5. Rex
Chapter five
Rex
H e looks at me like he knows me.
As Charlie watches me from across the table, I realize that a large part of why I want this commission to happen is because I feel like Charlie knows me and I want to understand that. He knows my cottage, that much is clear, but this feels like more. I find my skin warming while he scans my face as if his eyes themselves carry the sunlight to me for the first time in too many years to count. I find myself tempted to close my own eyes and allow myself just a few minutes of time to bask in this moment like some alley cat in the sunshine, but then his honey chemical scent wafts across the table to me again.
It’s stronger today. Far stronger than I smelled it at the gala, and looking at how he’s presented himself for this meeting just brings more questions without answers. He’s disheveled and drawn, like his skin has been pulled too tight over his muscles and he can’t stay upright because the weight of him is collapsing in on itself. Something is going on with this handsome human, something is tainting his honeyed blood sour, and the longer I scent it, the more vile it becomes. I want to grab him, draw him close and sink my fangs into his skin to loosen it from his blood. My mouth salivates as I glance at the curve of his perfect neck, wishing I could charge across the table and rid him if this foul scent that clings to him so deeply.
It is wrong.
Though I scarcely know him, I know that Charlie should not smell of this chemical decay.
“Are you sick?” I ask, though he’s told me he’s fine. Humans say they’re fine all the time though, even when they are on death’s door. That word is meaningless.
“No?” he responds, seeming a bit perplexed as to why I’m asking. “Just tired. I promise I’ll hold up my end of the bargain though. Let me go grab a contract and we’ll get the details knocked out.”
“If you’d wait a moment, I have one more request of you,” I say. Charlie nods and sits back on his seat, looking at my expectantly. “Murals. Do you do murals?”
“Not typically,” he responds. “I specialize in oils on canvas and murals are primarily acrylics. I’ve never done a real mural. Not sure how I’d even manage that in my style.”
“I’m thinking less oil on canvas and more spray paint on the walls of The Pinwheel Club,” I say with a knowing smile.
A slow smile of his own creeps across Charlie’s lips. “You remembered.”
Of course I did. I’ve catalogued Charlie from top to bottom since the moment we locked eyes at the gala, and having his art adorn the walls of my building will be an honor. “Any subject you’d like to paint, as long as it’s not offensive. I am trying to rent the place out, after all, but you can have the whole entry way to fill with whatever your heart desires.”
“Anything I want,” he murmurs, and I swear I can already see the wheels spinning inside his head. Getting him to paint a mural on the main floor of the building is a brilliant idea, the place could use a bit of a touch up, and the color he’ll hopefully bring to the walls will help sell the venue moving forward. That I just happen to live on the floor above is just the cherry on top of the whole scenario.
“And I will provide you with a credit card for all of the supplies you need, as I assume that will be costly.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Charlie says, his tired eyes meeting mine. “What you’re giving me should cover materials and my time for both.”
“No, Charlie. That fee is solely for your time and talent. I’ll provide you with extra to cover the cost of materials.”
“Can I ask for one thing?”
“What would you like?”
“Make the name on the building match the name on the inside,” he says. “It’s a pain in the ass to find it.”
I laugh softly, nodding. I had meant to change things around by now, but haven’t quite gotten there yet. I bump it up in my mental list of things to do. “I can do that. Is that all?”
“You’re really sure?”
“Of course. Name change and funds in exchange for a mural and a painting. Those are acceptable terms.”
He thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “Agreed, then. If that’s how you want it. It’s your money and your commission, I suppose. I’ll run and grab a contract so we have all this written down, just in case.”
I nod and he rises from his seat, moving quickly to the door and then out into the hallway beyond.
He confuses me, this Charlie Polston. I am drawn to him, yet repulsed. He is sick, but he is not. He is chemicals, but he is honey sweet. He feels like Marius, but at the same time he doesn’t.
I can’t force sense into any of it, though I keep trying as if by figuring out where that scent comes from, I can unlock all the mysteries of Charlie Polston and how he came to be.
