I had a thought of the start of a story and so, I decided to write it.
Here it is:
New Year's Eve
“What the blue hell is this noise?” He leaned forward, almost to a crouch, covering his head, ears and eyes as much as possible.
She glared at him, her hands on her hips, lip curled in a sneer of disdain as though she verged on the point of scolding him for being such a pussy. “You did the same thing last New Year’s Eve, and the one before that. What the hell is wrong with you? Get a fucking grip!”
She tried to get him to follow her but she knew from those previous years she mentioned, there wasn’t much point moving until the fireworks finished. She looked up to the skies between the buildings and took the lights, flashes and sparkles in, her sneer melted to a smile as she watched and remembered New Year’s Eves past.
When the fireworks fizzled out, she turned to him and sighed. Her eyes lifting to the skies again because he’d dropped to his knees in the filth of the alley.
“Are you crying now?” she asked. She sighed again and pulled his arm to help him to stand. “I said, are you crying?”
“No. I’m not crying. I just don’t like the noises; the flashes remind me…” He stopped talking and his eyes grew wide with his own memory of another New Year’s Eve, before he’d met her.
She winced at the pain she saw in their depths and relented. “Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. I forget,” she said and hugged him tight to her.
He sank into her arms and though he dwarfed her in height and breadth, anyone catching sight of them would have assumed she was the protector in the pair.
In a far more gentle voice, she said, “Come on, I promised we’d eat somewhere extra-special tonight.” She tugged his hand and he followed.
A stray firework stopped him for a moment, but he didn’t shrink away from it in terror as he had in the alley, his eyes grew wide again as the fluorescent colours exploded into the air across the city, throwing the buildings, statues and monuments into stark relief and silhouette.
“They sounded just like The Blitz, you know?” he said in a whisper.
“I know, I know.”
“I lost everything, every one. I died,” he said.
“But you didn’t die, not really, sweetness,” she whispered and pulled him close to her as she walked.
“A little bit of me did. In that alley, my faith died.”
“And a new Master found you and shepherded you,” she said the words as though she’d said them before, many times. He looked at her, at the back of her head, her long dark ponytail draping down her red leather jacket.
“I sometimes wonder if he was a saviour or predator.”
“Oh never wonder that. He was definitely a predator. There’s no mercy in his black soul. I doubt there ever was.”
She stopped off the beaten track, looked up at the imposing and derelict Gothic church swathed in shadow. “Here we are, I promised we’d eat somewhere extra-special.”
“Here? You remembered! Oh darling, you remembered!”
“Of course I remembered our anniversary, how could I forget? That’s where you bit me,” she said and pointed down the side of the church. “Then you took me inside the church and fed, but you nurtured me and kept me safe.”
“The terrible truth of it is that I didn’t know what I was doing. You were as much an accident as I was for… for him years before.”
“I don’t regret the accident though. Do you?” She pulled him into the church by the side door and showed him the altar she’d built. “There, your anniversary gift.”
The young Goth girl looked up at them in innocent expectation and she lifted her chin to offer her throat to him.
“Happy New Year, darling. Happy Anniversary,” she said as he bent his head to her offering and his pointed teeth slid further from his mouth and he accepted the first victim of the New Year.
Images from Pixabay
