“I should have noticed the resemblance.” Kyle’s bottomless gaze shifted back to me. He sneered. “You and your mongrel litter.”
With a grunt, he flung me to the ground. My tailbone hit the grass, but in my dazed state, I was barely aware of the pain.
Oringo strolled off the porch steps and came to me. The three nameless dogs that I had seen yesterday flanked him, protectively.
I wanted to get up and run away, but as I looked at Oringo, I suddenly didn’t trust my legs to work.
Oringo was the man whose portrait I had seen in the family photo album. The man with whom I shared a strong likeness. The man Aunt Lillie had called Grandpa Orin.
It can’t be.
Although his photo was sepia-toned and tattered, this man looked to be no older than forty. He wore a dark button-down shirt, dark slacks, gleaming black boots.
A ruby glimmered on his finger. The family stone . . .
“Rise, my son,” he said.
He took me by my elbow and brought me to my feet. His touch was paternal, and his calm, dark eyes held the wisdom of ages; I intuitively understood that I was looking at someone ancient, far older than I could comprehend.
Kyle clucked his tongue. “Your ways abhor me.”
Oringo’s nostrils flared. “Leave us, Kyle.”
“We will resume this conversation,” Kyle said. “But know that I will proceed—with or without your assistance.”
“As you wish.” Oringo shrugged.
In a blink, Kyle vanished. One second, he was there, decked out in his black ensemble. The next second, there was only empty space where he had stood, as if he had been absorbed into the night.
Dizziness spun through me, and my knees buckled. Oringo put his arm around my shoulder and kept me from falling, and the dogs closed ranks around me, too, seeming to sense my distress.
I dimly realized that the buzzing noise had finally ceased.
“What . . . what’s going on?” I asked, in a wafer-thin voice. “Who are you?”
“Come inside, my son,” Oringo said. “We have much to discuss. I have been waiting for you, and I believe you have been waiting for me, too.”
Chapter Eighteen
In my dream, stepping through the red door had plunged me into an abyss of fathomless depths. In actuality, when I crossed the threshold the hardwood floor was completely intact—it was only inside my own mind that I was falling.
Falling into a bizarre new reality that turned my beliefs upside down. A reality where strange beings could teleport in a heartbeat, where those same beings spoke of men as cattle, where someone who looked like me lived without showing any signs of aging since his photo had been taken decades ago.
The thoughts made me weak, feverish. Oringo led me to a chair in the front room. He placed a ceramic mug of a steaming beverage in my hands.
It had a spicy aroma that aroused my thirst, but I hesitated to drink it. Everything was unknown, a threat, until proven otherwise.
“It’s only tea, Daniel,” Oringo said. “Drink. It will give you strength.”
Using both hands to hold the mug—in my shaky condition, the only way I could keep it balanced without dropping it—I tilted the cup to my lips. The tea was hot and bitter, but I immediately felt the haze lifting from my thoughts.
I cast a quick look around. The room was narrow, lit by three white candles on an unadorned oak cocktail table. It was furnished with a fabric-covered sofa, two matching chairs. A collection of black-and-white photographs lined the burgundy walls; I recognized some of them as copies of pictures I had seen in Aunt Lillie’s photo album.
On an end table beside my chair, there was a photo of me. A shot my mother had snapped when I was five years old: Grinning, I wore a floppy straw hat and denim overalls as I petted a puppy in my lap.
It felt so weird to find a photo of myself in this mysterious man’s house that I felt as though I were looking at a picture of someone else.
“You were a good-looking child,” Oringo said. He settled into a chair across from me, and the canines came to rest near his feet. A smile touched his lips. “You’ve grown into quite a man, as well.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“You may call me Grandpa Orin,” he said. Another faint smile. “While not quite technically accurate, it will make things easier.”
“I saw your picture in Aunt Lillie’s photo album.” I didn’t know what else to say. Normally, I found it easy to conjure words, but my brain was sputtering like a faulty light bulb. “She wouldn’t tell me where you fit into the family tree . . . if you do.”
He released a hearty, good-natured laugh. “I’m the root of the family tree, Daniel. I’m the patriarch of the clan, the founder of the family.”
I was shaking my head. “God, I must be dreaming.”
“It would make it easier to believe if you were, eh?” He chuckled. “In 1734, I immigrated to America from Ghana. I was disgusted with the exportation of Africans as New World slaves, and fascinated by the notion of setting down roots in a fresh land. After taking many years to survey various territories, I took a human as my wife, and acquired the land on which my descendants reside to this day. I protected my children from the indignities of the slave trade. Know this, Daniel—on your mother’s branch of your family, at least, your people have always been free.”
His words swirled over me, but there was one piece that I couldn’t dislodge from my mind.
“You said you moved here in 1734,” I said.
He nodded matter-of-factly. “In August of that year, to be precise. A tedious, month-long voyage by sea. It would have been nice to have air travel then.” He laughed.
“That was almost two hundred and seventy-five years ago,” I said, numbly.
He nodded again. “Indeed. Time passes quickly.”
I gazed into the cup. The tea had initially warmed me, but now I felt cold and shivery all over again.
