Bound by blood
It seemed trivial to tell Riftan about my twenty-three years of life when I knew he would soon tell me about his seven-hundred-plus, but he pretended to be interested in everything I had to say, despite how insignificant it may have been to him. We needed to know more about each other, even if simply to make our obligatory time together more bearable. But I was still feeling a curious but pleasurable warmth from feigning friendship with him. He was much more than bearable like this, and he treated me like maybe he thought the same of me. It was almost like he’d never tried to kill me.
If we truly did have to spend years together, then this could be considered a good start. Good enough to indeed pretend like this was the start, and not the night before.
When I was done sharing with Riftan everything that I could possibly think of, he shared with me his story—starting from the present and going backward in time.
He described his “off decade”—as he liked to put it—was much like taking a vacation from work. He apparently enjoyed taking vacations every several decades, where he’d do anything but get involved with human dilemmas. He’d broken that ideal when he got involved with Johnny’s mess of a mafia business a couple of years back, which in turn had led him to me. Supposedly, he’d always had a problem staying out of organized crime-type circles since getting embroiled during the 1920s. Now, he felt inclined to keep crime families in line when things started to get out of hand—like when the Grioris decided to kidnap Johnny’s girlfriend for ransom. But that obviously wasn’t their only offence, since Riftan had no idea I was in that Griori’s trunk until I started screaming. “Happy accident,” he’d called it.
He then outlined a rough depiction of his whereabouts in the centuries prior to the twentieth. In the nineteenth century, he was an underground slave liberator after being “personally responsible” for legislature passed in the late eighteenth century to allow and propagate slavery in the United States—a mistake he believed he’d never be able to make up for. Though, he went on to say it wasn’t the worst mistake he’d ever made, all the while ominously leaving out what those superior mistakes might have been.
During the seventeenth century, he’d toured Asia in an attempt to stay out of European conflicts, as he’d spent much of his previous centuries enthralled in battles over land and treaties that didn’t have anything to do with him. That being said, he’d fought lots of wars prior to that before finally realizing human conquests would never end and in no way profited him. He lamented spending so many centuries on something so frivolous, but that he didn’t have to regret it, since he had many more to make up for it. He did say he was grateful for his “little decade vacations” because it let him enjoy the best of each century’s arts, even before he’d learned to let humans be humans and fight their own wars.
Unfortunately, his story ended when he turned into a vampire in 1269. He showed no interest in sharing anything before then, so I decided to ask, “Well, what about when you were a human? Who turned you? Who were you before?”
He bared a little grin that showed only his left fang. “That’s very mortal of you to want to know about my human life after everything I just told you.”
A shrug hinted at my shoulders. “How else am I supposed to relate to you?”
“Darling, I lived in the 1200s. You aren’t going to relate to me regardless.”
He had a point. “Okay, will you humor me?”
“Fine.” He breathed a sigh. “I was born in a small English town called Normereg. Like many of the time, my mother died giving birth to me and my father had died at war, so the church took me in. The priest trained me to be a knight and treated me as his son. So, when I was injured at war, he turned me into a vampire to save my life. There wasn’t much else. I was only twenty-six, very close to your age now, and I only ever knew combat and conflict. I didn’t have any relationships, aspirations, or friends, so the story is short.”
“The priest turned you?” I snorted, the idea of a vampire priest striking me as comical.
“Yes, and then he trained me much like I will you.”
“Do you still talk to him?”
“He was killed and burned at the stake many centuries ago,” Riftan stated.
My smile dropped. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“It happens. Just because you are immortal doesn’t mean you can be careless. Attracting the wrong attention can summon a heavy downfall—as his was. The only people you have to fear are other vampires and vampire hunters. If you are an adept vampire, even they aren’t much of a threat. But the moral of the story is: watch where you stand out, because a vampire hunter’s radar is not one you want to be on.”
I certainly didn’t want to think about being burned alive, so I nodded profusely, my eyes going wide.
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head.” Riftan’s dark hair fell to the side when he cocked an observant look at me. “I won’t let anything happen to you. We are bound by blood now. There’s not anyone out there who’s going to lay a finger on you—not over my dead body.”
His words, spoken in such a sincere tone, spread an unfamiliar warmth through my bones. But I didn’t let it distract me. Unsure of how deep his obligation for my safety might run, I requested clarification, “Bound by blood? What does that mean? Does it hold significance?”
