Blood of Eden
CHAPTER TWO
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My throat burns from choking back tears of confusion and betrayal for two-and-a half hours. My eyes sting as well as my skin from the acidic tears as they roll down my cheeks. My eyes probably have turned blood red, and my head throbs horribly in pain, the sobbing causing it to only become worse and worse.
My elbows are resting upon the hardwood table and my face is buried in my trembling hands as I weep. I can smell the blood, still moist, upon the gash in my head from when I had fallen in the bathroom. I feel it as it slowly oozes from the painful wound. I had been sleepwalking, dreaming it was time to get ready for school, and was really sick. The wooden door of the bright little bathroom was closed and I was bent over the toilet, coughing and gagging. My sister, Jamie Ann Ivan, had hollered through the door for me to hurry up. She left the door and my coughing got worse and uncontrollable. I had begun to cough up blood and couldn't breathe well. Dizziness overcame me and I tried to catch my balance, putting my hand on the tiled counter around the sink where it slipped and I fell.
I remember how, upon opening my eyes as I lay on the floor with my head bleeding all over the place, I had found the bathroom suddenly dark and the door open wide. I hadn't been able to move and could hardly see or breathe. That's when I had heard him speaking to me. I thought it was Dad at first. He was kneeling over me as he spoke in echoes I couldn’t understand. It was like my head was underwater. And then I had realized that it might be Octavius Michael. Octavius's voice had seemed cold and cruel, an unusually heartless tone. He's never spoken to me like that. His accent was even different, and his voice. I thought maybe it hadn't really been him and that I was mistaken, and I couldn't see him as he picked me up off of the floor and carried me to my room where he helped me stand on my feet.
The last of what I had heard Michael say, I could understand, and it sent a shiver down my spine and made my skin crawl. I knew it couldn't be him. I couldn't feel any of what he felt, which I had always been able to do, and I couldn't pull out of his hypnosis as he had had me under some sort of trance...
No, I had been able to feel one thing from him. Lust. I know he could have bitten me at any moment if he had wanted to.
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The one thing I was able to feel from him, his lust, traveled through to me as his emotions normally did. I hadn't been able to look away from his eyes. I could've sworn they were red, rather than his emerald-green eye colour. They seemed to pull me in and swallow me. The tempted, lustful way he had brushed his fingertips up my arm and trailed his hand around the back of me neck was scary.
The palm of his other hand pressed into my back really hard when he let go of my wrists, pressing me against his icy-cold body as he suddenly kissed me roughly...
My back still hurts. I reach back with my left hand and feel the throbbing bruise. I jump as a sharp pain leaps through my lower back at the touch. I again try to gently feel the bruise and this time manage to not hurt myself so badly...
He had never felt so cold before.
I remember how I pulled away from him. It wasn't the severe pain in my back that had broken the hypnosis. I don't know what it was. But I had somehow gotten that much...Maybe he eased up to see if I would jerk away from him…or maybe not.
He'd whispered in my ear, saying, "Your mind is strong...I might choose you to be my bride." That's when I knew for sure that it couldn't be him. It was not his voice or his accent. I was finally able to see clearly and jumped and gasped at the sound of his voice. I fell over backward and passed out, getting only a glimpse of the vampire's face.
I woke up around three AM, I don't know how long afterwards. But when I woke, I thought it had all been a dream, a horrible nightmare. A trip to the bathroom, however, proved me wrong. I saw the blood on the counter and the floor and then looked in the mirror at my head and saw the deep cut. I thought I'd just awakened with a migraine until then. But I still couldn't remember whom I had seen.
When I did recall the face in a suddenly unexpected manner, confusion and shock, and dismay and disbelief attacked me, all at once. It had been Octavius.
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All my life, I've had visions and dreams and have seen, heard and even felt things that are not from myself. I've known about vampires my whole life. I knew what they were and how they killed before I was even two years old. I knew how to impale someone before I could even speak.
