Soulless

A soul was a weighty thing to carry. Florien had never realised how heavy it was until this moment. Sarah Jane looked at him with luminous eyes that were sunken into her pale face, her soul shining through the shadows of pain and exhaustion. An uncomfortable shame churned in his gut. He’d nearly killed her. He’d gone feral, giving in to his primal instinct to hunt, and he’d hunted her.

It had taken years, centuries even, to reach the level of clarity that he had today. He could almost pass for human… almost. He drank ‘still’ blood, not the fresh and hot stuff that pumped straight from the source. Although his life ending allergy to the sun prevented him from keeping daylight hours, and he had never seen his own reflection in a mirror, they were minor inconveniences that he put up with in his quest to be human. Until today, he’d been proud of his accomplishments.

In all his centuries of existence as a vampire, he lacked one thing, a companion, someone to share the ups and downs of his life. He’d found it in a wide eyed, wild-haired artist, or at least he thought he had, but this recent debacle left him chilled to the bone. From somewhere deep inside, a violent and uncontrollable beast had emerged, and it frightened him. It was not safe to be a human in his presence, or more specifically, it was not safe to be the human artist Sarah Jane. She smelled divine, her every movement, each word she spoke, and the very action of her breathing thrilled the dormant vampire within him—the soulless vampire he’d spent years taming and controlling.

He stared down at the pale face surrounded by a tangle of auburn curls that spread out over the bed linen as she lay, weary and wan, and the shame in his dead heart intensified. He’d attacked her in hot blood, nearly sucked her dry and still she gazed at him in that bleary, hopeful (or hopeless) way.

“If you care so much, there is no way that you don’t have a soul. You wouldn’t be able to care without one,” she’d said with quiet certainty. Florien was not convinced. He’d long ago accepted that his soul was gone, stolen from him at his turning. But if Sarah Jane was correct, if he did have a soul, then he was damned to hell for all the atrocities he had committed. The guilt gnawed at him and he thought that he’d rather prefer not to have a soul.

Like a coward, he fled the room, fled all the way to Mrs Bedford, the owner of the local tavern. She took one look at his face and immediately placed a Bloody Mary before him. Florien had no idea of the donor’s actual name, but he was grateful for the sustenance. He gulped the bloody cocktail in one long swig, draining the glass completely, before slamming it on the counter, where it shattered into a million pieces, just like his fragile emotions.

“Oh my dear boy,” Mrs Bedford crooned with sympathy as she removed the larger shards of glass dumping them in the bin, before returning with a damp cloth the clear the remaining slivers.

“Boy? I’m over two hundred years old. You are only sixty-five. I’m hardly a boy.”

“When I found you starving on the blood of wild animals because you were desperately trying not to harm another human… that was your birth. You’ve been domesticated for nearly fifteen years now, and that makes you a boy in my eyes. You’ve still so much to learn.”

Florien stared at the tiny pieces of shattered glass, each fragment glittering in the overhead light of the bar.

“She thinks I have a soul.”

Mrs B was startled by his statement and, in a split moment of inattention, swiped a glass shard into her finger.

“Ouch! Blast it all,” she gasped.

Red blood welled at her fingertip and in an instant Florien pounced on her hand with lightning fast reflexes, the kind of reflexes that only belong to the supernatural. Without thought, he sucked on her digit, the warm blood like the sweetest candy on his tongue. Mrs B’s eyes widened in alarm, but before she could pull away, Florien threw her hand away in horror as he flew to the other side of the tavern. He crumpled into a chair like a rag doll, his head thumping on the table in anguish.

Mrs Bedford hurriedly applied a plaster to her finger and rushed to his side. He sat, eyes haunted and lost, a wooden stake held firmly in his grasp and aimed directly at his heart.

“Florien!” Mrs B cried as she grabbed his arm, shaking him gently, but with desperate urgency. “It’s not your fault, lovey. Come on, it’s OK.” Her voice filled with compassion and it was his undoing. He dropped the stake with a clatter and sunk his head into shaking hands.

“I’m a monster. Why do you put up with me? Why do you help me?”

“Oh lovey, you’re not a monster.” Mrs B wrapped a comforting arm around his shoulder as he shook with huge, gulping sobs.

“I am. I sucked your blood! Yours, Mrs B! Not some random person. I took it from you. I am damned eternally.”

“You’re not damned. You can’t help your nature. It’s part of you.”

“Sarah Jane believes I have a soul. It was easier to be soulless. I didn’t have to worry about my past if I didn’t have a soul. But now, if I really do have a soul, then it’s so blacked, so unclean that I’m doomed for all eternity.”

“Of course you have a soul. I could have told you that if you’d asked. It’s why I helped you, nurtured you all these years. You’ve a good heart. It’s not your fault you are what you are. You can’t help that, but you can’t keep fighting it, either.”

“If I don’t fight it, people die.”

