1
“Bitte! Bitte, lassen sie mich! Töte mich nicht!”
The man who just begged me to release him struggled against his bonds, making the legs of the chair he was secured to thump and screech across the floor. The chair was an antique, a French Louis the Fifteenth style armchair with a hand-carved frame. My captive’s handsome, squarish face gleamed with sweat. His hair clung to his brow in wet tendrils. He was flush, terrified, enraged. The smell of his emotions was intoxicating. The rawness of it, the animal musk. The scent of sweat is almost as fine as the scent of blood to creatures like me.
I knew he was begging me to spare his life because I speak German fluently. I was born in Germany, after all. 30,000 years ago, give or take a thousand years.
That’s right. You heard me correctly. I just claimed to be 30,000 years old. Those of you who’ve read the first volume of my memoirs already know this. For those who are just “tuning in”, as the modern saying goes, please allow me to introduce myself.
I am the vampire Gon.
Of all the vampires in the world, so far as I know, I am the oldest.
I guess that would make me the oldest living German, too. Funny. I never really thought of that before.
I sat quietly on the edge of my bed, my white hands clasped between my knees, and I watched the man writhe.
This killer, this villain: I had bound him to my sturdy wooden chair with duct tape.
Wonderful invention, duct tape. You can use it for just about anything. Fix a leaky sink. Patch a broken car window. Secure a man you are about to eat to a chair. I don’t think the average person really stops to think about a vampire buying duct tape at a hardware store, but we do. I always keep a roll handy. You never know when you’re going to have guests for dinner.
Maybe you think I’m cruel. Maybe you’re feeling a bit of sympathy for my reluctant guest.
Well, don’t!
He deserves his fate. He’s a murderer, just like me. He showed his victim less mercy just an hour ago, when he killed her on the docks beside the icy Meuse, than I intend to show to him.
I hunger, you see.
The blood lust came upon me tonight with an urgency I could not ignore. I was sitting in my den, click-click-clicking away on the second volume of my memoirs when it struck.
I’d been ignoring my hunger for days as I labored over my writing. I am a slow and meticulous writer, if not a very talented one. There was no such thing as written language when I was born. My people sometimes drew pictures in the dirt, but even then, we had an irrational suspicion of such things. It was our custom to erase our markings after we made them, to rub them out lest they somehow influence our thoughts, or the thoughts of any who viewed them. It’s not too different than your current superstitions about spilt salt or broken mirrors, so the written language, to me, can be a bit difficult, even after thirty thousand years.
As a writer, I tend to go back over what I have written again and again, obsessively changing a word here or a punctuation mark there, rearranging nouns and verbs because I subconsciously construct my sentences with a passive voice and it annoys me. She was going… He was doing… Instead of she went, he did.
I wonder what that says about me, this tendency to think and express myself passively? I certainly don’t consider myself a passive creature. Being a bloodthirsty strigoi, I’ve always considered my personality downright aggressive, but maybe I deceive myself. Maybe my inability to end this long and desolate existence is the ultimate proof of my passivity.
So anyway, I was hunched over my laptop (see? I do it all the time!) when my stomach snapped down like a steel trap, making all kinds of uncouth, toad-like sounds. I winced at the sudden pain, baring my vampire fangs, surprised how quickly the thirst had come on. My stomach felt like it was trying to tie itself into a knot!
I should never be shocked by the hunger. The bloodlust is always there, at the core of my existence. It has been my singular and most constant companion all through the millennia. Sometimes it has the decency to mind its manners, and sometimes it’s downright rude. Tonight, it threw an abrupt and impressive temper tantrum, stomping its feet and banging its head against the walls like an untrained child, stunning me with its urgency. The ferocity of my need surprised and frightened me.
Blood! I need blood now!
I realized I’d ignored my need for sustenance for a dangerous amount of time. I’d been rewriting a particularly vexing passage, unhappy with the flow of the words, and just kept pushing my deprivation out of my mind. I hadn’t gone out in days. I hadn’t even showered. I knew I needed to hunt before I lost all rational thought. If that happened, I would feed on the first innocent person who crossed my path. But first I had to get this paragraph just right…
When the blood hunger struck, bending me forward like I’d been punched in the gut, I realized there was no putting it off. I had to go now!
