Ben Wake
“Good night, my love…”
That is my cue that Ivy will be asleep within a minute. I keep reading for two more, just to be sure, before I put the book down. I continue to hold onto her for a while, until I feel her breathing shift as she falls into a deeper level of sleep. Only then do I carefully slip my arm out from under her head and slip out of bed.
A cold front moved through today, bringing rain with it. It’s almost cold in the cabin. Something I barely notice, but she certainly has. Before I walk away from the bed, I pull the covers up to her chin and tuck her in. I stroke her hair one more time before I leave…
…And my sense shows me a moment in our lives. Ivy looking ill, pale. “I need you to turn me, Ben…”
I jerk my hand back, sudden enough to wake her.
“What?” she asks me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I slipped while trying to sneak out without waking you.”
“Really? And I wasn’t awake to see it?”
“Apparently not,” I say, puzzled.
“You’re elegant, Ben. I’ve never seen you be anything but graceful.”
I kiss her cheek. “Next time I stumble, I be sure it happens right in front of you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t. Ruin my mental image of you…”
I kiss her again, letting it linger this time. She nestles into the covers a bit more. “I’ll put another log on before I leave the cabin,” I say, leaning forward to brush my cheek against hers.
“Love you,” she says, and drifts off again.
When she’s asleep, I touch her again the same way I did when I got the flash of my sense, but it does not return. It most likely will never come again. This is why it is so important for me to listen to what it says and to figure out the right course of action quickly.
I am so distracted by this that I barely remember to go outside and grab another log to put on the small fire in the bedroom. I keep a supply of very dry wood inside for when we need a fire during the day. The drier the wood, the less smoke it makes. At night, it’s not as much of a concern, so I can use the stuff that’s been outside in the damp.
Once I know Ivy is fully settled in and will be warm for a few hours, I start my first patrol of the night around the big stretch of land around our little hideout. It’s times like these that I envy the thropes. They could smell the passage of a vampire for hours afterwards. It made it hard to hunt them, because they could tell if you were closing in on them.
There are still ways, though. Not as reliable as a thrope’s nose, but they work most of the time. My first patrol takes me two full hours, as I make all of my checks, happily finding no evidence of any of my kind near the cabin. After that, I allow myself to sit out in a clearing a couple hundred yards upslope from the cabin and look up at the stars. The Lyrid meteor shower is happening tonight. It’s not as impressive as the ones in late summer and autumn, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Being out in the wooded valleys, not a single streetlight or house light visible at all, the light pollution of Denver hidden behind several mountains, even the warm would be able to see one shooting star after another. With my vampiric vision, I can see so many more than they can.
I find my thoughts drifting back to my sense, of Ivy asking me to turn her. As I replay the scene over and over in my mind, turn it over, examine every detail I can recall, I am more and more certain that it is not a warning, but an inevitability. I get up and walk, feeling the slope under me to find the right angle I recall, looking for a long, low, gray line of rock thrusting up through the soil and leaf litter. Once I catch sight of the rock and at about the right part of the slope, I sidestep right and left, rotating until I am in the exact place as in my sense.
I look around me, trying to figure out what might be important about this exact place. I’m just out of sight of the cabin. Nowhere near either road, still far from the property line. The bare rock shields one of the two escape routes up to the road above the cabin, but the sense didn’t have us on the route, no sense of urgency that we were fleeing.
One of the things I realize about the image is that the scene is just before full darkness, the hour that I am usually returning if I’ve made a quick run into town for supplies, to make sure I am back before she is at the greatest risk from any vampires coming onto the land. I wonder if that is significant, that she is meeting me as I come back from town, instead of staying safe inside the cabin like she is supposed to. Vampires cannot enter anybody else’s home unless invited, so I always impress upon her the importance of never, ever leaving the cabin when I am not on the land.
“I need you to turn me, Ben…”
What could possibly bring her out of the cabin to meet me here? She looked pale in the image, paler than she usually is. Will she be ill at the time? I get down on hands and knees, looking at the plants around this spot, but I have no knowledge of what they might be useful for. Ivy knows, but I have never had any reason to learn anything like that. Even plucking some of the leaves and sniffing them to see if any smell more astringent or medicinal than others, I can’t tell.
