Chapter Text
I awoke, incredulous as I tried to draw in a sharp breath, yet nothing filled my lungs. I was wondering how that was possible, for me to be alive, when the memories of what I had done, of what had happened, stirred into me like poison, an unwelcome reminiscence. I did not dare to speak for fear that my voice would come out wrong and crooked. I wasn't supposed to be able to look around, yet there I was, laying in a velvet cushion inside something that felt like a box.
A coffin, I immediately understood, for what I had done only implied that I had been buried. It was impossible though, or so I thought. What I had done required that my body would have been left rotting in a pile of waste, not laying on a soft yet caging coffin. That was meant for the people who died with God's blessings, and what I had done led me to deserve none.
Instead of waking up groggily and in pain,I rose with grace, first sitting up and staring at my black dress, lined in gracious roses embroidery and with a high lace collar.
It covered all my body but my hands, my feet were closed in low black boots.
What had happened to me? Why was I allowed to see and feel? Why was my heart beating again? Those unanswered, outwardly questions plagued my mind, but I knew that the first thing I had to do was to get out of that place unrecognised being a mausoleum. The room empty of furniture surely couldn't be a bedroom, the fact that I was laying in a coffin only meant that I had really died.
One by one the memories started to resurface, no matter how hard I tried to push them away. My husband, the way I had lost my precious baby, my suicide that followed for I could not bear to live with the thought of having lost my beautiful baby, the small and fragile creature that was growing inside of me.
Instinctively I touched my belly where once my joy was. It was empty, flat as if nothing had ever been there. My heart broke for the second time.
I could do nothing about it, I could not rewind time and run away before he could steal my baby from me, I could only pray that no one would have come to look for me ever again and that I'd become a phantom in everyone's memories, for I wanted only to disappear as far away as possible, away from all the things that reminded me of a life I didn't want anymore and that I hadn't wanted for so many months.
I had managed to stand it, to be strong and resilient for them, who were growing inside of me, but when they had been stolen, there was nothing tying me to life anymore. I had drank the deadliest poison I knew was available and died so quickly I didn't even realise I was dying. And so I thought all it had ended, that nightmare that my life was.
Yet, I had been given another chance, perhaps a better fate, though it was utterly impossible given everything I knew. But something in me had changed. I realised quickly and to my absolute horror that a strong thirst was starting to mold itself in the pit of my stomach. Not for water, but for blood.
I shrieked inside, letting out no sound for fear of being discovered, but tried with all my might to understand the meaning of this monstrous instinct. To bite a human being and draw blood from them, drink it until this unnatural thirst was satiated. I started to whimper as I stood in the middle of the small mausoleum, a stone cage with a wooden door as an exit. The faint sounds that escaped my lips gave me little hope that I was still able to talk, that I could have hidden somehow amongst normal people again. Was I a ghost?
I had heard stories of ghosts roaming the places they knew when alive, searching forever for something they could never find.
But I didn't feel transparent and ethereal as one. My body had weight, my dark hair was let flowing on my shoulders and I could feel the strands caressing my cheeks when I turned my head. I was alive, somehow, my heart was beating and my lungs were drawing in cold air against all Heaven's rules.
I quickly realised I had to get out of there. I had to see with my eyes if the world outside had changed somehow, if I was still in my realm and not in some hellish trap. Without lingering too much on my insistent thirst for blood I opened the door of the mausoleum, noticing that my steps made no sound as I crossed the stone pavement to the door.
Cold and crisp air hit my face when I stepped out. It was raining heavily and the night was as dark as my eyes, yet I could perfectly see every shape of every mausoleum, every gravestone that marked the holy ground, picturing the rotting bodies laying underneath the damp earth filled with mud puddles as the incessant rain poured from the cloud covered sky.
I had no other chance to walk, that's at least what I thought. My thirst was getting stronger and it scared me so much I dared not to think how I could have satiated. As I stepped out of the threshold completely, the rain crashed on me like a crumbling ceiling. The heavy drops fell on my head and shoulders in almost painful piercing shots. Occasional lightning lit up the sky in purple veins just to be followed by booming thunder. Yet, they didn't scare me like they did once. Somehow I felt even stronger than them, I had defeated every law of nature, I had defeated God's rules.
But something felt so terribly wrong. I could smell it, the blood of the corpses which had been recently buried. I could detect their graves and follow the scent. Yet I knew somehow that their blood was not for me to drink for it would have poisoned me. I needed fresh blood, I needed a living creature to drink from, not an animal or blood from a vial; I needed human blood, someone alive to drink from before all my limited strength would run out and I dared not think of what would have happened to me. Would I have died once again?
Before I had the time to linger on those horrifying thoughts I heard footsteps on the gravel. I initially thought they were a trick of the rain splashing against the rocks, but upon hearing better, and I did not know how I could hear so well to distinguish the sounds, I recognised the lazy walk of something walking on two legs. It could have only been the guardian of the graveyard, I thought, shaking and afraid as my hunger for blood almost choked me.
I had to find him, I had to drink from him. But I had never killed anyone, not even dared to think such a thing all my life, and what my new nature was requiring from me terrified and thrilled me both for a reason to me still unknown.
