by Lily Levi
Our course would be lost, there was no doubt about that. It was only lucky that we could subsist off of each other if it came to such a thing, though I hoped it would not. I preferred that none of my brethren be able to sense me through the intake of my blood. I trusted that Ambrose would never hurt me unless it meant his own life, but Zane was less trustworthy, just like the rest.
Ambrose stared at the wall, his gaunt face more sunken than usual and as sallow a color as I had ever had the pleasure of seeing it. Serena sat beside him with his hand in hers, white at the knuckles where she squeezed.
A small flower of envy blossomed in my chest, but I cut it down at the stem as soon as I noticed its color.
“Are you looking to hold a hand?” Zane asked, clutching the boy’s hand in his. The pale white of his skin contrasted sharply with the rich black of the boy’s skin.
“That’s all right,” I said, eyeing the boy.
His face was clear and calm. His eyes, glazed over with white, moved about the lower cabin though there was no telling what he saw - if he saw anything at all.
Lightning snapped above us and the boat lifted forward and then back again.
“By the devil’s mother,” Ambrose growled. He stomped his boots against the bottom of the boat as if to stop it from moving.
“Did he have a name?” I asked of the boy.
“Don’t know,” said Zane. “Parents probably gave him one, but don’t know. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care. Still don’t care.”
Serena looked up from her hand in Ambrose’s and gave him a weak smile that nearly betrayed her exhaustion. “You do care,” she said.
He stared at her. “No, I don’t.”
She leaned back against the plastic-covered seat and considered the small boy across from her. “Storm,” she mused. “He knew about the storm.”
The sails snapped loudly above us and for a moment I feared that they would be cleaved straight off from the metal poles.
“Amun,” she said, suddenly. “God of the winds.”
“Long dead,” I said.
Zane lifted his free hand and pointed a thumb at the boy beside him. “So is he, so it fits. Good, he’s got a name. No more about it and let’s have a little peace and some whiskey.”
But there was no peace that night.
Ambrose vomited twice and the stench of his cold bile filled the closed air below deck. Serena was the only one who slept. She’d moved to sit next to the boy - Amun - but her head had inexplicably found its way into my lap. I hoped Ambrose would feel the same sting of jealousy that I had felt at seeing their hands entwined, but of course he wouldn’t.
Ambrose had never been jealous as far as I knew.
I moved Serena’s dark hair behind her ear, beautifully and strangely pointed as they were. “What do you think she is?” I whispered.
Thunder rolled relentlessly above us, though the sea had seemed to calm itself in the passing hours.
Zane tilted his head from the back of the chair to examine Serena’s head in my lap. “A fucking thorn in our side,” he said. “That’s what I think she is.”
“She’s beautiful,” said Ambrose from across the aisle. I had never heard him say a thing like that about any other woman, human or not, at least not without the biting sarcasm he so loved to use. It was the seasickness striking at his heart, no doubt.
Zane nodded. “She’s handsome. Like a man.”
Ambrose smiled, face stricken with the pain of his nausea. “You do love your men,” he said. “And women.” He covered his mouth and turned away.
The boy, Amun, leaned forward. “Mooooon,” he moaned.
Zane’s jaw worked against itself. “Please try not to be a fucking cow.”
Ambrose gathered himself once more and raised a finger in the air. “Language,” he whispered. “Besides,” he swallowed, holding back the vomit that threatened to come forth once more. “He’s not mooing.”
Zane licked his lips. “I like you better when curdled chunks of wine and blood are coming out of your mouth.”
Serena’s head shifted in my lap.
I ran my hand over her cheek and pressed my palm against her shoulder to keep her steady against the boat’s incessant rocking.
“Why Iceland?” I asked quietly, though I believed I already knew the answer. I had told Serena of Ambrose’s origins and where the nest of lesser vampires - vampires much like herself without the added benefit of being something else, too - had lived for centuries.
Ambrose straightened his back against the seat. “To feast, my dear Theron.” His cheeks seemed to sink in further at the word. “Though I hardly think now is the time to think about food, so please, if you will.”
“Mooooon,” said the boy.
“Shut it,” Zane grunted at him. “Or so help me.”
A pleasant smirk crossed Ambrose’s face and for just a moment, he seemed to be himself again. “I imagine you hate being a father,” he said.
Zane closed his hands into fists in his lap. “He’s not my kid.”
“Very good,” Ambrose murmured, closing his eyes. “Very good.”
I looked down again at Serena’s head in my lap. Her face was so smooth and tranquil as she slept with none of the waking concern it so often held, though that had even begun to dissipate.
Her countenance was changing so quickly. Three years ago, she was meant to have been our sacrifice, our little lamb. She had been fierce and biting. She had not seemed to care and if she was afraid, it hardly showed. She’d grown bitter and numb after the Master had let her go, and I had to wonder if it was because the known purpose of her life had been - in some way, at least - fulfilled, even though she had not.
Now, what was it?
“Moooon,” said the boy, lifting me from my thoughts and back into the close quarters of the rocking boat.
The storm would soon subside. I could feel it from past decades spent on the sea. I would right our course as soon as I was able and we continue our way to Ambrose’s Iceland, to his Grindavik against the frozen sea.
