1Endless Night:

Fires of Hell and Heaven

Part 1

What people don’t understand about demons is that the most powerful of us are blocked from ever seeing the light of day. We’re creatures of darkness and fire. We’re not bad exactly, but our power was made only with destruction in mind. Just like angels were made for healing. It’s the balance of nature.

There was never anything said about being fallen angels or the sources of evil. We’ve been demons since creation and will continue to be demons until the day we die.

It was something I hated growing up. To know that no matter what I did with my life, I was still just a demon, still at the mercy of the hierarchy I was born into. Humans have it easy. Maybe a specific society can create a caste for them to fall into but should they choose, they can break free from that caste and be something other than what they were born as. They can move up or down or even sideways along the various ladders of society, fortune, and whatnot. They could even become something very different than what their genetics dictate they should be, such as creatures of the night or prophets.

Demons like me could only be jealous of the freedom they had been given.

I sighed and flopped over on my back. The vampire twins were sleeping the daylight away. It didn’t much matter that the basement they lived in was dark as pitch; so long as the sun was above the horizon, they were forced into a sleeping state. I wondered a bit what they did in summer with the shorter nights. They must sleep an awful lot.

I was sprawled in the middle of the floor, right in the way of anyone walking. Of course, the twins weren’t going to be moving for several more hours, so I was safe.

They had the nicest floor for lying on, fully covered in thick rugs that took away the sting of cold concrete. Here and there were random pillows of all shapes and sizes and fabrics. There was Amethyst’s bed in the darkest corner of the room. I found it odd that it wasn’t resting against a single wall, especially since I’d seen his penchant for thrashing in his sleep and just how high off the ground that bed was. Even after he’d rolled off the mattress several days ago, he hadn’t moved the bed.

The thing that Indigo slept on looked very much like an elegant couch. It was close enough to her brother’s bedside that she could see him but not within arms reach. I wasn’t sure what the couch was called but it looked really uncomfortable. The only other piece of furniture in the house was the table set at the foot of Amethyst’s bed. That, however, appeared mostly to be used as a storage device and not as its standard function in a household.

I rolled again, this time curling into a ball on my side. The sun was up. Not only did I know this by the fact that my vampire master was sleeping but also, I just knew. The sun was very different than the fires of hell, but it was still fire; my body naturally kept track of its rise and fall. In the month since my new bond had been forged, I’d grown more and more listless and yet more and more restless as well. The passage of time was marked by my fidgeting and nervous twitches. The odd behavior all stemmed from an urge to be lounging on a rock somewhere, soaking up the light.

Yet, at the same time, I found myself lacking the proper motivation to get up and bathe in the blessed warmth. A major part of the lack was that I was also terrified that Indigo wasn’t really sleeping and any move on my part that appeared to be an escape would end with me being torn limb from limb. I had no doubt in my mind that she would gladly follow through with every threat she’d made towards my person should she feel I warranted such an attack.

I uncurled and stretched, arching my back in a manner that was decidedly cat-like. It was rather funny how close dragons were to cats. Many people didn’t think so, as dragons were definitely lizards, but their manners were similar enough to cats that I halfway believed that the two might be far off cousins.

“Aubrey,” a voice whispered from the vicinity of the bed.

My stretch stopped mid-way, my arms still reaching above my head. I raised an eyebrow towards the speaker, forgetting that he probably couldn’t see the expression in this darkness. “Yes?” I asked back, my voice barely above the sound of a breath. My throat was healing very nicely. Part of that was the small amount of Amethyst’s blood and power I had drunk a month back, though the other part was simply because I was a demon and we tended to heal quickly anyway. Being only half demon meant I couldn’t reattach severed limbs, but I didn’t have too much trouble fixing minor damage. So long as angelic items weren’t involved, I could heal fine. After a month with the blood meal as a booster, I could finally speak again but only at a low, whispery volume and only for short periods of time. Anything more was still too much a strain on newly repaired tissue.

Amethyst’s snort was soft and free of its usual rancor. “Go outside.” The words were slow and felt like velvet against my ears. Amethyst is the more powerful of the twins, but his own inability to grasp just how powerful he is clouds his judgment. He believes himself weak because he controls himself so much that he has never seen evidence of his actual strength.

“Hm?” The sound of his sleepy voice made me want to go to take a nap. Although, considering the amount of time I slept around this place, more sleep was probably a bad idea.

