Absolution Page 8

  It was her blood. Poison Blood. It had made its way down to my ribcage and set alight my heart, wanting to turn it to ashes as it burned its way to the core. My core. My… soul. Or whatever that light was.

  Ellie.

  The name wasn’t uttered by that strange voice, or by me. It was more like a deep-rooted knowledge that flowed through all of me.

  The light wasn’t my soul, it was Ellie. What I felt for her. Bright and pure and beautiful.

  And if it was my soul then Ellie was it too.

  But the poison was tainting the light. I couldn’t let that happen. As much as I wanted to punish myself, I still couldn’t entertain the idea of not being able to protect Ellie’s light. Writhing in pain and ablaze on the inside, as though I was a human bitten by a vampire, I crawled over to my jeans and T-shirt and put them on.

  Without stealing a single glance at Ellie who was writhing in agony too, I darted out the door, locking it behind me. Remembering there was a small pond in the garden belonging to the house above this basement flat, I rushed over to it and began hurling out all the poison I’d consumed.

  Unlike vampire venom which converts humans into vampires, healing any wounds and broken bones along the way, changing soft tissue and skin into marble-hard surfaces that sparkle in the sunlight, the Slayers’ poison blood literally burns vampires to ashes.

  From the inside out.

  Whereas the burning feeling is merely figurative for humans bitten by us, the poison blood acts as a solvent to my kind.

  Shortly after I’d thrown up all the blood from my system, my head felt light, almost dizzy. Vampires do not feel this kind of dizziness! What was happening to me? Was I going to die anyway?

  I was sure that I’d vomited out all the poison before it could do any serious damage and yet my chest felt a little hollow. Like a hole had been burned into my heart. The kind you’d see if someone extinguished their cigarette on your skin.

  Collapsing onto the grass as my head turned completely weightless, I struggled to keep my eyes open.

  The bright light was back again, glowing in my heart like a lamp nestled in the empty space Ellie’s poison had left behind.

  And there she would remain for eternity.

  A short eternity, because I knew this was the end of me.

  Chapter 15: Shielded

  Obviously, it wasn’t the end of me. I’d just passed out. For a very long time. What woke me was a call from Lydia. My phone was in the pocket of my jeans and its obstinate ring-tone brought me back to consciousness. At first, I had no idea what the sound was. Vampires don’t faint or have any period of unconsciousness, so I felt even more disoriented as I came around and smelled green grass and dry earth.

  Chest throbbing a little, head aching and almost clogged up, I put my hands over my ears to drown out the ringing. But it wouldn’t stop and nor could I block it out. Moaning the way one does when roused from a deep sleep too early, I eventually became more aware of my surroundings. I was in a garden, the one above my basement flat. I also detected the direction from which that annoying ring-ring was coming.

  Reaching for it instinctively, I brought the mobile to my ear and pressed the ‘Answer’ button.

  “Christian?” Lydia sounded irritated. “What took you so long? Why haven’t you been answering my calls in the last three days? Why did I have to start calling you? Why haven’t you been reporting back to me?”

  Her barrage of questions caused all the memories from last night to flood my brain and force out the fog. What made me jump upright in a flash was the realisation that I had been unconscious for three days. Three days? My mind raced.

  “Well?” Lydia pressed, truly fuming. “What happened to you?”

  Ellie. Ellie happened to me. As soon as I thought of her, I knew where she was. My sense of smell and hearing confirmed that feeling. She was in my bed, the conversion complete. Not too long ago though, maybe just a minute or so.

  Oh! That’s why Lydia had called me. She must have seen Ellie was a vampire now - since I’d been too out of it to shield her like I’d planned - and wanted to know why and how that came about.

  Why I hadn’t informed her of this as soon as I bit the future Slayer.

  Feeling for my shield, I realised it was still intact, concealing me and my flat from everyone that I’d wanted it to in the last few weeks. Everything else I’d been screening seemed to be hidden too. Even in unconsciousness, my ink hadn’t run off the lenses it had obscured.

