Evelina silenced the crowd with a swift cut of her talons, swiping the air and scolding the few wild ones too amped up at the sight of the Empress’s split head. She gave Huitzilli the order, his diving down into the pit and grabbing the neck of one, pulling the other up by his hair. Both vampires welcomed the Hummingbird’s mercy after he tossed them across the deck without removing either of their heads. He bellowed out a laugh and returned to Evelina’s side where she stood as Athena among the immortals.
As a progeny of mine, she wielded her influence like one well aware of her greatness. She made me recall Shenmé in the beginning, powerful and electric, and no doubt vulnerable too.
“Fall in line or fall out,” she shouted from the upper deck, looking down on her bloody band. Her voice boomed over the crowd and they obeyed. “We are no longer in the business of blood trade, but shall conquer land instead.”
The vampires cheered their Dogaressa, as she raised the spike with Cixi’s head and shook the face over the crowd. The fickle brood showed no sympathy for the dragoness, as none rose in ire against their new leader.
But I had misjudged a crew member, one I had not read well enough to know her loyalty to the Empress ran deep. Youlan harbored revenge for Cixi’s death, keeping her secret hidden from Peter. Even he did not suspect her capable of such an act, to abandon ship for the shore once she found her Empress’s headless body on the deck of her cabin.
But she did not go alone.
Muriel sent Veor to pull me from Evelina’s inauguration, and I slipped out without notice, reading the urgency on his face.
“Youlan has taken Lucia,” Veor said, his mouth taut and eyes wild.
“When?”
“She was gone when Muriel went in to feed her,” he said. “The one sitting with her is—headless.”
I did not waste time inspecting the cabin for clues, but rose up on deck to catch the scent of the child whose thread of being came from me. I could track her to the ends of the world if that is where she had gone.
They had escaped the ship after the sun reached its peak in the sky. Evelina could not know, for she would brave the fire to chase after me. I turned to Veor and told him he must keep her onboard.
“She will fight me,” he said.
“You may count on Peter to help.”
I was gone before he could object, shunning Muriel’s offer of blood. Nothing could keep me from the chase, and I rushed headlong into the daylight, soaring off the deck, through the open air like an arrow slung from a bow. I hit the water without a splash, torpedoing to the shore. Youlan had used a boat to sail to land, but they had long since moored the vessel in the harbor. I pressed on despite their lead, using intuition as my guide.
I have not said how Lucia left an impression on me, as her mother had. One cannot see the seed of one’s own being without acknowledging the deep attachment it forges. Feral and brooding, my desire for Lucia was as innate as my hunger for her mother, but blood was not the thing. Her humanity was the part of her for which I longed, and the sealant Byron had forced on us.
For several days, when first onboard Cixi’s ship, I would slip into the cabin where the sleeping child lay. The menial girl who tended to her did nothing to appease my senses, for she was as artificial as the others, but the child shook my core and I did not know the cause. Once I discovered the truth of her parentage, I reminisced about those times alone in the beginning when the connection was magnetic, though still breakable. Now, she is my daughter and like me in every way. Then, she was Evelina’s child and the only other source of healthy blood.
I swam straight and scaled the rocky ledge to the flat land of the Nortrak. The shore along the coast was snowbound, but I could not feel the cold. The entire eastern shore had become stony and stalactitic beneath its blanket of ice, snow covering the land since the last rupture. The corroded terrain tried to block my ascent, but I lifted my corse up and over the ledge as easily as I had scaled any other rock face.
I recall the icy breeze on my face, as the sun fought to warm my tips. Winter in full swing, the chill on the air could freeze the hardest skin. But struggle pushed me forward, urging me on to find the one. My child’s aura penetrated the coldness and drew me to her despite our distance. I lapped up the cold as it drew a map to reach her.
Hunger and fatigue did not flag me, as they had once upon a time. I had energy enough to turn the sun around the earth, and I embraced the pounding of my heart, for it cried out exhilarated by the hunt. Not finding her was impossible, and I pressed on. Youlan would bring her to the facility, where she would go unharmed, at least in the beginning. As a female human, she was valuable. Youlan could not have known she was mine, and neither could Laszlo Arros. I convinced myself Youlan saw her as a way to spite Evelina for having killed her Empress. I could not know she had intended to steal the child all along, that Laszlo Arros had sent her to the ship with that sole mission.
I rushed to the place where she had docked the skiff, a spot as deserted as the harbor in Genoa. The vessel from the cargo ship was easy to make, and the vehicle that picked them up left tracks in the snow. Difficult terrain to cross, it was nothing like the one from which I had come. The North had seen snow for months, even in summer. Nature had conquered the seasons, surrendering the northern hemisphere to the cold, and reserving the summer solstice for the lower half of the globe.
My boots crushed the ice, as I chased the ghost vehicle, witnessing no signs of the plague, no bloodless, nothing at all. Wind whipped past my ears, deafening me to the set of electronic eyes tailing me. The remote-control drone watched me from above, leading me to the only markers in sight, twin towers with necks stuck out of the snow like javelins launched from giants above with unmeasured force, plunged into the ground below. No other signs—martial, or otherwise—indicated the sunken lair.
