The Craving

And his eyes . . .

They were small and blue, but not the clear blue of my brother’s. They were mottled, milky almost, and too ancient for the rest of his body, moving quickly but incorrectly, like a bird’s or a lizard’s gaze, but with a powerful intelligence behind it.

This man was not human.

He didn’t feel like a vampire, not exactly. But there was something just below his surface waiting for a chance to explode. The Power radiating from him was greater than anything I had experienced. And my instincts told me that even though he had come under the auspices of being our lawyer, this man was not here to help us.

He surveyed us in the jail cell and smiled slightly.

“You may go,” he said to the guard behind him. His voice didn’t even rise, but quietly reverberated in a way that carried to the far end of the empty holding cells. And yet they went. Quickly, and with something like relief on their faces.

We were left alone with this beast.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, smiling in a way that made me sick.

“Who are you?” Damon asked, clearly trying to sound bored. But I could hear the fear in his voice.

“Who am I?” the man repeated in a heavy accent. “Does it help to know the name of the one who will kill you? It didn’t seem any comfort to your wives.”

The words fell like stones to the floor, heavy and final. The man casually put a giant hand up to rest on a bar.

“You killed the Sutherlands,” I whispered.

“Yes.” He smiled and pursed his lips. “It was fun.”

“You tore them apart like paper dolls,” I said, even though I knew he could tear me apart, too, could scatter my limbs like the petals that had lined my wedding altar. “You . . . broke them.”

“Young vampire, you must know the hunger of the beast,” he said with a smile that wasn’t at all amused. “There are other hungers, for other things, that once awoken cannot rest until they are satisfied.”

The whites of the man’s eyes glowed red, and there was a hush in the air, like great Power was being summoned. I could practically smell the fear coiling off Damon in large strips.

But I began to grow angry.

Rage boiled in my stomach and shot out through my body. This man had butchered an innocent family and enjoyed it. This was what my new life as a vampire meant—layers and layers of evil, and even more horror and destruction, just when I felt I had reached the very bottom.

“Why?” I demanded, coming forward as far as the bars would let me. “What did they ever do to you?”

“Why?” the beast asked. He leaned forward, mocking my bravado. As he neared, mere centimeters from my face, a sickening stench of old blood and decay swept over me. It was like a thousand years of death and dismemberment followed him around, a trophy from each corpse he was responsible for.

“Recompense.” He said each syllable carefully.

“Recompense?” I echoed.

He bared his teeth. “Yes, recompense. For taking Katherine. And destroying any chance to break the curse.”

Katherine? What did she have to do with all of this, with this abomination in front of us? With the Sutherlands? And what curse?

I looked over at Damon. She had always shared more details of her life, of being a vampire, with him. But my brother was wide-eyed and gaping like a fish, even more stunned by hearing her name than I was.

I thought about the blissful, ignorant weeks I spent as her slave and lover, never imagining that she would lead me straight into hell.

The man backed up a few steps, including Damon in his foul stare.

“Yes, you understand now,” he said, nodding. But we didn’t.

“I—” Damon began to speak.

“SILENCE!” the man roared. Suddenly he was pressed up against the bars, a blackened fingernail inches from Damon’s throat. “Do you dare deny it?”

With a chilling deliberateness, he pushed an iron bar aside like it was a curtain. The metal screamed in agony. In a flash of darkness he had stepped through, and wrapped a giant hand around each of our throats.

“You took Katherine. I take your new life from you. An eye for an eye, as you people are fond of saying. Right?”

“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, choking.

The monster threw back his head and laughed.

“Of course you don’t.” He snapped his head back, suddenly fixing me with his eyes and a sneer on his lips. He didn’t believe me. “Katherine never mentioned Klaus?”

Even after her death, Katherine continued to haunt us. I looked over at Damon. There was a pained, heartbroken look on his face. It was gone in an instant, but for that one moment I thought I saw through to my old brother. He was shocked by the fact that Katherine, the love of his life, had been involved with a creature as heartless as the one that stood before us. I felt for him.

Unbidden, half a dozen images of Katherine came to my mind. Her amber eyes that commanded attention. Her long black hair hanging in waves around her neck, as if she had just done something that might have disheveled it. Her tiny waist and mischievous smile. She had been irresistible. And Damon and I weren’t the only ones to have felt her pull.

The man tightened his grip on my throat, and I could hear the groaning of vertebrae. In a moment we would be on the floor, our necks snapped as easily as that of the prisoner Damon had killed.

Then suddenly I was free. Damon fell to the ground beside me, also released from the stony grip that held him.

From outside the cell, the monster smiled viciously.

“I will see you two later,” he promised.