“That was an accident,” Zenzele chuckled. “She was only a year in the Blood. She didn’t know her own strength.”
I laughed, too.
A few minutes later, Zenzele reached out and took my hand. She looked down at my hand with a frown, conscious how its shape had changed, but she did not drop it from her grasp. That was a good sign.
“I have always enjoyed hunting with you,” I said after a while.
“It is our Paris,” she replied with a smile, and I felt something loosen in my chest.
Two weeks later there was another murder.
The third victim was also female, also from the community of Olympos. Her name was Cosima Hurgas. The thirty-year-old was found dead in her apartment by a coworker, who was concerned when the woman did not show up for her shift that morning. Like Rena, Cosima had been raped and strangled with one of her own stockings. When questioned by investigators, neighbors reported that Cosima had played loud music the previous night, but that was not an unusual thing for the woman. She often played her stereo too loud. An elderly neighbor from the apartment overhead claimed she had heard raised voices on the night in question but thought that Cosima was merely having an argument with a lover. Later that day, authorities revealed that Cosima had reported a prowler in the apartment courtyard the previous week, and they were asking anyone who had any information on the peeping Tom to phone in to the police station.
Ordinarily, Paulo and his family would have sniffed out the killer’s identity and sorted him posthaste. There is a reason Karpathos has so little crime, and it isn’t just the meager population. But they deferred to us on this one. They could see that we had taken a particular interest in this criminal, and that our hunt for the Olympos Strangler—which is what the paper dubbed the killer-- was beginning to mend the rift that had developed between the two of us.
That night, we went to Olympos to inspect the scene of the crime ourselves.
Olympos is a village on the north side of the island. It perches upon a low mountain of the same name and is considered one of the jewels of the Dodecanese. In antiquity, it was the Doric city of Vrykous, one of the three ancient cities of Karpathos, and has retained much of its famous character from those days. The houses there are squat, square and predominantly white, clustered together on the slope of the mountain in a way that looks almost organic, like a pillar of coral. It is a beautiful city, with a bustling nightlife and a stunning view of the sea.
Zenzele and I took one of Paulo’s sports cars, a Porsche Boxster, to the village. I drove while Zenzele enjoyed the night wind rushing by the window, eyes closed, a blissful smile on her face. It pleased me greatly to see her happy, to see her enjoying herself so much, so I drove a little more recklessly than was usual for me, taking the curves just fast enough to make the tires squeal.
We parked on the outskirts and climbed the winding steps to the village. We did not speak much but we were comfortable with our quiet, which was a great relief to me. That guarded look in her eyes, the awkward silences, was a knife in the heart.
Olympos is famed in the region, one of the main tourist attractions of Karpathos, so even in the winter months, even at so late an hour, there were plenty of mortals about. It did not take long to ascertain the location of the murdered woman’s apartment. After that, we took to the rooftops.
Cosima Hurgas lived in a small apartment on the ground floor of a Roman-style villa. We slipped from the roof to the loggia in back and made our way into her apartment with little difficulty, ducking beneath the yellow crime scene tape that was suspended across the doorway.
Her apartment was one large room with the bathroom area curtained off. There was a full-size bed inside, sheets torn off and lying in a puddle on the floor, a stereo and a bookshelf and posters on the wall of several American and European rock bands. In the kitchen area was a table on which a bowl of fruit was rapidly decaying. There was a plate of dried out pasta, half-eaten, beside it and an overturned chair. Beside the bed was a large dresser with the drawers pulled out and two pair of panties lying on the floor. The flat smelled of piss and potpourri.
Again, our vampire senses were confounded by the multitude of mortals that had passed recently through the apartment. It was not so bad as Apella Beach, but the combined scents created a miasma of human smells that was impossible to decipher. Any of them could have been the murderer.
“Anything?” Zenzele asked. She was over by the bookshelf, perusing the woman’s library. Most of the book were horror novels.
