A Distant Echo: Book 1 (Grim's Labyrinth Series)

by Grim's Labyrinth Publishing

  “It sounds like a college entrance exam.”

  “It was more detailed than that, Paxton. He was a wise man to vet me so comprehensively. He took a risk on me and I hope he was never disappointed. He turned me on August 8, 1841. I was thirty-one years old.”

  “You look older than that.”

  “That is careful alteration of appearance. I created an enzyme that would cause my hair to grow despite the follicles themselves being biologically dead. Thus I can cut off my hair and use some scapular injections to make it grow back out. Being tied to a single hairstyle was very dating. I had to be able to manipulate how I look to appear to be different men. As a matter of fact, I marketed the serum to chemotherapy patients with great success. I’ve also made a killing on the semi-permanent self-tanner cream in Asian countries. I can go to a conference looking like I’ve been to the beach despite slathering myself with military-level sunblock.”

  “Better dying through chemistry?” she said. She was treated to his laugh, unexpected and hearty. “So did this other doctor bite you? I know that’s what happened to Gillian at the club.”

  “That is not what happened to her or anyone else who was turned. She may have told you that but biting someone doesn’t turn him or her. She either bit her assailant back or she injected his blood into her own veins intentionally.” Paxton grimaced. “I chose to be injected myself. Balthasar had a home on Lake Como and we were on the terrace one evening when he brought me the syringe. I took it and chose to transfigure.”

  “Did you die? Was it painful?”

  “Of course. No great gifts are without price and immortality is perhaps the greatest of these. “

  “How did you explain that to your friends?”

  “I had colleagues but we didn’t work closely with one another.”

  Paxton reached out and touched his cheek. The face she had thought of as chiseled and composed, icy cold, had, in the shadows, taken on the stark piteous beauty of a Modigliani sculpture. His aquiline nose, his sharp cheekbones and the spare leanness of him spoke of coiled power but also the strain of duty. Turning his face slightly, Elias pressed his lips to her palm. He took her hand in both of his and held it, kissing the back of her hand in a manner that was both courtly and ravishing. Men who took her to dinner and kissed her on the doorstep, who tried to paw her in the cinema had never caused that tingle to race up her arm like lightning or champagne in her veins. Elias opened the car door for her and she slid inside breathless.

  “It must be horrible,” she whispered. “Being immortal means watching everyone you love get old or sick and die.”

  “It was no inconvenience to me in that way. Everyone I’d ever cared about was dead already.” There was something so stark in his admission that she clutched at his hand as though the breath had been driven out of her lungs.

  “That’s even worse, then.”

  “Who do you love, Paxton?”

  “My parents are gone but I love Gillian. She’s the family I’ve got left. She was my foster sister.”

  “Foster sister?”

  “She and her mom took me in after my father died in the accident.”

  “That explains why you were willing to go into the belly of the beast to help her.”

  “I’d hardly call you a beast, Elias.”

  “Then you haven’t read enough fairy tales, little one.”

  “You haven’t started the car,” she commented. “Let’s get something to eat. I’ll get you fries and a shake. They always make me feel young.”

  “Young or like you’re slowly dying of atherosclerosis?”

  “Oh, your arteries are already dead. What do you care?” she teased.

  “I do care, or so it would seem.”

  “About me?”

  “About you, Paxton. Whether I like it or not, which as it turns out, I would have preferred to avoid it.”

  “But have I made you feel young?” she asked playfully.

  “You make me feel older than mountains and more helpless than I have since my father died. My besetting sin turns out not to be vanity but hope. It nearly killed me as a boy and it may finish me off now.”

  “Hope isn’t a sin. I think it’s a virtue, though my Bible trivia is a little thin.”

  “No, hope is the devil’s finger down your throat. It can hollow out your heart and leave you wishing yourself dead. Rather anything than hope, Paxton.” He turned to her and took her hands in his. “I’ll ask it, though I’ll wish it unsaid a moment hence. Stay with me. Please.”

  “Yes,” she said instantly.

  “Not tonight, not only tonight, Paxton. I’m afraid I cannot bear to be without you again. You’ve pried open my closed-up existence and let light in that no sunblock could protect me from. I can go back to that—that process, for it cannot be termed a life of any sort, but you’ve ruined me for it. With your jokes and your teasing and your insecurities and every damned thing I want to protect you from, the worst of them all being myself.” His voice broke and his hands tightened on hers almost to the point of pain. The ragged edge to his low, velvety voice shook her to the core. She could save this man, she knew it, but would it destroy him to know why she agreed?

  “Still yes, Elias. Still yes.” Paxton’s arms went around his neck and she kissed him slow and long. “But I don’t want the injection. I want you to claim me yourself.” Her voice was husky, wanton and it startled him.

  “You don’t know what this means. You’d be giving up everything you had planned for your life, to be with me.”

  “I thought I’d be getting perfect eternal freedom and you. It’s not a bad deal.” She giggled.

