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

by Joseph Duncan

  Of course I was hungry for the blood. The smell was maddening. I imagined I could taste it on the air, as if a million tiny droplets of it swirled around my head, but the buck was dead and the blood would be cold and sluggish. The blood of the dead has never been to my liking.

  “I will feed later. Dawn is drawing near and we should find a place to sleep, someplace remote where the warriors of the Oombai will not find us.”

  Ilio turned to the east and saw, as I did, that the horizon was lightening. The rim of the plain was limned with lavender and pink light. The stars there were fading.

  We rose. I took a moment to look down at the buck, feeling pity for the regal animal. It was a lifeless thing now, the night’s chill stealing the last of its heat in a faint vapor. Ilio noted the expression on my face and looked confused.

  “I know it feels good to feed,” I said grimly. “The blood hunger is so overpowering, but it is not seemly to be so callous of the living things that die to sustain our lives. My people gave thanks to the spirits of the beasts who died to feed us when I was a living man, and that is something which I still do.”

  To my relief, the boy seemed to understand. He nodded gravely. “Then that is what I shall do as well.”

  “Good. That makes me proud of you, boy.”

  Ilio smiled, displaying his fearsome new fangs.

  I grimaced.

  I had many things to teach him.

  Taking his shoulder, I said, “Come, let us be rid of these fouled clothes and bathe. I can’t stand to be covered in such filth. The smell of all this blood will whip me to madness. When we are clean, we can find some place to rest for the day.”

  We moved rapidly north, Ilio taking the practice of his new strength quite seriously. I matched my pace to his, feeling no impatience for the boy’s weaknesses, only happy to have a companion with which to share these wonders. The guilt I felt at my corruption of him… that I pushed to the back of my mind. That was something I could ponder at length, when we had less compelling business. Tonight we were pressed for time, harried by approaching daylight, hunted by vengeful humans. I had eternity to question my motives and delineate, in fine detail, my offences against this child. Self-accusation and second-guessing could wait. For the time being, it was enough to fly through the air beside him, to cross the plains in great leaps and bounds, taking delight in the trill of his laughter, in his clumsy newborn antics.

  We found a shallow creek and shed our clothing, then glided into the bracing water. I washed the blood and bits of bone and flesh from my skin and Ilio did the same.

  “Can we still mate with women, Thest?” Ilio asked as he splashed water in his armpits.

  “Yes, of course. Your penis didn’t fall off, did it?”

  “No!”

  I laughed.

  “Yes, we can still mate with women,” I said more seriously. “But it helps to have a belly full of blood. When you are starved, your flesh will shrivel to your bones, as will your little schtupper. And you must take care not to lose control of your hunger for blood. It will gnaw at you a hundredfold so close to a living human female. You wouldn’t want to hurt the woman who’s so good as to offer her body to you, now would you?”

  Ilio shook his head. “No.” But he looked relieved. He’d only just lost his virginity before circumstance—and I, in my weakness—stole his life away.

  “Did you not observe me copulating with the female in the village of the Ground Scratchers?” I asked.

  Ilio shook his head. He grinned crookedly. “I thought you were just drinking her blood. You… put it in her?”

  I groaned and rolled my eyes.

  “I wasn’t really paying attention!” he laughed.

  “Come, boy. Let us set aside such distractions. We need to find someplace to sleep. It is almost daybreak.”

  I felt suddenly uncomfortable, instructing the boy. In truth, I was but a little more experienced than he was himself. I did not have the right to speak with authority on many of the things he was bound to question me about. I had spent so many millennia in solitude, a hermit in the mountains. Aioa was the first living woman I’d mated with since becoming a vampire. Still, it would do no good to admit my ignorance to the boy. Better that he have confidence in me. He would be less troubled.

  As I started away from the creek, Ilio called out. “What about our clothing?”

  “Leave them. I’ll not wear such filth. The smell of blood on them would drive me mad.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll steal new clothes tomorrow night.”

  “From who?”

