Karhi Emelyn

A soft whisper brushed his ear.  “Antti.”

He opened his eyes to darkness, but it was a calm, heavy darkness.  He could hear his mother’s soft snores from the corner of the room.

He turned toward the voice, his hand settling on the soft skin of his younger sister’s upper arm.  “Pirjo,” he whispered back.  “Why did you wake me?”

“Isä is outside.”

He scrubbed his hair back from his head, confused.  “Why . . .”  He smiled as he remembered.  “It’s time to finish the Reiskamma!”

“Isä said Veli and I could help.”  Pirjo’s voice was hushed, but he could hear the trembling excitement in it.  “I was awake before him, but he said I couldn’t come out until you and Veli were awake.”

A smile furled slowly across his face.  It was their first Reiskamma in years.  The last one had been when Antti was four—too early to do more than rake humus over the soil.  But he was sixteen now.  He could help.

Antti had spent all of spring with his father, cutting down trees in the heat of the sun and arranging them on the ground where his younger brother had raked humus over the soil.  Antti woke up every morning aching from the work, but he was becoming stronger and stronger.  He could haul the larger saplings by himself now.

It was almost the end of spring, and they were running out of time before the start of the growing season.  They had to start early that day to start burning all of the dried trees.  When it was completed, the Reiskamma was over and then next week, they would sow the barley and turnips.

He reached behind him for his brother.  He was nestled underneath the wool blanket he and Antti shared.  “Veli,” he whispered, shaking his shoulder gently.

He felt Veli jolt awake and look around sharply.  After a moment, he settled.  “Antti?”

“Reiskamma,” was all Antti said.

Veli sat up.  “Let’s go!” he shouted.

“Veli,” Pirjo hissed as the shout earned sounds of confusion from their youngest sister, Helena, and their mother.

Antti heard Veli clap his hand over his mouth.  “Oops.  Sorry.”

“Go outside,” Äiti groaned from where she lay next to Helena.  “It isn’t even sunrise yet.  Go.”

Antti grinned, standing up.

They changed into their work clothes and went outside into the pre-dawn light.

Antti stopped, rubbing his eyes in confusion.

The fields that rolled out before his house, tilled and planted with oats, were nothing but ash.  Embers and ash filled the air around him, floating noiselessly to the ground.  The pre-dawn light, normally a soft blue, was the angry red of an open sore.

He turned to look at his brother and sister, but they were gone.  And the house was gone.

He turned back to the burnt fields.  No . . . this wasn’t how the burning of Reiskamma went.  The field weren’t burnt . . .

“Isä!” he called out, stepping forward.

Ash filled his lungs and he fell, his vision plunging into darkness. 

Cold metal clamped around his wrists and ankles.  When he could see again, it was just those emerald eyes.  Fear gripped him, and he bucked against the metal restraints.

“Now, now, my pet,” Ilona whispered in his ear.  He felt the soft drag of her fingers along his sternum.    He could see a pale hand tipped with crimson nails.  No claws—not yet.

He was naked in his restraints, Ilona’s favourite way to hold him down.  The cold metal of the chair pressed into his back, insistent.  He was going to hurt.

He tried to speak but his mouth was filled with ash.  He spat it out but where the ash left, more filled its place.

“Don’t try to speak.  You’ll only make it worse for her.”  She pointed a single, red finger past him.

He turned to see Sloane in matching shackles, pinned to a table, just like him.  She was naked, too.  But unlike him, she already had blood flaking off of her skin, fresh cuts along her chest and arms.

He opened his mouth, but the ash just kept coming.  It filled his mouth and coated his throat.  He tried to cough but couldn’t expel anything.

“Did you think you were free of me?” Ilona whispered in his ear.

He woke from the nightmare with a jolt, earning a complaining moan from next to him.  He looked wildly to his side and the haze from the nightmare cleared as he remembered where he was.

