To Love My Sister, To Kill My Sister
Askari Knight
Disclaimer: I know, I know, it's a freaky title, but it is, oddly enough, something my sister and I actually talked about one time. Thanks to the section "In The Forests Of The Night," and the book by the same name by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, as well as a FF8 fanfiction I read earlier tonight, this little fic popped in. I neither own the characters, nor use them for profit. It's rated R for a bit of angst, and possible mean language, as well as blood. If you don't like vamps, don't read it, cause I'm sorta mean when it comes to the witches in the story. Oh, and my description of myself and my sister is actually quite true. She's platinum blond, and quite prone to sun-burns, and I'm raven-haired and nigh on impossible to burn with the sun. In other words, she's generally more tanned than I am. On with the story.
My vision was darkening as the creature that had grabbed me drained the crimson fluid that sustained my life.
A female voice resounded in my head as I struggled, managing to bash my head against hers a couple times, but that only resulted in my feeling very dizzy. Or more dizzy than I was already feeling.
"You're not doing me a favour," I whispered, ignoring all the protocols my parents had ever taught me about fighting with a woman. My elbow found it's way into her breast, hard, and the fingers on the hand of my other arm found their ways into the creature's eyes. Already, I was starting to feel the thirst, or rather, feel it more acutely. You see, my tastes had always run for blood, but more for actual desire of the flavour, and the idea. The actual thirst of a true vampire, however, this was more than I could bear right now.
She released me, dragging her teeth slightly as she ripped them from my neck.
"Foolish boy," Her voice was icy, and I turned around to face her, finding myself glaring into black eyes. "You ask for eternal sleep, infinite and total darkness, and I can give it to you. Just submit to me."
"No," I shook my head. "I don't seek death. What I desire is merely peace, from the voices, the sounds, everything." Then she moved too fast for my eyes to follow, and I found myself tackled to the ground, head slamming against the pavement while little rocks and pebbles ground into my back.
"Then I can give you the power to stop the voices, the 'sounds' as you called them," her voice was getting more and more silent, until it was no longer an auditory sense that received it.
"Stop toying with him, Fala." A new voice from the spinning world above me sounded. Stars were blending into each other, creating a blur of light that, coupled with my loss of blood, was making me feel very strange right now.
"Woof, woof," I murmured, coughing on the last word. "Obey your master, dog." In all probability, I probably would never have even thought of saying that. In truth, I hadn't even thought of saying that then.
"Aubrey, he's mine!" the now-named vampire shrieked.
"I'll grant you that," The male voice came floating out of nowhere that I could discern. "But you don't have claim, so he's free game."
"But-"
"No buts, Fala." This didn't come from Aubrey, though. It came from my lips, oddly enough. "Could you get off me, though? I'd much rather Aubrey be laying on me, instead of a worn out hag like yourself." Again, the creature screamed, especially at how calm I sounded. My heart was pounding harder not from excitement, but from having to move less and less blood around with each passing instant.
"Damn you!" She screamed at me, slapping me across the face hard enough to see stars. "Damn you to hell!"
"Sorry, Fala," Aubrey this time. "But he doesn't believe in hell." He pointed at the small, toonie-sized pentacle hanging off of the pewter chain on my neck. "So that particular curse doesn't work too well with him." Then he laughed, a horrible, cruel sound.
"I hate to interrupt you too fine mosquitoes," I grated out, conversationally. "But could you please hurry this up a little bit? You don't have to worry about bleeding out onto the street, but I do. And I'd hate to see what a mess this leaves in the morning."
"Fastidious, no?" The male drawled, before kicking Fala in the face. "My turn." He picked me up by the front of my shirt, and even with my unfocused vision, I could see his face, barely. He looked about seventeen, or maybe even eighteen, but young at any rate. An inverted, gold cross hung from his neck, and I found myself wondering how much it weighed, even as he sank his fangs into my neck, not even bothering to try and make it be painless. It burned, and tears stung my eyes as the pain shot through my entire body. As per usual, when pain is experienced, my legs and arms stiffen, but one of my knees found his groin anyways. Either he has some kind of cup on him, or he's got no nuts, cause he didn't even bat an eyelash.
