The Vampire Affair

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The Vampire Affair Page 20

by Livia Reasoner


  “She was…attacked.” After coming this far and risking everything, Michael wasn’t going to pull any punches. “Bitten by a vampire. And now she’s turning into a vampire herself.”

  His voice was loud enough for all of them to hear, but no one made any response to what he said except for Charles, who just nodded solemnly as if he heard such bizarre things every day.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Michael said. “Most people think vampires are, well, not real.”

  “Many unusual things are real in the world, whether people believe in them or not,” Charles countered. “Although I’ve never encountered this particular curse before, I think cleansing it will require our most powerful ritual, that of the Sacred Fire and the summoning of other spirits to aid us.”

  Max said, “You’re talkin’ about callin’ up demons? I dunno about this, Michael.”

  Charles smiled. “There are many spirits, my friend. Some serve evil, and some serve good. The ones we summon tonight will be of the earth. Strong, pure spirits.”

  Michael wasn’t going to stand around arguing, or even discussing the matter. He just wanted Jessie to be cured. “Tell us what to do,” he said.

  Charles pointed to an elaborate arrangement of branches within a circle of rocks. “First I will light the Sacred Fire, built of the Seven Sacred Woods—oak, hickory, maple, locust, birch, beech and ash, as they are known in English. Then you must immerse Jessie in the water seven times.

  “After that,” Charles continued, “you will place her on the ground near the fire and we will summon the spirits by chanting and dancing.”

  Michael felt a twinge of doubt. This ceremony was all well and good, but would it really drive the vampiric curse from Jessie? Or was it just something out of folklore, the Cherokee equivalent of an old wives’ tale or an urban legend?

  He shoved that doubt aside. Trying the ritual wouldn’t hurt anything, he told himself, and if it failed, well, they would keep Jessie sedated and look for some other way to help her. Just because similar efforts had never worked before didn’t mean that they wouldn’t work now.

  He walked forward as Charles knelt and struck sparks with flint and steel to kindle the Sacred Fire the old-fashioned way. When Michael came to the gently sloping bank of the river, he didn’t pause. He walked right out into the stream, feeling the mud on the bottom suck at his boots. The river, which looked peaceful in the moonlight, had a surprisingly strong current flowing in it.

  He stopped when he was waist deep. Charles called, “Turn to face the Sacred Fire.”

  Michael did so, swinging around so that the light from the steadily growing flames washed over him and Jessie.

  “Dip her seven times in the water.”

  Michael bent, lowering Jessie under the surface. Again he wondered if he was doing the right thing as the dark water closed over her face, blotting out her pale features. Immersing her this way felt almost like lowering her into a grave.

  Maybe that’s what it represented, he thought as he raised her into the air again. The water plastered the thin gown to her body. Her long dark hair, now soaked, hung down from her head in a black curtain as water streamed from it. Michael took a deep breath and dipped her under the surface again and again, until he had done it seven times, as Charles had instructed.

  “Now bring her to the fire,” the Adawehi called.

  Michael carried Jessie out of the river. The seven priests formed a ring around the fire now, with an open space to allow Michael to bring Jessie closer to the flames. The women, including Nana Rose, stood to one side, holding hands. Michael wasn’t sure if they were praying, but that’s what it looked like. To the other side, looking uneasy, Max and Clifford waited and watched.

  Following Charles’s directions, Michael carefully lowered Jessie to the ground. The fire glowed brightly by now as the flames leaped high, but it didn’t seem to be giving off much heat, only a gentle warmth.

  “Step back out of the circle,” Charles said.

  Michael did so, his nervousness growing as he retreated. There at the last while he’d been in the river with Jessie, he had thought that he felt her beginning to stir. Was the sedative wearing off, or was the ritual already having some effect on her? He didn’t know, but if Jessie woke up and still possessed a vampire’s bloodlust, this situation had all the makings of a catastrophe.

