The upper echelon of the Roman Catholic Church knows that we exist. An order of monks who called themselves the Venatori hunted us nearly to extinction in the 16th and 17th centuries. Pope Pius the Fifth harbored a particularly vehement loathing for our kind, and was largely responsible for the formation of the the Venatori. Fortunately, the Church no longer pursues us, though there are still some among us who fear a modern Internecion.
There are two ancient banks, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1492 in Italy, and the Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, who knowingly look after of our fortunes. I have accounts with both of them. The last time I checked, my net worth was somewhere in the vicinity of four billion euros, and I’m not a particularly materialistic immortal. When you are 30,000 years old, you tend to accumulate vast sums of money and property, whether it is your intention to or not.
And then there are the lawyers.
The oldest law firm in England, Thomas, Lampard and Sade, provides legal services to many European vampires. There is another in the United States, the Rosen Law Firm in Arkansas, and one in Russia, Vodoleyev & Partners, who are also aware we exist.
The day before we left for Germany, an attorney from Thomas, Lampard and Sade arrived in Liege to see me.
Cue the lawyer jokes.
2
His name was Harold Lipsky. He was an Englishmen, and, I believe, a Jew. Short, a bit heavyset, with short-cropped steely gray hair. He was eighty years old, but spry. Somewhat jowly faced. Clean-shaven. Very piercing blue eyes. In the forty years that he had been handling my legal affairs for Thomas, Lampard and Sade, I had only met the man twice. Both times I came away from our meetings impressed by his professionalism… and a little disconcerted by him, though I never knew quite why.
Lawyers!
There are no connecting flights from London to Liege, so he had to fly to Brussels and finish his journey by rail, but he arrived at Liège-Guillemins shortly before noon, where I had a limo waiting to bring him to my apartment.
Normally, I would have driven to the station and picked him up myself. I own a very well preserved 1963 Alfa Giulia Spider—red, of course—which I rarely ever drive. It would have been fun to take the old Spider out for a spin, but I had a fledgling vampire sleeping in my apartment, and I’d sooner trust my arm to the jaws of a hungry great white than leave my protégé to his own devices.
Day or not, I guarantee Lukas would have tried to eat the neighbors!
So I puttered around my apartment while I waited. I was far too anxious to sleep. I sorted through all my papers, getting them in order for my meeting with Mr. Lipsky, then sorting through them again, just to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. I checked on Lukas-- sleeping like the dead. I straightened up the apartment again. Perused some brick-a-brack, trying to decide to whom I would bequeath my last few possessions. Should I send this 7,000 year old fertility idol to Apollonius? Or should I donate it to a museum? I had already shipped far too many items to my beloved Apollonius. If I sent him anything more, he was sure to become suspicious. But if I donated it to a museum, which one should I send it to?
I hadn’t realized just how complicated it would be to end my immortal life!
Oh, I know I should just do it and get it over with. Have Lukas end me, and let someone else worry about the mess. Why bother with all these plots and preparations!
But… it just wouldn’t seem right.
I am the oldest living vampire in the world. I am history incarnate. I am thirty thousand years old, with Shared memories that extend nearly twice that into the past. I have untold legions of children in this world, both mortal and immortal, and I do not wish to die without giving them something to remember me by. To my mortal offspring: my memoirs. To my immortal offspring: the remainder of my possessions. Paltry things, perhaps, my memoirs and my possessions, but better than what death will leave us in the end.
Dust.
Nothing but dust.
So distracted was I by my ruminations that I did not sense Mr. Lipsky exiting the elevator. Normally I would have smelled him the moment he arrived in the street below. When my doorbell rang, I jumped a little and started toward the door. I stopped, realized I was holding a stone idol with an enormous erect penis in my left hand.
Mr. Lipsky might be taken aback by that!
I returned the fertility idol to the coffee table, turned it around so it was facing the wall, then walked to the door and opened it.
“Mr. Lipsky,” I said.
“Mr. Valessi,” the lawyer replied.
