The Sanguinarian

Billie kept her distance from her brother, Jack, as one always should when their he is moments away from sinking his teeth into a fresh body. It wasn’t just the principle, as one should always respect others’ space when feeding. Really, it was the practicalities of it all - the blood splashing, ripping, so on and so forth... Jack was just a very messy eater. His table manners hadn’t improved since he'd left the cot, and Billie was wearing her brand-new chunky leather cleats. Unfortunately, she knew that as soon as her brother sunk his teeth into the the boy that arteries, veins and flesh alike would be splattered over her clean shoes.

His skin is still flush with life, bright eyes framed by thick black lashes. It was a boy that she’d never seen before. A purple wound blossomed at the edge of his collarbone where a thin stream of blood trickled, steaming with fine mist into the frosted grass below. It was that perfect time of night, like the sweet spot on man’s collarbone, an inch below the neck .

The night was luminous and defined with bright hues of indigo and sapphire. Under the waning moon, Jack looked more lifeless than the boy in his arms did; so papery and thin was his pale skin that the blue ghosts of his veins ran like lightning shock beneath it. He looked from the moon to Billie, there was hardly any white in his small eyes. His pupils were swollen black wells, drinking in the dying twilight around them. Jack inhaled sharply as life seemed to re-enter his cold body. He wasn’t dressed for the snow — hell he was only wearing pyjamas, who wears pyjamas to kill a kid in the woods? Billie thought to herself, grimacing slightly at his choice of outfit. His look… he looks exactly how he is- insane.

He could’ve been anyone; a careless man out in the snow, a loon, perhaps (or definitely), no, that night Billies’ brother was desperate. A truly desperate, monstrous man. Billie knew that if she had been anyone else, she’d have been utterly repulsed by her brother. Beyond terrified and scrambling away for freedom before he had a chance to turn on her. If I was anyone else with a brain, she would have driven her keys into his eye sockets and made a run for it. But she didn’t, and never would because she was exactly the same.

She also had to drive him home…

A rosy hue returned to the height of his cheeks and a fine mist drifted from his wet lips. The high of life had returned to him in that second. Jack remained on his knees with his face upturned to the night sky as if in prayer.

‘Good feed I take it?’ said Billie, words sharp in the cold silence. The woods are silent apart from the feverish rattle of Jacks’ breathing. He gasps like a fish, unable to manage speech in his semi-spiritual state of renewed vigour.

‘Delectable.’ His voice held a slight tremble with the energy of the word.

‘Another child?’ She looked at the boy in pity, he was now a muddied mess of blood laying in the snow.

‘Better blood,’ He said simply.

Despite the fact that her life was filled with moments like this and in part half of her consciousness was accustomed to it, the other half of her was utterly disgusted. That same part of her withered with every blood-meal witnessed or drunk; every tender neck bitten, every snapped bone, each tangy blood clot that passed over her tongue. How was she supposed to say that this wasn’t for her, that she disagreed with her hungry stomach and the fangs in her skull?

If this was her nature, how was she going to reject fact? Perhaps it was because the boy was so young that she’d found it more difficult this time. His was the last name on Jack’s list, his last feed of the season.

‘He’s barely lived,’ She whined, disturbing the snow with the tip of her boots.

‘Annnnnd what a blessing that is,’ He tossed the boy back down and stood up. He shook his clothes as if the spots of blood would just jump right back off. Jack wasn’t the strongest of vampires, in fact, he’d done well enough just by being pretty. His frame was slight and long, no big shoulders or heavy chest. Human men and women alike would rush to help him with any type of task. ‘I would trade places with him in a heartbeat.’

Billie rolled her eyes. Even the feeling of having everything you could wish for becomes relative at some point, ‘Funny, you haven’t had a pulse since 6000 BC.’

‘1862 actually,’ He touched his porcelain face and looked at Billie, feigning horror, ‘Why, have I aged?’

‘I forgot how irritating you are after a feed, remind me not to help you with this shit again.’

‘Aw, at least I’m entertaining, you can’t tell if Klaus is still dead or just dead.’

Klaus, their older brother had been born during the Georgian period of early 18th century England. His inclinations had never really left him since that period of time. Despite being a near genius in intellect, Klaus kepts an array of strange habits that he’d picked up during this time and never put back down again. He was pessimistic, sometimes sour, and always practical.

‘The boy was dying of cancer anyway.’ He brings a finger to a part of his lips where they still had the boy’s blood on them. Wiping his mouth clean again, he stuck out his hand towards his sisters face with an offering of the child’s blood on the end of his finger, ‘Try it before it gets cold.’

Billie swiped him away, ‘You’re disgusting.’

He laughed and wiped his finger on his pyjama bottoms, '... It's all fun and games, huh?'

Jack’s white face was a reflection of his mothers, more so than Billie or Klaus. The three children were carbon-copies of their mother; they were her black-haired, dark-eyed, roman-nosed, sharp-looking clones. But Jack was certainly his mothers child — from hair to face shape and even the beauty mark just under his left eye.

‘It literally makes me feel wrong.’ Billie said.

‘The boy was miserable, there’s a reason why I was given his name, you know that.’ He crouched down to the body once more, contemplating the scene. I knew that he didn’t actually enjoy the whole ordeal, it was that a rush from a feed was too much too deny, ‘Tell me who’s last on your list.’

She shrugged, she didn’t want to tell him because his reaction was predictable. Jack was the more annoying of her two brothers; he knew exactly how to torture information from her. If she wanted an easy night, she’d say, ‘Just another paedophile.’

‘Exactly, no one asked for your opinion Ms Karma for all pedos, you drinking from dirty, perverted old men makes me feel wrong. After all, you are what you eat,’ he winked.

‘So you’re a child?’

