There were three mortals lurking in the trash-strewn backstreet, two men and a woman. The first male was a tall fellow in a fur collared brown leather jacket and cargo pants. He was gripping the forearms of an emaciated female whose skirt (much too thin and short for the cold) was hiked up over prominent hipbones. Thrusting into the woman from behind was a smaller male, pants around his ankles, shirt pulled up and tucked beneath his chin. The tall male had the knobby shaved head of a Neo-Nazi. His fingers were sunk cruelly into the woman’s flesh. I couldn’t make out the woman’s face. Her head was just a mass of over-permed ringlets. She didn’t sound happy, but she did not seem to be with the men against her will either. The man taking his pleasure of her was swarthy and ugly, with a large nose and bulging, frog-like eyes. He was dressed in a black tracksuit with yellow piping.
Lukas edged forward hungrily. “I want the woman,” he growled, but I placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“Those are not evildoers,” I murmured. “Just exhibitionists. Poor and uncouth. Let’s move on. Leave them to their vulgar pastime.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lukas hissed. “I know those guys! That Skinhead is Gerd Drechsler. He used to bring us girls for our movies. And that little fucker is named Lemming. We called him Lemming because he was always falling in the river. I don’t know why. I didn’t know him too well. Just saw him around the neighborhood from time to time, but I heard him brag once about stabbing a guy down in the park. Fellow knocked up his sister and wouldn’t own up to it, so he killed the bastard.”
I searched my companion’s face, but detected no deceit in his countenance. He was telling the truth.
“And the woman?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Annette or Annabelle something. I don’t know. Just some crack whore. She’s one of Gerd’s bitches.” He turned back to the alley. “I want her, though. I haven’t fed on a woman yet. I want to see what that’s like.”
“No,” I said sternly. “We take the men, but the woman lives.”
Lukas smirked. “How do you propose we do that? Without leaving her a witness, I mean.”
“Regardez,” I smiled.
I scanned the street, looking for cameras. I did not expect to see any in this section of Liege. It wasn’t a slum, but there wasn’t exactly much to protect here either, but I was surprised. A few buildings down from the alley, a camera was mounted over the show window of an office supply shop.
Always with the cameras now!
There was a pair of crumbling chimneys jutting from the roof behind us. I retrieved a chunk of brick from the pile of rubble at their base and returned to the ledge.
Lukas watched with keen interest (he enjoying watching things be destroyed) as I cocked back my arm and let the chunk fly. Pieces of broken camera rattled down the street after the brick.
“Watch, and do not interfere,” I said.
I do not normally hunt so early in the evening, but there was very little activity on Rue du Papillon. It was cold, and all the huddled shops were closed down for the day. Still, I needed to be cautious. The alley the trio was copulating in was open-ended but for a low brick wall and a wrought iron gate. I would be partially exposed to anyone passing on the street beyond. I crouched, waited as a delivery truck rumbled past on the far avenue, then propelled myself at my quarry.
I flashed across the street, moving too fast to be seen by mortal eyes. I struck the ugly, frog-eyed male with my palm, slamming him into the low brick wall, then whipped around, snatched the Skinhead’s fingers from his girlfriend’s bony forearms and threw him into side of the building. Both men slumped to the ground, knocked unconscious by the blows.
Moving at speed, I turned back to the frizzy-headed addict. She stood in a submissive posture, body bent forward at the waist, panties around her knees. Without her Skinhead boyfriend to hold her up, she was starting to overbalance.
I slapped my palm across her face before she fell. Hollow eye sockets. Bright red lipstick smeared across her cheek. A mask of tragedy, her face. I felt her muscles spasm as my attack registered on her drug-addled consciousness. One confused and tear-streaked eye popped open in the space between my thumb and forefinger.
“Sleep!” I commanded, my tone imperious, compelling her to obey with frequencies of sound no human throat can produce.
Annette or Annabelle went limp.
I lowered her to the cold cement as gently as I could, started to rise, then pulled up her panties and tugged down her skirt.
