Smile, what's the use of crying? Who: Raphael and his dolce (NPC) Where: A graveyard somewhere When: Before his arrival in SO
Her skin was porcelain - tearable, breakable porcelain - beneath his hand. So soft, so delicate. So touchable. He had his nose pressed gently to her ear, nestled in her hair. He liked the softness of the hair, the way it moved as she twitched. He had seen her, watched her wash it earlier, three hours and twenty seven minutes earlier, with something organic based. Hmm, tea tree. Perhaps a subtle under tone of eucalyptus oil. He had spent some time considering the scent. She looked after her hair and spent time browsing and browsing and browsing in order to pick the right product for her. Raphael appreciated the attention to detail. He enjoyed the way she had stood with arms folded across her chest, one finger pressed to her lips. The way the tendons running down her neck constricted and relaxed as she sighed and swallowed and clenched her teeth in thought. She was a pleasure to watch. The rare moments of serenity when he caught his dolce relaxed and peaceful, they were what made the rest so sublime. The contrast, the comparison - he revelled in that. Her innocence and her youth matched against his lust for death and his age. Only a child to the world - she had barely passed seventeen - but she was already so perfect. He wanted that. He needed that perfection.
He needed to hear her scream.
She was struggling, of course, struggling unbearably though he was not holding her tightly and she was not locked to him. But the way in which he held his hands together around her waist caught her in his arms, pressing her back to him, and she was without the strength to break through. "Taci, mia dolce," Hush, my sweet, he whispered in her ear. He could hear her pulse, the terrible pounding, coursing through the veins in her throat. One hand traced across and up her chest, catching her thrashing neck, the other moved across her waist to keep her in place. "Taci, taci," he sighed. His hands were not covered, not gloved, but his dolce had not realised her weakened state. Raphael could almost taste the adrenaline in her blood. The tendons in her neck were so active now, they were alive with fear as she gasped and whimpered, begged to be set free. Raphael closed his eyes. He longed to extend his teeth to that neck, pale and delicate in the darkness, to bite and tear and feed. But he was not feeding tonight. No, his dolce was going to do something special for him. Something important. Tonight they were going to play a game.
With straining stamina and the will to fight fleeting from her, his dolce began to quiet. The terrible pounding in her neck started to slow and her twitching was replaced by a sudden stillness. Raphael exhaled an inessential breath. Her tousled hair fluttered at the breeze and the fingers of one of her hands - they had been so desperately clamped to the elbow of the arm that held her still, but now were almost relaxed - shuddered involuntarily. So overcome with fear and so certain she was to die. With a smile, his eyes opened. "Now that you are calm, mia dolce," he murmured, a mere breath tinted with words, "I am going to tell you what is to happen." The hand around her waist turned her with gentle ease, so that she was facing him. He pulled her closer, his mouth back at her ear. "You will keep quiet and stay still while I explain, won't you, mia dolce?" He ran the hand that had been at her neck up and down the length of her back, feeling how her muscles tensed in its wake. She nodded, holding a whimper at bay. Brushing a strand of hair from her face, he titled his head and smiled with a kindness that was almost skin deep. “Good, mia dolce, you are a good girl.”
For a moment they stood there in the darkness, Raphael taking in every detail of her face, she searching for sudden belief in the after life. She was praying inwardly for a rescue, yet she didn’t believe in God. She had no faith. Here before her stood a messenger of God, he would have told her could he hear her thoughts, bringing about the destruction of the earth along with the rest of his family. He would be there, at the end of all things, to become a new angel of the earth. He would bask in glory and riches and honour. The end of the world would be such a thing to watch and Raphael often lost himself in dreams of what it might look like. It would be magnificent. Until the time came, however, he would savour each moment of suffering he witnessed, each cry of pain he caused. And here was the next moment to enjoy.
With a shift of his hands to each of her hips, he turned his dolce to face away from him again. His right hand took back its place around her waist, whilst the other tenderly lifted the hair from her neck. This time the bridge of his nose trailed down her neck, his words lost in his thoughts. His lips brushed the base of it and he tasted her briefly, until he came to the edge of his self-control and had to pull back his head. They would have to begin soon or he would start on her and once he began, restraint meant nothing. He would have to crush her ankles, or perhaps just one, and break her piece by piece, stripping the flesh from her bones as he moved. Ha. Raphael often laughed to himself about such a notion - his ability to get carried away knew no bounds. His bad habits had given him so much grief in the past. Sadly the justice systems had started becoming reliable, building an actual ability to track down killers. There was the introduction of finger printing, face recognition technology, the FBI. He had to reign himself in now, limiting himself to three or four kills a night rather than more. Now the world did not believe in heathen ghouls from hell and did not try and exorcise demons in order to protect the public, but was aware of vampires so that now he had to disguise his killing as humanly-possible. Covering his tracks had become such a necessity over the years. Oh, how he missed the Middle Ages.