If it was as he said and as I suspected, we would gorge ourselves there on the blood of our lesser brethren. The others were coming for us, though there was no telling how many. Perhaps some wished to join us as Zane had, though I trusted him less than Ambrose and I trusted the others even less that that.
Surely they would want to kill Serena and be done with it. They weren’t base creatures entirely, but they were as hungry for power as they’d ever been. And why shouldn’t they be? If Serena’s fate was to have been our little lamb to destroy, then their fates were to fight to their edged teeth for the dark throne.
Killing Serena would give it to them, whoever could do it first, and then what?
The rest of us would kneel before the killer and our blood would be his to partake. We would die, each of us, to bolster the near-immortal strength of the new Master. It was a tradition older than the earth. It had come from even below hell itself. Serena’s death would mean the death of us all - all but one.
It was our game. It was our fate. Each of us had agreed to its terms upon entering the mansion; a contract with each other and with hell. Breaking it would mean the end of everything we had ever known. It would mean the end of the vampires’ dark reign over the earth.
If that happened, a power vacuum would be created, like a black hole in the sky.
There was no telling who or what would fill it and it could not be allowed.
“Moooon,” wailed the boy with a quiet sadness beneath his breath.
Serena had been kind to the boy, even if her kindness had been ignorant of its own consequences. But kind or not, it would not preclude her from death.
Ambrose protected her to draw out the fun. What other reason did he have? Perhaps he cared a small bit for her, yes, but I had never known him to care about anything or anyone more than himself. He might reach across the aisle and slit her throat while she slept in my lap. There was nothing to stop him from doing it. Even Zane might try, but as long a
s Ambrose was decidedly against her death, he would be as unsuccessful as anyone else.
He would be able to sense the moment Zane decided to erase her from the earth and he would kill him. There was nothing to stop him from doing it anymore, though the more of us that died at the hands of the ones who wouldn’t be king, the weaker the new Master would ultimately be.
A complicated game, certainly, but even I could see how well Ambrose played it.
We would feast on the vampires near Grindavik, strengthen ourselves, and then wait for the others to find us. We would slay them all, our brothers, and then Ambrose would turn on us before we could feast on their fallen bodies. How could it be anything different?
Ambrose was a monster of generosity, but ultimately he would be most generous with himself.
I had always known the end was coming. I would not die of old age or disease. I would die to strengthen another. I wondered if it was how Serena had felt, only moreso. At the very least, I possessed a small grain of hope that I could be the new Master, as far-fetched as it was with Ambrose alive.
But Serena… she’d had nothing to hope for. She was slated as a sacrifice from the day of her birth, only she’d survived it and it didn’t matter. She was still our pawn, care for her as we might..
Care. Love. What things, what words. She would never love me. She would never love any of us. She was better than us in ways I could only feel just around the edges. She was stronger, though she played herself as weak.
I wondered if she knew.
It didn’t matter. I would protect her for as long as I could and it would be the one brilliant thing I had done in my wasted life. It had been wasted, of course. What had I done? Hunted monsters less monstrous than myself. Wiped some to extinction. That was my legacy, but I didn’t want it. I’d wasted hundreds of years with nothing of real value to show for it.
I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes against the roiling storm.
Nothing mattered, not really.
I felt how my hand rose and fell with every breath Serena took, her head in my lap. There were only the small moments and everything was small - small and insignificant - until they weren’t anymore.
Cain
The plane lifted effortlessly from the tarmac and into the sky.
“Welcome aboard the angel of death!” Darius’s disembodied voice cackled through the Boeing’s intercom. “I will be your pilot today and what a grand day it is.”
Nikolai reclined into a twirling leather seat on the other side of the aisle. His dog sat at his feet and both stared at me. “I agree, Cain,” he said, though I hadn’t said anything. “We really should’ve waited for more people to board after tossing out the others.” He screwed his face up. “Snacks,” he added. “Little snacks. Like peanuts.”
Pollux took the chair opposite mine and pointed up to the roof of the plane. “Is Darius really the best choice to fly?” he asked.
Nikolai lifted his hands in front of him and pretended to weigh something in one palm against the other. “He dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He kamikazed himself into Pearl Harbor.” He shrugged. “The insane fly better that most.”
Felix laughed long and loud. He had been waiting with Mathias, Desmond, and Ivan, meaning that all accounted were for.
“You know what’s insane, brother?” Felix asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Not killing Cain where he stands, that’s what I can’t understand.”
My eyes stung with the speed at which I flashed them from Nikolai to Felix. “You,” I growled, not knowing what I meant by it. My body had become like so much stone. I had found my way to the airplane’s seat and there I sat, unable to move.
Was Orlando’s blood so heavy that it still weighed me down? It seemed each night and every day saw me with less and less control.
Gargoyle, indeed.
“We could all do it,” Felix added, eyes darting. “All of us, together, kill Cain.”
“No,” said Pollux. “We need him.”
“He killed Orlando,” said Remus, chin downturned into his chest.
