Chapter Text
August 4, 1940, real, real late
Athens, Georgia
WHEN SHE MEETS HIM, IT’S LIKE ENCOUNTERING AN ANGEL. . . or a figment of the imagination, a flicker of light twinkling in the corner of one’s eye, something one knows isn’t really real, but still feels in every shivering fiber of themself.
He somehow felt even more mythical than she did. And hearing it now, away from the glamor of a stage and the synchronized claps of patrons, he felt grounded and solid, deep like his voice and far too ancient. Even more so.
This was the power Remmick tasted once; the one that drove him mad with envy and a thieving want.
The one that—
She gasps, feeling a chill of evening air. She bangs on his door. It’s a humble little place, still leaps and bounds better than the shoddy huts they used to have Black folks huddling in in the Delta—and many steps up from Blessa’s long-forgotten childhood shed in dirty-ass, pitiful-ass Jackson, Tennessee.
She falls to her knees at his doorstep, appreciating the pain as wood splinters into her knees.
She hears movement, and a wary male voice, unmistakable.
“Don’t open the door!” She orders frantically, something like a muted yell caught in her throat.
He audibly tenses on the other side. His whole house is dark; he never flicked on a light and he tried his damndest to stay quiet and nearly undetectable—as if he wanted to blend into the night from the comfort of his secure wood-and-brick shell.
“Believe me, I won’t,” he responded after an unpleasant beat of silence. Before he could ask, she does.
“You Sammie Moore?”
“I… Who are you?” He fumbles.
Logically, he knows he’s built a bit of a small following—the years of travel had garnered him admirers, people who loved to stomp their feet to his music, sway their hips, hum, and shout in booming, phantom-like choruses, empowered by forces even he had little understanding of—yet he still always got so frightened when someone knew him on first name basis. If he ain’t give out his name personally, it was as good as being accosted by a stranger. And nighttime strangers were the worst kind, even if they were admirers.
He shudders on the other side. He wished he had a gun on him but that wasn’t too fitting for a musician. He already had to lug around his guitar—and the other instruments he was learning—having firepower packed against his skin would only make him look suspicious, paranoid, and a little insane.
And the best thing the insane get is pity and prayers. Ain’t no money in that. As it stood, he could draw a crowd with his tunes but that didn’t always guarantee drawing cash—U.S. motherfucking dollars—especially when his main audience were other poor sharecroppers searching for escape.
He presses his ear to the door, hearing the diluted whimpering on the other end, recognizing it as a woman’s voice.
Throat dry, she replies, “Name’s Blessa Hayes. I… I want to be truthful with you.”
“Alright,” the musician replied slow, neutral. A single droplet of sweat slides down his brow. He gets a very bad, very familiar sensation stirring in the pit of his stomach. His expression sours, eyes darkening almost as much as his pitch-black room. “How did you find where I stay? How you know me?”
“I’m a fan of your work, you see,” Blessa rubs her icy hands together, before absently tugging the loose strands at the end of her braids. “I been… followin’ you. More accurately, searchin’ for you. I heard you in a dream. I had to come see you for myself. We was in the Delta around the same time but you left really quick. I thought I had you one day, then you up and vanished. I had to… find the legend himself. I… Don’t panic, I’m not gon’ hurt you—”
Sammie’s fist tightened, he felt a lump growing in his throat and despite himself, fiery hot tears prickling in the corners of his eyes. Defensively, he hisses, “The hell you mean?”
“I’m a vampire,” she said with a sharp, guilty inhale following. She didn’t release her breath. “I know exactly what happened that night with… that Irishman. Because he turned me,” she wept.
Sammie’s voice trembled, his legs felt like like gelatin. Or worse. Like carving the fatty, sticky, sinewy tissue out of raw meat—and the atmosphere suddenly stank just as potently. It was terror. Undeniable fear. There’d only been one Irish person Sammie knew his entire life. He despised him. “What?”
“He turned me. Remmick. Eight years ago. That same day he went and killed all your friends and them! I seen it all in his memories—”
The musician furrowed his brows and shook his head fiercely. By this point, his entire body was practically pressed into the door, and unbeknownst to him, Blessa’s was as well. But where he stood, she sat, slumped against the wood like a cadaver.
“What exactly happened?”
A dead-er than dead body.
•
She glared furiously, eyes a glowing flame like embers.
“Why is you here? Come to show your ass again? How the fuck did you find me?”
