by Barb Hendee
The first time they walked into a salon, a wigged man wearing face powder had fallen to his knees in front of Bernadette and kissed her hand. “My love!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been hiding? My heart would have broken had you not come before long.”
Christian stared at him. The men all seemed to speak in flowery, insincere phrases, as if any and all masculinity had been bred out of them long ago. Christian was attentive and unfailingly polite, but none of these men would have demanded that Bernadette take her wig off and show them her hair. And even if they had, they would have used too many words to flatter her.
Christian’s one breathy whisper of “beautiful” was something foreign to these people. They all used too many words.
He was something new to them, and he became an overnight attraction. Bernadette did not hide her pleasure. She was flooded with invitations, and Christian came to understand that in the past few years before his arrival, her invitations had been dwindling. But now she was in demand again—because of him.
Even after learning this, his gratitude to her did not fade. He loved their apartments and the fine food and the wine and the clothes and the fascination of wealthy women. He sometimes wondered how these same women might look at him if they knew that only a few months before, he’d been cutting purses to survive and had occasionally slept in alleys with rats running over his legs.
But as time drifted by, he began to forget the streets, and he almost came to believe that he really was Monsieur Christian Lefevre, the fourth son of a minor nobleman from the south of France.
His happiness was broken only by two separate events—which both happened with some regularity. About once a week, Bernadette would slip out and leave the apartments without him. She refused to tell him where she was going, and she would sometimes be gone for hours.
This tortured him, as he feared she might be meeting someone else. He feared being replaced more than anything else, and for the next few nights, he would always work harder to please her, finding little ways to make her smile.
The other event tended to happen about once a month, and it followed the same pattern as his first night with her. She would serve him a meal, sometimes feeding him with her fingers, along with several bottles of wine, and then she’d ask him to tell her about his life before he met her. He began to loathe doing this—as he preferred to forget that life. But he would do anything she wanted, so he told her ugly, sordid stories, followed by swearing to her how grateful he was to be living here with her and how she’d saved him. After that, she would want him to kiss her mouth for a while, and he’d be enveloped by the same mind-dulling sensation of overwhelming gratitude.
Then she would kiss his wrist and he’d black out, waking up the following afternoon with no memory of what had happened after, but with a bleeding, bandaged wound on his arm. This began to trouble him more and more, as did her complete abstinence from food and daylight.
After six months, on one of these nights, he made a point of drinking less, and he somehow managed to hold on to his senses when the mind-dulling feeling of gratitude swept over him. He snatched his wrist away when she moved to kiss it. Her eyes flew to his face in surprise.
“Christian?”
“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice sounded hard to his own ears. “I don’t like it.”
She heard the edge in his voice, too. He might have joyfully turned himself into her handsome escort, but underneath, he was still the same young man who’d cut purses to survive.
Suddenly he found his head clearing even more, and he began demanding answers. “Why don’t you eat? Why do I never share your bed? Why do you always vanish before dawn? Why am I forbidden to enter your room?”
She stood up, perhaps shaken by his questions, but he couldn’t be certain. Her back was turned.
“Do you truly wish to know?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Even if the answer is difficult to believe?”
“Yes.”
She turned around. “I have never known anyone like you. You are the best of all worlds.” She paused. “What if I told you that I could make it so you never aged another day, that your current charm would increase threefold, that you could stay with me forever?”
He stood up, his heart pounding. The first part sounded like madness, but he’d do anything to ensure the last part.
She raised one hand to stop him from speaking. “There’s a price. You too will never eat food again, and you will never again see daylight.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
She moved closer. “Truly? You would want this?”
“I want to be with you.”
She closed her eyes, but he could see the stark relief in her face. Did she fear losing him, too? Was that possible?
Stepping even closer, she ran her hands up his chest. “You have to consent,” she whispered. “You have to tell me you agree.”
“I consent,” he whispered back instantly, and the open relief on her face now astonished him.
“Sit,” she said, and she moved into his lap, kissing his mouth again, only harder this time, deeper. Suddenly the sensation of gratitude began to engulf him again, only this time, it was stronger than ever before. He was so grateful to her. The feeling seemed flow through and around him. She was the fountain of all good things, and he would do anything for her. He’d let her do anything to him.
Her mouth moved to his throat, kissing his skin, and then without warning, she bit down hard on his throat, not like a love bite, but her teeth sank deeply, ripping his skin. The pain was blinding, and his hands instinctively shot up to pitch her off, but the feeling of gratitude grew even stronger, engulfing him, and he stopped.
She was drinking his blood in gulping mouthfuls, pushing him slowly down onto the couch. His body grew weaker, until he could hear his heartbeat in his ears, slower and slower until he thought it would stop. She pulled her teeth from his throat and used them to tear open her own wrist, and then she pressed it into his mouth.
“Drink,” she whispered.
That was the last thing he remembered.
