The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  How liberating that would be!

  There was only one thing about him that truly vexed her.

  He wouldn’t tell her his real name.

  Although he had taken on a new identity, she still thought of him as Lord Venport, but she could not help but wonder what his real name was, who he had been before he took the Blood. Surely, he was a mortal man once. He must have been! He had spoken of his maker in passing once or twice. Of wives. Children. A mother who died when he was young. A father he admired. He had spoken of his own transformation, of learning to master his new vampyre gifts.

  So who was he?

  What was he in his former life?

  “I am very, very old,” he admitted, when she begged him to indulge her curiosity for the umpteenth time, “and I have had a great many names. More than I could possibly ever remember now, old as I am. Perhaps, someday, I will tell you of my mortal life, and the name my father gave me when my mother brought me forth. But not now. Not yet. Not until I have finished this work I have set my resolve upon.”

  Nora, who lusted for information the way other vampyres lusted for blood, found the mystery of him maddening.

  It was a mystery she was determined to solve.

  She tried everything: begging, bargaining, tantrums and tears. But he was frustratingly recalcitrant when it came to his past.

  He would not tell her how old he truly was, or what his birth name had been, or how he had come to be a vampyre. Sometimes he would drop a tantalizing hint or two, let slip a morsel of information that drove her mad with curiosity, but he would not answer her questions directly.

  “Would you have all my secrets at the disposal of our enemies?” he demanded. “Should you be taken hostage—“

  “I would never betray your trust!” she interjected. “Not on pain of death!”

  “You would not have to,” he said. “One drop of your Blood and they would have them all. Every secret I’ve confided in you. I have already told you more than I should.”

  That was progress, she supposed.

  Our enemies.

  It was no longer “my enemies”. He had begun to think of them as a couple. Or perhaps “partners” would be a better description. Though he was very affectionate, he had yet to make any romantic overtures toward her.

  That was another thing.

  Nora ached to be possessed by him, to have him take her as Duke Crowden had taken her. Seize her roughly by the arms. Throw her down on the floor. Part her legs. Drive himself inside of her. Her rape by the duke was the only sex she had ever known, so her imaginings were often quite violent, sometimes even brutal, when she mused upon things of a more carnal nature. Yes, she wanted him to take her. Force himself upon her, his fingers like manacles about her wrists, spread her open, take his pleasure of her. She wanted to be conquered. She wanted to be claimed. It was all she knew, and the seed from which true love grew in the tawdry romances she often read.

  But in matters of the heart, he was also frustratingly obstinate, sometimes treating her like a pupil, more often a child.

  She supposed she was a little of both those things to him, but she wanted more. She wanted him to desire her. She wanted him to love her. And she believed he would be more apt to confide in her, share with her all of his secrets, if they were more than just teacher and pupil, father and child.

  So she set out to seduce him.

  By then they had been living together in the apartment on Charing Cross for several months. Their relationship, until that point, had been strictly platonic. Though he now allowed her to accompany him when he went out into the city to search for renegade blood drinkers, he still had not made any romantic advances. She sometimes felt that he was using her, and her burgeoning telepathic abilities, to help him stalk and kill the feral vampyres who were threatening the anonymity of their race, but in truth she did not mind using her gift to aid him in his endeavors. It was exciting. The hunt. The whirlwind pursuits through the winding alleys of the city. The killings. It gave her an opportunity to hone her skills, to stretch the limits of her abilities. She did not mourn the depraved creatures her maker destroyed. In her mind, each of the corrupt blood drinkers they destroyed was Duke Crowley. Her master spared those who begged for leniency and swore to reform their ways, to abide by the old traditions, to kill only the evildoer, to hide the remains, and never risk the exposure of their race. He took pity on them if Nora confirmed that they were sincere, that they were truly repentant. She did this by piercing their minds, looking into their souls with the strange third eye that seemed to open inside her skull, just behind the bone of her forehead, whenever she accessed her telepathic abilities. She would peer into their minds and tell her master, “Yes, she truly means it. She will hunt only the wicked from this night forth,” or she would say, “He is lying, master. He cares nothing for the Tradition. He only means to save his skin tonight, and will go on doing what he has been doing if you are foolish enough to spare his life.”

  It was terrible to see them die. Her maker was pitiless when he had decided to destroy one of the renegades. They fought ferociously when they saw their end coming, howling and cursing and biting. Sometimes the Living Blood rose up out of them like the tentacles of some boneless sea creature, whipping violently in the air or stabbing at them like glistening black sabers. The old ones exploded into glittering dust when her maker delivered the coupe de grace. The young ones had to be burned. They never surrendered, these lawbreakers. It was always a titanic battle, and sometimes the rebel vampyres were able to elude her maker, to fight their way free and flee into the night. Lord Venport was not all-powerful. He could be injured. He bled, though his wounds healed with amazing rapidity. Sometimes Nora was injured as well. When this happened her master simply gashed open the veins of his wrist with his eyeteeth and healed her with his powerful blood.

  Ultimately, emboldened by her adventures, she cast aside her inhibitions and entreated him directly.

