Sometimes murder is the greatest mercy
“Meadow Lake apartment complex, floor six, 68B.” I read the paper in my hands aloud before admiring the pristinely painted black door in front of me with the gold-crested “68B” nailed in. The waning light from the city outside cascaded through the tall window at the end of the hallway, highlighting the expensive glass vases in each corner with a golden hour glow.
With one last deep breath, I steeled my waning strength for this last chance at living to see tomorrow. Then, swiftly and surely, I knocked on the door. When the only responding sound was the elevator ding down the hall, I knocked again, and then again once more.
A shuffle from within 68B had my heart leaping into my throat. “Riftan!” I slammed my knuckles against the wood in a fury. If that damn vampire didn’t open this door, I was going to knock it down. I may have fallen weaker than I’d been five minutes prior, but it didn’t matter, I’d find a way to break the damn door down.
“Riftan!” I screamed again, attracting the attention of several of the neighbors who peeked their heads through ajar apartment doors.
Just when I was certain somebody was going to call security on me, the locks clicked on the door I’d been pounding on. When it opened only wide enough for a dark-haired man to stick his head out, I was eye to eye with the familiar face that’d been haunting my waking nightmares. There was no mistaking the fair skin and strong features that announced I’d found the man I’d been looking for. I’d only seen him once, but I’d remember every square inch of that face until the day I died. And I hoped this wouldn’t be that day.
Seeing him didn’t scare me like it should have; it merely ignited deep-rooted rage for what he’d put me through. He was responsible for this, and I didn’t care who or what he was, I’d find a way to make him pay.
He scrunched his nose at me. Before I could berate the man, he said, “Oh god. It’s you.”
Although his cold, narrowed eyes terrified me the night before, I no longer bothered to cower from his intimidating presence. An entire day of being nearly one with the dead would do that to a person, I suppose.
Having absolutely nothing new to fear, I pushed through the door, past the man, and into his apartment. He surely let me do it, or else I wouldn’t have succeeded.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. His deep voice had a melodic cadence hinting at an accent that would have normally been unfamiliar—old English, as Nonna put it.
“You know fully well why I’m here. Nobody else can help me but you. You did this to me. Now undo it.”
“How did you find me?” He closed the door behind himself and locked it shut. That action alone should have raised red flags, but instead, it ignited my skin with excited tingles.
Unfortunately, I had no valiant answer as to how I’d found him. The best way to describe what had gotten me standing face-to-face with the only person who could save me was damned luck. So, instead of admitting that, I stood my ground and answered, “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and you have to help me.”
He examined me with eyes that were now decipherably a deep shade of blue that rivaled the ocean’s depths. After a moment, he gave a light shrug of his shoulders and walked away, his reply, “I can’t help you. You’re going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“No way!” I squealed, my voice becoming nearly incomprehensible from the shock of his rudeness. “I know you can help me! I remembered your face. Nonna told me that you would have hypnotized me to forget it if you didn’t want me to find you.”
He bellowed a laugh and strolled into the spacious contemporary kitchen situated in the center of the studio apartment. “I was giving you a chance at survival. That doesn’t mean I wanted you to find me. I never actually thought you would. It simply made me feel better about killing you if I gave you that chance. That way, at the very least, you had those few extra hours to make peace with things.”
“Well, I’m here now. I’ve used my last few hours simply trying to survive! And in that very comment, you admitted to having the capability to save me, or else there would be no reason to leave me those memories that would inevitably lead me back to you as my ‘chance at survival.’” I made myself obdurate in his presence, standing tall and trying to toe off with Riftan. Despite my lack of fear for my own death, there was still something natural within me that reacted when he stepped closer.
“I can’t save you. Now that you’ve been bitten, the only thing I can do is make you like me, and that’s not something you want or something I’m willing to do.”
“Like you? So, a vampire? Okay, fine. Do it. Anything for just one more day.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t give you just one more day. Turning you would mean infinite more days, and my conscience wouldn’t be clean if I gave you that curse.” He spoke as if he was really helping me, and not literally condemning me to death.
Planting my feet, I used every bit of my waning strength to shout at him, “This isn’t about you! It’s my life; you don’t have the right to take it from me because you are afraid of your morally corrupt conscience!”