When he woke up again, he was lying on the same couch, but only one candle was lit. He had a sense that some time had passed, but he didn’t know how much. The candle glowed too brightly in his sight. He could see colors in the flame he’d never noticed before.
“Christian?”
Bernadette was suddenly kneeling beside him. He could hear a beetle making its way across the floor.
“What did you do to me?” he whispered.
She smiled. “Given you a new life. A life with me. Forever.” He felt her hand upon his head, stroking his hair in a way she’d never done before. For some reason, he didn’t like it, and he wanted her to stop. But he said nothing.
The first fifteen years passed quickly as Christian became comfortable with the term “vampire.”
He had so much to learn, so much to discover about himself. Bernadette had not been wrong that his charm would increase threefold, but when his telepathy began to develop, he reveled in the power. How had he ever existed without it? To know what everyone was thinking put him at an advantage beyond his previous imagining.
Bernadette also taught him how to hunt, how to feed, how to blur a victim’s memory.
She’d been slightly unsettled at first that he did not develop something she called “a gift” quite in the way of other vampires. Her gift was to exude an overwhelming feeling of gratitude in her victims. He’d felt this from her himself, so he knew how strong it was—especially when she used it in full force.
But no element of his personality swelled into an aura when he hunted. Instead, he was gifted with a mental power of emotional suggestion. He could plant an impulse inside the mind of a mortal and make the person feel as he wished.
“Is this so unusual?” he asked. “Can others of our kind not do this as well?”
“To a point,” she answered. “We can make mental suggestions in order to do things like put a
victim to sleep or of course to blur memories, so we can feed safely. Some of us can use quick mental impulses to both confuse and lure someone off alone.” She hesitated. “But I’ve never known a vampire who could go inside a mortal’s mind and plant an emotional impulse the way you can, any emotion you choose in the moment. Your ability is unique.”
He liked that. He liked being unique.
She also taught him that there were a number of others of their kind and that they existed by four laws—laws that he must learn and never break. She made him recite them back to her:
First Law: No vampire shall kill to feed. This ensures our safety and secrecy.
Second Law: No vampire shall make another until reaching the age of one hundred years as an undead, and no vampire shall ever make more than one companion within the span of a hundred years. The physical and mental energy required is so great that any breach of this law will produce flawed results.
Third Law: No vampire shall make another without the consent of the mortal.
Fourth Law: The maker must teach the new vampire all methods of proper survival and all four of the laws in order to protect the secrecy of our kind.
With the exception of the first law, they all seemed far too removed from himself. But she was so serious about these laws that he obeyed and memorized every word. His main function in life was to please her. That never changed. If anything, it increased. He loved this new life even more than the one he’d begun when he’d first come to live with her.
Now he was the absolute toast of dinner parties or evenings in a salon, although it took him a little while to learn how to properly push food about on a plate and pretend to eat. With the possible exception of the silent servants taking the plates, no one seemed to notice that he never consumed anything.
He knew what every lady wanted to hear. He knew what every man thought of him. He could read five or six minds simultaneously, and he could pick lines of poetry he’d never even read from someone’s mind or draw upon political opinions regarding topics he knew nothing about. He could discuss art he’d never seen. He became the sum total of everyone in the room, and everyone thought him brilliant. His pale skin glowed and his eyes glittered, and women adored his young face and his wavy, steel gray hair.
He owed all of this to Bernadette.
Then in 1788, his happiness was tarnished again when a dark feeling came over him one night while he was out walking in the streets. For some reason he could not explain, he suffered from a sensation that something horrific was coming…not to him personally, but rather to Paris itself. The mood of the people around him had changed, and he sensed hunger and hatred as never before.
So when he arrived at home that night and Bernadette suddenly announced that they were leaving the city, he looked at her in confusion, but he did not argue.
“Why?” he could not help asking. Had she felt the same dark premonition?
But she said nothing of darkness looming over the city. Instead, she told him that the circle of the “right people” there in Paris was not infinite, and although they had changed their core group of friends several times, some members of the Parisian elite were beginning to notice that she never aged.
He hated the thought of leaving their beautiful apartments, but he did understand. Christian was a survivor.
“Where will we go?” he asked.
She smiled. “It’s time you met some others of our kind. I thought we’d go to Harfleur first, to visit an old friend. Then I’ll take you to Italy.”
Any lingering regrets over leaving the apartments fled, and excitement flooded through him. He’d never expected this.
Italy.
Unfortunately the visit to Harfleur to visit Bernadette’s old friend turned out to be less than exciting.
A drafty stone manor an hour’s ride from the nearest village was hardly Christian’s idea of society. Worse, the vampire they’d come to see was an aging Norman crusader named Angelo, and he could not have made a bigger contrast to the affluent men of Paris. He wore long breeches, heavy boots, and a wool tunic. His hair hung down his back, and his face was so preternaturally pale, he could barely pass for human.
Worse, he looked Christian up and down in poorly hidden disgust.
