Eternal Darkness, Blood King

by Gadriel Demartinos

  There I was, controlling his thoughts while he kept going and going about how “money people” would open their pockets because he knew what was missing in the hospitality business.

  I have no problem admitting my disdain for those who lack ambition, and I know that not everyone can be a leader; but I can’t help not liking followers, and I was not going to encourage this man and his efforts to become a glorified man-maid.

  To add insult to injury, I had to put up with the fact that Lucy was actually working on his business logo. One day I watched her drawing the damn thing, trying to make it as perfect as possible. Many thoughts crossed my mind, but I was not going to stop her. What she had with him was way too good to end. I stood in silence watching her work on his project. All the while, I couldn’t stop thinking what a waste of her talent and potential this undertaking was.

  She took a “break” from school—first to work and then to rest. In reality, she couldn’t find enough time to be with him. She lost track of her own path and couldn’t find the motivation to follow through on her own work. Meanwhile, he kept moving forward, away from her, keeping his options open.

  Why couldn’t she see where all this was heading?

  Lucy burned all her bridges. She stopped calling old friends, and not even I could grab her attention for more than the mandatory five minutes. It was not uncommon to leave her a message and never get a callback; but as long that happened, I knew everything was OK. That was why when she did finally call, I immediately got worried.

  She gave up everything for him, and now that they were no longer together, all doors were closed. Even worse, being part of the same social circle meant that sooner or later, she would cross paths with him.

  The note said that she was in school. Great to read that she had decided to finish what she had started. Everyone should always finish what they start. This time around, though, she would have to stand alone, find her own strength, and rebuild her confidence.

  The truth was that her love for Stephen had scarred her for life.

  Nothing, absolutely nothing, under the skies lasts forever. Not joy or sorrow, not hatred or love, not beings like myself. Not even forever lasts forever, because in the end, forever may never come.

  She was in the process of learning this truth.

  Chapter 51

  Dream a Little Silly Dream

  October 8, 2004

  Miami

  It happened again. That voice inside my head, whispering, telling me something.

  What did it say?

  I don’t have dreams. For over two hundred years, I have never had any. I don’t get happy images or memories, premonitions or nightmares. My sleep is absolute, deep and dark. However, for some reason, that can’t explain I always have this sense of awareness of any imminent danger that my body, while in that state, could be exposed to.

  More than once back in the old days, graveyard thieves encountered very surprising and quick deaths, thanks to that sense. Over the last couple of weeks, I had been feeling “that voice”—very soft, a whisper, but permanent, invading and sharpening my senses. I can’t recall what it said, just the knowledge that there was a voice.

  My eyes traveled down toward the city without interest. I needed the space after last month’s events. Tonight I decided to leave early. The arguments between Lucy and me were getting old.

  How can I tell her?

  I sensed the new life inside of her after a couple of weeks at the beach house. How could I bring up the fact that she was pregnant?

  *******

  “You shouldn’t go to the gym this often,” I said casually while watching her from the kitchen entrance.

  Lucy looked at me with a weird expression as she mixed a protein shake using the kitchen blender.

  “What’s with you and this new obsession with complaining every day before I go to the gym?” she asked.

  I remained standing where I was while she turned off the blender.

  “You don’t need to do this,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she wanted to know.

  “After months of sadness and depression, you have turned obsessed with becoming physically perfect,” I said.

  Lucy grabbed the blender and poured the protein shake into a thermos.

  “Well, some people use different things to deal with their anxiety. Some use pills. I choose endorphin,” she said.

  “You don’t have to become something that you already are,” I insisted.

  She looked at me with a serious expression.

  “At least that’s how I see you,” I said.

  She looked back at the thermos, closed the lid, put it inside a gym bag next to the blender, and proceeded to wash clean the appliance.

  “You don’t need to show Stephen his mistake,” I concluded.

  I felt her thoughts. Inside her mind was a storm of anger, disappointment, and sadness—a great recipe for disaster.

  She finished washing the blender, grabbed her gym bag, and walked out of the kitchen, then out of the house, without saying a word, but cursing out loud inside her thoughts.

  *******

  She returned to her paintings, becoming more productive than in the past years. I love angry artists! We discussed and agreed that if she finished her painting by December, I would submit it to the MoMA catalog.

  Her morning sickness should have given her a hint a long time ago, but no, not Lucy. Her stubbornness could be legendary; and of course, in her mind, it could’ve been anything except the evident.

  “Fuck!” I heard her saying out loud from her bedroom bathroom.

