Chapter 53 Chapter notes
We last heard from Victoria in chapter 46, where Brady tracked her to the cabin and attacked her after her disastrous feeding on Henry Upchurch. We pick up here with Victoria regarding her deteriorating condition with alarm. She's lost in the forest and disoriented after that attack and from Quileute blood, slowly seeping into her vampire flesh.
This chapter is pretty gruesome. Victoria blames the Quileute for all of her problems. And she's out for revenge.
***WARNING*** This chapter contains a vicious vampire attack***
The chapter title belongs to the Cowboy Junkies
Chapter 53 Common Disaster Wednesday, November 1st
Victoria crawls around the forest for hours, furtively looking over her shoulder for the massive dog that had attacked her, but he never appears. When it begins to snow, she marshals her remaining strength and is able to climb up a hemlock tree, where she takes refuge. The sun rises but can't make a dent in the cloud cover. It snows on.
She positions herself so she can see down through the branches. Snow piles up under her perch, but the animal doesn't make an appearance. A frigid wind blows the storm out and Victoria watches the fiery ball of the sun sink into the sea.
James had told Victoria that she would never feel pain again, that they were the strongest creatures on Earth. Did he not know about these dogs that could bite chunks out of vampire flesh? She pulls off her shirt and wraps it around her calf, as the howling wind makes her leg wounds throb like a heartbeat.
The isolation in the tree cements in Victoria's mind what she'd always suspected: The Universe has it in for her. She'd been marked from birth for pain and misery. She had what could be called happiness for a few years, then sorrow when her father died, frustration when her mother abandoned her in favor of her new best friend, Jack Daniels, to fear, loathing, and a grudging acceptance when she lived on the street, when she sold her body in order to eat. And then terror when James hustled her into her own kitchen and stared at her with those glowing red coals where his eyes should have been.
They'd had a few months of happiness, after he'd changed her. She remembers exciting sexual escapades with him, the thrill of the hunt, and then horror, when she'd sat behind the Cullens' house and heard what they'd done to him. Ripped his head off. Threw it into the fire.
Now she's alone, sitting in this tree with huge hunks of her flesh bitten away. Looking down, she can't judge how deep the snow is, then wonders abstractly why it matters. When she tries to turn and climb down the trunk, she loses her grip with the one good hand and falls with a soft whump, landing in a few inches of powdery snow. Tentatively, she tries to stand, and is pleased that she can walk.
But where is she? The landscape was confusing before. Now it's a mass of snow and fir trees. She estimates it's around midnight, and is distressed that she can no longer see in complete darkness. The full moon rises, huge and white, its light shining through the branches of the trees.
She stumbles around for a while, tripping over ice-covered rocks, her loathing of everybody and everything growing inside her, a hot, bubbling geyser of hate that is quickly reaching crisis point and will spew its deadly froth across the land.
Her hand is throbbing and the blisters on her skin burn like fire, but nothing hurts as bad, as deep, as the two gouges out of her calf. The jeans were bitten away as well, and the cold air that whistles through the makeshift bandage of her shirt, never mind any moisture, is enough to make her scream in agony.
Finally, she catches a few scents that lead her home. A cold breeze nearly cripples her, but carries on its wings the faint scent of cinnamon, and she follows this. After stumbling around for a long time, she spies the outlines of her cabin in the fog, and hobbles to it. She collapses onto the shallow step to the gaping doorway and inches the rest of the way inside.
The cinnamon candle, once so strong and powerful, has barely any smell left to her. She grabs it up and thrusts it under her nose. Inhaling deeply, she can barely catch the scent, and it's really just a taste on the very back of her tongue. With alarm, she grabs up item after item, pulling each one toward her, breathing its aroma, then flinging it aside. When she gets to Bella's sweater, she's relieved that she can still smell this. It isn't as powerful as it was before, but she can still smell it.
The blood from that Indian kid is what made her sick. Somehow, it has been integrated into her brain, and is slowly destroying her sense of smell. What else can she look forward to? Loss of sight? Of touch? Of the ability to run, or walk, or move?
An unspeakable dread consumes her. She's going to end up paralyzed, abandoned in this little cabin, unable to walk or feed, until she goes mad and shrivels up. She remembers her mother shouting at her when she was an unruly delinquent. God punishes evildoers.
Is that what's happening? Is God punishing her for the murders she's committed? For her enjoyment of the pain and suffering she's inflicted on her hapless victims? A freezing rain patters down, relentless, and leaks in through the hole she'd made in the roof. It splashes onto her, soaking her, every drop that hits her mangled flesh a stab of pain.