To Christian’s shock, Bernadette laughed like a girl. “Don’t be fooled. He’s not the dandy he appears to be.”
“Mmmmmm?” Angelo grunted, sounding unconvinced.
“I’ve been training him. He’s a lovely companion.”
Christian did not enjoy being spoken about as if he weren’t standing right there; nor did he appreciate being compared to a lap dog in training, but he said nothing.
However, within a few nights, Bernadette seemed to realize he was bored and miserable. Although what had she expected when there was nothing to do here and no one interesting to converse with? No one at all to admire him? She called the visit short, much to his relief.
But in their brief time with Angelo, two things of note occurred.
First, one night Christian was so bored he’d resorted to scanning the bookshelves in Angelo’s study, mainly historical or philosophical texts. But then he noticed a large, leather-bound book on the table titled The Makers and Their Children. Something about the title pulled at him. There was a quill and a jar of ink beside it.
He was just reaching down for the book when Angelo walked into the study, mildly surprised to see him. “I was just going to work on that, to start an entry for you.”
“For me?” A cold feeling began to settle in Christian’s stomach, similar to what he’d felt in Paris, that something dark was coming.
Moving closer, Angelo nodded. “It’s a record I’m keeping for all of us.” He paged through until he found the account for Madame Bernadette Desmarais, with detailed information and an illustration of her face.
The cold feeling in Christian’s stomach grew. “Why do you do this?” he asked.
“Keep the record?” Angelo seemed puzzled by the question. “It’s good for us to have knowledge of one another. Anyone can come and read it, and I don’t tattle anyone’s secrets. If someone wants something removed, I remove it. This is just a record to show who we are and that we exist. It’s important.”
“Has anyone ever asked to be left out?”
“No…Why?”
Christian didn’t know this man anywhere near well enough to ask him for a favor, but his stomach had turned to ice, and he felt something pitch-black looming above. “Please…leave my name out. Don’t include a record of me.”
Angelo frowned. “Why wouldn’t you wish to—”
“I’ll do anything you ask. If you ever need a favor of me, I swear I will serve you any way I can. Just leave me out of the book.”
Angelo shook his head in confusion, but he said, “As you wish.”
The cold feeling in Christian’s stomach began to ease.
The other event of note occurred on their last night at the manor. He’d finished his packing, resenting that he’d had to do it himself. Angelo appeared to employ no servants and lived entirely alone. Christian went downstairs and headed toward Angelo’s study, where he thought he might find Bernadette, but upon hearing both their voices inside, he paused to listen.
“What do you mean, he has no gift?” Angelo asked.
“That’s not what I said,” Bernadette answered. “It’s just not like any I’ve ever known. He exudes no aura, no influence as we do, but he can plant suggestions in someone else’s mind, and the result is astonishing. He can pick whatever emotion he wants the victim to feel. He’s not limited to inducing a single emotion…as we are.”
There was a moment of silence, and Angelo asked, “Has he ever tried it on you?”
“On me? Don’t be ridiculous. He adores me.”
“Mmmmmmmm?” Angelo grunted, once again sounding unconvinced.
“There’s something else,” Bernadette went on. “He’s still young, but I’ve never seen telepathic ability develop as quickly as his. He can stand in a roo
m full of people and read five minds at once. It’s uncanny.”
Their voices lowered, and then Christian heard steps coming toward him. He backed away quickly and pretended to just be coming down the stairs.
“There you are.” Bernadette smiled. “Ready to go? Angelo will take us as far as Rouen in his carriage. From there we can arrange a hired coach.”
Christian nodded and offered to carry her luggage, but her words from the study kept echoing in his mind.
The next visit proved a revelation to Christian, but it was also the point in his existence when everything began to change.
He enjoyed traveling from Rouen to Florence. Once they reached Italy, Bernadette had him busy reading the thoughts of every person they encountered, and to his amazement, the foreign words in their minds made perfect sense to him. Inside of a week, he was speaking fluent Italian.
However, they did not spend a single night in Florence. Bernadette took him straight through to a villa about thirty minutes outside the city, where he met two vampires who were expecting them, Demetrio and Cristina.
Almost immediately, Christian felt something in the world shift.
The villa was lovely, with gardens and an orchard, and the décor inside was tasteful and understated. The tables and chests were carved, polished wood in natural tones, and the few paintings on the walls were either portraits in rich, dark colors or still lifes of fruit and flowers. Somehow, he knew that each painting had been chosen with care.
Demetrio was slender, with dark curly hair, and he wore simple but well-tailored clothing and no wig. He’d been an artist during the Renaissance, but after being turned, he’d developed a fear of unknown places and spent almost all his time at home. He’d made a companion for himself, Cristina, and she was devoted to him. She wore simply cut gowns, which looked exquisite on her, and her wheat gold hair was piled on her head, with long strands wisping downward.
She grasped Christian’s hand with a warm smile. “You are most welcome.”