Desire of the Soul (3 page)

“Tammy?” a deep male voice said, and I whipped around. My fangs popped out, and I hissed at the stranger.

“Holy shit Tammy! It’s me, Luke. Your boyfriend! What the hell was that?” he asked, and I strode toward him. “Uh.... Tammy?”

My eyes were locked on his throat, as I heard the blood rushing through his veins. He was human. He had blood.

“Come with me,” I whispered, my voice sultry. Instantly, Luke’s eyes glazed over and he started to follow me as I walked to where the woods were.

I didn’t see anyone around me, just a few animals that scattered when I came near them. My thoughts repeated one word over and over, hungry. I was so hungry.

When I thought we were far enough away, I let go of my hold on Luke. He stumbled forward, and I grabbed his hand and pulled him towards me. My fangs tingled in anticipation, as I got closer and closer to Luke.
 

“What are you doing Tammy?” he asked, his voice slow, and his hair rustled slightly in the wind.

“I’m hungry,” I answered back, my teeth grazing his neck.

We both shivered with pleasure, and Luke pulled me closer. I took that as an okay for me to bite, and so I did.
 

The world exploded in millions of colors, a fireworks display above my head. Duke pulled me even closer, groaning slowly, and my body grinded against his.

Both of our bodies were burning hot, so when Luke slid his hand up my shirt it left a trail of his heat.
 

As minutes passed, I felt as though Luke and I were becoming one and I wanted more and more of him.

‘
No more,’
 
a voice in my head whispered.
 
’If you continue, you will kill him.’

Instantly I pulled my mouth from Luke’s neck, gasping as a sharp pain pierced my heart. Luke swayed, his eyes extremely glazed, and stumbled towards me.
 

“More...” he murmured, his arms outstretched.
 

My eyes widened as I remembered the homeless guy, most likely dead in some alleyway, and I started to run. The wind stopped, and it felt as if the world did too. I smiled, feeling as though I was flying.
 

“I assumed you had a good meal?” Duke asked, startling me to a stop. I jumped when I saw him, lying as though he had no care in the world, on a park bench.
 

I was standing in a field of bright green grass, ants paving their way along beneath me. I could smell flowers by the dozen, and hear the chirping of birds from miles away. In the distance, there was a small red-bricked cottage with a tiny white door. There were no windows in the house, and green vines were crawling up the sides of the bricks.

“You could say that,” I answered back, my eyes fixed on the cottage. “Um...quick question, who lives there?”
 

Something was nagging at my brain, but I couldn’t figure out what. The cottage looked so familiar, and when I went through my memory I was surprised to see how I knew every part of it. I knew how inside you would see blank white walls and wooden floors, no furniture at all, just a set of metal stairs going down.
 

And when you walked down those stairs, there would be hundreds of rooms. A whole city under the Earth. Tunnels that connected around the state of California. How do I know all this? I asked myself, and started walking slowly to the cottage.
 

“All the Amatores Sanguinis. Most of us have houses above land, but every house connects to these tunnels.” Dukes said, and I nodded, trying hard to remember why I already knew this.
 

The picture came suddenly, pulling me into the memory I would soon regret.

---

Hungry. The homeless guy is dead. I want more. My throat is burning. I looked down, pushing the homeless guy off of my lap with disgust. His blood had been dirty. I want a clean one. I tried to open the door but it was locked. I pushed and pushed on it, to no avail.

I hear a sound. My head tilts to the side, and I listen hard. There are people beneath me. My face pulls into a cruel smile, fangs pressing lightly against my lips. Food. My eyes spot a crack on the floor, and I speed over to it. Like I had thought, it opened.

When I was down in the tunnel, I started running silently toward the voices, my ears listening intently to their noise. It only took me seconds before I caught up with them. Humans.

“I told you! There is nothing here to be scared of! It’s just a stupid tunnel you idiots,” one of the three guys said, his voice tinged with annoyance. They all had black knit caps, black shirts, and black pants on, but my focus was on the sound of their warm red blood rushing through their veins.
 

They turned suddenly and jumped when they saw me.
 

“Shit Tammy! You scared us!” one of the boys said.

“Yeah, I mean we thought you were a monster or something!” another one added in.

“I am,” I whispered, trapping them in a spell as I bared my fangs.
 

Their eyes slowly widened in fear as they froze in their spot.

“Don’t worry sweeties. You’ll like it! And I promise I won’t kill you. At least, I’ll try not to.”
 

My smile was cruel as I bit into them, one by one, and drained their life, sip by sip.

The Truth

I came back to myself and whimpered.

“What is it?” Duke asked, watching me with confusion as pink tears rolled down my cheeks.

I brushed them off onto my hand, staring at the color with disgust. What had I become?

“A monster,” I sobbed, increasingly more pink tears falling. “I’m a monster.”
 

Duke grabbed my shoulders, and wiped away all my tears. “Why would you say that? You are not a monster.”
 

I shook my head slowly, and pulled his arms off of me. “You didn’t see what I did. I-I killed three more,” I whispered, feeling as thought my mind was millions of miles away from my body. “They knew me, and I killed them.” My voice sounded odd, and I saw a red tint in my eyes in the window of the cottage.
 

“Tammy, you didn’t kill them!” Duke said, looking worried as he stared into my eyes.
 

“Don’t tell me I didn’t kill them!” I screamed, my eyes now bright red and my fangs bared. “I know I did! I remember!”
 

