Blood of Eden
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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It turns out that I’ve missed the whole school year and a month extra. It’s mid-June, summer again…That means that pretty soon I’ll be seventeen. Where the hell did my life go? Being in a nine-month coma filled with nothing but visions of lies upon lies, upon lies, was a little more than something I could handle. I was nearly dead, and I was dying, and suddenly I snapped out of it and woke up—last week.
I convinced my parents to bring me home and even to get the film in my camera developed. (Cheap camera, not digital.) I’ve got about two or three pictures with Octavius or Octavius and me, and I’ve got one of him, me, and Jamie, all three. My uncle took that one.
I just got my pictures today. I’m now sitting upon my bed, going through twenty-four photographs. When I come to these, I begin to cry and throw the whole stack across the room as hard as I can, where they hit the wall and the light goes out. I had been sitting up in bed, my knees up as I laid on my back. Now I’ve rolled to my side and buried my face in my pillow, turned away from where I’ve just thrown all of them.
Danique and Chase are gone. They moved again. But my dad gave them our phone number so they could call me and talk to me. Chase gave his cell phone number in return. His parents were so freaked out they almost wanted to move to another county to get as far away as possible. But all they could afford was to move one state away, about two hundred miles from Weston, this town.
This room is dark now. It’s nighttime outside. I know I should be asleep, but I couldn’t sleep with all the memories haunting me. I’ve not slept well at any night since coming home. Whenever I fall asleep, I start having nightmares and wake up screaming, or if I’m lucky, just crying.
The light comes on unexpectedly and I jerk my head up and turn quickly to see why. I hadn’t heard my door open or even a knock or anything. My heart almost literally stops, terror gripping my throat. My tears are murdered instantly and I loose my senses to move or scream or even speak. I stand wordlessly, staring at him, my lips trembling.
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His red eyes gently stare into mine for several silent moments, neither of us speaking. Slowly his gaze shifts to one particular photograph that separated from the rest when I’d thrown them across the room in my angry outburst. It’s face-up at his feet. He slowly bends to pick it up, and he studies it quietly as he stands up tall again. In that picture he’d kissed me and Jamie had caught a snap shot of it. It was when we were leaving. She must have taken my camera because she’d expected us to kiss. We hadn’t seen her.
“Here,” he says, holding it out to me. “I believe this is yours.”
I don’t move. If I’d tried to move, I wouldn’t have been able to anyways.
At long last, I somehow force the question from my mouth. “Why? Why—How—do you change from what I knew to what you look like now, Leviath?”
He eyes dance gleefully, mocking me, “Easy when one shape shifts. My father’s gift to me.” He slightly nods politely as he speaks.
All I can concentrate on are his dagger teeth. He has the face of the strange vampire I’d seen in my dreams at the Kilbournes’ house, but his eyes are still so red and hypnotic. “Why the lies?” I ask, trembling. “Why me?” Even my voice quakes violently.
He tires of holding the picture out to me and steps forward and tosses the photo in such a way that the flick of his wrist with the picture thrown like a playing care, it makes it to my bed, right by me, three inches from my left knee and upside-down. But he walks closer, not just stopping at that one step. I tense and he sees it and feels it and stops a foot or so in front of me. My eyes stare wide at him in horror and fear all the while. He smiles cruelly and replies, reaching with his hand to brush my chin with his fingers. “Why do you think?”
As soon as he reaches, and when he nearly touches me, I am driven impulsively to jump to my feet and try to farther myself from him. I accidentally trip over the end of my bed. But as I fall backwards, he easily and gracefully steps and grabs my wrist. Before I can scream or cry out, or even do anything, he’s already pulled me back up to standing, way too close for my comfort, and he backs me up against the wall around the end of my bed with his hand over my mouth, pressing me against the wall.
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When my back is slammed to the wall and I realize what’s happening, I try to scream anyways, trying to pull his hand from over my mouth. The fear within me never seems to stop growing worse and more intense.
I fight against him, but he does the same that Tray had done to me. Liviath slams my head against the wall hard enough to daze me. “Stop fighting!” he hisses as he catches my eyes with his.
I find myself unable to look away and all my control drains. I am now unexpectedly unable to move. I am breathing hard and he releases me, standing back from me, “Just don’t scream. That’s all I was trying to get you to do was not wake them up.”