“Stop all that hollerin’, woman,” Remmick said slyly, barely biting back a snicker, glad to see his prized fledgling up and kicking. It was his single most productive kill that night.
It had been two hundred and two days since he turned her, leaving her to fend for herself in a defiled, abnormal, foreign body, and navigate through the night instead of relying on her former friend, the sun—the only thing that had never let her down.
He walked into her lodge easily, two dead things making natural contact, cross-contaminating.
“You made me like this—fuckin’ destroyed me—you was better off killin’ me, you goddamn white devil!” She growls at him, waving around her kitchen knife helplessly, implicitly knowing it wouldn’t work against the timeless beast.
He glances over to the live squirrel she had pinned to the table. He has the nerve to scoff.
“I meant what I said that night, I really did and you know it,” he said, soft and true. “You feel it. Everything I feel is yours. Ain’t no point in lyin’ to you.”
She did feel it, unfortunately. She loathed it, knowing Remmick could wear his heart—black, dead, decomposed—on his sleeve with ease—because his emotions had woven themselves into every flimsy yarn loop that made up her resolve—his thoughts and feelings, especially when physically close, practically drowned her brain, pleasant and poisonous and terribly confusing, like over-sprayed perfume.
“Then why’d you do it? I don’t get it. Hunger?”
Just because she could see his feelings and even feel them, did not mean she’d understand them. He was a puzzle, a library of confusion and contradiction.
“No, darlin’,” he says somberly. “I was… drawn. I ate enough that night,” he grumbles, bittersweet, regretful, and defeated. “I always meant to accept your help and be on my merry way. But then, I don’t know… sexin’ you, it had me goin’ haywire. Maybe I was high off all the previous kills, the near-death experience and all that—”
“You shoulda been dead,” Blessa deadpans with tearful anger, slamming the knife on the table, making the poor rodent flinch in its trap.
“I know,” Remmick nods with an unfit smile, “Then I ran into you. A good Samaritan. Too good. Too gracious to a sinner like me.”
“And just like that the sin popped right off the chain! You’s a rabid dog,” she rolled her eyes before shooting him a murderous glare. “Couldn’t contain yourself. No control! No humanity! No sense!”
“You liked that mad dog for a minute now—and deep down, you still do,” he whispers, “I can feel it. You. Maybe it was selfishness on my part but I wanted a family again; if I couldn’t get it from the Moores, well, my body did what a vampire does best. Suck.”
“You sucked the life out of me, motherfucker!” She squeezes her thighs together as she stands, reminiscing the feeling of losing thick heaps of warm blood so quickly, her entire leg being lapped up like some ice-cream in such a deviant, whorish manner by some white-skinned specter from the woods! She died. That day she fucking died—and ending there would’ve been better than this rebirth! At a certain point, she had mentally prepared for her death; she braced herself for permanent sleep, nothingness, freedom—but Remmick, the demon, cursed her to stay awake in this nightmare forever! “I hate you!”
“You don’t,” the elder vampire said knowingly, inching close, reaching tenderly for her small fingers. “You know you don’t. Though, it’s kind of a shit reason. You only hate one man.”
Blessa warned, “Don’t say shit to me, old bastard!”
“Just the man that hurt your mother, ruined her life. Whatever happens to you is secondary, damn near inconsequential. That’s one thing I don’t like ‘bout you, Blessa. You reduce yourself to a tool for your family, a tool for the community, and even if you get your great escape up north—I can see it now—you don’t know what the fuck you’re doin’! You gon’ go up there and be a tool for yourself and not a real fuckin’ person! Now that I’m in your brain, I know, holy girl. You been dead a long time. Tryna relight a spark that wasn’t there. You just been alive livin’ in this world, powerless to your circumstances, hopin’ that if you get your bearings with survivin’ then maybe you can start livin’.”
“Fuck you! Stay the fuck out my head!”
“I been there. I was there my first hundred years. It was tough, especially seein’ what I was seein’, watchin’ my homeland get turned into something unrecognizable. Then I became something I barely knew. Being together’s gon’ make a whole world of difference. I made you powerful. You were already beautiful but now I made you soar. That’s gotta be worth somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Ain’t worth a damn,” she cried hollowly. “I been suckin’ the blood of rats, cats, and hogs all for what? Your bullshit dream! And you can try to put all those flowery images in my head all you want, as far as I care, that’s the musings of a madman!”
