Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 106107 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106107 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
“You don’t have to like it, Aragon,” Abe says gravely. “You just have to accept it. And I have to accept that even though you are a dear friend of mine, I am needed elsewhere by others who need me more. It’s taken time, but you have been rehabilitated. You have been saved. My work here is done.”
He turns and starts walking toward the door, and I watch him go, his red hair bright even in the darkness, with the confident walk of a man who has accepted who he is, sins and all.
I get to my feet suddenly, overwhelmed by a clawing sense of desperation. “You’re my moral compass, Abe,” I cry out. “I’ll lose my control if I don’t have you.”
He gives me a sympathetic smile, a doctor’s smile. Then, he nods at the portrait of Jesus on the wall. “He is your moral compass. You’ve been a priest for over a century now. It should be God guiding you, not me.”
“You don’t even believe in God.”
“And neither do you,” he says.
Then he nods and opens the door, swallowed up by the frigid winds and endless night.
When I was human, I was able to sleep at the drop of a hat. My wife would always tell me she was jealous of my ability. Whether it was when the children were screaming, as children are wont to do, or when the farm cats were fighting and the donkeys were braying, nothing could wake me up. The minute my head hit the pillow, even with a leak in the thatch roof that succumbed to the rain, I was dreaming.
I told her I could always concoct her a sleeping potion, something she couldn’t do for herself. Our witchcraft rarely worked on ourselves, but it would for others. But she was stubborn and decided to tough it out.
Then, after a Vampyre killed me and forced me back to life as a monster, I was never visited by the sweet spell of sleep again. I spent a hundred years without a dream, a hundred years without any escape, and I was forced to reckon with the vile creature I had become.
It was only in the monastery that sleep would come in fits and starts.
Sleep that brought on nightmares, ones that continue to this day.
I pray to the God I try so hard to believe in and ask for release from the terrors, to be visited by that dulcet slumber, but still, he only grants me what I fear.
So I don’t sleep most nights.
Tonight especially.
It’s been a week since Abe left. The stores of blood he keeps in casks at the back of the church, casks that, if anyone was to stumble upon, they would assume is the wine of the sacramental union, are starting to run low. I have only enough to last a few more weeks before I must find my own sustenance.
Before I must kill for the first time in eight months.
The weight of it bears down on me, like a vise pressing down from the heavens themselves.
Who will I choose? One of the natives in the area who keep to themselves, naturally suspicious of the settlers and me? Or one of the villagers who comes to my church every week, ones I have gotten to know? There are only a couple hundred here, scattered throughout the settlements of Nombre de Jesus and Primera Angostura, along with the stationed military personnel. Or will I have to venture further to the larger town of Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, as Abe had done, disappearing for a night or two until I find a victim?
And when I choose them, what will I become? Abe says it’s not our fault we need human blood to thrive, that we were either born or created that way. He says it’s no different than slaughtering a cow, that we shouldn’t feel shame for something driven and decided by our biology. But the act of murder, of violence against another human, lets the monster come out, enough to remind me how damn good it felt to succumb to such a primal being, to become, to exist, to live without morals or guilt.
It’s the monster inside me who is glad that Abe left so that I might return to that beast once more, and because of that, I am afraid.
And I don’t dare sleep.
Instead, I step out into the dark night. For once, the winds have died down, giving the landscape the feeling of a long exhale, as if it can finally find peace. My cottage is surrounded by tussock grass and stunted brush and pine, a clergy house located behind the chapel, built close to the water’s edge. Tonight, the waves lap gently on the rocky shore, and my sensitive vision can pick out the craggy peaks of the mountains across the strait.