The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3)

by Joseph Duncan

  The blood drinkers of the east must understand this, I thought, else the world would have been overrun by our kind long, long ago.

  It was good that I had learnt this lesson.

  Before now, I had only worried about my hunger when I imagined living among mortal men. Now I understood that I must be wary of the mortals as well. Kuhl had proven that it was possible for them to track us to our lair, to attack us. If I weren’t so invulnerable to harm, he might actually have killed us.

  If I still planned to live among the mortals, I would have to do more than protect them from my hunger. I would have to protect them from their own ambitions as well.

  We must conceal the nature of our living blood, I decided. For their sake and for ours. We must guard the truth until the world of mortal men has forgotten it. Even if we must dress our nature in the clothes of myth and spirit-tales. Even if we must hide our true faces behind the masks of gods and monsters.

  15

  I think it was then that I first realized how ignorant I truly was. I was old, and yet, in many ways, I was like a babe fallen from his papoose. I was lost in a world I did not fully understand. I had been transformed by a cruel blood drinker, a demented creature that knew only hunger and the need to dominate, yet in destroying him I had made myself an orphan. Out of love for my mortal family, I had never ventured far from the valley of my birthplace. I had remained there, isolated, untrained, until the great mountains of ice came and swallowed everything… even myself. I had thoroughly explored my abilities in the years that I was a recluse, yet in all other ways, I was a child. As much as the boy I thought to father.

  I shared these thoughts with my adoptive son that night as we trailed after the Neirie exodus: that we must safeguard the living blood we carried in our bodies, lest we infest the world with the curse of our blood lust. That we must play the part of gods or magic spirits until the truth about our nature is forgotten again by mortal men. That we must make no others like ourselves unless we are certain of their trustworthiness.

  He nodded in agreement, confessing that he had taken Kuhl’s memories along with his blood. He had experienced the subjugation of the Pruss as if it were his own life, he said. He had shared Kuhl’s bitterness and thirst for vengeance.

  “You cannot imagine what he lived through, Father,” Ilio said gravely. “His masters were so wicked. I understand why Kuhl was so angry, yet in his hatred, he was no better than the men who owned him. In the end, he was just as cruel as they. We cannot allow men like Kuhl access to the powers the living blood has granted us. He would devour the world, thinking his suffering justified his actions.”

  The moon was bright in the sky, the weather balmy and pleasant. We walked peacefully side by side, following the trail of the Neirie exodus. I looked up at the trees shifting somnolently in the cool night breeze, listened to the insects chirring, the rhythmic croaking of frogs in some nearby brook, and I couldn’t bear the thought of this beautiful world coming to ruin.

  “I plan to live among the Tanti for a while,” I said. “These people are my descendants. I will stay until your child is born, Ilio, and then I go to find the blood drinkers of the east. I would like to know our history, and learn the customs of our brethren. You may accompany me on this journey, or you may stay with the Tanti. You are free to follow whatever path you choose. I am not your father, no matter what you like to think. I am not your master either. You are your own man, Ilio. I only tell you my plans because I love you, and because I enjoy your company.”

  “I love you too, Thest,” Ilio said. “You are as much a father to me as any mortal man ever was. I barely even remember the man who sired me, or my life among the Denghoi.”

  His words touched my heart, and I stopped on the path, turning fully toward him. My hands shot out of their own accord and grasped him by the shoulders. “I have committed terrible sins against you, Ilio!” I said with sudden vehemence. “I cursed you with this hunger for blood out of selfishness. You were mortally wounded, and I could not bear to lose you! I know you do not hate me now, but I fear you will someday. I fear you will curse the day you set eyes upon me!”

  “You have saved my life again and again and again, Thest. How could I ever hate you? If not for you, we would not be going now to live among these people; I would not be expecting a child. I am going to be a father, Thest! My bloodline, and the bloodline of my people, will live on in the mortal world. You have not just guarded my life, you have preserved the Denghoi people.”

