Chapter Text
All you have to do is run away and steal yourself from me,
Become a mystery to gaze into.
You’re so cruel in all you do,
But still I believe, I believe in you.
7.
It was the next year, on the thirty-third anniversary of the Battle of London, that Jenna realized the little girl wasn't growing up.
When Jenna came upon her sitting at Father Anderson's grave just before dawn, the white face which turned up to hers still looked no older than eleven or twelve—still the face of an almost-child and not the face of an almost-woman it should have become by now. Even Jenna, aged from 21 to 24, looked a little older to herself. Father Callahan, now nearing his mid-fifties, looked older too.
However, Jenna was not surprised that to find that the child was still a child. She had done a lot of thinking over the past year, thinking about the monster who slew Anderson, the man who wept as Anderson died and then bestowed his kiss too late upon the ground, and the girl who was still weeping even though Anderson had told her not to cry.
A girl who looked no older than twelve still weeping after thirty-three years, the whole lifespan of Jesus Christ.
But if they are one and the same, Jenna had wondered on many nights as she lay waiting for sleep to come, why did it take thirty years before she came here to mourn him? Where was she for those three decades, that she couldn't come? Because I think she would have come, if she could have.
Jenna had also wondered about the dog. She had not seen it again in her dreams since the night after she'd met the girl, three years ago, and she thought that perhaps it was entirely an invention of her subconscious. Her mind could have pulled its eyes and the way it called her “Little Sister” from her encounter with the child; and it surely had taken the concept of the photograph album from real life, then filled it with pictures of a cross-marked dog rather than nuns and priests and children.
When she recalled what the creature had said about Father Callahan and the “Type Three” vampire, Jenna told herself that it was mere nonsense her subconscious had constructed, just as she'd first suspected. Father Callahan had never said anything to her about “Type Three” vampires. The only thing he'd ever said to her about vampires at all was the old Transylvanian folk belief, that the thorns of roses kept them away.
No, the dog was only something my brain made up, Jenna had thought the night before the child's fourth visit. It wasn't her—or him, them speaking to me through my dreams.
But the next morning, as Jenna approached and the ageless girl looked up at her. . . for an instant, Jenna saw not that calm, pale face but a feral, dark one with those same eyes burning within it. Not two of them but hundreds, and hundreds of sharp white teeth, and she flinched back with the terror she'd felt in her dream: the terror of someone else at another place and another time as he gazed upon a horror almost beyond what his brain could comprehend.
The same horror which now sat at the grave of the priest it had loved, a little girl again once the instant had passed and the vision vanished. A book lay in the grass beside her.
Jenna relaxed, exhaling a shaky breath, and thought, They are one and the same. The man, the girl—and the dog.
“Good morning, Little Sister,” said the girl. She had returned her eyes to Father Anderson's grave by the time Jenna knelt on the ground beside her, but those eyes snapped back to the nun's face when Jenna spoke without a reciprocal greeting.
“Who was he?” she asked.
“Hmm?” The girl arched a black eyebrow. “Who was who?”
Jenna drew in another breath then replied, “The man you ate. The one you called an artificial Type Three vampire, and told me not to pity. Who was he?”
For a second, the red-to-fuchsia eyes widened, but then they narrowed again with pleasure, and the girl smiled.
“Oh, so you remember,” she said.
“Who was he?” Jenna asked a third time.
The girl shrugged and replied, “Just who I said he was: an artificial vampire. I told you there were man-made monsters in the war, and he was one of them. . . a worthless excuse of a man who gave up his body to the Nazis' experimentation, thinking they would turn him into a vampire even more powerful than the real deal—the Type One—so that he might finally amount to something. Spoiler alert—he didn't. His body proved useful eventually, but only as a disposable tool, a means to an end. The man himself was worthless, like I said.”
“And I said that no one is worthless in the eyes of God,” replied Jenna fiercely. All her empathy for this mourning creature couldn't overrule her disgust.
The girl's eyes flickered open wider again as Jenna met them. She no longer smiled, yet when she spoke, it was with quiet admiration.
