The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3)

by Joseph Duncan

  Those wicked, greedy Oombai!

  Ilio had spotted pillars of smoke rising from their settlement earlier.

  “Good! I hope the Neirie razed that cursed village,” I replied. “I hope they burned it to the ground!”

  I didn’t expect to encounter a people so cruel when we came down from the mountains. Ilio still lived then, a mortal child on the cusp of becoming a man. I’d wanted him to have a natural human life, to know a woman’s love, to have a family, and so we went to the village of the Ground Scratchers hoping to find him a wife. But the Oombai stole my mortal child from me, made a mockery of all my hopes, and in my wrath, I visited complete and total destruction on them.

  “Can you hear them singing, Father?”

  Ilio squatted in the high grass at my side, a short, stocky lad with round cheeks and long dark hair woven into braids. He would forever be a halfling, made immortal just at the cusp of manhood, neither fully a man, nor completely a child.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him, thinking, How many times have I chastised you for calling me father?

  It was not that I disliked his familiarity. I loved him as I had loved all of my children, but I feared he had grown too dependent on me. What if something happened to me?

  I did not know how utterly immune to death I was. Not then.

  But if the boy was anything, he was persistent. He was much more stubborn than I, anyway! I did not have the energy to argue with him about it.

  Besides, I reminded myself, you yourself call him “son” in your thoughts. You have no right to reprimand him.

  Ilio watched the distant campfires, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. It pained my soul to see him so changed. His form whitened, removed from time. An eternal boy-child. He had only been a vampire a handful of days, and there was still a hint of mortal softness to his flesh, but I knew even that would soon be gone, and then he would be like me—a creature of living stone, cast adrift on the listless watercourse of eternity.

  It was all my fault. I should have let him die.

  It would have been a mercy. A few moments of pain, fear, then release from his mortal shell, his spirit rising to take its place in the ghost world, or whatever afterlife his people believed in. But I was unwilling to part with him. I had grown to love the boy too much.

  “I wish we could go and visit the Neirie,” he said. “I would like to see them up close. Join them in their singing.”

  “It is a joyous music,” I agreed. “They celebrate their freedom, but you know it is not safe for you to venture very close to mortal men. Your thirst for their blood would surely get the best of you. Perhaps, when you learn to control your hunger a little better, we might venture among the living. For now, you’ll simply have to be satisfied with observing them from afar.”

  “I understand, Father,” he said, dropping his eyes in respect. “Still,” he said, peeking up at me with a smile, “I think it would be interesting.”

  2

  I patted him on the shoulder as I rose.

  “It won’t be forever, Ilio,” I assured him. “Though it may seem like that right now.”

  I scanned the surrounding plains, trying to decide which direction we should go.

  “What are you looking for?” Ilio asked.

  “You are just made a blood drinker, boy,” I explained, squinting toward a distant copse. I could sense many small animals moving in its shadows, tiny warm-blooded creatures that had risen with the night, looking-- like us-- to fill their bellies with food. But I sensed no large animals. Not large enough to satisfy our hunger, anyway. “The living blood inside you must be fed often when you are newly made, or your hunger will torment you unceasingly.”

  “The Hunger,” he muttered, his dark eyes grim. He already knew the relentless hunger of which I spoke. It is maddening in the first few years of immortality. In fact, it is pretty much all a vampire can think about, like a young man who’s just had his first fine taste of sex.

  “Yes, let us go hunt now!” he said. “I am starving!”

  The urgency in his voice made me laugh. He had eaten just a couple hours ago-- filled his gut on the blood of one of the Oombai warriors who’d pursued us on the plains. If you’ve ever raised teenagers, however, you know how it is with young vampires. Their bellies are bottomless pits. Still, I didn’t want Ilio to be tempted by the blood of the Neirie. We had sworn to protect them, not feed on them like parasites.

  “We’ll go in just a moment,” I assured him. “I’m just trying to find some game so we do not wander the grasslands aimlessly.”