“When you awaken, you will not remember how you got here, or that you were even with your male friends here tonight. You will go home and take a nice warm bath, and then you will go to bed and have the most peaceful sleep you’ve ever had in your life.” Her mind would be highly suggestible in the trance state that I had placed her in. I regarded her thoughtfully a moment, then added, “In the morning, you will rise, eat a healthy breakfast, and then check yourself into a rehabilitation clinic. It is time for you to take care of yourself. You deserve a better life than this.”
I rose. Checking for traffic, I grabbed the one named Gerd by the fuzzy collar of his jacket and dragged him across the street.
It’s a bit more difficult to climb walls when you’re carrying an unconscious mortal—you mortals are much heavier than we, with our hollow, bloodless cells—but I got him onto the roof of the garage without much difficulty.
Lukas gurgled hungrily and went to his knees beside the man.
I returned to the alley, fetched the man Lukas had called Lemming, who was beginning to stir and moan softly now, and climbed back onto the roof with him.
Lukas snapped the Skinhead’s neck as I passed, the bones crackling like kindling. He drove his face into the crook of the man’s shoulder and began to gash the flesh with his eyeteeth.
“Whassizzit?” Lemming moaned, folded over my shoulder. His pants were still tangled around his ankles, but I didn’t worry about that. I needed to finish this killer before he came to his senses. Before he started to scream.
“Hey, what is this?” Lemming cried. “Who are you? Where are you taking me?”
“I’m taking you to hell,” I said.
I threw the man down, and then I threw myself upon him.
Lemming drew a breath to scream, his frog-like eyes bulging even further in his terror. The shout never passed his lips. I didn’t let it.
I shoved his face rudely to one side, brutal in my eagerness. I was suddenly starved, hungrier than I could remember being in a very long time. I tore open his neck, catching the hot spray of his blood in my open mouth, feeling it splash across my tongue and the back of my throat, and then I latched onto him and began to suck.
Red tides of ecstasy washed across my thoughts. I dove deep, indulging myself without reservation. This would be the last night I spent in my beloved Liege, the last night I would feed on her wicked children-- the last time, perhaps, I would ever feed on human blood again. I wanted to feel every pulse of pleasure, every tingle and spark of bliss, and bask in the warm glow of my hunger’s satisfaction.
But all good things must come to an end. My mortal lover’s heart raced madly for a moment, then lost its rhythm and stopped, and did not beat again. Reluctantly I withdrew my fangs from the muscles of Lemming’s neck. I bit my tongue, spat a bit of the Strix upon the wound to heal it, then sat back on my knees.
I sighed, melancholy now, as I used to be after sex. All gone now. The ecstasy. The blood. All Gon’s, and all gone.
“Sad, is it not, to squander such a precious gift?” I said to Lukas. “He could have done so much good with his life. But then, who am I to judge? I have squandered a thousand lifetimes.”
My mortal victim looked very small and young now, flesh bled white, face turned to one side, as if in repose. There was a star tattooed on his right cheekbone, just at the corner of his eye. For some reason, it made me think of a child’s nursery, shooting stars painted on pastel walls. This man, Lemming, had been some woman’s baby once, whatever dark paths he’d w
andered later on. Remorse sank its sliver-sharp fangs into my heart.
“No time to wallow in guilt tonight,” I sighed. “We still need to get that photograph of you for Mr. Lipsky… Lukas?”
I turned around. I was alone on the roof. Alone with two dead men.
“Lukas!” I roared.
6
He hadn’t gone far. It wasn’t his intention to escape.
I found him in the alley below, sprawled across the frizzy-headed prostitute. He was feeding on her greedily, making rapacious slurping sounds. He had one hand in her hair, the other in her panties. When I laid hands on him to pull him off the woman, he turned on me with cat-like ferocity, fangs bared, curled fingers slashing at my throat.
I struck him hard across the face.
Lukas spun across the ground and struck a garbage dumpster with a loud, almost comical, gonging sound.