A woman lay on her side, faced away from him, pulling the blanket over her bronze shoulders to block out the cold.  He looked to his other side to see a man lying on his stomach, arm under Karhi’s pillow, still asleep.  All three of them were naked.

He leaned against the headboard of the bed.  His muscles were sore, and his mouth was dry.  At least this time he remembered the night before.  The last time he hired escorts, it was while he was already high, and he woke up the next day with two women in bed beside him and no memory of who they were.  It had scared the hell out of him, reminding him of when Ilona kidnapped him and murdered a woman to make him think he’d gone into frenzy after doing heroin.

He had promised himself that he would no longer use heroin until he had already hired the escorts.  And he would use escorts he knew.

And it had worked out.  He knew the name of the woman next to him was Tonya and the man was Li-Ren.  Tonya was going to school to become an accountant to move on from sex work as a full-time gig, and Li-Ren did sex work full time.  Tonya was in charge of the escort business that she and Li-Ren worked for, along with a few other escorts.

They lay in a king bed with four wooden posts that were taller than him.  The hotel room was carpeted with thick white carpet.  The walls were a soothing pale green, the light sconces mounted on them still illuminated.  Heavy green curtains covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, light peeking through the edges.  He could hear the dull rumble of the street several floors below them.  The slow heartbeats of the humans next to him overlaid the rumble with a gentle thump thump thump.

He laid there, looking up at the fresco painted on the ceiling.  It was a simple mandala of flowers, but he enjoyed tracing the lines of the flowers and leaves with his eyes.

A break in Li-Ren’s breathing made Karhi look over at him.  One dark eye was scrunched closed, the other blinking in annoyance.  He glanced at Karhi and made a face.  “You didn’t take all the heroin,” he complained in a low murmur.  He groaned, pushing his chin length black hair away from his face.

Karhi shrugged, showing his hands to Li-Ren and giving him an apologetic grin.  “Sorry.  I know I fed from you a few weeks ago so I didn’t want to go too hard, I guess.”

He sent a tired scowl at Karhi, but it wasn’t effective.  If anything, it made Karhi want to brush his fingers over the delicate pout of his lips.  “You barely drank anything.  Maybe like a tablespoon last time.”

Karhi honestly didn’t remember but he wasn’t going to tell Li-Ren that.  It was just before he had realized he needed to change something about his hook-ups.

“It’s because he doesn’t remember, Ren,” Tonya groaned from her side of the bed.

Karhi looked at Tonya to see she was reaching for the bedside table for her glasses.  He took a moment to appreciate the soft curve of her bare shoulders as she moved.

Then he realized what she had said.  Karhi started to protest.  “What—”

Tonya cut him off.  “Babe, you told us last night, while you were high out of your mind, that you were doing heroin differently because you woke up confused too much.”

“He did?” Ren asked, rolling over onto his back.

“His dick was in your mouth—understandable why you don’t remember,” she replied dismissively, looking at Karhi.  “You told me last night you were going to talk to your sisters.”

Karhi’s brow furrowed.  “I said what?”

“Carry and Onyx?” Ren snorted.  “Carry I could maybe get, but Onyx is crazy—”

Tonya waved him off to shut him up.  “You did.  You said your kid—”

“Ugh, don’t call her that,” Karhi groaned, leaning back against the headboard.

Tonya ignored him and finished her thought.  “You said she told you to talk more to your siblings to connect with someone over the shit your sire did to you.”

She wasn’t wrong.  Sloane had told him to do that.  She kept waking up because of the nightmares he had been having since Samhain.  The fledgling-sire connection was absolute shit sometimes. 

She had told him that talking to his siblings would help.  Especially if he had an actual conversation with them instead of just making jokes and referencing fucked-up things as if they were normal occurrences. 

When he pointed out she did the same thing, she told him she had therapy and more meaningful relationships under her belt, and he couldn’t throw stones at her.

“Fine,” he groaned.

