Nyal's Story (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga)

by Joseph Duncan

  “I can’t!” Gon said roughly, glancing at the boy with a horrified expression. “I can barely resist the smell of his blood.”

  “Resist…?” Nyal echoed, looking from Gon to her grandson in confusion. “What do you mean ‘resist’?”

  “It is my curse!” Gon blurted, retreating further from his injured grandson. “I no longer feed as living men feed. I have been made into some monstrous leech. I must subsist on blood now. It is all that I can eat, and my craving for it is nearly irresistible.”

  “Blood?” Nyal said, shocked by his confession. “Only blood?”

  “I have tried to eat other things, the flesh of animals, vegetables and fruit, but my body rejects it violently. I must have blood!”

  As if he’d dimly heard his grandfather’s words, Gilad stirred, moaning softly. Nyal ogled the lad in surprise, then crawled hurriedly toward him. “Gilad! Gilad, can you hear me?” she shouted. She coughed convulsively, and was surprised to see blood smeared across her hand when she wiped her mouth.

  Gon, seeing the blood, retreated another two steps. His eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring.

  “Grandmother?” Gilad muttered.

  “Yes, Gilad, it is I! Grandmother is here! Are you in pain? Can you move your legs?”

  “My head hurts,” he admitted.

  “That is because you fell on it, silly boy,” Nyal said, her voice rough with emotion. He tried to sit up. Couldn’t quite make it. Nyal took his arm and tugged him upright. She crawled behind him to examine his head, went through his hair like a monkey picking fleas. “You should praise your Fat Hand ancestors, Grandson,” she said finally, letting his hair drop. “They’ve granted you a skull made out of stone.”

  “I’m dizzy—“ Gilad started to say, then he saw Gon standing nearby and his jaw dropped. “You’ve found him!” he gasped.

  “Yes, we found him,” Nyal said.

  Satisfied the young man would live, Nyal struggled to her feet.

  “But tell me why you’ve come!” Gon demanded. He looked ready to flee from them, from the smell of all their blood.

  “The Foul Ones raided the village yesterday,” Nyal said, clutching her side. “We killed four of them, but there were many more than that. They made off with several children. Two of them were ours. Our granddaughters Korte-Anthe and Ganni. Breyya’s little girls. That’s why I came to find you. You have to save our granddaughters, Gon!”

  Gon was nodding before she’d even finished speaking. He gazed toward the north, the muscles around his eyes tensing. His fingers curled and uncurled. In his mind, she could tell, he was already ripping them to pieces.

  That pleased her.

  Would that she had the strength to do such a thing herself!

  “Can you see them?” Nyal asked. “I know you can see far. How else would you know that our mates had both passed on? Can you see where the Foul Ones have taken our babies?”

  “No,” Gon answered. “But I will find them. I will hunt them down and kill them. And if they’ve harmed our children, I will do it slowly. I will make it last for days.”

  “And you will take me with you.”

  Gon turned to her, a smile touching the corner of his mouth. “I’m not taking you with me,” he said. “You are…”

  “Old? Yes, I know I’m old! But all the same, you are taking me with you. I will not be refused!” She leaned toward him, a sudden, vicious grin making her face vulture-like and cruel. “I want to watch you tear them apart.”

  11

  When they were satisfied that Gilad would live, Gon swept the old woman into his arms.

  Nyal felt a tingle shiver through her flesh. It was a sensation she hadn’t felt in a very long time. He was so strong! He had lifted her like a baby. And when she looked into his face, she could almost forget that she was old and infirm and in pain. She felt young again in his presence, vital, as if his unnatural youth was a radiant thing, and she was absorbing it into her flesh.

  She smiled at him in triumph, hooking an arm around his neck. “You were never able to refuse me, husband,” she said. “Not once in all these years.”

  “Not once,” Gon said brusquely, but he returned her smile as he said it.

  Gon turned to watch Gilad limp down the hill. The strapping young man paused once to wave to them, then slipped into the shadows of the pines.

  “I hope he is well enough to make it back to the camp,” Gon said, his brow furrowed.

