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

by Joseph Duncan

  Such a profound and glorious love!

  With the birth of my granddaughters, Irema and Aioa, I knew all that it was to love, but I found that the joys of grandfathering were much different than the joys of fathering, which I knew already. In grandfathering, there is not the exhaustion of constant supervision, the midnight cries, the conflicts with one’s own selfish desires. I could play with my granddaughters to my contentedness, then hand them back to their exhausted parents. I could dote on them without fear or guilt of spoiling them. I was, after all, their Grandpapa! It was my job to spoil them!

  And in spoiling grand-babies, I found in Valas an equal, eager accomplice. Priss’s earthy father was as fond of children as I. There was many a day, when the season had returned to warmth, that we paraded our babies proudly through the village, grinning like fools as the women all cooed and made babble-talk and remarked how beautiful our granddaughters were and oh-my-how-quickly-they-are-growing! Side-by-side, my partner-in-crime and I.

  I wish I could tell you everything, every little detail, of those joyous times, but I know domestic bliss does not a thrilling story make. Just know that I was impossibly happy and bear with me as I detail my final days among the Tanti. My happiness, as always, would prove unfairly short-lived. It seems to be a recurring theme of my existence. I only beg your indulgence for a little while longer so that I might immortalize my twin beauties in the pages of this tome, and then we’ll get on with all the killing and the fucking.

  I promise.

  Irema and Aioa were uncommonly beautiful. I say this without bias, of course. They possessed the olive complexion of their father, with silky black hair and great fanning eyelashes, but the delicate features and startling blue eyes of their mother. Yorda, Valas’s wife, was of the opinion their eyes would change color as they grew older, but they never did. Their eyes retained that lovely shade of winter blue until the day that I last saw them, two fine and powerful women, huntress-goddesses who fought at my side against the vampires of the east. But we are talking right now of the days before the great vampire war, when they were just two inquisitive and affectionate toddlers, always eager to climb into the lap of their cold white grandpapa.

  They were so similar in appearance that people often confused one for the other, but I could always tell them apart. Irema was slightly more robust, bolder, while Aioa was the more delicate, the demure one, tenderhearted. They were so similar in appearance that Valas made necklaces for the girls, one with stones of blue for Irema, the other with stones of milky quartz for Aioa, and that worked fine until the clever little things got older and began to make a game of swapping their necklaces.

  I was in love with them both, my loneliness forgotten. I had even forgotten my dream seductress. I visited Ilio and his wife every evening, playing with the little ones until it was time for them to retire. Some nights I even rocked them to sleep in my arms, sitting on the floor beside the hearth.

  I witnessed Irema’s first tentative steps. I thought my heart would break when Aioa called me grandfather for the first time—adda, in Tanti. I watched them play with the little dollies I made for them of wood or bone or stone, sometimes for hours, and never once did I feel the urge to kill them and drink their blood.

  They grew quickly, the seasons whirling past. In the three years that followed, the old shaman who performed Ilio’s wedding ceremony passed on to the spirit world, and his protégé, a young man named Kuhnluhn, took over his duties. Yorda gave birth to a little boy, and Lorn got married to a fellow named Honch. Paba, the old Neirie I’d escorted back to his Tanti homeland, died that first winter, but he died contented in his sleep beside a grandson’s hearth.

  One summer evening, just a few months before the vampire thief came, Irema climbed into my lap. After tangling my beard for a little while, she looked up at me very seriously, and asked, “Adda, why is your skin so cold and white?”

  “I am T’sukuru, like your papa. We are different from the Tanti,” I answered.

  “But why?” she asked.

  “That is just how it is. Why is the sky blue, little one? Why do the birds sing?”

  She scowled at me. She didn’t understand. “When I grow up, I want to be cold and white like you,” she said, and I embraced her, sighing, “No, you do not, my beloved. No, you do not.” And her chubby little arms went around my neck to hug me back, so tiny and warm, her curly black hair tickling my lips and the tip of my nose.