On the table, she sees the little carved wolf on its leather thong. It emanates a faint smell, the same as the town below. The same as the giant dog that had hurt her. Somehow, they're connected, but she doesn't know how. She holds the trinket in her undamaged hand and stares at it for most of the day. James and his sensible counsel, to remain unobtrusive and inconspicuous, is forgotten, as a feeling of utter helpless, hopeless fury continues to build.
Victoria goes to the stream and washes her body, then dresses in jeans, a pair of soft woolen socks, and the lovely brown boots. She pulls on Bella's pretty blue sweater, disconcerted that its scent is nearly gone. Distractedly, she picks out her fiery hair, leaving it loose. Finally, she throws on her red and orange beads, her only gift from James.
At the door, she turns to bid goodbye to her home. She doesn't think she'll ever see it again. The little carved wolf rests on the table, and on impulse, she pulls it over her head to hang with her beads, and turns away. She's going to kill every Indian she comes across.
Every. Single. One.
Thursday, November 2nd
The trail to the reservation is easy to follow. She skirts around the 'thriving metropolis', to the very edge of town and emerges onto a dirt road, unlike the paved streets that crisscross most of this tiny settlement. Looking around, there are only rotten, moldering buildings, boarded up shacks that were once businesses, and the ever-present mud. This is an uninhabited corner of town, a gathering spot for old, broken-down vehicles, ancient fishing boats, and all manner of rotting nets, splintered traps, and rusted machinery.
Near the edge of a wide cleared space, Victoria sees two young men emptying a trailer into a huge bin. She's on them before they can comment on her sparkly skin. Biting back a scream of agony, she reaches out both hands and smashes their skulls together. They die instantly. She heaves their bodies into the bin, covers them with the debris from the trailer, and walks on. Truly, she wants a confrontation with these Indians, but she wants to dispatch as many of them as she can before he has to defend herself.
She keeps to the side streets, and after a few minutes sees a woman working in her yard. She's about fifty, her hair pulled back into a braid down her back. She looks up in time to see two hands reach for her, and before she can take a breath to scream, her neck is broken cleanly. Victoria looks around for a place to hide the body, and decides to drag it behind the house. It takes her a few minutes, but she digs a hole with one hand, about three feet deep. She tosses in the woman's body and covers it with leaves and vines.
Victoria walks on until she comes to a winding, crumbling street that fades into the trees and then disappears altogether, with houses peppered along the tree line at irregular intervals. She continues for a few minutes and comes upon a towering madrone tree sitting behind tumble-down apartments, set in an uneven row.
After climbing part way up the tree, she's startled to find that she can't go any higher. Realizing that her strength is failing, she desperately looks out and sees one street that goes off at an angle. It seems to meander toward the edge of the encroaching, omnipresent forest, where it peters out.
She peers through the branches, but doesn't see anyone out on the streets on this cold and lonely afternoon, so she climbs down and escapes into the forest. She limps along the inside of the tree line until the road ends.
When she emerges, she's disappointed to see that few houses line the winding lane. Not knowing how much longer her sight and hearing will last, she decides to start here, at the last house, and work her way back to town. If these symptoms of failing sense of smell and loss of strength foretell the end of her existence, she's going to make the Indians remember her name.
The last cottage, 16 Sycamore Row, is set against the woods, with no backyard other than moss and trees. Victoria creeps around to the rear door and peers into the kitchen. She listens but is disappointed to hear no one inside. The next house sports a For Rent sign in its front yard.
She squints into the distance and sees only three more houses. The next one is lived in, but nobody is at home. In a fury, she rips the back door clean off its hinges and tears through the tidy little house, upsetting furniture, throwing dishes and ripping the sink out of the wall with her uninjured hand. She screams and falls back as the water douses her wounds, reels out onto the front walk, and lurches down to the next house.
Nobody has lived in this shack for many years. A crumbling foundation is causing it to list dangerously to the left. Great gaping holes cover the roof and ivy climbs unchecked up its mossy face, weaving in and out of the broken windows, making it look alive. Victoria shudders and passes it by.
The last house, 12 Sycamore Row, is the crown jewel of the street, a dazzling diamond shining pristine white and neatly bordered by flower beds, hoed and ready for spring. Set about twenty yards back from the street, it is constructed in the clean lines of the Colonial style, and rises two stories to brush the bottom branches of the hemlocks that overhang it. A paved driveway snakes up to a double garage. Off to the left, a sidewalk leads to a broad front porch, complete with a padded swing and two rockers.