I shook my head, scowling in frustration. “There are too many scents. Perhaps…” I sniffed the mattress, trying not to disturb the sheets. Odor of soap and lavender skin lotion. I detected the residue of a male lover, but it was much too faint to be our rapist. Zenzele watched in amusement as I got down on my hands and knees and began to sniff along the floor like a bloodhound. Shoe leather. Dirt and grass from the courtyard. And then: fresh blood and semen. The stains were not visible—they had been wiped clean by the killer—but I could smell it in the grout of the tiles, and in the tiny pores of the ceramic tiles themselves. “Here,” I said. “He raped her right here.”
Zenzele stalked forward, eyes flashing in the shadows. “Do you have him?”
I pressed my nose to the tiles, inhaling deeply. I could smell the woman’s fear and pain like a ghost image imprinted on the surface of the floor. I could smell her tears, her blood. I could smell her assailant as well. The sweat of his body where his bare skin had come into contact with the floor—a knee, a thigh, an oily palm, and the semen he’d spilled and scrubbed away. I could smell his cologne and the cigarettes he smoked. The room was full of the scents of the men and women who had come to investigate the crime, but these smells, down here on the floor, they belonged to no policeman. These intimate stains, this spoor, could only belong to the man we’d come to kill.
“Yes, I have him,” I said. It came out a sensual growl.
Zenzele smiled. “Sic ‘im, boy!”
In a flash, I was up and out the back door. I slithered up the wall to the roof and stood there in the moonlight, sniffing the air. Zenzele joined me an instant later.
“He is close. A neighbor, I think,” I said.
“We must be as silent as shadows,” Zenzele said. “The mortals here are uneasy because of the murder. They will be vigilant tonight.”
I nodded absently, then slithered forward and dropped down into the inner courtyard, landing in a crouch behind an olive bush. There in the shadows behind the bush was an open space and a window. The victim’s window. The mulch there was disturbed, the little grasses crushed underfoot. My quarry’s scent was very strong. He must have come here often to peep on his victim. I could smell his lust, his leavings. I could practically see him in my mind’s eye: a young man, thirty at most, sound of body but slightly mad. The bitter odor of his madness inflamed my hunger. I was quaking with need. My fangs felt very long and sharp.
Zenzele slipped noiselessly beside me.
“He came here in secret to watch her,” I whispered. “Through this window. They knew each other. She invited him in the night he killed her.”
“And the other two?”
“A chance encounter, I imagine,” I said. “He saw them on the beach, alone and vulnerable, and acted on impulse.”
I turned from the window and peered around the courtyard. It was not so very late and several of the apartments were still lit up. Babble of television sets and radios. A woman laughed. A couple was quarreling. Yes, we would have to be careful!
I pointed. “His smell is all over the courtyard, but I believe he lives there. In that apartment. Let’s return to the roof and wait a while longer. There are still too many residents awake. We will take him later, when everyone is sleeping. When he believes he is safe and secure in his bed.”
She grinned at me and ascended. I followed. We crouched together on the rooftop, her hand on my shoulder, and watched the killer’s apartment.
After a while, I said, “You do
not like this new body.”
She didn’t answer for a long time. When she did she merely said, “It is strange.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “For everything.”
“You have changed before,” she shrugged. “I will get used to it.”
But I could see that it was difficult for her. Change is difficult for all immortals. We are like dolls on which the fashions of the times are regularly swapped out, but like dolls we do not age. We are always the same, frozen by the Strix in the form we first received the Blood, never older, never fatter or thinner. Not so much as a hair can be plucked from our scalp without the Living Blood regenerating the matter. If I should shave my beard or cut my hair tonight, I would wake from my slumber tomorrow evening with my hair grown out to the exact length that it was this very moment.
“If we were a mortal couple, you would have to watch me age,” I said. “Get old and gray, fat and wrinkly. That, I think, is the most unnatural thing about us. That we do not change. We never change.”
Zenzele chuckled. “I cannot imagine you fat or gray-headed.”
