“How do you do it?” I asked. “Is it this place that drains my energy or the blood?”
“The blood determines your strength.”
“I fed minutes ago, and yet I am robbed of all my energy.”
“It seems that way,” he said.
He sat down at my side and put an arm around me. Even the weight of his body was similar to mine, though he seemed more graceful in his movements, as though he were a dream and moved without moving.
“Let me tell you about Youlan,” he said. “Shall I?”
“She claims Johann Mendel made her from my seed,” I said.
“Agáta’s child,” he said.
“Agáta died before giving birth.”
“She did, yes,” he said. “In the bathtub.”
“How do you know?”
“You and I, together, we saved the child.”
“No,” I said. “The child died when I abandoned her, dead in the bath. You were not there.”
Laszlo Arros touched my brow and said, “We are the reason she survived. We shifted to save her life.”
“I am no shifter,” I said.
“You think not,” he said. “But you are the son of Thetis.”
“I have never shifted.”
“You leave it to me,” he said. “Shall I tell you the story of Youlan …”
The Birth of Youlan
Agáta’s body floated in a pink pool made from the bloody wound in her stomach. The baby had been torn out by the angry claws of one unable to quench the hunger in his bones.
“What have you done?” Johann Mendel said, as he dropped to his knees in the doorway.
Vincent would have finished off the child if Mendel had not begged him to concede her. “She is dead,” he said.
Mendel rushed him and ripped her away, cradling the small corpse in his arms, warming her on his chest, as Vincent escaped into the night.
The great botanist revived the child with more than science, thanking Augustine’s god when the spark of life returned to her sunken eyes.
He raised her as his own, keeping her heritage and conception a secret. She believed he was her father and loved him as a daughter might, until the day when Laszlo Arros returned as Vincent Du Maurier.
“I have met someone,” she said to Mendel. “He is perfect, a dream.”
“Who is this boy?”
She blushed, afraid to tell her father he was no boy, but a man. “He is like you.”
When Mendel learned Vincent had returned for Youlan, he did the only thing he could to keep her from him. “Come daughter,” he said. “I have a gift for you.”
He had made no others like him, shunning the life of blood, the endless pursuit forced upon him. He did not waver in his decision, though, convinced it was the only thing to do, and transformed her without regret, freezing the blood in her veins.
“What have you done to me?” She writhed when awakened, bitterness sowing discord in her heart. “He will not want me now, not like this.”
“Good,” Mendel said. “You are too fine for a man like him.”
“He is no man,” she said. “He says he is my father.”
“Bad company is like a nail driven into a post,” Mendel scolded her. “After the first and second blow, it may be drawn out with little difficulty. But when driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, it can only be done by the destruction of the wood.”
“You have destroyed the wood,” she said. “But I shall annihilate the destroyer.”
Youlan bludgeoned Mendel, cracking the top of his head open like an egg. But once she witnessed the end of the man who had raised her, the one who had awakened her to blood, she longed for his presence again.
For many years, she let his final word rattle about in her stony mind, wondering what it could mean. “Kinblood,” he had said into her ear, as he descended into oblivion.
A Plague to Kill Them Both
As Laszlo Arros told Youlan’s story, her rebirth and awakening, she came into the room and stood by the entryway, watching us both.
“It is a lie,” I said.
“Which part?”
“I never saw Mendel again,” I said. “Not after that night, not ever. Agáta died by my hand and everything inside her womb was dead when I left her.”
“A shifter has the gift for sparking life,” he said. “You should know that.”
“I am no shifter,” I said.
I looked up at Youlan, and asked her which of us she believed was her real parent.
“You look the same,” she said, “but I come from you.” She pointed to me, sitting on the bench, crushed beneath the weight of Laszlo Arros’s tale.
“I did not bring you back to life,” I said.
“He did,” she said, grinning at my double. “He set the spark.”
“She is loyal,” Laszlo Arros said with a wry smile. “Exactly like you. Tell him, my darling girl.”
She smirked, and drew closer. “You taught me the ways, father,” she said. “I understand my purpose.”
“To whom are you referring?” I asked.
Laszlo Arros shot her a stern look and she backed off, circling us as she kept to the edge of the room.
“We did not know if it would work,” he said. “In the beginning she embraced the change, overcame the withdrawal. She even refused the minimal quotient, but after she made the great sacrifice, carrying the disease within her, only blood could revive her.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“A living incubator,” she said. “Right, father?”
“That is correct, my darling girl.”
“She carried the virus to the world,” Laszlo Arros said. “A living petri dish in which the microorganisms could be cultivated, and bloom.”
“I am patient zero,” she said with a smile.
“She is the cause of the bloodless?” I asked.
“Chosen by you,” he said.
“I never met her before the ship,” I said.
“Time is not relevant,” he said. “She is your weapon of choice.”
