Fairy Tales

by Catlyn Ladd

I will be waiting for him when he comes, just like in a fairy tale. The sun will be setting in a perfect golden glow and he will come up my walk with the dying sun on the tips of his hair. His chin will drop in that way it does, his lips curving up in smile that I know is just for me. Beautiful death in the dying day on the edge of endless night. I am the princess and he is the prince. He will awaken me with his touch and his kiss will be for all time.

Then the pain. It rips through my abdomen and I cry out, weaker than before, my voice cracking and hoarse. I am freezing cold and shivering though I drip with sweat. My teeth chatter and Zeke’s image blows away on the wind. I cry feebly.

It is dark here and the floor beneath me is cold and damp. The only light comes from a guttering candle on the floor twenty feet away, casting shadows on the huge four poster bed that looms alien in the dark behind me, an ancient relic of eras bygone, the mattress stained and unspeakable. The shadows twirl and dance in ecstasy over my agony.

I writhe as the pain cuts through me again like glass in my veins. My stomach cramps and I bring my knees to my chest, though the muscles in my back scream in protest. I hurt everywhere, all over, my kidneys throbbing from his blows. My flesh is mottled with bruises and abrasions, a neat row of puncture marks up my arms from his teeth. He had drank again and again, until I felt my heart fall into rhythm with his.

All at once I am burning up and I push away the filthy quilt. He has left me naked, drying blood flaking off my chest and thighs, bites and scratches scabbing over. There is more blood, my blood, drying on the cracked floor in a dark and muddy pool.

Shuddering with effort, I roll to my knees and kneel on the quilt, the cold of the concrete seeping through the fabric. I am too weak to stand and I drop my head, sobbing, though it hurts every time I take a shaky breath. I think ribs are broken.

I will be waiting for him when he comes but it will not be Zeke. Not Zeke glowing in the last light of the dying day. Not Zeke with the shadows swarming beneath his cheekbones and shifting in his molten eyes. I will be here when he comes, there is no avoiding it. I retch miserably but nothing comes up, only bile burning the back of my throat.

A shadow moves across the room, darkness against the dark, and I grit my teeth against the screams I know he will tear from me as Malachi appears, his skin shining in the dark. All of my mental defenses are down and I see his aura pouring off him in wild red waves, burning against the dark. That vampire aura, predator red, that only witches like me can see. My own aura, normally a deep and vibrant violet, has taken on a sickly greenish cast. My blood on the floor shines with the same glow, but fading.

Malachi is shirtless, his ebony skin flawless, rippling across the muscles in his stomach and arms, his black hair coating his shoulders like oil. The reason that all vampires are beautiful is because who would want to spend eternity with the plain, the homely? Of course they are beautiful. The vampire virus takes the raw material and transforms it into the perfect predator, designed to attract with every sense. Physically perfect, they emit pheromones designed to heighten the desire in their pray. Zeke smells of the desert after the rain, Malachi like night blooming jasmine.

Only I can see their secret, it is hidden in the auras that pour from their skin. It is red, the same as great cats, the tiny darting bats of the sky, crocodiles in their watery beds.

That aura brightens every time he hurts me.

I see the glitter of a glass in his hand. “Here,” he holds it out and dark amber liquid ripples. “It will help with the pain.”

I take it and drink, the whiskey scorching my raw throat. I gag as the heat hits my stomach but hold it down, drinking it all, the warmth bursting in my belly. Malachi watches me choke, a small smile playing on his lush lips.

“It’s time for more of this, too.” Malachi produces a switchblade and clicks it open, the blade appearing like a magic trick. Holding out his wrist, he draws the blade across the blue veins. His blood seeps from his flesh and I smell it, like rust and jasmine. Already the flesh begins to close across the wound.

My stomach roils but it is too late to turn back now. I can give up and die or I can continue to fight. And still probably die.

I take his hand and bring his flesh to my mouth, swallowing the viscous liquid that blossoms on my tongue. The scent of jasmine fills my throat, sickly sweet and cloying. I catch flashes of memory and each one makes me shudder. A girl, mascara streaked down her face as she screams, a raw and tortured sound. A boy no older than ten, running, his terrified face over his shoulder and then he stumbles. My own face turned trustingly up. I had assumed that all vampires are like Zeke.

Malachi pulls away and I curl inward, freezing again. I wanted this, I remind myself. I asked for this. If only I had known the price. “Sweet little Zorah,” he croons. “Sweet little angel. So lost. So alone.”

