Death Song, page 1
Death Song
Tales from the Tarot
B. Ripley
Death Song
Copyright © 2024 by B. Ripley
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, or actual places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover art by Fae Quin
Cover design by Amanda Meuwissen
Formatted by Amanda Meuwissen
Edited by Raven Quill Editing LLC
Contents
Fullpage image
Author’s Note / Content Warnings
Prologue
1. Charlie
2. Charlie
3. Rex
4. Charlie
5. Rex
6. Charlie
7. Rex
8. Charlie
9. Rex
10. Charlie
11. Rex
12. Charlie
13. Rex
14. Charlie
15. Rex
16. Charlie
17. Rex
18. Charlie
19. Rex
20. Charlie
What's Next?
Tales from the Tarot
About the Author
Also By
Author’s Note / Content Warnings
Hello!
As a first note, thank you for picking up Death Song. This book was a challenge to write, but once I gave in and let the characters take the lead, Charlie and Rex really began to shine. Honestly, without Bob Ross’ gentle voice, none of this would exist as I exclusively listened to episodes of The Joy of Painting in the background the entire time this book was coming to life.
As a second note, this book is written in Canadian English as I am Canadian.
This book contains blood, violence and gore (because vampires!), but also kidnapping, misuse/abuse of over-the-counter medication, intimate partner violence, thoughts of suicide, death, vulgar language and discussions of sexual assault including verbal threats.
Should any of this content cause issues for you, please take care of yourself and reach out to supports local to you as needed. Self care is never selfish.
xoB
Prologue
Rome, 70CE
Rex
Blood.
I was born into it, remade into what I am today because of it, and now, I suffer for it.
Stepping forward, I toss the head of the vampire sent to kill me to the cold ground, the thunk of skull crashing over stone the only sound save for the pained cries that now meet my ears. I leave the wretched body clad in the armor of the newly crowned Lord Nikandros behind as I race towards the garden, praying to the ancient ones that I am wrong.
I have to be wrong.
But I am not.
Marius, my beautiful, innocent singer of songs lays on the cold ground, nestled among the red roses and blue chicory he loves so very much. He clutches his side, and as I rush to his aid, I can see his precious blood spilling over his clenched fingers. I kneel beside him as his eyes meet mine, blood trickling down his chin to water his garden as his life seeps out of him.
“My love,” I whisper, pulling up the sleeve of my tunic to reveal my own skin.
“I am dying,” Marius whispers back, already sounding like he’s slipping away. “I am dying, Rex.”
“You cannot.” He will not. I have blood that can heal him, as it has done for me over the course of many battles. I sink my fangs into my own skin, tearing my forearm open so that what runs through my veins can trickle into his wounds and repair what is broken inside.
Then he moves his hands away from the wound and my despair grows. This hole that’s been punched in his chest is deep and raw, ragged at the edges. I can hear his lungs sucking at the air as Marius wheezes, blood bubbling in the wound that goes through his rib cage. Claws, I know, tore him wide open, and I curse myself for not being more alert knowing he was out here tending to his flowers.
“I can heal it,” I say, holding my torn open arm over the hole in the side of his chest.
“My love,” Marius mumbles, coughing on the blood pooling in his throat. His red spittle flies from his lips, spattering my clothing, and my heart aches. I squeeze my arm, dropping my blood into his wound, watching as the edges start stitching themselves together again, but it’s too slow.
Far too slow.
What I have is not enough to give to heal all that is torn apart inside of him, but I will keep trying. I tear a bit more of my skin away from my muscle to let even more of my blood seep from my body and raise it above his wound again, begging it to work.
“Stop, it is too much,” Marius says, coughing up more bloody spittle. He moves his hands to press on the hole in his side, blocking my work.
“Marius, let me save you. Please. Please let me save you.” He can have all of it. Every droplet that is inside me is for him.
“And kill you in return?” he whispers, voice hoarse and lungs wheezing. “No, I won’t have you do this. I am dying, Rex.”
“Let me turn you then. Become one of my kin and you will heal yourself.” It may be too late for that as well, but I will try. I must try.
Since the moment I first sighted the copper-haired human tucked into the corner of the throne room, I have loved him. He’d been among a traveling troupe of performers and artists seeking refuge in a storm. Taking pity on their misfortune, I had demanded a sole boon in exchange for bed and food, as was my right. Their payment for a night’s lodging was a song, sung by the most beautiful voice they had among them.
My Marius, the songbird, stepped forward, and I found myself utterly lost in his voice.
I’m still lost in him a year later, the rest of the troupe having moved on, leaving him behind in my bed and my heart. Marius learned the secrets of the hidden vampire world they’d stumbled upon and had kept fealty to me even when the rest of the court—who once called me their beloved king—turned on me in favor of my brother Nikandros and his cult of madmen.
