The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  Even as the vampyre drew breath to answer her question, Nora cast her thoughts into the darkness, searching for her maker, crying out to him: Come home, master, your fledgling is in danger!

  “Surely, you’ve deduced the truth by now,” Madame Elektra said. “You may be newborn to the Blood, but you are no simpleton.”

  “You are the leader of the renegade vampyres my maker has been fighting,” Nora said. It was difficult to converse with Madame Elektra at the same time she was crying out telepathically to her master. It required great concentration. Luckily, her foe mistook her intense focus for infirmity. She believed Nora still rattled by Angus’s blow.

  “I prefer Queen of the London Hives,” the veiled woman said.

  “And what do you intend to do to me?” Nora asked. She limped forward to support herself on the edge of the table.

  “We believe your master to be an Eternal,” Madame Elektra said, looking down on Nora haughtily. “As you know, Eternals cannot be killed. But they can be incapacitated. They can be imprisoned. There is an ancient practice called Dividing. Have you heard of it? No? Well, let me enlighten you then. Dividing is where an Eternal’s body is quartered and beheaded, and then each of the pieces is carried away and hidden in remote locations. It will not kill a true immortal—no, not even that!-- but the victim is helpless to restore himself unless a third party collects the pieces and brings them all together again.”

  “That… that’s horrid!” Nora exclaimed, imagining such a thing.

  The vampyre queen shrugged. “One does what is necessary. We are, after all, fighting for our lives.”

  Nora sat at the table, putting her head in her hands, pretending defeat. “So you intend to use me as a bargaining chip, to coerce my maker into submitting to this barbarous practice.” At the same time, she flung out with her mind: Please, hurry, master! They mean to Divide you!

  Faintly, as though from a great distance, she heard her maker call back to her: I am coming, child! Fast as I can! Play for time, if you think it safe!

  Safe, Nora thought ruefully. Of course, it wasn’t safe! But she didn’t see that she had any alternative.

  She thought quickly, trying to come up with something to buy her maker a little more time. He was still very far away.

  And then it occurred to her: why play for time when she could play for victory instead?

  “I do not think my maker will submit to you,” Nora said. “Not Gon. And certainly not for me. It was not his choice to make me an immortal. His hand was forced by the Duke. I am a burden to him. Nothing more.”

  “Gon?” Madame Elektra said. “Your maker’s name is Gon?”

  Eyes wide, Nora covered her mouth with her hands.

  The woman seized Nora by the shoulders, hooked nails digging into her flesh. “Speak the truth, fledgling, or I will destroy you now!”

  Nora quailed. “Yes! His name is Gon! You know him?”

  Madame Elektra looked at her compatriots. All but two of the blood drinkers appeared decidedly anxious all of a sudden. Even Angus had gone rigid, eyes bulging with mortal fear.

  “Of course, I’ve heard of him,” Madame Elektra hissed, releasing Nora and taking a cautious step back. “In legend. In whispered prayer. In truth, I thought him only myth. Some say he is the father of us all, or at the very least, the source of our oldest bloodlines. But it cannot be him, surely! Not your impetuous master!”

  “Oh, but it is,” Nora said, relishing their alarm. She rose from the table, smiling in triumph. “My maker is Gon, eldest of our race!”

  And with that declaration, Nora reached out with her powers, seizing their awe and amplifying it to an unbearable degree.

  Half of the renegades fled immediately, throwing themselves from the windows with shrill cries of despair. They vanished into the night like chastened thieves. Only Madame Elektra and two cohorts remained-- Angus and a baldheaded blood drinker with skin as black as India ink. Angus moaned in an ecstasy of terror, turning to his queen to strengthen his resolve. The bald one looked as if he would break at any moment, his attention vacillating between Nora and the window at his back.

  But Madame Elektra was in no condition to encourage her companions. She had retreated to the far side of the library and was pacing the floor as if she expected Nora’s master to come flying into the room at any moment.

