by Lily Levi
I rested my head against the back of the seat and let the slow rush of the river pulse through the silence between us once more.
It was foreign to imagine another being wanting to protect me, if he did, in fact. I had let myself relax into the naivety of the fantasy the night before, but now it was harder to do. Orlando had once been a shadowed phantasm like the rest; a dark creature I had encountered in the back walls of Deadmourn Mansion; a voice and a body; a monster.
But now here he was, more real than the rest, though I could put my finger on him less than some of the others.
Ambrose, for example.
Cain.
Orlando was - what was he?
I opened my eyes as his mouth pushed itself against mine. His hand grabbed for my hand and he held it as he kissed me.
I squeezed his hand and pulled away from him. “You want to protect me,” I whispered into the dark that folded in around us.
“Yes,” he breathed. The angled lines of his face seemed to cut the shadows apart and his eyes had revved back to life with the same passion I’d witnessed the night before.
“What if the others are here now?” I asked, letting the smile spread across my face just slow enough for him to appreciate it. ”What if they’re just waiting to push in through these flimsy metal doors and tear us to pieces?”
He raised his hand to my cheek. “I don’t care. I would fight off the billions of denizens of hell for you.”
“You would die fighting and besides,” I said coyly, hoping to draw him in further. “You hardly know me. Oh no, you just know that you want me.”
“No, Serena,” he said and moved his hand to the back of my neck. “I don’t want you. I fucking need you.”
Theron
The sun pulled itself up against the horizon with a concentrated hesitation and the city groaned beneath a renewed heat. A hot wind unfurled between the close-set buildings and I wished again for the cool cover of night.
“Has she been fading from you?” I asked.
Ambrose glanced at me and we turned a corner. He shook his head. “You want me to say that you’re a better hunter than I am or ever will be and that if Serena’s embodiment is fading for you, it’s most certainly fading for me. Is that it? Yes, well then, there it is.”
“It’s the land,” I said and hurried to keep his pace. “There’s something wrong with it.”
Ambrose bared his teeth in an amused sort of smile. “There are a lot of things wrong,” he said. “Ah, here we are.” He stopped beside a black motorcycle, propped up on one thick silver leg.
“There are cars,” I said.
Ambrose pressed the bottle of wine into my hands. “Be a dear and hold this, thank you.” He closed the front of his tailored coat to protect his vest and bent over the front of the bike.
“There are cars,” I repeated.
“Shh,” he said and pointed with one hand to the darkened apartment windows above us. “You’ll wake the mice.”
I adjusted the bottle of wine into the crook of my arm and watched him work with a patience I did not feel. “Motorcycles are dangerous,” I said. “There are perfectly good cars or a train if you must.”
“Train,” he muttered with his head down over the front panel. “Is that how you finally got here, by train?”
“I took an airplane,” I said and set the bottle down onto the cracked sidewalk at my feet.
Ambrose shook his head. “Stoker’s vampire takes a ship and you take a plane.”
I crossed my arms and watched him work. “And you took what, exactly?”
“I took a plane, of course,” said Ambrose. “What else? Ah, there we are, do you hear the belly of her purr? Oh, beautiful, beautiful rumble. I’ll need one when we return home. Do remind me.” He turned and a pleasant grin filled his face. “You’d better hurry and find your train, sweet Theron.”
I swallowed back my primitive fear of the motorcycle and picked up his bottle of wine. “I think not. You’re taking me with you. I don’t trust you.”
He took the wine from my hands and moved to straddle the motorcycle. “And why would I do that?”
“You will do it,” I said and moved around to the back of the motorcycle against every shred of better judgment I owned. “For familial love.”
Ambrose uncorked the bottle of wine and said nothing.
I wrapped my arms around the front of his chest and Ambrose backed the motorcycle out from against the edge of the sidewalk.
“I won’t be sad if you let go,” he said.
I laughed into his back. How I hated Ambrose, but I loved him, too. He was a difficult creature to feel one way or another about. Instead, I felt them all at once with fuller emotion than I had for anyone or anything else.
He had saved my life, though my life had been worth very little at the time.
The Master had brought me down from the black mountains and into the fold when I was no more than ten, thirteen at most. There was no way to know long I had been hunting between the mossy rocks and fallen trees. I spoke no language and knew no one but myself. If I had ever been part of a society, then I couldn’t form even a singular, terrible memory of it.
Ambrose was nearing the mark of his first century at my arrival. The others were younger than even him, but I was still only a babe in the shadows.
They’d wanted me dead, though it was not of a personal nature. They were twelve before me and thirteen brothers after. My addition to the dark family lessened their chances at the Master’s seat. I was one more potential heir, though a simple one to dispose of, and one more threat to the end of their own lives.
I couldn’t blame them that they’d tried to stymie their competition. The truth was, I had hardly lived my own life long enough to miss it. I was not so attached to it.
Perhaps I felt then as Serena felt now, with her numbered choices and that bitter freedom from attachment that Ambrose had so correctly read into her.