Sobering up slightly, thanks to Aubrey and his sadistic feeding technique, my vision cleared just enough to see his neck, pale, and unprotected, and just within reach of the left side of my teeth, including my canines. When punches and kicks in specific areas fail, fall back on the most basic of defence mechanisms, one of which being biting. So that's exactly what I did. I bit him, and all of my muscles that I could still control went into that sharp-toothed chomp. That brought Aubrey back to reality, and I realized, idly, that I couldn't hear Fala anymore.
The realization that I'd pierced his skin came to me as liquid flooded against my lips, and the thirst took over, causing me to drink from Aubrey. He'd stopped drinking from me, and was merely holding me while I imbibed the liquid flooding my mouth. Eventually, he pulled my head away from his neck, and my head rolled back and down, exposing the marks both he and Fala had left on me.
"Sleep, human," Aubrey whispered as darkness overtook me. "You'll awaken to humanity no more."
- - -
Ages, eons, millennia had passed as I drifted in death, not really thinking about anything. Perhaps it was only days, or even a matter of hours, after I'd died before I woke up again. It was as Aubrey had promised as my lungs had filled out of necessity for the last time: I was no longer human. I sensed it in the air, could even smell my own aura, which, while not reeking of death, was significantly darker than I remembered it being.
Aubrey's voice sounded in my head. --I was beginning to think you were a weakling who couldn't figure out how to come back.--
Deciding to try and give him an answer back in the same form as he'd been speaking to me, I tried to focus a thought at him.
--I am not a weakling. I merely cannot move much right now.--
My tongue moved with the words, but with practice, I supposed I could do away with that habit. In my mind I heard him laughing.
I could tell my ignorance was amusing to him.
--Rest, and we shall hunt soon.-- He told me, smirking. Come to think of it, I hadn't even ever really seen what he looked like.
- - -
A week of living, well, existing around Aubrey was painful, to say the least. He taught me the basics, which were essentially shape-shifting, altering my appearance slightly, mind control, shielding my thoughts, reading auras, reading thoughts, and ethereal teleportation, which was just disappearing from one area and using the ethereal plane to transport myself somewhere else instantaneously. He also started teaching me the basics of fighting, vamp-style.
That week led into two, and in the middle of the third week, Aubrey pronounced me fit to be alone and on my own. Not even two weeks old and he was turning me out. The nerve!
First off, I transported myself to Toronto, and amused myself by playing Death with the rapists and murderers. I became quickly bored, though, and started hopping around the world, checking out different styles of living, as I'd always wanted to do, amongst other things. A couple vampires challenged me whenever I set foot into their territory, but they were minor skirmishes, and they didn't last long, seeing as I was lucky enough to infringe upon the lands of very weak vampires. Their disposal took me very little time. Thankfully I hadn't encountered any of the vampire hunters, though I don't know if it was luck or care that kept me from getting stabbed. I always avoided staying in the same area for too long, and as far as I could tell, my globe-trotting was random: I went where I felt like going.
I heard stories from different areas of the world, all in the native tongue of the region. Ten feedings or so on people who spoke French granted me the knowledge to understand it, and, if I decided to practice and learn, to speak it. It was thus with every culture I encountered. I preferred to use illusions to make people think that my lips were moving, when in fact I was speaking into their minds. It's so much easier that way. Four months of hopping around the world quickly becomes boring, and I was growing curious as to what my family was up to.
A flicker of a thought brought me to the house where my sister lived with our, no, her father. I was no longer able to call them family, but I looked in on them, regardless of that fact, and curious.
My father and step-mother were doing fine, what with their hydroponics shop and all. My sister was doing fine in school, and all the pets were healthy, except for Flahr, who used to be my cat, and is, as well as was, quite obese.
After a few days of watching, I became bored, and considered what they'd be like if I suddenly showed up, all fancy and stuff. Over the months of my undead existence, I'd accumulated an astonishingly large amount of money from all over the world. It wasn't enough that I fed off of the bodies, but that I also took their money, in the event that I decided I wanted a house, or someplace to call "mine."
In areas of the states, purchasing a car is ridiculously simple, so I vanished from Canada for a few days and spent a solid week searching out various car dealerships, and specifically one that wouldn't ask for a license. Then I got an idea: I could change my appearance, or control somebody.
My new plan was simple, really. Beautifully succinct. I sought out, and brought back a nobody from the town that the dealership was located in. It was a simple matter, actually, to manipulate my way into his mind, and take it over. Two days spent dominating him, then a day of haggling, before he signed the car over to me, along with full insurance, using all the money left in his life. No family, no wife or children, not even any pets to take care of, so his life wasn't important. Unknowingly, to him at least, he got me a pair of license plates, as well. I was bound and determined to show off to my family that I was very well off.