“You’re telling yourself that it’s not possible,” he said. “You are correct—the tremendous lifespan to which I lay claim is not possible for a man. While I immigrated to America in 1734, I’ve lived in countless countries before—Ghana, Egypt, Senegal, Rome, Greece, Brazil. I’ve seen empires rise and fall, great nations of which you’ve read in your history books. I’ve seen the fortunes of man go boom and bust and boom again. I’ve seen the entire course of human history, Daniel, thousands of years, and it is but a day to me.”
Slowly, I looked up at him. My head felt heavy, as if a lead weight lay on the back of my neck. “What are you?”
“You pose the question to which you’ve already found an answer,” he said. “You overheard my conversation with Kyle. You saw his teeth . . .”
He opened his mouth. I saw the gleam of saliva on sharp incisors. My heart clutched. It took all of my courage to keep from bolting out of the room.
“Ask yourself, Daniel,” he said. “Have you ever suffered the common cold, or the flu, or any disease whatsoever? Have you ever broken a bone? Sustained a bruise for longer than an hour or two?”
My mind raced, searching for answers to his questions, and in every instance, finding the answer to be no. No, no, no, never.
“Do you understand the origin of your unusual agility and quickness ?” he asked. “Has it not arisen to aid you when you needed it?”
I thought about dodging the blows of Bruno Jackson, the school bully.
“You make your living writing books,” he said. “I’ve read them all, and I’ve read about your work habits in interviews. You say that you write your books in a mere few weeks—but you and I both know that you could write an entire book in a day, for you possess an extraordinary ability to focus your energies, as we all do.”
He knows everything about me. He knows my entire life.
He leaned forward in his chair, dark eyes glimmering. “You’ve seen your blood relatives. You’ve seen how even the oldest among them walk easily without the aid of a cane, see clearly without eyewear, and possess a singular
nimbleness of mind and overall robust health . . . many passing on from this world only after they surpass the glorious age of one hundred.”
I envisioned Aunt Lillie, ninety-two, moving about with the energy of a woman thirty years younger.
He said, “You came here, to your family home, because you knew there was something in your family’s history, a secret to which you had not been privy, hidden knowledge about yourself. I summoned you into these woods, for I believe the time has come for you to learn the truth of your ancestry.”
He rose, and crossed the room. He placed a firm hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t move. I was afraid to move.
“I am a vampire, Daniel,” he said. “And you have my blood.”
Chapter Nineteen
I am a vampire . . .
Head lowered, I pulled in a deep breath.
A vampire.
I swallowed.
Vampire.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
I had always known there was something different about me. I remembered how everyone in my second-grade class came down with chickenpox, and I was the only one who avoided the illness. Remembered how I’d been struck by a car, an accident that should have landed me in the hospital with serious injury, and how I’d gotten up with only minor bruises that had faded an hour later. Remembered how throughout school, I always managed to ace exams without studying much at all, how term papers and essays flowed out of me as if channeled once I settled down and focused. Remembered that odd sense I’d had so long I must have been born with it, that there was something unique about me, but unable to put my finger on what it was.
Those differences always had made me feel isolated. Alone in way that I couldn’t describe with words, but which I’d long felt poignantly, like a burr under the collar.
“Come,” Oringo said. “There is more.”
He took my arm and lifted me to my feet.
As I shuffled through the house behind Oringo, I noticed that he and I shared the same posture, the same manner of walking, and that casual observation both fascinated and frightened me.
The dogs trailed behind us, herding me along.
Like in most shotgun houses, there was no hallway; each room led directly into the next. Beyond the living room in which we’d been sitting, there was a bedroom; beyond the bedroom, a kitchen.
There was a wooden door with a shiny brass knob set flush in the floor between the kitchen and bedroom. Oringo bent, lifted it open.
A candle on a nearby table revealed a stone staircase beneath the doorway that appeared to descend into the darkest bowels of the earth.
“The rabbit hole goes deeper, Daniel,” Oringo said with a flickering smile.
He ushered me through the door, and closed it above us. The dogs did not follow, and intuition suggested that they would stand guard over the house until our return.
It was a narrow spiral stairway with a sturdy wooden railing, illuminated at several junctures by candles in sconces bolted to the faded stone walls. The air was cool, and I thought I detected the smell of paper, books. The bottom was so far below, however, that I couldn’t see it.
“Almost there,” Oringo said, as if anticipating my question.
We finally emerged in a vast, candle-lit, circular chamber that reminded me of a university library. The area was full of over a dozen bookcases that must have been twenty feet high, and the shelves were packed with books. A ladder on wheels leaned against the far wall.
“I’m something of a librarian, as you can see,” Oringo said. “These are texts I’ve collected over the millennia, volumes valuable to humans and vampire alike.”
“Books about vampires,” I said.
“Genuine vampires, not the creations of over-imaginative novelists and filmmakers,” he said. He strolled to the center of the room, a wide-open space furnished with a couple of immense oak desks, and leather armchairs. “Much of what you think you know about vampires is a fabrication. Myth, not fact.”
My legs were quivering again. I lowered myself into a chair.
Oringo sauntered around the room, arms crossed over his chest, like a college professor ready to deliver a lecture.
