The Undead Heart

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by Tate Jackson


  Maybe not, but she was praying that they would cheat it one more time.

  ***

  The next day, she talked to Saphira. She decided not to beat around the bush about what she wanted to know. “How did you become a vampyre?”

  Smiling, Saphira said, “I was bitten.”

  “I know you were bitten, thank you very much. What I want to know is why you were bitten.”

  “It was my choice. I lost everything in 1849, when I was only nineteen years old. I was spending a week with a friend of mine, and while I was away, our house caught fire with both my parents inside. Neither one of them survived. They were heavily in debt, so there was no inheritance, and I had no relatives to turn to for help. I ended up out on the streets.

  “I begged and pleaded with strangers for money, and did unspeakable things with men just to be able to eat. And then a man picked me up one day.I thought he wanted sex, but all he wanted to do was talk. He informed me what he was and told me he could help me if I so wished.

  “He said if I allowed him to turn me, I could live with his clan. I’d never have to worry about money, food, or shelter ever again. I was desperate, and his offer sounded like the answer to my prayers. I told him yes, and he turned me. I’ve never regretted my decision, but left the clan after three years.

  “Daniel, the man who bit me, wanted me for his wife, but I didn’t feel that way about him. The situation became uncomfortable, so I left. I traveled on my own for five years before I met the Youngs. They showed me how I could feed on animal blood. They accepted me as one of their own. I’ve been with them ever since, and I’ve never been happier. They’re wonderful people.”

  Gerold joined them at the picnic table in the yard.

  “So, how did the two of you meet?” Beck asked Gerold.

  “I was crossing the street in New York one night. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, and stepped out in front of a bus,” Gerold said, taking Saphira’s hand. “Saphira grabbed me and yanked me back onto the sidewalk. I asked her out right then and there. We dated for six months before she told me that she was a vampyre..

  “At that point, it didn’t matter. I was completely and totally in love with her. I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. Two years later, I convinced her to bite me so we could spend forever together. She agreed, and I’ve never looked back. For me, it was the right decision.”

  Beck thought it was a lovely love story, and prayed their story would continue for many years to come.

  ***

  Her next target was Jeremy. “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask how someone became a vampyre?” he asked as they walked the path towards the creek.

  “I do know that, but I want to know anyway. We may only have a week to live, and I want to learn everything I can about the people I love.”

  “My story isn’t that interesting anyway. You already know I’m from Ireland. What you didn’t know was that I was a prize fighter. I was very good at it, and I never lost a match. I was also a hard drinker, what you would now call an alcoholic. It wasn’t considered a big deal at the time. Most of the men in my town were drinkers.

  “I managed my drinking fairly well until my wife, Kathryna, died giving birth to our only child. Her labor was so long and hard that her body just gave out. Our son, Shawn, followed his mother into death just one day later. He was a beautiful boy. He had a tuft of red hair, the same color as his hers. He had her lips, and my eyes.

  “We buried him in his mother’s arms in the family cemetery. After that, my drinking got out of control. The first thing I did every morning when I got up, was pour a glass of whiskey…the breakfast of champions, right? I still fought, though. I had to.

  “It was how I earned my living. And just for the record, I never lost, even after I was an alcoholic. But after every fight, I would head straight to the pubs. The problem was that after my wife and son died, I went from a fun drunk, to a mean drunk. I’d beat the shit out of anyone that I just thought had looked at me wrong. I was way out of control, but I couldn’t see it.

  “I was drunk one night, like usual, and on my way home from the pub, I tried to pick a fight with a stranger. It was a bad decision. He beat me like I was a child. He was a vampyre, and apparently not in the mood for my drunken bullshit. After he broke most of my bones, he said, ‘It’s time for you to learn some self discipline, laddie,’ and then he bit me. I woke up in the woods three nights later. I was very thirsty, but not for whiskey. It was blood I thirsted for.

  “I grabbed the first person I found and fed on them until there wasn’t drop of blood left in their body. This was in 1812, and the town I lived in was very small. I knew I had to leave. If I had stayed, I would have killed everyone there in a matter of months. I traveled from place to place for many years, feeding on strangers. I fed on humans for thirteen years before I started feeding on animals. The guilt of killing all of those innocent people had started to weigh heavily on me.”

  “You were never part of a clan?”

  “No, not until Richard and Leso found me. I’d moved to Dublin about six months before they came to my door one evening. They told me the story of how they’d found me, of how a woman from the future had sent them for me. I can’t say that I completely believed them, but I was tired of being alone, so I went with them. I’m glad I did. They were telling the truth about you. Because of you, I now have a wife and a family. Thank you, Beck.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. We may all be dead soon.”

  “At least I would die with my family and not alone. That means more to me than you could ever know.”

  ***

  Heidi and Levi were next. “Yes, we heard you’re asking a lot of questions,” Levi said as they sat at the kitchen table. “I told you how Heidi and I met. What else would you like to know?”