“You are brave, Little Sister,” the child said. “Shy and fearful on your own behalf, but brave for the sake of those you bless with your love. You speak for your beloved when they cannot speak for themselves. . . even those you never knew. Tell me, how does one earn your compassion, the way Anderson and the rest have?”
The rest, thought Jenna. Father Anderson and Father Callahan, Archbishop Maxwell and Bishop Makube, Heinkel and the man this child calls “worthless”. . . I do love them, not as a woman loves—that kind of love I'll never know—but as a child of God loves His other children, as He commanded. Except—there are so many people I don't love, so many that I am tempted to hate. . . I fall so short of what He asks of me.
Aloud, she murmured, “One doesn't. Love and compassion shouldn't be earned, they should be given freely, but I'm not—I don't, not to everyone like I should. Don't think that I'm anything special. . . that I'm brave.”
“Hmph, you're too hard on yourself, that's what you are,” said the girl with a hint of her smile returning. “I've seen your bravery, seen you ring your Dark Bells even as you quaked with fear, for the sake of one you loved. 'Just a dog,' he called me even though I saved his sorry hide killing my own kind, as you did then. . . and I still do, now.”
Jenna frowned in puzzlement. “When? In another dream, one I don't remember?”
“You could say that,” replied the child with a shrug. “There are other worlds than these, Little Sister, and what is real in that one may as well be a dream in this, for all the good it did either of us. Before I came here to Anderson's grave, I wandered for three decades looking for myself, and looking for him. I never found him—but there, I found you. You were just like me. . . and yet, as you said yourself, you're not like me at all.”
Is she crazy? Jenna wondered, not for the first time. Then she told herself, No. What I know is true—that she is a man and a girl and a dog, one and the same; that she is a vampire; that she loves Father Anderson in a way that transcends all of that—the two of us meeting in some other world is no more insane than any of that. And it explains why it took her thirty years to visit his grave!
I only wish I could remember that world and her, “just a dog,” and him, the one whom I loved. . . as a woman loves. I must have.
Jenna turned from her self-centered thoughts to something else the girl had said, that she had wandered looking for Father Anderson and never found him.
“I know where he is,” she said aloud. “Father Anderson, I mean. I know where you can find him. Heinkel—someone told me what he said as he lay dying, that he had to go to his children. . . .”
“I know. I heard him.” The girl's voice was flat and grim. “But we'd always sworn that we'd meet again in Hell, or in limbo—that's purgatory to you, Little Sister. So I'd hoped that I'd find him again, somewhere, no matter what I heard him say. Thirty years isn't a long time to the likes of me, but it was long enough to kill that hope.”
She turned her head to look at the desert lilies blooming on Father Anderson's empty grave as she said quietly, “Anderson's in Heaven, stolen away from me forever. His way of punishing me for my sins—or God's way. Because you'll tell me that God is love, and maybe that's true. . . but God is cruel. Sometimes He makes you live.”
When one red tear slipped from the corner of the child's eye to run down her white face, Jenna pulled her handkerchief from her pocket and reached out to wipe it away. The girl jumped as if startled but kept her eyes fixed on the flowers.
“It isn't forever,” murmured Jenna. “To our perspective, yes, God may seem cruel, but I do tell you, God is love, and He forgives. Someday, you can keep your promise to meet again.”
“Ha,” the girl scoffed to the lilies. “The way to Heaven stood open to me once, and I turned my back on it to make my own way here on this fallen Earth instead. There's no forgiveness for that.”
Jenna told her, “Where there is repentance, there is forgiveness. Father Anderson forgave you, didn't he? If he told you not to cry, doesn't that mean he didn't want you to suffer?”
The child did not reply, but her pale lips parted and a shaky breath hissed through her sharp teeth.
“And I forgive you,” Jenna went on gently, “for what you did to the man you call worthless, and for everything else. So if it's possible for us two flawed human beings to forgive you, how can you say it's impossible for God? All you have to do is let go of your pride and ask.”
The girl responded to none of it, not in words although her long, dark lashes trembled over her strange eyes. Instead, she said something else when she finally turned to face Jenna again.
