by Raven Hart
“Do you remember what happened the last time you were here?”
“Yeah, I do.” The memory of it almost made me sober up. But not quite. “But I need to talk to you.”
“You’re as drunk as Cooter Brown, but I want to talk to you, too. Who knows? Maybe you’ll make more sense this way. Come on in.”
I walked into Connie’s cozy apartment and sat down on the sofa, as far away from the cross on the wall as I could get. I’d accidentally backed into it the last time I was here and come away even more scorched.
“You first,” Connie said, and sat in a gliding rocking chair opposite me. She looked soft and cuddly in a pink cotton sweat suit.
“Okay,” I began. Now that I was here I didn’t know quite how to say it. “I really wish you wouldn’t come to the werewolf fight.”
She huffed an exasperated breath. “We went all over this. I’m coming and that’s that.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told Seth you’d say.”
“So you two are still talking about it. Conspiring against me, are you?”
“The thing is, he doesn’t want you to see him change into a werewolf. It’s kind of a…grisly sight, you might say. I guess he doesn’t want you to see him as an animal.” I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, trying to sound all sensitive-like. Maybe then she might volunteer something that would give me a clue how she felt about Seth. “It’s just an awful, awful thing to see. He’s afraid you’ll never look at him the same way again.”
“I thought you said he looked like Chewbacca,” she said.
“No thanks. I never touch the stuff.”
“Chewbacca, the Wookiee,” she explained.
“Yeah, right. It’s awful, really nasty.”
“Chewbacca’s actually pretty cute.”
“What?” I demanded, horrified. “Chewbacca?”
“Why don’t you admit it, Jack? You want me to think that Seth is gross now that I know he’s a werewolf.” She arched a dark brow in that way she did when she thought I was misbehaving. So much for her taking the bait.
“Um, well, no. The truth is, I don’t want you in a dangerous situation.”
“And?”
“And, well, I do admit I never wanted you to see what I looked like when I went all fang-faced. I figured if you got to see Seth do his werewolf bit, it might make me look better by comparison.” I realized when I said it that I’d gone from trying to determine her depth of feeling for Seth to trying to determine what her feelings were for me.
Connie shivered, no doubt thinking back to the night Sullivan died and she saw me have a knock-down-vamp-out with Will. The night I had to admit to her what I was. “At least I finally found out the truth,” she said. “Always err on the side of the truth, Jack, especially when you’re dealing with me. Promise me right now. Never, ever lie to me.”
“Uh…okay,” I said. Now this wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all. Connie hadn’t revealed any of her feelings, and instead had gotten me to make a promise I’d never meant to. When you’re a vampire, deceiving people about who you are and what you’re doing is something you learn early on. There were still things about myself and my kind I didn’t want Connie to know.
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Connie said.
“Very funny.”
“Promise, then.”
“Okay. I promise. But please reconsider coming to the fight. Seth and I can take care of unhuman business.”
“Just like you took care of Will?”
I knew it was only a matter of time until she threw that in my face again. “I know you’re tired of hearing it, but that situation is—”
“Complicated, I know. You keep saying that. In light of your promise, don’t you think it’s about time you told me why it’s so damned complicated?”
I couldn’t argue with that logic. She already knew so much I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her. “Will is William’s son,” I said.
“His vampire son or his real son?”
The way she put that stung me a little bit. I always felt like I was William’s real son, even though we looked about the same age in human years. “His human son,” I said.
Connie ran her hand through her hair. She looked beautiful and sultry even in sweats and without a drop of makeup. “Okay. I suppose I can understand now. You could hardly kill William’s son and not get in trouble with your sire.”
“That’s pretty much the size of it.”
She smiled for the first time tonight. “See there?”
“What?” I asked.
“You filled in the blanks for me, told me the truth. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No,” I said. “I guess it wasn’t, at that. I suppose I should have told you before.”
“Damn straight. Is there anything else you want to tell me—that you should tell me?”
Yeah, plenty. I wanted to tell her how her hair shone like black diamonds by the light of the Tiffany floor lamp, or how she smelled like wildflowers.
“Jack?”
“Uh, there probably is, but I just can’t think right now,” I muttered. “You said you wanted to talk to me about something. What is it?”
“It’s about what I asked you for awhile back. There’s somebody in the afterlife I have to see, and I want you to take me to him.”
“How do you even know that’s possible?” I asked.
“I know that the afterlife, or the underworld, or whatever you want to call it, is very real. Melaphia has shown me more than enough to convince me.”
“So why haven’t you asked Melaphia?”
“Because she began to clam up when I started talking specifics. And you know how she’s been out of it since the kidnapping.”
“Maybe there’s a reason she doesn’t want to speak about it.”
“Don’t talk around this, Jack. I know you know what’s involved in this. You’ve opened up to me about so much in the last couple of days, and the sky didn’t fall. Can’t you level with me about this, too?”
