The Violet Hour (3 page)

Only death could end this brand of pain
, he bleakly mused.

Some would think that when swimming in the depths of one’s own grief, one could forget what it was that made them so unhappy, but tell that to Nathaniel. Martha Harrington would never be low on the totem pole of his thoughts and thinking, not at that moment nor any day in the far-off future. The love they shared and made was definitely not something that could be told within the confines of a simple vignette—that was for sure.

“This should warm your cockles,” trumpeted Enyah, placing a steaming pint glass of blood down in front of him, breaking his disconsolate trance. “I made sure the bartender heated it up just the way I know you like it.”

Nathaniel threw her an exasperated stare. “Cheers,” he went on to grunt in response, not breaking the grim line he had for a mouth. He was clearly annoyed that she yanked him out of his reverie.             

“She’s real pretty. I’d kill for hair like hers,” Enyah remarked instantly noticing the picture that his gaze was locked onto. “Is she your girlfriend?”

Nathaniel didn’t answer her.

Enyah’s comments didn’t even register with him. He was more than preoccupied. His troubled mind was clearly somewhere else—somewhere far away from the hubbub of the tavern.

The elegantly dressed woman in the photograph, who was the perfect specimen of prim and properness, looked nothing like Enyah, the effeminate heathen. Seeing that Nathaniel was obviously infatuated by her, Enyah suddenly felt insecure. Secretly, she had never felt so homely.

“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Valour. If you need anything—anything at all—you just let me know. Ask for Enyah if I’m on a break.”

Again Nathaniel didn’t verbally respond to her. A listless nod was all he could, or wanted to muster.

Enyah gaped longingly at him. He still had his gloom-stained orbs fixed on the Daguerreotype. She assumed he was probably lost in some romantic flight of fantasy, but that was not the case. As a matter of fact, Nathaniel was recalling the last time he and Martha spoke. It wasn’t a pleasant memory for him, or for any of the Cistercian nuns who were involved. Rome hadn’t seen that much bloodshed and lechery since the reign of Caligula. The smell from the slaughtered bodies still fearsomely lingered in his sinuses. It was an aroma that no one, especially a vampyre, could easily forget.

It was during that particular rampage in Rome that something unexpected happened; the alignment of Nathaniel’s soul shifted. It was as if whoever placed the cowl over his pneuma had whipped it off that night. No longer could he feed on the blood of the living, and no longer could he kill the non-deserving. He was forever changed into a hybrid, a mongrel of monstrosity.

In the end, that was the chief factor that tore the two eternal bound lovers apart. The love that Nathaniel thought he and she shared was a love of endless supply, an incessant river that flowed from ocean to ocean across continents of time. But regrettably, he was also mistaken. And badly mistaken, at that. Consequently, a dimensional prison constructed itself around him due to his cafard, and Martha had no intentions of sharing it with him.

Nathaniel knew thinking about her so much and so often was counterproductive on so many levels, but he just couldn’t control his destructive reflecting. Thoughts of the fiery Martha were simply ubiquitous and had no plan of absconding anytime soon. Recollections from his youth back in County Cork, mainly before he was turned vampyre, were jumbled and fragmented. He could never be certain about a lot of things from those times, but his love and passion for Martha he could clearly and easily recall.

Contradictory to popular belief, vampyres were not emotionless vessels. In fact, they were the exact opposite—they were
über
-emotional and hypersensitive beings.

During the metamorphosis from human to vampyre, the soul found itself released back to its genesis, leaving the vessel’s senses and primal instincts dangerously heightened and fraught with raw feelings that the soul would previously stabilise. What would be left
sans
soul was a temperamental life form, boasting supernatural strength and a libido that could make the devil blush.

The soul, in a manner of speaking, was the great balancer. Without it, one lost the ability to control, curb, and restrain oneself—one simply became more beast than human. Having a lack of a soul brought with it many hindrances and disadvantages, but the most remarkable drawback was the inability to cry. The lachrymal apparatus became disabled in the eye thus making it impossible for a vampyre to create the necessary chemical reaction to shed tears. The build-up of sentiment longing to be expelled was the principal causes of their legendary tetchiness and rash decision-making.

