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The Donor House: Alice: First Night at the Donor House
Nick: First Night at the Donor House
A tiny slither of sunlight penetrated through a gap between the curtains. The dust danced in it. No matter how Alice fiddled with the curtains the gap remained. Sighing, she sat up. Sleep had been eluding her ever since she’d slipped into her room and the daylight told her both the other vampires in the house would be asleep. Or, at the very least, lying in bed tossing and turning the way she had been. As she looked around the room she had chosen she knew why she couldn’t sleep. Even though she knew that the donor house was her home it didn’t feel like it was. The house she’d left behind had been home, which was why she’d convinced Nick not to sell it, and the donor house felt strange.
Sighing again, Alice ran a hand through her hair. It was so much easier to be the positive one when Nick was being pessimistic. When she was alone was the time her worries and memories plagued her. Nick was just on the other side of the wall, but she didn’t want to talk to him about how she was feeling. He already had enough of his own worries, so there was no chance of her adding to them. Finally, she slipped out of the bed and slid her feet into a pair of slippers, needing to do something that wasn’t sitting in a bed that didn’t feel right. The slippers did, because they were hers, unlike everything in the room, which had been bought new the same way all the furniture in the house had.
The dressing gown hanging on a hook on the door was also Alice’s. With one hand she took it off the hook and wrapped it around herself, knowing that the donor house was still cold. It could easily have been because of the way she was feeling, as Issac had turned the heating on, but the building was huge. On her first visit, when it had still been a hotel, it had been a big building, and all the additions they’d made to it had, unsurprisingly, made it bigger. She could understand it taking a while to heat up, especially as there was only three of them there.
Leaving the room didn’t make Alice feel any better. The hallway she found herself in was obviously a hotel hallway rather than a home hallway, which was something she was going to have to change. If they were going to make the donor house a success it needed to feel like home as quickly as possible. All of the decoration was basic, Issac having insisted on magnolia paint everywhere, but there were simple things she could do to change the plainness of everything. Some pictures would be a good start, before she started working on convince Issac to let her redecorate. Once she was halfway down the hall, planning where she would put the pictures, she realised the thing she missed most was the squeak her door had. Nick would have already been out of his room if the door had squeaked, so she was grateful at the same time, but she wished she could have her squeak back once she didn’t want to be alone.
Wanting to be alone was the reason Alice took the stairs, which were just as boring at the hallway, rather than the elevator. Shaking her head, she should have thought about the decorating before but it had seemed the least of their problems, she made her way down one of the donor room hallways, and sighed once more. The more she looked around the more the place seemed like a hotel, which was the wrong image for the house. Opening one of the doors to the rooms she was once more faced with magnolia paint and a room that made her think of a hotel. It would be good for the long term donors to decorate their own rooms, but she was going to do something about the short term donors’ rooms.
At the bottom of the stairs was the reception. That was a room that had been created to be inviting, because it was the first room every donor and vampire would enter in the donor house, which was what they should have done with every room. It was also the darkest room because there were no windows letting natural light in. Standing in the centre of the room Alice turned slowly in a circle, taking everything in. Even though it was better than the other rooms there was still nothing that made it seem more than a reception in a hotel. Before she’d moved into the house it had made sense to focus on what had seemed to be the most important things, like the rules. Finding herself in a building that seemed more like a hotel told her it had been a mistake.
Two hallways led from the reception to other rooms in the donor house. Going right would take Alice to the small shop they’d set up, as part of a way of making money from the house, and going left would take her to the dining room. The shop had been Lewis’ idea, because he believed that the house was really going to be the beginning of something new that he wanted to take full advantage of. Ever since he’d chosen to become the main investor for the house he really had thrown himself in whole heartedly. If it hadn’t been for him she could have envisioned times when they would have given up, but he’d never seemed to have any worries about what they were doing. Creating the donor house had simply been the right thing to do.
It seemed likely that the shop would be locked up, because there was no one to run it yet, so Alice made her way to the dining hall. That had been one of the rooms they had the most conversations about, trying to get it right because they knew it was the room that everyone was going to spend time in. Plans had been made to make certain that there would be someone in there at all times, there would always be food available, and that it was comfortable. None of the blackout curtains had been pulled so the room was full of light, which almost blinded her to begin with, until her eyes got used to the sunlight she hadn’t seen for years, because vampire eyesight was different to human. Some vampires also avoided sunlight in an attempt to avoid the memories that came with it.
