by Raven Hart
From one of Melaphia’s altars I took the long braided lock of hair she had cut from Eleanor. I tied the hair around my wrist, then plucked the box from the air and cast the shells.
Eleanor… Closing my eyes, I touched the soft strands of what remained mortal, and waited for the sight of her.
I was transported to unnatural darkness, but as a night creature, that is my element. I can discern shapes in the deepest caves of the earth and on the floor of the ocean, but this darkness wasn’t earthly. This was a suffocating, unnatural shadow, the total absence of light or even light’s memory.
Yet there were sounds. The slither of scales on rock, the slow sliding footsteps of bereft wandering creatures. With a low pitiful whine, something shivering cold brushed by me. Then a guttural growl came from the distance, followed by a shriek.
Was this an in-between dimension or had I been delivered to the dark side of hell?
Eleanor’s body in the coffin was screaming but if her suspended spirit had been banished to this dark place, how would I find her? “Eleanor?” I said aloud in case she was near and could hear my voice.
The sound echoed and set off a cacophony of reactions. The beings who inhabited this damned place closed in around me, speaking, entreating, threatening all at once. The din was beyond alarming.
Even a vampire knows when to step back. Yet somewhere in the chaos I heard the desperate whisper of Eleanor’s answer.
“William, I’m here. Don’t leave me—”
For the first time in my overlong existence, I needed light.
“Stand back,” I ordered those clustered around me, and drew myself into a killing posture, calling on any power the shells could provide.
Let there be light…
I felt the spirit of Lalee rise through me, toes to ears, like oil through a lantern wick. As my essence grew taller, a brilliant wash of illumination lit the area. It took several seconds to realize the luminescence emanated from my skin. It took half that long to regret my request for vision. Some things are better left to the dark.
Here there be dragons.
There have been poems written to the velvet sky, but this place had the total inky darkness and none of the stars. No light could penetrate the utter black above all who roamed beneath it.
As far as my borrowed power could penetrate the gloom there were beings—moving, searching, squirming in their dank bucket like mindless worms. Their howling moans set my teeth on edge. Gerard, ever the scientist, would have had a field day with this supernatural evolution run amok…from amorphous slugs leaving trails of slime to zombielike humans, wild-eyed and witless. A primal forest of teeth dripping blood, lolling tongues and blank, horrified eyes. This was a den of demons to give anyone pause, but I had other things to think about.
In the distance, Eleanor, or her essence, called to me, though ten thousand trapped souls stood between us. The closest demons had drawn back—driven away by the unfamiliar light. Then with a growl, one of the larger ones leaped toward me like an overgrown rabid dog, his yellow canines bared. I braced myself for the attack but, as Reedrek had on the Alabaster, the snarling attacker sailed through my insubstantial form, leaving behind an essence that smelled of ripe dead meat. The demons he inadvertently crashed into roared at his failure and proceeded to bite and rip his body until all that remained was blood and gore…and teeth. Bon appétit.
Then they all fell silent, whether from shock or fury I could not say. And I didn’t care. For the moment, I had become a lord of light instead of darkness, and I intended to use any advantage I could find. I waded into the demons and they fell back before me, covering their eyes like pilgrims in the desert who’ve discovered a flaming angel in their midst.
Hallelujah!
By the time I reached Eleanor, a press of demons silently at my heels, my large demonic attacker had been mostly reconstituted by whatever power reigned in that terrible place. He pushed his way through the others to get a better look. He only had one eye now. Failure had its consequences.
“William!” Eleanor flung herself at me, again with little result. The ripple of sensation caused by our joined spirits was a brief and mostly pleasant experience. She smelled alternately of magnolia and fear. I tried to comfort her, but without touch it was difficult. Our connection was rooted in the physical, in sex. We’d never taken time to discuss philosophy.
“I won’t let them harm you.” I moved toward her until she stood inside the circle of my light and our spirit forms overlapped slightly. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, perhaps imagining my not-so-human comfort.
“Why am I here? This isn’t how you said it would be.” Her voice shook with growing horror. “Am I dead?”
She wanted to know if she’d been summarily sent to hell. I couldn’t set her spirit at ease without lying, since there’d always been the chance she might be lost.
I raised a hand and pushed glowing fingers along her cheek. She closed her eyes and sighed as if she could feel the touch. “Help me.”
“I’ll see you through it. I won’t leave you.” And as easily as that I’d made another promise. One that might be both end and bitter beginning. If Eleanor did not survive her making, then both of us would be caught in the dark.
A buzz and a hiss traveled through the throng. There was movement, a shifting on one side. “William…” I heard my name again and glanced down toward Eleanor. She had her gaze on the crowd, on the disturbance in the distance. A small glow seemed to be moving in our direction—the light was pinkish white. With much grumbling and growling the crowd parted and another angel stood before us. No, not an angel.
Shari. Jack’s first attempt at making a vampiress.
She looked very different from the last time I’d seen her. Her honey blond hair had turned silvery white; her warm amber eyes, a glimmering gray. Fey as the fabled Sidhe. Her burial clothes were torn at the sleeve and shredded at the hem; her bare feet were bloody.
