The Vampire Burns

by Amy Cross

  “Curiosity will get you nowhere.”

  “Are you a vampire?”

  I bristled at the use of that word. The word vampire had been so over-used in human culture, so badly bastardised, that it barely seemed appropriate anymore.

  “They say you all left this part of the world when the war began,” she added. “I've studied the stories. They say you all chose to walk away from our fight. I can understand that, even if I find it pretty annoying. I mean, if we had just a few men like you on our side, that'd count for more than a hundred German divisions.” She stepped even closer, and she was once again staring at me with a hint of wonder. Finally, she placed a hand on my chest. “We could win this war in an instant,” she purred, “if only you'd choose to fight with us.”

  “And what if I chose to fight against you?” I asked.

  “That would be bad. Buy why would you do that?”

  “The point is, I can't pick and choose.” I took a deep breath. “You have no idea how petty and pointless human conflict seems to... other species. I don't care which side wins in this war, although I wish you'd get it over with as fast as possible. Sometimes the noise can be rather irritating.”

  “But you're here,” she pointed out. “You didn't flee.”

  “I need to be here for a while,” I replied, “to bathe in the water, so to speak.”

  “You enjoy watching us fight and suffer?”

  “I don't enjoy it,” I explained, “but in some ways it benefits me. I'm not even -”

  Suddenly she leaned closer and kissed me, planting her lips firmly against mine and then placing her hands on my shoulders. For a moment, I was too startled to know how to respond, and several seconds passed before I finally managed to push her away. As soon as I did so, however, she simply tried again. This time I allowed the kiss to linger for a few more seconds, not because it was in any way enjoyable but because – in truth – I had not been so close to another living creature for a long time. And then, just as she placed her hands on my waist, I pushed her away once more.

  “What's wrong?” she asked breathlessly. “Why not?”

  “It would not be a good idea.”

  “You have to take your pleasures where you can find them in the middle of a war,” she replied. “You're strong. You're powerful. I spend all day, every day, with people who are weak. And we fight other people who are weak. Whereas you...”

  She put her hands on my shoulders again.

  “Is it true what they say?” she continued. “Can you turn me into a vampire?”

  “Please -”

  “Then do it!” she hissed. “I'll do anything you want, but give me your strength! You don't want to fight, and I understand that. I even respect it, in some way. But you don't have to fight. Give me the power, and I'll fight in your stead. You can walk away and not look back, and you can leave it to others.”

  “That's not how it works.”

  “Do it!” she snapped angrily, as she pressed herself against me. “However it works, make me like you!”

  “It's not that easy.”

  “You can't change me?” she asked. “You can't just bite me and turn me into a vampire?”

  She waited, staring desperately into my eyes.

  “Then help me conceive one,” she continued finally. “Let me have a vampire child, who can be used in the war effort once he's fully grown.”

  “It's not that simple,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, the vampire gene usually skips the first generation after conception, for another -”

  “You're just making excuses! I know you can do it!”

  “Of course I could do it,” I replied testily. “When a male vampire makes love to a human female, pregnancy is guaranteed. Every time. But I won't unleash that kind of power into the world. There are rules.”

  “Break them.”

  “No.”

  “For the sake of humanity.”

  “No. I would only -”

  Suddenly she slapped me hard across the side of my face. Startled, I opened my mouth and prepared to bite her, to kill her, but somehow I managed to hold back. Never before in all my life had a mere human dared to strike me like that. My anger quickly became a kind of admiraton.

  “We need your strength,” she said firmly. “I don't care how we get it, but you have to help us.”

  I stared at her, and for a moment I considered giving in to her request. I had the power to change her, even if such actions were frowned upon in vampire society. She would not be a full vampire, of course. She would be somewhat weakened, since the strength of the vampire race was best passed on from one generation to the next, but she would at least become stronger. Yet even though she plainly yearned for such strength, I did not want to be the one who let that particular genie out of its bottle. Rules were rules for a reason.

  After all, I could not trust her. What if she in turn changed others?

  “Please,” she whimpered, with tears in her eyes, “I'm not asking you to do it for me. I'm asking you to do it for us. For all of humanity.”

  “But you would not be human,” I pointed out. “Not anymore.”

  “That's a price I'm willing to pay.”

  “If you felt the power that I feel,” I replied, “you'd lose all interest in humanity.”

  “Never!” Her desperation was palpable, hanging in the air between us. It was the desperation of an entire species. “What's it like, knowing that you'll live forever? How does it feel to walk the world like that?”

  I opened my mouth to end the discussion, but then I thought back to my earlier conversation with Chloe. I'd insisted on not knowing about my own future, but I'd still picked up on something in her tone of voice, in her eyes. I wanted to tell myself that I was wrong, but I was increasingly convinced that somehow – thanks to some terrible chain of events – Chloe had witnessed my death in the future.

  “It feels good,” I said finally, partly to make myself feel better, “and it is not something that I can share with a human.”