“Enter freely—“
Lipsky smiled thinly and pushed inside, muttering, “And of my own will. Yes, yes. Quite amusing, Mr. Valessi.”
It can be a shock to see a mortal after several years have gone by. Time is a very subjective thing for vampires. For me, it seemed only a couple months since the last time I’d met with Mr. Lipsky, but objectively, a little over two decades had passed. Since the last time we’d met, Harold Lipsky had transformed from a man in the prime of his life to a gray and stately gentleman. It was unsettling… and a little depressing.
“May I take your hat and coat?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Bespoke coat from a proper English tailor. Nothing so gauche as an off-the-rack garment for H. Lipsky!
He was nearly bald now, I saw. And heavy.
“Drink?”
“Scotch, if you have it.”
“Of course.” I remembered from our last meeting, and had purchased a bottle just for him. As I walked to the liquor cabinet, I said over my shoulder, “We can speak English, if you’d like. It won’t offend me. In fact, I find it rather interesting to speak the Saxon tongue.”
“The Saxon tongue!” Mr. Lipsky said with a genuine snort of amusement. “Thank you. That would be a relief. I’m afraid I’ve never had much of a knack for speaking Deutsch.”
“Your German is quite terrible,” I said, and he laughed again, a bit more easily. “How was your flight?” I asked, handing him his drink.
“Not too bad,” he said. He met my gaze over his glass, eyes glinting in the peculiar way the eyes of our human agents sometimes gleam, especially when they have been in service to us for a very long time.
It was the blood.
It is customary to offer a mortal servant a drop of our living blood when they perform a service for us. We call it a “boon”. It was the reason his eyes sparkled so brightly, his flesh was so smooth and flawless. Like the Elders of the Oombai, the living blood he’d imbibed over the years had kept him youthful and strong. He was an eighty-year-old man who looked—maybe-- sixty. Fifty-five, if you were feeling generous. Plastic surgery can work a similar kind of magic if you are rich enough to afford it, but it only sands the rough edges off. It does not make one youthful.
Someday, perhaps, if he continues in the service of the undead, the living blood might quicken in him, and make him an immortal. Probably not, though. It takes a lot of “boons” to trigger the transformation. And most of his type don’t want to be a strigoi. Who would? They just want to enjoy the perks of our affiliation: the wealth, the health benefits of lapping up our blood from time to time.
“It’s cold here,” he said, lowering his glass from his lips. “Much colder than in London.”
“I prefer the cold,” I replied, thinking of glaciers. Glaciers creeping over the mountains of my mortal birthplace. The smell of the wind as they blew down from the north, swirling off those white shelves of ice.
“Yes, but you would, then, wouldn’t you?” He waited for me to reply, smiling politely. When I did not speak, he looked somewhat discomfited, then confessed with a shrug, “I read your book, Mr. Valessi. Or perhaps I should call you Gon. May I address you as Gon? Mr. Gon?”
“I’d prefer that you call me Mr. Valessi,” I replied.
“Of course. Whatever you prefer. I meant no disrespect.”
“Oh, you have not offended me. It is simply that I reserve my birth name for more intimate acquaintances. May I ask you
how you came across my book?” I had published it under a fictitious byline, disguised as a work of fiction.
“Oh, my secretary found it, actually. She reads a lot of that gothic, uh… literature. She saw the name Valessi and showed it to me, thinking it an amusing coincidence. I, of course, realized the book was not quite as fictional as it appeared to be.”
Unable to restrain myself, I asked, “Did you enjoy it?” The author’s reflex.
“It was a bit short, too much sex,” Lipsky said apologetically. “But interesting!”
I laughed. “I’m sure that’s a fair appraisal. Now, shall we get down to business, Mr. Lipsky? We’ve a lot to cover today.”
“Yes, certainly,” Mr. Lipsky said.
I gestured toward the dining room table and he proceeded ahead of me. He sat, placed his briefcase on the table in front of him, unlocked it and swung the lid open.
“And what will we be taking care of today, Mr. Valessi?” He took out pen and paper.
