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

by Joseph Duncan

  “Careful, it’s hot,” I cautioned them.

  Valas sipped loudly after sniffing the drink. “It’s good. A bit bitter. What is this?”

  “It’s called framash,” I answered. “Your forefathers drank it long ago. It can make you a little giddy, so drink it slowly.”

  “You are not drinking it?” Valas’s son said suspiciously.

  I smiled. “You know my kind only drink blood.”

  “Gibbus, don’t be rude,” Valas said, and the young man dropped his eyes.

  We conversed leisurely as the snow began to swirl more thickly outside. All three finished their drinks, growing more at ease as the night wore on and the sedative in the infusion took effect. They took off a couple more layers of clothing, and stretched out on them, their cheeks flushed by the framash. Valas asked if I would teach his wife how to make the drink and I nodded. “It would be my pleasure,” I said.

  “So explain to me—and I don’t mean to be rude,” Valas said, his eyes glassy, “how your boy here became the same as you. My daughter insists that he was a mortal when they mated in the village of those accursed Oombai. She said she saw him struck down.”

  Ilio glanced at me, eyes wide, and I scrambled to come up with some lie that would assuage the man. It had to be plausible without revealing the secret of our living blood.

  “There is no easy explanation,” I finally said. “He was a mortal boy. He was fatally injured. He should have died. I do not know what happened. I prayed for him to live, and he was transformed.”

  “But you do not believe in our gods, or so you have said.”

  “Must the Tessares be believed in to intercede in the affairs of the living?” I countered.

  “I suppose not…”

  “If they rely on faith to exist, we could kill them with a thought. Then what kind of gods would they be? Nothing worthy of our respect, I would think.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like double-talk, my white-skinned friend,” Valas said, but he smiled when he said it. His twinkling eyes asserted, I will let it go, but do not think I am fooled.

  I did not.

  “My father always said: take great care when asking the gods to meddle in your affairs,” Valas resumed, looking into his empty cup with a frown. “Disappointment is always the result, he claimed. When they do not answer, which is most often the case, but also when they do. I never quite knew what to think of that... until now. You are either a very lucky man… or a very unlucky one!” Valas chuckled, his ruddy face crinkling.

  Unlucky, I thought. Definitely unlucky.

  “At least we know the seed takes root,” Valas laughed, nodding toward the boy. I glanced at Ilio with a smile. I didn’t know then that vampires were incapable of impregnating mortal women. I suspected it might be so. The glittery black fluid that issued from my organ seemed incapable of striking the spark of life in a woman’s belly, but I didn’t know for sure.

  We shall see, I thought, worrying vaguely for Valas’s daughter. If Ilio somehow managed to get her with child again… but my imagination shied from the thought.

  Valas sat up suddenly, looking intensely into my eyes. “Priss said that you mated with my Aioa before she was murdered. That you went mad with rage when they killed her. She said that you slaughtered the Oombai’s chieftains in vengeance. Every one of those bastards!”

  “Yes!” I hissed, and I am fairly certain my eyes flashed at the memory. There is no word for the feeling that coursed through me right then, no modern equivalent for it, anyway. My people called it “kel’hrath”, which was the joy you feel in avenging a terrible offense. Filled suddenly with kel’hrath, I spoke, my voice rough with emotion: “We met only briefly, but I was quite taken with your daughter. She was beautiful, and she had a fiery spirit, which is something I have always valued in a woman. I tried to bargain for her life, for the lives of all three of your daughters, but the Oombai killed her instead. So I killed them. I killed them all!”

  He nodded, his eyes misty with tears. They did not fall—not the tears of a man such as Valas—but they glittered there at the edge of his eyelashes. “I thank you, Thest!” he said huskily. “Twice we tried to rescue our stolen ones from the Oombai, and twice their warriors turned us back. My family suffered greatly at their hands, but you have avenged our honor. If your boy wishes to be mated with my daughter, I would be proud to call him my son.”