  Before I collapsed however, I hadn’t gotten around to veiling Ellie from her seekers’ awareness or from Lydia’s foresight.

  “Answer me damn it!” Lydia demanded angrily, pulling me from my panicked thoughts.

  “I’m sorry Lydia, I just-” I stopped before the truth slipped out in my anxiousness.

  The voice that had spoken from behind the white light, a light which was now tinted pink due to it mixing with the red of Ellie’s poisonous blood, had given me my alibi. The idea was to tell Lydia that I’d pretty much destroyed Ellie and dumped her in a river. Considering how much damage I’d done, there was no way she would survive.

  I would report that Ellie never reunited with her family - Lydia could send more agents to confirm this because Kim would definitely send out a search party. She probably reported Ellie missing on the very night she ran away from home, or as soon as she spoke to Ellie’s friends and found that none of them had seen her

  In sum, the Slayer was gone.

  I couldn’t very well tell Lydia that I was absolutely certain that Ellie was dead due to the small chance that she might one day discover Ellie is an immortal. I’d be proven a liar. No one could know that I changed Ellie, as that would lead to the question of why, when I so vehemently refused to consider Lydia’s plan to recruit the girl for The System.

  And if I had come around to Lydia’s way of thinking, why wasn’t I bringing Ellie to headquarters?

  But I had no choice but to bring her to headquarters, now that Lydia had seen Ellie the vampire. Perhaps she had a vision of Ellie joining The System, which would mean I had changed her and brought her to London. Was that why she hadn’t sent anyone to check up on me while I was in a comatose state?

  “You just what?” Lydia’s frustrated question snapped me out of my reverie. “What are you playing at, ignoring my calls and not reporting back to me?”

  “I’m sorry, I was-”

  “What?” she cut me off. “You were what Christian? Stop stalling - it’s not like you. How close are you to killing the Slayer?”

  “Huh?” My confusion frenzied my mind. Our conversation so far spun in my head. Thankfully, our brains are just as quick as our bodies and so I was able to recuperate the next second. “How close?” I said calmly as my mind concluded that Lydia didn’t know anything. Anything other than the fact that I’d not spoken to her for three days.

  I couldn’t fathom how it was that she didn’t know anything.

  “Yes! How close?” she snapped. “How much longer Christian?” she complained. “Mac is not very happy with you. Nor with me. With every failed attempt of yours, he is getting evermore frustrated. And suspicious. Of me,” she seethed. “He thinks I’ve convinced you to change her and that we have our own agenda. Damn it, Christian, I think he might even suspect that you and I are planning to-”

  “So, you weren’t planning to turn Ellie into your ultimate weapon?”

  “Ellie?”

  “That’s her name.”

  “I know that-”

  “And she’s gone.”

  “Since when do you call her-” Lydia came to halt as she processed what I’d said. “Gone?” she whispered.

  “Yes. The Slayer is no more.” It wasn’t a lie… not entirely. The human Slayer didn’t exist anymore. As a vampire, was she really a Slayer? She hadn’t gotten her powers yet. Her veins no longer ran with poison blood and without that, she was simply a stronger version of a vampire.

  And completely oblivious to it too.

  I told
Lydia the lie provided by the light and she believed it, clear that she had seen no vision of Ellie as a vampire. How was this possible? I hadn’t done anything to hide Ellie from her foresight before I fainted, and I wasn’t doing anything to hide her now, but I sensed that she was hidden. Hidden in the same way that I was.

  To the same people that I was…

  Impossible, I thought as my mind fleetingly wondered whether Ellie was somehow sharing my shield. Did I split it with her when I created her? That couldn’t be. I’d never heard of inheriting the abilities of our creators. If that were the case, I would have some of Lydia’s psychic abilities, which I was sure I didn’t.