  “So, husband, when are you going to uphold your part of the matrimonial contract?”

  “What are you talking about?” Looking at her over the top of a book.

  Wasn’t the negligee she put on obvious enough?

  “Your duties,” she said. “As a husband.”

  “Nora, we’re not really married. This arrangement is a subterfuge, so we can live among the mortals without arousing their suspicions. We could just as easily pretend to be brother and sister. Or father and daughter.”

  She sighed.

  “What?” he said, putting aside the book and sitting up. “Nora, what are we really talking about?”

  “Sex!” she exclaimed.

  Her maker seemed shocked by the idea. She realized by the expression on his face that the thought had not even crossed his mind.

  His reaction was more than a little annoying—was she not a woman? Perhaps she was not pretty enough for him!-- but she was persistent, and he offered only token resistance before acquiescing to her demands, asking only if she was certain of her desires. He knew, he told her, how prudish the people of her era were regarding sexual matters.

  “I’m not proposing marriage,” she said, climbing onto his big four-poster bed. “Not, I should say, a real marriage. Just the act of love. I would know a man other than the Duke.”

  That seemed to touch him, that the only act of sex she knew was rape. She saw the pity in his eyes, and then shame. Shame because he had failed to consider her needs on this matter before now. He took her in his arms then and made love to her, as gently and as devotedly as he could. And at each stage of the act, he stopped to ask if she wanted him to continue, if she were comfortable, if he was pleasing her.

  “Yes, continue, please,” she said. “Yes, you can put it inside of me. Yes, it feels good.”

  She was afraid she would be frigid, or find the act uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, but it was good. Surprisingly good. Her maker was a gentle lover, and her heightened vampyre senses magnified every touch, every kiss and caress, until she was ne
ar to swooning at the pleasure of their union, hips rising of their own volition to match him thrust for thrust, nails digging into the flesh of his back, spurring him on, urging him deeper inside of her, to go faster, harder, and then the crescendo, a moment of aching “almost” before an explosion of dizzying ecstasy, waves of bliss coursing through her body. It was almost too much to bear.

  She thought he would be more open with her after they became lovers, that he would share his secrets with her, and he was more open in many ways, but of his past he was still frustratingly reserved.

  “It is for your own protection,” he insisted. “It is an easy thing for vampyres to discern truth from a falsehood. If you are ever captured by our enemies, they will want you to tell them all that you know about me. If you do not know my secrets, you will not have to lie. They will know you are speaking the truth when you say that you know nothing. They might even let you live. But if they know that you are lying, they will do unspeakable things to you.”

  He glared at her forbiddingly.

  “Unspeakable!”

  His continued denials were worse than maddening. Nora considered using her telepathy on him but was afraid he’d sense the intrusion and be furious with her. Hurt her, perhaps. Or worse, leave her.

  That winter, shortly before Christmas, the wisdom of his rejections was gallingly proved wise. A group of renegade blood drinkers attacked them in their home.

  There were six of them. Two were blood drinkers they had confronted before, killers of the innocent who had begged, and been granted, a reprieve from her master’s judgment. The rest were unfamiliar to her.

  Nora sensed them moments before they launched their attack. She heard their whispered thoughts—now quickly don’t give them a chance to fight back!-- and cried a warning to her maker. An instant later, the windows of their apartment burst inwards, all six renegades attacking simultaneously, each leaping through a different window. The strategy in attacking this way was to cut them off from escape, but Nora’s lover wouldn’t have fled even if he’d had occasion. He destroyed three of them immediately, flying up from the divan where he’d been reading by the hearth and parting their heads from their shoulders. Nora retreated into the corner, moved more by instinct than lack of courage, but when the three remaining criminals dog-piled on her lover, she lashed out at them with her telepathic powers, distracting them just long enough for her maker to destroy another of their number. The two survivors fled posthaste, leaping back out the windows.

  Lord Venport rose from the carpet with as much dignity as he could muster, little bits of broken glass twinkling in his hair. “Are you injured?” he asked, straightening his dressing gown, and when Nora shook her head, mute with shock, he went to one of the broken windows and glared out at the snow-swept night. The sleeve of his robe was torn at the shoulder and there were several gaping wounds on his neck and upper arm, but his injuries were healing nearly as fast as she could take an accounting of them, the black blood stitching the edges of the wounds together with astonishing rapidity. “No mercy now,” he said, leaning on the window sill. “It is over for them.”

  “For whom?” Nora asked. She stepped around the body of one of their attackers, which was rapidly decomposing on the rug. “Just those who attacked us tonight, or…?”

  “All of them!” he snarled, and he turned on her such a look of glowering menace that she took a step back from him, hand going to her heart-- not out of fear of him but out of pity for his enemies.

  Unsure how to respond, she turned to survey the room. It was a shambles. Broken glass everywhere. Furniture tossed over and bleeding stuffing. Holes in the walls. Pictures thrown down and all her pretty gimcracks shattered. All this destruction, in just moments!

  The bodies of their enemies had finished decomposing. Nothing was left of the blood drinkers but dust and crumpled garments. Soon, she knew, it would be as if they never existed.

