Sam steered the Aston Martin around a semi-tractor trailer and then immediately yanked the wheel to the right. A red compact blared its horn as they blew past it, but Sam didn’t so much as flinch, even though they’d shaved past the little car by centimeters. Less than that, probably.
The whip-like movements of the car tossed Nora first one direction and then the other. Though most of the passengers of the Aston Martin were unfazed by the violent movements, John groaned quietly in the backseat, fingers sinking into the cushion of Sam’s backrest. Of the six passengers in the Aston Martin, John Worthy was the most vulnerable; the most… human.
Nora had given him the Blood shortly after Gon forsook her for America, and he had remained her devoted companion ever since. A portly man with an impressive though thoroughly anachronistic waxed mustache, John was still very much the Edwardian gentleman that he had been when she made him an immortal: well-mannered, reserved, and perpetually disconcerted by the accoutrements of modern life-- especially high-speed motor vehicles!
She had taken him as a lover shortly after she became a vampyre. He was a bookseller then, the proprietor of a shop she frequented after moving with Gon to the country. John was dependable, considerate, well-bred and thoughtful. Everything that Gon was not. First, she gave him her body, and then later, when Gon abandoned her, she gave him her Blood. Hopelessly besotted, he had indulged her every whim ever since, even when she decided to take Sam Coleridge as a second, and infinitely more exciting, lover almost a century later.
The two men had a prickly relationship, John and Sam. They were natural rivals, polar opposites in every way, yet they were united in their devotion to her. Sam, she knew, would leave her someday. He was very like her maker in many ways. Impulsive, fearless, emotional, uninhibited. He could be carefree and jolly one moment, reckless and cruel the next, but that was part of his appeal. John, she knew, would never abandon her. On that she could rely. And it was a comfort to know that he would always be there for her, though his fear of modern things vexed her greatly sometimes. With Sam, it was like keeping a wild animal as a pet.
“I don’t mean to chunter on about it,” John said, “but couldn’t we make this journey at a slightly less hazardous rate of speed?”
Sam grinned and goosed the Aston Martin to one-ninety. He had large, wolf-like fangs, needle sharp at the tips. Sometimes he filed them to make them extra sharp.
John looked as if he meant to rebuke the younger man, then thought better of it and sighed. He knew from their long and contentious association that any reply he might make was sure to fall on deaf ears. Might even spur his counterpart to greater acts of vehicular recklessness.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, Nora could see the fear in her companion’s eyes and could not help but feel a swell of pity for the fellow. Were he a mortal, he would have been mopping the sweat from his face with a handkerchief.
“We will be there soon, my darling,” Nora sympathized.
“Thank God for small favors,” John murmured, adjusting his derby, which had been knocked askew by Sam’s violent maneuvers.
Sam laughed at that, scornful of his cohort’s timidity. With his spiked yellow Mohawk, studded leather jewelry and unusually large fangs, Sam looked like one of Doctor Moreau’s experiments: only partially human.
Nora pushed their bickering out of her consciousness, a trick she had mastered many years ago. Their thoughts, however, were an altogether different matter. To her more refined female sensibilities, their unceasing male rivalry was like fingernails down a chalkboard.
All male thoughts were somewhat distressing to her. Louder. More emotional. It was a commonly held belief that women were the more emotional sex, but in her experience, that was not usually the case. Men merely repressed their feelings better, stuffing them deep down inside so they could not be used against them. But Nora could feel them, and it was like being battered by rubber mallets. All day. Every day.
Sydney and Miranda’s feelings impinged upon her awareness as well, a complex weave of love and fear and excitement. Their individual need for companionship clashed with their independent personalities, creating a low feedback hum of anxiety and resentment. It was below the threshold of their own self-awareness but perfectly evident to Nora’s acute senses.
The cacophony of all those thoughts and emotions made her uneasy, and a fine thread of pain pulsed in the center of her forehead.
It was always a chore to keep out the thoughts and emotions of the people around her. Even at the best of times she felt like a woman under siege. She tried to fortify her mind, maintain barriers to hold them at bay, but she could always hear them, scratching at the windows, pounding on the doors, trying to find a way in. It was like fending off a relentless horde of clamoring zombies. It was exhausting, especially in close quarters.
The only one she could not hear was Zenzele. The ancient Eternal’s mind was an abyss. Sitting placidly in the backseat between John and the Americans, she was a Sphinx in splendid female form. Her soul was a soothing nullity, a locus of psychic stillness, an oasis of silence in the eye of a storm. If she were not so jealous of Gon’s immortal lover, Nora would have entreated Zenzele to take her as a companion.
What a wonderful respite that would be, to spend a decade or two in the company of one whose thoughts were so perfectly shielded from her telepathy! But alas, there was a part of her that hated the mysterious Eternal. She was jealous and she hated her, just as her own immortal lovers were poison to one another.
As John and Sam quarreled back and forth, and the two Americans basked in mutual affection, Nora turned her thoughts to Justus.