  “Trying to find some game?”

  “Yes, now be quiet!” I answered, irritated.

  Always so many questions!

  I turned in a circle, sending my senses out like invisible tentacles. That is how I imagined them. My senses probing into the high grass, the dry washes, the shadowy copses. Like delicate antennae. I detected insects, hares, a solitary fox. Ilio waited impatiently, then interrupted me again.

  “Do you sense anything?”

  I sighed.

  I decided to take the opportunity to educate him. Turning to address the young man, I said, “You know that your senses are more finely tuned now that you are a blood drinker. Do you remember the first night that I changed you? How the world around you became a whirlwind of sight and sound and smell?”

  “Yes…?”

  “I taught you how to close your thoughts to it that night,” I continued, “but now you must learn something a little more difficult.”

  He understood. “Now I must learn how to master the whirlwind!”

  “It would be a valuable weapon in your arsenal of skills,” I said.

  He nodded, stepping away from me and squinting into the distance.

  “Take your time,” I advised him. “Lower the barriers in your mind one at a time, but do it cautiously. Only let in the sensations as you are able to absorb them.”

  “All right.”

  Moving behind the boy, I said, “First, allow yourself to see to the full extent that your eyes are capable…“

  Ilio gasped, squeezing his eyes shut.

  I waited.

  After a moment, he opened his eyes to narrow slits.

  “I can see… everything!” he hissed.

  “I know.”

  “Every star… every blade of grass…”

  “I know.”

  “There is a cloud of mosquitos swirling above a pool of water. It is so far away… but I can see it like I am standing right beside the pond.”

  He groaned.

  “I can see their wings flapping!”

  Tears beaded his eyelashes-- the tarry black tears that blood drinkers weep. He jerked back suddenly, as if dodging a spear. “It is too much!” he exclaimed.

  “It’s all right,” I said soothingly.

  “I’m sorry, Thest. It is just too much!”

  “You have an eternity to master your new skills,” I said reassuringly. “You cannot expect to learn them all in one night. “

  He nodded, wiping the black tears from his cheeks, but I wondered—I worried... Did he really have an eternity to master his new skills? I had survived the grinding teeth of the glaciers. How many millennia I’d slept in their dreamless embrace I could not say. But I had survived, and I did not look a day older than the moment I was made into this thing that I am. Ilio, however, seemed made of more fragile material. Perhaps it was because he was made so young—only half a man. Perhaps the gifts the living blood bequeathed weakened with each descendent generation. I only knew that Ilio was a far more delicate blood drinker than I. I suspected that he could die, just as my maker had died, and the thought of it was a horror to me.

  To lose so fine a son--!

  I slapped him on the back.

  “Come. Let us fly on the wind. I spied a fine stag while you were trying out your skills.”

  Ilio nodded, looking morose.

  “You can practice some more after we’ve fed,” I promised. I grinned to cheer him, bending dow
n to catch his eye. “I will even tell you tales of my most embarrassing failures. I was a clumsy fool when I was first made into a blood drinker.”

  Ilio smiled, peeking up at me. “You were?”

  “Of course! Did you think I sprang from my maker’s lair a master of all of these powers?”

  Ilio laughed, and laughing with him, I took three running steps and leapt into the chill night air. “Come, Ilio! Follow me!” I cried back to him as the wind lashed through my great feathered cloak.

  3

  After we fed, I kept my promise to the boy and told him of my early days as a blood drinker.

  My vampire child knew the origin of my parasitic nature. I had already told him of the fierce blood drinker who had attacked our neighbors, a tribe of Neanderthals, and how the warriors of my village had gone to battle the creature in his lair, afraid our community would fall victim to him next.

  This the boy knew. That there were two of them, a master and a slave. That we had laid an ambush for the little one, unaware that there was more than just the one. I managed to slay the little one-- with a lucky thrust of my knife-- but his powerful master attacked us moments later.