“First things first,” he began. Such distracting hair she had, so irresistible. Lost again to thought, Raphael began tangling his fingers into the locks, lightly pushing them through so that their tips grazed across the skin of her back. She was so inappropriately dressed for the cold night. With a light scoff, he mentally shook himself. She had not been expecting to end up here, with him. She thought she would be dancing all night, getting drunk with friends. Though he was not feeding from her, Raphael was pleased that she had not started drinking when he found her. She had to be at her best for the game, otherwise the fun was lost. Imagining it already, he couldn’t help but smile even further. The palm of his hand pushed through her hair now, and rested between her shoulder blades as the other moved to hold her cheeks between it. He turned her face to him now and gave her a meaningful look, eyebrows raised. “You really should smile.” His thumb stroked across her cheekbone and for another flicker he felt the urge to bite her. “We’re going to play a game after all, mia dolce, and games are made to be fun.”
“Here’s how to play.” He was suddenly far more excited. His face had lit up - though his eyes were the only part of it truly visible - and he jumped both hands pack to her hips. Something snagged his left hand, though he ignored it. His dolce, however, seem incapable of it and writhed and moaned and fussed in his arms. The smile was lost for a moment, as he wondered why she wasn’t smiling. It was then that he felt the strange texture between his fingers. He raised his left hand. Hanging from his fingers was several locks of long, curled brown hair, hair that had previously been attached to his dolce’s head. Pulling a kind of “oops a daisy” face, he shook his hand away from the two of them, letting the strand drop to the floor. Perhaps if he remembered he would take it home as a souvenir. He really liked the idea of mementos though each time his dolce’s were finished with he never remembered to collect one. It would be different this time, maybe. She was still writhing though, despite Raphael’s hushing. Humans had tendencies such as this. They seemed to live for their melodrama. He appreciated drama with cause but losing some of one’s hair was not something one responds to with writhing and frowning. He sighed, slid his hand over the top of her wrist and increased his grip. It took a time for her to notice the new damage occurring to her person but, as the bone began to fracture, she paid attention to the pain. The writhing accelerated significantly, except this time he was not going to stand for it. He had tolerated enough of it. Locking his arm around her waist with one swift movement, trapping her useless arms to her and her entire body to him, he ragged on her hair with his other hand. She was not doing as she was told. She was not smiling. She was starting to scream, turning and raging to be free of him. He did not stand for disobedience. His dolce would be obedient when he gave instruction. They were going to play a game, and she would enjoy herself. They both would.
“Stop that,” he told her with a calmness that did not much his rising irritation with her, “Stop that now.” He squeezed without full force, knocking the wind out of her rather than embracing her vital organs into a useless mixture. As the breath began escaping from her, his dolce’s fighting grew weaker until she once more gave up on escape. “Good, mia dolce. Obedience is key and you understand that, don’t you?” When no answer came he pressed again with his arm and she nodded frantically. “You’re forgetting something, mia dolce.” In her eyes flickered panic. What else had he asked for? She had stopped fighting him. She dragged to corners of her lips into a grimace. It was not what he had been looking for, but Raphael smiled and pressed his lips to her cheek in response. Now things were going well. “May I tell you of the game now, mia dolce?” he whispered in her ear. A tremor spread through her, yet she still nodded, holding her weak attempt to smile in place. “Good.” He lifted her a foot or so from the ground, in order to carry her a few metres over. The cemetery felt dead, the few living had scattered several hours before night fall, and night had fallen hours ago. Their surroundings were very much something from a horror film, or television show. Almost like a set. The way the trees inclined inwards to lean over the pathway that joined one part of the graveyard to the other was comical and the way the street-lamps at the gateways cast shadows across the head-stones looked fake. To his dolce it did, at least. Raphael had seen enough graveyards at night to know that the majority looked like this one. All the lights hit the head-stones the same way, and all the trees appeared to grow into unnatural shapes. The scene was familiar to him, but that did not mean he spent all of his time in places of the dead. They just happened to make perfect arenas for his games.
He had carried his dolce over so that they were stood in the centre of the path, a place where the trees inclined inwards to form an archway of branches overhead. Reaching out in front of them until the iron gates of the south entrance a good two hundred and fifty metres away, was a long stretch of worn ground, lined with rich grass on either side and then large banks of trees. The summer air took no edge off the cold night, nor of the feeling the graveyard emanated. Whether the vampire was ignoring the atmosphere or could not feel it, his dolce could not tell but she certainly could and she was weighing where she was with being alone on that stretch of path, prey to whatever else may be present in the cemetery. Without question she would rather be alone and cold, lost amongst the buried dead. The undead were far too alive and she had never known fear like this since she was small and she mistook her trapped cat for a monster waiting in the closet. How she wished to be afraid of something that wasn’t real again. The arm fastened around her waist, the voice her in ear, it was all too real. Her heart was trying to tear itself from her ribcage but the heaviness that knowing she was going to die was keeping it locked there, like her cat had been trapped inside the closest. Seventeen years old and a dead girl walking. She was not crying - his dolce hardly ever cried - but there was a burning in her throat that warned the presence of coming tears. What would she look like when he was finished with her? Would her parents even be able to identify her? Suddenly a jarring, desperate grating, sound broke throw her grimacing lips.