I circled around to the other side of the table. Sat. Steepled my hands with a smile.
“My last will and testament,” I answered.
3
I’ll give him credit. He didn’t even flinch. He blinked. Once. Those strangely smooth eyelids lowered to cover his unnaturally glinting eyes for a moment. Down. Up. Then he continued as if I’d said nothing unusual at all.
“You are dying?” he asked casually.
As a seasoned vampire attorney, he knew that the term “immortal” was something of a misnomer. Nothing in this universe is truly immortal. Stars die. Galaxies die. Even the universe itself will die. Most vampires live a century or two, if they’re strong and resourceful, if they aren’t killed by a fellow blood drinker first, or perhaps a very lucky mortal. A few live for a thousand years or more. All but the true immortals, the vampires we call Eternals, eventually decline. They grow listless and frail, their powers waning, their appetite slowly diminishing, until they end themselves or simply fall to dust. Usually, it’s violence, though. We lead the lives of cats, we strigoi.
“Not at all,” I answered. “I intend to destroy myself.”
“I didn’t think that was possible,” Lipsky said. “Not for a vampire as powerful as yourself.”
I shrugged. “It is difficult. Nothing is impossible.”
Lipsky smiled that thin smile of his. “You are correct, of course.” He shuffled through his papers distractedly. “I need to apologize. I had presumed, when I was told I was being sent to Liege, that you would be assuming a new identity. How old is our Mr. Valessi now? Seventy-seven years old?”
Mr. Lipsky was the lawyer who had provided me with the Valessi identity, oh, forty years ago. Before that, I was Gregor Vogt. And before that: George Vickers. I have had a great many names.
I chuckled. “Yes. A well-preserved seventy-seven years old.”
“I took the liberty of generating a new identity for you. I.D. card. Passport. Bank account…”
“I will need all those things, but not for myself.”
“No?”
“I have a new protégé. He’s sleeping in the back bedroom.”
“Ah. Well… I’ll need a photo of… Him? Her?”
“Him.”
“And some time to generate his new documentation…”
“How much time?”
“Oh, I’m certain I can have it ready for you overnight. It shouldn’t take long. The bulk of the work is already done. Will we be transferring your assets to this new protégé?”
I started through my own papers. “A small portion, yes. The bulk of my holdings will be transferred to my vampire child Apollonius. He goes by the name Paulo Nikas. He currently resides on the isle of Karpathos, in the Aegean Sea.”
Lipsky flourished his pen. “Apollonius… How do you spell that?”
Don’t fret, my readers. I shan’t torture you with a detailed account of the business we transacted that afternoon. Like sex, legal affairs are only interesting to the parties directly involved with it. To Apollonius and his great brood of vampire children on the isle of Karpathos: my European properties and the largest portion of my wealth. To my wild vampire child Sydney in the United States: my American properties and a smaller, but no less vast, fortune. I divided the remainder of my assets among my surviving vampire children: Stefan, in Paris, Justus, in Germany, Nora, in Wales. There was Yvette, Preston, and Wynn in England—not my own vampire children, but young immortals I had come to love during an adventure we had there fifty years ago. I set up trust funds for the mortal descendants I had managed to keep track of over the ages. In about two weeks, the few living descendants whom I had met personally or loved from afar were going to receive a very pleasant surprise from a rich, recently deceased uncle they had never known. The rest of my immense fortune I intended to donate to charities and museums.
And what of Zenzele, my vagabond queen?
Zenzele does not exist.
Not in mortal society, anyway. Not in a legal sense. She never has. She remains, as ever, time’s eternal wanderer. I know that she still lives. I feel her presence tremble over me from time to time, like the spirit of God moving across the Biblical waters, but I have not beheld her with mine own eyes, held her in mine own arms, for what seems like ages upon ages. No, there is no Zenzele in the world of mortal men. If there were, I would have given her everything I possess, as I have already given her everything I am.
It took hours to sort through all my holdings. Thankfully, Mr. Lipsky was more familiar with my estate than I, so all I had to do was dictate who got what after I was gone.
