Crystal Clear
Chapter 1
I was born in a small village, just outside of London, to Lady Elizabeth and Lord Mathew Stratt. We lived in the largest house in the village and were generally very wealthy because my father was always travelling between home and London for business with the King. Our high status and immense fortune meant that I lived a relatively secluded but peaceful life and I hardly ever left the house. The only boys I ever saw were the servants’ children and even if I’d been allowed to play with them they would have avoided me as much as possible.
To be honest my life was both boring and lonely and no amount of money in the world could make up for the fact that my parents didn’t love me. All I had were books, all hand scribed of course – they hadn’t perfected the printing process just yet. Most of the books that my father brought back from London were on the sort of subjects that a girl wouldn’t usually read about, but no one ever cared enough to stop me and my father had openly encouraged my attraction to staying in the library for hours every day. I quickly became what is referred to as book smart. I knew a little about exotic animals and a little about politics. I had also read a lot of novels and had made my father promise to bring back Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when he was next in London but he never did.
All I knew about the world outside was what I heard from the servants. I would sit in the rooms the maids were cleaning and ask them questions about money and life outside my prison. I would listen to them sing and learnt a lot of folk tunes until eventually I knew every word to every song they sang. Occasionally their children would be sat with them and they would actually speak to me, but I had never really fitted in with children my age. I enjoyed talking to adults and finding out things that I probably shouldn’t know but wanted to anyway. I enjoyed broadening my mind. I didn’t want to be one of those empty girls that most daughters of noblemen were. Unfortunately, all my mother and father had wanted from me was to be an empty, pretty shell that they could marry off.
I sat on the windowsill, staring out at the world beyond the walls that they had trapped me in, caged me up in. I felt that desperate urge that I got sometimes, when I wanted to leave and explore the world. I heard something clatter behind me, disturbing my thoughts. My head snapped round to search out the cause of the noise.
“S...So...” Roger stuttered, holding a wooden tray that he had just dropped on the floor. Roger was one of the servants’ children and he was the only child in the whole house that would say more than two words to me. Naturally, he was still slightly on edge around me, because my father had the power to fire his mother if he upset me. His pale blue eyes glazed over with tears and he pulled on a honey blond curl at the side of his head – it was a nervous twitch that I had grown accustomed to.
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling reassuringly at him. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
The misty look in his eyes slowly faded away. He nodded vigorously and rushed over to me. Roger was only about eight years old and he had the innocent, baby faced features of an angel. His smile was infectious and made his sharp, crystal blue eyes sparkle. Staring into them seemed to make everything so much simpler, clearer.
“Miss Stratt,” he said, following my gaze out of the window. “What are you looking at?”
“Freedom,” I said distantly.
“How can you look at freedom?” he asked, his expression looking puzzled.
I turned to him and smiled at his ignorance. “One day,” I said, “when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
I turned back to the window just in time to see a carriage arriving outside.
“Do we have visitors today?” I asked, perplexed.
“I believe there is an important guest of your father’s coming to dinner tonight,” Roger told me.
As the carriage drew closer I could see it more clearly. It was black with red swirls painted on the edges and around the windows, which were blacked out by black, velvet curtains. The slender man, with slicked back, black hair and sunken cheeks jumped down from the driver’s seat and opened the door to the carriage. He removed a large black parasol and held it up while a black shape slipped out of the carriage. I turned away from the window and walked quickly towards the front hall. One of the servants opened the door and the man walked into the room, greeted by my parents, who were waiting by the door nervously. As soon as he was in the house the door was closed and all the curtains were drawn. My mother curtsied to him and my father gestured for our servants to take the parasol and the man’s coat. I moved closer, perching on one of the steps close to the top of the stairs, to get a better look. The man was attractive, and not just because he was handsome – I couldn’t draw my eyes away from him. He was tall, very tall, with long legs and strong, broad shoulders that his cape hung from, moving with ease as if it were simply another limb. He was well dressed and obviously not a poor man. The cuffs and collar of his dinner jacket were hand embroidered and his breast pocket on his waste coat was adorned with a small crystal rose hanging from a chain. His skin was deathly pale and his large, dark eyes completed the proud smile of an arrogant nobleman. I knew the look well; it was the same look my parents always wore.
Today, however, the look on their faces was very different. Rather than pride, they displayed worry, anxiety and, above all, terror. The man stood before them now scared my parents and that was not an easy task.
