Dancing in the Dark - 8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8.

Viktor got up and left the room around thirty seconds after I started cleaning up. I picked up my flechettes from the floor, frowning as I checked the blades. I loved flechettes for torture, but they blunted very easily. I went through four with Emma. I cleaned them quickly and put them back into my suitcase with the collar and remote that Viktor and I had used together the night before. I posted a little sticky note the case of the flechettes to remind me when this was all over that I would have to sharpen them. The salt went back into the kitchen.

I retrieved my Gigli saw from the suitcase and took that into the bathroom to start cutting up Emma. I could hear Viktor in my living room, pacing. Back in the bathroom I studied Emma for a moment. Her throat gaped where I had sliced it, and a huge amount of her blood had spilled down her front. I sighed and began at her ankles, cutting her into smaller, more easily transportable pieces.

I had just worked my way up to Emma’s arms when Viktor came back in. He was looking a little embarrassed for some reason.

“Sorry,” he said with a small smile. I straightened up and looked at him, confused.

“For what?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean to melt down like that. It took me a minute to wrap my head around it all. I…it’s been a strange couple of days. Months, actually,” Viktor looked off to the side, not really looking at anything, just staring at something in his own mind. I put my saw down and stepped out of the tub to wrap my arms around him. His came around me, but I think it was more an automatic movement than anything.

“I hate that we met like this,” I murmured into his chest.

“I’m just glad I finally met you,” he whispered back. I tilted my head back and looked at him, and our eyes met for a moment. I couldn’t help but smile at him, and was relieved when he smiled back.

“What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing with his chin towards Emma.

“Oh, well, we need to get rid of her, so I figured I’d chop her up and we can take her to my friend Jeremy and feed his pigs. Then we need to go to my storage container, and then we’ll head to a safe house for the day.”

“Oh…ok, do you need help?”

I smiled up at my vampire and nodded. “Sure, if you want to go and grab some garbage bags from the kitchen that would be great,” I said. Viktor nodded, kissed my temple and then went out to get the bags. I got back in the tub and resumed cutting.

I worked the rest of the way through Emma’s wrist, tossed the now severed hand down to the other end of the tub. Viktor came back in with the roll of garbage bags and sat with crossed legs next to the tub, where he started bagging up various body parts.

“So how old are you?” he asked after a moment.

“Physically, or actually?” I replied.

“Both.” He smiled.

“I stopped aging when I was around twenty two, I think, maybe twenty three. That was around two hundred and eighty years ago.”

“So that makes you a bit over three hundred then,” Viktor said.

“Yeah, I think so. I can’t actually remember what year I was born, but I was brought here as an indentured servant to a family who were part of the colonisation of Georgia, so I think I was born somewhere between 1705 and 1715. I can’t be sure though, because it took me a while to realise I wasn’t aging, and I never really kept track of the years back then.”

“How did you discover you were immortal?” With a final jerk I pulled the saw through Emma’s elbow joint then picked up the forearm and handed it to Viktor. He took it from me, but didn’t put it in a bag, just looked at me expectantly. I sighed and looked back down at Emma.

“I didn’t,” I said finally, and went to work on severing her upper arm from her torso. Viktor didn’t say anything for a moment, waiting for me to elaborate. I didn’t.

“So . . . .”

“So, what?”

“There had to be a point at which you realised you were immortal Mark,” Viktor said. I stopped sawing and stared at him. I knew he was just curious, but as much as I liked him, and we had this thing between us, there was no way I was going to talk about that. Not ever.

I stared at Viktor until he dropped his eyes from mine. He was fiddling with the piece of arm he still held in his hands, not seeming to mind that it was dripping blood in his lap. I went back to work. We didn’t say anything for a little while.

“Do you have family?” he asked when I tossed him the rest of Emma’s arm. I stared at him and the piece of human arm he was now placing in a garbage bag with the rest of it, and laughed.

“What?” he asked.

