The boy slowly relaxed. He took off his outer coat and made a sleeping roll for himself and wrapped up in it. He lay down as if to sleep, but his wide eyes rolled at every sound, and he trembled long after the fire should have warmed him.
Monster, I accused myself, watching him through the leaping flames. You are worse than the Foul One who made you!
After a little while, I began to sing again. I sang the song of the deer that jumps in the fire. It is a sweet and soothing song, a kind of lullaby. I’d sung it to my children many times as I sat cross-legged by the fire, rocking them in my arms and brushing their hair from their brows. Little Gan. Little Breyya. Little Hun. All my children. I remembered how their eyes would glaze over in sleepiness, then roll back in their sockets, their little thumbs in their mouths.
As I sang my people’s lullaby song, the boy Ilio relaxed, and then his eyes drifted closed. He slept as my children once slept, his eyes slightly open, little crescents of white showing between the lashes.
I fell in love with him a little, seeing him drift off to sleep as my children once had. I swore to myself that very night, I would keep this child safe… at any cost.
It was a promise I did not keep.
7
After the boy fell asleep, I rose silently and stole from the camp. The blood-hunger was clamoring in my belly, and I feared my resolve. I hunted the dark tundra, seeking my evening meal of the region’s wildlife, as I had done in the past when I watched over the River People from my mountain refuge.
I flew in great leaps and bounds, my hair streaming out behind me, and came across a small herd of reindeer gathered by a frosted pool. The animal I took was large and full of blood. As its herd thundered away, I tore open its neck and drank until my belly was quivering, then I used my superhuman strength to rip away its haunch, which I carried back to the fire with me. I planned to cook the loin for the boy in the morning, when he awoke.
Feeling more sure of myself, I got comfortable by the fire and waited for sunrise to come. It would be uncomfortable for me to move about in daylight. The light would sting my eyes. But for his sake, I would do it. Watching him sleep across the fire from me, I felt a great swell of protectiveness rise up in my heart for him.
I had done so much to harm him, but no more.
Ilio… so small and fragile, more child than man. This hunt was surely the first expedition he’d gone on. To my way of thinking, he hardly seemed big enough to leave his mother’s side. None of the men I’d stalked had seemed particularly mindful of the child, as a father should be. He’d seemed more a tagalong than anything else. Perhaps he was an orphan and was being raised by the hunting men in his tribe.
The boy slept through the night as I watched over him. When dawn broke, I built up the fire and spit the deer haunch over it.
Ilio slept until full daylight, then rose up with a lurch, confused and frightened. He blinked at the steppes surrounding us on all sides as if he could not believe he’d lived to see another day.
I smiled and nodded at him, pointing at the deer meat roasting over the fire. I rubbed my belly and licked my lips in an exaggerated manner.
Ilio smiled back shyly. He sat up in his furs, his curly dark hair smashed flat on one side and sticking up in spikes on the other. His face was puffy with sleep, his eyes red and swollen.
I tore off a hunk of steaming meat and passed it to him. He murmured something in his alien tongue and ate hungrily, smacking his lips and then licking the grease from his fingers when it was gone. He looked at me imploringly, speaking some more words I did not understand, but I recognized the tone of his speech and gave him a second helping.
He was much happier when his belly was full. For a while, we played the game of naming things, learning one another’s language. He pointed to the fire and said, “Stoh,” and I mimicked him, saying the River People word for it: “Echah.” He pulled up a hank of grass. “Sah.” I patted the grass. “Ess” I ignored the pain stabbing in my eyes from the sunlight as we continued with the naming game. The word for sky was “enghoi”. That bird flying there in the enghoi was called “creewah”. My mind held onto every word he taught me. Vampires retain information very easily. The dark blood inside us preserves our memories in much the same manner that it preserves our flesh, I suppose.
After an hour, he said he needed to do something I didn’t understand. I watched as he rose and walked away from the fire a little ways.
