The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  “Those names,” her maker said, standing by the grate across the room. “How do you know them?”

  “I dreamt them,” she said. She was groggy, disoriented. She sat up and looked at her hands, felt of her breasts to confirm she was a woman again. And then she looked at Lord Venport, her father in darkness, her bridegroom in eternity, and said, “You are Gon! That is your real name! Gon of the River Tribe, and… oh my goodness! So old! So very old!”

  “Get out of my mind!” he shouted, and she recoiled from him in surprise.

  For a moment, they stared at one another without speaking, Nora shocked and hurt, her maker furious. She had seen him angry before, angry enough to kill, but this was the first time since she became his acolyte that she had been the object of that fury.

  He glared at her as if there were a part of him that wished to destroy her, eyes narrowed to slits, nostrils flaring, and then he relaxed. Lowering his shoulders, blinking those burning eyes, he turned away from her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking into the fire. “I did not mean to shout at you.”

  She wanted to go to him, make amends somehow, but she was too frightened to move. She had never seen such fury in his eyes! Not even in battle.

  “Mortal men believe that it is the physical world that is permanent,” the vampire said haltingly. He picked up the poker, stabbed at the burning logs. “This is why they ascribe such value to things like gold and land. But that is only because their lives are so short. For creatures like ourselves, the long-lived and the eternal, it is our memories, our identity, that are enduring. I have seen continents rise and fall, mountains crumble to dust, the birth and death of countless human dynasties. Only my memories stand, my sense of self, my true identity. I would have shared them all with you. Eventually. When I could bear it. When I could trust you. But you could not wait.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to pry into your thoughts. I was dreaming. It was an accident.”

  “Was it?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at her.

  She was not certain.

  “I does not matter, I suppose,” he sighed, staring pensively into the fire. “I was going to Share with you soon. What does it matter if it is now or tomorrow, by blood or by dream? Time is all but meaningless to me. But I wanted to make a gift of it to you. As a token of my faith.”

  Anguished, she scurried from the bed to him. “Please, Gon, forgive me,” she sobbed, throwing herself at his feet. “I don’t know if I did it purposely or by accident, but I’d do anything to take it back! Please, I beg you!” She clung to his legs, staring up at him pleadingly.

  He took her wrists and pulled her up to him. Gently. Without rancor. “There is nothing to forgive, my love,” he said. He enfolded her in his arms, breathed his words against her cheek. “I stole your life, and now you’ve stolen mine. Whose sin is the greater?”

  How terribly his words pained her! She would rather he be furious with her, that he bluster and storm, perhaps even punish her for what she had done, for she knew just how awfully she had wounded him. She knew it by the memories she had stolen from him, through the connection they now shared. She had taken his freedom, burdened him with her care, and now she had taken his life. But there was nothing she could do about it now, no way to undo it, just acknowledge it and move on, and that is what she intended to do. That is what she believed they both would do.

  But they did not.

  He did not.

  Despite his forgiveness, he drew away from her after that. He was cautious of her, much more reserved than he had been before. She felt that he had put up a kind of invisible wall between them, and she did not know how to surmount it. She could breech that wall by force if she wanted. She sensed she had the power to do it. Her telepathic abilities were growing exponentially. She could force her way past his psychic barriers, enter his mind and read his thoughts, perhaps even impose her will upon him, but she knew such a thing would be an unforgiveable trespass. And when she tried to broach the subject, draw him into a discussion about his remoteness, he offered her only reassurances and platitudes.

  It was terribly frustrating.

  She felt now that she knew him more intimately than any woman had ever known a man. She had been inside his head, shared his thoughts. She could recall at will the memories she had taken from his mind, experience them as if they were her own. Yet, at the same time, he had closed himself off from her, withdrawing emotionally if not intellectually, holding her apart when she needed to be close. They still slept together, and even on occasion made love, but he was guarded, almost to the point of paranoia, as if he constantly suspected she was peeking into his thoughts.

  He spent more and more time alone, on the prowl in London, hunting down the renegades. He rarely allowed her to join him in these hunts, saying they were too dangerous for her now. His enemies had joined forces, he claimed, determined to resist him. Sometimes he returned injured, and she looked after him until his wounds had mended. Only once did he ask her to come with him to the city. On that particular occasion, he needed her help recovering his hand, which had been torn from his arm during an especially vicious battle. It was just a search and recovery mission, nothing very exciting, but she was happy enough to go along.

  “How many are left?” she asked as she helped him look for the hand. They were in another filthy alley, digging through heaps of garbage together. He thought her psychic abilities might help him locate his lost appendage. She could have told him her powers didn’t work that way, but it had been so long since he’d asked for her help she didn’t want to spoil the fun.

  “The renegades?” he asked.

  “No, silly, hands,” she teased.

  “Not many,” he chuckled, using his foot to turn over a crate. “Less than a dozen, I’d say. Most have fled the city. Word has gotten out that I mean to rid London of its vampyre infestation. They’ve chosen the better part of valor.”

  “So they’ve escaped punishment.”