I wondered if he felt at all for her the way he’d felt centuries ago for me. He’d saved my life though it was hardly worth saving and even he must’ve known that, but he saved it nevertheless.
The others were powerless against him then and so I had grown - not under his care, for ‘care’ was entirely the wrong word - but within his shadow where the shadows of the others could not pass through.
He was, in many ways, a father and a brother, and I imagined that he both hated and loved me in the same way I did him. He had always been hard-pressed to deny me and it was my one good fortune in the world.
He held the motorcycle at a crossing and passed the bottle of wine from between his legs into my hands. “Quickly,” he said. “I’m going to need it back.”
I took a drink from the long neck.
When we stopped again, Ambrose turned his head and gave me the fiendish half-smile that had always marked his best moods. “You feel alive,” he said. The words were unmuddied by his usual sharp drawl. They were clear and full of the meaning they were supposed to have.
“Yes,” I said, reaching for the wine again. “But I’m only drinking because I’m sure you’ll kill us both. I dull the pain where I can.”
“Ah, my dear Theron.” He turned back to the road ahead of us. “Serena Moon is the best thing to ever happen to you.”
Orlando
Tourists piddled along the side of the road and fanned themselves against the rising August heat. On another day, I might’ve allowed myself a swift massacre of their thin numbers, but time was suddenly more precious than blood. I couldn’t feel my brothers, but it would be odd if the others weren’t watching.
“Meadowcroft Rockshelter,” she said, reading the brown sign with a kind of lazy enthusiasm. “A natural wonder of the world, I assume. Worth risking everything for?”
“You’ll see,” I said and continued to let her lead the way. Her backend was more exciting to look at than the trees and the dirt road between them.
Serena turned her eyes back at me and I adjusted my gaze up to her face.
“You’re not telling me something,” she said. “Or there’s something you don’t know.” Her tone had shifted dramatically from our first night together. She was growing suspicious and she was losing interest faster than I would’ve liked.
“I have a distaste for games now,” she said. “I’m sure you can imagine.”
I moved to walk directly beside her. “I know you’re feeling unsure,” I said and took her hand in mine. “I only want to show you something; to see what you see, and then we’ll be on our way.” It was the best I could give her, not that it mattered. If the others weren’t listening, they would follow. I only hoped that their sense of Serena was as hazy as mine had become.
“And where does ‘our way’ lead?” she asked.
I squeezed her hand. “Where I can keep you and the child safe. You have to trust me.”
Her brow furrowed and she glanced down at her belly as if to check that something was truly there. It wasn’t, of course. She was as barren as I suspected she’d ever been. I had fathered others, many others, and I knew the feel of a woman who carried my spawn. They had all consumed their mothers from the inside out and none of them had survived. I shed no tears for them and Serena would’ve been no different, as different as she was.
Thankfully for her, Serena was not burdened in that way, though she was certainly burdened in more terrible ways.
“I’m going to help you,” I said, squeezing her hand again. “But in order to do that, we need to figure out what you are.” I would bring her back to the Master with as much trust in me as could be drawn, but I couldn’t face him without a better idea of her nature. I would at least try, but that was all I could do.
Discover what she is. Had he not commanded it? I would gather what I could from her, though it seemed she knew little enough about what she was, if anything at all.
The only thing I had was what Ambrose had mused so foolishly on for anyone to hear. She’d made her course for three years through the lands of the world after leaving our fine company in England. She’d settled as much as she could be expected to settle in America with its strange, tainted soil. Curses shot through the ground, blessings too, but the land was restless. Something had angered it nearly twenty thousand years ago - a magnitude of time, even by Master Deadmourn’s standards - and Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania had acted as a cradled safehaven for the ancients, never once abandoned.
If Serena had been drawn to America, there was no better place to sense a resonance than at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Ambrose had watched her since her departure from London. She’d spent more time in the Great Lakes Region than anywhere else, always rotating through the same cities, always circling Avella and the Rockshelter.
She was like a silver fly circling a dead dog.
“You said a priest killed your mother,” I said. There was no decent way to renew the conversation from our drive into Pennsylvania and I hoped she would believe I had been thinking about her small tragedy, perhaps even pitying her.
We stepped up a short flight of pinewood logs that had been fashioned into stairs. “You know how to brighten the world around you,” she said.
It was a flat brand of sarcasm, but it meant that time was even more valuable than I would have liked. I knew her type and how could I not? How many women had I enjoyed over the course of three hundred years? Some of them had refused to cling to me with the violent force of most of their peers and all of them had found some overrated power in sarcasm.
Did I inspire it in them? Perhaps. Did it bother me? Hardly. But in Serena, it was the last thing I wanted to hear lacing her words in all of their simplicity.
We stopped at the barn-sized door of the visitor center.
“Yes,” she said, pulling her hand away from mine. She crossed her arms in front of her. “A priest killed my mother. He’d called it ‘a holy necessity’, but I’m guessing it was wholly unnecessary.” Her lips pulled into a faint, silly smile at her own words.
