Lou's Life Chap 6 "Blood"

I love NY and I love my house! I live in a beautiful 1940's NY brownstone in Greenwich Village, which I actually purchased when I was going to Syracuse University, but back then I had to commute out to Syracuse. I don't like to drive in NY. Now it's just a short bus ride to Washington Square. The main thing I love about this place is the quiet. The city is busy with hectic crowds, and full of noise. I can put up with only so much of it. It's so wonderful to come home and as soon as I drop my keys in the bowl on the table in the foyer, listen to the quiet descend. It's soothing. Since I have lived in this house off and on for almost 70 years, I have developed quite a routine. Sometimes I change it up and do things slightly differently, but my favorite thing to do is come home, change into a t-shirt and sweats, put some heavy metal on my $4000 dollar stereo system, and prepare my meal in my $27,000 gourmet kitchen. The rabbit hutches are in the basement, so first thing I do is go downstairs, care for all of them, feed, water and clean the droppings and then I select two of the older ones. I have my rabbits on a strict breeding schedule, and I keep track of which male is with which female so I can keep my gene pool healthy. A rabbit pregnancy is only 31 days long and she will have between 5 and 10 babies at a time. The rabbits are mature enough to eat in 3 months. I eat twice a day, two in the evening and two before I leave the house in the morning, sometimes more if I need to be around large crowds that day. I've got this down to a science so that I've always got a steady supply of food. I have to keep a rotation going of babies and grown-ups. By the time I run out of mature ones, the babies are old enough to be ate. I like this activity, caring for the animals. Even though it's been a couple hundred years since I actually lived on a farm, I've never forgotten the simple pleasure of doing chores. I hate being still. I get bored to easily.

The one thing I hated about living with Quinn, and living in a cave was the serious lack of activity and no sense of time. I was used to living on the farm where chores were not a option, there were a part of daily life. Then at the convent, my life was filled with chores and prayers. So for me, sitting around in a room with nothing to do was sheer torture. For the first bit of time, I laid on the bed. I didn't want to move. Moving around the room made Marcus's smell worse. The hunger was about to drive me mad, and if I laid very still on the bed I only barely smelled his blood and it wasn't so bad. He was still alive and conscious but he had been staring at the floor for quite some time. I only knew he was alive because I could see his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed. I had no sense of time since I couldn't see the sun or the moon, but I knew it had to have been several days because Marcus was to weak to hold his head up.

Quinn was gone. He had left some time ago. Either it was to leave me alone with my "meal" or it was because he was angry with me for not conforming to his will for me, I'm not entirely sure which. Right after he had left I was very worried that he would not come back. Now I had reached the point of not caring if he came back or not. He was gone and I was alone with Marcus and the insane thirst in my head. There were so many times, I got up and walked toward him so many times, but then he would look up at me with those eyes the color of the sky at dusk. And there was something inside me that raged, it was wrong to kill him. I don't why I couldn't just do the deed, I just know that a force greater than my hunger was holding me back from feeding.

I was laying on the bed when suddenly I caught the smell of clean, fresh air. I smelled it a full second before I felt it. It came like a whoosh, blowing across my face. There was a crashing sound. To the left of the bookcase was a corridor leading back to what Quinn referred to as his Chamber. It was more of a human sized tunnel carved through the rocks than an actual corridor. I had never dared to go back there. Now I sat bolt upright in bed, and even Marcus lifted his head and inhaled deeply. I stopped and listened. I heard no noise, but now there was no denying it, there was definitely a breeze coming from Quinn's chamber. I got off the bed and took tentative steps toward the bookshelf. I glanced back at the door, for some reason expecting Quinn to come in any moment, and took a few more steps toward the tunnel. "Aidez-moi! Je vous prie! Aidez-moi!" Marcus yelled for help suddenly. I almost jumped out of my skin at the sudden sound. I spun around, glared at him, put my finger to my lips and "Shhhhh!" I turned back and grabbed a torch from the wall sconce. As I made my way down the corridor, the breeze got stronger. Blood, I smelled blood. But it didn't smell like a human's blood. What was going on?

The door to Quinn's chamber was standing slightly ajar. I pushed it open. I was very surprised to find his bedroom to be just as opulent as the main room where I slept. A large canopied bed sat in the center of the room, a huge oak armoire that was big enough for me to climb in was to my left. To my right, close to the door was a desk, smaller than the one in the main room. There was movement to the right of the bed and it caught my attention. I lifted the torch higher, and walked farther into the room. As I looked closer I realized that the entire back wall of the room was covered in fabric, a heavy, thick red velvet curtain. The bottom corner of the curtain was flapping in the breeze coming from behind it. If the curtain was covering the solid rock wall of the back of the cave, where was the breeze coming from? And why was the smell of blood getting stronger the closer I got to the waving fabric? I pulled the curtain back, looked up and saw a large beam of sunlight, like a spotlight, shining down through the ceiling. I could see a little patch of blue sky and tree roots dangling down through the hole. Blood, the smell of blood was so strong I was choking on it. I had to move the curtain aside far enough to get the torch in front of me so I could see where I was walking. The rings the fabric hung from made a clinking sound as they slid across the metal bar embedded in the stalactites on the ceiling.

A pit! A huge, cavernous pit was before me. I was struck by a mixture of horror, disbelief and curiosity. I held the torch as high as I could to get as good a view as I could. Where was I? There were bones, piles and piles of human bones and human remains everywhere. Suddenly it dawned on me. Quinn's victims. I was standing on the edge of Quinn's garbage dump. The beam of sunlight was shining down on a deer. I guessed that the ground above had given way and the deer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and fell through. The doe was struggling to get up, but it was obvious that its legs were broken and it was bleeding as it struggled. Before I realized that I had moved I was beside the deer, holding it by the snout with its head pushed back, breaking it's neck.

Standing on a pile of human skulls, this vampire had her first taste of blood. Before I ever thought about it, I buried my teeth in the warm flesh on the deer's neck. The instant pleasure I felt was intoxicating. The rush of heat and wetness is impossible to describe. The feelings were so intense I practically felt I was having some sort of out of body experience. It seemed like the blood flowed forever, and I was hungry enough to consume every last drop. I was being messy, I could feel the stickiness of the blood on my face, but I didn't care. It was like I wasn't complete before, like there was something missing. But now I had found it. Blood, the miracle cure for all that ails me. I had no idea it could be like this. The bones , the pit, the cave, everything faded away and I was floating on a sea of red. The flow began to slow down and I returned to myself. I realized I was not alone. As I finished, I looked up and saw Quinn standing there, on the ledge above me, holding Marcus in a deadly embrace. Left hand behind Marcus's head and right arm around his waist, head bent to Marcus's neck. His eyes never left mine as he drank. As he finished he let Marcus slip from his arms, and the dead boy fell at my feet. Quinn laughed. "So it begins" was all he said before he turned and went back through the curtain. I knelt on my pile of skulls, beside the dead deer, with blood on my face, and wept for my dead boy.