My father gestured towards the dining room and led the way, followed by a party of servants. As the man swept past he seemed to sniff the air, before turning to look me straight in the eyes through the wisps of his long black hair. His smile became feral and tied knots in my stomach to accompany the shivers that ran down my spine. Then he looked away again and followed my father into the dining room, leaving me with a single thought – his eyes are the colour of blood.
I found myself paralyzed, unable to move from my seat on the stairs. For some reason I couldn’t get the image of those crimson eyes out of my head. I don’t know exactly how long I was sat on the stairs for; everything after seeing him was a blur.
My thoughts were interrupted the sound of two servants fumbling with a trunk. They carried past down the stairs and out of the door.
“This is all she should need,” one of them said.
I jumped up and followed them. They struggled over to the carriage and placed the trunk into the small luggage space at the back.
“Is that one of my trunks?” I asked.
“Yes milady,” one of the servants replied.
They walked past me, obviously trying to avoid anymore questions.
“Why are you putting in there?” I persisted.
“The lord asked us to,” she told me.
“Why?”
“Because you will be leaving with our guest tonight.”
“Leaving? With him? Why?”
“Because the lord has said you are.”
They escaped up the stairs and I lost the motivation to follow them. The door to the dining room opened behind me and I spun round to see my father emerge from the room. I rushed over to him.
“Father, what’s going on?” I demanded.
He ignored me.
“Father?” I pleaded as he walked away from me.
The skinny, black haired man grabbed my arm and started dragging me out towards the carriage. I tried to fight against him but, despite his slim build, he was much stronger than me. I was thrown into the carriage and the black haired man slid the bolt across and locked it with a padlock so that I couldn’t escape. I banged on the door repeatedly, desperate to get out and certain that being in this carriage was dangerous. I kept banging on the door over and over again until the skin on the side of my hands started to crack and rip. When they started to bleed I stopped and cradled them in my lap. Then I heard a man’s footsteps outside the carriage. I moved away from the door as it was flung open and a shape was bundled in hurriedly. The door quickly closed again and after a series of thumps and shouts the carriage lurched forwards raced along the gravel front of my house.
The man sat next to me turned and looked at me with those blood red eyes and I gasped, unable to look away from him. He smiled, reaching out a hand to touch my face. I flinched away from and hissed, “Don’t touch me.”
At first the man looked shocked but then he simply laughed raucously. “What a spirited young girl you are,” he said. His voice was deep and velvety. It was as hypnotic as those blood red eyes of his.
“Why am I here?” I demanded; I was able to think properly now that he wasn’t looking at me.
“Because your parents gifted you to me,” the man said, looking right into my eyes as if he was trying to guess what my reaction would be.
“They did what?” I breathed.
“Your father is a very bad man,” the man explained. “And he owed me a lot of money. As payment, he gave you to me.”
I was struck dumb. It’s not that I wouldn’t expect my father to do something like that; he’d sell me in a second, and had, apparently. It was more that it had actually happened. Of all the ways my life could get worse it was to be via slavery.
“But I’m being rude,” the man continued. “I should introduce myself first. My name is Lucas Farrington. From now on, you belong to me.”
“And what exactly do you want from me?” I asked, trying to keep my composure.
“Oh not much.” He picked up my hand. I tried to pull it away but his grip was like a vice. “Just this, your blood.”
He looked at me with glowing red eyes and grinned. Then he sunk his teeth into my wrist and I screamed. I could feel him drawing the blood from my body and every now and then his teeth would move a little and slice away at another part of my flesh. I started to feel dizzy until everything went black and, for a moment, I thought I was dead.
When I opened my eyes I wasn’t in the carriage anymore. I was lying on a bed covered by ornate silk sheets and was now dressed in a long white gown. My hair had been left untied and spread out on the pillow around my head. Distantly, I wondered who had changed my clothes and desperately hoped that it wasn’t the slim man with the black hair. I rolled over so that I could look through the gap in the lilac netting that was draped over the large, four poster bed. Only a few weak flecks of light breached the barricaded window and fell in sharp shapes on the floor. I slipped my feet onto the floor, gasping when I realised how cold the dark wood floor was against my bare skin.