I've had some sort of a telepathic connection to this innocent accursed man named Michael. Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the Impaler Prince, had taken Michael in as a servant and when Michael found out what Dracula was, Dracula had decided to spare his life rather than to kill the witness as he usually did. Instead, Dracula turned him into a vampire, and Michael's been trying to starve himself to death or find a way to simply die every since. He's tried to resist the demons in him but when he gets weak enough, they change him to winged form and cause him to kill, feeding upon his victims' blood. I've seen all of his memories and have felt all of his grief and disgust. He's always hated blood and has always had to kill for it.
This last summer, my dreams and visions got worse. They had been clearing away until one day, when they suddenly came from practically nowhere, and slammed into me, attacking me viciously, one after another, with little peace in between. It started off with a nightmare, one of Michael's memories, the memory of his finding out about Dracula, and Dracula's biting him. The feeling of how his soul was drained of his life in that horrible, painful way, how the world seemed to fade from him and leave him to die in the overwhelming darkness of evil's hold, it haunted him endlessly.
When I woke from the dream, my neck was bleeding badly and had teeth impressions in the exact same place they'd been upon Michael's neck. My sister saw it when she came to my door. She's always flipped out the mere thought of blood. I saw in the mirror hanging above my homework desk with its small lamp, the bite mark, and suddenly, Dracula's face flashed before me. When I jumped and looked again in the mirror, it was only a scratch and there was no bite at all. But there were red teeth marks. The only little bit of blood was from the scratch that I had probably inflicted by accident. I had the dream, a vision from the dream as I sketched what I had seen of Dracula, and a vision as I looked in the mirror at the bite that hadn't really been there. But somehow, the teeth marks were real, though only slight indentations.
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Jamie got rude with me and I snapped and began to yell at her. I was tired of seeing, of hearing and of feeling. I was sick of everything. Mom and Dad had put me through counseling, and all that, to convince me vampires aren’t’ real and help me to be normal and get rid of my delusions and hallucinations. I hated it. I wasn’t even allowed to watch scary movies anymore or anything. I had to paint and draw my dreams as best I could. I got pretty good at it. But I hated the topic because it was basically the same all the time: vampires, Michael, Dracula, death, Blood, hated, grief, darkness, hunger, loneliness, having no one to help, demons that took over…The list never ends. But most of it circles around only a few main topics: Michael’s being a vampire and hating to live or kill; how lonely Michael was, that no one could help him, that he was forever cursed, that he would never know love again as it was torn away from him by the curse.
I screamed till Mom and Dad both came to the room, and then I kept screaming. Even though they really wanted to, they didn’t stop me from screaming. Dr. Hayze, my counselor, had warned them that if they stopped me in the middle of it and I was forced to suppress it more, then the next time could be both worse and dangerous. I could lose control and attack one of them, or even myself.
In the middle of my fit of screaming, I began to see again what he saw as he turned. He tried to stop it, but the pain was unbearable. We both doubled over and screamed for it to stop. I shoved my hands to my ears and shut my eyes tightly as I yelled at the top of my lungs for it to stop. I began to have some sort of a seizure and my nose started bleeding from the extreme trauma as I fell to the floor. Then he felt my presence for the first time as he started to turn again. We both cried out to each other helplessly to please make it stop. I then fell unconscious, even though I could still see what he went through, and feel it and taste the blood.
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He killed ten people that night and two of them were my best and only friends, Ashley and Janice Blanderson. Their aunt and uncle were killed, the sheriff was killed, our Junior High School principle was killed, my dad’s coworker was killed, and our two friendly neighbors, husband and wife, were killed. There was also a homeless man with a cart full of empty milk jugs and an open, partially eaten Three Musketeers candy bar in his hand. I didn’t know him, but almost everyone knew and respected most of the people that were killed. My family knew all but the homeless man and we were close to all, so it impacted us especially hard.
I was always considered a freak at school that no one liked. Ashley and Janice were both twins and they were my only two friends. Their being killed hit me worse than anyone but their parents.
I woke up in the hospital and wrote down the names of all ten and how they died, describing different wounds and which wounds caused each death. Most all of them had a severed pulmonary artery or vein in their neck. I had originally planned on getting the bodies found somehow but didn’t go through with it. People would think I was crazy and not believe me till they found each body, which would take days or weeks, and that was too long.