Transporting the car, a black convertible, proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Four times I tried to teleport it along with me, but apparently, I could only bring humanoid materials, as well as clothing, with me. Or a certain amount of weight. I wasn't too worried, and decided to merely drive the whole distance.
Contrary to popular belief, a vampire can easily survive under direct sunlight, and isn't allergic to most of the "usual treatments" used to slay us, such as stakes, garlic, holy water, crucifixes, etc. The reason I comment on this is because the drive north was abysmally bright and sunny.
Approximately a week and a half after that, almost exactly five months after my disappearance, I arrived in front of my old family's place. It was about supper time, Halloween eve, so it was fairly chilly. This area of Ontario actually had snow on the ground, already. A whispered command made my dad and step-mother leave the room and go to bed, swiftly followed by slumber so deep as to be almost death. My step-mother took a little longer to control than my dad, but she spends a lot of time meditating, and has a very well protected mind. I suppose my sister noticed something odd about the automaton-like manner in which our parents left the dinner table. Her blond head whipped around when I honked the horn, before pulling into the driveway. The dog didn't bark, though that was due to my control on him. I didn't want him to wake up our parents.
I left the car, shutting it off, and walked to the back door, where I knocked once before she opened it, gaping at me.
"Where were you!?" She cried, embracing me the instant the door was out of the way. She was dressed in a red and black banded long dress that reached to her ankles, as well as a maroon blouse and arm coverings.
"Busy being dead," I said calmly, taking her hand and pressing it against my chest. I knew there was a heart-beat, but I could will it into stillness, which I did. After five minutes of fearful staring, she looked up at me.
"Why did you come back?" Her eyes had tears in them, barely held in check by her will-power. I would give her a choice.
"I came for you," I whispered, embracing her slowly. "I love you, sister, and I wish for you to be beside me for always."
"That sounds like a bad line out of a Roman-setting-ed movie," she sniffed, clutching my arms. "Why didn't you come back sooner?"
"I was trying to find myself," I explained, stepping into the house, slowly. I may not be able to feel the cold to the same extent as my sister, but that doesn't mean squat. "I found that I needed a balance, just as I did in life, so do I in death."
Her eyes closed, delicate blond lashes curled slightly upward. She nodded once in understanding. "How?"
"I was turned." She knew what that meant.
"Did it hurt?" I thought back to my death, and gave a little laugh.
"No, it didn't."
Sniffing again, tears dripping now just slightly, she walked into the living room, and came back with a pen and paper. Using the green-tiled kitchen counter as a desk, she quickly wrote a note. My eyes darted in and found what she had written:
"He came back, Dad, just like you said. But he's different, and I'm leaving to join him. We love you, and we know that you love us. We may contact you, eventually, or perhaps not. Good bye."
"We can come back and visit all you want," I said, watching as she signed the note. "It's up to you." I, too, signed the note, and I also included my new name. The one I'd chosen a few months ago.
"Can we bring Tamsin?" She asked me. I smiled, and nodded.
"I own a, house, in Europe, in the mountains. It's fairly large and private. I think I want to bring Flahr along, as well."
"Are you going to turn them, too?" She asked me, archly.
"They'd be the first vampire-cats that I've ever heard of, then," I laughed, the sound odd from my throat. That I hadn't laughed in months was interesting. "No, I think we'll bond them to us, as some other vampires bond humans to them." She nodded, and quickly gathered up the only other thing she wanted to bring: her laptop computer.
Silently, we gathered the cats in their carry-cases, and my sister began to look worried.
"They'll wake up, won't they?" She asked me.
"With the sun tomorrow, they will. And don't worry about the cats eating. There'll be plenty for them at my home." She smiled gratefully, and looked at me.
"How are we getting there?" I smirked, then motioned for her to grab Tamsin's carry-case, while I did the same with Flahr's.
"Pick up your laptop, and try not to be too startled," I warned her. The keys to the car were on the counter, as well as a note inside telling them to keep it as a gift. A flicker of thought brought us to my home, which was really more of a mansion than anything else, really. I'd amused myself during bouts of boredom on my trip by carving it out of the rock itself. Outwardly, it looked like nothing more than an odd formation of rocks atop a cave. Inside, the opulence was staggering. Even I couldn't believe I'd gone so far with it sometimes.
