by H. T. Night
“Okay…you promise, right?”
“Yes, I promise!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at her persistence, thinking it was so much like me…. If the chupacabras vamps held their sadistic fondness for a beautiful African American instead of a girl of Basque descent, I’m sure I’d be just as obsessive for her safety.
After my conversation with Tyreen ended, Peter called to me from atop the stairs. No sign of anyone else but us, he had already dialed the police. The dispatcher advised him that a patrol car would be on its way in a few minutes.
He looked numb, his expression blank as he headed downstairs. No doubt, the images of what he saw in the daylight were still being reconciled to the bizarre and terrifying events from the night before.
“There’s no one here,” he said, his voice subdued. “What in the hell am I supposed to tell the cops?”
I could almost feel the depth of his angst and bewilderment. And beyond that, the torment of trying to merge his previous understanding of the world and natural laws with the incredible destruction left by our inhuman visitors. What I had right then was a man whose perspective on life had been seriously jacked up!
“You stick to the facts,” I told him. “Tell them you saw shadows of someone moving upstairs and then we ran down into the cellar. Whoever was here got angry and tore the place up. Just be glad they didn’t decide to burn the building down around us.”
I added a wry smile to go with this last part, which he seemed oblivious to. He nodded pensively.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said, quietly, once he rejoined me in the living room.
Neither of us wanted to rehash anything more. Since I had prior insights—courtesy of the so-called ‘good’ vamps—there was nothing Peter could add to my knowledge by talking about it. For him, however, I worried he might ask me questions about what I saw earlier before the attack, in the library parking lot. Luckily he never did.
Before long the police did arrive, two cops—a male and a female. I’ve already forgotten their names, although I believe the female’s name was Debbie. Or Denise, Desirae—or some shit. All I know is she tried like hell to flirt with my man while the guy cop restrained himself from casting more than one flirtatious glance at me.
They didn’t stay long, especially after Peter followed my advice in giving just cursory replies to their questions. Vandalism cases are frequent enough to elicit apathy among Knoxville’s finest. After a brief tour of the townhouse and the back porch, they completed their report and left. I helped Peter tack a handful of garbage bags over the front window, and after he called his landlord with the police report number for his insurance claim we left.
***
Talk about lock down.
The security checks to get back onto campus were much more intense that morning as compared to Thursday. And unlike the previous day, there were Knoxville cops everywhere. Peter parked his Camaro at the library again, and we walked the rest of the way to my dorm. By then, we had already heard that classes for the rest of the day were canceled. Other than the dorms, only the libraries, bookstore, and cafeterias remained open.
When Tyreen and Johnny grilled Peter about what happened and what our assailants looked like, he surprised me by staying evasive about those details while expounding on the actual damage inside the townhouse. Johnny especially got excited about the overturned kitchen appliances and the birdbath impaled inside the sixty-inch plasma TV.
As for me, Tyreen gave me another scolding that thankfully didn’t last long. But neither she nor Johnny badgered me with questions about what happened—nothing about what I saw and heard. So for the time being I got to keep that information to myself.
We spent the day finishing our class assignments pending for the next week, and then returned to Massey Hall well before dusk. None of us broached the recent string of murders and the four latest disappearances. Nor did we keep tabs on the local news surrounding these terrible events. Sort of like an unspoken promise to avoid the subject, as if our mutual silence would protect us all from the growing menace. The University and police had arranged for pizzas to be delivered to the entire dorm, and after we had our fill of food and drink, the four of us moved upstairs to our room.
“I think everyone should stay here tonight,” Tyreen suggested, after she closed the door behind us. “And it’s not like we’ll be the only ones up here with our men staying with us tonight.”
“Me and Pete can use the guys’ facilities on the other side in the morning to take a shower,” added Johnny. “Unless ya’ll can’t stand to be alone for fifteen minutes!”