  “I'll give you anything,” she replied, placing her hand on my belly and then starting to slowly move it down toward my crotch. “If you won't save humanity from this war, that at least let me do it. Why not? If we're truly insignificant to you, then what's the difference? It literally doesn't matter to you, one way or the other, but it will change our entire world. You can do this for us without even batting an eyelid, you can walk away and not look back, so I'm begging you.” She leaned even closer, until I could feel her breath against my face. “Help me save the world.”

  I stared down at her, and I felt my resolve starting to crack. After all, Chloe had been horrified by my refusal to interfere. Was it possible that she'd been right all along?

  “Michelle,” I said cautiously, “if -”

  Suddenly a scream rang out, filling the night air from the other side of town.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chloe

  “What is it?” I shouted, rushing out of the house and immediately seeing that several people had gathered over on the other side of the town square. “What's wrong?”

  Voices were shouting in French, but I didn't understand anything they were saying. I could tell that they were upset, however, and as I crossed the square I began to realize that a small crowd was starting to convene around a figure on the ground. As I got closer, I heard a woman sobbing wildly.

  “Henri!” she shouted.

  “What's happened?” I asked, as I saw Michelle hurrying toward the group.

  “It's one of the children,” she replied, sounding worried. “They sometimes carry messages for us, through the forest, but there are traps out there.”

  As she said those words, I heard another cry of pain, and I was somehow able to tell this time that it came from a boy. As I reached the crowd, I was just about able to see him down on the cobbled ground, and I gasped as I realized that one entire side of his body seemed to have been horribly burned.

  “What
is this?” a voice asked, and I turned to see that Matthias was coming over to join me.

  “I don't know,” I stammered, “but there's a boy... He's hurt.”

  For a few minutes, the entire town square was filled with chaos. People were hurrying out of nearby houses, and stopping to watch as Michelle and a few others tended to the injured boy. There was frantic activity all around him, but I could hear him sobbing and it was clear that his wounds were severe. I wanted to help, but in truth I knew there was nothing I could do, not even with my supposedly advanced knowledge. I could only stand helplessly and hope that somehow someone else would be able to intervene.

  Finally, Michelle pushed back through the crowd and stormed toward Matthias.

  “Save him!” she snapped.

  “Please,” he replied, “I -”

  “Save him!” She slammed her hands against his chest, and to my shock I saw him take a step backward.

  “There's nothing I can do,” he told her.

  “You can do everything!” she shouted. “You can do anything you want! You can save him, you can save all of us! And if you won't, then what's the point of you?”

  “We don't interfere in human affairs,” he replied, sounding a little shocked as the child continued to cry nearby. “If we did, we'd have to get involved with everything.”

  “And what's wrong with that?” she screamed. “You have all this power! Why are you so afraid to use it?”

  “You don't understand,” he replied, turning and walking away. “You never will. You're only human.”

  “Coward!” she shouted after him, before hurrying back over to the boy. “Let me through! We'll find a way to save him!”

  ***

  “Matthias?”

  Stopping in the doorway, I saw that he was standing at the window. In the distance, voices were still frantically calling out as the townspeople continued with their desperate attempts to help the injured boy.

  “Don't lecture me,” Matthias firmly, with his back turned to me. “You don't understand anything about this. You don't know how my world works at all.”

  “I never claimed that I do,” I replied cautiously, “but... Is there really nothing you can do?”

  “These petty human lives -”

  “They're not petty to us,” I said, interrupting him. “You can talk all you like about the world, and about traditions and about how things work. But right now, there's a child dying out there in agony, and if there's any way you can help him, then I don't understand why you're holding back.”

  “Exactly,” he said darkly, “you don't understand. And you never will.”

  “Then help me out a little.”

  “It's beyond you,” he replied, turning to me. “The human mind can't come close to understanding the responsibilities. You think I can just swoop in like some kind of hero and make everything better, but that's not how it works at all. There are consequences to any action, Chloe, and those consequences are very real. If I were to help that child, I'd be breaking an oath that my species has upheld for many generations.”

  I stared at him for a moment.

  “So?” I asked finally.

  He furrowed his brow.

  “So what if you break an oath?” I continued. “Are all oaths just supposed to last forever, no matter what else happens?”

  “You don't understand.”

  “You keep saying that, but maybe you're the one who doesn't understand.” I stepped toward him. “You keep talking about oaths and promises, and about how things are supposed to be done, but you still haven't explained why you personally are against helping people.”

  “You want to know?” he snapped. “Fine, I'll tell you. It's because humans are the weakest of all the species. Wherever I've gone, I've never encountered such weakness before, but do you know the strangest thing? The most infuriating thing? I've seen other species rise and fall, I've watched empires crumble, I've witnessed the deaths of some of the strongest creatures in all of creation. Yet somehow, while all that has been going along, the human race somehow managed to keep going despite being... being...”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Unworthy?” I asked after a moment.

