“Well,” Theroen said after a moment’s pause, still looking over at them. “That was unpleasant.”
Two put her face in her hands and wept.
* * *
“Two … look at me.”
She had heard that voice countless times in her dreams these past two years. She had heard and woken weeping sometimes, as she was weeping now. She had never expected to hear it again outside of those dreams, and faced with it now she found she could not obey the command.
“I can’t,” she sobbed, and the voice came again.
“Why not?”
“Because this might not be real!”
Two felt hands, his hands, take hers and move them gently away from her face. She could see a male figure before her, wearing a black suit. Theroen put a hand under her chin and raised her face to look at his.
“I like what you’ve done with your hair,” he said, and Two laughed, incredulous and still weeping.
“You’re really alive,” she said.
Theroen nodded.
“I’m not dreaming?”
He shook his head and smiled. “No.”
Two leapt forward, flinging her arms around his neck, pressing her lips against his, wrapping her fingers into his hair. She kissed him with a raw passion that she had honestly forgotten she was capable of. Theroen kissed back, put his own hands in her hair. Two could feel the twin points of his elongated canine teeth as he pulled gently at her lower lip. She sighed and shivered, holding him to her, kissing and kissing. Theroen wrapped his arms around her lower back and lifted her off her feet.
At last, Two spoke around his lips. “Don’t you ever, ever leave me again, you asshole! You don’t get to die without me twice.”
Theroen laughed, kissed her, set her down. “I will try to avoid it.”
Two at last moved her lips away from his and stood with her arms around him, face against his chest. Theroen glanced over her head at the other party in the chamber.
“It is good to see you, Naomi. I feared you were dead.”
Naomi smiled, nodded. “I am glad to see you as well. It has been far too long. How do you feel?”
Theroen contemplated this for a moment. “I could use a shower.”
Two laughed against his chest. She was trying to make herself let go of him, embarrassed by her own behavior, but was having a hard time doing so. Finally, she forced herself to take a step back, letting go of Theroen’s waist but taking his hands in her own.
“I think she was worried more about the whole screaming thing,” Two said. “Are you all right? Does it still hurt?”
“No, the pain went from excruciating to … gone, in a blink. I am hungry, and I feel somehow different. I must also confess to some confusion. I don’t know how to say this, but when is it? Time must have passed. It must have, or Naomi would not be here now, and you would not be a human, and Abraham … what happened to Abraham? How long has it been?”
“You’ve been dead for nearly two years,” Naomi said in a gentle voice.
Theroen was silent for a time, contemplating this revelation. “Two years,” he murmured. “Dead?”
“It’s a long story,” Two said.
“It feels like yesterday,” Theroen said. “It feels like it was just last night that Abraham … I remember nothing. There were no dreams, no thoughts.”
“You were dead,” Naomi repeated. “Your heart stopped. Your breathing stopped. Your brain function stopped. The only thing preventing you from rotting into the earth was the trace amount of blood that Abraham left in you.”
“And now, somehow, you have brought me back,” Theroen said. “But it has been two years and I … I do not feel the same.”
“You’re not the same,” Two said.
Theroen pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. “There is much you need to tell me.”
“That is a serious understatement,” Two said.
Naomi’s cell phone began to ring and she flipped it open, holding it to her ear. Two and Theroen paused, listening.
“Stephen. Yes, we’re still here. Yes, it worked. No, not yet. What do you need? Oh! Stephen, are you serious? Yes, we’ll be there as soon as we can. Yes, bring her in if they start before we get there. No, no, I don’t advise that. No, not while they’re waiting. Yes, that’d be best. We’ll leave right now. Goodbye.”
She closed the phone and looked at Two and Theroen. “I hate to do this, but—”
“But there is something urgent that you must attend to,” Theroen finished for her. “Yes, that’s fine. We’re going to New York?”
“Yes,” Naomi said.
“Then we will have plenty of time to talk along the way.”
“I’m sorry to do this, Theroen. You should have had time to adjust, but I think you’re about to be thrown forcibly into vampire society.”
Theroen shrugged, smiled. “It’s been four hundred years,” he said. “I guess it’s about time. Let’s go, Naomi. I spent more time in this chamber than I cared to even before I was buried here.”
“No time to shower, I guess,” Two said, and then laughed, a bright sound that made both vampires turn their attention to her.
“What, Two?” Naomi asked.
“Doesn’t matter!” Two said, and she giggled. “The whole place is burned down,”
“It is?” Theroen asked.
Naomi nodded. Two grinned up at him. Theroen rolled his eyes.
“There is much you need to tell me,” he said again.
Two squeezed his hands, pulled him toward her, kissed him on the lips. “Yup.”
“Let’s go,” Naomi said, and she turned toward the stairs. Theroen and Two followed.
