Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Crystal ❯ Chapter 19

Crystal, Chapter 19:

 

 

“This isn't you.” I felt sweaty, sick. In my mind's eye, I kept seeing Johnny drinking my blood, draining me of life and leaving me on the floor of Rose Brown's living room as my vision darkened and finally faded away. “This isn't you.” I whispered because my throat was raw.

 

I didn't remember being carried to bed, I didn't remember first Paul, then later Michael and Uncle Robert, nursing me secretly on their blood when Rose Brown was not around to see. I only remembered the ache in my heart where Johnny used to be, and the overwhelming sense of loss at his absence. I didn't even mind that he drank so much of my blood—everything I am belongs to him. I minded that he left me.

 

Everything Johnny had done was so out of character for him. I was missing something, I had to be. “Johnny.” My breath caught as I said his name.

 

“Hush, drink.” Paul cradled my head and shoulders and offered me his wrist. We were past the open palm offering now. I drank because I needed to, but for once I didn't want it. What was the point if Johnny was not going to be with me? I turned my face to the wall and pretended to sleep.

 

I got better. I slept, on and off, a day and a night and part of the next day. In all that time, Johnny hadn't come back. Neither had his brother.

 

“They're not like us,” Michael said when it was his turn to feed me. “You can't expect them to tell us everything. But I think they've gone.”

 

I knew they were gone. The hole in my heart told me so. Had Lachlan taken Johnny to find others of his kind? If that was so, then maybe Johnny had decided he didn't need me anymore.

 

When I felt up to it, I wandered down to the loch with my charcoals and drew. I didn't welcome company, and for the most part everybody left me alone. I drew pictures of the loch in sunlight, obscured by clouds, in thick mist, and in darkness. I filled an entire sketchpad with scenes of the loch, and then I began adding thing my eyes did not see. I drew Johnny rising up from the water, and when I looked closely I realized that the background had subtly changed. It wasn't this loch anymore.

 

I was better, but not well. I sat on the bank wrapped in a blanket although for once it was sunny, and scribbled in my pad. When Paul's shadow fell over me, I glanced up in annoyance.

 

“You look tired.” He sat down beside me and offered his wrist.

 

I drank because it made me feel marginally better. “Ow,” he said once, theatrically, and I pulled back in dismay. My mouth had been scraping at the small cut he'd made on his wrist.

 

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn't mean to hurt you. Guess I was more hungry than I thought.”

 

He smiled, and patted his wrist with a small tissue he'd brought for the purpose. There was hardly any blood. “I was joking. You didn't hurt me.”

 

But I had. My tongue probed the inside of my mouth. I had bitten down so hard that one of my teeth felt loose. “I'm sorry,” I mumbled again, looking away. “I feel bad that all you guys have to take care of me.”

 

Paul put an arm companionably around my shoulders. “Of course we'll take care of you,” he said. “You belong to us.”

 

I stared at him. Did that mean he finally accepted me as a—a vampire? Even though I wasn't exactly one yet, and might never be, now that Johnny had gone away.

 

“We do love you, you know,” he said quietly, despite the red that seeped into his cheeks. “We won't let anything happen to you.”

 

I didn't know what to say to that, except, “Mine.” I whispered. Maybe it would be enough, and I could go on with this half-life. I loved them all too, but as family, every bit as much as I loved my mom and Kenny and my little brothers.

 

“What are you drawing?” Paul brought my attention back to my sketchpad. I showed him the picture of Johnny and the mysterious loch.

 

He studied it for a long time. “You really miss him, don't you?”

 

I nodded, taking my pad back. It was a true drawing, a real place, I knew as sure as I knew Paul was sitting right next to me. Paul and the others didn't know about my drawings or my visions, and I was suddenly thankful for that. To Paul, my drawing was just wishful thinking.

 

He sighed. “They will come back eventually. This is Lachlan's place. When they are through doing whatever it is they went away to do, he will come back here. He's not finished with us yet.”