“Fucking can’t sleep if you can’t stay still.” Okay, so that sounded just a tad irritated. The presence of the sun in the sky made Amethyst slow; he wasn’t going to be getting up and braining me any time soon, but if I annoyed him too much now, he might find a way to take it out on me later. My master loved a good joke. Unfortunately, Amethyst’s idea of humor was laughing at someone else’s expense.

Humming softly in compliance, I climbed to my feet and headed for the door. Opening it without flooding the basement with killer sunlight proved to be a challenge, but I solved it by hanging a thick blanket over the doorway.

The basement the twins lived in belonged to a house – an old fashioned manor, really. The subterranean room had been a cellar or pantry at one point in time. I sincerely doubt the original owner had had “vampire nest” in mind when he’d build it, though it served well enough. The twins had made the place beyond livable with their luxurious rugs padding the floor and ancient tapestries covering the stone walls. They had even extended the original plumbing down into a sectioned off room for a shower room. The two above-ground levels of the house were another story entirely.

There were twenty rooms upstairs including a kitchen, dining room, and receiving room. The first floor was spacious, all the rooms so empty they echoed. Glass from broken windows littered the floor and fabric and paneling peeled from the walls. The second floor bedrooms still contained furniture, though much of it was dusty and home to rodents and the like.

I had found myself wandering the empty halls a handful of times but always retreated back to the basement before too long. There was something so sad and lonely in this house that it made me uncomfortable to walk through it by myself.

Even in the daylight, I slipped through its silent walls quickly to be free of its heavy air.

Outside, the sun was a welcome heat. The twins’ basement home was very beautiful, but it lacked anything in the way of warmth. As powerful superhuman beings, they didn’t feel the weather like everyone else did.

The front door squealed shut behind me and I leaned against it, closing my eyes in bliss. Humans say their skin tingles like pins and needles when sleeping nerves reawaken. After a month of darkness and moonlight, my skin may as well have been waking up. These tingles felt more like little fires erupting over my hands and face, wherever the light could touch. And man oh man did that feel nice.

--

“This is what you’ve been doing all day?”

I sighed internally to have it be my more favorite twin. There was only so much in the way of death threats and meaningful glares a guy can take before he starts becoming unnerved every time a certain evil mistress comes near. I wasn’t going to tell Amethyst about his sister’s behavior though. Somehow that seemed like tattling and just a little on the childish side.

Rolling onto my stomach, I wrinkled my nose at my master. /I couldn’t tear myself away from my rock. The sun felt too good./

Amethyst barked a short laugh, stepping out from under the shadow of the house and into the path of moonlight.

The appearance of a vampire was something else the humans hadn’t quite caught onto. They’d noticed right on that vampires were unnaturally beautiful. They had that half-right. The newly made vampires were barely more than the humans they had been. If they had been an ugly bastard as a human, they still were as a vampire. The only difference was their ability to create a lure towards those weaker in mind and spirit than them. It was a natural impulse in them that allowed them to feed until their power grew.

However the more vampires grew in power, the better predators they became. A vampire was not an unchanging rock in the stream of time, no matter how much they liked to believe they were. They were more adaptable than even humans and changed as was needed in order for their species to survive.

I had met a few vampires upon their births and had seen them again during later summons to the human realm. The vampires would look nothing like their original selves. They were more beautiful, more striking. Nothing had been taken away from them ultimately or else they might all become copies of one image in the end. Instead, the power that made them vampire refined them until their beauty was deadly. Even vampires born as children didn’t remain untouched by this change. Eventually they grew into the sensuous creations of legends, though they were barely taller than their juvenile selves.

It’s not easy to tell a vampire’s age by looks alone. Some creatures of the night are just born beautiful and the power has less work to do. If a person has been around vampires often enough, however, they can immediately spot an elder vampire out of a crowd.

First there was the way they moved. It’s not cat-like despite what most of the books will tell us. Their movements are more like those of ghosts, that gliding, unhurried grace that no amount of physics can stop. Put a brick wall in front of an elder and I assure you they will find a way to go right through it if they feel they should.

Elders also have a certain color to their skin that makes them look like they’re made of porcelain. It’s a white so pure their faces eventually start to resemble geisha dolls and their lips somehow always manage to stay red no matter how old they are.

The most telling sign of an elder is their eyes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they look like aged souls or anything like that. Children growing up in poverty can take on that look too. No, elders have a certain glow to their eyes, one that only gets stronger the more emotional the elder becomes.