  “He’s a strong boy,” Nyal replied. “He has Eyya’s blood in him.”

  “Yes. And Brulde’s blood as well. I can see it in his face.”

  Nyal nodded, looking after the young man with great affection.

  Gon glanced down at her then, and she reached up to wipe the tears from his cheeks. His eyes were so different now-- gold, where once they were hazel. They were beautiful, his new eyes, but their luster was unnatural. They disturbed her a little, even as she felt drawn to them.

  “Why do you weep these terrible black tears?” Nyal asked, rubbing the dark fluid experimentally between her fingers. The tears, whatever they were made of, caused her fingers to throb. She scowled and wiped them on her clothing.

  “It is the sun,” he answered her. “The light burns my eyes.”

  “Another aspect of your curse? Like the cold flesh and the hunger for blood?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, accepting his answer without further question.

  “So… are you ready for this, my wife?” Gon asked, shifting her in his arms. “I am going to move very quickly now. It will not be pleasant.”

  “I am ready.”

  Once again: darkness.

  12

  Nyal dreamed she had been caught in a howling windstorm. Buffeted by the wind, she sought shelter in a copse of trees. She crouched down in the dream, covering her head in her arms, but the wind lashed her with the branches of the trees, drawing welts across her skin. She cried out, but her cries drowned in the roar of the storm. She tried curling her body into a ball, but the limbs slashed her without reprieve. Each swelling hash mark was a sizzling brand of pain. Thunder boomed overhead, a pantheon of gods clapping at her torment. They weren’t her gods. She didn’t believe in gods. But they cheered her agonies all the same.

  Nyal lurched awake. She was flying through the treetops, the forest a blur around her, green and gray, with brief flashes of blue and white. She was traveling so fast she could barely lift her cheek from Gon’s chest. It was like a strong but invisible hand pressing her body against his. She tried to turn her head, to look ahead of them, see where they were going, and a slender tree branch slashed across her cheek. She felt her skin part, felt warm blood trickle across her face to her lips. If that limb had struck her in the eye, it would have blinded it. She turned her face inwards, seeking safety in her husband’s chest, and felt Gon’s hand curl protectively around her head.

  How long had she been unconscious this time? The last thing she remembered was Gon warning her. He had said he was going to move very quickly, and that it would not be pleasant. She had told him she was ready, not realizing just how fast and unpleasant their journey through the forest was going to be. And then he had launched himself into the treetops, and his sudden acceleration had clubbed her in the head. She had been propelled into oblivion, shot like an arrow into the dark heart of nothingness.

  The pain was bad. Burning welts crisscrossed her arms and legs where she had been whipped by passing tree branches. Her stomach hurt where the Foul One had kicked her the day before. Her back and ribcage ached where Gon had caught her, fracturing several bones and snapping three ribs in the process, and her chest burned where one of those broken ribs had punctured her lungs.

  But she knew pain. Pain was an old acquaintance. Not a friend! No, not someone she’d willingly invite in. But someone who insisted on visiting regularly. An annoying relative, perhaps. Someone she was forced by custom to accommodate, but whose prattling she had long ago learned to hold at a distance from her thoughts. Th
ose long winter nights of aching joints had made her a master of pain.

  Gon stopped abruptly, and she felt the slap of that invisible hand, striking from the opposite direction this time. Dizzy, she turned to peer ahead. She did not know where they were. They were nowhere she had ever ventured. A thickly wooded hillside, the floor of the forest covered in a thick layer of duff—leaves and bark, needles and twigs.

  “Do you see them?” she asked, once she’d found her voice.

  “No, but I can smell them,” Gon answered her. His smile was predatory. His strange gold eyes glittered hungrily. “They smell of blood and human shit. We are much nearer now.”

  “Tell me, before we continue on,” Nyal said, her lungs burning, “why did you not aid us when they raided the village yesterday?”

  He glanced down at her, eyebrows arched. “I was to the south, feeding on the plains,” he said. “I cannot be everywhere at once, my love.”

  “Then you are no god,” Nyal said.

  Gon laughed.

