In the face of eternity, that’s the blink of an eye
I was fucked.
I didn’t know shit about vampires, and yet I’d happily agreed to jump right into living as one.
Growing up, I hadn’t read fantasy stories or pondered ancient mythologies where one might learn a thing or two about vampire lore. Hell, I hadn’t even read Twilight like the other middle school girls. Reading was for nerds—fantasy was for nerds. I was too cool to be one of those girls. Too popular, too mature, too busy trying to make it in a shit hole like Creswell. I didn’t have any family or skills and I thought I could make up for it by having the mostfriends. I was the “it” girl, not some fiction nerd.
Look how far that popularity got me. My crown certainly was shiny atop my pile of shit.
So, as far as being turned into a vampire went, I didn’t have an inkling of a clue what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t afraid to start a new life—mine was the kind of mess I’d willingly forget in a heartbeat—but would this truly be the terrible curse this Riftan guy swore it was? Would I have to become an emotionless murderer? Would I be able to do it if it meant survival, or would I choose my own death over taking another’s life?
Was this a mistake?
I didn’t have time to ponder any of it because, like I’d been struck by lightning, my entire body jolted with more than consciousness. My lungs struggled for air, my heart beat faster than I’d ever remembered it pumping, and each nerve on my body lit with overwhelming stimulation akin to feeling every sensory input imaginable.
I sprung upright. Though short-lived, the scream projected from my lips was brutally loud, echoing against the walls and piercing my eardrums until they burned from the agonizing intensity. It mingled with the cacophony of cars honking too loud, engines whirring and buzzing, phones ringing—vibration, scrape, beating thump—it was all too much. My hands covered my ears as a cry beckoned at my throat.
Fortunately, I was immediately plucked from my absorption in the stimuli. Riftan’s face appeared in front of mine, his hands firmly gripping my chin where my every follicle protested being handled. He was more stunning than I had ever thought, even in the darkness that surrounded us. With that, I realized that every light had been turned off, yet things still glowed magnificently. His face was as bright as it had been in the fullness of light, and it was sublime. His hair was darker than I recalled, the endless void of space mingling in each strand, only highlighted by the healthy shine of it. It contrasted, so bizarrely alluring, against his poreless white skin that framed the strength of his prominent bone structure and radiant eyes. How hadn’t I noticed how stunning he was? How had I never recognized how beautiful anything in this world could appear?
He was a murderer. He’d tried hard to kill me, as he’d probably done to many others before. Yet, that wasn’t enough to deter me from acknowledging how captivating he was.
While the emergence of his attentive look helped to ease a bit of my tension and distract me marginally from the chaos, it didn’t stop the noise, and it didn’t stop the prickle of his touch.
I’d never been one to habitually weep, but tears like the ones I’d cried earlier streamed down my face from the agonizing experience of it all. I couldn’t escape the sounds, the touch, the senses. I couldn’t get away, and it shook me with terror.
What had happened to the world in the time that I’d been asleep?
Riftan’s voice was loud in my ears, though as I watched his supple, tender lips move only slightly with each word, it was obvious that he was whispering. “Everything is going to be really oppressive at first. I can turn out the lights, but I can’t turn off any of the sounds. I’m sorry, but the best thing you can do is suffer through them for now. I promise you, it will get better soon. Don’t fight it, just realize that it will get better.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to be done with the torture. I wanted to feel nothing. “Please get your hands off me.” I choked out the request, aching for a bit of relief.
Riftan did as I asked, pulling his hands from my chin and sitting back on his heels. As he got farther from me in the darkness, I could still see him plain as day. The spot where he’d once touched my vulnerable skin now caught the brisk cold of emptiness and found no alleviation from the pain. My heart sank and my skin ached. His warmth had been overwhelming. The blood rushing through his veins and the beating of his heart against my chin, all felt through the palms of his hands, had been panic-inducing. But it wasn’t until it was gone and all that remained was the barrage of noise that I realized it wasn’t a bad kind of overwhelming; it was good. It overpowered the others—if only a little.