Expensive windows frame white curtains that billow enticingly in the wind. A pair of chimneys sit on either end, each drawing well, suffusing the air with the comforting scent of wood smoke. Victoria swallows as she gazes at the house. It reminds her of the happy home she'd shared with her parents before her life disintegrated. Her house had also been a Colonial, but had been blue, and three stories, instead of two.
These old Colonials have stature, Victoria thinks. She wavers. Is there a happy family inside, just sitting down to supper? Cheese pizza and ice cream for dessert? A sense of longing comes over her, for that little girl who sat in her daddy's lap while he watched cartoons with her, laughing in all the right places. Who had a favorite dress, a bright yellow with little black polka dots. Victoria is queer for yellow, her friends had teased.
Victoria Genevieve Thurston. She'd lost herself after her father's death and her mother's descent into alcoholism. Had failed in school, become a prostitute, a thief, and now, a murderer.
James hadn't taught her much, but had imparted to her that Immortals were the strongest beings on Earth, and she had no idea that her body could be damaged.
It begins to rain. She limps around to the back and hears a family inside. By climbing onto an upturned bucket, she can peek in through the open window to watch and listen to their interactions.
Two men sit at a big kitchen table while a woman stirs something on the stove. She's not even surprised when she can hardly smell them.
The younger man says in a hushed tone, "Usually when I go to the market, Darla is in class, but yesterday the schools were closed for the renovations that were scheduled. She asked if she could wait outside, and I told her it would be okay."
The older man shakes a cigarette out of a pack pulled from his top pocket and says, "Gordon, don't blame yourself. Darla will be all right. Just, don't make too much of it." There's a tense silence and he says, "Maria, what are you stirring over there? It smells good."
Victoria can't smell the food at all. Maria, a short, thin woman, doesn't turn around but says, "Pea soup, Julius."
"It smells good." He turns to the man named Gordon. "You didn't get a look at Henry Upchurch's body, did you?"
Henry Upchurch. Victoria grits her teeth and bites back a snarl. So that's the name of the kid who made me so goddamn sick.
Gordon shakes his head. "No. I took Darla home. She kept asking me what had happened to Henry. She…" he takes a deep breath. "She'd seen the blood. Luckily it was watered down by the rain…" His voice trails away as he gets up and leaves the room.
Julius lights the cigarette and Maria clucks. "As a doctor, you should know better than to smoke so much!" she chides. "What do your patients say when Dr. Pierce shows up with a cigarette always sticking out of his mouth?" The doctor smiles at her back and puffs away.
The rebuke loses some of its sting when she turns and says softly, "I spoke to Beth Upchurch today. She's going to stay with her sister in Portland for a while. She said to tell you thanks for all the times you looked after Henry, especially last year when he was so sick with the flu."
The doctor gives a weak smile. Gordon walks back into the kitchen holding Darla, who looks to be five or six years old. She's a pretty little girl, with long black hair pulled back into a French braid. She's wearing a yellow dress. With black polka dots.
Victoria gapes at the child. What are the odds? A closer look reveals what she'd thought had been polka dots are actually little black flowers. And the dress isn't exactly the same color yellow. Not a bright lemon yellow, but a more pastel shade. But against her coppery skin, it is striking.
Still, Victoria has a plan, and it isn't going to be waylaid by a little girl in a yellow dress, of all things. Now that the happy little family is all in the same room, Victoria gingerly gets down off of the bucket. She eases open the back screen door and sneaks inside the tidy kitchen, surprised when the two men wrinkle their noses and look around, perplexed. She makes eye contact with the younger man, Gordon, who from the conversation, Victoria thinks must be Darla's father.
Before anyone can speak, Victoria takes a couple of steps forward and grabs Gordon. She spins him around and puts him in a chokehold but winces as his breath stings her already throbbing hand. She switches arms.
Darla shrieks, and Dr. Pierce picks her up. Maria stands in a defensive posture with a ladle in her hand. She holds it like a weapon. "Who are you?" she demands in a halting voice. "W-what are you doing in my house?"
Dr. Pierce hands Darla to Maria and gently pushes them to stand behind him. Like that will do any good. He holds a hand up and says, "You're Victoria, correct?"
Victoria grimaces. She'd thought that no one knew of her presence here. "How do you know my name?"