“To some, it doesn’t. To me, it does. It means that my blood turned you, and in that way, we will always share something in common. Not only that, but it was me who chose to give you this curse, and for that, I’m responsible for you. I will always feel accountable for you. It’s kind of like having a child, I suppose.”
Ick. The last thing I wanted was to think of Riftan as a father figure. Not that I’d ever had one of those, but still, he was far from what I wanted to imagine. The hot and muddled feeling that sparked deep in my belly whenever he flashed that devilish little grin he’d been giving me was certainly not the kind of sensation one should get from a blood relative. The growing urge to have his warmth against my fickle skin again surpassed what was appropriate in the presence of any sort of paternal figure. “I definitely won’t be thinking of you like a parent,” I assured him, doing my best to swallow around the unsolicited lump of desire forming in my throat.
Luckily, he waved the notion away with the flick of his wrist. “I would hope not. It’s not the same type of thing anyhow. I merely thought it would be the best way to explain it to you.”
“So how many more are like me? How many have you turned?”
“Honestly, not as many as you’d think. Only five others. It’s not an action I tend to take lightly. It’s cruel, as it is a curse.”
“Who were they? Will you tell me about them and why you turned them?”
Riftan pursed his rosy lips before assenting. “The last one I blame on getting soft in my old age. He was a middle-aged man named Calvin. He was deathly ill, but he still didn’t want to die. He’d sought out all sorts of enigmatic and supernatural remedies, but nothing worked. He had severe lung cancer that had spread all over his body. He’d sought out witches, but they couldn’t help him. He came to me, and of course, I turned him down much like I did you at first. Unfortunately, also like you, he was incredibly persistent and for some peculiar reason, I ended up being quite fond of his spirit. He also didn’t have any family to get in the way of his decision. I tested his will and devotion much more vigorously than I did yours before turning him. But that was because even in his ill state, he had a lot more time to mull over the pros and cons of immortality than you did.”
Riftan sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Before that was a friend of mine named Jameson. He was one whom I’d freed from the slave trade and then worked with in freeing others. I never planned on turning him. We worked perfectly well side by side when he was human. We’d become like partners in crime over the years, and when he was shot in the back with a pistol, he asked me to save him. I knew full well that he understood what he was asking for after years of being around me, so I turned him before his death. I trained him for longer after that than I did anyone else. He’s probably the only person I know who I might not be able to beat in a fight—I’m glad for that. Not only does he know everything I’ve taught him, but an abundance of other things he learned far before and after meeting me. He’s the best marksman I know, and he certainly didn’t learn that from me. I use guns as rarely as I possibly can. I suppose that’s because for the majority of my life wars were predominantly fought with swords and not handheld projectile weapons like they are now.”
He paused for a moment to reminisce, and I took the opportunity to ask a question. “Do you still speak to either of them?”
“Jameson, yes, absolutely. Calvin, however, not since I let him go off on his own. He’s the adventurous type—never was much of a fan of company. More of a lone wolf, and he liked the opportunity for solitude that being immortal gave him. I tend to prefer the same, so I’ve let him be.”
I nodded, hoping to coerce him into continuing.
“It goes a little downhill from there. After stepping away from warlike conflicts around the 1680’s, I was more desensitized than I am now. That’s what happens when you’re a soldier for a few hundred years. I ended up turning and training a woman named Meridith who had a vendetta against a group of thieves who’d murdered her family and ended up being a part of a larger illegal trading organization. She was vindictive and murderous, and I’d turned her anyway. As desensitized as I was, I didn’t care then for her wellbeing and how changing her would affect her mentally. I just wanted to see her murder a national gang of thieves with her bare hands. There was no other motive, and I didn’t consider what would happen after it was done. She’d be immortal and never die to be with her family in the afterlife—as she believed. So, after she inevitably got her revenge, all that was left was her shallow, hopeless immortality. Without purpose, she no longer had any control and let herself fall into primordial instincts. I’d created a monster with insatiable blood lust. And because of that… I had to kill her.”
He gave me an inhibited smile and kept going. “Before that was someone I’d been to war with many times. He was the first one I’d purposely changed, and the first I trained. His name is Darrin. And before you ask; no, we don’t talk.” His firm tone hinted that maybe they weren’t on good terms. He then continued, hastily trying to bypass the previous statements. “The first person was the most complicated. It was entirely an accident; I didn’t understand what I was doing. It was kind of like you. I bit her and regretted dooming her, so I turned her. I didn’t stick around to train her though because I simply didn’t know any better. When she awoke, completely scared and confused, she took out an entire town in her own misunderstanding. Without knowing what she was or why she’d done what she did, her confusion turned to infuriation, and she took it out on humans. She attracted a lot of attention and was quickly thwarted by vampire hunters.” He ended his story with a shaky sigh.