  His eyes lit up as a great truth suddenly occurred to him.

  “Thest!” he gasped, seizing ahold of me back. “You say these people are your living descendants? Do you know what that means?”

  “What?” I asked, startled by his excitement.

  “If these Tanti are truly your descendants, then you are the great great grandfather of the child I have made with this Neirie woman!”

  I gaped at the boy, stunned by the revelation. I couldn’t believe the thought hadn’t occurred to me before. It seemed too incredible, and yet it was true! I felt the certainty of it in my soul. His woman Priss was just as much my descendant as the old chieftain Paba and all the rest of the Tanti.

  Ilio danced in a circle, kicking his feet up and laughing. “I will have to call you grandfather now!” he cried.

  He was right. I would be his child’s most ancient grandsire.

  Ilio dashed ahead, taunting me, “Hurry up, Grandfather! You’ve become much too slow in your old age!”

  He leapt into the trees as I stood staring after him stupidly. I could hear him crashing through the canopy of the forest, his laughter receding into the distance. Finally, I followed.

  Grinning, I gave chase through the dense network of limbs and leafy branches, jumping from tree to tree as the land rose steadily higher. He was a fast little monkey. His smaller stature gave him a slight advantage when we travelled through the treetops, but I finally caught up with him. He had paused at the apex of the ridge, hanging out from the trunk of a tree so that his body was outside the greenery. I stopped there too, standing with him near the top of the soaring oak, so high we swayed back and forth in the breeze.

  “There it is,” he said. “The village of the Tanti.”

  He was pointing down into a densely forested valley. There, on the shore of a great lake, stood the tiny homes of the descendants of the River People. My people, I thought, staring solemnly at all the winking torches that lit the settlement’s avenues. I felt something lodge in my chest looking down on the village. The rugged gray peaks of the Carpathian mountains, capped in gleaming snow, loomed over the village, but it only reminded me of the great mountains that guarded our people so many years ago. A protective presence, those mountains, not oppressive or threatening in any way.

  “The village of the Tanti,” I echoed softly.

  In truth, I felt as if I were looking through time, not space. I imagined that my family was waiting down there for me, that I might descend from this ridge and rejoin my mates and my children, and that all the years that separated me from that most precious moment in time would evaporate like a sad dream in the honey-colored light of dawn.

  “What are you waiting for, Grandfather?” Ilio cried. “Let us go check on our new family!”

  He flew from the upper boughs of the oak, making it sway violently back and forth for a moment. I watched him descend to the canopy of the forest below, his arms thrown out to his sides, his clothes flapping as he dived like a bird of prey, growing smaller and smaller. He disappeared in the lush green foliage with a resounding crunch.

  I grinned, shaking my head with a mixture of amusement and consternation-- praying to my ancestors that the fearless boy hadn’t impaled himself on some sharp tree limb—then, with youthful impulsiveness, I pulled back on the narrow trunk of the tree and used the forward momentum to launch myself into the wind.

  Interlude

  1

  For a moment I was twice lost in time, dreaming of my home in the Swabian Alb as I d
escended into the valley of the Tanti-- as I sat in the spare bedroom of my penthouse in present day Belgium, recounting all this to my captive Lukas Jaeger. For a moment, I didn’t know which was real. Was I in the past, dreaming of the future? Was I in the future, dreaming of the past? It was the sound of motorized traffic that finally snagged my floundering psyche. It caught in my mind like a hook, reeling me through the millennia to the present. One moment I was falling through the treetops, dreaming of my mates, my brood of squabbling children, as summer foliage whipped past me in a rustling green blur… and the next moment I was in my penthouse in the here and now. Liege. Winter.

  I felt a constriction in my chest, as though my heart were being squeezed, as if I could no longer draw breath. Yet, I am a vampire. My heart does not beat. I do not breathe—unless I wish to speak.

  I strove to still my mind. My soul was a gaping wound, spurting blood. Staunch the flow with serene thoughts, old monster, I counseled myself.