Engel Abbey was drawing nearer by the moment. Already, she could sense his watchful presence. She could feel his impatience. If she desired, she could reach out to his mind, read his thoughts directly—distance had little effect on her powers, especially when she concentrated on a single individual—but that required a bit more effort than she was willing to expend at the moment. Also, it was unnecessary. He had no new information. She would have known it if he had.
They hadn’t communed since Gon departed the monastery. Not since her maker’s little beast of a fledgling had forced the Living Blood upon the monk’s aged confidante. The old woman, Agnes, did not wish to be a vampire. Never had. But Lukas had transformed her anyway—an act of rape. To add insult to injury, the Strix had made the woman an Eternal, frozen for all time in the form of an elderly female. And her lover, Justus, was a short-lived blood drinker. He would endure only a few hundred years more, perhaps as much as a thousand, barring accident or violence, but then he would perish, while the pitiful old woman lived on and on and on. It was an abomination!
The little beast must die, Nora thought.
Lukas Jaeger, that was his name. Even if they saved their beloved maker, convinced him to abandon this mad scheme to destroy himself, they could not allow a creature like Lukas to survive. The harm he could inflict on the mortal world, and her own clandestine tribe, was too terrible to imagine.
She wished she were powerful enough to take control of other minds. In modern science fiction, telepaths were often portrayed as having this ability. They could dominate the wills of other lesser intellects, make them think and do things contrary to their nature. All they had to do was put their fingers to their temples and look constipated. In real life, it was not so simple a thing. She could sway the thoughts of others, plant whispered suggestions in their brains in the sound of their own voice, but only with the most delicate care, and her whispered enticements just as often drove her victims to a contradictory course. It was as if they were subconsciously rebelling against her influence, much like the human immune system will reject invading organisms. And it was impossible to do even that with some. Some blood drinkers—mortals, too—could sense the feather-light stroke of her telepathic manipulations no matter how much care she took. Her maker was one such being.
She might, perhaps, hold their wayward progenitor long enough for them to catch up to h
im. Give them a chance to persuade him from his course. Most likely she would fail—and spectacularly-- if she tried to force her will upon him. Gon was the oldest blood drinker in existence, and one of the most powerful. A flea would have a better chance wrestling an elephant to submission. And Justus had warned her against making such an attempt.
Specifically.
“I beg you, Nora, do not try your wiles upon him,” he had said. “If he realizes we have uncovered his plot, our father will rush headlong to his fate. Right now, he believes he acts in secrecy. He is taking his time, relishing his final hours. If we are to have any chance of stopping him, he must remain ignorant of our collusion until the penultimate moment.”
“You know this for a fact?” she had asked.
“I have foreseen it,” he said.
Gon knew Apollonius was coming. Their maker’s favored child grew suspicious of his master when Gon began shipping his most precious keepsakes to Paulo’s villa in the Dodecanese. Ancient relics. Priceless art. The sarcophagus of poor doomed Julia Varus. Gon claimed he was preparing to take on a new identity, relocate to a new city, as he had many times before, as they all must do from time to time, but this was the first time he had divested himself of his mementos. Paulo set off in pursuit of his maker before Nora could warn him off. Fortunately, Gon believed he had eluded his vampire child in Belgium. He was still taking his time, entertaining his new protégé with tales of the first vampire war. Nora had telepathically contacted Apollonius, instructing him to await them at Engel Abbey. Paulo, who was every bit as headstrong as his maker, had only reluctantly agreed.
Of Justus’s desperate gambit, the oldest living vampire was still mercifully oblivious.
The only real question, Nora thought, the only one that mattered, was this: even if they could get to Gon in time, would their loving entreaties divert him from his plan?
They could not, after all, force him to live.
If Gon had discovered some way to destroy himself, to destroy an Eternal—and Justus assured her that he had—then what right did they have to deny him his death? He had not chosen this life. Like so many of their kind, the Living Blood was forced upon him. And he had suffered, as they all suffered, night after night, year after year, millennia after millennia. He had suffered more than any other living being. If anyone deserved an end to the suffering that all of them were forced to endure, it was Gon, the eldest of their race, the one who had suffered the longest, and with no hope of respite.
Until now.
Justus believed they could turn Gon from his path. The monk had seen it in his dreams. She did not understand how her sibling’s precognitive abilities worked—and she would leave the implications of such a gift to better minds than hers—but she knew the visions were real, and that Justus was telling her the truth. He had shared his dreams with her telepathically. She had witnessed Gon’s destruction. She had seen the monster, Lukas Jaeger, hacking at her former lover with an axe, had watched Gon widen the wound with his own hands so that his protégé could drain him of his Living Blood. The vision was beyond horrendous. Her maker’s agonies had ripped at her soul. She had echoed his pained cries. Clutched at her breast as Gon’s heart was torn from his.
Jaeger had drained Gon dry in the vision, drinking until his belly could hold no more, then vomiting, then returning to the gushing font for more. He had fed, unfazed by the Sharing, until he had taken every last drop, until their maker’s body was as fragile as blown glass. And then… and then Gon’s murderous acolyte had used the blunt end of the axe to shatter their maker to dust.