I pressed my forearm over my head and against the wooden wall. “You knew the priest,” I said, finding what I thought must be the middleground between disgusted curiosity and boredom.
The wry smile returned to her rounded lips, dark and full of the blood of men, and I knew my tone had worked.
“Yes,” she said. “I suspect he was my father in more ways than one.” She peered through the door. “What is it you wanted to to show me? What is this ‘appointment with the land’?”
I moved away from her and she followed with a kind of independent obedience that I had always found mildly attractive in other women.
Inside, the open building was strangely cool despite the heat of the day. Across the long floorboards, the iron railings against the cave-like shelter sat unoccupied.
I pressed my palms against the cool metal and waited for Serena to join me.
“Rocks,” she said.
I nodded. “Meadowcroft. A dwelling for nineteen thousand years. Fearful creatures they must have been, hiding in the dark for so long.”
Serena wrapped her hands around the iron bar next to mine and peered downward. “I’m sure they had every reason to be afraid.”
I scanned over the chunks of rock and broken earth. “And why do you think they were afraid, Serena?”
She said nothing and we stood together for a long while, hands pressed against the railing and sleeves touching. I watched her from the corner of my eye, but her face remained still. Her eyes had glazed over, as if she were somewhere far away, but not far away enough that she was existing in some primitive space. If there was a resonance with the place, it was not immediately apparent.
I grit my teeth and waited for her to speak, to say something that would indicate anything at all.
“People are always afraid,” she said at last and pulled away from the railings.
“Are you?” I asked, following her away from the ancient crumblings of rocks.
She stopped and looked up into the high rafters of the barn-like structure. “I’m afraid I don’t understand why we’re here.” She dropped her chin back down. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I took a long breath and pulled her close to me. Something told me she would push back against my chest, but she allowed me to hold her. A small spark set off through my veins, but I waved it away.
“I need to know what you are,” I said. “It could help us.” I looked up into the rafters where she had looked, half-expecting to find Ambrose or Pollux, squatting in the beams. “It could help us against them.”
It wouldn’t, of course. It didn’t matter what she was, only that the Master wanted to know, but how could he not know already? It was a game that didn’t make any sense at all, but it was a game that I was certainly winning.
She breathed against me and her back rose in a short sigh. “I’m a bloodsucker. I’m a leech. I’m a vampire. I’m just like you, only worse off for it.”
I pressed my cheek against the top of her head and examined the open cave behind her once more. I’d beat them all to Serena. I’d gained her trust in as much as could be expected. I’d taken her to the place that Ambrose suspected would spark some kind of primitive recognition in her, but nothing had happened. He’d been wrong and he would’ve found out for himself had I not been the better between us.
“You’re not a leech,” I whispered and unfolded my arms from around her. I would do the thing I had thought best about doing in the first place. I would gain her trust, learn her story, find at least a semblance of an answer as to what she was, and then I would deliver her back to the Master. The game would end and Serena would be taken care of in the worst way possible. I could only imagine what the Master had in store for her. When had he ever taken such an interest in another creature besides himself?
I only wished his directions had included more instructions than it had demands. With Ambrose’s simple idea of Meadowcroft so easily exhausted, I only had Serena herself left to explore. But what could she know if nothing had led her to believe that she wasn’t
a simple breed of vampire?
We walked out from the visitor center and back into the bright light of day.
“The priest,” I said, shading my eyes against the sun. There was little time to lose in digging up her past and she seemed candid enough about sharing it.
She pulled a cigarette from her pocket. “Yes?”
“Was he the vampire, then?”
Serena
The sun had set long before we pulled into the outskirts of Rhode Island. Orlando parked the stolen sedan in an off-road motel parking lot, dimly lit and as nondescript as anyone could hope for.
“Come with me,” he said and pointed towards the motel office that was lit by a single fluorescent bulb above the glass door.
“No,” I said and grabbed for a cigarette. “I’ll be here.” I’d gone along with him well enough. I’d left Chicago at his direction, I’d went along with his little flight of fancy at Meadowcroft, and I’d let him take me to the very edge of the United States without question.
“All right,” he said and shut the driver’s side door firmly behind him.
I lit the cigarette. I had never given a man, living or dead, so much power - and for what?
Hope, nothing more and nothing less, that was all. Just hope.
Hope in exchange for a semblance of obedience.
Hope that Orlando was telling the truth about the possible child and that he wanted to protect me - to protect us.
Hope for a life that didn’t entail crouching through the shadows and if it did, then a life crouched in shadows that didn’t come with a set expiration date to be served as a sacrifice to greater, darker creatures.
Little lamb. Even three years later their voices still played through my mind, taunting me as they had. Even Orlando had said it, but now here he was, offering me the only thing I couldn’t afford to refuse, not unless I was done with life all together.
And I had been, but that was before I’d let myself believe there was a chance.
I lowered the window and flicked the ash out onto the oil-stained blacktop below.