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vampireshmampire · 2 years

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The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side (Ch 4/8)

Guillermo can't remember the last thirteen years of his life. It has something to do with being found beaten half to death on the side of the road three months ago. Although he’s safe now, living with relatives far from New York, the trauma lingers—physically and mentally—and he’s having trouble putting his pieces back together. Everyone says he just needs to give it time, but he may not have much of that left. The past is catching up, and it’s not going to wait for him to remember it.

AO3 link!

You dream of the house again that night. This time you run through it, throwing open every door, screaming at the top of your lungs. Not words, just screaming, endless and soundless though it rips the back of your throat. You tear the paintings off the wall and claw at them, as if you could peel the pigment away and uncover the faces you know should be there. There are too many coffins and they’re all empty. There’s no one here but you.

You collapse on the floor and you scream and scream and scream until you wake up, shaking with silent tears.

You lay there, feeling the cold water sliding down the side of your face to drip uncomfortably into your ears. You want this to be over. You want it to go away. You want whoever did this to do what they're going to do so that one way or another, you don't--

Something in your kitchen goes clonk.

There are things in your kitchen that go clonk, but nothing that should go clonk by itself in the middle of the night.

You push the covers away and sit up. You don’t hear anything. You take a deep breath and hold it, trying to hear past your own pounding heart.

Something in your kitchen goes shff-thmp.

There is nothing in your kitchen that should be going shff-thmp at any time of day.

From under your bed, you pull out the crowbar. You had originally intended to buy a baseball bat, but you weren’t satisfied with any of them. The metal ones felt flimsy and every time you picked up a wooden one, you couldn’t stop thinking about how hard it would be for you to break it, and how sharp a point it might make. The crowbar, in contrast, felt nice and solid in your hand, even if your arms couldn’t seem to get the angle of the swing right. You had to keep fighting the instinct to stab with it.

You open your bedroom door very slowly.

There is definitely something going on in your kitchen. You can hear a lot of rustling and thumping, and the occasional muffled grunt. This doesn’t sound like an average home invasion, or even a non-average home invasion.

It takes approximately five million years to creep down the little hallway to the kitchen. Your hands are so sweaty on the crowbar, you almost drop it twice before you get there. At one point, you hear a soft hiss, like an angry cat with the sound turned down.

You have excellent night vision, but when you get to the doorway you can’t make any sense of what you’re seeing. Two shadows lurch back and forth between your kitchen and living room, circling like dancers to music you can’t hear.

You turn the lights on.

Uncle Marco freezes in the middle of attempting to murder a total stranger in your apartment. He has the man pinned to the kitchen counter. Both his hands are wrapped around a long piece of wood, capped at one end in a sheath of silvery metal that ends in a sharp point. The man at the wrong end of that point has his hands gripping Marco’s wrists, trying to hold the weapon at bay.

The stranger's clothes are so old fashioned they have shot past retro and hit ren fair attire. His hair is long and dark and spills across the counter like ink. His face…

Your ears begin to ring.

His face is…

Your head aches like it’s trapped in a vice. You think it might explode. Halos of light burst in the corners of your eyes as you stare at that face.

The face you cannot comprehend goes stark with fear. The stranger calls your name and the voice hits your ears like a death knell, an almost physical force straight to your brain, and you can already feel the blood and the bile rising up.

But the darkness rises faster, and you are falling, and your last thought is I know you.

You wake up in your bed. For a second, you think it was a dream, and you are not sure if that thought comes with relief or despair.

Then you notice the light is coming from the lamp, not the window, and you see Uncle Marco sitting on a chair next to your bed with an expression so grim you almost don’t recognize him beneath it. You sit up, and whatever you were about to say, you don’t, because the stranger is here too.

He stands with his back to you, ramrod stiff behind his cape.

“What’s going on?” you ask. Uncle Marco sighs, heavily, and rubs at his face, clearly wrestling with something.

“This isn’t…how we like to introduce people to this. It’s a lot to take in, even if you aren’t—”

Broken.

