It began as just an average day at work. I put the newly arrived CDs into the computer, ordered other CDs, swept the aisles. Normal stuff you do before the people start coming in.
So I did what I always do at the Second Spin store down in Pacific Beach. And then the slow hours came, the ones that always happen around nightfall out here. About five pm, business starts to thin. By seven it’s gone.
So I was sitting around, it was seven thirty, and the store was dead. No costumers, period. Just me inside this empty store, cleaning up early, spinning the various CDs, as always. And then she ran in.
The doors pounded back, and this golden haired angel ran in, pulling the doors shut, slamming them behind her, and then yelling hysterically for me to lock them.
“Please!” she screamed. “Please! You have to lock the doors! Please! Help me!”
And who was I to turn this yellow haired seraphim down? So I locked the doors, and then I saw them. Their dark eyes stared at me. Soulless eyes, almond shaped spots of emptiness on dark skin, framed by the black night outside.
I felt cold fear then, and wondered what I had gotten myself into by helping this girl. I gave the figures outside of my store one last look, there were maybe six of them in all, and then I turned back to the girl who had run in.
And I lost my breath just looking at her. She seemed to glow, almost, though it may have just been the store lights. Her pale yellow hair hung like softly spun gold, and her eyes were luminous and green, like liquid fire. They almost sparked with their fear and anger. She was pale, pure white, and a snatch of a poem I had read so long ago came back to me. It said
“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her hair was soft-spun gold.
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The nightmare life-in-death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”
I can’t recall who it was written by, I couldn’t then either, but I didn’t care at the time. Her eyes enthralled me, and I couldn’t bring myself to look away. But I did. I looked back to the window, and the dark people were gone. A man stood there in their place. His eyes were liquid and blue, and he was white, like she was. His hair was blacker than the night around him in the alley.
I heard his voice in my head, and he smiled, beautiful and cold and cruel.
‘Open the door, James…’ he said. ‘Let me in. You have nothing to fear from be, let me in. They’re coming back for her, and for me. Please.’
I didn’t understand how I could be hearing him inside my head, but I looked at the pale angel, and she urged me forwards, and I heard her speak to me, aloud.
“Please let him in,” she implored, her voice soft, but the fear for him was obvious. “Please.”
I walked over to the door, found the key and unlocked it, letting him in, then swiftly shutting and relocking the door.
I looked at them together, two pale angels, and I saw he had the same ethereal kind of glow to him, the same amazingly coloured eyes. His liquid blue eyes held mine for a second, and then he looked past me in fear.
I looked behind me, and saw the strange dark people again. They stared at me with their black almond eyes, and I felt the cold grip of fear again. Something about them was just wrong, though I could not place it.
I took the two of them to the back room and asked for one of them to explain. She broke down in tears, so he started to tell me, but he began to dry heave, so I took him into the employee bathroom.
When I came back, the girl was still again, no longer crying. She stood up, and came over to me, kissing me softly and putting her arms around me.
“Thank you,” she whispered, then she kissed down my neck softly.
A sharp pain went through me, and her grip tightened, and I felt her mouth clamp onto my neck, the nexus of the pain, and I felt hot blood rushing from me. I heard it rushing in my ears, and the steady thud of my heart.
Then I felt another pair of hands on me, and the same needle sharp pain on the other side of my neck.
I could hear them sucking from me, I could feel my blood leaving my veins as I went further and further into the gray.
And then finally, I saw black, and nothing more.
Lythia wiped the boy’s blood off of her lips and smiled at Cristophe.
“What, if I may ask, did he see that made him fear so badly?” she asked.
Cristophe only smiled. “Well that’s for me to know until you learn for yourself, isn’t it? And besides, you did a good enough job acting afraid yourself, my love.”
He kneeled down near James’ corpse, and took the keys out from his pocket, then led Lythia out from the back room, locking it behind him.
He opened the door to Second Spin, and locked it again before pulling it shut behind them.
The two pale, angelic looking vampires walked down the deserted alley, and out into the waiting night.
this is actually the ending to a story I’m working on, heh… I’ve currently got three vampire stories in the making, including the sequel to ‘She Was Mine…’, as well as this one, and another.