 

I thought so too. I hoped so. “How well do you know Lachlan?” I asked, trying to get a feel for what kind of person he was. My initial impression had been that he was arrogant, although Johnny didn't seem to think so. Or maybe he was only arrogant to his human relatives.

 

“Not well. I was introduced to him first when I was a child, and we made the blood offering. My father left us soon after that.” Paul's voice held a trace of wistfulness. “He must have suspected my mother of doing something of the sort, but she wouldn't tell him. The blood-drinker belonged to her branch of the family, and even though father had potent family blood, our blood-drinker wasn't his. After that first introduction, we rarely saw our blood-drinker. Mother did, occasionally. When Father telephoned to tell her about your family's blood, and that there were young ones with enough potential to be turned, she awakened Lachlan and we met with him again. He sent us to the States.” Paul glanced at me apologetically. “Michael had recently married, so it fell to me to court the young daughter of the American branch with her potent bloodline. I wasn't happy about it—I knew you were much younger than me—but you don't say no to a blood-drinker.” He smiled. “Who would have thought we'd hit it off? If things had been different, I wouldn't have minded marrying you.”

 

I ignored Paul's remark because it embarrassed me. “Why did Lachlan want my brothers to be turned?” He hadn't known about my bloodline, still didn't, unless Johnny had told him. Judging from what Johnny had done to me, I doubted he'd told his brother what I was.

 

“Not necessarily turned, not necessarily both. But my brother's wife is pregnant—if she has a daughter, then perhaps one of your young brothers would marry her someday and—“

 

“And strengthen the bloodline,” I finished. “Why? Why is that so important? It's not as if you have much in common with your vampire anyway. What does it matter if the bloodline dies out?”

 

Paul gave me a haunted look. “Then there will be nobody left who knows him,” he said softly. “Nobody who cares.”

 

I understood now. Lachlan was lonely, too. For all his arrogance, he needed his human family every bit as much as Johnny did, as I did. He had a funny way of showing it, though I suppose Johnny's way was not much better. Johnny had all of us now, but at the beginning, when he first met my mother, then Kenny, and later the Brown brothers, he had attacked them. Never me, until now. He had never, ever attacked me or used me as food.

 

“Did you ever try talking to him?” I asked.

 

“Who? Lachlan? I didn't even know that was his name,” Paul said. “No, we didn't think it was proper. Your Johnny is different in that way. He talked to me as if he weren't a blood-drinker and I was the family servant.”

 

“That's because you're not,” I said sharply. I stood up. The sun was giving me a headache. “I want to lie down,” I told him.

 

Paul accompanied me up the hill and I slept through dinner, not waking again until it was full dark. Mrs. Brown had saved me a plate, and I ate listlessly, because I needed to eat. She smiled hesitantly at me; she had been shocked, too, by Johnny's brutal attack. All she had to compare it with was her ritual blood offerings to her resident vampire. Either she didn't realize how he fed on his own, or she turned a blind eye to it, sort of like my Grandpa Brown. I didn't fault Johnny for feeding on me—it was a statement, that much was clear, even if I didn't know what it meant—I almost wished he had taken it farther, drained me of all my blood so I would have had no choice except to go under the water or die.

 

I met Clara, Michael's wife, on a visit to the village. She was very sweet, very pregnant, and totally ignorant of anything vampire-connected. I raised my eyebrows at Michael, who shrugged. The baby would have our blood. That must have been how it was in the old days. Except for the keepers, who knew who their blood-drinkers were and how to summon them, the rest of the village had traces of our blood, no more, and knew nothing about their otherworldly heritage.

 

A week had gone by, and I was beginning to believe Johnny wasn't coming back. I still drew, sometimes at the loch, sometimes in the village itself. It kept me calm. My craving for blood grew, even as I told myself I didn't want it or need it. But my body betrayed me, and if it weren't for Paul, Michael and Uncle Robert, I might have tried to take blood from someone in the village. That would have been a disaster. As it was, they fed me like I was a baby.