Slowly my mind drifted back to the memories from the carriage and I remembered why I was here, because my parents had given me away to compensate their debt. Then I remembered the moment in the carriage when the man who called himself Lucas had sunk two sharp fangs into my skin. I lifted my arm and turned it over to look at the underside of my wrist, where two raw, red, circular scars were forming.
I looked up from my wrist at the room I was in. There was almost no light but the pale colour scheme of white drapes hanging from the walls, and the shear size of the room helped to compensate for that. There was a single picture of fairies in an enchanted garden hanging on the wall and a white rug, with gold thread woven into the shape of vines and flowers on the floor. I stepped tentatively on to the rug and marvelled at how soft the fibres were.
There was a loud bang and I spun round, as skittish as a dear. The slim man with the black walked into the room, barely even acknowledging my presence, and placed a tray of food on the small dressing table next to the bed. Then he left the room again and I heard the sound of a key turning in a lock. I wandered over to the tray of food and pushed at a messy chunk of meet on the plate with my finger. I looked back towards the boarded up window and my mind explored what little I knew of the world beyond. I so wanted to leave the room and explore. To be free to just travel, experience, live must be a truly beautiful thing. Instead I had been taken from one prison to another; except the security at the new one was much better than at my previous abode.
I didn’t eat – I couldn’t quell the sick feeling that came with the memories that were growing gradually clearer and clearer. I could remember the pain and the feeling of my blood being sucked out of my veins. The fear was too strong to forget and the expectation that it would almost definitely happen again. My mind wouldn’t stop spinning. I was so lost in my own head that I didn’t even notice the slender man enter the room again.
“You should eat,” he said – it was more of an order than a suggestion.
I backed away from him into the corner of the room and watched him clearing away the tray.
“If you don’t eat, you’ll grow week,” he said. “And then you won’t survive the feeds.”
I winced. He referred to what had happened in the carriage so easily and half heartedly. Then he left and I didn’t see him again until the sun set, taking away what little light broke through the boarded up windows, when he brought another tray of food and placed it in the exact same place on the dressing table. This time I nibbled at the food so that it looked like a small mouse had attacked the dish, but I still couldn’t bring myself to eat anymore than that. The last human contact I had for the day was when the slim man came back to take the tray away again. After a while the fatigue started to settle in and I had to go to bed. The next few days went by in the same sort of way. I was left alone in the room and only saw other human beings when the slender man came with trays of food for me. Once I had grown accustomed to the schedule and my senses had returned to me, I started planning my escape attempts. I tried to pull the boards off of the windows. I had to use my bare hands because there was nothing in the room that I could use to ply them off of the window. After a while I gave up but, by then, I had already filled my fingers with splinters and blood was seeping from the cuts.
I quickly lost count of the days; they were all the same. I inspected the room and found that I had been supplied with clothes varying from basic dresses to eccentric gowns in a gothic fashion. One day, to entertain myself, I tried on each of the fancy gowns and flaunted them around the room to an imaginary audience. The slender man had interrupted me, coming in with a tray of food like always. When he came back to collect the tray he placed a pair of pristinely white pumps with black laces. Then he gave me something resembling a smile and left the room. I just stared at the shoes from my position on the foot of the bed. Slowly, I slipped off of the bed and crawled along the floor towards the beautiful pumps. I reached out and gently curled my fingers around them, pulling them towards me. I slipped my feet into the shoes and laced them up. I stood up and span round, trying out the way the shoes felt on my feet and giggling as the skirt billowed out around me. I lost myself in the spins, growing dizzy and confused from the high speed that the room was travelling at. I let myself forget where I was for a while so that I could enjoy the brief moment of peace that I had.
I fell onto the bed and curled up into a little ball. Life as I had known it was over and no amount of beautiful dresses or shoes or large, fancy rooms could delude me into thinking that I was still in my safe boring house. It was the epitome of be careful what you wish for. I fell asleep crying and slept through dinner.
A loud commotion on the other side of the door woke me. I sat up, eyes wide and senses fully in tune. I knew it was him long before he entered the room – I could feel his presence as if he was sending a signal straight into my brain. I scrambled backwards, desperately pushing myself as far away from the door as I could get and squashing myself against the wall in doing so. A key turned in the door and it swung open. He swooped into the room, cape flowing elegantly behind him, and stopped at the foot of my bed. He smiled in the way that a cat does when it’s cornered a mouse.
“Stay away from me,” I whispered.