  My beautiful grandbabies. They were my life. My love.

  And then the raiders came.

  2

  I call him the vampire thief because he stole away two children, and in so doing, he also stole the happiness I’d enjoyed living with the Tanti.

  Though I would not know it for another day or so, the blood drinker’s name was Hettut. He came in the night, in the winter of my third year with the Tanti, and snatched two sleeping children from beside their dozing parents.

  We found his tracks leading in from the forest to the east. From the eastern edge of the wilderness, where the great pines gave way to open meadow, he circled around the north side of the lake and struck the first lodge that he came unto.

  His victims were two Tanti boys named Pudhu and Emoch. They were only a little older than my darlings. I shudder to think how easily he might have taken Irema and Aioa, and I thank the ancestors that he did not. Cruel, I know, but a grandfather cannot help such merciless thoughts.

  The vampire’s icy touch woke the boys as he eased them from their sleeping furs. Both of them began to scream, first Emoch, then Pudhu moments later, and their parents leapt from their bedding in horror. Though their father, a fisherman named Iltep, reached immediately for his weapons, Hettut was T’sukuru, and he flew from the lodge with unnatural speed after grinning toothily at the children’s’ frightened parents, head twisted strangely to one side. He vanished into the night before the man’s blade could even clear its sheath, a plump squirming child tucked in the joint of each of his arms.

  If we were home, Ilio and I might have been able to save Iltep’s children, but we were far away when the blood drinker attacked, hunting in the snowy forest to the northwest of the village. If we had been home, Hettut might have even passed around the Tanti village, confused by the presence of other blood drinkers.

  Yes, I know: if and if…! Who can really say what might have happened? The ancestors might know, but not this man.

  I did have a strange sense of foreboding when I rose that evening, the sky crowded with dense gray snow clouds, or maybe I just made that up later, to spice the stew of self-recrimination, but really I think that I did. It was just a tingle in my guts. A sense that something unpleasant was bearing down on the village, and not just the storm heads creeping over the eastern peaks. I remember standing in front of my hut, sparse white flakes drifting down around me, the sky starless and thick with freight of snow, thinking there was some odd quality to the atmosphere that evening: the air was too heavy, the cold more cutting than it normally was. I dismissed it after a moment or two, and went on to Ilio’s home. I wish I had investigated further, but I did not.

  There was no way I could have known. There had been no sightings of the blood drinkers from the east since the fall of the Oombai three years before. Though they came up in conversation from time to time, the Tanti had forgotten about the eastern vampires just as surely as I. They didn’t even really think of Ilio and I as T’sukuru anymore. To them, we were only Tanti.

  It wasn’t until we were returning from our hunt, our bellies sloshing with the blood of a boar, that we realized something was amiss.

  “Look at that, Father!” Ilio said, pointing toward the village as we rounded the white hump of a hill. “Why are there so many torches? Everyone’s running through the streets!”

  (There were not actually streets in the village, just muddy strips of open ground running between the buildings—filling in with drifts of snow that night—so please do not lecture me on linguistics. The Tanti called the avenues between the
ir homes leptruff’u, which mean throat or open passage. I simply use the modern approximation.)

  I had been listening to the crunch of my feet sinking into the snow, enjoying the sound of it, the sensation of my feet punching through the crusty surface of the ice. The boar we had killed was slung across my shoulders, the warm tingle of its blood pulsing through my limbs. At Ilio’s exclamation, I looked up with a frown, following his pointing finger to the sparks of light winking between the tree trunks.

  “Something bad has happened,” I said.

  We both went still for a moment, lowering our mental defenses so that we could hear what was going on in the village. The hiss of the wind through the trees, the clatter of bare branches brushing against one another as they stirred, even the snap and flutter of the torches twinkling down there in the village, made the Tanti’s voices an unintelligible babble. I filtered through the extraneous sounds, pushing them out of my consciousness until only human voices remained.

  What I heard turned my heart to ice.

