The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2)

by Joseph Duncan

  Eat!

  Hot salty smell of blood, coppery and red… my mouth filled with saliva.

  My mouth. I discovered my mouth then, and I creaked open my jaws and ran my tongue around my teeth, feeling the tips of my fangs with it—careful! They’re sharp!—feeling my dry lips stretch and crack, like cold-stiffened leather. My jaw felt strange, misshapen, and there was pain when I yawned it open. I heard the bones pop and crunch.

  Feeling my lips, then, I discovered my head. It felt oddly twisted and flattened. I tried to move it, but it seemed frozen, calcified. I pressed harder and felt a searing pain in my cheek. I heard a sound like small branches snapping. Why did it hurt so much to move my head? It felt like something was ripping the skin from my face.

  I moaned softly, and in moaning, heard the sound of myself.

  Sound. Ears!

  I listened and found that I could hear a melancholy hooting, a thing I once called “wind”. Carried on the wind was the resounding cry of a bird, wheeling high overhead, searching the ground for prey.

  Screeee!

  From the dark hole of my mind, a word swam up for that sound. Lenthe, or what you modern humans would call a “hawk” in your English language. I could hear the hiss of the wind in the grass, and the rustle of leaves, a dry ticking, as from the tips of brittle branches. Further away: the low murmur of human voices, the crackle of a campfire.

  That was where the smell of blood was coming from! The voices. The… men.

  I sniffed the air and found I could smell the odor of their flesh, sweaty and unwashed, the fats they had smeared their skin with to protect it from the wind. I could smell the animal furs they adorned their bodies with, their leather footings and the cords they tied their hair with. I could smell their cocks and their balls and their filthy, unclean asses. I could smell the hares they had eaten, the gas of their belches. But their blood… that was the strongest odor I could smell, and I wanted to fly at them and tear them to pieces and glut myself on the hot red fluid that issued forth.

  I tried to move my limbs, but my limbs would not obey me.

  Frustrated, I opened my eyes to see why I couldn’t move.

  Sight! I could see!

  It was daylight, and the light stabbed into my eyes, into my brain, like two burning spears. I hissed and bared my teeth, trying to turn my head from the light, but there was no shade in which to retreat. I was trapped in that blinding glare. I felt black tears bead my eyelashes. The all-encompassing light drilled into my skull.

  I snarled and snapped at the light, trying to drive it away.

  Bite it! Kill it!

  I peeked at the world through the slits of my eyelids, maddened, furious. Slowly, then, my pupils contracted. The glare began to dim, and with that dimming, the pain it caused to me began to diminish. Sniveling, I blinked around myself, seeing without comprehending the broad rolling plains of the cold-blighted tundra in which I had awakened. I squinted up and saw ribbons of hazy, far-away clouds drifting across the blue sky. I turned my head down and saw that I lay upon a jumble of gray stones, and from the cage of my ribs there sprouted a twisted, stunted little tree, hardly more than a bush really, but it came up through the center of me, and its roots were threaded through my torso.

  What is this madness?

  My mind could not grasp what my eyes were reporting. I only knew that it was wrong. It hurt and it was wrong. There should be no tree screwing up through the center of me!

  I tried to move my hand, to claw the small tree out of me, but my hand still refused to obey me.

  I turned my attention from the bush and squinted down my shoulder to my hand. My limb, I saw, was grotesquely flattened and broken. My white flesh was fused to the gray blocks I lay sprawled across and mottled with lichen and moss. There appeared to be an unnatural number of joints throughout its length, and bones protruding from my bicep and forearm like the sharp points of broken sticks.

  I tugged at my arm, but it would not move. Even my fingers were stuck, smashed flat to the stones and fused to them, unrecognizable.

  I remembered then that I should have more limbs than just this one, so I looked all around for them.

  My arm… where was my other arm?

  Though I searched with my eyes for it, all I could see was the knob of my shoulder. I thought then to move it, or at least to try, and felt it twisted around behind my back. And my legs? Where were my legs? When I peered down my torso, I saw that my legs were submerged in the frosted earth and covered over with low grass. Here was a knee, floating in the sward like a little white island, and there, too far away from my body, the end of my foot poked up at a weird angle, my toes curled and shriveled.