“I am mad. Madly in love,” he titters. “With you. Your potential. The way a lifeless thing like you still breathed life into me.”
Appalled, Blessa leers, “I was the lifeless one?”
“You were calculated. I was hurtin’ by the flesh and you were hurtin’ by the heart. Lone woman livin’ by herself. You had to be. We complete each other. My failure led me to you… an angel with a pistol, hesitant yet ready to patch me up.”
She grimaces, noting something subtle, floating along the edges of his tone. “You still bitter over Sammie.”
The Irishman admits it. “As great as you are, he’s got something that ain’t easily replicated. I’m gon’ have both of you eventually.”
He was the one that got away—the song that the musician sought, the statue the carver unearthed—the one Remmick truly wanted—needed—to bring to life, but first, death. As long as the boy was alive as a normal human being, he was potential wasted—not for talent—there was no shortage of that—but for use in fulfilling Remmick’s dream of reconnection. He’d only grow older, weaker, further away with time. He needed to be timeless, endless.
Blessa stammered. “W-What?”
“My wings. Liftin’ me up, connecting me to what I’ve lost and showin’ me what I could have,” he states decisively.
“Mmm,” she lours, picking up the jittery squirrel. It flailed in her grip. Before biting, she comments, “Wings. Behind you. Doin’ all the heavy lifting. You just like every other white man; except you takin’ the long way round to get you some slaves.”
“Fuck that, Blessa. You know that ain’t what I mean,” he retorts irritably. And truly, she does feel it. Domination was an unconscious side effect of his plan, not a direct goal. But Remmick was too old and stubborn to understand that, insisting that he knows best! How the fuck could he know what was best for her? Or any of them? Fellowship and love… and a whole bunch of bullshit! Remmick snatches the seizing animal out of her hands, causing the poor critter to gush out even more blood. “And stop eatin’ this shit! You’re past the stage of bloodlust eatin’ you from the inside.”
“No thanks to you, massa.”
He huffs, tosses the animal and pinches the bridge of his nose, peeved. “Blessa.”
“Yessuh?” She jeers, though her hands are melded together in mock-prayer.
Though she was slightly taller than him, her whole demeanor shrunk dramatically, as if she was some meek nun, only to show Remmick how the fuck he looked.
“Babe,” he begged. “Stop.”
She stopped. Scowled. Blood spread across her cheeks in thin streaks, unsatisfactory.
Despite the blood still in her throat, she sounds hoarse. She glares at Remmick with a shine in her eyes that’s more than the tapetum lucidum—more than the glowing glare of a wildcat—its pain, sorrow, confusion, and need all wrapped in one. A need to be comforted, to be held, to be told everything was going to be alright, and that things weren’t her fault, weren’t hers to fix. Even if they were. It was demented.
“What,” she deadpans.
“Come here,” he gestures softly. She draws nearer, as if tugged by a imperceptible string, light and harmless. He wipes the blood off her cheek, the lesser stuff, with his thumb before jabbing the finger against his knifelike canines. Blood pools over the swirl of his fingerprints, dripping slowly like spilled paint. “Try some of this instead. Ain’t as filling as living blood but it damn sure tastes better. Come on, babe... just a pinprick.”
Blessa purses her lips, doubtful. She wants to say no but she desperately wants to say yes; her resolve indecisive and lightweight—not sturdy—it blew with the wind of Remmick’s words or the unbearable delicateness in his predatory eyes.
She feels him in the edges of her mind. Genuine care. He loves this. He loves watching something he made grow. He loves making up for lost time, nurturing something of his own creation.
A twisted fatherhood. Sirehood? Makerhood? Something gross. Something unable to be related to human love.
Just a pinprick.
Those words were cursed. She takes his thumb into her mouth and he generously slathers it all over the eager muscle.
In a matter of moments, Blessa is hastily slammed onto the table, legs at either side of Remmick’s hips.
His blood is reminiscent of chocolate. Blessa only had it once as a child; it was an unforgettable feeling.
He kissed on her neck as she bit at his thumb, clamping down on the bone. Fire blazes under her bronzed skin.
He ruts his clothed dick against her, feeling the shudder rake through her body against his.
He sank his teeth into her neck, making her jerk for a moment, as he lapped up her sweet, dead blood—it tasted like something Remmick couldn’t remember the name of, just old and sweet, maybe like of berries from the Old World.
She grinds against him, moans, grips at his shirt, her nails scraping at the skin of his back.