Craving that reprieve, I dropped off the edge of the couch and tucked my head into Riftan’s chest. He didn’t stop me, only hesitated a moment before wrapping his arms around my back and holding me tight. The thumping I’d heard before was undoubtedly the sound of his heart, because it was louder now—deafening, actually—with my head in his chest. But it smothered many of the other sounds, his body buffering some of the traffic on the streets below.
Everywhere his skin touched mine was both painful and appeasing at the same time. His tantalizing contact was enough to wane the dread-inciting noises from all around, but it was all still deafening, as though my senses were splitting hairs on whether to focus on Riftan’s touch or the blaring car horns and millions of voices. When he drew a gentle line down my bare arm with the palm of his hand, the scales tipped, and the sounds weren’t so overbearing anymore. My skin ached from his touch, but it was enviable in comparison to the alternative.
When he stopped, and the sounds came piling back in, a whimper escaped my lips along with the tears that seeped from behind my eyelids and stained his white t-shirt. Taking the hint, he touched me again, this time tracing up until he was rounding my chin where it sat pressed against his beating chest.
A sigh left my lips as his caress soothed my ache like ice on a wound. This time he didn’t stop, and the world mollified around me. The longer we sat like that, the more I thought the universe might equalize.
The thought of sleeping and forgetting about the painful overstimulation was tempting enough to take it as soon as I could get it. After what felt like hours of torture, I finally became comfortable enough to fall asleep in Riftan’s arms.
A knock on the door startled me awake, and the arms wrapped around me held tighter. I found the strength to lift my head and look around. The sounds were oppressive but not severely painful, manifesting into a persistent headache rather than a piercing assault on my ear canal.
Riftan sat, watching as I separated myself from him. He didn’t move for the door, or make any contrary movements at all.
“Aren’t you going to get the door?” I asked, feeble words scraping together despite the pain they left in my throat and against my ears.
His voice was somehow quieter than mine. “That was a knock three floors away.”
“No… it was—” The knock had most certainly been right at his door.
His lips parted into a genuine smile, the first I’d seen from him. Fangs that I’d only ever felt on my skin hinted visibly at the corners of his mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” he whispered, giving me a soft pat on the cheek before standing from where I sat huddled on the floor.
My breath caught in my chest at the thought of his departure, but the horde of senses no longer attacked me, and I realized I didn’t need his touch to handle them. They were all still present, but they were becoming nearly bearable.
Riftan dropped a blanket around my shoulders before walking toward the kitchen. His bare feet on the hardwood floor were like thunder in my eardrums, and I wrapped my head up in the blanket that tickled my skin with its velvety embrace. I’d never felt anything so soft, and it was a proper replacement for Riftan’s warmth.
That was when I realized I was exceptionally temperate. While feeling the warmth of the blanket over my shoulders or the heat from Riftan’s embrace, I didn’t become sweaty or clammy. I wasn’t too warm, even when I could feel heat encompassing me. Contrarily, the cold hardwood under my butt was noticeably cool, but it didn’t give me chills, and my normally freezing feet were neutral to the touch. I could feel warmth and I could feel cold, but it didn’t cling to me, as if my body adapted to them before I could feel anything but comfortable.
A loud tapping sound echoed from the kitchen. “Come in here.” Riftan spoke in his peculiar accent from the other room.
Slowly, I did as he said. The air that moved across my skin when I made any motion prickled my flesh and whirred in my ears. There simply was no way to walk slowly enough to stop the sensation from bothering me or to stop the thunderous creaking of the floor under my feet. Just the blanket dragging behind me was a low and abrasive itch to my senses. Once I’d finally made it to the stools that rested at the granite counter, I warily sat, attempting to ignore the pain from every little sound my chair created.
“Drink this.” Riftan carefully placed a glass full of red liquid on the counter in front of me. No matter how careful he was, the clink of glass on stone ground against my eardrums.
In agony, I huddled farther into my blanket.
“It will make you feel better,” he taunted with a light tap of his finger on the counter.
“Will it make the noises stop?” It was wishful thinking.
“No, only time will do that, but it will cease the pain that the noises cause.”
I nodded and stared into the glass. It was a dark and ruddy liquid, the smell wafting into my nostrils like bitter rust. “Is this blood?”