The twins were elders. I had known even before I’d tasted the age in Amethyst’s blood. Only elders could leak as much power as they did. But given that not many creatures can feel the energies of others, Indigo was the only one of the pair who would be noted as being an elder by appearance alone.

I could watch my master all day and would still be hard-put to find the clues that told me he was an elder.

Somehow, he managed to be the clumsiest vampire I had ever met outside of the new bloods. He had the beauty, but his was a rough sort accomplished with frizzy hair in need of a brush and clothing that had ragged hems. At least his skin was the right color, though there might have been numerous reasons for such.

The oddest part of all was the fact that his eyes didn’t glow. By all accounts they should, especially with the amount of power he possessed. As I watched him come towards me in the silver moonlight, I noted again the lack of light to his violet eyes. He looked a normal human, albeit a rather pale one.

“We’re a funny pair, I’m thinking,” Amethyst told me in his quiet voice. The following grin bared his little fangs shamelessly. “You being so full of fucking sunshine and me being so fucked if I ever come near it.”

I snickered. /Poetic. Except for the part where you cursed./ There was something in me urging to say something stupid and sappy about being the only sunshine he could get. No need to deepen the mood like that though.

The grass whispered against the silk of his pants as he sat down next to me. “That’s me,” he quipped as I rolled over to sit beside him, “I’m all cultured to a fault.”

To a fault was right. Amethyst could quote you lines from old books and plays but each and every one of them ended up vastly different than the author’s original intent. And every time he related bits of historical facts, little vulgar stories made it into the mix. He’d just told a rather lengthy one the night prior involving a Confederate soldier and a prostitute. I wasn’t sure of the reason for these bawdy tales other than to ply his own strange sense of humor and to drive his sister to distraction.

The silence between us had gone on for several minutes when Amethyst scared me half to death by lifting one of my hands. His delicate fingers traced lightly over the dark gold scales drawing patterns over my skin. Hours soaking in sun fires had made the scales give off light like sleepy coals.

“You have dragon scales,” he murmured in a tone that sounded of child-like awe.

I hummed in agreement. Of course I had dragon scales. Wasn’t that what dragons were supposed to have?

“Why do they make designs like this? How is it you don’t have them all over?” His fingers trailing over my scales were giving me goose bumps. Scales were the best armor known to demon-kind, but the skin underneath them was also the most sensitive skin a dragon possessed.

I didn’t pull my hand away, but instead watched those pale fingers trace the scrolling pattern of one patch of scales. My heart was pounding loudly in my ears and I wondered at it. This wasn’t any different than the reactions of every other summoner on their first glimpse of my true form. /All dragons have the patterns, but as a half dragon mine are more apparent than a full blood’s. In dragon society, the marks are used to identify specific bloodlines or traits./

“So your mother had marks like these?” He looked up from my hand and met my gaze levelly. No magic flared at the contact though I could feel his power simmering under his control.

This was starting to become unnerving. /Yes./ I was relieved at how calm my voice sounded when all I wanted to do was yank my hand from his and run back into the relative safety of the house. For some reason, facing Indigo’s deadly fury seemed preferable to his touching me.

“You’re glowing. All over.” My breath stopped completely when he reached up and touched my cheek gently. “Here.” The fingers moved to the mark on my forehead. “Here.” The hand dropped to my shoulder and he leaned in until I could feel his breath on my skin and smell the copper scent of vampire. “You smell like sun too. It’s like you took it in and kept it to show the night.”

My mind reminded me of my earlier mental deviations on vampires being alluring because they are predators. A shiver spread throughout my body as I wondered what he had in mind to do. Ultimately, I was the more powerful of us two, but he was still the master. Whatever he said, I had to do. It was hard to breathe with those thoughts running through my head and his cold nose brushing my skin.

He hadn’t moved though. He just seemed to be inhaling my sunny qualities.

/Are you going to eat me?/

He smiled against my neck but retreated, letting go of my shoulder and sitting back to watch the moon rise. “No. I don’t feed much. You just smell nice.”

I eyed his profile for several long minutes. He knew I was watching but that didn’t seem to bother him. There was something seriously wrong with a vampire who could shove themselves into a person’s neck and not be tempted to drink, elder or no. It was like waving wine under an alcoholic’s nose.

Amethyst was nothing if not stubborn. If I’d been some blinded fool of a human I might have shrugged it off, but I wasn’t. I was vampiric too. I knew the taste and call of blood.

Something was wrong with Amethyst. Something other than his twisted sense of humor.