Finally, reluctantly, he nodded.
I sighed. “A boy,” I said. I could see it in the way his eyes and mouth moved.
He shot me a startled glance. “Yes,” he said.
“What is his name?”
“I’m not telling you that!”
I spread my hands. It didn’t matter. “I have no desire to harm your child. I was merely curious,” I said.
Rising from my seat, I drifted toward the balcony doors. I pushed aside the heavy drapes and looked out at the city. The glass was frosted, the skyline blurred by the intricate crystal patterns. “I only wondered if you would understand what I did next. If you could fathom the horror I felt as my adopted son lay dying in my arms. I loved him, though he was no child of my flesh. The thought of losing him was too much for me to bear. And so, once again, I found myself heaping another great wickedness onto the pile of offenses I had already committed against the boy. All of them sins of my own immeasurable egotism. He was ever, and always remained, an innocent, unsullied by my depravities. Even when he rose up against me, his vengeance was pure.”
I felt tears come to my eyes. I stood with my back to my captive, my vision blurring for a moment. Not human tears. Of course not. These were the cold, infectious black tears of a monster. Ebu potashu, in the language of the Oombai. The Black Blood. My vampire lover Zenzele called it the Venom.
I did not wish the brute to see my pain. I wiped the tears away quickly.
“So you turned him into a vampire,” Lukas said.
“Yes, of course, I did,” I murmured.
The man shifted in his seat again. I knew he was dreadfully uncomfortable, but I wasn’t about to release him. He was, after all, my captive audience. Call it “dinner theatre”.
All joking aside, I was still in the mood to reminisce.
“Listen, Varney,” the German said. “I want to hear the rest of your story. I really do, but right now I need to piss like a racehorse. I’m about to bust.”
I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing.
I was tempted to let him soil himself, but then, angry and humiliated, what kind of audience would he be? And I wanted him to hear my tale of woe.
What is a story without a listener?
Answer: The masturbation of the literate.
Without replying, other than my surprised laugh, I turned and left the room. In my kitchenette, I flipped through the cabinets. There were few dishes, little in the way of food-- only enough to maintain the appearance of normality, if, by some chance, I might have guests who would look through my cupboards.
“What are you doing?” my captive asked when I returned to my bed chamber.
He protested as I kneeled down before him and tugged at the zipper of his fine designer pants.
“Hey! Stop that! Don’t!” he objected, his face blazing red. He kicked and jerked in his chair, trying to squirm away from me.
“Calm yourself,” I scolded him. “You said you needed to urinate.”
“Yes, but--!”
“But what?” I asked mildly. “Did you expect me to release you from your bonds? Allow you to roam free in my home? On your honor? A child murderer?” I chuckled. “You would lunge for the nearest sharp object, I’m certain. Not that it would do you any good.”
Flushed and sweating, he set his features in an expression of resigned indignation, turned his face aside. At his acquiescence, I wriggled his fly the rest of the way down and slid my fingers inside the gap. He jerked a little at my icy touch. His organ grew slightly tumescent as I handled it, but I pretended I didn’t notice. He had a rather large penis. I could smell the little girl still on it, the child he had murdered after raping tonight. Placing his uncircumcised cock inside the rim of a large drinking glass, I waited for him to void his bladder.
I watched as his face turned ever ruddier. Finally, he said in a strangled voice: “I can’t.”
“Shall I avert my gaze?” I mocked him.
He glared at me, suddenly enraged. I watched the veins in his neck and temples stand out, and then a great gush of urine sprayed from his cock.
“There we go,” I chortled. “You really had to go. You’ve almost filled it up.”
I left the room when he was finished and poured his vile-smelling urine into the commode. I flushed. Glanced at the soiled tumbler and dropped it into the garbage can.
He glared at me with pure hatred when I returned, sitting with his knees splayed and his cock dangling out his fly. “What if I have to do number two?” he asked.
I arched an eyebrow. “I trust you’ll not press your luck so soon.”