And I have repaid him by bringing danger to the one place he was supposed to be safe. This place that is just ours, with the cottage I built with my own hands and the garden he tends with his.
For so long, we had wanted to escape from the malice that was slowly overtaking the Bloodrend Court at the hands of my brother, and when the chance to run came, we bolted like rabbits into the silent night.
We were supposed to be forgotten, and I foolishly believed we had been until the feral vampire with the blackened soul came to the borders of our home, seeking me as a prize.
It was not meant to be this. It was not meant to be the end.
“This was supposed to be our time,” I whisper, as Marius reaches a hand towards me. I grab his fingers in mine, cradling his hand against my lips. “Please, let me turn you.”
“It is too late, little king. You know it is too late.”
“Why didn’t you let me turn you sooner, Marius?” I had offered many times to gift him with eternal life. To have him become a vampire like myself and like the rest of the souls in Springhollow where the Bloodrend Court holds the throne. That he did not allow this was a point of contention between us, but his mortality was something he had long become accustomed to, and he was loathe to live eternally.
“All men must live and in living they must die,” he whispers, his eyes starting to close. A phrase he often repeated that now seems vile and cruel coming from between his bloodstained lips. Foolish and wrong. I can feel my anger soaring forward inside me, mixing with the mourning for him that has already begun in the depths of my marrow.
I am meant for him.
He is meant for me.
“You can’t leave me. I cannot go on without you. You are my everything, Marius.”
Marius coughs, his eyes sliding closed as his lungs heave and pitch beneath his hand. “Sing for me, Rex. Sing me into the next life.”
“Marius, I—”
“Sing me a song,” he asks, cutting me off. “Please, let me have peace. It hurts to die, my love. Ease this pain with a song.”
“I don’t have the words for it,” I respond, throat thick with grief as I watch the one I have sworn to love until the end of my days die.
“Try. Sing me the moon and the stars and everything in between, my love.”
I hesitate a moment, watching as his skin turns pale, his copper locks mixing with the blood pooling on the dirt beneath him. His hand, once pressing against the wound is simply laying there now atop his shallow breaths. I cannot make sense of this, this death, this dying he is currently doing, and I can’t seem to make this request of his come from my own voice.
But then his breath falters, and I open my mouth, letting the sounds of mourning flow through me like a river, unwilling to let him die in nothing but pain. Tears stream from my eyes as I sing a song of mourning, my heart dying inside my chest as Marius moves towards his own death. I grasp his hand in mine, his fingers growing colder by the minute, his life moving through my lips as I sing of his love of music and his favorite blue flowers. I sing of how he loves honey cakes and figs, and how he once befriended a raven that sang with him in the gardens in the waning hours of the day.
I sing.
And sing.
Until there is nothing left but my own sorrow sitting in the garden with me.
Chapter one
Charlie
Present Day
He is singing.
Though I can’t capture it with my brush, as I create the lines that make up his angled jaw on the canvas in front of me, I know there’s a song rising from between his plump lips. I don’t even know what song it is, I’ve never heard it before, though it keeps playing in my mind like a broken record as I paint his face. The tones that rise from his lungs are slow and stilted as he breathes through them. He is mourning, and his sorrow and despair filter through what I have of him in my head to become realized on the canvas in front of me in tear tracks that trickle down his cheeks.
Though I’ve painted his face many times, I have never painted him quite like this.
He has never come to my dreams so filled with a sorrow and grief so deep that I was thrown from my sleep with tears streaming down my own face.
My tears are long gone now, replaced with the bone-deep exhaustion that I always feel on nights like this. I yawn as I reach for the crimson paint, knowing that’s the next color I need to use. His lips are reddened, but that color wants to drip down from his mouth and land on the pure white tunic he wears. I let it fall like a stream, creating the thin lines that trickle down his chin with one of my finest brushes before letting it splash on his clothing.
Just like it did in my dream.
Outside, the world is quiet and dark, moonlight my only company as I sit here in my bedroom, scraping paint over a canvas. It’s long past the time I should be sleeping, but that doesn’t ever seem to matter much on the nights I forget to load my body with so many sleeping pills that the dreams of this man stay away from me. Said pills sit on the bedside table along with the glass of water I intended to wash them down with before I fell asleep. As I yawn again, my eyes tearing up this time, I regret not taking them before I climbed into bed earlier.
“Fuck,” I mutter, as I am struck with the need for a color I don’t have close at hand. I thought I’d done well with stocking the corner of my bedroom I use to paint these paintings, but a blue I know I don’t have in the box on the floor rises in the picture in my head left behind by my dream, and I groan my frustration into the quiet.
I could leave it out, but the missing color will eat at me, which is infinitely worse than taking the time to shuffle to the studio like a zombie to grab it. With an irritated sigh, I pull myself off the stool and stumble down the short hallway to my open studio space at the back of the main living area. The night lights I’ve left in the outlets above the baseboards guide my way, illuminating the floor so I don’t trip or fall as I’ve done before. With a yawn, I make it to the studio and head for my paint storage cabinet beneath the window to sort through blues until I find the one I’m looking for.
