Three

A mass of bodies gyrated to the beat of deafening club music. The clinging girl in Darius’s arms pressed her neck against his lips like a penitent offering to a merciful god. Only Darius was no god. Nor was he merciful. He only wanted her blood to neutralize the hold Katarina’s still held over him. Whenever he fed, he tasted Katarina’s blood and felt the echo of her heartbeat weaving itself through his until he couldn’t tell them apart. If he tried to ignore it, the thirst for it magnified. Tonight, instead of fighting it, he’d try to distract himself.

The sweet breath of the female in his arms brushed his nostrils. Her heartbeat, now faster and deeper, began to throb in her clitoris. Darius grinned at how easily she got aroused. The more intense her reaction to him, the more powerful the distraction.

He brought his mouth to her ear, breathing on it in a gentle exhale. Her breath caught. Her entire existence converged into a hope of getting pleasure from a perfect stranger. Like most mortals, she made every conceivable effort to escape the pain of meaninglessness, but beneath the thick outline of black eye-shadow, he looked into a vacant stare of a lost soul.

She reminded him a little of Katarina. Except that unlike this sorry girl whose heart emulated the droning dance beat, Katarina was aware of her pain. She had surrendered to the hopelessness so long ago that the pain itself had become a thread that kept her hanging on. Darius almost felt sorry for her, but the young woman in his arms licked his ear while gyrating her hips against his.

Her glossed hazel stare confirmed her readiness. With a jerk of his head, he pointed to the dark back room and led her by the hand. Against the wall, with his body flush over hers, he rubbed the small rigid nipples through a filmy fabric that passed for clothing. Sighing with pleasure, she closed her eyes. When Darius licked her sweat-glistened neck, she moaned through parted lips. The beat of her heart pulsed in his tongue. Inside him, the rhythm amplified, its exact speed relayed to his own heart. It took mere seconds to synchronize his heart to hers. Once he did, their two hearts tolled as one in a hypnotic cadence as powerful as the club’s deafening drums. The girl, the club, and everyone in it moved to the command of Darius’s thirst.

His fangs cut through the skin. Her scream burst through the undulating multitude like an orgiastic pinnacle. No one even missed a beat.

Darius relished every drop. Even after countless kills, the power of blood still left him in awe. The girl pushed against him feebly. Her muscle strength, had she actually applied it, might have even irritated him, but she lacked the spirit to fight. If she surrendered and found peace in his possession, she could catch a glimpse of who she really was inside.

Mortals had no idea that blood carried the life force responsible for keeping the soul embodied. This vitality flowed through blood in sparkles of light. While he drank the girl’s blood, its light warmed him like the first shimmer of dawn across the eastern sky. If only this wretched girl knew how beautiful the light was and how utterly she’d wasted it.

He could show her the light, but he couldn’t make her see it. That was the problem with these stupid mortals. They lived in darkness when they didn’t have to.

He slowed down until the blood passed into him in a mere trickle. Focusing on the light, he directed it into the girl’s mind. At first, her thoughts and emotions reflected no change, but then, her grip on him tightened. The light became blinding, forcing him to detach from her neck. The girl gaped at him in terrified bewilderment.

“Have mercy,” she sobbed, pulling him closer. “Don’t stop.”

He’d offered life. He’d given her a glimpse of the possibilities. She’d made a choice. He refused to let it disappoint him.

This time, when he sank his teeth into the pulsing wound, he focused only on the blood and let it all come into him. Within a minute, she sagged in his arms. Her weakening heart diminished the blood-flow. Darius sucked harder against the dying of the light until the last brilliant beat dissolved in his arteries. He held the girl for a moment before letting her body slide to the floor. Her ankle twisted. Her black leather skirt hiked up. With her head hanging forward and concealing her pale face, she almost looked asleep.

Without a backward glance, Darius left the club. The girl’s light had long dissolved into his darkness, but the warmth of her blood would radiate through his still recovering body for hours. Only it wasn’t her blood that sang to him like a siren. Like a fragment of a bad dream, Katarina’s image returned to his mind. Damn her for taking the coins. Damn him more for not getting them back when he had the chance. For almost two thousand years, he’d never once parted from them.

New strength rippled through his muscles, urging him into a run. Now that he’d verified his treasure remained safe in Esztergom, he could get ready to follow Katarina across the Atlantic. The sooner he found her and got the coins back, the sooner he could sever the blood link that fed him a constant stream of her experiences. In the past, he’d always been able to control the connection with a marked mortal by seeing only what he wanted to see when he wanted to see it. Katarina’s blood was different. It demanded every moment of his attention even after he fed. It haunted with its complexity and mystery. It made him want to taste it again and again to find out why.

