Monsters Within (6 page)

1

Saul fought every instinct in his body when Nikki stepped into the cabin. He could tell that she did not fear him as most other people did. Even when Kara had paid her visit, her lust-like excitement had been tinged with fear. But this girl was showing no signs of it. There was a sort of nervousness to her, but Saul thought she might be that mousy type of girl that was always nervous or anxious about something.

“Forgive me for saying so,” Saul said, “but I have no idea who you are. So how could we possibly have anything to talk about?”

“First,” the girl said, “you should know that two people know that I have come here. If anything happens to me and I don’t show up around town tomorrow, they’ll go to the police.”

Saul nodded, although it was fairly obvious that she was lying. He could tell from her posture alone. The nervous-sort of smell also grew stronger as she spoke.

“Rest assured, I won’t harm you in any way,” Saul said. “I fear you’ve been brainwashed by the Red Creek gossip circles. The Benton family is not a Satanist group. We’re also not—”

“I know you’re not a Satanist,” she said.

Then, to Saul’s astonishment and amusement, she sat down on his couch without being asked to do so.

“You do?” he asked.

“Yes. But I also don’t think you’re a human.”

“Okay,” Saul said, not liking where this was going. Still, he tried to play the part of the innocent hermit that had simply been misunderstood by the town he called home. “Which story would you like for me to debunk for you?”

“Stop,” Nikki said. “Seriously. I know. I saw you yesterday. You pushed Lester Dobbs through a window like he was nothing. And Lester is a big dude. His feet came off of the ground, and I don’t think you put much force into the shove.”

“I caught him off guard.”

“He came off the ground a good three feet,” Nikki said.  “I saw the whole thing. But even besides that, there’s more.”

Saul was worried now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt that way with someone from Red Creek. The last times nerves had gotten the best of him had been around the time his sister had split.

“Go on,” he said dryly.

“I saw an old newspaper clipping. It was from the time your…your um, father died. You were in it, off to the back like you were hiding from the camera. But I saw enough of you to know that you look exactly like you do now. You look like you haven’t aged a day since the picture was taken and that was more than twenty years ago.”

“Well, I guess I age w—,”

“Cut the shit,” Nikki said.

Now there was a bit of fear in her voice. He stood in front of her, no more than five feet between them, and knew that she still wasn’t done. To hear the fear in her voice like that, Saul assumed whatever it was that she had left was a doozy. Still, he couldn’t imagine what else she might know about him.

“Fine,” Saul said. “What else do you have on me?” Secretly, he was thinking
:
I really don’t want to have to kill this girl. The Guard would not be pleased. I could place Jill and myself in a lot of danger.

“A video. From two nights ago. It’s trap cam footage.”

“Trap cam?”

“Those cameras hunters put out in the woods. There was one at the edge of Deke Goode’s pasture, out along the forest side of it. I saw you. Or I saw what yo
u
reall
y
are, I guess.”

Saul’s panic began to fade away when he realized that she really did have nothing. She had perhaps used the local legends about his family and used it as fuel in addition to footage of some animal from the forests.

“Yeah…sorry,” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She actually seemed to grow angry at his denial. She leaped to her feet and pointed an accusing finger at him.

“
I
sa
w
it. It was you. There was that same hateful expression you had when you left Lester Dobbs pushed through a window.”

“I have no idea what you’re—,” he said, but then a new sort of panic seized him.

“I watched you slaughter at least three cows,” Nikki said. “I can’t be sure it was you, of course, but it damn sure made me think of you. The expression…the anger and rage on your face…it was the same I saw on the street.”

Saul didn’t think she realized it, but she had just ruined her story for any good policeman by stating simpl
y
I can’t be sure it was you
.
But he was barely aware of that. He was hung up on something else she had said. She had seen something with a rage similar to his own on its face. Most people might claim that making such a heap was huge, but Saul knew better.

Among his kind, many looked the same when they transformed. There were ever certain traits and facial features that remained the same in some cases; one of them was rage.

Was there another vampire in Red Creek? And if so, how was the Guard allowing it? There were rules to follow, after all.

“This footage,” Saul said. Was it taken on your camera?”

“No. It was a friend’s. And no, I won’t tell you who.”

Anger and concern battled inside of Saul. He took a single step towards her and saw her hands sneak towards the pouch of the hoodie she was wearing. He could make out a long shape in the pouch, probably a gun or a knife.

Now he had a new problem…did he pretend that he was indeed the creature she was referencing or milk her for information and hope to get to the bottom of what was really happening? If there was indeed another vampire in Red Creek, he needed to know as soon as possible.

He figured he’d play it by ear and be as non-committal as possible.

“So why are you coming to me with this?” Saul asked.