“I do have your compassion, don't I? Even I.”
“Of course.” Jenna meant to smile at her, but the look of utter bewilderment on the child's face almost moved her to tears. With the impulsiveness that plagued her, as it had once plagued her in another world until it killed her, Jenna leaned forward, took the girl's face in both hands, and kissed her forehead between the strands of black bangs that fell over it as her own black curl was forever falling over her brow.
Wayward like its mistress, at the moment a bride of Christ who now whispered to a vampire who had rejected Him long ago, “I love you, my Little Sister.”
The girl's skin felt cool to her lips, and Jenna pressed her fingertips to them as she sat back, blushing at her own boldness though not regretting it. The child still looked at Jenna with bewilderment for a few seconds, but her eyes then softened as her own lips curled in an equally soft smile. Bearing that expression, she was beautiful, and Jenna could see the love in her gaze.
Did he ever look at Father Anderson like this? wondered Jenna. And if he did, how could Anderson not understand that he loved him? If she shows me so clearly with her eyes that she loves me, as a sister loves, surely he showed Father Anderson all the more that he loved him. . . as a man loves.
“I brought you something,” the girl said suddenly. She closed her gloved hand over the hardbound book lying at her side and held it out to Jenna. As the nun took it, the child went on, “It's a book of poetry, by Robert Browning. Did you ever have to read him for your lessons?”
“Um. . . oh, yes, sort of. Father Callahan used to read 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' to us,” Jenna recalled.
The girl grinned, which was a little startling after her somber mood. “Oh, so you got the nicer version of the story—not the one where the piper leads the children into the river and drowns them all like the rats.” She laughed outright at the horrified look Jenna gave her. “But no, he pipes them off to paradise—or else to Transylvania, where according to Callahan, their descendants grow wild roses to fend off Count Dracula with their thorns!”
Jenna had forgotten about that part of the poem and absurdly wondered if an interest in Transylvania was why Father Callahan preferred it to other versions.
“Anyway,” the girl continued, “that one's in there, but I marked another one I believe you'll like more. Read it, and you can tell me what you think about it, next year.”
She spoke playfully, so Jenna responded in kind, “All right then, I will! I'll leave you alone now—stay as long as you like.” The offer was merely rhetorical, Jenna knew, as the girl wouldn't be lingering. The sun was almost up.
Jenna got to her feet and brushed the grass off her habit, then turned to go inside. However, the girl called after her, “Little Sister!”
Jenna paused and looked back. “Yes?”
Still seated on the grave, red-fuchsia eyes turned up to her, the child said, “His name was Luke—like the saint this place was named for. Luke Valentine.”
Jenna opened her mouth to say, “Whose name?” but then shut it again. She already knew.
“At least I remembered his name, even after all this time,” added the girl. “No one else ever could.”
Jenna told her, “I'll remember it. Thank you. . . Little Sister.”
–
That night, Jenna dreamed what began as a nightmare.
Her mother was newly dead, having brought Jenna to the orphanage to be cared for just before the cancer eating away at her dissolved the last of her life. . . except in this dream, Jenna was an adult and instead of St. Luke's, she had arrived at a convent.
As she walked in, the room she entered seemed to be a calm and peaceful place with open windows covered by gauzy curtains, which did not prohibit the sunlight or a fresh breeze from wafting in. It looked like a dormitory, the walls on both sides of her lined by beds made up with clean linens, and Jenna wondered if this was where she was to sleep.
She was greeted by five nuns, older than she by some years, whom she knew to be her new sisters. They wore snow-white wimples adorned with tinkling silver bells, and matching habits bearing the sigil of a rose on the breast, embroidered in scarlet thread.
There is a folk tradition that the thorns of wild roses keep vampires away, Father Callahan had said.
(At the moment, I'd say that thorns attract vampires.)
Are they my new sisters, though? Jenna asked herself as she squinted at the other women's faces. She was unable to see them clearly, as if they changed and shifted subtly with every motion. They seem so familiar, like I already know them from somewhere. . . . Did I live here before, with them? Am I coming home?