* * *
Nearly an hour had passed since the trio had begun their drive back to the city, and Two had spent most of it filling Theroen in on everything that had happened since that cold November night when Abraham had drained his blood. She had tried not to skip any details, other than those pertaining to her relationship with Naomi. She wanted to discuss that with Theroen in private, both for her own comfort and because she didn’t think it was fair or appropriate to do it with Naomi sitting there. If the vampire girl disagreed with Two’s decision, she didn’t speak up.
Two finished the story by telling of their meeting with Ashayt and her revelation about the possibility of bringing Theroen back to life, and of their journey together back to the United States. At the end, Theroen spent some time sitting in silence, staring out the window, lost in thought. Finally he said, “This is a great deal to consider.”
“It’s pretty nuts,” Two said, and Naomi laughed from the front seat of the car.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s one way to describe it. The emergence of the sole surviving Ovras vampire, and the creation of a new one. Not exactly a typical week.”
“Is that what I am now, then?” Theroen asked her. “Theroen-Sa? A source?”
“That’s what Ashayt believes.”
“And pretty soon you’ll have a Theroen-Chen of your very own,” Two said, grinning. Theroen glanced down at her with concern.
“Two, we do not even know what I am yet …”
“Don’t give a shit,” Two said, still smiling.
“But—”
Two turned, leaned in, and kissed him. “Shut up. Listen, I brought you back from the dead, so you owe me. We’ll get you all filled up with blood, and then we’ll get me sorted out, and it will be fine. Nothing we did to you should make you unable to make me into a vampire, so relax.”
Naomi was watching them in her rearview mirror, smiling for the first time that night. Theroen looked over at her, saw her grin and sighed.
“I am not going to get any support from you in this, am I?” he asked, and Naomi shook her head.
“Not a bit. She’s going to be your first, Theroen-Sa, if we have to knock you out and take the blood by force. We’ve spent too much time trying to get this done.”
“That appellation is going to take some getting used to,” Ther
oen commented. “Abraham kept me in the dark about so much. I am only now coming to understand how significant my status as Eresh-Chen apparently is … or was. Now I’ve become something that will be even more prone to drawing unwanted attention.”
“Do you feel different?” Two asked.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Theroen laughed. “I don’t know if I can explain it. It’s … when I awoke, my mental abilities were gone entirely; I couldn’t even feel your minds, much less read your thoughts. That was a bit disconcerting, but I believe I can feel those things coming back.”
“Good,” Two said. She was anxious to reconnect with Theroen on the same level as before, to feel his presence fully.
“It may be some time before we know everything that’s changed,” Naomi told them, and Theroen nodded.
Two looked out the window. Trees and the lights of other cars were rushing by as Naomi sped down the highway. “Where are we going, Naomi? What’s the rush?”
“I was wondering that myself,” Theroen said.
“The council is meeting tonight. Not only are they meeting, but Stephen said that from his observations, the gathering was neither organized nor is being run by Malik.”
“Who, then?” Two asked.
“He said that it seems to have been organized by William, the man for whom I served as apprentice … the one who should have inherited the council from Abraham but chose instead to step down.”
“And now he’s staging a coup?” Theroen asked.
“That’s how it seems,” Naomi agreed. “It doesn’t sound like William to me, though. Something must be happening that we don’t understand.”
“I’m sure that throwing Ashayt and Theroen into the mix will just calm everything down,” Two said, and Naomi laughed.
“We’ll find out soon enough, but first … Theroen, there’s a mall a few miles away. You can feed there, and we’ll get you dressed in something that didn’t deservedly go out of fashion in the nineteenth century.”
“It was Abraham’s choice,” Theroen said, his voice dry.
Two giggled. “It’s cute. In a kind of … you know … it’s …”
“Not cute?” Naomi finished for her.
Two glanced up at Theroen, trying to look solemn. The left side of his mouth curled up in a little smirk, and Two laughed at him.
“Two and I aren’t dressed for council, but I think they’ll forgive us,” Naomi said.
“Doubt they’ll even notice,” Two said. Naomi had pulled off the highway and was now navigating surface streets. Two could see the mall in the distance.
“We definitely need to stop soon,” Theroen said. He was clenching and unclenching his fingers. Two took his hand in hers, forced him to stop.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“It’s growing worse by the moment. It is like something is inside of me, gnawing away. It burns. You should stay away from me, Two. If it gets worse, I could … I might …”
Two was having none of it. She shook her head. “You’re not going to hurt me.”
“The blood is working on you,” Naomi said. “It is reshaping you, making you whole, and it needs fuel.”
They pulled into the mall’s parking lot, still brightly lit and filled with Christmas shoppers. Naomi found a parking space and they stepped out into the crisp December air, heading for the mall’s entrance. Two and Naomi left Theroen at the men’s bathroom, sparing him from having to walk through the crowded mall in his antique suit. They returned in less than ten minutes with a basic pair of black slacks and a red button-down shirt, socks, and black leather shoes.
“Hope you’re not still in your all-black phase,” Two told him.
“I had been meaning to branch out,” Theroen told her.
