“I met a Caplata, I think it was… Anyway, she knew about him. She could sense it, somehow. She warned that my brother did not belong where he was. That eventually he’d find a way out. But she said I could stop him.”
“How would you do that?” Nico asked.
I showed him the strange fetish totem Caplata Antoinette had given me. “She says we can capture him in here.”
Nico nodded. “It’s possible. But did she tell you that you’d have to be the one to do it? That you’d have to go there, somehow, in the flesh… Even if you could be staked, you wouldn’t be able to bring the fetish with you.”
“She did,” I said. “She said we’d have to appeal to the crossroads or something.”
“The Loa of the crossroads,” Nico said. “Papa Legba. But what does that have to do with Ramon?”
“Because she said I won’t be able to capture Edwin while he’s in hell. I have to capture him in the in-between… before he gets to heaven.”
“And you need Ramon to let you know when that’s going to happen?”
I nodded.
“Fine,” Nico said. “But from now on Ramon is bound to this house. He can’t leave. If he needs to feed, we bring someone here and we supervise his feedings. I won’t have bodies piling up on his account. Our alliance with the Voodoo community is a fragile one, and there are hunters here, even if the Order is not.”
“Understood,” I said. “Thank you.”
Nico nodded. “I’m proud of you, Mercy.”
I shrugged. “Why?”
“You didn’t allow Ramon’s charms to get in the way of doing what had to be done. I saw how you were looking at him before.”
“He has a way with words,” I admitted. “But it had to be done. You don’t think he’ll be angry with me the next time he rises, do you?”
Nico laughed. “That boy has been staked more times than I can count. He’s always just glad to be back again.”
“You’d think he’d learn, eventually…”
“You would. But if we’re keeping him alive for your sake, it will be your responsibility to ensure he respects his confinement. Ramon does not leave Casa do Diabo without my supervision. If he does, I won’t hesitate to cut out his heart and burn it.”
This became my life at the dawn of the twentieth century. Raising Ramon. Staking him again when he got out of hand. It was only a matter of time, every time, before he’d find a way to sneak out of the house. Every time it ended up with a stake in his chest. But he always came back with news about Edwin.
Apparently, Edwin had become resigned to his place in hell. He wandered aimlessly—a wraith without a purpose. Would this go on indefinitely? Possibly. But I had to resurrect Ramon periodically to be sure. And, of course, I grew accustomed to his charms. Did I love him? I don’t think I was capable of love. I mean, how can a vampire, one without a heart no less, really love? Still, he had a way of making me feel special. Every time I staked him, in fact, I could see the pain on his face. Not because he regretted losing control again… but because he knew he’d let me down.
15
I HADN’T PICKED up my wand in years. It was tucked away in my nightstand drawer. I just didn’t have much use for it. I was a vampire, living a vampire’s eternity. I had a nice room at Casa do Diabo, a wardrobe full of the finest wears, all funded by Nico’s “business” ventures. Not just the brothels—in fact, he didn’t stay in that business for long.
During prohibition Nico got involved in bootlegging instead. It was a dangerous game, bootlegging. Nico had several gangs working and reporting to him. They thought themselves rivals, but hadn’t a clue that they all, in the end, were reporting to the same “boss.” Let them fight it out, Nico had said. The more they competed, the more lucrative their ventures would be. From time to time a gang would rise up without connection to Nico. He and I made short work of them. After all, if we had to feed anyway—at least periodically—we might as well eliminate competition at the same time. It wasn’t personal. Just business.
After prohibition was repealed, we had more than enough money to last us a while. Nico again set off on a number of trips around the world while I stayed to guard the house. I raised Ramon intermittently, usually managed to keep him around a few days at a time, and inevitably ended up staking him again. Then the second World War came… Ramon wanted to enlist.
Can you imagine? A vampire on the battlefield—he’d be unstoppable. Still, Nico forbade it. While he might be able to get his predilection for dismemberment out of his system on the battlefield, Nico was afraid it would make things worse—it would be like giving an addict another fix and expecting it would get it out of their system.
In truth, if we let Ramon indulge his viciousness in war, it would make him even more difficult to control once he got back home. Still, a part of me wanted to see what would happen if we dropped Ramon off somewhere in Berlin, sent him after Hitler.
He could have saved millions of lives. But Nico insisted that he knew how history was to play out. He insisted that Hitler would be defeated, that he’d die by suicide soon enough. And sending Ramon to war—sending any vampires to war—risked exposing us to the world. After all, get a vampire on a bloody battlefield and even the most seasoned of us wouldn’t be able to keep our hunger at bay.
It still didn’t make sense to me. If we were destined to eat humans, why not go after the worst of them? For someone so concerned with crafting a public image for vampire-kind, Nico was sure short-sighted when it came to things like that. I mean, think about it: if we were credited for ending Hitler, we’d be celebrated as heroes, maybe even gods. But Nico insisted that the world wasn’t ready for that. Humanity is, after all, a generally terrified species—known for eating its own, destroying its brightest and best, all on account of their fears.