Sure enough, the eldest who stood in the middle flanked by two of the others on each side greeted her, “Oh, thanks be to God! The baby has been returned to us, nearly the spitting image of our sister her mother whom we loved well. Welcome home, Sister Jenna.” Her voice sounded kind superficially, yet Jenna could almost hear a thread of mocking sardonicism through it.
Yet Jenna heard herself reply, “Thankee, Big Sister,” the strange accent and stranger words falling from her lips so naturally.
Sister Mary—for that was her name, Jenna suddenly understood—smiled with a horrible false sweetness. Another of the Little Sisters stepped forward holding out a stack of folded white garments.
Sister Coquina, thought Jenna.
“I've brought your habit and wimple, freshly washed!” she chortled. “So ye can make yourself decent again.”
Jenna reached for the clothing and found herself dressed instantly in a wimple and rose-embroidered habit like the rest. She looked down at herself in mild surprise then lifted her head to look at Sister Mary when she spoke again.
“Now don your bells, girl,” Big Sister said, all false affection gone from her tone. She pointed to one of the otherwise empty beds, upon which lay a headdress of tiny bells. At first, Jenna thought them identical to those the other Little Sisters wore, but as she drew closer, she realized that they were a darker metal. Not silver as bright as the faux sweetness of the others' voices but a color darker than pewter though not quite black.
When she hesitated, the one called Sister Louise cooed, “The dear departed left the Dark Bells behind when she ran away with ye. They burn us to touch, but if you're your mother's daughter, they'll suit ye well!”
Jenna took up the headdress in both hands and draped it upon her brow, over her wimple. When she touched it, the bells sounded with a richer tone than the others' tinkling. From the corners of her eyes, Jenna thought she saw something moving along the floor in response to the noise, but when she turned her head to look, nothing was there.
“Now she's decent,” Sister Louise said to the woman next to her, Sister Tamra. “Still pretty as a picture, though!”
“Ooh, yes!” the other squealed. “Almost as pretty as the pretty man yonder! Maybe they'll make a match!”
“Journeys end in lovers' meeting,” said the last of them, Sister Michela. “'Tis true, the end of baby's journey to come back to us—and the end of his journey too!” All of them except for Sister Mary twittered like birds with laughter. Or cawed like crows.
Sister Mary looked Jenna over then lifted a hand and flicked a finger in the direction of her forehead.
“Make your hair tidy,” said Big Sister, and Jenna bit back a sigh as she tucked the wayward curl into place under her wimple. The elder nun favored her with a thin smile and continued in the tone of false affection, “And now ye must be famished, poppet, after so long away. 'Tis what killed your mother, her refusal to feed, so to be sure she didn't see that ye were fed, neither. You're fortunate she brought ye back to us in time.”
My mother didn't starve to death! It was cancer. . . wasn't it? Jenna remembered her mother kissing her goodbye outside the orphanage, tears streaming down her gaunt cheeks, and that was the last Jenna saw of her. . . .
And yet it wasn't, because she also remembered her mother falling to her knees and then her face outside the convent, screaming in agony as her body shifted and changed and broke apart into a thousand tiny pieces—pieces that scattered and yet still danced at the edges of Jenna's vision, in time to the chiming of the Dark Bells.
Jenna blinked back tears of her own, at the same time becoming aware that she was famished with a gnawing hunger unlike any she had known before. Sister Mary gestured more widely, towards the far side of the large, open room.
“Go and sup,” she said, “so the rest of us may feed. We've waited to give you the first taste of him, to show how glad we are to have ye home.” Big Sister said this last in an almost sing-song tone, and Jenna thought that she and the others were not so much “glad” as vindicated.
“Yes, we're faint with hunger!” Sister Coquina said, the others echoing her.
The first taste. . . of him. The horrible words echoed in Jenna's ears even as she moved down the room past the rows of beds. Her hunger compelled her, demanded it.