  “It matters not. I did not come here to destroy my own kind. The London hives had grown too brazen. They threatened the secrecy of our race. If I have scattered them to the winds, made them a little more cautious, then I have accomplished my mission. The less bloodshed the--”

  “Here it is!” Nora said, holding up his hand. “A rat was gnawing on it.”

  “Did you destroy the rat? If it has ingested any of the Blood…”

  “Yes,” she admitted, looking rather embarrassed. “I fed on it, I’m afraid. Can the Blood transform animals into immortal creatures as well?”

  “Rarely,” he said, taking the hand from her. “But it has been known to happen. We must always take care that no lesser creature ingests our living blood. Imagine London overrun by vampyre rats!”

  “I’d rather not,” Nora shuddered. She was terrified of rodents when she was a mortal woman. They were more hors d’oeuvre than d’horreur now, but she still found the creatures repulsive.

  He placed the tattered flesh of his wrist against his stump. Nora watched, fascinated, as hundreds of glistening filaments rose up from his forearm, stitching the two pieces together again. Within moments, his hand was reattached to his body. He flexed his fingers with a smile.

  “There. Good as new!”

  If only the Blood could mend broken hearts as easily as it mended flesh.

  11

  Her maker procured for them a sprawling estate just north of the city, not far from the village of Orsett, where they had fled after the attack at Charing Cross. It was a lovely old manor with meandering gardens and a large silver pond and woods she could hunt rather than take her prey of the local populace. But that suited her. As her telepathic abilities increased, it became more and more difficult to feed upon her fellow man. Her telepathic abilities made her exquisitely proficient at finding and stalking her prey, but she could not help but share in their pain every time she killed. Taking nourishment became a nigh unbearable enterprise. She finally vowed she would feed no more from
human beings, and instead subsist on a diet of raccoons and deer and other small forest creatures. Their minds, such as they were, were blessedly silent to her, and she could feed on them without experiencing their pain and terror.

  Gon was sympathetic to her travails, and supported her endeavors to feed only from animals. “I have done the same many times in the past,” he said. “It is always best to forego human prey when one is living in the country.” On occasion, he would bring her a criminal from the city to feed upon, for the blood of human beings was more satisfying to vampyres, but usually she just fed on animals.

  Gon continued to hunt in the city. It was a good distance away by carriage but not so far for a creature who could leap rooftops with the ease a mortal man might hop a curb. He also continued in his efforts to rid the city of its vampyre infestation. There were only a few renegades left, he informed her, but they were ancient and powerful blood drinkers, and determined to resist him at all costs. Gon’s own determination to reform the city’s vampyre population had become something of an obsession. The harder they battled him, the more single-minded he became. Ultimately, Nora decided it had more to do with ego than principle—a very male thing, certainly—and she washed her hands of the whole affair.

  She had no love for conflict, and no interest in the government of her new tribe. It all seemed so bloody mortal, this preoccupation with power and territory and ancient prohibitions. Instead, she immersed herself in her first and most abiding passion: literature. Taking full advantage of her patron’s endless wealth, she stocked her libraries, of which there were two, with the most rare and valuable books she could lay hands upon.

  When she thought on it, which happened more and more infrequently of late, it seemed to her that their relationship had become quite the English marriage. Cordial, even affectionate at times, but he pursued his interests while she attended hers. She even took a lover, a local bookseller by the name of John Worthy.

  John was everything her maker was not—reserved, thoughtful, attentive. He was witty and well-read, and nearly as clever as she. So clever, in fact, that Nora was afraid he’d soon discern the true nature of her being, that she was not the mortal woman she portrayed herself to be. Because of that fear, she developed a new utility for her powers: camouflage.

  Taking the most delicate care, she found that she could enter his mind and cause him to overlook her most obvious vampyre traits. When he looked at her, he saw plump, ruddy mortal flesh instead of the smooth, bloodless, marble-like skin with which her kind were encumbered. When he touched her, he perceived that she was warm and soft and pliant. He resisted her advances for a while, put off by her youthful appearance, but he was a man and thus particularly vulnerable to the desires of the flesh. Finally, she conquered him, and found him to be a surprisingly ardent lover once he’d put aside his inhibitions, so much so that she once inquired if he were not just a little bit French.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” he chuckled, idly caressing her breasts with his fingertips. They were lying naked in bed together, his hot mortal seed trickling between her icy thighs.

  It pleased him that she should wonder if he were French, she knew, and she was glad that it pleased him. If she could change one thing about him, she would have him be a little more confident of himself, a little bolder.

  But not too bold!

  She found that she liked her lovers now to be a little more manageable, a little more… compliant.

  Gon knew of John Worthy, of course, and seemed little concerned by her dalliances with him, only warning her that mortal lovers had an annoying habit of becoming immortal ones, a tiresome burden should she ever grow weary of the man.

  “It’s quite one thing to be rid of a mortal lover,” he teased her gently. “You can simply have him for dinner. But an immortal lover, well…it can take forever to get rid of one of those!”

  She wanted to ask if that was what she was to him now, a tiresome burden, but thought better of it. She was afraid she wouldn’t like the answer.