“But don’t you see? That is the problem,” I said.
Without change, there is no growth. It is why, I think, I make the same mistakes again and again. I wanted to say this to her as well, but I held my tongue. I do not think Zenzele would have understood. She did not question her existence as I do mine. She accepts her life as it is, lives in the moment, without much care for the past or what the future may bring. It annoys her when I wax philosophical.
But things were different now. I was different. I was not the man I’d been before. And I wondered if that change would turn out to be more than just a cosmetic one.
Perhaps now I would make all new mistakes!
Time passed. We watched the killer’s apartment. Once, his shadow moved across the curtained window. A few minutes later, it passed the other way.
“I am still me,” I said. I looked back at her, touching my temple with a finger. “Here, inside my mind. My thoughts are my own, my memories intact. I am as I’ve always been, whole and completely myself.”
“And what of your fledgling? Is he in there, too?”
“I have looked deep inside where the Other Voices sleep. I have searched far and wide for some trace of the man, but I have found nothing of Lukas in my other memories. Not so much as a whisper. When my Blood battled his, when I took possession of his body, his spirit was utterly destroyed.”
Zenzele looked satisfied. “Good,” she said. She settled closer to me. Leaned her head to mine.
The night deepened. The city quietened. One by one, the windows of the apartment complex went dark.
The killer’s window went dark, too.
Zenzele quickened next to me, her body tensing.
“Soon,” I said.
She trembled in her excitement.
I was trembling, too.
We waited, giving him time to slip into bed, to relax into sleep, perchance to dream. The sky was a vast gulf of stars, the moon a silver planet falling into the sea.
But he didn’t go to bed.
I heard movement in the killer’s apartment. His door cracked open and he peeked into the courtyard. He was a tall muscular man with dark greasy hair and a hooked nose. Not very attractive. He looked left and then right. There were security lights in the atrium but they were low to the ground and dim. Our killer slipped from his apartment and sank into the bushes, his shadow crawling across the wall behind him. He was dressed in a black jogging suit with white stripes down the legs.
We watched him with the fascination, perhaps, that the hawk watches the hare. It amused me that he should creep out like this tonight. He might as well have gift wrapped himself for us!
Zenzele moved silently away from me, creeping across the roof in the direction of our quarry. Her eyes were like silver coins in the dark, unblinking. I eased onto my belly and crawled after her.
The killer crept from bush to bush, peering anxiously around each time he advanced. He peeked into a window. I could smell his adrenaline, his sexual excitement. A car horn tooted on some nearby street and he ducked down, holding his breath. After a few minutes, he relaxed and rose back up. Peering in the window again, he began to massage the front of his pants. By this time Zenzele had worked her way around the roof so that she was directly above him. She looked at me and grinned. I grinned back at her.
I found a loose tile and wriggled it free, let it skitter down the roof and drop into the courtyard below.
The killer spun around in a crouch. He looked for the source of the noise I had made, eyes wide in the dark.
Zenzele slammed into him from the rear, landing on him feet first and smashing him to the ground hard enough to knock him unconscious. She scooped him into her arms and flew back to the rooftop an instant later. Pressing the unconscious killer to her breast, she crossed to the north side of the apartment complex and dropped over the side. I leapt to my feet and dove after, skimming down the wall of the complex and the rocky escarpment further on. We crossed a narrow road, leapt down another sheer escarpment and then raced across the roof of an ancient Byzantine church. Below, on the grounds of the old temple, was a wooded graveyard. The grove was dense and dark, a perfect place to do our business. I caught up to Zenzele as she laid the killer across a stone sarcophagus.
He began to rouse as Zenzele tugged his collar from his neck.
“Wha--?” he groaned. “Where am I? What are you doing?” He looked around in terror, eyes bulging from their sockets.
With a snarl, Zenzele latched onto his neck.