None of Alice’s memories returned because of the sunlight, because she’d always done her best to not push them away. It didn’t always work. For a long time she hadn’t wanted to think about her family after they’d disowned her. ‘What did you expect if you spend time around vampires?’ She shook her head. Even when she had been contemplating asking Nick if he wanted her to be his companion she’d known what would happen, so it hadn’t been a surprise even though it still hurt. Of course that had been before she realised how many secrets Nick kept. Forgiving him for keeping those secrets had taken a long time, longer than she’d wanted it to, but it had been forgiving him for the choices he’d made that had taken the longest time.
The donor house would be a new start for both of them. Alice wasn’t certain she wanted a new start, but Nick needed one. Their old house had been full of memories, some that were good, the majority of which were bad for him. At the donor house they could begin making new memories, maybe rebuild the friendship they’d once had, even though they both knew that it was possible they’d make even worse memories at the donor house than they ever had before. Mixing humans and vampires could end up being the biggest mistake they’d ever made.
A door from the dining hall led to the kitchen. The kitchen was a room that most vampires avoided, knowing that they’d never be able to taste anything that came out of it, which was why they’d ended up hiring humans to work there. Each of them had been interviewed, knew they were working for vampires, and insisted that they were the right people for the job, but they were all worried, except Lewis, about hiring humans to work in the donor house. Especially in a room where it would be easy to destroy the house in one move. Lewis was certain everything would be fine. He’d been hiring humans as day guards for decades.
One side of the room was taken up by a huge table, where there would be a daily buffet, which was flanked by two large fridges. They’d already been filled with a mix of juices and other drinks. Nick had been the one to convince them that having readily available food as well as the option to order something would work better than having one or the other, but if it didn’t work out it would be easy enough to switch to the one that did work out to be the best. Alice knew the room would be very different when it was full of people and she couldn’t wait to see what it was like then. Right at that moment, as she stood there looking around the empty room, it was almost impossible to imagine how different it would be.
“What are you doing, Ally?” Nick asked from behind her, making her jump because she hadn’t heard him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied, “so I went for a walk.” She turned to look at him. “What are you doing?”
“Same.” He smiled. “It’s not my bed.”
“I didn’t have much of a problem with the bed. I couldn’t get used to the curtains.” She smiled back. “If I’d known you were awake…”
“You wouldn’t have knocked on my door.” Nick reached out with a hand and brushed some hair off Alice’s face. “I know when you’re worrying about things and don’t want to talk to me.”
“Adding to you own worries seems like it wouldn’t do you any good. Or me, for that matter.”
“Maybe here you’ll find someone you can call a friend.” Nick bit his lip. “I know it’s been hard for you.”
“Nick…”
“I’m sorry for making so many mistakes.”
“What’s done is done.” Alice looked down at the floor. “If you’re honest about what happened after then I made mistakes too. I blamed you for things I should never have blamed you for and…” She shook her head, lifting her gaze so her eyes met Nick’s. “There are some days when I still wish I wasn’t a vampire.”
“That’s normal.” Nick shrugged. “At least normal for us. Sometimes I wonder if there should be a separate word for vampires who don’t embrace what they are.”
“Unfortunately we are still vampires. No matter how difficult it has been for us to come to terms with what we are we are immortal blood drinkers, which defines us as vampires.”
“Immortality.” Nick sighed. “I never asked to live forever and yet my creator saw it as a great gift he’d given me.” Alice could see the emotions in his eyes that he always had when he talked of the vampire who changed him. “That he wanted payment for, because if he hadn’t chosen me I would be like all the other mortals… prey.”
“Which is part of the reason we created the donor house. You don’t think the same way he did and you may not be a normal vampire, but that makes you the better vampire.” Alice took a couple of steps closer to Nick and put her hand on his shoulder. “The choices you have made make you better than he will ever be.”
“At first it seemed like it would be easy to embrace being a vampire. The siblings I met seemed to do it well enough and they were happy, but it just… Hunting humans felt wrong, catching them to auction them off was…” He ran a hand through his hair. “I can never understand how any vampire can think it’s right to buy humans.” He sighed. “It’s possible, though, if I hadn’t been asked to do that I might have tried harder to be who my creator wanted me to be.”
Alice smiled. “I don’t think you’d have managed it.”
“Neither do I, but it would have meant I stayed with him for longer and maybe that would have made me into a different person to the one I am now.”
“That is possible, but I honestly doubt that anyone could have changed you into someone you’re not.” Alice squeezed his shoulder. “It’s what he tried to do when he attempted to kill me, because he thought he could, and I don’t think even my death would have caused you to become like him.”
