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There is a faint memory lingering at the back of Owen’s memory.
It was from back when he was a young child, before his illness flared up and tore his family apart, before it caused his mother to look at him with shame rather than the love she showered the rest of her children with. He had sat at a table beside his brothers and sisters, the wood beneath his bitten fingernails lovingly carved by his father’s hand, worn and familiar.
‘Hey! Hey, Owen!’
One of his sisters reached her hand over the table, fingers just about managing to reach Owen’s as she tried to gain his attention. He looked up, slightly startled; her voice was hushed beneath the chatter that swathed the room, though laced with a competitive mischief that Owen was all too often the enabler of. They never got into anything too bad, not like the kids they’d see hung over their mothers’ knees nearly on the regular, but they had earned the fond nickname ‘troublemakers’ by their usually stoic father, a title they wore with pride. Really, it was usually just stupid contests and games between the two, ones that others would struggle to see the point of – much like this situation was turning out to be.
“I bet you,” She started, a sing-song lilt to her voice, “I bet you I’ll find more apple chunks in my meal than you. And the loser has to give Martha a bath after dinner.”
The sound of her voice humming at the periphery of his memory is the only reason he remembered the baby’s name at all, years after the fact – he couldn’t remember the name of the sister who had challenged him, one of the truest friends he had through that short, golden flicker of childhood, but he could remember the name of the baby who kept him awake for multiple evenings with her incessant crying. Memory was stupid like that.
They had been eating porridge. Their mother had cut up small chunks of green apple from their small tree outside, a rare treat; the soft, sweet flesh of the cooked fruit must have burst in their mouths like little pocketfuls of hot syrup, his siblings no doubt falling silent as they all shoveled the food into their faces, oats and apples balancing precariously on their small wooden spoons with each mouthful.
Owen wasn’t paying attention to any of it.
He had taken his sister up on the challenge, of course he had – long would be the days until she would shut him down when he tried to raise another one, eyes flickering away uncomfortably as she argued, "Don't you think we’re a little old for this now, Owen?” Long would be the days until Owen drew away into himself in return, hardly offering his presence to anybody else at all, knowing it was unwanted. He was still young, and competitive, and barely noticed the sweetness of the apple as he counted it in every mouthful.
One, two… four, five, six… eight, nine…
Eleven chunks he had counted by the time his bowl was scraped out to the bottom, the rest of his family finishing their meals around him. Chatter had begun to spark again around the table, his father’s warm, deep voice cutting through the laughter sporadically as he and his mother talked.
You are my son! He remembered that voice later shouting, warmth difficult to place in the frigidness of the winter. Owen’s tears were freezing to his face and his hands were bleeding, seeping into the frayed fabric of the axe’s grip beneath them. You are my son, and no son of mine will be left jobless. If no others will work with you, then so be it! You will learn my trade. And you will provide for whatever family ends up finding you in the end.
The next time they had porridge and apple chunks, Owen counted them again. His sister didn’t know about it, this time; she had grown so irritated with trying to bathe Martha after she had lost the last contest they had held, Owen felt it probably prudent not to bring it up again, keeping his little private tally inside his head. He had only gotten 7 chunks this time anyway: she probably would have won.
The next time, he counted again. And the next.
He was struggling to stop.
It was irritating. He wanted to enjoy the taste of the apple, wanted to fall into the comfortable silence of eating like the rest of his family, wanted to really mean it as they said grace before each meal. How could he thank the Lord for the food he ate if he could barely focus on it in the first place, mind never shutting up with the incessant counting, the chant of one, two, three, four counting higher and higher within his head?
He travelled to the city once, meeting a doctor who had claimed to have cured all sorts of unusual or unseen illnesses. His clinic had been cold compared to the stifling body heat of the cityfolk – in the small waiting area before reaching the doctor’s office itself, there had been little else but a couple of hard upholstered chairs, and a grandfather clock ticking away in the corner.
One, two, three, four… eight, nine- no, stop it, Owen. If you start counting you’re not going to stop. Counting the minutes won’t make you any less scared, it’ll just give you a headache on top of everything else- twenty, twenty-one- do something else Owen, focus on the pain if you need to, just stop counting-
He had gotten to 14 minutes, 36 seconds before the doctor finally opened the door on the other side of the room, and brought him in. Turns out his treatment was leeches, which hadn’t worked before, and wasn’t about to work this time, no matter how much the quack insisted these leeches were “special, and brought over from a foreign land, much like many rare diseases I’ve encountered-” or whatever other rubbish. Owen left the office weaker and more in pain than he had entered it, dreading the return journey back to his own, safe woods.