Then came the Cold War. The Red Scare. Eventually, Vietnam, civil unrest, and the civil rights movement. The free love movement provided us with great cover for feedings. Nico marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nico’s latest project that he was influencing, The Vampire Lovers—which was billed on posters with the invitation, “If you dare… taste the deadly passion of the blood-nymphs”—was something of an eyebrow raiser. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. We weren’t sexually-motivated creatures—that’s not how we reproduced. We could do it. We had all the parts. It just didn’t drive us, not like it did humans. Of course, that was precisely what seemed to make humans so easy to enthrall with our allure. They reacted to us with lust, as if our presence awakened a carnal and irresistible drive.
At least, that was how it usually worked. Over the years my allure had grown more and more powerful. Nico said that on account of sampling human souls, we might encounter some with unique, though latent abilities—he’d acquired more than a few through the years.
He could levitate. Not exactly fly, but float. He lacked propulsion. All of us were fast, but Nico was another level of quick, and apparently he could maintain his speed over longer distances than most of us. He claimed he could move quickly enough to skim across water, to run over the oceans between America and Europe. I hadn’t seen him do it, but he did make regular trips between the continents.
It started in the early eighties. After a feed following a Black Sabbath concert—they were, ironically, touring their Heaven and Hell album—my allure seemed to evolve. It was no longer a purely sensual draw, but I started to notice people found it impossible to resist anything I’d command.
The first time it occurred was shocking, even for me. I’d fed on a random female who’d clearly had more than her share to drink during the concert. I’d zeroed in on her early—even her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind our flirtations.
He was something of a quiet man—subservient, even. I didn’t even have to use my allure. The girl who would be my meal had him eating out of the palm of her hand. It was clear, to use Shakespeare’s language, she interned to make a cuckold of him. And I, due for a feed, was happy to oblige. I f
ed on both of them in their car after the show.
Then, as I casually walked out of the parking lot and prepared to return home, a man gave me a whistle. He was a catcaller. I ignored it; I was used to that sort of thing. But this man was persistent. If I hadn’t just fed, I would have leveraged his harassment to my advantage. But I was satiated and wasn’t in the mood to deal with it.
That is, until he came up behind me and grabbed my ass.
I punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground.
“Damn,” the man said, smirking. “You sure pack a healthy punch for a girl.”
“You have no idea.”
“I like them a little feisty… What do you say you come home with me?”
I looked at him, narrowed my eyes, and said it: “Go to hell!”
He immediately pulled a gun out of the waistband of his pants and shot himself in the head.
He’d taken my expression as if it were a literal command. And he was powerless to resist me.
I didn’t bother with disposing of the body. The man had shot himself. It would appear, to anyone who investigated, like a run-of-the-mill suicide. But I was beside myself. Not because I felt guilty about him offing himself. That didn’t bother me in the least. It was the power of my words…
I started testing it out. Small things. Telling people to stand on their heads. Forcing a man to go streaking across a baseball diamond. And speaking of diamonds, the jeweler had no hesitations when I told him to give me all of his.
It worked on humans… I never suspected it would work on vampires, too. But when I told Ramon to clean the house and he actually did it, I began to suspect my allure—or better, my compulsion—affected vampires, too. I didn’t tell Nico about my ability. If I did, I was afraid he’d become wary of me. And it didn’t work on him—must’ve had something to do with him being my sire.
Not to mention, aside from my on-again, off-again relationship with Ramon, he was the only friend I had. I was afraid if he knew what I could do he’d grow weary of me, avoid me even. After all, if you knew you’d have to do anything someone told you without any choice at all, wouldn’t you avoid the person entirely? I represented, to him and other vampires, the exact opposite of what vampirism was supposed to be—a freedom, a liberation.
I was a threat. And I was afraid that was exactly how he’d see me if he knew.
16
THROUGH ALL THE years, Ramon never had much of interest to report concerning Edwin’s condition. He’d been there so long, it seemed, that he’d become more like the vampire spirits who accompanied him than the boy I used to know. If that was the case, perhaps he’d never press for his escape. Maybe he’d never find his way to the in-between… That would certainly make things easier for me.
My newfound ability also made Ramon a bit easier to control. I found I could avoid compulsions if I phrased things as a question. It took some adjustment. I’d grown accustomed, being the only female in the house, to telling Ramon what to do.
But I had to be careful about issuing commands, even unintended ones, since they could have drastic consequences. The phrase “go to hell” was now out of my repertoire. For the most part, “go fuck yourself” was something I avoided, too… for obvious reasons.
I did find some creative ways to rephrase things so they sounded like commands, but wouldn’t have the same effect as a compulsion. “I’ll be quite displeased if you don’t…” was one of my favorites. Or, “How about you do such and such for me?” A simple indicative statement or a question can be spoken in such a way that the imperative is implied. “Why don’t you go to hell?” seems to work, for instance, with all the rhetorical force that a simple “go to hell” might, and it’s a lot less messy.
That’s not to say I didn’t have some fun with it. “Go suck a lemon” is relatively harmless while still mildly entertaining. Humiliating insecure men by forcing them to kiss other fellows in public, or wear women’s clothing, or sing “I’m a Little Teapot,” to name a few examples, was one of my favorite things to do.