“Oh, yeah, big boy?” Tyreen retorted, when he preened like a helpless female. “Who’s to say you’ll make it ‘til morning with your stank ass, be-e-e-a-a-t-c-h-h-h!!”
That got him. Stopped his comic pose and snickering grin before it erupted into one of Johnny’s loud and irritating laughs.
They’re so much like a married couple, loving and yet so dysfunctional. But they got things revved up for a fun night, and before long we were all poking fun at each other while taking turns playing Johnny’s Guitar Hero video game, and after that a few rounds of Taboo. When Peter and I began to nod off around eleven o’clock, Tyreen and Johnny headed downstairs since neither one was ready to retire just yet. Both of us exhausted from so little sleep the night before, I helped Peter climb up into my bed and then I snuggled close to him. Soon after, despite the lights still on and the TV muted in the corner of the room, we drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 9
“Careful…that’s it, Garvan.”
I suddenly awoke. My room was immersed in darkness. The lights and television were off. I could hear Peter’s soft snores to my left, and I was moving toward the window…more like floating on my back toward the open window.
“What the hell?” I whispered hoarsely, trying to get my bearings on what was happening. To my right, I could see light from the hallway beneath the door, and the shadow from one of my floor mates passing by my room. I couldn’t hear Tyreen or Johnny—snores or otherwise—which told me that neither one had returned yet.
Am I dreaming?
“It appears she is waking up….cover her mouth and let’s be on our way!”
The same voice from a moment earlier, and the Spanish accent was familiar. Very familiar.
“Armando?”
“Si,” the owner of the voice whispered in response to my question. “I must insist you keep quiet, dearest Txema!”
The same cheerful tone and irreverent delivery from the other night. Definitely him.
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed and finding it hard to keep my voice low. Preparing to float through a fourth floor window on a chilly night will do that to you.
“I’m grabbing your coat,” said Armando, “and your slippers too.”
Huh?
“Where in the hell are you taking me?!” I shouted at him, or at least I shouted at the spot where his voice emanated from. I couldn’t see his face—just the outlines of his long fingernails guiding me along, as if I lay upon an invisible raft drifting through the air.
“Some place safe.” Another voice, this time Garvan’s, and it resounded from my other side. Calm and assuring, I couldn’t see him either—just the now-familiar cinnamon scent slithering into my nostrils. “A place not far from here.”
“A place where everyone else is waiting anxiously to meet you!” added Armando.
I immediately felt panicked at this announcement and tried to look back at Peter, still snoring in my bunk bed. Some protector he turned out to be that night, though I considered he might’ve been ‘tapped’ like Tyreen was two nights earlier. And my hope that vampires had to show some sort of courtesy by waiting to be invited in one’s abode had been officially nixed—both by these so-called good ones and the meaner chupacabras who crashed Peter’s pad the previous night.
“Ah, cheri, do not be alarmed,” Garvan said to me, his sexy voice soothing, despite the fact I felt no less terri
fied. Especially since I had just tried to move my arms and legs and couldn’t do it. I could barely feel anything from my neck on down to my toes. “In just a minute we will reach our destination.”
I remember how this confused me. I tried to picture what campus locale was nearby—even considering the ultra-quick movements I’d seen from both vampires previously. If they planned to carry me out the window at our present drift, we might make it to the Alumni Center if we were lucky, and that’s if we allowed a few more minutes to make the trip.
However, once we cleared the window and hovered some forty feet above the ground below, they both took firm hold of my arms and shoulders. Everything suddenly sped up. Sped way up, I should say. Like being shot from a cannon into the sky, we flew so fast that the lights below us became a streaming blur.
It wasn’t long before the lights below disappeared and the air around us grew even colder. Then, as quickly as Garvan predicted, we reached our destination; dramatically slowing down once we approached a cave deep within the Smoky Mountains—by my estimate at least five to ten miles east of Knoxville. Tall cedars and eastern pines stood near the cave’s entrance, and a roaring fire glowed from within the cave as Garvan and Armando set me down on the ground.