She bites him back just as hard, siphoning blood out of him uselessly; simply indulging in a moment that offered nothing—meant nothing in terms of nourishment—and meant everything in terms of torture.
She was dead. Remmick kisses her, rams his bloodied tongue in her mouth. She opens up. His dick is rock solid against her, pressing up against her clit over and over and over—she whines and rolls her hips, meeting him every time, needily.
She’s been dead. Remmick snarls when she bites him again, humping against her like a wild man. Blessa didn’t care. She was in hell with him. If hell had moments like this, she could deal—she always dealt with whatever was thrown her way! Their torsos are covered in each other’s blood. The continued to sap life from each other and fuck like lust itself. He took her right there on that kitchen table—again. And she took him in like he was long-lost. She tries not to dwell on how well they fit. What an unfunny joke of fate.
Remmick never says it through his lips—slashed through Blessa’s relentless biting, forcing themselves to heal over and over—but he radiates it with every bit of his being—the message ‘I love you, I want you,’ messily and loudly. Blessa wonders in the quietest corner of her mind if he can lie telepathically, even through emotional signals, even while buried deep in her vulnerability, with her wrapped tightly around his, choking it fiercely, trembling, whining for more, for less, for all. Can he lie in the midst of all this?
He makes her cum three times. Nasty bastard slurps it all too and kisses her with it. Slathers her belly in it, spits it in her mouth, grunts in her ear with each thrust, squeezes her tight—burrows his claws into her waist—like he’s scared of losing her. He calls her a beauty, treasures her sweet taste, determined to share it with her in every graphic detail—and he hums a tune soon after, full of inhumane gladness—seemingly blood-drunk. It’s abominable, soul-stealing.
He cums inside her too, naturally—they’re chained at the groin and at the throat like dogs—and maybe chained, too, by the last remaining sliver of their souls—near-silently, except for quivering moans and growls from the gut—teeth deep into each other’s arteries, bodies covered with shared gashes, love and war in simultaneous effect—and it shouldn’t matter because she was an undead fledgling of less than a year but they both think it does.
It does matter. Neither of them have to say why. She hates how her dead heart beats for him—skipping happily—as he drips out of her. She kisses him mindlessly, suckling on his tongue. He relishes in it, eyes rolling.
“Ain’t no damn slave,” he whispers when their lips part, breathing heavy, mouths slick with bloodied saliva, shining like rubies. Their eyes shone brighter, his like a demon and hers like the hellfire it called home. His next words are halfway between a reprimand and a worship song, “You a saint.”
•
Her tone shifts from a whine to pure indignation. “He… he didn’t show me who he was until it was too late—he said he wasn’t gon’ hurt me, he wasn’t gon’ bite,” she hisses, annoyed at her own foolishness. “Then he did. Shit went downhill from there. Listen, Sammie, I... I wanted to see you. I had to meet you before he did.”
“Why? So you can kill me first?” He accuses.
“No. I ain’t him. I ain’t gon’ kill you. I swear it. On my own life…” she starts before pausing and gulping. “Stake me if I’m lyin’.”
Sammie’s brows scrunched. He was suddenly filled with the desire to see the mysterious vampire’s face. It was a curiosity he was smart enough to not feed; not now.
With a deep-set scowl and a hatred borne of trauma, he assures, “I will.”
He glances towards a dining area, completely made of wood, from the sturdy table to every leg of every chair.
He repeats himself resolutely.
“It was hard for me,” the young woman admits suddenly, after an uncomfortable beat of near-silence, with nothing but the crickets singing, bugs and night birds chirping about. It was a symphony of the nocturnal; and in a sense it was comforting because if the world was dead silent at night, even when nothing was being killed, Blessa’s sure she would’ve long lost herself. She furrows her brows, a pitiful twitch of the muscle, a precursor to tears. Her eyes are dry and borderline apathetic. “Was so hard. I’d stay up all mornin’, cardin’ through memories the motherfucker left in my head—he buried them there for safekeeping, seems like. Like I was his lil treasure vault. I couldn’t sleep durin’ the day, even though I was supposed to—couldn’t do nothin’ else; had no option but to sleep, yet I didn’t. Couldn’t. I was just in bed, cowerin’ away from the windows, scared that if I closed my eyes and rested, I’d roll right into the sunlight and burn alive. I can’t stand dyin’ so slow and painful, twice. I ain’t gettin’ burned.”
“Why you tellin’ me this, ma’am?”
