by Aya DeAniege
“Of course not.”
“I want proof,” Lu said, pulling a little knife from inside his jacket.
“Proof that I didn’t break Council law? Are you mad?”
“Then I want proof you’re a fucking vampire,” I countered snarkily.
Lu arched an eyebrow. “Fuck? Now that’s a word I don’t hear often.”
“Her first. We don’t know if you carry any ancient, dormant disease since you won’t allow anyone to check on you.”
“Are you afraid the bubonic plague will come back? You’re starting to sound like those fearmongerers on the television news broadcasting station.”
“You shouldn’t watch that. It’s bad for your brain.”
“They have lovely hosts. I like listening to them, and it won’t rot my brain. I’m not foolish enough to believe what they say about the end of the world.”
Quin grumbled. His rumbling and muttering sounded very much like a grandson trying to get along with a doddering grandfather.
He stood and took the knife from Lu, then studied the tip of the blade.
“It’s sharp. I use it to bleed the bags they bring me. Just cleaned too, in case you’re worried about contamination.”
Quin seemed to glare up at the ceiling. Then he shook his head.
“I can’t take your word for that. If she got an infection and died from this, the Council would take my head, not yours.”
“Rubbing alcohol is there,” Lu said, motioning behind him and to the door. “Fetch it, boy.”
“Are your bones bothering you?” Quin asked as he walked away.
“Bones always bother me these days,” Lu snapped. “I was turned too old. Now I’m starved too much. These morons won’t even allow me to drink from the living. Can you believe that? What would I do with a full-grown man? With how starved they keep me, I might as well be mortal. I stand no chance.”
“Uh huh,” Quin said as he walked back into the room.
“They’re hobbling your poor Maker, boy. Have you no heart?”
“You had me thrown in a box.”
Quin sounded desperate almost, as if he were holding onto that memory to keep from falling under Lu’s thrall. Despite being apart for hundreds of years, he was no freer than he had been during the plague.
“For your own good. He was getting close, and I could no longer control him. You being in that box saved your life.”
“You’ve had four hundred years to explain that.”
“He’s always watching, always listening. What could I do about it?”
“There’s only one thing,” Quin muttered as he sat beside me with the blade and a little medical kit. “And I know that’s not an option on the table.”
He opened the kit and eyed the contents.
“Some of it might be expired, but the cleaner is brand new,” Lu said. “Expired, it’s still good. Just bandages.”
Quin pulled out a little package and ripped the top off. He sniffed the contents before he pulled out the alcohol wipe and very carefully cleaned the blade. Once it was cleaned to his satisfaction, he set it just so on the table and snapped up another one.
This one received the same treatment as the last. A sniff to be sure the contents were correct, then Quin turned to me and took my hand gently in his. He swabbed just above my wrist, leaving a cool area as the alcohol evaporated.
I couldn’t help but shiver as the alcohol wipe was pulled away.
Quin dropped it on the table beside the first one and then plucked up the knife.
“Hey,” he said to me, pulling my eyes away from the blade as he smiled. “It’s just a nick.”
“Why?” I asked as Quin set the blade back on the table.
I should have asked before the whole thing was done. Vampires were supposed to be able to identify others of their kind by look alone.
“The first few days are difficult to tell without this.”
“Ow!”
“Sharp blades sometimes delay the pain reaction,” Quin said.
He was already grabbing a bit of gauze to wipe the blood away.
“See?” he said to Lu. “Still bleeding. Still living.”
“Son of a bitch,” I snapped, clamping my hand over the mark on my arm.
It was almost like a paper cut, multiplied by about ten and with some salt added in for good measure. While it hadn’t hurt at first, it was certainly making up for lost time.
Quin pulled my hand away and wiped the blood once more before placing a little disposable bandage across the line on my wrist.
“Oh dear,” he said with no inflection whatsoever. Like he knew he had to say the words, but didn’t want to participate any longer. “There’s blood on my hand.”
Just a little drop, on his finger. As Quin reached for his mouth, I realized what he was doing. Even if the spot of blood was unintentional, he was going to consume it. He obviously—given his tone of voice—recalled what I had said just a few minutes before.
If he licked his finger, I wouldn’t get a show of power later.
I lunged forward and latched onto the finger.
His eyes grew wide as I sucked the remains of my blood off his finger. As I sat back, there was an audible choking sound. Quin’s mouth fell open as I wiped at my lips with the back of my hand.
“I did not consent to you tasting my blood in public.”
“That’s not a thing,” Lu said.
“That’s definitely not a thing,” Quin said in agreement.
“Well, it should be a thing,” I said. “Your turn, old man.”
“That’s a rude thing to say,” Lu said, malicious intent dripping from his words.
“You accused me of being a fledgling. Prove you’re immortal, then.”
Lu stood and retrieved then knife. He slashed his left hand with it, keeping his palm towards me as he did so. The knife clattered to the table as blood spilled. Lu grabbed a gauze and wiped the blood away.