  Ilio’s head jerked up, his eyes bright. He looked at me with a grin, fangs exposed in his excitement, but no one seemed to notice, or if they did, they chose to ignore the unsightly display out of politeness.

  We never did get the roof of Ilio’s hut finished that night. Valas and his sons stayed to discuss the dower, and the details of the marriage ceremony. I poured them another round of framash and enjoyed the woodsy sweet smell of the merh they smoked when Valas’s younger son produced a satchel of the dried leaves from one of his coat pockets. I partook of the merh when Valas passed the smoldering pipe to me, even though the drug in the smoke would only elevate my mood for a moment, at best, before the Strix eliminated it from my system, as it does all drugs or poisons. I didn’t do it to be social, but for the nostalgia. Sitting around a fire, talking and smoking with my fellow tribesmen, recalled previous nights of like camaraderie.

  Priss’s dower was modest. Valas was not a greedy man. When we had agreed on the terms, her father and I discussed less pressing matters.

  Valas was a family man, as I once was, and his thoughts turned to family and faith more than any other subject. He was frustrated that I could tell him nothing of the spirit world, but enjoyed my tales of the time before the ice, when our forefathers still lived in the valley by the river.

  His two sons, Gibbus and Sephram, kept Ilio occupied.

  “You are our brother now!” Sephram declared excitedly.

  Though Gibbus was more reserved, he somehow managed to talk Ilio into showing them his fangs, and goaded him into demonstrations of our vampire speed and strength.

  “Our grandchildren will be great warriors if they have even half his T’sukuru strength,” Valas said as he watched Ilio stand upside down on one hand.

  Our grandchildren…!

  I felt a great upwelling of happiness as his words echoed in my mind-- for the man, for these simple people, and for the thought of having a family once again.

  I also realized that I had not once thought of killing them and drinking their blood. The bloodthirst was there. It was always there. I was just so used to its clamoring, living among the Tanti, that I had put it out of my mind.

  I was adapting to living in the world of mortal men.

  6

  Ilio and Priss wed shortly after.

  When the first storm of the season had come and gone, the weather warmed back up for a few days. It was not what you might call balmy, but it was warm enough to melt the snow that had accumulated on the rooftops and in the avenues of the Tanti village. The sky cleared, the sun flashed off the lake and the air smelled earthy and pure. Spring fever spread through the village like a virulent contagion.

  As melting snow dripped from the thatch roofs and the runoff coursed in gleaming rivulets down the hill to the pristine lake, the village women prepared for the wedding ceremony. I watched with amusement from the doorway of my lodge as groups of women tramped back and forth in the streets all day, paying little attention to the mud and muck.

  The entire village was swept up in the excitement of the nuptial. Everyone was talking about it. It was very much like a modern celebrity wedding. Even the villagers who had previously been standoffish were coming up to me to converse about the wedding. They visited our hut to gossip and gawk under the pretense of bartering for goods. The village shaman and his protégé performed fertility rituals, good luck spells and came to our home to purify the boy’s spirit with prayers and sweet smelling incense.

  Ilio had not moved into his own hut, despite the fact that we had completed its construction. Now that the time had come for him to fly the nest, he was
strangely hesitant to leave my side, but I didn’t comment on his reticence. I really wasn’t too eager for him to go either, even though I’d been preparing my mind for him to leave.

  I had missed out on this human experience when I was first made into a vampire. In those early days, I was much too dangerous to go anywhere near my mortal family. I had been forced to watch my children grow up from afar, and had missed the sweet agony of my offspring leaving home to start families of their own.

  I loved Ilio like he was my own, and I doted on him shamelessly. I made sure his lodge was outfitted with every comfort I could think of: mats, rugs, furs, hangings for all the doors and windows. I bartered for furnishings, all manner of utensils and dishware, spices and stores of food. I had new clothes made for him, and rebraided his hair so that his bride would find him more fetching. For his part, Ilio was especially attentive to his chores and, in general, was behaving much more maturely.