Sammie curled his lips at his own words in a mix of shame and contempt. That respectful little boy had been molded and beaten into him so expertly, that even at this age, he couldn’t shake it, even for folks who didn’t deserve such courtesy.
Sure, Blessa the vampire hadn’t harmed him yet, nor had she really even alluded to doing so, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t coming. Sammie knew he should keep his guard up, in both the physical and mental sense. He wasn’t gon’ bleed for her. Especially not no disembodied voice. The only body part he was sure to see were curled teeth, primed for catching onto veins and not letting go. Best suited for slicing through hollow organs.
“I feel like you’d get it. I think…” Blessa reveals, “He… and I are similar, by force of his doing,” she frowns, downtrodden, her clawed hands palming at her chest, ripping at her lacy dress and thick jacket. “I never wanted this. Never wanted him. But I’m stuck with him. He planted roots in me, deep, winding, and barbed. I ain’t want ‘em but I got ‘em and I’m fine with that. I think. If it’s my cross to carry, dealin’ with him, yankin’ back his leash when he gets too zealous, fine. But I don’t wanna give him the satisfaction of gettin’ you. Or anyone else. He wants a mystical storyteller and them folks exist all over the world—”
“Is that why he went after you? Were you one of the gifted folks he wanted? Could he not… tame you?”
“Naw,” she shook her head with an airless laugh. “No magic on me. I think at first, honestly, I was just a pretty face, someone to get his dick wet—”
“He forced you?”
“No,” Blessa answered, swift and solemn. “That was the worst part. It’s like he imprinted on me. I hate him… and I don’t. It’s odd. I don’t like it. Makes me hate myself. It’s the… I dunno. He left a handprint in my mind. It ain’t moving.”
Sammie didn’t know how to feel. His hand rests on the cold doorknob, not turning it either way. In place of an intelligent response, he grunts, “Hm.”
“But you, Sammie… This is my point. He already found you so he hellbent on havin’ you. I can’t let him have that. I can’t let him win after what he did to us.”
“Us… There was a point after that where… I stopped playin’ for a while. Stopped singin’. It wasn’t too long; force of habit, a singer’s gon’ sing. But I was scared. Real scared. Scared of combining the music with my voice and petrified of singin’ at night.”
“How you get back to it?”
“I did it despite the fear,” he answers candidly with a soft shrug. He realizes there wasn’t much fanfare in it, just… “My love for the Blues was just too big, I guess. Had to keep goin’. Blues saved my life in more ways than one; I wasn’t gon’ abandon it for nothin’. Not really.”
•
“I bought my ticket fair and square, big man. Is you gon’ let me in or just block the door?” Blessa taunted the bouncer with a glance that bled arrogance, holding a fragile ‘ADMIT ONE’ slip between her fingers.
The man was too concerned with her eyes, glowing yellow and batlike, so she quickly donned her sunglasses even though the moon sat high, full, and fat in the black sky. He looked a bit wounded, like he took it as she was tired of seeing and being seen by him. Frankly, she was.
“You got an illness, miss?”
“Light sensitivity,” she fibbed. It came out pointedly enough to shoot down further questioning, but still she added salt. “And a sensitivity to unnecessary questions from unnecessary doormen.”
Curtly, he replied, “Enjoy the show.”
Then he scooted out of the way, giving her entry. Blessa hears him mutter something like ‘high-saddity bitch’ and just chuckles to herself behind her gloved hand.
This was the first time she heard Sammie live, on a proper stage. Now a grown man, two states over, with four slashes carved into his cheek, he sang even more fiercely than before, as if daring anyone to do a thing about it.
No one could do a thing but dance as his voice rang out like heavenly bells and trumpets, with the support of a small band behind him and the unified claps of tipsy clubgoers.
An overwhelming sense of togetherness flooded all of Blessa’s enhanced senses. Her heeled feet shifted and shuffled across the floors, she swayed from hand to hand between men and women—vixens and dames, princes and paupers, saints and sinners—and she danced like she was imbued with the strength and passion of those she had not yet seen, as if they were pushing her and urging her to ride every note of music, every glorious wave that flowed from Sammie’s lips, every vicious ripple that came with the vibrant strumming of his resonator guitar.
She felt elevated. She felt joy at her core—connection and intuitive value that couldn’t adequately be described or related to anything else. Pure resonance. Everyone on a single, bouncing wavelength at his command. Happy.