I saw a clear view of the tendons in his left hand. The slice stood bloodless for what seemed like forever. Then it began sealing from both ends, knitting together neatly in the middle as if it had never been damaged.
Ladies and gentlemen, they’re actually vampires.
Now you may lose your mind.
That was exactly what happened to me at that moment. As Lu took his seat once more, I just stared at the spot where his hand had been. There were drops of blood on the table. The blade still had blood on it.
Quin picked up the knife and licked it.
“Really, boy?” Lu asked.
Quin responded with a shrug and stuck the blade into his mouth. I’m guessing he was lapping at every speck of Lu’s blood that he could.
He hadn’t had fresh Maker’s Blood in four hundred years. Who knew when he’d get it again.
Ever so slowly, it dawned on me that I was sitting in the house of a vampire. That everything Quin had told me was true.
The entire night hit me like a ton of bricks. As my head slowly began working again, it was trying to make sense of the tale Quin had told.
There were holes, but those holes weren’t because Quin was telling it wrong, or making it up as he went along. He had told these stories to other vampires over the centuries.
Do not panic. Predators sense fear.
I had gone in with a sense of disbelief, hoping not to get so wound up in the possibility that I believed it before it was proven to be true. And when it came time and evidence was placed before me, I could hardly wrap my head around it.
Vampires existed and had been haunting our world long before I was born, before my family was founded and before most modern countries were even an idea in the minds of their founders.
“Vampire,” Lu huffed out, “I do believe that is what the young ones are calling it. In my time, we called ourselves gods, because that was what we were. And now we live in the shadows, begging humanity for scraps like a fearful mutt.
“Don’t you dare call me an old man again.”
I stared at L
u, a hundred things flitting through my mind. All the things I wanted to say, to do, and none of it came out of my mouth. If I said even one of those things to Lu, it was Quin who would suffer the consequences.
He had suffered enough at Lu’s hands.
“Ask what you came after, we should get going,” I said.
“You don’t want to ask my Maker questions?” Quin asked. “I heard that was required if you met.”
“They suggest it, it is not required,” I said. “Just do your thing, and we can go. I’m tired, probably not thinking straight anyhow.”
“Yes, surely you didn’t come just to check on me,” Lu said. “You could have done that over the phone.”
“I came for the item of mine you took from me,” Quin said. “The carving of the dog.”
The carving of the dog, as in the animal that his father carved for him, or a newer one? If he was making reference to the former, then I knew it was gone. As for the latter?
Well, Quin hadn’t mentioned collecting sculptures at all, just paintings.
“Whatever would you want that for?” Lu asked.
“I have an interested party looking to buy an original carving. I trust you’ve kept better care of it than your own things, considering everything else was stripped of you.”
“Yes, it’s here somewhere,” Lu said.
“Fantastic, where?” Quin asked.
“Do you know where my items were stored?” Lu countered.
“In the Archives,” Quin said with a shake of his head. “Where else would they be?”
“Along with his items. They know I won’t go anywhere near those things. Not with him right there. Practically in the room! No, if I went, it would spell disaster for everyone.”
I felt like they had an entirely different conversation in front of me. What I didn’t understand was why they didn’t switch to another language if they wanted to talk without my realizing what they were talking about. It was like they were pantomiming the words. The sentences made sense alone, but when placed together, they lost their context.
Unless Lu was implying that the carved item Quin wanted was in the Archives, with the rest of his items.
“So, you were here all night?” Quin asked.
“Of course,” Lu raised his leg and lifted his pants slightly, revealing a black band. “They told me it is called a GPS tracker. If I leave the house, it goes off, and I get tackled by the Council’s hounds.”
“Then why is there a car in the garage?”
“I don’t know. I don’t go in the garage. Perhaps the guards drive themselves and keep the vehicle here. Or George has a friend over. How am I to know? I can barely work the television set, let alone a vehicle. There are so many buttons now. Why couldn’t they have stayed with the on and the off? A remote shouldn’t be larger than the television itself.”
He sounded the way I expected an older, computer illiterate person to sound. But there wasn’t annoyance or frustration in his voice. Just a desperate sort of edge that Quin dismissed with a sound.
“They showed you how to use the television.”
“But every time I turn around, they’re changing it around again,” Lu protested.
“That’s because mortals are in a technological revolution, you can’t keep the old stuff because it just won’t work. What about the radio? You used to like music.”
“It’s all talk about celebrities and women being vain and stupid cows. No one wants to listen to that. The news stations don’t come in well. One of them, they broadcast from right in downtown, but I can’t get it on my radio. George said it’s because of interference, but I think he does it on purpose. That’s my only connection to the outside world.”
“I’ll talk to them about that,” Quin said. “If you could be trusted online, you could get all that stuff. But you can’t, because you did something bad. So, they have to be careful about what you have access to.”
“It was one mortal.”
“One ten-year-old boy,” Quin said. “Who escaped, I should remind you. You’re lucky they couldn’t talk him into fingering you as an immortal, or you’d be at the bottom of the ocean, Death or no Death.”