“Here we go,” Charlie says, coming back into the room. I am pulled from my mind with a jolt inside that draws me upright in my chair, though I cannot say why. His presence alerts me, makes me more aware than I was when he was not near, and I am reminded of what I felt standing alongside him at the gala, knowing that he had created the cottage painting with his talents and hands.
Home.
Which is very strange.
Charlie places the document and a pen on the table, then flips through the pages. With a nod, he pushes it across the table towards me. “Standard contract. You’ll find that I ask for a month to return a commission of this size, though I may take less time to do the painting. The mural? I’m not sure. If you have a day you need it done by, let me know and I’ll try my best to make it work. All the other details including payment deadlines and deposit amount are jotted on page two.”
I reach forward and grab the papers off the table, scanning through them quickly but I find I don’t care. Charlie could take a year to paint my cottage and my mural, and in the end, it would be okay, because it would mean that I had a whole year to get to know him.
In fact, I hope it takes a year. I hope it takes two. It could take forever and that still doesn’t feel like enough time to get to know Charlie Polston with his beautiful face, lithe body and sunshine eyes.
I scribble my signature onto the right line at the end of the last page and add my contact information into the proper boxes. Passing the papers back to him, my hand brushes his fingers, and he inhales a sharp breath, eyes popping up to meet mine for a split second before he turns his gaze downwards again just as fast. My own heart titters in my chest like it’s become a butterfly, and he offers a shaky smile.
“Static,” he comments.
“Yes,” I agree, though I clearly did not feel what he just felt.
“You sure you want to pay me twenty thousand dollars for one single painting and a mural?”
“Of course, all I ask is that when you paint the cottage, you paint it exactly as you saw it in your dream. Log by log, brick by brick. Exactly as you saw it.”
He hesitates a moment, then turns his eyes to mine. “Why so much money?”
“I’d gladly give you even more, Charlie. Paint me a cottage and I’ll pay you the moon, the stars and everything in between.”
“Okay,” he whispers, his tainted honey scent catching in my nose.
“What do you know about seers?” I ask, slipping the paperwork containing the signed commission contract with Charlie into a folder in my home office.
Emery, my youngest chosen brother, stands in the mouth of the doorway, a glass of chocolate milk in his hand and a lime green curly straw between his lips. How he can still stomach that sweet stuff is beyond me. While I still have a palate for some foods, I can’t handle much sugar without my stomach churning. Give me red meat and potatoes with a glass of wine any day of the week though. Emery slurps a mouthful of chocolate milk, then swallows before answering me. “A what?”
“A seer. Humans born with the ability to see beyond the veil to past, present and future.”
“That’s a thing? Huh. Impressive. Should I know about them?”
I sigh, but it’s not out of any irritation towards his question. The answer is that yes, he should know about them, and that he doesn’t is my own failing. Emery was only turned in the early 1990s, and while I was not the one to create him, I am the one who found him abandoned in a warehouse. He was nearly feral from blood starvation, eating the remnants of a plastic packet of crackers in a desperate attempt to fill his aching empty belly and not understanding that his hunger wasn’t for the foods he grew up eating. I took him under my wing and brought him home to learn how to hunt like the vampire he now is. Guidance is what he needed then, and still needs to this day, though he is grown into fang and claw. There are many secrets Emery has yet to learn of our place in this world. Still, I am not alone in my duty to ensure his understanding of the world beyond the one the humans live in. Emery is not the only vampire I’ve collected and brought home to my makeshift chosen family of broken ones and outcasts over the many years of my unending life.
“We have failed this child,” I call out, knowing Gibson is awake somewhere within the home. I heard him rumbling about in the kitchen when I got home from meeting with Charlie.
“We have and will continue to do so,” he calls back. “How have we failed this child today?”
“I don’t know what a seer is,” Emery offers, going back to slurping on his chocolate milk. He yawns as he finishes the last of his cup, then runs a hand through his shockingly pink hair, leaving it sticking straight up and disheveled. He looks exhausted, but well fed with pinked up cheeks and veins that sit blue beneath his skin. It’s good to see that at least I taught him one proper thing about taking care of his young vampire body, even if my education in other areas is sorely lacking. We don’t need to feed often, but when we do, it’s a feral, creeping desire that echoes in every part of us. Without that nourishment that we can only get from taking blood, we wither and waste away into insanity. Much as Emery was doing before I found him in the warehouse. A few more days without blood and he would have been lost into blood starvation and eventual death.