As we concluded our meeting, I took a small assortment of envelopes from the stack of papers on my side of the table. It was nearly six pm by then. The city beyond my dining room window had begun to darken, its lights winking cheerfully in the gloaming.
There were five envelopes, four addressed to the most beloved of my surviving vampire children-- Apollonius, Sydney, Justus, and Nora—and one to my soul mate Zenzele. These were to be delivered in two weeks time, I instructed Mr. Lipsky, simultaneous with the distribution of my earthly possessions. The letter to Zenzele was to be delivered to Apollonius, to be held in trust until she sought him out, whenever that might be.
“My final words to them,” I murmured. I caressed each envelope with my fingertips before I passed them over the table. In my mind, I was caressing each of them in the flesh, sliding my fingers down their cheeks, one after the other.
I cannot tell you what I wrote to each of them. It is too personal. Too painful and embarrassing and pathetic. I poured out my soul to them, in as much as one can pour out a soul with written words. I only hoped that they could forgive me someday.
Lipsky accepted the envelopes wordlessly, but with a satisfactory expression of gravity. He placed them into his briefcase with the rest of his paperwork, then shut the lid and locked it.
“Do we have any other business to discuss?”
I shook my head.
“Very well. I should head to my hotel and get started on all of this. It’s quite a lot, I must say, but I doubt if any of it should present any problems. If you bring me that photo before it gets too late, I can have your fledgling’s new identity ready by morning. I assume you’ll be going out tonight?”
I nodded.
“Of course you are. You can drop off the photo after you and your new companion… dine.“ He smiled like a man sharing a dirty secret. “Drop it off at the front desk. I’ll be up all night working.”
He had risen, was heading toward the door, his briefcase swinging against his leg.
“The Ibis Liege, correct?”
“Yes.”
I was retrieving his coat and hat when Lukas began to howl.
4
He had awakened, as most nosferatu do, the moment the sun vanished beneath Liege’s encircling hills. Disoriented, alone—expecting to wake up, as he had his entire life, a normal mortal man—he sat upright with a shout, staring at the white, ossified flesh of his hands.
/> It’s quite understandable. I still have nightmares from time to time. Or wake from some poignant dream of my mortal life, thinking I am still a man of flesh and blood. It is worse the first few years after the transformation, before time scrubs away the last of our mortal instincts. Those first few years are when most newly made vampires—those who should never have been given the living blood—destroy themselves out of remorse or madness.
Lukas’s shout was quite shocking-- for both of us.
Mr. Lipsky retreated to the door, moving impossibly fast for a man of his advanced age. “What is that?” he snapped, yanking on the doorknob. He didn’t look frightened, just startled. Startled and suspicious. Mortals who service the clientele he serviced must be very cautious—and have very quick reflexes. If I hadn’t locked the door he’d have been halfway down the corridor already.
Before I could soothe my guest, Lukas came shambling down the hallway, naked as the day he was born, head down, hair hanging in his face. He was panting like a living man who’d just finished running a marathon. He stared down at his hands as he careened from wall to wall.
“It is just my fledgling,” I said to the lawyer. “He’s only been a blood drinker a few days now. Don’t be afraid. He won’t harm you. He’s just disoriented.”
Lipsky dropped his hands from the doorknob. He straightened his jacket with a couple brusque yanks, glaring at my vampire child.
“Lukas,” I called.
“What did I let you do to me…?” Lukas muttered in German, tottering into the parlor.
“Lukas!”
My acolyte’s head snapped up as if I’d jerked a string. His eyes were red-rimmed, his mouth slack. Those rheumy eyes shifted to Lipsky, then narrowed. All the muscles in his body went taut. He grinned, the tips of his fangs projecting out over his bottom lip. It was not too difficult to read his mind: Dinner is served!
“Lukas, this is our guest, Mr. Lipsky,” I said, speaking as if to a child. “I told you he was coming to see me today. Do you remember?”
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 6
