Twisted

He appeared in my bedroom again that same day, this time at evening instead of midnight. I was grateful for that – being stalked for being a potential wife was one thing, but having my sleep interrupted because of it was a completely different story.

I was sitting on my bed when he appeared, clutching the two letters in my hands, wondering about the “fairy tales” – or if they were actually real. I nearly shrieked when I saw him – one minute I was alone, the next he was part of the shadows in my room. He literally bled out from the shadows, as far as I could tell.

“H-how did you do that?” I stuttered, slightly freaked out. He was so creepy. And all he did at first was give me a wicked grin, full of shadowy desires that had been hidden under a clear mask every other time they’d met.

While he walked towards me, I quickly stuffed the envelopes beneath my blankets and then focused my attention to his answer. “Let’s just say,” he said slowly, rolling the words over his tongue, “that some Vampires have the ability to travel via shadows. It’s not comfortable but it gets you basically everywhere during night time. And it sounds a whole lot better than turning into a bat, like some humans think we do.”

I just stared at him. Travel by shadows? How could that even be possible? Then again, how could any of this be possible?

He looked at me with an intense turmoil in his eyes that robbed me of breath and made me itchy and uncomfortable at the same time. He eased his body onto my bed beside me and that was when I remembered – he was a Vampire. He could be there to drink my blood and leave me dead. My heartbeat quickened with fear. I inched away slowly.

“Hey,” he said, frowning. “What’s the matter? Are you…scared?” Like a spring that had suddenly uncoiled, he leapt from the bed and stood straight up with a back stiff like a ruler. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m scaring you. I can leave if you like.”

I drew my legs up to my chest and balled my hands into fists. “How can you not know what is scaring me? You’re a Vampire. Who knows what you could do to me.” My voice was but a tiny whisper near the end of the sentence.

“You think I’m going to hurt you.” His reply was a statement, though it rose slightly near the end in hope of a denial. I nodded. He sighed and shook his head as he lowered himself back down onto the bed, this time at the opposite end and nowhere near me. “For one: You’re not a human, so your blood doesn’t appeal to me. The only time a Vampire would drink another person’s blood, who wasn’t a human, would be during the Bonding Ritual. Even when we do drink blood, we don’t kill the person; in fact, the human feels pleasure from it because something like a drug is released in our saliva. We basically have a one night stand with the human and the only side effect they may experience is slight dizziness in the morning. I’m not going to hurt you.” His voice was sharp and only thinly veiled the slightest bit of hurt.

I swallowed back any fear that remained, telling myself to get a grip. Apparently I was so important to these people, so he most likely wouldn’t hurt me, I reassured myself. But what if…? My mind insisted on adding, drawing up scary possibilities of situations in which one certain Vampire loses control of himself.

“You’re still scared.” It wasn’t a question; he could see it in my face, hear it in my heartbeat. He rubbed a hand over his eyes before sighing. “Fine,” he said, irritated now. “If you’re going to be a baby, I’m going to leave.” His words stung but I knew he was right. I was being a baby, scared of a – well, a Vampire. Saying that in my head didn’t sound too irrational to be afraid but my feelings told me otherwise.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, but the apology felt sticky in my throat.

“Just forget it,” he muttered and bled back into the shadows, disappearing as easily and quickly as he appeared. I felt guilty after he left – I shouldn’t have been so cowardly.

Silently, I stepped out of the room, after pulling on my jeans and a pair of boots. Before I walked out of the house, I quietly stole a sharp knife from the kitchen and slipped it in my boot, avoiding the lounge room where Brian and Alex were. And then, in the light of a just-rising moon, I followed the footpath right beside the road outside my house, ducking my head down. I was heading towards the river.

I didn’t know why I needed to go there or why I felt I had to be armed; it was just this awful sense inside me of something else out there, something big and scary, something that made me want to hide under the covers of my bed. Which made my going out after dark somewhat confusing.

I reached the river, where the trees were tall and intimidating, the sound of the water loud in my ears. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.

And it was there that a man stepped out from behind one of the most gnarled trees, if you could call him a man. He was made of blackness and evil, pain and agony, confusion and dark magic. His figure swirled, larger than a man ought to be, and his eyes glowed bright purple, bleeding into the rest of what seemed like smoke instead of skin. The outlines of his body were blurry.

He floated forwards; he was walking but drifting along at the same time, somewhere in between hovering and standing on the ground. And that was when I noticed the girl on the ground.

She was tiny and shuddering, just a child, her lank blonde hair unkempt and matted. She wore what could only be described rags, hanging off her skeletal body. I wanted to help her; I wanted to find out what was making her whimper like that, and stop it. No child should be hurt like this. But it was her the shadow-man pointed to with fingers that curled upwards; it was her he screeched at. “What did you do, child? What made this happen? Tell me!” His voice was like what a shadow would taste like, if you could swallow it – darkened coils resting on your tongue, spicy hot and awfully cold.

“I-I,” she stuttered from the ground, stumbling over her words, her voice just a thread in the air, fragile. “I didn’t do anything, please, I didn’t-”

“Save your snivelling for the bars, okay?” he sneered. I had no idea what ‘the bars’ were. “Just tell me how you managed to kill her. I know you did it. I saw you with her blood on your hands.”

“She didn’t bleed!” the girl said indignantly, instantly slamming her hand over her mouth. She’d said too much; if the shadow-man had a mouth that could be seen, I bet he’d have been smirking. Quickly, his smoky fingers closed over her throat, tendrils of swirling grey-black drifting up her nose. Fear struck inside me, like a snake rearing in my stomach.

“Stop!” I demanded, but neither took any notice of me. The child was screaming, but it was muffled, as though she didn’t have enough air to scream. I pulled out the knife – it fitted into my hand somehow – and stepped forward, slicing it through the air at the shadow-man. He may have been made out of shadow and smoke, but I knew he had substance enough to be hurt. And yet, the blade went right through him.

That was when I understood. This was a vision. All I could do was watch.

The shadow-man abruptly stopped his suffocating thing – or whatever it was – and grabbed the arm of the child. “Come,” he said imperiously, no longer angry but still just as scary. “You’ll serve your punishment in the bars. You’re lucky you don’t get anything worse for killing a baby; you’re lucky I have plenty of them.” And with that, he yanked her away cruelly until they faded away at the edge of the vision.

I stood there, knife in hand, shaken by what I saw. A shadow-man and a child, just two of them, and who knows where? I didn’t know what was going to happen to the girl; ‘the bars’ didn’t sound very welcoming. By the girl’s look of terror at the very name of it, I decided I never wanted to see it.

And then –

“What on earth are you doing here with a knife?”