Running a hand through his thick head of ear-length hair, Riftan said no more. His eyes failed to meet mine, unlike how confidently they’d captured my gaze during his long-winded story telling.
“So, that first girl, she woke up to this”—I motioned to my entire existence that still thrummed with the overstimulation of senses—“all by herself? I can’t imagine surviving this if you weren’t here to help me from the start.”
“Yes, well, there are plenty of people out there who turn without anyone sticking around to spoon-feed them. They usually end up fine. In fact, right now I could turn on all the lights, blast the radio, and you’d be in agony, but in a couple of hours, you’d adjust and be fine, too. For that matter, you’d end up adapting much quicker than you will with the gentler way we are going to go about it.”
Regardless of what I meant to do, I felt my face contort at the thought of him actually turning on all the lights and blasting the radio. It seemed hard to believe that I’d survive something like that, but I had to trust Riftan’s assurance that I would. Nonetheless, I was thankful he was going to go easy on me.
“Thank you,” I told him sincerely. “I mean, it was shitty of you to try and kill me in the first place, but I appreciate that you are being patient with me now.”
“Glad I could make up for my transgressions,” he joked, returning that clever smile to his sultry lips. “Besides, we have all the time in the world. I don’t need to push you and make you hate me right from the start. Just tell me if we are going too fast, and I will adjust for you. It’s been a long time since I was turned, and I won’t be able to help make you comfortable if you don’t communicate with me, okay?”
“Okay.” If I was going to be doomed to an eternity of vampirism, at least the person who’d turned me didn’t seem all bad. He was obviously only showing me his good side, but it was hard to see past his chipper fangy smile and shining blue eyes.
The two of us may have started on the wrong foot—with the killing and all—but I thought we would get along fine. For the first time that day, my muscles unraveled.
Riftan stood and patted me on the head. “You seem to be feeling better. Will you be alright for an hour or so here by yourself if I leave to take care of some things?”
Since he’d mentioned it, I noticed I did feel worlds better. He’d distracted me enough with fanciful tales and eye candy that I hadn’t noticed my ears no longer buzzed and things had started to equalize. I felt far from perfect, but it was slowly becoming bearable. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. I’m actually feeling okay.”
“Great.” Riftan strolled away from me, stopping by the fridge across his kitchen. Pulling open the door, the entire room illuminated from the intense white light inside.
With a yelp, I pinched my burning eyes closed and tucked my head under the blanket still tight around my shoulders.
Riftan laughed as if that was in any way comical, but then quickly apologized. “Sorry, I didn’t think about it. Here.” From under my blanket, I saw the butt of an amber bottle as it slid in front of me. “Drink all of this before I get back. As a newborn vampire, you need to feed more than most, and it’ll do you good to get used to the taste.”
I examined the amber bottle and sniffed the liquid inside of it. It was blood, smelling identical to the drink he’d offered me before. “Why is it bottled?” I raised my eyebrow at the seemingly senseless formality.
“Because it’s less off-putting than drinking it out of a bag.” He shrugged. “I know someone who bottles, so I buy some from him whenever I can. It’s preferable to what you’d find at a hospital. And whether by placebo or by truth, it seems to taste better.”
Swirling the ruddy liquid around in the bottle, I did my best to pretend it was beer and took a swig. Going down, it wasn’t much worse than the taste of a cheap beer—or even an expensive IPA. The alkaline tang stained the back of my tastebuds, but it wasn’t completely adverse. While I hadn’t had anything but top-shelf liquor and the fanciest merlot since meeting Johnny, I had once been a college freshman. Thanks to that, I was no stranger to choking down a beer or two—or four or eight. The almost sweet aftertaste blood had taken on since waking up on Riftan’s couch was maybe even preferable to any beer I could imagine it as.
“Atta girl,” Riftan cooed as he grabbed his coat off the rack and made for the door. Before leaving, he added, “If you have an emergency worth blinding yourself over, I put my cell phone number in your phone as an emergency contact.”
I didn’t plan on having such an emergency, but I appreciated the precaution.