  I looked him in the eye. “When night comes tomorrow, I plan to visit my wrath upon the Elders of the Oombai.”

  He gaped at me, stunned at the ferocious look upon my face.

  I spoke no further of my vengeful desires with the boy that night. Instead, I pointed toward a wooded ridge in the distance. “Let us fly that way, Ilio. There is sure to be a cave or some hidden place in that mountainous area where we can rest through the day. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I need sleep.”

  “So we must rest as we did when we were human?” Ilio questioned.

  “Our minds need to dream. Our bodies, I think, could go on without pause, if we cared to push them so far.”

  For the last time that night, we plied the winds.

  On the rocky ridge, we did indeed find a small cavern to curl up in. It was barely large enough for the two of us to wriggle into, but it was high and obscured by brush and thorn bushes and seemed very remote and secure. I fetched a large rock to close the entrance with and pulled it into place behind us. Ilio moved to make room for me and I shifted around in the earthy dark until I’d rooted out a comfortable spot.

  There was not much room. I wished we’d had time to find more spacious accommodations, but beggars can’t be choosy. Ilio put his head on my shoulder, his fingers twining in the matt of hair upon my chest. I was reminded of my own flesh-and-blood children, how they laid upon me when I was a living man. They’d always plucked at my chest hair the exact same way. I felt a strangling sense of melancholy then, the black and bottomless loss that dogged my every step, as persistent as my thirst for blood. I almost pushed his hand away, but I didn’t, because it was good to be a father again… if only a father of deceit.

  “Do you love me, Thest?” Ilio asked in the dark.

  “Yes, I do,” I answered. I did not qualify my reply. I did love the boy.

  Ilio snuggled closer to me. “Can I call you ‘father’?” he asked.

  I winced. Children can always find your vulnerable places!

  “Go to sleep, boy,” I said in a tight voice.

  If my answer hurt him, he did not betray it.

  4

  My vampire child fell asleep quickly, but I lay awake long into the day. Sunlight glimmered around the edges of the stone I’d used to cover the entrance of the crevice. By its light, I looked at the boy… and looking at the boy, condemned myself.

  He was so pale and motionless. In sleep, we vampires give up the pretense of breathing and lie inert. It was horrible to see my child in such death-like repose. He looked, for all intents and purposes, like a frozen white corpse.

  I weighed my love for him against my crimes, and came up guilty.

  If I lavished him with love the rest of eternity, I could not compensate the boy for the things I’d stolen from him: his family, his innocence, his life. Out of selfishness, I’d made a monster of him, and for that I could never forgive myself.

  After a time, he stirred and murmured in his sleep, and for that instant, he looked alive. Wan and unearthly, but alive… but then he fell still again. I had to close my eyes to the travesty. I could not stand to look upon my handiwork any further.

  Instead, I contemplated the villains we’d fled from, the men who’d forced me onto this path of death and damnation. Old, wicked and greedy, the elders of the Oombai were worse than any vampires. At least I had the excuse of physical compulsion—the ravening thirst
that sometimes drove me to immoral acts. They had no curse compelling them to their behavior, only avarice and evil.

  The memory of Aioa’s cruel fate kindled my anger further.

  I am not a vengeful man, but there must be a reckoning for Ilio’s corruption and the murder of the slave woman Aioa. Those Elders had to be taken to task. It was my obligation to mete out their comeuppance, for I was the only one with the power to do it. If I avoided that responsibility, I knew I would forever condemn myself a coward.

  Aioa’s last words rang in my mind: “I was not born a slave, Blood Drinker. If I had the strength of your kind, I would kill those old men and end the rule of the wicked Oombai, once and for all.”

  I’d killed their leader Bhulloch, but there remained four others—all just as cruel and greedy as their chieftain.

  I recalled their faces in my memory. Tall, imperious Hault. Wizened Y’vort and his nursemaid son Gant, and the fat, hairy boar named Ungst. Callous, grasping men, each one. Slave-keepers. Murderers. Kidnappers of children. For Ilio, I would hunt them down. For Aioa, I would murder them all, and if I could, I would free her sisters and return them to the land they’d been stolen from.

