Noctem Voluerunt

The Sleeping Spell. 3

A week had passed since Vita woke up, he cured both, Helian’s face and Morttymer’s arm with magic, he said the more he used it the more natural it will become for him. He helped around the house and gave Mortty lots of information about humans and the modern times, though he spent most of his time running from place to place, so he didn’t had an accurate depiction of how humans lived normally, he just had some glimpses of it, but he had a vast knowledge about witches, and Mortty was absolutely delighted with all the new things he was learning.

Helian got a little jealous of how well those two were hitting it off, especially because it seemed as if Vita didn’t like him very much and Mortty was forgetting who his best friend was. It had been just the two of them for so long that it didn’t felt right when he asked him where the tiny witch was, yeah tiny, because Vita only reached to Helian’s chest, so that made him tiny, he was even smaller than Mortty.

“Hellie, come here a second” The pink haired demon called and he obeyed, but not without complaining. When he got to the living room he saw Mortty sitting on the couch, nervously shaking one of his feet and then he saw the worst of his nightmares, sitting just in front of him.

“Well, guess the b***h repellent I bought was a scam” He said with a smile, looking at the woman in his couch.

“Classy as always, Helianthus” The woman said, looking at him like she rather be elsewhere.

“What brings the lady of the House of Stars here? Are you worried about your son or did someone f****d up again and you need a sacrifice for the media? “Helian said, still smiling, as he sat on a chair, away from her.

“I came here because I have received news about you. My informants say that you have a human in this house, Helianthus, and although you like to act like an i***t, I am well aware you are not” She said in a very slow, very calm voice, looking at her son with her cold blue eyes. “I have alerted the authorities about this possible crime, and I came here to tell you that no help would be provided for criminals from ou part”.

“First of all, who the hell gave you the right to stick your nose on my business?” He said brushing his long black hair back. “And ‘no help would be provided for criminals’? Have I imagined the past 200 years of my life then? Or it’s only criminal when I do something?” He asked, raising his voice, it was always the same. He looked around trying not to lose it right then and there. Nothing would come out of him being mad at her, and acting like an angry teenager. Morttymer was nowhere to be found and he cursed him in his mind until he remembered that he was probably with Vita.

“I did not come here to be yelled at. I came here to warn you that this kind of behaviour would not be tolerated” She coldly said as she stand up and looked at her son. “The Royal Guard will be here any time soon, be prepared for your hearing, and try to be civil.” She said again, with the same tone as she started walking to the door. As soon as her hand reached the door knob she hesitated, as if she wanted to say something else, but Helian hostile look changed her mind, or that was what she told herself as she walked past by the guards in her way out of her youngest son garden.

Vita heard some shouting and decided that he really didn’t want anything to do with it, so he went back to the room that was lent to him. He started to explore a little, up until now, helping was all he did and didn’t actually pay much attention to his surroundings, which was quite stupid, after all, this was supposed to be a whole different world, and his hosts had made it very clear that it wasn’t safe to go outside with his unstable magic, another overdose wouldn’t be great and it felt like s**t, actually, he needed Helian to drain some of it every day, so the best thing to discover a little about this new world would be to peek here and there inside the house.

The room looked pretty normal, or as normal as he thought it could be, he wasn’t in many human homes before, he was always scared of being found out, and it happened, he lowered his guard at the wrong time with the wrong people, he was tired of being alone so he tried to mix up with humans, he even started going to school, maybe the spell he cast on the dean had worn off and no one was looking for him,  not like his friends were, one of them had tried to kill him what it looked to be just yesterday. He wondered how it would be outside; the house was far from town in walking distance, at least that was what Morttymer had told him, and he just had to believe him. He also explained to him the basics of the law. Basically, this world was not that different from his when it came to politics. This world had a monarchy, but the king tittle was not pass on for generations; the moon was the one who chose it.

Kings could be women, men, or neither, it was just a tittle, and the person married to the king was the Queen, again, not a gendered tittle like he was used to. He also told him that there were something called houses, which to him sounded a lot like royal lineages, there was five of them, House of Hearts, House of spades, House of Diamonds, House of Cloves and House of Stars. Each of these houses would have a candidate and the moon would choose one, not anyone could be a candidate, this has to be a “moon child” that being someone born with silver or white hair and blue icy eyes, this moon child, at a certain age will start to hear the voice of the moon, therefore, being the direct link between the moon and the other creatures of the night, creatures like fairies, sirens, elves and dragons were seen as foreign countries, as far as he understood, trying to compare this rules to humans made it easier for him to understand, so basically he was in the “country” of the creatures of the night, those being demons, ghouls, vampires and werewolves, each represented by one of the houses, except for the House of Hearts, that had a little of everything. This country like thing was called The Main land, and the current king was part of the House of Stars, and that was the vampire house, the oldest vampires were part of it, and was seen as the purest house, since vampires there hadn’t “mixed in” with other species, the other houses treat them like royalty, it was really something to be part of the bloodline of that house.