I tried to remember what Mel had said when I asked her advice. She had reacted strangely when I suggested telling Connie about what happened to William in the underworld. Why? Melaphia had just told me to stall Connie and tell her Mel had forbidden her to attempt a trip to the underworld. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I shouldn’t just keep telling Connie the truth. It felt right, and it felt liberating. Besides Melaphia’s ancestors, I’d never been able to come clean like this to a human before—especially not one I cared about.
“Okay,” I said. “The reason I don’t want to let you do this is that William had to go there once to rescue somebody who wasn’t quite dead and wasn’t quite alive either.”
Connie leaned forward in her chair, staring, as if she was listening to a particularly scary story around a campfire at the Girl Scout camp from hell. “How can that be? I mean, how can somebody be in a state like that?”
“It has to do with the process of making someone into a vampire,” I said. “Let’s just say a lot can go wrong. But that part’s not important right now. What you have to understand is what happened to him after he went there.”
Connie nodded. “Go on.”
“First of all, when he left his body, it was like he was dead. I mean really dead. Mel and I couldn’t wake him up. To this day I don’t know how he ever figured out how to get his spirit back to this world and into his body. And I don’t even want to think about him getting trapped in the place where he was. It was full of demons of all kinds. Things in the dark that reach out, and—”
“Stop!” Connie had put her hands to her ears. Slowly, she smoothed back her hair and moved her hands to the upholstered armrests of her glider, which she clutched until her knuckles were white. “Do you mean everybody goes there? Even—even if they’re good and pure and innocent?”
I thought about that for a minute. The only ones I knew who had been there were William, Eleanor, and Shari, vampires or vampire wannabes all. “I don’t
know,” I said. “Now that I think about it, the only dead people I’ve talked to who complained about the place were, well, vampires.”
Strangely, Connie brightened for a second, but then she looked troubled again. She tucked her feet onto the chair and hugged her knees, thinking. “When you were human, were you a religious man, Jack?”
“I was raised Catholic just like you,” I said, glancing at Connie’s little shrine to the Virgin Mary on a table in the corner. “And I reckon you could say I believe in God.” I thought about how crosses and holy water burned my flesh. What stronger proof of God’s existence was there than having the third-degree burns to show for it? “Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess you could say I’m still a religious man. As much as a guy without a soul can be.”
“Okay. Let’s say that what they always taught us in church is right.”
“Which part?”
“The part about how good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. That would mean people who aren’t bad could be satisfied with where they are in the afterlife, but people who are vampires—that is, damned for all eternity—end up in a place of torment, right?” she said, and added, “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” I muttered. Dang, there were some things a fellow just didn’t like being reminded about, you know? “Yeah, I’m following you. So you mean that who you need to talk to was a good person and shouldn’t be in a scary place.”
“Yes, but there’s more.” The little crease in her forehead was back.
“What more?”
“I actually need to talk to two people. One is in heaven.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely sure,” she said with finality.
“But the other?”
“He,” she began, and her face changed. I saw revulsion and even, yes, hatred, in her eyes. “Is in hell.”
“I have to ask you again,” I said. “Are you sure?”
Connie’s eyes told me she was no longer with me, not really. She looked like she’d gone to a faraway place and time, someplace that was her own version of hell.
Finally her attention snapped back to me and she looked at me with an intensity I’d never seen on her face before. “Oh, yes,” she said. “If it’s true there is a hell for those who are entirely evil, for those who deserve to burn for all eternity, he’s definitely there.”
Nine
William
Renee was to be sacrificed. Fear was not an emotion I had often felt in my long undeath. It was not so much that I was so hard to kill; it had more to do with my ambivalence about my continued existence. But now I knew real terror for my beloved Renee. There were only two entities to whom a vampire would make a sacrifice. One was Satan himself. The other might be just as bad.
“The full moon is two nights hence,” I said, trying to calm myself as best I could.
“Too right,” Will said.
Olivia asked, “What did you overhear? What did they talk about?”
“Politics, believe it or not,” Will said. “Evidently Mother is toadying up to this Ulrich fellow to try and move up in the ranks of some bloodsucking power structure. Ulrich himself is kissing up to those above him. They think that offering Renee as a sacrifice will be quite the feather in their caps with the higher-ups, maybe even get the Ulrich bloke a seat on some kind of vampire council. Does that mean anything to you, William?”
The Council. Just as I’d feared. I knew the day of my reckoning with them was coming, but I’d hoped it would be on my own ground, Savannah, with Jack and other trusted lieutenants at my side. Instead I must rely on those with uncertain powers and unknown loyalties, with Renee’s life and Lalee’s precious bloodline hanging in the balance.
“It is the gathering of dark lords,” I said. “A thousand years or more ago, the most ancient and evil blood drinkers banded together to form an entity they thought they could use to rule over others of their kind.”
“For what purpose?” Andrew, one of Olivia’s vampires, asked.
“In simple terms, to force all blood drinkers to make as many humans into vampires as possible, so that they could take over the world,” I said.