  It seemed a noble thing to do. Perhaps, in some small way, I could atone for some of the horrors I myself was responsible for.

  Free of their degenerate leaders, perhaps something good would come of the odd tribe of the Ground Scratchers.

  Planning my vengeance, I drifted to sleep.

  5

  Like children are wont to do, Ilio woke before me. I swam to awareness as he wriggled toward the entrance of our burrow. Disoriented and groggy, I watched him push against the stone I’d used to plug the mouth of our warren, realizing just a moment too late that it was still daylight outside our shelter. I opened my mouth to warn him, but my objection rose too slow to my lips. Ilio pushed out the stone before I could stop him and blazing light filled our sleeping hole.

  Gleaming gold daggers stabbed into my eyes. Ilio shrieked and fell prone on the earthen floor, clapping his hands over his face.

  “My eyes!” he wailed. “Thest, the light--! It hurts!”

  Squinting my sensitive eyes to the glare, I slithered around the boy and pulled the stone back into place.

  “It’s all right now, Ilio,” I said, after I’d restored the darkness. I patted him on the shoulder. “You can open your eyes now. It won’t hurt.”

  “Why does the light hurt my eyes so much?” he sniffed.

  “The transformation has made your eyes very sensitive. You’re a nocturnal creature now.”

  “But you walk about in daylight.”

  I smiled. “It doesn’t feel very nice.”

  He regarded me strangely a moment, his eyes rimmed with sticky black tears, and seeing the expression on his face, my guilt made me paranoid. What was he thinking right then? Was he remembering the monster who’d hunted his people in the night, taking one after another until he was the only one left? Had he realized I was the monster who orphaned him?

  But no… he was too young. Innocent, he accepted all things at face value—even when the coincidence was too broad.

  Perhaps because the coincidence was too broad.

  I waited for the horror to dawn in his eyes, the accusations to fly from his lips. But my lies were his truth. He scrubbed his cheeks and smiled.

  “I have much to learn,” he admitted.

  Relieved, I pulled him into my arms and hugged him. “You’ll be fine.”

  We waited until the light shining round the stone first dimmed, then cycled from gold to orange and finally to purple. As we awaited nightfall, we conversed, speaking idly, joking around a little. We talked about the Neirie women Ilio had mated with, then women in general. He wanted to know if I’d ever seen a female Blood Drinker. Mostly Ilio questioned me-- questioned me incessantly, to be honest. He wanted to know about “my people” the Blood Drinkers, what they were like, how I came to be a vampire. I told him of the foul Blood Drinkers who’d plagued my human settlement, and how I’d come, against my will, to be inducted into their ranks, my vampiric sire intending to make me his slave. I told him of my revenge on the brutal being who made me an immortal, and how I’d hid away in the mountains, eschewing human interaction out of fear of harming those I loved.

  And that is where my truthful recounting faltered and the lies began. I told Ilio nothing of my attempted suicide, or how I truly came to cross his path. I only told him that, after a time, I decided to come down from the mountains and explore the world, and that I’d crossed his path purely by coincidence, lost in the endless span of the tundra.

  “And it was a lucky thing, too,” Ilio said. “For there was another Blood Drinker preying on my tribe. A horrible, shriveled thing. If you’d not come along and frightened it off, it probably would have killed me, too.”

  If I could blush, I probably would have. “Yes. That was a lucky thing.”

  “Did you know there was another Blood Drinker hunting on the steppes?”

  I shook my head. “No… I sensed no other presence. I was just wandering. I’d lost my way.”

  “He probably saw you and ran. Perhaps we’ll meet him someday,” Ilio said. His eyes narrowed with hate. “If we do, I shall try to kill him.”

  I remained silent.

  “It looks as if night has come, Thest,” Ilio said.

