Familia

“What did you leave behind?” the man asked him, and offered him a damp cloth. “Or should I ask what you're running from?”

He wasn't listening, Charlie turned the cloth over in his hands, unsure what he was supposed to do with it. absentmindedly, he dabbed his mouth. The man nodded. “Sorry, I forgot what you told me your name was,” Charlie replied, now rubbing along his jawline.

“Oscar,” he said. He held out his hand expectantly and Charlie returned the handkerchief, bloodied and already stained. “Oscar Foscari, but I prefer Oscar Vega. What are you running from, Mr.Boucher?” 

“Charlie,” he responded curtly. “Just call me Charlie.” 

“How did you end up so far north, Charlie?” Oscar asked, he stared at him, with a certain curiosity. Charlie felt like he was being observed with the same interest as a lab rat. “Greyhound bus. You know, my legs, I walked a good bit of the way.” he clarified. “Hopped a boat here and there. Don't matter much how I ended up here does it?”

Oscar shook his head, but his face remained stoic. “No, I don't suppose it does. You're hungry and you're tired and you're weak and you've been traveling for a very long time, am I wrong?” Charlie could tell just by his face that Oscar knew he wasn't wrong. He scrunched up his nose and looked away. There was a lot to take in inside the room, though much of it was in boxes or paper wrapping to keep it from breaking.

“What is this place, anyway?” Charlie asked, now squinting across the room at something he thought he might have seen before in one of Madge's art history books. A middle eastern vase of sorts. It probably cost more than Charlie's life was worth. 

“My study,” Oscar answered, with a hint of pride that vanished when he looked around the dishevelment of the room. “Or it will be. Sorry. We're all still settling in here.” Oscar spun his chair around and pulled from a box behind his desk, a bottle of something and two glasses. He uncorked it and began to pour two glasses. “I'm not going to kill you, you know. You're beyond that point. I don't trust you and I don't expect you to trust me, but I certainly have no fear of you and would appreciate the same from you.”

Charlie remembered the violence earlier that evening. He remembered the equally gruesome threats the man spewed like venom as he bent each of Charlie's fingers backwards so far he could hear them rip and tear and pop. 

After being told that if he failed cooperate and continued killing Oscar's men, he would, as Oscar had said, be 'the first living being to experience life with his organs flipped entirely inside out his skin', he found the fear was a little bit more than something he could just wave away. He swallowed the lump down his throat. “I'm not afraid of you.” he said. 

Oscar nudged a glass filled to the top with red wine towards him, as he took a sip from his own. 

Charlie stared at the drink and gulped it down, wiping his mouth with a small grunt when he was finished. 

“It's nice isn't it? From Tuscany, it's something I miss often since coming to America.” He stared at the drink with something of nostalgia and swirled it before taking another sip. Charlie didn't know much about wine or care to. Even for someone who drank straight bourbon and rum, wine always reminded him too strongly of the sterile rubbing alcohol smell that pervaded the classrooms he studied surgery in.

“So, you're Italian?”

“Originally I was from Spain,” Oscar corrected. “But I have lived so much of my life in Italy, that I did grow to see it as home, yes.”

He took slow, small sips of the wine that he savored with closed eyes. 

“When I was young, I traveled very far for very long,” he continued. “That's how I know you're running from something. Or looking for something. Either way, there's a reason you're here in Boston, isn't there?”

Charlie stared at him, unflinching, matching his expressionless gaze. “Absolutely not,” he answered, and it wasn't a complete lie. 

“What happened in New Orleans, Charlie?” Oscar pressed.

Absolutely nothing. Nothing happened in New Orleans. And if something did happen in New Orleans, it had nothing to do with me. He told himself this and tried to believe it. He hoped that his face matched the confident lies he repeated inside his head.

Oscar took another sip of his disgusting cherished wine and gave Charlie a look. It was a 'cut the shit, kid' kind of look, a gentleman's version. It involved raised eyebrows and a knowing smirk that made Charlie want to punch him in the teeth.

