by Greg Sisco
“It’s Christmas Eve. In fact, you know what, it’s just after midnight. Merry Christmas.”
“One more week.”
Eva was weak now. She only got out of bed a few minutes a day and wasn’t interested in talking. Tyr stayed by her side when he could and fought to fix the relationship, but she mostly ignored him. He was convinced she hated him, but Eva didn’t have the energy for hatred anymore. The fact was she felt almost entirely indifferent to Tyr’s presence, other than for a second here or there when she either wanted him gone or wished he’d say something less tedious than ‘I love you.’
She thought she’d fallen out of love with Tyr, but every now and then her eyes caught his in the way they had six months ago the night she was told of the cancer, the night her life turned to hell and Tyr pulled her back, and she wondered if there was an ember of love still glowing in the recesses of her heart—glowing dimly, it would seem, since her health took a downward turn when the abundance of love had faded.
Still, she held on for the millennium. It was less for Tyr now and more for herself, but she’d come this far and didn’t see the point in giving up. The arbitrary finish line was coming into view, and she meant to cross it. Then, on the first, she planned to surrender to the comfort of death.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“No.”
“Something to drink then?”
Tyr hovered over her bed like a nurse who’d spent the last ten centuries caring for the dying, which on some fucked-up level was exactly what he was. The sympathy in his voice and in his facial expressions was almost enough to kill her this instant. It never felt feigned or exaggerated, but it was more, she thought, than she ever deserved to be loved—and more, at the moment, than she cared to be loved by Tyr.
“Why do you love me, Tyr?”
He looked taken aback, probably because she had not spoken of anything personal for some time, ignoring his pleas for forgiveness and responding only to conversation about food and water and exercise. She’d said it now without realizing it was the first real thing she’d said to him in days.
The way Tyr lit up when he heard the words, she feared she’d prompted another flood of apologies and professions of admiration. It was fine though. She’d taken her medication and was barely conscious at the moment and if he got boring she could drift off without being blamed. One of the advantages of terminal cancer is nobody gets pissed at you for falling asleep when they’re being boring.
He sat on the bed next to her and put her hand in his. She allowed it, though she hadn’t much strength to protest.
When Tyr talked he talked in clichés. “Because you’re so good. And strong. Of all the people I’ve met, you’ve had the most undeserved rotten luck but it never made you bitter. You’re so… pure. You’re wiser than your years. One would think you were a lot older than nineteen.” Blah, blah, blah.
“How old… do I act?”
“Maybe two or three hundred?”
Eva had to laugh. It was a compliment she’d never been paid before and his flat sincerity gave it an unintended humor. “How old are you, Tyr?”
“Not sure. A thousand or so?”
“How did you die?”
“Murder, I’m told. Some Vikings sacked an English village where I lived and killed me and a bunch of other people.”
“Mmm…” she said sleepily. “Fucking Vikings.”
“They got theirs in the end.”
“Will you tell me a story about them?”
“About Vikings?”
“And you, when you were human.”
“I don’t remember being human. In death you forget.”
Ah, the always disappointing Tyr. Just when she’d begun to take interest, he’d let her down again.
“Tell me a bedtime story,” she said, “about when you were young.”
“What do you want to know?”
“The first time you were in love.”
Tyr gave a half-smirk. He looked up to one of the corners of the room and sent for thousand-year-old memories. It took a while for him to begin, but when he did, he did exactly as he was told.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tale of the Black Rose, Part I
A Bedtime Story for Eva
Once upon a time in a faraway kingdom called England, there lived a vampire named Tyr. He was as innocent and pure as a serial murderer could be, a quiet, religious man whose life belonged to the church. Tyr didn’t know he was Tyr yet. He still called himself Harold. He lived with his brother Loki, whose current name was John, and his father Odin, who was still called Jacob.
Tyr, Loki, and Odin were lying to themselves, but they were happy. Even in spite of their isolation.
“They must never know what we are,” Odin said often. “If they discover us they will kill us.”
They passed from village to village, never staying in one place for more than a month at a time. They had to feed once a week, and usually they drained one woman each. As travelers were not entirely common in most villages and the townspeople were often well acquainted with one another, mass disappearances drew suspicion. Though they occasionally became mildly acquainted with the humans in various towns, they never divulged their secret. This was the result of their common sense and nothing more.
It was late one night in a magical land called Yorkshire when Tyr first came upon a young girl named Eleanor. At the time, he was living in the catacombs and only slipping into the village one night a week to hunt with his Brothers. They’d fed three nights prior, but Tyr told them he was restless. He wanted to see the beautiful land of Yorkshire. To walk the streets in the moonlight, to watch over the townspeople as they slept.
Loki and Odin were uninterested. They stayed in the catacombs and read books from the church library. They furthered their education however they could. While Loki in particular worked to build his perspective of the world as an observer, Tyr worked to build an understanding of his place within it. Such is the difference between education and experience, and there would come a time for them when this difference would feel much more significant.