  And it didn’t feel like my shield had been halved either. It was still the same… only it wasn’t just mine anymore. That’s right, I realised. It belonged to both me and Ellie now. When I used it on myself, it did the same to Ellie. She’d be protected from everything I was protected from - including Lydia’s foresight.

  Ellie and I, we were one now. Sort of.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” Lydia asked, dragging me back to our phone conversation.

  “I got some of her blood on my jacket so I threw it in the water with her. My phone was in its pocket,” I explained smoothly. “It took me a little longer to get a new phone with the same number as I was so busy keeping an eye on the Slayer’s family and whether her body was found.”

  Lydia bought this story too, assuring me she would relay the message to Mac as soon as she hung up. I was relieved that we were having this conversation over the phone. Face-to-face, would I be as convincing? She had known me for a hundred years, had the century equipped her with the ability to detect whether I was being dishonest?

  It didn’t matter now. Now, I had to get back to Ellie - she was moving about in my bed. From the shuffling sound of her skin against the bed-sheets, I could tell she was still lying down.

  “So when are you coming home?” Lydia asked, her tone less strained. She would have been celebrating the end of the Slayer had she not wanted Ellie for herself.

  “Soon,” I replied. “I just need this day to… finish up here.”

  “I understand. I’ll see you when you’re back in London.”

  “If you’re not off chasing some special vampire.”

  She sighed. “It won’t be the same anymore.”

  “Why not?” I laughed.

  “We just killed the most powerful vampire we could have ever had before she even became one.” The disappointment was evident in her tone.

  “You can’t know that. I still think Amber’s the one that deserves that title. Ell-” I stopped before I used her name. “For all we know, the Slayer would have simply been a little stronger and faster than the average vampire. We had no reason to believe that she’d have any magical powers.”

  “But she was the Slayer, Christian,” Lydia stressed, exasperated. “She would have been special.”

  Chapter 16: Education

  By the time I returned to her, Ellie was sitting up on the bed, swallowing painfully. I recalled the moment I realised that the painful burning I’d endured for three days while I changed from mortal to immortal had compressed itself into a fiery ball and settled in my throat.

  It wasn’t exactly pleasant.

  At the same time, my breath caught when I saw just how beautiful she was. She was very pretty to start with, but after the conversion, she was inexpressibly wonderful to the eyes.

  I’d never seen anything like it.

  “So, it is done,” I said quietly to alter my train of thought. I should not be thinking of her this way, not after what I’d done to her.

  She was naked and covering herself with the bed-sheets, so I gathered her clothes and tossed them on the bed. I’d done that in under a second and it didn’t startle her - we see everything just as clearly as if we were moving in slow-motion. Ellie dressed just as quickly, without noticing it.

  “What’s done?” She gasped at her new voice. “What’s happened to me?”

  “You have become a vampire, Ellie,” I told her simply.

  She froze. I let her take it in. Obviously, she believed me. I went and picked her up in my arms, took her to the sofa and replaced the bloodstained sheets. Sitting on the edge of the bed myself, I began to initiate her into my world.

  I started with my own story, repeating most of what I’d told her friend Selma, and just like her friend, Ellie found it fascinating and came to sit next to me. She liked the idea of being stronger, faster, smarter, sparkling in the sunlight, and apparently it’s “genius” that we can’t enter anyone’s home or business without invitation.

  “Otherwise, what’s to stop us from robbing an entire street in one night and leaving no trace behind?”

  “Exactly,” I agreed, grinning.

  In my head, I was thinking that without this little glitch, what’s to stop us from massacring an entire street in one night and leaving no trace behind? No doubt, it would be a huge risk to take. Even if we left no fingerprints or evidence, even if we burnt down the street so the bodies would harbour no signs of being fed on by vampires, the humans would investigate and there’s always a possibility that they might just suspect something.

  As I expected, Ellie hated the idea of having red eyes.

  “They turn oil-black if you don’t feed for a while,” I assured her. She winced, not keen on such dark eyes either. “And you can always wear contacts.”

