“No,” he explained. “He knows she is different. He knows she did not go into remission because of Aleksandra’s protocol drug! And he is right, Bree. She is different. She would have never missed her brother’s graduation party. She would not have missed his graduation! She’s no longer our Judith.”
“Peter, Aleksandra knew what she was doing,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper as a couple approached and exchanged a few pleasantries before making their way onto the beach. “Judith knew, too. Aleksandra prepared her as best she could. She had days, left, if that, you know this.”
He was quiet for a while as we both gazed out onto the beach, the fires dying into soft halos of warmth. Car engines purred to life in the driveway, their lights blooming in the darkness. The party was dying down and Colin was moving his mother to her bed; she was tipsy.
Finally, when the veranda was deserted he spoke, “That’s when I found out she was a vampire, Wesley too.” Silence fell once again.
Colin and his son, David, could be heard escorting guests to the front door. David was on his cell phone, calling for a taxi.
“Aleksandra came to me the night Judith spiked her last fever, the night the doctors said she had, maybe, two days left. Everyone had left for Colin’s and I stayed behind, to hold my Judith’s hand, and when I went to check my work e-mail from the laptop, your sister had sent me a note. You know what it’s like when a good friend catches you at a vulnerable moment?” he asked. I smiled and nodded. “I think I replied with a novel! Every memory I could recount, from Judith’s first steps to graduating Oxford.”
“I am sure she read every word, too.” A letter that personal would have demanded no less.
“I hit send, got up to stretch and decided to walk down to the cafeteria for some coffee. I was gone thirty minutes, Bree. When I returned, Aleksandra was standing at Judith’s bed side,” he recalled.
That night, Aleksandra revealed herself to a startled Peter, and nothing was ever the same between them. The family released Judith to hospice care and Aleksandra took over as her physician, coming from Northwestern with a new blood augmentation protocol that could save her life. That is what it did. Two nights later, instead of dying, Judith climbed out of her sick bed a new woman.
The journal felt heavy in my hand as I stared at the overgrowth covering the entrance to my old sanctuary. Even though I could not hear his thoughts, I knew he was behind that clad iron wall. Behind that set of intricate locks and down the staircase, he was waiting for me. He would wait forever if he had to.
A gust of wind stung at my eyes and I shielded them with my sleeve. The fleecy parka rubbed against my cheek, the ivory fabric washing against my skin. Snowflakes started falling against the wind as a storm set into the fjord. I walked with trepidation to the entrance and brushed away enough covering to open the lock. My fingers slid effortlessly over the combination with my eyes closed.
The door creaked open, and heavy trails of dust flittered in the air as the light crept in. The main room was dark once the door shut behind me, except for the sliver of light skirting the panel leading to the inner sanctuary. I followed this light and fumbled with the heavy locks. The door was built into the floor and, when I lived there, was cleverly hidden by furniture. Now dust concealed its secret levers and switches, its locks and pulleys. Time had forgotten this place and there was no longer a need to hide the sanctuary.
Managing the last lever, a cumbersome brass invention that unlocked the final lock, the panel clicked and slid open. A cascade of candlelight warmed my weary eyes as I descended the stone staircase.
The flames licked at the walls, charring the stones as candle wax spilled from the narrow niches. The wax collected in cooled piles on the steps below and melted against my satin Gucci platform boots.
My fingers felt the amulet in my pocket, the hardness heightened by the cold, Norwegian air. I turned it over in my palm, clutching it and tightening my grip upon the trinket. A musty odor rose from the inner sanctuary, and as I got closer, the amulet grew warmer with my touch. Slowly, I pulled the amulet from my pocket, glancing at my likeness staring back, and then I slid it tightly into the palm of my hand. I secured it there, and slid both back into my pocket.
Candlelight engulfed the sanctuary, tiny flames saturating the ledges with their incandescent auras. His back was turned to me as I entered. My linens still graced the bed, the azure satins, and velvet cream pillows imported from England. They were relics sent from a long past time, buried and forgotten here. My hand reached out toward the bedspread as I crossed the room, my boots tapping at the floor as I walked.