“Who did you kill in New Orleans, Charlie?”

Charlie said nothing, but he knew his guilt showed through clear as day on his face.  

“Ah, so it was someone close to you, was it?” He said. 

Charlie clenched his jaw. The ease it took, for Oscar could merely glance at him and seem to understand everything, was unnerving- to say the least.“Why do you care what happened in New Orleans?” he said in a low voice. 

Oscar rubbed the stem of his glass between his fingers and sighed. “Charlie, I had no intention of rubbing salt into any open wounds or anything like that,” he said. “I merely thought I could understand you a bit better if I knew where you were coming from and thought, perhaps, that you could benefit from having someone to talk to... It seems like it's been a while.”

Charlie crossed his arms across his chest and gave him the same kind of high eyebrowed look of contempt he'd given him earlier.

“I apologize. It is just that you have so much potential, Charlie,” Oscar said with more emotion in his voice than I'd heard all evening. “I want to teach you, to help you, but without trust none of that can be established.”  

Truth be told, Charlie didn't understand why. Sure, he was smarter than the backwater hicks in rural Louisiana, but he'd killed more of Oscar's guys than he even knew about and other than that, he didn't have much going for him. Charlie thought he must have made a face because Oscar suddenly became silent and contemplative. 

With careful articulation, Oscar said, “How about you ask me a couple questions instead?” 

Charlie rolled his eyes and let his arms drop to his sides, “Alright,” he said. His first question was, “Who are you, really?”

Oscar looked impatient as he began to answer, “Oscar Fos-”

“No,” Charlie interrupted. “I know your name. What I asked you was, who are you, really? What are you? What are we?”  

“Vampires,” Oscar said, and he slumped his shoulders and clasped his hands together, looking down at them in his lap. “How foolish of me, I should have thought you may not have known, you were abandoned by your master weren't you?”

The word 'master' felt archaic, even coming out of the mouth of the man across from him who looked like he could have been in a painting from 300 years ago. Whatever the woman who'd turned him back in that shitty hotel on Bourbon street was, she was no master. 

Vampire on the other hand... 

“Vampire...” Charlie repeated, the word was warm and comfortable rolling off his tongue. It felt right. “Are there many like us?” 

“More than you would know, but few enough as not to attract the attention of humankind.”

“But humans know about vampires,” Charlie insisted. “What about Dracula, The Vampyre, Carmilla,”

“You are well-read, but they are stories, Charlie. Just fairy tales for humans. They write about dragons and minotaurs as well, have you ever encountered one of those?” Oscar smiled displaying rows of perfect pointed teeth. “For them, we are dragons. We are exciting for a story but we do not exist in their world.”

Charlie nodded, he wasn't fully satisfied, but supposed that even just knowing the name of the kind of creature he'd become was a little better than wandering through his strange undead life in a state of confusion. Better than feeding off the blood and meat of his fellow man but never knowing why. He did not say that he thought he was a devil until now. He thought of his next question.

“What do you do?” 

“Pardon?” Oscar wrinkled his forehead and for once, the man's age showed, at least in some small part, on his face. 

“You nearly disemboweled me over killing your men, so what is it exactly, that you and your men do?” 

“Many things, Charlie,” he said simply and stopped. Charlie thought he was being intentionally vague but after his silence, he rubbed his chin and continued, “We do things that we must to make money and survive in human society.” He spoke slowly, and seemed to pause intermittently, choosing carefully his next words. “Many of these things are what you would call illegal, but by the nature of our kind, our mere existence is something quite illegal. And so, we do not exist, are not governed by any human laws. There is a word for what we are doing now, I believe, the people of the United States are calling it 'organized crime'. We are calling it a family.”

“So you're part of a crime syndicate? You're mafia, that it?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes” Oscar answered. 