You see, I try to be a conscientious vampire. I’m not an evil or uncaring immortal. I try to monitor my blood hunger much the same way a diabetic human must monitor his blood sugar levels, because when I get too starved, I can be a real bastard! If I get hungry enough, I’ll rip the head off a virgin nun and suck the blood from the squirting stump of her neck.
Being an ethical demon, that’s something I try to avoid.
So I showered, wriggled into some nice clean clothes (tight, sexy leather pants and a black turtleneck with long sleeves; as a published vampire, I must keep up appearances, you know) and then I put my laptop to sleep and walked to my balcony.
Beyond the drapes and the frosted glass panes of my balcony door, the city beckoned.
Liege is a beautiful city. Say that word: “Liege”. The sound of it is musical to my ears. The feel of the word on my tongue is a sensual one, but the city itself, the city is the real wonder. A million bright lights spread all around, and the traffic… traffic crowds the countless winding streets, even at this hour.
The Belgian city is famous for its vibrant night life. Even so late and cold, the boulevards are busy. Its denizens march along the icy pavement, bundled up for warmth, their breath blowing from their mouths in little puffs of white steam like cartoon word balloons. Christmas decorations blink and sparkle in all the shop windows. Cars honk. Engines rev and whine and burp. The sounds of modern life are so different from when I was born.
Standing on my balcony with the sharp December wind whipping through my hair, I suck in the wintery air and smile. I imagine I can feel the heartbeat of the city as it awaits me, eager, like a lover on satin bed sheets, powdered and hot with desire. The ebb and flow of its traffic is like the blood rushing through my veins, the living black blood we immortals call the Strix.
Anyone who saw me right then would have screamed in horror and ran for their lives. I looked like a real hobgoblin. When I go too long without feeding, my flesh turns chalk white and shrivels to my bones. You can see my withered veins, like squirmy blue worms, knit through the skin of my temples, my throat and the backs of my hands. But that is how a starving vampire looks. It’s not a pretty sight.
Even when I’m not starved, it’s evident I’m no longer human. My skin is white as marble. My fangs are long and sharp. My eyes gleam like fire frozen in amber, reflecting any light that falls into them. Peering out across the city, my city, eyes shining like gold lanterns, the sharp tips of my teeth curved out over my bottom lip like the canines of a wolf… only a fool wouldn’t realize instantly what I was.
But I was all alone, standing on my balcony a dozen floors above the street, and I only paused for a moment to relish the chill December wind before I bent a little at the knees and launched myself into the open sky.
The high-rise buildings tilted in the heavens, swaying like the masts of a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Their glowing windows streaked past. I put out my arms with a beatific smile, my auburn hair streaming out behind me. Weightless. Flying… then I twisted in the air and landed in a crouch on the ledge of a neighboring balcony. I leapt. Clung to the
concrete wall of an old office building like an insect (the strange texture of my flesh gives me this ability) and then I climbed. I scaled the building in a flash, dashed across the roof, and then I launched myself into the sky again.
I hunted: a killer looking to catch a killer.
And this is what the killer cat dragged to his killer home.
I hadn’t learned his name yet. In fact, he’d just come to. The force of my accelerated movement, when I whistled out of the dark and snatched him from the ground, had knocked him unconscious.
I know firsthand what it’s like to be snatched from the earth like that. I was a human once, and the monster who made me what I am now abducted me in the exact same manner. We vampires have prodigious strength and unbelievable speed. We can move faster than the human eye can see, and when one of us grab you at that speed, it feels like you’ve been hit by a bus. Or like the dark just made a giant fist and punched you with it.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed, regarding him hungrily, when he stirred and began the swim back to awareness.