 

My pictures grew clearer. Johnny was moving, spending his days in different lakes. One of my drawings showed the coast, with ragged cliffs that dropped down to waves that slammed the shore. Was that where Johnny was now? I wished I knew for sure. He was far to the east, that much I knew. For his sake, I hoped he found what he was looking for. I saw no sign of Lachlan.

 

That night, Lachlan reappeared, alone, next to the loch where I had set up my easel. I still preferred my little sketchpad, but the night called for a more formal picture. The boys had taken to giving me my space, keeping an occasional eye on me from the top of the bluff to make sure I didn't suddenly decide to jump into the lake or something. I wasn't that far gone.

 

Now I understood why I hadn't seen Lachlan in my visions. “Where's Johnny?” I asked. My voice was steady, which surprised me.

 

“Away,” the vampire replied, coming to stand beside me. The loch I drew was not the one in front of me. “I wanted to speak to you. You seem to have recovered somewhat.” He meant from Johnny's feeding. I smiled bleakly and went back to my drawing. “Eoin made it quite clear that you belong to him and him alone. A shame, that. I had intended you to be Paul's.”

 

Instead, Paul was mine. I didn't say it out loud. I continued drawing.

 

“He means to bring you to our life.”

 

“Is he coming back?” Hope flared in my chest.

 

“You realize it may not work.”

 

I stopped drawing and turned to face the vampire. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

 

“I want you to consider the matter carefully,” Lachlan said. “Walk with me.”

 

I left my drawing things behind and started after him down the thin strip of beach before the path turned to scrub or stone.

 

“If he succeeds in changing you, you will have to leave your family behind. You will have to drink blood, human blood, Crystal. Are you prepared for that?”

 

Obviously, Lachlan didn't know I already drank human blood, and quite steadily ever since Johnny had gone away. I grinned. “I'm okay with that,” I answered.

 

“You love him.” It wasn't a question. “I understand that. Will you love him through the centuries you will be alive after you have changed? You don't have to do this, you are young. Paul cares for you as well. Together, you and Paul could live a completely human life, have children together, children who carry our blood. Won't you at least consider it? I have spoken to Eoin, and he will leave the choice up to you. He knows the risks involved with changing you, and he prefers you to live, even if it will only be for one human lifetime.”

 

“Johnny didn't say that,” I stated. “He knows there is no choice for me.” I turned around. We had run out of beach. “Where did you and Johnny go?”

 

Lachlan let out a small, resigned chuckle. “I took him to the places I remembered where some of us used to live,” he said. “Eoin was searching for one of us who could tell him how to make the change.”

 

I glanced up. Lachlan didn't know? “Did he find someone?” I asked.

 

“He's still searching.” We had come back to my easel. Lachlan stared at the drawing. “There,” he said, wonder in his voice. “He was there the last time I saw him. How did you know?”

 

I smiled, and started gathering up my things. “I didn't, really. I just missed him.”

 

Lachlan gave me an appraising look. “I won't say anything more, then,” he said. “Don't tell the others I have returned yet. I want to hunt first.”

 

“In the village?” I asked quickly. Would you let Johnny hunt in your village,too? If he didn't kill anyone? Just a little taste now and then?” I almost wanted to ask him to take me along. I felt a surge of hunger.

 

Lachlan frowned. “You shouldn't be asking those things,” he said, but he looked at me strangely. “Eoin is my brother. I would never deny him anything.”

 

Good to know. I watched Lachlan disappear back the way we came, through the thick scrub where there was no path. I made my way back to the house, which was dark and silent. Everyone except Paul was asleep. Paul waited for me in the darkened living room, with just the light from the dying fireplace to illuminate his worried face. “Are you all right?” he asked.

 

“I'm fine,” I said. “I couldn't sleep. I am a little hungry, though.”

 

He smiled, and offered me his wrist. I wondered what Lachlan would have thought of that.