It also does not help that in the vision, we are standing very close to each other, embracing. I can only see her face, not the rest of her body. The sense does not give me any idea of what she will feel like at that moment. Will she be thin? Cold? Trembling? There will be a waver in her voice, but I don’t know if it will be emotional effort or physical weakness.
I spend another ten minutes with my thoughts and memory of the sense running circles around themselves and going nowhere when I finally force myself to give up, and take my next patrol for the night, the one that goes all the way out to the property lines and the roads.
A couple more hours of stalking silently through the woods, checking every little indicator I’ve set out, shows me that nothing larger than a big raccoon or a small coyote has been through. I check the hidden rope handles on the emergency boxes at the end of each of the escape runs. Nothing has disturbed the boxes at all.
There’s something that bothers me about one of the boxes at the road above the cabin. I carefully search the area around it again, looking close at the rope handle and the soil above the box lid. I can’t see any indication that anything has opened the box or even found the rope. I squat down between the stones. Exactly like somebody would if they had noticed two unusually white rocks set up by the roadside. I was smart enough to not place the emergency box right in the middle, for exactly this reason. I look down the slope, and see that for an eye trained to look for such things, the escape route is clear. I slowly walk toward it, eyes scanning the ground before me.
I find it. A single, partial footprint. Just the impression of a toe. It’s the kind of print left by somebody trained to move through woods quietly. To do that, you probe gently with the toe for any leaves or branches that might make noise before fully setting the foot down and shifting your weight onto it. But every so often, you overbalance a bit, or your other foot shifts unexpectedly, and the careful toe stomps down.
Somebody who is very good at hunting has been on the land.
I keep on walking, to the edge of the escape run. I stand for a minute taking it in. No vampire has gone down the run. So whoever was up there is either not a vampire, had turned back before taking the run, or had gone around it. I double check the land for a hundred yards on either side of the run, still finding no evidence a vampire has passed.
I don’t want to think about it, but there is one person who might be probing our hideout. I don’t want to admit to myself who I think it is. I recall the other sense I’ve had regarding Ivy, a thrope halfway transformed, limbs broken and arranged to tell me that he is leading them closer to Ivy. This incursion, though, doesn’t feel like it’s tied to that earlier sense. If the partial footprint I found did truly belong to the one I don’t want it to belong to, I’m sure I’d be remembering the sense more strongly than I do. But that memory is fading. I hope it means that danger is passing.
All of this leaves me terribly worried about Ivy. The worry that someone might find us, coupled with what my sense has shown drives me to return to the cabin, to make sure she is still well. I carefully detour around the space shown me in my sense, not wanting to freshly agitate myself before getting to the cabin. Once inside, I silently pad my way to the bedroom and look in on her. She’s curled up on her right side, one hand under her cheek, her long, dark hair braided up for sleep. It’s warm enough in the room now, even with the wood burned down to just glowing coals, that she’s let the blanket slip down from her shoulder. I want to sit on the bed beside her, but I can tell she’s wandered into a lighter sleep, and would likely wake up if I did so. Even though we’ve settled into a good rhythm in our days out here, I know that she worries constantly about her grandmother, and misses her friends terribly. It weighs on her constantly when she is awake. It is only when she sleeps that she stops worrying about them, and even then, I’m sure they are still in her dreams.
I can only hope that in her dreams they are happy and not apart.
Instead of disturbing her sleep, I sit down on my bed to watch over her. I listen to the light wind outside the cabin, the constant chatter of the night insects, the occasional pop or crackle of the coals in the fireplace. Somewhere in there, Carl’s words come to me, the last conversation we had together when he demanded I forget about Ivy and leave Stokers Mill.
There are only three outcomes for a relationship between a vampire and one of the warm. The vampire turns his lover. The vampire remains beside them remaining forever young while they age and fade. The vampire leaves them when the can no longer hide what they are.