Duke grabbed me tightly, but I couldn’t feel a thing. My body wasn’t my own right now, and neither was my mind. The monster was taking over.
 

“Damn it Tammy! They are fine! Stop being a drama queen, and calm the fuck down!”
 

In the few days I have known him, Duke had never talked as he did now. His words shocked me back into myself, and a shiver went through my body.

“They’re okay?” I asked quietly, and Duke nodded.
 

“You heard somebody coming up the tunnel, and dropped the boys. They’re home right now, sleeping.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, and got up from the ground. “Thank you,” I whispered, and started walking the few feet to the cottage doors. Tears were running down my cheeks, pink tears that I didn’t want Duke to see. They were tears of gratitude and pain, tears of love and loss.

I couldn’t pull away though, when he grabbed me. I was too weak, he was too strong.

Duke turned me around, and hugged me tight to him. My body responded immediately, melting into his embrace as more and more tears fell. He rubbed my back slowly, whispering
It’s okay
over and over again.
 

We stood like that for several minutes, until my eyes were dry because my tears were gone.

I guess you could say, that that’s when I started to fall for Duke.
 

---

We spent many days together, him teaching me all the things an Amatores Sanguinis can and cannot do. He taught me how to cloak myself so I was visible to none, he taught me how to control my thirst, and he taught me how to make my senses focus on a single thing.

When he wasn’t teaching me, Duke would take me to different places in the underground city. Each place was more beautiful than the last, because there were many Amatores Sanguinis from all different locations who brought a piece of their home, to the city.
 

“Tell me about your home?” I had asked Duke softly, the day after I had the breakdown by the cottage.

Duke had sighed and pulled me tight to him, his eyes lost in the memory of his youth.
 

“Italy,” he murmured, a slight accent appearing as he said his home country. “It was in the time, where there was no time. Animals were free to roam where they chose, and people lived in homes created by the trees. We were all no better than animals ourselves, although we claimed to be.
 

My mother, she was a beauty. Long black hair, bright and intelligent green eyes, all the men were after her. My father, well I was never told what happened to him. I had never asked either, because I could see the loss in my mother’s eyes.

When I was a kid, it was the women who held all the power, not the men. The men would be there for muscles, the women for their intelligence. We had no need for armies then, for there was nothing to fight over. Everyone had an equal share of things, whether it be food or supplies.
 

I had an older sister, Eva. She looked nothing like me, but everything like my mother. She died at the age of fifteen, from what I now assumed was cancer. It was a hard time for all of us, she had been liked by everyone.
 

We did not fear the animals that walked among us, nor did they fear us. Fear was a concept we did not know, or understand. Why waste time fearing things, when you didn’t have to?
 

The world was no more than green trees and bright, sweet-smelling flowers. We did not know that any others existed, we only knew of us. That is, until a man who called himself ‘Dracul’ arrived in my town.

He stunned the woman, my mother included, with his tales of the world and his looks. He had thick blonde hair that went to his shoulder, tan skin, and golden eyes. Still today, he’s the only man I’ve ever met with golden eyes.
 
The first time I saw him, I did not like him.
 

Unfortunately for me though, he took a liking to my mother. After a week, they were inseparable. A month later, and they were what we now call married but used to call joined.

Dracul loved my mother, I could see it in his eyes, but it was as though he had her under a spell. She would do what he said, whenever he said it. And she started to have bite marks appear on her neck.

I worried that Dracul was slowly killing my mother, and I was right. He was, but she did not die until after giving birth to her third child, Lucina. My mother had picked her name after the Greek Goddess of childbirth, knowing that the name also meant light.

Lucina was anything but on the side of light though. She was evil from the day she was born.

She would set traps on innocent children, that would spring when you would least expect it and could do anything from break your bones, to leave you forever paralyzed. Lucina had no regard for human life, and she made that known to all who crossed her.

As she grew older, her tricks grew worse and worse, until the point where she would kill for fun. She would set brother against brother, compelling them to hate one another and fight until the last blood was spilled. She would send men to rape women, and women to kill their children. Lucina could make anyone do as she wished them to.

Dracul did not care that his daughter was terrible, she was his and that was all that had seemed to matter to him. He overlooked his daughter killing the village, turning it into a bloodbath of sort. As if, if he ignored it then it wasn’t happening.

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Lucina grew sick. She coughed up blood for hours on end, and after seven hours, she died. Dracul blamed me for her death, as if I could prevent something that was as inevitable as her body rejecting the Change, and that is when I discovered that he was a demon.
 

His teeth grew long and sharp and his eyes turned a bright red. Then he attacked, breaking the bones in my body and then biting me. A terrible pain filled me, and my body started to shake. I was thrown against the floor, and fainted from the pain. I woke up days later, a new person. A terrible, bloodthirsty, person.
 

I killed many in the first few centuries as an Amatores, and felt no guilt for the deaths I caused. It was only when I met someone that it all changed.
 

She was a girl, almost seventeen, and the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I knew from the moment I saw her that she was mine. And only mine. To make that true though, I knew I would have to change her.
 

But I was afraid to, seeing what I had become. I was afraid that she would be as I was, and I did not want that. I wanted Kallisto as she was, not changed at all. But it took me only a week before I caved and changed her.

She awoke, and at first it was all okay. But then I noticed how she was not eating the meals I was giving her. I talked to Kallisto, trying to figure out why, when she told me that human blood repulsed her. And how she had found a new way to sate her thirst, animal blood.