Page 88 of House of Crimson Kisses
I pace the rooms all day, unable to sleep. Half the hours I lay on the floor screaming and writhing as my body contorts and twists like a dead spider. Sharp pains lance through my bones, hot then cold as the depths of the ocean. I throw up everything in my stomach. I sweat half the day away until I am sure I should have died from dehydration.
I eat my way through the stores. I consume everything, mouldy bread, jars of dried beans, grains, flours that crawl with bugs. But it matters not. I throw everything up and even the bits I keep down cannot satiate the hunger gnawing in my veins. It consumes me.
It makes my teeth ache and my tongue twitch. Nothing helps.
The pain ebbs away for a while, and I pace again. And then, as the sun sinks in the sky, I finally leave the building and make my way towards the source.
I take a week of searching, hunting. I live off rats and rabbits and scraps of meat, even drinking down their bloody fluids. My mind vomits everything, but my body keeps it down. I want to claw my skin off in disgust, and I consume the rodents like I consume the air. But still, nothing satiates the pains in my stomach.
Finally, after a week of seeking shelter in the day and trudging on at night, I can feel I’m close now. I can sense the connection. Under the dark of night, I enter a small village on the edge of the city, a rather quaint gathering of bungalows and thatched cottages. There are no people around. It’s like a ghost village. I steal fresh bread and milk, only to drink it all down and gobble it without tasting. But like all the other nights, I throw it up and hunt for a rat instead. I find some scraps of chicken in a bin behind a larger bungalow. But even that doesn’t satiate the pain in my belly.
I continue on.
But the further I go, the sicker I feel. It’s not only the hunger, but the bodies.
At first, it was only one. A young girl, dead in the street, a dhampir—a healer. Her hands have shrivelled as if someone sucked the magic out of them.
The deeper I travel into the village, the more bodies I find. They litter the streets and doorways. I peer into windows and find corpses riddled with maggots. It’s a stark contrast to the herbs and planting troughs that fill the front gardens. Their windows have jars and jugs of picked flowers and herbs. Specimens and creatures.
The witch village.
Was I cursed? The realisation hits me hard as I peek through window after window. But nothing in there is what I seek. Then, I reach the last house in the village and warmth settles in my belly. I found it.
The door throbs with more magic than any other building in the village. It hums the same rhythmic beating that weaves its way through my veins. A beat that dies with ever successive pulse. And I have to wonder if this is where I meet my demise.
I knock on the door as another fresh wave of agony curls my stomach in on itself. The hunger now is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It threads its way into my mind until the only thing I can think of is that I need to drink.
Drink blood.
The door opens, and a young woman stands before me. But I’m weak and I can barely see her face. Long raven-coloured locks covered much of it.
She gasps when she sees me.
“What did you do to me?” I rasp.
“It... it wasn’t me,” she says, “Your family. They made me.”
“Made you what?” I bark, though it comes out as a choked cough. Blood splatters her white dress. I think my insides are disintegrating.
“They made me curse you and your lover, Eleanor. They didn’t want you together.”
“What did you do?”
“I...” her head hangs low. I want her to look at me. To stare into my eyes so I know the face of my killer. But she won’t, she refuses. There’s a rustling in the background, but I ignore it. I’m fully focussed on her.
“What did you do? Why am I hungry?”
“I’m sorry,” she weeps. “Curses are fickle things, and the wording... I don’t understand what you are. But I know what you need. The curse was wrought in blood magic. It ruined everything. We have paid the price because it destroyed all our magic. The dhampirs are dead. I am the only one left…”
“Then how do I survive?”
“I suspect unless you consume blood, you, too, will perish.”
That is why Eleanor’s neck, the pulsing of her heart, drew me in.
“Your family asked me to curse you, to make you hate each other, to never love one another again.”
Something cracks inside me. We fought for so long to keep each other. Through beatings and burnings. Through the hate and betrayals, only to have this fucking witch take it all away, anyway.