He grinned wickedly.
“My hunger for your blood is very finely balanced against my desire to converse tonight,” I warned him.
I walked to him, helped him regain his dignity, then left one more time to wash my hands. I did not want his rapist’s stench on my flesh.
When I had taken my seat on the edge of the bed across from him, he prompted me: “So… you turned the kid into a vampire.”
I smiled sadly, my eyes waxing distant. “Yes. Ilio was my first Blood Child.” I looked down at my hands, clasped once more between my knees. “In all the millennia I’d lived as a vampire, I never thought to make another like me. The idea, in truth, never even crossed my mind. That was how much I hated the monster I’d become. But he was dying, my young Ilio, my innocent little boy, and I was weak. I could not bear to let him go.”
The Raising of a Dead Child
1
I could smell the blood pouring out of him, but worse than that, I could smell the life pouring out of him. Every moment I delayed, my adopted child emptied of blood… and filled up with death. I was out of my mind with despair and anger. He had so little time left--!
Love was probably the only thing which kept me from succumbing to my appetite. I felt no temptation to drink the boy’s blood as I fled across the plains, despite the fact that I was covered in the oozing, hot fluid. My clothes were soaked with it. It blew off my body in whirling droplets, falling to the grass below in a scant and horrid rain. But in my love for the boy, I had no desire to drink it. I did not even think of such a thing.
I thought only of my love for the boy as I shot through the moonlit heavens. I thought only of saving him.
As I angled toward the haven of a darkened copse of pine, well away from the menace of the Oombai, I promised myself vengeance on those greedy, wicked elders. If my young charge passed into the afterlife, they would join him shortly.
Yes! I swore to myself. If Ilio died, I would return and slaughter them all!
I would extinguish their race like a mad white god.
I would bathe in a river of corpses!
I arced through the night with the boy in my arms. The plains rushed up to me. My feet touched the earth and I slowed the speed of my movement as gently as I could. The moon flickered behind a lattice of tree branches and foliage. I glided within the shadows of the copse and laid Ilio on a soft hump of grass and fallen pine needles.
Ilio’s eyes rolled toward me. He was pale, shivering.
The crickets, which had fallen silent at our arrival, resumed their nightly choir. I made quick work of my injuries. Gritting my teeth, I yanked the arrows from my flesh, giving no thought to the pain or the black blood rising within the wounds to erase them from existence. With a snarl, I wrenched the javelin from my rump and tossed it in the underbrush.
“Thest,” my adopted son murmured, “It hurts.”
He coughed and blood seeped from the corner of his lips.
“Hush, now, boy,” I said sternly. “Let me tend to your wounds.”
I sat back on my knees and examined the arrow protruding from his ribs. It was so deep! Did I dare pull it out?
Of course, I knew what I had to do. I could smell death on his tremulous exhalations. I had but a moment. Make him immortal… or allow him to die.
My motives required no deeper examination. I was weak. I could not lose him as I’d lost my human famil
y, so many ages ago.
“I think I’m dying,” Ilio sputtered. “Stay with me til it’s over, Thest. It’s dark here. I’m… scared.”
“You don’t have to die, boy. I can heal you. I can make you like me.” I spoke quickly, brushing his bangs back from his brow. “It will hurt, but you will rise from this place an immortal being.”
Did he nod, or was it only my imagination? Foolish monster--! Foolish, careless monster--!
His eyelids fluttered. The boy’s eyes rolled up white. Panicked, I opened his jaws with my fingers and leaned over his face, moving my mouth over his, our lips just a centimeter apart. I did then by instinct the thing that my maker had done to me, so many eons ago. I summoned the black blood from inside me—the Venom, the Demon, the Strix—and I poured it into his mouth.
It rose from within like an angry living thing, clawing its way out of the altered cells of my tissue, uncoiling itself from my internal organs. The pain was stark and tearing. It felt like I was being ripped inside out.
