The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Thest!” he laughed, but he strutted after that for a little while, high on my praise.

  We practiced a little while longer, then I told him I must be on my way if I was to exact my revenge on the Elders and return before daybreak. “I want you to stay near our little burrow tonight. You can make a fire if you’d like, but I forbid you to follow me to that cursed village. If you have any trouble with the humans pursuing us, take to the tree tops and await my return. I don’t think they’ll find us, but you never know.”

  “Are you going to kill those old men tonight?” Ilio asked. He had a bloodthirsty look in his eyes.

  “Perhaps not tonight. Tonight I shall be the shadow at their doorway. I go to observe and discover their weaknesses. If I have the opportunity, I will take it, but in most instances, Ilio, you will find that caution and wisdom are two sides of the same face. Rest assured, those old men shall pay for their greed and depravity. The Elders remind me of the monster who forced the Blood Curse upon me. It is their avarice that is the root of your untimely transformation. I shall have vengeance for the both of us, and free the Neirie.”

  “I wish I could join you, Thest,” Ilio mused. “I would like to have revenge on them as well.” His eyes went very dark as he said it, almost cruel. “I should also like to know what the blood of men tastes like. I suppose it’s richer than the blood of animals.”

  I had no reply to that. The boy spoke the truth.

  The German Pornographer Tells All

  1

  “So what happened? Did you kill the last four Elders? And what became of the boy Ilio? Does he still live?”

  The German asked these things in a rush. I sat quietly gathering my thoughts, my head down, my white hands clasped between my knees. The curiosity—the need—writ on his features filled me with sadistic pleasure. If my hair were not hanging in my face, he would have seen the enjoyment I took from his curiosity in the twitching of my lips, though I tried to constrain my expressions, lest I betray my weakness to the treacherous man sitting across from me.

  You think him helpless, this man sitting bound to my chair with silver duct tape? Men like him are never helpless. They’re never anything less than deadly, these human predators. If I were a mortal man, every moment that passed between us would be fraught with danger. He would have taken advantage of any opportunity to free himself. He would have tried to get inside my head. Twist me to his will. Any angle he could think of—bribery, flattery, fear—to suborn my will, confuse me, seduce me, kill me.

  Perhaps he already knew my weaknesses.

  Yes… I might be immortal, but I have weaknesses.

  I’m lonely. I love.

  Those are my weaknesses.

  Take this man, for instance. My captive. My evening meal. Already, loneliness had stayed my hand. His brutal beauty had enticed me, had led me to bring him here, to my private sanctum, rather than feed on him in some dark corner out there, in the city. I should have made a quick meal of him, tossed the carcass in the Meuse, but I hadn’t. And already I was beginning to love him—this killer, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. If not love, then fascination. I gazed upon his features, and I imagined how he would appear as an immortal, his flesh white and flawless and gleaming, his grey eyes glittering like diamonds. He would be a God of Death, this man. A terrible angel.

  No! Too dangerous to think such thoughts! Was I so desperate for companionship that I would unleash a monster like him on an unsuspecting world?

  Ha! I might.

  I’ve done it before.

  “I have shared with you,” I said quietly. “Now it’s time to keep your end of the bargain. I will finish my tale, but first I would have your story.”

  Lukas licked his lips. His eyes narrowed. Caution. Paranoia. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  I peered at him through the fringe of my bangs. “Start with the girl. The child you raped and murdered tonight. Who was she? How did she come to be in your…” I smiled. “…Not so tender care?”

  He stared back at me. I could tell by the tension in his body that he did not want to share his secrets with me. Suspicion comes so easily to men like him. Men with blood on their hands. Paranoia is a country they live their whole lives. Finally, he submitted. He surrendered to my patient stare. His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know her name. Not her full name.” He sighed. “I don’t recall it, anyway. She might have told me once. Yes! Yes, I remember she told me, but I wasn’t paying attention. It didn’t really matter to me. I only remember her first name. Amelie.”

  “Amelie,” I repeated. A beautiful name. It rolled on the tongue like a candy.