  She was on the scale again, as she had done each morning for the past several weeks. It had become a war between her and her weight each morning. She realized that despite diets and crazy cardio sessions, the “war” was not turning in her favor.

  “Is everything OK?” I asked out loud from the darkness of my room.

  I heard her footsteps in the hallway as she approached my closed room door.

  “Come in, it’s open,” I invited her.

  She opened the room door and saw me resting in bed. I felt the life inside of her, and it bothered me.

  “What is it?” I persisted angrily.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up,” she said.

  I opened my eyes to find her standing in the door in her underwear wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey that showed the outline of her beautiful female body.

  “I was up. What is it?” I asked again.

  She turned around and walked out of the room. “It’s that stupid scale!” she said in anger.

  She couldn’t explain why she was not losing weight despite almost not eating and pushing her body in the most ridiculous way anyone could think of. In this America of the twenty-first century, “smart,” women don’t have children when nature decides when they should but when they say so. Thanks to science, society is one step closer to the gods by controlling the conception of life.

  I come from a place and time where women would have had children as soon their bodies were ready, usually at age thirteen. It was common to see a bride child and her older husband, and it was also normal to see families with nine or eleven members; but all that is part of history now, pretty much illegal, and unpractical to most of this ever-modern “civilized” world.

  Lucy was a woman of the twentieth century aiming for that twenty-first century knowledge, and that made things more complicated for me. For starters, I had no problem with killing Stephen, but now I needed to wait, because as soon as she found out about the baby, she would want to keep in touch with him. I had to be extra careful because the last thing I wanted was to hurt her even more. So I did the good-friend thing and stayed away. Around but away.

  Now this presence, this “voice.” What did it mean?

  I called the others after years of not doing so. First, I felt Jason. Nights later, Julia. After that, no one else. Beyond us three, there were no other immortals in the Republic.

  *******

/>   I returned late, past 4:00 a.m., and fired up my laptop. I felt like writing and surfing the web. I didn’t know why, but lately, I had found myself reading blogs. My thirst for knowledge was stronger than ever.

  There was a trend over the Internet called MySpace and after reading an article over The New York Times.com of how this concept of “virtual social network” worked, I made up my mind to check it out. I had seen the advertising banners here and there. After opening an account under an alias—no photo or any relevant information, just a way of trying the thing—I did a search. Eventually, I found myself searching for Kamille. Apparently, the name is not as unusual nowadays; and there was not enough time for me to click on all the search results. After conducting a couple more searches, including one for Amorgos (I knew it was a long shot, but didn’t hurt to try, right?), I did a search for Lucy using our zip code; and just when I was about to log off for the night, her picture popped up. I clicked on it; and seconds later, I was on her page, which was inexplicably open to the public. I looked at the pictures of her friends—over a hundred of them, not bad—and then I saw photos of her own paintings and others that she admired. And then there were the photos of her with Stephen.

  I went through every single picture and saw happy faces, drunken eyes, and the sheer joy of the young in love. They were in places like clubs and hotels, South Beach, and the Caribbean. She did not reveal her interests in her profile; there was nothing about her status or any other relevant information. I read her friend’s postings, and a few made me crack a smile or two. Then my eyes zeroed in on the tag line she had chosen for her profile: “Always your silly head.”

  I logged off and stayed in darkness, looking at whatever was left of the night, thinking about what I had just discovered. I realized that Lucy, despite her potential, had become her own worst enemy; and there was nothing anyone else could do. Only she could save herself. This whole thing reminded me of the tale of Exois, who despite having all the power he could achieve wanted only one thing—to be left alone in his own grief.

  The sound of her rushing up the hallway toward the bathroom caught my attention, and right after I heard the particular noises associated with nausea, I went out into the corridor to help her, pushing the thought of killing Stephen to the back of my mind. For the meantime.

  *******

  October 22, 2004

  Orlando

  I had to land on top of a building when the dizziness hit. I walked around looking in every direction, as if by magic I would find a reason to my symptoms.

  I was getting very annoyed by the damn voice that kept coming back. I was even beginning to “hear” it when I was awake. I faced east, feeling the night wind hitting my face, and then I understood what it was saying: “I hope you can guess . . .” That was all I could make out of it. It was too weak and soft, but it was there. Then it was gone.

  I was beginning to recognize it, to feel the different sensations in my body before I got “sick,” before I felt the voice. The only question in my mind was, who was trying to contact me? Could it be her after all this time?

