The Donor House: Advent Story (part 7)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

“Do you think that’s likely?” Dominic asked.

“I think it’s possible.” Nick ran his tongue over his bottom lip, telling himself not to think too much about the meetings that Alice was still having with Sam, even after he’d made it obvious to the entire House that he was still very prejudiced against vampires. “Alice and I… being here it lets us have our own lives for the first time, which is something we couldn’t have before, because I was trying to keep her safe and she’d got it into her head that I really needed looking after, and I guess there are times when I do.” Smiling, he shook his head. “Our entire focus was on each other, even though she was still dealing with her anger, without really having all that much time for what it was we wanted to do with our time. Now we can do our own thing, we have friends to spend time with that may mean we end up spending all night on opposite side of the dining room or we might get a chance to sit together without feeling the need to talk to each other, and it’s something I always hoped would happen, but for a long time, too long, I had no idea how.”

“Alice spends a lot of time with Sam, even now.”

“She’s not going to give up on him. I wish she would, I wish she’d walk away and never see him again, but she isn’t like that. He screwed up his first visit to the House, in such a way that I think he realised pretty quickly that we wouldn’t be happy to see him return, and if it was any else they would have accepted a hunter is almost impossible to change, but as Alice was the daughter of hunters she knows that it can happen, if they really want to or something happens to make them question whether what they were taught in really right.”

“Whenever she goes we always make sure someone’s close. I don’t think she’s noticed at all, but she’ll always have either a vampire or donor sitting within yelling distance, in case something goes wrong. John thought it was a good idea when he realised what she was doing, because he cares about Alice and doesn’t want her getting hurt.” Dominic sighed. “He said if he thought she really was in danger he would have stopped her and as he hasn’t he’s obviously not too worried that Sam will actually do anything to her, because John seems to think that coming to the House actually made Sam think about the differences between what he was taught and what Alice is actually like. I’m not so certain, but it’s John so I’m going to give Sam the benefit of the doubt for now.”

Nick smiled, unsurprised that John had put that much thought in to looking after Alice. “That’s all any of us can do. John told me what she was doing when she left the first time and I did want to convince her not to when she came back, but I need to let her be Alice. If Sam ends up hurting her then I can be here to look after her. If we’re all wrong and Sam really is beginning to understand who we are then all I’ll have done is made her mad at me for no reason, by not accepting that she knows him better than any of us, because she does and she’s the only one who can know for certain whether he is learning.”

“The first time I thought about doing exactly the same thing. I really didn’t like Sam when he came to the House and I’m not sure that he can change, but it’s Alice. Alice has been there for me since I first walked in the door, so if she thinks he’s worth her time then I accept that, even though I don’t think he is. She’s a better person than he could ever be.”

“I remember, when Alice and I first met, thinking that she was a better person than I was, because she thought about me, even though she didn’t have to. Yes, I’d saved her from the auctions, but that didn’t mean she needed to insist that I should have somewhere to live in thanks or put herself forward as a donor. She felt she owed me for what I’d done and it didn’t matter that I didn’t really think I’d done much at all. Being in the right place at the right time to scare the vampire into dropping her was pure luck. The gatherer was an amateur as well. Everyone knows that the first thing you do is cover the human’s mouth so they can’t scream.” Nick shrugged. “Alice could scream, so she did. It wouldn’t have been enough if I wasn’t close enough to help her, but I was and I went to help her, knowing that no human would be able to get there as quickly as I could. The scariest part was when I realised the village I’d decided I wanted to stay near, at the very least, was full of hunters, including Alice’s brother. He hated me from the moment he saw me and wanted to stake me. She wouldn’t let him, because I’d saved her from what she called a fate worse than death – becoming an addict. That was her greatest fear, even when she offered to be my donor and I was lucky enough to know how I could stop something like that from happening. So we worked together to make certain that I had enough blood, that no one would get addicted to my bite, and that I had a comfortable place to live.”

