C5: Carla

“Lara, what are you doing here?” I plaster a false smile over my face. Lara, the Queen of Darkness, stands before me charismatically with a profound smile. Her true beauty is indescribable. She is an otherworldly creature not from this world. But to adapt to this world of mine, she has adopted a less lethal form.

“What about you? As far as I recall, you are supposed to be in your office right now. What are you doing in this rundown place?”

She means well. A CEO should serve his purpose in the company. I nod with a sigh. She smiles again, showing a row of perfect white teeth. I smile inside me at how cleverly she has her fangs hidden away. She is a vampire from Another World. But being a vampire queen gives her the benefits of not being wholly dependent on blood for survival. Unlike lesser vampires, she can indulge in the delish of our worldly delicacies. Although her main meal is blood, she opts to take it from the blood bank or from her prisoners without killing them.

Being the Queen of Darkness also gives her a whole lot of perks. Reciting her mantra, she calls upon her teleportation pad and transports us into the Shadow Plane. The Shadow Plane of my world is no different from the world I live in, but instead of being in colour, it is in black and white. We see the exact humans passing through the same streets, but we cannot touch or interact with them.

Lara leads me to sit in a monochrome cafe where at her bidding, food appears on a plate by the supernatural beings in the cafe. She waves her hand and our glasses fill themselves with wine. As usual, she has remembered that my favourite cuisine is Eastern cuisine. 

“She’s changed,” I reveal to her as I finish the last spoonful of rice. 

“Arabelle?” Lara smirks, tousling her dark reddish-brown hair. Her hair is a little wavy at the ends, a natural characteristic of the vampiric race in her world. “You too, have changed, haven’t you?”

From a poor farmer, I am now a demon and a CEO at that. I nod, making sense of her words. She just continues dining as if nothing had happened. Then she swipes a bright red card through the air. A paper floats out of nowhere, falling onto our table. The Shadow Plane is highly magical. The supernaturals have advanced technologies that are non-existent in our world. Although, of course, the demon race has its own tech, which is kept hidden from humans. 

Many of us, to preserve the secrets of the demons, have intermarried with humans. The result of such a union is either a superhuman or a failure. Not all demons can successfully breed with humans without the humans suffering repercussions. Even those who produce superhumans result in the human spouses dying an unnatural death. For this reason, I chose to turn off the mating switch between Scarlet and I when we performed the deed. As long as I don’t inseminate her with my seed, she will live a ripe old life.

But just thinking of Scarlet hooking up with the jerk over a stupid assignment she can’t do, just vexes me. It’s not that I can’t help her, but demons have intelligence way beyond humans. If I did her assignment, it would be highly unbelievable. Even if I were to tone down my intelligence level to ten per cent of my standard, it would be just too much for the professors to handle.

“Thompson,” she greets me by my last name again, “If you wanted, I could introduce you to a kind woman from my nest. She may be a bloodsucking creature,” she changes her terms remembering how I dislike vulgarities, “But as long as you supply her with ample blood, be it from an animal or a blood bank, she will be harmless to you.”

“What’s so special about this woman?” I recall that Lara has offered to introduce her to me more than once.

Lara sighs. “She was once Carla Thomas.”

Carla. I don’t need to think further to remember the existence of the woman who was once called Carla. She was another farm woman in my village while I was in my past life. Carla was who I was originally engaged to, but her love for me had always been one-sided. Unfortunately for her, her parents fell on bad times and resorted to marrying Carla as a young wife to an older man. Before she left to become the older man’s wife, she gave me her innocence. Later, she fell out of favour with the older man when he took a younger wife. 

Despite all that she had gone through with me, I had never loved Carla. I had thought that giving Carla one night with me would help her through the darkest days ahead of her, but I had never expected that after my death, she would lament my demise and turn to nunhood. 

Lara explained further that she had come across Carla being humiliated and brutally tortured by a group of men. Although she didn’t go through the details, with my clairvoyance, I knew what that translated to. At the nunnery, she had been preyed on by men who pretended to be believers of the faith but had forced themselves on her mercilessly before leaving her for dead. In her final moments of life, Lara came across Carla and in the nick of time, turned her.

Turning in vampiric terms was yet another profound matter. Lara took Carla’s memories and wiped them from her mind, leaving within her, a new soul. Carla was Lara’s trusted assistant, her right-hand man and bodyguard. But even without her memories, Carla retained the purity of her soul. She was kind and innocent, and that part of her alone made me fill up with remorse for not being able to reciprocate her love.

I leaned back on my chair. Scarlet and I were just beginning, but to capture her heart would be akin to making a walk through a long, winding path filled with thorns and brambles. Still, I wanted to meet Carla and see how she was doing all these years, in her new body and identity.

“Fine, I’ll do it,” I answered. “What else do you want me to do after meeting Carla?”  

Lara’s lips curled into a deep grin. “I need you to take her on a journey, for three days, no less. Let her familiarise herself with the ways of your world and your kind. I believe she will be a worthy addition to your cause.”

Due to her royal status, I didn’t bother correcting Lara that it was a company, not a cause, that the demons were using as a false cover. Lara was hundreds of thousands of years older than me, although she saw me as a younger brother. Lara and Vernon were at loggerheads for what seemed like forever. But what Lara said definitely made a lot of sense.

Maybe meeting Carla would clear my doubts and take my mind off Scarlet’s casual hookups and how she often used her body to bait men into benefits. I put down the burden.

Yet, there was another matter that bothered me. Scarlet seemed genuinely concerned and even fearful that the jerk she had agreed to spend three days and nights with, knew that she was Scarlet. It wasn’t just as simple as knowing her party name was Scarlet: from the looks of her shocked expression, it had to be more than that. 

Though I wasn’t knowledgeable about the education system, something made me feel she was threatened to lose her place in college if her dark past was revealed. I had read something about a former pornographic star being laid off from an office job due to her past involvement in the AV industry. 

Probably the same thing went for Barays College. Despite Lara calling it a “rundown place” due to the advancement of the world she came from, it was still a prestigious college. Scarlet was possibly afraid that the man would threaten her with the knowledge of her past, so willingly acceded to his desires. 

On the other hand, from the way he knew her needs and lustiness, it was probably not the first time she had allowed him to touch her in class. Maybe it was the first time she had been laid by him, but he was not new to her. That possibility as well as the fact he seemed to be blackmailing her with her assignment and his knowledge of her past, tormented me. I knew that I would have to get my mind off thinking about Scarlet and her endeavours with Jerk.

But as I focused my mind on the laptop screen before me, images of Scarlet’s body moving in sync with Jerk’s just kept swimming in my mind. I snapped the lid of my laptop in place, heading to the fridge in my office for a bottle of demon booze. 

That was it. I needed to find out the identity of that jerkass, I told myself, but before I could open the fridge door, my cell phone began ringing.

“Mr Thompson, Miss Carla is here for a meeting with you.”

“Send her to my room.”

I sucked in my breath and pulled on my black coat, adjusting my tie in the wall mirror that manifested before me. In less than a minute later, a soft knock on the door diverted my thoughts towards how Carla would turn out to be after all these years.

Maybe it was a blessing indeed to be reunited with this angel.