“Well, that’s where we come in.” She gestured to all the locals sitting in the tavern as they watched him with curiosity. “We can help you resist that part. The bagged blood helps, doesn’t it?”

He nodded.

“And if it’s your soul you’re worried about, we can help with that, too. Gordon’s brother is a priest. He could baptise you, wash your soul clean and you would be good as new.”

“Vampires don’t do well with holy water. We tend to shrivel up and die.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask. Maybe you could be baptised with regular water. I’ll ask Gordon to call his brother.”

“I don’t know…” Florien didn’t finish the sentence because at that moment, the most amazing smell wafted through the door, and he looked up, mouth watering and fangs extending, to see Sarah Jane, pale and trembling, stagger through the door. He gasped, and flew to her side, as he growled, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“You left me in a cold, empty castle.” Her voice was a mere thread of sound that barely reached his ears—and he had exceptional hearing. He wrapped his arm about her shoulder, ignoring the trembling in his limbs that threatened to shake him apart, and guided her to a seat next to Mrs Bedford.

“Oh dearie, you shouldn’t be out of bed.” Mrs B clucked like a mother hen with a chick and she caught the attention of a young barmaid. “Francine, bring us some stew, will you, hon?”

“How did you get here?” Florien asked and as was the case when his fangs extended from his gums, they tangled with his tongue, which made speaking difficult.

“I walked.”

“Oh hon,” Mrs B said as she took the girl’s hands in her own, rubbing them briskly to warm them. “You should be resting. You have been through a big ordeal.”

Florien couldn’t tear his gaze from the young woman. Her skin had a deathly, bloodless pallor, and if he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was a vampire. She sported an enormous purple bruise at her neck, with two fang-sized puncture wounds. He flinched with remorse as he remembered the feeling of sinking his teeth into that delectable flesh. Further down, there was bruising in the crook of her elbow, where the nurse, had inserted the needle for the blood infusion, that had saved Sarah Jane’s life.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Florien growled. He could barely speak. His fangs had descended so far and his entire body shuddered as it reacted to Sarah Jane’s presence.

She just looked at him with those wide eyes framed by dark-rimmed glasses. “I don’t want to be alone.”

The words were a punch to his guts. They were his own words thrown back at him, the very words that started this horrible ordeal. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’

Florien gazed at her, drowning in the luminous pools of her eyes, neither of them unable to look away. His mind repeated the mantra silently ‘Sarah Jane is not food, she is NOT food!’ But his body was having difficulty following the directions of his brain. He trembled and his hands itched to clasp her to him, to sink his fangs into her neck and… oh, for God’s sake! He wrenched his body away and turned his face to see a newcomer. It was Fr Miles, Gordon’s brother, and he looked rather stern and foreboding.

With the fortuitous arrival of the priest, it was decided that Florien would be baptised there and then. As for whether or not Florien still retained a soul, the priest was not certain, but he was convinced that if a soul remained in the vampire’s body, then clearly cleansing it through baptism was a certain requirement.

Florien was not so sure. The thought of burning to a crisp, or melting away, or any other demise as a result of being sprinkled with holy water, was terrifying. However, the priest believed that the only way for Florien to regain a semblance of humanity, to obtain a measure of control over his vampire nature, was to undergo the torture. And Florien supposed that such a death would be preferable to a life where he would harm others, especially those he had come to care for.

His soul was proving to be a weighty burden.

“Florien D’Aubigny, I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” The priest intoned solemnly as he dribbled holy water down Florien’s head as he bent forward over the tavern’s sink.

The water burned its slow path along his skin, searing him from the outside in. He grimaced and gritted his teeth against the pain, choking a scream behind his teeth, as the tavern filled with the rank odour of burning flesh.

“My God!” Mrs Bedford cried as she clutched a sobbing Sarah Jane to her side. “What have you done to him?”

Fr Miles watched in horror, his eyes wide with disbelief as the holy water sizzled and seared the vampire. Clearly, he had not believed the writings of ancient priests who had ventured forth to battle demon vampires armed only with crucifixes and holy water. Florien could have vouched for their authenticity, having witnessed the demise of many vampires in this manner. He was almost relieved to go, to leave this world that he’d lived in for so long.

There was just one regret, or maybe two. He was not sure where his immortal soul would end up, if he indeed possessed one. And his second regret was leaving Sarah Jane. He’d known her less than two days, and he would have enjoyed knowing her for longer, without the pain of his vampire attraction. She was an adorable little thing, and he believed that he could have loved her. As the light faded from his eyes and the burning pain engulfed him, he looked at her terrified face one last time. He couldn’t speak but he thought the words hoping she would hear them in her own immortal soul.

‘If my heart weren’t dead, then I believe that I could have loved you with my whole heart. But you believe that I have a soul, so I promise that I will love you with that entire soul, now and for eternity.’

And then, he was gone, a pile of cinders and ash. Mrs Bedford wailed, Sarah Jane screamed and Fr Miles fainted dead away.