84. Vampires are Demons to be Hunted

I wake up stretched out on the stones, staring up at the ceiling. I blacked out, and I didn’t think I’d ever wake, but I touch my hand to my cheek and find to my devastation that all the damage has fully healed. Holy water can burn us, but I guess I can’t kill myself with it. Not that easily. Still, I should at least try drinking it before giving up. I can’t wait until sunrise. I need to be punished, after what I did...

I sit up slowly. Then I see Father Patrick, staring at me wide-eyed with a revolver in his hands, of all things. “Hello father,” I greet him numbly, climbing to my feet and reaching for the chalice on the altar intended to be used for communion. “Nice gun. You don’t need to shoot though. I’ll be dead at dawn, even if this doesn’t…” I lift that golden cup now filled to the brink with holy water to my lips, and I try to force it down. My body refuses to comply, and I spew it out onto the floor in a spray of blood and steam, as the chalice drops from my shaking hands. I drop to my knees, raising my eyes to the heavens. “I guess I have to wait for sunrise,” I gasp, seared vocal chords already fully functional again.

“Oh, child, I should have never permitted you to leave our flock and return to those creatures. I knew it was feeding from you, using you, but I never thought he’d… do this.”

I cock my head, staring him down in cold assessment. “You know about vampires?” For all the graphic details I gave him alongside my confessions, I never mentioned that part to him – that Luc was a blood-sucking immortal, because I would have sounded crazy. That and… Luc asked me not to tell. He trusted me to keep it secret.

“Yes, Julian,” the priest sighs, with gun never moving from its steady held aim -- pointed straight at my chest. “I know. I saw the scars: the fangs marks on your neck, but I was hoping you would confess it on your own. I was hoping you’d come back here, much sooner than this. Now it’s too late, but you… You seem to know this. You did not wish for him to steal your soul? You did not wish to be turned?”

“No,” I confess. “And it’s not just what I am. It’s what I’ve done. I killed them, father. My own parents. I… I just wanted to see them again. It had been so long, but I…” I wish I could cry about it. I can’t force a single tear. All I can do is stare blankly at the floor and replay the memory, feeling nothing but distant echoes of horror and self-loathing. “I need to be punished.”

“You need to be put down,” he agrees, cocking back the hammer. “I will give you last rites, even if it be a blasphemy, and pray that your soul may somehow return to salvation.”

“Thank you. But… I don’t think I’ll die from you shooting me.” Antonio’s been shot dozens of times since he turned apparently, right in the skull, and in his heart, but the damage always heals. Our only weakness is sunlight, or so I at the time believed.

Father Patrick shakes his head. “You know little, child. This consecrated weapon has been passed down from the Vatican. It will end any vampire, no matter how ancient, if the aim is true.” I exhale, feeling my cold, dead heart swell with twisted relief at the news. “The church has been the guardians, protecting our flock from the forces of darkness, and I have long kept the peace in this city. I was an exorcist, a trained vampire hunter in my younger days, and Luscious is a demon I have long known exactly where to find.” I stiffen. “I would have long since put a bullet in his forehead, had the pope not forbidden me from doing so.” He grinds his teeth, still eyeing me in clear dismay and heartbreak. “The amount of vulnerable souls he has corrupted, taken, killed… Yet apparently, he keeps the peace. The sinners are to be left to his corruptive clutches until they come to us for refuge, to repent and be cleansed, as you… as you did, at first.”

“You should have told me all of this then,” I murmur. “Maybe then I would have believed you. Maybe then I could have stayed away, and they would both still be…” My eyes lock back with his own. “Don’t bother with the rites. Just shoot me. Now. Put me out of my--”

Luc comes right up behind my priest and breaks his neck, knocking the gun to the side as he compulsively fires, so that the bullet ricochets off into the pews.

I stare at him in horrified judgment. “Why would you do that? Why are you here?!”