“—traumatized.” Uncle Marco sets the silver-pointed stake down on the bed beside you. "You come from a very long line of vampire hunters, descended from Abraham van Helsing. That," he points at the stranger, "is a vampire."

You look at the stake. You look at your uncle. You look at the stranger, who still hasn’t turned around.

Vampire hunters. It has to be a joke. Those aren’t real. Vampires aren’t real.

“I don’t believe you,” you say, even though you’re actually kind of on the fence, because you can’t think of anything else to say.

“Show him,” Uncle Marco orders. “Carefully.”

The stranger half turns towards you, though he keeps his face turned away. He’s standing between you and the full-length mirror on your closet, and at this angle, you should be able to see his face reflected in it.

You can’t. You and your uncle are the only people in your room, according to the mirror.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay, that’s—vampire are real, okay. That—is a thing. Is everyone in the family a vampire hunter?"

"No, not everyone. We're careful about who we bring in. Not everyone can handle it."

"Is Alice--?"

"We're the family quartermasters—we keep everyone outfitted for the field. Weapons, armor, supplies.”

You try to imagine Alice—cheerful, sunny-smiled Alice you’d known your whole life—killing vampires. It’s worryingly easy.

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Your mother said no. It’s not that she didn’t think you couldn’t do it. She thought you wouldn’t have the heart for it. And…well, you know. You always had that…that whole thing about vampires--”

You think about how you were a vampire for Halloween three years in a row, and that your vampire hunting relatives knew about it, and very suddenly want to not be talking about this. You nod at the real live vampire.

“So what is one doing here, in my room?”

You have had this fantasy a thousand times, although it usually involves significantly more smoldering gazes and significantly less Uncle Marco. From a decade away, you can feel your teenaged self asking what exactly is the process and procedure for becoming a vampire and will he do it if I ask very nicely.

You tell yourself that it comes from your teenaged self.

“Magically speaking, the human brain is very…stubborn,” Uncle Marco says. The vampire snorts, which earns him a very dangerous glare to the back of the head. “You can’t just take things out. You can paint over things, or hide them, or wall them off, but it’ll still be in there somewhere. The right word, the right trigger, and it all comes undone. Your brain knows who you’re supposed to be.”

“That’s very interesting,” you say, patiently, knowing what an asshole that makes you sound like even as you say it, “but—”

“You’re cursed.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Uncle Marco’s expression doesn’t change.

“Oh.”

He waits to see if you’ll say anything else. You don’t. Your first instinct is to say “that’s ridiculous”, but you’re looking at a mirror that’s only two-thirds full, so you don't say anything.

“This particular curse hides memories behind the magical equivalent of an electric fence. They’re in there, you might even be able to see them, but every time you to try get at them…”

Headaches and nosebleeds and worse. You think of all those little standalone thoughts, your certainties—such little things, fragments of memories, small enough to slip through the gaps in the fence and make their way to you.

“I don’t know if they were trying to make you forget the last thirteen years, or if they tried to make you forget about vampires and there just…wasn’t anything left over.”

You glance at the vampire again.

“You wanted me to forget you?”

The vampire whirls around. You shut your eyes, but not fast enough.

There is nothing wrong with the vampire’s face. You can see that there was nothing wrong. Objectively, you were aware of a proud nose and a trim beard, and dark eyes, but somewhere between your eyes and your brain, that image scrambles into something you can’t understand. It’s like trying to comprehend infinity. It’s like looking at the inside of your own eyeballs.

You pinch your nose shut, feeling the tell-tale ooze of blood seeping towards freedom. You can’t make out the vampire’s words, just a squeezing pressure on your eardrums, but you do hear your Uncle Marco.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay in here! Look at what you’re doing to him just standing there--!”

“It’s okay!” you say, not opening your eyes, your voice sounding strange through your pinched nostrils. “It’s okay, I want him here. It’s how I know this is actually happening.”