The polished floor was amethyst, made utterly smooth and level by my will when my boredom reached an all-time low. The walls arched upwards into a crystal globe at the ceiling, harnessing light from a lamp fed oil by special gas lines I'd installed. The globe refracted all the light, sending a kaleidoscope of colour down, and washing everything with blues, yellows, greens, purples, reds, and oranges. A spiralling staircase in the middle of the room led down into an underground cavern complex. The next floor down was one of onyx, smoothed and polished into black mirrors. Each floor was set with a different type of substance, the third floor down being diamond, and the one below that of jade. There were designs in the walls and floor, and even some on the ceiling, but mostly, attention was captivated by the lights and, or the rooms themselves.
"It's beautiful!" My sister exclaimed, gaping at the halls. "Did you do this all by yourself?"
"No, the cavern was here before I came around. Everything was set in place already, but I'm the one who polished it all. Come down stairs, it is cold up here." In truth, it was really quite warm up in that main, reception, room.
- - -
She lived with me for a week before she came up to me one night, steeled herself, and spoke.
"I'm ready." I closed my eyes and nodded, before motioning for her to sit down beside me.
"You're going to feel really calm, and really relaxed. Don't fight it. It will hurt, otherwise." With that, I moved her platinum blond hair out of the way from her neck, and letting my teeth unsheathe in my mouth. I felt her relax even before my teeth had pierced her neck and her life's blood was flowing into me. I felt that we could be there for eternity, for all the bliss it gave me.
Eons later, or perhaps only seconds, I felt her heart falter. That was when I knew it was time for her to feed. Slowly, I withdrew from her neck, and brought out a knife from my vest. Tilting my head to the side, I slashed quickly across my neck, and blood started to flow. Quickly, I brought her lips to my neck, where she slowly took in the fluid that would grant her immortality, of a sort. I felt her heart shudder, and stop completely.
Just before she died, she looked up at me and smiled.
"Better you than a stranger."
- - -
Even now, five hundred years later, my sister still doesn't neglect to let me know that I'm the one who changed her, and even now, five hundred years later, we love each other, and balance the other out, each other's yin and yang, the alpha and omega of our undead existence.
Askari Knight
Disclaimer: I know, I know, it's a freaky title, but it is, oddly enough, something my sister and I actually talked about one time. Thanks to the section "In The Forests Of The Night," and the book by the same name by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, as well as a FF8 fanfiction I read earlier tonight, this little fic popped in. I neither own the characters, nor use them for profit. It's rated R for a bit of angst, and possible mean language, as well as blood. If you don't like vamps, don't read it, cause I'm sorta mean when it comes to the witches in the story. Oh, and my description of myself and my sister is actually quite true. She's platinum blond, and quite prone to sun-burns, and I'm raven-haired and nigh on impossible to burn with the sun. In other words, she's generally more tanned than I am. On with the story.
My vision was darkening as the creature that had grabbed me drained the crimson fluid that sustained my life.
A female voice resounded in my head as I struggled, managing to bash my head against hers a couple times, but that only resulted in my feeling very dizzy. Or more dizzy than I was already feeling.
"You're not doing me a favour," I whispered, ignoring all the protocols my parents had ever taught me about fighting with a woman. My elbow found it's way into her breast, hard, and the fingers on the hand of my other arm found their ways into the creature's eyes. Already, I was starting to feel the thirst, or rather, feel it more acutely. You see, my tastes had always run for blood, but more for actual desire of the flavour, and the idea. The actual thirst of a true vampire, however, this was more than I could bear right now.
She released me, dragging her teeth slightly as she ripped them from my neck.
"Foolish boy," Her voice was icy, and I turned around to face her, finding myself glaring into black eyes. "You ask for eternal sleep, infinite and total darkness, and I can give it to you. Just submit to me."
"No," I shook my head. "I don't seek death. What I desire is merely peace, from the voices, the sounds, everything." Then she moved too fast for my eyes to follow, and I found myself tackled to the ground, head slamming against the pavement while little rocks and pebbles ground into my back.
"Then I can give you the power to stop the voices, the 'sounds' as you called them," her voice was getting more and more silent, until it was no longer an auditory sense that received it.
"Stop toying with him, Fala." A new voice from the spinning world above me sounded. Stars were blending into each other, creating a blur of light that, coupled with my loss of blood, was making me feel very strange right now.