“You forget yourself,” I hiss, looking up at him through tangled hair. He glows, perfect and deadly in the shadows. He is a deranged Cupid, his perfect mouth a dark bow beneath his seawater eyes. Black skin and green eyes: of course some vampire had chosen him, who knows how long ago. The rings in his eyebrow glint in the light and he suddenly opens his jeans with a rip of buttons. I moan. He is pierced below as well, three deadly spikes.

I will be waiting for him when he comes. I will wait for him in the shadows, Sleeping Beauty awakened from the dead by the kiss of the dark prince. His beauty will consume me and I will run to him and he will take me into his arms, his aura enveloping mine, red on red, for all time. He will be my lover who cannot die, the one who will save me, though I have always claimed that I do not need saving. My Zeke of the innumerable ages, with his fleeting smile of sharp teeth, he will carry me away into the magic night. His mouth will come down on my lips and I will kiss him forever.

I scream, though I no longer have the strength for it. My insides are weeping out through my pores, my ovaries liquefied and consuming my womb. I am so hot, burning, my skin suppurating, howling with agony. I am dying.

The vampire virus kills almost everyone it enters. Zeke had told me this and Malachi had said it, too. It burns through the fragile human body, elevating the temperature to such dangerous levels that the brain literally cooks. Both Zeke and Malachi had tried to turn people before and they both told the same story: the spiking fever, the fall into coma, the final agonized breath.

Zeke had refused to turn me and so I had found another. Malachi is everything that Zeke is not: cruel, heartless, sadistic. But he had agreed to turn me, or try. Zeke is afraid of killing me. Malachi doesn't care. I am just a girl to him, a fleeting plaything. A science experiment.

He sits on his heels and watches, my angel of agony, my dikini of death. He is naked now, the studs in his flesh glinting, his skin catching the candlelight. He is coated with streaks of my blood, shining dark like brands on his skin.

“He won’t save you.” He grins over sharp teeth. “Fairy tales aren’t real, pretty Zorah. In this world the monster always wins.”

I roll onto my stomach, the lacerations in my skin shrieking and burning. I feel the fever in my body, raging through me, burning me up. I draw deep on the well of power inside me, the special hidden place he can never touch no matter how he digs into my flesh. The place my magic lives. “You will never understand, Malachi. You are the monster and I am the myth. You can never have me.”

“I’ve had you lots of times.” His smile makes angels burst into flame and fall smoldering from the sky.

“Just a body, Malachi. And I am so much more than just a body. Now where’s that whiskey?”

“You know,” he hands the bottle to me. “I have never met anyone quite like you.”

It burns going down but I don’t care. I grin at him through bloody teeth. “Super for you.”

One black brow arches. “That comeback isn’t up to your usual standard.”

I take another shot and curl up, fetal, conserving myself. “Sorry. I sort of have a lot going on.”

“Hm. What with the dying and all?”

I shoot him the most toxic glare I can manage. “I am not dying.” “You’re not turning either.” He grins. “What you say we ramp it up a bit?” The knife is in my skin before I know it’s coming, slicing down through the sinew of my thigh, my blood welling. His mouth against me, in me, devouring me, his aura lightening. My flesh heals and then he bites me again and I scream. The pain is too much. I reach inside myself, the power like a deep blue well in my mind, and I draw it in. I bring my hand to his shoulder and focus my attention, pushing aside the pain. I elevate the temperature in my palm and he leaps back, a cry escaping him. My handprint stands out, a welt of red.

He glares at me and then glances down at the burn on his skin. His pink tongue laps slowly at a drop of my blood on his lower lip, the gesture sensuous and obscene. “I leave you like this now and you die,” he says.

“You just said that I’m dying anyway,” I reply.

A slight shake of his head, imperceptible but for the ripple of his hair. “When I bite you, you heal.”

He is right. He had bitten me and my flesh had drawn together over the wound. There is too much pain to focus on this remarkable fact and I hesitate a moment too long. He leaps on top of me, pinning me to the abrasive concrete, his mouth up under my jaw. I feel him tear, his teeth sliding into me, and the agony overwhelms. I try to repel him but the cool blue well of power in my mind is inaccessible, overcome by the torment of my flesh. I scream. My voice burns and cracks and then I cannot scream anymore. The dancing shadows come for me. And their teeth are all sharp.

A fairy tale princess needs a savior. Only in Disney movies do they actually come. In the real stories, the ones that began as folktales in the wild places of the earth, the princess gets swallowed by monsters or abducted by pirates. The strong women of these stories are always witches, evil and heartless. They don’t get saved.