He didn’t move too far away. I think he was worried the monster who’d killed his companions would try and get him if he went too far. He looked all around and then, keeping an eye on me nervously, he pulled out his little boy penis and began to urinate.
Ah! That’s what that word meant! “T’sitz”!
He finished quickly and returned to the fire. I fed him some more and we continued with the naming game as we rose and put out the fire and gathered our belongings.
He pointed south and said, “I want/need to—something-something.” I shrugged and nodded and we began to walk south.
He latched onto me quickly, as children are wont to do. By nightfall, I’d learned enough of his tongue that we could maintain a basic dialogue.
He was still fearful that first day. Even as we walked further and further south, his eyes roved to and fro without cease, scanning our surroundings for the monster who’d killed his companions. When he needed to void his bowels, he strayed only a little distance, and he watched me the whole time to make sure I didn’t turn my eyes away from him. The rest of the day, he stayed within arm’s length. He even gave me his spear to carry. I’m a tall, broad-shouldered man. Perhaps he believed I was big enough to protect him if the monster attacked us.
As the sun began to set, he clung even closer to me. Almost underfoot. We gathered tinder together for our fire, speaking haltingly.
“There… get stick,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Let’s make fire now.”
I gave him the rest of the meat when night fell, which he devoured ravenously. We made a big fire, but he sat right beside me anyway, staring out at the dark with barely concealed terror.
His fear shamed me afresh. I listened and nodded solemnly as he tried to explain the terrible things that had befallen his hunting party, the monster who had stalked and killed his family. I did my best to comfort and reassure him, though I was hesitant to touch him more than necessary. I was afraid he would notice the chill of my flesh, its horrid and inhuman texture.
So far he had displayed no suspicion that I was anything more than a living man. If he noticed the pallor of my skin, or the strange way my eyes glinted, he gave no sign of it. It was the dark he feared, or more exactly, the monster he imagined in the dark, the misshapen thing he’d seen squashed to the rocks.
But I was growing hungry as well. My appetite for blood was mounting with the night. His nearness tortured me. I’m ashamed to say, the smell of his blood made my mouth water. I sat stiffly beside him, afraid I would lose control of myself if I touched him. I couldn’t bear the thought of harming him.
He put my self-control to the test, however, when it came time to sleep. He insisted we lie next to one another near the fire, shaking his head stubbornly when I gestured for him to sleep apart from me.
“Please,” he begged, “I’m afraid it will get me. It comes at night.” His eyes were so large and terrified, I could do nothing but acquiesce to his wishes.
We lay down side-by-side under the stars. He asked me to do something I didn’t understand. Then, when he tapped his lips and made a humming sound, I realized what he wanted and couldn’t help but smile. Nodding, I began to sing the lullaby for him. He was really too old for lullabies, but I was happy to do something to comfort him, considering the weight of my offenses.
He listened, staring gravely at the stars overhead, his fur drawn up to his chin.
He looked so like my boys Hun and Gavid that when he finally dozed, I couldn’t help but stroke his dark curls back from his brow.
&nbs
p; I waited for his sleep to deepen, and then I rose and went to hunt. As I did the night before, I brought food back to the camp for him, meat and some mushrooms I’d discovered growing on an outcrop of rocks. I slipped quietly beside him.
The fire was low and rosy. I watched the air ripple with the heat, the rhythmic way the embers glowed and dimmed inside the flames. Ilio turned over suddenly and squeezed up close to me, making me stiffen in alarm. But my belly was full of reindeer blood and my flesh was soft and warm with it. I felt no urge to drink his blood, as full as I was, and I suppose I felt like a normal man to him, at least for the moment.
It felt good to me. So good, in fact, I might have wept. It had been so long since I held my children in my arms. My mind crowded with memories, memories which were as sweet as they were heartbreaking. I put my arm over him. I held him close as he slept, thinking of the children I’d lost to time.
