"Take a card," she said, gesturing towards the table with a frail white hand. A veil concealed her face.
She did not seem frightened by my sudden appearance, even at this hour of the night, when most of the city this far from the lights district was sleeping.
I had been out walking again, driven by the hunger I still kept secret from David who had rescued me. I had wandered along the streets and soon found a girl with thin, short black hair and violet eyes. She was runaway, cold and scared. I had offered a place for the night, and trustingly, she had accepted. She had been quiet as we walked, interrupting the silence only once to ask me, "What is your name?"
"I am Annabel," I said, giving her the only name I knew, which was the name David had given me.
"My name is Lyssa," she had said with a wavering smile.
We said no more but walked towards Cemetery Street, and in the deep shadows of the Japanese yew trees, I had fed on her. She was lost, confused, and, near the end, somewhat resigned. She enveloped me with her thin arms before lapsing into unconsciousness. This selfless acceptance moved me, and I wept.
How does one such as myself weep, you ask? Without tears, but a silent, mournful cry that originates from deep within the soul, and, yes, I do think that I still have a soul.
I took the girl to the cemetery and put her in a tomb with the others. For a long moment, I had watched her until she grew cold. Then I closed the door tightly and wandered the streets again, relishing the moment before the dawn would force my return to the apartment on Demetrius Street.
This was the beginning of fall, when the air carries a note of resignation mingled with remembrance. Passing a grove of trees, I stopped to listen to their voices, their long breathy sighs and the occasional shrieking of a branch. I turned in the direction of the wind, and then it was that I saw a light burning in the darkness of a house and an open door beckoning me.
I crossed the threshold and found a candlelit room and the woman sitting next to a table. On a table, the only furniture in the room, aside from the chair in which she sat, was a deck of cards.
I reached for the deck and my eyes were drawn to the crimson stain on my sleeve. I conscientiously wiped my mouth and looked down at a blood-stained hand.
"Take a card," she repeated. She seemed to not take notice of the blood on my hand.
Again I reached for the deck, this time taking a card. I placed it face-up on the table. The Death card.
"Do you understand?" she asked me, her voice echoing in the empty room.
I nodded. The death card did not mean death in the literal sense but represented a change, an ending and a beginning. I knew the Death card well, for so had been my life, the ending of the world of the sun, and the beginning of a dark era. Taking the life force of another so that I might live. Why it should be that I live, I wondered sometimes after taking what had seemed such an innocent life. Still, does the wolf wrestle with its conscience or try to justify its nature? So I killed. Such was my nature.
So why had I been drawn to this place, I wondered, when I already knew what her cards had to tell me? There was nothing in the deck that could surprise me. I was sure of it.
"I want you to understand," she said, and even as I opened my mouth to tell her that I did, her hands were moving towards her face.
Her pasty white arms lifted the veil. Before me was the girl with short black hair and violet eyes. Her violet eyes scanned the room, and I glanced about me. I saw around me all of the others, the ones from whom I had taken. There was the young girl from the bar, and she still held the rose in her hand. There was a man I had found at the site of a single-car accident. They were all there.
As suddenly and silently as they had appeared, they vanished, taking the light with them, and, thus, I found myself alone in a dark empty room in an abandoned house on Channel street. A gust of wind blew several dry leaves through the door and across the wooden floor.
Just as the light had invited me into the house, the wind welcomed me with a moan and wrapped me with its embrace. I arrived home just before the dawn, and as I fell into the softness of my bed, I pondered my nature. Human no longer, was I animal or some other kind of beast? I closed my eyes and dreamed dreams I would not remember… dreams of a sun-dappled garden, a strangely familiar face looking down at me from a high window, and delicious laughter.