Forever

by Natalie J. Case

  “Would you rather I left you to him? He was winning that night you know. If I hadn't shown up when I did … you would have died anyway.” He stood and paced away. He was agitated, but I couldn't tell by what. To make matters worse, I couldn't tell myself how I felt. “I came because I had reason. I meant to find you, protect you. I've tried before, but you were never very open to assistance.” He kept his back to me, his thoughts and emotions shuttered tightly against me. “You should rest. It will be quite some time before you are well enough to take care of yourself again.”

  He was gone before I could respond. I simmered in my mix of emotions, the hurt anger, the appreciation for his generosity, the outrage at his presumption. He was right, my body was not yet strong enough to support me, and was already pulling me back to sleep.

  When next I woke there was a woman in the room, quietly cleaning. A new bottle sat on the table beside the bed. The smell of her filled the room, wakening the part of me that wanted her. I sat up slowly, reaching for the bottle though I wanted to be reaching for her. I took a long, slow drink and when I was done she was looking at me. “Are you feeling better?” she asked, just a hint of an accent in her voice.

  I nodded, hoping she wouldn't come too close, lest I lose myself to the hunger building inside me again. “Good. Dovan went out for awhile. He should be back shortly. Would you care for something to eat?”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  She curtsied so politely and withdrew, returning moments later with a tray. The same rich broth and more bread was joined by some fruit and cheeses. “I do hope it's to your liking. I'm rather out of practice,” she said as she set it on the bed beside me. Her hand brushed against my leg, and sudden pain rushed to the place. I must have paled for she leaned closer, concern flooding her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, please, step back.” I said, my eyes closed as I battled the demon I carry inside. I drank again from the bottle and the delicate balance returned. “Thank you. I'm sure the food is just fine.”

  “I am Justine. Dovan is my friend.”

  I raised an eyebrow, as I bit into the yellow cheese. “Indeed?” I looked at her, and could see suddenly that she was neither as young as she appeared, nor quite as human either. Her face was abnormally pale beneath the blush, her eyes more sparkling than was allowed by nature. She reminded me somewhat of Moira, before the Change had come to her fully. She knew what Dovan was, and somehow she loved him. She smiled at me, and there was some manner of knowledge there, something she knew about me that even I was unaware of.

  “Indeed. I think I hear him. Excuse me a moment?” She left and I turned my attention to the food, devouring it quickly and washing it down with the remainder of the formula. It did little to dull the aching of need inside me.

  “I hear you've met Justine,” Dovan's voice said. I looked up, somewhat surprised that he could enter without my hearing him. “I do still have a trick or two up my sleeve, Amara. Don't be so surprised by me.”

  “Well, Dovan, what can I say? Your entire person surprises me. I don't know who you are.”

  “I can change that … if you're ready to hear it. I have much to tell you.” He sat beside me and his face softened. “I have wanted to tell you for so long. At first it was Crenoral who got in the way. Then it was Jesse. Now, you're here and you're all mine.” He smiled and moved away. “What do you think of Justine? She's wonderful if you ask me. I adore her.”

  “Is that why you give her just enough to keep her young and beautiful, but do not bring her to you fully?”

  His face dimmed some. “Aye. I love her and would not take away all of her humanity to make her one of us. But, neither can I bear to let her go. I must have her. She gives to me, so I give back.”

  “It is not fair to her, you know,” I said, thinking of the distant shell Moira had always been until I brought her completely to me.

  “I know,” He said. “I know all too well.” He was quiet a moment, then returned to sit in the chair beside me. “Now then, I was going to tell you about me.” He leaned back, lifting his feet to rest them on the bedside table. He seemed more mortal than most I had known sitting there, as if we were sitting in the bedchamber of some manor house. I settled in to listen, unsure of what to expect, but with the surety that my perception of this man was soon to change.

  “I was the youngest of my mortal brothers, as you know. I was twenty-eight when Bestin came. He didn't offer me a choice, as he had Crenoral. He knew me well enough to know that I would not come. He took me by force. In those first nights I was lost in my grief and newborn hunger. I gave myself to them, followed them as I had all my life. However, unlike my brothers, I refused to turn on my mortal family. I had a wife and three sons. I walked away from them, because even in that twisted place that comes with the gift, I loved them.”

  His face grew distant, visiting that time as if it were spread out in front of us to witness. “I watched from the distance as the boys grew, as my wife aged. She knew what had happened, but she wouldn't tell the boys. She kept the secret from them, told them I had gone to help Bestin and died. They became men, good men. They married and had sons and daughters of their own. Eventually Crenoral took interest in what it was that drew me back to them. He too began to watch their lives. He became enamored of them. Maybe it was how much they resembled his own family which he had destroyed. I don't know.”

  He sighed and I could almost feel the weight the years had been to him. “She was the wife of my youngest son. She was a good mother, a good wife. From the moment they married Crenoral watched her. Then, he wasn't content to watch anymore. He went to her. She loved her family, but her love was no match for his charm. She went with him.”

  “Mother.” I saw it in his eyes, the torment of that moment, of the night when Crenoral brought home his chosen bride.