  Hoping to distract herself from that terrible look in her master’s eyes, Nora moved to straighten up the room. She went to a column of books that had spilled across the floor and began to stack them up.

  “Dispose of the clothing,” her maker said. “Burn them in the fireplace. Don’t worry about the rest of it. We must find ourselves a new lair.”

  “A new lair?”

  “Quickly, Nora! Even as we speak, the mortal tenants who lived below are creeping up the stairs to see what all the commotion was about. They’ll have summoned the police, or will do so momentarily.”

  Yes, she could hear their downstairs neighbors in the stairwell, a man and a woman, huddled together and whispering fiercely back and forth as they crept toward the door of the apartment.

  “Be careful, Ian! You don’t know what’s happened up here!”

  “Calm yourself, Barbara. Someone may need our assistance.”

  “Please, darling, I’m begging you! Let’s go back down and find a bobby. Let the police sort it out, whatever it is. Your curiosity is going to be the death of us!”

  “Hush!”

  Nora scooped up the dusty clothes. Little puffs of grayish-white powder, glittering faintly, arose from the garments of the deceased blood drinkers. Nora wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell. Crossing to the hearth, she threw the dusty garments on the fire. While she was doing that, her maker dragged two large suitcases into the middle of the room and filled them rapidly with essentials: clothing, documents, grooming supplies. Nora asked if she could bring her books.

  “All of them?” he said, looking around in dismay.

  “Well, some of them, at least,” she said. “Just my favorites.”

  “I’ll return for them as soon as it’s safe,” he said. “If any are missing I’ll buy them anew.”

  Their downstairs neighbors knocked at the door.

  “Hallo? Is everything all right in there?” Knock-knock! “Are you in need of assistance?”

  “Come!” her maker hissed. “We must flee our home, and damn the miscreants who’ve driven us from our comforts.”

  She took his hand and one of the suitcases and together they leapt from the window.

  Out into the cold and wind. Out into the nighted city. They raced through the shadows, moving out from the center of London and in a northeasterly direction along the Strand to St. Paul’s Cathedral, then taking St. John’s Street north to Lower Road and through the suburbs into the countryside. There they found lodging at a public house called the Whitmore Arms in the village of Orsett. It was near dawn by then, as they had doubled back several times along the way to throw off any pursuers. The sun peeped at them through the lowering clouds like hot embers in ash, stinging her eyes, making her feel feverish and weak. They checked in and scurried up the stairs to their room. Once inside, her maker barred the door and then blocked the window with a large wardrobe made of dark walnut. “Just in case,” he said. Exhausted, they collapsed onto their bed fully clothed and slept in one another’s arms ‘til nightfall.

  10

  Like most vampyres, Nora did not dream during the deathlike torpor that claimed her kind during the daylight hours. Once the sun’s brassy light flashed over the horizon, a powerful languor overtook her, and she had to seek her bed immediately or drop where she was standing. There was no transitional stage when the death-sleep overtook her. She did not drowse. There was no period of thoughtful reflection. Her mind simply shut off, and she did not stir again until the sun had rolled over the edge of the world and dropped off into the dark. Then, just as suddenly, she snapped awake, usually with a sharp intake of breath. Often, she found that her hands had come up in a defensive posture of their own volition, fingers curled into claws. But she dreamed that evening, the evening following the attack. It seemed the dreams ran through her unconscious mind, like red thread through black cloth, the entire day through.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t her dreams.

  She dreamed of a lush green world, and primitive peoples as beautiful in form as the first man and woman in Eden must have been. These were lean tawny
men and women, dressed in leather and braided grass, their bodies strong, their faces free of guile and greed. They lived on the fruits of the land and the meat they could kill with their crude bows and spears. They lived fast and loved hard and died young, but their lives were so very intense, so very immediate and sensual, and everything in their world was a wonderful mystery.

  She dreamed she was a man, which was a curious thing in itself. To be so large and powerful and confident, with such strong and simple desires! Her desires, she found, were so much more straightforward as a man, not nuanced as the needs of women tend to be. She needed food, sex, entertainment. That was nearly the extent of it. Fulfillment was the respect of her peers, and her skills as a craftsman and hunter. She did not worry so much of the social niceties or the deficiencies of her character. The man she had become was so much more practical than the creature she was in that other universe, which she knew to be the waking world. She knew she was dreaming, but she did not resist it, did not resist being this man or living in his world. It was something of a relief, to be honest, as if a heavy yoke had slipped from her shoulders for a little while.

  There were wives and children, friends and lovers, and then… and then a darkness came. An Enemy. An ancient, evil, insatiable thing that stole all of it away from her: that wild green vivid world, the wives, the children. She was cast out of the light, exiled from that wondrous Eden, banished into a cold dark eternal wasteland. There were bright spots in that sterile waste, souls that blazed across the sky like shooting stars, but mostly it was just darkness, a lonely never-ending darkness.

  She woke with blood-tears on her cheeks and the names of those she’d lost trembling from her lips, as if she meant to call them back to her.