  I woke to find myself in a charnel pit, trapped like an insect in the web of a hungry spider. There, in that terrible pit, he made me what I am. The fiend changed me against my will, tried to break my spirit with violence. He wanted a replacement for the slave that I’d dispatched with my blade, but the living blood wrought a more powerful change upon me than the brutal old beast could ever have imagined.

  “I thought only to return to my people after I slew the Foul One,” I said. “My only thought, as I climbed from that pit, was to return to the wives and children that I loved.”

  Ilio listened gravely, the campfire gleaming in his eyes, his belly full of stag’s blood.

  “I didn’t think of the danger my lust for blood might pose to them,” I continued, staring into the fire. “My maker knew only violence, so violence was all that he taught me. I knew nothing of our nature, nothing of our powers, or the hunger that so easily takes possession of us. I was an orphan blood drinker, ignorant and frightened. A danger to every mortal around me.”

  “What happened when you returned to your people?” Ilio asked, his eyes wide with trepidation. “You didn’t hurt your children, did you?”

  “No,” I sighed. “Not my family, thank the ancestors! But I did hurt someone, I’m ashamed to admit. It was a man named Ludd, an old warrior. He had stayed behind to defend the village while the younger men went off to war.

  “Gray-headed like my father he was, but always glum, always looking on the dark side of the world. He was standing guard when I returned. We had moved our camp to a place called Bubbling Waters, hoping to evade the demon-ghost who was preying on our neighbors, but the Foul One had found our village anyway, snatched away some children and a good mother named Pendra.

  “Ludd was too excited at first to notice how I’d changed. We went to rouse the camp, walking side by side. We were about halfway back when he became suspicious of me. He’d finally noticed how pale I was, how my eyes seemed to catch the light of the moon, but it was too late for him by then. I could smell his blood, and I lost control of myself. I attacked him. I fed on his blood, and then I took his body and hid it in a bog.

  “I knew then that I couldn’t trust myself to return to my tribe. Even though I had slain the fiend who was preying on my people, my maker had defeated me, for I lost the very thing I had fought him to preserve.”

  “So what did you do?” Ilio asked.

  I poked a stick into our fire and watched the sparks swirl into the sky.

  “I hid,” I said. “I found a cave in a remote mountaintop—one that overlooked my village—and there I stayed, year after year after year. I protected my people, mostly from myself. I explored my new strength, my powerful new senses. I fed on game while I tried to master the Hunger. I learnt how to fly, how to scale sheer rock walls. I learned that I could stay underwater for hours at a time, and that my body would quickly heal itself no matter how terribly I was injured. I was never able to tame the blood lust, though. I attacked any warm-blooded creature that ventured too near to me. It was impossible for me to resist it.

  “In despair, I watched my wives and children grow older. My male companion, Brulde, died, then my Fat Hand wife Eyya. Nyala died the following winter. My children married and had children of their own, and then their children married and had children.

  “From time to time I came down from the mountain to defend them. When our enemies came slinking through the pass, intent on snatching away our children, I flew down from my cave like a howling god of death. I tore them apart with my bare hands, fed on them without remorse. Later, when I spied a flood that threatened to sweep away the village, I flew to them faster than the water could flow, and commanded them to retreat to higher ground.

  “They called me Thest-u‘un-Mann, the Man Who is a Ghost. It was many, many generations before I was able to move among them, and even then, when I appeared unto my children’s children’s children, it always seemed to be a very uncertain thing for me, the battle between my willpower and my hunger for their blood.”

  Ilio whined unhappily, “And how many generations must I wait before I can walk among mortal men? You are so much more powerful than I, Thest!” He tossed a stick into the flames. “Perhaps, for me, it is a hopeless aspiration!”

  I laughed affectionately. “Don’t be so dramatic, Ilio! You have one advantage I never had.”

  “What?” he demanded, overwrought by his imaginings.

  I grinned broadly and thumped my chest. “Me, silly boy! You have me! I will be your teacher, your counsel and your guide. I will hurry you on your path to mastery.”

