“Oh no! no! no!” I could barely hear Evelina’s screams, as they filled the room.
She dropped to her knees, beholding her guardian in smithereens. I did not know if Elizabeth’s condition was infectious, if she had been attacked and was contaminated, so I tried to hold the girl back with my free arm, but confusion got the better of me, and as I reached for Evelina, she slipped farther away.
“She is stone!” Evelina’s voice was so small it was barely audible.
My own suffering sprang up, as the searing pain of a seizure took hold of my head. The blood—I could not speak. My brain seemed to rattle in my skull and everything shook around me. The anguish made my body heave, and I felt my gut ripped from my body, as my ribcage was torn apart and my lungs were pulled out of my corse. My limbs cramped as though the very flesh within them was ground up in a grinder. I went blind, as I tried to raise my arms to steady my dizzying head. Elizabeth disappeared, the room vanished, the world went mute, and I succumbed to oblivion until my angel of salvation arrived.
When I finally woke, I was prostrate on the bedroom floor, and the memory of my suffering was fuzzy. She saved me, Byron. Your girl saved me from the painful demise a vampire should never know.
I retched when I saw Elizabeth’s fractured body beside me, overwhelmed by my reality. “Vincent!” Evelina threw her arms around my slumped frame. “Thank goodness.” Her tender voice calmed my nerves, as she stroked my forehead with warm fingers. “I didn’t have the strength to move you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry you’re still on the floor.”
I smelled the blood and my voice was barely a whisper when I asked her what happened.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “We couldn’t go on without you.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, revealing the blood. I reached for her arm but she pulled it away.
“You are hurt,” I said.
“I’m fine. You’re alive.” She tried to hide her shame.
“What have you done?”
“I brought you back.”
I did not need to ask; I tasted her still. Her blood lived in me, pulsing through me with its candied persistence, daring me to refuse more. I reached for her bloody arm again, this time catching it before she could get away. The wounds were fresh, the blood coagulated on the opening. I pulled her arm to me, holding it up to my nose. I drew in her scent, letting my fangs anticipate the pleasure of piercing her flesh, and then I gave in, tearing into her wounds with my teeth. I sucked the blood from her as if she held a bottomless reserve, the pleasure as intense as my earlier pain. Aroused and wild, I could not stop.
By the time I heard her scream, her anguish had already shamed me. I pulled my fangs out and dropped her arm from my mouth. Evelina had passed out, limp on the floor beside me. I did not let my weakness get the better of me, and rushed to repair the damage. I ran to the kitchen, her generosity coursing through me, and reached for the bottle of grappa on the counter, tearing it open as I returned to her slumped on the floor. I pulled her into my arms and gently tapped her cheeks. When she did not stir, I touched her mouth with the rim of the open bottle, rubbing some of the liquor on her lips. I held her for several minutes before she finally opened her eyes and drank some of the draft. The wounds on her arms had clotted, but would need to be cleaned and bandaged.
“Vincent,” she said with her eyes closed again, “do you feel better?”
I had attacked her, gorged on her blood after she had selflessly saved me, and yet she did not fear me. My safety seemed her only concern. When she had heard Elizabeth’s scream, she grabbed her small switchblade. The sight of the stony vampire had frightened her, but when I started to convulse she reacted without thinking. She swiped the blade across the inside of her arm multiple times, drawing as much blood as she could. She held her open wounds to my mouth, forcing the blood into me. Once I started to swallow, she cut deeper and drew more blood, feeding me in excess of what she should have spared. Minutes passed, as she let the blood pool in my mouth. She saw my subtle fangs drop and used them to puncture the vein more deeply, stopping only when the symptoms seemed to pass and I regained consciousness.
“I prayed for you, Vincent,” she whispered. “I asked God to spare you for my sake.”
Her compassion should have overwhelmed me, but I could not forget that her sacrifice would cost me. I desire her blood more than ever now.
“I won’t survive without you,” she said. “That’s why I’m willing to risk my life to save yours. If you die…” She looked away and I did not bother to remind her that her death may very well be my demise too.
Later. — I have left Elizabeth’s remains where they are. Ah, sweet Elizabeth! Her petrified pieces lie scattered on the floor of the bedroom. When the substitute seized me, I dropped her and she crashed to the floor, her stony frame smashing into bits. She is now a heap of dust just as Byron had become. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—her end terrifies me for many reasons.
Evelina’s blood acted as a transfusion, purging me of the tainted substitute and rendering it harmless. I do not know if I would have succumbed to the same fate as Elizabeth, but I would have eventually walked the path that Byron had. The substitute had contaminated my beloved and slowly eaten away his insides.
The blood that courses through me now is the same that saved me from that dreadful fate. I will never forget what the girl has done, but I must abate my hunger without tasting her again.
1 November. — We have been here for six days. I recovered within hours of drinking her blood, and the girl is healing too. Her wounds are hidden beneath bandages, though I force her to check them every few hours. The smell of her blood lives inside me and I cannot shake my hunger for it. It is the child that makes her cocktail so enticing. The sugary bite of her ichor, the baby’s blood, is dangerously addictive. Byron warned me of this. I will not taste her again.
