Undeath

by Lily Levi

  “Laurie?” she whispered, inexplicably hopeful.

  Nothing.

  It had been a stupid thing to wish for.

  Lightheadedness overwhelmed her and she laid back down beside him. She would need to get out, but she couldn’t leave his body there. The broken ceiling swirled in on itself and she closed her eyes to keep from passing out.

  She needed to stay awake. She needed to get out. She needed so many things, but where to begin?

  Somewhere far, far away, a siren blazed through the night.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  When she woke again, it was to the soft lapping of waves.

  Stars blinked in the dark above her. A pregnant moon filled the black sky and a haze of ashy smoke drifted between her and the edge of the world.

  A warm hand touched her cheek.

  “Laurie,” she whispered. Her ribs ached with a sharp pain and she remembered the fall. She remembered Benny and the old woman who Laurie had called Maman; she remembered the house; the blood; the fire. Every detail rushed forward and nothing was lost.

  She had thought he’d died.

  It wasn’t something she’d imagined, but now here he was, holding her head in his lap.

  He smiled down at her, but it was a sad smile, and his gray eyes betrayed him. “You’re okay,” he said.

  A succession of loud, hot snaps filled the night from somewhere far away.

  She struggled to sit and Laurie helped her to lean against him. They listened to the crackling of flames on the beach.

  Riley nudged her silken head beneath her palm and the rowboat swayed sleepily.

  Jolene searched across the cold, black waters. Giant billows of fire lit the shoreline. Trees stood like blazing swords in the night. Their branches cracked in the flames and fell into the pointed rocks and pine needles below. Along the beach to the north, small figures of faraway men worked to douse the fire.

  “Laurie,” she whispered. “Your home.” She could almost taste the fiery ashes in her mouth. “The woman, your grandmother, your – ”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I know.”

  The flames licked out of every window and crowned the parapets. Orange embers snapped up from the roof like a thousand furious lightning bugs.

  She turned up to look at him, but his eyes were not on the house.

  He reached for her and she let him hold her against his warm, blood-stained clothing.

  “I kept so much from you,” he said. “I’m so very sorry.”

  She let her exhausted body rest against his. “I thought you were dead,” she said. It was all she could say.

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you, too.”

  She lifted the side of her face from against his chest and found his eyes. “But we’re both here. I really did,” she said, stumbling through the memory of his lifeless body next to hers. “I really thought you’d died.”

  He looked away from her and out over the water. “Death was very close to us tonight, yes.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ve done you immeasurable harm. I’d meant to tell you, one day, and I tried, but.” He stopped himself. “I suppose you know what a vampire is?”

  “You haven’t hurt me,” she said, ignoring his question. It wouldn’t do any good to acknowledge it.

  Vampire. It was impossible, of course. Benny had strangled her and left her for dead in the middle of the forest, but he hadn’t killed her. Laurie had only found her, and he hadn’t found her dead. He’d nursed her back to health. He’d saved her life. He’d given her a home when she’d lost hers. He’d taken a bullet for her. If he wanted to believe in vampires, green men on Mars, or witches flying through the sky, she wouldn’t question him.

  “Can I tell you a story?”

  “Yes,” she said. She would listen.

  “I died, too,” he said slowly, carefully, as if he were unfolding an old and very delicate piece of cloth. “I was eight-years-old, somewhere in the Arctic wastes, only God knows where. My father fashioned himself an explorer and he thought to take me with him.”

  “Eight-years-old?” she asked. The pain her ribs throbbed and she held her breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to go far from the ship. At least, that was what he told my mother. But when we left the icy shore and the ship behind, I was so very excited. She was never supposed to find out. It was our little secret.” A small smile crossed his lips at the memory. “We were looking for a man, a friend of my father’s, only we never found him.” He paused. “No, death found me and madness found my father. We all died, every one of us died, except for him.”

  “What happened?” she asked, not knowing what else to say. It was only a story and if it helped him in any way to tell it, she would listen.

  The crackling of flames lessened the further they drifted out into the bay.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I remember only small things. I remember a room made of ice. I remember hearts in ice, like quartz. I saw these things and I saw myself outside of myself. My father went back to that place alone, I know that now.” He closed his eyes. “Perhaps he went back to find his heart. That is what I think, at least.”

  Jolene said nothing. She would let him speak.

  “I don’t age,” he said, opening his eyes again. “So long as I sustain myself with the blood of others, time means very little to me. There is the passing of events, if I choose to partake in them, but that is all. Still, I can die, in a way, only it is worse than the death of those who are genuinely alive. In time, the same will be true for you, I’m afraid.”

  Jolene felt how the little girl who she’d once been wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe in vampires, in lost boys, in Peter Pan. But none of that was possible. None of it could fit in the world they both lived in.

  And yet.

  They sat quietly for a time and drifted further and further out into the water until the grand manor on the shoreline was like a small log, set aflame.

  “It’s not so wonderful as it will seem at first,” he went on, though he spoke more to himself than to her. “You will not want to age and you will not want to die. You won’t be able to die, not really. The dead don’t die. They pass painfully away and then they are lost forever.”

  She stared up at the cold stars. If she couldn’t accept that he was a made-up vampiric creature, and that she was one too, she could at least accept him. It was an easy thing to do.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “To be lost, I mean.”

  She lifted her hand to the sky and traced the fading tail of Capricornus. The sun would rise soon and the new light of day would wash away the terrors of the night.

  “Do you see those stars,” she said. “Right up there, right above us?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Then we aren’t lost.” She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his warm chest. “Not anymore.”

  Epilogue

  November 1, 1701

  North of the Laptev Sea

  He was the first man and he would be the last man. He’d been born before the snows had come and if he died, he would die after they were gone.

  Nobody would remember him.

  There would be nobody left to remember.

  A man came to him with a boy. There was no language to share except the language of what could be seen.

  He saw the dead boy. Together, they saw the dead boy.

  It was not the first dead boy he’d seen and would not be the last.

  He looked at the organs he’d taken from other men. Together, they looked for a long time.

  “Yes,” said the man with the dead boy.

  He, the first man of all men, did not know what the sound meant.

  The man with the boy opened his furs and showed him his chest.

  There was an agreement.

  He took the man’s heart.

  There were no tears.

  He, the first man of all men, lifted the dead boy from the wood and h
eld him in his arms. He was so small.

  He bent over him and bit into his shoulder with teeth that he had sharpened for this purpose. He might have cut him open with something else, but it was good to taste the flesh.

  He would taste it when he could.

  He bit into his own tongue and mixed his blood into the new wound.

  Potent blood, the first blood that had made all men. His children had lain with things not of the earth. Their children’s blood was sullied and their children’s children after them.

  He pitied them in a quiet way, but he hated them, too.

  And so, he took the man’s heart and he gave him back the dead boy, no longer dead.

  It was an agreement.

  The man left with his dead boy, no longer dead.

  He, the first man of all men, tasted the dead boy’s flesh, still fresh in his mouth.

  Sitting back in the cold darkness, he listened to the icy wind howling and wished for death, too.

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