“Because I want you to know that I know.”

“Why?”

Nikki shrugged. “That part
I
don’
t
know.”

“So let me get this right. Let’s say you’re right and that I’m some sort of creature of the night. You think you saw me do something atrocious and violent on a film. But you still came here just to gloat about your discovery? What makes you think I won’t do to you what I did to those cows?”

“I’m not a cow.”

“No you aren’t.”

“And besides, like I said, I have two people that know—”

“Cut the bullshit,” Saul said, borrowing her earlier phrase.

She nodded and looked towards the door very quickly.  “So, what are you then?”

“Pissed.”

“For real,” she said. Again, he could hear the fear in her voice.

“Let’s say yo
u
ar
e
right. And not just you, but every idiot in Red Creek. Let’s say all the stories are true and that my family is something dark. What do you think I am?”

She thought about it for a moment and as she did, Saul started to feel the same urges that Kara Humphrey had brought out in him earlier in the day. He could tell that Nikki was skinny under that sweatshirt, but he still badly wanted to see her naked. He hadn’t felt such cravings in a very long time and he was growing angry with these two stupid women for putting him such a predicament.

“It’s dumb,” she said finally. “But I’m guessing either a demon of some kind or a vampire. But if you’re a vampire, you’re a genuine evil as hell creature of the night and not one of those sparkly fruity ones.”

Saul smiled, not giving her an answer one way or the other. His mind was in other places, trying to figure out a way to prevent any trouble.

“So what do you want? What do you want me to do to ensure you don’t show anyone that video?”

He knew he was on sketchy ground here. He had still not come out and admitted to what he was. But he had to come close or at least play along so he could get as much information about this other creature as he could. Part of him worried that he might be placing her in danger. But that wasn’t his concern
.
Sh
e
had come here to him so that opened her up to danger as far as he was concerned.

“Not much, really,” Nikki said. “I just want you to tell me your story. I want to know what you are, why you are, and why you’re in Red Creek.”

“I don’t have a story,” he said. “Because I’m not a vampire.”

Nikki sighed. He saw something flicker in her yes, maybe a steeled sort of stubbornness. It came and went so fast that he couldn’t tell. She removed the object from the pouch of her sweatshirt and Saul saw that it was a knife, as he had suspected.

He took a step towards her, prepared to ward her off gently if she attacked him. But instead, she took the knife to her arm and slashed across. She drew blood instantly. It welled up and streamed down her arm. She hissed at the quick bite of pain but extended her arm.

The action took him off guard and he wasn’t able to catch the instincts of that other self that rose to the surface at the sight of that crimson gold. He felt his other self take control for a few moments—maybe a bit longer than he had allowed it to surface while confronting Lester Dobbs in this same room the night before.

Nikki gasped and took a step back. “Oh my God, you are…,”

“No,” he said, but he knew it was useless. He had felt the other part of him rise up. He knew his eyes had gone that peculiar shade of red and that his facial features had contorted for only the briefest of a moment.

He’d been found out. He’d been fooled by this stupid girl.

Saul pushed the urges back when he realized that his calf muscles were primed and ready to launch his body at her, to suck her blood until she was nothing more than a shell. He pushed it down hard, so hard that he felt it die in his guts like a worm on a hot sidewalk.

“Damn you,” Saul said.

“So you are,” she said, the fear evident in her voice now. Still, she held out her cut arm. The wound was shallow but the blood ran all the same. He watched as a single drop fell from her pale skin and hit the floor.

“Say it,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said indignantly. “But I did not kill any damned cows.”

“I saw it and—,”

“I said it wasn’t me, you brat!”

She looked like she had been slapped. But instead of leaving, she sat back down on the couch.

Acting without thinking, Saul walked into the adjoining kitchen and grabbed the roll of paper towels from the counter. He threw them at her without looking.

“Please clean that up. I’ve worked too hard on restraint to let your foolishness destroy me.”

She took off a handful of paper towels and began to blot at the cut.

“So what do you want from me?” Saul asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to know.”

“Well what can we do so that this stays between us? You can’t spread this around town.”

“It’ll be no worse than the ignorant shit that’s already circulating about you.”

“This is serious,” he said. “What do you want from me?”

She thought about this for a moment, slowly blotting away the blood on her arm. The knife sat beside here on the couch and Saul’s eyes saw the thin rivulet of blood along its blade.

After roughly ten seconds, she looked up to him. There was fear still apparent on her face, but it was fading. “I want to know how you ended up here. I want to know how a vampire ended up in Red Creek. I want to know your history.”

Saul let out a nervous chuckle. He stood at the kitchen table, keeping a good distance away from the spilled blood, even the red stains on the paper towels she held.

