Answering the Call

 

Short Story Drama

Rating: PG-13

 

             Blood called to him.

             Even in his dream, Daniel recognized its call.  As Daniel watched, unwilling observer of a sacrifice that both fascinated and disgusted him, the Fairy King slid the knife free from the victim’s death-wound.  Blood coated the knife, rich red like the finest wine, and part of Daniel reveled at the sight of it.  He saw the Fairy King’s tongue flick out to taste the blood and wished it was his own tongue.  The desire for blood inflamed him.  He hungered for its taste, ached for it, needed, needed, needed…

             With a strangled sob, Daniel flung himself out of the dream and out of his bed.  He barely made it across the room to the wash basin before he vomited.  He gasped for breath in between heaves and shuddered convulsively as he braced himself against the table where the wash basin sat.

             Moments later, a cool hand brushed back his sweat-soaked hair and brought a damp cloth to his heated forehead.  He leaned into the touch.

             “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his throat raspy after its ordeal.  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

             His wife soothed him with a wordless murmur and continued bathing his face while her other hand rubbed circles on his back.  His tremors eased and faded.

             “Daniel?”

             He turned to look at her.  Summer’s Morning was the epitome of the Fairy world in which they lived.  Her flaxen hair and fair skin glistened in the moonlight that streamed through the bedroom window.  A tendril had escaped her braid, and he smiled into her anxious eyes as he tucked it behind her pointed ear.  She was his guiding star, air and light coalesced into a vision of loveliness.  He caressed her cheek.

             She reached up and drew his hand from her face, twining her fingers in his and refusing to be distracted.  “This is the fifth time since the sacrifice.”

             The seventh, but he wouldn’t tell her that, nor would he mention the half dozen other times he’d managed to conceal before the sacrifice.  The sacrifice five days ago had only magnified a bloodlust that had been growing in him for months.

             He had hoped he would be spared this.  He was the twenty-seventh and youngest son of the Fairy King, the halfblood result of the Fairy King’s fling with a Man-maiden, unacknowledged and unwanted when his mother died in childbirth.  He had thought his diluted blood and his distance from the throne would keep him from the curse of the Fairy King’s lineage.  He was wrong.

             “I feel the way your skin burns,” she persisted.  “I hear you cry out, begging for something as if you will die without it.  Do not tell me this is an ordinary sickness.”

             He felt his heart stutter.  He hadn’t realized he cried out during the dream.  “It’s nothing, Summer.  It’ll pass.”

             He would deny the blood path with every ounce of strength he possessed.  He would refuse its call.  He wanted nothing to do with it.

             Summer’s Morning gazed at him, skepticism visible on her face.  He prompted her with a gentle tug.  “Come, love.  You need your sleep, and so does the baby.”

The comment distracted her as no other would.  She smiled tenderly as she smoothed one hand down her swollen belly and allowed herself to be settled into bed.

             Long after Summer’s Morning had fallen asleep, Daniel lay awake.  He stared at the ceiling, hands clenched at his sides, jaw clamped.  Sweat poured from him.  In his mind, he watched the sacrifice replay, saw the blood run in rivulets down the knife, heard again the siren call of the blood path.

 

#

 

             The Fairy King studied his halfblood son.  Daniel stood before the throne with chin out-thrust and arms crossed aggressively over his chest.  He was like a craggy rock jutting up alongside the seashore, defying wave and wind and rain.  The Fairy King had always thought his youngest son weak, so he admired the boy’s display of contempt, even as he planned its defeat.

             “Well met, my son.”

             Daniel scowled.  “The king summoned; the subject came.  I am no son to you.”

             The Fairy King allowed the point.  Vexed by the loss of the Man-maiden who was his lover, he had spurned the halfblood child who was their son.  In doing so, he had inadvertently saved the boy’s life.  An unacknowledged son was no rival.  When the Fairy King’s twenty-six true sons plotted each other’s deaths, they had ignored Daniel’s existence as thoroughly as their father had.  Now only Daniel remained to succumb to the dark pleasures of the Fairy heritage.

             He had worried at first.  Although he had rejected Daniel, he had still watched from afar, searching for signs of himself.  In thirty years, he had seen nothing.  Daniel was pensive, apt to serious questions, prone to study.  His features were plain; his ears, rounded; his skin and hair, dark.  He lacked any aptitude for manipulation, trickery, or deception.  The Fairy King had feared the insignificance that protected Daniel from his brothers’ rivalry had also weakened the call of the blood path.  What he had observed at last week’s sacrifice had reassured him.

             “I think blood cannot be denied so easily, my son.”

             Daniel retreated to sullen silence.  The Fairy King reclined in his throne.  He had expected no less.

             “I saw your fascination at the sacrifice.  How you craned forward.  How your body hungered for the blood.”

             Daniel quivered with tension.  His hands curled into fists.  His jaw hardened.  His eyes burned.  The Fairy King smiled, pleased with the effect of his words.

             “I wonder if you watched long enough.”  Daniel’s voice trembled with suppressed rage.  “Did you see the revulsion on my face when it was over?  Did you see me vomit after you licked the blood from your knife?”