  “I’m serious. This isn’t a decision to make rashly, on a whim or out of lust. I’ll take you to your home. Call me in a month, or six months or a year.”

  “No. You can’t take it back, you can’t ask me never to leave you and then rescind it. I’m giving myself to you freely. I want you to make me immortal. I want to be like you.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll regret it.”

  “You’re afraid to hope, Elias. I can feel it. But know this, I won’t change my mind. I won’t blame you.”

  “We’ll discuss it.” He turned away from her, hands gripping the steering wheel. He was visibly shaken and she laid her hand on his shoulder. “That unmans me completely when you do that.”

  “Take me home. Your home,” she corrected and sat back, giddy with relief. She had only to convince him and it was half done already.

  Chapter 5

  Paxton fed him fries from a drive-through which was a new experience for Elias who had last eaten “frites,” as he insisted on calling them, on the Left Bank in Paris.

  “We should go there. That way we can make a fair comparison,” she said.

  “I’m not going to tempt you with lavish international travel, Paxton.”

  “You’ve already tempted me with yourself and your irresistible vampire pheromones. Why not offer me a plane ride? I’m not after an incentive package, or haven’t you figured that out yet? I’m mostly alone in the world and I’d rather be with you and leave behind my petty regrets and past.”

  “What past do you have? You’re awfully young to have a past of any sort.”

  “My parents died. You know that, of course. My mother was killed in a car accident and I never knew my real father. My dad kind of lost it after she died, totally fell apart. So I was thirteen, fourteen and basically on my own trying to take care of myself and make sure he ate and paid the bills when he wasn’t passed out drunk. When she died it was like I’d been killed only worse because I had to go on without her. She was a seamstress. She taught me to buy discount store clothes in the biggest size because you got more fabric that way and we’d alter them together and make something lovely and tailored out of something crappy. That’s what I’m trying to do with my life now. Tailor it to fit me, cut away the parts that aren’t useful.”

  “How old were you when you went to live with Gillian?”

  “I was f
ourteen.”

  “After you were orphaned, you lived with them until you got out of school?”

  “No. Helen, Gillian’s mom, kicked me out because she thought I was trying to seduce her boyfriend.”

  “Were you?”

  “Ugh! No! That’s disgusting. He was thirty-five!”

  “I’m a hundred and ninety-five, Paxton,” he deadpanned.

  “I was fifteen years old. He kept creeping around me and walking in while I changed clothes and offering to rub sunscreen on me, and generally being sleazy. But where could I go? Gillian was all the family I had left and I got kicked out. The county put me in a group home because I’d been labeled sexually aggressive and that made me hard to place with a family. So I got beaten up and my stuff got stolen all the time. I managed to hang on to one picture of me and my mom together but that’s it. Her locket—everything I had of her is gone. It was stolen or destroyed. So I got a need-based scholarship and went to college and now I’m reduced to seducing vampires to pay for a theme park trip for needy children.” She tried to finish lightly but her voice was scarred and bitter.

  Elias eased the car onto the shoulder of the road, flipped it into park and took her in his arms. He whispered to her, his voice an agony of compassion after so long being impervious to suffering. It was as if she, one girl, had awakened him to the pain of all of the human race with her simple story. His shoulders bowed with the weight of it.

  “Darling,” he said to her and she felt strangely relieved, leaning in to kiss him.

  The intensity of his kiss blotted out the pain and bitterness of betrayal she still felt at the bad memory. She was aware of nothing but a swirling darkness drawing her deeper and deeper until she was beyond thought, her body alight with sensation. This, she thought. This is how I can finally forget. Feeling lighter, suddenly free, she kissed him again, greedy for more forgetfulness.

  Breathless and panting, she lay her head against his shoulder and his arm came around her protectively as he steered the car back onto the highway and they drove through the darkness toward home.

  “If my mam had known you, she would have said you have attaching manners,” he said and she could hear a rueful smile in his voice, see the slight shake of his head by the green dashboard glow.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you were designed to make people love you. That no one could help becoming attached to you.”

  “It sounds childlike.”

  “It isn’t. It’s an old way of saying you are good-natured or you have a happy temperament.”

  “I’m not happy most of the time, Elias. I like trying to help people like the mentees but it’s mainly frustrating so I feel helpless. I know Gillian hates what she’s become and I want to help her. The only thing I’ve ever felt really good at since sewing with my mom is being with you.” The admission felt too big, she heard her voice drop at the end. Elias turned and kissed her forehead softly.

  “See? Attaching manners, just as I said. Tell me, do you want to continue at your job if you become immortal?”

  “I think so, for a while. I’d like to gain experience and do some volunteer work as well to build my résumé so I can advance and do more good. Not having to sleep or eat ought to give me some time to do that,” she said practically.

  “Have you considered how you feel about having to consume blood?”

  “I eat meat, Elias. How different is it, really? Except that the animals have to be killed for me to eat a hamburger and the blood doesn’t require their death. It’s sort of disgusting but it’s a necessary evil. Like exercise. Speaking of which, will I have to do sit-ups and run to maintain my weight?”