The body of the Sheriff was found and live coverage was on the television in the lobby as we were leaving. I had already told Mom and Dad that Ashley and Janice were dead and they didn’t believe me. I told them before the reporter could even get the information that the sheriff was dead and he did from a severed pulmonary artery. A little while later, some dude came on TV and whispered something in her ear and she explained she’d just received word of the cause of death. She said exactly what I said, which caught Mom and Dad off-guard big time.
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I’d been able to communicate with Michael since he found out about me and we spoke only a little. He was mostly watching our ways, which seemed kind of strange to him, being that he’d never been given the chance to be normal and live like a human being. His own father had abandoned him in Walachia and Dracula had taken him in as a servant and was kind to him, except for the fact that Dracula tried to get him to impale people for fun, which Michael was disgusted by. Michael had never liked being cruel, which is what Dracula had tried to get him to do. Dracula bit Michael when he was only seventeen years old.
We left the lobby and got to the car and I heard Dracula’s voice as he spoke to Michael. Michael made him angry and Dracula lost his temper and slowly cut his arm open, causing mine to be sliced as well. It freaked everyone out because we couldn’t see what was doing it. Dad freaked out the worst and nearly broke his neck against the roof of the car when he jumped away upon seeing the cut snake its way down my forearm. It hurt really badly. Michael and I begged for Dracula to stop and he did, only to end our relief by suddenly strangling Michael, which strangled me in turn. When I regained consciousness, I knew he was dead and that was the only reason I was alive still: the connection had broken with his death.
Michael’s death was worse than anything imaginable. He was all I’d ever known. I’d always wanted to be free of all the visions and pain and dreams and grief. But I’d never anticipated what being without him would be like. His dying was my losing part of my soul, most of myself. When he died, it killed a big part of me and left me so horribly empty.
I locked myself in my closet with this lights out, which I was always petrified of doing before, being that I hated the dark so much and was so terrified of it.
Mrs. Hayze discovered that I’d seen the ten killed and even knew where because of the vision. When a couple of the victims’ bodies were found, she realized that something really was going on and I wasn’t just some paranoid schizophrenic that everyone believed me to be. The way the cut happened was a little unbelievable, but she had to trust it as true when Mom and Dad told her how it happened. She knew they wouldn’t make up a story like that.
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What convinced her more than anything was my paintings and sketches. It was a project that was part of counseling. I was supposed to paint or draw what I saw in my dreams. I had so much practice at drawing and painting these things that I’d gotten really good. I had painted around fifteen to twenty large paintings and had drawn probably three hundred sketches, all of which got better and better, and more and more realistic through time. She and Mom and Dad looked at all of them, which I had never shown to anyone before and would’ve even killed to keep them out of sight and in my dark closet; they got more understanding and a door to possibility was opened in their minds, though they didn’t want to believe about vampires. I had problems what were not just problems. Part of my mind was found active when it was never seen but dormant in normal people’s heads. Perhaps it was the cause of my problems, they thought.
We went on a two-week vacation to my uncle’s. Uncle Reid’s place is four to five hours away in the countryside. But as we got closer, I fell asleep and had another screwed up dream. I was running from something in the darkness and was searching frantically for Michael, wishing that he wasn’t dead. A voice called my name as I ran and I looked behind me to see only the darkness. When I turned back again, a vicious-looking wolf darted in front of me and was ready to attack me. I nearly fell on it and jumped back and hit something solid that hadn’t been there before: Dracula. I jumped away and the snarling fury called the wolf darted in my way and blocked me off. I tried to turn but Dracula took hold of me and bit me.
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When I woke up at Jamie’s screaming, I really was bleeding really badly. Turned out, she had seen my dream in the reflection in the window next to my head by some freak of nature. She was terrified of it all and my neck hurt so badly, it was all I could to do keep from screaming in pain. I convinced Mom and Dad to take us straight to Uncle Reid’s, which was only a couple minutes away by then, rather than to the hospital, which was an hour or more away. By then, I had fully left my grieving state because of the shock and other things.