Dust and time tarnished the satins smoothness. My fingers ran along the rich embroidering, the faded flowers, the delicate stitching, and a thick smudge of dust clung to my fingertips as I lifted them away. As I looked down onto my fingertips, he turned and I felt his eyes bore heavily down on me.
“They woke you,” he said, stepping toward me. He stretched his hand outward and brushed it against my cheek. My eyes followed his fingertips travel toward my lips. He ran his index finger over them until they parted.
“You stopped writing,” I replied. “They did not know what else to do. And they did not know how to find you.”
“And you did?” He sat down on the edge of the bed, his lanky Norse legs dangling over the platform edge.
“Why did you stop writing?” I asked. “Was it because of this?” Pulling the amulet from my pocket, I handed the jewel to him and watched as he shrank back onto the bed in fear. “Aksel, what is this?”
“Bree,” he began. “This is yours. Keep it and hide it. I cannot have it!” He threw it toward me, the amulet landing onto the bed with a soft thud. Billowing clouds of dust rose from where it landed.
“The Vatican is after this! A good friend of mine had to leave his position at a museum because of this, Aksel! What is it?” I demanded. I retrieved the amulet, inspecting it as I sat down next to him on the bed. My face stared back at me, eerily smiling.
“It is a good luck charm,” he said. “That is all. But the church believes the amulet is witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft?” I turned the amulet over. The underside revealed the emerald beneath. “Even so, why does the church care? If they thought it was black magic, they would have destroyed it.”
“This amulet belonged to Pope Julius II,” he explained. “In his journals, Pope Julius II wrote of a mysterious woman with golden hair, who roamed the papal temple at night. And when, one evening he spotted this woman, he called for guards and she rose into the air like an angel.”
“That was me,” I said. “After I left you with Evelyn, in Hungary, I went to Rome.”
“He wrote that you were the devil; that you had come that night to tempt him,” Aksel said as he eased toward me on the bed.
I looked closer at the image painted on the amulet. “What is it for then?” I asked him, holding it up to the candlelight.
“Apparently it wards away evil. That is why they painted your face upon it,” he explained.
“We are not evil,” I told Aksel. I stood and paced the room. “We are something in between. This proves that.”
“This proves nothing because this amulet is worthless,” he insisted. He came to my side and stopped me. “I went through a lot of trouble getting this from the Vatican, Bree.”
“Why?” I asked him. “If this is worthless, then why bother?”
“Do not ask questions, please. Just listen and take a silly trinket from a silly old man. And promise me you will keep it for good luck.”
“Aksel, my friend committed a crime and lost his job for this amulet. And I had to hunt you down via cryptic clues in a journal because you stopped contacting Aleksandra and Wesley.” My voice echoed off the stone. “They woke me up because of this.”
I held it to the candlelight and rubbed my finger across the face again. A painted visage smiled back. “All of this trouble for a good luck charm? This is not like you! Wild goose chases… drama… mystery. Fi
ne, maybe it is you, but I deserve answers! I deserve my oldest friend by my side when I wake!”
“Bree,” he said, taking my head into his hands. His eyes met mine and I remembered the pain I felt watching him as Wesley placed me in the sanctuary. How he held Aleksandra from me. “You are right. This is not like me. So, just trust me. Please? Hold on to it. Keep it safe.”
“Safe from what?” I asked. “Safe from whom?”
“You hold great power,” he whispered, “and there are those who will use it against us. Against you.”
“The Vatican?” I asked as I searched his eyes. They revealed nothing.
He looked away. “Keep it with you,” he instructed. “And keep it safe.”
“Aksel, please?” I begged.
“No questions,” he said. “Just trust me.”
TWENTY-SIX
Good luck. If that amulet meant to bring such a thing, it never did. Aksel moved in to our State Street pent house, taking residence in the upstairs study. Even though he lived among us, he was seldom there. He was shifty, like a shadow, moodier than I remembered him.