“For what?”
“To destroy both races.”
“Nothing you say is truthful,” I said.
“Human and vampire,” he said. “Vampire and human.”
“Give me Lucia,” I said.
“I cannot do that.”
“Why?”
“You think this a scheme,” he said. “You think yourself powerless, but you hold the cards.”
My head seemed to rot from the inside, but I fought my rapidly waning physicality.
“We are the same creature,” he said. “You are me, and I you.”
Insanity knocked, my sitting next to it as I was. To speak to an exact reflection of oneself, in voice, in every physical feature, even in mind, challenges one’s ability to beat the paradox, and I refused to let our seams blur.
“I am an original,” I said. “The origin, and I have no match.”
“Even as I stand here staring you in the face, a perfect echo, still you deny me.”
“Everything after comes from me,” I said. “Even you.”
He scoffed. “You are one blind old coot. Did you not understand what I said about the ash?”
“You claim to be a phoenix, no? Risen from my destruction.”
“Yes,” he said with a softer smile. “I am you.”
“There was no ash.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was no ash, no pyre, no immolation from which you could rise.”
“Of course there was,” he said, his voice betraying a quiver.
He stepped toward me then and reached out, soldering his hands to my temples, pulling me into his mental sphere once again, ushering me out of the present and into the past. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “See.”
A moving picture rose up like an image on a screen. The frames flicked past as though set to fast-forward, each one showing the ashy remains of my human body, centuries in the g
round, nurturing the soil. Eventually that earth passed its energy along through veins in the core, running through as natural material and coming up to see the sky again in the seams and grooves of the bark on a tree. That tree was chopped down and made into firewood, all the while carrying the life energy from my original body. The wood burned in a stove somewhere far from the coast on which my pyre was set, and when the ash from that fire was tossed out, its energy continued its cycle and traveled through the earth until it was absorbed once again by another living organism, and used as ash a second time.
“It is simple physics,” Laszlo Arros said, awaking me from my reverie. “Energy is neither added nor taken away.”
“How many times?”
“Three times my spark was set to the fire and renewed. On the third, the god of resurrection used my spark to his purpose.”
“This?” I said, gesturing to his current physical state.
“Immortality is costly.”
“How is it immortality if I am replaced.”
“Consider it an upgrade,” he said. “Perhaps I should not have said you were being replaced. You will be better, rather.”
“You are saying we will become one?”
“We already are.”
“This is some sort of time slippage, or a trick,” I said. “For you are the future me, and I the past.”
“If that makes it easier for you to understand it,” he said, “then yes.”
“How do I get out?”
“There is no out,” he said. “You will leave here once we have become the same.”
“Which means?”
“You have given up your lust for blood.”
I glanced at Youlan, who stood in the corner admiring the two of us. She licked her lips when he spoke of blood.
“What if I refuse your offer?”
“Our split is impossible.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am you,” he said with a smile.
“You are me.”
“You can feel it already, your body giving in, surrendering to the path of enlightenment.”
“This is not enlightenment.”
“But it is. To need common blood for sustenance—or anything—is base. We must rise like a god, a phoenix, and be reborn, better and supernal.”
“If you do not drink blood,” I said, “what is it you feed on?”
He smiled wide with an open mouth, showing me the singular difference between us. He had no fangs, my finest feature. “The substance of the gods suits me fine.”
“Which is what?”
“Ah-ha,” he said. “You must become one to know.”
“I am all that I need to be.” I had let my muscles relax, as the energy continued to pour out of me, but when our conversation turned to blood, and the other vampire in the room seemed stimulated by the talk, I noticed the shift in my body. I could feel my temperature rise, and my strength return despite how weak.
“And I am you,” he said.
I rushed him then, plowing into him where he stood. My body crashed into his, and we hit the wall behind him. A laugh rose from his belly, but I continued to push into him with all the force I had, trying to put him through the wall. He went limp and allowed me to exorcise my wrath. “You cannot meld our bodies together,” he said, “if that is what you attempt to do.”
I pressed on his chest with renewed vigor and dug my talons into his flesh. His shell was softer than mine, for lack of blood, but he had not lied when he spoke of enlightenment. His physical body had become invincible with his transformation, and he received my punishment as a bull bears a fly.
“To destroy me is to destroy yourself,” he said. “See the truth.”
He reached up and touched my forehead, implanting a vision. I witnessed Evelina leading a troop of vampires over the Nortrak. She looked as fierce as ever, a villainy that once made me proud, but with Laszlo Arros’s influence my skin crawled, and she repulsed me for the first time, as I recoiled at the sight.
“How can that be?” I whispered.
My concentration broken, I dropped to the side, and he picked me up by the collar, dragging me back to the bench.