  Her head definitely moved a little from side to side, Michael saw as the Adawehi closed ranks around her and the fire. They began stomping hard on the ground as they moved slowly in a circle. The women stomped as well, and Michael realized why no grass grew in this field. The Cherokee must have performed many rituals here, going back maybe a hundred years or more.

  As soft, guttural chanting rose from the throats of the dancers, Michael’s mind flashed back to a place he had visited in eastern Europe, in the dark, shadow-haunted valleys where his family’s ancient crusade against the vampires had been born. He had seen a similar circle there, only it ringed a steeply upthrust monolith of some black stone, and the legends that surrounded that place were all of evil, of demons summoned from the pits of the netherworld to take part in ceremonies that turned into orgies of blood and death. That wouldn’t happen here, though, he told himself. Just because some similarities existed didn’t mean the results would be the same.

  Suddenly, Jessie’s back arched and a hoarse cry came from her mouth. Her head whipped back and forth. Michael took an instinctive step forward, but Clifford’s hand clamped around his arm and stopped him. “Maybe the curse is being driven out of her,” the older man said, “and the part of her that’s already a vampire is fighting to hang on.”

  That made sense to Michael. He could hope that Clifford had it right, anyway.

  After a while, time meant nothing. Michael had no idea how long the ritual had gone on. The moon dipped lower in the sky and the shadows seemed to grow darker, but the light from the Sacred Fire held them at bay.

  Jessie seemed almost transparent as she continued to moan and writhe on the ground, but her eyes remained closed.

  “Holy crap!” Max yelled. “Look at the ground!”

  Michael looked down and stifled a yell of his own as the longest, fattest rattlesnake he had ever seen slithered past his right foot. More than a dozen rattles at the end of its tail told Michael that it was very old. The rattler wasn’t alone, either. Dozens of similar snakes squirmed along the ground as they converged on the ring of dancing, chanting Adawehi. As if their movements had been choreographed, the snakes twisted between and underneath the stomping feet, neatly avoiding being trampled.

  Then they headed straight for Jessie.

  Michael let out an inarticulate cry of shock and horror and started forward, but from the other side of the fire Nana Rose called, “Michael, no! The spirits are here to help! Do not interfere!”

  “Spirits, hell!” Max muttered. “They’re snakes! I hate snakes!”

  Michael wasn’t too fond of them himself, but he could tell that these rattlers weren’t behaving normally. None of them had struck at him or his friends, or at the healers dancing in a circle around Jessie. Instead of coiling and setting the rattles on their tails to buzzing, they seemed to be ignoring the humans.

  Except for Jessie. Michael held his breath as the first of the snakes reached her. It crawled over her midsection, twisted and looped around her arm. More of the snakes followed. Jessie continued writhing at first, and Michael saw to his amazement that the snakes seemed to be mimicking her actions. Dozens of them crawled over and around her, until at times he almost couldn’t see her because of the thick, moving carpet of reptiles on her body.

  On a night of horror after horror, this one shook Michael to his core as much as any of them. It took all his iron will not to obey his instincts and rush forward to break through the circle and snatch the creatures away from her. Something told him that would be the worst possible thing he could do, though, so he stayed where he was, watching as Jessie’s struggles slowly subsided. When she lay still,
the snakes began to crawl off her. The men stopped dancing and chanting, and so did the women. In an eerie silence broken only by the flowing of the river, the snakes crawled between the feet of the priests and departed, slithering over the dirt and vanishing into the shadows that gathered beyond the light of the fire.

  Charles turned toward Michael. Infinite weariness gripped the old man’s face. All the chanting and dancing had taken a visible toll on him, as it had on the others. But he smiled as he said, “The rattlesnake is the most generous of spirits, because it takes the evil of the world and stores it in its venom. Our friends have taken enough of the evil from the spirit that possesses Jessie to tame it.”

  Michael wiped sweat from his forehead. “To tame it, you said? But not to banish it?”

  Charles shook his head. “The spirit still resides within her. The only way to rid her of it completely is for her to let it go.”

