by H. T. Night
“Should I grab my coat?” I worried, thinking winter in the Atlantic couldn’t be any warmer than winter back home.
“No. It shouldn’t take that long,” she assured me.
The random thought suddenly flew into my mind that maybe she would suck me dry and toss my blood-less corpse overboard.
“You are such a silly girl, sometimes, Txema!” she chided me, chuckling as she led the way outside. “Why would I possibly harm the last link between my kind and the elixir of eternal youth and beauty?”
She laughed heartily. A stiff frozen breeze embraced us, far colder than her presence. I wouldn’t last outside of the yacht’s protective warmth for long. The deck swayed noticeably, forcing me to grab the handle to the door we had just exited with my free hand. The brass felt especially frigid, sending deepening pain through my fingers.
“Hold on to me instead,” she said, offering her arm for me to grasp onto.
She seemed like a statue with a lead base, unmovable, despite the ship’s reckless speed through the darkness. If not for the recent knowledge I’d gained about vampires’ supernatural abilities, I would’ve been scared shitless right then. I grabbed onto her arm and held on for dear life.
“You and I are not so different,” she told me, her long dark hair billowing around her face.
Her luminous eyes flashed with acute excitement, and in the glow from a nearby lamp they seemed even brighter than I’d recalled seeing before, perhaps accentuated by the paleness of her skin. Even so, I had no doubt that most males—alive or not so much—would find her beauty extremely compelling. She even added a dash of makeup that night, accentuating her lashes and eyebrows with a touch of mascara as well as adding blush to her cheeks and lipstick to her otherwise bluish lips.
“How do you mean?” I asked, certain her comment wasn’t a reference to her ancestry to me.
“As I told you, long ago I was once where you are now,” she said, pausing to look out into the darkness surrounding us. “I was young, like you, when Gustav came to me. It was the last time a crisis like the one we find ourselves in now happened. I had seen him before. I recalled waking up in the middle of the night on several occasions, with a slight pain in my neck above the birthmark you and I share. I would catch a glimpse of a handsome man in his late twenties leaving by way of my window.”
She paused for a moment, and the way she studied me told me she was allowing me a moment to search my own memory for such experiences. I was about to shrug my shoulders to let her know I had nothing to add to what she told me. But then I remembered something…an image of a young woman who would sometimes show up in my room late at night—often following a nightmare of falling off a cliff into a pit of sharp wooden spikes. Most the time, I ended up running into my parents’ bedroom, screaming from the nightmare. I scarcely recalled the pinprick pain in my neck, but I knew it felt familiar the first night Garvan visited me.
“Yes, it is the same for all of us who share the twin tears on our throats,” she advised. “I can tell by your shivers that we only have another minute out here where we can talk like this. So, I will try to be quick with what you need to know now, and the rest will have to wait until we can afford a longer visit.”
I nodded enthusiastically that this would be best, since I was literally freezing my ass off. It became my hunch that reading a human’s thoughts must be related to close proximity, since when I glanced through the nearest window I could see everyone else on the ship remained gathered at the table, although Garvan stared intently in our direction. He looked both perplexed and frustrated.
“You will be given the same choices that I had long ago,” she continued, once she had my full attention again. “Follow your heart at that moment. Immortality is yours to decree with whatever decision you make—whether it is your immortality or another’s. Just don’t let Racco sully your mind and heart. Your entire being must be lucent when the moment of truth comes for you.”
“When will that happen?” I asked, after nodding thoughtfully. I knew the likely locale for this decision would be someplace in France. But would it happen quickly, or were there more pieces to this crazy puzzle that had to fall in place first?
“Not as soon as we reach our destination, but certainly not long after you get settled in your new home.”
“In the castle?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Gustav will share more about this tomorrow night, when you meet him and the others who are waiting anxiously to meet you!”
“So, we will reach France tomorrow?”
“Yes, we are less than five hundred miles from the mainland now, and should reach our docking point sometime in the morning,” she said. “Whether or not we will wait until dusk to make the trip into the mountains, to reach the castle, has not yet been determined. It depends on Customs and on other developments going on among the European vampires. I will share more once I know for sure what is happening.”
“Do you know what became of my friends back in Tennessee? Peter and Tyreen?” I asked, just before she ushered me back inside the ‘Blue Antoinette’. “I’m really worried about them.”
“I understand your fears for their welfare,” she said. “You want assurance they are okay? I will tell you this: they are both safe and doing fine. You will soon see them again. Very soon.”
Chapter 15
Chanson’s words proved cathartic for me, and I had no idea the tremendous comfort and relief I would feel from what she said. Almost immediately, the overwhelming stress of everything I had gone through hit me full force. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open, and much worse than the night before. I had become a queen-sized party-pooper.
Needing time alone, I walked myself back to my cabin. Surprised I even lasted until shortly after ten o’clock, I laid down on the bed, intending to rest just a moment and then go wash my face and brush my teeth. I didn’t wake up until almost noon the next day.
Tuesday, exactly one week after my initial encounter with a vampire.
Before taking a shower, I peered through the window blinds, thinking we must be drifting since the ship’s engines were silent. But the ship wasn’t drifting. It sat motionless.