Surprised and enraged, I had struck him with nearly my full strength. I had restrained myself at the last second, and he was lucky that I had. If I had slapped him with my full strength, even with an open palm, the blow would have taken his head completely off his shoulders—an injury that would almost certainly have killed him.
It very nearly killed him anyway. He lay insensate in a drift of stinking rubbish, groaning quietly.
I kneeled beside the woman and pressed my fingers to her breast. Her heart sat beneath the swell of her bosom, still as a lump of coal.
Dead.
I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to reign in my anger.
I might yet save her. I could give her the Strix. Pry apart her jaws, press my lips to hers, like some dark prince in a perverse fairy tale, and vomit the black blood into her mouth. The living blood might reanimate her, heal the damage my fledgling had done to her frail body.
It might also transform her into a strigoi, or worse, a degenerate one.
I wasn’t willing to roll those dice.
I closed her staring eyes with my fingertips. Pulled up her panties… again. Rose. Walked to Lukas.
Lukas had regained consciousness, but hadn’t moved from the spot where his body came to rest. He lay in the garbage, trembling violently. “Look… what you… did to me,” he wheezed through gritted teeth. His head was fractured, spit like a ripe melon that had been chucked against a wall. I cocked my head to one side, watching his brain pulsing inside his skull. “You… killed me!” Lukas wailed.
“You’ll live,” I said unsympathetically.
It was more than I could say for his pitiable victim. Maybe she was a whore, maybe she was an addict, but it was not a sin to be ignorant and poor. She was as much an innocent as any matchgirl or beggar.
Lukas cried out as I seized his shirt and hauled him from the garbage. “Quiet,” I snapped. I got down on my knees and inclined my mouth over his head. “Don’t move. This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you.”
I bore down with my abdominal muscles then, forcing the Strix up from my guts.
The living blood surged through my throat like razor blades. It gushed from my mouth, pattered down on my fledgling’s shattered skull. Lukas squeezed his eyes shut as a warm admixture of mortal and immortal blood splashed down on his head. He hissed as it began to mend his injuries. I watched as the fragments of his shattered skull shifted back into place, as the living blood sealed the pieces back together with fresh new bone and tissue. He clenched his jaws and drummed his heels on the ground as his split flesh closed like moist, red lips.
I fell back on my rump, weakened.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I panted, “I healed my vampire child Ilio in much the same manner twenty thousand years ago. He had been pierced through by an auroch’s horn. It was a mortal injury. He was not a very strong blood drinker, but it saved him. You are much more resilient. You will be fine.”
Ilio had betrayed me, too.
Why were my fledglings always so treacherous, I wondered.
Time and time again, my beloved dark children rose up against me. All but a few. Apollonius. Sydney. Nora. Justus. Why?
And then I looked at the dead prostitute, and the answer came to me.
Because you deserve it.
A vehicle passed along the Rue du Papillon and its headlights splashed across the alley. The light flared across Lukas’s staring face, the prostitute’s white sprawled legs. I waited to see if the driver noticed us.
Apparently not.
The drone of the car’s engine faded down the street.
Lukas rose shakily to a sitting position, his head in one piece again. He held it in his hands as he got up as if he expected it to come apart. He glared at me reproachfully. “You didn’t have to hit me so hard,” he said.
“I was angry. I don’t like to be disobeyed.”
“She was just a whore,” he said.
“You are just a murderer.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” he said sullenly. “I only wanted to taste her blood. See if it was different. Once I bit her, though, I couldn’t stop myself.”
I stood. “That is why I told you no. Now we’ll have to dispose of three bodies tonight.”
“Why bother?” Lukas asked. “We’re leaving tomorrow evening. Why not just leave them where they are?”
The seams where his head had healed were still faintly visible, but they were fading quickly. Soon, you wouldn’t even be able to see that he’d been injured.
“We hide them for the same reason we dug holes to shit in when I was a mortal man,” I answered him.