None of these outcomes is good for the lover. I was honest with Ivy when I told her my cold life is not a good one. The wars between the clans, the wars within the clans, the constant weight of the ennui that grows heavier year by year. Knowing what I do now, I wish that Sonia Vătafu had just drained me and left me to die that night. I would have been spared that year on the western front, and the following century of darkness.
I put my hand on my chest, to feel the slow beating of my heart. Usually, I go for days between feedings, days without having a pulse. Since I’ve come to the cabin, I feed a little bit every day so I have some warmth and a heartbeat for the woman sleeping in front of me. In the darkness, I can see one of her veins gently pulsing, a constant reminder that she is warm and alive. I breathe in, and I can smell her. Under the plain soap I keep at the cabin is still that undeniable essence of Ivy. I remember kissing her, losing myself in her scent and the moment. I cannot drink wine, but in those moments when I brush my lips against her neck, I am drunk on something much finer.
How could I take all of that away from her? Her warmth and her heartbeat and her beauty and her scent? How could I even let myself think of inflicting my curse upon her? The only reason to turn her would be to have her forever, to make her mine, my possession, my property. To trap her with me.
No. Ben Wake loves Ivy Sparks too much to treat her that way. The only way to love her in the way she deserves, to thank her for warming this old vampire’s cold heart, is to simply let her live.
It is only when Ivy shifts and pulls the blankets up again, that I stir. I go outside for a couple of fresh logs to put on the fire for her, and go back to my endless walking up and down the slopes. Much like Ivy the stress we’ve been under while hiding out had dampened my physical desire for her, but I suddenly find myself constantly distracted by thoughts of her body again. In the bedroom when she had let the covers fall, I could see the upper curve of her breast, rising and falling as she breathed. With her hair braided, I could see that little, delicious erogenous zone behind her ear that sends a shudder all the way down her spine.
I find myself constantly struggling to keep my thoughts on the mystery of who had approached our escape route. I have to keep focusing my thoughts to the task of looking for more footprints or any other sign that anything had been disturbed.
The arrival of dawn is actually a great relief, because I can finally excuse myself from trying to focus on the woods to go back to the cabin and make Ivy’s breakfast for her. I first get the coffee going, then start assembling what I can from the assorted dried goods and whatever fresh greens she foraged up the day before. Almost on cue, she comes out of the bedroom as I’m setting out her plate. It’s still dreary and gray, drizzling lightly, so we sit at the small kitchen table instead of on camp chairs outside the cabin.
“Did you sleep well?” I ask, putting creamer in her coffee, and handing her the mug. I kiss the top of her head. She reaches back and strokes my cheek as I do so. A very familiar stirring happens just a little bit below my belt. I rest my hand on her shoulder, and am tempted to slip it inside the neck of her sweatshirt, but I don’t. She takes a moment to enjoy my touch, but doesn’t quite turn to make it easy for me to take it to a more personal part of her body.
“I did,” she says. “Thank you for keeping the fire going all night for me.”
“You noticed?” I ask.
“I was up a few times during the night. Including once while you were sitting on your bed.”
I must have been very deep in thought then, because I never noticed her wake up.
“I don’t know how I was able to tell. I certainly didn’t see you. I just knew you were in the room. I actually liked it that you were there. You seemed very at peace with something, and I didn’t want to disturb that.”
This sets me to a new line of thought. It’s not known for the warm to be able to pick up on the thoughts or emotions of vampires. Two vampires that are closely linked to each other somehow, as when one has turned the other, can do it. But I’ve never heard of a vampire being able to broadcast an emotion to a mortal. I wonder if it is the love that I feel for her that she can feel.
I realize I am still standing behind her with my arm on her shoulder. I start to step away to go sit at the table, when she puts her hand on mine, holding me still.
“I love you, Ben,” she says, and I see a little glint in her eye that I have not seen since I was driving her home from the Harker’s Pass Inn, two weeks ago. “You didn’t move that bag with my little gift in it, did you?” she asks. “I might want to get a proper look at it tonight when I get ready for bed.”
Oh, Ivy. What you are doing to me right now!