He counted the seconds Louis took to burn, even as his screams tore at his throat and the holy fire bubbled the already warped flesh upon his fingers.
One, two… fourty-five, fourty-six, fourty-seven… three hundred and eighty-two, three hundred and eighty-three… two thousand, five hundred and fourteen, two thousand, five hundred and fifteen…
Apple chunks in porridge. The sweetness of the blood upon his tongue burst like overboiled fruit, the flesh of each segment giving way with layers upon layers of viscera, skin and muscle and fat barely satiating the undying need inside of him. He could barely identify what part of the blustering drive under his skin was the rage – which was the grief, which was the hunger, which was the clamouring of his instincts with each new citizen spotted to count two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-seven, two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight, two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine…
Two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine…
One more person.
Two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine…
He instinctively reached for his axe as he headed towards the treeline, forgetting how it had been abandoned buried in one of his brother’s necks, claws shredding through the futile defense of their clothes and armour so much easier than that dull instrument ever would. It didn’t matter which tree he felled. He only needed a small cut of wood, after all.
Two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine.
His brain felt like a collapsing void at the number, something deep and primal within him screaming. His lover was dead. He had been promised an eternity with the one last person who could bring themselves to care about him, love him even, and his mind was repeating ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine on loop in his head like a jackdaw in a cage, waiting to be killed.
It wouldn’t have to wait long. He would fix it. He could be with Louis again, and that number would finally be brought up to a perfect, logical finality, and the screeching bird in his chest would lay in a pool of blood and feathers, its cage finally unlocked.
There was only one person left, after all.
“What about the counting? That’s a vampire thing, isn’t it?”
Owen sat at a table carved by his own hands, hands that sat clenched in his lap, the scars that traced his skin stretching and pulling with each flex of his fingers. Scott was sitting at the head of the table while Shelby peppered him with questions about vampirism, scribbling occasionally in a small notepad that seemed to be one of the few possessions she had brought back from town – each note accompanied a small ‘oh!’ of surprise as she stared at her previous notes, before sticking out her tongue and scribbling a new one. She occasionally tore out a page, even, letting it catch the air and float back down to the table in what was ending up as less of a pile and more a collection of loose paper strewn about over the table.
Owen’s fingers twitched in his lap. She had torn out 13 pages so far.
“Oh, no, that’s a myth.” Scott drawled in response. “I’m not entirely sure where that one came from, actually… I think humans just wanted a way to convince themselves they had any chance against a vampire.”
“Oh well- oh, that’s pretty fascinating honestly, considering arithmomania comes from some of the earliest depictions of vampires in folklore. In fact, I’ve read…”
Owen let Shelby’s excited voice fade into the background. A strange and cruel twist of fate, was it, then? This strange affliction had followed him around for longer than even his illness had, so he had known from the start it wasn’t a symptom of vampirism. (If it had been, maybe Louis would have been better at keeping his files and office in order. Owen sometimes joked that he could do a better job at managing the town, and he couldn’t even read properly).
(The thought of Louis tightened the grip of his fingers on his lap once again.)
He had stopped, once, in the middle of the woods, to count the grains of wheat lying on the side of the path. Funny, wasn’t it, that he had ended up as the one creature to which that wouldn’t be seen as strange? Convenient, too. For anyone who wasn’t already a vampire, it would stop them asking questions.
Except… probably the doctor. Owen scowled at his lap. The doctor would always ask questions.
“I appreciate you… giving me the chance. And giving me the choice.”
It was rare that Owen got to see a sunrise nowadays. As a human, he had often woken up early, catching the first rays of sunlight as they filtered through the canopy of trees in the copse near his house – for the longest time, it was the brightest part of his day, a flicker of gold before his hands started bleeding and his arms started aching as he swung his axe again, and again, and again into the trunk of some long forgotten tree.
As a vampire, however, the sting of the rays upon his skin often just weren’t worth it, and he hid beneath the shade of the leaves or within the castle’s shadowed walls.
The sunrise… it was just as beautiful as he remembered.
“Not every vampire is bad. Not every vampire is good. They have their reasonings, so…”
He didn’t turn to face Abolish. Didn’t take his eyes off of the view.
“Yeah. He was one of the good ones.”
He gave in.
Two thousand, eight hundred.