Charlie bit his tongue before he opened his mouth again. Now you know too much, he realized. You're either dying tonight or you're a part of this. He stared at Oscar, and then at his own empty wine glass. The taste of the stuff was stomach turning, but any booze was better than none to take the edge off tonight. “Will you top off my glass?” Charlie asked.

Oscar graciously complied and began to refill the glass to the middle, before Charlie interrupted, saying, “All the way, please” and he made a grunt, but continued. He watched as Oscar poured. He was a smallish man by comparison to his own stature, but enormous in presence. Charlie somehow knew the hands now pouring his wine had produced more deaths than some small wars. He was a man comfortable in the company of death, her supplier. He produced the bodies and carried on contentedly in death's good favor. If he declined, he would make this man his enemy- and that was the best case scenario.

He willed his hands not the shake as he raised the glass to his lips and sipped the foul concoction “Now I take it this is my initiation?” Charlie asked. “Welcome to the club, that sorta thing?” 

Oscar nodded. “I'm glad that you understand.”

He placed the bottle back on the table while Charlie took in all that'd happened tonight. 20-some odd years of complete freedom had come to an end, but he'd traded it for safety. He didn't have to run anymore, not if he didn't want to. He was smarter than Oscar's other men, Charlie knew that from experience. Whatever job he ended up with, he was sure he could do it if he tried. Master it, if given a chance. It was a small price to pay for security. 

“Now, if you don't mind my asking, Charlie, what did happen in New Orleans?”

Charlie looked up briefly through his shaggy straw colored bangs to Oscar watching him with interest in his ancient eyes. His gaze fell back down to his half empty glass of wine and he thought about what he was giving up, it wasn't much. He thought about New Orleans. He could smell the scent of magnolia trees through that open window. He recalled the boisterous music outside that crept in with the heat, on that sticky march night he'd spent with a woman whose face he couldn't remember. (But who was infallibly beautiful every time he tried to picture it.) Finally he thought about how he could never go back. 

Then, he thought aloud, “Where would you like me to start?”

“Wherever you feel is necessary” Oscar replied.  

So, he told him about bloody nights on the run. He told him about the mystery woman who killed him and saved him all in one, Charlie told him, regretting it as soon as the words escaped his lips, about Madge. “But,” He said in conclusion, “there is very truly absolutely no reason that I am in Boston right now.”

“A stroke of good fortune for our paths to have crossed then,” Oscar said with dry delight in his voice. 

“Sure,” Charlie replied. 

“And,” he cleared his throat, “my condolences about your late fiancee, I'm sure-”

“Forget about it,” Charlie said, cutting him off. The last thing he needed was for a monster who'd nearly ripped his fingers off to tell him he was 'sorry for his loss'.

“Forgotten. At any rate, you'll need a place to stay, won't you? I trust you haven't been in one place for very long.” Oscar replied with wave of his hands, switching from one topic to another effortlessly. “Much less have any permanent address. We'll need to do something about that.”

Charlie could only imagine the kinds of places that men like Oscar lived in. The study they'd been conversing in alone was more ostentatious than any other room he'd ever been in, and half of it was in boxes. Even Madge's old family home was a distant runner up from this place. 

“Would an apartment do fine? Something downtown?” 

“That'll do fine,” Charlie said, with little interest. What else could he do but agree? He'd been drafted into something without so much as warning or choice. From now on, Oscar would say 'jump' and he'd say, 'how high?' Oscar could say 'kill' and he'd say 'who, and how many?' 

Much like Oscar's wine, it left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he drank it down regardless. There weren't any better alternatives.  

“Good. We'll get you settled in tomorrow, then. I assume you have no possessions that would require be moved in?”

“Just what I've got on me,” Charlie replied.

“Right, right.” Oscar nodded. “Well, I should think everything is in order then. I look forward to working with you, Charlie.” He extended an across the table, offering his open hand. Charlie hesitated to accept it. His hands were warmer than his own, and smaller, but his grip was firm. They shook on it, closing a deal that Charlie had never wanted to agree to. Oscar smiled brightly and all Charlie could feel was regret.