Blood Feud: Vampire Cohorts Book Five

Chapter One - It Was Real

"If this is love, I don't want it! Take it away, please! Why does it hurt so much?"

"Because it was real."

- Tauriel and Thranduil

The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies (film adaptation)

2014

THE pain warned me that I still lived, a siren hollering "wake up, wake up!" whether I wanted to or not. It burst through every part of me, spreading like the fresh blood through my desiccated veins, and dragged me from the darkness which provided my only peace. The vampire coma state receded in a blaze of white-hot agony as human life filled my cells, and the inferno raged, as familiar as my name, because I had burned there more times than I could count.

How many times had Ragnar brought me back from my oblivious sanctuary to toss me again into my world of despair? How many times had my cohort followed his lead? I didn't know, but this time hurt more because I knew no cruel gaoler tortured me. Instead, my friends wanted me to wake, to feel, to suffer rather than leaving me in my safe cocoon of nothingness, floating out of time and space. Yet even their callousness wasn't what hurt me most of all.

As organs revived one at a time – as my heart pushed my sluggish blood around veins that had forgotten their purpose – none of that hurt me most. Leof's anger burned me more thoroughly than my waking body, every bit as furious as when I first dragged him out of Valhalla, and that anger speared straight from his heart into mine. His hatred simmered, his sense of betrayal washing through me, directed at me and my mistakes, and along with it came so much pain, and confusion, and grief for what he'd lost in the darkness of Tiw's arena. The oppressive weight of it strangled me.

Conn's shame and soul-deep despair draped over me like a familiar cloak; as poignant and recognisable as the pain of waking up. I had been where he was before; lost because of the cruelty of a merciless tormentor. I wanted to hold him together in a way no one had ever held me together in all the long centuries of my existence. But I couldn't. Attempting it risked inciting an explosion of fury from the man who held my heart in his hands.

He would kill me.

He would send me to Tiw in his stead.

Hadn't he promised as much?

I could only languish, far from him, sharing his pain as if it was my own while he crushed my heart in his vice-like grip. He caused more suffering than the ache of my waking body.

Yet alongside that crushing anguish, another piercing wound tortured me as well; another wound without physical form but which burned nonetheless, where I'd separated my son's soul from mine. That wound would never heal. None of it would ever heal. I had lost everything I loved.

I longed for someone to explain it to me; why anything as vital as love caused so much suffering. People needed connection – we were biologically programmed to crave others to trust, depend on, belong with – and yet that seemed like such an easily exploited flaw; a crack that both enemies and errors of judgement put pressure on. I wanted to demand someone take my grief and regret away. I didn't care that my pain proved my love was real, because it also reminded me that it was a lost cause.

Although even that wasn't entirely true. I wouldn't choose to remove my love, to commit the crime that had landed me in this mess. No, instead I wished to erase my own existence, to wipe the slate clean and become an untouchable void which no one could ever again harm. I yearned for peace, with the weary longing of someone who'd lived too long, seen too much evil, and lost too much along the way.

Let my love be a burning fire, a flare of heat and energy that returned life to one who deserved to live, but then burned away everything I was so that I never had to feel anything ever again. Let that be my legacy. Let my life end with the defiance that had torn my Leof from Tiw's grasp. I didn't want my friends to make me wither in the aftermath, hopeless, and hollow, and never again strong enough to make a stand. Just let me sleep.