  “It cannot be!” the seamstress muttered. “No, no, it is impossible!” Then, wheeling on Nora, pointing a trembling finger: “You lie, you terrible child!”

  Confronted by his mistress’s terror, the baldheaded blood drinker fled from the manor.

  Gon arrived some twenty minutes later.

  He burst into the library ready to fight, eyes blazing, fingers curled into claws. His fine clothes were torn to shreds, and the wind had made a fright wig of his hair.

  The sight of Madame Elektra and her last remaining accomplice caught him up short.

  “We surrender, ancient one,” Madame Elektra said, kneeling on the floor.

  Gon blinked at Nora in confusion.

  Nora smiled and shrugged: I don’t understand this any more than you!

  Gon approached the two, wary of a trap.

  “What is this?” he said.

  Madame Elektra spoke for the two of them. Her companion, Angus, was trembling in an ecstasy of superstitious awe, mouth agape, peeping up only so far as he dared and then ducking his head quickly back down again. “We throw ourselves on your mercy, Unholy Father,” Madame Elektra said. “We knew not who you were.”

  Gon did not like this. Nora could tell by the way his mouth tightened, and he looked accusingly at her. But there was nothing she could do about it now.

  “You presume that I have mercy,” Gon said, and Nora wondered if he meant to destroy them. He did not look inclined to leniency.

  “If it is your will to destroy us then let it be done,” Madame Elektra said, accepting his judgment. “But might we beg a boon of you first?”

  “And what is that?” Gon asked. He moved to stand over them, glaring down like an angry monarch.

  Head bowed, Madame Elektra rose carefully. She daintily pushed back the ruffled cuff of her left sleeve, exposing the delicately veined inside of her pale wrist, and then she used the gold fingernail protector of her right index finger to slice through the skin. “Drink of our blood, so that our memories might be preserved for all time in the vessel of your eternal flesh.”

  A little torrent of black blood trickled down her arm. Gon watched this for a moment, and then sighed, and went to sit across the table from Nora. He flopped down on the chair like an exhausted mortal and looked at Madame Elektra with an exasperated expression.

  “I am no god,” her maker said.

  Elektra looked at him as if she did not understand. Angus appeared to be weeping silently.

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Nora was amused. Did they really think her maker some sort of… vampyre god? If so, they’d failed to take into account the distinctly clay-like feet.

  Gon stroked his chin for a moment and then rose. “I will grant your request on one condition,” he said.

  “Yes?” Elektra breathed.

  “You must repent of your evil ways,” Gon said. “From this night forth, you must feed only on the wicked.”

  “Yes, Master!”

  “And you must swear to enforce the Edict of Innocent Blood, so far as you are capable of enforcing it,” he added.

  “Yes! I swear it!”

  “There must be no more attacks in the papers,” he went on, taking on that lecturing tone that Nora was much, much too familiar with. “No more stories of white-faced demons preying on the denizens of London.”

  “I promise!”

  “Then give me your blood,” Gon said, and she stepped forward to offer her bleeding wrist to him.

  Gon seized her arm and brought the wound to his lips. Madame Elektra cried out as he sucked her blood into his mouth, her gasp a mix of religious ecstasy and sensual pleasure. Gon swallowed, eyeli
ds fluttering as her memories passed through the Living Blood into his mind, and then he moved to Angus. “And you,” he said, pulling the enormous man to his feet. Gon Shared with Angus, and then the big man collapsed back onto the floor, bawling shamelessly. Nora almost laughed, and then it struck her what was actually transpiring here.

  Her master had granted these vampyres true eternal life!

  Both were powerful blood drinkers and might live for thousands of years, but they were not true immortals. They were not Eternals. They would die someday. Death, for them, was as inescapable as it was for any mortal man.

  But her master could not die.

  Gon was a true immortal, the rarest of their breed, and he was enfolding their memories in the everlasting vessel that was his undying flesh, preserving their souls for all time.