The device that buzzed at my head was just one example of the sphere into which I would be inducted. The facility maintained post-modernity in a newly antiquated world. An electronic force field lay above the entire grounds like a blanket thrown overtop, making escape impossible. The only reason the volt tongues had not licked me as I approached was because they awaited me inside, allowing me to walk freely past the safeguard. I went to the first tower, the only one with the door.
“Step back.” A computerized command broke up the sound of the wind. “Step forward,” it said.
I stepped within a few inches of the door, and the metal seemed to melt down, liquid silver gathering at my feet.
“Step in.” I stepped back, but the quicksilver defied hardening in the snow, and crawled toward me. “Step in.”
I made a large stride forward and planted my foot in the liquid metal. My boot sunk down into the pool like quicksand. My other leg followed, committed now to the plunge. I would have held my breath had I felt myself sink down through the liquid, but time skipped and I went from having my legs in quicksilver to standing in the subterranean lair. It defied magic, for it was physics from another sphere, or perhaps simply a mental trip between realities.
I found myself in a room, alone, the wind and cold left outside.
“Are you brave enough?” The voice that greeted me was the same one as above, but without its computerized filter. I did not recognize the speaker, but believed it could only be Laszlo Arros. Androgynous, innocuous and unfamiliar, his voice could have been one I heard in my head.
The room in which I stood was aseptic, like a laboratory illuminated with blinding fluorescent lights, humming in the silence. Above me, hanging from the ceiling, was a black screen carrying a single dot across it from one side to the next. The ball of pixels pinged back and forth from left to right to a rhythm I had created. The beat mimicked the sound I made when I drummed on the metal pole of the radio tower on Cixi’s ship, as I sat with Veor at sunrise. The signal had been sent out and received, calling me home without my knowing it.
Laszlo Arros spoke again, “I have been waiting for this, but I am delaying the pleasure of showing you m
y face.”
“You do not need to reveal yourself to me,” I said. “I am here for one thing.”
“Your spawn.”
“Give me the child.”
“No.”
I had no leverage and was completely at his mercy, unsure if I was not in another dimension of time. Laszlo Arros, like me, had a hold on physics.
“She has no place here,” I said. “I will stay in exchange for her safe return to her mother.”
“You are trying to negotiate with me?”
“You made a deal with the Empress,” I said. “Why not me?”
“What you offer I already possess.”
“The child cannot come to harm.”
“I would never dream of harming her,” Laszlo Arros said. “She is a miracle, wouldn’t you agree?”
“She belongs with me.”
“Perhaps you have a fair claim,” he said, “but she is not safe with you.”
“Better than with anyone else.”
“Right,” he said. “You are so much more.”
“What do you want?”
“Simply put, what is owed to me.”
“Which is what?”
“Everything that is yours,” Laszlo Arros said.
“Who are you?”
“Didn’t Byron tell you?”
“Show yourself.”
“I don’t believe you are ready to see me yet.”
“Why?”
“I am too perfect.”
“Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
“I am you.”
I grew frustrated talking to the air around me, competing with the sound of the beating monitor. I stepped forward and smashed the screen with my fist. The room went silent, as Laszlo Arros disappeared with the blip on the monitor.
“Come back,” I yelled. “I am not done with you.”
The pressure of the chamber in which I stood suddenly changed, as though my head were placed in a vise, my brain squeezed with the swirling of a boa, wrapping its body about synapses. The pain worsened and I dropped to the ground, shutting my eyes for lack of relief. The agony thrust me back to the bier, back to where my human body withstood the pain of death and my torturous rebirth.
“You have died.” Thetis’s voice was unmistakable. “Foolish boy, you have died.”
Sightless and disoriented, I fumbled in my blindness, unable to open my eyes to see the invocation that had thrust me back in time. The smell of burnt flesh, crisping redwoods, and charred skin was unmistakable.
“Rise,” my mother shouted, her voice ripping through the ash. “Rise and rise and be risen.”
I submitted to her orders and lugged my corpse up to a standing position, on two wobbly legs like a cub learning to use his hinds.
“Come to me,” she said.
I stumbled and crawled to her voice in my blindness, relying on my mother’s will to guide me. “Come to me,” she said over and over.
But I could not reach her. Or she kept moving away. My struggle to catch her was long, endless and a day. When light finally found my eyes, when I could use more than sound and smell, I witnessed my rebirth, my regeneration, my surroundings. She had pulled me from the wreckage of my pyre, scorched and fevered, and fed me the blood of her ancestors, forcing new life on me.
“How?” I begged the darkness to show me the way.
Thetis was only there in mind, a memory so real it forced my body back in time to witness the thing I had only ever undergone, not seen. She spoke her story into my ear, telling me how she had rescued my shade from the field of asphodel.
