“What does a witch of the Black want with me?” her voice rough.
“I’m sorry, I would not bother you were this not important.”
Lady Hollow’s eyes narrowed and she sat forward in her chair. Both she and Nicole were in the Manor sitting room. Nicole had called her because she didn’t know where else to turn to get the help and answers she was looking for.
“This I know to be true. You kind rarely bother with us. It is as though we are beneath you.” It was Nicole’s turn to narrow her eyes.
“I will play political dodge ball with you at a later date but right now, I need your help.”
Lady Hallow looked at Nicole and Nicole stared back unflinchingly.
“Very well, I will hold you to that my friend. What is it you need?
*
Nicole returned to Lara’s room with buckets, towels and baby stuff floating behind her. Following the trail was Lady Hollow who looked less than pleased. As Nicole began rushing about, Lady Hollow observed Lara who had not moved once.
“Nicole, did you place her under a spell?” Lady Hollow questioned.
“No,” Nicole responded. “Any spell I use might harm her or the kid. Aside from a cleaning spell for the room and the bed, which I’m going to have to perform again, I’m going to have to do this manually. Why do you ask?”
Lady Hollow didn’t respond. Instead she gestured quietly to the bed. Lara was lying prostrate. There was no rise and all of her chest, no subtle movements behind her eyelids, nothing. Lara looked well and truly dead.
“Do something.”
“Like what? If she’s dead, aside from reanimating her corpse, which I’m not about to do by the way, there is nothing I can do.” Nicole said.
“She’s not dead.”
Nicole gave her sallow and sunken cousin a once over. Lara was of a darker complexion, as was Nicole but Lara looked ashen, almost grey. Her body was beginning to bloat and there was a foul stench in the air.
“Okay, maybe I’m not too clear on what dead is but she looks like it.”
“It’s a spell, and a nasty one at that. It’s the Curse of the Living Dead. It turns you into a corpse from the inside out. Someone does not want this baby born.”
“That’s not possible.” Nicole said. “Only family can cast spells that affect anyone inside the house. As much as I dislike them, no one in my family would do something like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“From the look on your face I’m guessing this spell is powerful?”
Lady Hollow nodded. “Very.”
Nicole sighed. “There are only four people in my family capable of doing this. Two of them are dead, and the other two are my mother and I. She might be a power hungry wretch of a woman but she’s too caught up in the White to do something like this.”
Lady Hollow eyed Nicole. “Are you certain all of them are dead?”
Nicole nodded. “ We buried my father when I was nine and my grandmother shortly after.”
“Then it has to be your mother.”
Nicole snorted. “The white would not allow it.”
Lara let out a groan of pain. Her chest heaved and she started clawing at her stomach. Nicole rushed over and held down her arms. Lara thrashed about. She was screaming. Long, guttural, unsettling noises streamed from her mouth and Nicole was at a loss.
“So this is the Curse of the Living Dead huh?”
“No, this is something more. I’ve never seen anything like this.” Lady Hollow’s voice was reverent. She was in awe of what she was seeing.
Lara pitched up and threw Nicole half way across the room. Her spine bowed nearly in half and Nicole and Lady Hollow saw the imprint of a small hand pressing against the flesh of Lara’s womb.
Black gloop poured freely from between Lara’s legs as the poor girl continued the scream. The baby was indeed coming but now Nicole wanted to know who or what was the father.
“Bless it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have to bless it.”
“The hell I do.”
Lady Hollow sighed. “I am no longer speaking as your friend but as your fellow creature. You must bestow upon the child the blessing of the Deep Magic. It is intrinsic to all of us, and it is also why there is always a witch present at any birth. This child is the long heralded Haeven Child. I sense greatness in him.”
“I’m not doing it. I’ll call my mother.”
Lady Hollow looked out of the window. The moon was pale in all her splendour and was high in the sky. She turned to regard Nicole who was still struggling on the floor. Nicole was covered head to toe in black goo. It had gotten on to the floor and was splattered in an almost deliberated way on the walls and ceiling.
“There is no time. It must be done now.” Lady Hollow’s voice was commanding and firm.
Nicole rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll need eight black candles, chalk, lavender and thistle.”
Lady Hollow returned with the items and Nicole set them up around Lara’s bed where she was still thrashing. The candles lit and the room went dark. Lady Hollow drew an eight-point star around Nicole herself and the candles.
Any black gloop that the candlelight touched became animated. Lady Hollow looked around as it writhed and gyrated in an orchestrated dance to silent music. Nicole could feel the magic buzzing around her skin. Everything felt alive. She started chanting:
“Here my words, I cry to the night.