  Nora gasped when the realization struck her, and she covered her mouth with her hands, tears starting from her eyes as she shared in their rapture. Was this not what all religions promised their adherents? Eternal life in exchange for obeisance?

  But where religion promised, her maker could make real!

  Perhaps she was being influenced by the mania of her maker’s new apostles, but Nora felt terribly moved, and she sobbed aloud when Elektra shrieked and tore her veil away. The face beneath was exquisitely beautiful, pale and finely proportioned, with golden hair and great blue eyes and lush ruby red lips. Madame Elektra fell to the floor in a heap of black satin, weeping hysterically beside her cohort, clutching Gon’s pantsleg like a child.

  “Thank you, master!” she cried. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”

  Gon endured their adulation without remark, but he did not like it. He looked miserably at Nora as if she might rescue him from all this bowing and scraping.

  Nora felt terribly guilty for revealing her maker’s true identity, but surely this was better than all the discord and strife… all the killing.

  Wasn’t it?

  12

  The following night, Madame Elektra returned with Angus and three more blood drinkers, seeking an audience with Gon. The night after, there were twelve, and then nearly thirty. The oldest among them was a mere five hundred years old, a white-headed physician who was brought into the Blood during the Black Death. Most of the vampyres who came to see Nora’s maker were less than a hundred years old. The Interneccion, Gon explained to her later, had all but wiped out their race. That was why there were so few old ones, and none truly ancient. No one that knew the old ways, and few who remembered the Court of the Night’s Watch.

  “It is why they do not follow the Edicts,” he said to her, and then, in an apoplexy of guilt: “I have been murdering orphans!”

  They did not allow the supplicants into their home. It would have been the height of folly to do such a thing. But Gon went out to greet them when Nora sensed them lurking in the hedges or peeking at the manor from the woods. Sometimes they fled, but sometimes they stepped forward and made their desires known to the Eternal. Most just wanted to lay eyes on her maker, to see such an ancient creature for themselves. Despite the fact that vampyres fancied themselves immortals, blood drinkers did not often live so very long. They perished of violence or misadventure, and so frequently, that the very word “immortal” was often spoken with bitter irony. Perhaps it encouraged them to see one so very old, to see the promise made flesh. Others, like Madame Elektra, asked her maker to take their blood, to preserve their memories within his Eternal form. Gon Shared with them when they asked, though she knew he did not like it. He did it out of guilt, but he also did it out of compassion. He pitied the short-lived ones. Most, he claimed, were actually descendants of his mortal blood line, or the progeny of his Children in the Blood. Her master was impetuous, vain, sometimes even selfish, but there was great kindness in him, too. He wanted to help them. He wanted to save them.

  Such selflessness always takes its toll, and Nora watched as her maker’s compassion drained him of his vitality, of the joie de vivre she had always found so charming. He spent his every waking moment ministering to his “orphans”. He turned none away. He met them singly and in groups, taking advantage of his newfound celebrity to teach them the ancient ways.

  He called it the Moonlit Path. It was both a philosophy and a set of rules. These principles, he promised his supplicants, would give their lives purpose. They would give meaning to their existence, something more than just survival and the satiation of their endless hunger.

  The rules were simple, really. They must revere the living. They must feed only on the wicked. And mortal man must never learn that vampyres were real.

  That above all else.

  The Living Blood must always remain a secret from the mortal world. For if mortal man ever discovered the secret of their immortal blood, they would wage such a war to possess and control it that they would lay the very earth to waste.

  It seemed rather practical to Nora, but Gon’s acolytes welcomed it as revelation, which both amused and saddened her.

  She was no more and no less impressed with her maker than she had ever been. She had shared the man’s bed, had seen him at his best and at his worst. She recalled the passage in the bible: “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Nor in the boudoir, she thought wryly. Not that they shared a bed anymore. Their relationship had remained strictly platonic—well, maybe not strictly, but mostly, for certain-- since the day Nora discovered who and what he really was. Her maker was kind to her, as he had always been, but he withdrew from her the moment that she violated his trust.

