Chapter III - Death

Teddy had a kind face. It appeared from behind the door once he knocked, and my meek voice bid him enter. I didn’t know what else to do. In a world of devils with silly names, Teddy just seemed like another one to throw on the pile.

“You must be feeling a bit confused,” he said, looking around at the walls I’d been staring at for the best part of an hour, “and a little worried, I daresay. I’ve been telling Sebastian to clean this room up for years.”

“I’m a vampire,” I told him dumbly, not knowing anything else to say but feeling like I had to say something.

“You are,” he nodded. “Can I sit down?”

I looked at him for a moment. He looked normal enough. Middle-aged and slim. His skin was dark and his face clean-shaven. A leather jacket hugged his shoulders, seeming a little small—once he sat down, I picked up on the smell of cigarettes.

A normal person. Except, of course, for the glowing red eyes and the fangs which I saw glints of when he smiled. Compared to the other devils, his eyes seemed to be much brighter.

Of course they were. He was sent ‘hunting’ by the older devil: Sebastian. I wasn’t completely clueless. Hunting meant blood.

Hunting meant murder.

“You’re my half-sire,” I said, narrowing my eyes as he winced.

“The younger ones keep using that phrase. I hate it,” he admitted, “half this and half that. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“You’re… not my half sire,” correcting myself, I looked Teddy up and down again. There was something about him which suggested he belonged in an antique shop. I don’t know where I got that impression from, since I’d never been inside an antique shop before, but it stuck out in my mind.

“As far as anyone needs to know, I’m your sire,” Teddy nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something else for a moment, but then shook his head and smiled. “So, how much did Sebastian tell you? He had Matty with him, I’ll bet?”

“Yeah,” I said, “he was interesting.”

“That he is,” Teddy chuckled. “Well, you know you’re a vampire. That’s a good start.”

“Sunlight burns. Need blood,” I counted off the facts on my fingers, “and I’ve got a half-sire. Sire, I mean. Oh, and everyone here is a vampire.”

“Not strictly true,” Teddy smiled, “some of the people in this house are ghouls. But we are all people, regardless of if we are vampires or ghouls. Just like humans—in terms of morals and identity, at least.”

Vampires. Ghouls. Humans. How many more words did I need fluttering around in my head? Questions whirled around my mind. I couldn’t ask any of them because my tongue was dry and thick in my mouth, but I wanted to.

We sat in silence for a few moments. My eyes moved between the walls, the floor and the ceiling of the prison cell, or room. The ceiling was remarkably clean compared to the rest of the room.

Even vampires struggled to get blood on the ceiling, apparently.

I still wasn’t completely aware of what was going on. I didn’t feel properly present in the world. To be honest, I didn’t know what I meant by that. Things were going in one side of my head and straight out the other.

Maybe I’d wake up and it would be a bad dream. All of it. The woman and the attack. The hell room and the devils. It’d be one hell of a nightmare, that’s for sure.

A fever dream? A coma dream? Something worse?

Actual death?

None of it really mattered. If I was in a dream, then I seemed well and truly stuck in it. There was nothing else to do but try and figure out what was going on within the dream, or messed-up reality, because no matter which it turned out to be, I was curious. Life seemed to have broken down before my eyes. Death was unfolding.

It all seemed needlessly complicated. Why couldn’t my death be a nice, easy vision of meadows and flowers? I’d never been much of a vampire fanatic. I knew the bare minimum. What was wrong with my subconscious?

It was as if it didn’t even know me. Devils and vampires, ghouls and monsters—I wasn’t really into any of that. Blood and guts and gore? I didn’t want any of it. All I wanted was a peaceful and quiet existence.

Unfortunately, ‘peaceful’ and ‘quiet’ seemed to have fled my life—or death.

Knowledge from a yellowed skull

“I feel that you should know what happened,” Teddy said seriously, looking into my eyes, “when you were sired.”

I personally felt that I needed a dictionary to understand what anyone was saying to me. Sire. Childe. Ghoul. Vampire. Working from my knowledge of pop culture and common folklore was only getting me so far. Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I was completely wrong about everything.

It’s not like fiction has to bend to the rules of reality when no one knows that the reality exists.

“Teddy, what does ‘sire’ mean?”

“Oh,” he laughed for a few seconds, shaking his head, “I forget how much new-bloods don’t know. When one vampire transforms a human into a vampire, the first vampire is the sire. The newly-transformed vampire is the childe.”