At the bank of the Danube, he leapt into the overcast night sky and aimed southwest to Katarina’s town. Far beneath him, he watched the web of roads crossing the landscape. If only Marcus Aurelius could see this, he might have a lot more to add to his journal. In a matter of hours, goods from one city could reach another. In days, they could reach the other part of the world.

Even so, fear and despair filled the air like the smell of blood hovered over a battlefield. Masses of people drifted without passion or interest, or any clear emotion at all. In his youth, in the great era of the last great Roman Emperor, Darius had been so determined to be his own man that he’d refused to marry when his father commanded it even though the beauty and spirit of his intended bride had left him sleepless and stirred. If he’d heeded his father’s edict, would he be here now, sucking the blood of hopeless fodder, or would he have lived out his days as husband to Julia and father to Helena?

He pressed both arms tightly against his sides to push the speed of his flight to the limit. Katarina didn’t deserve to even lay her eyes on those coins, much less touch them.

When he arrived to the town of Sisak, it lay quiet. Long ago, the Romans had called it Siscia, and Darius had known it well. Except for the three rivers that surrounded it, it looked nothing like the ancient settlement.

Back at Katarina’s mother’s empty house, he aimed for the bathroom window he’d left ajar. He’d used this same window to get into the house when Katarina had still been here. Nothing of hers remained that could give him any explanation for the gripping effect of her blood. He caught a trace of her scent and followed it to the bedroom. The source of the scent emanated from the bed even though the sheets had long been stripped. Leaning over the mattress, Darius inhaled the shimmering texture of female skin. It conjured the perfect image of Katarina. The image carried a sense of warmth, comfort, and...

Darius reared. He still wasn’t completely himself and his senses must have been playing a trick on him. It couldn’t have been hope he’d just felt. For one thing, he didn’t believe in hope any more, and Katarina certainly had none to spare. She was as hopeless as the rest of them.

When he climbed back out the bathroom window, dawn cracked against the horizon. He leapt over the four stairs descending into the basement. The cool semi-underground space spanned the length and width of the house and had several utility rooms. Darius followed the faint scent of potatoes to one of the doors.

Inside a small cell, molding dust clung to windowless brick walls. Wood planks lining the concrete floor would give him a more comfortable place to sleep than he’d expected. Darius picked up one of the planks and barred the door from the inside. If people came through during the day, they would hardly fuss over a locked potato storage.

In the farthest corner from the door, he stretched out on the floor and clenched his fist against his side. If he had the coins, he could drift off into oblivion where even immortality ceased to exist. Instead, lying on the grungy planks, he noticed the stirring of Katarina’s blood in his veins. It seemed as if it wanted to tell him something but he’d refused to listen.

Centuries ago, as a fledgling vampire, he used to fear that the people he’d killed might haunt him some day. In reality, he only heard the cries of the living. Deep down, where their yearnings were hidden from their minds, so many actually begged for the mercy of death.

If the devil existed, he worked his curse by robbing people of purpose, hope, and meaning and then forcing them to live. Maybe this meant Darius was working for God, or at least embodied some aspect of what mortals considered divine.

He pressed the heel of his palm to his temple. He needed sleep, but as soon as he closed his eyes, visions of Katarina intensified. He could easily ban her from his mind by dissolving the blood link between them, but then he wouldn’t be able to track her and the coins would be lost forever.

Closing his eyes, he let his mind drift toward the blood that linked him to a woman half the world away. Immediately, her presence permeated his being and with it came a desire for something he’d wanted for so long that he’d forgotten what it was. Sudden desperation to figure out the nature of his longing tightened his chest. Again, he let go and looked deeper into the blood that made Katarina alive inside of him. He saw her eyes. The light in them drew him into the depths of her pupils. He surrendered to the pull. The force that carried him deeper and deeper into oblivion had the strangest quality. If memory served at all, peace used to feel like this.

* * *

Students huddled over their papers when Katarina glanced at the classroom clock.

“Two minutes. Finish your concluding sentences,” she called out, straightening four piles of papers on her desk.

As much as she resented the burden of grading essays on her first day back to work, she wasn’t exactly ready to teach a swarm of two dozen teenagers who’d spent a month with a sub. An essay kept them quiet and engaged and gave her time to readjust to being back.

Around the classroom, she’d found everything more or less as she’d left it. A few student desks had been rearranged, and book-shelves along the rear wall had fallen into a bit of disarray. On the surface, nothing had changed, but the familiarity of an old routine failed to provide comfort. Instead, she struggled to shake the edgy confusion from her mind and body.