Tonya rolled out of bed, give him a nice view of a thick torso and round ass.  He poked at one of the dimples beside her spine.  “Hey Tonyaaa,” he purred.

“No,” she said.  “I have class at three, and I need to finish a problem set.”

“Worst.  Hooker.  Ever,” Ren said from where he lay next to Karhi.

“Shut up, you twink,” she replied.  “You hook up with him if you want to.  I brought my laptop, so I’m going to finish my homework in the living room.”  She pulled on underwear and walked out of the room into the adjacent room.  She shut the door behind her.

Ren eyed Karhi.  “Quickie?”

Karhi reached over and entangled his hand in Ren’s short hair, leaning down.  He kissed Ren, reaching beneath the sheets.

Ren jolted, grinning against Karhi’s mouth.  “Naughty.”

“Mm-hmm.”  Karhi pressed his tongue into Ren’s mouth and sunk into the bed with him.

TW for drug, sexual, and physical abuse, and discussion of suicide

Karhi sat in the small courtyard in Onyx and Carry’s penthouse, eyes up to the snow-covered skylight in the roof. 

A small creek with white and orange goldfish skirted the perimeter of the room, moss and orchids decorating the path the water took.  A single square of tile made up the footbridge that went over the stream to the door leading back into the penthouse.  A fountain sat in the centre of the courtyard, feeding the stream.  The sound of the water burbling down the fountain was pleasant.

He sat in a chair at a small wire table.  A petite woman with brown skin sat across from him.

“Are you okay?” Carry asked.

Karhi looked at Carry, furrowing his eyebrows.  “Huh?”

“You’ve been staring at the skylight for the better part of five minutes.”

“No, I haven’t.”

She pointed to where her glass of blood was empty and his was full, raising an eyebrow.

He blinked for a moment before scowling and reaching for his blood.  It was lukewarm already.  He downed it in four gulps, setting it back down.  “Better?”

She held up her hands, shrugging.  “I wasn’t saying it was bad—you just walked into my house and said you wanted to hang out.  I assumed that meant . . . talking?  Isn’t that usually what hanging out means?  I don’t know what the kids do these days.”

He snorted but she was right.  He was the one who had showed up out of the blue.  Onyx, Carry’s wife, was out of town.  It had been a while since he had spent time with them separately.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said sheepishly.  “I’m, uh, still on the comedown.”  He felt like he was almost swimming through the air when he moved.  And when he sat, he felt firmly planted, but somehow airy.  He had expected to be done with the comedown by now.

Carry’s brow wrinkled in confusion.  “Uh . . . I also don’t know the kids’ slang these days.  What does that mean?”

Karhi was pretty sure that was a universal term, but he also didn’t think that either Carry or Onyx did any drugs besides alcohol.  He clacked the ball of his tongue piercing against his teeth nervously.  “I’m coming down from . . . a heroin high.”

Carry’s face was impassive as she regarded him.  She tilted her head, pursing her lips thoughtfully.  “From the way you’re tapping your teeth with your tongue, you’re anxious.  And from your tone . . . this isn’t new.”

He stopped tapping the ball on his tongue against his teeth.  “Yeah.”  He hadn’t expected the shame he would feel trying to tell Carry.  Sloane knew and didn’t care.  Lunette knew, and she cared, but she had found out by accident.

This was the first time he was explicitly telling one of his siblings.

“Okay,” she said.

He rubbed the back of his neck, confused.  “Okay?”

“I don’t know a lot about drugs, but I know that most people who do them, do it to escape something, right?  And we’ve had a lot to escape over the centuries.”  She smiled, one corner of her mouth higher up than the other.  He had always liked her crooked smile.  It felt like the sun after a snowstorm.

He found himself laughing nervously.  “Yeah.”  He resisted the urge to tap his teeth.

“Why did you tell me?” she asked.

“Uh—well I was going to tell both you and Onyx.  I thought she was here, too.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

It did not.  Why was he struggling so much to tell her?  He talked to Sloane about this.  And he talked to Ren and Tonya with no issues.

