I don't kill.
That is my one salvation, my only shred of sanity that I still have
left in this world. Out of all the things I've done, the wretched
horrors I've committed that haunt my days and nights, I've managed
not to kill anyone. It's only a feeble thread that connects me to my
humanity, as thin as the filaments of a spider's web, but then, a
web is meant to hold things captive, and my little thread holds the
evil within me captive. For now, anyway.
He's coming, I know. I can hear the glide of his bare feet against
the wooden floor, can smell the richness of the shampoo he used only
a few hours before. My mother and my grandfather are breathing
slowly and evenly in the peacefulness of their sleep and it's a
stroke of luck that their bedrooms are on the ground floor because
this is something I could never explain, not to them. I would kill
myself a hundred times over before looking into my mother's eyes to
tell her...
But no, I'll never have to tell her, one way or another. I can't
even tell her the simplest parts of it, bad enough that he is
suffering without adding our mother's pain to our own. I can't look
at her anymore, I can't tell her that killing the Master Vampire may
have given me control again, but it didn't make me human. Not
completely.
But he knows. And he'll do anything, anything I ask, anything at
all, to keep me home, to keep me safe.
My brother, my younger brother, who I remember holding when he was
only a baby, playing with him, tormenting him in a way that only an
older brother can manage. My brother, my family, mine.
I'm fucking my brother.
It burns to say that aloud, as easily as the sun burns my skin. I'm
using him as a distraction, to ignore the blood that sings through
the veins of every person who walks past me, calling me to taste, to
drink, to slaughter the little sheep that walk the streets so
bravely during the day.
Is it worse or better to fuck your brother than it is to kill? Which
is the lesser of two sins?
Does it even matter?
When I feel the urge, dream of a wash of sweet crimson trailing over
me and I wake in the night chilled with my own sweat, he comes to
me. It was his idea, really, those fucking comics of his said that
sexual lust and blood lust were very closely linked.
They were right. It does work, usually, although sometimes it takes
most of the night for the vampiric hooks to pull out of my skin, for
the sweet unholy desire to let me go as I indulge in a desire of a
different sort, although one that is no more blessed.
It's linked us somehow, twisted our psyches together, and I don't
need to go to him at night, not anymore. He feels it when I need
him, pads into my room on nearly silent, bare feet. It's an
addiction, he's an addiction and I wonder if he still comes to me
for the reasons he thinks he does...or if its his own cravings that
send him to me now.
I wonder if he is still as human as he believes he is.
I've done research now on myself, more than I did on anything in
school, and I've found books that perhaps no one else has read in a
century or more, and wouldn't believe if they did. Or perhaps they'd
be too afraid to peer between the dusky, cracked covers, knowing
deep inside what they would find there.
I know now that most vampires kill their families first, slaughter
the ones they loved the most like so much cattle.
My brother is slipping inside my room, feeling his way through the
darkness like I no longer have to do. I take him in my arms, feel
his smooth, naked skin beneath my own, and I know the truth, even as
I push inside the willing body beneath me, even as I scrape the
fangs that I no longer try to hide against the far too tempting
pulse beating softly in his neck.
Nothing taste sweeter than the blood of your kin.
-finis-
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