  “Yes. She didn't know me, of course, I had been gone for many years before she became a part of their lives, but he knew. He had always been a jealous man. I never thought he would go so far. I hated him for it. For the rest of his days I hated him for it.”

  We sat in silence for a long moment, and in that silence not only did my perception of Dovan change, but my perception of myself did as well. Suddenly there was more to my life than what I had always known. There were mortal ties within that immortal family I had known. Here before me sat my mortal grandfather, spilling forth the sordid family history that had brought us to this cavern on the side of a mountain thousands of years from the beginning of it. “What became of them?” I asked, for the first time in my years curious of the mortal family she had left behind.

  “Your father?” He sat up and seemed to draw from deeply hidden memories. “He took another bride eventually, he had little choice. Your brothers were hellions and needed a mother's touch. She was not beautiful, but a strong woman. She raised them to be good men. Your mother never looked back.”

  “I know.” I yawned involuntarily, my wounds pulling at me in a sweep of tired and pain. I wanted to stay awake and talk more, but the healing process would not be denied.

  “We have years to remember, and many years to do it in,” he said, rising. “I'm not going anywhere. Justine and I will not be far away. Sleep, recover. There will be time enough for talking another night.”

  Chapter 13

  I recovered in time, graduating from my sick bed to short walks in the wooded area around our cave. Justine proved to be a good woman, and a fair cook. Dovan was entirely a different man than I had supposed him to be. He was wholly paternal, giving and caring. He often carried me back to my bed when my ambitions took me further away than I had strength to return.

  In those nights and weeks of nights we talked, often at great length about his brothers, about history, the people we had known. I found he had paid attention to my life, followed it as it were. He knew my children, those who had survived and had taken time to look in on each of them before returning to claim me from my grave. He told me of the descendants of my mortal famil
y, the sons of his loins. They had grown far and wide, spreading across the continent to make homes for themselves. I could see pride in his eyes when he spoke of them, and when he looked at me. Part of me withdrew when I saw it.

  Of his own dark children there were few left. His clan had been the smallest, even in the days I walked among them and over the years it had been hardest hit by mankind and other tragedies. “In all the world there can be no more than fifty anymore,” he told me one night as we sat beside a cold mountain stream. “Fifty too many.” He was dark, and had been for several nights, pulled into himself as if hiding from his own shadow.

  “What is it, Dovan? What chases you?”

  His sigh was heavy and almost painful. He didn't answer. I felt such a kinship with him, and yet his mind was closed to me. We had become so much like father and daughter that I reached out a hand to him. He didn't move to accept the gesture or to move away from it. He simply sat, staring into the murky water, brooding in silence. After a long time, I left him to it, limping away into the woods in the general direction of the cave. “He hurts.” I heard Justine say before I could see her. Slowly her form separated from the trees. “I can feel it. His soul aches at what his heart can no longer feel.”

  “What is it that tears at him so, Justine?” I asked, truly concerned.

  “If he were mortal I would say his conscience, but since he isn't it must be something else.” We both turned and I could just make out his form in the silvery moonlight. He was bent over himself, making himself as small as possible. “He weeps.”

  I looked at her strangely for never had I seen one of them truly weep. “When we sleep, I hold him while he cries. He dreams of his life and it wounds him every day. I do not know how to heal such pain.”

  “Nor do I, Justine.” I looked again and it almost appeared his shoulders shook, as one would while crying. I closed my eyes and turned away.

  “He wanted to have this time with you,” she said, taking my arm. Together we began walking back toward the cavern. “For the last fifty years he made this place for you, filled it with gifts for you, spoke of you. He wanted you to know the truth about your birth, about your mortal father. It was very important to him that he tell you.”

  “You make it sound as though he never intends to leave this place,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “I don't know that he will. He came to make his final peace with the missing part of his life. He has resolved all the rest.”

  “He came here then to die?”

  “I cannot know his mind, but his actions speak loudly of his desires. He is tired, more than you can see with your eyes, and sickened by his life.” We were nearly back to the cave and as we entered, it were as if I was seeing it for the first time. The entire place was dressed in things that had pleased me over the centuries, paintings by my favorite artists, furniture in my favorite colors, even things that resembled those I had kept in my room all those years before. In the farthest reaches of the string of chambers was a library, filled with scrolls and parchments and books of poetry and legend in languages as old as myself. It was as if the entire place had been built from my imagination.

  “I have a gift for you as well,” Justine said, lifting a small stack of books from a trunk in their room. “He isn't ready for you to have them, but I think it is time. They might help you understand.”

  I withdrew then with the books, Dovan's own journals, written in his native language, one I had nearly forgotten, and reaching back to a time when he was still mortal, though the writing indicated they were less journals and more remembrances captured in words. “On that night I had found the woman I would marry. Her name was Justa, and she was as the very air,” it began, once I had figured out the translation. It came back to me quickly enough from there and I was drawn into the incredible tale of one man's journey from contented bliss to the nightmare of hell.