  “She doesn’t want it,” Michael said. “She doesn’t want to be that way.”

  “Only she can decide that.”

  Michael didn’t have a chance to question him further, because the words were barely out of Charles’s mouth before the old man suddenly lifted his head and peered off into the night. His weathered features grew taut, as if he expected something bad to happen.

  Michael felt it at the same time, a loathsome twisting of his guts and an unpleasant keening in his ears. He jerked around in time to see ominous figures emerging from the shadows, led by a tall, imperious man in black.

  Jefferson Rendell stepped into the light, smiled arrogantly and said, “What a pity you started without us. But at least we got here in time for the grand finale when your own beloved Jessie rips your heart out, Brandt!”

  Again she awoke disoriented, with no idea where she was or what was going on around her. The only memories her mind could lay claim to were fragmented images that flashed vividly but incoherently through her mind, like snippets of film cut up and spliced back together in random order. She saw blood and fire. She saw a ruggedly handsome man smiling at her, holding his hand out to her as if inviting her to join him in the greatest pleasures two people could ever know.

  But as warmth surged inside her, a quickening that she felt spreading through her body, the picture changed. The same man still stood there, but he wasn’t handsome anymore. He was ugly, his face contorted with hatred, and he held a stake in his hand, a stake that he wanted to plunge into her chest. He wanted her dead.

  The kaleidoscope turned, and the image shifted again. This time Jessie saw a tall, dark, hawk-faced man, and even though the gaze he directed toward her was compelling, she felt repulsed and sickened at the same time, as if there were something loathsome about him. Her mind began spinning faster and faster, the images flickering back and forth until they all began to blur together, then finally a voice cried out somewhere in her head, Stop it! I want Michael!

  Michael…

  Saying the name to herself unlocked everything in Jessie’s brain. Everything that had happened in the past few hectic, terrible, wonderful days flooded back in on her, from the first time she had seen him coming out of that elevator to this very moment, when she’d awakened lying next to a fire, somewhere outside. She still didn’t know what she was doing here, since she’d been unconscious, but she remembered being bitten by Jefferson Rendell and she recalled with awful clarity how she had attacked Michael and tried to kill him. The memory of it sickened her.

  But in the back of her mind, a voice still clamored for his death, still urged her to lunge at him and sink her fangs into his neck. Fangs? she thought. Yes, she realized as she moaned and started pushing herself to her feet, she had fangs. She felt the sharp points with her tongue. The vampiric curse still gripped her, even though the horrible bloodlust she had experienced earlier had faded almost to nothingness.

  It could come back at any time, she warned herself. She staggered to her feet and looked around, trying to figure out where she was and what was happening here. She saw the fire, and Michael and Clifford and Max, and standing around her were a bunch of people she didn’t recognize at first. Unease vanished when she saw a familiar face. “Nana Rose!” she cried out as she took a step toward the older woman.

  But Rendell was there, too, and he bellowed, “Kill them!” as he swept a hand toward Nana Rose and the others. “But leave Brandt for the girl!”

  Rendell had seven or eight of his acolytes with him. They rushed forward, fangs bared. Michael, Max and Clifford leaped to intercept them before they could reach Nana Rose and the other Cherokee.

  Jessie had begun to remember some of them from her childhood on the reservation. They were all friends of Nana Rose, including the old man Charles, who was rumored to be some sort of shaman. Jessie had never put any stock in that sort of thing, but now as she glanced around she began to wonder. She recalled misty images of a ritual being performed. She heard chanting in the back of her head. She seemed to feel scaly things crawling over her skin.

  She stumbled forward, covering her face with her hands as Michael and his cousins battled the vampires. Charles and some of the other men rushed to join the fight, despite their age. Jessie wanted to shut it all out.

  A voice suddenly cut through the chaos around her. “Kill him, Jessie! Kill Michael Brandt!”