“They would enslave those of us who choose to live in peace and freedom, beyond the notice of humans,” Olivia said.
“Or worse,” I added. “If their numbers are great enough they could just as easily slaughter us all if we continue to be uncooperative.”
“So these council members, they’re the ones you also call the old sires?” Will asked. When I nodded, he said, “So it’s because of them you started shipping to America those vampires who wanted to get as far away from the dark lords as they could.”
“Yes. Late in the eighteenth century, I first went to the New World to make my fortune. There was to be an uprising among our kind against the old lords who had begun to enslave us. Many, like Alger, chose to stay and fight. But I’d had enough killing. For centuries, under Reedrek’s thumb I was forced to slaughter humans indiscriminately and vampires in my own bloodline for retribution against every slight, real or imagined, to my sire.”
“But the bloodbath never happened on the scale you and others were worried about, did it?” Olivia said. “Alger said so.”
“That’s right,” I said. “But according to my contacts, their goals remained the same. Their minions made raids on vampire covens and colonies here and there, killing some outright, enslaving others.”
“What happened to the all-out war they were planning, then? What have they been doing all this time?” Will wanted to know.
“No one knows for sure, at least nobody who’s willing to tell. The prevailing theory—proposed by Alger, in fact—is that the Council thought that together, their power would be greater than each of them acting alone. But it didn’t work out that way. They are still dangerous—don’t mistake me,” I said. “But there is a certain amount of infighting, and they were never able to summon an overwhelming force in numbers or power.”
Olivia and Bree looked at each other. “William,” Olivia began. “You’ve seen my journal, so you know about my ongoing project—the one where I document the lives of female blood drinkers, going back thousands of years.”
I nodded. It was when Deylaud read Olivia’s book that I had learned of Diana’s existence as a blood drinker.
“We collect historical data through a network of contacts we’ve forged since Alger began the project before he made me,” she continued. “We’ve only recently begun to put this information in a computer database.”
I started to speak, but Olivia cut me off with a wave of her hand. She said, “Don’t worry about it falling into the wrong hands. We’ve encrypted all the data and taken every security precaution imaginable, believe me. You’re also aware of the wealth of research material that Alger collected on his own through the centuries.”
I nodded again. My friend Algernon, in addition to being an unbridled libertine, was also, somewhat paradoxically, a scholar of the first order. He made copious notes throughout his long existence about myriad topics, mostly the history of blood drinkers and their origins.
“Just in the last couple of weeks we’ve started to enter all Alger’s information in the database, so we’ll be able to analyze it statistically and in other ways.”
“What do you mean ‘analyze the data’?” Will asked.
“We can make comparisons, draw inferences, construct models, make predictions…,” Andrew explained.
“Whoa, mate, what are you on about?” Will asked again. “How is all that supposed to help us?”
Intrigued, I said, “I can think of many applications. We can figure out which vampires through the ages have known one another, which ones would have been at the same place at the same time, determine what alliances may have been formed—”
“Exactly,” Olivia said.
“Did Alger gather much information on the dark lords?” Will wanted to know.
“Yes,” Olivia said. “Just a few days ago we found a cache of doc
uments all about the Council.”
I said, “I’m sure that Alger told me all he knew about the dark lords by the time of his death,” I said. “We were very close. He wouldn’t have held anything back from me.”
“Of course not, William,” Olivia said. Her eyes glistened as she spoke of her beloved sire. “Did you ever wonder why Alger agreed to come to Savannah when he did? After you had begged him to join you for more than two hundred years?”
“Yes,” I said. “He hinted that he felt we were entering into a heightened time of danger from the old lords. As soon as he was settled in America, we were going to bring all of you over on the next crossing.”
“That’s true,” Olivia agreed. “But it was more than that. He had just acquired the papers of another scholar blood drinker. It included research that goes back until almost—if you can believe it—the beginnings of blood drinkers on this earth. Some of this material is so ancient it’s on papyrus and stone tablets, William!” She positively glowed with excitement now.
“What languages are they in?” I asked.
“Aramaic, Greek, ancient Celtic tongues, all types of languages. It will take some time to have it all translated. Particularly since we have to parse it out in so many lots.”
“What do you mean?” Will asked.
“If we have to employ human interpreters, we cannot give too much material to any one—”
“To make sure no human is able to learn too much about us,” I finished for her. “You seem to have this well thought out. I applaud you.”
“Thank you, but most of the credit for caring for the material should go to Alger. He had his vampires through the years make duplicates of all the material as a backup in case it was torched or stolen by our enemies. When we found the stone tablets and the other really ancient stuff after Alger died, there was a notation that the material had already been copied. Alger even made rubbings of the stone tablets. He was taking the copies to you when he was murdered aboard the Alabaster. It was to be a surprise. He knew your love of ancient artifacts. He hadn’t even taken the time to have any of it translated before he left. He thought you could help him with that.”