  “There's a power to your species,” he replied, “that I do not understand. And that's the truth. You're weak, and yet your persist. You're unworthy, and yet you persist. You're pathetic and foolish and you do everything to harm and kill yourselves, and yet you're still here!”

  He hesitated, and he seemed almost breathless with concern.

  “So I worry,” he continued finally, “and many others worry too, what your species would achieve if you weren't weak. If humans gained the strength of vampires, you might very well come to dominate all of the seven worlds.” He paused for a few seconds. “And that is at the heart of the decision that I and all others have made, when it comes to humans. We won't help you, not in any way, because we're worried about just what you might do if you become invincible.”

  I stared at him, barely able to believe what I was hearing.

  “I have to go to that kid,” I say finally, taking a step back. “I have to see if there's something I can do.”

  “That is your choice.”

  I hesitated, and then I turned and hurried out of the room. I'd seen a new, darker side to Matthias, and I finally did understand one thing. He was never going to help.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Matthias

  “You can't outrun your memories. Trust me, the faster you try to run from them, the harder they slam into you when you finally have to stop running. And everyone has to stop running eventually, even... Even people who thought they could escape it all. Especially people who thought they could escape it all. The most you can do is try to pick your spot, to decide where you'll be standing when it happens.”

  Those words hung in my thoughts. They were my own words, delivered by my voice, yet I had never heard them before. They had drifted unbidden from Chloe's mind, from her memory, and I knew they must be words I had spoken to her in the future. In her past. Now they seemed almost to be taunting me, as if my future self was inadvertently mocking me as I stood in a little room in a little town in a little country in the grip of a little war on a little world.

  “Everyone has to stop running eventually.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to regather my thoughts, but in truth I was feeling a growing sense of panic. When those words had escaped from Chloe's mind, they'd been accompanied by thoughts and feelings that I couldn't quite understand. I was more and more certain, however, that Chloe's knowledge of the future was a dangerous thing. I wanted desperately to ask her about my own fate, to know what was going to happen to me, yet I feared the answer. And as I felt another flicker of pain in my chest, and as I reached down and instinctively touched my side as I waited for the pain to leave my body, I felt something I had never truly felt before.

  I felt a fear of death.

  Even when I'd been poisoned, even in the grip of that agony, I had somehow managed to believe that I would survive. There had been weak moments, for sure, but some deep part of my soul had insisted that I would escape death's thick maw. Even when I'd heard the singing voice of one of death's minions, even when a girl named Hannah had come and told me not to be afraid, I had pushed back and insisted that I would live. Sometimes I think that it was my sheer refusal to die that had saved me. Yet now I stood and waited for the last of the pain to pass, and I realized that I could sense death approaching. I had thought that perhaps it had been Chloe I had sensed while I was waiting in Paris, but now I knew the truth.

  It had been death all along.

  “No,” I whispered, as the panic rose in my chest and blossomed to become fury. “I refuse...”

  I hesitated, and then – in a sudden blur of uncontrollable anger – I overturned the nearest table, sending plates and cups clattering to the floor. Realizing that this wasn't enough, I took hold of a chair and threw it across the room, and then I watched as it smashed through on
e of the windows. Even this didn't satisfy my need for release, and in truth I felt as if nothing ever would. I was surrounded by mortal souls, by a mortal war, and suddenly humanity seemed like a wretched reminder of every weakness that I had ever feared.

  And then, quite suddenly, I understood the truth.

  “It's some kind of trick,” I snarled. “Yes, that's it, I've been fooled. Chloe isn't from the future at all, she's lying to me. This is all some attempt to weaken me further.”

  Deep down, a part of me wondered whether this could be true, but my sense of fury was too strong. Turning, I stormed out of the building and across the town square, and I could already see Chloe up ahead. She was carrying a bucket away from the crowd, going to collect water, but she stopped as soon as she saw me approaching.

  “Matthias,” she stammered, “what -”

  “You want me to save everyone?” I shouted, pushing her back so hard that she almost fell. “I don't know what kind of trickster set this up, but I refuse to play the floor for even one moment longer!”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I know!” I yelled, grabbing her and pinning her against the wall, then leaning close to her terrified face. “Is it my brother? Did he put you up to this? Or is it Antoinette? I have no shortage of enemies, and even my friends might be tempted to meddle in my affairs.”

  “Matthias -”

  “I don't know the truth about you,” I continued, “and I don't need to know. But I'm absolutely certain that you've been sent to drive fear into my heart, to make me doubt my own strength. I won't do that, not anymore. You can find your own way from now on, Chloe Carter. Whoever you are and whatever you want, I will no longer be your plaything!”

  “All I want is to get home!” she gasped.

  I pulled away, and then I turned and saw that several of the townspeople were gawking at me.

  “What are you looking at?” I snapped, and they all hurried back over to the injured boy.

  “Matthias,” Chloe said, clearly close to tears, “you need to calm down. No-one's trying to trick you, at least not as far as I know, and I've told you the truth.”