“Why are you even awake?” Gibson asks, coming to stand behind him in the doorway to my office. “You’ve only been home a handful of hours and I assumed we wouldn’t see you until you slept off your meal.”
“I wanted chocolate milk.”
“You woke up because…”
“I wanted chocolate milk,” Emery repeats with a shrug and a grin. We keep odd hours around this house, living half during the darkness like the rest of our kind and half during the day to keep track of the human world, but Emery is the only vampire I’ve ever met who will wake up specifically to have a snack. If he fed last night, he’ll likely be going back to sleep very soon and that means the education on seers that is rippling through my head at the moment will have to wait for a later date.
“What do you know about seers?” I ask, looking at Gibson. He, too, is from a different era than I am having been turned to vampire after an accident in the middle of the Klondike Gold Rush. Even though a true seer is a rare thing, there’s a chance he’s met one in his lifetime. The only vampires I know that hail from the age when Lord Nikandros and his Bloodrend Court were in power and kept their seer locked in the castle are called Gallio and Junius, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of either of them for nearly twenty years now.
“Met one once,” he says, his tone somber and low. “Poor thing had nearly clawed her eyes right outta her head tryin’ to get those visions to stop. Had to be kept under lock and key to keep from doing away with herself. I hear rumor that her parents had even paid a man to chop off her fingers to stop her from poking at what was left of her eyes, but that’s all hearsay, really.”
“Wild,” Emery comments, looking fairly shocked.
“Oh yeah,” Gibson adds with a sober nod. “Some seers have it worse than others. The ones without control over their visions? Past, present and future all melding together in their brains until they lose all sense of what’s what? Not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.” He pauses for a moment, then shakes his head and grins. “Naw, that’s a lie. I would wish it upon my worst enemy, but a regular human being with no evil in ’em? No way.”
I nod my own agreement, thinking to Charlie who I can’t get out of my head. He’s taken up permanent residence in there since the moment I met him at the gallery and saw his artwork. I can’t imagine watching him suffer in the way Gibson’s described, and I make a silent vow to not let that happen.
“This question have anything to do with that fancy art sitting in the corner of the living room?” Gibson asks, turning his attention away from Emery’s stunned expression and placing it squarely on me.
“Maybe.”
Gibson crosses the room, gently pushing past Emery and comes to stand across from me where I sit at the heavy mahogany desk I’ve had for years. I’ve paid handsome sums to haul it around everywhere I went over the last few years because I can’t part with it. It’s silly to have a favorite piece of furniture, but I do, and this desk is it.
“You meet one? A seer, I mean,” Gibson asks, settling into the plush leather armchair across the desk from me.
“Maybe,” I repeat, because I’m not sure what Charlie is. That he paints what he sees in sleep and is dreaming of the cottage I built for Marius is leading my brain down some dark and dangerous paths. “A painter named Charlie. He’s been painting his dreams. Or at least, has painted one thing he’s dreamed about. Things the same out there among our kind? Anything strange with the shifters you’ve noted?”
“Nothing outside the usual. Everything seems pretty peaceful,” Gibson offers with a shrug. “You see anything weird, Em?”
Emery offers a shrug my direction as well, yawning so wide I swear I can count his teeth. “That freaky reaper was out last night again, but that’s about it.”
“Thomas is harmless,” I remind him. “If you see him, it’s—”
“Because he has a job to do, yeah, yeah, I get it. Taking souls and shit. He’s still freaky as hell though, even you gotta admit that.”
