Lourdes: A Vampire In The Old West

6. An Unenviable Home

Two black dogs cross against a red sky. Passing along a cliff, they're replaced with the shapes of men. Egon and Duncan look into the oncoming night. They crouch amid sharp stones and train tight eyes on where the earth ends and the tiny yellow lights flickering there in defense against the unavoidable black.

A dusty road snakes about the desert floor leading to a faraway town, and after a moment more, Egon and Duncan, again dogs, bound toward it.

†

Lourdes stands in a simple room. It's Katterina's. High above the bar and in the rear of the Guinevere Hotel, it's removed from the customers and their desires. Cries of ecstasy and anguish are replaced by only empty wind blowing off the desert and the sound of lonely wolves.

Lourdes is alone here, and he takes his time pacing back and forth before becoming familiar with these new walls. His yellow eyes wash over this barren space.

A carved and polished bed stands at one end of the chamber and an equally ornate dresser the other with only bleak, dry wood in between. The boy moves to Katterina's dresser. A line of objects sits atop this chest of drawers. Trinkets and piecemeal memories. Lourdes's eyes, though, are only on one, a tiny cross propped against the wall. He overturns the thing, pushing it down with not so much pain as disdain for the shape.

Lourdes now looks over the rest of the menagerie. These fragile scraps are the only things of Katterina's here. Her only possessions. Lourdes finds a picture of a little girl. A faded child with Katterina's hair. Age has robbed this image of its time and place, but the girl's face hasn't dimmed with the passing years. Lourdes knows her eyes, her nose, and her hair, but her smile is something new to him. Lourdes looks beyond this child, part of a row of photographs, to see the girl grow into a woman.

Katterina age five in a uniform, her clothes pressed, immaculate, and adorned with the crest of an exclusive academy. Katterina age six on a yacht with her tiny hands trying to grasp the boat's billowing sail. Katterina age seven standing in the middle of a great city in the East with her eyes to the sky, trying but unable to see the top of a building rising above the clouds. Katterina age eight kneeling with her arms around a meticulously-groomed hound in front of a sprawling estate. Katterina age nine on a train with ribbons in her hair. In the background of all the images are a man and a woman unchanging throughout time. Her parents. They look on, smiling and warm, just a step behind their daughter. But in the very last photograph, they're absent.

Lourdes picks this picture up. Katterina stands alone in black. Lourdes knows her eyes, her nose, and her hair, and her smile – her smile's gone.

"You don't look like you belong here," the boy whispers to the picture. He sets the image down, staying with it for a stolen moment before moving to the bed.

There, he's careful as he sits. Lourdes removes his cloak and, running his thin fingers through his hair, shakes loose the last of its ash. Going for his boots, one after the other drops to the floor, revealing skin the complexion of cream. Where this morning were bites, slices, and gashes cut deep into this flesh remains only polished white. Lourdes holds his feet, moving his hands slowly from his heels to his toes. The boy's lips tremble as he traces where sinew was exposed. His injuries are gone, but the pain remains. Reaching for his shirt, Lourdes slowly lets its buttons fall away, and here, where the boy wouldn't let the makeshift nurses touch, yawning wounds still bleed. Pieces of Lourdes's body simply aren't there. Mossy bandages and terrible lines of red crisscross his chest.

Stretching out his arm, Lourdes watches an ounce of shattered skin stitch itself back into whole cloth, and there's still a great deal more flesh that must mend. Here, his emaciated form exposed to the dim light, his mind flirting with exhaustion, Lourdes's strength and will meet their end. The boy collapses. Flat on his back, he lets out a hard breath.