That monumental night in Rome, Nathaniel regained that particular gift of expression when his soul retook the wheel, and from then on he hid it at all times from others like him.

“Anyway, hope you enjoy your blood,” Enyah added, her voice trailing off towards the end. She then turned and skittishly made her way through the sea of nocturnal
habitués
back towards the bar.

Nathaniel lifted his pensive face as she left. He did in fact hear her on that occasion, but he didn’t feel like responding.

The mood around him always had a good chance of going south to a much darker place. That night was no different. However, before his eyes had the chance to return to the faded picture in order to relive another tragic recollection,
she
sauntered into the dimly-lit, smoke-filled saloon with great élan.

She
strutted with a quiet certainty, an inner strength, and a heedful of sable, rebellious locks that cascaded down the front of her shoulders like a silken waterfall.

She
was Faelynn LeCroix.

Faelynn was beautiful—fatally beautiful. She made every woman that Nathaniel had ever before laid his eyes upon seem plain. She was an enchanting specimen at the eventide of her twenties. Her azure blue eyes delightfully complimented her jet-black hair, which framed her strikingly snowy face. Faelynn was lissom, but her body held an hourglass shape. She had a timeless elegance to her. Similar to a fine Bordeaux, the older Faelynn got, the more exquisite she was becoming.

If Nathaniel’s antique heart were able to beat it would have skipped, or at least pitter-pattered a tad. He was lost for words, and that was a mean feat since he was a polyglot. For the first time in twenty-seven years, four months, six days, four hours and thirteen minutes did the great Nathaniel Valour find himself more than curious about someone other than Martha Harrington, whose phantom came to haunt every time he let sleep come upon him. He found himself completely agog to know more about this woman with the inky mane who was as luminescent as a firefly caught within the colourless fog of death and decay surrounding her from all angles. Faelynn was in clear and present danger being there, but she strangely didn’t seem to be bothered in the least by that exact detail.

Only mere seconds ago, Nathaniel would have traded a thousand and one lifetimes of first kisses and noble deaths to get one more chance with his beloved Martha, but that was then.

A switch had been flicked.

A button had been pressed.

A trigger had been pulled.

Something was after happening to him and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The cavity in his heart that was Martha-shaped had suddenly been refilled.

Scanning every inch of the five-foot-four figure of Faelynn from his secluded booth at the far end of the tavern, Nathaniel noticed that she looked more like a wistful librarian than a stylish hellion of the night. Her royal blue V-neck blouse was faintly ruffled around the collar and down the front, giving respectability to the cleavage she had on show. The merest and tiniest suggestion of trim from a black lacy bra protruded from the blouse, allowing the gawker a glimpse of what possibly lay beneath. She had on a maroon cardigan that showed off her slight figure and the shrug style of it made her narrow shoulders look more powerful than they actually were. Navy skinny jeans complemented her toned legs and a pair of black kitten heels gave her pert derrière a nice, youthful lift. Finishing off her ensemble were chic, rimless glasses held by titanium frames that magnified and intensified the blue in her irises.

No human would be so bold to enter The Dungeon, a predominately vampyre hangout, without having a death wish—especially a delectable woman like herself who looked as if she was derived from light, not darkness. It would be far too dangerous of a place for any soul-carrying individual to be casually visiting, even one who had steely determination sitting comfortably on her features. Their chances of survival would be as likely as a cube of ice dropped into a roaring campfire. But Faelynn LeCroix wasn’t your garden-variety, perishable human—she was one with a twist of aberrance, and Nathaniel could sense that the minute he saw her strut past him.

A creature of that beauty surely could not be mortal
, he initially assumed. But Nathaniel had been around the block a good few hundred times and was old enough to know that sometimes, it is often those with the whitest wings have the blackest sins.

Faelynn didn’t fit in comfortably in her world, just like Nathaniel didn’t fit in his. Her aura was murky, infected, and one could even go as far to say tainted—just like Nathaniel’s. But she wasn’t a vampyre, or any sort of dæmonic being at that. She wasn’t shadowed like he or anyone else within the tavern’s walls. Instead, her energy was one of righteousness and rectitude. Nathaniel didn’t know what she was, exactly, and that intrigued him all the more. At that moment he was prudent enough not to guess, as everything contained within The Dungeon was far from mainstream.