Lukas, it seemed, was immune to the Sharing. She did not bother to speculate why this might be so. There were others she knew of who did not Share-- the terrifying Baalt, for example. Those vampyres, the ones who could not Share, were usually vicious, amoral fiends, and shunned by their own kind.
The Sharing was a defense mechanism. Its purpose: to keep vampires from preying on one another. That was the modern consensus among their kind, though its true nature had been shrouded in a lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo in less enlightened ages. The transference of memories paralyzed the aggressor, and inspired a powerful sense of simpatico in the attacking blood drinker, rendering him or her utterly incapable of carrying out their assault.
But not this perverse creature, this awful mutant fledgling. Like the Eternal Baalt, Lukas Jaeger was either incapable of Sharing or he was so mentally deranged he felt no sympathy for his victims, even while experiencing all of their thoughts and memories. He could take the Blood of another immortal being without becoming addled, unconstrained by human compassion.
The oldest living vampire had finally found a way to end his interminable existence. And it had only taken thirty thousand years!
That’s what the monk’s visions had shown her.
“But the future is not set in stone,” Justus had assured her, speaking to her mind-to-mind. “The future is like a vast flowing river, sweeping us inevitably to our fate. But there are branches, side streams and forks. I have caught glimpses of those other futures, but they are faint, fleeting—Gon is determined to destroy himself—and it will require that we all come together to stop him. Even then, I cannot be certain of his ultimate decision. The branches where we are successful are vastly outnumbered by the ones in which we fail. I will tell you this. In nearly every path I have explored, I see us battle that horrible Lukas Jaeger, that enfant terrible, and then my vision falls to darkness.”
“And why is that?” she had asked. “Why do you see no further than that, brother?”
She felt him shrug. He was nearly a thousand kilometers away, but she felt it quite distinctly, as if a ghost had momentarily taken possession of her body and caused her shoulders to twitch.
“I do not know,” he had answered. “Perhaps it is because I die.”
That was why he’d contacted her. Of all who loved the vampire Gon, she was the only one who possessed the telepathic gift. It was perhaps the rarest of the vampire race’s preternatural gifts. Only she could call them all together before their maker met his fate.
She had immediately sent out the summons, beckoning all of Gon’s most beloved companions to come, to help them stop him.
Those who could had come, as quickly as they could manage, but time was running out. There were only a few hours remaining in which they might intervene, and then it would be too late.
Nora tried to imagine how she might feel if they failed, if her maker succeeded in destroying himself. Though he had broken her heart, though he had abandoned her shortly after making her an immortal, she still loved him, and she could not imagine the world without him in it.
She still remembered the first time that she saw him. Even now, one hundred and fifty years later, she could close her eyes and picture it like it was yesterday. Standing there outside the Adelphi Theatre. The man in the top hat and tailcoat stepping down from the hansom. The street lights glowing in the fog. The moon riding over the boulevard like a Chinese lantern. She was a mortal girl then, a virgin woman-child, and he was a gaslight demi-god with gleaming eyes and auburn hair curling down over his shoulders and the most dazzling smile she had ever seen! It was not love at first sight. Though she considered herself a romantic, in theory if not in practice, she was much too pragmatic to believe in such a thing. But later, when her aunt invited him to dinner, and he came with the horrible duke, she found her maker so charming, so unselfconsciously unguarded, that she did fall in love with him a little.
Gon once confessed to her, after he made her an immortal, that he thought her to be a thoroughly lovely and intelligent young woman—“A little naïve, perhaps, but otherwise quite impressive,” he had said—but he would never have brought her over were it not for the duke.
It was the duke who forced his hand, who caused Nora to be given the Blood.
It was the most hurtful thing Gon ever said to her.
4
“You should wear the Garibaldi,” Lady Harcourt said, quite out of the blue. “Wi
th the green velvet skirt, I think. The one your uncle likes so much.”
“Auntie?”
“You know the one,” the countess said, waving a hand distractedly. “That dress with all the pretty trim. I think it would go nicely with that blouse you got in the post this week. The Italian one Mr. Redding just delivered.”
It was just after breakfast, about a week after they attended La Belle Helene. Nora and her aunt had gone to the hothouse to examine some flowers. Earlier that morning, the groundskeeper, Mr. Burroughs, had informed Lady Harcourt that the Generael der Generaelen van Gouda, an exquisitely flamed tulip, had just bloomed. The Generael der Generaelen van Gouda was an exceedingly rare flower. Imported from the Netherlands, the tulips had cost Lord Harcourt nearly nine hundred pounds-- and for just three bulbs! Lady Harcourt had invited Nora to accompany her.
“Whatever are you talking about, auntie?” Nora asked, genuinely perplexed. “Why should I wear the Garibaldi blouse and green velvet skirt?”
“Why, for the party, my dear!” Lady Harcourt exclaimed. She spoke in an exasperated tone, lips pursed, as if Nora were neglecting her. In fact, it was the first time her aunt had said anything about a party. But Lady Harcourt was like that when she was preoccupied. She sometimes believed she had spoken aloud when in fact she had only thought a thing.
Rather than take offense at her aunt’s tone, Nora smiled and asked, “When are we having this party, auntie, and who have you invited?”
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 2