I try to speak, still penned to the wall by some imaginary force. He suddenly releases his control of my mind and body and I fall to my hands and knees, weeping.
“The answer you inquired, I love decievance. I enjoy the hell out of all the torture you get. It’s deeply satisfying in a way you couldn’t understand as a human.”
“Why…why me?”
He shrugs as I look up at him, and then he holds out his hand for me to take it. His control dips into my mind and he actively, yet passively, forces my left hand to take his. He helps me to stand and then he steps closer to me, and he leans to whisper in my ear.
My skin crawls with him so near, and I loathe it, but I can’t make myself try to get away from him. It seems as if there are chains locking any thought I have, binding me in a way that any thought of mine that may be against his will is restrained. “I have already told you the reasons.”
Leviath stands back, still holding my hand gently, and he tells me, “Come with me. I want to show you my home. It is quite secluded, save for a mile or two away are a few human residences. But they do not know of the Avari. It is ancient and well-hidden, even guarded by a few watchers.”
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I have no power over my body or my actions. As willing as an obedient dog, he leads me through my wall, literally, to the yard, and he stops, again turning to look into my eyes. Before me, giant shadows sprout from behind him…wings. Hideous black dragon-like wings. My heart screams for me to run, but I cannot. I am simply rooted to his will. I could almost swear his teeth are a bit longer.
Leviath temptedly brushes my hair from my neck on my right side as he stares wantonly upon my pale flesh, almost feeling my heartbeat, the blood rushing through my veins. He speaks to me, hesitating to pry his eyes away to look into my eyes and push away the want to bite me, and either kill me or simply infect me. “You are to be seventeen soon?”
I do not answer, not even nodding. I stare blankly with fear.
“Well?”
“Yes,” I stutter after several moments. I am confused as to why he’d care. I don’t exactly want to know either. “I thought you knew that already. You were there on my birthday when we left my uncle’s…”
“Yes…I must have been…”
For some reason, I feel his words are empty beyond the normal emptiness I’ve been feeling from him. The words are given extra falsity, as if he doesn’t really remember it having been my birthday then and as if he doesn’t honestly recall being there, like he’s thinking along the lines of it having been someone else there instead of him. Leviath even seems a little unsettled by it, as if the other person being there angers him and like he doesn’t exactly like that person…
Maybe he didn’t enjoy being the fake Octavius character he had to pretend to be. That must be it.
I am unable to stop myself, “Your words are empty.”
But he smiles and sardonically states, “That’s how my heart claims to be most of the time.”
At this, I feel truth in more than one sense.
He continues, again coming far too close to me, beyond my comfort zone, “But with you, all I feel is desire. Whether my council accepts or not, I think the day will come that I choose to take you, as we discussed last I spoke with you.”
I suddenly step back from him, somehow able, perhaps at the moment he is off-guard, my eyes wide, and my mouth agape. Something stops me from taking another step, which must be Leviath’s reassertion of is control. He simply laughs, “What?”
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He allows me to speak, and my voice trembles terribly, “That wasn’t real. It was a dream while I was—“
“Of course it was real, and I meant every word, too—well, most, anyways.” Then he becomes serious and shakes his head. “We’ve wasted much time. It’s time to go.”
“I’m not going with you,” I say despite his power over my mind. I’m trying to fight it, and he feels my useless efforts. However, he grins for a second and then he starts to become threatening toward me, danger lurking in the bloody shadows of his eyes.
“As you said before, you’ve got no choice…” His tone turns thoughtful, “Though I do find it amusing that you’re trying to fight me. But so that you know, you don’t stand a chance.” He’s silent a moment and then he pulls me close to him forcefully, his hands holding my arms tightly, almost bruising grips, as he roughly kisses me, knowing he can overpower me mentally and physically, illustrating his example by the long, hard, not at all chaste kiss.
At least he releases me and I try to hit him, to which he easily steps aside. My wild, enraged swing ends up making me lose my balance and I fall to the ground as he laughs hard, laughing at me, at how pitifully helpless and weak I am. I start to scream at him, but he suddenly stops laughing angrily and glares at me, and my throat is seemingly sealed off so that I can’t even breathe. At first, in my anger, I still try to scream, but gradually, as the pressure in my head increases, as I grow dizzy and weaker, I turn to fighting not him, but for air instead. Tears well in my eyes and one even falls down my cheek. I look up at him as the point of passing out nears me, and just so easily, his face relaxes, his being satisfies with the result, and he releases me moments later, to which I desperately gasp for air, painfully barely even able to do so much as breathe.