With a convulsive croak, the ebu potashu poured from my lips, an ebon gout of fibrous tissue and fluid, thick and syrupy and stinking. Ilio’s lips and cheeks were painted black. His mouth filled up with it. Then, as if by some trick of light, it seemed to rear up in his maw and plunge straight down his gullet.
He shot upright, clawing at his throat.
His eyes locked to mine, bulging with terror and pain.
“It will last only a moment,” I promised, falling back from him weakly. I scooted a couple feet away, clutching my stomach. “Be brave!”
I watched, helpless, as the boy jerked back, then began to writhe and twist on the ground, sobbing and crying out as the living hunger worked its way through his veins. I relived my own transformation as I watched him shudder and claw in agony at the ground beneath him. Sympathetic pain worked its way through my limbs as he contorted.
I remembered the charnel pit where my vampire father imprisoned me, the ground piled with his stiff, frozen victims. I remembered the way the monster had come to steal my humanity, dropping down through the entrance of the pit like a great bird of prey, his fur cloak spread out around him. He took me by force, the wicked creature, prized my lips open and vomited the foul black blood into my mouth. And the pain. I remembered the horrible, engulfing pain… how it spread through my veins in burning cold threads, devouring all that was human in me, turning me into a thing of ice and hunger.
“Ilio… Ilio, I’m sorry,” I gasped.
His body went taut, his back arching up. His spine bent so far I feared it would snap. The shaft in his ribs quivered, then he collapsed. His head lolled on his neck like a flower with a broken stem.
He stopped breathing. His eyes went blank, staring into the black forest, staring into the blackness of death.
The spark of life had left him.
“Ilio…?”
I choked back a sob, scrubbing my eyes. Too late--!
Then I saw his flesh begin to whiten. I dared to hope.
The transformation spread slowly from the center of his body, working down his arms, his hands, down to the very tips of his fingers. His nails turned to glass. His bronze skin faded to the color of bone. His face became a sculpture of gleaming marble. His glazed eyes glimmered, then blinked, then rolled toward me. For a moment, they caught the moonlight, and his pupils filled with gibbous light. It was beautiful and horrible all at the same time.
“I live,” he murmured, his voice full of disbelief. Then he smiled and I saw his eyeteeth elongating.
2
The shaft was still sticking out of him. I shifted toward him as he sat up. “Let me get that arrow out of you,” I said. He nodded, and I put my hand on his chest and yanked the bolt out. He winced but did not cry out. Pulling his shirt open, he examined his torso. Though he was covered in tacky blood, the wound had begun to vanish. He looked at me with wonder.
“Yes,” I said with a chuckle. “Your injuries will heal quickly now.”
He touched the place where the arrow had wounded him, sketching his fingers over his ribs, but of his mortal injury, there was no trace. Not even a scar.
“Come,” I said. “Let us rise. We must find a place to hide before daylight comes. I fear the Oombai will send their warriors after us.”
I put my hand on the boy’s elbow and helped him to his feet. As he rose, he bent forward with a gasp, clutching his guts. “Oh! My stomach! It hurts!”
“I know. I’ve afflicted you with my hunger for blood. I’m sorry.”
He blinked at me, confused and in pain.
“Come,” I said. “We need to move quickly. I will help you feed and then we must find shelter.”
We walked quickly from the dark of the wood, out into the moonlit plains. The grass hissed as the wind tilted earthward and blew across the low hills. As we travelled side by side, I educated him. “You’re a Blood Drinker, now,” I said. “There is a demon inside you that ravens for the life fluid of the living, but it grants you strength in return. Strength and speed and the ability to heal rapidly. All this, so you may hunt your prey more easily. Your senses have been sharpened, your thoughts and reflexes quickened. I’ve made you a god, but I’ve also cursed you.”
“For love,” he said, and I nodded.
“I could not bear to let you die.”
He nodded, looking at me with awe… with awe and abject adulation. His flesh seemed to glow in the moonlight, as if there was a nimbus of light surrounding him.