  She wanted to obey the command, which she knew came from Jefferson Rendell. She felt compelled to obey.

  But something just as strong, if not stronger, rebelled at the idea of hurting Michael. She loved Michael, and he loved her. He had risked his life again and again to help her and protect her, and she knew he would die to keep her from harm. She could do no less for him. They were two halves of a whole, neither complete without the other, even though neither of them had been aware of that need until recently.

  “Kill him, Jessie! Kill him!”

  But she had to do what Rendell told her. He was her master. He had made her what she was now, and she could never go back. Despair welled up inside her. She was a vampire, one of the foul, unholy creatures Michael had devoted his life to destroying. He would destroy her, too, if he got the chance. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to plunge a stake into her heart and turn her to dust. He wanted to steal the bloody glories of immortality from her.

  Jessie knew that those unwanted thoughts came from Rendell. He put them in her mind. But she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t push the bloodlust away as it grew stronger in her. The only way she could appease it, the only way she could stop the voices in her head, was to kill Michael as Rendell commanded. With that new resolve forming in her mind, she stalked forward, pausing only to reach down and pluck a burning branch from the fire. The light from the makeshift torch cast a hellish glow on her face as she approached Michael from behind.

  Nana Rose suddenly appeared beside her and clutched at her arm. “Jessie, no!” her grandmother cried. “For God’s sake, don’t do this! Don’t listen to him!”

  Jessie’s face contorted in a snarl. She brushed Nana Rose aside, not hurting the older woman but making her stumble backward. Michael, Max and Clifford had destroyed all the vampires except for one, and now that one collapsed in a heap of dust as Max thrust a stake into his chest. Jefferson Rendell stood nearby, watching as he had throughout the entire struggle, not wanting to soil his own hands with physical combat.

  As Michael stood there with his back to Jessie, breathing heavily from his desperate exertions, Rendell said, “I really wanted to take the woman with me, Brandt, like I did with lovely Charlotte all those years ago. But when I was forced to leave prematurely—and thank you for killing Spaulding, Escobar and Takahashi for me, by the way—I resigned myself to being satisfied with knowing that you would have to destroy her, and that you’d suffer the torments of the damned from being the one to kill her.”

  Rendell took a step forward, his calm facade slipping a little as he went on, “But you tried to save her! Don’t you know that there’s no going back, you fool? Nothing can cure a vampire!”

  Jessie was only a few feet
from Michael now, and he still had his back turned toward her. Even though Rendell’s lips didn’t move, Jessie heard his strident voice in her head, urging Kill him, kill him, kill him!

  Then Michael said, “You’re wrong, Rendell. One thing can cure a vampire.” He finally turned to look at Jessie. “And that thing is love.”

  She stopped in her tracks as if she had run into a wall, with the burning branch upraised to smash it down on his head. Her eyes met his, and something rocked and shifted inside her. It broke loose like the pent-up fury of a flood bursting through a dam. She twisted, her soul convulsing, and as Rendell screamed, “Kill him, you stupid bitch!” she launched forward with all the strength in her still supernaturally powerful body.

  But not at Michael. She leaped at Jefferson Rendell instead, and as his eyes bulged in sudden shock and horror, she slammed the burning branch into his chest. The jagged end sank deeply into his body, and as it pierced his heart, he began to fall apart, the flames igniting the dust into which the centuries-old creature disintegrated. It went up with a whoosh and a blinding flash, and Jessie felt herself flying backward.

  She didn’t hit the ground.

  Michael caught her.

  And as he turned her to face him and his powerful arms drew into his embrace, she felt something leaving her. A shudder ran through her as the thing ripped loose from its moorings and fled into the darkness. The curse was gone. She had time to run her tongue over her teeth and make sure the fangs had vanished before Michael kissed her.

  Then she knew nothing except the sweet, searing heat of his mouth and the strength of his arms around her and the muscular framework of his body as she molded herself to him. She had lost nothing when the curse left her.

  Instead she had gained the whole world.

 

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