I gasped in surprise. A beautiful coastline sprawled before me, featuring a mixture of French and Spanish-styled buildings. Sailboats surrounded us beneath a cloudless sky, skimming along much bluer water than what I’d seen the past few days.
I assumed we had arrived in France, less than a half-mile away from that nation’s shore.
I could hardly wait to set my feet on solid ground again. Yet, at the same time, that same prospect brought a dire sense of finality. Like whatever I was then, or more like whoever I was at that moment, would soon irreversibly change forever, with no way to get back to the person I was before my forced trans-Atlantic journey began.
I thought about my family, and how many times we had talked about visiting France—to return to Grandma Terese’s childhood home—but always found some reason or another to not follow through with an actual trip overseas.
“But here I am now,” I whispered to myself, trying to find something to focus on other than sadness, since I missed them all terribly.
I glanced around the room, looking for familiar items from the past few days to distract myself.
Somehow, another complete change of clothes had been laid out across a chair just inside the door to my cabin. Unlike the other night when elegance was the choice made for me, this time my outfit consisted of brand new jeans and a heavy dark blue sweatshirt not unlike the ones in my wardrobe back on campus that bore the UT insignia.
I showered and took a little longer getting ready than yesterday, hoping that Racco’s offer to join me for some afternoon fun was still a possibility. I needed a big distraction to get past the emotional war going on within me. If Peter were here, I’d have insisted on time alone with him. But he wasn’t, and it could be a long time—if ever—before we saw each other again. Regardless of Chanson’s assurances. If she was correct, mor
e than likely that would be long after our budding love had died, and his devotion given to a new love.
At least that was my rationale right then. However, a ship not moving didn’t necessarily mean we had a skipper with idle time on his hands—certainly not the kind of idle hand time I was hoping for. In all likelihood, plans were already being finalized for our move to dry land, with a caravan up into the Southern Pyrenees the top priority of the ship’s crew.
A knock resounded at my door soon after I finished blow-drying my hair.
“Who is it?”
“Mademoiselle Ybarra?”
It sounded like Racco’s assistant, Mercel.
“I’ll be right there!” I called out, rushing to finish my makeup and grab my shoes and, unlike last night, a jacket. “Coming!”
“It’s all right, my chere,” the owner of the voice replied. Apparently, there were people on the yacht who did speak and understand more English than I gave them credit for. “Racco would like you to join him upstairs for lunch.”
When I opened the door, I did find Mercel waiting for me. I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t previously addressed me in English, and it irritated me how he acted clueless when I spoke English before. But the question would have to wait. He walked ahead of me, briskly, leading me to the stairs I was well familiar with by then.
“We will be unloading the ship within the hour,” he called back to me.
By the time I caught up to him upstairs, he and the rest of the crew were gathered at a table near the window facing the scenic view I had glimpsed from my cabin window. Mercel introduced me to the others—all of whom spoke perfect English—that included two males I had not seen until then. Hearing them all speak so casually and in my native tongue was quite unsettling, and made me wonder again why in the hell they had gone through such a charade of acting like they only understood French the past two days. I was about to upbraid everyone for the bullshit at my expense, but then I heard Racco’s booming voice enter the room from behind us.
“Txema! You are such a vision in even the most mundane attire, are you not?”
He laughed merrily, and just like that, my anger melted away. Well, maybe it didn’t completely. He was dressed similar to me and the others, in a sweatshirt and jeans. But, unlike the oversized shirts the rest of us had on, his was form fitting. Hard to know if it was on purpose or not, but the affect was the same. I couldn’t help but smile…lovingly.
“You’re pretty easy on the eyes, too, I’d say,” I told him, feeling my pulse quicken.
My comment pleased him, though he seemed a little self-conscious for a moment. He grabbed a ham sandwich from the table, foregoing the finer finger foods and the caviar he seemed to cherish on Sunday.
“We will be leaving in about twenty minutes,” he said, and then motioned for the two males I hadn’t recognized before that afternoon to follow him as he moved toward the stairs leading to the flybridge above us. “Raul and Simon will take the ship into port while the rest of us finish packing up everything we’ll need at the castle.”
Everyone else grabbed what they could carry in their hands to eat, and despite my desire for the more delectable items, I settled for a couple of finger sandwiches and a raspberry wine cooler and followed Mercel and the girl servers as they moved downstairs.
“Is this how you normally do lunch, to be in such a rush?” I asked Mercel once we neared my cabin. “I thought the French always take their time when dining, with the idea of savoring a meal instead of wolfing it down like an American.”
At least he caught my joke, as he laughed immediately. After he explained it to the girls—in English, no less—they laughed too.
“We are not usually like this, and Racco had planned for a leisurely afternoon out here in this beautiful bay. However, a phone call this morning changed those plans,” he advised, motioning for the girls to follow him to the room where the caskets were stored. “He wanted you to sleep undisturbed, but now we are in a rush, since it will still take a few hours to arrive at the chateau. Racco said we must be there before darkness returns. So, be sure to take only the things you cannot live without.”