  Where was I? I wondered. How did I come to be this horrible, broken thing in the middle of a wind-blasted wasteland?

  I tried to remember, but all I could envision was ice… an eternity of creaking white ice… pain and hunger and ice…

  And the blood! The smell of blood was making me crazy! How could I get that blood? I wanted to drink it! Feel it gushing in my mouth! Gulp it down! Have it inside me!

  But I couldn’t move. I tried to jerk my body back and forth, but I couldn’t pull free. I had become a thing of dry flesh and stone, with a tree growing up through the center of me.

  Blood! Give me that blood!

  Panting and snarling, my fangs protruding, I sniffed the wind blowing against my cheeks. I squinted to and fro, searching with my eyes for the source of the blood-smell.

  There!

  Small with distance, a party of men squatted in a circle around a low cooking fire. They were dark headed and broad, their size exaggerated by the fur-trimmed garments they clothed their bodies with. I listened to the low rumble of their chests. The sounds they were making were words, I knew, but they were words I did not understand. One of them spoke in a louder voice, and the others laughed. I counted them with my eyes—six big ones in all, with one or two small ones. I drooled as I watched them, desiring only to leap upon them, tear them apart, swallow the hot blood that squirted from the pieces. I watched them greedily, thinking only of how I might free myself stone and tree, how I might get to them so that I could feed.

  I could smell the juices of the animal they were cooking over their fire. If I had been a living man, the smell of the dripping fat and sizzling flesh would have sparked my appetite, but I was no longer a living man with a living man’s tastes. I was a monster, and I longed only for the blood of the hunters, not the seared meat of their prey.

  I watched them hungrily all through the afternoon, hardly aware of the sun passing overhead, or the day’s lengthening shadows.

  Presently, one of the smaller members of their party rose to his feet and trotted away from the fire. I realized with a flash of excitement that the little one was trotting my direction.

  Yes! Come, little one! Come this way!

  2

  I could see, with my vampire’s piercing vision, that he was young and strong and pink with blood. He looked about fourteen years old, but in those ancient times that was all but a man. He had round cheeks and shaggy black hair and large, almond-shaped eyes. He came as far as halfway between his group and my position, then peered around in every direction. As I watched, he pushed aside a few layers of clothing and squatted in the grass. I watched his face redden with effort, smelled the sweet stench of his feces, then he grabbed a handful of grass, twisted it into a tuft and cleaned himself. He rose, examined his stool, and then started to return to his clan.

  NO!

  Thinking to tempt him nearer, I opened my jaws and made a guttural sound.

  I saw him stop, his chin jerking over his shoulder in my direction. He stood stock still a moment, listening, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  I groaned again, and saw his body stiffen with alarm. He turned fully around then and searched for the source of the noise he’d heard. His eyes swept past me, then returned. He leaned forward, squinting, and then took two steps toward me, shading his eyes with his hand.

/>   One of the adult males in the hunting party yelled for him.

  He called back to them: “Alaie! Enong Ae!” which meant, in his tongue, “I hear you! I’ll be right there!” I did not speak their tongue until later, but that is what the words meant.

  Drooling in hunger, I watched as the boy-man approached me slowly.

  Yes, come closer, little one, so that I might tear my arm free of this stone and catch hold of you!

  He was dressed in heavy outer furs, and beneath, a layer of woven clothes decorated with blue beading. I had never seen clothing made with such complexity, but in that animal state, I had no eye for his fashion, only for the vein throbbing in his thick, tan neck.

  He crept closer and closer, then stopped, frustatingly, a good fifty meters away. He examined me with his eyes, looking up and down my form with interest.

  “Tepongoi? Ne w’ae?”

  You there, what are you?

  “Ne q’ae tsebsus?”

  Can you speak?

  I twisted my torso, trying desperately to pull free. I heard my skin tear from the stones with a fibrous ripping sound, but I couldn’t free myself. I couldn’t get loose and catch hold of him. Furious, starved, I bared my fangs and hissed at him, and the boy-man jumped back with a horrified expression.

