed their blood in one last accidental sacrifice, they forgot him there. His children, borne of blood given and taken, fled the temple, and with time, they forgot him too. His rage and bitterness at being forgotten filled me until I thought I would break. Some people think vampires came from Cain, when he sinned and shed the blood of his brother, it created a lust for it within him, others think a demon inhabited the body of a man and became trapped there, lusting for blood and death. I don’t know how ancient the thing in my dreams is, but I know it thinks it was the first of us. 

It once had skin the color of burnished bronze, and rich dark eyes, but now it is a shriveled black hulk, restoring itself with hearts from my kind. I could feel its eyes boring through me from the darkness as it killed the men who woke it, as it ripped the heart from a beautiful Latino vampire girl, and ate it. It was coming, that much was certain, and it made whatever Emile was seem like a lamb by comparison. Em was right, we stood a better chance in numbers.

Emile stirred, a groan escaping his lips. His eyes opened and a look of terror crossed his face. The thing in my dream was in his dream too, and when he leaned up to look at me, he knew. “You’ve seen it, then?” I nodded and he buried his face against me. “Kat, I’m so tired, and I know it’s coming, please let me stay by your side for this.” I nodded and whispered “Of course” while smoothing his hair. His lips met mine, and I remembered, as his hands caressed my hips, how much I had missed those kisses. I could never forget the way he tasted.