She assumed this was what freedom felt like. The celestial, time-fraying freedom that her vampiric ancestor—her maker—sought. The rambunctious, psychosocial freedom the patrons at Club Juke, all those years ago, felt.
“This next one is called ‘Pearline,’ after a sweet friend of mine,” Sammie would say in the midst of panting and cheering partygoers. Blessa flinched like she was stung. She’s seen Pearline. Remmick gave her those thoughts. She was Sammie’s sweet thing, his first love. She was taken in such a sick way—but, for all it was worth, coming from another vampire, she was pretty heroic. Blessa sees Sammie blink rapidly as if he’s trying to force away tears. He starts stomping—hard. Almost an assault on the floor itself. Any harder and they would’ve surely brought the venue down.
Blessa smiles wide like an idiot and joins in, as does the rest of the packed building. They build a beat organically like that—just stepping, stomping, shaking—with members of the crowd shouting and chirruping and just releasing their emotions in the rawest way they knew how! Then, after about a minute or so, of what felt like pure tribal unity, Sammie strums beautifully on his guitar and howls something fierce!
It could almost be called sensual, maybe even a bit effeminate—as if channeling Pearline herself to sing through him—and he plays harder, using the established rhythm of the stamping feet as a base—and he sings, his voice enveloping the whole room, sending chills through every blessed and cursed bone, enticing everyone to move, yet keeping everyone on beat amongst the joyful disarray!
The message was clear. He says it anyway, hollering with with sweat on his brow and the warmth of beer on his lips.
“Pearline wouldn’t want no sob story in her name!”
Blessa was almost sure she was floating the entire evening.
If paradise was a real place, surely the angels would sound like Sammie, infused with merriment and magic.
•
“I admire you,” she acknowledges mellowly. “You ain’t as fickle as me; ain’t a runner. I’m tired of bein’ a runner. Tired of bein’ victim of my situation.”
“What you mean?” Specifically.
“He and I, our connection gets weaker the further apart we are physically. He disappeared but I know for a fact he’s still in the United States. I don’t know if he layin’ low ‘cause of hunters or if he plottin’. Hell, he may be recoverin’ from another skirmish as we speak—but I know that the moment he close enough to you, he gon’ wanna strike again. I ain’t sayin’ to stop tourin’; it’s good, you keep movin’, keep him on his toes—but from now on, you ain’t got a bigger fan than me, Preacher Boy.”
Sammie winced. “Nobody calls me that except for… since…”
“You want me to stop?”
“I don’t care,” he lied. He focuses back on her. The newest vampire he summoned. The latest devil at his feet. “You wanna protect me?”
“I wanna kill him.”
•
Blessa is true to her word.
She follows Sammie like a plague and he… gets used to her.
She goes to his shows as a guest. It’s easy for her, comfortable, since he doesn’t know her face; but nerve-racking for him because he doesn’t know her face. It’s like having a poltergeist stuck to his soul, tracking his every move. Though she said she’d never harm him, and in the last few weeks, hasn’t, it’s still alarming.
Late in the evening, when Sammie’s at his lodging place, she’d hobble onto his doorstep or meander around his windows.
They’d engage in pleasant conversations until the early morning hours, until she had to retreat, running away from the sun.
As much as they both felt conflicting feelings towards each other, a rapport was forming. It was inevitable really. Blessa was a good listener and an even better talker. Sammie liked having someone to hear him out at his realest; hearing the feelings that were too complex to squeeze into stanzas and lay up on a guitar.
Church came up, after Sammie told his side of the story with Club Juke.
“You believe in God?” The woman asked cautiously, as if holding his beating heart in her clawed hands.
Sammie hesitates but says something unexpected. “Yes. I just don’t believe in God the way my daddy does. I think, at the core, that’s why we always butted heads.”
“You ain’t wanna be a slave to Christ?” Blessa snorts.
“I ain’t wanna be a slave to no man, much less a divine one. A God wouldn’t need no slaves. Not a loving one. A loving God wouldn’t give me talents only to curse me to never use them, yet that’s what my daddy preached. Passionately, too. If a Good Lord made me to be Sammie Moore, then he’d love Sammie Moore as Sammie Moore. I ain’t tryna be nobody else,” he affirms concretely. “And… you?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure I’m disqualified now anyway. Enough holy water can kill me,” she notes sadly. “I’m not sure a Christian vampire can work even as an idea. Or any religion. They’d prolly kill themselves.”