“I don’t know, Ally.” Nick put his hand over Alice’s. “Losing you would have affected me badly.” He sighed. “Even after I kept thinking I was going to lose you.”
“I’ve told you more times than I can remember that I’m not leaving you.”
“Sometimes I don’t know why you’d stay with me. My arrival changed you life.”
“Your arrival saved my life, remember? If you hadn’t been there at that time then I would have ended up at one of the auctions and we both know how well that would have ended.”
“Unless you’d been lucky.”
“We both know how likely that would have been. The majority of vampires who buy humans are looking for chew toys they can throw away when they get bored. I’d have either ended up being an addict or a dead body.”
“You still ended up nearly dying.”
“In front of my best friend’s house, who just happened to be a vampire who could save my life. Which is exactly what you did.”
“And then you hated me for it… sometimes you still hate me for it.” Nick shook his head. “Maybe I did save your life, but I followed it up by turning you into a vampire because I couldn’t imagine living without you.”
Shaking her head, Alice sighed. “I know that I’ve been unfair about that. You made the best choice you could have done, considering the circumstances, but I’d come to terms with dying. When you made the decision you did it was as though you’d taken my choice, the choice I’d made thinking there was no real other option, away from me and I think that was what I was more angry about, even though I know if you’d asked me I would have said yes.”
“That was the problem, though, wasn’t it? You didn’t get to say yes. Instead you woke up as a vampire, with no choice about what you were or what was going to happen next, and you hated me for taking that away from you.”
“You’re the one I can hate.” Alice squeezed his shoulder again, in an attempt to take the sting away from her words. “There’s no point in hating your creator, because exactly what good is it going to do. He doesn’t care how I feel about him. All he cares about it somehow making you into the vampire he wants you to be. You’re right in front of me every day. You have been for the last thirty years and you probably will be for at least the next thirty. Hating you, sometimes, makes it less painful to be what I am. At the same time I feel incredibly guilty for hating you at all. If I was in your position I know I would have done the same thing. I loved you, Nick. I still love you.”
“I still made a lot of mistakes.”
“I was your first child. You always make mistakes with the first one.”
“If Blake hadn’t decided to leave I would have made mistakes with him too.”
“They would have been different mistakes, so at least you would be learning.” Alice looked at her hand and Nick’s, trying to gather up the courage she needed to ask the next question. “Would you ever change someone else?” she asked finally, hearing the tremor in her own voice.
“Maybe, if they needed me to, but I’d never change someone without their permission ever again.”
“I almost did.”
“Did what?”
“Give you permission. I thought about it, I wanted you to know what I wanted if something bad happened to me, but in the end I was too scared of what you might think of me to say anything.”
“Alice…” Nick shook his head. “I never would have thought any less of you.”
“I’d been brought up by vampire hunters, Nick. Even though I knew you were a vampire it could be hard to talk to you about things I never would have mentioned to my parents. They never wanted me to become a vampire and I know they would have tried to kill me, thinking it was better for me than becoming a vampire.”
Nick bit his lip again, looking beyond Alice rather than at her. “They did, once.”
“What happened?”
“I never wanted to tell you. You were hurt enough when they disowned you, so I thought it would be better to keep this from you, but I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.” He sighed. “I understand if my choice is one you can’t cope with, because…”
“Nick…” Alice shook her head. “Just tell me what happened. I’m not going to leave, okay?”
“It wasn’t long after I first changed you. They thought you should be dead, and I should be dead, because of what we were, so they came after us. Your dad and your brother did, anyway. I don’t know about your mum. I’d found us a little cottage to sleep in, just for the night, and you were already asleep, but I was having trouble even thinking about going to sleep. I watched them make their way up to the cottage, not knowing that I was away, holding tight to their stakes and their beliefs. All I wanted to do was make them leave, but in the end I had no choice but to…”
“I know what they were like.”
“I was tempted, just for a moment, to make them into the thing they hated. Instead I gave them a quick clean death, even though that wasn’t what they would have given us, and buried them before you woke up.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.
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Wow, there's a lot of power in this one.
>>Even though it was better than the other rooms there was still nothing that made it seem more than a reception in a hotel. Before she’d moved into the house it had made sense to focus on what had seemed to be the most important things, like the rules. Finding herself in a building that seemed more like a hotel told her it had been a mistake.<<
It always takes time to make a house a home, or any building. You have to form memories, choose decorations that mean something, make scratches on the furniture. It has to be lived in.
Typos
…to your own worries…
…changed your life…