Poison Blood, Book 2: Absolution Read online

  Chapter 6: Background

  No, I didn’t want to fail him. Again. So I came to the town of Reading with a plan that I thought was pretty much guaranteed to work.

  I just had to make sure I didn’t let Ellie walk away from me like at the end of our first encounter.

  Luckily, I still held captive the other mortal I’d involved in my scheme.

  “So you see Selma,” I said to Ellie’s classmate a few minutes after my initial meeting with the future Slayer, “I won’t need your services anymore.” Swallowing my disappointment and astonishment over letting pass a great opportunity to kill Ellie, I returned to my basement flat at the other end of town.

  Technically, it wasn’t my flat. I was just borrowing it. The owner, a 35-year-old recently divorced father of one, wouldn’t mind.

  Considering he was dead.

  Selma was sobbing, her eyes sore, red like blood. Mmm, blood. I would taste hers soon. If she tasted half as good as her parents then the wait was definitely worth it. The girl had turned out to be the best accomplice I ever had.

  And she didn’t even know it.

  “What do you mean?” the teen asked. She was shaking with her sobs, sitting all crawled up in a ball on the floor by the bed. The sound of her cries irritated me now – at first, it had almost made me feel uncomfortable and nervous, almost understanding her pain. Almost, but not quite. There’s only so long a compassionate person can bear the sound of a teenager’s wails and cries.

  And I was a soulless vampire.

  I crouched down before her. “I mean, you’ve given me all you ever can.” Well, not all, not yet. She would be giving me my meal tonight, and she knew it.

  Her shaking stopped, tears ceased to flow for a few moments. She wasn’t crying anymore. Fear doesn’t make you cry. It freezes you. Makes your blood run cold. Ugh, cold blood. Not good at all.

  “You’re going – going to – to…” she hiccoughed.

  “Yes, I’m going to…” I half-smiled and she cowered back. Already, the venom in my mouth was washing over my glassy tongue. Anticipating. It fanned the burning in my throat. It burned constantly and for one thing only.

  Blood.

  “Just like – just like – like you did – you did–”

  “Yes,” I agreed, my voice smooth, silky, “just like I did your parents.”

  The girl started crying again. Thinking of her parents’ death. Or contemplating her fate, which would be similar to theirs.

  “Think of it this way, Selma,” I soothed, running my fingers through my short black hair, “at least you know what to expect.” I’d killed her father and mother right before her eyes, in this very room.

  “Why are you doing this to me? Why did you… kill my parents?”

  “You still can’t say it, after all the quality time we’ve spent together.” I shook my head in mock disapproval. “I fed on your parents, drank their blood. Your father was the starter and main course, and your lovely mother was dessert.”

  “Stop it!” she urged, covering her ears with her hands, squeezing shut her small brown eyes. Even now, she couldn’t accept what I was.

  “I guess you could say you’re the coffee at the end of the meal…” Coffee was a great analogy, especially since the girl had coffee brown hair and a mild tan to her smooth skin.

  “Stop it, please. And please don’t kill me,” she begged, her words coming out in a rush. “What have we ever done to you?”

  “You’ve done nothing to me, Selma,” I told her, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her.

  “So, this is about Ellie?”

  Finally, the girl caught on. I’d interrogated her about her classmate, hoping to glean as much information as possible about the girl. “Of course it’s about Ellie.”

  “So why’m I here? Why’s her family…?” The girl couldn’t comprehend why it wasn’t Ellie’s family that was no more.

  “Don’t worry Selma, what I have planned for Ellie is far worse,” I assured her. “Unlike you, Ellie is my enemy. The only enemy I have. Your parents did me a great service, so I showed my appreciation in the way I eliminated them.” They’d called the school yesterday to relay the message about flying to the US with Selma and that she wouldn’t be back before her final exams. “You helped me even more with what you told me about Ellie and your friends, so I’ll go easy on you too.”

  “You snapped my dad’s back before–” she came to a stop, unable to describe the scene that took place last night.

  So I did the honours. “Sucking him dry.”

  “You held mum captive in your arms and…”

  “Sunk my teeth into her neck, watching her reflection in the mirror.”

  You never really get to see the facial expressions on your meals while you’re feeding on them, when your teeth and face are buried so deep in their skin, their veins. But when I laid eyes on that portrait of Ellie, I wanted to know what she’d look like while I ate her.