You crack open an eyelid. The vampire has turned back around again. The cape obscures most of the body, but somehow you know what you’d see. Crystal clear in your mind’s eye are the hunched shoulders, the fingers nervously twisting a large ring, even the downcast expression, although you can’t picture the face.

You wish you could picture the face.

You take a tissue from the bedside table and press it to your nose so you can at least sound sort of normal. It is very important that you not look or sound uncool in front of the vampire, which is so high school of you.

"By ‘they’ I mean ‘whoever did this to you’. As much as it pains me to admit it,” this said only slightly sarcastically, “I don’t think he’s the bad guy here. Or at least, not any more of a bad guy than your average blood-sucking monster. He says you worked for him; lived with him and three other vampires as their bodyguard."

Something about that answer feels off. You know, the way you know the other things, that it’s true, but you also think maybe it’s not the whole truth.

"What does a vampire need a bodyguard for?"

"Protecting them from other vampires, mostly, according to him."

You look down at the stake in your hand. It’s in your blood. It’s been your life, all day every day, for the last thirteen years. That many years of memories, it stopped being just stories in your head, it was you. Your body has been shredding itself to pieces trying to work around this curse because there wasn’t enough of you left to work with.

No wonder you’re a wreck.

You look at the vampire again, who is still the way only someone who doesn’t need to breathe can be still.

“Then…what happened?"

"Says he woke up one night and you were gone. They found signs of a struggle in the backyard. Apparently, he had a 'friend' in a werewolf pack and asked her to track your scent. It led them to, and I quote, 'a warehouse full of blood'."

The old wounds on your chest and arms tingle unpleasantly. There are some things you have been glad you don’t remember.

"Then they went to some witches and asked them to help track you down. Well--they wanted to track down your body. Imagine their surprise to hear you were alive and well out here."

Something about that story nags at you. Something doesn't feel quite right, the same way saying you were this vampire’s bodyguard doesn’t feel quite right.

"Witches and werewolves."

"They're real," Uncle Marco starts to say.

"No, I believe you, I just--I get the feeling like...I remember you guys don't get along with those two groups of people."

The vampire nods.

"But you went to them anyway?"

Nod.

"Why?"

The vampire takes a step backwards, then another.

“Careful,” Uncle Marco says, warningly.

The vampire reaches out and feels blindly along the bed until his hand bumps against your leg. He wraps his hand around your ankle and squeezes gently. Then he lets go, very hurriedly, as if he is embarrassed.

You glance at Uncle Marco, who has gone very still. His eyes are narrowed and his mouth is a thin, hard line. It makes you feel nervous the way you felt nervous when your mother found all those Interview with a Vampire pictures under your bed.

“Uncle Marco, could you give us a minute?” you ask.

“No,” says Uncle Marco.

Fortunately, you are not twelve this time.

“Uncle Marco,” you say, very firmly, “please give me, a grown man, a minute alone, in my own room in my own apartment.”

Uncle Marco looks surprised, and you don’t blame him. The entire time you’ve been in Denver, the firmest you’ve managed has hovered somewhere below ‘al dente noodle’.

“Alright,” he says, warily, but he casts a meaningful look at the stake, and doesn’t take it from you when he goes.

You test your nose, and find it’s stopped bleeding. You take a notebook out of your bedside table. You’d bought it with the intention of using it to write down the things you remembered. The first few pages are spattered with results of that little exercise.

You flip to a clean page and lean forward to set the notebook and pen next to the vampire’s hand. The vampire hesitates, then picks it up.

“What’s your name?” you ask. The vampire shakes his head. “Please.”

Another, more emphatic shake. The curiosity is killing you, but you know he’s making the smart call. It’d probably make your brain explode.

“I’m not really your bodyguard, am I?”

The vampire nods and scribbles something in the notebook.

You were my familiar, first.

You are not surprised to see that he writes in a curling and elegant hand. You reach into your bedside drawer again, and take out the note. You’d forgotten about it in your hurry to mail the wallet back to Nicoli Bronson, but you’d been relieved, not worried, when you found it. It had been hidden so well in your wallet, you’re sure they wouldn’t have known it was there.

