The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  “But she has your Blood,” Madame Elektra said. “We can smell it in her.”

  “Do you intend to lodge a formal complaint?” Venport asked, putting a little menace in his voice.

  Madame Elektra did not reply. Instead, she addressed Nora: “Heed the lessons of your maker, child. You are lucky to have a Blood Father as venerable as Lord Venport. It is a sad fact that the young of our species are all too often abandoned by their makers, left to fend for themselves in a cold and compassionless world. We have the Edict of Secrecy, the Edict of Innocence and the Edict of Clean Blood, but there is no Edict to punish those who do not rear their own young. There would be far less lawlessness among our kind if we did.”

  “An unfortunate upbringing does not justify anarchy,” Lord Venport said, showing his fangs. “If you are speaking of Duke Crowden—!”

  Madame Elektra rounded on Lord Venport. “We are aware of the Duke’s failings. We make no excuses for the deficiencies of his character, nor do we protest the severity of his punishment. The law is the law. We only express our grief at the outcome. So far as we are aware, the Duke never Shared his immortal blood. His experiences, all his memories, are lost to us now!”

  “A tragedy, yes,” Lord Venport acknowledged. “Would that the Duke had chosen a better path.”

  Madame Elektra dismissed Venport with a sniff, addressing Nora once again. “Such a fragile thing,” she said. “Not very strongly made, I think. It is well that you have such a powerful protector, child.” Her tone was syrupy sweet, despite the implied threat.

  Nora gazed down, unsure what to say or do. She sensed that the woman hated her, hated her bitterly, but what was the source of such caustic resentment? She had never met the woman before tonight.

  Without warning, Nora was assaulted by an image of the veiled woman crushing her skull. It was like a waking dream, or a fever hallucination: Nora, crying out in terror and pain as Madame Elektra seized her head and pulped it between her powerful white hands.

  For a moment, Nora’s vision doubled, and she saw both the world as it was and the terrifying image of her own destruction, one laid over the other, like an object glimpsed at the bottom of a reflecting pool. The dark-veiled woman sinking her fingers into the flesh of her temples, driving them like spikes through the bone, digging deep into the moist brain matter within and then tearing her head apart like a rotten melon. At the same time, she heard Madame Elektra’s voice in her head. It was as though the woman were whispering in her ear, a venomous litany: pretty little thing kill you crush you make you not so pretty-pretty anymore oh how we would love that for what you did what you did to the duke! It was the manifestation of that rarest of vampyre gifts, the first fitful expression of her telepathic powers, and Madame Elektra’s hatred rocked Nora back on her heels.

  Nora yelped and put her fingers to her temples, swaying on the dais. It was like nothing she’d ever experience before. She felt as though she were losing herself, drowning in those alien thoughts, and her ears began to ring as if reality itself were oscillating at a very high frequency, as a wineglass will sing right before it shatters from a resonating sound wave.

  She must have been inside Madame Elektra’s mind, and her master’s mind as well—it would be decades before Nora completely mastered her so-called gift—because both of them twitched very subtly and drew away from her.

  Venport scowled and stepped immediately back toward her, reaching out as if he feared she might fall. Madame Elektra retreated to the far side of the room. She shook her head, veil swishing back and forth, and then glared at Nora through black lace.

  “What was that?” she demanded. “I felt a presence in my mind. There was a voice, only it was not my own. What did you do to me, you horrid little creature? You… you little bitch!”

  “I… I don’t know!” Nora stammered. She took Lord Venport’s hand and stepped down from the platform. “Oh, my head!” she said, clinging to his chest. “It aches terribly!”

  “Get out!” Madame Elektra spat. She slashed the air with an arm, pointing towards the door. “Take your merchandise and GET OUT!”

  The saleswoman and seamstress were goggle-eyed. The seamstress’s assistant fled with a cry, seeming almost to vanish from the room.

  Lord Venport placed himself between Nora and Madame Elektra, an arm encircled protectively round her shoulders. He snatched up her new dresses as they sidled from the room.

