The Donor House: Advent Story (part 12)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
“Which is more than bad enough,” Caleb commented, shaking his head. “She always kept me to herself, because she didn’t want to share me, but as she was much older the chemicals in her saliva were much stronger and that was why I ended up an addict. If it had been any other vampire I probably would have been, if not fine, at least much less addicted, so I can’t help wishing I wasn’t quite so unlucky. There were two others who were bidding for me who lost out to her, simply due to the money she had at her disposal, as, from what I could tell, she’d lived at least three centuries longer than both of them and had made decisions that led to her having a fortune she could use to buy humans like me from the auction.” He sighed. “When she bought me she also purchased three others, who I didn’t know until we became her donors, and when we got to her home we found that she had ten more humans there. She’d bought the four of us so she could get rid of the ones she no longer wanted, who ended up being left miles away from where they’d known so they had no way of returning to her. As soon as she tired of me she did exactly the same thing, which is how I ended up close enough to the House to get here, otherwise…” He shuddered, even thinking about what might have happened if she’d left him somewhere else. “I probably would have never had a chance to regain the life I lost because of her.”
“Have you ever thought about becoming a vampire?” Blake asked, looking out at the crowd, and Caleb knew it was so he couldn’t see Blake’s eyes.
“Yes, Blake, I have, and I’ve thought about it more since I came here. I never believed that I’d come to care about a vampire, not after what happened to me, but I have, and, even though I still want to live a human life, I’m more accepting that my only option might be to become one of you.” Caleb bit his lip. “Honestly, it’s not what I think of as an option right now, not when we’ve come so far, but in the future, if I’m still an addict, then at least there is a step I can take that will mean I can have a real life, rather than this.” He gestured, hoping that Blake would understand. “As much as I appreciate all the hard work you’ve done this isn’t what I wanted for myself, to live in the House because I really did have no other option.”
“I understand.” Blake took Caleb’s hand, squeezing it. “Even now I can remember what it was like to live in that haze of always needing a vampire to bite me and the relief that I felt when it finally happened, but the relief never lasted long enough, even though I was nowhere near as addicted as you are. For three hours, maybe a little longer, I would feel normal, like I was before I ended up at one of the auctions, until that need started coming back, much sooner than I wanted it to, and there was nothing I could do about it, apart from hope that I would come across a vampire who’d lower themselves to feed from an addict.” He shook his head. “So many of them looked at me like I was nothing more than a bug they wanted to squash on their shoe.”
“That’s something I never had to deal with. I went straight from Bianca’s to here and I’ve never had any vampire look at me with anything other than pity, but, sometimes, even that makes me feel like I’m a lesser being. Due to something that happened to me that was never my choice I’m not quite a human being, not any more.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t. It’s not you. You’ve never once looked at me with pity in your eyes, I’m guessing because you’ve been here yourself. Being an addict, as much as I hate it, is better than being dead, and the three addicts she bought with me all ended up in graves. Compared to them I’m the lucky one. I’m alive. Even though I’m addicted to being bitten by a vampire I am alive, so, really, I have nothing to complain about. Yet here I am, complaining because someone feels sorry for me.” Caleb shook his head. “I have a chance of being normal. They don’t. Not now. Unless necromancers exist.”
“They don’t as far as I know, but if they did there are several people I’d resurrect. My owner purchased a girl of thirteen at the same time as me and she wasn’t strong enough to cope with his parties. She managed to survive through three of them, thanks to the help she was given by several of the older girls, but at the end of the fourth one we found her dead with a couple of others. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was bury her, because I remember looking at her when I first met her and seeing the knowledge that her life was already over. It hadn’t really started before she found herself at the auction, but being there, being bought by a vampire, meant that she’d probably never see fourteen.”
“Bianca, when she killed her humans, always buried them herself, thankfully. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have to do that.” Caleb squeezed Blake’s hand. “No one can understand what it’s like to have been through an auction and bought by a vampire unless it’s something they’ve actually been through, even though we do our best to explain. Having to watch as your owner, or one of their friends, kill someone you’ve become close to, against your better judgement, is something you can never truly describe. It’s something you have to go through to understand and it’s something I hope no one ever has to go through again, but it’s going to happen today, tomorrow, and every day for the next week, because the auctions exist. Maybe we will be able to bring an end to them in the future, but it’s going to be the distant future. Vampires who chose to follow that path aren’t going to let us change the world easily.”