“The neighbors heard your little ‘domestic dispute’, Jules,” Luc snaps. “You’re lucky it was *my* police force to uncover that mess. I never expected you to actually…” He exhales, raking a hand through his hair. He holds out his hand. “Come here. We’re going home.”

“You said you’d never control me,” I remind him numbly, as my body starts to take an involuntary step, right up to that outstretched hand.

He rolls his eyes. “That was not a fucking order, but it is what will inevitably happen. Look, I… I am sorry about your parents,” he forces out: a shallow and token condolence. “But that is now three, fresh bodies I have to go covering up, making sure the Vatican never hears about how this one truly died.” He gestures dismissively to Father Patrick’s corpse.

“You really are the devil,” I breathe, and his eyes narrow in annoyance.

“*You* are the one who is causing all this chaos,” he acidly retorts. “Now come home, and make it up to me already.” He’s already turned his back, heading for the doors. He just enforced that his statements are not orders though, and that is the only reason I retain any capacity to resist the compulsion to fall meekly into line at his back. I grab the revolver up off the floor instead. I press it right to my temple, and I move to pull the trigger.

Luc is unnervingly fast, faster than a bullet even. He heard the click of that hammer, and he was on me in a second. The bullet goes up into the ceiling, and we stand locked in place, just inches apart, with his hand in crushing grip, right overtop my own. “Did you just fucking try to shoot yourself?!”

“I deserve to die.”

“No.” Those eyes hold me pinned, alarmed and insistent. “It was an accident, Jules. You deserve to be forgiven. That’s why you came to a fucking church. And forgiven you are. I absolve you, alright?”

“No. I want to die,” I clarify, pulling on the gun. He is leagues stronger than I am. I can’t get it to budge.

“You are not going to die,” he grates, cupping the back of my head.

“I’m already--”

“Stop fucking saying you are dead! Never say it, not ever again. It is a fucking lie!”

His eyes glow with command, and my jaw clicks shut. I force it back open, “Was that--?”

“Yes it was a fucking order. You will never say that again, and you will not, ever, shoot yourself.”

The gun drops limp to my side, and I stare at him in powerless, accusing, frustration.

He toys with my hand, studying the weapon in calm evaluation. “You will never hurt yourself with this, but… You can keep it,” he resolves. “If Roman comes near again… Be smart about it, Jules. He is fast, even faster than I am, but if he tries to touch you, to hurt you like that again, you blow his fucking head off, alright? That’s not an order. I just…” He cups a hand to my cheek. “Protect yourself.”

I didn’t. I was still his powerless tool, revolver or no. I became a damn good shot, dangerous in my own right, but I still let every vampire in that coven do whatever it is they wanted with my body, working my way through bedroom after bedroom, one at a time, for years, after he forced me back down into the darkness. I stopped letting Luc touch me, because if he wanted it from me, then what I wanted didn’t matter, not at all. He could just order me to fuck him and behave however he fancied. He never crossed that line though. He would only have sex with me of my own free will, so I used that joking semblance of ‘free will’ to shun him and cheat on him with anyone who would have me, regardless of how repulsive and brutal their kinks.

Luc watched it all on his cameras and displayed obvious outrage and disgust, but he still refused to be done with me. He would not let me walk out into the sunlight. He wouldn’t let me shoot myself, but I did wind up shooting Roman.

I did it decades later, and it wasn’t for my sake. I did it to save Luc, once I learned he actually wasn’t the pleasured partner of his breathtaking sire. He had endured worse abuse than I ever could have survived, and now Roman was about to literally crucify him, so I put a bullet in his skull, exactly like Luc had so long ago suggested.

Luc says if he did not truly love me before that night, he surely did ever after. He saw me, the real me, someone fierce and protective and selfless to the point of stupidity. He used to claim that I was perfect in his eyes… Still, he has never meaningfully apologized for ruining me, taking away everything I once held dear.

Now I’m alone in his city with nothing to lose, and I use this gun, gifted to me with the murder of my former priest, to eliminate yet another greedy, mockery of life.