  “Do you think I am ready to be on my own, Thest?” he asked one evening as we prepared to go out to hunt.

  “As ready as you’ll ever be,” I answered lightly, showing no sign of my own concerns.

  Then later: “I am so afraid I’ll hurt them. What if I lose control of the bloodthirst, Father?”

  He was talking about his wife and children, of course.

  “I feared the same thing when I first took you into my care,” I answered. “I’m certain your affection for your new family will stay your hand, as my love for you stayed my hand when I took you under my wing. You should be mindful of the bloodthirst, at all times, but you have always had more control of it than I. I think you will be fine.”

  “If I feel my restraint weakening, I will flee to the wilderness and hunt until I’m as fat as a tick,” he said seriously, and I nodded in sympathy, laughing a little. Then we slipped out into the dark avenue and raced like pale revenants to hunt the forest for blood.

  Twice, Ilio announced that he was going to move into his new home, and twice he reneged, but I did not comment.

  One evening, Priss’s brothers came and stole Ilio away. They were boisterous, as fresh young men often are. They said they were taking him across the lake to engage in some kind of pre-wedding tradition— the Tanti equivalent of a stag party. I grew bored waiting for him to return and began to straighten up my lodge, and that is when I found all the little toys I had carved for him when he was a mortal child.

  I found them wrapped carefully in some hides beside his sleeping mat. They were pressed into the corner of the wall behind the rolled up fur he rested his head upon when he slept. I squatted and picked them up from the floor after they had tumbled from the hide. Turning them over in my hands, I examined them. Little wooden men, a carving of a wooly mammoth, a spear-tooth cat (one of the hind legs broken off). My eyes stung suddenly and I wrapped them back up and returned them where I’d found them.

  You’ve become a sentimental fool, Gon! I berated myself, wiping black tears from my cheeks.

  At least I could take solace from the company of Priss’s extensive family.

  As the nuptial drew nearer, Priss’s father had become a frequent visitor in my home. He had taken a liking to my framash… and a liking to me as well. He enjoyed gossiping about his fellow villagers, especially who was coupling with who behind who’s back. He had an inordinate amount of interest in the sexual escapades of his neighbors. He also derived great enjoyment from complaining about his wife, his ungrateful kids, and was not averse to the telling of tall tales—“big fish stories”, the Tanti called them. It often felt as if we were co-conspirators in some plot I was only half-aware of, but I liked him. I enjoyed our conversations, especially with Ilio absent so much of the time now.

  Nearly every evening, usually around sundown, Valas would yell from my doorway: “Oya, Shast’pa’ulm! Thest, you old bloodsucker! Rise and tend to your guest!” Sometimes he came with his sons or his cousins or sons-by-marriage, but usually he came on his own. When I swept open the door hanging to admit him, he strolled in without hesitation, giving my crotch a passing swat—a gesture of affection among Tanti men, somewhat similar to the way your modern athletes will slap one another on the rump during games. “Are you hiding a hogleg in there?” he would ask-- or something in that vein-- and then he would throw himself on a mat beside the hearth and wait for me to prepare some framash.

  If Ilio was still home, the boy would roll up in his bedding, complaining about the light. Usually he was gone by the time Valas came around, however. Ilio had begun to venture out before nightfall more and more frequently. Trying to get better accustomed to the daylight, he claimed.

  “You’ll never guess who I caught sneaking off into the woods with my brother Hale today, Thest,” the old fellow grinned, running his fingers through his great frizzy beard.

  “Who?” I asked, building up the fire in my hearth.

  “Lettia! Tateron’s new wife!” and then he proceeded to tell me of Lettia and Hale’s longstanding affair, opining at length how calculating some women can be when it comes to their own satisfaction. “Hale is a lazy man. A terrible provider. He is my brother, but I am only speaking the truth. She would have been crazy to choose Hale over Tateron. Still, there are some things more important than a full belly and a warm hearth! While Tateron is out fishing on the lake, Lettia goes fishing as well.” And then he burst out laughing.