“We all know that, but that doesn’t change what we want to do.” Blake smiled at Caleb. “Our future is going to be different. Even though the auction vampires, the vampires who accept what they’ve become and revel in it, are the majority right now, the longer the House is open the more vampires we’re going to gather here. Humans are going to see that not all vampires are the same, even though that’s what they always believed, because the donors are going to leave this place better off than when they came in.”
“And some will make the choice to leave their mortal life behind, because they’ll have become so close to the vampires here that they won’t want to leave them.”
“If you’ve read the rule book you’ll find that Alice, Nick, and Issac have planned for that eventuality.”
“You’re going to have to change it. Those rules were made before the House even existed and they didn’t understand what they were creating, not really. It was impossible to. Now there are certain rules that don’t work for the House, so the time will come when they’ll need to, at the very least, adapt them. Some will have to be changed entirely.”
“Exactly which rules are you thinking of?”
“Obviously the one about not changing donors, even if they ask, because I think even Issac has realised that you’ve all become closer to the donors than they expected before the House was created. I’m not entirely sure why, when they know what happened between Alice and Nick. Alice wanted to become a vampire, Nick would have willingly changed her, and the two of them would have had a very different relationship to the one that they have now, because it would have been a choice they both made, rather than a choice they had made for them.” Caleb thought for a moment. “The rule about relationships in the House. A rule they created in an attempt to assuage any jealousy, but this is the Donor House. Every single vampire who comes here knows exactly what the position is and that hasn’t stopped people from falling in love, even though the decision has been made by each of those possible couples that they’ll wait until they leave the House. To them the House matters more than the relationship, because they want it to be a success - changing the world has become the most important thing to them as they’ve come to believe in Nick’s vision of the future. Every choice they make now is based on what would be best for the House, whether that’s what’s best for them or not.”
“Caleb, you can’t change a rule because you don’t like it. I know it’s hard for us to not be able to see if we would work together as more than just friends, but there are vampires who would get jealous if their partner was feeding another vampire, and if that happens I dread to think of how it would effect the House?”
“Would you get jealous?”
“No, but I know what it’s like to be an addict.”
“How about Jean-Luc or Kist? Can you see either of them getting jealous that their other half was feeding a vampire who wasn’t them? Or how about Georgie or Morgan? Would they get jealous because their vampire was feeding from another human?”
“They’re people we know. You can’t be sure of everyone in the House.”
“We can’t, but Alice and Nick can. They get to know all the vampires and all the donors that come into this place, for two reasons - it’s their job to make sure that everyone is safe and they want the House to be a success even more than the rest of us. Well, Nick does, at least, because this was his idea in the first place. He’s done so much hard work to make it a reality, to start changing the world into one that may be slightly safer for the humans he shares it with, and, if I’m honest, he’s got so close to some of the donors here that I can see him falling in love again.”
“He’s still in love with Alice.”
“You can be in love with more than one person. I don’t doubt for a moment that he’ll be in love with Alice for the rest of his life, however long that happens to be, but that doesn’t mean he won’t fall in love with someone else.” Caleb smiled. “That’s something I realised a long time ago. Some people are naturally monogamous, while others are polygamous, and I have no problem with either. Personally I’m much more monogamous, but I wouldn’t complain if you fell for someone else.”
“I can’t see it happening.” Blake bit his lip. “There was a time when I thought I might be in love with Alice, but then I realised that what I was feeling was gratitude, because she was the one person who gave me a chance. She could easily have walked away, the same as the majority of vampires did, and, if I’m honest, that was what I was expecting her to do. For her to turn around and ask me if I wanted her to help… it was more than a surprise, Caleb. I looked at her, through that haze, and I saw her smile gently at me, and that smile was what made me nod. That was what convinced me that I should go with her, because none of the others had ever smiled at me like that. They’d just stared at me, before taking me somewhere dark, so they could do what needed to be done.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.