Vita looked at the little sunflowers on his wrist and frowned slightly, he was confused when he first saw them, or felt them rather, every time one of the tiny flowers covering his body appeared it stung and hurt like a burn, he was expecting the one on his arm but this ones were a surprise, he wasn’t upset, he had a really hard time feeling some emotions, he thought he lost them at some point and it was possible that magic had something to do with it, but that night he had felt something, he felt betrayed, he wasn’t angry, or scared, maybe he was, he just didn’t know. He sat on the bed, still looking at the tiny flowers, he couldn’t figure out why sunflowers, it was kind of funny, a wound made by a vampire had taken that form, he didn’t recall having more of that kind, but again, magic was always kind of unpredictable, no matter how much he tried to understand it, after all, for him it was like a wild animal, and just a handful of people were born with the ability of taming it, more often than not he felt like he wasn’t one of them.

“Is something wrong with your arm?” The voice coming from the other side of the room made him rise his head, there was the vampire, arms crossed, leaning on the door frame, looking at him with his blue eyes, his messy long hair, though he didn’t looked unkempt at all. He walked closer to him, and sat in the bed beside him. He seemed to be angry about something, but Vita wasn’t sure if he could ask.

“Not really, I was just thinking of how funny it is that it’s sunflowers” He answered, looking at the taller guy next to him, this must be the first time they have spoken alone since that night. Helian made a weird face, he was very transparent, and had so many faces, unlike himself, he was, most of the time, expressionless or made the wrong ones at the wrong time.

“Yeah, I guess it is” they stayed silent for a moment, Vita found it quite nice and comforting, when he was with Morttymer, the latter wouldn’t stop talking and asking questions. Helian on the other hand could feel how the anxiety started to creep from the corner.

“Thank you” said the witch, he didn’t recall saying that before, and this moment was just as good as any other.

“Well, I guess you saved me too” Helian looked at him, with a soft smile on his lips while hiding his hands under his thighs.

“If it wasn’t for you,” he looked at his arm and then at Helian’s eyes. “I would’ve died twice.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think about it. Time here flows different, it’s slower. Sure, it would be only a year, but that's on the best casee scenario where the portal is not destroyed, and years would’ve passed on the human side, your family-”

“I don’t have one,” Vita cut him right there, looking at him calmed “I don’t even remember their faces. Humans are horrible creatures, anything they don’t understand they destroy, that includes other humans.”

Helian looked at him, he had been there with him for a week, and this was the first time they ever actually spoke to each other. The expressionless face of the witch was so unnerving for some reason. There was no sight of the scared little human he had found in the forest, but he could smell that something was wrong, there was anger in the air and it wasn’t coming from him.

“Hellie,” both of them looked at the source of the voice. It was Morttymer, the room started to feel a little hot and Helian just knew were the anger was coming from. “Why was Damara here?”

“Well, glad you asked Morttymer, since you f*****g bailed on me there.” He said raising one of his eyebrows.

“Who’s Damara?” Vita asked, peeking from behind Helian to have a better view of the angry demon.

“Helian’s mom” Mortty replied, making the room feel a little hotter with every word.

“Birth giver” He corrected with a sigh then laid back on the bed so the other two guys had to look down. He hated his stupid family and was totally okay with not knowing a thing about them, but of course she had to butt in. “Apparently word of me having a pet human arrived to the all mighty House of Stars, and now the council wants to hold a trial against me for breaking the law.”

“They can’t do that, he’s not a pet, we technically didn't broke any rules.” Morttymer spoke in a tone that sounded like a growl and his horns looked pointier than before.

“I know you didn’t, but we did,” He pointed at Vita and then himself. “He’s basically a trespasser and I snug him into the realm. We have a hearing in two days, because of course we do. Why would they give us time to prepare anything?”

“We?” Vita looked at him, slightly annoyed, since he hadn’t bothered telling him that before Morttymer appeared.

“Well, yeah, they'll want to take you away, I guess.” He sighed again.