  “I came here to Liege to shoot videos for a business associate.” He snorted a laugh. “Fuck films, to be precise.” For a moment he grinned at me, as if we were partners in his crimes, as if it was all a big joke and we would laugh about it together. “Kiddie porn, to be more precise,” he continued. “I’m a child pornographer. I make movies of little kids being raped, and I sell them on the black market.” He confessed this as if it were a terrible intimacy. He searched my face for reaction.

  I raised one eyebrow. “Is that supposed to shock me? Children have been the victims of monsters like you since the days I walked this earth a living man. The tribe that lived to the north of my people—the Foul Ones-- frequently raided the villages around them for children to exploit. They enslaved them, raped them. They even ate them, and adorned themselves in jewelry made from their bones. Your crimes are nothing extraordinary. You humans eat your young with nauseating regularity, in some manner or other.”

  He seemed confused for a moment, disconcerted by my lack of outrage.

  I was outraged, don’t get me wrong. I abhor violence. Man’s propensity for visiting suffering on his fellow man sickens me to no end, but in thirty millennia, I have grown inured to any great feelings of surprise or indignation. World-weary. The ultimate cynic. Another weakness, perhaps.

  “I apologize,” I said with a tiny gesture. “You were saying…?”

  His eyes twitched to and fro in their sockets as he searched out the trail of his thoughts, then he said, “I found her at the train station. She’d run away from home with her boyfriend. I didn’t care about him. He was just a skinny, blond-headed jono named Bertrand, a dirty keck poseur with an acne-pocked face, but she was something special. Young. Maybe fifteen. Thin and pretty and naive. She was small for her age. She looked much younger than she really was. The two of them were from a little villa in the south. I forgot where they said. Their parents did not approve of their romance, so they bought train tickets and came north to the city. To Liege.”

  “So there they were, alone, cold, homeless,” I prompted.

  He laughed. “Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen.” Two flies with one swatter!

  “And of course, you befriended them.”

  “It was snowing outside the train station. A beautiful Christmas snow. Flakes as big as your thumbnail. But so cold, and they had nowhere to go. I drove them to my flat. It only took me a few minutes to talk them into my car. I think they knew what they were doing. That they were selling themselves to me for food and shelter. They even saw the cameras and lighting equipment, the bedroom set in the corner of the flat by the windows, but my apartment was warm, and I had lager and reheated some sauerbraten and potato dumplings I had in the refrigerator for them.

  “I called Maurice while they were eating. I told him I had some chickens in the coop. He said he’d be right over.”

  “Maurice?” I asked.

  “Maurice Fournier. He’s an old friend of my dad. A Frenchman. Or half-French, half-Jew. Something like that. He’s a short guy with curly gray hair. Got a big kike nose. He’s my financier. He bailed me out of jail when I was arrested in Hamburg. Smuggled me out of the country. Set me up here in Liege under a false identity. I guess you could say he’s my producer. He likes the way I shoot my films. Says I alchemize suffering into poetry, or some artsy shit like that. Sometimes he helps shoot and edit my
work. Mostly he deals with production, though. Distribution.”

  I nodded.

  “Maurice got there about an hour later. He had Hans with him.” Lukas smiled. “Hans Baer. My god, he’s a big motherfucker. Almost seven foot tall, with a wiederschlappen the size of your forearm. Ugly as sin in the face, big scar running down through his right eye, but the body of an Adonis. If I was a faggot, I would worship that body. It’s absolute perfection, from neck to toe. Hans… he stars in a lot of my films. The man can stay hard for hours, and when he cums, it’s like someone shook a bottle of champagne and popped the cork.” Lukas laughed, blushing a little.

  “Hans made my little chicks nervous, with the glass eye and the scar, but they were well on their way to getting plastered, and he has a knack for putting the children at ease. He acts very meek and slouches when he is off camera. Wears hornrim glasses like that American super hero Clark Kent. They’re not prescription glasses, though. Just to protect his good eye.

  “We all partied for a while. Smoked some hash. Drank. The boy, the skinny jono, wanted to know what all the cameras and lights were for, so I told him. I film young couples for an internet pornsite, I said. He wanted to know how much I paid. When I told him two thousand Euros per shoot, I thought he would shit in his baggies!” Lukas laughed. “You see? I didn’t even have to sweet talk them. It no sooner left my mouth than he was begging me to shoot them.

