Chapter Eleven | Origin

Between the short bursts of fruitful conversation was a barren wasteland in which they didn't speak. It was a kind of neglect Karou had never experienced before. Her mom regularly neglected her emotionally, hurled verbal insults, and stooped to physical assault when alcohol was involved, but Warren? He seemed to have forgotten she existed. It felt like she was living with a ghost. Whether she was curled up on the couch or making something to eat in the kitchen, he would go about his business without a word.

Most days, Karou felt like a fraud for even being at the Compound because she was Mortal. No matter where she went, what she did, or whom she talked to, she was constantly reminded she was different. The old reality of living as a regular person around other regular people had vanished. It was a painful irony that she hadn't fit in there and didn't fit in here, either. Her ability to cope with being accustomed to being unwelcome was wearing thin.

All that aside, there were things to be grateful for. On down days, Karou would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and reality check. The Compound was safe. She had a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in, and clothes on her back. Warren wasn't that bad, even if his mood swings gave her whiplash. She never had to ask for anything—if Warren was good at one thing, it was anticipating her needs. He was a master facilitator, if not much of a talker. He'd stocked the kitchen with food that wouldn't hinder her allergies. The coffee machine always had a mug waiting for her every morning and two slices of bread by the toaster. Her laundry would disappear and reappear folded on her bed. Products in the bathroom would be replenished without her needing to make any requests. Once, when all her drawing pencils had become too blunt to sketch with, Warren had somehow noticed she'd given up on her hobby for a few days. The following day, a sharpener appeared on top of her sketchbook.

Kind wasn't a word she figured most people would use to describe Warren Howard, but through his work, he'd mastered the skills required to meet demand with supply seamlessly. So, although he was not often gentle with his words, at least his actions were thoughtful. Those small acts made all the difference to Karou but made weighing him up as a person a minefield. Communication was the main thing he lacked, and so much chaos was born out of that shortcoming.

By now, they'd lived together for almost four months, yet neither knew much about the other. They'd had so few in-depth conversations, but through patient observation, Karou had found Warren easier to glean information from on the nights when he'd had one glass of scotch more than usual.

One particular night, Karou sat in the corner of the sofa, watching Warren finish his third glass. There was a period before he decided to retire when he just sat ruminating. Interrupting his meditative silence, she boldly asked, "Warren, what are you?"

Jolted to attention, he mimicked her question incredulously. "What do you mean; what am I?" 

"What kind of Mythical are you?"

"Surely, you already know the answer." Warren was ready to blow her off, but in her eyes glimmered her power, her faultless resolve. There was no way she'd drop the subject, and when her head tilted nearer her shoulder, her show of curiosity passively urged him to answer.

"If you don't, then it's a very personal question. Don't you think?"

Now that she thought about it, it was. "Is it considered rude to ask?"

"I suppose it's an unspoken rule." Warren shrugged and nonchalantly relaxed back into the couch again. A pang of disappointment tugged in Karou's chest when he resumed staring off into space. She'd opened her lips to speak, hoping to spark up further conversation, when he surprised her by saying, "What if you asked someone Mortal by mistake? We'd have been found out centuries ago." 

"But I know that you are a Mythical."

"I wasn't always." Warren's gaze was intense when it found her. He stared her down, but she didn't falter; curiously, her head inched closer to her shoulder. "Fine." He huffed, caving to the "pressure" as if she'd put up a great fight to squeeze blood out of a stone and him being the stone. He figured she was open-minded enough to handle knowing how he became what he was. "I suppose I ought to start with her… Ellis Denver." Warren hummed her name, ominously and disdainfully, like the mention of her was a bad omen. Although Karou had perked up at the prospect of hearing his story, she couldn't help how her nose wrinkled at the mention of the woman either. "She made me what I am." For now, he wasn't going to say the V-word because he enjoyed the element of suspense his story could have if he told it right. However, he'd never retold it like it were a campfire story.

