My Precious Nightmare

Chapter 30: Visions in a Closet

A few days passed with something like a routine. At nights, Husani would return from his hole in the wall, sniff him to test that Aster had been staying on his irritating lemon shampoo routine, and then they would go to his personal gym (which had been cleared of exercise equipment), and begin their lessons. The amount of times he was smacked in the head with that little blue ball reminded him of earlier days when he still made mistakes and his father had whapped his hands for it. By four in the morning, Aster would collapse once more in the hall, Lane would bring the cooler, and Husani would vanish without another word. Apparently, the leaf musher actually had a job doing just that.

On the third day, Aster demanded to know how Husani managed to get by on so little sleep. Before, when Aster had been human, he had been able to function at maximum with only 6 hours of sleep. Now he had no choice in the matter. He and Lane both had to sleep twelve hours or their bodies would find the worst moments to force it on them. It was like they had become narcoleptic.

"Your need to sleep is part of being newborn," said Husani, who had been tossing his blue ball threateningly, as Aster had yet to jump to the ceiling and hold himself there without making a sound. "After the first year it should wear down to the usual seven to eight hours. The older a vampire gets, however, the less... human he becomes. He needs less sleep, less blood, the body becomes more like stone, and the eyes become permanently red."

"And the glowing?" Aster asked wryly, eyes already on his target steel beam. He had found that Husani actually had a weakness for teaching. He couldn't resist answering a question, and so Aster hoped any noise he may make jumping would be hidden beneath Husani's talking.

"As blood super inflates the back of the eyes and the cones and rods are adapted, there is more reflection in the cornea, like when you see animal eyes reflect light in the dark. During moments of intense emotion or blood lust, the vessels are super saturated even further and—I heard that."

The ball hit his right ear and he came crashing down with a muffled bang on the wrestling mat.

Aster's work began to suffer. He could not keep up all night practices and go to work at the same time. His secretary and closer employees were beginning to wonder where the workaholic had run off to.

Lane suggested sending a note that they were holing up in the mansion until all the rampant deaths and vampiric attacks waned off (which were doubling by the day). The old 'I'm just being cautious' tactic. Aster loathed the idea with every fiber of his being, but he couldn't bring himself to cancel his training sessions with Husani, even though he despised that vamp and his damn ball. Or, rather, he couldn't quit because he loathed him. The end goal of these lessons was to kill his teacher, after all.

And Husani encouraged that. He wanted to be dead as much as Aster wanted him to be.

On the fourth day, while Aster caught his breath, Husani watched dead-eyed as tendrils of dark shadow moved about the room in time with lazy flicks of his fingers.

"Maybe I could make some targets for you to practice on." He closed his hand into a fist, and the end of half dozen or so tendrils began to curl in, trembling. Then they simply...dissipated. Husani sighed.

An idea came to Aster's mind. Since he was eager to do something that didn't involve physical effort or that stupid blue sphere of hell, he went on the old strategy of luring the professor into talking.

"When did you figure out how to do that?" Husani had already tested Aster for the most common of talents, strength, smell, and speed, and found him lacking. He was hoping he could find his skill sooner than later.

His scarlet-eyed teacher frowned. "I'm actually...not entirely sure. The shadows are strange ones."

Aster sat up, pulling his ankles to him. "Elaborate."

Husani sent out another tendril, which snaked across the floor to curl around a set of dumbbells. "I...I was always somehow aware of the shadows, even before I was turned. Probably not unlike anyone else. Just laying in the dark and imagining I could feel it pressing in around me, like water, except seeing me at the same time. Aware. Unthinking. But there," he flexed his fingers and the dumbbell of 300 plus pounds thunked to the floor and came sliding towards him. "I think that's why children are often afraid of the dark. It isn't just the unknown. It's some old instinct from ancient days when we knew when we had reached the edge of our tiny senses. I suppose my fascination of meditating in the dark after two hundred years or so allowed my mental capabilities to adapt. So much of the body is changing when you become a vampire, evolution comes easy."

"So...you're saying this isn't necessarily your talent?"

Husani gave Aster a strange look. "Then why haven't I met anyone else who can work this, human or vampire?"

"As you said, they didn't have a strange fascination with laying around in the dark playing pretend that it was watching them." Aster smirked. "Why don't you give me a try? Tell me how you do it, old man."

Husani blinked, then flicked the ball smack dab between Aster's eyes. Aster swore, something he was getting better at every day with this monster.

But the next thing he knew, Husani was commanding him down the hall and to the darkest closet in his basement, where they spent the rest of the night 'feeling' the darkness.

Which gave him a lot of time and space to think.

A cocky, tall girl cropped in more than a few times. This time, she didn't just stand before the window or look up at him with eyes gleaming with frightened tears. She ran down the halls of his mansion with reckless abandon, half naked and laughing at the top of her lungs. She stood in his kitchen frowning at a pan filled with eggs, not in consternation, but in uncharacteristic concentration.

But past that, deeper into the darkness, he began to see other things. Stranger things. Sky, walking down a dark street dressed in baggy men's clothes. Sky with her honey-tanned face to the sky, teeth bared in defiance as moonlight shone off her tear stained cheeks. Sky trying to play a video game with her toes in an unfamiliar room with a skylight and old Disney posters. Sky, running, hand in hand with her short friend. Sky struck down by a man with wild, platinum hair. Sky down. Bleeding. Her brown skin gray. Glassy eyed. Throat stained a too-bright red and punctured with two, jagged, torn holes.

He sucked in a breath and smelled...all of it. The blood, the musty stench of trash, the old gasoline from the street behind him, the layers of pollution baked onto the sides of the buildings, the murky cold sky above. He could see the grooves in the bricks. The dips of Sky's pores. Each strand of her chocolate hair.

Aster broke out of the closet, gasping for breath, covered in an icy sweat and trembling from head to foot.

Husani, who had been coaching Aster from outside the closet (like hell the two of them were about to get cozy together in a closet), dropped to his haunches.

"What happened?"

"I saw...I saw..." But his mind had started to spin, still ripe with Sky's chocolate stew of rosemary and thyme. "It was so real, I could see—I've never seen that place—those places—"

"Slow down and sit back. Here, against the wall. Breathe."

"I don't need you to tell me what to do!" Aster snapped, struggling to his feet instead. "Martinez. She's hurt. She's—where's my phone? Lane."

Despite knowing he kept his phone off of him during training to stop it from being smashed between supernatural vampiric forces, he patted himself anyway, stumbling down the hallway like a drunk. For some reason, his eyes didn't seem to want to work. His vision kept blurring in and out, jumping between visions of gray skin and cloudy brown eyes.

Not her. Not her. Not her.