"Woof, woof," I murmured, coughing on the last word. "Obey your master, dog." In all probability, I probably would never have even thought of saying that. In truth, I hadn't even thought of saying that then.
"Aubrey, he's mine!" the now-named vampire shrieked.
"I'll grant you that," The male voice came floating out of nowhere that I could discern. "But you don't have claim, so he's free game."
"But-"
"No buts, Fala." This didn't come from Aubrey, though. It came from my lips, oddly enough. "Could you get off me, though? I'd much rather Aubrey be laying on me, instead of a worn out hag like yourself." Again, the creature screamed, especially at how calm I sounded. My heart was pounding harder not from excitement, but from having to move less and less blood around with each passing instant.
"Damn you!" She screamed at me, slapping me across the face hard enough to see stars. "Damn you to hell!"
"Sorry, Fala," Aubrey this time. "But he doesn't believe in hell." He pointed at the small, toonie-sized pentacle hanging off of the pewter chain on my neck. "So that particular curse doesn't work too well with him." Then he laughed, a horrible, cruel sound.
"I hate to interrupt you too fine mosquitoes," I grated out, conversationally. "But could you please hurry this up a little bit? You don't have to worry about bleeding out onto the street, but I do. And I'd hate to see what a mess this leaves in the morning."
"Fastidious, no?" The male drawled, before kicking Fala in the face. "My turn." He picked me up by the front of my shirt, and even with my unfocused vision, I could see his face, barely. He looked about seventeen, or maybe even eighteen, but young at any rate. An inverted, gold cross hung from his neck, and I found myself wondering how much it weighed, even as he sank his fangs into my neck, not even bothering to try and make it be painless. It burned, and tears stung my eyes as the pain shot through my entire body. As per usual, when pain is experienced, my legs and arms stiffen, but one of my knees found his groin anyways. Either he has some kind of cup on him, or he's got no nuts, cause he didn't even bat an eyelash.
Sobering up slightly, thanks to Aubrey and his sadistic feeding technique, my vision cleared just enough to see his neck, pale, and unprotected, and just within reach of the left side of my teeth, including my canines. When punches and kicks in specific areas fail, fall back on the most basic of defence mechanisms, one of which being biting. So that's exactly what I did. I bit him, and all of my muscles that I could still control went into that sharp-toothed chomp. That brought Aubrey back to reality, and I realized, idly, that I couldn't hear Fala anymore.
The realization that I'd pierced his skin came to me as liquid flooded against my lips, and the thirst took over, causing me to drink from Aubrey. He'd stopped drinking from me, and was merely holding me while I imbibed the liquid flooding my mouth. Eventually, he pulled my head away from his neck, and my head rolled back and down, exposing the marks both he and Fala had left on me.
"Sleep, human," Aubrey whispered as darkness overtook me. "You'll awaken to humanity no more."
- - -
Ages, eons, millennia had passed as I drifted in death, not really thinking about anything. Perhaps it was only days, or even a matter of hours, after I'd died before I woke up again. It was as Aubrey had promised as my lungs had filled out of necessity for the last time: I was no longer human. I sensed it in the air, could even smell my own aura, which, while not reeking of death, was significantly darker than I remembered it being.
Aubrey's voice sounded in my head. --I was beginning to think you were a weakling who couldn't figure out how to come back.--
Deciding to try and give him an answer back in the same form as he'd been speaking to me, I tried to focus a thought at him.
--I am not a weakling. I merely cannot move much right now.--
My tongue moved with the words, but with practice, I supposed I could do away with that habit. In my mind I heard him laughing.
I could tell my ignorance was amusing to him.
--Rest, and we shall hunt soon.-- He told me, smirking. Come to think of it, I hadn't even ever really seen what he looked like.
- - -
A week of living, well, existing around Aubrey was painful, to say the least. He taught me the basics, which were essentially shape-shifting, altering my appearance slightly, mind control, shielding my thoughts, reading auras, reading thoughts, and ethereal teleportation, which was just disappearing from one area and using the ethereal plane to transport myself somewhere else instantaneously. He also started teaching me the basics of fighting, vamp-style.
That week led into two, and in the middle of the third week, Aubrey pronounced me fit to be alone and on my own. Not even two weeks old and he was turning me out. The nerve!