“She’s told me about that day before. I think it was when we were talking about Blake, because she said that she’d appreciated what you did even then, even when she thought of vampires as nothing more than blood drinking creatures who’d be better off exterminated. You didn’t have to help her, but you did.” Dominic bit his lip. “Talking to Caleb has made me worry more about the auctions than I did before, because now I know they really do exist. Unless you know someone who’s been taken and either died or become an addict they seem a bit like a story.” He shook his head. “Every year I was warned, by both my school and my parents, that anyone could be taken by the vampires, but I still went out at night, because I didn’t think it could ever happen to me, and I realise now that I was an idiot. It can happen to anyone.”

“One of the things they don’t tell you is that the auction vampires have no scruples at all. They will, if they have to, break into someone’s house and take them from their bed if they think they’ll sell well or someone has let them know there are a couple of vampires stalking them who have the money to get into a nice bidding battle.” Nick sighed. “Going out at night is the easiest way to get grabbed, because they will take anyone they think will sell, but it isn’t the only way. Another thing I’ve heard of recently in the auction schools, where the children of hunters get taken to be brought up as pliable donors who have no idea what might happen to them. I want to bring an end to them and bring an end to the vampires who buy their humans from them.”

“We all know that’s one of your goals.” Dominic squeezed Nick’s shoulder. “It will happen, Nick, but it’s going to take time and planning. The auctions have always made me think of the hydra – if you chop one head off several more will appear.” Nick nodded, appreciating the imagery. “Keep your focus on making the House the best it can be, because I think that’s a good step in the right direction, and we’re teaching people that not all vampires are the same, which is just as important as bringing an end to the auctions. Well, it is to me anyway, now.”

“Issac has said exactly the same thing and he thinks the longer we’re open the more likely it is that we might have visitors who would normally go to the auctions, but have decided it might be better to not keep spending their money on humans they end up hurting, for one reason or another. Even though I’m not so sure I know that we’re all going to have a different point of view when it comes to the auctions and the vampires who go there.”

“Caleb said that some of the vampires really could be called evil, but he thinks the majority of them simply want to make the vampires around them proud. They want to be seen to be a true vampire, rather than be mocked in the way that the vampires who come to the House are, and I can understand why. Once I told my friends that I’d applied to be a donor at the House I became seen as the walking dead. The majority assumed that the vampires here were just like those running the auctions. A few talked to me, asked me why I’d made the decision, and, I think, started to see that their point of view might be wrong. Luckily those are the ones who chose to visit me, because if the others had I know I would have got you to throw them out.”

“The problem with vampires is that we pass down bad habits. At least that’s what Issac calls them. When the first vampires were created they realised that they’d die if they didn’t drink blood and that dying of starvation wasn’t much fun at all, but that was all the information they had. Learning how to survive can’t have been easy for any of them.” Nick tried to hide his shudder, remembering what it was like to know that he needed blood to survive and how hard it had been to stop himself from killing those first humans he’d fed from, because he’d chosen to go it alone, even though he could have stayed with his creator… if he’d become a gatherer. There wasn’t a choice as far as he was concerned – he wasn’t going to let go of his humanity, no matter what his creator or siblings said. “Unfortunately they didn’t make the best decisions, choosing what seemed to be the easy way rather than the hard way, picking humans to feed from when it started getting dark. It didn’t help that they needed to feed more often and soon they got addicted to human blood. A couple even got addicted to particular humans, which was actually what, we believe, started the auctions. They realised that owning the humans they fed from made things so much easier and as they were creating more and more vampires it would be a good way to make some money.” He shook his head. “We don’t know any of this for certain as our history is oral and can easily be changed by someone who doesn’t like a certain idea, but it makes a lot of sense, and when Issac met one of the first vampires she told him a lot of what he’d already heard from her point of view. She was one of the vampires who chose not to take the same path as the others, instead becoming the first of the alternative vampires, like us. Issac keeps hoping that she didn’t walk out into the sun the way she said she was going to and will eventually visit the House.”

“Walk out into the sun? I didn’t think the sun could kill you.”

“It can’t, but it’s become a way for one of us to say that they’ve become tired of immortality and want it all to end. The stories of us burning in the sun were started because the original vampires chose to hunt at night, as it was much easier then to find the dregs of society, those who wouldn’t be missed, so no one knew of their existence.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.