He took his first blood as an Ovras vampire while stray price tags still hung from the clothes he was wearing. A wandering security guard had heard women giggling in the men’s room and decided to investigate. Theroen, well beyond caring whether his victim was male or female, leapt upon the man as Naomi shoved the door closed and leaned against it.
Two could see that Theroen was ravenous, but also that he was struggling to retain his focus and not kill the man. At last, she stepped up next to him and pulled him away, whispering in his ear, assuring him that there would be more. Theroen forced the thirst down, licking his lips, and let the guard drop to the ground. In less than an hour, his coworkers would find him there, wake him, and raise him on shaky legs. With no memory of what had happened, the episode would eventually be dismissed as a case of food poisoning.
They went next to the bathrooms by the movie theater. Theroen found no one in the men’s room, but Two reported that there was someone finishing up in the ladies’ room. Theroen wasted no time, but he was somewhat gentler with this one, leaving her standing in swoon in front of the mirror, a cell phone in her hand, its text-message half-complete. The entry of a gaggle of teenage girls a few minutes later would rouse her.
They stopped once again in the parking lot, where Theroen mesmerized and drank from both a man and a woman; a couple who had come to the mall to catch a late showing of a movie. He left them in the back seat of their car, entwined together, and they slept there for hours before waking in confusion.
“How are you doing?” Two asked him as they got back into Naomi’s car, and Theroen smiled, breathed deeply, and nodded.
“Vastly better,” he said. “Not so weak and hungry, and I can feel your minds again.”
He touched his fingers to Two’s forehead and closed his eyes, asking, “Can you feel it?”
Two closed her eyes and tried to sense him in her mind. She thought perhaps that yes, she could feel something, but it was faint, like the distant fluttering of wings.
“Not much,” she said. “Not yet. I’m still human.”
“That will change.”
“Not now,” Naomi said as she sat down in the driver’s seat. “We have little time. The meeting must have started by now.”
“Didn’t take long the last time,” Two commented. “I mean … we could do it while you’re driving.”
“We have no idea what it will be like this time, Two,” Naomi said. “The process is different for each strain. It takes hours for an Ashayt fledgling to rise from trance, and I really would rather not leave you lying in the car while we go to this meeting.”
Two grimaced, but sat back in her seat and nodded. “OK. Shit.”
Naomi angled them back toward the highway. “I know you’re anxious. It won’t be much longer. When we are done with the council, you and Theroen will be free to … well, to do whatever you want, I suppose.”
“Unless, of course, they choose to detain us,” Theroen said.
“I would love to see them try that,” Two muttered.
“I’m inclined to agree that that won’t be a problem,” Naomi said. “Attempting to hold us would be nearly impossible.”
“Would it?” Theroen asked.
“You need to meet Ashayt,” Two told him. “She’s uh … kinda strong.”
“You’ve a gift for understatement, Two,” Naomi said. “Theroen … Two can’t sense it yet, but you’re throwing off power like a blaze. I think they would have a hard time containing you alone, and if you’re a fire, Ashayt is the sun. You will understand when you meet her. No one will stand in our way so long as she remains on our side.”
“They shouldn’t have any reason to be mad at us, should they?” Two asked.
“I highly doubt it. We’ve done nothing wrong and anyway, William is my former mentor and a good friend. He is held in much greater respect than Malik, and the other vampires will defer to him. I am much more concerned about whatever it is that’s forced him to call this meeting.”
“That is a plus,” Theroen said. “I would prefer not to introduce myself to the council by fighting with them.”
They were quiet for a time. Two leaned against Theroen, who had his eyes closed as if he were listening to something. Naomi drove, we
aving expertly between cars on the highway. They had almost reached FDR Drive, now, and from there it would only be a few minutes.
“There’s something … I feel something between the two of you that I don’t understand,” Theroen said, his eyes still closed. Neither Two nor Naomi acknowledged this statement immediately, and Theroen opened his eyes, glancing at them each.
“Not now,” Naomi said finally. There was an ache in her voice that she could not disguise, and Two felt guilt flare up inside of her. She sat up, leaning away from Theroen and rubbing the back of her neck with one hand.
“I’ll explain everything after the meeting,” she told him.
Theroen looked at her for some time, considering this, and finally nodded. “Very well.”
Silence descended again upon the trio, and they sped on toward the city and their meeting with the council.
Chapter 28
Before the Storm
“Oh,” William said. “Oh my dear God.”
Stephen’s smirk widened to a grin, and he stepped up to stand beside Ashayt. “Never thought ye’d live to see this, did yeh, William?”
A nervous murmur was making its way through the crowd of vampires as they realized the significance of what was happening. Stephen turned around, glancing at the assembled council, gauging their mood. He was enjoying springing this surprise upon them, but he didn’t want to start a panic.
William’s mouth worked, but his voice was nothing more than a dry noise, like wind rattling through reeds. He closed his mouth, passed a hand across his brow, swallowed, and tried again. This time, his voice was there.
“This is the greatest honor of my long life, Mother.”
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