First off, I transported myself to Toronto, and amused myself by playing Death with the rapists and murderers. I became quickly bored, though, and started hopping around the world, checking out different styles of living, as I'd always wanted to do, amongst other things. A couple vampires challenged me whenever I set foot into their territory, but they were minor skirmishes, and they didn't last long, seeing as I was lucky enough to infringe upon the lands of very weak vampires. Their disposal took me very little time. Thankfully I hadn't encountered any of the vampire hunters, though I don't know if it was luck or care that kept me from getting stabbed. I always avoided staying in the same area for too long, and as far as I could tell, my globe-trotting was random: I went where I felt like going.
I heard stories from different areas of the world, all in the native tongue of the region. Ten feedings or so on people who spoke French granted me the knowledge to understand it, and, if I decided to practice and learn, to speak it. It was thus with every culture I encountered. I preferred to use illusions to make people think that my lips were moving, when in fact I was speaking into their minds. It's so much easier that way. Four months of hopping around the world quickly becomes boring, and I was growing curious as to what my family was up to.
A flicker of a thought brought me to the house where my sister lived with our, no, her father. I was no longer able to call them family, but I looked in on them, regardless of that fact, and curious.
My father and step-mother were doing fine, what with their hydroponics shop and all. My sister was doing fine in school, and all the pets were healthy, except for Flahr, who used to be my cat, and is, as well as was, quite obese.
After a few days of watching, I became bored, and considered what they'd be like if I suddenly showed up, all fancy and stuff. Over the months of my undead existence, I'd accumulated an astonishingly large amount of money from all over the world. It wasn't enough that I fed off of the bodies, but that I also took their money, in the event that I decided I wanted a house, or someplace to call "mine."
In areas of the states, purchasing a car is ridiculously simple, so I vanished from Canada for a few days and spent a solid week searching out various car dealerships, and specifically one that wouldn't ask for a license. Then I got an idea: I could change my appearance, or control somebody.
My new plan was simple, really. Beautifully succinct. I sought out, and brought back a nobody from the town that the dealership was located in. It was a simple matter, actually, to manipulate my way into his mind, and take it over. Two days spent dominating him, then a day of haggling, before he signed the car over to me, along with full insurance, using all the money left in his life. No family, no wife or children, not even any pets to take care of, so his life wasn't important. Unknowingly, to him at least, he got me a pair of license plates, as well. I was bound and determined to show off to my family that I was very well off.
Transporting the car, a black convertible, proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Four times I tried to teleport it along with me, but apparently, I could only bring humanoid materials, as well as clothing, with me. Or a certain amount of weight. I wasn't too worried, and decided to merely drive the whole distance.
Contrary to popular belief, a vampire can easily survive under direct sunlight, and isn't allergic to most of the "usual treatments" used to slay us, such as stakes, garlic, holy water, crucifixes, etc. The reason I comment on this is because the drive north was abysmally bright and sunny.
Approximately a week and a half after that, almost exactly five months after my disappearance, I arrived in front of my old family's place. It was about supper time, Halloween eve, so it was fairly chilly. This area of Ontario actually had snow on the ground, already. A whispered command made my dad and step-mother leave the room and go to bed, swiftly followed by slumber so deep as to be almost death. My step-mother took a little longer to control than my dad, but she spends a lot of time meditating, and has a very well protected mind. I suppose my sister noticed something odd about the automaton-like manner in which our parents left the dinner table. Her blond head whipped around when I honked the horn, before pulling into the driveway. The dog didn't bark, though that was due to my control on him. I didn't want him to wake up our parents.
I left the car, shutting it off, and walked to the back door, where I knocked once before she opened it, gaping at me.
"Where were you!?" She cried, embracing me the instant the door was out of the way. She was dressed in a red and black banded long dress that reached to her ankles, as well as a maroon blouse and arm coverings.
"Busy being dead," I said calmly, taking her hand and pressing it against my chest. I knew there was a heart-beat, but I could will it into stillness, which I did. After five minutes of fearful staring, she looked up at me.
"Why did you come back?" Her eyes had tears in them, barely held in check by her will-power. I would give her a choice.
"I came for you," I whispered, embracing her slowly. "I love you, sister, and I wish for you to be beside me for always."
"That sounds like a bad line out of a Roman-setting-ed movie," she sniffed, clutching my arms. "Why didn't you come back sooner?"
"I was trying to find myself," I explained, stepping into the house, slowly. I may not be able to feel the cold to the same extent as my sister, but that doesn't mean squat. "I found that I needed a balance, just as I did in life, so do I in death."
