The Donor House: Nick: Nick’s Village (part 2)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1

Nick looked at Alice and found that she was looking straight back, seeming much more calm that she should have been after such a near miss. “Maybe you should go home,” he said. “It’s been a difficult night.”

“I’m not going home until I know that you’re safe.” When he opened his mouth to speak, she continued, “Don’t even think about arguing with me. You saved my life and I owe you.”

He shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“That sounds like arguing to me.” She smiled at him. “I don’t know your name.”

“It’s Nick.”

“Right, Nick, I’m grateful for your help tonight. If you hadn’t of stepped in then I would be on my way to being auctioned at this very moment, and no one in this village would have been able to do anything about it. Now, if I leave you then I doubt that any one of these men would remember that fact so your death would be on my conscience. Until I know that you’re safe somewhere I’m not going to leave you.”

Nick raised an eyebrow. “They don’t want me here. I should just go and not cause any more problems.”

Alice put her hand on his arm. “If you leave then the vampire you scared off might come back.” Nick saw the fear in her eyes and realised that she wasn’t quite as calm as she was acting. “Stay here, please.”

“We don’t need him, Alice,” a voice said from within the group of men.

“Don’t be a moron, Christopher. Do you really think that you’d have been able to stop the vampire who wanted to take me to be auctioned?”

“Yes, I do.”

Alice ran her free hand through her hair. “Sometimes I can’t believe that I’m actually related to you. You didn’t get to me fast enough to stop the vampire from taking me to wherever it is he was going to take me. Nick did.”

“Why was Nick even here?”

Glaring at the voice, Alice squeezed Nick’s arm. “Nick is right here. If you have a question for him then ask him, don’t ask me.”

“Fine. Why were you here, vampire?”

Nick didn’t know if he really wanted to answer the question, but finally he replied, “I was looking for somewhere to live. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a place I can call home.”

“What made you choose our village?” another voice asked.

“It feels right.” Nick shrugged. “There’s no easy way to explain it, but when I walked into the village I just knew that this was somewhere I could live happily.”

“How many people have you killed?” Christopher asked.

“The word vampire is not synonymous with murderer. I haven’t killed any people, humans or vampires, and I don’t plan on killing anyone.”

Alice squeezed his arm again. “How did you survive?” she asked.

“I mostly lived off animal blood, with an occasional meal of human blood.”

“When did you last have human blood?”

Nick heard the slight tremor in her voice and he knew that Alice was at least slightly scared of him, no matter how she acted. “A while ago, but it doesn’t matter right now.”

“Do need to feed soon?”

He shook his head, lying so that she wouldn’t offer to feed him right there. Nick didn’t think that any of the humans would enjoy watching him drink someone’s blood and as Alice’s brother was stood in the group Nick really didn’t want to do anything that might lead to a smack around the head with a plank of wood. Alice looked at him in a way that led him to believe that she knew he was lying, which made him feel guilty even though there was no reason he should feel that way. He didn’t owe her anything.

Finally she looked at the group of men. “How about we get Nick settled into his new house and then I can get the rota sorted?”

They started muttering between themselves again, before Christopher said, “Do you really trust him not to hurt you?”

“If I didn’t trust him not to hurt me, or anyone else in the village, then I wouldn’t have said anything. I’d have just let you chase him away.”

Nick looked gratefully at Alice, unable to believe that any human would trust him. “Thank you,” he whispered, just loud enough for her to hear.

“All vampires were human once,” she continued, “and I truly don’t believe that the vampire’s personality automatically changes simply because they’ve been changed. If the human wasn’t nice before they were changed then it’s likely that the vampire won’t be nice. I don’t see why we assume that all vampires are going to be evil, when it’s obvious that nice people must have been turned into vampires too.”

For a moment Nick found himself thinking of his creator and why he had originally been chosen to be a vampire. The man had believed that Nick’s love of money and pretty things would make him do things that could easily be called evil, but it hadn’t. Instead it had made him walk away because he couldn’t do the things that his creator had wanted him to do.

“How old are you, Nick?” Christopher asked, his voice seeming slightly less full of hatred than it had before.

Nick raised an eyebrow, wondering why the question had been asked. “I’ve been a vampire for over four-hundred years and I was twenty-five when I was changed.”

“A Tudor vampire,” Alice said, surprising Nick.

“Yes,” he replied, nodding. “I was changed during the reign of Mary Tudor.”

“Would you say you were a nice person back then?” Christopher asked.

“That’s a really hard question to answer.” Nick sighed, knowing that they all needed an answer. “It’s been a long time since I was human and it feels like it was another lifetime. I know I wasn’t perfect but I wouldn’t say that I was a nasty person.” He smiled. “Then again, who would ever really admit to being a nasty person?” Looking at the men closely he realised something important. “I made my fair share of mistakes and I still do. I’m really not all that much different from you in some ways. I strive to be a good person more so now than I did when I was human, because I feel like I have to make up for being a vampire. It was never my choice and if I had the choice then I wouldn’t have chosen this life.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.