3 - Ryet
Ryet doesn’t live here anymore
When I wake up, I’m craving blood , my dick is hard, and Syrsee is gone.
It’s like this every day and I’m sick of it. All I want is her. I want to drink her, and fuck her, and then sleep with her, only to wake up and do it all again.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty about all my carnal wants and needs, but it’s not the worst way to waste a life. And anyway, I have a strong suspicion that this phase we’re going through right now where all we crave is each other won’t last.
I just want to make the most of it. I mean, for all I know there will come a time when she repulses me and never again will I lust for her the way I do now.
I don’t want that to happen, but since when does anyone care about what I want?
Never. No one ever asked me if this is what I wanted. It would be nice to given a choice. But even if I did have a choice, what would I do?
I think about leaving. This whole mountain. This world. I think about digging a hole in the earth and burying us inside it, never to see the light of day again.
I’d do it. I would. But only if I could take Syrsee with me, and she likes what she does here. She’s reading books. I can’t take that away from her. It was my promise. You will read the books. That’s what I told her. Well, actually, what I told her was… You’re gonna read the books and find us a cure.
A cure. What a joke, not to mention a lie.
Not sure there is an actual cure for what I am, but more importantly, I don’t want to be cured. There’s nothing to cure. I am who I am. And Syrsee is who she is too.
This is us.
It took my whole life to get here. Ninety-three years, to be exact. That’s the sum total of my first life, when I was born, and my second, when Paul began my transformation from scion to vampire.
No. I am not here to be cured. I’m here to let the Guild poke and prod me until Syrsee gets what she came for, which is those books and the knowledge contained within.
I’m certain that if I asked her to choose—me, and the blood, and sex, and the dirt, or those books—she would choose me. But I would never ask her to do that. To give up what she wants so I can have what I want. It needs to be mutual or it’ll never work.
And I really, really want it to work.
So happy medium it is.
She doesn’t tell me about what she does in the library, but I don’t tell her what they do to me in the lab, so I guess we’re even.
Suddenly, Paul is in bed next to me, his warm body pressing into mine. His naked body. He chuckles. “You miss me, don’t you?”
I look at him, squinting, trying to decide—as I do every morning when he appears like this—if he’s real or not. I’ve asked him, of course I’ve asked him. But he doesn’t ever answer me. All he wants to do is touch me. And drink me. And feed me.
And, since Syrsee is never here when I wake up, I let him.
Mostly because I don’t think it’s real. It’s some kind of dreamwalk, which is kind of real, but not real enough for it to feel like cheating.
And anyway, Syrsee, and Paul, and I are connected whether we want to be or not. He’s part of this—whatever this is. And maybe he’s appearing to her the same way? Maybe she lets him touch her, and drink her, and feed her as well?
I wouldn’t actually care if she did. I have no feelings of jealousy about Paul. This detachment isn’t rational because he’s handsome, powerful, seductive, and charming—in his own way. So I should be jealous. I’m just… not. Whatever relationship Syrsee has with Paul, it’s not what she has with me. Same goes for him and I. I wouldn’t want him to disappear, but I would choose Syrsee over him without hesitation.
So I don’t think Syrsee would care that I’m spending my mornings with fake Paul after she leaves.
“I do miss you,” I say, finally answering his question. He doesn’t need to ask this question every time we meet up, he knows I miss him. He just likes to hear it.
And once the words come out of my mouth, his hand is sliding up my bare leg. It glides right over my hard cock and then up my chest. His palm comes to a rest on my cheek and then he turns my face towards him so we can look each other in the eyes.
“And all it took was ninety-three years and a little Black witch between us. It was worth the wait, Ryet. Don’t you agree?”
I press my lips together and hum. “Mmm. I do.”
This makes Paul smile so big, his eyes go bright. “It was always you, you know that, right? You have always been my reason.”
It’s not true. He’s been trying to make a baby vampire for hundreds of years. Much longer than I’ve been around. But I understand what he’s saying.
He loves me. For whatever reason, he does.
“Do you want a drink, Ryet?”
“Always,” I say back.
“Then help yourself.” He turns his head away from me, exposing his neck, and even if I had denied my desire to drink him, that silent offer would be enough to change my mind.
My blood lust for Syrsee is constant but my blood lust for Paul is beyond that. It’s insatiable.
At first all I do is lean over. But I can smell Paul’s blood and before I know it, I’m crawling on top of him. His hands caress my body as I open my mouth and press down, breaking the skin, puncturing the artery, and then it’s gushing. Blood fills my mouth faster than I can swallow it.
He never let me do this as a scion and I love every moment of it.
A moan escapes and for a moment, I think it’s me. But the low rumble of a growl is actually coming from Paul. “That’s it, Ryet. Take what you need.” He’s stroking me. My head, my leg, my back—I feel his touch everywhere. “Hell, take more than what you need. Take all you want, Ryet. You’ve earned it.”
A flash of anger passes through me, then the reason. A memory of Jane and the kids.