I had never really been into guys or boyfriend/girlfriend crap before. I wasn’t the average teenage girl and Mom and Dad and Jamie made it worse because they’ve tried so hard to get me hooked up with so many half-interested or paid-off guys that it’s not even funny…Yeah, they’re kind of off in the heads. I know, but as soon as I saw Octavius when he walked in the front door behind Father Torrence, my face began to burn bright red. He was extremely hot. He looked only a little older than me and had kind of a dark, yet kind, air about his personality, and that light darkness was somehow overwhelmingly attractive. I couldn’t keep from staring at him, and when he saw me, he wouldn’t stop looking my way. I was the one who looked away, even though I could still feel him staring at me. The most awkward moment was after he introduced himself to Mom and Dad and then Jamie and walked over to me to do the same.
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We found out that Octavius needed a place to stay and he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Uncle Reid had taken people in before and he agreed. I had to show Octavius where his room was, which was next to mine upstairs.
Octavius and I became friends and we walked together a lot. Jamie was jealous and got rude about us, and Octavius kept me from punching her when she said something about us kissing, which he hadn’t done at all. He made a joke that caught us off-guard and made us not sure whether it was really a joke or not. He’d said, “And what would you do if we did kiss?”
Not long after finding that we both had identical scars on our arms when we went for a walk, we were heading back to the house and I saw Mom waving to me from the back door. When I reached her, she started speaking and in the middle of it, I suddenly got really dizzy and passed out. I saw another vision.
Later that same day, when I woke, I heard Mom and Dad talking to Octavius about me. They were asking him to watch out for me and make sure I didn’t get into trouble when they weren’t around. Then I found out a big secret they’d kept from me; I was adopted. They told him not to tell me anything said. They didn’t want me to find out. But upon hearing it, I saw how my being so different from them made sense. It explained my hair and skin and height perfectly.
I avoided everyone for a while and when Octavius came to find me when I was in my room, I yelled at him and locked the door. I got mad and stupidly began to beat the door in anger, which was how I busted my knuckles up pretty bad. He waited outside my door for me to cool off for two or three hours while I listened to music and wrote song lyrics. I thought he’d give up, but upon opening my door, I found myself wrong. So I apologized to him.
When he started to look at my knuckles, Jamie found us and she was really, really mad. She yelled at us and practically shoved me from the doorway so she could get her stuff to change rooms so she wouldn’t have to share rooms with me anymore. I saw the door coming at me in my mind, and I even felt it before she did it. When she started to slam the door shut so it would hit me really hard, I swung around and slammed my own fist into the door, leaving a crater in it and causing the door to ricochet back and hit the wall. It tore my hand open and I was bleeding all over the place. I threatened her to never do that again. She backed down big time because she’d never seen me so angry.
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The pain was almost unbearable and Octavius wrapped my hands up for me.
A couple of days or so later, Dracula possessed me and he made me attack Jamie. I started talking to Octavius, or at least, Dracula started using me to speak to him. He was angry with him and asked him why he resisted and didn’t bite us now. Then I found out that Octavius was Michael, the vampire I’d known all my life that I’d thought had died. He discovered that I was the girl he’d found out about the day Dracula nearly killed him. He’d thought Dracula had strangled me to death by trying to kill him.
Dracula made me try to again hurt Jamie when she regained consciousness and scrambled to her feet to get away. Octavius pushed her out of the way and I began to choke him when I grabbed his throat.
The connection started to return and was weak at first as I felt the light crushing in my own throat. As he started trying to gasp for air and trying to pry my hand from his throat, the connection got stronger and stronger. But I couldn’t make myself quit. I couldn’t stop or remove my hand. Dracula wouldn’t let me.
But then, I don’t know how, I screamed and shoved Dracula out of my mind completely and let him go, and I backed away to the wall behind me, where I collapsed.
I asked if he was Michael, simply stuttering the name, and he nodded. Neither of us could understand how Dracula could possess me.
We played a game of chess later, when my sister forgave me out of fear. I played Jamie and then started to play Octavius. I was supposed to make the first move, being that I was playing white and he was playing black.
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I asked Jamie where Jeana, Mom, and John, Dad, and Uncle Reid were. She told me they had to go back home for a couple of days on an emergency. John’s an undercover agent in town, and he busts dealers and junkies and thieves and such. Jeana’s the town historian and an environmental volunteer. There was something about a train-wreck and both of them had to go home.