  She didn’t need telepathy to know that he wanted to leave her. It was why he spent so much time away from her, why he sought distraction in this ridiculous vendetta against the London renegades. He did not love her, probably never had, but he was too bloody honorable to abandon her.

  It was rather insulting, really.

  She was no weakling. His Blood had made her a formidable immortal, with powers even he did not understand, powers that often frightened and repelled him. So much so that it had spoilt his burgeoning affection for her. Yet, in some ways he regarded her as a child. Perhaps she was to him, old as he was, but she was also a full-grown woman with a keen intellect and strength enough to crush bricks to red dust with her bare hands. She could move faster than the mortal eye could follow. She could read minds and manipulate the thoughts of everyone around her. But to his way of thinking, she was just a fledgling blood drinker, scarcely able to survive on her own.

  Perhaps it was time to dissolve their partnership.

  Neither of them were satisfied, and she was perfectly capable of looking after herself. In many ways, she would miss him terribly, but she didn’t want to be a burden to him. She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. And she couldn’t bear the look in his eyes when he was home, the way he paced, the way he gazed longingly from the windows. It pained her too much.

  Yes, it was time to break it off.

  She was sitting in the great library one evening, contemplating that very thing, when Madame Elektra came to call.

  In hindsight, it was a very lucky thing she was alone that night. Gon was away, as was usual of late. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. Usually John joined her in the evenings after closing his shop, but he was in Guildford purchasing a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos for her. And her servants, who lived in the village nearby, had already gone home for the night. She was quite alone, which is probably what emboldened the renegades. But at least they were safe. She didn’t know what she would have done if John or any of her servants were hurt. Or worse, killed.

  She was reading a particularly amusing passage from Jacques the Fatalist when she sensed a presence lurking somewhere nearby.

  Master: Do you pray?

  Jacques: Sometimes.

  Master: And what do you say?

  Jacques: I say: "Thou who mad'st the Great Scroll, whatever Thou art, Thou whose finger hast traced the Writing Up Above, Thou hast known for all time what I needed, Thy will be done. Amen."

  Master: Don't you think you would do just as well if you shut up?

  It is easy to forget that religious satire is not new within the realm of published fiction, she noted in her journal, and then that niggling in her mind, that sense of presence, drew her reluctantly from her scholarship.

  Frowning, she rose and went to the window, reaching out with her mental powers to locate the intruder and ascertain its intentions.

  An instant later, the windows of her library exploded inwards, just like Charing Cross.

  Nora fell back with a shriek, shielding her face with her hands. She knew immediately who the intruders were and what they intended to do, knew without even reading their thoughts. They meant to capture her, use her as a bargaining chip, make her master surrender. That she could not allow! Before the glass had even tinkled to the floor, she turned and raced for the door.

  But she was a tot too slow, and one of the renegade vampyres, a great brute of a man in an exquisitely fashioned dinner ensemble, seized her by the ankle and flung her against the hearth.

  “An immortal bookworm,” Madame Elektra purred, gliding across the room. “How droll.”

  Nora shook her head to clear her thoughts, saw the flash of the dressmaker’s teeth through the black lace veil she wore.

  Madame Elektra stroked the cover of one of the books on Nora’s desk. “One might think immortality could be put to better uses,” she said, and then, with a contemptuous flip of her hand, sent the book thumping to the floor. �
�Reading!”

  “I know you,” Nora said.

  “As a humble seamstress, perhaps, but we are so much more than that,” Madame Elektra replied. Ornately engraved fingernail guards gleamed on the tips of her fingers. They were long and curved and looked wickedly sharp.

  Nora rose unsteadily from the floor, dusting herself off. Her ears were still ringing from the impact.

  “Your impulse is to flee,” Madame Elektra said. “We warn you to resist the compulsion. If you try to escape again, Angus here will tear your limbs from your body.” She nodded towards the tailored brute who stood now guarding the door. Seven feet tall and nearly as wide, he was a visual contradiction in his tophat and tails. “I assure you, he can do it, as easily as a man might pluck the wings from a fly. I have a feeling you are not quite resilient enough to survive such a terrible injury.”

  “No,” Nora said. “Probably not.”

  Nevertheless, Nora cast her gaze about the room, looking for an avenue of escape.

  All possible points of egress were blocked by glowering vampyres. There were five in total, all male, all powerful immortals. Plus, Madame Elektra.

  Nora’s heart sank.

  Hoping to stall for time, Nora asked, “How did you find us?”

  “Oh, please!” the woman said scornfully. “Your maker is a powerful immortal, but he is careless in his arrogance. Like most of his kind, his great strength is also his greatest weakness. To answer your question more succinctly: your foolish master does not bother to cover his tracks. We discovered your new lair within the week.”

  Nora snorted. That certainly sounded like Gon!

  “We’ve been observing you ever since,” Madame Elektra went on. “Studying your routines. Biding our time. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike.”

  “So tell me who you really are,” Nora said, but she knew. She had already stolen the secret from the woman’s mind, snuck it out of her skull while she was making a show of struggling to her feet.