The man frowns. "Someone told us you might be in the area. I'm Dr. Pierce. I noticed that your hand is damaged. I might be able to help you, but you'll need to release Gordon. Then we can talk."
His voice is soft and persuasive. Their eyes meet and she pushes Gordon away from her. He stands by the doctor, massaging his throat. "Now, I'd like you to allow my family to leave."
She laughs. "Nope. Nobody's getting out of here until you help me!" Maria winces but clutches Darla closer to her.
The doctor says, "Okay, okay, Well, were you attacked by a Wolf?"
"Yeah," she says slowly, "but I thought it was a big dog. I didn't know it was a wolf."
"What happened?" She might be a human patient, sitting on an exam table.
"Um, I was in this little cabin, way up the mountain, and he ran right at the door. Knocked it clean out of its frame. Bit my fingers and clawed my arm." Without preamble, she extends the damaged hand and pulls up her sleeve to display the symmetrical swipes left by the Shapeshifter's razor-sharp claws.
"When I got out of the cabin, I tried to climb a tree but he grabbed my leg and I fell. She gingerly pulls up the bottom part of her jeans and displays the two gouges.
The doctor steps back and takes a deep breath. "If I tell you how to fix these wounds, will you leave the reservation and promise never to return?"
Fix the wounds? They can be fixed? "Maybe," she says uncertainly.
"Apply some venom to the claw marks on your arm and massage it in."
Feeling as though this solution seems too simple to be effective, she goes ahead and spits venom onto her arm and gently rubs it over the scratches. They knit immediately. "Thank you," she says. "My hand? Leg? Will the pieces regrow?"
The doctor shakes his head. "Sadly, no. You'll need the pieces. But you know where you were attacked, correct? It will be easy for you to find them. You just do the same thing. Apply a thin layer of venom on each side, as if it were glue. Then press. They'll knit in minutes."
Her face falls. "The fingers I might find, but not the gouges of my leg! That dog ate them." Victoria feels even more desperate now than she did before, when she actually had some hope that her body could be repaired.
The doctor's eyes grow wide. "The dog ate the pieces? Of your flesh? You're certain?"
She nods slowly, gritting her teeth. What she'd suspected has now been confirmed. Her body cannot be completely repaired. As an Immortal, she'll live with this pain forever.
Victoria looks at him with an exhausted expression. "Yeah, I'm certain. And that blood from the Indian kid made me sick." She lifts her shirt to show the blisters that still cover all the places that the blood touched.
Julius bends forward and peers at the blisters. "I'm, I'm sorry. This is something I've never seen before. I don't know what can be done about these areas."
"So in reality, you can't help me, other than telling me how to knit the scratches on my arm."
"I did help you. I told you exactly what you need to do to effect a repair." The doctor's voice is still calm and non-judgmental. Victoria is confused. She'd expected these Indians to be hostile, she'd expected them to be barely literate. She falls into a chair and holds her head in her good hand. Before, they had stunk like dead animals. Now, she can hardly smell them at all.
She holds her damaged hand in front of her and looks at it with revulsion. The bubbling hate surfaces and she jumps up, surprising Gordon. She grabs him and with all the power she has remaining, rips his arm up to her face and sinks her teeth to the bone. Every bit of venom she can manage is injected. Gordon screams and his body bows back, fetching up hard against the edge of the table.
Victoria rinses her mouth at the tap and spits out any of that poisonous blood before it makes her mouth blister up, paying little attention to the young man writhing and shrieking on the floor, only feet from her.
Dr. Pierce stands over Gordon's convulsing body with his mouth hanging open, hands outstretched to help. The young man's legs flail out in spasms as he shrieks and rolls around on the tile. A chair skitters across the floor, hitting the adjacent wall, causing a plate to fall from its shelf.
Glass chunks fly toward Maria, and she turns, shielding Darla from the onslaught. The glass knicks her arm in several places, and soon, her blood drips onto the floor. Gordon begins to bang his head on the tile and soon he's writhing in his own blood, which streams from a wound on the back of his head.
The little girl cries steadily while Maria holds her protectively in her arms. She looks at Victoria with a mixture of fear and defiance. Victoria smirks at her. "What, no pleading? No screaming?" She wishes that at least one of them would make a run for it, but they stand their ground.
Dr. Pierce gasps as he kneels and tries to prevent Gordon from gouging his eyes out. Sharp cracks split the air as his bones break from the allergic reaction to the venom. "Kill me, Julius! Stab me, strangle me, anything! The fire in my arm—he begins to choke and his breathing becomes labored.