Because they weren’t strangers to drugs, he realized.  He did drugs with the escorts, and Sloane had dealt with addiction with her friend Mikko.  And while Karhi didn’t necessarily consider himself addicted to heroin . . . he also knew he was using it way more now than he ever had before.

Carry was patient as he thought through her question.  Onyx would have fidgeted and tried to coax it out of him.  Maybe it was better it had been Carry.  She would wait him out.

“Sloane,” he finally said.

If that answer surprised her, she didn’t indicate it.  She just waited.

And he found himself spilling everything then.  The heroin usage.  The escorts.  Sloane’s handling of his comedowns.

He went even further back than that.  He went back to Ilona’s abuse.  The sexual abuse.  The physical abuse.  Controlling him in ways that he was still only finding out.

“She paid off my accountant to keep her apprised of all my financial assets.  She bought out one of the companies I heavily invested in back in the late 90s.  She made tons of awful decisions, just to tank the stocks.  I lost millions and almost lost my house.”

Carry’s eyebrows were high on her forehead.  “I remember that.  You had to live with Luna for a bit.” 

He nodded, tapping his stud against his teeth.  “Sloane told me I needed to talk to someone that wasn’t her.  Someone who had been through it, too.  She said it would help.  I’ve been having a lot of nightmares since Samhain.”

Carry surprised him by reaching out and taking his hand.  Her hand wasn’t particularly warm, but the gesture was.  It helped ease the tension that had settled into his shoulders and neck.  He unclenched his jaw.

“She used to make me have sex with men in front of Onyx.  And if I didn’t climax, she would take it out on Onyx.”  Carry looked down at the floor.  “She would switch us out.  One on the chopping block, the other on the sex block.”  She pressed her lips together.  “The blocks looked the same after a while.”

His mouth dropped.  “What?” he whispered.  He couldn’t express the horror that twisted his stomach.  He could talk about what happened to him—some of it had been centuries ago.  He could be dispassionate about it, not inspecting it too heavily.

He hadn’t ever known that Onyx and Carry had been subjected to the same thing.

“She . . . m-made Onyx . . . with Zeren.”  She looked down at the floor.  Her voice trembled, eyes filling with tears.  Zeren was Carry’s brother.

He squeezed her hand, lost for anything else to do.

He had known that Lunette’s torture had been physical and mental.  As far as he knew, it had never been sexual in any way.  When Lunette had found out, around Samhain, about Ilona’s repeated rape of Karhi over the years, she had been horrified.

He had assumed that the same had gone for the others.  Because he was Ilona’s plaything, he was the only one subjected to her perversions.

But no.  She had just been finding other ways to hurt them without touching them herself.  He hadn’t been the only one under her hand.

“How often did she do that to you?” he asked.

“I think the last time was maybe a decade or two ago.  Remember when the three of us ‘moved to Australia’?”

He did.  It had been in the late 90s.  They had lived there for a year before moving back to the States.  Zeren had moved to Europe, and . . . come to think of it, the three of them had been living together on and off since Carry and Zeren had been turned into vampires.  They hadn’t lived together since Australia.

He felt sick as he finally understood.

“She kidnapped us and kept us imprisoned in a cellar outfitted with prison cells interspersed with threads of sun gold to keep us weak.  She barely fed us—forcing us to kill anyone she brought for us to . . . mount.”  She squeezed her eyes shut, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.  “Zeren couldn’t look at me for over a decade.  We’ve only recently started talking again like we did.” 

He had never noticed.  How had he not noticed?  Carry and Zeren had been joined at the hip for over a century.  They were closer than any siblings Karhi had ever seen.  How hadn’t he realized that Zeren avoided them for years?  He remembered remarking it was odd that he was “around less now”, but Karhi hadn’t ever realized there was a reason.  Carry hadn’t ever said anything.  Nor had Onyx.