The scape outside is relatively quiet now, and the few bloodless that have passed by have not detected the girl. But I am more concerned with the arrival of other vampires at the moment. I am on constant watch.
The girl eats well and rests often. We have lived in the same room since the incident. She will not leave me, sleeping at my side mostly. She is attached and I do not know what else to do but let her indulge in this bond. I confess her presence comforts me in ways. I do not desire isolation, nor do I want to remember all that I have lost, but today she asked me one of those questions that forced me to recall my situation.
“Where did Veronica go?”
We had not spoken of Veronica since the night she disappeared, and I knew the girl felt responsible for the vampire’s suffering. “We cannot know,” I said.
“You don’t sense each other?”
“Most of us do,” I said. “But Veronica is too weak to emit a frequency.”
“A frequency?”
Though Evelina would not understand and I was in no mood to explain, I gave it my best effort. “We give off an auditory emission when others are close,” I said.
“Like bats?”
I hated to admit it, but it was similar to the biological sonar used by certain animals.
“Bats send out a signal and listen for its echo to locate objects and guide them in flight,” I said. “The signals we send out are not in our control. We are stimulated by others and automatically emit a call—a unique frequency undetectable to any but us.”
Mortals will never comprehend our nature, despite an attempt to understand it. We are collective creatures, not solitary, and though we do not seek one another out, we know when we are near.
“So you can tell when another vampire is around?”
“More often than not,” I said.
“Not always?”
“As I said, some of us may be too weak to emit.”
Though I am extremely skilled at controlling my own frequency, something I did not bother to explain to the girl, on a few occasions a vampire has caught me off guard. Some wield their nature with gr
eater precision than others.
“Is Veronica dead?”
“We cannot die,” I said. “We can only move into a state of nonexistence.” It seems like semantics, but to me there is a grave distinction. “Veronica may be gone, but she is not dead.”
She thought about the difference for a moment. I could see her mind working it out. “Do you believe in heaven?” She asked.
“Is one life on earth not enough for you?” My question cut and her look of embarrassment shamed me. “Veronica cannot continue to exist without proper nourishment.”
“She can’t survive without human blood, right?”
I smiled, though I have no idea why. “Yes,” I said. “None of us can.”
“Will you consume mine after the baby is born?” She was stoic, disturbingly deadpan, and I hesitated before reassuring her I would not. “And my baby’s blood?” She asked. “Will you consume it?”
The girl believes she is kept alive to restore the vampiric race. It is as if she does not realize the human one hangs in the balance too.
“Are you frightened of me?” I asked. She did not flinch. “You should be,” I said. “I am not your friend.”
Her cheeks flushed, as if her blood wanted to tempt me. “But you were human once too, weren’t you?”
“Many lifetimes ago—too many to recall,” I said.
My lie was somewhat the truth—I no longer entertain human sentiment, but I will never forget the mortal I was.
Later. — My genesis is primal. I am the first of our kind, though my mortal origin may be more compelling since I am a legend. A great-grandson of Zeus, I was born to a warrior father and nereid mother. My Thessalian name is Achilles and though my history has been spun in epic tales, the truth is my mother is in fact only part human, a sea goddess with a gift for shifting her shape. My father worshipped Thetis from the moment he trapped her in his nets and her father Nereus offered her up to him as a gift. When King Peleus married his water-born bride, she promised to forego shifting while she remained his wife, but only if he gave her a son. She was a mere woman for years, until his death, but I was born into my full inheritance—I was a demigod.
My mother, known for her volatile moods, probably an offshoot of her denying her true nature, began plotting shortly after I was born. She was determined to make me immortal like her, though my father could not understand—he was a brutish man. I was just a baby at the time, but I recall my mother’s attempts as if I had witnessed them as an observer, not the sufferer. Each time she botched my deification, she made me more sacred.
Her last attempt had me submerged in the Aegean Sea. Nereus was present, and my mother’s nereid sisters too. When she dunked me beneath the foam and held me under, I floated in the water as though in the womb, hearing the beat of her heart pulsing in tandem with mine. Sealed in the warmth of the liquid around me, as if ensconced in the vessel of my incubation, I heard the melodies of the nereids’ lullabies, sung to me before I had hands and feet with which to crawl. I smelled the sweet blood of my creator, the substance on which I fed before I had fangs to subdue. I could see the portal from where I came into being, the light that beckoned me forth and promised me an eternal existence. I floated in the abyss forever, as I shaped my own creation, watching the genes of my father envelop those of my mother, the nature of my being taking root in the darkness of the immortal’s womb, shifting in form as though becoming were an undecided and fickle state of existence. I knew the love that embraced me, her love, the eternal mother who relinquished me to the gods for the promise of immortality. Consumed by the maternal, devoured by the creator greater than us all, I heeded to the profundity of life, the ephemeral and fleeting essence of the flesh, the everlasting nature of the soul. I was just about to see the One when a force yanked my infant body up and out of the water. Peleus had found me, having come upon the shifters in their perverted ceremony of induction.
