The door creaked slowly open making her jump. A chilling surge of air flooded through the guardroom causing an involuntary shiver. She wearily got to her feet to close it. The coffee mug slipped from her fingers as she recoiled. The gasp was lodged in her throat and did not make it out. The scream was even further down her oesophagus. Standing right in front of her with beguiling, hazel-coloured eyes was the man she had last seen two days before at the petrol station. She instinctively backed up several steps as he took one long, deliberate stride towards her, holding out his hands in a placatory gesture.
“Do not be afraid, you have nothing to fear from me.” The same words he had spoken to her before in the shop. She felt the fear subsiding as a warm feeling washed over her.
“Sebastian.” It was what she had heard his friend, the female, call him. She said it not as a question but more just a blunt statement of fact or a prediction that has come to fruition at last. He smiled but did not query how she knew.
“How did you find me?” she asked breathlessly.
“I have been searching for you for a long time.” She did not know whether he was talking figuratively or literally and did not notice or care that he had ignored her question. Once more she was totally consumed by the irresistible pull of his hazel eyes, the light sparkling from within and the aura of powerful calm that radiated out. She suddenly realised that this time she had not removed her pistol from its holster and glanced down at it instinctively.
He saw the look and smiled. “You won’t need that with me. Save your bullets for others.”
She felt herself being drawn into his eyes, her focus narrowed and the peripherals of her vision began to grey out as she started to sink down those endless, honey-coloured wells to the black depths below. She put a hand out to steady herself and her knees wobbled beneath her.
Before she knew it he had closed the gap between them, his arms were behind her head and cradling her under her legs as he effortlessly scooped her up in mid-swoon and set her gently down on the edge of the table. It was as though she weighed no more than a small child and he still supported her until she regained her balance. Although they were so close now, for some bizarre reason she was distracted by the total lack of odour from him which was odd if only because of its absence. His touch was cool; comforting yet unyielding, like gripping hold of a statue honed from immovable stone. He had pronounced cheek bones, perfectly coiffured hair and those piercing eyes again. She felt as though she must drag her gaze away but found it so very hard. The entire effect was of one enthused with health and vitality and full of life, which seemed ironic given that he was a vampire.
“Who are you?” she was finally able to stammer.
“As you said already; I am Sebastian.”
It was hard to formulate or elucidate any thoughts and so she continued with an uncharacteristic stutter. “You saved us. From the infected. Thank you.”
“You are so very welcome. It was my,” he searched for the right word, “my pleasure.”
She blurted out the next words before she even had time to think about them and she was not sure where the thought came from. It seemed completely evident, indisputable but something that her mind had been denying, eluding and hiding from in the quiet of the night. At Headley Court people had avoided the subject, not allowing themselves to believe the account of the attack at the petrol station yet not having any other potential explanation. It had been easier to avoid the subject but now it seemed to Collins that there was no other possible explanation.
“You are a vampire.”
He inclined his head slightly and again did not directly answer her, other than through implication. “I was human once, just like you.”
There were so many questions. Unlike a moment before when she had found it hard to think straight, now it was difficult deciding what to ask first. She tripped over her words as they tumbled out of her mouth, one sentence forming before the previous one had even been finished.
After a slow, slightly awkward start they spoke at length about his past, his life while he was a human and how he was ‘turned’ into a vampire. He had been born in Bordeaux although she could not exactly work out the year and he seemed either reluctant to say or did not fully know himself. His life had been reasonably unremarkable until he had moved to Marseille and started working at the docks as a rigger on French merchant sailing vessels, and frequenting certain bars of lesser repute in Marseille’s slum areas. He described life in detail, in what she assumed must be roughly around the middle or towards the end of the nineteenth century and it was totally enthralling to hear him speak of it.
Just before he had become turned, he had been involved with a woman and had got into a fight over the affair. His attacker pulled a knife on him but Sebastian had managed to disarm him and used it upon his aggressor. The man had not died but had been able to identify him and Sebastian was blamed and vilified. The woman turned out to be well-connected and married to a ship-owner. Although Sebastian’s advances had been encouraged and appreciated by her at the time, as soon as the liaison became common knowledge she changed her story and claimed that his attention had been a nuisance and that he had been molesting her. One night shortly after the fight, he was hunted and chased through the streets of Marseille and cornered by a gang of dock-hands who were in the employ of the lady’s husband. They would surely have killed him but for the intervention of a certain stranger.