             The Fairy King shook his head gently, clucking his tongue.  “My son, haven’t you wondered why it affects you?  While you shuddered and seethed, didn’t everyone else walk away, reassured by a centuries-old ceremony they witness every month?”

             Dread shadowed the boy’s face.  He pressed his arms tighter against his chest as if protecting himself from the questions.  The Fairy King leaned forward, to score a final blow.

             “Shall I tell you why your body feels like a furnace, why you awake in the nights, drenched with sweat, dreaming of the sacrifice?”

             Daniel rocked back.  The blow had struck.  “How—how did you--”

             “The blood path calls you, only living son of the Fairy King.”

             “No!”  He flung himself away, turning his back on the Fairy King.  His breath had quickened to sobbing pants.

             “The path is unavoidable.  You can’t restrain these passions by force of will.  They will build inside you until you perform the sacrifice.”

             “I won’t!”

             The Fairy King straightened angrily.  “Will you stand by and watch the portal between Man and Fairy close?”

             “I’m sure Man wouldn’t mind,” Daniel snapped.  “The portal isn’t worth the victims they’ve had to expend for it.”

             “Don’t be so sure.  A world without Fairy magic would slowly poison itself.”  He lowered his voice to a whisper.  “And have you considered what happens to Fairy?  Man gives our world substance.  Without the portal, we become ghosts.  Imagine taking your wife into your arms and feeling… nothing.”

             Daniel gave a satisfying moan.

             The Fairy King smiled and continued, “I wonder if you will fade, halfblood.  You might lie in bed, surrounded by the emptiness that Fairy has become because of you, and feel the whisper of a breeze.  Is it a one-time friend come to haunt you?  Is it your wife come to embrace you?”

             “Stop.”  Daniel bowed his head, clutching at his hair.  “Please…stop.”

             The Fairy King stood, and his voice echoed in the chamber as he pronounced judgment upon his son.  “You will perform the sacrifice three weeks hence, after which I will prepare you to follow me as Fairy King.  You will answer the call of your blood.”

 

#

 

             With a frustrated growl, Daniel slammed shut the heavy Man-book.  He shoved it to one side, where it collided with several other volumes.  The parchment notes on his desk rustled in agitation.  The breakfast tray that Summer’s Morning had brought in hours before teetered at the edge of his desk, wavered, and crashed to the floor of the library.  Daniel winced at the noise.  That would bring Summer running for certain.  Mind and body numb with fatigue, he laid his head on the desk and made no move toward the mess of uneaten food and shattered dishes.

             He had barely slept in the two weeks since the Fairy King’s ultimatum.  Time jeered at him.  Only one week remained until the sacrifice.  He was no closer to finding an answer, and he was so very, very tired of fighting.

             It seemed the Fairy King was right.  Daniel couldn’t control the bloodlust.  The harder he tried to resist, the more it hounded him.  He heard the call all the time now, like the background buzz of a mosquito.  Distracting, annoying, insistent.  His body was an inferno.  He saw blood everywhere.  Only the other day, he had caught himself staring at Summer Morning’s throat, watching the throb of her pulse, wondering how her blood would taste.

             He could feel his sanity slipping away, corrupted by the hunger for blood.  He needed to find a way to end the sacrifices before he lost himself.

             A cool cloth touched the back of his burning neck.  He blinked, opening his eyes to the fuzzy image of Summer’s Morning, illuminated by moonlight, leaning over him.  He realized he had fallen asleep and was torn between relief at a few hours of dreamless sleep and irritation at the loss of a half-day’s research.

             He lifted his head, massaged the stiffness in his neck, and stared at the parchment where his sweat-drenched forehead had rested.  The ink had smeared; the words were beyond recognition.  He sighed.  Summer’s Morning pushed a tray under his nose, hiding the parchment from view.  He glanced at the floor and saw that she had cleaned away the breakfast tray while he slept.

             “Eat,” she ordered.

             He speared a forkful of salad.  Salad was safe.  No blood there.  Unless one considered the sap coursing through veins from root to stem.  He gagged, spat out the mouthful, and vaulted from the desk.  Summer’s Morning followed him to the window.  She rubbed circles against his back while he gazed at the night sky.

             “Do you want to tell me again that this will pass?” she asked with gentle irony and a hint of steel that warned him that excuses would no longer satisfy her.  “That a fever that does not burn itself out is ordinary?  That eating and sleeping are mere indulgences?  Tell me again that nothing is wrong, Daniel.”

             He crossed his arms over his chest, hugging himself.  “The Fairy King wants me to succeed him.”

             “You are his son, his only living heir, and he is very old.”

             He closed his eyes.  It sounded so reasonable when she said it like that.  She didn’t know the cost of the Fairy King’s lineage.   He wasn’t sure he could tell her.

             “He wants me to perform the next sacrifice.”

             She didn’t say anything, but he sensed her confusion, knew what her face would look like with her puckered brow and the tip of her tongue playing over her upper teeth.  The sacrifice was commonplace.  It had been part of their lives forever, part of what made the Fairy world what it was.  She wouldn’t understand why it troubled him.

 

                                                                                                       

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