Dangerous Playthings by Della Van Hise

Author:Della Van Hise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: coming of age, immortality, love and madness, immortal love, post apocalyptic romance, literary love story, dystopian romance young adult, vampire immortality, dystopian fiction young adult, love among the ruins

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Three years vanished. Merkinder did not know where they went, only that he awoke one evening to find them gone. Perhaps the pumpkins ate them. Perhaps the scarecrows chased them away. During that time, he did not go outside other than to feed, and that only twice. At his age, he did not need to drink blood anymore. Instead, he thrived on the perpetually self-renewing animus of Life, whether the essence of the humans or the jackrabbits who came to pilfer the garden, or simply from the Earth herself. That, too, was his nature – ironic when studied too closely. Merkinder the Wicked, king of the damned, now the custodian and guardian of Life – reverencing it more than any mortal ever had or ever could. Life... the pure urban poetry scrawled on the walls of the abyss.

That thought brought a sharp pain somewhere in the vicinity of his soul. He’d gotten used to playing the role of cold orb that ruled the night. And Willow had threatened to bring him back to life in a way he wasn’t sure he wanted in the least. Who would turn whom? And into what?

Her question still hung in his ears, three years after the fact.

If you could be human again... would you?

“No being in their right mind would choose to be human!” he shouted into the cold, black air, acutely overwhelmed by the avalanche of feeling he had held in check for more centuries than even he could count. What sad, pitiful creatures they were – so lost out there in the darkness while Death stalked them and Pain nipped at their heels. So brave to keep going when all the odds and all the gods were stacked against them. So innocent that they could sing into the night that would eventually consume them and return them to the dust from which they came. How brave they were to love, secretly knowing that love would always end in grief.

A thorny breath grabbed his chest, caught in his throat, seized him by the shoulders and shook him until – eventually – he realized he was sobbing, not for himself, but for every destitute, terrified, mystified mortal being who had ever lived, whether it walked on two legs or four, or slithered on its belly, or flew through the air on gossamer wings. They were all dying. Already dead. And that was simply that. In the end, it was nothing less than profane.

“My goodness!” Madness commented from darkness that smelled of still-born shadows and old snow. “You’re carrying on as if this is some great revelation wrapped up for your birthday! Should I get you a tissue?”

Merkinder wept for three days and three nights, thoughts tumbling through his ravaged mind like evil acrobats.

And then, abruptly, something long forgotten emerged, buried so deep it must have crawled out the left nostril of some misshapen wormhole. The one and only thing his maker had told him on the night he himself gave up his humanity for

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