  His response satisfied her. She settled her face into his chest. “Let us move quickly. I quail at the thought of what those beasts have done to our granddaughters.”

  Gon nodded, and the forest melted.

  13

  The sun had passed the zenith of the heavens when they finally overtook the Foul Ones. It had begun its slow roll downhill, the shadows of the forest stretching toward the east like a thousand grasping hands. Gon arrested their punishing motion when they drew near. Ascending , he crept through the upper canopy of the forest, moving like a hunting cat, eyes locked onto his quarry. Nyal clung to his powerful shoulders as he glided from branch to branch, trying very hard not to cough and give them away. Below, just a little further down the hill, the Foul Ones marched their captives to their territory in the north.

  Nyal counted nine of them. They advanced in a circular formation, their captives stumbling forward in a little clutch in the center of it. There were only four girls now, Nyal saw. One of them must have escaped. Or died. Death was more likely, though she didn’t want to think on it. She tried to see if her granddaughters were among those who remained, but Gon shifted forward again, leaping soundlessly to the bough of another tree, and her vision was obscured by leaves.

  Their voices drifted up from the forest floor, the harsh animal-speak of the Foul Ones, the keening of the children.

  Nyal felt Gon pluck her from his body, and she shot him a protesting glare. She couldn’t see from this vantage, she said with her eyes. She wanted to watch him punish their enemies.

  Gon frowned faintly, then eased forward until she had an unobstructed view of the procession below. He settled her down on a thick bough, one she would have no trouble perching on, and crawled forward.

  Nyal leaned to the left so she could see around his wagging butt. She still could not tell if her granddaughters were down there. Her lungs hitched and she clamped her palm over her mouth, trying to contain the cough. Her chest was burning fiercely, and she felt as if she could not take a full breath, though she wasn’t sure if that was her injuries or her excitement.

  Before she was quite prepared for it, Gon leapt.

  He flew down at their adversaries with a snarl, moving so quickly she could barely follow him with her eyes. He didn’t appear to travel so much as disappear in one place and reappear, an instant later, in another. It was much the way movements appear when lightning sparks the heavens at night, a rapid series of frozen poses, as if the strobing light arrested time in each blinking instant.

  Blink, and he was at the rear of the procession, seizing two of the Foul Ones by the nape. Blink, and he had torn their heads from their shoulders, bright blood spraying in the air. Blink, and he had moved to the man standing beside them, lifting him over his head. Blink, and he had thrown the man into a tree before the first two men even fell.

  Blink…blink…blink…

  Nyal covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide. Her heart felt like a fist inside her chest, squeezing. She had said she wanted to see Gon tear their enemies apart, but now that she had seen, she wished she could un-see it. It was too awful!

  Gon killed most of the men before they even knew they were under attack. The last three barely registered his sudden appearance before he was at their throats. Gon dispatched the third man quickly. He simply punched through the man’s chest. Nyal gaped at the sight of her husband’s arm protruding from the Foul One’s back, slick and red with his blood. Gon jerked his arm from his enemy’s chest and turned to the second man, who was just now bringing his knife up to defend himself. Gon seized the man’s arm in both hands and snapped the bones, then jerked the warrior to his mouth and ripped his throat out with his teeth. Gon spit the flesh from his mouth, then arched his spine, every muscle in his body taut and straining. He howled, and when the last of the Foul Ones turned to flee from him, Gon grabbed the man by the shawl and jerked him into his embrace.

  I must have blood! Gon had said. And he had it.

  As Nyal watched from the tree, too terrified to move, too horrified to even breath, Gon thrust his face into the crook of the Foul One’s neck and bit down. The Foul One screamed, his teeth bright and pointy in his dark, mud-encrusted face. Gon repositioned his mouth and bit down again, and a torrent of blood cascaded down the Foul One’s chest and abdomen. He fell, and Gon sank with him, still latched on.

  The quartet of young women screamed and clutched one another in terror, eyeing Gon as they would an angry cave bear. They didn’t run. They were too frightened to cross the ring of dead bodies that encircled them. They moved as far from their savior as they could, though, retreating from him without stepping across any of the dead men, but they did not flee.