First, he raised his head. He’d been sitting for a long time, slumped against the silver straps of the duct tape I’d wrapped around his chest. Body limp. Chin tucked down to chest. Breathing with a slushy flapping of his lips. After a time, he twitched his legs and raised his head. Mumbled something. He opened his eyes and blinked them-- once, twice-- still confused and groggy. As I continued to stare at him, mouth watering, he finally jerked completely awake and, with a curse, whipped his head back and forth, staring around my suite in alarm.
He noted my presence across the room from him and stammered in German for help.
I did not reply.
And that’s how we remained for a time, me sitting there watching him twist and jerk in the expensive French chair I’d duct taped him to, my victim freshly awakened and furiously trying to free himself.
“Wer bist du? Lass mich gehen!” he demanded.
He was a beautiful man. I think that might be what kept me from draining him immediately. Like most vampires, I’m strongly attracted to physical beauty. It has stayed my hand in the past—as with my first vampire child Ilio, whose innocence stilled my desire when all I wanted was to feast on his blood.
Stocky, mid-thirties, with lush masculine features, my victim had large, deep-set gray eyes, a bulbous nose and prominent cheek bones. Not your modern definition of beauty. No. This was no emaciated mannequin, no androgynous whore with ribs standing out like the slats of a fence and sharp jutting hip bones. His was not the beauty of a starved and sexless skeleton. This was the beauty of the brute, the raw sexuality of the pillager, who comes in the night and knocks down your door and takes you against your will. The sweaty, grunting animal who rapes you in your fantasies. Who makes you come, even as he degrades you, even as he soils you with his lust. Generous mouth and square, cleft chin. His hair, thick and black and oily, shoulder-length and straight, with just a hint of feathered bangs. An expensive haircut and an expensive suit. Yes, he was a killer, a plunderer, a rapist, but a beautiful, wealthy, sexy monster, and looking at him there, I realized I wanted more than just his blood.
For simplicity’s sake, I will translate all that was spoken between us from that moment on.
2
“You bastard!” he cursed. “Let me go, fucker!”
It excited me to see him struggle. I can’t lie about that. I won’t lie. When I set out to write my memoirs, I promised myself I wouldn’t lie about anything. What good is setting your life to print if you are just going to make up a bunch of nonsense?
So, yes, it aroused me to see him struggle. It turned me on. If I was an actual living human, you might even be correct if you said it made me “horny”. But I don’t think in sexual terms much anymore. I can fuck like anyone else. It’s a myth that vampires cannot fuck, but the blood… the blood is what satisfies my desires.
Looking at him, smelling the fear in his sweat, hearing the rage in his voice… it excited me. I imagined slipping close to him, lowering my face to the crook of his neck and sliding my lips back to expose my fangs. I pictured the terror in his eyes as my icy tongue trailed over the throbbing blue vein in his neck, the anticipation as I held back the ultimate moment as long as I could bear… and then…and then the splash of his hot blood in my mouth, the shocking force of its spurts as I bite into his flesh.
Ah, the image is so vivid! Hoarse cries of pain and revulsion. His fear makes me laugh as I sink my fingers into the muscles of his shoulders and savage him. I release all restraint. I indulge myself. Let the predator out of its cage. I’m in his lap, shaking my head back and forth in the crook of his neck like a wolf ripping the guts from a rabbit’s belly, the meat in his neck splitting and tearing.
Bite him. Maul him. Chew his neck open. Blood gushing from the ragged wounds. Pulsing in my mouth. Splattering my chin and cheeks. Cascading down my cold, hard skin.
I lick the drying blood from my fingers when he’s dead…
Shivering, I enjoyed my little pre-game fantasy. I rarely indulge myself like this. Normally, I eat on the go.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
He stopped struggling and gaped at me. “What?”
“I asked what your name is,” I said.
“Lukas,” he answered finally, his face still red and sweaty.
His fat lips curled as he spoke, as if it degraded him to answer me. He had the same look on his face when he took the skinny girl from the trunk of his expensive German car. I watched him break her neck and roll her dead body into the river with that same disdainful sneer. When I snatched him from the loading dock moments later, he’d smelled of sex and expensive sandalwood cologne.