Without a moment’s notice, his expression morphed and Riftan’s alarmingly powerful hands wrapped around my throat, pushing me against his countertop. The air left my lungs, but it wasn’t at the mercy of his grasp. In fact, his hands were gentle—not choking me, but steadying me in front of him. The only forceful contact was the bodyweight he used to pin me between him and the counter.
I caught a glimpse of his snarl and intense blue stare before clamping my eyes closed. Nonna had warned me how vampires got their way, and I refused to let him subdue my pleas with only a look.
There was a moment of stillness before Riftan realized I wouldn’t be willfully opening my eyes for him. In response, he spoke in a harsh, accented tone, the warmth of his breath only inches from my own lips. “Do you have any idea why I did what I did to you?”
When he didn’t continue without provocation, I shook my head.
“I was going to thrall you to forget what had happened and go on your merry way, but when I looked in your eyes to do so, all you wanted was death. You told me to kill you. I showed you mercy by doing what you requested; sometimes murder is the greatest mercy.”
Keeping my eyes clamped shut, I whispered, the sound coming out feebler than I wanted it to. “That’s not mercy. You could have killed me quickly like you did the driver, but instead, you cursed me to die this slow, hopeless death.”
“As I said”, his tone leveled once again, but he didn’t let up on the weight he had against me, “I was simply doing what my conscience thought was right. You had nearly twenty-four more hours to make peace with death. That seems merciful enough to me.”
Does he plan to banter until he can trick me into opening my eyes? Fine, all the more time to convince him. “Well, your conscience was wrong—you are wrong. How could you let me die now that I’ve come all this way? There would have been no point in doing what you did in the first place. You’d have been better off killing me right off the bat. Now your conscience will have to live with that. It will have to live with the twenty-four hours I suffered fighting for the chance that you waved before me and then denied to me once I’d reached the finish line!”
“Maybe you are right.” The weight of him left me and I nearly tumbled to the ground without his support. Lacking the warmth of his presence, I felt compelled to take a peek, only to find that he was still close and pinning those deadly eyes right on me. Still not sure if he was going to try and hypnotize me into walking right back out his door completely voluntarily, I decided to remain in the dark.
Riftan continued, “But how old are you now? Twenty-three, twenty-four? You already wanted to be done with this life—already wanted to die. How do you expect to enjoy an eternity? It would be irresponsible of me to give you immortality, and you’d be irresponsible to accept it.”
This argument was leaving me weaker by the minute. Any hope I’d come in with was slowly slipping away. Despite any repercussions it might have, I opened my eyes to hold fast with his. My final pitiful statement on the matter being, “I don’t want to die. I want to live to experience things I never have. I’ve never been out of Creswell and there’s an entire world full of things I wanted to do—people I wanted to meet. Whether it was one day or an eternity of days, I’d take any opportunity to live my life differently than I have. I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want to die with this as my legacy.” Tears beckoned at my eyelids and I found myself blinking them closed to hold back any pitiful waterworks.
Riftan’s voice was shallow, but closer than seemed appropriate. “If I turned you, you’d have to leave everything you love behind. Your family, your friends, your entire life would be in the past.”
I nodded. I’d never had a family, I only had one friend, and my life was most certainly a wreck to boot.
His tone lightened, turning his argument into a delicate warning. “Any heaven that you believed in won’t accept you, and any hell you feared will be a vacation compared to what comes if you die.” Silence followed as though he was awaiting my response—awaiting my agreement to a no longer hypothetical option.
I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of him giving me a chance to decide. “Would any heaven have really accepted me anyway?”
“You will be damned to a fate worse than death.”
“Nothing you say can change my mind.” A stream of tears left my eyes, no longer confined behind drawn lashes when I peered up at him.
Riftan’s sapphire gaze fixed on a single tear as it streaked its way down my cheek until ultimately dropping off my chin. When he returned to said tear’s origin, he shook his head for reasons untold. I didn’t understand the sentiment that lingered behind his softened eyes, but I perceived it to be more kindred than it should have been coming from this murderous stranger.
