Final Chapter: A Fitting End

Final Chapter: A Fitting End (1199)

LIAM:

The lights were becoming dimmer and dimmer as the night progressed. I can feel my body getting colder than it normally does.

“Sir Liam, the council will surely ask what happened to Subject X-EL when the morning comes. What will the team say then?”

“Hmm… Think of a good excuse, Ralph.”

“But…”

“Ralph.. It’s time… I can feel it...”

Vampires live quite a long life, and for the strongest ones, they begin to develop powers overtime…

My powers involved mind-reading and also predicting the coming of my very own death.

I have prepared everything in advance. Ralph has the most potential to become the next chairman. I gave him the necessary documents he would need when the time comes.

I knew my death would come this year, so I wanted to set Project Elixir Blood into its rightful course before that. Thus, I decided to monitor the next subject experiment more closely…

For three years, I have latched myself to Jade – a human and a candidate luna. I got close to her in an attempt to learn if she was a suitable candidate for the experiments.

She has an allure about her that was so hard to pinpoint in just one quality. By and by, she grew closer to me until I had failed to realize that I began to care more deeply than I would normally do…

Desperation for the fourth experimental subject led me into finally luring her towards us after three years of quietly observing her. I knew that Jade had a curious nature. She loved adventure and wouldn’t stop if she was caught in one…

I decided to give her a pair of red shoes one day and treated it as a sign. If she accepts the shoes, she accepts being our experimental subject. It was as simple as that… I even fed her bits of information about the case, such as that card containing Marian’s locker combination and the site of the Red Shoes’ Curse…

It all started as a game for me. I thought I would happily look how a mouse like Jade would run inside the maze I had created for her only to be trapped in the end…

I never thought that I would end up being truly enthralled by Jade, that I had even willingly entangled myself with that werewolf boy she had fancied from before...

I often wracked my brain why I fell in love with Jade Sy to the point of obsession. Perhaps it was the lonely story of her first love or the way she would always act like a naive girl in front of me. It made me feel I ought to protect her.

To deeply love someone I had set myself to kill - perhaps this was my karma all together due to the people whose lives I had taken away in the past…

I killed my own mother because I hated women who slept around. I killed countless people when I was still human and hundreds of faceless souls when I was turned into a vampire accidentally by one of my victims… I killed everyone who did not fit into my perfect world…

And yet no matter how much I suffered because of Jade, I couldn’t find it in my heart to let her die a twisted death…

I clung to her as desperately as I could. I tried to be the boy of her dreams. I wanted to give her the normal life and relationship she had craved, but it was no use…

Despite seducing her countless times and turning her into a vampire, Jade refused to become one of us. No matter how much I had to physically force her to stay beside me, she never drank even a drop of blood for three, whole f*cking years...

I didn’t know how she endured it. No matter how much tortured her or how long I had imprisoned her, she never wavered...

In the end, I pleaded to her not to waste away just like that, but it was no use. She only had one person in her heart, and sadly, it wasn’t me…

I realized that if I wanted her to live, I should send her back to that werewolf boy today…

Letting her go at this time, on the day of my own death, was my final gift to my Jade…

I looked at the clock. It was already five in the morning. I could hear the sound of the crickets and the roosters’ cries, signaling the start of daybreak.

If Jade won’t drink Kix’s blood soon, she would finally die. Soon my death will come too. We could still be together if she chooses not to be with him at the end…

From the darkest corner of my office, I heard the noisy clink of solid heels against the floor.

I looked weakly from where the sound was coming, and all I could see was a pair of red shoes with a mother of pearl at the very center. This was the exact same shoes I snatched from Marian’s dead body and had gifted Jade anonymously...

I lifted my eyes towards the face of its wearer, and I smiled in amusement.

Bafore me was the gory body of a woman with dark wavy hair and a bloody neck. Her face was somewhat obscured, but I knew exactly who she was.

So Marian Rabelo’s words were true… She really could come back as a ghost…

“Did you come to bring me death,” I asked her bloody and almost translucent apparition weakly.

She didn’t say anything else. She just stood there with a murderous stare as she pointed a finger at me.

I followed where she was pointing at. It was just a little over the top of my head.

I gazed upwards only to find the face of my mother – all black and blue. She looked the same way a few centuries ago when I last saw her…

I remembered hovering over her sleeping face one silent night when I was fifteen and thinking deeply. She just came home from another midnight encounter with a man. She was drunk and stuporous…

My father, the only person who remotely cared for me, died only a week before that, but my mother did not even stop to grieve. She didn’t even lift a finger to take care for the child she bore through her own body. She had neglected to the point that I didn’t have any clean clothes to wear nor food to feed on for days…

Angry, resentful, and lonely, I reached for a pillow and decided to do what my father had done to his own life due to his own desperation for my mother’s love…

I lifted the pillow to her face and smothered her to her death.

I remembered not stopping even when she flailed her arms or scratched at the wrists that held the pillow. I never lifted it until she had quit struggling about and had positively stopped breathing…

Now she was paying me back by closing her twisted fingers around my neck as tightly as she could to end my long and miserable existence forever…

***** END *****