Victoria leans back against the sink and watches him, unmoved.
Maria trembles as tears stream silently down her face. She holds Darla's head down on her shoulder so she won't see her daddy convulsing on the tile floor. After a few more minutes, the venom has worked its magic and he heaves his final breath.
Julius glances up at Maria and then down to what used to be their son-in-law. The doctor struggles to his feet and looks longingly at a package of cigarettes on the table. He says, "Would you grant me a final smoke?" Victoria gives a short laugh and nods. With shaking hands, he lights the cigarette and inhales deeply.
When Maria hands the little girl to her husband and turns to the stove, Victoria doesn't worry. Her vampire senses are dulled by the effects of Henry's blood, and she realizes too late that a steaming pot of soup is being hurled at her. The boiling liquid, hot and viscous, hits her injured hand and she loses her mind.
Maria winces as Victoria's screeches and howls of pain and anger fill the kitchen. She tries to shake off the boiling, viscous goop from her hand, and ends up slinging soup onto walls and counters. The tap is thrust on but the spray makes her jump back in agony. The water hurts worse than the soup had.
Dr. Pierce grabs Maria's arm and they bolt for the kitchen door. "You bitch!" Victoria screams. She runs and grabs Maria from behind. Darla is screaming in the doctor's arms and they both watch in horror as Victoria squeezes and shakes Maria by the throat until she stops squirming.
Victoria drops the dead body and advances on the doctor. He holds his hand out and whispers something to the little girl, who has stopped crying, but is still gasping in terror. "Let Darla go. I'll stay. Do whatever you need to do, but let Darla go. Please." He puts the little girl down but she doesn't run. She turns her face away from Victoria and clutches her grandfather's leg.
Victoria laughs a high, hysterical laugh. Even to her, it sounds deranged. She takes a few steps back and picks up the soup pot. She hefts it in her undamaged hand. It's heavy. Probably enameled cast iron, Victoria thinks. She pulls her arm back and throws it at them, as hard as she can. Dr. Pierce bends to shield Darla and the pot glances off of his head. Blood spurts in a crimson fountain, spraying Darla's pretty yellow dress with droplets of red.
He staggers and drops to the floor, beside his wife's dead body. Darla falls on him, crying "Papa! Papa!" She shakes him and keeps screaming.
Victoria stands gazing at the child, and for one heart stopping moment, she sees herself, sobbing over her dead father. He'd fallen from the roof, where he'd been hanging Christmas lights. Blood and brains, freezing to the sidewalk.
She can't kill the child. She can't! Thinking that she's had enough of these Indians, she runs out of the house and down the dirt lane that leads back to the paved roads, back to the madrone tree. She climbs again, but she can't make it to the top. She stops at the first gnarly branch and just sits.
She'd intended to kill every person in town; she's had to settle for three people on the street and three more in one stinking house. But the little girl will be okay. She couldn't bring herself to harm her, so pretty in her yellow dress.
She's wanted to elicit fear in these Indians, with everything that they'd ever heard about the cold ones reinforced in the seconds before she took their lives. She imagined that some of them would scream; some would plead; some would offer her money. Some would stand straight, awaiting their fate. She would have killed them all.
In her deteriorating mental state, she doesn't consider the cost. Doesn't care about the lives disrupted, the children left behind, the grieving widows. Even before the Wolf attack, before she'd attacked Henry and had felt the effects of the poisonous blood, she could have killed the Quileute—anyone, really—with no regrets. Except for the little girl. She reminds Victoria too much of herself.
Truly, she is the sociopath that her mother had believed her to be. In her human state, she didn't have the requisite skills to be a killer, so she used her abilities to seduce and obfuscate so she could swindle, steal and embezzle.
The wind whips up and blows Victoria's hair all around her head in a wild tangle. She sits alone, losing all connection to the wider world. She's become untethered, and floats in a dreamlike state, totally overcome by pain and terror and stress.
By blisters and missing fingers, gouges the size of lemons, hollowed out of her flesh by great, gnashing teeth. By the knowledge that the poisonous blood is somehow affecting her cognition, memory and motor skills. She gathers up her hair away from her face so she can see, but instead of getting lighter, her world dims.
First, her sense of smell. Now, her eyesight? She is paralyzed with terror, hoping that a storm is brewing, that dark clouds have obscured the sunlight, but when she peers through the branches, she sees blue sky, white clouds, dirty town. And a darkening, all around the edges.
Darkness, closing in on her.
Desperation, her last, best friend.