“Yes,” said Nikolai. He reached down to pet the large, flat head of his dog. “He killed Orlando. Ambrose will use Serena to kill us, so we use Cain to help us kill him - if we must, if it comes to that. Must I go through the weapon analogy again, Felix? It does get old.”
“And,” said Ivan leaning forward from Felix’s side. “Pray tell - who kills Serena? You, I suppose? Shall you be our new king?”
Nikolai stretched back in the seat and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Master Nikolai Romanova has quite a delicious sound to it, but no. No one kills Serena.”
Ivan crossed his arms. “Then we do what with her?”
“Take her,” said Nikolai. “Feed her. Do exactly what Ambrose plans to do with her, only we won’t use her against ourselves, brothers that we are, if not in blood than in spirit. No, no.” He sniffed the air and his pale eyes gleamed with a new sharpness. “Who cannot sense the shadow wars to come?” He smiled wanly. “We take Serena, we feed her and protect her until the Master passes from this earth, and then we use her as our weapon and shield to keep the brotherhood alive forevermore. What could be simpler?”
Pollux shifted uncomfortably in his seat beside me. “You want to keep us alive to rule together,” he said. “Is that it? You want to break tradition - tradition for a very good purpose, let me remind you - because you think you know better than aeons of time?” His voice brought me back into myself, but still I only listened with half-interest. They didn’t mean to kill Serena and if the Master no longer demanded it, which he did not, then I was free to seek her safety if my body would allow it.
The intercom buzzed alive once more and broke into the white noise of the conversation. “This is your captain speaking,” said Darius from overhead. “Captain Darius, your captain.”
Remus pulled a small brown bottle of brandy from his coat pocket. “Only one of us Nikolai really wants to keep alive,” he said bitterly, unscrewing the lid. His light eyes darted from Nikolai to the bottle between his fingers. “Just one.”
Nikolai reclined in his seat. “I know you don’t like it, but can you blame me, Remus?” He folded his hands behind his head and laughed up at the ceiling of the plane. “The insane are utterly irresistible.”
Ambrose
The storm subsided at last and Serena insisted against my better judgment that we take Amun, the dead-thing-who-was-once-a-boy, above deck. “He needs air,” she said, holding tightly to his little black hand. It was odd to see how he gripped hers in return, if not more tightly.
“He doesn’t,” I said. “Zombies don’t quite possess the wanting mechanism.”
Amun’s white eyes moved upwards. If he could see properly, he would’ve seen Serena smiling down at him with a gentleness I wouldn’t have supposed she possessed.
“Moon,” he said.
Serena nodded down at him. “And are zombies, grave walkers, are they supposed to be able to speak?” she asked me.
I flicked my fingers through the air to dismiss the observation and rested them back down on the vessel’s railings. There were always anomalies in species; ‘genetic mutations’ as Theron would say.
“How long?” I yelled back to Theron over the bursting wind. My absence from the place had been long. If we were close, the salt rising with the splashing waves no longer spoke to me with the same cold scent of home.
Theron pushed his head out from the side of the square cockpit and pointed out to sea. “Keep your eye set for land,” he yelled. He had righted our course as soon as he was able to come above deck. It was lucky to have him, though I would never tell him as much. He had been a needle beneath my skin for hundreds of years, but I had likened it to walking with a rock in my shoe for as many miles. I’d gotten used to him there, like it or not, and I almost supposed that I would miss him should he ever go.
I turned back to Serena, zombie-child in tow. “You’ve stopped asking about our purpose,” I said. Either
Theron had told her, she’d heard us speaking in her sleep, or she’d figured it out on her own. I placed my bets on the most former. How easy it was to see the growing care in Theron’s eyes for her, that shine of warmth for a creature other than himself.
But he was easily fooled.
Serena placed a cigarette in the corner of her round mouth and lit it with her free hand. She took in the smoke, eyes closed. “There comes a time when we have to stop giving a fuck about things we can’t change,” she said with a calm wisdom she only barely possessed.
“Ah,” I said. “So Theron told you.”
She blinked at me and then shrugged, confirming what I already knew. “You want to eat a couple of other vampires,” she said. “And you know where to find them.”
I stared out over the crashing waves, cold and white with foam. The sky had slowly turned from a wicked blue to a low gray.
“No,” I said, more to myself than to her. “More than a couple.”
“A nest,” she said and took her place beside me. The hesitation in her voice rang out against the wind.
“A nest,” I said.
She nodded. Amun stuck his hand out between the railings and reached out for the water. She pulled him back. “How many are in a nest?” she asked. “Ten?”
A fine mist rose from the sea to speckle the air. I caressed my own palm to feel how it was already wet with cold saltwater. “Ten,” I whispered. “How quaint. You’ve never visited a nest before, have you? No, of course not. They are exclusive little groups. No one enters, no one leaves.”
Serena was silent.
“Besides your night in the mansion, how many vampires have you seen closeted together at once?” I asked her, still somewhat bemused by the mist that grew in thickness even as we spoke. “Your lesser kind - please, take no offense - they scurry through the shadows, hardly taking note of one another at all. If you’ve never seen a nest, I can’t imagine the number is very high.”