The killer yelped and pushed against her forehead, the muscles in his arm straining. An instant later, I pounced on him from the other side, grabbing his wrist and pressing his arm against his side. I sank my fangs into his neck, gashing open his carotid and jugular arteries. Blood, hot and salty, pulsed into my mouth in forceful draughts. Oh, the taste of it! The heat! I shivered in pleasure, sucking hard at the wound. I could feel him in my belly, his warmth spreading through my extremities, nourishing every empty, aching, hungry cell. He lunged and kicked atop the sarcophagus, trying to wriggle free, but he was helpless to resist.
It did not take long to drain him, not with the two of us at his throat. His struggles grew weaker. His heart began to stutter and he swooned, eyes rolling back in their sockets, his little dance of terror slowing… slowing.
I slid my palm to his chest and crushed his sternum, pressing his ribcage inwards to force out a few more drops of blood, one last little ejaculation of nourishment. Dead now, his head fell back, eyes glazed, jaw agape.
Zenzele grinned at me over his body, lips smeared with blood. I grinned back, penetrating her with my gaze.
See me, I thought. I am still the man you love!
A moment later, she leapt across the sarcophagus. I caught her in my arms and met her mouth with mine. Our fangs clashed as we kissed, each scrape sending chills running up and down my body. Her fingers on my shirt and trousers: tugging, unzipping. In a frenzy of need, I threw her back onto our victim’s body, pushing her legs into the air, tearing her garments away, ripping them in my eagerness. She parted her thighs for me, head thrown back and I placed my mouth upon the chalice of my desire. I paused, looking up at her, awaiting her permission. She pressed my head between her thighs, thrusting her hips toward me, grinding her sex against my lips.
I needed no further encouragement.
She howled as I lashed her with my tongue, grabbing my hair and pulling me against her, squeezing my head between her legs. I pleasured her with my tongue, my lips, my teeth, even my nose. Closing my eyes, I wagged my face between her legs, smearing her juices from cheek to cheek. And then I stood up and drove myself inside of her, as deeply and as forcefully as I could. She grabbed my hips and pulled me deeper. “Harder!” she cried. Our exertions forced the dead man from the tomb. He rolled limply off, fell to the ground with a boneless thump. We paid him no mind. He was nothing. Dead meat. Inconsequential.
&nbs
p; I climbed onto the sarcophagus atop her, perched upon my palms and toes, and continued to thrust into her. She reared up suddenly, driving her fangs into my neck, biting deep into my flesh. “Yes!” I shouted, taking delight in the pain, relishing it. “Take it! Take me!”
She sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, then fell back in a trembling stupor as my soul poured into her mind. Every thought, every deed, every memory and emotion I had ever experienced. I drove my fangs into her throat and devoured the cold blood that spurted in my mouth, her experiences flashing through my consciousness like sunlight on moving water.
All of me! I cried, or perhaps I only thought I cried it. Take it! Take all of me! It is yours. All that I am! Forever!
Afterwards, lying together atop the tomb:
“How long has it been?”
“Since we made love?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty years?”
“Too long.”
“Yes, it has been far too long.”
“And how long will you stay this time?”
“Until the bitter end.”
I laughed, sitting up beside her. The sky was salmon pink in the east, the clouds blue and purple, like fresh bruises. Soon, the city would awaken, and we had yet to dispose of the criminal we’d just killed. We could not allow him to be discovered as he was, neck half gnawed through, flesh bled white. And it was too late to use the Blood to conceal the injuries we had inflicted upon him. He had been dead too long.
Zenzele sat up beside me, an expression of annoyance on her face. “You do not believe me?”
“Would you ask such a thing of me?” was my response. “It may be thousands of years before this body succumbs to the ravages of time. Lukas was a powerful blood drinker. I may yet live for many millennia.”
“But you will die.”
“Yes. I am no longer an Eternal.”
“You know this to be true? Without a doubt?”
“I can feel it in my bones. His flesh was imperfect, and not even my powerful blood can remake it into something it was never meant to be. I will live longer than Lukas might have lived, much longer perhaps, but not forever.”
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 29