  I closed my eyes projecting all my energy around me. When I am in this state, my entire body acts like a barometer, picking up all sources of energy, natural and artificial, to help me identify anything out of the ordinary, such as someone like me. My mind creates a mental log of every single variant of energy source, each by its own pulse and noise. Most of them I already knew—the trees, the grass, the animals, insects, people— even the wind has its characteristic sound. And like all of them, all immortals posses a particular vibrating pulse not equal to anything else.

  After a while, I couldn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. The voice was gone, and so the wind. Suddenly, a faint noise distracted me. I turned right, my eyes scanning the dark streets, looking for its source. I saw the shadow of a man moving silently between buildings. I recognized his posture. Being a killer, I know one when I see one.

  Floating from high above, I followed him, careful to use the buildings in my favor, hiding myself. He was dressed in black, just like me; but unlike me, he was wearing a mask and holding a weapon. Then I saw the focus of his attention—a couple of vehicles and several men in a back lot.

  The human shadow moved in angles, a basic military combat technique. I landed on top of the nearest building and waited. The men were in the middle of some negotiation—drugs or weapons, maybe both. There was a disagreement between the two groups about money. Then came the distinctive sound of a gun silencer and I saw one of the men fall quietly. The group couldn’t figure out what was going on; and before they did, there was another mute shot, and another man fell lifeless. I watched them run disoriented while the shooter moved strategically parallel to them, in the cover of darkness.

  One by one, the men were killed. It was all over in minutes. The human shadow walked out of the darkness toward each and every one of the bodies on the ground and added another bullet in each skull . Then he opened the driver’s door of one of the vehicles. He grabbed something from his waist and, with one quick movement, threw it inside. Then he sprinted down an alley. Moments later, the vehicle exploded in a ball of fire.

  I followed him to a car parked four blocks away, all the way to a cheap motel. He got out of his car, opened the trunk, and grabbed a black bag with the gear he had just used. It was at that moment that I saw his face. I was impressed with this man; what he did was nothing personal or for money. This killer was by himself. He was resolved, cold-blooded, and a professional.

  That brought a smile to my face. I felt joy because after all, it was not every night that I got to have my own private vigilante.

  *******

  October 22, 2004, 5:35 a.m.

  Miami

  The house was quiet.

  I was enjoying the sea breeze and the sound of the constant breaking of the waves against the shore. It had been a very interesting night. The vigilante was the highlight.

  Who was he? What motivated him?

  A personal vendetta perhaps. Or maybe he was just an assassin under contract.

  If he was such, he had to be a very expensive one, and his exclusivity would create an easy trail to follow. I mean, a highly trained killer like him couldn’t have been cheap, which narrowed the possibilities of who could afford his services. I was thinking about this when a brochure on the dining table caught my attention. It was from an abortion clinic.

  I checked the bathroom trash can. It was empty. There was also nothing in the one in the kitchen. I gently opened Lucy’s bedroom door and heard her steady breathing as she slept. I felt the life of her unborn child inside her. She had figured it out—either by a home or a clinical test, or maybe both. It didn’t make a difference; what was important was that she finally knew the truth.

  I looked at her in silence for a while, trying to guess her reaction. Would she tell me about it? Would she keep it to herself? Would she have the baby?

  I listened to the sound of her sleeping; and in a strange way, I felt responsible for her fate.

  “You’ll have the best possible life,” I whispered to her.

  The little heartbeat inside her agreed with me.

  Her decision would give me a clear picture of what I should do. If she chose to abort the baby, Stephen would die. If she didn’t, I would be forced to think of a different approach.

  I was looking forward to the next couple of weeks, because they would define my future with Lucy; and with these thoughts inside my head, I left her room and went inside my own.

  I needed peace and quiet, and maybe, for once, a quality rest—away from voices, vigilantes, or babies.

  *******

  October 31, 2004

  Miami

  Halloween is not what it used to be. It was better before this new trend of crazy people afraid of putting their kids in danger with poison candy. Kids should stay away from Halloween.

  To me, Halloween is every night. Because every night, I get to play the devil, so to speak. Some called it De
vil’s Night; others still keep the old tradition of All Hallows’ Eve, which began way before my time. I don’t know, or care to know, how it became a family holiday.

  Maybe there is no explanation for it. Perhaps it is equal to Christmas in the sense that most of the world celebrates the birth of the carpenter on December 25, when historically, no one knows when he was born, and the date originally belongs to the greatest pagan holiday of the ancient world.

  In the twenty-first century, in Miami, Halloween is at its best in clubs, and I wanted to spend mine in as many of them as possible. I club-hopped for most of the night, enjoying the different themes and the costumes of the partygoers. It was in one of these places that I ran into good old Stephen.