“And that’s it?” he asked. “I tell you my history and you’ll forget about the video and the things you have seen?”

“Hell no I won’
t
forget
.
But I’ll keep it between us.”

Saul thought about this for a moment. He looked down to this peculiar young woman and she returned his gaze just as intently. Even when she knew what he was, she didn’t seem to be truly afraid of him. He had no idea how to react to that.

He walked across the den and into the kitchen. There, he took out a bottle of red wine and two glasses. He poured the wine and took the now-filled cups back into the den. He handed one to Nikki. He then sat down on the other end of the couch and gave her a queer look.

“You’re strange,” he told her.

“So I’ve been told. But I have a feeling you’re a bit stranger.”

“Fair enough,” Saul said. And then he began to tell her his story, starting with a particularly nasty period in Europe.

2

The details of his family’s history were rather boring as far as vampire history went. Still, he told that part of his story as well as he could. He would catch himself getting distracted from time to time, impressed with how calm Nikki seemed. He could smell slight twinges of fear coming off of her, but it was nothing compared to what he was used to while in the presence of humans who knew what he really was. He wondered what sort of demons this girl had in her past to make her so relaxed in this situation.

“We lived in Romania for about two hundred years, living our lives the way you’d expect. It’s not at all like the movies make us out to be, though. W
e
di
d
kill people and we even purposefully turned some, but it was usually criminals.”

“What do you mean b
y
turne
d
?” Nikki asked.

“Sometimes, rather than kill a human, we decide to turn them. We simply bite them, infecting them. They then become vampires, too.”

“Does that automatically make them a part of your family?”

“No,” Saul said. “But they will forever be loyal to whichever family turned them. It doesn’t matter anyway because several hundred years ago, it was decided that there could be no more vampire families. That meant that we could no longer turn humans. Turning humans means that they have a chance to go on, live forever, and have families of their own. Around 1500 or so, it was decided among the larger clans that we were starting to have something of a population problem. Of course, if our numbers got too big, we’d become common knowledge to mortals.”

“How many families were there?”

“There were thirty families, the Bentons included. But there were also rogue vampires that never really settled down. In total, it was estimated that there were nearly nine thousand vampires living worldwide. And like I said, that was in the early 1500s. It was also suggested that we scatter—that we break up. There were too many of us clustered together. Romania, parts of Russia, and South America had huge populations. So when the families scattered, the Bentons ended up in the land that would later be called the United States.”

“So who was it that made all of these decisions?” Nikki asked. She was sipping on her wine and reclining back on the opposite end of the couch as if she were having a normal conversation with one of her friends. It unnerved Saul slightly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, who decided that there were too many vampires and that you had to stop turning people and scatter over the ends of the earth? Do vampires have a President or something?”

“No,” Saul said with a laugh. “There is a group that is called The Guard. I will tell you that when it comes to The Guard, I am not allowed to tell you much. It’s just a rule. But it is their responsibility to ensure that creatures such as vampires don’t do anything to threaten the human population of the world. They sort of keep us in check.

“As a matter of fact, members of The Guard came to America shortly after the Revolutionary War to make sure we were not up to any ill tricks. At that time, there were four families living in the U.S.”

“And what did you do here in the U.S?” Nikki asked. “Did your family just spend its time killing cattle?”

He grunted and gave her an annoyed look. “That wasn’t me on your friend’s video. I swear to it. But anyway, this is where another of The Guard’s rules comes in. For the most part, vampires don’t necessarily like The Guard, but this rule is actually genius. To ensure that vampires posed no real threat to humans, a system was set into place. We are only allowed to hunt and live our normal lives in remote regions of the world. And each family can do this only for a certain period of time. Each family has free reign over that remote area for a period of two years and then must go into hiding to live presumed human lives. This allows another family to hunt in another remote area. This way, there are never two families at large at the same time.”

“So how long have you been living this presumed human life?”

Saul smiled and shook his head. “It makes me seem old.”

“That’s okay. You look no older than forty, if that. And apparently, you’ve looked that way for at least twenty years, if that newspaper clipping is any indication.”

“One hundred and six years. All of it spent, in some fashion, here in Red Creek.”

“How has no one noticed?” Nikki asked, clearly stunned.

“I’m not sure. It’s sort of a charm that my kind has over humans. If you were to find the oldest resident of Red Creek and ask him how long the Benton Cabin has been out here in the woods, he’d probably claim he wasn’t sure. People’s memories of us get foggy when they try to piece the oddity of it all together.”

“That’s convenient.”

“It is. But it’s been going on since 200 B.C. When the families started to really take off and grow, we realized that one of our advantages was that humans seemed to get very confused and hazy when they tried to recall anything about us for more than a period of thirty years or so.”

