CURSE OF THE BLOOD MOON

Stephan stayed with his son for a couple of minutes before following her. He thought he had given her enough time to cool off but he was wrong. She was in Solara and Kayla’s room blowing off steam.

“He doesn’t understand what I’m going through.” She paced up and down the room.

“How about you, refrain from walking a hole in my bedroom floor.” Kayla stood up and held Scarlet’s arms to her side. “You also need to understand him. He’s just worried about you and so are we.”

“Are you taking his side?” Scarlet felt betrayed by her best friend for the first time since they met.

“I’m not. I’m on your side we all are.”

“Scarlet the sooner you accept what you are now the better it will be for you.” Solara chipped into the conversation.

“There’s that word again accept.” Scarlet had just had about enough of that word and the other words accompanying it.

“This is your life now-,” Kayla stopped midsentence and gasp, “Scar, calm down.”

“I am calm.” She hissed.

“No, you are not.” Kayla dragged her to the bathroom and turned her body to face the mirror. “No, you are not.”

Scarlet stared at the reflection. If not wasn’t just her and Kayla in the bathroom she could have sworn the woman looking back at her, wasn’t her.

Her eyes were red with a ring of black around them. She stared back at the girl, leaning closer and closer to the mirror. Scarlet mind went back to the final days of her pregnancy. She remembered how Archie and the superintendent had commented about her eyes.

She thought about Archie and how if he had known he was looking into the eyes of a killer, he wouldn’t have gone back to her apartment that day. And maybe, just maybe he would still be alive.

Stephan stepped behind her, his arms around her waist. “This is who you are now, love. If you don’t start living your new life as you should you will become a danger to yourself, to everyone around you, and most of all to our son.”

Scarlet hang onto his last word, her son. “I would never hurt him.”

“Not intentionally, but if you keep living in denial, you will never learn how to control your emotions, your moods, and most of all your thirst. If you let yourself be controlled it will consume you and destroy you.” He kissed the back of her head and left.

Solara and Kayla went with him. They wanted to give her some time with the vampire in the mirror.

Scarlet raised her hand to the mirror when the eyes looking back at her began changing into a familiar hazel color. She promised herself that she would give it some thought. But from what Stephan had told her she didn’t have much of a choice.

She thought of how the four vampires in the house, the fifth that was her son, drank the small doses of human blood. They had to, because of how their skin would look in the sunlight, but she didn’t think she needed to.

The past two days, she had been out in the sun with her son, and nothing had appeared on her skin. She was going to reach a compromise with herself and the three people who were waiting for her in the living room. She would drink the blood, but she wasn’t going to touch human blood.

The three of them had lived a long while without thinking about their lives before they became immortals, but she hadn’t. A month ago, she was a human and she couldn’t willingly feed on another human being’s blood.

She was going to hang on to that part of her for as long as she could. She was never going to let go and soon she was going to put her life back on track. Scarlet hadn’t given up on her human dreams, and somehow she was going to work her way back to it.

***

“Did you notice the color of her eyes? When she was pregnant we didn’t think much of it because we always assumed it was SJ.” Solara was trying to make sense of what Scarlet was.

“They are exactly like mine when I take both forms.” Stephan leaned forward in his seat as his fingers rubbed his jaw.

“What if it had always been her?” The blank looks on both their faces made it evident to Kayla that they didn’t understand her. “What if, she was slowly transforming when she was pregnant. But she didn’t know it like it was her doppelganger.”

“That’s impossible, Vampires don’t bleed that much or at all.” Stephan didn’t think her theory was viable.

“What about beasts they bleed don’t they?”

“I think so I’m not sure. We’ll have to ask Eric in the morning. But either way, it’s impossible. You can’t turn someone into a beast.”

Kayla shot him a look, and he immediately knew what she was thinking.

“I wasn’t turned into a beast I always had the gene.”

***

Scarlet was listening to their conversation, she had decided to stay out of it while they were trying to figure out the answer to the trivia question, what is Scarlet now? She only joined in when Stephan rerouted the conversation to himself.

He held out his hand to her, and she took it. He pulled her towards him to seat on his lap.

“Marquis-,”

“Marquis!” Scarlet had no idea the conversation would head that way. “Are you sure you don’t want to hold a bible when you speak of her? Drink a gallon of holy water.” She didn’t hide her distaste for that particular vampire.

Stephan grinned and stroked her back. “Anyway, she told me that she waited for me for a long time. My great, great, great grandfather was a beast, so they didn’t change me. They just had to wake up the dormant gene in me.” He couldn’t help but think that Scarlet also had the dormant gene in her. And it was set off by the pregnancy. He didn’t dare say it out loud just in case that idea didn’t sit well with her.

“Wow, so how long did she have to wait?” Kayla asked.

“She kept on saying centuries. She was pissed that I kept on loving a woman that wasn’t her.” He smiled up at Scarlet.

“So what’s going to happen now?” they had spent most of the day arguing about what she was and spending time with their son, that she didn’t get a chance to ask him what happened. How come he was back home, especially after everything Kayla had told her.

Stephan wasn’t going to tell her about the deal he made, not yet. “What’s going to happen is that we are going to be happy.”

Solara and Kayla looked away. They knew what he was leaving out of that sentence and they didn’t want to risk Scarlet reading it on their faces.

“That we will.” She didn’t want or waste time arguing anymore. Stephan was back home with his family where he belonged.