“You’re lucky,” he stated finally, his tone taking an upbeat turn. “You caught me during my down decade, and I was getting quite bored. I’ll turn you, I suppose, but you’ll have to stay with me until I can teach you how to face an eternity. Training someone like you may be exactly the fun I need to get out of this slump.” He snarled, his raised brow revealing the wondering gaze that raked over me, giving a deviant perception of perverse intention to his statement. In a strangely contrasting way, his knuckles grazed my cheek, removing the tears that seeped from me.
“You will really do it?” My entire body went limp, flooding with relief.
“If you promise you understand what you are getting yourself into. Immortality is not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare. I’ll give you one last chance to resolve.”
I didn’t need another chance. I knew what I wanted. “Please do it. I don’t care what I lose or what I gain or if it’s a mistake. I want the opportunity to figure all that out for myself. I want the opportunity to learn my lesson, even if it’s the hard way.”
“So be it.” Riftan wrapped his fingers through my arm and led me in the direction of his apartment’s living space. I let him pull me along until we stopped in front of the angled couch overlooking an impeccable night line view of Creswell. Each of the little skyscrapers twinkled like diamonds in the dirt. “Sit,” he demanded.
Without question, I did as he suggested, wiping the remaining tears from my eyes. My mind buzzed with everything it could mean for me, if he was truly turning me. I hoped that he was really turning me like he’d claimed.
Kneeling until we were at the same level, Riftan’s breathtaking eyes searched my face one last time, reflecting only a glimpse of guarded apprehension.
My heart pounded in the silence—or so it felt. Though, surely my pulse didn’t beat quite like it was supposed to. Each melodic thump was a little slower than the last, and I quivered at the thought that Riftan might be stalling until my life slowly gave out.
Before I could noticeably lose hope, Riftan let loose a finalized sigh and lifted his wrist to his mouth. A moment later, he offered it to me, dripping fresh crimson blood. “You’ll have to drink my blood. That’s what will turn you.”
“Really?” The memory of Jayleen’s sour blood stained my mind and left my expression pinched.
“Now is not the time to be squeamish,” Riftan scoffed, rolling his eyes at me. “If you have really thought his through, then you have to know that there is plenty of blood drinking in your future.”
“No, I know that.” I hadn’t meant to sound so disgusted. If I indeed needed to get used to that taste to survive, then I would. It just might take me some time. Putting any averse thoughts behind me, I took his dripping wrist in my hand. I didn’t exactly know how to go about drinking it, and it seemed so incredibly odd to put my lips on him—a bleeding stranger. In a way, I wished he would do it for me. However, it was obvious from his patient position kneeling by my side, and the casual look on his face, that he wasn’t going to force this on me. I had to do it myself—no matter how bizarre it seemed.
Shaking away all reservations about the oddity, I closed my mouth around the bloody puddle on his wrist. I did everything in my power not to taste the warm liquid that came from his veins, but it was impossible to ignore. Every bit that contacted my tongue as it grazed over what was once an open wound was as sour and bitter as I’d expected. It was revolting, but I had to tell myself that it was a little milder than Jayleen’s, if only to keep it down.
I wasn’t sure if what I’d taken of his blood was enough, but it seemed as though Riftan’s inflicted wound had already stopped bleeding and there wasn’t any way to pull more of it into my mouth. I couldn’t have forced myself to draw any more regardless, the one slurp having been enough to make me gag. Luckily, that little bit must have been sufficient, because Riftan pulled his arm away, wiping the remaining blood and saliva onto his dark jeans.
Though the taste still stained my tongue, I was too weak to care. If I’d wanted to vomit it up, I no longer had the ability. When gravity pulled down on me violently, Riftan caught my shoulders and laid me on the plush couch.
He spoke gentle words, matching that of the tenderness in his fingers as he wiped his blood from my lips. “You’re going to feel really tired. Just let yourself sleep. You will wake up in a couple of hours and everything will feel different, but you’ll be alive—depending on your definition of it.”
His features were going blurry before I had the presence of mind to understand his words. I tried to fight consciousness as things started to fade, as was my instinct. It was only once Riftan’s words had set in that it dawned on me I needed to make peace with the actuality of what was to come. Despite the feeling that I should do the opposite, I let myself lose the battle with sleep as it beckoned me toward darkness.
Riftan’s careful fingers were the last thing I felt as they left my lips in exchange for the delicate skin at my neck where they rested until everything—even his touch—was merely a memory of my consciousness.