  “I want to know what no one seems inclined to talk about. You don’t have to tell me, but I would like to know how you became vampyres.”

  “If you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” he said. “In 1820, during my travels around the world, I decided to visit Romania. While there, I got it in my head to visit Transylvania to see Dracula’s castle, though most Romanians know it by the name of Cetatea Lui Negru Voda, or the Citadel of the Black Prince.

  “I didn’t really have much interest in vampyres, but I thought the story of Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, was interesting. They called him Dracul, which can mean devil or dragon. Obviously, he was not a vampyre; just a sick person that the locals thought was a vampyre because of his occasional habit of drinking human blood.

  “Anyway, I was standing at the base of the castle at sunset, looking up, when someone grabbed me from behind. I was taken to another location and placed in a small cell. They held me there and fed on me every few days. They didn’t take all of my blood, but only left enough to keep me alive. There were three of them, and they kept me there for three months.

  “One day, while the other two were away for a few days, the third one took pity on me and bit me. When I woke up a few days later, he’d brought me a person to feed on. I fed, killed the vampyre that had held me captive, and ran. I fed on humans for three years, and then switched to feeding on animals. I haven’t fed on a human since then, and that, Beck, is my story.”

  She turned expectantly to Heidi. Heidi took a breath and began her story. “It was 1871, and I was 23 years old. I was attacked in my bed. I was asleep when I felt someone sit down. When I opened my eyes, I saw a man sitting at the foot of my bed. I tried to scream but couldn’t get any sound to come from my throat. When he leaned forward, I saw that it was Duncan, a man from town that had been trying to court me.

  “I’d always told him no, but I guess he didn’t handle rejection very well. He picked up my leg and bit me on the ankle. My mother found me dead the next morning. They held a funeral and buried me. When I woke up, I dug myself out of my grave and fed on the first person I could find. I left Sweden and traveled for six years before Rita found me. I was still feeding on hu
mans then, and Rita showed me that it didn’t have to be that way. I started feeding on animals, joined the Young clan, and have been here ever since.”

  Beck nodded in gratitude. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

  ***

  “How did you come to be a hunter? I mean no offense, but you don’t exactly look Irish,” she told Gunner as they were sitting on the porch three days before the battle was supposed to take place.

  Gunner laughed and said, “No, I’m not from Ireland. Actually, I’m from Jamaica.”

  “What made you decide to become a hunter?” she inquired curiously.

  “When a vampyre killed my brother. My brother was fourteen, and I was nine. We were playing on the beach one day when a man attacked my brother. I stood there, paralyzed, as the man drained my brother of his blood. Then the man turned to me and said, ‘You’re not yet big enough to be a meal’.

  “He threw my brother’s body down and left. I vowed then, that one day, I would find and kill that vampyre. As I got older, I searched the world for him. I just happened to be in Ireland when our creator was recruiting hunters. I figured I was hunting a vampyre anyway, so what the hell.”

  “Have you ever regretted doing it?”

  “Becoming a hunter?” he asked, and shook his head. “No, I have no regrets.”

  “Did you ever find the vampyre that killed your brother?”

  “I did. Believe it or not, I found him in Ireland just days after I became a hunter. He suffered a very long, slow, painful death. I’ve been killing vampyres ever since.”

  She understood his motivation. If someone killed Bev, she would hunt them to the ends of the earth.

  ***

  “So ‘Big Un’, what made you want to become a hunter?” she asked Damon that evening as he was eating at one of the picnic tables. If she didn’t talk to him while he was eating, she would never get to talk to him at all. He always had food in his hands.

  Damon smiled. “I just got tired of seeing the people in my village die. Every few days, someone would be found dead, drained of all their blood. I was the gravedigger for the village, and it just seemed like I was digging a lot more graves than normal. When our creator sent his familiar into our town requesting volunteers, I signed on. I just figured that if I killed enough vampyres, then I wouldn’t have to dig so many graves,” he said and took a big bite out of a cheeseburger.

  “So, you didn’t lose any of your family to vampyres?” She knew it was a personal question, but she really wanted to know while she had a chance to find out.

  “No one in my family, but they got the boy that lived about half a mile away. His name was Ryan. We grew up together and were like brothers. I cried the whole time I was digging his grave. It was maybe a week after he died that the familiar showed up with an offer to become a hunter. It took me all of two seconds to agree.”

  She knew Ryan not being a blood brother didn’t make him less of a brother to Damon. It didn’t make the loss any easier for him, either. She hoped he didn’t lose anymore of his brothers, but she knew that it was inevitable that he would.

  ***

  “Hey, Darian. Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure. I heard you have been talking to everyone. I was wondering when you’d get around to me,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “What made you decide to become a hunter?”

  “I had a family once…a wife, a four year old son, a two year old daughter, and a six week old baby boy. We were having dinner one night when someone kicked in the door. There were two of them. Neither of them looked as if they had yet reached their eighteenth birthday. They tied me to a chair and made me watch as they did unspeakable things to my wife and daughter.