“Vampires are not the poor, damned members of humanity, or some wicked spawn of Satan,” Oringo said. “Vampires walked the earth long before the dawn of man. We are a species unto ourselves—we were living civilized lives while humans were hunting buffalo with spears and stones and living in mud huts. We’ve watched humans evolve, and aided the evolutionary process in instances when it suited our needs.”
“Did you feed on humans?” I asked. The question had just popped into my head, and I spoke without thinking that maybe I really didn’t want to know the answer.
He looked at me. “Yes. We preyed on them. That is one thing about vampires in fiction that is actually true—we do subsist on blood.”
Nausea twisted my stomach. But I found myself thinking about those times when I had tasted my own blood—when getting a paper cut, for instance, or a bruise that broke the skin. I found myself recalling the jittery excitement that coursed through me when the coppery taste touched my tongue.
“You have inherited an affinity for the taste of blood,” Oringo said.
“Sunlight doesn’t bother me,” I said, eager to change the topic.
“You are human enough that it would not. I can venture outdoors during daylight as well, if I take precautions to protect myself. While exposure to ultraviolet rays does not cause vampires to shrivel and explode as you see in popular films, it does irritate our skin and cause rather unsightly wrinkles.”
I laughed sourly. “Sounds like what happens when someone sunbathes too much.”
“As for garlic cloves, holy water, the Christian crucifix?” Oringo grunted with disdain. “They affect me no more than they would you.”
“Mirrors?” I asked.
“A most absurd legend. Of course I would see my image captured in a mirror!”
“Sleeping in coffins?”
“I prefer my Tempur-Pedic mattress,” Oringo said.
“Do you have to be invited into someone’s house before you, ah . . .”
“No,” he said. “Furthermore, I’ve not laid my lips on human flesh in over a hundred years. The advent of blood banks has been a boon to vampires, and we’ve brokered confidential arrangements with suppliers throughout the world. I receive a monthly shipment and keep the stock in my refrigerator.”
I’m sitting here talking to a vampire who’s telling me he gets a monthly shipment of blood by freakin’ FedEx. Jesus.
I slumped in the chair. I was beginning to feel dizzy again.
“Each vampire does have particular talents, however,” Oringo continued. “Kyle, the one you met earlier? He has the gift of telekinesis—he can move objects from one location to another, a rather useful skill. Others, such as his late father, could influence weather patterns.”
“What can you do?” I asked. “Fly?”
Oringo didn’t laugh. “I can procreate with humans, produce children that share traits of both species. Few vampires possess the gift—most of us who want to take on human partners must change the human’s blood chemistry to a close approximation of ours, a painful and lengthy transfusion process.”
“But not you?” My voice was slurred; I felt intoxicated.
“It’s a humble gift, perhaps, but one with which I long ago made peace. I have no interest in waging wars with humanity. Why would I—when I count among them so many of my own children?”
“Right, makes perfect sense,” I said.
Oringo came to me. “You must not share what I’ve told you with anyone. You cannot tell the woman you intend to marry. This is a secret that must remain within the blood circle of the family. Do I have your word?”
“Yeah,” I whispered. I tried to nod, but my head drooped, and when I looked up, the room was spinning, as if I’d had way too much to drink.
“This is too much for you to digest,” Oringo said. “You shoul
d rest now. I’m afraid a task awaits us, and you must be prepared when I call on you . . .”
He might have said something else, but I’m not sure what it was, because I passed out.
Chapter Twenty
When I came to, I was lying in bed in a dark room. Blinking groggily, I grappled for the edges of the mattress, hoping to discover I was sleeping in our king-size bed back in Atlanta—and felt the narrow width of the twin.
No. I was still in Mississippi.
Then, I felt a cool metallic chain around my neck, and a hard lump lying against the base of my throat. I closed my fingers around it.
It was too dark in the room to see, but I knew what it was: a ruby ring. The family stone. Given to me by the family elder.
You may call me Grandpa Orin . . .
I wanted to believe that my encounter with him had been only a dream, something I could dismiss and forget. But the feel of the gemstone in my hand brought everything back in an undeniable, delirious rush.
I am a vampire . . . you have my blood . . . much of what you think you know about vampires is a fabrication . . . you have inherited an affinity for the taste of blood . . . this is a secret that must remain within the blood circle of the family . . .
I looked across the room. Asha was a shadowy shape on the bed, sound asleep. The crimson digits on the clock read 3:28 AM.
I’m afraid a task awaits us, and you must be prepared when I call on you.
Before I realized what I was doing, I had pushed off the mattress and snatched my car keys off the nightstand. I was still fully dressed, from my earlier jaunt to the woods.
I hurried out of the house. Opened the door to my Expedition and got behind the wheel.
I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going. I was driven by an impulse I didn’t understand, and I was powerless to resist it, much as I’d been powerless to resist the humming that had drawn me to the forest like a pin to a magnet.
I fired up the engine and roared out of the driveway, gravel spinning from the tires. I swerved onto the adjacent country road.
I’d forgotten to switch on the headlamps. I started to reach for the lever, and that weird impulse told me not to, ordered me to drive in darkness.
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