  In the icy streets below: the rumble and burp of automobiles. Horns honked. A siren wailed.

  Day was dawning on my beautiful snow-dusted city. Its pastel light glowed faintly on the bedchamber’s frosted windows. I could sense the denizens of the city rising with the sun, attending to their toiletries, bundling up in fur-trimmed coats (faux fur, of course, in this “civilized” era) before rushing off to their jobs in their rude and fuming vehicles.

  I shifted in my seat, wiped a tacky black tear from my left eye.

  Lukas watched me from his bed, his body motionless, saying nothing. He didn’t have to speak, however. He didn’t have to move. He could not conceal his emotions from my preternatural senses. His faintly frowning lips, the way his eyes shone back at me-- the flat and emotionless stare of a crocodile—all but shouted his disdain. My nostalgia disgusted him. For this mortal, love was an alien concept.

  “Are you aware of how horrible the present smells?” I asked.

  I saw a flicker of confusion in those soulless, reptilian eyes.

  “Of course you don’t,” I said with a smile. “Why would you? You were birthed in the fetor of this poisonous modern world. The stench of this age is as natural to you as your own skin.”

  Though it annoyed him to ask, I saw that he was too curious to resist. “What do you mean?” he said. He raised himself up on his pillow, trying to get comfortable. I’d been talking a long time. All night, actually. His body was probably aching from lying still so long.

  If he weren’t a ruthless murderer I might have felt some shame. Our original bargain was for an even exchange: his sad stories for mine. But I was the one doing all of the talking. How terribly egotistical of me!

  His right knee was bent in the air, his left leg lying flat on the mattress. He had crossed his arms.

  I gestured vaguely. “The atmosphere has become a toxic haze in the last one hundred years. With each passing day, the atmosphere grows increasingly alien and repulsive. You do not notice because your mortal lifespan is so short, but for a creature like me, it is as if it happened overnight. The air of this world has become a wretched miasma of carbon monoxide from your gasoline-powered automobiles, of industrial pollution, insecticides and fertilizers. Human waste. Drugs. Humanity drowns this planet in artificial chemicals like a child playing carelessly at some new game. The rivers reek of sewage and unmetabolized pharmaceuticals. You bathe in noxious chemicals, then drench your flesh in pungent perfumes to mask your natural scent. Why mortals do this, I cannot fathom, as your natural scent is so alluring.”

  I laughed derisively.

  “Better living through chemistry! Isn’t that the motto? Modern man has bought into a lie, like an old fool who believes the snake oil salesman will cure all his ills, and now you drown in a sea of toxic chemicals! Even the taste of mortal blood is tainted.

  “Soon, I fear, the scales will tip, and mankind will vanish from this despoiled land. Perhaps that would be the best thing for this planet, before humanity drags the rest of the world to the grave with it.”

  “It’s a big planet,” Lukas said. “There are still places untouched by humankind.”

  “You believe so?” I asked. “When I walked the earth as a mortal, I knew of only three or four hundred other men and women, and half of those were Neanderthals. Man did not dominate nature. We lived in balance with nature. For every human there were a million birds in the sky, a million fish in the waters. I have seen, with these very eyes, herds of bison stretching from one horizon to the other. I have seen the sky darken as if it were night with the passage of migrating fowl. What do you have now of any great number? Rats and cockroaches? Pigeons? If you venture into the countryside, the silence is deafening. Man has conquered nature, and left the carcass to rot in the sun.

  “I once fought a war to save your race,” I said to him. “I destroyed untold numbers of my own kind to preserve humanity.” I looked to the frosted windows, which glowed now with a soft golden light. “I wonder if that was the right thing to do,” I said softly.

  “A war?” Lukas asked, his interest quickening.

  Of course...!

  He sat forward, his eyes avid. “There was a war between your kind? A vampire war, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this? Why don’t you tell me about that, instead of all this soap opera crap? I don’t care about Ilio’s baby, or how you reunited with your descendants.”