Only one of the beds was occupied, almost all the way to the far wall. As Jenna drew near, she could make out the dark form of a man in black lying there. His arms were extended outwards, almost in a pose of crucifixion, and held in place by slings of pale cloth tied to a ceiling beam overhead. No such slings held his legs, and when she reached the bed side, she realized why: he had none. Both had been sheared off at the thighs. The remnants of his black pants hid the stumps, but streaks of blood on the once pristine sheets told that the wounds were fresh.
How has he not bled to death? Jenna wondered in horror, made even worse by the fact that she could smell the rusty-iron scent of his blood. . . and it smelled delicious.
She dragged her eyes up his body to his face, standing out white in stark contrast to his black clothing and shaggy hair. He was pretty, as Sister Tamra had said, but his face was pinched with pain, and his eyes were open wide as they fixed upon her. His pallid skin was as white as the habit Jenna wore, and his eyes as red as the rose embroidered on her breast. . . .
As red as hers, the girl who came each year to kneel at Father Anderson's grave.
Because they are hers, thought Jenna while a heavy sick feeling warred with the hunger inside her. This is him, the man who loves Father Anderson.
“No!” she said in a low voice. “I won't—I won't feed on him!”
The other Little Sisters had gathered behind her, and they giggled.
“Ooh, we were right!” cried Sister Michela. “Baby loves him already!”
“Love at first sight,” Sister Coquina crooned. “Go on and have your first kiss of him, Sister Jenna! Then we'll all have kisses.”
Sister Mary commanded more stridently, “Feed from him! You've never supped with us before, prideful girl, but you will now—or you will starve. You may wear the Dark Bells, yet you are still one of us. Denying that will not change it.”
Then, to Jenna's amazement, the man in the bed smiled and whispered in a deep voice—the same voice she'd heard from the girl that first day—too low for the others to hear: “Big Sister's right, draculina. You are what you are, and there's nothing you can do about it. So drink my blood and come into your full powers—Little Sister Jenna, my No Life Princess!”
Even though her heart recoiled at the thought of drinking his blood, Jenna's mind told her, If he wants me to do it, it can't be wrong. And as they say, I am what I am—the form we take makes no difference, and I will always be me: the real deal, Father Callahan's Type One vampire, draculina. . . in this dream, this world, and any other.
She bent over him, leaning down between his suspended arms as she breathed deeply the scent of the blood congealing from his severed legs. Jenna had never kissed nor been kissed before, and her lips touched a man's flesh for the first time when she put them to his neck then parted them to press her teeth—sharp teeth—against his skin.
Just as the tips of her fangs were about to pierce it, her heart, her wayward vampire heart, recalled what he had said to her only that day in the voice of a little girl:
I've seen your bravery, seen you ring your Dark Bells even as you quaked with fear, for the sake of one you loved. . . . I never found him—but there, I found you. You were just like me. . . and yet, as you said yourself, you're not like me at all.
Jenna's closed eyes flew open, and she pulled back and straightened up with a gasp, leaving the pale skin intact.
I am what I am, and I will always be me—but that me is what I say it is, not them!
“No! I won't!” she growled out loud with a hard shake of her head. . . ringing the Dark Bells for the sake of one she loved.
The other Little Sisters clustered at her back, hovering like vultures, gasped too. Jenna turned to them and saw their true faces clearly now, ancient and sagging with blood-red eyes as hideous as his were beautiful. Sister Mary, glowering, took a step towards the bed, but Jenna shook her head again fiercely, and Big Sister drew back at the sound of the bells.
As the glamour had fallen away from the Little Sisters, so too had it fallen from their convent, and Jenna saw it for what it really was: just a fairly small, shabby room with a few rickety beds clothed in tattered sheets. The things she had seen scuttling in the periphery of her sight were now closing in, surrounding the other sisters and the bed to pause and wait just out of reach. They were a dark tide of insect-like creatures, some of them surely those into which Jenna's mother's body had disintegrated. . . the can tam, the doctor bugs who answered the summons of the Little Sisters' bells, and especially Jenna's own.