Bless this child by moons pale light
Fathers and Mothers, daughters and sons
By the ancestor Great Circe, let this be done
I give this child by the chant of three
Gifts to him impart of thee.”
Nicole chanted. A strong wind started up but Nicole closed her eyes and kept chanting. She started to glow, as did Lara’s stomach. Lara had stopped moving. Her complexion returned and she was breathing normally.
Nicole spoke the blessing three times and on the third time a cry filled the room. It was a baby. Nicole looked at Lady Hollow and Lady Hollow looked back. Both women were incredulous.
“It couldn’t have been that easy.” Nicole said.
“Only one way to find out.” Lady Hollow broke the circle and clambered up on top of the bed. “It’s a boy.” She was laughing but her laugh had a slight hysterical edge to it.
Nicole jumped up and took a step back in shock. The baby was black. Not black like the physical colour of human skin but black as in the absence of light. The baby stopped crying when he saw Nicole and was looking at her with green eyes that were far too intelligent for a new born.
Nicole stared back and found that against her will, she had fallen in love with the child.
“I’ll name you Ceren, at least until your mother wakes up.” Nicole’s voice as soft as she picked up Ceren and gently rocked him in her bosom.
Ceren looked at her with his too intelligent green eyes and smiled. Nicole was too busy doting to notice that the child already had sharp pointed pearly white teeth.
*
Nicole took Lara to the hospital the next day and was told that there was nothing wrong with her other than the fact that she was in a coma. Nicole opted to leave here there.
Doctors were baffled as how Lara could have had a one-day-old baby. Her body had shown no signs of pregnancy. She wasn’t lactating. Stranger still, people from the creature community that she was affiliated with kept dropping by and congratulating her on the birth of her son. These same people had known of Lara’s pregnancy but kept telling her that it was sad that Lara was in a car accident.
When she told them that it was Lara who was pregnant and she was just the second cousin to the baby, they told her that post partum depression was normal in first time mothers and that she’d get over it soon enough. Even Lady Hollow, who had been through the birth with her, had no recollection of Lara being pregnant or even who Lara was.
“You don’t remember anything?”
“Child, you are the bearer of the proph
esied child. I would think someone that now has your status in our world would be happier.” Lady Hollow said.
“Why would I be happy?”
“You have a child. A powerful child yes, but a child none the less. That would make most first time mothers happy.”
“I wasn’t there for most of the pregnancy.”
“It’s normal to feel that way.”
“There is nothing normal about this.” Nicole muttered.
Lady Hollow didn’t catch it but Nicole almost wished she had. She was sad about Lara and how nothing worked the way it should. She didn’t feel like a mother. She didn’t feel like an aunt. The best way to describe it was that she didn’t feel at all.
*
Things got a bit better after that though. The baby’s skin had lightened to the same shade as hers and as Nicole gazed at him taking a nap in his bed, she realized that she did not mind having him around. He was a quiet baby. He didn’t cry or fuss and sometimes she even forgot he was there. She liked that about him.
“What am I going to do with you?”
Nicole ran her hand over the Ceren’s baldhead and leaned down to kiss him. He didn’t wake up. Nicole turned to leave. She didn’t notice two bright, too green, too intelligent eyes watching her as she walked away.
The End
Kitten
Kat looked around. Her hair was strewn with dirt and rotting leaves. Tears and blood streaked her beautiful face. She lay where she had fallen, trying to catch her breath. A fur cloak made from the skin and fur of her ancestors, given to her upon her mother’s death, was wrapped tightly around her shaking frame.
Both the night and the forest were dark and damp. Her jeans were ripped and she didn’t buy them that way. Her shirt was not the colour she bought it as and her left shoe was somewhere between what used to be her house and the forest she was in, almost nine miles away. A biting wind nipped at the exposed flesh of her face, neck and hands.
“Why?” she asked the wind.
Her only response was the sounds of tree boughs rubbing together. They produced a long, low ominous moan that chilled her to the bone.
Five days ago her mother passed away. Kat didn’t even think she had time to properly grieve before her stepfather, Cassius, was upon her. She fought him off as best she could and then she ran. Her mother’s wish had been for them to stay together as a family and for Cassius to find someone that he loved. Kat didn’t think that her mother had meant her but even when she was alive, Cassius had always said they looked alike.
Kat didn’t like it but her mother had said that it was just a joke. Besides, they really did look alike. Same hair that looked like hand spun rays from the sun, same soulful brown eyes like pools of warm melted chocolate and the same heart shaped faces. Kat never liked it when Cassius had compared them. His stare made her feel dirty and used. She wanted to fulfil her mother’s wish but she knew that if she went back she’d kill him or he’d kill her.