Eleanor was sixteen years old and the child of serfs, so she had spent the day ploughing and weeding and harvesting with her father and the eldest two of her four sisters. The family had eaten supper at dusk and retired to bed shortly after, knowing work would begin again at dawn.
She awoke during the night and wandered outside restlessly. A thin fog had rolled in and the moon was full, and an ethereal glow emanated from the dew on the grass. She wasn’t sure how much time she had before sunrise, but she felt the urge to walk through town, to see the beauty of the village at rest.
With similar ideas on how to spend the night, Tyr and Eleanor had not wandered long before they came to face each other on a dirt path near the woods.
“Hello, sir,” said Eleanor. “Are you a soldier?”
“No, madam. What makes you ask that?”
“It was only a guess. I’ve not seen you before. I thought perhaps you were a night watchman.”
“I am not. I am a traveler. I’ve ventured to all the corners of our great country and found few sights as beautiful as Yorkshire on a foggy night.”
“A traveler. What work do you do that permits you to travel?”
“I am a messenger for the church. What work do you do?”
“Nothing interesting. I work in the fields with my family. I’m sure I don’t have stories such as yours.”
“I have many stories that are short and amusing, but I expect the one story you have is longer and more meaningful than any of which I could dream. There is no shame in a subtle life. My name is Harold.”
“Eleanor.”
Tyr bowed and Eleanor curtsied.
“Shall we walk?” asked Tyr. And they did.
Over two short hours, Tyr gave an honest representation of the last year of his life—though he omitted many murders and the fact that sunlight would kill him—and Eleanor talked of the joys and difficulties of a life spent toi
ling in the fields. Neither party had to feign interest or wished to prove anything, and so the conversation went as ideal conversation goes, with each person more interested in knowing more about the other than telling about themselves. A two-hour conversation meeting these criterion is all it takes for a bond to form, and after this brief period spent feeding each other’s interests and emotions, Tyr and Eleanor parted ways as great friends and with a spark of romantic love between them.
When the first traces of the light of morning inched toward the horizon, they quickly said goodbye as Eleanor was eager to reach home before her family awakened and Tyr was eager not to be burned to death by the sun.
A week later, Tyr and his Brothers left Yorkshire, and though Tyr and Eleanor had only seen one another on the one night, he thought of her often. She became his picture of the common people and the life of which she told him became the life he imagined for all humans—one of hard work and harsh times, of grief and loss and pain, made worthwhile by love and companionship, by the joy brought on by other people.
In their travels, the Brothers arrived in Yorkshire every year, and each time they found themselves in town Tyr would take one night to wander the village and find her. For years he came to her house and rapped on her bedroom window and they walked the streets together in the moonlight and related their adventures to one another.
When he returned to visit her at age eighteen, she had been recently married and she spoke of her husband with a casual indifference not uncommon for the age. A year later when he found she’d given birth to her first child, Clara, she had the love in her eyes one might have wanted to see after her marriage.
The relationship between Tyr and Eleanor developed one night a year for most of Eleanor’s life. As her family grew, as she gained and lost children, as her husband died of leprosy, Tyr and Eleanor always looked forward to the one night a year they would spend catching up with each other, when Eleanor would bear her soul and Tyr would practice his charm and his half-truths, though his interest in her life was always genuine.
The meetings were not a secret Tyr kept from his Brothers. They never came with him to visit Eleanor, but he informed them of his visits beforehand and they politely asked about her afterward. There was a level of innocence present in all of them in those days, and there was no worry over the dangers of their friendship. There was the small concern that Eleanor might piece together that disappearances in her village took place anytime Tyr came to visit, but if problems of this nature were to one day arise, the situation would be easily rectified by leaving Yorkshire and never returning.
One night near the land of Ipswich, while venturing alone, Odin met another vampire, a missionary, and was told of the ways of their species.
“Have you not heard the word of the great Ofeigr?” the missionary asked.
“I don’t believe I have.”
“You must.” The missionary reached into a tote bag and came up with a leather bound book, the edges of its pages tinted gold. “Your masters have done you a disservice. You know not of the Augury?”
“I do not. But my family and I are Episcopalian and we’ve no interest in your strange gods.”
“Not gods; vampires. I am not here whoring religious faith. The Augury concerns itself only with the physical world. Ofeigr is very much alive, a being who walks and talks like you or I, and it would be a grave mistake for you not to follow Him.”
“What does He ask of us?”
“Only that we follow some simple provisions.”
“And what might those provisions be?”
“Take the book. Your life in death will be far easier if you read it. Through how many human generations have you lived?”
“Not one. I was given life after death by a fledgling vampire who taught me little and left shortly. I turned my sons when they were killed by Vikings. The three of us have lived not more than thirty years in death.”