  “I don’t like wearing contacts,” she mumbled and I chuckled.

  The next step was to go over the rules. “One: you cannot tell another human you’re a vampire. Not a soul. Keep our existence a secret. You cannot go back to your old life because they will realise something is different.”

  “A lot’s different,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Besides, I have no intentions of going back home. Ever.” The stubborn edge to her voice when she spoke of home still made me smile.

  “Two: you cannot do anything that will make the humans suspicious of you or our kind. Most nomads just keep to themselves and only let humans see them when absolutely necessary - like when they have to feed.”

  As I uttered the word feed, I swear I saw her… cringe. She knew I was referring to feeding on human blood and I’d expected her ruby red eyes to glint with thirst and hunger and need, to see her reach for her throat which burns more ferociously when contemplating the idea of drinking blood.

  But I saw none of those things.

  When she winced earlier, was that in relation to my mention of feeding rather than eye-colour as I’d assumed?

  “I’m sorry, Ellie, you must be thirsty. Would you like me to go and… hunt for you?”

  The expression on her face seemed to be one of utter disgust and… horror. She didn’t like the idea of me getting her first meal for her. Didn’t like the idea of a first meal.

  That’s when I remembered what Mac had said - Slayers would never take a human life, even after they turned into vampires. Born to protect humans, to disapprove of blood-drinkers and eliminate them, as a vampire, Ellie couldn’t even consider the possibility of hurting a mortal.

  Not even to satiate the painful thirst that flamed in her throat

  So, would Ellie never eat? How would she survive?

  “No… you don’t need to err… hunt for me, thanks. I’d like to… um, know all the rules first.”

  “Well, that’s it really,” I shrugged. “The major rule is to keep the secret and it encompasses a number of things,” I continued sternly. “Since our minds can think fast and about several things at once, it’s easy for us to determine whether our potential actions will in any way threaten to reveal the secret. One of the main risks to avoid is: creating another vampire and not teaching the newborn all the rules and regulations, failing to keep an eye on them.”

  “But you’ve taken that risk-”

  “The other thing is,” I cut her off before she could ask why I turned her, “you can’t not feed.”

  “I don’t understand,” she murmured.
“You said we’re indestructible, immortal.”

  “We are immortal Ellie, but it doesn’t mean we can go without sustenance. Or not get ourselves killed. If you don’t feed for a significant length of time, you will go mad. Like a drug addict getting withdrawal symptoms. You’ll be so thirsty that you’ll grab and eat the first human you see, not caring where you are or who is watching. It’s suicide.”

  “I suppose the secret would be out,” she said under her breath. “But we’re so fast, we’d be out of their reach before they even made sense of what they saw. It wouldn’t get us killed.”

  “Oh yes it will,” I sighed.

  From the sound of her voice, the determination in the set of her mouth, it was evident that she was planning to refrain from feeding. And she really shouldn’t contemplate such a thought.

  I had to make her see sense.

  “We follow these rules religiously,” I told her sternly, “and it’s out of fear that should we rebel, we will incur such punishment that we’ll wish we weren’t born.”

  “I see,” she nodded. “We have a vampire king and queen, don’t we?”

  I laughed. “No, we have no monarchy but a… governing body. They refer to themselves as The System.”

  “Ooh, I’m scarred,” Ellie joked but listened intently as I explained the role the vampire government plays in preserving our way of life, protecting our secret. “You seem to know a lot about these guys,” she murmured and I realised I’d shared more insider knowledge with her than I should have. Particularly the gory details relating to how The System punished the law-breakers. “Did you ever get in trouble with them or something?” she asked curiously. I wanted to believe that there was some concern there too.

  Concern for me.

  I sighed as I realised that there wasn’t.

  I frowned as I admitted to myself that she didn’t feel about me the way I felt about her. What had passed between us last night didn’t mean the same thing to her. Didn’t mean as much.