Mercel’s beautiful blue eyes turned slightly darker, adding emphasis to his update.
“Okay,” I agreed, shrugging my shoulders and heading into my room. “Do I need to grab anything from the bathroom, like the shampoo, facial scrub, and soap?”
“Just the makeup, since there is plenty of soap and shampoo at the chateau,” he advised, before darting into the room where the girls had already disappeared. “Not that you need make-up, but a woman likes to always look her very best, yes?”
“I guess,” I replied, shooting him a smile I hoped told him I appreciated his compliment. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
***
Apparently the caskets were already set up on rollers. I hadn’t noticed that fact the previous afternoon. Then again, it was hard to notice much else when the sexiest ‘old’ man the world has ever known stood just inches behind me.
Within fifteen minutes of the hustle and bustle, Racco’s crew had gathered up everything we needed for our trip into the mountains. The caskets were all lined up in the hallway outside my cabin, while the mere mortals and their immortal human captain reconvened upstairs. Even the table laden with food had already been cleared and cleaned, though I admit I entertained an image of Racco’s servants shoving everything inside the kitchen during the rush.
“Once we reach the dock, we will need to stay organized,” Racco advised his staff and me, while the ship coasted to the shoreline. “The trucks will be there, and each of you will stay with our friends during their rest. It remains imperative that they are not disturbed during transport. Any questions?”
The others all shook their heads ‘no’, to which he smiled and nodded approvingly.
“Where will I ride—do you need me to watch over a casket too?” I asked, more out of politeness since it wasn’t something I had any desire for.
“No, Txema,” he said, turning to face me as I stepped up to him. His eyes seemed more penetrating than before, his interest keen. Or was it lust? “You and I will ride in a limousine and the others will follow.”
“Sounds good,” I said. No qualms there. Ancient or not, the close traveling proximity of a beautiful man will never be declined by yours truly.
In a matter of twenty minutes everything was loaded up inside a pair of semi-trucks, and Racco and I sat in the back of the lead vehicle, a stretch Mercedes. The temperature hovered in the low sixties, or between 27 and 29 degrees Celsius, according to Racco. A refreshing change from the sub-freezing temperatures I recently endured in Knoxville and the mid-Atlantic.
By 1:30 p.m., Central European time, we made it past the heaviest congestion in Perpignan, city streets much older than any I had ever seen before and where many of the buildings dated from the fourteenth century, and some even older. Racco served as my tour guide in our relative privacy, where the driver only glanced occasionally at us—mostly on account of my companion’s boisterous laughter.
Once we left the city limits of Perpignan, we traveled through several more towns while navigating through the Pyrenees’s foothills. I was surprised by the stronger prevalence of Spanish architecture as compared to French, although Racco explained how for centuries the borders between Spain and France were not clearly defined as they are now. Instead, ancient kingdoms in either country warred against one another, and subsequent victories or losses defined the ‘turf-layouts’ throughout the Pyrenees.
“We will be veering onto a seldom used highway that will take us up to the castle,” he advised, just before three o’clock. “It shouldn’t take much longer to get there, and it does appear that we will meet Gustav’s mandate to be there before the onset of dusk.”
Just ahead of us on the right side of the road stood an iron gate within a marble wall that seemed to stretch well into the surrounding forest on either side. The wall’s visible gray blocks were tightly fitted, and streams of rus
t covered each one. Very old. The limo pulled up to the gate, and once the driver called in a code to his dispatcher, the gate opened. All three vehicles moved through the entrance and onto a gravel road. For a moment I worried about the steady speed that didn’t change when the incline suddenly rose steeply. A cloud of dust obscured my view of the trucks behind us.
“Do not be alarmed, my chere,” said Racco, his husky voice making me want to curl up next to his shoulder. But the driver’s eyes were drawn to us from within the rearview mirror. “Within thirty minutes we shall reach my home. You are now moving through an area of the Pyrenees rarely seen by mortals—other than those in my employment, of course.”
He flashed a mischievous smile, and then motioned to the stunning view outside the limousine on either side. I had never seen anything quite this pristine before—not even the breathtaking mountain views in Gatlinburg, Tennessee or the glistening snowcapped peaks in Vail, Colorado that I witnessed at Christmas three years ago. Granted, these hills could never compete with America’s Rocky Mountains. But it was obvious that nothing had ever been disturbed in this wilderness by mankind—other than the road we traveled on.
As the incline increased, so did the drop off on either side. I tried to focus on the view that stretched for miles around us, especially the bluish peaks in the distance that were covered by a blanket of snow in the highest elevations. Still, it was nearly impossible to not occasionally look down. Several hundred feet soon became more than a thousand. Even though I’m a roller-coaster junkie, I started to feel sick.
“Do you honestly think the lords who rule the vampire world would allow something bad happen to you?” Racco laughed again, after watching me flinch. It was hard not to feel sheepish for being so fearful. “If only you knew the scope of sacrifice these creatures will make to ensure their way of life continues unhindered. You are their golden egg, Txema, and as their only trusted confidant in the daylight hours, neither I nor those who serve me will let any harm come to you!”