  When I discovered she was a Poison Blood, I no longer harboured any intentions of drinking her. I’m not suicidal. But I still wanted to know how the victims felt…

  Giving into my curiosity, I made a hasty decision when I no longer needed Selma’s parents. After finishing off the father and dumping his drained body by the front door, I took the mother in my arms and went to stand in front of the wardrobe’s full-length mirror. Holding her close to me with my arm across her stomach, her back against my chest, I used my other hand to bend her head a little so I could bite her neck.

  The scorching pain of my venom as it hit her bloodstream was clear in her eyes. As were the useless pleas in them for the poison to stop setting fire to her insides. And then, as I began to drink, drag the sweet, warm blood into my mouth and down my burning throat, losing myself to the instinct of feeding, the corner of my eyes noticed how her mouth parted slightly, as though gasping in pleasure. Her eyes rolled back into their sockets before she closed them, content.

  The expression on her face was one of… something close to ecstasy.

  When others of my kind told me that humans enjoyed being fed on, I never believed it. But it seemed they weren’t exaggerating. I myself had not been fed on. I’d only been bitten. Once. Enough to inject the right dose of venom into my system to create a vampire. More than enough to wish I’d never been born.

  Enduring that kind of burning for three whole days… I still shudder at the thought. The pain was just too much. So much that I knew I never wanted to do that to another human being.

  Never would I sire a vampire.

  “What do you have against Ellie?” Selma’s question pulled me away from where my thoughts were heading. “What’s she ever done to you? Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Still can’t say the word, huh?” I chuckled.

  “No, I can,” the girl challenged. “You’re a monster, a demon. A – a – a vampire.”

  “Correct.”

  “But who are you?” She wanted to know my personal identity. “Why’s Ellie your enemy?”

  “If I told you that, Selma, I’d have to kill you.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  “That’s right. I am, aren’t I?” I laughed a little. Her last minute strength and curiosity was refreshingly different to her annoying pleas and cries. I decided to tell her the story.

  From the beginning.

  “My name is Christian Dorset. I was born in London. I was a simple young man, nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, some said perhaps I was too ordinary for I barely stood out from the crowd. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know I was doing it – if I was actually doing anything – but I seemed to blend into the background so easily. People never seemed to notice me turn up or leave, notice my presence at all. My father used to joke that I’d make a great spy.

  “The joke became reality very suddenly, when I turned 20.

  “The year was 1911, the month February, when I was approached by an official-looking man who
supposedly heard about my uncanny abilities of going unnoticed for extended lengths of time. Before I could query whether he was playing a trick on me, I found myself privy to some of the most intriguing intelligence I could imagine. ‘You know too much now,’ the mysterious man said ominously, ‘so if you refuse to join us, it will be the last thing you do.’

  “Meaning, join them or die. I decided to join them.

  “When I learned the true identity of this group, that they were in fact a terrorist organisation, it was too late. And I was having far too much fun. Breaking and entering. Stealing top secret information. The odd assassination. Of a bad guy,” I emphasised when Selma’s eyes widened in horror. Clearly, she assumed I became a killer after I changed into a vampire. “I thought I was helping the government. Killing the bad guys. Enemies of the state. Turned out, I was the enemy of the state. Well, my employers were anyway.

  “I was one of them, and so I was a terrorist too.”

  “Did the terrorists make you what you are?” Selma asked curiously.

  I shook my head and she frowned. By then, she had stopped crying and was listening intently to my story. Obviously, she wasn’t enjoying it, disapproved of how fascinated she was by it.

  “It wasn’t just this underground terrorist organisation that had heard of my bizarre talent,” I continued thoughtfully. “News of my successes had reached the very organisation that my bosses wanted to bring down. I’d also made the mistake of voicing my desire to leave the group. If I’d just upped and left without telling them, I’m certain I would’ve very easily eluded them for the rest of my life. By then, my strange gift had started feeling… tangible. Something I could control and manipulate.

  “Perhaps because I had to consciously use it.

  “Fearing that I’d walk out on them, get caught by the government and rat them out, my employers arranged for my assassination. As soon as I heard this, I ran. Running from two powerful organisations, I had nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.”

  “So you went to the… vampires for help?” Selma enquired, gulping hard.

  I shook my head again. “It was the other way around. The vampires came to me. Well, it was just one. My creator.”