The thing about Rasheen Perpetua is this: he was born a runner and a master of mischief.
-
Many things are pulling along the way the moon does to the ocean's tide.
His fingers, delicate things that once nimbly danced across the keys of a piano, are twitching toward a girl, attempting to pull her closer, to get her to leave. His hands, slightly rougher around the edges due to strings snapping back from the vibrations of a cello, are gripping on tightly to her shirt, trying to bring her to his side, back to safety.
How long have they been here? A second, a minute, an hour, a few hours, a day? A day seems to be the best answer, but even then it isn't the best situation to be in – one day in a room full of emptied bodies is never good for anything.
Reed, he almost yells, but he has no voice. After all the times of peaceful protest and interchangeable riot, his vocal chords shouldn't fail him now; but they do, and he has no idea how to get her to pay attention. They need to go the way all things in a circular and nonexistent time return to their fabricated origin – it's a monomyth, and Rasheen assumes he's the hero of the tale.
Synthetic pastimes are sweatshop-made versions of stories.
His mind is riddled with metaphors, but his tongue is burned with them.
And it seems like his is the only mouth to rest parched.
The ten humans, or what were humans, are sprawled across the floor at all angles, in various stages and degrees of withering to death. They are sucked dry like sand in a desert, desecrated like eroded coves by the sea's running waves – they are far past the gone, and it's his fault he couldn't save them all.
How easy would it have been to drag Reed by her arm, pull her across the room even if she fell to the floor in efforts to quench her thirst? How easy would it have been to try to convince the other vampires in the room to slow down, that he didn't want a feast of any kind in his honor?
How easy would it have been for me not to participate, either?
Among the bodies of delayed, yet upcoming, death, his dear friend rests in the pile too. Francis was a holy boy who didn't believe in a god or a creator, but he believed in himself and humanity, and that in itself was a miracle. Like some things in life, he was gone too fast. It's what happens when a boy with fangs for canines bites into a person, and with pools of lust for eyes stare deep into one's soul.
It's what happens when Rasheen fails to save a life who granted amnesty to deep-sea villains among others.
His eyes lift from the boy he once called his best friend, past the girl who he knows has some innocence intact in her, and toward the trio he once called parts of his new home. Of the three vampires he knows, one is being cornered by the other two, all of them shaking and quivering.
Lust and fear are interchangeable too, or so it seems.
The girl has the wickedest braids he has ever seen, intricate curls of seaweed and designs made of kelp bulbs. The only thing that makes her look like more of an anti-hero is the way her leather boots clack with every flick of her tongue against her teeth, and the way her eyes shine with ink rather than emotion. His mind reels through clips he has of her, and all he can come up with is a bottle of wine and one of scotch.
Her name is Jane...Bruno. And ordinary Jane has now met brawn.
The woman, as there is quite a difference between their ages, has a timeless face, but not like that of the vampire Elders. Her hair is let loose, and yet it seems stiff all at once, like a clam before it is broken apart by the beak of a preying bird. Her eyes are even deader than the former's, and all he remembers of her is an eccentric connection to snakes.
