The Vampire Anthologies

Bellinor

     Two hundred fifty five years; that is how long it has been since the night I died. Well, almost. It's hard to tell if how I am living is really what one would say "living."

     Every sunrise that this world is graced with means yet another life had to be taken for me to live. Their life source, their life blood, their very soul even. With one bite I can taste it all beneath the copper, for beneath the rich red lies their pure human soul. I feel exactly who they are as a person, their memories of how they felt in that exact moment. I feel their hopes and sins, their regrets. I feel it all in an overwhelming matter of seconds.

     And in those seconds of them clawing at me, crying and begging helplessly, their hearts desperately beating before it stops, it all ends. The reaper beckons them to the afterlife and they are sent to wherever they go.

     I long for that sweet release of death.

     I long to feel the warmth of the sun.

     I long to feel anything other than nothing.

     But most of all, I long to see Her.

     I want to see Her more than anything. To feel her auburn red waves sliding through my fingers, the smoothness of her ivory pale skin, her slender hands that would touch my cheeks. And her lips that would touch mine so softly, her ocean green eyes sliding closed when she leaned in.

     Two hundred fifty five years have passed since she was murdered on those cobbled streets, red staining my hands and clothes as I held her in my arms. Those soft lips parting to give out her last breath as mine parted in lies that she would be fine.

     I will never forget how the world burned around us that night. The screaming and the crying of our fellow colonials as the Red Coats tore us apart. Shots firing periodically, followed by the sounds of the people falling. Rivers of blood flowing between the stones, red and sticky. Mixing with hers, mixing with mine soon after as a burning hot pain like no other hit my back.

     Laying beside her, our blood mixing together irrevocably, I didn't mind. I was following her, my wife that I had married just hours ago, in death.

     Yet that very same night, little did I know I would become cursed to walk this life without her. Punished for the sin of a woman's scorn, I am cruelly snatched away. Instead of the calming peace, I awoke with sharpened fangs and claws and a thirst so powerful that I feared my own self.

     I became a Vampire.

     And the One who cursed me, mocking me, stood proud and tall next to me. Her thin, pale, blood stained lips were pulled into a sadistic smile; those once blue eyes that rivaled an ocean, were now blackened and glinting in mirth in the hellish light of the fire around us. Twirling around in a macabre dance amongst the corpses of the town, her golden hair swaying in the breeze, I recognized her as the woman I had left behind in England. The one I had believed to be dead yet there she stood and danced and cackled at my misfortune.

     Caroline had cursed me to a life without love, separating me from my wife, forever. I had screamed so loud in rage, my fangs glinting in bloodlust, that she paused for a moment before laughing. Even as I had my hands around her throat, she continued to smile in glee.

     "Try as you might, Bellinor. You will never be free. You will forever be chasing Death and he will forever be running from you. She will be running from you, a monster that will kill thousands for centuries. You will know my pain as yours, a life without love."

     Even after I had snapped her neck, she awakened again to torture me. She followed me to my burnt home, mocking me as I buried the dead. Over and over the cycle continued. For two and a half centuries she followed me, my personal torment.