Her eyes closed, delicate blond lashes curled slightly upward. She nodded once in understanding. "How?"
"I was turned." She knew what that meant.
"Did it hurt?" I thought back to my death, and gave a little laugh.
"No, it didn't."
Sniffing again, tears dripping now just slightly, she walked into the living room, and came back with a pen and paper. Using the green-tiled kitchen counter as a desk, she quickly wrote a note. My eyes darted in and found what she had written:
"He came back, Dad, just like you said. But he's different, and I'm leaving to join him. We love you, and we know that you love us. We may contact you, eventually, or perhaps not. Good bye."
"We can come back and visit all you want," I said, watching as she signed the note. "It's up to you." I, too, signed the note, and I also included my new name. The one I'd chosen a few months ago.
"Can we bring Tamsin?" She asked me. I smiled, and nodded.
"I own a, house, in Europe, in the mountains. It's fairly large and private. I think I want to bring Flahr along, as well."
"Are you going to turn them, too?" She asked me, archly.
"They'd be the first vampire-cats that I've ever heard of, then," I laughed, the sound odd from my throat. That I hadn't laughed in months was interesting. "No, I think we'll bond them to us, as some other vampires bond humans to them." She nodded, and quickly gathered up the only other thing she wanted to bring: her laptop computer.
Silently, we gathered the cats in their carry-cases, and my sister began to look worried.
"They'll wake up, won't they?" She asked me.
"With the sun tomorrow, they will. And don't worry about the cats eating. There'll be plenty for them at my home." She smiled gratefully, and looked at me.
"How are we getting there?" I smirked, then motioned for her to grab Tamsin's carry-case, while I did the same with Flahr's.
"Pick up your laptop, and try not to be too startled," I warned her. The keys to the car were on the counter, as well as a note inside telling them to keep it as a gift. A flicker of thought brought us to my home, which was really more of a mansion than anything else, really. I'd amused myself during bouts of boredom on my trip by carving it out of the rock itself. Outwardly, it looked like nothing more than an odd formation of rocks atop a cave. Inside, the opulence was staggering. Even I couldn't believe I'd gone so far with it sometimes.
The polished floor was amethyst, made utterly smooth and level by my will when my boredom reached an all-time low. The walls arched upwards into a crystal globe at the ceiling, harnessing light from a lamp fed oil by special gas lines I'd installed. The globe refracted all the light, sending a kaleidoscope of colour down, and washing everything with blues, yellows, greens, purples, reds, and oranges. A spiralling staircase in the middle of the room led down into an underground cavern complex. The next floor down was one of onyx, smoothed and polished into black mirrors. Each floor was set with a different type of substance, the third floor down being diamond, and the one below that of jade. There were designs in the walls and floor, and even some on the ceiling, but mostly, attention was captivated by the lights and, or the rooms themselves.
"It's beautiful!" My sister exclaimed, gaping at the halls. "Did you do this all by yourself?"
"No, the cavern was here before I came around. Everything was set in place already, but I'm the one who polished it all. Come down stairs, it is cold up here." In truth, it was really quite warm up in that main, reception, room.
- - -
She lived with me for a week before she came up to me one night, steeled herself, and spoke.
"I'm ready." I closed my eyes and nodded, before motioning for her to sit down beside me.
"You're going to feel really calm, and really relaxed. Don't fight it. It will hurt, otherwise." With that, I moved her platinum blond hair out of the way from her neck, and letting my teeth unsheathe in my mouth. I felt her relax even before my teeth had pierced her neck and her life's blood was flowing into me. I felt that we could be there for eternity, for all the bliss it gave me.
Eons later, or perhaps only seconds, I felt her heart falter. That was when I knew it was time for her to feed. Slowly, I withdrew from her neck, and brought out a knife from my vest. Tilting my head to the side, I slashed quickly across my neck, and blood started to flow. Quickly, I brought her lips to my neck, where she slowly took in the fluid that would grant her immortality, of a sort. I felt her heart shudder, and stop completely.
Just before she died, she looked up at me and smiled.
"Better you than a stranger."
- - -
Even now, five hundred years later, my sister still doesn't neglect to let me know that I'm the one who changed her, and even now, five hundred years later, we love each other, and balance the other out, each other's yin and yang, the alpha and omega of our undead existence.