  And that was what it was to him—a violation—whether she meant to do it or not. She regretted it terribly, and mourned for what might have been between them if things had been different, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She could not undo it, and she had her own affairs to look after. She pursued her interests and enjoyed her clandestine affair with the mortal bookseller John Worthy, and life went on, strangely, for the two of them, the immortal bookworm and her ancient, eternal master.

  Finally, one morning, with dawn simmering on the horizon like burning coals, Gon took her aside and announced that he was leaving.

  She pretended to be surprised by his declaration, though she had sensed his desire to leave growing in his mind for months by then. She pretended to be sad, and she was, a little, but she was nearly as relieved as she was unhappy. She would miss him, probably more than she thought she would, but she was ready to live on her own, and tired of entertaining all the vampyres who came seeking enlightenment from her ancient maker.

  “Where will you go?” she asked, though she knew the answer already. She could see it in his mind. But because her telepathy was so abhorrent to him, they pretended she could not read his every waking thought now.

  “The New World,” he said, looking wistfully toward the salmon colored sky. “The American frontier, I believe. I think it will be restful for me there. The memory of that country does not run so very deep. There are not so many… graveyards.”

  “And what of us? What of me?”

  “You will be fine,” he said. He glanced guiltily at her, then returned his gaze to the horizon. “You are a bright and capable young woman. You have your books, and that handsome scholar, John Worthy. Madame Elektra will tie off any threads that I’ve left dangling.”

  “She’s become a devoted apostle.”

  “I intend to Share my blood with her before I leave. She should know our history. It will insure she does not forsake the Path after I am gone. In my own bungling way, I have accomplished what I set out here to do. It is time to go, before familiarity tarnishes the allure I have for these English vampyres.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” Nora said with a chuckle, thinking of the zealous gleam that came into Madame Elektra’s eyes whenever her maker was near.

  Madame Elektra had forsaken the veil and all her eccentric affectations. As it turned out it was all just a ruse, all her outlandish mannerisms, a ploy to obscure her humble beginnings. Before becoming the queen of th
e London Vampyre Hives, she had been a meagre botton-holer, working the night shift in one of the hundreds of squalid sweatshops that operated in the city. She was made into a blood drinker by an equally impoverished vampyre, who attacked her as she was walking to work one night, just like in the papers.

  Nora knew her whole tragic history, though she pretended to ignorance, just as she concealed the true extent of her psychic powers from her maker. If she did not do this, she would become even more of a pariah than she already was. She was tolerated now because she was the Blood Child of the legendary Gon, but that acceptance was limited.

  We all wear our veils, Nora thought.

  “Oh, it would happen,” Gon said with wry amusement. “It is inevitable. I think that is why God, if He truly exists, hides His face from us. Eventually someone would peek beneath his skirt.”

  “And see his feet of clay?”

  “All gods have feet of clay,” Gon said.

  13

  “We’re here,” Sam said, throwing the Aston Martin into park.

  It was a moment before Nora came back to the present. She saw that they were parked before a colonnaded wall in the center of an open courtyard. The stone columns were old and gray. A few of them had buckled and lay in untidy jumbles, like chunks of petrified wood. Flurries of snow twirled in the headlights. The ruins of the medieval monastery had no charm in the moonless dark. Just hulking shapes, edges obscured by snow.

  Nora could feel the other immortals who were waiting here for them. Justus. Apollonius. And one other. An immortal whose mind she could not penetrate. Justus’s Eternal companion Agnes, perhaps? Nora did not know for certain, and did not have time to probe the vampire’s mind more thoroughly. Her fellow travelers were already clambering from the vehicle, eager to be free after the long drive across the Rhineland. Few vampires could tolerate confinement for very long.

  Nora unclasped her seatbelt and got out of the car. The wind caught her hair and whipped it into Gorgon coils. She drew her coat more tightly around herself, though the cold could not harm her. One of the benefits of being a vampire.