At the door, I eyed Riftan snagging a pair of sunglasses off the key hook. With the darkness in the room, and the time of day I’d arrived, I hadn’t thought for a moment that it could be daytime. The thick drapes over the windows gave no hint of light bleeding through.
“Wait,” I called after Riftan before he could turn the doorknob. “Is it daylight outside? What time is it?”
He stopped and looked at his watch with a marginally exasperated sigh. “Yes, it’s three-thirty in the afternoon.”
Well, shit. I’d slept a fraction of the day without a clue how much time had passed. The sun outside was already up and preparing to make its descent again. The thought of that big white ball of light made me cringe, chills traveling up my spine. Thinking about looking at the day-lit sky with my sensitive eyes settled angst into my bones. Which begged the question, would I ever see that burning star in the sky ever again? Vampires technically couldn’t go out in the sun, right? “Wait, you’re going out mid-day?” I asked Riftan. “Can vampires do that? Won’t you, like, burn alive or something? Or is that a myth?”
“It’s not a myth.” He played along, though his brows raised impatiently. “But there are lots of ways to get around it.” Riftan proceeded to roll up his sleeve and point out a black tattoo resembling a pentagram surrounding the sun. “I have a witch’s sun spell, but that’s not the only way to walk around in the daylight.”
“Will I ever get one of those?” I asked, watching as he rolled his sleeve back over an otherwise unassumingly muscle-weaved forearm.
“That’s a conversation for a later date. Why don’t you focus on not being blinded when I open this door?”
When he reached for the handle, I tucked my head into my hands, where I could cover my eyes and wait for him to leave.
After the door whooshed closed and clicked shut behind him, I listened to Riftan’s footsteps as he made his way to the elevator. They paused for a moment, then continued to what I thought I remembered as the stairwell. That was confirmed when I heard his feet patter down each consecutive step. I was amazed when I could hear him pass each level, and only started to lose him when his steps mingled with the chaos of other footfalls on the busy street below. I shook my head to get the sound of shoes on pavement out of it. Unfortunately, now that I’d been listening for them, I couldn’t stop hearing the shuffling movements, along with the constant murmuring of a hundred voices and an avalanche of dings, rings, and—I covered my ears with the blanket. It helped to muffle the sounds, but what I really needed was a distraction.
Lifting the bottle of blood that I was to finish by the time Riftan returned, I decided to explore the small studio apartment. I’d be trapped there until I disciplined the disarray that were my heightened senses, so I might as well get familiar with it.
Never letting go of my literal safety blanket, I trudged through the living room and inspected the little office nook in the far corner. The apartment was nice—lavish even—like the outside had projected. The kitchen boasted modern features adorned with sleek grey cabinetry and stainless-steel appliances, while the living room featured a plush grey throw rug beneath an elaborate stone coffee table. For an old man, Riftan possessed top-notch electronics, including a large TV mounted on the wall and an expensive laptop adorning the desk.
Above, the loft was wide open, the only path up being the wrought iron stairs on the far wall. Intrigued, I ascended the clanky steps, pausing only when the foot of a large bed with tousled grey sheets and a black comforter crested my view of the room. Momentarily, I questioned how discourteous it would be to snoop in Riftan’s bedroom, but quickly decided I didn’t care and continued my exploration.
The bed sat pushed against the black far wall, opposite the banister but otherwise centered across the room. Along the other two walls were long grey dressers without much décor on top, only a couple of dusty books and an unburnt candle on each. Under my heels was the same dark oak as downstairs, and my only escape from the thunderous sound of my heels on its surface was the thick rug that extended from under the foot of the bed. Wiggling my toes between the rug’s fibers, I followed it to the edge of the banister. Three green plants sat on top of the iron railing that overlooked the apartment. Two of which were leafy and green, flourishing like they’d been perfectly nurtured. I imagined that they got plenty of sun when the floor-to-ceiling blinds at the front of the apartment weren’t drawn over the massive windows. But even that didn’t seem to be enough for Riftan to keep the third plant alive. It was a suffering succulent which looked brown and dry despite the wet soil at its base. I knew from experience that succulents were fussy, and it was likely that Riftan had over watered it. The thought of him over-caring for anything prompted a quiet chuckle.
Leaving my drink by the banister, I meandered back to the bed and flopped down on the foot of it, sinking into the rumpled down comforter. The ceiling was unfinished with exposed ducting, but painted black as though that was the industrial look the designer had been going for. I stared at it, pondering what little entertainment I had without my cell phone or other technology in a stranger’s apartment. I couldn’t even stare out the window for fear of burning my retinas out.