  “Of course, she was not so eager, money or no. Young girls protect their virtue like they are setting seed aside for next year’s planting, but she was drunk and her boyfriend wouldn’t stop badgering her. ‘We can get our own place, Amelie!’ He said. ‘We can live until I find a job to support us!’

  “I acted as though I was unsure about it all. I asked them how old they were. Of course, they lied. He told me he was twenty, his girl eighteen. I looked at Maurice and he smiled back at me. It was hard not to laugh.

  “Finally, she nodded. She said, ‘Yes, all right, Bertrand! I’ll do it for us.’”

  Lukas’s eyes had gone distant. He smiled at the memory.

  “So much for love, yes? A few hours in the big city and he was already pimping his girlfriend out. Himself as well. Little whore. The punk wanted their money up front. He thought he was being slick. I counted it out on the table for them to see. Two thousand Euros. And why not? They certainly weren’t leaving with it.”

  2

  “She didn’t want Maurice and Hans to watch, but I told her I needed them to help with the cameras and lights. I also needed Hans to doll her up.

  “The big man was good with makeup and wardrobe. I guess you could say he had an eye for it! Ha-ha! ‘We can’t shoot you looking like a hobo, now can we?’ I asked. So we got her to change into some striped red and white knee highs and a skirt and did her hair up in pigtails. Hans did her makeup and joked around with her until she relaxed. She liked the attention. Hans has a silver tongue. By the time he had her ready for the camera, she was smiling and laughing and looked like her papa’s dirty cheerleader fantasy. A little slut with too much makeup and her futz showing through her pink cotton panties.

  “Her boyfriend had a rail spike in his baggy pants until he got in front of the camera, then his boner wilted and wouldn’t come back. She blew him for a quarter hour while we filmed, but the little prick couldn’t get it up. Finally, he said he was going to puke and he pulled his dick out of her mouth and went running to the bathroom.

  “I said I’d go check on him. Maurice continued to film her. He was getting some good footage of her licking a giant lolly and playing with herself. Meanwhile, I went to the toilet to check on Juliet’s nauseous young Romeo.

  “He was on all fours with his head in the crapper when I went in. There was puke all over the floor, puke dripping off the outside of the toilet. He was naked and kneeling in it. I thought of all that good lager and sauerbraten gone to waste and for some reason I got furious. Little boys shouldn’t pretend to be men!

  “’Are you all right, kid?’ I asked, and as I asked I got my knife from my pocket and unfolded it.

  “He moaned and puked some more, so I stepped over him from behind and held his head in the pot and stuck the knife in the back of his neck. I shoved it into the base of the skull, the way they’d trained us to do in the military. The punk jerked and slid his knees around in his own puke, but I held his head down and twisted the blade around until he was dead and then I rolled him into the tub and pulled the curtain closed. I flushed his blood and puke down the toilet and washed my knife and my hands and returned to the set.

  “Maurice looked at me when I came out and I smiled and shrugged. I showed him the folded knife in my hand, then slid it in my pocket.

  “The girl wanted to know if Bertrand was all right. I told her he was fine. But he wasn’t going to be able to perform, and he was too embarrassed to come out of the loo right now.

  “She wanted to know about the money.

  “I shrugged.

  “’Maybe… maybe I can do it with one of you,’ she said. ‘For the money…’

  “’Hans has made a few films for us,’ I suggested.

  “She blinked up at the big man, and I could tell she was scared, but I could tell she was a little bit intrigued, too. He might look like Frankenstein’s ugly half-brother, but he’d really charmed her when he was doing her makeup, so she finally nodded, reluctant, and smiled at him. ‘Ask… ask Bertrand to stay in the toilet,’ she stammered. ‘I don’t want him to watch me do this.’

  “’I’ll go talk to him,’ Maurice volunteered. He wanted to see what I’d done to the punk. Maurice is the kind of guy who slows down for car accidents. He likes to see all the blood and guts. I think he gets off on it.