“Yes.” He waited patiently.
“Whose blood?” I hated to think of the poor soul.
“Someone who is still out there somewhere alive and none the wiser. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, I suppose.” I dropped my lips to the edge of the glass but struggled to make myself tip it back. If all my senses were so much stronger now, could I keep it down? The memory of the viscous feel and acidic taste of metallic, cerise blood made me visibly gag.
Riftan glanced toward the ceiling like I was testing his patience. “Will you just drink it? It won’t be as bad as the last time, I promise.”
Taking his word for it, despite not really knowing its worth, I tipped the glass back. I expected to choke on the taste, but I was prepared to swallow it anyway. I could discern every little drop and the exact spot that it slithered over the flesh on my lips, but that was where my heightened senses stopped. The moment it passed my teeth and entered my mouth, what I’d remembered as harsh and unpalatable was instead completely muted. There was still that hint of a bitter, bloody taste, but it was tolerable—if anything, it was sweet. The taste wasn’t terrific, but I was able to knock it back regardless.
When I lowered the glass, a hint of a smug little smile tugged at Riftan’s lips. The traffic down below still buzzed in my ears, but the blaring ache that it caused began to fade. Without meaning to, I sighed a powerful, relief-stricken breath from my lungs. I couldn’t imagine going back to how I’d felt moments earlier. And just like that, I could sense myself being dependent on the way I felt basking in that moment.
I’d once been addicted to cigarettes for eight months when I was eighteen, and this was… so much more than that. I already knew if I went back to the way I’d felt prior to that drink, I’d panic. This was like the strangest nicotine high I’d ever felt, and I only hoped this would last longer than those had. “You were right,” I confirmed. “That wasn’t quite as bad as before.”
“Obviously, I was right. All of your senses are going to be heightened, save for your taste buds, which will be dull and slightly off. You’ll be glad for it—it’s the only thing that makes drinking blood bearable. Soon you’ll learn to crave it and then you’ll have to learn to stave off those cravings. But don’t fret, I’ll be here to help you through it. There’s a lot more I’m going to have to teach you before you can go out on your own, too. So, why don’t you save us the argument and trust me next time I ask you to do something, okay?”
Slouching into my seat, I promptly felt ashamed for questioning the worth of his word. Maybe I didn’t need to worry about that. Maybe he earnestly wanted to help me. Just to be sure, I asked him, “Why are you really helping me? You were so adamantly against it when I first came here.”
“I told you, I was bored. You offered me something to do.” His tone was as casual as ever. Then he shrugged and added, “And you did kind of catch me in a tricky situation. I’d be a hypocrite if I left you with your memories but didn’t help you when you found me. I’m a man of my word, and it would be rather poor form to commit to something so significant and then fail to see it through. You’re here now, so I suppose you earned it. I locked myself into that obligation when I chose not to thrall you.”
I nodded. Whether that was exactly what I wanted to hear, I wasn’t sure, but it’d have to do.
“So,” Riftan continued with an upturned grin, “you just died. How do you feel?”
“Horrible,” I grumbled. “But the opposite of dead. I’ve never felt so much before. And I can hear my heart beating. I’m certainly not dead.”
“You both are, and you aren’t. You were dead for six hours, now you are somewhere in between. Your heart will beat faster than before, but weaker. That will be the easiest way to tell apart other vampires without tasting their blood or seeing their teeth. They’ll possess a heartbeat faster than any human could survive with.”
I’d like to say that the information was collected like a sponge, but my head was so wracked and inundated that his words were going in one ear and out the other. “Ugh. What do I do now?” was all I could muster.
“You need to call anyone who might wonder where you’ve gone and tell them you’re going on a trip out of the country. You don’t know when you’ll be back, if you’ll be back. It’s a real Eat, Pray, Love scenario.”
“Ah, shit.” I’d accepted the idea of never seeing anyone I knew ever again when Riftan proposed it the first time, but now that it came to following through, I was getting figuratively cold feet. Not because I’d miss anyone, but because I was scared to take charge of my life—scared of what Johnny might do if I hinted at my ability to exist without him. Evermore terrifying was the thought of what Johnny would do if I told him blatantly that I was leaving him indefinitely. “Johnny will actually kill me if I tell him that.”