And, if he thought he couldn’t feel more horror, he was wrong.  Because, if that was what had happened, it brought to light an awful, awful question.

“Is . . . your bond with Onyx the only reason you two are still together?”

Carry smiled ruefully.  “Now there’s a question.”

Vampires mated for life.  No one knew why, but vampire lovers—their bonds were tight and unbreakable.  They were so strong that if one died, the other always killed themselves not long after.  He didn’t know of a single pair bond that had survived one half of the bond dying.

Karhi had always found himself grateful that he had never bonded to Ilona.  No matter that she had wanted him to.  He had always been able to feel her loathing towards him, and towards Carrick, that she had pair bonded to Carrick.

 “I think, at first, yes.  We couldn’t look at each other for almost two years.  The horror of what had happened had burned scars into both of us.  Honestly, we considered suicide.  We couldn’t bear it.”  She sighed, looking down at their hands.  She squeezed, and he squeezed back.

“Eventually, we finally started talking again.  It took a lot of courage.  But we wanted to try.  Because this miserable, miserable pair bond was suffocating us both.  And neither of us wanted to die before we at least acknowledged what happened.”  She smiled tentatively.  “It took a long time.  But we eventually started to talk again.  I heard her laugh at a joke I made for the first time in years.”  Tears continued to streak her face, and with a jolt of surprise, Karhi realized he was crying, too.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.  “I never even realized.”

“You lived in New Zealand with Luna.  Why would you have?  I think we saw each other twice from between then and when you moved here?”

“I should have felt something . . .”

She shook her head.  “We don’t have the sibling bond we had when we were first sired.  Don’t blame yourself.  It’s her fault.  She did this to us.”  She looked up at him, her hazel eyes bright despite the tears streaking her face.  “You finally broke the cycle.”

His brow furrowed.  “What?”

“Well, I guess, Sloane did.  But you brought her into our lives.  And as cold as she can be—she saved us.  All of us.  And that would never have happened without you.”  She smiled.  “Thank you for bringing her.”

He had been thanking Sloane, sometimes out loud, but mostly internally, since Samhain.  He hadn’t really thought about how it had affected his siblings.

He had been so selfish.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

She shook her head, smiling.  “I didn’t know what you went through.  She isolated all of us on purpose.  It wasn’t any of our faults.  Only hers.”  She squeezed his hand.  “We’re connecting now.  I guess we can thank Sloane for that, too.”

Carry was right.  Karhi felt lighter than he had in a long time.  He had felt so heavy since Samhain.  The burden of Ilona was gone, but the burden of his memories of her weren’t.

Maybe, together, he and his siblings could ease their burdens.

He stood up and brought Carry with him, pulling her hand toward him.  He hugged her as tight as he could.

She hugged tighter.  He heard his bones creak.

“I love you, big bro,” she said into his chest, his sweater muffling her words.

“I love you, too.”  He smiled.  “Little sis.”

She chuckled into his chest.  “Zere doesn’t even call me that.”

“Do you call him big bro?”

“No.”

They both laughed wet, tearful laughs.

Karhi felt his skin crawl at his hip.  Carry jerked away in surprise, but one hand stayed on his upper arm, a protective gesture.  She didn’t know what had caused the feeling between them, but she would make sure they were both safe.

It was just his phone vibrating.

“Sorry,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone.  He looked to see an unfamiliar number on the screen.  He didn’t recognize the area code.  Normally he would ignore calls from unknown numbers, but Sloane hadn’t been in touch in a couple days.  What if it was her?

“Hello?” he answered.

“You need to get on the first flight to Montana,” he heard Mira say on the other end of the phone.  “Sloane’s here, and we need you to be here, too.”

Confusion filled his already-exhausted-from-crying brain.  “What?  Where?”

“The House of Living Vampires.”

He looked at Carry, who could hear the other side of the phone.  She looked as dumbstruck as he felt.

“The what?” he said.