  Women were crying out, sobbing, calling after their husbands in fear. Someone was keening, “My babies! It took my babies!” And the men, speaking in loud, angry voices: “Where is Thest?” and “Its tracks head toward the mountains!” and “We have to set after it at once!”

  I heaved the boar off my shoulders. “Come, Ilio! Someone has violated the Tanti while we were away!”

  I flew down the hill toward the village, my bare feet kicking up great fans of snow. Fast as I was, however, Ilio was faster. Fearing for his mortal family, he raced ahead of me through the darkness, his passage whipping snow back in my face in a sudden icy flurry.

  3

  Pudhu and Emoch’s mother screamed shrilly at the sight of us, which is completely understandable, as we were moving at full speed, and it must have looked to her as if we’d suddenly melted from the darkness. Worse, we were buck naked and splattered in pig’s blood. We were lucky the Tanti men, who were working themselves into a fury, did not start chucking their spears at us immediately. If not for Valas, they probably would have.

  “It’s him! It’s him!” the boys’ mother wailed, a trembling finger pointed our direction. Her eyes rolled in the torchlight, empty of all thought save for her children.

  “Calm yourself, mother!” Valas snapped. “It is only Thest and Ilio!”

  Priss was standing nearby, her stepmother Yorda fretting at her shoulder. Ilio ran to his wife and grasped her upper arms. “Are the girls safe?” he demanded, and when she nodded he closed his eyes in relief.

  As did I.

  “What has happened, Valas?” I asked, after the spears and bows and knives pointed toward me had lowered.

  Before Valas could answer, Iltep, the boys’ father, shouted, “You fucking T’sukuru stole my babies, that’s what happened! From my very hearth!” His voice cracked as he shouted at me. His cheeks were wet with tears. Several men had taken hold of his arms-- to restrain him from chasing after the blood drinker, I assume. “Let me go, you cocklickers!” he snarled at them, twisting his body back and forth. “We can still save them!”

  “There is nothing you can do, Iltep! You know it!” one of the men restraining him said, not without sympathy, and Iltep railed against him, cursing profusely.

  “No man can prevail against the T’sukuru, but we are not all men here,” Valas said. All eyes turned to him, and then, when his meaning was understood, toward me. Valas squinted at me. “Will you aid us against your kindred, Thest? Will you help us to save Iltep’s children?”

  “Of course, Brother,” I said. “I told you before. I’ve told you all before! I have no allegiance to these blood drinkers from the east. They are no kin of mine.”

  Valas nodded, smiling grimly, while Iltep and his wife looked at one another in sudden hope. They all knew of my prodigious speed and strength, if not the full extent of my powers.

  “Then let us be after this craven fiend, before he does harm to good Iltep’s sons!” Valas declared. He hesitated, glanced down, then leered back up at me. “You might want to put some breeches on first.”

  4

  I had little hope we could rescue the children, but I was more than willing to make the attempt. I had helped Iltep with his labors many an evening. We were not close, but his rough tongue and bawdy humor had always amused me. The others tried to persuade the man to remain behind—saying he was too overwrought to be of any help—but he refused. I understood completely. I wouldn’t have been able to stay behind either.

  I think most of the men who took off in pursuit of the stolen children were about as optimistic as I of the boys’ safe return. I was confident of my abilities. I had no fear of being harmed. But I knew the Hunger. The beast we hunted would have no mercy for his victims—not even for children so young and innocent.

  The Tanti were well acquainted with the cruelty of the T’sukuru. This was not the first time a blood drinker had abducted someone from the village, though it had been many years since the last time a vampire had preyed on them. Long before our arrival. If not for my presence, and the trust they had in my strength, I doubt they would have pursued the T’sukuru into the wilderness. Like Valas said: no man can prevail against the T’sukuru. And for the most part, that was true. I had killed one such creature when I was a mortal, but only with the aid of four other men, not to mention a good deal of luck. And it had been a weak one. And day when the battle took place.

  At least the beast was keeping to the ground.