  The sons of Valbaulm, Valas’s father, were renown in the village of the Tanti for their fertility… and their physical endowments. Valas, like most religious men I’d ever met, was inordinately obsessed with carnal things. He took great pride in his family’s reputation as cocksmen and the number of children he had sired—sixteen, at present count, by two wives, the first of whom was (unsurprisingly) dead. Yet he was strangely prudish about subjects outside his experience. He acted appalled when I asked him if Tanti wedding rituals included a celebratory orgy, as his forefather’s had practiced when I was a mortal.

  “Great Tul, no! How would we know what children were ours if we all just humped in a pile? And you say our forefathers indulged in such rituals? Ha! I’d be afraid some nearsighted fool would mistake my fat rump for a woman’s hindquarters!”

  He was scandalized when I revealed that my group marriage had included a co-husband-- my lifelong companion Brulde, who raised our children after I was made into this thing that I am.

  “Sometimes our young males will dabble in such behavior, but we try to discourage it whenever we can,” Valas said. “It is not productive for a man to lie down with a man.” He snorted. “Although I have heard some pretty lurid tales about those fishermen! Sometimes we see the boats rocking, but none of the men hauling in nets! They say they’re napping-- ha!”

  “There are advantages to such a living arrangement,” I countered.

  “Oh, I’m certain there are!” he exclaimed merrily. “There would be less children to tend to, for one thing. And a lot less haggling for sex!”

  That wasn’t really what I meant, but I didn’t bother to debate the matter with him. Most people will not tolerate ideas foreign to their upbringing. I merely steeped his framash and let him ramble until he left.

  In the meantime, Ilio was staying very busy himself.

  Tanti marriages were often arranged, although allowances were made if the betrothed were irreconcilably incompatible, or a woman became pregnant by another man. The Tanti also tended to discourage intercourse between the prospective bride and groom before the wedding ceremony—socially as well as sexually. This was supposed to make the couple pine for one another, but I believe it was really just to make sure both parties had less of a chance to find fault in their mate and spoil everybody’s plans. Ilio had only been allowed to visit with Priss a few times since our arrival in the village, and once the two of them were officially betrothed, he was not allowed to see her at all.

  He spent his days adding the finishing touches to the home he had built for her, and gathering the dower we had all agreed upon (mostly foodstuffs, but also animal hides
and trinkets for her mother and father and all her brothers and sisters).

  He was restless and uncertain, and constantly sought my advice on everything from lovemaking to childrearing.

  Childrearing I could tell him about. I had fathered six children. Lovemaking was the topic that neither of us were quite certain of.

  I had plenty of experience with human sexuality. My people had been very casual about sex. But sex between a vampire and a mortal… that was a different matter altogether.

  I knew it could be done. I had made love to Priss’s sister Aioa when we visited the village of the Oombai. But it was the first and only time I’d made love to a mortal woman, and she had allowed me to drink of her blood in the midst of our congress. It had been a rapturous experience for me, my spirit soaring to the peak of sensual ecstasy, but I could not in all honesty encourage the boy to do anything but approach the act with the utmost care.

  “I would discourage you from making love at all while she is with child,” I counseled the young man. “With your strength, you could easily injure your bride, and your unborn child. If you wish to have congress with her after the child is born, do not use your hands on her until you are certain of your self-control. Allow her to make love to you.”

  I also advised him to depart from her temporarily during her monthly cycle. The blood that issued from her body, I feared, might tempt him to unsavory behavior.

  “Blood?” he asked. “What do you mean? Why would she bleed every cycle of the moon?”

  “It is her estrus,” I explained. “Have I never told you of the female cycle?”

  “No.”

  “No? I’m certain that I did.”

  He shook his head, eyes wide.

  His ignorance did not surprise me. He had been raised almost exclusively by men in a tribe of nomadic mammoth hunters. The Denghoi were quite circumspect about their sexual practices as well. He had been ignorant of even the rudiments of human sexuality when I adopted him.