“I didn’t even get to feed off him,” Lu grumbled in annoyance.
“Which is why you aren’t allowed living blood. Maybe try following the ethical guidelines.”
Removed section of tape.
I didn’t do that, Quin took the tablet from me and cut out a piece of the recording. Abused ten-year-olds are okay, but start talking about the ethical code, and every vampire in the room drops into another language and then destroys the record.
They didn’t end up fighting, not that I could tell. It seemed more like Quin was pleading with his Maker to behave, and Lu was making excuses and blaming others.
Quin had appeared distant, but Lu was outright mad. The vampire had no moral compass. It wasn’t even like I was anything more than a dog at Quin’s side, once it was proved I was still mortal. We humans are nothing to Lu. We could be a nice leafy green.
No shame in eating it, because it had no feelings, thoughts, or voice. And it was good for you.
Even other vampires were beneath him. Lu’s only connection to the other immortals may well have been Quin. His guards weren’t even beings enough to deserve a title beyond hound. He only referred to the one by name, and I couldn’t help but think he had only done it to manipulate Quin.
I had grown up with manipulators, so I knew how they worked. Perhaps the oddities I was seeing would have affected me more if I didn’t know what a complete asshole Lu was. If he had managed to convince me that he might have a heart before proving he was a vampire. Maybe then I would have been with Quin, thinking about poor pathetic Lu being taken advantage of by the Council.
“I’d like to see how this works,” Lu said as Quin handed the tablet back to me.
I checked to make certain it was recording, and that Quin hadn’t erased the entire night, then put it back around my neck.
“He’s run out of things to talk about, surely.”
“We could talk about art,” Quin said.
“Is this going to be another thread through history? Your stories about specific years in time are much more interesting,” I said.
“Yes, I think art is a good one,” Quin said. “It is how I started off making money, after all. And a lifelong hobby of mine.”
“The boy used to beg me for an art tutor. Months and months, he pleaded. Finally, I told him I would bring in a tutor if he—”
“She doesn’t need to know how I debased myself for art,” Quin said. “Margaret says we have to keep a little back because mortals don’t see the world the way we do. They don’t understand, and then they won’t let you forget.”
“That you eat babies,” I said sternly.
“Used to eat babies,” Quin said defensively.
“And he rapes children, mutilating them for shits and giggles,” I snapped.
“Goodness no,” Lu said.
“He has his fun until they get too old for him, then he does it,” Quin said.
“And oh, how the boy cried and wept when he lured them home for me.”
“Anyway,” Quin said loudly, drowning out whatever Lu attempted to add. “About the art.”
Take recording to a sound specialist. Find out what Lu said then find a way to stick him in a box and toss him into the ocean.
It began long before I recall. I liked to draw things, but artist was not one of those things which I considered for a profession. We didn’t have art in the village, could be why I never thought of it.
I was aware of statues, but could never sculpt anything of mud that looked like much beyond a dirty snowman. Sculpting can be good when done right, but I prefer the brush strokes of a painting.
After Lu had taken me home, I was ever aware of art. It was on the walls of his home, in the statues standing guard, and on the floor. At that time mosaics and reliefs were the main art. Lu was not an avid collector.
The
pieces you see hanging here, I found and gave to him over the years. None of them have ever impressed him much, but they are now worth millions. I’m a little surprised they’re still hanging, and in such good condition too.
The Hagia Sophia made a lasting impression on me. Not only in art but God as well.
I was a born-again believer, though as far as anyone knew I had always believed. At that time, it was their religion. Now, it is different.
Being inside the Hagia Sophia was awe inspiring. To the masters of later years, our art may have been primitive.
Art is constantly evolving and changing. It is a glimpse into the past, but also into the heart and soul of the artist. You get to see the world as they see it, even if the image they paint is not real to life.
While still mortal, my studies were mainly about science and literature. Books have evolved as well. I found the literature I read to be boring and humourless.
Though that could be because of who chose the words I would read. Most of my reading was for practice anyhow.
Language was of great importance, but if one wanted to be successful, one had to speak several languages. Ethics didn’t always guide translators. I understood that as I learned, so I did throw myself into my studies of that area.
Art as painting wasn’t new, but it also wasn’t popular enough for Lu.
What did he just say? Hey, back it up!
What?
I’ve got three minutes of nothing I can understand. He said something, and you switched languages.
What was the last thing I said in English?
Art wasn’t popular enough for Lu.
Right, he wouldn’t hire an art teacher. It was beneath the dependant of a lord to learn such things. I would have been better off declaring myself pagan than to have a desire for art. The moment I laid eyes on the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia, I knew.
The world captured in colour.
I begged Lu for an art teacher for six months before he relented. I was ten at the time. He demanded I stop resisting him.
Even five years on, I fought each time.
For the chance to do art, I stopped. I began doing as he commanded, at nearly every turn.
An art teacher was found, and I began my lessons. My art was never allowed to remain. It was burned the moment it was complete. No one ever talked about what talent I might or might not have because while I was taught art, I still was not permitted to pursue it.