“You’re going to have to get used to the idea that nobody can kill you, Leanne. You’re already dead.” He was matter-of-fact in his statement, but then his head perked to the side. “Are you Johnny’s girlfriend?”
“Yes, who did you think I was when you pulled me out of that mafiosos trunk and I said, ‘I’m Johnny’s girl’?”
“I thought you meant you were one of Johnny’s hookers.”
I scoffed. “I’m not a hooker! I don’t even look like a hooker!”
Arching a brow, he slithered his gaze over me. “Are you sure? You’re a little young for Johnny. Do you not have sex with him for money?”
“No! I’m not a hooker!”
He looked around the room, searching for a better answer. “So, what do you kids call it nowadays? A sugar baby?”
With no better response, I growled under my breath.
Riftan let out a hearty laugh that stung my ears. He stopped when I ducked back under the blanket draped securely around my shoulders. “I’m sorry.” His voice still tickled with humor. “This is too good. I had no idea you were Johnny’s steady. This is really going to piss him off. I love it.”
With a shudder, I peeked out of my blanket to glare at the dark-haired man who continued to giggle on the other side of the counter.
“Don’t look so narky,” he insisted, his sharp incisors glowing at me. “You’ll be free to do whatever you want when I’m done with you, and you’ll never have to go back to Johnny for anything. Be it fear or money that are the reasons you were with him, I’ll teach you how to get plenty of each of those things for yourself. You can have all the money you’d like and be feared by anyone who opposes you. I promise.”
The idea of having those things was tantalizing, but Creswell was all I’d ever known. “And after you’re done with me, am I allowed to come back here?”
“I advise that you don’t, but who will I be to stop you? At that point, it will be none of my business what you do.”
At least I’d get to see Jayleen again if I wanted. “Okay,” I agreed. Reaching into my pocket, I took out my phone, careful not to bump any of my surroundings. The sound of my clothing and skin rubbing together had waned and no longer caused me agony, but I knew the sounds my phone made would. For that reason, the first thing I did was turn off any possible tone it could emit—including vibration—without looking at the screen. Forgoing the deadly pitch that would come from a phone call, or the blinding light that would come from the dimmest setting on my screen, I slid the phone over to Riftan. He took it knowingly; I had to curate a message for him to send to both Jayleen and Johnny—the only two people who would care or cause a ruckus when I didn’t show up tomorrow… or possibly ever again.
I took my time thinking up something that would sound as sincere as possible to its intended audience. Jayleen’s message was more to assure her that I was okay, just had a fever, nothing vampire related, and that I was getting out of town due to the whole kidnapping incident. Johnny’s was briefer, as I knew he’d have a cow regardless of what I said. He didn’t know of my vampire problems, and I didn’t expect Nonna to nark on me. However, Johnny would have found out that I’d been kidnapped the night before. Certainly, he would know that I’d survived, and he would know that I was going to be pissed about the whole ordeal. I decided to use that in my message to him.
I may have always been guarded about what I said and did around Johnny, but he still knew I had a temper—and being thrown into a trunk was exactly the type of thing that would send me overboard. For that reason, my deciding to up and leave after all this wouldn’t be so hard to believe. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the idea of telling him any less distressing.
When my nerves got the better of me, and conceptualizing my message to Johnny ended with a lot of “umm,” and stutters, Riftan was there assuring me with grand words about how there wasn’t a single thing Johnny could do to hurt us. We were untouchable, or as he put it: “completely on a different plane of existence than Johnny’s pitiful mortal operation.”
Sending that message gave me chills even when my skin was otherwise temperate. But the moment Riftan said it was done, the sensation morphed into something warm and tingly. I never had to go back to Johnny. That could be a chapter in my life that I forget about completely with no repercussions—well, if I didn’t consider being turned into a vampire and tossing my life upside down a repercussion. This truly was a rebirth. I’d attained a new life I could make it into whatever I wanted it to be.
In the blink of an eye, Riftan was gone, only a puff of black fog remaining where he’d stood. Reappearing over my shoulder, he slipped my phone down on the counter in front of me without making a single sound.
