Of Light and Darkness: The Vampire's Daughter

release his face from his hands because he did not want to see his reality. His other senses showed him enough as he stayed fixed, listening to his Lottie’s mind. She was talking to him from two stories up. Reassuring him. She was not happy, obviously, but she was being cared for. In the deeper parts of her thoughts, he felt the slight amount of blame she held for him. He put enough blame on his own shoulders for the both of them, anyway.

Someone touched Valek’s back very softly, though it still startled him. He looked up to see whom the touch belonged to. Sarah stood there meekly.

“Valek—”

“What?”

He hadn’t noticed Sarah come to join him in the basement. He peered up from his hands to see light filtering down the tunnel from the house above. The door had been opened.

“Valek, she’s okay. She is resting now but she’s asking for you.” The Witch looked at him with pity in her bright, brown eyes. “I–I wanted to get started on her…but I figure it’s best if I wait.”

Valek averted his focus from her, his face blank and distant, like he had just witnessed a house burning down with the family still inside. He slowly, fluidly rose to his feet. He regarded the Witch again, nodding at her with a faint smile, before he slowly began back up to the higher parts of the house. He had been drained as much as Charlotte had.

He rounded the corner to her bedroom to see her lying there peacefully. Her hands rested delicately on her stomach, her face away from him, gazing out the window.

“Lottie?”

“Yes?” she answered quickly, sitting up in the bed. “What are you doing here? Don’t they need you downstairs?” she whispered a little bitterly. Her pretty mouth contorted in a slight grimace.

He knelt to the floor, grasping one of her hands in his, seeing that while she had been cleaned up, the bedclothes had not. The sight of her lying in the middle of all that drying blood was both tantalizing and horrifying, a reaction he had never experienced before. “Yes. But I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

She lowered her gaze, her eyebrows mashing together. “I am now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t you hear me? I’m all right.” Her tone was slightly flat.

Valek thought for a second. “Charlotte?” He wrapped his giant hand around both of hers.

“Yes?”

“Lottie,” he began again nervously. “This isn’t…wrong…is it? The way we are now?”

Tension began to fill the space. She pulled her hand away from him, and he heard her mind begin to race again, the frown returning to her face. Images from the night before when she had kissed him, flashed before him again, though she stayed silent.

“I only mean….” He continued to search for words. “Lottie, you know I love you more than anything. You’re my world, my angel on Earth. I want you to be happy. I had no other choice but to make this agreement with Francis, lest he kill you. You know our world is a dangerous one, but you could still have a normal life. It is not too late.”

Charlotte sat up, worry creasing her forehead. How could he be talking like this, Valek heard her think. She started to panic.

“Lottie.” He sighed and stood up. “I am only concerned about you. I would hate to think I am doing the wrong thing, or taking advantage of some situation in which I should be acting like a father.”

Charlotte winced at the word “father”.

His eyes widened and he knelt beside the bed again. “I love you more than anything. What do you want me to be?”

She stared at him, searching through his eyes for what he was thinking, but came up empty. “I want you to be whatever you want to be,” she said simply, looking at him again.

He thought about this, climbing next to her on the bed. He rested her head on his chest. Holding the rest of her secure to him, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

He opened one eye, peeking down at her and smiling. “I think I like the place that you have put me in most recently.”

She nuzzled her cheek against him. “Good.”

His claw rested over a patch of dried blood left over on her clothes.

Chapter Sixteen Bewitchments

“I have a feeling you'll be more comfortable upstairs with me, anyway,” the Witch said in a high, musical tone when Valek finally left.

The two of them started walking down the stairs until they met the second floor of the house, which seemed like a different house entirely. The landing had a living room of its own, complete with several cushy, green chairs and a brick fireplace, and another small hallway Charlotte suspected led to separate rooms.

This was like a house that belonged in that one British fairytale with the girl and the “drink me” bottles. It just seemed to extend on and on. She looked at the indigo-colored apartment walls encrusted with what looked like bits of moonstone and jade spiraling in a complicated mosaic. She scanned the numerous oak bookshelves stacked high with volumes and scrolls of things enchanted.

“Stay here,” Sarah chirped. She bounced out of the small living room and around the corner.

Charlotte walked over to one of the sagging, velvet armchairs and sat down, sinking deep within its cushion. Despite the nightmarish ordeal she had just been through, she felt strangely at home in this curious labyrinth house. Sarah emerged from the small kitchen with two mugs of hot drinking chocolate, smiling politely, and handed Charlotte a mug.

“Drink this. You’ll feel much better.”

Charlotte smiled, wondering if the first sip would have her shrinking or growing. Shyly, she took a small sip and felt the sweet, hot liquid run down the back of her throat. Within only a few moments the emaciated, weak feeling virtually disappeared, and she could almost feel the new life replenishing in her veins. It was an odd, warm, pulsing sensation that seemed to flare specifically near her throat and wrists. “Thank you.” She smiled and sipped at it again.

“The licorice and chocolate beads between feedings doesn’t help as much as that stuff does, but it takes a lot longer to make,” Sarah explained.

A small fire crackled in its place as Charlotte apprehensively sank backward into the dark green cushions, her eyes shifting wondrously around the room. Shelves that held grimoires and jars of unrecognizable things hung haphazardly from the walls. Charts of moon phases and star patterns covered the other flat surfaces entirely. Spiders and their captured prey clung to the cobwebs, and there were even several trinkets Charlotte guessed the Witch used to communicate with the dead scattered on the floor in one corner. Charlotte’s eyes slowly moved back to Sarah’s cheerful face.

“Do you love it?” The Witch beamed. “I decorated it myself.”

“It’s fantastic.” Charlotte smiled, gaze still wandering.

“I’m glad you like it. Now, give me your right hand.”

“What?”

But before Charlotte could get an answer, Sarah had already grabbed it, analyzing her hand over the crooked coffee table between them, held up by small wooden gnomes.

Charlotte watched the Witch trace the lines in her palms. Sarah looked no older than eighteen. She wasn’t anything like the two-faced Witches she knew from the Bohemian Occult. She decided Sarah looked a lot like a doll she’d once owned. It had the same brown curls, petite nose, and rosy cheeks. She remembered how she’d been playing with it when she was around six or so and had dropped it, smashing the face to pieces on the floor.

“Curious.” Sarah’s voice shattered Charlotte’s reverie.

“What?”