“Thetis!” His voice shook the rocks that surrounded the bay. Nereus and his daughters fled beneath the waves, but my mother was pulled up and tossed onto the deck of my father’s ship.
A shifter’s demeanor is as malleable as her physical form and thus Thetis eventually pacified her husband, making him forgo his anger. King Peleus did not forget, however, and as soon as I was old enough to speak, he sent me away to be raised by another. I did not see my father again, for he died in the jaws of an Aegean fish. They say nothing was left of him but the macerated stump of his right arm and the hand that bore the great king’s Myrmidon signet ring, the only circlet he ever wore. When I was stolen from my mother, she went into a toxic rage and pined away, but within hours of Peleus’s death, she shifted and disappeared into the sea.
I saw Thetis again years later when the pinch of the deadly arrow sent poison into my veins, but she fled as quickly as the life of the Amazonian queen I killed at the battle of Ilium—ah, Penthesilea! I still recall the ichor of that raging beauty—it was dried and stuck to my sword when the arrow’s toxin bit into me. I remember the touch of her frizzy strands against my cheek, as I sent my blade into the side of her neck. Her savage blood sprung from her throat like the arched water of a fountain in Chios and she dropped her spear to stifle the wound with her delicate fingers. The blood gushed from between them, and I longed for it when I woke with a vampire’s thirst.
When the poison reached my heart, Hades rushed up to meet me. I do not remember the numbness, the acute sting of death, but recall the sublimity of resurrection. Three days after they mourned for me on the shores of Ilium, I rose from the ground and stood transfigured beneath the light of the moon. My rugged helmet, blazoned shield and bronze sword were gone, but I no longer needed them, for I knew what I was—I always had—though I could not embrace my true nature until I abandoned my citizenry among the living. From that first day of my rebirth, I saw the world in black and white until I only saw red.
3 November. — The taste of the girl’s blood haunts me still, and I now know withdrawal’s burdensome ache, that for which my beloved had warned me.
“If you consume her blood once,” he had said, “you will never stop.”
“I have tasted pregnant women before,” I had said. “Besides, she does not appeal to me.”
“This girl is different.”
“You find her that potent?” I had hoped my voice would not betray my jealousy.
“Yes,” he had said. “Even for the strongest of us.”
It had not gone unnoticed that he meant me specifically.
“It is simply blood, my darling,” I had said. “Have I not yet proved my resolve with our rations?”
“I am not questioning your ability to resist her, Vincent.” Our conversation frustrated him.
“Then what are you questioning?”
“Her ability to deny you.”
“I did not realize you found me so irresistible.”
“I am not joking,” he had said. “Your appeal to humans is unlike anything I have ever seen.”
He referred to my superior state of immortality. For the past hundred years or so, I have experienced a heightened communion with my victims—my aura is now divine and draws them to me. No other vampire enjoys this kind of magnetism. It is reserved for me, the progenitor. My allure is irresistible, for its cardinal nature, but the attraction is never sexual. More enlightened individuals will sense my gnosis, and sometimes take me for the Deity. I had not explained this to my beloved, for he was too inexperienced to understand and I could just barely comprehend it myself. But also I had not wanted him to think it was the reason he desired me so. I wanted him to believe he loved me freely.
“She is ignorant of my station, and too young,” I had said.
“She may only be a child, Vincent, but she is also alone and frightened and will cling to any olive branch you offer.”
4 November. — The bloodless have made their way up to us. The howls draw closer every hour. Something has aroused them. We are quiet, living mostly in the dark, and Evelina sleeps despite the time o
f day. I told her the baby makes her tired, but her wounds have also taken their toll. I fear they may be infected since she is forced to cover them with incense to mask the bloody scent and the oil irritates her lesions.
I have considered our options, but the thought of leaving is unpleasant. My energy-infused high has long since faded and I cannot do battle without another feeding. Our situation is bleak and—
Later. — This evening in the pitch black of the villa, as Evelina slept in the bedroom at the back, I caught the whiff of another. The scent of fresh blood was unmistakable. I anticipated a man’s arrival, as the pungent odor of ichor grew with each passing moment. When he reached our door, he used a key to unlock it. I waited in the shadows for his entrance.
I know you wonder if I hallucinated, if I imagined him into being with my bloodstarved mind, but if you had been there you would have been as surprised as I to see the young man fall through the entryway of the villa, wielding a machete and carrying a large rucksack. He kicked the door shut as fast as he had opened it, slamming it closed with his back. I watched him, undetected in the dark, ready to pounce. The door thumped behind him, as the bloodless clawed at him from the other side of it. Their howls rose to a fevered pitch like a cacophony of crickets in thick springtime air. The man’s expression was more determined than frightened, as he pushed his whole body up against the door.
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 9