My legs felt weak and it took me a minute to catch my breath after such an exhilarating experience. I’m sure my racing pulse was just as much due to the sudden surprise of flying a few hundred feet above the ground as from the incredible g-forces from traveling so fast. I doubt my vampire companions do this sort of thing on a regular basis, since I believe it’s likely someone not as athletically inclined as me would’ve passed out for sure, and maybe worse.
I could once again feel my body—my arms and legs no longer felt like rubber. I already had my coat on, covering much of my night gown, and as I marveled at how the two had dressed me in my parka without my awareness, Armando placed my slippers on my feet. Unlike the other night, both were dressed completely in black, wearing leather trench coats that hung below their knees. Their boot heels clicked against loose gravel just outside the cave’s mouth.
“You are now ready to meet the princess and the rest of her entourage!” Armando proudly announced. “Right this way…please!”
He motioned for me to walk through the entrance, while Garvan joined him behind me. I could feel them withdraw as I stepped through a narrow passage that opened to a fairly large room. An immense fire burned within a large stone ring near the room’s center and in front of it stood a tall female flanked by a slightly shorter male on her right and a petite female on her left.
“So we finally meet, Txema,” said the taller female. “Come…closer. Let me have a better look at you, my cousin.”
“Cousin?!”
How could this pallid woman be any close relation to me? Granted, she stood almost as tall as me with the same build, and her shoulder-length black hair flowed the same way mine did—even with the same widow’s peak atop my forehead. But her eyes were greener than mine, like sultry emerald fires. Like Tyreen’s eyes, only brighter and unearthly in their glow.
She smiled, and the tips of her fangs peered out through her full pouting lips—same as mine and my best assets according to Peter. Her subtle head nod and amused smile let me know she had just read my thoughts.
“Yes, it’s sort of like looking in a mirror, eh?” She chuckled warmly, and in the next instant moved from the fire to a mere two feet in front of me. I wish they wouldn’t do that shit—it really is unsettling. A slight lilac scent arrived with her. “You are as radiant as advertised, and you remind me of Bernadette Soubirous, the girl who put the city of Lourdes on the international map long ago.”
She stepped back with one hand on her hip, studying me while apparently comparing me to this other name that I remember hearing my grandmother speak of when I was younger. The way this woman stood there reminded me of both my grandmother and Aunt Sylvia, Papa’s sister—that’s how they would often stand when about to make a point about something.
“You have heard of Bernadette, correct?” she asked me. Her French accent was more pronounced than Garvan’s, but there was also some other influence in the delivery of her words. Perhaps an older Basque touch?
“She’s the one who saw visions and had a shrine built in her honor. Thousands of people come to visit the town every year,” I acknowledged, after nodding shyly. I could already tell that I suffered a huge disadvantage in terms of what she knew about me and my family—her family too, apparently, which I struggled to wrap my mind around.
“Actually, it is three million people each year that journey to Lourdes—many on pilgrimage,” she said, her eyes twinkling with the same mirth I often felt when someone got the facts wrong about a subject. “A basilica was built long ago in 1876, and an underground church was finished in 1958. The town served as a medieval stronghold for yours and my ancestors too.”
“Oh,” I said, softly. The warmth from the fire had reached me enough to where my parka had become a furnace on my shoulders and arms. The history lesson suffered as a result.
“Allow me,” she said, moving to remove my coat so quickly that I scarcely felt my arms pulled through it. “Now, that’s better, eh?”
“Yes… Thanks.”
“My earthly name was Berezi Ybarra, the great, great, great auntie to Bernadette—who is one of your most famous ancestors, as you’ve surely been told,” she continued, handing my coat to the other female who stepped forward after a slight nod. “But our bloodline goes very far back…further than you can even begin to imagine.”
“Which again is why we’re all here!”