“What should I do?” she cried, silently begging her mother to respond all the while knowing that she wouldn’t, that she couldn’t. Her life would never be the same. Part of her felt like everything was her fault, like she was somehow to blame for Cassius being a freak. She knew she wasn’t at fault, but how else was she to explain him being such a freak and her being only fifteen?
Picking herself up, Kat didn’t recognize anything around her. She was well and truly lost.
The End
150
Darien snapped out of his thoughts. He glanced around him at the torch illuminated stonewalls covered in moss and dilapidated tapestries framed by cold and rusted suits of armour and slumped back onto his four poster silver and midnight blue canopy bed.
The light was dim but Darien could see perfectly. His green eyes glowed. He sat up. His hair, long and dark chestnut brown, flowed down his back and over his shoulders. He was naked. The satin sheets fell about him like sea of silver and his shone beautifully against the coffee and cream of his skin.
“I see you’re awake.” It was times like these that Darien wished that his room had a door.
“You always know when I’m awake. Why do you bother?” Darien’s voice had calmness to it but there was an undertone of annoyance and anger.
“One hundred fifty years and you’re still an ungrateful son of a motherless goat.” The speaker was tall. His skin was pale almost translucent. His eyes were as a pale a blue as they could get and his hair was almost bleached bone white.
“One hundred and fifty years and you still haven’t realised that I will never be happy about what you did to me.” Darien’s words were soft.
As soon as the words left him mouth, the other man was upon him. He wasn’t the human that Darien had been talking to moments earlier. That was gone. Replaced with monstrous creature made from the stuff of nightmares.
This creature was skeletal, stretching upwards in excess of almost eight feet. Because of the torchlight and Darien’s enhanced vision, he could see the membrane that spread along the large skeleton. It looked delicate but nothing short of a silver blade or another one of those creatures could tear into it or do any sort of damage.
Darien could see the shrivelled organs signifying that the creature on top of him had yet to feed. It’s face was stretched and twisted and gnarled to the point that even though he knew that this creature was human at one pint, Darien still could not find any correlation between it and anything living.
The thing roared. It was sound that made everything with in him ache in fear and despondency. Darien swallowed thickly as the creature leaned in and looked him dead in the eye. For his part, Darien was frozen. The creature flexed its claw like hands, roared again and then it got off of Darien. The transformation was gone as quick as it had come.
“Forgive my boorishness. I lost myself, sire.” The man, Darien’s sire regarded him shrewdly.
He then smiled. It never quite reached his eyes but it allowed Darien a perfect view of the longer than normal incisors.
“What is my name, my darling Darien?” He was standing near the entrance to Darien’s room. There was no door and windows.
“Marcel.”
“And what am I to you?” every time Darien had a dream, nightmare or not, about his past, Marcel would do this. Darien thought that the sick freak got some sort of perverse pleasure out of it.
“You’re my sire, you saved my life after I got hit in the chest with a hatchet. I thought I was going to die. You should have left me there.” Darien looked away from Marcel.
He missed Marcel smiling to himself and leaving the room.
“Should’a could’a would’a. You’re alive and you have me to thank. The sooner you get past what ever resentment you have towards your life, the less likely you are to become like me.” The words were whispered but Darien heard them loud and clear.
“One hundred fifty years and you’re still an asshole.”
The end.
Diner
“Hey Kyle! Come here, I’ve got this great joke for you!”
Heads turned as a beefy young man walked into the calm quiet diner. He was loud and his clothing was obnoxious. Several of the patrons shook their heads in exasperated amusement; they were used to this.
“Kyle! Kyle, I know you’re here. Come on Kyle!”
Two figures were huddled at the back of the diner in a corner booth. They both looked out of place in the desert diner. One had stringy black hair and dressed like winter had come early. The other was bald and dressed like a high earning businessman. As the shouting male got closer, both men huddled lower.
“Shouldn’t you answer him?” the speaker was the bald one.
“No. Just ignore him. Avoid eye contact and he’ll go away.” The stringy black haired male dressed for winter in the desert turned his head away from his more than amused companion and place his head on the dusty and sticky table.
Said companion took this time to look about the diner. Kyle had told him about this place and he just had to see
it. It had a bit of rustic charm to it, if you liked that sort of thing. It was in the middle of nowhere off of one highway in Arizona on some dirt road or another. One had to get well and truly lost to find this place but Kyle seemed to like it.
“He’s coming this way.”
“Larry, I told you, avoid eye contact and he’ll leave.”
“Kyle!”
“Damn it! You looked him in the eye didn’t you!” Kyle’s head shot up and he glared his accusation at his cohort. Larry for his part was amused. He had never seen this side of Kyle. It was intriguing to him.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?”