‘And you’re a perv.’

‘Be careful, you’re next on my list, cradle snatcher.’

‘As long as the Circle is fine with it, I’m fine with it.’

‘As long as the Circle are fine with it and we cover our tracks properly, and by tracks I mean make it look as natural as possible.’

The Circle had worked on a justice-based rota for the last two-hundred years. It wasn’t solely based on doing necessary good, since any murder wasn’t always a necessary good, but it gave a system to feeding, and the system avoided chaos. I looked again at the boy. The first moments after death, the person never looks completely real. Maybe it was in the way their limbs fell, or in the silence of their faces; they always reminded Billie of wax dolls, marionette-like.

‘I don’t know how you can be arsed to drag them out all the way into the mountains everytime you need a feed.’ The whole night had been such an effort.

First, Jack had to stabilise the boy — how he managed that, she didn’t bother to ask, neither did she want to know. Knowing less allowed her to feel uninvolved in the whole ordeal. She assumed it was some type of pill he’d given the boy to knock him out. Under his instruction, she drove him to the woods whilst Jack kept the boy comfortable and out of sight. Then, they had to creep through the woods like creatures from a nightmare. They trudged through the freshly fallen snow carrying the boy, who by now was as limp as a sack of flour and just as heavy. They attempted to make as little noise as possible, snaking their way around sharp branches and hidden tree stumps. Jack had wrapped him up in an old tent with enough gap to breathe. The idea was to look like two loony hikers who were going camping in the snow but Billie, slightly more perceptive than her brother, highly doubted that that’s what anyone would’ve actually thought if they’d seen them.

‘Small price for security, tracks will be covered by tomorrow’s snow and when the body is found next spring, his body will have already decomposed or got moved around by animals.’

‘Two animals have already moved him around… Can’t we bury him, rest in peace and all that jazz?’

‘Ha-ha and no, not unless we want the pigs to scream bloody murder,’ But it is a murder, she thought sourly. Jack let out a long sigh, ‘I know what you’re thinking, Billie, and don’t get me wrong, I used to think exactly the same way you did back when I was your age but reality is — being sensitive in this world, as it is today, doesn’t work,’ He pulled our old tent from under the boy and began folding it. ‘Unless, that is if you want to end up in a ditch yourself then go for it, hun!’

She was ready to return a snarky comment when in the same moment, a crack sounded from a distance behind them. It was a steady and obvious crack, a twig broken by a slow-moving thing. The pair froze and Jack directed the side of his head to the origin of the noise, he did not move a hair until he seemed satisfied that it had been game or nothing at all.

‘Probably just a deer.’ But he spoke too soon, as soon as the words left his mouth a bullet came whistling through the dappled shadow of the forest, taking Jack in the shoulder before either of them could anticipate a thing. He released a string of profanities and stumbled back into Billie.

‘What the fuck!’

Billie pushed forwards into Jack to steady him. Then there was silence. There was nothing to see except the snow, brush and trees. Had that bullet been meant for them? No one was meant to be around them, neither could anyone have seen them from where they were. Jack held onto his shoulder, he didn’t feel pain the same way as he would’ve two hundred odd years ago.

Another crack sounded, they braced themselves but this bullet was more distant again, across the tree line, a cloud of Jackdaws rose from the trees. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Don’t be.’ He smiled at Billie, he had a wonderful talent of reassuring people in the most damning circumstances, ‘Do I look like I’m in pain?’ Jack swung his right arm into the air, his shoulder crunched but he remained smiling, eyes still wide with delight from his feed. Another shot sounded, this time even further away.

‘You are one disturbing mother fucker...’

‘Well one of us has to be.’

‘Doesn’t it hurt?’

‘We’re fucking vampires, Billie’ He shrugged, the metal of the bullet grinding into his socket was audible out in the cold silence.

‘That’s not what I mean, is it silver you moron!?’

‘Fuck no’ He laughed, ‘You’d fucking know about it if it was.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone shot before.’

‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your generation is wet.’

‘Ugh, Let’s just get out of here,’ The sense of urgency had gone, more bullets went off in the distance. It really did seem like they’d got caught in the cross-fire of some poachers.

‘We will be fineeee,’ Jack said it near-disappointedly. This evening probably had been one of their more exciting evenings in a good while. ‘Let’s roll him back up and get back home.’

The boys’ scrawny physique was easy to carry before, but now drained all of blood was now even easier. Jack fumbled forwards between the lengthening shadows cast by the towering pines. With the front end of the rolled up tent, he leaned forward in attempt to dodge branches and thorns but it was an awkward procedure, still they stopped multiple times to unwind their long hair from the trees.

Apart from the weekly feeding ritual, Billie’s life, and the life of the general vampire, wasn’t that exciting. Normal things that her human peers thought they couldn’t live without, just didn’t have the same value to her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any practical interest, it was just that the emotional motivators that played such a key role in all of her peers’ lives simply didn’t exist for her. She barely felt any type of way about anything. So much so that her school send her to a psychiatrist to study her ineffectiveness. The shrinks said she was incurable.

Yet she didn’t need a cure, it was her superpower. She was immune to the effects of bullying since she could walk, she never felt disturbed by an overwhelming emotion, and those that noticed her thought of her as a stoic rather than unemotional.

The only one who could disturb her or any of her siblings was her mother.

‘What are we going to do with the body?’

‘Leave that to me.’ He said.

‘What are you going to do to it?’

‘I said, leave it to me.’ He paused, turned to Billie and practised his best to smile.

‘What a strange sight, I don’t quite know what to do.’

‘Appreciate the sentiment and the fact that you won’t have to do anything to help me.’

Billie said nothing.

‘Actually, you can do one thing… Don’t tell mother’.