His presence bristled at my back, the compression of air moving between our bodies enough to prickle my sensitive skin. With that moving air, I could sense exactly how much space there was between our flesh without seeing him, all while the sound of his beating heart pulsed loud enough to triangulate exactly where he stood.
His breath draped heat over my ear. “Is there anyone you told about me? Anyone that knew you were looking for me? Even just my name?”
“I don’t know. Several strangers in the bars, some vampire in a club…” I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. “Oh… And Nonna is who told me your name. She knew I was bitten by you, but I don’t think she’d tell anyone.”
“I’m not worried about strangers, or other vampires. Nonna, however, I’ll take careof later.”
“Wait.” I cut him off before he could possibly say any more. “Takecare of her? You aren’t going to hurt Nonna, are you?” I must have worn some horrified expression when I looked up at him.
“Of course not,” he scoffed, settling down in the painfully creaky chair next to me. “I’d never hurt the innocent old hag. I simply meant that I’d thrall her to forget about your conversation, that’s all.”
“If you are going there anyway, can you just thrall Johnny to forget about me, too?” It was wishful thinking.
“How long were the two of you an item?”
“Three years.”
“Nope. Not a chance. That’s way too long a period to thrall away. While I’m not entirely opposed to turning Johnny’s brain to mush, I don’t want to have to deal with the repercussions of that coming back on us right now. My duty is to teach you, for the time being, not to start a war with the Roufes. If you’d like, we can do that after you’re trained.”
I wasn’t interested in that, or anything involving the Roufes, but I asked, “And how long will that be, before I’m trained?”
“I don’t know. A year, maybe a couple, give or take, depending on how much I like you or if I simply want to get you out of my hair as quickly as possible.” He followed up with a wink.
“Years?” I scoffed, nearly choking on the pain from my own escalated voice.
“Yes, dear. In the face of eternity, I assure you, that’s the blink of an eye.”
Yearsmay have been no time at all for him, but not me. Having only ever lived twenty-three years, spending a couple with him seemed excessive. I wasn’t prepared to spend a couple of years with Riftan. After all, he was the sole reason my life had been upheaved. Technically, he had killed me—or so he described my state as “dead.”
While he’d been relatively kind to me since I’d awoken on his couch, I still didn’t think we were buddies. But, If I had to spend the next couple of years with him, then my starting question would tell me exactly how inconsequential those years would be to him. I asked, “So, how old are you really?”
“I was born in 1243. I have no idea how old that makes me. You do the math.” He eyed me with a smirky look, slighted that I ask him to add it up for me.
My brain was much too muddled to do any math, and I couldn’t use my phone, but I’d gotten enough to base my consensus: very inconsequential.
Riftan continued regardless, “Seven hundred and… eighty-something.”
That amount of time was nothing my tiny human brain could comprehend living through, so I simply nodded in response.
“Well, since you’re still fresh, I’m not going to push anything on you today. Why don’t we just talk?” He suggested it in a friendly tone, placing his elbows up on the counter with a vibrative thunk that I wouldn’t have heard before he’d turned me into whatever I was now.
“Okay.”
“I know your name, you know mine, obviously. That’s about the extent of what we know about each other. Why don’t you tell me about you, then I’ll tell you about me—and I promise I’ll do my best to keep the seven hundred- and eighty-plus-year summary brief.” The white of his teeth glimmered in the darkness once more and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was talking to a completely different person than the one who’d taunted and tortured me the night before. From the moment I’d reawakened, all Riftan did was smile. Although his words were glum, his cheeks were pinching upwards in a way that lit his face with character. His threatening little fangs showed unashamedly—the same fangs that I’d once felt tear through my flesh. Even with those dangerous incisors showing uncouthly, his authentic, supple-lipped grin still made my heart flutter in my chest. It was sincere and… cute. A full-grown, seven hundred- and eighty-year-old man, as intimidating as could be, still somehow possessed a smile that could be described as cute.
There were stories behind that smile, and I didn’t want to hear only the abbreviated summary. “And if I ask for the unabridged version?”
“Well then, I’d say you better get comfortable. But regardless, you’re still up first.”