I am a witch, too. It began when I was a child. In the farthest reaches of my memory I see everything surrounded by coronas of light. The colors sometimes made me dislike people or feel a gentle affinity for strangers. I trusted the colors because they never lied. My mother took to get my eyes checked when I tried to explain. That was when I learned that not everyone saw them. I stopped talking about them then.

Fairy tale princesses get saved. Witches do not. I have no one but myself.

I close my eyes and reach deep, feeling the earth beneath the concrete. I sense worms and tiny creatures moving there, each spark of life. I feel the virus in me, an invasion trying to change the biology of my being. I feel the fever, the cellular ruptures as the virus forces its way in.

I asked Zeke to make me a vampire but he refused. On some level I know it isn’t a rejection. The opposite, in fact. He doesn’t want to risk my life. But he underestimates my drive. I want this. And I get what I want.

I open myself to the virus. I picture my immune system as a tiny army on white horses and I envision the virus like a red cloud, overwhelming, the miniature soldiers keeling off their horses, their swords falling into the moist swamp of my body.

I’d called to death and he had answered. Not as a cloaked figure with a scythe but as a vampire with golden hair, an impossible being who cannot die. Death is not a step into liminal space but a transcendence into immortality. Not a sweet suicide oblivion but an eternity of everlasting. When Alex, my-sweet-one-my-meaning, died I’d fallen into darkness, a spiral of alcohol and devastation, my forests laid waste, my verdant pastures drought-stricken. With all of my vast power I could not raise him from the dead. And so I determined to die, too. I seduced death like a whore and Zeke had come, a shining star in the darkness. But he had refused to transform me. He had refused to give me his power, the power of immortality, the power over death. So I had found another to do it instead.

I feel my temperature rise. The army that is my immune system begins to scream and cook. My eyes are too dry to open and I press myself down against the cold concrete. If I survive this I may be brain damaged, a witch vampire deranged. I do not care. My body becomes a funeral pyre. I blow away like ashes, the way Alex’s ashes had been snatched by the wind, erasing him as though he had never been.

When I awake it is no longer dark. The light is so shocking that I cry out and scuttle backwards over the floor to the bed, pulling the filthy quilt over me against the bright. My eyes feel pierced, lacerated.

Slowly, I take deep, even breaths. The faint illumination on my eyelids feels like a thousand watt bulb burning into my brain and I curl up, bringing the blanket over my head. Cocooned, I focus, shutting out the troublesome light, the pain in my body, how thirsty I am, the scent of sweat rising from my skin. My heartbeat slows. I reach out with mental fingers, a clarion call of my will. I am surrounded by life and I fasten to it with psychic teeth, pulling all that vitality into myself, using it to heal. I harness my will and focus, bringing all the considerable might of my determination to bear on my wounded and dying body.

When I awake again the light from the setting sun streams straight in through the door, a burning brand on my bare leg hanging over the edge of the bed. I reach out with my telekinetic mind and slam the door shut.

And sit straight up in the darkness, heart pounding. Usually moving objects takes a moment of concentration, a gathering of will, and a quick explosion of energy. But that had been easy. I had done it almost without thinking, a quick flex, like an involuntary impulse. I take stock of my battered body. A pain in my leg from where Malachi had cut so deep, an ache across my ribs. But nothing more. The great searing pain of my being is gone.

I realize that I can see the contours of the room. Every living thing emits an aura and every surface is covered with living organisms. The tiny microbes that coat stone and earth range in color from blue to green to gray and the room lights before my eyes. I see the concrete floor and walls, the tiny insects in the rough beams of the ceiling. The bed crawls with minuscule life and I flinch in automatic revulsion.

Remembering the candles that line the steps that descend into the basement I send out a flash of thought – flex – and flame blooms. Again it is so easy.

I push off the coverlet and stand, wincing at the streaks of filth on my body. I have never felt so dirty, so absolutely defiled. I rub my hand down my side but only smear the grime into my skin. I look around for my clothes, struggling to remember what I had been wearing. It seems so long ago, not days but years, that I had come here, following Malachi, thinking I knew the danger.

I spot a wad of fabric in the corner and shake it out to reveal one of my old black dresses. A pair of panties, shredded almost beyond recognition, fall to the floor. I pull the dress over my head.

I chose this, chose what to become. My stomach growls. I am become vampire, destroyer of worlds. I walk across the floor and open the door to the outside. Darkness falls. I let myself out into the night sending thoughts of conflagration into the basement behind me. The fire from the candles leaps and races across the floor toward that monster of a bed. The mattress blazes. I walk forward into the night. It welcomes me with open arms.