His Volkswagen was probably still parked on the dock, its engine running. That’s what attracted my attention as I leapt from rooftop to rooftop, searching for a soul to take, a black wicked soul to feed to the monster inside me: the sound of the car’s engine, rumbling in what should have been, at that time of night, a deserted locale.
I was hunting the warehouse district in a rundown section of Liege. I often get lucky near the river. Bodies of water have always attracted predators, and I am the ultimate predator, one who hunts his own kind.
I zeroed in on the solitary vehicle, flying through the whirling snow to land at the edge of a condemned building. The rumble of the auto’s engine drew me like the smell of fresh blood-- here to this silent, decaying plaza, where the streets were blocked with chain link fences and signs to warn off trespassers. He might as well have fired a flare into the sky. I crouched down and peered over the edge of the roof, spotting him immediately below. This man and his victim.
The exhaust of his car churned out thick clouds of condensed vapor as he kneeled over the trembling girl. The white mist made the tableau strangely romantic, like a 1940’s detective movie, one shot in black and white. Something starring the American actor Humphrey Bogart, perhaps. Or maybe a better description of the scene would have been “gothic”.
Yes, they were like two lovers, clinging to one another on a foggy moor. The girl was naked save a pair of filthy, stretched out panties… and the zip-ties cinched around her wrists. She looked so used up and pathetic, her face a skull beneath her bruised white skin. A battered angel, fallen to earth, this weary girl-child, reclining weakly in his arms.
I didn’t realize he intended to kill her until he gripped her head between his hands and wrenched it savagely to the side. I did nothing to stop him. I’d stumbled across the scene a moment too late.
One instant they were kneeling together like a flip-flopped pieta, the next there was a muffled crunch and an expanding pool of steaming urine swelling between the dying girl’s thighs. I would have saved her. I promise. His cruelty took me by surprise.
I smiled—not showing him my fangs yet. For the moment, I kept them out of sight. “My name is Gaspar Valessi. Here in this modern world, anyway. I’ve had a great many others throughout the years.”
Lukas regarded me as if
I was a madman. Which I was. You cannot live as long as I have without going a little bit insane. “So? I don’t care who the fuck you are! I don’t care if you think you’re Napoleon fucking Bonaparte! Let me out of this fucking chair!”
He ignored me then in a paroxysm of rage, jerking and thrashing against his bonds. He made the chair hop up and down an inch or two. The arms of the chair squeaked as he began to twist them loose.
I wondered if my neighbors in the suite below were home tonight, and what they must think was going on in my apartment. I’ve nodded to them in the elevator a few times. They were an older French couple, cultured and polite, he a retired banker, she his trophy wife gone just a little to seed. Not yet enough to surrender her face to the surgeon’s knife, but soon I’d wager.
I live in an expensive penthouse and the walls are soundproof, but I’m sure they could hear the chair thumping up and down on the floor, even if it was muffled. I wondered what fantasies the rhythmic thumping would inspire in their erudite imaginations.
I’d have to get his attention before he broke my fine antique chair and I was forced to finish this. I didn’t want to finish it—not so quickly tonight. I felt like playing with my food.
“You like to say ‘fuck’ a lot,” I observed.
“What?” He paused to ogle me.
“You like to say ‘fuck’ a lot. I think you like the word. Fuck. Fucking.”
“Yeah, so?” He twisted at the torso. My Louis XV gave a squawking protest that made me wince.
“Did you fuck the little girl before you killed her tonight?”
He went very still. Every single muscle in his face and neck bunched up tight as springs, ready to fly apart. I saw his cheeks turn splotchy, and his eyes lost their focus.
Fascinated, I watched his eyes twitch: up, to the side, down. Tiny movements. Thinking fast. I could practically hear the gears in his brain whirling into sudden, frenzied motion, working quickly, trying to come up with some falsehood or excuse that might exonerate him. Finally, he squinted at me and spoke. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you lunatic,” he said.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 26