It was a matter-of-fact statement. One where, given just enough thought, Sammie found himself reluctantly agreeing with. At best, immortal bloodsuckers with human faces were freaks of nature; at worst, they were demons incarnate. He thinks, for Blessa, she lay somewhere along the middle—but that could be said for most people, then.
In a moment of boldness and unending curiosity, he mutters, “Can I see you?”
The woman sounds scandalized on the other side of the door. “What? No!”
“Please? I just wanna know who I been talkin’ to all this time. Or else… how am I gon’ know you real?”
“Even your eyes can lie to you, Sammie, that ain’t a strong enough point.”
“Fine. I want to. Is that strong enough for you?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“I ain’t say nothing about lettin’ you in.”
“Sammie,” Blessa argues, bunching her shawl up in her fist. She shook her head violently, as if she drank the most sour, putrid blood on Earth. “I don’t want you to see me.”
“I hardly find that fair. You been stalkin’ every show, followin’ me home, state to state, all that! If we gon’ be talkin’, we can at least be talkin’ fair, right?” He counters smoothly, his anointed, baritone voice penetrating Blessa’s carefully-built barriers. She feels breathless. “Look, you got the strength and speed to kill me with ease. That’s unfair but neither of us can control that, now can we? Keepin’ me from seein’ you is completely, I dunno… asinine. It ain’t right, and you know it. Plus, if you jump at me, I’mma slam the door in your face and take my Black ass to bed.”
Blessa didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh or cry at that.
She stays silent.
Sammie warns her, then slowly opens up the front door, as if giving her time to dash off.
She doesn’t. Instead, she stands there, head down like a guilty child, fiddling with her clothes.
Once revealed, she loses a lot of her luster—a lot of her confidence; the one she wore as a suit of armor. When she cared about somebody’s opinion, she held it in high regard. Maybe even too high. She cared about his.
Up close, separated by an invisible wall of air, right at the threshold of the door, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ Sammie thinks she’s—
“Beautiful,” Blessa mumbles, swaying nervously, taking a half-step back. “You… Your singing’s always been beautiful.”
Sammie… swallows and glances over her. She was taller than most women but shorter than him still, and all the prior authority he’d gradually known her to speak with had been shot down in an instant. She was young and wounded. It made Sammie so terribly… sad.
“You don’t look that much older than me when… when it happened,” he notes, upset. A nasty feeling stirs in his gut, hollows out his chest. “How old were you?”
She smiles only with one corner of her mouth. It’s the fakest thing Sammie’s ever seen; the weakest attempt at self-soothing, at coping.
He was nineteen going on twenty back then.
“I was twenty-five.”
Sammie feels like he got shot.
She was too young to die. Sammie, now, at twenty-eight, had outlived her ‘natural’ life.
It wasn’t fair though! She died by unnatural means. Her death wasn’t even peaceful, finite, or honorable! Her death turned her into the monsters he had to kill!
He recollects the other things she’s referenced between herself and Remmick and can only barely hold back a gag.
“So. You satisfied?” She queries.
Seeing her like this humanizes her far too much—it makes her real; the exact thing Sammie advocated for, and what he regretted speaking up about almost instantly. At the doorway, this crossroads, she had the same deer-in-headlights look that he wore when answering that clubhouse door.
He can’t help but ask, upon seeing her shift in demeanor, “You scared of me?”
A lead lump sits heavy in her throat, choking her from the inside. It was much worse than that.
“I’m scared of ruining you.”
•
They travel five states together, inching closer and closer to the Mason-Dixon line. Sammie’s notoriety amongst Black southerners is booming and he’s somewhat of a household name. He’s got white watchers too, but most of them are detractors, too offended at the notion of enjoying a Black man’s music that they’d rather pretend it didn’t exist all together. That is, if they couldn’t find a way to bastardize it for themselves, make it palatable, easy to swallow, easy to clumsily hop around to like dazed jackrabbits.
Sammie drew awestruck stares from a diverse array of men and women, all with their own stories, always circling back to how their town, city, circumstance—America, the only place they knew as home in their lifetime—fucked them over. His music sent them to a new home they hadn’t ever seen for themselves, only knew of in stories, linking them with brothers and sisters—foremothers and descendants, too—that they’d never meet, but could feel in the way they moved. Sammie took a piece of Heaven and dragged it down to Hell for them. For a brief moment, the world was theirs.
Blessa was with him every step of the way, lurking in the shadows, moving with the wind, pleasantly unseen.
