Two Days Can Feel Like a Century (Daphne - Part 2)
To an ?Old Man? like me (as Millie calls me), two days is a blink of an eye. It?s a minuscule portion of time that can be gone with a breath taken, without notice. When you reach the point I have, it?s nothing. Not a day, not a week, not even a month. Even a year isn?t much when you?ve lived through as many as I have.
But those two days waiting for Daphne to show felt like a century. I thought it was impatience, even consideration that I may have to track her down -- at first. That first day had made me grumpier than usual, irritable and moody. I?m relatively sure I heard one of them mention a ?man period?. I ignored it, just kept drinking. I was a mixture of confused feelings, conflicted and contradicting.
By nightfall of that first day, I felt sick. I?d honestly thought I?d drank too much. Which is an impressive feat for me, and I couldn?t recall how much I had drank to confirm or deny the conclusion. I finally put the bottle down, drank some blood to try to speed up the process of the hangover and get it over with. It never came.
By morning of the second day, I was still sick to my stomach. I considered I?d drank some bad blood or maybe -maybe- I was dying out of my ridiculous paranoia. I didn?t want to talk to anyone. I didn?t want to see anyone. When one of the girls or Micah talked to me, I just stared at them blankly. Direct questions were met with silence, and it probably seemed as if I was ignoring them. In reality, I just couldn?t collect my thoughts enough to answer.
Eva started to get nervous, hovering close by - asking if I needed something every few minutes. Finally, I got sick of it and shut myself in my room. I came out to hunt and was gone for hours. I said little to any of them, hardly looked them in the eye. I found myself unable to, any of them. Without any damned clue to why, but every time I tried, they sought the floor or the wall immediately after and I walked out of the room.
It wasn?t until the hunt went awry. It was the usual song and dance - track, stalk the prey, and attack. I found someone roaming alone near the beach, I stuck to the shadows and lunged at them. They never even saw me coming. I landed on their back, pinned them down. I laughed like a madman as they struggled beneath me. There was a little scuffle. In? in the midst, they managed to turn around.
Staring my prey face to face, I came to find it was a youthful boy. No more than twenty years old from the looks of it, maybe younger. He pleaded for his life as tears streamed down his face. I don?t know why I hesitated, staring the boy in the eyes. I didn?t know him. He didn?t remind me of anyone I knew. But I couldn?t stop staring at him - at my reflection in his glistening eyes. The way his throat moved when he struggled to breath through his blubbering crying like a baby.
I could already feel my stomach churning, but that voice in my head wouldn?t stop. Taunting, screaming at me to do it. Telling me I?ve gone soft, I?m losing my edge. I don?t deserve the throne or crown I?ve self-proclaimed as my own. The title of Blood King that I declared myself since birth.
It angered me. Fueled me until I saw red. I attacked the boy. Tore into him like a wild animal that had been bitten by rabies. I made sounds that? I didn?t recognize as my own. The blood coated my mouth and throat, but it tasted like vinegar. Bitter, sickening. I smelled no illness on him - no hint of reason for it to taste that way. The boy was human, I could smell it. Sense it. So why did it taste so bitter?
It made me gag, but what pushed me over that hill of nausea I?d been feeling for the past day and a half was pulling back. Seeing the pale, horrified image of the boy?s face stilled in a scream that I?d muffled by tearing out his throat. For some reason, I started picturing his life. Who this boy could?ve been. A brother? A son? A lover? Who did he belong to? Why was he out at that hour alone? Did he have no one?
As those thoughts swirled into my head, my stomach churned until I tasted bile in the back of my throat. I stumbled away from him, made it a few feet away before bile laced with blood spilled over the sand. I wretched until there was nothing left - dry heaved until my stomach ached and I couldn?t breathe.
I looked at him one more time, swallowing the lump in my throat of what I?d just done to a boy who?d barely even begun his life. Naive in his youth, to wander the streets alone freely without a care in the world. I?d ripped him away from any chance to have a life. A family of his own - a wife - children - his life. I?d become the monster I declared myself to be, the one that I told myself I had to be to protect Mira. The one that I?d secretly know was a fluke, an image. But I?d become it. Something I didn?t realize. For that moment of attack, I?d lost myself. There was no control.
A young boy is dead, and that?s my fault. For? ultimately no reason. I wasn?t hungry when I left home. I?d gone on a hunt to kill - murder in cold blood. To be the Blood King. And I ended it with an impressive spill of vomit in the sand.
I went home after I?d cleaned myself up. I wouldn?t speak or look at anyone, nearly unresponsive to any of them - Eva, Millie, Martyr, Micah. I think I managed to tell them I didn?t wish to be disturbed - but I can?t tell if that was imagined or not. I isolated myself to my room for the rest of the night, the boy?s face playing over and over and the questions of who or why battering me.
It wasn?t until I was about to lay down to rest that I realized it.
What I?d just done to that boy? I was about to do to Daphne. A girl who?d put her time and effort on the line to make special weed so my underlings could enjoy food they don?t need. A simple, pleasant indulgence. She?d been kind to us, with no hint of judgement - even upon seeing Millie and myself in the park that day covered in blood. She?d still gone out of her way to do this deed with little want in return. Or any, from what I noticed.
She tried to right the wrongs of the same kind of humans that had turned me against humanity in Transylvania. The same kind of humans that would chase my kind out of their cities with torches and pitchforks. That would scream 'Monster! Run!' or 'Monster! Kill it!' at the slightest hint of fang or redness in the eyes.
She told me that day I laid out my speech that I was going to take what I want: You don't have to change me for me to be on your side.
What I was about to do - was destroy her the way they destroyed me.
I fell asleep that night with my final thought: Even realizing all of this? I was still going to do it.