I never wore the amulet. It remained in its velvet box, tucked safely away in my nightstand. Collecting dust among other trinkets, it lived there until Aksel returned each month asking me to fetch it. He had to see it, to touch. He had to feel it beneath his own weary fingers.
He came just last month and loosened a tiny ruby from its outer edge. I watched him pocket the jewel and then walk onto the balcony. He dangled his lanky arms over the rails, the traffic blurring below, its incessant hum irritatingly sweet that evening. The cool, October air blew in a soft gust as the jewel teetered in his palm.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked, coming behind him. His visits were more frequent that month. Since I had found him that past January in my old Lofoten home, he came to visit every month and only stayed for two nights. Yet in October, he came on the first and stayed longer. He lingered, sleeping in his guest room during the day and skulking around the apartment at night – traipsing from room to room, gazing from window to window, and fidgeting any time he sat too long. He only left long enough to feed, and even then, only every few nights.
“They know where you are, Bree,” he told me. “They know where we all are, now.”
“It is the Vatican, Aksel,” I told him. “You are foolish to believe you were ever invisible.”
“I may not have been, but your friends were,” he replied. He fingered the jewel, placed it in an envelope, sealing it. I grabbed at his arm. “They have Judith,” he said. “I think I know where they are keeping her, though.”
“Rome,” I told him. Turning, I walked back into the bedroom. I glanced at my cell phone; the slick white contraption once felt unnatural in my hand. I thought of calling Colin, of warning him. But anything I could have said would have sounded absurd.
“We have to get her back,” I yelled to Aksel. “You have to get her back! Colin almost lost her once; I cannot watch him lose her again.”
“Stop, Bree, just stop,” he said, placing his hands on my shoulders. “They are not in Rome. They are here… in Chicago.”
Colin’s Albany Park apartment door was unlocked, his living room window cracked open, the wind scattering desk papers to the floor. He should have been holding office hours that evening until eight. It was his one late night that month as Chancellor of the English Department, to meet with students at North Park University, but he was not at his office. By the time I arrived, a line of distraught undergrads had already collected outside his door. They rushed the door, their banging fists striking the glass. Some slipped term papers under the door and walked away, eager for a night of collegiate mischief – or extra cramming time for Colin’s next test.
His office was locked, though, unlike his apartment. Colin was a cautious man. I had never known him to make such a callous error as this. Albany Park was one of Chicago’s quieter neighborhoods, indeed, but still a college campus, and still in Chicago. One should not feel comfortable leaving their home unlocked with a window ajar.
The door creaked on its un-oiled hinges as I swung it open, gingerly stepping inside. Other than the papers that had blown off the desk and onto the floor beside it, nothing looked out of place. A half-eaten bowl of chips sat next to an open and empty pizza box on the coffee table. Throw pillows were strewn into a heap near the television. An empty pop can was on the floor next to the couch. A musty odor clung to the air despite the open window, and a pile of laundry peaked itself from behind the corner leading into the apartment’s bedroom. Exactly what one would expect from a divorced-bachelor.
Colin’s wife, Morgan, a theatrical arts teacher, left him for a thirty-something, up and coming Wall Street Day Trader, and moved to New York to reclaim her lost youth. She snagged a part in a pathetically received off-Broadway play. To be supportive, before she fell ill, Judith flew out to see it. Even she could not sit through both acts. Morgan was no match for the Big Apple’s bright lights, and her career remained off-off Broadway.
When Judith returned without her mother, Colin realized there was no hope in reconciliation. The woman he had fallen in love with in Paris during that French class trip in college – whose eyes had sparkled in the moonlight as they looked over the Seine, and whose wavy hair distracted him from Notre Dame’s gothic spires – was no more. Her tutoring was a salvation, boosting his tragic failing grade to a meager passing one. She threatened midway through their tutoring the first semester to drop him if he did not pay attention, but her eyes were too distracting. He struggled but, in the end, finished the second semester able to go on the class trip. And by then, they were falling in love.
