Crazy Little Thing Called Love
The old cleric shoved the glowing white soul into my chest, used all of his mental and physical strength completely up. All of his magical power reserves were probably going dry as well. He had told me it was a difficult business, troublesome because it’s always harder to insert a soul than remove one. I should have believed him when I demanded that he possess me with my own lost soul.
The sheer, opaque whiteness of the soul moved almost like a ghost, but it had no form. It brushed up against my skin and burnt me like a cigarette, just a first degree burn. But as the old man began to force the resistant soul through my chest, I caught fire. It burned my flesh, ripped open my skin as the flames climbed higher up my chest. The soul refused to go, fluttered about like a piece of tissue paper caught in the middle of a horrible wind storm. As the phantom above me swirled in fury, the flames moved up to my shoulders and neck, slowly burnt their way across every exposed area of my chest.
The pain was excruciating and I almost regretted doing it, but I thought about everything that had brought me to this point. Love. Without a soul, my beloved Darren and I could never be together unless I took his soul as well. I refused to kill him, to put him through that enduring loneliness. I had lived for three hundred years without a soul and it wasn’t something I wanted to continue doing. I knew the circumstances and I knew what I was getting into, I just hoped that once I did this I could finally feel at peace with myself.
Being a vampire was more of a curse than a pleasure. Sure, I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, but I had grown bored of the never-ending loneliness, the tiresome nights stalking prey through the nasty, grimy streets of New York, the depression. I wanted to feel love, I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be in love. And then Darren had come along, he had brought a sort of sun into my life and that was before I’d ever even spoken to him. It was almost like love at first sight, though it took him a while to feel the same about me as I did about him.
He finally agreed to let me have my soul restored. He had refused at first because I explained to him how painful it was going to be, but then I told him that if I didn’t, I would never feel like myself. I hadn’t felt like myself since the night I became a follower of the darkness. I didn’t want to follow the darkness anymore, but there was no known cure of vampirism that didn’t result in permanent death. Getting my soul back was the only plausible way I could think of that would keep Darren safe and alive in my arms.
The flames spread to my tank top, caught it on fire and scorched the fabric black where it used to be blue. The pain was intensified the farther along the cleric went about forcing the soul back into my chest. There was about three fistfuls of my soul left to be replaced and it brought bloody tears to my eyes. The flames dug deep down into my skin, down through the muscles and almost caressed my bones. I had to let out a scream. The scream felt good, brought me out of my thoughts of love and kept me grounded to the pain. The longer I held the scream, the better I felt. The cleric had grown tired of it, I knew, but I wasn’t going to stop when the screaming kept some of the pain at bay.
The soul disappeared into a hole in my chest, along with the cleric’s hand. He quickly removed his hand and chanted over my chest, sprinkled some kind of red powder onto the hole to keep the soul from fleeing. As the soul found that it knew my heart, it let out a jolt of happiness and dove inside the left ventricle. It wriggled around, made itself at home inside my chest. I felt a sudden tingling sensation spread from my heart. The bones replaced themselves, the muscles folded over the bones and the flesh soon followed them. The sensation melted down my stomach and into my legs as well, warmed every inch of me. The tingling sensation separated and headed in two directions, up and down. It slithered up into my head, made me realize everything I had lost when I had lost my humanity. I hadn’t lost just myself, I had chosen to lose my morals. They now flew back into my body, filled me up with the warmth that had been missing before. I thought I even felt my heart beat once.
The flames disappeared and the pain stopped. I felt like I was almost alive, only I still didn’t have a heartbeat. I relaxed for a moment or so, reflected on whatever I had just gained and compared it to everything I had previously had. The new me was so much better. It was an old me and a new me combined. My body was warmer, but would never be human warm ever again. I could keep my lover in my arms and maybe he wouldn’t shiver like he used to. I could watch over him and actually care about everything he did. I felt as though my morals had come back with my soul, wanted me to be more human so I could love. Oh, that crazy little thing called love could make a person do anything for practically nothing. I sat up, thanked the cleric, and left to be with Darren.