You’ve been keeping it close, because it still makes you smile every time you look at it. And it feels so good to smile.

You hold it out to him. He inhales sharply. Tentatively, he takes it from your fingers. You see the edges of the paper tremble slightly, though he’s only holding it by his fingertips, as if afraid he might damage it.

“I found it in my wallet,” you say, softly. Even though you know the answer, you ask “Did you write it?”

He very carefully passes the note back to you, and nods once.

“What does it mean?”

The vampire starts to write in the notebook. Stops. Starts. Stops. Sighs.

It’s a very long story. You killed vampires, we did not kill you for it, because you saved our lives.

He reaches out and rests his hand on your knee. Actually, slightly above your knee. To your despair, you begin to blush, which is stupid, because you are reading too much into it, you have to be.

But God help you, you are alone in your bedroom with a vampire, which has been your deepest and most secret wish since you hit puberty. Your brain keeps making abortive attempts to imagine things it has no right to be imagining right now. It’s ping-ponging back and forth between the curse headaches and your own repression, but absolutely refusing to give up, like a bumblebee knocking into a window.

You notice that even though you can feel the weight of his hand through the sheet, you can’t feel any warmth. You wonder if vampires have no body heat. Out of purely scientific curiosity, you reach for his hand.

Then you lunge for him, hurling yourself out of the bed and grabbing him by the waist, dragging you both down to the floor.

Now look, you think sternly to your body as you fall feather-slowly, the world crystalizing around you such that each heartbeat takes a thousand years, I know we’re a little disappointed about how this scene is shaking out, but the response to not being ravished by a vampire is not do the ravishing ourselves.

Your body does not respond, but it doesn’t need to—the front brain has caught up with the hind brain reflexes and noticed the silver-tipped crossbow bolt that punched through your window, currently hovering in mid-flight straight towards where the vampire’s head had been.

Ah, you think, somewhat embarrassed. Carry on.

You hit the ground with a thud, nearly cracking your skulls together.

You hear Uncle Marco thundering down the hallway and twist yourself around. He starts to throw the door open and you kick out with both legs, slamming it shut again.

“Don’t!” you say. “Crossbow bolt came straight through my window.”

“Are you—"

“We’re okay. I need to get the light out before we can stand up.”

The vampire slithers out from beneath you. There is a shudder in the air, a blurring motion, and you are plunged into darkness.

In the space of half a breath, the vampire had crossed the room, turned out the lights, and come back to crouch beside you.

It is incredibly sexy of him, to be quite honest.

Focus.

You crawl across the floor to your closet and open the door, grateful it opens away from the window, and your attacker won’t see the shifting reflection of the mirror. You’d have done this even if it had opened the wrong way, though. You don’t care how high school it makes you, you are not walking around in front of a hot vampire in your boxers and a ratty band t-shirt your cousin lent you.

You hope you don’t actually look like you dressed in the dark.

“Guillermo?” your uncle calls.

“Back away from the door, we’re coming out.”

You slide out into the hallway, crouched low. It’s only when the door is carefully shut that you and the vampire both stand. Your uncle is giving you the strangest look, half-proud, half-amazed.

You are still holding the stake. You realize you never put it down, except when you were getting changed.

Something inside of you snaps.

It’s not a shattering of sanity, or the breaking of a dam. It feels like the first crack in an eggshell. The click of a key in a lock.

Your front door thuds loudly as someone tries to open it and is stopped by the shiny new deadbolt you’d purchased along with the crowbar.

You are instantly standing between the vampire and the exit, stake at the ready. Shit, you think, I am a vampire bodyguard.

“What is this? Vampires?”

Some shuffling behind you.

“He says he hears a heartbeat,” Uncle Marco says, lowly.

The front door rattles—you’re not sure how they plan to open the deadbolt and you have no intention of finding out. You drop low, out of sight of the windows, and scurry across to the front door. You can hear someone muttering and swearing on the other side. You brace yourself, your grip firm and comfortable on the stake in your hand.

