On his bad days, the days he wore red hairs and bite marks like battle scars, he smelled of sex and female and regret.
On his bad days, my sire trembled, breath stuttering unevenly through his parted lips when he thought the silence was safe enough to let go of his carefully held composure.
On his bad days, Riley called us monsters.
As if it meant something. As if we had enough of our humanity left to compare. As if we could even define the word monster anymore.
I listened as his voice wrapped around the word and caressed it with a soft, whispering breath. Velvet and sad and almost angry. I knew then who he must've been once. How the boy he was must've sounded before he became a dealer in death.
On his bad days, the days he felt the most vulnerable, we were monsters.
I had been called much worse than that. So I will be a monster. Those wounds had already become scars. I had called myself much worse than that long before I'd tasted my first breath of air in this life. I could live with being a monster. I do live with it.
I am a monster as I rip flesh and bathe in blood. Those words can't hurt me now.
I am a monster as I smile with stained lips and dance with purple smoke. Those words can't burrow under the thick, twisted knots of skin that replaced open, festering wounds.
Monster.
Vampire.
Woman.
Murderer.
Words are meaningless. Combinations of symbols assigned to sounds, and combinations of sounds given some arbitrary definition. They can be twisted and broken and false. They have no rules.
I was a monster as I screamed at the sky, covered in the drying blood of my father.
I was a monster as I clawed and kicked and sobbed curses at the bronzed arms I can sometimes still feel restraining me.
Words have no power over me anymore. They cannot hurt me.
I was a monster as I gave my life, the life my loved ones had died to give me, to a stranger because I had wanted to feel the rain wash me away.
Better to know myself for what I am than to wrap myself in the robes of a saint and spend my life attempting to convince myself that my piety is genuine.
Monster.
Vampire.
Woman.
Lost.
Victim.
Murderer.
I am a monster.
On his bad days, he wanted someone, needed someone to argue with him.
He would be disappointed. He is always disappointed. Many of us had simply accepted his statement as fact.
We are all monsters here.
I am his monster and I embrace the bitter tang of the word on his tongue, soft and sinful as satin as it passes his lips. Slow. Sad. Heavy. Angry. Resigned.
Those of us who had been around long enough, had seen enough of these days pass by, we knew what he meant. What he always meant on days like these.
We are all monsters here.
Because in this, he is not above us. On his bad days, when spirals of glinting crimson cling to his clothing and his open wounds leak the scents of venom and sex and rage into the air, he calls himself a monster too. The accusation surfaces in a broken, ragged voice as he curls in on himself, shrinking further into the shadows of the warehouse where I was born.
He shapes us. Creates us. Makes us what we are. We are all monsters here. So must he be too.
And he is angry about it. My maker, in all his mystery, in all his hardness, is shattered in a way none of us could comprehend.
We are all monsters. And he is the worst of us.
And maybe it is that knowledge that causes him to hide from us, to seclude himself in a place where he can collapse and let his walls fall violently as dry, broken sobs fill the stale air.
Because on his bad days, he forgets words have no rules. Not on their own.
Monster.
Murderer.
Vampire.
Man.
But some of us, some of us uphold our own. Impose our own. And he could not follow his own rules.
Because on his bad days, he dreams he is anything but himself.
Monster.
Murderer.
Trapped
Vampire.
Broken
Man.
On his bad days, he dreams he is not a monster. Not a murderer. Not trapped. Not broken.
On his bad days, he dreams he is nothing at all.
But dreams are for the living. Even when the living squander them in their inability to grasp what is in front of them. Even when they do not realize the value, the gift that dreams truly are. Because only humanity can dream with the intensity and the purity of the brightest star.
Dreams are for the living.
We will always be monsters.
Monster.
Murderer.
Vampire.
It was his first lesson to us, when he told us to think in shades of grey. We are all monsters.
We cannot change who and what we are. We are unyielding, undying, unchanging. We cannot resolve to be anything but what we already are.
Monster.
Murderer.
Vampire.
So good or bad must lie in perspective. Those shades of grey are what keep many of us sane. Keep us from tipping from the point of the knife blade into the comforting embrace of insanity.
It is better to accept the truth.
To focus on what we are. On what our nature is.
Because on his bad days, the days I sit behind a broken boy as he unravels and stack those damning crimson strands on the wood beneath us, I want nothing more than to tell him a beautiful lie.
But there is no honor in that.
Monster.
Murderer.
Vampire.
We are enemies here. We are monsters.
We live or die for blood and venom.
And there is honor in that. Honor in that glaring honesty. That willingness to exist as we are without scruples or second thoughts.
Monster.
Murderer.
Vampire.
There is honor in keeping my own words whole. In being as I am. His monster. His child. His best and brightest. His creation. His.
There is honor in silently sharing the burden my sire carries as he shakes and shudders beneath my touch, trembling and gasping when my tongue glides softly over his wounds and my fingers trace through his matted hair.
If I must be a monster, a terrible creature of the night, at least my words remain my own. I am still too new and too bitter to this life to spin such beautiful lies as those I had believed from the lips of a lover. Too new and too bitter and too jaded and too blunt.
On his bad days, it is better to let him come apart and wordlessly offer comfort until he is able to rebuild his walls again. It is kinder to bear his heavy stare and halfway outstretched hand in silence as I slip away from his haven and resign myself to be nothing more that a soldier once more.
On his bad days, it is better if I say nothing at all.
Because truth has no beauty and my words are a weapon.