“William,” she said again, as though she couldn’t believe her sight. “You’ve come to save me?” she breathed, awestruck.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her otherwise. “I’ll do my best, girl.”
Then her gaze shifted from me to Eleanor. She moved forward and put out her hand as though we’d just arrived at a party and needed introductions. “I’m Shari,” she said.
Without releasing her contact with me, Eleanor made an effort to take Shari’s insubstantial hand. “I’m Eleanor.”
Then they both looked at me for what should come next. Where was Jack when I truly needed him? “Are you all right?” I asked, ridiculous as it might seem.
Shari seemed to shrink inside her pale glow, then nervously glanced around the circle of hideous onlookers. “They don’t bother me much, now that I have protection. The lady—Melaphia told me what to do when they try to scare me.”
“And what is that?”
Obediently, Shari bowed her head and began a low chant.
Jack
I had to go to William’s office at the harbor warehouse to help his foreman, Tarney Graham, work out a schedule of men to watch the harbor and waterfront for anything suspicious—like, say, a shipment of coffins and old dirt—that could indicate a vampire invasion.
As I left the building I felt a presence in the shadows: someone watching me. I acted as if I heard nothing, continuing down the boardwalk a ways. Someone behind me matched his steps to mine, thinking that the clatter of my cowboy boot heels would mask the noise of his own footsteps. I wheeled and with one blow caught my stalker in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
“I thought I told you never to try to sneak up on me,” I said, extending my fangs for show.
Lamar Nathan Von Werm, or just plain old Werm, as William and I referred to him, got to his feet and dusted himself off. “I was just practicing my vampire…sneaking skills, that’s all.”
A short time ago, Werm was nothing but a vampire wannabe. He was unique among the goth crowd he ran with in that he’d been clever eno
ugh to figure out that vampires really do exist. Werm had actually researched vampires and he made me for one fair and square when he witnessed my lack of reflection in a downtown shop window. He’d stalked me for a while until I caught him in the act. After that, he begged me to make him a vampire, which I of course refused to do.
It was only through sheer dumb luck, if that’s what you want to call it, that he happened to be in the wrong place at the right time and finally got his wish. Reedrek had forced William to make Werm a blood drinker. Werm hadn’t quite gotten over his romantic notions of vampirism or “the brotherhood of the blood,” as he liked to call it. He had a lot to learn, and, unfortunately, William had made it my job to teach him. Somebody had to. Anybody who would willingly choose this existence was too dumb to come in out of the sun.
“Vampire sneaking skills?” I hissed. “Listen here, junior, vampires don’t have to sneak.”
“How else do you surprise your victims so they don’t run away before you get a chance to bite their neck and suck their blood?” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. He’d been pale even before he vamped out. Now, with his white blond hair and punk outfit, he looked like some scaled-down version of Johnny Winter without the guitar.
I stared at him, disgusted. “If I ever catch you preying on an innocent human being, I’m going to drain you and leave your dry husk out in the sun to vaporize, you understand me? Where have you been getting your blood?”
“At the butcher shop, like you taught me,” Werm whined. “But no matter how much pig’s blood I drink, it’s almost like I’m…still hungry.”
“You’ll get used to it. Just remember, not killing humans without cause is what separates us from the old lords, the evil ones.”
He shivered. “Like Reedrek. I know. But can’t I bite an evildoer, some really nasty criminal?”
Werm knew that William and I dealt out vigilante justice from time to time. When there was a particularly evil human on a murder or rape spree in Savannah, we would not suffer that person to live. My sire and I didn’t have to concern ourselves with such niceties as due process, and there was no potential for mistaken identity because we could literally smell out evil. We served as judge, jury, and executioner.
“You don’t have the chops yet to make sure you’ve got the right bad guy. You might go hurting some good ol’ boy by mistake. Leave the justice-bringing to me and William.” I winced, realizing I sounded more like William every day—keeping Werm on a need-to-know basis.
“Then what do I have the chops to do?” Werm wailed. “I’m a vampire, for Pete’s sake. I want to do something…vampirey.” Werm held out his leather-clad arms and let them fall to his sides. “William promised to teach you more about being a vampire. Have you learned anything juicy?”
His face fell when I explained that William hadn’t really had a chance to start teaching me, what with making Eleanor and working on vampire politics. “I did learn one thing that’s pretty interesting, though,” I said.
“What?” Werm asked eagerly.
“Whatever traditional powers vampires usually have, we have ’em in spades and more besides.” I passed on William’s theory about how the voodoo blood made me, Werm, William, and Eleanor special. I skipped the part about how Werm probably got shorted in the skills department because he was such a weak specimen to begin with. There’s nothing more pitiful than a vampire with low self-esteem.
“So it’s just a matter of figuring out what your special talent is,” I continued.
“Cool. Maybe I’ve got X-ray vision.” Werm brightened at the thought.
I didn’t need X-ray vision to see the cogs of his little mind turning. He’d be at the beach bars on Tybee tomorrow night as soon as the sun went down, hoping to see through some wet T-shirts. Girl T-shirts, I hoped. At least that would keep him busy and out of my hair. “Yeah. Maybe so,” I told him.