She jerked when the shrill school bell sounded three times. Not a head lifted. Pencils scratched beneath frustrated sighs as students scurried to finish.

“Pencils down,” she said and walked toward the front row to collect the papers.

“Please... Just a sec...” a freckled girl begged when Katarina paused at her desk.

“For tomorrow, read and write a reader response essay on Emily Dickinson’s poem Sight. There will be a quiz first thing.”

“Noo... Ohhh...” several voices grumbled in unison. “Not the quiz, puh-leez...” a gangly girl said, handing over her essay.

“Come, come, Gabrielle, you always ace the quiz,” Katarina joked. This girl alone made it worth the effort.

“I’m glad you’re back, Ms. Plavić,” she said, smiling. “Sorry about your Mom.”

“Thank you, Gabrielle. See you tomorrow.”

The girl’s big brown eyes tinged with palpable compassion, and Katarina’s eyes misted. The feeling caught her by surprise. Since she’d gotten the news of her mother’s death, she hadn’t shed a single tear. She would not start now, especially in front of the kids. Before Gabrielle could notice her vulnerability, she crossed to the next student desk.

The shy girl in the third row center was still writing. Katarina picked up the corner of her paper. “That’s fine, Jamie.”

The girl scribbled on. When she punched in the period, the mechanical pencil point snapped, and the pencil tip drilled through the three-hole punched sheet.

“Ohh.” The girl exhaled sharply and finally released the paper. “Sorry, Ms. Plavić.”

Katarina smiled. “Bye, Jamie.”

After the last pupil left, the heavy classroom door shut and muffled the carnival of voices in the corridor. Katarina dropped the papers on her desk and sat. Her gaze coasted to the writing style posters on the wall. One of them was crooked, but she couldn’t find the strength to stand up again. Jet lag was still working its way out, which certainly explained the nervous tension.

Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. An hour or two would get her well into the piles of essays. Even though surprise projects weighed little on the grade point average, Katarina never postponed grading. Checking tasks off her ‘to do’ list satisfied as much as the actual completion. Besides, after years of teaching, she’d gotten a knack for breezing through papers. With the exception of one or two, they were all the same anyway--the same attempt at an interesting hook, the same third sentence thesis statement, which was really a capitulation at developing a provocative introduction, the same regurgitated interpretation they read in the book, or heard in class. Huck Finn. The boy who went on an adventure for egocentric reasons and learned about compassion, courage, and justice. She wished more of her students cared, but so few actually applied themselves.

After marking the third essay with a bright red B-, Katarina paused. The edges of the ruled sheet hadn’t quite ripped smoothly all the way, so she picked at the small protruding pieces. When the edge was perfect, she took the next sheet, and the next, her short unvarnished nails fumbling to pluck away the fuzzy miscreants.

A third of the way through the stack, she caught herself almost hypnotized by the repetitive act. What in the heck was the matter with her? She slapped her hand against the faux oak desk surface, and the slight sting of the impact refreshed her alertness. She had not known her mind to wander like this - not before going to Croatia.

She picked up another paper, laid it in front of her, and smoothed it with the back of her hand three times even though it was perfectly smooth to begin with. The hand-written words in blue ink soon began to blur. Even staring at the thick stack of essays yet to be graded could not force her to keep going.

Katarina cupped the side of her neck and closed her eyes. It had happened so fast. First the pain then the light, the flight, the whole world passing into her like the hum of a seashell pressed to an ear. For a second or two after the bite, everything inside her had moved and thawed, lifting her higher and higher to a place of undeniable belonging.

In that moment, regardless of everything else that went on in the world, she alone mattered. Not even terror, a natural reaction to a monster’s attack, could spoil the realization.

Lowering her hand from her neck, Katarina forced her attention back to the present. She could keep grading or go home, but strange inertia kept her from doing either. If only she could make herself quiet enough, still enough, alert enough, maybe, just maybe, she could recreate those precious few seconds the attack had provoked.

Great. She was finally losing it for real.

With forceful jerks, Katarina shoved the papers into her large leather bag, separating different stacks by varying vertical to horizontal orientation. The sooner she got back into her routine, the sooner she’d be her normal self again. Jet lag and stress could overwork a person’s imagination. After dinner, perhaps with some Mozart to lighten her mood, she would finish the essays. On her way out, she turned off the lights.

Outside, on the way to the teacher’s lot, the constant hum of traffic on Pacific Coast Highway gave way now and again to a few seconds of pause. The contrast of those brief silences against the background noise made her only more aware of the hustle. Everything moved. Everyone had somewhere to go. She only wanted some peace to pull herself back together.

