My Precious Nightmare

18: The Infected Bride

He hesitated, shifting from foot to foot as he glanced at her. He was stuck between feeling more stupidly fuzzy and pleased than he had in centuries and worried she'd become too comfortable with him, and therefore, other vampires. Perhaps she was flattering him on purpose to get into his good graces. Maybe working him into letting her go. Thinking that helped him cool his head a little. Perhaps he needed to have more conversations with his patients if he'd gotten this lonely and out of touch that a teenage girl could work him around like a piece of string.

"Don't be fascinated. What I am is nothing more than a blight, a disease. There is nothing fantastic or good to be found in vampirism."

"I didn't mean vampires were—well, I guess if it's about how long you lived..." she trailed off, looking down at her feet in what could have been guilt. He wanted to tell her the last thing she should feel is guilt about offending her kidnapper, but before he could she asked, "Could you tell me how you...you know. Got changed? What it was like?"

He could see the city bus coming up around the corner, but knew for a fact that bystanders rarely cared too much about what they heard, as long as it wasn't too alarming. Still, his story could qualify for that.

But did he really have any right to deny her anything when he'd kidnapped her? And...and it really did feel good, talking to her candidly like this. Perhaps she was just buttering him up, but if nothing came out of it...it wouldn't hurt to indulge in it, right?

There had to be something wrong with him.

"I grew up in a village not far from the city of Thebes. How I became what I am today is because I wanted to marry the daughter of a family far richer and of better blood than my own. But because my father had saved the lives of both her parents and siblings from a horrible sickness, they listened to my desires via my father." The bus had come to a stop and it's scratched, worn doors hissed open. "We were to be married only a few months hence. But I was impatient, as many young men are, which brought my end all the much sooner."

Once they had squeezed into the back, eyeballed by a few weary passengers, he went on to tell her, in quiet but clear tones, about how he had been caught up in the beauty of his bride to be and impatient to show her of said admiration. He had managed to convince her to meet him somewhere private, but when he found an excuse to touch her she threw herself on him. As he told Lea of his horror to find that, it wasn't out of love that she had embraced him, but blood lust. He got the pleasure of seeing Lea's full sympathetic horror as she took off her sunglasses to wipe the sweat from her nose.

His betrothed drained him nigh to death, and when she pulled back, rather than calling for help, she hid his body in some bulrushes and fled the scene, leaving him to die.

The next thing he knew was the thirst. Then waking up to find a stranger dead in his arms and the taste of blood on his lips.

He tried to find his betrothed, to get an explanation, just to find that she had fled the city the night she had hid his body in the bulrushes. He had tentatively tried to continue life as usual, but as the blood thirst came upon him, so strong in his newly formed vampiric body, and news of the body of the man he had accidentally killed being found, he too fled. He planned to find his betrothed, staying alive off of the blood of beggars and eventually whatever animal he could get his hands on. He started a life spent in the night, afraid of his existence, and mourning for what he had lost. The only comfort he found was his increased strength, his ability to fly, and the occasional opportunity he found to treat those too poor to afford the attentions of a doctor.

It was 20 years later when he finally found her again. Alas, she had become a shade of her former self. The beauty was still there, but there was a demon inside, lost in the mindless pursuit of blood. She had been the one to originally start the sickness in her family, and had even returned to quiet them should anyone start to piece together what she was.

She became the first vampire he ever killed.

"She didn't stay dead, though," Husani watched Lea's eyebrows shoot up above the sunglasses.

No. He ended up having to drag her malformed body around until he learned the proper way to kill a vampire.

"You have to tear out their heart," he told Lea. "All of it. Aorta, nodes, everything. Then you burn it and the body, but in different fires, and far from any human, as the fumes from the burning bodies is a poison to them. If you don't, the heart will grow back in the body and the vampire will just wake up more ravenous than ever."

"Aren't you—why are you telling me this?"

"What?"

"How to—how to kill a vampire. I mean," she turned her face away from him.

He gave her an easy smile. "I told you before, vampirism is just a disease. So far, death is the only cure I have come up for it. If you ever had the ability to kill me, you'd be giving me the greatest gift. I don't enjoy my life, Lea. No one sane could. I hurt and kill, whether I want to or not."

"But you don't just hurt people," she said. "Who knows how many lives you've saved just because you've existed."

He flinched. He had already told her it didn't matter, that he had still been the cause of premature death, but decided to continue on with his story anyways.

He had gone to Europe and throughout Asia and learned what he could there about herbs. Herbs were safe because medicines could be administered without surgery. It had taken a lot less longer than he had hoped, and by the time he was heading back to his homeland, news of the new world had reached him. He had grown weary of human company, tired of hurting and waking up from episodes with bodies in his hands, so he went to the new world in hopes of finding a stretch of land where he could be alone. He found that out west, far past the Indian tribes, in a beautiful canyon that could have been carved out by the very hand of God.

And, well, she knew the rest. He lived there quite happily, occasionally getting a visit from a native seeking his cures or expertise, but otherwise alone until some Mormon pioneers settled in the canyon. While the natives had been wise enough to stay away from the flash-flood prone canyon and the mysterious foreign man with blood red eyes and the ability to fly, the Mormon pioneers had been a fearless, but harmless lot.

It had worked until a particularly dry season scattered the wild game, and therefore Husani's line of non-human blood.

By the time he rounded up to the end of his story, they had delivered eight more packages, had lunch (or rather, Lea had lunch and medicine and Husani made sure she ate it all), and gone grocery shopping (he laughed out loud at how big her eyes got when he bought the most expensive steak he could find). Lea had ended up being carried on his back, due to exhaustion and light-headedness. Dredging up the past had given him something to distract himself from the feel of her arms next to his neck and her soft cheek in his hair.

His last customer was the one to tell him that Lea had fallen asleep. Husani had an awkward time accepting the money and wriggling it into his pants pocket while holding her.

"I hope you don't have any more to do today," said the older man, who looked up at the darkening sky pointedly.

"Everything else can be mailed," said Husani, adjusting her weight on his back. "You don't happen to have any baking cocoa on you, perchance?" He'd forgotten to buy some.

"Not sure how you're going to carry it like that, but yeah. Just give me a moment."

Husani put the baking cocoa in his now empty basket, thanked the man, and headed off to the bus stop. She didn't even stir as he sat down, tickling the edge of his ear with her sleepy sighs.

It was then, sitting in the little bus stop booth, watching the cars hush by and listening to the sound of kids playing a game in the park a block over that he realized something both wondrous and heart-wrendingly awful.

He didn't want this day to end.