So far as Ramon was concerned, simply telling him, “Don’t kill anyone tonight” usually made for much more enjoyable evenings together. Every few months I’d stake him for good measure—so he could check on Edwin—but my brother’s condition hadn’t changed much in the better part of a century. It also gave me a lot more confidence as the nineties flew by and the millennium dawned that I’d be able to handle myself once we had to stake Nico…
Even though he didn’t have a soul, as a vampire he feared he could not exist in the same time twice. Marie Laveau—the Voodoo Queen with whom he’d had a number of romantic trysts back in the day—had warned him as much. And apparently, thanks to some kind of Voodoo mumbo jumbo I didn’t understand, his former lover had returned from the dead and resumed her role governing the Voodoo underworld.
Apparently Laveau could foretell the future—she’d written books that, Nico insisted, I must study to prepare myself for whatever might come when he was gone. I studied them thoroughly, but most of it was in riddles, or pertained to people I’d never met.
One thing was clear, however, based on the drawings of a shirtless and provocatively posed Nico filling the margins of her books: she was more than a little taken with my sire. Undoubtedly on account of his allure. It was an alliance, Nico insisted, I must try to maintain in his absence.
Still, one of Laveau’s illustrations troubled me: a half-sun, as if rising on a horizon. The same symbol I’d seen in salt when the Order of the Morning Dawn burned Moll… Everyone who’d known of me, those who’d killed Moll, had long since died. Still, even if I wasn’t directly in their crosshairs, if the Order was expanding and coming to New Orleans, they would undoubtedly represent a threat.
And, even if I couldn’t get revenge on all the members who might have been involved in Moll’s murder, she’d told me that she’d planned for me to be a weapon to destroy the Order.
I’d sort of figured, until I saw this sketch in Laveau’s book, that the Order must’ve been gone by now. The superstitions of the past, the ones that kept the Order on alert against the so-called vampire threat, were no longer.
As the millennium dawned, I assumed if there was such an Order there’d be evidence of them on the internet. I wasn’t especially good with computers. Being a child of another era, I suppose, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about embracing new technologies. I knew enough, though, to perform a basic search.
I’d tried everything I could think of. I searched the Order of the Morning Dawn. I found a Luciferian cult by a similar name, but the Order of the Morning Dawn had been something of a fundamentalist pseudo-Christian organization.
I found a number of websites full of conspiracies about vampires, individuals who claimed they knew we existed. I even found a message board where a moron—clearly targeting naive teenagers—claimed to be a thousand-year-old vampire and was offering to “turn” young people—for a fee, of course. I entertained the possibility of confronting the con artist myself.
But the more digging I did, the more I realized there was just too much of this kind of nonsense going on to make it worth my while.
Not to mention, I suspected this sort of behavior was the result of Nico’s longstanding campaign to alter the image of the vampire in the public eye.
New shows and films where we became humans’ love interests were birthed—a trend that would continue even after I staked Nico. I found it nauseating; we were monsters, we were devils, and the idea that we could love a human beyond the sort of love one might have for a pet, at best, or even a juicy steak, was patently absurd.
But such was a part of Nico’s plan—to soften the public eye toward our kind, because he believed as the era of technology dawned, it would be even more difficult to keep our existence a secret.
Better for the public to be primed to view us as romantic figures, a curiosity to embrace, rather than as demons to fear. I didn’t exactly agree with this approach. How long, I wondered, would the public be de
ceived? It was only a matter of time before they saw us for what we really were…
Still, as Nico and I prepared for his temporary rest, he wanted to be sure I’d protect the work he’d done.
17
NEW ORLEANS DOES not have typical graves. Much of the city is below sea level. Instead, bodies are buried in giant, above-ground tombs. I’d wanted to keep Nico in the house—in Casa do Diabo—but he insisted a natural disaster was going to befall the city in the coming years and he’d need a more secure resting place. Something less likely to be raided by looters after the city flooded.
So we had a rather large tomb built in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. It was close enough that I could keep watch on it from afar, and aided by technology, it had its own security system that would alert me if it was ever disturbed.
We simply couldn’t be too cautious. If indeed the Order of the Morning Dawn was to return, eliminating the oldest and original vampire would certainly be at the top of their agenda if they ever discovered where he was resting. It meant having the tomb constructed, and convincing a contractor and the cemetery groundskeeper to run electricity to it and install a security system required the use of compulsion. Thus, I offered to handle the matter myself on Nico’s behalf.
We couldn’t risk so much as a receipt, a paper trail of any kind, that someone from the Order might follow.
We had everything prepared. Nico’s parents—Reginald and Katherine Freeman—would be with child in a matter of weeks. We needed to stake Nico before he was conceived.
“Keep an eye on Annabelle Mulledy,” Nico said.
“The vodouisant who left you behind in the Otherworld, in Guinee?”
Nico nodded. “But she’s not involved in that world yet. She won’t be for about eighteen years. Still, learn what you can. I’ve already bitten her parents.”
“What? Why?” I asked.
“You know, one of my many abilities…”
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 81