But it’s so quick, so fleeting, there isn’t even enough time to get mad. There isn’t even enough time to care.
Jane is gone.
The kids are gone.
I’m gone.
But Paul is still here. Even though I’m not really sure where ‘here’ is, he’s here.
There is so much blood in my mouth now, I start to choke on it. I don’t want it to end the drink. I don’t feel full enough. I want more. But I pull back anyway because it’s dripping out of my mouth. The moment I do this, the wound I made begins to close.
Paul is stroking my head like I’m a child. And since the drink is over, it annoys me. I push his hand off and roll over on my back, eyes closed, mind closed, body relaxed and approaching satisfaction. But, as always, I’m still hard. There is still more to want .
I feel like that’s the only word on my mind these days. I want. All I do is want. Blood, and sex, and, if it were available right now, dirt.
“Don’t worry,” Paul says. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you, Ryet.”
And so he does. He strokes me. Slowly, with a firm grip. His body pressing into mine. His mouth at my neck.
“Drink me,” I say. “Feed.”
“You like it, don’t you, Ryet?”
“Just do it.”
“It was all worth it, wasn’t it?” When I don’t say anything, he keeps going. “Go ahead. Lie if you must. Tell me you hate it. Tell me you crave that little wife of yours. That pathetic past life of yours.”
But I don’t crave her, or have any use for that life, and he knows this. I’ve already told him that it was worth it, but it’s never enough. He asks this question over and over again every time he appears to me. Like he needs constant reassurance. Or maybe he’s worried I’ll forget and start blaming him for something.
And let’s face it, Paul is a hundred percent responsible for every evil thing that ever happened to me, so he deserves this insecurity. But I’m done fighting with him. There is no point. So again, I say, “It was worth it, Paul.”
Paul chuckles. “I knew it. I knew you’d love it. I knew it from the moment you were born. When I was sitting in that forest looking down at you in my arms. I felt this. I felt all of it and I knew.”
I think about that baby and that forest. I’ve seen him holding it in my dreamwalks before I knew it was me. And now that I have a clearer picture of what is happening and what it all means, I have questions. “Do you love them all like you love me?”
“Does it make you jealous that I have more scions?”
I shrug, not bothering to open my eyes. “Jealous of what? You’ve given me everything.”
There is no chuckle now but I know he’s smiling. “I did, didn’t I?” He sounds different. Serious. His voice less musical than it usually is.
“Mmmhmm,” I hum. Because I’m tired and I’m probably gonna fall asleep.
“Well, I love them all in different ways, Ryet. So I guess the answer is yes. But none of them will deliver the gift of Darkness. That’s you. And Syrsee, of course. You are the best of me. And so I will always be there for you. Remember that when the time comes.”
I hear the threat in these last words. Well, threat is probably not the right word. More like a warning, maybe. Because what he really said, and I know this because he’s done it so many times now, is that things are going to get horribly bad for me. There’s no way around it. And he wants me to know he’ll be there when they do.
“Am I going to live through it?” My words come out sleepy and slow. My eyes remain closed.
Paul swipes some hair away from my face. Then he leans in, his mouth touching my neck, his sharp teeth ripping my skin. He licks up some blood before answering my question. “I certainly hope so. You and I, Ryet, are meant to spend eternity together. I’m counting on it.”
And then he feeds. Pulling the blood out of me. Mixing us up once again.
I go somewhere else now. Some other realm, maybe. It’s nothing but an empty place filled with gold and purple mist. But inside the mist there are specks of black.
The Darkness.
The mists, both colors, represent magic. Or a better way to put it, I think is that they represent what can be done with magic. They are like paint colors sitting in front of a canvas, waiting to be used.
Mostly, so far, at least, I’ve used them to dreamwalk.
“But you can do so much more, Ryet.” Paul says this because he’s standing next to me in the mists now, but still feeding on me at the same time.
“Where are you right now?”
He shrugs up one shoulder. “I’m right here.”
“No. Where is your physical body?”
“In the dirt, back home in Montana.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me to do what?”
“Come up out of the ground, of course. I’m waiting for your third life. I’m waiting for the new you.”
“What about this me?” I point to myself.
“All things in good time, Ryet. We’re not in a rush.”
“I don’t understand what will happen.”
He turns and smiles at me. This version of him is wearing a suit. He looks very… Paul . Commanding, and arrogant, and fucking desirable. “You’re going to Hell, Ryet. But don’t worry, I’ll be there too. I must have that final conversation with our Maker.”
“Isn’t the Darkness our maker?”
“It is.”
“Isn’t it… technology?”
“It’s that too.”
“But it’s not like… I mean, does it talk?”
“Of course not.”
“So how do you converse with it?”
Paul turns to smile at me. “What do you mean? We’re talking to it right now.”
I’m just about to ask him to explain when I hear a distant voice. “Ryet?”
“Syrsee?” I’m still looking at Paul and he shoots me a big smile. “Now what are you doing?”
“Just helping things along.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, turning me around. “Come on. Let’s go back. Syrsee doesn’t have much time and there is blood to exchange.”