“This vampire who turned you, he needs Ofeigr’s word as well. What was his name?”
“He did not have one.”
The Augury, the book was called. It dealt in parables and riddles often, same as any religious text, but the words rang true for the Brothers, perhaps more so even than the Bible. The text spoke to them in much the same way, excited them about life in death even while it frightened them of their own species and their own desires.
“You can no longer speak with that young woman in Yorkshire,” said Odin to Tyr. They were sitting at a table in the catacombs with the Augury between them.
“I must,” said Tyr. “In all these years a problem has never arisen. We do not copulate. She doesn’t know what I am.”
“The book makes it clear. Nothing more than passing relationships with humankind. Not even a single lengthy conversation with anyone but a drain.”
“What if none of it is true?” asked Loki, always the first to suggest a possibility that benefited him.
“It is not our place to ask such questions. We are children, all of us. This is the wisdom of vampires older and wiser than we.”
“You mean to alter our lives based on the writings in a book handed to you by a stranger?”
“Do you disagree? Are your eyes not opened as are mine?”
“I only know what I’ve experienced. As long as I’ve lived, I’ve lived as I do now, and no Chosen vampire nor an Ofeigr nor anything else has expressed disapproval. If this Ofeigr were so powerful, why are we hearing about Him from some polite missionary and not being scolded by His minions.”
“Harold, do you agree with John?” said Odin to Tyr. “Do you find these texts preposterous?”
“I do not, though neither do I see the harm in polite discourse if it is done under the guise of a human. As long as she does not see me for what I am—”
“You cannot choose the passages in which you see truth. Either it is the code by which members of our species must live, or it is a book and nothing more. You cannot see it as both. Would you agree it was written by greater vampires?”
Tyr and Loki begrudgingly replied in the affirmative.
“Then from this night forth we will minimize our interaction with mankind. The three of us shall live according to this book.”
Tyr and Eleanor never spoke again, though one month a year he watched her in the night. He listened in on her activity in the bedroom, read her diary while she slept, sat outside her window if she ate a late supper with her family and imagined himself at the table with them, enjoying their company and participating in conversation.
A few times, Odin followed Tyr to make sure the trips were as innocent as Tyr claimed them to be, and he became satisfied that they were. Gradually it came to be that Odin and Tyr would visit Eleanor together, and on a few occasions Loki even joined.
They never said goodbye to one another, and she even wrote in her diary from time to time wondering what had become of him. It took strain not to have one last conversation, to give her closure, to let her know he wouldn’t be coming back, but he never succumbed to the temptation. Eleanor was Tyr’s introduction to solitude, to viewing the world of humanity from outside. As she grew old and her children married and had children of their own, he stood outside her window and watched.
She lived an emotional life, ignorant of almost anything beyond her village. Tyr’s life was the opposite, full of culture and knowledge but devoid of emotional connection. Eleanor’s curse was that she had to imagine the larger life she’d missed. Tyr’s curse was that he could clearly see the smaller life he’d missed. Once again, the difference between education and experience.
CHAPTER NINE
“You’re amazing,” said Eva, so quietly and slurred together she might have been talking in her sleep. “I’ve never met anyone from medieval England.”
“Y-yeah. That seems likely,” said Tyr.
She’d become gradually less coherent as he told her the story. It was late, by Eva’s standards, and these days she was tired regardless of the time. Add to that the fact that she was whacked out on p
ain killers and it was understandable she’d have trouble following a story.
She’d run out of medication a few days prior and, afraid of taking her to the doctor, Tyr had drained some old people and stolen their drugs for her. He never told her where the drugs came from, of course. She was still uncomfortable with the idea of killing people.
“Tyr…” she said, and he leaned in close to her. “Are there werewolves too?”
He laughed. “No.”
“Good. I hate them.”
He didn’t want to press his luck and he could tell she was sick of hearing from him, but he had a question he wanted to ask again, one he’d asked a hundred times in the last three days. The way she’d looked at him during the story, with eyes of wonder and a warm smile, it seemed time to ask it once more.
“Eva.”
“Mm.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“For what?”
“For being a vampire? And trying to kill you?”
“Yeah,” she said from a dream. “It’s whatever.”
Tyr felt himself smile, even though he was fairly certain she didn’t know what she was saying.
“Really?” he asked. “You forgive me?”
“I forgive you.”
He leaned down and kissed her lips and she kissed back weakly. It floored him how much three short words from a human could mean.
CHAPTER TEN
Go.
Fuck ‘em.
Thor had to believe the thought had been in his head for a while now. Ever since he’d let himself acknowledge it, it seemed the only thing to do.
Or take control.
Burn the club down.
Kill Eva.
But it wasn’t his business. He owed Loki and Tyr everything he had, and he was a child by comparison. He’d been the peacekeeper this long. There was no sense in trying to take charge now. Besides, Loki was easy to predict when it came to contesting dominance.