Uncle Reid was helping Father Torrence at the church because it had been vandalized.
I never got to make my first move. I was wondering why someone would vandalize a church – and then I began to see it in my mind. The huge stained glass windows were busted all around the church and I walked inside, limping. My leg was bleeding as if a dog or something had bitten me. I couldn’t see at first, but when the mayhem came into focus, I saw bodies scattered throughout the room among the displaced pews. There was lots of blood and burn marks. I could hear the choir in my mind when I looked up to the choir benches, and could hear Father Torrence speaking loudly in a booming voice for all to hear when I looked at the podium. The sounds faded and there was a trail of blood in front of me, going down the wooden floor of the isle. It went up past the podium as I followed it, and it didn’t stop at the wall. It instead continued up the wall and fanned out into a design I couldn’t yet see clearly. When my vision finally returned to normal, I read the dripping letters, which said something, I don’t remember what.
The words scared me so badly that I jumped and tripped over Father Torrence’s body behind me. When I fell, I saw a white chess piece on the floor, covered in red. I picked it up to look closer at it, and when I realized the red was blood I dropped it. It shattered upon the floor, but then it came back together, turning black, and I heard laughter. A red silk ribbon fell from above me and landed on the floor over the chess piece.
Then I came out of the trance and was suddenly back in the kitchen with the chess game in front of me.
Having all my visions ever come true or been true once, I knew I needed to get to the church. I ran out of the house and headed to the church, which was a really long way. Octavius and Jamie both chased after me, not knowing what had gotten into me or why I ran out on them.
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I passed this really spooky house that seemed to beckon me forth to it and scream at me to come back to it when I turned away. The church was not like I had seen. I had never been in it before and the giant main room was what I had seen, excluding the chaos and blood and bodies and all. There were only a couple of broken windows and trash littered the floor. There was graffiti on the stone walls outside the church. But that was it.
Father Torrence and Uncle Reid saw me and came to my aid. After some confusion, Octavius came into the church, painting and out of breath. Uncle Reid thought maybe I was running from him at first until I explained why I had come. I felt horrible and decided to leave, refusing the offered ride from my uncle. Octavius left with me.
It was on the way back to Uncle Reid’s that I received my first kiss – by a vampire, Octavius. The kiss wasn’t anything like just a couple of hours ago, from this morning…
I again remember how strange he had acted and how hard his hand pressed into my back. I’ve never known Octavius to want to harm anyone, especially not me. But it seemed like he enjoyed my pain as much as kissing me like that. The other kiss had been kind and gentle, even unsure…
We walked on to the house and I stopped at a stream, remembering what I had seen when I’d passed out in front of Mom when she’d been speaking to me. There was a little rowboat and I had seen something fall into the boat. I went to retrieve it when Octavius agreed to let me. He was reluctant, though, because he knew what had happened there as well as I did; when Dracula struck him and he fell unconscious the day after he thought I was dead, he was so weak in heart and mind that he couldn’t stop it, and he turned, the demons in full control. What he had seen, he could barely remember because it was so much like a dream.
There were two bands of prayer beads tied together. When I started to turn to show him, something was wrong with him and he was backing away from me. He screamed for me to run and get away from him. I hesitated to obey, but did so and fear overwhelmed me. He could be turned and hunt me down and kill me, even if it was daylight.
I ran to the house and fell against the door after I shut it behind me. Probably an hour later, he appeared in the distance and staggered slowly toward the house. He was deeply wounded as if something had attacked him and I could feel all the pain from each cut that went across his chest, arms, back and neck. He collapsed as I ran out to him, terrified for him, that he might die. Even then, he worried more over me. Having my still open wounds and his bleeding everywhere, he tried to push me away so that his blood could not touch my cuts and scrapes. He fell unconscious, saying that it would stop. I thought he meant that he was going to die, or that he meant—I didn’t know what else. I could only think of his dying and I feared it so much. I didn’t want him to be dead again. I already had to go through that once.
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He seemed to stop breathing and I made Jamie help me take him inside, where I closely watched over him and doctored his wounds. He showed signs of life only a few hours later. But he didn’t wake up.