I’m still trying to figure out what all that means when I wake up in bed. Syrsee is here now, climbing over my body to fit herself into a space that Paul has made between us.
“There you go, sweet Syrsee. Get comfortable,” Paul says. “Let’s all have a drink now, shall we?”
But what the three of us do next is not drinking. It’s blood lust. It’s all kinds of lust. I’m inside Syrsee as she drinks from Paul, Paul’s inside Syrsee as she drinks from me. And then she’s between us as we both drink from her.
It’s… sin.
That’s the only word I have to describe what we do to, and with, each other in this bed. Which isn’t even a bed. It’s nothing but a bit of Darkness.
Just like us.
It is pure sin.
I wake .
And when I open my eyes it’s just me, lying in our bed, with a hard-on and covered in blood. Which would be concerning if I hadn’t been waking up this way for weeks now—the part with Paul, at least. Not Syrsee joining in.
I sit up, letting out a long sigh, and look at my body. Is it my blood? Is it his? I’m not sure. It shouldn’t be possible to actually drink in a dreamwalk, but what the hell do I know about dreamwalking anyway? What the hell do I know about anything, actually? Paul never handed me a rule book. It was always just need-to-know. And, as far as I can tell, my name is the last one on the list of who needs to know. Pretty much everyone in Paul’s life knows more about what’s happening to me than I do.
I swing my legs out of bed and get up. There is blood all over this room, not just the sheets. But there’s no way to tell how much of it is from Syrsee and me drinking all night and how much is from… well, whatever it was that just happened.
Housekeeping cleans up after us every morning after I leave, so I just go into the shower, wash off all the blood, and come out pretending that everything’s fine as I put on my clothes, grab my phone, and leave, heading for the lab where I will spend my day.
And when I come home tonight the apartment will be clean, the sheets will be bright white again, and all I will be thinking about is the drink.
This is my life now.
I live, and eat, and breathe… blood .
The first week or so I was here , I would stop at this café near the research center and grab a cup of coffee. I would stand in line, and glance up at the trendy menu board that had everything written in liquid chalk, and I would smile at the Guild people all around me as they talked about their upcoming days or whatever else was on their minds.
It felt like a very Ryet thing to do. I’m not like a coffee fanatic or anything, but in my other life it was a morning habit. And it’s not hard to blend in here. I’m living in my Ryet body. There are no wings. There’s no bruise-colored skin. My eyes aren’t glowing red. I look like every other human around here so I figured… well, carry on, ya know?
But right around week two, when I started to realize that the blood lust was taking over, I just stopped going in. This was also right about the time when the people in the lab stopped being coy about what it was they wanted from me.
The first few days I showed up in the lab they took blood samples. Lots of them. And it felt pretty normal. I mean, the blood is everything to a vampire. It feels like a logical first step. At the very least, it’s something physical. Something scientific.
But they don’t want my blood. It’s dead outside of me anyway. One day—again, right around week two—they left the samples in the room I was in. The room is big, and open, and there are like half a dozen research stations and twice the number of researchers all sharing this one area. There’s nothing private about it. Half walls made up of soapstone lab benches with open shelving above filled with glassware and other science shit.
Usually they hook me up to an EKG machine or whatever it’s called. I might’ve just made that up because I heard it on TV, but it’s the brainwave electrode thingies they put on your head. It’s actually a helmet, but anyway. My point is, they didn’t take the blood. The lab tech got called away and it was just forgotten about until the end of the day when someone finally noticed.
And the blood in the vials wasn’t even liquid anymore. It looked like molasses, or maybe tar. Thick, and black, and gross. It looked like the Darkness, actually. It looked dead and it was tossed into the trash.
That’s when I figured out that they don’t care about my blood. They’re after something else and that something else was far less tangible. That something else turned out to be the thoughts inside my head.
“Ryet,” the lead researcher told me the next morning, “the magic is inside you, but it’s not something physical. It’s your brainwaves. It’s your frequency. It’s your…” Well, he went on and on about this and the words he used got progressively more and more technical. I vaguely remember him saying something about the Doppler effect, but that’s only because everyone’s heard that term. It’s how they track rain.
What did it all mean? Well, he might’ve told me during that actual conversation, but all I heard was blah, blah, brainwaves. Blah, blah, frequency. Blah, blah, Doppler effect. It made no sense to me at all.
They stopped taking my blood that very day.
And ever since then, when I get to the lab, they wave at me. “Hi, Ryet!” they call out. “Get undressed and we’ll meet you in there.” And then they point to the little dark room made up of glass where my chair lives. It’s a very special chair with a headset, and those electrode thingies that get stuck to various parts of my naked body, and cameras. Lots and lots of cameras.
Because even though nothing has happened so far, I get the feeling that they are expecting something very spectacular to happen very soon.
And they don’t want to miss a moment of it.
They’re gonna record it so all of humanity—or maybe just everyone in this room—will understand exactly who and what they are dealing with. Who and what I really am.
Because Ryet doesn’t live here anymore.
I am the Darkness.