“But without you he could die” Morttymer growled again, walking to the window to open it since it was getting too hot in there.

“I don’t think they care that much, for them he’s just a human. We could tell them that you’re a Spell caster, but that may make them want to take you away even more,” The dark haired vampire said, thinking really hard how to keep the human alive.

“You could mark him” Mortty said, and there was a dead silence. Vita didn’t understand what that meant and Helian couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I know what you’re thinking, but it may be the only way.”

“What does that even means?” Vita asked, annoyed with the lack of explanation.

“It means that he’ll have to bite you,” Morttymer explained with a soft voice, like he was talking to a child what made Vita a little more annoyed than before. “But not like he has been doing, it’s a little riskier.”

“A little riskier?” Helian jumped, looking at his friend like he was crazy or something. “It means that I have to bite his neck, his neck, his damn neck! Do you have that much faith in me? Because I don’t.” He had raised his voice without noticing, completely exasperated with the sole idea of having that much living creature’s blood in his mouth.

Vita looked at them fighting over if he should entrust his life to Helian or not, but none of them asked him. He didn’t want Helian to mark him, as far as he could grasp from the yelling, it was something really dangerous and even Helian didn’t want to do it.

“Vita, what do you want to do?” Helian asked him, taking him out of his own thoughts. He looked concerned and honestly scared, his eyes moved like those of a man being sentenced to hanging.

“Explain that marking thing to me, because I’ve never heard of it” He said frowning slightly, but no real emotion reaching his face. The little sun under his eye did a little spin to the right and he covered it with the tip of his fingers.

“Basically I’ll have to bite your neck with your consent. The mark is something really dangerous right now because I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop. Biting you neck is riskier, I’ll have to pierce the carotid artery and I could just lose to the blood lust.” He said, looking really serious and almost sad. “Your blood makes weird things to me and I don’t want to hurt you.”

Vita nodded and looked at the marks on his wrist, he wondered if a bigger one would appear on his neck if he let him do it. He looked at both of them and they looked back at him, like telling him to take his time. There were still some things that he didn’t understand. “Why does he need to mark me?”

Helian looked at him, with a pained smile before speaking. “Vampires are creatures of tradition, all we do to others has to be with their consent, we can’t even enter someone else’s home if they don’t want us to, sure we came up with ways to cheat the system like glamours to make our prays agree with stuff,” He looked at his hands as if blood was dripping of them. “Marking is a way to make others aware that that the victim is yours, if I do it, It’ll meant that they can’t touch you, but it also means that I’ll be cursed, and I will not be able to drink other’s blood, if we are way from each other for too long, both of us will die. With a marked a pray, blood is not enough to set you free, the pray has to be eaten.”

Vita looked at Helian with so much sympathy in his eyes, that if he had seen himself he wouldn’t have recognised the mint haired guy in front of him. He patted his back, he knew way to well what it meant to be forced by ones nature to do things that you really don’t want to do.

“I don’t want to put pressure on any of you,” Mortty said, feeling like he was interrupting something. “But it’s worth noting that the council has been after Helian’s head since he was just a kid, if found guilty, I don’t think that jail time would be served. I think they’ll kill you, this is the only way, unless you want to be killed” The nagging tone on Mortty’s voice was back and the room temperature suddenly dropped, making Vita move a little closer to Helian.

“I knew you would say something like that, Mortty, this is not the time-”

“Then when is it? I didn’t mention it before because you said it wasn’t the time. It’s been a month Helian” The room was so cold that they could see their breaths leaving their mouths. Helian threw a blanket over Vita’s shoulders when he started to shiver.

“If I die, Morttymer, it’s going to be on my own accord, not at their hands” He snapped back, at him. “You should get out until you calm down, you’re freezing my stuff.”

“What does it matter? You were ready to leave it behind anyways.” He growled, his hair was bubblegum pink and his horns were all pointy and twisty, they looked more like thorns than the deer antlers from before. Vita was impressed with the many changes Morttymer had with his emotions, he’d seen his eyes spin like crazy when he was asking him things, and an occasional flower pop out on his horns when he had an idea, but this was new.

“Morttymer, I’m not having this conversation with you right now, not like that, you’re going to give him hypothermia or something” A snapping sound was heard from Morttymer’s horns when he heard that, he turned around and left the room before whispering something and Vita interpreted as an apology towards him. “Are you okay?” He asked once Morttymer’s steps couldn’t be heard anymore.