In what should have been silence, my ears rang with chaos that breached the limits of my accustomed hearing. Tucking my blanket back around my head, I muffled the sound as much as I could before giving in and focusing on the most beckoning parts of the clutter.
I eavesdropped on a couple quietly bickering next door. Fixating on one thing was easier than trying to shut everything out altogether. I could get lost in the argument and the other sounds dulled into a low hum on the peripherals. Until their voices grew louder and angrier—more painful. Seeking refuge from the spat, I attempted to shift to the woman singing in the shower a few floors up—three floors, I believed.
The sound of the water droplets hitting her skin harmonized with her soft voice. When she reached the chorus, the volume building, her sound also became too much for me to take and I moved on to something else.
Someone played a gentle tune on that same level. It was soft and slow, with a gentle arrangement of instruments that gave it an air of Middle Eastern origin. It held my attention indefinitely, reminding me of something they’d play in a yoga studio, which probably explained the rhythmic breathing and elevated heart rate I could hear coming from that same room. That was the sound I didn’t stray from. It was enough to lull me to the brink of rest before Riftan’s gruff voice summoned me back.
“I see you made yourself at home,” he said in a tone that aired somewhere between displeasure and humor in its own odd way. “The least you could have done is make the bed.”
I uncovered my face to see him standing over his bed with a smirk that matched the aforementioned tone.
Realization struck that he was standing over his bed and I had fallen asleep there without his permission—which was probably rather disrespectful.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I was looking around and then I fell asleep… on accident.”
“That’s fine. You’ll need your rest.” He turned his back to me and dropped a pile of folded clothes on the grey dresser closest to the stairs. “I brought you some clothes from your apartment. Enough to get you by until you can handle going outside.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, watching Riftan wander over to the loft railing.
He grabbed the bottle that I’d left there when I’d admired his attempt at a green thumb. Squinting at it, he sloshed the half-full bottle of liquid around. “I told you to finish this.”
“I’m sorry, I meant to. I just fell asleep.”
“While you do need your rest, you need strength more, especially for what comes next.” He gave a boding nod. “The best way to gain strength is by drinking as much as you can, especially for the first few weeks.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “And what exactly is it that comes next?”
“Well, you have to overcome these senses sooner than later, and quite frankly, I’ve been rather easy on you since I do feel responsible for putting you in this situation. That means I don’t plan on doing anything that may be overly torturous to you in the process of helping you overcome the basic sensory overload that all new vampires start with, but I’m also not going to let you sleep in my bed with a blanket tucked around your head forever. Fragile treatment is not generally my style, and it’s going to get old much too quickly—especially when I want to move onto the fun stuff in a few days.” His tone had hardened, making me tuck my blanky under my legs as if he was going to try and steal it from me.
“What exactly is the ‘fun stuff’?” I asked meekly, attempting to think of anything that wasn’t confronting the challenges of sight and sound.
“You’ll see in time,” he teased with a coquettish grin. “But first you must finish this”—he handed over the bottle of half drunken bitter liquid—“and then you have to conquer your senses enough to function in public without a blanket turban.”
I sighed, taking the bottle from Riftan as he sat down next to me at the foot of his bed. Swirling the liquid in the glass, I stared at it with the apprehension of what it meant once I finished it.
I glanced at Riftan’s patient face, waiting for me to do as he’d said.
He was completely on board with this whole thing, and I supposed I could understand why. I was his pet project—the excitement that he’d been waiting on to break up the monotony of whatever his normal was. But this was my life too now, and it wasn’t something I’d been waiting for or even hoping for. He’d successfully thrown everything I knew upside down and the only thing I could do about it was nod and follow blindly.
I had no option but to trust in him as someone who knew much more than I. That meant I was practically a slave to whatever he wanted of me. All I could do was hope that he’d want the best for me, and not abuse the inequity of our positions. No matter how optimistic that hope was, I had to grasp at anything that could make the situation feel safer.
Taking one last look at the promising eyes set under Riftan’s dark brows, I told myself those eyes held only the best intentions for me and knocked back the bottle of bitter—now room temperature—liquid. The taste was getting better, more bearable with every drink, but I still had to bite my tongue to stave off a shiver as it crossed my taste buds.
In the end, I kept it down, ready for the next.
With any luck, the onslaught of senses that was my every waking moment would be as easy to get used to as that bottle of heinous acrid blood.