“Auuugh!” a voice yelped from the bed. It was still a deep voice yet not the one which had whispered to her, and Jenna turned back to find that the glamour had fallen from the man on the bed as well. He wasn't the vampire at all but a man with spectacled green eyes and long blond hair spilling all around him as he pulled on his bound arms in a panic. He too was pretty, yet even more gravely wounded than the illusory vampire; his white suit jacket was torn in a dozen blood-edged slashes, as if something had cut right through it into his skin. His legs were still severed to bloody stumps, and he wept as he stared past Jenna at the other Little Sisters in terror.
Then his wild eyes flicked to Jenna, and he all but wailed, “Where am I? What are you monsters doing to me? Why does this keep happening?! How many times do I have to die?!”
The sense of fear in his voice was intimately familiar to Jenna, and when he said monsters, she recognized who he was.
What have the monsters done to him? she wondered in sorrowful pity as she again bent over the bed—not to go for his neck this time, but to clasp his anguished face in both hands as she had done the girl's earlier. He flinched at her touch and whimpered aloud when she kissed his brow too.
“Shh, Luke,” she murmured as she drew back enough to look into his fearful eyes. “It's all right. I won't let them hurt ye anymore.”
At the sound of his name, he blinked in bewilderment then relaxed the slightest bit. But Sister Mary snarled from behind Jenna, “Don't make such bold promises ye cannot keep, vowless girl! If ye won't have him, we will!”
Luke whimpered again, but Jenna spun round to shout at Big Sister, “Ye won't! I won't let ye!” A ripple seemed to pass through the waiting can tam as Jenna said more calmly, “We won't let ye. Now go, or I'll have 'em on ye.”
And they were gone, as instantaneously as Jenna's habit had dressed her. Her need for them past, the can tam scattered, retreating into cracks in the floors and walls. Jenna turned back to the crying, shuddering man on the bed and sat down on its edge, reaching down to stroke his sweat-damp hair back from his face.
“I won't let 'em hurt ye anymore, Luke Valentine,” she repeated. “Not them, and not him either. Be still, dear, and just breathe.”
His confused eyes dropped closed as he obeyed, his breathing slowly steadying and deepening. Jenna kept stroking his hair.
After a moment, Luke opened his eyes again and looked up at her as he whispered, “It still hurts. . . everything hurts.”
“I know, I'm sorry. It will be over soon,” Jenna promised. For a moment, she considered ringing the bells again and calling back the can tam. The doctor bugs couldn't regrow Luke's severed legs, but they could heal the lesser wounds and ease his pain.
Yes, and they'd scare him out of his wits too, she told herself. He's dying regardless, and I can't stop it. He shouldn't die covered in insects and screaming.
Jenna stood again and reached for the sling tied around his left wrist, tugging ineffectually at the knot in the hopes of releasing Luke's arms to make him at least a little more comfortable.
“Cut them down,” he said, his voice a bit stronger than before. “There's a knife on my belt. Or there was. . . I guess it's still there. I still had my gun—” He broke off, wincing, and mumbled, “Oh God, my gun, he made me fire it—put his wires in me and used them to make me pull the trigger, over and over—”
“Shh, no, don't talk about it,” Jenna said quickly as she pushed up Luke's suit jacket to find the knife in a sheath on his belt. Although it still burned with hunger, her stomach turned to think of what must have happened—razor sharp wires dug into Luke's flesh and tendons, maybe down to his very bones, and used to manipulate him like a marionette on strings.
His body proved useful eventually, the girl had said. A disposable tool, a means to an end.
Was it he who did this to Luke? wondered Jenna. Or could another be so cruel?
She used the knife to slice the fabric of the left sling, and lowered that arm gently to rest on the bed. After freeing the other arm as well, Jenna tucked the knife back into its sheath and sat down again, returning her hand to Luke's face and stroking his cheek. His eyes had fallen closed again, but he turned his head to press his cheek into her hand.
“Who are you?” he whispered. “And how do you know my name? Are you an angel?”
Jenna exhaled in a soft laugh. “Nay, not me. Someone told me your name, Luke. Mine is Jenna.”