In one of the ale-houses that he frequented there was a small group who always seemed to occupy a remote, gloomy area of the bar. They kept themselves to themselves and wore dark cloaks and hoods much of the time, as many did in those days, so that he had rarely seen their faces. He occasionally had the weirdest feeling, as though they were watching him although he had never actually made eye contact with them. As he was cornered by the dock-hands Sebastian feared for his life but one of the strange, hooded people from the bar jumped down in front of him from some roof above, startling the gang and creating a brief distraction. As usual, the stranger was wrapped in a dark cloak as though feeling the cold, even though the night was stifling with hardly a breath of air. At first the hooded character bantered with the gang but the men were crazed through cheap alcohol and bloodlust. As the assailants turned back to their vengeful task and tried to get at Sebastian the stranger lashed out and in a few moments one of the attackers lay dying, blood dripping from a wound that had been opened with unseen blades. This obviously enraged the gang but seemed to have an even more startling effect on the stranger who entered some kind of killing frenzy, moving amongst them with poetic speed and grace as though the attackers were all motionless whilst the hooded figure slashed and whirled. Within mere seconds the rest of the men had been slaughtered.
Now Sebastian was convinced that his death was surely imminent. The hooded figure approached as Sebastian stood cowering. The fear and exhaustion seemed to overcome him and he lost consciousness and that was the last that he would be fully aware for some time. His memories of the subsequent events were hazy. He was unconscious for a while, how long exactly he did not know although it might have been merely hours or perhaps days. During the brief moments when he was awake it was to a blur of people and activity. There were patches of lucidity interspersed with strange visions and nightmares. He could not distinguish reality from illusion, was he dreaming of being awake or having a waking dream? It was hard to know which memories were real and which his brain had invented. At times he found himself in a strange room in an unfamiliar house but was not sure whether he was imprisoned or being cared for. He could remember shivering so hard it hurt his limbs, and feeling feverish and aching all over his body, right down to the very core of his being. He was nauseous and there was a burning deep in his belly. Then the next thing he could remember was waking up with a ravenous, insatiable thirst and being introduced to the vampire clan as its newest member.
Sebastian had not spoken of such things in a long time and the flush of memories were all still vivid and carried with them str
ong emotions. He found the conversation with this human strangely liberating and totally different from any he had with his comrade vampires. He spoke about some of the nicer times of his long life and it reminded him how much he missed being human. Now that society had collapsed he understood how much he had yearned to be part of it again all these long years. Darius had directed them all to go out and find the humans in order that they might forge a relationship with them, and he was just doing what he had been told to do, but it was an easy order to follow as his heart craved this interaction more than he had realised.
Collins sat in silence, spell-bound by his account, transfixed by the images of life in those days gone by. There was something about the way he talked and stared at her, so intense and earnest, that brought his words to life. Throughout his tale she could imagine the cool, salty wind blowing off the sea. She could smell the docks, hear the clank of chains on the masts and envisage life as it was then.
It was talk of the vampires however, that particularly engrossed her. “My God, I just can’t imagine what it must have been like; waking up to discover that all of a sudden your existence was never going to be the same again, from that day on you would be a vampire.”
“Yes, it took some getting used to,” he nodded soberly.
“So what are the rest of your clan like then? I mean, that woman from the petrol station, is she like, your girlfriend?” She felt silly saying it, like a jealous sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and the word ‘girlfriend’ seemed woefully inadequate. For some reason though she did feel an inexplicable twinge of jealousy although she had no idea why and tried to banish the emotion.
“Flavia? No.” His answer was swift and sharp, almost an admonishment. “She has another mate, another from my clan.”
“Oh, I guess I just assumed…” Collins did not know what she was saying. She was nervous and the words were just babbling out before she could think about it. She immediately regretted sounding even more juvenile than before.
He paused and looked uncertain, then shook his head, looking down at the floor.
“No. She has been with her mate for quite some time, since before I knew her.”
“So do you have a… a ‘mate’?” Again she felt that confusing surge of irrational jealousy and tried to stop herself from blushing. She hardly knew this man, this vampire before her, and as beguiling as he was, she had absolutely no business feeling any such emotions. She did not know why she felt as she did and she could feel herself acting completely out of character. Perhaps it was the improbability of the situation or his effect upon her. Perhaps.
“No. I do not.”
He returned her look evenly and unblinking, his hazel eyes boring deep into her. It was hard to tear herself away from his stare and her attention never strayed far from his gaze. As they spoke she became aware of small details of his features. His lips were thinner than she remembered but with a perfectly neat little dip in the middle of the top one, and when he smiled he tended to do so with a closed mouth. She had yet to see his teeth and found it simultaneously intriguing and terrifying to contemplate what they might be like, the supposedly killer incisors of legend. His nose was thin, vaguely Roman she would have said, but somehow majestic or arrogant and he flared his nostrils occasionally when he spoke as though testing the air. He had a full head of luxurious, thick hair and she could imagine him having been immensely proud of it when he was still human. However, for some reason she could not envisage a vampire preening himself in front of a mirror, if they used mirrors at all, or did they avoid them as in fable and folklore? But it was to the eyes that her attention returned mostly; she completely forgot about the time while they conversed in their private little room, ignoring the outside and everyone else.
“How many of you are there in your clan?” she asked.
“Seven. I was the last to join.”
“That sounds a lot. I guess I’d always imagined vampires of mythology to be solitary creatures really.”