Colin had purchased a bottle of Parisian cologne on that school trip. Foul smelling stuff, actually, but Morgan adored it. He would wear it for her and his belongings still carried the scent – faint but traces remained. They were afterthoughts, aromatic memories to haunt my senses, to remind me that something was dreadfully wrong.
I caught the faint wafting of his cologne in the air as it moved past me, but I did not smell him move with it. His heartbeat, his blood, was not present in this room. Nothing living moved here. The streetlight illuminated the desk and shone off the aluminum pencil holder, its smooth grating letting the light pass through. I could see painfully well in the dimly lit room, where the darkness would blind a human.
A human, I knew, could not walk in this blackness. Not undetected. A human would stumble. A human would catch its toe on a door jam, or smack itself on the edge of a chair, wincing uncontrollably. A human cannot help, after all, doing so when they are in a tug-of-war with death.
“I smell you,” I said into the darkness. “You should not be wearing his clothes. They betray you.”
“They are all I have left,” she said, emerging from the shadow. Judith wore his Blackhawks jersey over her t-shirt and jeans. Her blonde hair was pulled away from her face in a ponytail. Wisps of hair escaped, framing her cherubim face.
“You look better than the last time I saw you.” I stepped over the pile of laundry as I moved to hug her. Her arms were unsteady around my shoulders, the tears quickly coming before I even embraced her.
“I told dad my secret,” she admitted, whimpering into my shoulder.
“He probably did not believe you.” Taking her hand, I led her to the couch and forced her to sit next to me. A Writer’s Weekly stuffed between the cushions pinched my thigh before I removed it. I plopped it onto the coffee table. “Your dad needs to hire a cleaning service.”
“He did not believe me,” she started.
“But I insisted. ‘I am!’ I kept shouting it, Bree. ‘I am a vampire!’ I kept shouting it! And he was trying to calm me, so I showed him my fangs,” she said, hanging her head. “He thought they were plastic.”
“Why did you not leave it at that?” I asked.
“I needed him to know,” she said. “I am not sure why, but I did. He is my father. I was dying, and now I will never die. And he needs to kno
w why.”
“No, he does not. You know how much trouble you are in now!”
“Well,” she whispered. “The cat is out of the bag; he saw me.”
“When?” Her face turned to mine, her eyes squarely looking into my own.
She gestured toward the open window. “I left and came upon a student. He was coming to see my father. I fed from the kid and dad saw me. When I realized this, when I heard him scream my name, I rushed back here, but he ran out. I have waited here since, but he has not returned.”
“Where could he be?” I asked.
“I have no clue!” she replied. “I phoned my brother, some of my father’s friends, no one has seen him.”
“He is still in town,” I said. “I think I know where. Just stay here.”
There was a coffee shop near campus where the college students gathered, their laptops and books cluttering tables, coffee mugs filling the empty spaces. This was the official “cramming” spot, where students ran for the mid-term and finals half-off specials. While the other coffee haunts closed shop at ten, this one was open all night during testing weeks, catering to the profitable, caffeine-addicted student clientele.
The day-glo neon lights stung my corneas as the glass door slid open, the aroma of freshly ground espresso welcoming me. He sat in a corner booth alone, his back to the door. Surrounding him were students hunched over their lattes and frappes, their steaming and blended vats of caffeine with added shots of energy, peering into lit laptop screens, their highlighters moving over passage after passage. Some were, despite the rooms energizing caffeine haze, teetering on the verge of sleep.
Smiling at the weepy-eyed barista behind the counter, I walked toward his table and sat across from him. He cradled his head in his hands; his cheeks pale, and his eyes bloodshot. The untouched espresso had grown cold. I took the cup from the table and he barely noticed.
“Can I get a fresh one of these?” I asked the barista.
“Will the professor be okay?” asked the short brown-haired woman as she pressed a button on the large coffee grinder. The aroma of freshly ground beans permeated the shop again. “He just looks so… sad.” She made the espresso machine whirr and buzz, blending coffee and water, producing clouds of steam.
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