  “Get out!” Madame Elektra shouted once more.

  On the sales floor, he paused only long enough to take his wallet from his jacket. He placed several notes on the counter.

  “More than enough,” he said, and then they slipped out onto the foggy street.

  9

  Nora was a clever young woman-- a quick study, her tutors always said-- and considered herself a very intuitive person. That intuition, which had arguably saved her from the fire that claimed her parents’ lives, was probably the basis for her telepathic powers.

  At first it was like her experience in the clothing shop, just flashes. She would be reading a novel or attending the theatre or feeding upon an evildoer in some dark and grimy alley, and there would intrude upon her consciousness a stream of strange and vivid imagery, or a jumble of semi-intelligible words, as though someone were whispering frantically in her ear. Human beings, she learned, did not construct their thoughts in any coherent order. Reading someone’s mind was not like reading a novel. There’s no formal structure to thoughts as there is to written language. Often there were not even words, just images and feelings. Human thought was like a river. There was a surface to the thoughts she occasionally eavesdropped upon, like the sun-spangled surface of a watercourse, but that glimmering upper layer hid murky depths and swirling, dangerous undercurrents. Only rarely were the thoughts she glimpsed orderly and peaceful, like a sedate pool. And on a few occasions, the minds she encountered were like devastating floods, with leaping waves and ravenous creatures lurking beneath the foam. Those were the thoughts of madmen and zealots, and they left her shaken and fearful she might somehow be infected by the subject’s dreadful lunacy. At the best of times, she found her powers to be an annoyance, an unwelcome distraction. At their worst, the psychic intrusions were frightening and/or painful. It was months before she began to get a handle on her strange new ability, and years before she felt that she had truly mastered it.

  Lord Venport taught her what she needed to know about her new status: the rules that governed their mutant biology and the shadowy underworld through which they stalked their prey. He recounted for her the history of their clandestine tribe, all fifty thousand years of it, and how their immortal race came into being. But he had no wisdom to impart when it came to her telepathy.

  “I have heard of such things, of course,” he said to her. “I am an exceptionally long-lived vampyre, and there is little I have not encountered before. But it is a rare gift, and one I do not possess. I cannot advise you how best to master this extraordinary ability, nor even where you might seek better counsel.”

  It was vexing to be so alone. It was a terrible irony, really, to be privy to the thoughts of her fellow human beings, to be able to know them so intimately, yet be so completely isolated by that talent. Even among the nosferatu she was an outsider, set apart by her unique gift. Once it was learnt that she could read the minds of those around her—a rumor spread, no doubt, by Madame Elektra, the first victim of her untamed power-- the blood drinkers of London avoided her company as though she carried the plague.

  That suited Lord Venport, of course.

  He had not come to London to partake of their society. He had come, he confessed, to hunt down those blood drinkers who were threatening the anonymity of their race. With the aid of Duke Crowden, he had been stalking and killing rogue blood drinkers for months. “At present, there is an intolerable number of vampyres in London,” he said to her. “They flout our traditions of secrecy. They kill indiscriminately, and make new immortals without an ounce of discernment. They threaten our
entire race with exposure. If mortals ever learned that we truly exist, that we are not just the stuff of penny dreadfuls, they would wage such a war to possess and control our Living Blood that the entire world would be laid to waste. It would be the end of us all, mortal and immortal alike. That must not stand.”

  “So you are culling them,” she said, shocked by her maker’s cold bloodedness.

  Lord Venport looked pained. “I try to avoid killing if at all possible. It is not something I enjoy. I always give the scofflaws a choice. Reform their ways, abide by our ancient and most wise traditions, or be destroyed. If they continue to flaunt the law after that… well, then it is on their own heads.”

  “Like Duke Crowden?”

  “He was the leader of one of the English hives I tried to reform. He disbanded his coven at my request, promised he would no longer feed on the innocent. He even agreed to assist me with the unsavory task that brought me here. I had thought-- I had hoped-- he would be able to control his baser instincts, to abide by our laws, but alas, self-control was never his strong suit. He enjoyed his ‘little indulgences’ too much.”