This time Raphael chose to ignore her. He was staring down the path, an awful grin tugging at every inch of his face. “If you win, mia dolce,” he was saying, “I will let you go. I will no longer hunt you, mia dolce. You will be free of me.” She snatched a bewildered breath. She dreamt for a moment that she would come out of this horror story alive. She yearned to be free. She could think of nothing better than running home, only a few short blocks from here, throwing herself into the house and bolting the door shut. She wouldn’t leave for a week. She’d be happy enough just knowing she was breathing. Knowing what she had escaped from. Her heart jumped in a frenzied rhythm, beguiled between the fear of death and the joy of freedom. Both cases were dangerously intertwined and she still had not been told of the game. Not fully, anyhow. For the first time since they had arrived at the cemetery, his dolce spoke. “And what if I lose?” The words were barely strung together and she stammered through them, her voice raw from screaming and crying. The answer came as a laugh, a disturbing chuckle that for a moment seemed uncontrollable. Raphael had to bring his hand over his mouth to stop himself but once he had stopped he did not offer his dolce any other kind of answer.
“The game is simple,” he continued, seriously now. “You simply have to make it all the way to the gate without stopping.” Forgetting her unique smile, his dolce frowned. It seemed far too simple, and far too easy. But she wasn’t going to say anything. She was only convincing herself that she would make it home alive. She knew you couldn’t trust vampires. They only wanted your blood and that was it. And there had to be some kind of twist to this game. She had to make it to the gate without stopping? It couldn’t be true. Her pulse had not relaxed, however, instead it was thumping like some kind of wild thing, pining to be released from his grip.
Then he was no longer holding her. He was no longer anywhere. Her brain didn’t register this for a second. Time seemed to slow as she readjusted herself to standing on her own two feet. Where he was, she didn’t know but, after the original moment of shock had passed, she didn’t wait to be told to move. The ground could not pass by her fast enough. She was tired from the stress of the entire evening, and her breathing was jagged and irregular, her feet pounded across the ground. Her brain was so consumed with getting to the gate, to beating the vampire, that she had no time to curse the boots she wore or the jeans that clung so uncomfortably to her legs. All that was visible to her was the gate. Her destination. She just had to make it there and she would be free. The trees were not rushing by, not like in films. There was a feeling, a feeling she mistook the cause as the dead air of the night, a shivering, a flutter that spread through from the base of her spine to the back of her neck. The cold, that was all it was. Until something slipped past in her peripheral vision. She was running out of breath fast, drained, the adrenaline was no longer her driving force. Her calves were burning, striving to keep going. She couldn’t stumble, she couldn’t fall but again and again something broke past the corner of her eye. Again and again. She had forgotten Raphael. No, hadn’t forgotten, but he was a distant memory. He was not between her and the gates. But where was he? There was a jolting moment as the image from the corner of her eye appeared in front of her. Not in the middle of the path, but at the side. She saw his eyes first and the drop in her stomach nearly shuddered her to a standstill, but she couldn’t slow down. She kept pushing.
Raphael was enjoying himself. There was no containing his smile, his sheer glee. He revelled in the moment. Watching her run was not necessary. Her panting and heavy heartbeat, the pounding across the dirt made her position obvious. This time he sped across to the other side of the path, another few metres forward. He heard his dolce gasp and, this time, something inside her tremored. Her ankle wavering and her body collapsing above it. Not forwards, but to the side. She was out of the archway of trees now, the path leading her amongst grave after grave after grave. The tremble sent her into the headstones, the name of the graves taking on a new meaning for her as the hands of a granite angel struck the side of her head. He watched his dolce fall and tasted the air with snake flicker of his tongue when her skull cracked. He regarded her, a metre or so away, as she began clawing at the earth, heaving her breaking body over the ground. From her vision, she could not see more than a foot ahead of herself, failing to see where the ground parted into a six foot abyss. Raphael stepped over to her, replacing his gloves as he moved. The smile seemed to have been temporarily misplaced. There was no feeling behind his eyes, a mechanical edge to the way he moved. With one foot, he rolled his dolce over. Desperation was an understatement for the way her eyes were tearing out of their places. Her nails, so pristine and red when the night began, ran with a different texture now, some still remaining in the prints of the soil. She began raking at the ground with her elbows, drawing herself, inch by inch, away from the vampire. He simply looked on, though a smile broke through his serene face as the ground disappeared from beneath her and he observed as her shoulders collided with the dank ground below. He stepped forward to the edge of the grave.
His dolce was barely moving now, only a glimmer of life passing across her eyes. Her neck resembled a child’s doll, disjointed and snapped after too enthusiastic a play time. Her broken wrist lay curved into an arc and her ribcage no longer heaved with vehement gasps of breath. Raphael titled his head at the body, considering it for a moment or so.