“Don’t touch his hand and you’ll be fine,” Gibson says, leaning over to poke Emery in the ribcage. Emery scowls and slaps his hand away before stooping low and jabbing his elbow into Gibson’s shoulder from behind. I watch in amusement as the jabbing and poking gives way to an all-out brawl, Gibson rising from his seat to do battle with Emery for a few moments. Finally, Gibson catches Emery in a headlock and starts rubbing his fist on his pink hair. Emery grumbles and tries to get away but one swift movement by Gibson has him down on the hardwood floor.
Gibson pops up off the floor with a grin on his face. “Gotta be faster, kid.”
“I’m not a kid. I was nineteen when I was turned and I’m, like, at least forty now.” Emery huffs, hopping to his own feet and smoothing out the pajamas he wears like they’re made of the finest silk linens instead of the red cotton printed with little Nintendo controllers. He scowls at Gibson for a few seconds then turns to me. “What you gonna do about the seer? That Charlie guy?”
“I’ve commissioned him to paint a mural in the basement. I’ll keep an eye on him that way and see what unravels, if anything does unravel.”
Emery makes a face at that, his forehead scrunching up a little bit as he frowns. “Are they, like, dangerous or whatever?”
“I don’t believe so. I haven’t gotten anything that says Charlie is a danger to us,” I admit with a sigh. A danger to himself, perhaps. The scent clinging to his lithe body speaks of something not being quite right, but when I consider Charlie with his freckles and his wide green eyes, I don’t get danger. I get the need to be protected, helped, guided.
Needed.
Charlie needs to be needed. Wanted and cared for. As before, the strange sense of home and comfort pools inside me as I consider his face, his art, the knowing glances he sent my way. His long fingers, speckled with remnants of paint and the haphazard way he carries himself call to me to keep him safe from anything that would seek him out to do harm.
Even if that person ends up being himself.
“There’s something more to it,” Gibson says, gently, as he sits down in the chair across from me again. “It can’t just be a seer you may have found that has you all wound up like this.”
I hesitate a moment, then sigh. “It’s my cottage, Gib. The painting I bought is my cottage. The one I lived in and built for Marius. Somehow, Charlie saw it in a dream and painted it.”
“Whoa,” Emery breathes.
“And there’s a bit more,” I add, carefully. “I’ve met him twice and he feels like… like home. Like comfort and familiarity. Kind of like Marius used to make me feel. It’s strange, but they share some physical similarities as well. Coppery red hair. Freckles. A similar nose.”
I don’t want to say the word that’s come into my mind because I know there is no return from death. Marius is resting with the gods now, and that is where he has been for hundreds of years, yet when I think of Charlie, I can’t help but wonder.
“Not possible,” Gibson says, though he doesn’t sound all that convinced of his own words.
“Is it really so impossible, though? Maybe Charlie isn’t a seer like the ones you’ve described. Maybe, he’s Marius reborn into a new body. We live in a world where men can shift into wolves and creepy reapers walk the streets collecting souls,” Emery offers with a shrug. “I mean, shit, you guys. We exist somehow even though regular humans think it’s impossible to be a vampire, right? A myth and a story they tell on Halloween, sure, but we’re real. Reincarnation? That doesn’t seem too far off from the things that could be possible.”
He has a fair point, but I’m not entirely willing to accept that Charlie is Marius reborn. My heart aches to consider that all of these years have passed, and his soul hasn’t found the eternal peace he sought out in his refusal to let me turn him into a vampire.
But at the same time, this strange yearning has set up shop inside me. This needing to know the answers and a soul-deep want to seek Charlie out so that I can bathe myself in his sunshine warmth again lingers inside me. I know his phone number is on the contract we signed, and it’s tempting to give him a call just to hear his voice again.
I want and that is an odd feeling after so many years without wanting. Without needing anyone or anything nearby to provide comfort or even more lust-filled pleasures. I’m no stranger to indulging in sex when I feed, but those moments don’t draw me near the core of the human I’m taking blood from. They’re an exchange, blood for orgasm, should the need arise while I’m taking a meal, nowhere near the soul-deep yearning I had for Marius.
Not the craving and want I feel blooming inside me for Charlie, the artist who paints his dreams.
“It’s not impossible,” Gibson admits after a long silence.
It isn’t, and I don’t know what to think about that.