  “Yes, let us rise. We should hunt and continue your training for a while.”

  As we wriggled from our little cave, Ilio asked, “Are you still returning to the Oombai village?”

  I climbed from the hole behind him. The sky was deep blue and sprayed with night’s first glittering stars. The temperature was cool and comfortable, a nice breeze rustling the foliage of the surrounding forest. Rising to my feet and dusting off my nude body, I answered the boy.

  “Yes. The elders of their tribe have offended me. I do not like how they keep other human beings against their will. I am reminded of the monster that took me captive and forced this transformation upon me. I think it would be a service to their people if I killed the rest of those old men and freed them from their corruption.”

  Ilio regarded me, his eyes shining with admiration. “I want to go with you.”

  I laughed. “No, boy. You’re too young, and we’ve not yet completed your training as a Blood Drinker. Your presence would only serve to distract me. I would be too worried about your safety.”

  Ilio crossed his arms petulantly. Perhaps he thought his stubbornness would impress me, but it only served to illustrate just how young and inexperienced he really was. Yes, he’d matured since our paths crossed. He had a rim of fuzz around his cock and a scruff of hair on his chin, but hairy nuts does not a man make.

  Remember, the boy could have been no more than fourteen at the time. In that long ago age, that was nearly a man, but “nearly” was the key word. He was untried, and his face still bore the soft roundness of childhood, with big eyes and a small nose and broad, full lips. He was robust for his age, but he was also short and he had yet to develop a grown man’s solidity.

  He might one day have made an impressive warrior, but he was trapped now in that place between child and man. It saddened me for him, but there was naught that could be done about it. I had not changed a whit since my transformation to a Blood Drinker, and I did not expect him to mature further—although I could not be certain of it in those days. There was still much I did not know about our vampire nature then.

  “Would you have me come to harm, Ilio?” I pressed him, a little exasperated.

  “No!” he declared, looking ashamed of himself. “Of course not. Never.”

  “Then please do not vex me further about this. You nearly died in the village of the Ground Scratchers. I was forced to make you a Blood Drinker to preserve you, or have you forgotten already?”

  “No… No. I’m sorry, Thest. I will not defy you.”

  I sighed. “Don’t look so downtrodden, Ilio. It breaks my heart to see it. We will have many adventures
together. We have many years ahead of us, and I promise I will not wet-nurse you forever.”

  He laughed.

  Returning his smile, I said, “Now come. I’m starved. Let’s find something to eat and we shall practice your new skills for a while before I visit my wrath upon the Oombai.”

  6

  There were deer aplenty in that region, and we fed upon the blood of a young male. This time I let Ilio make the kill. He wrestled the buck to the ground with little difficulty and drank his fill, looking at me with a proud, bloody smile when he was done with it. I finished the beast and we went on our way.

  “Tonight,” I told him, “We shall practice moving through the tree tops. Observe.”

  As Ilio watched, I flew naked to the nearest bough and then circled him through the surrounding woodland, a ghost streaking through the branches and rustling leaves. When I leapt down to his side a few minutes later, a couple twigs tangled in my auburn mane, he danced a little in excitement and cried, “Let me try that!”

  “Go ahead. Just take care until you’ve gotten the knack for it. Don’t try to impress me. You’ll only impale yourself again.”

  Licking his lips in preparation, the boy flitted into the branches of a nearby tree. He scrambled amid the boughs for a moment, smiled down at me through the greenery, then cut a swathe through the forest in a wide circle. He moved with impressive speed. I think his small stature was an advantage in tree-running. I heard one yelp, and then he flew down beside me, holding his cheek where a branch had slashed his skin.

  “How bad did you hurt yourself?” I asked, pulling his hand away.

  His injury was already mending. There was a daub of black blood where the branch had gouged him, but that was the extent of it. I watched the lips of the wound draw together and fade.

  “I’m fine.”

  I ruffled his hair. “You did well. That was very fast. I think you must have the spirit of a monkey inside you.”