“But…” Vivid memories of the woman leaning over my neck—the woman attacking me—the woman ripping my flesh open—rippled through my mind. “You didn’t sire me, then. It was her.”

“Sai.” He sighed, nodding. “This is why the younger ones are confused. Technically, I would be your ‘half sire’, with the woman who attacked you. She began siring you, and I finished it so you wouldn’t be in a lot of pain as you died. Half-transformations are one of the worst ways to go.”

“So, you saved me.” Cogs turned slowly in my mind as I replayed the night with this new information. “And you’re my sire, as well as… Sai?”

“Yes, but Sebastian and I decided that we won’t recognise Sai as your sire. It’s up to you if you’d like to,” he added quickly, “that’s your choice, but, from our point of view, she began siring you against our rules, in our territory. Just as you’re free to leave us, you’re free to join her.”

I didn’t feel very free to leave. In fact, I felt rather trapped and unable to leave. Even if they would let me walk straight out the door, I’d be stuck in the human world as a vampire. Was there a vampire world? Or did they just sneak around the human world and pretend to be alive?

Too many questions which I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I didn’t know why. Teddy seemed nice enough—he had a kind face. He was… He wasn’t the sort of person I would expect to be a vampire. A father, maybe. I could imagine him owning a small business and taking his child out on weekends with a loving wife on his arm.

But, instead, he was sat next to me in a room which looked like hell. Blood and guts and gore wasn’t what I associated with his face. That just went to show that faces were misleading, I guessed, which was a shame. Previously, I’d practically relied on faces when considering who to trust and who to run from.

The woman, Sai, proved me wrong once. Teddy proved me wrong twice. That was enough for me. Faces could no longer be relied on.

In fact, I already had a much better replacement. If I saw someone with red eyes, I would not trust them under any circumstances. I didn’t care if I was one of them.

I was also attacked by one of them and transformed by two of them, so it was a quick decision.

“Sebastian didn’t mention your name,” Teddy broke the silence between us, “so I’ll have to ask for it.”

“He told me yours. Teddy.” He must’ve heard the disbelief in my voice, because he began laughing.

“My full name,” he said, recovering from the brief laughing fit, “is Theodore. Teddy is only a nickname.”

“It’s not your full name; it’s only your first name.”

“I don’t use my last name,” Teddy explained curtly, shaking his head. I thought I might’ve touched a nerve. “But that’s besides the point. Would it be okay for me to know yours?”

“Kassidy,” I said, seeing no harm in giving one more devil my name.

“That’s not your full name either,” he said, although he didn’t outright ask for my full name. I narrowed my eyes.

“I don’t use my last name,” parroting his words back to him, I couldn’t stop a small smile forming on my lips.

It disappeared once I remembered where I was, and who I was in the company of. Devils who turned me into one of them. Blood-stained walls.

Hell.

Keeping only the company of the moon, now

Fortunately, Teddy revealed that I wasn’t going to be left in the hellish room forever. He stood up, turned and offered me a hand. I took it, cautiously.

I didn’t want to be polite to devils. I didn’t want to touch them, or be anywhere near them. But I also didn’t want to annoy them and end up even more dead.

Or, worse, left out in the sunlight to burn, slowly.

Not that I knew the exact details around the burning process. It could’ve been spontaneous. One ray of light and boom—gone. There again, I thought that it would be a bit difficult for vampires to hide from humans if they were constantly exploding.

Still, it was a possibility. A possibility which I didn’t want to explore first-hand, so I let Teddy help me up and followed him to the door. From outside, I could hear faint murmuring which was too quiet to form discernible words. Vampires, or ghouls. It had to be one of them. The only thing I was sure of was that there were no humans left in this house.

Teddy opened the door, leading me out onto a half-normal-looking landing. On one hand, it looked exactly like any other terraced house’s first floor. A few rooms. Not much space. The ladder to the attic was down and a faint yellow light glowed up there, but that wasn’t completely out of the ordinary.

What was completely out of the ordinary was the ridiculous number of paintings on the walls. Some of them may have been photographs, but I was so startled by their sheer quantity that I missed the details. My eyes skipped over beautiful women in ball gowns and found sprawling meadows inhabited by fluffy sheep. It was insane.