His smile widened. He slowly moved round the bed so that he could sit beside me. He swept my hair back, tucking it behind my ear. I cringed, flinching away from his touch and starting to shake violently. He traced the line of my jaw with his palm, cupped my chin and tilted my head back so that my neck was fully exposed. I didn’t move an inch – I didn’t dare to. His face moved slowly closer to my throat and I whimpered as I felt something sharp brush against my skin.
“You don’t command me, human,” he growled against my jaw, saying the word human in the same tone used to say scum. “You are mine.”
His fangs pierced my skin and I gasped with terror. I could him sucking the blood from my body, like something crawling under my skin. Worse still, I could hear it. I could hear him slurping up the blood. I could hear him swallowing. I could hear it coursing out of my body. I tried to gather my composure, ignoring the sounds and feelings. I tried to suppress my terror. I was too proud and stubborn to take such humiliation and abuse without protesting.
“I will never be yours,” I hissed. Then I passed out.
The next night he had a party of guests around. I was made to wear a glamorous black gown so that he could parade around the party. As I passed them, the guests would follow me with their eyes, licking their lips with hunger. I stayed by his side, too afraid to stray away from him. A few of his more important guests were permitted to drink from a small incision that he’d made in the skin on the back of my wrist. By the end of the evening I felt more drained than tired and I just wanted to lie down in my bed. Instead I was danced around room and spun until I was so dizzy that I could hardly stand up. I was passed through the crowd throughout the night until I was too tired and bewildered to remember if they did anything worse than that to me.
When I woke up the next morning I had pounding headache and aching joints to match. It must have been closer to midday because the first meal that was brought to me was lunch, and I was so hungry and drained that I gorged on the food as soon as the slender man brought it through the door. He stayed while I ate. As soon as I was finished I burst into tears. I noticed the slender man tense beside me, feeling awkward the moment that I started to cry. Then he relaxed and placed a bony hand on my shoulder to comfort me.
It was a few days before he visited me again, which I was grateful for. In the meantime the slender man’s visits became more regular and after he’d fed on me the slender man would stay with me and comfort me. It reached a stage when I thought that I could truly count him as an ally of mine. Occasionally I would anger him and instead of feeding on my blood he would strike me. Occasionally he would bring ladies, human ladies, back to the house and have me watch as drew the life from their veins. But looking back now, even though he subjected me to physical and mental torture all day every day, I couldn’t bring myself to hate him at that time – I didn’t have enough hatred left for him. Everything that was happening to me was happening because of my parents and at that moment in time I couldn’t feel anything but hate for them.
I eventually grew used to being mistreated. The feeds became a part of everyday life. I lost track of how many days or weeks had passed – it could even have been months. I became subdued, no longer caring about anything. I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t even move from my bed. I couldn’t tell you when it happened or how long I’d known Lucas Farrington before he ended my life forever, but it is still one of the most vivid and powerful memories that I have. I will never forget the day I died.
I opened my eyes and he was standing over my bed. His eyes glowed red with hunger and anger. Looking straight into them hurt me slightly – it was like looking into the heart of a fire. He sat down on my bed and wrenched me up. His movements were aggressive, especially compared to the strange gentleness that he usually treated me with. He sank his teeth into my neck and I could feel myself fading again. I went week and when he let me go I collapsed onto the bed. Somewhere distant, I could hear him talking to me.
“I drained too much,” he said, his voice echoing in my mind long after he’d stopped talking. “You’ll die. But you don’t have to. If you want, I can turn you into a vampire, like me.” He leaned in close and looked straight into my eyes with a strange sort of affection. “What do you say?”
I nodded, using all the energy I had left in my body. He lifted his wrist to his lips and bit down until the crimson blood trickled down his arm. He held his wrist to my lips and the blood trickled into my mouth. It tasted like metal and it was cold, as dead as he was. As I swallowed the liquid it took its hold on me and I found myself desperately gulping down more and more of it. Every drop I consumed made me want another even more than the last. Without even realising, I gripped his and held it to my mouth. Slowly I felt myself drifting away, as if the cold blood was cooling my body to the same temperature. He pulled his arm free and I fell against the bed. I gasped instead of breathing, suddenly realising that taking in oxygen was becoming much more difficult. Everything went black and body became cold. I gulped down one last breath of air. Then I was gone.
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