Jamie and I covered for him for nearly a week and kept Uncle Reid from knowing anything. We lied and told him Octavius was doing something and said he’d go for a walk afterwards, among other things. But it worked.
I found Octavius awake on one of my routine checks on him one day, maybe the fourth or fifth day. He seemed strangely distant and weak. His eyes were even pale, and he looked quite dead, save for the fact that he was sitting up and breathing. It was hard to tell by the way he stared blankly, not noticing me. When I started to back out of the room, he looked at me with the empty glare. It was pretty scary, the way he just stared so penetratingly and lifelessly. He was mad because I hadn’t listened when he told me not to touch him. But his anger went away.
I remembered the prayer beads and retrieved them from my room, sitting next to him to untie them when I returned. When he reached for one and took it with interest, something changed about the room, about him. He rested his chin upon my shoulder, over his right hand, and as he laid his head against mine, another horrible vision occurred, one that I thought real at first. The room jolted forward and I felt his fingers dig into my shoulder and he suddenly bit me. The pain was quite excruciating—But then I gasped and blinked, and he had done nothing.
I moved away from him and he knew at once that I’d seen something. I tried to lie, saying I thought I’d remembered what had been written on the wall, but had forgotten it right then. But he could see right through me, and he could tell I was lying.
He told me he would never hurt me, and then he kissed me again…
He’d never hurt me…
Obviously a lie, he only lied.
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Jamie walked in on us, causing us embarrassment in an awkward moment. We left him to rest and another couple of empty days passed.
I was on the phone with Jeana and she asked how Octavius and I were getting along. It caught me off-guard and I, as an idiot, repeated the question aloud. Jamie snatched the phone and told her she’d seen us kissing.
I hate that word so much. But I guess that’s what we were doing.
Anyhow, we ended up fighting over the phone…I didn’t even realize it then, but then I tasted blood. I’d bitten her hand upon the impulse to rip out her throat. I don’t know…perhaps she moved her hand in the way or something. It shocked both of us and made me so sick that if I’d had anything in my stomach, it would’ve been on the floor.
Uncle Reid rushed to her aid and Octavius came down all healed and everything. I didn’t look for light scars, which I’m sure he had. I just noticed the bandages were gone and how pale he was. He was still weak, too. He came over to me, ignoring the other two except to see what was going on. He figured it out.
But I was still sick because as soon as I’d bitten Jamie, I heard someone, I suppose Dracula, snicker and say, “Not bad for only human.”
As I think, I remember how much I’d hated him the very moment I saw him coming down the stairs; how that hatred multiplied when he tried to help me. I’d been right to hate him like that, except that it wasn’t for the right reason.
I continue to go over everything that happened over the summer…
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He was so kind to me, or at least acted that way, even when I yelled for him to leave me alone when he reached me. When I tried to stand, I fell from loss of strength, and he kept me from hitting the floor. He even helped me to the couch, ignoring Jamie and Reid completely…
An extremely good actor, that’s what he is.
I grit my teeth and force my whimpering to stop. I’m trembling horribly now, and I clench my fists as they lay upon the table before me.
Still the tears threaten to continue, and my head hurts evermore as I hold my breath. I can feel my face beginning to grow warmer as the pressure increases upon my lungs and I become dizzier.
I hate him!
I finally feel the welcomed absence of emotion, as I have strangled it unconscious. I’ve recoiled from grief and confusion and returned to the soulless sort of being that I was in when I had thought he had died. But I know that without warning, it can all return abruptly and be worse than before. Still so, I relax, unclenching my hands and jaws and letting go of the hot air within my lungs. With the first breath of air I take in, the dizziness threatens to knock me unconscious…
I don’t care.
I again wipe the stinging salty tears from my face.
He had comforted me as I cried, leaning against him on the couch. I told him what happened, even the voice. We conversed mentally so that Uncle Reid and Jamie wouldn’t hear.
We all sat there so long in silence that I fell asleep. Octavius did, too.
I woke up later when Jeana and John had returned. They didn’t bother to try and wake us, but instead, they let us sleep, something I am now angry about. Why couldn’t they have awakened me?