  Nyal leaned forward, wheezing and clutching her chest, and tried to identify the girls. She squinted, and then smiled in triumph.

  Ganni! There is little Ganni!

  She was filthy, her dark hair tangled, but she was alive! Alive and uninjured!

  The other three girls had their backs to Nyal and wouldn’t turn around.

  The girls squealed again as Gon raised his head, blood drizzling from his mouth and chin. He stared at them blankly for a moment, the bridge of his nose furrowed, lips peeled back from curving, wolf-like fangs. For an instant he looked like he might throw himself upon them, savage them the way he had savaged their captors, and then his reason seemed to reassert itself. He shivered, blinking his glimmering eyes, and then wheeled away from the children in shame, hiding his face behind his hands.

  “Don’t look at me!” he choked.

  “Girls!” Nyal shouted, but they couldn’t hear her for their own wails and hysteric sobbing. The old woman slid her butt from the bough Gon had placed her on, dropping down to the next branch. “Girls, up here!” She wobbled, waved one hand at them, smiling in spite of her pain.

  They heard her that time. All four children gazed up at her with teary, confused, miserable expressions—including Nyal’s other granddaughter Korte-Anthe!

  They both live! Nyal thought. They both live! Oh, thank you, ancestors, my granddaughters live!

  “Don’t be afraid, girls. It is only Gon. It is my husband, Thest-u’un-Mann. He has come to rescue you,” Nyal called down. She looked below, hoping she might see a way to climb down to them. She wanted to pull her granddaughters into her arms, hug them tight. They would probably be as frightened of Nyal’s hugs as they were their blood-soaked grandfather, but she didn’t care. Let them be afraid! She was going to hug them anyway!

  Her head swam as she looked down, and she tightened her grip on the branch above her head. She thought the dizziness would pass, that she was merely exhausted, but the faintness only grew worse. The world shrank to a tiny peephole in the center of her vision. She thought, Oh, Nyal! Don’t let them see you fall from this tree and break your neck…

  And then she fell.

  14

  Gon caught her, of course. This time, thank the ancestors, he didn’t break any of her bones.

  She woke i
n her husband’s arms. She was lying in his lap on the ground, her granddaughters kneeling beside her.

  “Korte-Anthe… Ganni…” Nyal croaked, reaching out to cup their cheeks in her hand.

  “Grandmother, are you okay?” Korte-Anthe cried, tears trickling down her cheeks.

  “Are you going to die?” Ganni demanded.

  Nyal laughed. “I’m far too mean to die just yet,” she said. She coughed, wiped a bit of blood from her lips. She glanced toward her husband, worried the blood might incense him, but he was covered in blood from head to toe. She doubted one little drop of her blood would upset him now.

  Relieved, the girls patted her.

  “We need to return to the village quickly,” Gon said to Nyal. “I have fed until my belly strains to bursting, but my hunger will not remain sated for long. Do you feel well enough to travel?”

  Nyal nodded. “I didn’t come all this way just to die at the end. I’ve had better days for certain, but I can travel. You’ll have to carry me, though.”

  When he smiled, the blood crusted to his face crackled and flaked away. He moved his arms beneath her back and the bends of her knees, rose carefully. “Follow us, girls,” he said, “and don’t trail too far behind. Believe it or not, there are beasts more dangerous than your grandmother lurking in these wilds.”

  Nyal would have laughed if it didn’t hurt so much, but he was wrong in what he’d said. There was no beast more dangerous than a mother, not even in the wildest wood.

  15

  They walked, but not through the entire night. The girls were exhausted, and Nyal had begun to cough regularly, even bringing up some blood from time to time. The blood she scowled at, as if it were an offense. Pain and infirmity made her angry. Hers especially. She tried to urge the girls on, thinking of Gon. He walked with his strange gold eyes set resolutely forward, tension quivering in the lines of his face, the muscles standing out in his neck and shoulders. But the children had been pushed to the limits of their endurance. They cried and complained until Gon relented. “We will rest here a little while,” he said, near a burbling brook. He placed Nyal down gently and set about making a campfire while the girls scurried to the stream to drink.