Armando’s booming voice echoed off the cave walls, drifting up through a small shaft nestled between an outcropping of stalactites above us where the reverberations were shriller. He danced around the fire, wearing a maniacal look on his face while playing an imaginary violin. The others all snickered.
“Yes, it is the reason we’ve come,” this female once known as Berezi continued. “The bloodline that began thousands of years ago is now in danger of dying. Armando and Garvan have advised me that you now know the reasons for our urgency to protect you. Due to the expanse of your Basque relatives throughout the world, less than ten years ago there were nearly one hundred females who carried the gift that our breed of vampires needs to survive, and which allows us to govern the less-fortunate of our kind. But roughly six months ago, the gift carriers began to die. In September, the survivors numbered just fourteen… dwindling to three as of two weeks ago….”
Her voice trailed off and she looked away, as if somehow reliving what had happened to these ‘carriers’. No doubt they bore the same birthmark as mine.
“Yes…they did,” she advised, turning to face me again.
Dressed in the same dark clothing and trench coat as Armando and Garvan, she opened her coat and pulled her sweater away from her neck. The pastiness of her skin accentuated the tiny teardrops that marked her jugular near the base of her throat.
“It is the mark that we all bear—all of us who carry the gift,” she advised. “But you are now the only living human being in the entire world that has it.”
For the first time during our conversation, her eyes betrayed her depth of worry….This was some serious shit! All of a sudden, an enormous burden settled upon my shoulders, the weight nearly taking my breath away.
“Armando called you a princess when we arrived here,” I said, looking for some distraction…something to lessen the impact of what she just told me. “My papa told me recently that the little tears on our necks were once the symbol of Basque royalty. Is that true, and is it the reason Armando said that?”
“It’s more than that, I assure—”
“Armando, let me handle this!” she scolded him, though lightly. He nodded his consent to her interruption and she addressed me again. “Your papa is correct. Many members of not only the Basque royalty have born the same birthmark, but other cultures as well. And those predated the Basque arrival to the Pyrenees
. Our lineage dates back thousands of years, where the carriers of this gift easily infiltrated the ruling class of the world’s most highly developed cultures.”
“That’s why we do not address her as ‘Berezi’,” said the petite female, who suddenly joined us, eyeing me as if I were a very rare novelty—or perhaps, more likely, as a delectable treat to taste. Her French accent also strong, I detected the slight aroma of roses. “She is known to us all as ‘Chanson de Eternelle’, since she is the vampire who carries forth our Song forever!”
Her eyes were violet, so unusual and assuredly a byproduct of her vampire birth long ago. They flashed with desire within her small oval face that was framed by a rich halo of crimson colored hair hanging in loose curls upon her shoulders. All her other features were dainty, including her thin lips and delicate nose and cheekbones. Her similar attire of black leather trench coat, stiletto heels, and a dark sweater beneath did little to make her look fearsome. If not for the fangs and her china-doll porcelain skin—as well as those piercing eyes—she could easily pass for some men’s magazine pin-up.
But the way she studied me made me uncomfortable…like I was potential ‘dinner’ if given the right opportunity.
“So, how should I address you, then?” I asked, not sure how to address either one at this point.
“‘Chanson’ will be fine,” said Berezi. “And, this is Raquel Meurtrier.”
She gestured playfully to the flaming redhead, who curtseyed with dramatic flair.
“Ah-hem!” Another booming male voice resounded behind the females, as the lone remaining stranger to me lifted his chin in defiance at being ignored for so long. Even so, I detected an impish glint in his amber vampire eyes.
“And this…this is Franz Blutliebhaber,” Chanson advised, motioning for him to join them.
Franz stepped over to us, completing my immersion in a mixed bath of sensual aromas. He bore more of a sage-like musk scent that seemed to go well with his strong German features— blond with high cheekbones and dimples framing a toothy smile. Only the fangs and iridescent eyes would alert otherwise unsuspecting humans that a dangerous predator walked in their midst.