When I did get up, I found them in the kitchen and Octavius followed me, having woke up when I did. That’s when Jeana and John began to tell me about my real parents. It all started with my grandmother, Ivory Coal. She had become a schizophrenic when she was only fourteen. She had seen something that even the scariest of movies couldn’t portray back then. No one knew what.
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A couple of years later, she met the love of her life, Aaron Johnson. They never got the chance to get married because she was raped and Aaron was murdered during a nighttime picnic. His body was found three months later and all the time before then, she was in a partial coma; she wasn’t sleeping but not responding to anything in any way. Even sedation didn’t work to put her to sleep because something she’d seen had scared her so badly that she resisted it. Sleep deprivation began to kill her and after two months, she lapsed into a deep, deathly coma, barely even alive but at last sleeping. The hospital personnel almost thought she was dead because her life signs were so faint, except when she screamed during seizures while in the coma.
My grandmother woke the day before Aaron’s body was found and screamed till she fell unconscious. She woke again and cried about what had happened, explaining that it had killed Aaron and raped her. She never told whom it was and kept talking about a hallucination.
Jeana gave me a picture my grandmother continually sketched in ink or painted in the art therapy classes. It had two faces blended in one by a swirling motion. Art therapy didn’t help her any.
My mother’s name was Eden Coal, and she was worse a schizophrenic than my grandmother and I. She spoke to herself and claimed to be talking to her father, whom she hated as well as herself for what she was.
She had major dreams and inflicted her own wounds often. But then the problems went away for a while.
Eden met a Russian-American named Vladimir Ivanov when she was sixteen. Two months after her becoming pregnant, he left her and disappeared. I was born on her seventeenth birthday, my grandma’s birthday as well. We were all three born on the twenty-fourth of July, which is rather strange and coincidental.
Then Jeana told me my full real name, Marian Draculess Ivanov. It hit me as a shock. My mother called me her “little Empress” the day I was born—so Jeana said.
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She tried to commit suicide but due to the suicide not, they stopped her. They took me away from her when I was one moth old, and that’s when I was adopted. Then Jeana got pregnant with Jamie despite the fact that she wasn’t able to before.
Jeana handed me an envelope with a letter and an object inside. It was for me, from my mother. I was to read it when I was old enough. Nothing inside the letter was in English, so Jeana and John never read it. I didn’t want to read it. I still haven’t read it. I don’t even know what the object in the envelope it because I’ve never opened the envelope.
I got a few pictures of my mom, my grandma, and there were also pictures of their boyfriends, Aaron and Vladimir.
Oh, I hate that name! And I hate my middle name even more!
Upon my asking, I was told my grandmother was put in a mental hospital called Carl Albert’s, and she died only a couple of years ago…But the weird thing is, she was never buried because her body was misplaced and never found. My mother, also put in Carl Albert’s, was suspected in helping to hide the body.
Weird? I thought so.
Then I realized moments later that if Dracula had been who’d raped my grandmother, then my mother would be half-vampire and me, even less. Right after realizing it, though, I deemed it simply improbable, and dismissed it from my mind.
Then we all packed up to leave and started heading out an hour later.
I didn’t want to go for many reasons, mostly because of Octavius. Octavius’s being there was putting my uncle in danger; his being away from me could put even more than just my uncle in danger.
He noticed my sadness and asked kindly with concern if I was ok. He then, though I did not answer, promised that if I needed anything, I should tell him and he’d come.
I turned fifteen this summer…
The rest of the summer came and went in slow passing. The only thing that made it go faster was thinking about the cherished memories of Octavius and how everything was finally beginning to turn for the better in my horrible life…
And last night, what happened hurt me so badly and utterly confused me.
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I no longer know whether Octavius is everything he seemed to be, or if he is simply a lie, a lie that he made, and that he made of my life. I don’t know if anything is true anymore.
I thought I could trust him…I even thought I kind of loved him. I thought he loved me, as he’d always seemed to.
This morning was nothing but cruelty and revealed truth. He could’ve bitten and killed me with more ease than breathing. Not biting me was simply waiting and wanting to, like not blinking for a few moments and wanting to, but waiting instead…
I was such an idiot!
My head falls to my hands again and I begin to weep violently.
Why does my life have to be like this? Why do I have to be like this? Why does everything have to be lies, lies, lies?