He couldn’t grasp the analogy.
I sighed. “When I am dead and you are on your own, you will find out very quickly what happens when you do not dispose of your dead.”
“The others,” Lukas said.
I nodded. “They will hunt you down and kill you if you arouse the suspicions of mortal men. We hide our dead for the same reason the hunters of my tribe buried their shit. So our prey does not suspect we are here.”
7
But he was right. We were leaving the city on the morrow. There really wasn’t much of a reason to dispose of our victims properly. I was mostly just trying to impart a lesson to my acolyte, to be a good maker and train my unruly fledgling. And I really didn’t know why I was trying to do that. I would be doing the world a big favor if I left him unschooled. Some other ancient blood drinker would tire of his antics, end him before the year was up probably. It was just hard for me to be lackadaisical when it came to doing things the proper way. It went against the grain for me. Perhaps it was my fathering instincts. This is the proper way to do it, and we do it because it is the proper way.
So I compromised.
We carried Annette or Annabelle to the roof of the garage with her cohorts. Arranged them neatly side-by-side. We made sure all the bites on their bodies had been healed with the living blood. I made Lukas do it so he was familiar with the process, then I broke open the two chimneys and we stuffed their bodies inside.
The stone throats of the chimneys were narrow and crumbly, but we managed to cram all three inside. We threw some broken bricks down on them before I replaced the uppermost section of the flues.
“There,” I said, dusting off my hands. They were covered in brick dust and soot. “It will be months before someone finds them. This building has been abandoned for a long time. Maybe, when summer arrives and the bodies begin to smell, someone will be compelled to investigate… but then again, it may be years before our victims are found. As you said, it doesn’t matter now. Neither of us is returning to Liege.”
“No,” Lukas said, staring off across the city. He gazed at the glittering lights with a look of faint revulsion. “I’ve never much cared for this city. Maurice brought me here when he smuggled me out of Germany. I think his grandmother lived here once.” And then he laughed.
I joined him for a moment, admiring the brilliant skyline, watching traffic wind its way through the streets. I imagined all those vehicles to be luminescent blood cells surging through the veins of some transcende
nt being. I watched boats glide down the Meuse, thousands of anonymous men and women pass by thousands of brightly illuminated windows. I took in the glittering towers. The hovels and huddled tenements. The parks and sprawling factories. Where the eyes of my companion smoldered with revulsion, however, my eyes gleamed with adoration.
Adieu, mon chere, I thought. Goodbye, my beautiful Liege.
8
Impending mortality had made my existence precious again. I was not sure exactly when it happened, only that it was glorious. It was as if I’d been viewing the world through a dirty pane of glass, glass caked with the dust of thirty thousand years, and my rapidly approaching death had scoured the glass clean like a howling whirlwind.
I took a deep breath as a mortal man would do, smelling the crisp winter air, the redolent scent of wood burning in some nearby fireplace, supper cooking in a dozen kitchens, tar and concrete and car exhaust. I felt the chill of the night air on my bare flesh as if I were a living man again. I imagined my cheeks turning red, my nose running, my ears going numb.
It had been a long time since I had really felt the cold—felt anything—as a mortal man might feel it. The sensations are the same for an immortal, keener even, but for many hundred of years there had been a disconnect, a gulf between physical sensation and my experience of things. The cold did not have the power to affect me (few things did anymore) and so I’d chosen to ignore it. I could see and smell and taste with a sensitivity that would make mortal men weep or go mad, but it did not reach me. I had forgotten how to be alive, which is a strange thing for a vampire to say, I know, but no longer.
That elation persisted all through the night.
When we returned to my penthouse to bathe and change clothes, Franz, the doorman, peered curiously at us. He did not comment on our disheveled appearance-- servicemen rarely do-- but I found myself uncharacteristically curious about him. Who was he? Where did he live? What were the circumstances of his life? He had been a part of my life for better than a decade, longer than I had been neighbors with the Gerouxes, yet I knew almost nothing about him.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 8