Long before she reached her Ford Focus, Katarina fished the key from the side pocket of her purse. She pressed the unlock button and the trunk release. In ready response, the door lock clicked and the trunk lid popped open. She dropped her bag in the back and turned toward the silent school building. The same building had greeted her in the morning and watched her leave in the early evening for years. This was her world. Nothing had changed.

Katarina sat behind the wheel and burst into laughter. Of course, she’d imagined the attack. She might have even had a vivid nightmare, but there had been no intruder, and there had definitely been no bite. She was home now. Everything was back to normal.

She merged onto Pacific Coast Highway, heading south toward Avenue I. There had to be some logic for what had happened to her. The coins were real, but the attacker was not. The worst nightmares always combined something real with total fantasy. That’s why they haunted. She got mint-condition Roman coins from an old graveyard in Croatia. Naturally, her mind ran with it. There was no intruder and no neck-bite.

Taking a deep breath, Katarina listened to the squealing wheels while waiting for the underground garage gate to open. This wouldn’t be the first time that she’d mixed dreams with reality and couldn’t tell them apart. As a teenager, she’d often carried on as if her dreams were real, until her father slapped her back to reality with his usual reminder that only hard work, not wishful thinking, would get her somewhere in life.

She pulled up into her parking slot, cut the engine, and dragged herself out of the car. The full weight of reality solidified when she hefted her school bag out of the trunk. She’d become a teacher to empower young minds with the beauty and hope of the written word. Instead, she’d degenerated into a gear in the machinery whose only objective was to perpetuate its own existence according to the latest set of politically correct standards. The beauty had long faded. The passion had fizzed away like day-old champagne before she even got a taste.

No wonder she had crazy dreams. She’d gotten so stuck in life that she needed nightmares to conjure up excitement. Even now, she held a vivid memory of what it felt like to go beyond fear and pain and get a glimpse of herself she’d never even imagined before.

With a renewed bounce in her step, she bypassed the elevator and headed for the stairs. She wanted to move, to run, to breathe so much ocean air that this new idea of herself became sealed into the very fibers of her being. With each step up, Katarina reached for the memory of herself in another time and place, but like the essence of her students’ papers, the experience had worn itself down to a few fuzzy patches along the edge.

She unlocked her door and pushed it open with her foot. Inside, she let the school bag drop to the floor with a thud. She tossed the wad of keys into the seashell on top of the white shoe case, hung the purse on the wrought iron coat hook on the wall, and plopped onto the white, wooden hallway chair. In an automatic motion of a well-established ritual, she slipped out of her pumps and into a pair of baby blue bunny slippers. Nothing had changed.

While carrying the pumps into the hallway closet, where a canvas shoe organizer hung from the clothes rod, Katarina planned the next day’s attire. Setting her clothes out ahead of time saved her from madcap mixing and matching in the morning when every spare minute mattered.

She stowed the black pumps and retrieved a pair of brown open-heeled loafers. They would work with the brown pants and cream blazer she’d wear tomorrow. Back in the hallway, she placed the loafers into the shoe box and picked up the school bag, which she stowed into its designated compartment in the dining-room cabinet.

She’d use the dining table to work on the essays later. Until then, nothing should litter the spotless glass table-top, or any other area, for that matter. If she didn’t immediately put everything in its proper place, she felt messy and constricted.

Weary, Katarina propped both arms on the dining room table and leaned against it. She’d leave handprints, but that would only give her an excuse to polish the glass again. Wiping every last smudge and fingerprint off the table felt like wiping off her own mental slate for a fresh start. Unfortunately, her fresh starts never amounted to anything more exciting than a new stack of school essays.

Tears misted her eyes, but she gulped them down and forced out a chuckle. It had all been a dream, and the monster in it had leered a warning. Unlike shoe organizers, drawers, and sparkling table-tops, dreams could not be manipulated. If she cared at all for her sanity, she would shove all of this out of her mind, eat some food, and get back to her papers.

With the outside of her fingers, she swiped her neck. It began to throb. Like a string, the throbbing tugged the gates of the rusty chamber inside of her. She clamped her hand to her neck and choked down the rising wave of tears. The throbbing turned to pain. It stabbed through her neck and cut off her breath. She’d always had a high tolerance for pain. She knew how to grit her teeth and fight. Except this pain. She had nothing left in her to fight this. Turning her head so that her chin trapped her hand against her neck to lock it in place, Katarina let the tears come.