  “And will you also be a father to me?” he asked slyly, peeking at me from the corner of his eye.

  “Yes, boy. Yes,” I surrendered with a sigh. “If a father is what you require to be content, then I will be a father to you.”

  Ilio whooped and leapt across the fire to me. He was not as small a child as he believed, however, and his enthusiastic hug knocked me flat onto my back.

  “Control yourself!” I laughed. “You are much too big to jump into my lap like that!”

  Ilio rolled off of me, smiling up at the stars. “I am sorry, Father,” he said. “It is just… I am blessed by the gods to have a guardian like you. You saved me from the blood drinker who stalked and killed my tribe. You raised me as your own child, and then saved me again when those terrible Oombai did their best to slay me. If it wasn’t for you, I’d just be rags and bones by now. Instead, I have become a magic spirit. Or a god, like the ones my uncles spoke of when we gathered at night by the fire.”

  I turned on my side, looking at him sternly. “No, Ilio. You are not a god. Never think that! You can perish just like any mortal child. You are only stronger, more resilient, than our mortal brethren. Our kind can be slain. I’ve done it with these very hands-- and I was a mortal man when I did it. So do not deceive yourself. You are no god. You are only a blood drinker.”

  “I am sorry,” he said quickly. “I only spoke in excitement.”

  “That is all right, Son,” I told him, putting my arms behind my head. “If you promise to be careful, I promise not to coddle you. You must become strong so that you can care for yourself if anything should happen to me.”

  “I will work hard to master my new skills, Father,” Ilio swore. “And I will work even harder to master this hunger for blood. I want to live among the mortals. I want to have a home.”

  He smiled then, his eyes twinkling at some inner rumination.

  “And women,” he murmured. “I would like to have mates. As many as you once had. Two. Maybe even three.”

  I chuckled, staring up at the heavens. “Three wives?” I asked. “No one can say you lack ambition, Son!”

  4

  As the world rolled round to the day side of the heavens, I took Ilio into my arms and wrapped us both in my cloak
. It was a beautiful garment, that cloak, lined with sleek fur inside and out, and boasting a bristling collar of crisp raven feathers. It was regal and resplendent, and I was inordinately proud of that silly thing. It also made a good shelter for us during the daylight hours.

  You should already know, my cherished readers, that Hollywood’s depiction of vampires is something of a joke. How could any preternatural creature survive even a week if they exploded into flames at the slightest wisp of sunlight on their skin? I assure you, we don’t! In fact, there’s a sunlamp sitting less than a meter from my desk as I type this passage. It is casting its artificial daylight upon a lovely potted lily. But just imagine if I were a fictional Hollywood vampire. I’d be steaming pile of ash right now, destroyed by a lamp.

  Actually, why don’t we dispose of all those myths, right this very instant, especially for those of you who have just recently “tuned in”.

  First and foremost: crucifixes. No offense to you Christians, but I find crucifixes repulsive. Not because they have any kind of supernatural power over me. They don’t. I find them abhorrent because of the atrocities they remind me of. If you’ve seen as many mortal men put to death on them as I have, you’d likely feel the same way. It is a terrible, painful way to die, one that was quite popular long before the followers of Christ made it a symbol of their religion. If I never have to see another soul writhing on one of those things, dying slowly of dehydration and exposure, I will be a happy blood drinker. For that matter, why a crucifix? Why not venerate some other symbol of Christ’s purported miracles? And we are accused of being morbid creatures!

  Let’s see... The smell of garlic does not repel me. (Really? An herb?) I can see myself in mirrors just fine. I can walk right into your home uninvited—though I wouldn’t, out of respect, if you are a good person. I cannot change into a bat or a wolf, although I think that it would be a wonderful power to command. I cannot turn to fog, or fold myself flat and slip through a door crack. It’s all just rubbish, really, most of the legends that are associated with vampires. Hollywood hokum.