  “Then they started to torture my son. They reached into the fireplace, pulled out a burning log, and started poking him with it. They burned him over and over again. I can still hear his screams in my dreams. The screaming woke up the baby, and one of the vampyres picked him up and threw him to the floor. He stomped on my baby, and then threw him into the fire. He never screamed, so I assumed he was dead when the flames got him. God forgive me, but I hoped he was dead.

  “They went back to work on my wife and remaining children. They beat them mercilessly, breaking their bones and biting chunks of flesh from their bodies. Finally, they fed on them and left their bodies dead on the floor. They never touched me. They left me tied to the chair, and walked out of the house.

  “I sat there all night looking at my dead family lying on the floor, and smelling my baby burn in the fireplace. It was about two months later that the familiar showed up looking for men who wanted to hunt vampyres.

  “You asked why I decided to become a vampyre hunter. My answer is, I didn’t. Those vampyres made that decision for me the night they walked into my home.”

  “Did you ever find them?”

  “Yes, I found them. It took me fifty-four years, but I found them. I made sure they suffered as much pain as my family did before I took their heads.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She knew the coming battle was nothing to him. What could compare to what he had already been through?

  ***

  Shane was next on her list.

  “You want to know why I become a hunter?” Shane asked.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. I never lost anybody personally, but we were hearing stories from a few villages away about vampyre attacks. You have to remember that this was in a time when people still believed in things like vampyres. From the stories that we were hearing, we knew the vampyres were heading in our direction. I was raising four children on my own, and there was no way I could protect them from vampyres. There is no protection from vampyres.”

  “Had your wife passed away?”

  Shane shook his head. “No, she left us when our youngest was only one year old. It was just as well. She wasn’t worth a shit, and I was glad to see the back of her anyway. When the familiar showed up, I jumped at the chance to be a hunter. I would have done anything to keep my children safe.”

  “Did the vampyres show up in your village?”

  “Yes, about three weeks after I became a hunter. I killed the vampyres that had caused the trouble in all those villages. Our village didn’t lose a single person,” he said proudly.

  “And your children?”

  Shane smiled. “They all lived long, happy lives. I didn’t leave the village until they had all passed away, most of them from old age.”

  “Any regrets?”

  He sighed and said sadly, “Only that I had to watch my children die. It’s not supposed to happen that way. Children are supposed to bury their parents, not the other way around.”

  She couldn’t agree more, but at least he hadn’t had to go through what Darian endured.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  She’d talked to all the vampyres and hunters, all of them except one.

  “Potter, why did you become a hunter?” she asked as they were sitting at the edge of the creek with their legs dangling over the drop.

  Potter smiled. “You’ve known me all this time and now you want to know why I became a hunter?”

  “Yes, I really want to know.”

  “Well, the village where I lived was fairly large, and we were starting to take heavy losses from vampyre attacks. I never lost anyone personally, but I understood that the vampyers had to be stopped. A group of men, me included, had already started to hunt the vampyres that were attacking our village. We did the best that we could, but the odds were against us. We knew what we had to do, but our human bodies weren’t up to the task.

  “No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t stop them. Every few days, someone else would be lost. I watched a vampyre pick a man up and crush him like he was nothing. To the vampyres, we were nothing. How could we fight against a creature like that? We were fighting a battle that we couldn’t possibly win. Then one day a familiar showed up in our village.

  “He told us th
at his master had an offer for us. Once we became hunters, we would have the ability to not only sense and track vampyres but also the ability to defeat them. I’ve told you the story of our creator before, but you wanted to know why I became a hunter. I would have to say that I chose to become a hunter to save humanity from the monsters, to keep humans at the top of the food chain,” Potter explained. “Plus, I loved to fight.”

  With tears in her eyes, she said, “I love you, Potter.”

  “I know you do. I love you, too. Stop worrying about me. I’m not going to die. I’m the best, remember?”

  “Second best. I seem to remember you getting your ass whipped by Richard.”

  He laughed. “Fine, second best then, but I’m still good enough to get through this. Hell, I’m looking forward to it. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to kill a vampyre. Now I’m going to get to kill a whole shitload of them.”

  She was glad he could laugh about it. Her nerves, however, were stretched to their limit. They had one day left before Elderson’s clan was supposed to descend on them, and no one but her seemed to be concerned about it.

  “Do you know what I’d really like to do right now?”

  “What would that be?” he asked.

  “I’d like to get, tore up from the floor up, drunk.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I know. I’ve never even been drunk,” she admitted. “I don’t even drink.”

  It was true. She’d had a total of two beers in her entire life, and she hadn’t finished either one of them.

  “No. I mean you literally can’t. You could drink a barrel of whiskey, and you’d never get drunk. You could do all the drugs you could get your hands on, and you would never get high. It’s a hunter thing, and it sucks. Most of us are Irish for Christ’s sake. If we’d known beforehand that we couldn’t get drunk anymore, half of us wouldn’t be here today,” he laughed.

 

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