  “No. Your physical condition will remain the same as when you transfigure, although you gain stamina and strength obviously. You will eat only rarely and you don’t metabolize calories that way.”

  “What about fertility?” she asked shyly, looking out the window.

  “Biological processes are so altered that it’s unlikely you would become pregnant naturally and as your heart doesn’t beat and you couldn’t nourish a fetus, the pregnancy wouldn’t be viable. An embryo could be created in a laboratory and carried by surrogate but the child would be a vampire so there’s no knowing what the pregnancy would do to the surrogate. It’s fundamentally too dangerous to attempt. You would have to forfeit having children,” he said flatly.

  “I’m not sure I wanted children anyway. It’s almost impossible to protect them.”

  “You could not adopt because although paperwork could be provided to satisfy all bureaucratic requirements it is too risky to bring a child into the home, have to explain the situation and keep him from telling it to his friends and teachers just to get attention. Then word gets out and we have to go into hiding far away and the suspicion has been stirred up, making it dangerous not just for us but for all vampires.”

  “Tell me the part where this also makes the earth spin off its axis and the sun perishes from the sky,” she said sarcastically. “A simple, no there is no way on this earth you could ever parent a child would have been sufficient without the doomsday lecture.”

  “I do lecture, Paxton. I was once a fellow at Cambridge. Well, technically the man who is supposed to be the father of my current incarnation, Sasha, he was the lecturer. Died in a boating accident off of Greece in the ’80s. Quite a playboy.” Elias sounded smug.

  “So you get a real kick out of inventing and playing these characters. I thought you were all devoted to your work.”

  “I am, but to remain an unsuspicious presence in the scientific community, I have to rotate identities every so often, redo my Ph.D., although with the Internet that is sinfully easy now. I had to take two months off before submitting my dissertation the last time to avoid setting a record for fastest doctoral completion.”

  “We’ve established that you’re a genius. Now tell me, how many people have you turned?”

  “One, but that didn’t work out well.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “She attacked me and I had to kill her. Ugly business, that.”

  “Ugly business, that? That’s how you think about having killed someone?” She caught her breath.

  “She was very angry with me and didn’t regulate her emotions well. I made every attempt to subdue her safely but she cut me up badly enough I was in real danger of bleeding out. She left me no choice. I do valuable work and could not afford to have my life shortened by her infantile rage.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “No. She knew that but evidently had not accepted it as fully as she claimed. Christine found out that I had a new consort, that I had fed off of her, and she thought I had betrayed her.”

  “So you fed off girlfriends?”

  “Yes. For a time it was a convenient way to satisfy my hunger without the inconvenience of having to overpower an unwilling host.”

  “Did you ever bite anyone who didn’t want you to?”

  “Yes. I have. I have, in fact, killed several people who made themselves obstacles to my work or the necessary secrecy about my immortality. Their removal was perhaps unfortunate but it was a step I took for practicality’s sake. I’m out of that chaos now, feeding off live humans. I prefer the simplicity of blood samples. I think you will, as well, should you transfigure.”

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “Let me think. Apart from Christine, there were, I suppose, either seven or eight depending upon whether you consider Roland’s tumble off the roof to be murder or merely an accident that occurred during a struggle.” He parked the car and got out as nonchalantly as if she’d asked him about breakfast.

  “It doesn’t bother you? You aren’t ashamed? You don’t feel like a monster?”

  “Paxton, listen to me. When you have all of eternity to live with yourself, you see how senseless it is to flog yourself with every bad decision, every sin. Humans torment themselves, thinking to atone for their weaknesses with self-inflicted misery. Whe
n you have centuries with no end in sight, you have to make peace with yourself and your choices.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “Then you continue to torture yourself endlessly, I suppose. Do you know why I chose this place?”

  “The ocean views?”

  “Not this building. The town. Lointaine. It’s a French word, a musical term. It means a distant echo. That’s what your past, your mortal years become when you’re a vampire. Nothing but the memory of a sound, the shade of a note struck on a piano many years before. It fades, becomes remote. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you would cling to your humanity, insist on eating a cheeseburger twice a day and flossing your teeth.”

  “There’s nothing of this life I want to keep. I can still work with Mobile Mentors, and Gillian’s already a vampire. It’s fairly neat package after all.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her to turn you?”

  “She wouldn’t be the best coach for this process. She’s still mourning the life she left behind. The sunlight especially. But you’ll give me the formula and I can give her back the light.”

  “Are you trying to repay her somehow? You are loyal to her, but there’s more than simple affection when you speak of her.”

  “She was there for me when my parents died.”

  “That’s all? Her mom kicked you out. She did not protect you then.”

  “She couldn’t. It wasn’t a safe place for her either. But she’s protected me in more ways than you know.”

  “Then I’ll have to respect your loyalty to her. My question is about your loyalty to me. While I don’t expect you to attempt to murder me as Christine did, I want you to consider whether you can spend centuries with a killer.”