8
The featureless tundra seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of us, but we continued south at Ilio’s insistence. Every now and then, the arid emptiness was broken by a line of low hills or a few trees gathered around a small creek or pool of water, but for the most part, the world was little more than two parallel planes: flat grasslands and empty blue sky.
On the third day, gray clouds crowded into the heavens, threatening rain—or snow, perhaps—but there was no precipitation, and the clouds finally drifted past.
Within three days, I had mastered the tongue of Ilio’s people. Our language barrier broken, Ilio told me of the monster who’d killed his uncle—the frizzy headed hunter named Lene’Hab—and all the rest of his party. His recounting filled me with shame, but I was glad he seemed to have no suspicion that I was the monster he spoke of. He confirmed what I’d supposed earlier, that he was an orphan being raised by the hunters of his tribe. I agreed to accompany him the rest of the way to the base camp of the Mammoth Hunters, which was about five days further south.
His people called themselves the Denghoi, he told me, which basically meant the Mammoth People, although there had been fewer of the wooly beasts of late, and his people were beginning to rely more and more on the fish in the nearby lakes and streams, and the herds of reindeer that thundered across the tundra, for their livelihood.
“I guess when all the dengh are gone, we will have to call ourselves the Hap’phenoi. The Reindeer People,” he said solemnly.
I chuckled sympathetically. “I suppose so.”
“Where are your people from, Thest Un Mann?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I do not know. Far away from here, I suppose. I was hurt and lost my way, and now I do not know how to get back to them.”
“That’s sad. Did you have children?”
“Yes. Many children.”
“Did you love them?”
I frowned at the boy, who was walking stride by stride beside me. “Of course I did.”
He nodded. “I’m sure my father loved me, too, although I don’t really remember him. He was killed when I was a baby. A great bull ran him down and squashed him during a hunt. That is what my uncle told me. Dengh are very heavy, and the males will knock you down and step on you if they get angry. My mother died the year after. She got sick with the coughing illness and the medicine woman could not heal her.”
“My mother died when I was young, too,” I told him. “A venomous serpent struck her on the heel.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I bet you missed her a lot.”
“Yes, I did. I still do. I try to hold all the people I love in my heart. If you don’t forget them, then they are not completely gone, even when they pass on to the afterlife.”
Ilio nodded. “I think you’re a very wise man,” he said. “I’m glad I found you.”
I nodded, feeling very ashamed of myself.
Travelling with the boy was very agreeable to me. At night, after he’d fallen asleep, I stole away to hunt for us both. When I returned, I snuggled up to him and slept as a living man slept: at night, with the stars gleaming in the heavens over my head. As long as I filled my belly with blood every night, my thirst was not too difficult to resist, although I was a little fearful to let myself slumber beside him at first, afraid I might attack him in my sleep without knowing I was doing it. After a night or two, however, I put that fear to rest. My vampire body did not harm him of its own accord while my mind was dreaming.
Travelling in the daylight was uncomfortable. Vampire eyes are extremely sensitive. I can see in pitch dark as easily as a human sees in broad daylight, so you can imagine my misery traveling in the sunlit hours. Imagine staring into a stage light for twelve hours straight every day, and perhaps you will understand.
The morning of the sixth day I traveled with the boy, as I was lying asleep beside the fire, I felt warm living fingers exploring my flesh and roused in alarm.
Ilio was lying awake beside me, and he was stroking the skin of my shoulder and chest, where my clothing had gaped in my slumber. “Your skin is very strange. It is cold and smooth like stone,” he said. He moved to touch my face and I rolled away from him, pushing his hand aside.
“My people are different than yours,” I told him. Thinking fast, I expanded upon the lie, “My people are from an icy land with lots of snow, far to the north. That is why my skin is so pale and cold.”
He nodded. “Your eyes are different, too. When it’s dark, the firelight fills them up. It’s very peculiar.”
Ilio was a bright, curious boy. Had I thought he was oblivious to my vampiric traits? Ha! I was the oblivious one.
I was more careful to deceive him after that.