“So you chose Red Creek to hide away until it’s your family’s turn to feed again?”

“My father did, yes. I am not quite sure why. But we came to love it.”

“Well,” Nikki said, never one for tact, “if you father is dead and you are living alone, will you go to some remote place for two years all by yourself when your turn comes around?”

Saul almost kept the next part from her, but decided to tell it all. He rarely had anyone to speak to and he found that it was almost therapeutic to share his history. Even if it was with a mortal that seemed to not fear him at all, he wanted to tell it all.

“No, I have a sister.”

“Yes, the article mentioned that.”

“I assume she’ll show up wherever I go. We’re linked like that. But she split after our father died.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“No. If I set my mind to it, I could probably find her rather easily. We can track each other. But she obviously wants to be alone. So I’ll let her have her time.”

“How much more time do you have before it’s your family’s turn in the cycle?”

“Eight years.”

“And you aren’t supposed to attack humans until then?”

“That’s right. That’s why this thing with Lester Dobbs had the potential to cause a lot of trouble. If I had killed him—even without killing him the traditional ways vampires usually do—I could have caused a lot of trouble for my sister and me.”

Nikki sat up, as if she’d had a sudden moment of clarity. She looked earnestly at him and a slow dawning slowly crept into her face. It was the closest thing to fear Saul had seen on her face since she had arrived.

“So do you have yourself sort of trained to not attack humans? Is me being here, sitting on your couch, hard for you to resist? Do you want to attack me by nature?”

“A hundred years or so ago, it would have been hard for me. But after a while, I got used to it. And when
I
d
o
feel the need to draw blood, I can sort of make myself go into a hibernation where I sleep for several weeks. When I come awake, the urge is gone.”

He obviously didn’t tell her about the other urges that were rampaging through him. These urges had nothing to do with his vampire instincts, only the purely male ones. It didn’t matter that her body was hidden beneath those baggy clothes or that she was shy and awkward like Kara Humphrey had been. Nikki’s face was enough for him. It was the way she chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip when he spoke to her. It was the steel in her eyes that basically told him that no matter what he might be, she wasn’t afraid of him.

It was the last one that was baffling to him. He drained the last bit of his glass of wine.

“So the movies got that wrong, too?” Nikki asked. “You won’t die if you go without blood?”

“No. Not at all. Although, when I’m…well
,
transformed
,
I have to have it within a few hours or I become ill.”

She considered this for a moment and sipped from her wine. Saul’s’ male urges rose up in him again as he watched her lips part to take the glass.

“So let me as
k
yo
u
something,” Saul said.

“Sure.”

“You had a pretty good idea of who I am, yet you came here to confront me face –to-face. Why are you not afraid?”

“You already asked me that.”

“I did. But you dodged the question,” he said, getting up to refill his glass. Nikki followed him into the kitchen and he saw that she was keeping a slight distance between them.

“I don’t know,” she said, giving the same answer as before.  “I guess I’ve led the sort of life where even if I thought yo
u
woul
d
hurt me, I wouldn’t care. It sounds clichéd and troubled, I know…but that’s all I’ve got. I mean, I don’t have a death wish or anything, but things of a darker nature have always fascinated me. To know you were out here and t
o
sort o
f
know what you might be…it was just too much to pass up. I had to know.”

Saul held out the bottle of wine. Nikki eyed it for a moment and he could tell that she wasn’t quite ready to leave. Saul himself was torn; part of him wanted to her to leave and a larger part of him wanted her to stay. But he could tell that this girl could be trouble. He had sensed some degree of possible danger when he had let Kara into his house to question him earlier in the day, but what he felt stirring between himself and Nikki was something different. He wasn’t sure he had ever experienced anything quite like it before.

After a moment, Nikki shook her head. “No. I better not. I think I’ve had enough crazy for one day. I’m really not interested in going insane.”

“Fair enough,” Saul said.

Nikki gave him a faint smile and then started walking towards the door. Saul followed her, careful to not walk too closely behind her. He didn’t want to alarm her in any way.

“So we’re good?” he asked. “Is my secret safe with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “And…I don’t know. Is it weird of me to ask if I can come over again sometime? You have to think of this from a human’s perspective. This is pretty cool, you know? And I’m not the most popular chick in Red Creek, so it’s not like I have a ton of friends or anything.”

“Yes, yo
u
ar
e
a strange girl.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Saul said nothing. Even if he had have wanted to, Nikki didn’t give him the time to do so. She turned her back to him headed down the steps.  Saul watched her go, feeling the cool allure of the night inviting him out.

He fought it off, though. He closed the door and, with an odd stirring in his guts, returned to his bottle of wine.