Cobalt blue.
It goes on the white flowers in the dirt below his feet, I know. I thought I could perhaps mix some of the royal blue and white together to approximate the color I saw in my dream, but like the idea I had to omit the color completely, that would never work. I grab it, then shuffle my way back through the loft to my bedroom where the unfinished canvas sits. My head pounds as I move closer to it, the strange urgency to get back to this painting pulling at me like it has claws.
“I know. I’ll finish it,” I mumble to no one, because no one else is here.
Not anymore. My last boyfriend packed up his shit and left a little over five months ago after an explosive argument that ended much as our fights often did. While I was icing my swelling jaw in the bathroom with the door locked and wondering if the cut in my lip needed stitches, he’d shouted through the door that he wasn’t going to be forced into spending nights like this anymore with a “fucking idiot” like me. Interrupting his sleep on a nightly basis was never my plan, but he never understood that once this urge to paint the things I see in my dreams starts I can’t simply ignore it.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
How I have fucking tried. I’ve spent nights wide awake in my bed, feeling my heartbeat pulse in my head send cascading waves of agony through my entire body until I gave in and went to paint. I’ve tried sketching pieces of the dreams on a sheet of paper left beside my bed instead of getting up to paint it, but that too failed miserably. Many nights have been spent in blinding pain leaving me curled in the sheets, clawing at my eyes from the pressure that had built inside of them simply because I refused to get up and paint when I should have. This urge inside me owns me.
It won’t be ignored.
It can’t be ignored.
And so, I must paint until I am finished enough of the picture that the urge to capture what I see in my dreams settles and I can get back to my much-needed rest. When this first started happening, I’d been thrilled to have inspiration, even if said inspiration struck me in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. The push to get out of bed and paint the things I’d seen in my dream was overwhelming, but back then I had welcomed it. Been excited about it, even if Colin, my ex, had never understood how good it had felt to have something to create and the drive to see it through.
Now, months into this pattern of broken sleep with the knowledge that I can’t simply choose to not paint these things that come to me exactly as I saw them in my dreams, I’ve become bitter about it. It’s not inspiration anymore, it’s pure duty, though I don’t know what the point of it all is. Unlike other art pieces I work on during the day, they won’t get me any money. I don’t sell them, or even show them to anyone else. There’s no need when the rest of my completed and sold works aren’t in the same realm as these dream things I am compelled to paint. I’ve made a name for myself by painting canvases of ancient architecture and landscapes with modern pop culture references hidden inside of them, not this intense, intimate portraiture.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin with marketing this shit since it’s so far from what I am known for, but still, I do as the dreams command or else there will be hell to pay.
Making my way back to my bedroom, I settle down on my wooden stool and open the cap for the cobalt blue, adding it to my palette. Grabbing a fine tip brush, I pick up some of the new color and start placing highlights into the flowers at the man’s feet.
As I add more blue, I can feel the urgency easing inside of me. The claws that shoved me from my sleep and forced me here to my easel are loosening on my mind, and I yawn again as my eyes grow heavy. Apparently, that blue was the final piece that was needed and I’ve painted enough of the dream into the canvas to appease whatever force it is that makes me have to do this. I yawn into the quiet of the room as I finally put my paintbrush down for the night.
Exhaustion grips me as I stand up from my stool, not even caring to look at the whole painting before I get to bed. I used to stand and marvel at what I’d created, but I don’t give a shit anymore. It’s always the same. Always this handsome blond-haired man. Sometimes, I paint him in intimate positions with a copper-haired man who is equally as handsome but that is about the sum of it. It’s hard to revel in the glory of a new painting when it’s the same shit every night I’m called to put brush to canvas.
Except for the night I painted him completely naked, that is. That was a night in which I had to really consider that I was losing my entire mind. Dreaming of the blond-haired man naked, laying in a shallow pool of water with his lust filled eyes gleaming outwards and hardened cock resting on his belly was one thing, being pushed to paint it on the canvas was quite another. My cheeks had never been quite so red and my skin had never felt quite as heated as when I’d been painting the fine, blond hairs that lay between his legs and the swollen vein that ran down the underside of his dick.
Tonight, I gather a sheet from the floor and drape it over the unfinished painting. I used to finish them out in full a few days after the first night I was awoken out of dreams to paint, but not anymore. This one will sit there exactly as it is beneath the cloth until the morning, and then I will grab it and throw it in the locked closet in the studio with the rest of them. One day, I’ll paint over the stack of them with something more my style, or maybe figure out a way to put what is already on them to good use so I can make some actual money off them, but for now they can sit and collect dust as far as I’m concerned.