He noticed I never ate. It seemed to disturb him so I pretended to share meals with him. I would bring the food to my lips as if I was putting it in my mouth, but instead of putting it in my mouth, I would cup it in my palm and work my jaw like I was chewing. He also noticed that I did not need to empty my bladder or bowels. He asked me to accompany him to the bushes, and when I told him I did not need to go for the tenth time, he demanded, “Don’t you ever need to pee or poop?” I shrugged, unsure how to explain that one. Finally, when he would not budge on it, I said, “My people don’t do that very often. But you go ahead. I will guard you while you relieve yourself.”
If he was older and more experienced, my strange habits might have alarmed him more, but he was still a year away from manhood, at least. He’d yet to get his first real spurt of growth, and his body was hairless aside from a bit of fuzz on his upper lip.
His youth was probably all that preserved my ruse. Children are so much easier to deceive. For them, the world is full of strange, unknowable things.
The days began to grow a little warmer as we travelled, the land more hilly and populous with trees and shrubbery and bodies of water.
“We’re very near my home,” he said, examining the landscape around us. He finally seemed at ease, happy almost. He no longer jumped at every strange noise. He no longer clung like a babe to me at night when we slept by the fire. Perhaps he thought we’d finally escaped the monster that had hunted his people, left it behind in the colder climes of the northern country. Perhaps our nearness to his home was comfort enough to ease his fears.
I found myself reluctant to part ways with the boy. I had grown fond of him. But I knew it was something I must do. I’d promised myself I would deliver him safe to the village of his people. If he stayed in my presence, I would eventually harm him, I knew, whether I wanted to or not. It was simply the nature of my curse.
Even as I loved him, I wanted to kill him and drink his blood.
I tried to push aside the urges, ignore the fantasies that flashed unbidden in my mind—holding him down, sinking my fangs into his throat, gulping the hot red blood that gushed out of him.
It would make me sad to part company with him, to be alone once again, but it was a necessary thing… for his sake.
At last we came upon a wooded rise. At the sight of it, the boy grew suddenly very excited. He looked at me
with a broad grin, his blue eyes bright. “I know where we are now! The camp is just over this hill!” With that, he dashed ahead of me.
“Wait! Stay with me, Ilio!” I called, but he paid no heed.
Frowning, I jogged to catch up with him. I ascended the ridge and found him just on the other side of it, frozen in his tracks. He was staring down at the ruins of a small settlement. The blood had drained from his face. His mouth hung agape.
“What happened?” he asked softly, his eyes wide, uncomprehending.
I moved past him, scowling fiercely.
Down below, the village of the Denghoi lay in shambles. Human bodies sprawled in the dirt, unmoving. The huts and various wood structures of the village had been smashed flat or burned to the ground. There were no signs of life in the boy’s semi-nomadic camp, not even a dog sniffing at the carcasses. The only movement in the destroyed camp was the fluttering clothes on the bodies of the dead, stirred by late winter’s chill winds.
“What happened to everyone, Thest-un-Mann?” Ilio asked, trying to take my hand.
I pulled away from him. “Quiet, boy,” I said. “Give me a moment.”
I opened my mind, allowing all the sensoria my vampiric senses could detect to come blasting into my awareness. One learns quickly, after the transformation, to block most of that sensory information out of the consciousness. It’s that or be dazed by the sheer overwhelming copiousness of it—the miasma of smells and tastes, the overpowering stimulation of sight and sound and touch. You can let down your guard, let the whirlwind in, but first you must steel yourself for the assault. You must gather your strength to endure it.
As Ilio waited beside me, I opened my mind and let it all swirl in. The smells, the sounds, the tastes, the sights. The overriding impression was death, violence, panic. I was assaulted by the rank odor of dead human bodies, the acrid stench of charred wood and leather and woven plant textiles. I could smell the blood soaked into the earth, the phantom scent of fear hormones still lingering in the atmosphere, flyblown organs spilt from guts, the shit and piss that had dribbled from the bodies of the dying, now long dried.
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 8