You snap open the deadbolt, jerk the door open, and come centimeters from impaling your cousin Alice through the heart.

“Jesus fuck!” she yelps, dropping the lockpicks in her hand.

You grab her and haul her inside, slamming the door shut.

“What are you doing?” you hiss

“Saving your butt!” she hisses back. “There’s like five guys stalking your apartment build—what the fuck.”

You don’t need to turn around to know what she’s looking at.

“I was his bodyguard. Whoever grabbed me cursed me so I’d forget working for him, but because I’ve been doing nothing but that, it took out the whole thirteen years.”

“Okay,” Alice says, with very clearly forced calm. “That explains why the Order of Rhodes is here.”

Uncle Marco swears, quietly but explosively.

To your surprise, so does the vampire. You assume it’s a swear because it has the right tone—you don’t hear the words, just a pressure on your eardrums that makes your teeth grind.

You hate being the only one not in the loop.

“Who?”

“They’re a vampire hunting organization.” She glances at the stake in your hand and adds, “No relation to us. They’ve basically turned vampire hunting into a religious cult. Absolutely nutbars--part of their initiation is tattooing crucifixes on their necks with ink made out of holy water.”

A terrible prickling feeling goes up your spine, and a wave of nausea unfurls behind it. You want to shut your eyes, but you don’t, against the image that flashes much too clearly to be your imagination. Someone bending down so they are face-to-face with you, although your memory has no more faces than your dreams do, faded black ink wrapping around their neck.

“They’re zealots,” Uncle Marco snaps. “They cross lines no one should touch.” He gives you a look that is both sad and angry, which makes you want to cry. “A Van Helsing working for a vampire is exactly the kind of thing they’d decide is a sin to be punished.”

Hands rest on your shoulders. You are very aware of the vampire standing behind you. His grip is strong and protective and it sends goosebumps rippling down your arms and you pray to whatever god there is that it doesn’t show on your face.

Alice’s eyebrows go up, but she’s not looking at your face. She’s looking at the vampire’s.

“We have to get you out of here,” Uncle Marco said. “We have a safehouse. Alice?”

Alice pulls out her phone, hits two buttons, and something in the near distance goes whumph. You wait for one, two, three seconds, and then the fire alarm goes off, blaring up and down the hallway outside.

“We’ll lose them in the crowd,” Alice says, like it’s totally normal that she’s just done whatever the hell she just did.

“Alice! What have I told you about explosives? Think before you use them! Look at how he’s dressed! He can’t blend in!”

Suddenly a pair of cool hands are pressed over your ears. The vampire is standing very close to you, and you can feel his voice reverberating from his chest to your back and you really really hope he doesn’t notice how warm your ears are getting under his hands.

Five minutes later, you join your neighbors, stumbling half-dressed down the hallway. You resist the urge to look down the front of your jacket.

Outside, you feel jittery and exposed, your eyes darting wildly from building to building. The people hunting you may not know you have the vampire with you, but they do know what you look like. They knew where your apartment was. How long have they been watching you? Why did they wait this long? Why the mocking note and the threatening phone call?

Why the warning?

Alice’s car is in the parking lot; you pile in and she pulls out just as the first fire truck approaches.

You give into temptation and pull the collar of your jacket forward, peering down. The bat’s little claws are curled in your sweater, pulling the threads loose. It was shifting around a lot when you first left the apartment, but now it has settled with its head turned to the side and resting on your chest. Its eyes are closed. You wonder if it has somehow fallen asleep.

As though sensing your gaze, the bat suddenly looks up. It lets out a tiny squeak.

You wonder why you can look at the vampire when it’s like this.

There are so many questions you want answered, so many things you want to ask him, and you know you probably wouldn’t be able to hear any of the answers. All the same, it brings a sense of relief, and comfort.

At least you know that they did look for you.

You try to remind yourself to ask who they are.

#wwdits #guillermo de la cruz #nandor the relentless #nandermo #fic: the mirror crack'd #what we blog in the shadows #things r happening

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