"It was 1932. I was a twenty-eight-year-old, 'new money' American living in Paris. I'd lived the high life through the twenties and made a series of intelligent business decisions, meaning I was making a lot of money out of the depression that'd hit hard back home.
n my youth, I'd already gone through one significant life change. I was born into a poverty-stricken family, but my father had had some luck in the oil industry. Within months, we had more money than we knew what to do with. He moved us out of Kentucky and to New York. I was clipped from my mother's apron strings and put into an all-boys school to learn how to be 'authentically rich', 'a gentleman'." Warren cleared his throat. 

"Anyway, that was a special kind of hell… Ultimately, I squandered everything. The things money could buy tempted me too easily." He scoffed. "Mostly, I dabbled in dark fantasies. I made money quickly but spent it faster. I wasted evenings drinking too much in lousy company and entertained numerous women. I liked driving fast cars and put everything else on hold to play polo. I snorted cocaine to maintain the energy required to burn the candle at both ends. I thought I had the world on a string and under the illusion that the fountain of my fortune would never stop flowing. Uh, I'm getting off track," Warren paused to gauge Karou's interest. "It sounds like I enjoy the sound of my own voice, doesn't it?"

She sat completely still, staring at his face, engrossed. "Huh? Oh! No." She shook her head. She was glad of it, in fact, because it was the most he'd spoken to her. "Please carry on. I'm listening." Karou smiled softly.

"Alright. If you insist. What I'm getting at is that I'm not a good person. I wasn't very good at remaining faithful to my partners—my eyes and attention wander effortlessly. Even when I was engaged to Camille, a beautiful young actress, I was fooling around with Ellis on the side. She wasn't twisted back then. While it lasted, it was a beautiful affair, but it had to end, like everything does.
It was August when she went missing. All in all, she was gone for almost a month. When the nights started to grow colder, the Parisian Police stopped looking. They said if she weren't already, she'd be dead. If her body had found its way to the Seine, it would've found its way to the Atlantic. I was... crushed, and I barely tried to hide it. Cammy saw through me. We had a huge argument. She called off the wedding. After I left her at her Daddy's house, I went M.I.A for a couple of weeks. I went to one of my apartments—one of Ellis and I's love nests. That's where she found me." He cleared his throat, reached for a cigarette, and lit it before continuing.

"September 10th. About eleven PM. The rain had gone on since around sundown but the sky was lit up like the fourth of July because of the storm. I remember staring through the balcony window from my bed at the rain. I couldn't sleep."

As the tale's climax neared, Warren's voice grew quiet. Karou had to lean closer to hear. Now and then, his words were tainted with a honied twang. Even after having been away from his mother state for so many years, his accent was still somewhat southern sounding. Karou had decided that Warren was an excellent storyteller, or perhaps she was just so taken by his voice that it wouldn't have mattered if he'd been reading the phone book. It really didn't matter what he was doing; he always looked impossibly handsome. It was so easy to forget that the man before her was telling a first-hand story of the 1930s; he barely looked 30. Yet, she figured being of such an age meant he had an archive of interesting things stored in his head and an abundance of stories to tell.

"The balcony door burst open and the voiles came billowing into the room along with the rain and lightning. Suddenly, she was there. She flung herself onto the bed, into my arms. God, she was so happy. Said she'd been lost. But now she saw everything clearly and that we could be together forever like we'd wanted. She whispered honeyed promises into my ear, and I wanted to believe it all, but it was crazy. Crazy to think that she was actually there! She'd been gone for so long. She'd come in from the balcony—in a storm—my apartment was on the third floor! Why didn't she come to the door? And why now? There was just no way… I couldn't escape the truth." He took a deep breath to centre himself.

"When I managed to pull her back and look at her, I saw red. The dream of having her back in my arms turned into a nightmare on a dime. She was dead. Pale, with these black, looming eyes. The picture of a real devil staring right at me. At the same moment, she must've seen all that fear on my face, and she knew that what she'd dreamed of, of 'us being together forever,' was impossible."