  So long as he stayed on the ground, it would be easy to track the creature. The snow was deep. In some places, the drifts were knee high. The beast’s tracks were plain to see in the jumping gold light of our torches, but I could see in the dark, regardless of moonlight or torch.

  I wasn’t certain why the villain had not taken to the treetops. It was what I would have done, rather than leave such a plain trail for vengeful villagers to pursue. There were plenty of trees to which the creature could take flight. The forest to the east of the village was dense, full of great old oaks and soaring pine, acacia and beech. Perhaps the vampire could not move into the treetops with two squirming children in his arms, or maybe he just wasn’t accustomed to flying through the trees as I was, or he didn’t believe the mortals were a threat to him. Whatever the reason, I was grateful the creature had not taken flight. I might have been able to track him through the canopy of the forest, but it would have been a much more difficult task.

  “Why do we hold back, Thest?” Ilio asked as he jogged through the snow at my side. “We’re much faster than these mortals. We should race ahead, catch the foolish blood drinker before he has a chance to harm the children!”

  “And what if there is more than one of them lurking in the forest?” I asked. “What if the one we pursue doubles back on us? He could slaughter our entire party in moments.”

  Ilio’s eyes widened, and then he looked grim and nodded. “I understand. I apologize for questioning your wisdom.”

  “No need,” I replied. “Just be on your guard.”

  As I raced through the snow, the Tanti villagers at my back, I was helpless but to recall my people’s battle with the fiend who made me. I do not know the name of my maker, only that he was powerful, cruel, and insatiable. He had glutted himself on the blood of our neighboring tribe, and would have killed them all if they had not fled from the region. When we went to make war on the beast, marching to the land of the Gray Stone People, my powerful maker and his strange vampire pet had killed nearly every single member of our war party. Only two had survived, my uncle and my companion Brulde, and I… I was made into this.

  I would not let the same fate befall my Tanti brethren. And if I got my hands on the leech that had raided my new home, I would rend the bloodsucker limb from limb!

  No! First, I would question him! Where are you from? Are there others nearby? We needed to know if there were more of them. And if there were, I would make him tell me if they were just passing through, or did they intend to make war? It woul
d be nice if I could make him answer some of my own questions, things I’d always wondered about—where do we come from, how many more of us are there, is there some way to undo this cursed affliction—but I knew this was no time for selfish concerns. Not with so many lives at stake.

  I smelled blood.

  Freshly spilled mortal blood!

  I faltered and saw Ilio, a moment later, do the same. We exchanged an anxious glance. The smell of blood, so strong… it did not bode well.

  “It’s close,” I said to the boy, and he nodded.

  It had begun to snow again. Heavy flakes, like puffs of cattail fluff, spiraled down from the lowering heavens. Far to the east, a sheet of ice broke loose from some steep mountain slope with a reverberating crack: an avalanche on the distant Carpathians. The rumble of all that falling ice thrummed in the still winter air as we rounded the hill.

  There, on the far side, lay one of the children.

  It was Emoch.

  The boy sprawled in a shallow ditch, a gully carved into the hill by spring runoff, empty now but for pebbles, the snow, and the little boy’s body. His clothes had been rent from his bruised white flesh, his throat torn savagely as if by a wild animal.

  As soon as his father caught sight of the boy, the fisherman fell to his knees. Iltep threw back his head and howled at the sky, the hundreds of little muscles in his neck standing out like ropes, his face turning purple. I and a few other Tanti men approached the pitiful corpse as the rest of the group encircled the bereaved father, trying to comfort him, to shield him from the sight.

  “Oh, that poor baby!” Valas murmured.

  The snow around the boy was splattered liberally with blood, still steaming. A spiral of tracks circled the spot where the boy lay, then continued east. I went to my knees beside the child, wrestling with my own blood hunger, and put my hand on his pale, bruised chest. There was no need of it. I could hear, even from a distance, that his heart no longer beat. I only did it to comfort the boy, should any awareness linger in his mind.