Once I’d got over the initial shock, my brain connected the dots. Vampires were immortal—or, at least, I thought they were—and immortality opened up a lot of opportunities. Hoarding art appeared to be someone’s hobby.

“Jasper,” Teddy greeted a stout man who was leant on the bannister next to the stairs. His hair was curly and grey, falling to his jawline. “This is Kassidy.”

“Yuh childe,” Jasper nodded and grinned at me, revealing several remarkably shiny gold teeth, “welcome to tha bloodline. Is ’Bastian ‘round?”

For some reason, the man, whose glowing red eyes had not escaped my notice, began a show of looking around, a grin playing on his lips. Teddy chuckled. I edged behind him, suddenly feeling a lot safer in the company of this particular vampire, rather than the one putting on an amateur theatrics show.

“Sebastian enjoys indulging our bloodline in certain… quirks of formality.” Teddy turned to me with a smile, patting me on the shoulder. “We are somewhat forced to fully introduce ourselves to each other, quite frequently, for little apparent reason.”

“When e’s round, anyways,” Jasper said.

“Did he spare you that torment?” Teddy asked me.

“I… think so…” Not entirely sure of what they were referring to, or what was going on in general, I spoke quietly. Jasper laughed—it was a belly laugh which reminded me of Christmas.

Did vampires celebrate Christmas?

Did vampires celebrate… anything?

More and more questions which I didn’t anticipate getting answers to any time soon. It was difficult to find answers for questions which you didn’t ask anyone.

“I’m Jasper, love.” He stretched out a hand, and one look into his crimson eyes had my hand reaching out to shake it tentatively. I had two new rules in life.

Don’t trust anyone with red eyes, and don’t upset a vampire.

“It’s nice to meet you.” The formality trembled on my tongue. Jasper laughed again, and Teddy put his hand on my shoulder again. This time, it didn’t leave.

“Yuh’ll like my childe, Skye n’ Matty,” he told me, nodding and looking at Teddy, “though I think yuh’ll like Skye more. She’s just like yuh—quiet as a mouse.”

After a little more small-talk between the two vampires, Jasper excused himself to go downstairs and check on his ‘childe’. I couldn’t get used to that word, or its meaning. The ‘e’ on the end was pronounced oddly and it sounded exactly the same, no matter if you were talking about one ‘childe’ or twenty.

More than that, it implied that I was forever tethered to some random guy that I’d just met. Plus, of course, that awful woman.

I had a name for her now, but I didn’t really want to use it. In my mind, she was worse than a vampire. She was a monster.

The two words seemed like they were meant to overlap, but the world was shifting all over the place and words often lost their meaning. ‘Child’ had been twisted into ‘childe’. ‘Sire’ appeared, probably stolen from animal breeding or something like that. ‘Vampire’ was ripped from myths and romance novels for teenagers and plastered all over the real world, spreading like an oil spill.

Teddy shook me out of my thoughts. Not literally, although that phrase did somewhat describe how I felt when he nudged me forwards, his arm lingering on my shoulder. The touch felt horridly fatherly.

I was being cruel to him. He’d saved me, apparently. If it wasn’t for him, I would have died a horrible death—apparently. I couldn’t stop that word souring my thoughts. As much as I was trying to be kind to these people, or vampires, all I knew was what they told me. It could all just be a huge prank.

But I knew it wasn’t. Even clinging to that hope felt childish.

“We weren’t planning for a new member,” Teddy said, as we rounded a corner and found a previously hidden door. “It’s alright, though. Charlie and Skye are more than happy to share their room with you. Charlie’s been really excited—she was itching to meet you when I got in.”

“Are they all Jasper’s… children?” I asked, still not liking the word ‘childe’ on my tongue.

“His childe,” Teddy corrected me, predictably, “and no. Skye and Matty were sired by Jasper, but Matty sired Charlie. So, he’s more like her… What did Sebastian say, that funny word Matty invented?”

“Grandsire.” Although Teddy was talking to himself, I knew what he meant instantly. Matty left a rather vivid impression on me.

“Yes! Well, of course, you were there,” he said, striding forwards and knocking on the door in front of us. “Girls? Are you decent?”

“It’s the middle of the night—why the heck wouldn’t we be?”

That phrase took a little deciphering, but I didn’t have any time to work it out. Teddy sighed with a smile and opened the door, releasing a torrent of pink and leather onto me.