Luke nodded faintly then winced before more tears seeped out from under his lowered dark blond lashes. Jenna didn't know whether he wept from physical pain or emotional when he mumbled, “I'm afraid. I keep dying, over and over, and every time is worse than the last. Y-you say it will be over soon, but—but I'll only wake up somewhere else. . . hurting more. . . and more alone. Jan—”
Whatever he'd been about to say dissolved into a sob, and Jenna leaned down to slip both arms around his broad shoulders, hugging him to her breast.
“Shh, no, don't ye cry,” she soothed him, the way she would soothe a distraught child at the orphanage. “You're not alone, Luke, Sister Jenna's here.” He lifted both arms, at the same time groaning with the pain of moving them, and clutched her in a convulsive embrace. Jenna rested her cheek against the top of his head and petted his hair.
Journeys end in lovers' meeting, she thought. Not just romantic lovers, either. . . the other kinds of love matter just as much.
When Luke's crying had finally calmed, she murmured, “Who is Jan?”
“M-my brother,” Luke breathed shakily. “My little brother. We—we were supposed to be together. That's why we became vampires. . . so we would be always be together. B-but—I died without him. Alone. And every time I wake up again, he's never there. Jan's gone. . . stolen away from me forever.”
She said Luke let the Nazis experiment on him so he could “finally amount to something,” Jenna recalled, but that wasn't true. That wasn't the reason at all.
She whispered to the dying Type Three vampire what she had told the Type One who was still very much alive: “It isn't forever. Soon ye will meet again.”
Luke lifted his head to gaze up at Jenna with blood-shot eyes, through glasses streaked with tears.
“Do you really believe that, Sister Jenna?”
She smiled. “Aye. Don't be afraid, Luke. He's waiting for ye in the clearing at the end of the path.”
For the first time, he smiled, but then he cringed in pain once more and gripped her tighter, pressing his face into her shoulder.
“You—if you're hungry, you can take my blood,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “I'm dying anyway, so go on and eat me! If I come back again, maybe—maybe it'll be inside you instead of him. You'd make a much better Master.”
His blood smelled so sweet, and again, Jenna's mind cajoled, He told me I could, so it isn't wrong. This time, though, it was easier for her to resist.
“No, Luke,” she murmured. “Thankee sai, but no, I won't. I won't become one of them this time, even if it means I'll die too. Now be still, dear, and rest.”
Luke did, relaxing in her embrace. Jenna could feel the tension dissolve from his body, and then his body began to dissolve too—not as her mother's had, with an agonizing disintegration into the can tam, but into an insubstantial red and black mist which began with the remnants of his legs and swept upward.
Jenna looked down into Luke's face to see with alarm that tears again streamed from his closed eyes. But then he smiled and with pure joy in his deep voice, cried “Jan!”. . . calling out to his brother as Father Anderson had called to Archbishop Maxwell and his other children.
“Journeys end with lovers' meeting,” Jenna whispered. Luke was gone by the time she spoke the last word.
She awoke, lying in her own bed with her arms empty, embracing nothing. Jenna folded them over her chest, clutching herself as she began to cry. Maybe she could be brave when she wore the Dark Bells on her brow in the presence of someone she loved, but here and now, her head was bare and she was alone.
Dear God, how much of it was real? she prayed as she wept. Those horrible Little Sisters, those vampires—were they real? The girl said, “There are other worlds than these,” so in some other world, was I one of them? Was I a monster too?
Jenna's tears finally slowed, and she sniffled. She shook her head against her damp pillow, and heard in her mind the echo of the Dark Bells.
No, I wasn't a monster. I'm not a monster now. Maybe it was only a dream, or maybe it was real, a glimpse of another life where I took another form and where this world is the dream. But I'm not a monster either way.
Jenna thought of the ancient leering faces and burning eyes of the other Little Sisters—and then she thought of Luke Valentine's joyous smile as he lay dissolving in her arms.
Even with all the awfulness of it, I hope it was real—or at least real enough that I shared his dying dream and comforted him as he passed. . . that for a moment before he found his little brother again, I was his Little Sister.
(continued)