Rippeet

Veren mukana tulivat kyyneleet. Ne juoksivat pitkin naisen ryppyisiä poskia samalla, kun veri valui käsivarren viiltohaavasta. Kauan sitten veri oli tuonut iloa ja mielihyvää, mutta nyt jäljellä oli vain kipu ja rakkauden rippeet.

Nainen keräsi punaiset pisarat kuppiin viimeistä myöten. Ikkunan takana taivas tummeni hitaasti, ja kohta olisi aika avata arkun kansi. Olkoonkin, että Vlad ei ollut siitä mitään ymmärtänyt sitten sen verisen marraskuun yön.

Mina pyyhki pois kyyneleensä ja kääri sideharson pakottavan kätensä ympärille, kuten hän oli tehnyt joka kolmas ilta niin kauan kuin muisti, senkin jälkeen kun toivo oli mennyt. Kuppi oli puolillaan, ja se saisi riittää tänään.

Cascade 2

My chair clattered across the floor as I sprang up. I drew breath to speak, thought better of it and ran my fingers through my hair in confusion.

“We’ve stayed in touch,” continued Angelo, “but she hasn’t updated her Facebook page or called me in two months.”

I sat down again heavily and shook my head more to clear it than in denial. To remember all that again was dizzy, but I could only think of how much I wanted to forget all over.

I looked down at my desk and tried to speak but failed.

“I know you have no reason to help her now, or especially me,” Angelo said gently, almost sadly. “But I ask you, please, help me find her. She could be in trouble.”

“Why would I care?” I asked. I lifted my gaze from the tabletop to his face. 


Without replying, he changed the subject. "I need your language skills and your detective skills. I need you to come with me to Finland and find her."

Finland. I was Finnish once. I swallowed emptiness and recalled a land of spring snowfall and sunlit summer nights.

"How much did you take away from me?" I asked, throat trying to close in on the words. "How much of my life have I forgotten?"

"I'm sorry." Angelo sighed.

"You're sorry?" I snorted. "You didn't even do it, Maria did. And now you want me to help her?" I fought to keep my voice down through rising indignation. "Unless this is just a new game the two of you have cooked up between yourselves..."

"That's unfair. No one ever played games on you," Angelo protested.

"Just go away." I turned away, faced the window, tried to admire the effect of shop signs and streetlights in the London fog.

"She asked me to give you a letter."

After a small pause I snorted again. "Before or after she disappeared?"

"Years ago."

I couldn't think of anything more to say.

"Please, Lena. Help us. Help her."

"My name is Julia," I whispered.

Cascade

I had forgotten my greatest love, my greatest fear and my greatest adventure.

Suburban motherhood contains very little in the way of adventure or fear and ours is a different kind of love, and that had been my life for a decade: take the children to school, drive to work at Victim Support, drive home via Tesco, make dinner, put the kids to bed… then repeat. And repeat, and repeat. It’s not a bad life, if you love your children and have a worthwhile job, especially after you leave your controlling, boring husband.

From before, prior to that decade on the family-work axis, I actually remember very little of my life. One fine March morning I had woken to reality in a hospital bed, bloody and battered and weak and completely amnesiac. Over time, I had regained memories of my childhood and adolescence spent in another country and had some fleeting impressions of moving to London of my own volition, but any life I may have led in London lay buried under a red fog I called before, a fog I could never shift.

Until now, when a man I knew appeared unannounced in my upstairs office at Victim Support.

I was working late to support a newcomer to the night shift, but he turned out to need hardly any support and in any case my eminently competent colleague also working the lines had him well in hand. I took the opportunity to organise my files and clean my inbox, something that hardly ever happened as evidenced by the piles of written reports and the 2000+ e-mails. I had barely reached item 1406 when the door clicked shut. I schooled the annoyance off my face and glanced up, and my blood froze.

Angelo. His name was Angelo, and he was from before.

That wasn't all, though - he was also a vampire.

I think my world stopped for a full minute in that realisation: that I knew vampires were real. Not storybook draculas or edwards or lestats, not emo superheroes, not invariably even heartless, loveless monsters preying on their once-fellow humans - just vampires, as varied a bunch of ageless narcissistic sanguivores as your heart could desire.

I must have stared at Angelo the whole time but he never even flinched, just gazed at me with hazel eyes from below dark eyebrows, still as ridiculously handsome as he had been two decades before. (And how disorienting it felt to remember that far back! Like suddenly acquiring x-ray vision and being able to see through previously impermeable walls.) Tonight his curling chestnut hair was tied back with a ribbon, giving him what I imagined to be something like his original air of 18th century Italian gentleman. All he needed was one of those collared jackets and tight trousers.

That thought reminded me of another. My face heated and this time my heart turned over in my chest. I swallowed through a sandpaper throat.

"Go away," I said and turned to the window.

Angelo sat down on my desk (my visitor chair had been appropriated weeks ago and never replaced).

"I'm sorry to intrude on your important work," he said. He still had that Italian accent and that singer's voice that befit his name. I had heard him sing--impossible that I should have forgotten that, but I had. "But I have no one else to turn to." He paused. "You see... Maria has gone missing."