“Hey, did you think to ask William if vampires can fly, like in Anne Rice novels?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t get hung up on those fictional vampires. Cool or not, those are just fairy tales.”
“Some of what shows up in her books and other movies is true, though,” Werm countered.
He had a point. Bram Stoker had picked up on the fact that a vampire had to travel with the soil of his homeland. Almost no literary vamps cast a reflection. I think some of the vampire writers through the years had some good and not-so-human sources to draw on. “So why don’t you climb up on the boathouse roof and see if you can catch an updraft,” I suggested. Our walk had pulled us even with William’s yacht launch. “If you don’t take off, you’ll land in the water and you won’t feel a thing.”
“And ruin this?” Werm ran his palms down the front of his black leather jacket.
“Hey, you don’t know until you try.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, eyeing the roof.
He left his jacket with me and let me give him a boost onto the lowest edge of the roof. Then he gingerly made his way up the side as best he could in those sissified boots he wore. He crossed over to the side facing the water and teetered on the edge.
“Go ahead. Jump!” I shouted. “Concentrate!” Damned if the little devil didn’t flap his arms like a chicken when he jumped. It didn’t help. He landed in the river with a surprised yelp. I crossed over to give him a hand out of the drink. “It looks like you’re earthbound, my friend,” I observed. My young protégé looked like a drowned wharf rat.
“Your turn,” he sputtered.
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
“Hey. At least I had the guts to try.” Werm, still dripping river water, started flapping his elbows and clucking.
I had to laugh. “All right. You win. I’ll try it.”
I pulled off my boots and climbed onto the roof, feeling like a complete fool. As I made my way to the edge closest to the water, I hoped William wouldn’t come along and see me, ’cause I’d never live it down. But still, what if I could fly? William once got so mad at me—over a jacket of all things—that he grabbed me by the collar and levitated us both off the ground. If he could do that…
I stood on the edge, looking out toward the mouth of the river, and took a deep breath. I smelled the life all around me. The river creatures, the lush vegetation in the marshes, the sea itself. I thought about my place in the world and my overlong undead existence among the living. I was an unnatural being and still somehow I belonged here in this old port city, same as everything and everyone else. I closed my eyes, stepped into space, and waited for the water to come to me.
But it didn’t.
I opened my eyes again. I was hovering three feet over the water.
“Damn! Look at you!” Werm whooped.
I looked back at him, sending my concentration all to hell, and then I landed in the river feetfirst with a splash. I swam between the moored boats and Werm gave me a hand up onto the boardwalk. He laughed and did a little dance. “What was it like?” he asked, clearly awestruck.
“I don’t know. It only lasted a second.” I shook myself like a spaniel and sat down to put my boots back on. “It was weird. It was unreal.” I felt kind of stunned. I mean, how are you supposed to feel when you first realize you can defy gravity? Had I been able to do this all along? A guy just doesn’t go around jumping off things to see if he can fly. If it hadn’t been for William’s remarks about what the power of the voodoo blood might mean for us, I would never even have thought of trying it.
“You’ve got to practice,” Werm said firmly.
“Practice?”
“You know, learn to control it. Learn to use it.”
I leaned my head over to get the last of the water out of my ear. “I guess it could come in handy in a fight,” I said. “Or to get somewhere really fast, if I got good at it. But I’d have to be careful where and how I used it. I mean, I can’t very well have humans see me jetting through the air like the freakin’ Flying Nun.”
“Who?” Werm said.
“Never mind,” I said wi
th a wave. “Before your time.”
Werm thought about this for a second. “I guess you’re right. What else did William teach you about us and the things we can do?”
I got to my feet and started walking back to where my ’Vette was parked. It was kind of embarrassing to think that William still had kept me in the dark about everything except the bare minimum I needed to know to survive. I decided that I was going to be straight with Werm from the beginning—tell him everything that I knew. Only problem was, I still didn’t know much.
I searched my mind for something I could tell Werm to help keep him out of trouble, because I had the sinking feeling that keeping Werm out of trouble was going to be a tall order. At the very least, I could tell him something interesting. I thought for a second and settled on a very important subject. And I sure could have used some guidance on the subject from William myself.
“I can tell you what I discovered on my own not long ago,” I told Werm. “Something very important.”
“What?” he asked eagerly.
I put one arm around his scrawny shoulder as we ambled down the walkway. “My boy, let me tell you about the birds and the bees—and the vampires.”
Two
Jack
By the time I got through telling Werm the ins and outs—if you’ll pardon the expression—of vampire sex, we were in the car and on the way to Werm’s house. Basically, Werm had just about decided never to have sex again. The again part was debatable, in my opinion, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Since I’d only met one female vamp in my hundred-and-fifty-year tour of duty as a bloodsucker, the Werminator had a pretty good chance of remaining a vamp-virgin forever.
Some boys just can’t catch a break.
Werm had set up housekeeping in his parents’ wine cellar after his father had boarded up the place when his mother went into rehab. The society ladies who lunch in Savannah rarely do so without half a dozen mimosas, or whatever the hell those type of women drink, and it seemed Matron Von Werm was regularly pickled by the time hubby got home of an evening.
