True Love's Bite

16 // Not Since I Met You

What do you say to that?

What words of comfort do you offer in a situation like this?

One of the ways in which vampires are created, as stated on Wikipedia, is through the use of dark magic. And Silas was a product of that, he was turned into a vampire by his mother, using witchcraft.

I don't know what I expected, a part of me still believes that I was in a dream. I think that I was in denial as much as the qualities were there, it didn't make sense how he could have turned into a vampire when vampires only existed in fiction. A part of me had assumed that maybe he was bitten by another vampire and thus, transformed into one.

However, that was not the case. He died, and it was death by suicide - he killed himself.

I was dying to embrace him, to ask him what was so terrible that it drove him to kill himself. I wanted to hold him and take away the pain he clearly still suffered through.

But I did none of that. All I did was try to imagine a world without him, and it just did not make any sense. I was scared, scared for him. What if he tried to kill himself again?

"My father was ill for a very long time, until he passed away when I was a kid, Esra was a bit older so she understood everything, but for me, I always thought he had gone out and would come back later. Even after witnessing his burial, it didn't make sense to me. Eventually, I kinda got used to the idea of his absence and accepted that he was not coming back," he said with a ghost of a smile. "I only came to accept my father's death in Grade 7, I don't know how, but I did it. For the longest time, it was just us three; me, my mom, and my sister. And then three years ago, I came home after picking up Esra from town, and guess who I found there? My dead father. Except, he wasn't dead at all and hadn't age a single day in the last 22 years of his life buried below the earth."

My heart swelled for him. It reminded me of my neighbour's story when she learnt at her mother's funeral that the father she thought was dead for thirty years was actually alive and that he had not known of her existence.

I passed him my bottle of water and he only took a sip. For some reason I couldn't help noticing how he seemed to look sick.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

He nodded. "I was once like you, you know, and I don't mean in the sense of being human. But I also didn't believe vampires were real, until I saw my father. I remember Esra running towards him, but my mother pulled her back and shielded her. She said, "Don't! I know what it looks like, but that's not your father, he's a monster. A creature of the night that survives off drinking people's blood." I didn't want to believe it, I would have rather she said he abandoned us for another woman, but instead, he chose immortality. He did not want to die, so he made a deal with the devil in exchange for eternal life. The truth was in the detail, my father was a shadow of his old self.

When I confronted him about it, he said he was doing it for me, that he didn't want me to suffer through the pain of living without a father. He said that if I gave him a chance, he could make up for everything and that we would never be separated after this. All it was gonna take was just one bite."

"He wanted to turn you into a vampire," I thought out loud.

"Yeah. When we asked him why now after all this time, he said because we were old enough to make our own decisions. Turns out, my mother banished him from our home right after his supposed death because he had wanted for the entire family to join him and be turned into vampires. He didn't give us much of a choice now that we were older, he even brought a hoard of those red-eyed monsters. Mom and Esra could protect us with their magic, but I was too emotional and ran off. I remember my father hunting me down like a predator, he could have used his enhanced speed to catch me, but nope. As usual, he wanted to assert his dominance, he stalked me until I reached a dead end. There was a dam that was forbidden since we were kids after several cases of people drowning and others disappearing." He chortled and shook his head, albeit the not amusing story. "I wonder if I would have still had the pleasure of meeting you had my parents invested in swimming lessons. I couldn't swim, but I still jumped into the dam than let my father turn me into a blood-sucking monster. I said to him, "I'd rather die than become what you are". Guess the joke was on me because my mother turned me into one anyway."