They talked at the end of the night, like they always did, standing at the threshold, nothing but air and opportunity between them as always.
Well, that, and a bunch of unspoken words.
Sammie loved her.
He hadn’t expected to; quite frankly, he didn’t want to. But he couldn’t deny the fact of the matter. He did. It grew more troublesome with each interaction, more obvious.
Blessa’s righteous cause… was never righteous to begin with. It was a fool’s errand, riddled with sin, tainted by vengeance, and doused in emotions and unclarity—but where she could formerly pretend that it was solely about hurting Remmick through blocking access to Sammie, now, she could no longer keep up that act. Sammie was a living spirit that made an indelible mark on her heart. One side torn and blackened, rotten with evil for the old Irishman to get cozy in, and the other side full of new life and purpose by Sammie, who was so bright and warm he practically made up for her divorce from the sun!
She loved him. Ghoulishly. Fiendishly.
They were gon’ ruin each other if they weren’t careful.
Keeping the door open, Sammie walks back further into the small rental house, grabbing a sharp blade. It was too small to be a machete but too large to be any old kitchen knife.
Sammie was pensive, concentrated like how he would be when formulating a new song.
He sits on a wooden chair, not too far off. He snatches another one and slams it to the ground with all his might, causing two legs to break off instantly. He grabs one and sharpens it. He glances up at the woman, who stood dumbly at the doorway, just observing. His eyes had a determined sparkle.
Blessa somehow felt reassured, safe.
Why was little human Sammie, making her—the guard dog—feel safe? Shouldn’t it have been the other way round?
Wood chips and sheets fly off the chair leg as the man carves a stake. He doesn’t stop until he’s satisfied with the point.
He holds it to his chest with deference, the same dedication he had when he held the broken neck of his resonator as he sped away from his father’s church.
He stands before her, looking at her with an ambivalent stare. There was something tender in his gaze, something vulnerable, but also something generous.
His voice is gruff, a little hoarse. He may have overdone it tonight. Typically, they’d laugh but... this was no laughing matter. “You ate before you came here?”
“Always eat before I see you,” she replies certainly. She glances between him and the stake. Then she notices his scars and remembers who she is. Her voice shrank. “I ain’t hungry.”
“Then—”
“Whatever you’re thinkin’ still ain’t a good idea, Preacher Boy—”
“Don’t call me that, Blessa. It’s been damn near a year. I’m not no baby and I’ve killed my fair share of vamps when I was. I don’t need your protection from you. If you wanted to kill me, you would’ve done it already—all them times you were in the audience at my shows—you could’ve torn up the whole thing. Before, during, or after. You didn’t.”
“So?”
“I trust you,” he says firmly, though his face twitches as if he shocked himself too. “I seen the lack of self-control in vampires. You would’ve been killed me if you wanted to. Ain’t no restraint for what y’all want. I told you things I ain’t told no one else, yet you ain’t try any mind tricks; you didn’t try to break me or make me do what you want.”
“But—”
“You ain’t like him,” he asserts. He throws her words back at her. He defends her from her harshest critic—herself! The stake between them looks like a bouquet of gardenias. “I don’t think you are. I hope you don’t think so.”
“Sammie! He turned me after swearin’ he wouldn’t! I read his thoughts, his intentions—and he was being honest! We can’t be sure I won’t do the same! I could hurt you completely by accident!”
“Then I’ll kill you,” he says thoughtfully, reaching out and grabbing her forearm lightly. The touch is foreign and hot. Not painful, though; Sammie doesn’t hurt. He nods dutifully, his grip on the makeshift weapon tightening. “I’ll kill you myself.”
Blessa’s eyes water. “You’d do that? You promise?”
Sammie bristles, almost expecting some pushback, some fierce will to live. He has no clue why. She’s given every indication that she’s not as attached to life as he is; only attached to the man she wants to slaughter and maybe the one she wants to embrace. The musician pities her, though he shouldn’t; she’s too good for pity. Too resourceful, too conniving, too full of hate.
Gently, he tugs her, sealing his fate, walking into unknown territory—neither of them know.
“Come on in, Blessa.”
She turns to him with a mournful glance. It’s less of a threat and more of a declaration; a testament to how little she trusts herself around a good thing—how much she expects to fuck it up like her predecessor did.
“You’s gon’ regret this.”
Sammie retorts smartly, “Won’t be a reason to, I hope.”