"The next hour of my life is still a loss to me" He waved his cigarette-wielding hand. "I remember as much of it now as I did in the days after it happened. But I know there was a fight—a fight that I lost. I remember seeing fangs for the first time, and let me tell you, that put the fear of God in me. I remember pain. Pain like I'd never felt before. Of being thrown down against the floor so hard, I thought my spine had snapped. In the chaos of her attempt to feed from me, whether to kill me or Sire me, I didn't know, she… plucked—" Warren gestured with his hand, a delicate motion, like how one might pick a flower to emphasise his word choice. "—the iron foot post from the bed and impaled me. She pinned me to that floor like an insect." Warren paused, centering himself. The recollection of his trauma and the toll it took on him, even now, was plain to see on his face; it contorted his brow over his eyes in a pained way. Karou didn't doubt that the pain of the encounter was as fresh to him today as it was decades ago. As he took a long, sobering drag from his cigarette, his other hand massaged his thigh. 

"You hear about people who have lost their memory because something awful happened to them. They're lucky. I can still recall the texture of the floorboards. I scraped my nails ragged, clawing to reach the shotgun I kept under the bed. I can feel the trigger beneath my finger." As he lifted his hand from his leg, his fingers trembled; Karou almost reached over to steady them, but before she could, he balled it into a fist. 

Exhaling after another deep drag that finished off his cigarette, he continued, "I aimed the barrel right into her chest. I'd never pulled that trigger faster and with so little thought. We bled out together. With barely a drop of blood left in my body and her blood pool surrounding me, it mingled and seeped into me. Magnus figured that's how I turned." 

What came after that was a long week spent dying. I was delirious. Fading in and out of consciousness. I thought infection had set into my leg, but the reality was so much worse. I'd shot her, thinking I'd rob her of her life. It was shallow vengeance for threatening mine and gave me no relief. All it achieved was to make me immortal, granting me an eternity to suffer. This could've been a story of defiance—a tale of my stubborn will to live—it might've been inspiring, but truthfully, I was angry and cowardly in the face of death. I didn't want to die alone.
My rebirth into my new life was as horrific as my Siring. It was Magnus who found me, he took me to his Coven, but that was no joyride. I was shackled and locked in a cage, reduced to a monstrous and feral creature, and I was treated as such. The Davikov's methods of weaning newborns were barbaric; it took too many defenceless souls to wean me until I could control my thirst until I was conditioned enough that the bloodlust that fogged my every thought passed, and I'd regained some civility. It's a gruelling and harrowing process, becoming a Vampire. I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

After that, Warren fell silent. Karou shared in it while she digested his story. It confirmed two things to her: one, Warren was a Vampire, and two, he had a past as devastating as her own.

"Wow, that's—" She muttered, staring down into her lap in contemplation. Nibbling at her lower lip, she sought for the right words. "It's incredible. But awful. And I feel sorry but also not, y'know? Because you're here and if you weren't here, then I don't know who would've saved me."

"You think I saved you?"

"...Yeah. Don't you?"

"That remains to be seen, don't you think? What did I "save" you from? You never told me the reason you left home."

Karou rubbed over the back of her neck, suddenly reluctant—if only he'd asked about something, anything else. She'd never opened up to anyone about her home life before. Karou wasn't the type to play the victim; she had a 'good sport' complex, so she never complained, regardless of how bad things got. Talking honestly about how her mother treated her made her feel like she was tattle-telling. "I didn't get along with my mom. That's the long and short of it."

"I have yet to meet a teenager that does. Surely, there's more to it than merely not seeing eye to eye?"

Again, she paused, giving herself a second to consider how to express herself. Karou sighed and met Warren's eyes. "Basically, my parents should never have had kids. They didn't want or know how to care for us. They didn't even try, and it only got worse when my dad upped and left."

"You're not an only child?" Warren's brows pinched in surprise, he'd taken it for granted that Karou had no siblings; the vibe she gave off was that of a loner.

"No, I have an older sister, Magdalena. We called her Magda. We're estranged now—I haven't seen her since she left home. She got away as soon as she could."

"Your parents certainly had a flare for unusual names..." Warren evaluated, though his tone wasn't unkind, as he reached for his packet of smokes on the coffee table. His following question was somewhat muffled because he held the cigarette between his lips while he opened his matches, "What made you decide to leave when you did? You didn't seem all that well prepared?"

"It's… complicated." Karou didn't know how to put what she'd been through into words. Until now, she had shut down and pushed her feelings deep so she didn't have to deal with them. If they surfaced, she didn't know if she would make it to the other side. But if she didn't face it, then what would become of her? The emotional wound would surely fester. She didn't want to be a broken person. She wanted to be happy. To find healing, she needed closure, and to get closure, she at least needed to acknowledge what had happened to her. 