“Yes, in truth it is quite a lot – probably too many. It leads to…” It was his turn to be lost for words, “…to tensions.”
“So are the others much older than you?”
“Yes. I am the newest member; some of the others have been vampires much, much longer than I. Darius, our Clan Leader, has been a vampire for many human generations, I do not know exactly how many. I do not think he knows himself. After a while it ceases to matter.”
“Was Darius alive in the time of Dracula then? And was he a real person, a real vampire, or was he purely fictitious?”
He smiled. “I wondered when you would ask me that. I know that in your society there are many different stories and rumours as to whether Count Dracula was a real person or perhaps as many believe, based on Vlad The Impaler.
“Vlad was a bloodthirsty ruler in the fourteen hundreds who lived in Wallachia in Romania. There are many who think that Vlad was an actual vampire himself. The truth is that the Count Dracula from the book by Bram Stoker was not a real person but merely a character created by the author. It is correct however that he was indeed loosely based on Vlad, also known as Vlad III of Wallachia or Vlad Dracula. However Vlad was not a vampire and although he did impale his victims, the reports of his brutality are, as is so often the case, grossly exaggerated and have grown with the passage of time. The tales of his gory reprisals towards his enemies were embellished in order to create an aura of fear around him.
“His father, Vlad II, was a Romanian hero who fought the invading Ottoman Turks. Because of his bravery and services against the Turkish army he was admitted to the Order of the Dragon which was founded by Sigismund, King of Luxembourg, Hungary and various other countries, as well as, most ironically, being at one time the Holy Roman Emperor. Sigismund founded the secret Order of the Dragon which was created to uphold Christianity and defend the empire against the infidel Ottoman Turks. After being admitted to the Order, Vlad II took the name Vlad Dracul, dracul being Romanian for ‘the dragon’, or alternatively, and again quite paradoxically, ‘the devil’.
“His son Vlad III took the name Vlad Dracula; dracula merely means ‘son of dracul’. He continued where his father had left off, by slaughtering thousands of Turks. His favourite method of killing them was by impaling them on a sharp spike earning him his name, Vlad the Impaler. Vampires were quite commonly known about through folklore in that part of the world in those days. However most people would not openly admit to believing in them and certainly wouldn’t talk about them in public. It was said that Vlad the Impaler drank the blood of his enemies as it dripped down the spikes because he believed it gave him unnatural strength and long life. In truth he was not a vampire and did not drink blood although he embraced and harboured these stories as much as he harboured actual vampires behind the walls of his castle.
“He was the patron to a very small number of extremely powerful vampires, exactly how many I do not know. He provided for them a safe haven where they could rest unnoticed and unmolested, a practice that has continued throughout history and even, occasionally, to this day. When they went forth at night in order to feed throughout the superstitious villages of the surrounding lands they were occasionally sighted by people who only rarely lived to tell the tale. Perhaps it was they who drank the blood dripping down the spikes of impaled victims, I do not know for certain. The stories were that Count Vlad Dracula himself wandered the lands preying on the simple people, taking their blood and leaving most for dead. This gave to Vlad a truly fearful reputation that he encouraged and it dissuaded many potential enemies from attacking him. So Vlad was indeed Count Dracula in real life, but he was not the vampire Dracula from the book.
“When Vlad III finally died the vampires spread such fear amongst the servants who worked in the castle that some fled the castle babbling insanely. Any that remained became lost to relatives and friends on the outside and continued to serve their new masters. It was believed that Vlad the Impaler lived on after death and although his armies no longer served his cause, t
he castle was never attacked again. Slowly with the passing of many years fewer people went anywhere near the area, believing it to be cursed. The lands and paths leading up to the castle became overgrown and virtually impenetrable. The castle had been well placed anyway in a location that made access rather difficult and hence kept the castle safe from marauding armies. It was forgotten about by all except those who lived in its shadow and remembered the terrifying tales from days of yore. The stories turned into myth and legend from the darker days and were rarely repeated, fading with time. But the vampires liked this anonymity that it gave them and they were still very much alive within the walls of their home. Or at least that is how the stories go that I have been told.”
Collins was silent throughout, speechless and absolutely riveted by this window into the distant past that linked together fable and fact, transforming the fantasy of Count Dracula into a very real and terrifying reality. Had it not been for the last couple of weeks she would have found it all too hard to believe. Now though having seen society come crumbling down and normal people turn into crazed, bloodthirsty creatures not dissimilar to zombies, she was more open to the seemingly fantastical. Besides, Vlad the Impaler was a real figure with historical truth behind him. And she was sat at that very moment talking to a real vampire.
Her head span, she felt almost like she was watching herself from outside of her body, as though she may pass out at any moment. She gripped the table edge and closed her eyes for a second. It took her several seconds to regain her composure.
“That sounds like a whole lot of killing going on. They sure were ruthless. So if Darius is really old has he also killed a lot of people then?”
The Blood of the Infected (Book 1): Once Bitten, Twice Die Page 34