Лиза Смит: The Craving

At least Lexi was safe, I told myself. If nothing else, at least I could spend the centuries knowing that she was out there somewhere, living her life – protected by my ring. And maybe, just maybe, trying to find me.

‘ So long ,’ I whispered to Lexi in the silence of the tomb.

As if on cue, the doors to the crypt opened one last time, and a petite blonde came hurtling through, landing with a thud at my feet.

‘Lexi!’ I cried as the doors slammed shut behind her, plunging us into darkness again.

‘Hey there,’ she said weakly. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.

Lexi raised a brow at me. ‘Same thing you are. Looking forward to a long, painful eternity together.’

‘No, I mean why didn’t you run?’ I asked, resisting the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

‘Of course I ran, you idiot!’ she snapped. ‘But I guess he expected I would…I never even saw him come after me.’ I could feel her shiver in the dark. ‘He appeared out of nowhere.’ Her voice grew grim. ‘I wonder if that’s how humans feel when they meet us. If we ever get out of this, I swear I am going to be nicer to them in the future. Humans, I mean. That vampire – now him I want to kill.’

I put my hand on her forearm, softening. ‘I just pray we get that chance.’

‘Come, let’s get out of here.’ She turned and swung her leg, putting the heel of her boot smack into the middle of the doors.

There was a resounding thud, but nothing budged.

She delivered another roundhouse kick to the doors. And another. And another.

Again, nothing happened.

‘Together!’ she insisted. On the count of three we both kicked.

‘Maybe there’s vervain in the stone…?’ I suggested.

Lexi looked grim. ‘Vervain doesn’t make things indestructible. But there are other things that can be done to lock something up. Permanently. What about the walls?’

For the next hour we ran our fingers over the white walls, ceilings and floors, our highly sensitive skin picking out even the most minute gaps. We ripped open sarcophagi, ransacked the corpses for tools.

‘No knives, no diamond crosses, no silver-plate Bibles, no pennies for Charon, no lucky stone, no nothing,’ I growled, throwing my hands up in frustration.

‘This doesn’t look good,’ was all Lexi said.

Twenty-four hours later there was a service in the chapel. We could hear it with our Powers. It was a memorial to the Sutherlands, to the two brides who were killed, to the proud parents…along with a biting invective against the young men who did it, running off with the dowry money. Murderers, thugs, con men, robbers…

The only accusation that didn’t make the list was ‘demon’.

But none of the insults stopped us from screaming.

‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘In here! We’re in here!’

Lexi added her voice to mine, screeching in different high-pitched tones that nearly blew out my eardrums. At one point I could hear a hollow-voiced Hilda whisper, ‘Do you hear something?’ And our hopes were raised.

And then nothing. The service ended, people filed out and once again we were completely, utterly alone.

With a sigh, Lexi gave me my ring back.

‘Many thanks for its loan,’ she said quietly, slipping it on my finger. ‘But I don’t think it will do me – or you – much good now.’

I hugged her tight. ‘Don’t give up yet,’ I whispered in her ear.

But the words echoed hollowly within the crypt, having nowhere else to go.

There was nothing to indicate the passage of hours inside the windowless vault – not the barest suggestion of sunlight ever made its way under its doors. Days melted into weeks, maybe months. It felt as if an eternity had passed, and yet another stretched out endlessly before us.

Lexi and I had stopped talking. Not out of anger or hopelessness, but just because we couldn’t anymore. We didn’t have enough strength to force ourselves to scream when we heard someone approach, much less get up and fight the stone that kept us buried. There was no more strength to fight the darkness, no strength to stand up. If I’d still required my heart to survive, I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to keep blood pumping through my veins.

We lay silently next to each other. If anyone ever found us, a hundred years from then, we would look pathetic, like a sister and brother in some horrible fairy tale trapped in a witch’s basement.

Each passing second drained me of my Power. My eyes no longer parsed the darkness. The silence was absolute as sounds from the outside world faded into oblivion. All that I had left was my sense of touch – the feel of Lexi’s waxy hand, the rough wood of the battered coffin next to me, the cool metal band of my useless ring.

I felt almost human again, in the worst possible way. And as my Power retreated painfully, so with it went my immortality. I had never noticed its continual presence until it began to disappear, leaving meat and bone, brain and fluids and taking away all that was supernatural about me with it.

Except for my hunger.

My vampire side reacted to starvation. My teeth ached and burned with need so badly that I would have shed tears if I’d had any. Blood weaseled its way into my every thought. I dreamed of how it had beaded up, jewel-like, on Callie’s finger when she’d cut herself. How smoky my childhood crush, Clementine Haverford, had tasted. How, as my father lay dying on the floor of his study, his blood had spread out around him like greedy, searching fingers, staining everything in sight a dark, delicious red.

In the end, everything comes back to blood. Vampires are nothing but hunger personified, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing blood from our victims. Our eyes compel them to trust us, our fangs rip open their veins and our mouths drain them of their very life source.

Blood…

Blood…

Blood…

Blood…

The word whispered to me over and over, like a song caught in one’s head, filling every crevice of my brain and coating each memory with its tantalising scent.

And then a very familiar voice began to talk to me.

‘Hello, Stefan.’

‘Katherine?’ I croaked, barely able to get the words out.

I managed to turn my head just enough to see her sprawled voluptuously on a set of silk pillow cushions. She looked exactly as she had the night of the massacre, before they took her away and killed her. Beautiful and partially undressed, her pouty lips giving me a knowing smile.

‘Are you…alive?’

‘Shhhh,’ she said, leaning over to stroke my cheek. ‘You don’t look well.’

I closed my eyes as her intoxicating scent of lemon and ginger swept over me, so familiar and so real that I swooned. She must have fed recently because the heat from her skin burned in the cold tomb.

‘I wish I could help you,’ she whispered, her lips close to mine.

‘Your. Fault,’ I managed to breathe.

‘Oh, Stefan,’ she scolded. ‘You may not have been as willing as your brother, but you didn’t precisely object to my…ministrations.’

As if to emphasise her words, she leaned over and pressed her soft lips to my cheek. Again…and again…dragging them down my parched neck. Very, very delicately, she teased me, letting the tips of her fangs just puncture my skin.

I moaned. My head spun.

‘But. You. Burned,’ I rasped. ‘I saw the church.’

‘Do you wish me dead?’ she asked, fire in her eyes. ‘Do you want me to burn, to collapse to the ground in a pile of ashes, simply because you can’t have me all to yourself?’

‘No!’ I protested, trying to push her off my neck. ‘Because you made me a monster…’