  “’Is that okay with you?’ I asked Hans. Hans smiled, acting all shy and embarrassed, then nodded— just a façade. Just play-acting. It’s part of his game. I think the girl, drunk and horny as she was, would have fucked him right then, money or no money. She’d bought his act, hook line and sinker.” Lukas flicked his bangs out of his face. “I guess she had a beauty and the beast complex. Probably why she fell for Mr. Pimples.

  “’Okay,’ I said. ‘Camera’s still rolling. Amelie, you pretend Hans is your papa, who has caught you being naughty in your bedroom after school. Hans, you will be cross with her until she tries to win your forgiveness with her affection…’

  “Maurice returned from the lavatory then. ‘He says he’s sorry, and he promises to stay in the toilet until it is over,’ Maurice tells her. ‘He says he loves you too much to watch.’ I winced a little at the insincerity in his voice. Mo isn’t a very good actor. But lovely little Amelie did not seem to notice. Maurice took his position at camera two, winking at me before ducking his eye to the viewfinder.

  “Amelie sniffed with disdain. It was obvious from her expression that Romeo had disappointed her many times in the past. She reclined on the bed and affected a naughty mien, fingers sliding between her thighs. ‘Do you want me to lick the lollipop some more?’

  “I smiled. ‘Whatever you feel inspired to do, my love.’

  3

  “We shot for three hours straight. Hans is a real animal. I’ve seen him go for six hours straight, hard as a rail and not one Viagra, but that night, only three. He gets too turned on when they struggle. Especially if they’re small and they scream when he puts it in.

  “When he climbed onto the bed with her, he dropped the gentle expression from his face like the mask that it was. Poor kid didn’t know what hit her.

  “Once she caught a look at the python he was packing in his jockey shorts, she tried to beg off, but it was too late for any of that. Her boyfriend was a stiff little keck in my tub and there were no other tenants in the building to hear her cry for help.

  “Hans quit playing nice and got down to business. She was willing enough to blow him for a little while, but when he tried to put it in, she started to cry and tried to squirm away from him. She kept crying, ‘It’s too big! Please! Stop!’ Hans finally got
tired of wrestling with her. He slapped her hard enough to bloody her nose, then yanked her round little ass in the air and shoved it in to the hilt. Little country bumpkin, she howled like someone lit her futz on fire. He slapped her around some more. Choked her. He took her every way you can imagine, and we got it all on film. When he was finished with her, the chick’s face was so purple and swollen her mama wouldn’t have recognized her. Hans pumped what looked like a quart of squazzo in her bloody, broken mouth, and then Maurice and I had a go at her.

  “You ever have sloppy seconds?” Lukas asked, smiling in a particularly repulsive manner. He licked his lips. “That futz was tenderized! I know most men joke about sloppy seconds, but I find the experience very pleasant. It’s softer on the inside. Nice and puffy.”

  I pretended I did not notice his erection pressing against the zipper of his trousers.

  “We bound her with zip ties when we were done with her,” he went on. “Taped her mouth real good. We had to get rid of her boyfriend’s body. We pulled the shower curtain down and wrapped him up in it, me and Maurice. It’s not easy moving a dead body. It’s kind of like trying to pick up a sleeping cat. All limp and floppy. It just kind of rolls out of your arms if you’re not careful.

  “You should have seen the look on her face when we carried him out of the toilet, though, wrapped up in the shower curtain. She knew she was dead too. You could see it in her eyes. The realization. It turned me on so much I told Maurice to hold on and then I walked over to her and rolled her on her side and fucked her again. Just a quickie, but I had to get off. It was just too much of a fucking rush, seeing that look in her eyes.

  “’I’m gonna fucking kill you, slut,’ I told her as I fucked her. ‘You know that, don’t you? I’m gonna use you until I’ve used you all up, and then I’m gonna kill you, just like I killed your fucking boyfriend.’ I had her mouth taped up so she couldn’t scream, but I could see her face. I could see the tears running down her cheeks, and I blew another load in her swollen little snatch while I watched her cry. Her bleeding little reamed out snatch…”