I see a light come on form the house…the living room light. I want to run from Leviath and try to go in my house and the safety illusion it holds, though deep inside of me, I know that, after seeing him go through my wall, even taking me through it with him, it would be useless. Not only that, but he’d most likely kill my family upon seeing him or he’d leave to make me look crazy.
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What I don’t expect, he quickly strides over to me and takes my hand and jerks me to my feet so suddenly and hard, that I nearly fall down again. Leviath pulls me away as I look over my shoulder in fear, watching the lighted house go farther from me. When I turn my head to see what direction he’s pulling me in, I try to scream and stop. I could swear the shadows, like a moving black mist or fog, are alive, and they rise above and around us and come down on us, swallowing me, and him. I think I did scream, but I faint. Of all my fears and nightmares, this evil is my greatest fear: living demon-shadow sorts of evil spirit, whatever could possibly describe it…nothing could ever describe it accurately. But alive? Definitely, though it may have no eyes or hands or ears or face. Alive? Yes, unmistakably so. This is the sort of evil that could sneak up from shadows anywhere, the crevices in floorboards, beneath one’s bed, in one’s closet, beneath the very people themselves as they lie in bed at night, thinking they’re safe. It could rise from the corners in a ceiling or beneath your blankets, and it could envelop you and smother you before you ever realize what’s happening. This liquid darkness, tasteless, odorless, not-solidified, living mass; there is no place to hid from it at night. It is everywhere, never nowhere, but it’s alive, and it seems to wish to feed upon your soul whether you are awake or asleep. This is what drives fear into you. This is Fear and Death and Evil and Darkness and Demons. No true form, but alive? Oh, so very much so. So very alive!
So. Wonder why faint? I faint…probably die from the fear…But no, I dream, seeing a flash of two beautiful Greek columns perhaps twenty feet high, set in stone in a stone wall. A giant silky black curtain, a sort of veil, hangs between them. There is a slight breeze that blows it aside, revealing darkness of the same sort directly behind it; living darkness. I am standing before this gate and the dark shadows seem to beckon to me, calling to me wordlessly. My fear is great and I turn to run but it pulls me, and even as I fall, it comes to swallow me, spilling from the arc behind the veil. Before it reaches me, the vision disappears.
I see a momentary glimpse of Leviath leaning over me, looking with a cheap, weak expression of concern. He is mostly displeased the second time I see a glimpse of him. The third time I come to, I am awake long enough to gasp and sit up. He turns to me and helps me to stand even though he seems a little upset about my falling unconscious. He tells me, “I summoned the earth arc ways to avoid being seen. The ones leading to Eradesh are much the same. I didn’t exactly intend for it to scare you so badly. I didn’t really expect it to…”
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I waver as I stand helplessly, shaking. He still holds me by my slightly bruiesed arms and I, dazed, even accept the support, not refusing in the least, not even capable of comprehending a thought to refuse, let alone even being capable of conceiving a thought to refurse, despite who he really is and what he's done.
He sees how very pale I still am and tells me, "I'll take you home. You look very ill. You came and went about every three hours..." He then adds thoughtfully and suggestively, "Or you...could stay here, with me tonight..."
Still I don't understand his words, incapable of doing so. I stare ahead, shaking weakly, barely breathing, blood rushing in my ears. My gaze shifts to him slowly and I try to sound the word, "Home," to him. Nothing but a barely voiced, muffled noise escapes my throat, but it resembles nothing in words. My hands are girpping his arms so tight it has to be hurting him.
My knees give out, but with his mysterious grace, he is able to keep me from hitting the solid ground beneath our feet. Somehow he understood what I wanted, and he nods his head and replies, "I'll take you home. Besides, there's not much night left anyways. You'll be missed now anyways, and it'll be trickier to return you any later than tonight..."
His words fade slowly as my eyes start to roll back in my head. I slowly fall unconscious, fighting to stay awake. Then, darkness as my body goes limp.
Leviath stands with me in his arms, summoning the arc again so that he can return me.