  “You want action, is that it?” I asked. “Blood and gore and murder!”

  “Hell yes!”

  “Rest assured, I plan to tell you all of it. It’s not much further along in this narrative, actually. I only tell you of Ilio and my grandchildren so that you will understand the decisions I made. You must love something before you will fight for it… or at least you should. What would be the point otherwise? To kill for the sake of killing?” I sighed. “I suppose there are men like that. Men who wage war simply for the sake of killing. For the thrill of it. But that is not something I would do.”

  The light was stinging my eyes. I was tired. Not physically tired. This immortal body does not grow weary so quickly. I was emotionally spent. I suddenly felt the need for solitude. I rose to leave the room.

  “I think we are done for now,” I said, moving toward the door. “Is there anything you require before I leave?”

  “You’re going to bed?” Lukas asked.

  I nodded.

  “Something to drink,” he said. He raised his arm and shook his wrist. “Oh--! And unchain me from this bed!”

  I smiled. “I will refill your glass.”

  2

  He complained about the water again. I suppose I should stock a few bottles of wine. I do entertain guests from time to time. Not often. The last guest I’d had in my home before I became embroiled in this dance of death with Lukas and his vile compatriots was a man named Florian Gertraud.

  Florian was a serial killer who stalked the nightclubs of Liege in the early 1970’s. He seduced homosexual men, murdered them and took their hearts as trophies. The newspapers christened him the Valentine Killer. By the time our paths crossed, he had killed half a dozen men. I posed as a gay man, invited him to my suite. We shared a bottle of wine and listened to music, and when he stabbed me from behind as I stood listening to my phonograph record player, I turned and had my bloody way with him.

  I found his address by going through his wallet, then carried his lifeless body to his bachelor’s joyless flat and threw him from the roof of the building with a note pinned to his lapel. I AM THE ONE WHO TAKES THE HEARTS. That is what the note I affixed to his jacket declared. I had imitated his block-style handwriting, which I copied from the horrific journals he hid in a secret compartment in his bedroom closet. I also found the hearts, which he kept frozen in his icebox. Though there was very little blood in the body when it burst upon the pavement, the police were none the wiser… or simply did not care to investigate.

  I sat with Lukas as he drank. I did not leave the glass with him as I feared he would break it and use
the shards to slice his wrists.

  As he drank, he asked me what time was like for immortals.

  “In most ways, I experience time no different than mortal men,” I answered. “I exist, just as you do, trapped in the present as between two panes of glass. I can glimpse the future that lies ahead of me using my imagination. I can turn and look to the past through the impressions of my memory, but I cannot cross the invisible barrier that separates the present from the future and the past. In that, I am no different than you. We are all trapped in the glass corridor of the Now. I am time’s prisoner just as surely as you are mine.”

  “But your memory is extraordinarily vivid. How do all those thousands of years of experiences fit inside your brain?” he asked.

  “They do not. I can no more remember who I fed from exactly one hundred years ago this day than you can remember what you ate for breakfast on June Third, 1997. The little things, the unimportant minutiae… they drift away like flakes of ash upon the wind. Like mortals, I remember only the events that are important to my soul. They are so real I can close my eyes, and it is like I am living those days again. It is like I am there. All the rest… Dreams. Ghosts.”

  I glanced at him, the hint of a smile flickering across my lips.

  “But why do you ask those things?” I said. “You do not care about them. I can see it in your eyes. The lie of your curiosity. What is it you really want to know?”

  He took a sip of water. Swallowed.

  “You do not plan to kill me,” he finally said.

  I laughed. “Really?”

  He looked nervous, but he spoke his mind regardless. “Your long life has made you arrogant. You don’t think a mortal man can grasp the workings of your thoughts, but I have been observing you just as much as you have been observing me. I am… getting to know you.”

  “So what is it you think I plan to do?” I asked.