I hid in the shadows anyway. The night and the rain provided the perfect environment for the man wandering the gravel path covering his head with an umbrella and holding a lantern, being unable to spot me as I hid behind my mausoleum. When he came close enough, something horrifying happened. My body transformed in a way that scared me and caused revulsion to rise in my stomach. My teeth, once normal and human, had elongated, only the canines, protruding from my mouth and piercing my lower lip as the transformation caught me off guard. My hands clawed at the fingertips and as my mind tried to process all of that the man turned the corner and found himself in front of me.
He didn't see me immediately for he thought I was just a girl, maybe lost in the middle of the night, but when he raised his lantern and the orange light cast upon my features he shrieked and the scream stood above the loudest thunder. I didn't have the time to think as I kept forward with a speed I didn't think was possible for me to have and pierced his collar bone with my fangs. They sank in the tender flesh as a knife in a cake and blood started to immediately seep from the wound. The man struggled, but somehow I was able to tackle him and lick at first, then drink every drop of blood that escaped the wound I had caused.
Relief surged through me when the liquid entered my body, it felt warm and right, it felt like drinking a glass of fresh water after days of thirst, but I knew it wasn't water. It was blood, it stained my lips and dropped down my chin to my dress.
The man didn't move anymore. He laid on the ground with only the incessant rain to wash away the remnants of blood that still leaked out of the two red dots at the base of his neck. I was horrified. My mind told me to gag, but my body didn't answer, if so I felt stronger, like if I had feasted on a wedding banquet instead of on a poor human being.
I felt something warm drip down my cheeks and so realised I had started crying. Warm tears mixed with the rain; I prayed for the sky to wash away my sin as I knew I had never seen something so ungodly as a girl feasting on the blood of a man. Yet I knew I did have to do it, to keep myself alive, even if there was something wicked in my alive state.
My heart was thundering in my wrists and chest so hard I thought it might have suddenly stopped again; I prayed a second for it to really happen as I rejected the idea of having to live such an ungodly life, but nothing happened.
Instead the surge of adrenaline that came from taking that man's life and feasting on his blood got slowly washed away as if by the rain and I was left wondering what life I could have lived from then on, who would have befriended such a creature, how much time would have passed before someone would find out of my true nature and burn me on a pyre like the most horrible of the witches.
Yet I had no magic power, I couldn't enchant objects or people for what I knew. I couldn't hear spirits or voices of any kind apart from my own softly but constantly whispering abomination in my head. I looked around, trying to recognise anything that could lead me out of the cemetery. I was completely soaked in rain by then, my corset was stuck to my underdress and so the other was like a second uncomfortable skin. My shoes were filled with water to the point I could feel them splashing inside as I started to walk. I dared not to think about my hair, sure that it was probably as hideous as it had ever been, glued in black strands to my forehead and cheeks.
Shivering and bent under the imposing power of the storm I followed the path of lanterns that I hoped would lead me out of the graveyard for I had no idea of its layout and everything seemed the same in the night, even with my improved vision. The gravestones brought foreign names, yet some of them I knew. I was still close to my village and that at first made my heart slow down. I was close to home.
Then reality hit me like a violent slap on the face. If I were to be so close to my house how could I have explained my sudden apparition in the living world again after being buried? All the people I once knew wouldn't wait twice to call: monster! and probably, try to kill me once again.
All I knew was that I had to run, as fast as my legs could take me, out of the graveyard and into the only place I was sure no one would have found me when dawn came, or if so, where I could have easily hid. I had seen with my eyes what I was capable of: my horrible transformation that gave me such incredible strength. A woman my size, tiny in frame and with curves not yet fully shaped by adulthood shouldn't have been able to do such a thing, but the creature I was now had a power I was sure came not from the Heavens, but from the pits of hell.
I wondered if I were a demon for a second, yet I had never read of shape shifting demons which could transform and mostly which needed to feed on human blood.
That thirst started to prick at the base of my neck again. I wasn't in need for another ration of blood, but I was sure I'd soon be, and the picture of me bending over an unlucky person and drain them clean to their last drop of blood made me shiver more than the cold of the night and the rain did.
I started to walk anyway, first tentatively, wondering if I should just have returned back into my mausoleum and waited for my inevitable withering, or if I should have started a new life like that. But the more I stood on the holy ground of the graveyard the more I felt some sort of sickness rise in my throat, threatening to choke me. It didn't surprise me that anything holy would have harmed me from now on, for I was sure I had been cast out of being close to anything holy.
The gates of the graveyard I found slightly ajar thanks to the guardian who had come to check for those who desecrated the graves in the middle of the night felt like a door to a foreign world. Though I knew the layout of the town well enough to find my way to the forest, it all seemed wrong, a place I had no right to be. I walked out anyway and didn't look back as I sprinted through the narrow cobbled streets, the rain falling less heavy than before was still muffling my steps. For that I was grateful for as a drenched woman running frantically in the dead of night would have surely attracted unwelcome attention.
I ran almost blindly, my lungs expanding in my corset to the point my ribcage hurt, yet I didn't dare to stop for fear of being spotted. The dim light of the street lamps didn't pierce through the rain enough to cast any long shadow on the low windows of the close houses I had to walk next to, almost flattening myself to walls and trees, yearning to finally see the beginning of the woods
that led to the forest of Styria.