  Without another word, he turned and pelted away.

  3

  Enraged, desperate with hunger, I watched the boy-man run back to his elders. Even before he rejoined them, he was motioning toward me. The men in his hunting party rose in alarm. I flung my broken white body back and forth, incensed, but I could not rip my flesh from the stones or dislodge the tree that was growing up through the center of me. I saw the boy reach the hunting party, heard the distant babble of his frightened voice. He pointed back to me emphatically, over and over, and the older men leaned down and peered in the direction he was gesturing.

  Fear now was warring with my desperate hunger. I realized how foolish I had been. I was helpless, vulnerable, and now those hunters would come and they would hurt me with their spears and knives, stick me, cut me, maybe even try to burn me!

  I grew more alarmed as the entire party rose and started my direction. I could see the spears and bows they carried with them. Some of them clutched knives and hatchets. One even hefted a burning branch, taking it up from the fire.

  I tried to gnaw my arm, but couldn’t reach it with my teeth.

  They came cautiously closer, bringing their weapons to bear.

  “Ne w’ae?” they called. “Ne weta!”

  Closer and closer they edged, until I could make out their features, see the revulsion in their eyes. Fear and violence boiled from their pores. They recoiled in shock as they came near enough to see me clearly-- the terrible, mangled monster I’d become. Some of them fell back a step or two, and a couple of them moaned and called for my destruction in their mysterious, musical tongue.

  “Utt! Ne w’ae?”

  That, from the largest man in their group, their hunting leader or chieftain. His name was Korg, I would learn later. He was tall, dark-skinned and broad, with sleek black hair that hung down his chest on both sides of his neck, styled in thick plaits.

  “Utt! Utt!” he prompted me.

  He was dressed in ruddy reindeer fur with an ornately decorated undershirt and heavy leather leggings. Running up the right side of his face was a deep and puckered scar, a mark he’d gotten from the blow of a mammoth’s tusk when he was younger and more careless. This, I would learn later, too. The scar disappeared into his hairline, from which a long stroke of gray hair wound down. He was lightly bearded but heavily muscled, with squinty grey eyes and a wide scowl of a mouth. His large hands gripped the shaft of a sturdy stone-tipped spear, which he poked in my direction as he pressed me again to answer him.

  But I could not answer. Freshly awakened, I had no memories, little human intelligence. I was an animal, a broken thing with only the most basic emotions and instincts.

  Frightened by my vulnerability, I displayed my fangs and snarled. Stay away!

  My yowl frightened most of the men in the hunting party, and they fell back, moaning and gabbling. All but Korg, who did not retreat from me as the others did. Korg cocked his head to one side and then lowered his spear. He spoke to me in a softer, less urgent tone of voice, and then approached a bit closer.

  I did not hiss or struggle to get free this time. I merely stared at him while he studied me.

  He came closer, and then one of the other men in the party caught his shoulder, a shorter, heavy-set fellow with curly black hair and a thick frizzy beard. This one was named Lene’Hab, Korg’s second-in-command. Lene’Hab had bulging and suspicious eyes, eyes that rolled my direction nervously before returning to the face of his leader. He said something low and fast, but Korg brushed his hand away and came within five meters, close enough, I noted anxiously, to pierce me with that spear.

  I wouldn’t know their tongue for many days, but I know now what Korg said to me as he squatted down to bargain with me that afternoon.

  “I’ve heard of your kind before, spirit man. My father told me of the cold white ones who feed on blood,” Korg said. “My father said your people have powerful magic.”

  It all sounded like monkey gabble to me, but later, after the boy taught me their tongue, I recalled his words and knew what he’d said.

  “I will make a deal with you, white one. I will make a blood offering in your honor if you bring the mammoths back. We have hunted for nearly a moon this season and have found only their leavings. If you are as powerful a spirit as my father said, perhaps you will show us favor in the days to come.”