Staring on as Faelynn confidently made her way through the mob of diabolical beasts with her shoulders back and her head held high, Nathaniel quickly assessed that she walked like a broad who had her six-guns strapped on and he knew with certainty that she had them fully loaded. Faelynn was a woman on a mission, and her body language screamed,
Stay the fuck out of my way—or else!
She was a woman of complexity and was absolutely stunning to boot—the perfect combination, in his experienced opinion.

The wine-coloured leather of Nathaniel’s booth let out a barely audible squeak as he adjusted himself while attentively watching her march directly up to the bar. She gracefully slipped herself onto a cushioned stool, crossed her legs, and signalled for one of the staff to come over. The largest of the vampyres tending bar nodded on seeing her. They seemed to know one another.

He was a rather large, muscle-bound lout who stood head and shoulders above most of his fellow employees at a couple inches shy of seven foot. He wore a protective vest that was made of molten rock with visual cracks throughout its strata. Searing red-hot liquid magma ran throughout it like veins, highlighting the fissures in the garment. All and sundry tending bar were required to wear these clinker vests, for they offered a protection unlike anything else, especially to a vampyre whose heart was its Achilles heel, so to speak. A wearer of such a top was hard to associate with due to the pyretic effect they had on one’s body, not to mention the foul toxic odour they issued.

Any piddling mortal who spent more than a minute in the immediate company of someone wearing the article of protective clothing would cough uncontrollably and most likely develop black lung, but Faelynn didn’t seem to be affected. More interestingly, the lunkhead vampyre and she certainly seemed to be on cordial terms. She sure didn’t seem to mind the noisome pong as she whispered in his ear and stealthy slipped a series of folded fifty-dollar bills into his humongous palm.

On hearing what Faelynn had to say, he bobbed his head up and down, and then pointed to one of two male vampyres
playing pool on a ratty-tatty, threadbare table that stood beneath a single bulb flickering sporadically. To the right of them a pair of intoxicated females (both with hair piled high on their heads and wearing clothes that just yelled,
We are skanky bitches and couldn’t be more proud of it!
) danced seductively against the jukebox for the pool players’ entertainment in between shots.

Faelynn scooted off the barstool and sashayed over to the table and assertively introduced herself.

Nathaniel knew the vampyre in question who was fingered by the bartender. He went by the name of Wayne Bronco and was known to hail from San Antonio, Texas. Nathaniel didn’t for one second believe his surname was “Bronco”. It would have been far too cliché to be true. Strangely, Wayne still wore his rodeo getup from the time when he was turned; brash leather boots with spurs attached, blue denim jeans, black chaps, a red bandana around his neck, and of course, a fawn Stetson—the whole shebang. Wayne was a flamboyant cowboy in life and he was adamant about staying one in death, even if contemporary fashion said otherwise.

His and Nathaniel’s paths had never crossed before, but from what Nathaniel heard, Wayne was a good ol’boy who kept his head down, didn’t cause much trouble, and never said a word—literally, that is. Rumour had it that he had lost his tongue in a scuffle with a dæmon hunter years back in Canada’s Yukon Territory during The Klondike Gold Rush.

Even so, why would this spellbinding woman be looking to talk with him? Nathaniel’s interest became even more piqued when he witnessed Faelynn sneakily leave with Wayne Bronco through the tavern’s emergency exit, making sure nobody saw them.

Not letting curiosity have rule over his mind, Nathaniel stopped and mentally corrected himself. He decided to try and ignore his inquisitiveness and dismiss Faelynn as just an oddity to his extreme and highly receptive senses.

Nathaniel picked up his pint of blood and toasted to his shadow as he customarily did every night. “May our victories be sweet, our defeats never be in vain. May love in our life always be aplenty, and may it never ever wane.
Sláinte mhaith
,” Nathaniel said, continuing his ritual before taking a strong pull on the pint.