“I came as the great Odysseus,” she said, “taking his form and shape, leading his men to where they could beach their ships on the shore of the outermost ocean, the Cimmerian land of mist and fog. We came to the mouth of the dead, to the place where the Sybil had directed me, and I dug a pit with my sword. I poured out libations of honey and milk and sweet wine from Aeolian groves, and then we sacrificed the finest heifer and the great black ram for the soothsayer. I cut the wether’s throat over the pit, and the black blood pooled at a great speed. With my supplication to the shifter gods, my ancestors, more blood was added to the pool, the blood of the savior, the only blood that could bring you back, that of the greatest shapeshifter. He spilled his blood as sacrifice for your genesis.”
She paused in her retelling, and the soft stroke of her hand on my brow eased my pain in the darkness. The touch was lighter than a tickle, but penetrated me to the core, and I grew in strength. Rise, Rise, Be risen, her words were carried on the air with wings.
“I prayed for your arrival on that shore,” she continued. “Odysseus’s men held off the shades with their swords and spears. All were hungry for the blood, the serum to cause loose lips and open their minds to the living past. They came, and we defended our plot, until you, my yiós, rose out of the fog and ash to find me.”
I did not recall the moment she described and yet it bound me up as though it were true. The moment of my resurrection, my escape from the barren wasteland in Hades, my freedom come at the hands of my companion, the wily Ithakan whose face remained most present in my mind many years after I had risen.
“You gorged on the blood, my yiós, and rose to lead a new empire, one for man to fear. Your wrath became your darkness and you were to become the god who shifts into all things.”
I recalled the taste of the blood, the hardening of my core, the rising of my spirit to life anew.
“My son, you were to be forever,” Thetis said. “This life of change was to be yours until the end of time, but you, you deceiver, have dismissed your gifts.”
The shapeless form of darkness wrestled itself together to form a body, a hulking mass that hung overtop me where I stood, a white light, the vision of salvation, the face of sótéria. Thetis overcame the darkness then, and I gazed on my mother’s aspect. It had never escaped my memory, her features branded like a tattoo on flesh. Young forever, she possessed unchanging beauty like every goddess, though wore hers like a hypocrite’s cloak of gold and lead. Thetis had always been a cantankerous woman in human form, but a docile and demure goddess of the sea.
“Mitéra,” I said, my Greek call a force of habit. “Mitéra, why do you forsake me?”
“It is you who have done the forsaking, my yiós,” she said. “I come to save you from yourself.”
“I do not understand.”
“This is your doing.”
At the time, I could not know what she meant because forgetting what I had done had been a part of the whole, what I had wanted. The finale I orchestrated was to be forgotten for this very reason. From the moment I set it in motion, I was no longer its maestro. Had I remembered, I would have done everything to stop it.
“To turn back is impossible,” she said. “But believe me, I am doing all I can. I have left you crumbs to follow, and you have picked up the trail.”
“I have come for Lucia,” I said.
“You have come for yourself,” she said. “Your kóri will save you. That is why she is here. For you. Do not forget it.”
“What have I done?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“You must face Laszlo Arros now. You must, my yiós. Repair the wrong you have done. He is your creation, your equal in all ways, as powerful, as intelligent, as capable as you are. But remember he is not you.”
“Who is Laszlo Arros?”
“The greatest character in your story,” my mother said. “The hero to your anti-hero.”
“Laszlo Arros is the hero?”
“There is good and evil in both of you,” she said. “You and Laszlo Arros are one, and the same.”
She pulled me into her light, bursting with brightness as a star explodes and consumes the darkness around it. Blinded once again, I reached for her only to find myself somewhere new, a place I had been before.
The Burden of Immortality
Vincent paused mid-sentence and groaned with a yowl so terrifying
I nearly slid from my stool. I wouldn’t turn to look at him but could hear him scraping his claw along the stone wall behind him. I couldn’t tell if his anger drove him to the gesture, but his dig rattled the walls at my end of the studio.
“You see, Dagur,” he said, “I grew tired of my endless existence, and nursed complacency with an extreme indulgence. Life’s boredom drove me to it, made me believe I could be a deity. I tested the truth with blood, no longer wishing it as my only succor. I invented a scenario, a scheme really, to rid me of the need.”
I swallowed and asked why, my raspy voice barely audible.
He rose and went to the open window to admire the sun, suspended in the sky as if in ice. The horizon’s hue had shifted from red to purple, a common occurrence for this season.
“The reason is the least interesting question,” he said. “The method is far more intriguing.”
“You caused the Red Death,” I said.
He braced the window sill and threw his head back with a dark chuckle, his mask of evil having come back. I turned away and focused on the last few lines I’d transcribed, I reached for her only to find myself somewhere new, a place I had been before. I would have silently prayed for my own escape to somewhere new if I thought it would change the course of my fate, but I was stuck inside the tower with him, a nightmare from which I couldn’t awake.
“Do not be frightened,” he said from the window. “My kin is safe now.”
His choice stung me like a swarm of angry wasps, my kin. The word kin doesn’t exist in the vulgate, but I understood it from the things my guardian had taught me, and its meaning as the blood in a vampire’s own line.
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 55