  “And I was to be one of those ‘little indulgences’,” Nora said, and only (to her credit) with a little bitterness.

  Venport nodded.

  “After your aunt’s dinner party, we went out into the city to hunt. It is very hard to elude my senses, but somehow he managed to give me the slip, and he made his way back to your uncle’s house to spirit you away.”

  “But you stopped him. At least… you kept him from killing me.”

  “But you are dead, dear Nora,” Venport said gently. “Do not deceive yourself. I preserved you, snatched you from the very gullet of oblivion, but you are not alive. You will never again enjoy the simple pleasures of living—food, drink—and you will never know the joy of motherhood. Duke Crowden murdered the innocent woman that you were, Eleanora, and all the bright lives that might have sprung someday from your womb.”

  “So you consider it murder, even though I live on in this altered form? Even though I continue, and may continue for millennia to come?”

  “Yes, I do. That is why I had to destroy him. I learned long ago that mercy is no virtue.”

  “I wonder what his story was,” Nora mused. “If it is true what Madame Elektra said, that he never Shared his memories, then I suppose we’ll never know. In a way, he is as much a father of this new life I lead as you. It’s a pity. I would have liked to know more about him.”

  “I gave the Duke his chance, and you are what he made of the opportunity. I do not give second chances. Not anymore. If I had destroyed him out of hand, as I should have done in the first place, your path would be a much brighter one.”

  Nora frowned at the anger in his voice. “It is hard for me to hate him,” she said, “especially when I look at myself in the mirror and behold what I have become. A fairy queen. An icy demi-goddess. I will never grow old, never suffer illness and infirmity. I have been made an immortal being, and my heart sings out in joy of it.”

  “I did not do what I did out of hatred,” her maker sighed. “I enjoyed the Duke’s company. I mourn for him now. He was an amusing scoundrel. I considered him, and still consider him, my friend. What I did I did for all our sakes. Our race must remain hidden. If a few rotten fruits can spoil the crop, then they must be cast away. As quickly and as efficiently as possible.”

  “Your philosophy sounds very noble, but it is cold. Is there no room for mercy? None at all?”

  “It is no philosophy, child. It is necessity.”

  “I shudder at its heartlessness. It makes me fearful of my own weaknesses. Would you destroy me as well, if I gave in to my baser instincts and fed upon the innocent?”

  His look sent a chill down her spine.

  “Yes,” he said. “Without hesitation.”

  The London hives had become a real concern for the greater vampyre community, she learned. Lord Venport showed her the newspaper clippings he had collected. This was after they had gathered his belongings from Duke Crowden’s estate and relocated to an apartment in Charing Cross, not far from the rail station.

  He had reserved the apartment as a safe house, he explained, in case things went south with the Duke. Venport kept several safe houses in and around the city of London. And he was wise to do so, she had to admit; his partnership with the Duke had certainly gone in a distinctly southerly direction rather abruptly.

  Nora read the newspaper clippings with great fascination as traffic clattered in the street below. She had heard of the infamous Spring-Heeled Jack, of course, but she was unaware of these other attacks, which were so numerous she was shocked by her own ignorance of them. There were dozens of reports of white-faced creatures attacking the denizens of London—usually in the streets at night, but sometimes in the victims’ very homes! Most of the eyewitnesses described the creatures as ghosts or demons. There were also reports of mysterious murders, brutal crimes in which the victims were mutilated or drained of their blood, and countless disappearances.

  Countless!

  “Of which you, my dear, are only the latest victim,” Lord Venport said, tossing the evening edition of the Courier onto the bed beside her.

  Near the bottom of the first page was the heading, LONDON HEIRESS ABDUCTED FROM HER BED. Below that: No Ransom, No Clues, No Arrests.