“I can see every lash in your eyelids,” he said then. He squinted. “Every wrinkle in your lips. Every—“
I put my hand up with a chuckle. “One of the first things you must learn to do, boy, is try and block all that out. It serves only to distract. Your senses will overwhelm you if you allow them to. You must be the master of them, and not let them rule you.”
Ilio glanced away, frowning in concentration. “Yes. Yes, I will try.”
I turned my face south, toward the country of the Ground Scratchers. We’d traveled a couple kilometers in my brief, mad flight. I stretched out with my senses then, searching for pursuers. Yes, the hunters were coming! A large group of them. I could hear the distant babble of their voices, angry and vengeful.
Foolish men, I thought. I recalled the face of the slave woman Aioa. I would teach them about vengeance!
If I’d already tested the strength of my vampire child, I would have set us against our pursuers, but I did not know yet how powerful Ilio had become. I had not trained him in the use of his new skills. I could not risk a confrontation… not yet.
Turning away, I said, “Let us see how powerful and swift you have become. Follow me.”
With that, I flung myself into the wind.
I flew at about half the speed I could actually summon. As if launched from a catapult, my body rose silently into the sky in a smooth, controlled arc. I landed near an alder one hundred meters to the north and turned around to watch the boy.
I could see Ilio, small now with distance. I watched him crouch down and throw himself into the sky.
He landed well short of me. Tripped. Rolled across the grass. He rose and leapt again. This time, he travelled much further, the arc of his leap higher than his first attempt. I watched him descend from the sky toward me, flapping his arms and legs, his eyes wide and frightened.
I moved out of the way. He crashed into the foliage of the alder, vanishing from sight with a swish and the crunch of breaking branches. An instant later, he dropped from the boughs with a thump.
I rushed to his side, trying to restrain my mirth. “Are you hurt?” I asked.
My careless new vampire child sat up with a strangled cry. A splintered tree branch was sticking out of his belly.
I kneeled down beside him and pulled the broken limb from his abdomen. He healed, but his healing was nowhere near the speed at which my injuries vanished. “Before you leap, you should take heed of where you’re going to land,” I scolded him gently.
Ilio nodded. “Yes, Th
est.”
He looked embarrassed. I ruffled his hair.
“Have no shame. You’ll catch the trick of it,” I said. “I flailed about like a buffoon the first night I was a Blood Drinker. Your body has been transformed, but your mind is still a human mind. You will discover your strength and a wealth of new talents, but it will take time for your human mind to take ownership of them. You’re like a child who must learn to walk again. You will fall many times before you can run.”
“Yes, Thest. I’ll be more careful.”
3
And so began the education of my vampire child Ilio.
After testing his strength that night, we hunted. Not far from the alder tree, we pounced upon a large buck deer. I took the powerful animal down, wrestling it to the ground by its antlers while Ilio watched. It thrashed and mewled and stamped its hooves.
“Hurry, Ilio, seize it and bite its neck!” I prompted the boy. “Bite deeply. You must sever the arteries and drink your fill before its heart stops beating.”
Eager with hunger, Ilio fell on the beast. He savaged the creature’s neck inexpertly, making it squall in pain. The blood flew out the wounds, powered by its galloping heart, and we both ended up soaked before the child had filled his belly.
I broke the creature’s neck as a mercy, feeling my own blood hunger yammering in my guts, but my concern was mainly for my vampire child.
How would he feel about this merciless killing? How would he feel about this banquet of blood? Would he be horrified? Disgusted? He was so young, and in many ways, his was a gentler spirit. Yes, he was a child of a hunting society, but the men who’d raised him were protective of him, and I’d been just as sheltering.
Ilio sat back on his knees, wiping his face and then licking the blood from his fingers. He was covered in blood. There was even blood in his curly dark hair, but the look on his face was far from the expression of horror or disgust I’d expected. He grinned in sublime satisfaction, his eyes heavy-lidded. “Oh, that tastes good,” he sighed. “Thest, you should drink, too. Aren’t you hungry?”
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 14