Saved

The next six months were hell. My days were filled with flashbacks and grief and during those darker hours of the day I was haunted by nightmares. My injuries slowly healed, but the pain of my loss never did; it wasn’t as fresh as it was on the day of the accident- it was like a scab- on the outside it looked as though it was healing, but probe any further and you’d find a gaping parent-shaped hole.

Instead the hole was steadily being filled by another, different shape figure- incidentally, the same figure who had taken me from the scene of the crash – a mild mannered man who went by the name of Alex. I was unsure of what it was short for, if he were American I would have taken as guess of Alexander; however he had a faint European accent which I couldn’t quite place.

I’d been living with Alex since that fatal day, he’d nursed me back to health, which he was very good at – he definitely knew his stuff. Well…he’d had the time to learn hadn’t he? Although Alex looked to be in his late twenties; he assured me he was, in fact, much older.

Alex was a Vampire.

It wasn’t all garlic and coffins though, as the legends promised, but there were glaringly obvious upsides and downsides to vampirism, it seemed.

The first of his many powers included his superior strength, not just physically though – but his strength of will and patience was something to behold- though it was just as likely that this may have been acquired from time, alone.

Alex didn’t just have me back upon my feet again; he made my life the difference between surviving and living. I felt as though I had purpose. In the space of six short months he became my parental figure, my friend and my tutor all in one.



It was over breakfast one morning that Alex brought up my nightmares, his face almost passed for casual if only I hadn’t noticed the worried edges around his eyes.

“Sophia,” he said in that formal way of his “You haven’t been getting any better…”

I’d had another of those night terrors and woken up in a cold sweat in the early hours of the morning. I had hoped that I’d managed not to cry out in my sleep, alas, I had - but what could I do? Much to my humiliation, fresh tears had sprung to my eyes and a lump had settled painfully in my throat as he brought it up.

“Is it something you’d like to talk about?” he asked me kindly; he was like that, Alex- kind.
Although I was declared ‘missing’ throughout the country and it wasn’t safe for me to be seen with him, Alex had offered many a time to call in a therapist to help me get over my loss. I had, however, declined at each of his generous offers. I knew what would happen if he did, and losing Alex wasn’t something I thought I could handle, not after all of this.

You see, there was a price for living with him; no contact with the human world.

I thought regularly about seeing my two best friends, Roxy and June, again, but it was a fantasy, something that I’d never be able to do. It wasn’t as though I was locked in either – Alex lived in a secluded area so it was safe to wonder around outside too but Alex’s warnings were unneeded as I was already scared enough about being discovered.

During the day when I was alone I usually stayed indoors and entertained myself, his house was a nice size but it wasn’t by any means large enough to host a variety of different entertainment centres, so I often busied myself reading books – which Alex was all too happy to supply.

The house was an old one, made up of a golden coloured brick, which was both soft and old enough to have eroded away in places. After inquiring about this strange material, Alex told me it was called Bath Stone and that he’d had the house moved brick-by-brick from a town in the south west of England to where it stood erect today. I was impressed; it was a beautiful building and could see why he’d gone to the trouble of moving it.

The inside was bigger than it first looked from the outside though, originally it was a five bedroomed house, however Alex had added a basement too - not that it needed it.

The front of the house was home to a variety of different and very old trees; my favourite was a large gnarled oak which stood not far from the front door. The writhing limbs of the tree were all twisted and crooked and from one of them hung a very delicate looking swing.

It wasn’t the swing that interested me though, as pretty and fairy-like as it was; of all the trees the large oak was the best tree to climb. I was oft found in among those top branches in the sun, my face buried amongst enchanting tales that I read from Alex’s extensive book collection.

I was happy here and this was why I tried my best to conceal my feelings from both Alex and myself – I didn’t want to go back to my old life; not without my parents, I didn’t want to face the reality of it all.

Worse was the irony of it all. My mother had finally got her wish; I only hoped she was able to see it all in death .

I was in love.