“We’re chopping Emma here into little pieces and getting ready to make her pig food and you want to know if I have family?” I asked incredulously. Viktor’s face warmed into a rosy glow. I didn’t know that vampires could blush.

“Well, I want to get to know you. We’re kind of stuck with each other for the rest of our lives you know, it would be nice to know you,” he mumbled.

“Ha, ok,” I agreed with a smile. “No, I don’t have family. I’m an orphan. That’s how I got my name, actually, my last name anyway.”

“How you…what?”

“My last name, Atwood. I was found on the edges of a forest, when I was around five or so I guess. Mark was a pretty common name back then as well, and there were three or four others at the church that took me in, and everyone just started referring to me as Mark Atwood, as in Mark who was found at the wood,” I shrugged. “It was the only thing that was mine for a long time, so I’ve kept it all these years.”

Viktor smiled at this and we kept on chatting as we worked. Viktor had a seemingly endless list of questions for me, and I answered most of them, but there were a few things I wouldn’t answer, like when he asked me how I got into the assassin business. And when he asked me about my friends I didn’t mention Miri. The last thing she would want was a vampire finding out about her.

After Emma was all chopped up and bagged, we cleaned the bathroom, bleaching every surface until Viktor could no longer smell blood. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would, mostly because Viktor could move really fast when he wanted to. We picked up the bags of Emma and headed out after it was clean. In the elevator on the way down I started asking Viktor questions.

“So, when were you turned?” I asked.

“1876.” He smiled at me, looking pleased that I was finally asking about him.

“How does that work anyway?” I asked, elaborating when he gave me a questioning look. “How does one get turned?”

“Oh, there’s this huge magic ritual you have to follow, it’s actually really hard. Only mated pairs can do it, and only heterosexual ones at that.”

“Really?” I was surprised, although I’m not sure why. Anything I knew about vampires that didn’t involve how to kill them I knew from popular myth, and I already knew from experience that a lot of the stuff about how to kill a vampire was completely wrong.

“Well yeah, I mean it’s like nearly every other creature in the world right, you have to have a male and a female to breed. Just because we’re kind of magical and don’t actually breed doesn’t mean we don’t need the basic ingredients to create more of ourselves.” I glanced at Viktor sidelong as we stepped out of the elevator. He seemed kind of pissed. I got the feeling this was a subject he liked to rant about.

“Right . . .” I said, “and how old were you when you turned?”

Viktor visibly shook himself and then smiled at me. “Twenty six,” he answered. I popped the trunk on my car and we unceremoniously shoved Emma in.

It took about forty minutes to drive out to Jeremy’s farm, and on the way I learned that Viktor was a bit of a nerd. Well, not a nerd, but a scholar certainly. He had worked in a lot of universities over the decades, or attended them, and had completed so many courses it made my head spin. He was really smart. Not just because he had the time to take all the courses, but he had an eidetic memory, which was the main reason he was turned. His role in the vampire community was to document their history and rituals accurately.

He was born in the Austrian Empire in 1850, in what is now known as the Czech Republic, and moved to the United States during World War II like so many other vampires did because they feared being discovered. Not that that mattered after they revealed themselves to the world at large in the 1990s, after the humans’ weaponry and forensic skills began developing at an exponentially rapid rate.

We were just moving on to the subject of his family, both human and vampire when we arrived at Jeremy’s. I pulled up to the house and glanced at the clock. It was after 2am, and I grimaced. Jeremy was not going to be happy with me waking him up this late. Viktor got out of the car with me but waited by it while I went to knock on the door.

It took a while, but Jeremy finally came stomping to the door with muttered curses about jerks waking him up in the middle of the night needing good reasons to do so. He cracked the door open and looked through.

“Hey, Jeremy, it’s just me,” I said with a smile. He stared at me for a moment, clearly deciding how angry he was going to be with me, and then he opened the door fully and stepped out hug me. He had just barely touched me when Viktor was there, pulling me back away from him and growling that sexy animal growl.

“Mine,” he snarled.