“It is no longer who we are,” he said. “When you leave here, Vincent, you will be a god. These creatures, those you fathered long ago, and those you fathered most recently, are equally abominable. Bottom feeders, blood feeders, worthy of genocide.”
“I set the course,” I said.
“It is simple evolution,” he said. “Do you not recall our planning, our meticulous scheming to get us here?”
“There is no us.” I slammed my fist against the wall behind me, and shut him down.
“But you willed this,” he said. “You resented your nature, the one Thetis thrust upon you.”
“Never,” I said. “I have never doubted my superiority, my advent as the origin. I regret nothing, not one kill, not one awakening, not even one taste.”
“But hers,” he said.
I imagined my own look of doubt, as indecision seemed to cross his brow.
“I will not taste her.”
“How will you resist?”
“I owe it to her mother.”
“Ah, yes, Evelina.” He scratched the side of his neck with the edge of his fingernail as an addict betrays his wanting a fix. “Your spawn is an abomination, too.”
“She is a gift.”
“From whom, let me guess.”
“Byron was a genius.”
“Doctor Darrow,” he said. “I know you have read our letters. How did you find them? Enlightening?”
“He has gotten in your way, has he not?”
“Our way,” he said. “Yes.”
“You shall never destroy that side of me.”
“Which side?”
“The bloody one.”
“Byron put a kink in things, and I suppose Thetis is to thank for that.”
“Not so,” I said. “I set the course.” I held his gaze and managed a hard stare that would have sent an ordinary man into spells, but rattled him nonetheless. “I want to see my child,” I said.
“Your breed stands before you.” He gestured to Youlan, a statue in the room with us.
“Not her,” I said. “My flesh, my blood.”
“Do you regret the mother’s blood? Or was she brought around so you would no longer desire it?”
“I did not make Evelina mine by choice,” I said. “She was made for me.”
“Who do you think gave her the venom, if not you?”
“You.”
“Me?” He glanced at Youlan, and she raised her chin. “I am you,” he said.
“Stop this charade,” I said. “We are not the same.”
“In here, she is still human, you know,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Inside this place, nothing that has come before is real. Would you like to see her again, as she was with that wretched worm in her belly?”
I scaled the wall that marked his trap and flew overtop it. “Evelina is my counterpart, and no longer the girl she once was.”
He smiled and touched my shoulder. “Tell me about the sparrow. Did the frequency match—exactly as we planned?”
“What do you mean?”
“The sound of her frequency,” he said. “Did you recognize it as your own, our design?”
“No—I do not understand.”
“We came up with the marker together,” he said. “We decided she should have a call in kind to yours, so you would know she was the one. Your desire for her would not be enough, and of course the smell of Lucia’s blood in her womb—your vanity project—would be gone once she gave birth. If we did not design something for you to favor in her, to choose her as your counterpart, you would have abandoned her before reaching me.”
“It was fixed?”
“Of course,” he said. “How else was I to get you here?”
“You lie—all of this is a lie.”
“Granted, it is difficult to h
ear without recalling the details to which you were once privy. But if you think hard enough, you will probably remember some of our planning.”
“No.”
“Be patient with yourself,” he said. “It should come back.”
He dropped his head, as though giving me time to reflect.
“Nothing,” I said. “I remember none of this.”
“Poor thing,” he mumbled. “Come with me.”
“No.”
“Please,” he said, reaching for me.
We moved without moving, and found ourselves in a new room. Youlan was gone, but I faltered when I caught sight of Evelina.
“She is a beauty,” Laszlo Arros said.
“But how?” My words tripped off my tongue, alien to sound. “How?”
“Look at her, Vincent.”
I could not peel my eyes from the sight I beheld. Evelina stood on a pedestal, a single tube poking out of her naked torso that seemed to be holding her in place. “She is not real,” I said.
“But she is. Everything is as real as it will ever be.”
I stepped forward and touched the body I had come to know. Her skin had softened, her nails and teeth no longer those of a vampire. Her hair had returned to the length it was when she lived with me once upon a time.
“She is not real.”
“You touch her and yet you say she is not real. She is as real as ever.”
“She is not real.”
“She stands before you,” he said. “What makes her unreal?”
I could not keep a steady hand on her skin for it felt too fleshly, no longer the stone I admired. “She cannot be here.”
“Why not? You are.”
Laszlo Arros stepped forward and stroked my arm, as I caressed the replica. I reached for the tube and yanked it out of her flesh, and he did not stop me. Freed from captivity, her body folded forward onto itself, and she fell from the pedestal, pinning me beneath her. Her weight was nothing, her body as light as it had once been, but still I could not lift her off me.
Laszlo Arros dropped down beside me and said, “Absorb her while you can, every last bit of her before she lies on the bier.”
I clung to her wilted body, as my own sunk into the floor, too weak to bear the weight of my sin.
Beneath the Hearth
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 62