  I tried to pull free once more. I think he mistook my contortion as a nod of agreement, for he stood up then and gave a couple terse orders to the men bunched behind him. Two of the hunters bowed and ran back toward their cooking fire. Korg watched them trot away, then returned his gaze to me.

  “We seal our bargain with blood, earth spirit man,” he said. “Do not dishonor our agreement. My father also taught me how to send your kind to the ghost world, if the need ever arose.”

  I bared my fangs at him but did not hiss. I was exhausted, like a fox caught in a snare, weary of struggle.

  Korg’s men returned, holding two snow hares by the ears. Korg thrust his spear in the ground, took the two hares in one hand. He held his other hand open and his lieutenant put the handle of a stone knife in his palm.

  Korg approached carefully. I imagine his father had also warned him how dangerous the “cold white ones” could be, but the Mammoth Hunter was desperate. He had wives and children to provide for, and no mammoths to feed and clothe them with. The great wooly mammoths were nearly extinct by then, and his people’s fortunes passing with them.

  I eyed the hares hungrily as he approached. I had begun to grasp what he intended to do. The two hares, plump and white, wriggled their noses and kicked, but their feet were tied together with leather thongs and they could not flop free. Their bulging eyes rolled in their sockets as Korg drew near.

  Korg set one aside and held the other over my head. He called out an appeal-- to me or to the spirits of his ghost world, I’m not sure which-- and then he slit the hare’s throat. The furry beast squealed, its bright pink mouth gaping open, but its cry was silenced when the blade laid open its windpipe. The animal jerked as its terrified heart pumped blood from the wound in bright, pulsating arcs.

  I twisted my head back, my jaws open wide. Hot, succulent blood spurted into my maw, spattered upon my dry, cracked lips. I swallowed, gasped, opened my mouth for more. I felt the demon within me leap at the nourishment, greedily encoiling the blood in my belly.

  Korg squeezed the rest from the dying creature’s body. He passed it back to Lene’Hab when it had finished bleeding and took up the other.

  Yes! Yes! More! I swallowed the blood as fast as I could, accepting the man’s sacrifice with a grateful smile. I nodded at the foreign words he spoke to me. Yes, anything you want. Just feed me!

>   When the second hare was drained, he gazed sternly into my eyes. “Remember our bargain, earth spirit man,” he warned me, then he turned and shooed his men back toward their camp.

  At the rear of the group was a curly-headed boy. He was the smallest of them all, and slight of build, even within his heavy, layered clothing. He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he followed his elders away. Though I did not know it at the time, his name was Ilio, and he was about to become the last of the Mammoth Hunters… and my first vampire child.

  4

  A human being, on average, carries a little over five liters of blood in his body. Rabbits, of course, have quite a bit less. Korg’s sacrifice only whetted my appetite, but there was enough nourishment in those three or four mouthfuls to rouse the living hunger inside me.

  The Mammoth Hunters broke camp and moved on. As I watched them vanish behind a low hill, leaving me to my fate on the icy tundra, I could feel the blood of the two hares threading through my torso. The blood spread out from my belly in a web of heat and pain, repairing the destruction those dreamless ages in the glacier had wreaked on my body.

  The dark hungry thing that dwells inside my kind is terribly efficient at metabolizing every drop of blood at its disposal. Even blood on the surface of the skin can be absorbed, if a vampire is starved enough. As I laid there in a stupor of pleasure and pain, I felt my cracked lips heal, the fissures sealing shut as the thing inside me knit the tissue back together. The places where the blood had dripped on my neck and face and torso turned white as all the tiny pores in my flesh sucked the nourishment in.

  The hot threads meandered across my chest, into my shoulder, then on down my right arm. Pain followed quickly after as the Strix worked to set my skin and bones in order. There was not enough blood to heal me completely, but there was enough to loosen the grip between my flesh and the stones beneath it.

  With a convulsive snarl, I tore my arm free of the stones, leaving a layer of flesh behind. My limb was still twisted and broken, with dry bones jutting out, but I could wave it around a bit, and with a grimace of pain, I set my deformed fingers to work, scratching at the bark of the tree that was growing up through the center of me.