  Nora had never considered herself an heiress, but she supposed that she was. A very insignificant one. She certainly wouldn’t have thought her kidnapping worthy of front page coverage, but she had to admit there was an element of salaciousness to her story. Kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night! That sort of thing sold papers, and would keep the tongues of London gossips wagging for a good week or two. Not to mention, her aunt and uncle were prominent members of London society, and peers of the Realm to boot, though not especially rich or influential. Just well off and well liked.

  The paper described her aunt and uncle as “distraught” and reiterated their pleas for any information related to their niece’s disappearance.

  She felt terribly guilty, reading that part. She was very fond of her aunt and uncle, and knew they were very fond of her as well. She wished there was some way she could comfort them, let them know that she was well, but her maker had forbidden her any contact with her mortal relatives, and she was hardly confident enough of herself to defy him… on any account.

  “It will only bring them further pain,” he said. “This I know from bitter experience. Let the break be quick and clean. Let them mourn you and get on with their lives.”

  It was difficult. She was terribly homesick. But she had many new things to distract her from her melancholy. Her new home, for one. She liked it very much. The apartment was roomy and artfully appointed, with high paneled wainscoting of rich red mahogany and ceilings of raised plasterwork and expensive, exquisitely detailed furnishings. At all hours of the day and night, the apartment resounded with the whistle of trains, the chuff-chuff-chuff of their engines and the squeal and clash of steel wheels on iron rails. It was a terrible racket, but she found the commotion comforting for some reason. And then there were her books. Venport allowed her to buy all the books she desired, and he had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of wealth to fund her insatiable hunger for literature. She found she could read now at unbelievable speed, scanning an entire page of text in the blink of an eye. This led her to buy new books by the armload. Venport lined the walls with shelves, and she stuffed the shelves with books. There were great columns of books stacked in the corners, books piled on the tables, and crammed in all the closets. It was a wonder the building didn’t collapse from the weight of all the books she bought!

  Lord Venport kept her at his side at all times—“For your own protection,” he said—but he was no longer Lord Venport. Guy Venport was an assumed name, and he discarded it now like an article of clothing that was no longer fashionable.

  “We are now Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Vincent, recently of Kent,” he said one evening, producing som
e documents with a comical flourish. The documents had been delivered by a nervous young courier who dashed away the moment her maker tipped the gangly lad.

  Her master’s grin sent a shiver through her body, and she found that she was pleased to be his wife, even if their marriage was a fictitious one.

  “And what is my Christian name to be, husband, if I am no longer Eleanora?” she asked.

  “Nellie,” he answered.

  “Nellie?” she shrieked. “What an atrocious name! It puts me in mind of a horse!”

  “You do not like it? To my ears it has a melodious sound, like the ringing of a bell.”

  She hated it. As a child, she had been bullied by a girl named Nellie. But he thought it was pretty so she tried to make the most of it.

  She was, she realized, quickly falling in love with the enigmatic man. He was fantastically handsome, of course, and maybe that was part of it, but she was not so shallow a creature that she should be swayed by appearances alone. He was also intelligent, kind, witty, and he had a strong moral code—an unconventional one, admittedly, but it was iron-clad. And yet there was something very vulnerable in his nature. He was not aloof like her uncle, removed from the beauty and tragedy of the world around him. Her maker could be brought to tears by a poem or a passage of music. He was shockingly immodest and very free with his affections, constantly touching her and kissing her and parading around the apartment naked.

  The first time she saw him lounging naked in the parlor, she had shrieked in outrage and demanded that he dress immediately.

  “Why should I trouble with clothing in the privacy of my own home?” he had asked, laughing at her Victorian prudery. “I do not need them for warmth, and I am entirely comfortable without them. Clothing is an artifice, the first deceit a man puts on when he ventures out into the world each day.”

  He relented when she refused to look at him, but she still caught him traipsing about in his birthday suit whenever he thought she wasn’t around. And musing on it privately, she had to admit that his immodesty was terribly stimulating. Her outrage at his nudism was as much a conceit as he believed modern fashion to be. She found his naked form quite pleasing to the eye, the personification of masculine beauty, and wished she were bold enough to cast off her own attire whenever the fancy struck.