"Alright," Warren said plainly, ready to leave it at that, afterall, it wasn't his business.

"I—I was a sick kid." Karou started, "My mom never made it secret that I was a burden. She did her best to have as little to do with me as possible—especially once my dad left. In the end, I guess even turning a blind eye to me wasn't enough. She must'a wanted to get rid of me for good."

"She'd started to drink more but then complained that she never had any money. Unpaid bills started to pile up. I didn't care much; I'd been offered a scholarship—thought I'd be off to college soon. It must have been the money that triggered her to do it. One night after I'd gotten home from school, she was waiting for me." There came another pause, a stall, a hesitation. Karou's nerve faltered; the inevitable guilty feeling weighed heavily and held down her shoulders, so she hunched over her lap. Talking about her mom always made her feel small and helpless, and her body language didn't hide that fact.

"We don't have to—" Warren offered, despite Karou having piqued his interest. Morbidly curious, he needed to know, what was the extent of the damage inflicted on her before she'd managed to get away. 

"No, I've never told anyone, but I have to face this. Even if you don't listen, I'm going to say it. If I don't say it now, I might never have the guts to." Her eyes were pleading. In response, Warren merely nodded—he'd listen.

"They… They cut me open," she admitted, and somehow, her face held no expression. She didn't want to cry, hanging her head made the tears that had gathered in her eyes feel heavy, so instead, she raised her head and stared ahead at Warren. He'd been focused on the flame that flickered at the end of the match he was holding to his cigarette when his eyes darted back in her direction. The dead look in her eyes was haunting. Somehow, in those simple words, the meek, Mortal girl had managed to disturb him.

"Hassan, our neighbour, pinned me down on the kitchen table. He pressed his forearms down across the back of my shoulders. The weight felt like my ribs were going to snap. And all the time, my mom kept yelling. And crying? She wasn't upset; she just sounded desperate." 

"Hassan's wife, Minisha, uh, she's a doctor, she was the one to do it. She cut off my sweater and poked around my back. Before I knew what was going on, she sliced me open." Karou winced. "I—I can't remember if I screamed or if I even fought back. I don't know if I passed out or if they drugged me, but when I woke up, I was in a basement I didn't recognise. My mom was gone. It was just Minsha and Hassan. They'd come down to feed me and check my bandages. They were going to sell me; I heard their phone calls. I don't know what I was being sold for or why. I've no idea why they did any of it." Karou's forehead wrinkled in deep creases, and her distracted, glazed gaze spoke of how much this fact tortured her the most.

"I was there a month until I got out. Then I just ran. I stole a car and drove until it ran out of gas, and then I ran some more until Nate and Kenichi caught me and brought me to you…" 

All the while Karou spoke, Warren kept his eyes on her face, transfixed. His cigarette burned away between his fingers, unsmoked. He never imagined they would share common ground, knowing what it was like to be abused by a parent, to go to sleep at night knowing that you were a disappointment to them, ultimately unloved. Even so, he didn't presume to comfort her or offer his condolences—it wouldn't do her any good, and he believed that pity was rarely not an insult. Instead, he simply said, "It's all behind you now," and somehow that was enough. Finally, letting her tears free to trickle down her cheek, Karou's eyes found his, and she almost smiled.

Warren stubbed out his cigarette and suggested that it was bedtime. Mostly, he didn't want to see her cry and hoped she'd take the hint and go to bed to do it privately. How she had made herself small in her seat had already caused the empty feeling Warren often felt inside to swell in sympathy for her. The most humane course of action would have been offering some reassurance, perhaps a hug, and if she broke down and wept in front of him, he didn't know if he could muster the restraint required not to take advantage. Touching her when he was so thirsty seemed like an awful way to tempt a dark fate.

As Warren passed her in the hall, going to his room, she whispered, "Thank you for telling me your story." He said nothing, but she thought that for a moment, she saw him smile. As soon as he was out of sight and she was safe behind her bedroom door, she sighed with relief - telling someone about her traumatic past was cathartic.