  “Bestin disappeared. No one seemed to know where. He was last seen at dinner, in a monstrous mood, terrorizing his children. Crenoral was furious for they were to travel to town on the morrow to sell that damned stud of his. Now I supposed he would bully me into going. I would much rather remain with Justa. She was due any day now, and the witch assured us of a son.”

  There were descriptions then of Bestin's family, the boys who tried to fill their father's shoes and two daughters not yet walking, and their brutal deaths. “Bestin was not gone. His family lay in bloody shreds on the funeral pyre. Only he could be so cruel. Only he would demand such sacrifice. I knew not what manner of demon this was, but I liked it not at all and wanted to have no part in it.”

  I lit the candles and soft oil lamps in my bedroom and fell across my bed, enchanted and appalled as I read. “Crenoral was gone. Nearly ten years passed since Bestin's departure and I could still feel his hand upon me. It was as if his shadow followed me into the day. I could only count the nights until they came for me as well. I tried to warn Crenoral's family. They would not listen to me. The boys were too young to remember Bestin and what he did. They wept and wailed for Crenoral's return, but I feared it greatly. I feared the death that would come when he returned.”

  There was a long gap in dates then, such as his dates were written, and I knew simply by the minutest of changes in his hand writing that the next entry was made in a rush of memory regarding the night when Bestin came for him. It was almost as though I could hear him in a hushed whisper in my mind as I read those words. “I am no longer. I am changed from what I was. They came to me in the middle of the night, drawing me from my home into the trees. There they fell upon me. Bestin was beautiful and terrible as he took my hand to bring me to him. Somehow I was helpless to resist them, unable to express my loathing of what they were. He kissed me, then I felt the first touch of my death. His teeth were sharp and he showed no remorse as he drank from me. There was little pain, only thoughts of my family, my children, regret. I felt myself going, dying I suppose. It was as though I watched the whole affair from some other place. Bestin held me as we fell to the ground and Crenoral hovered over us. Then, just as my thoughts began to fail me and I lacked the strength to care beyond the end of it, I felt something between us change. I tried to speak, to scream out. I did not want it. I did not choose. In the end, that mattered not at all. Something passed from him into me and the change began.”

  “I do not know how to describe this thing that has happened. My heartbeat slowed within me, my breathing quickened and then stopped. The blood ceased moving. My eyes closed, and yet I could clearly see my brethren waiting and watching, pacing in circles around my dying body. I felt each limb go numb and then contract on itself, as though the blood had been a swelling and with its departure my skin could return to its rightful place. My stomach churned with something beyond hunger. My heart stopped its beating. I died. Then it was born, this thing I am now. My breath returned in a rush, my brow fevered with desires too base to name. My conscious thought failed and in its place was only blood.”

  I shivered and pulled a blanket closer around me. The air in the cave seemed chill and I could almost feel Bestin's eyes upon me. That was, of course impossible, but I felt it none the less. It had never occurred to me what it must feel like to die that way, to be made. My heart seemed loud in the silence of the chamber, and my breathing seemed out of place. I read on, and it was as if Dovan sat beside me reading his pained and twisted narrative. At times he was remorseful, anguished by his new nature. At times he reveled in himself, losing the remorse of man in the thrill of delivering death. So much like myself, I realized after a time, connecting my earliest battles with my humanity with his early battles with the monster he'd become.

  He spared his own family, a thing he described as the most difficult to do. “You see … it is those we love best that we desire the most.” He wrote regarding a passionate visit to his wife's bedchamber. She saw him as a spirit returned to take her with him. He had been nearly undone by her pleading. “Physical attraction alone is hard to ignore in this sta
te of being. The well-turned body, the dusty curls of her hair are enough to make my body scream in agony for a taste of her. Add to that my adoration for her person, the passion of our bed together … the sight of her on her knees before me, her pale skin bare in the light of the fire. That part that stirs a mortal man to sin in such moments stirs me to much more passionate a thing and the hunger in my stomach echoes it so loudly that I could scarcely hear her words. I fell to my knees with the Change upon me, ready to take her in the only way I was able to at that moment. I was weak, intoxicated by her scent … the blood pounding in her body … her lips touching the cold, smooth surface of my unearthly skin. She seduced me into weakness, and I would have been helpless to save her had it not been for Gregan. He had heard the noise and come to see. The sight of my youngest son in his nightclothes, startled at the sight of me and crying in his fear pulled me to myself and I fled.”

  I don't know how many days and nights went by as I read. I hid in my bedchamber, wrapped in quilts and furs against the chill that had taken me. I read of his feud with Bestin over his making and over the nature of what they had become, and of his inability to disobey either of them for long. His clan was built in protest, bringing to him those Bestin thought not suited to the night. He relished in providing immortality to those with the talents to affect the world … poets, prophets, musicians … all were welcomed by him with open arms. Unlike his brothers, he explained in great detail what would take place once the deed was done, before he laid a finger upon them. He had a talent for picking those who could handle the influx of power inherent in the gift, those who would understand and use their power wisely. Somehow this angered Crenoral especially, for he was prone to those who had no gift for the dark and who often extinguished themselves before mankind had opportunity to do it for them. There was so much hatred between the three of them, and yet they were bound together forever.