His grin twisted into a scowl. Black fluid speckled my forehead and cheeks. He made a choking sound, and we both looked down simultaneously. Even as we looked, the spearhead that was protruding from his chest vanished inside his body, scraping against his sternum. It burst back through an instant later, just above and to the left of the first hole, a ragged chunk of his heart jiggling on the tip of it.
Zenzele swung the god king in an arc, lifting him by the shaft of the spear she had impaled him with. Lips peeled back from her teeth, she set her foot against his buttocks and shoved him into the vampires who held me down.
They fell away to every side of me, knocked off their feet by the impact of Khronos’s body. I was free! I scrambled up, grabbed the first blood drinker I could get my hands on, and swung him by the arm into another group of immortals.
“Gon!” Zenzele shouted.
She had already retreated to the entrance.
I followed.
Bhorg and Goro and Tribtoc had encircled her protectively. So Zenzele’s comrades intended to make good on their promise to stand by their mistress! I saw Bhorg shatter a vampire to shards with his massive hammer. Tribtoc and Goro were fighting hand-to-hand.
Where is Palifver? I wondered, scanning the room, but he and Hettut had retreated, or perhaps they were only lost in the chaos. The god king was flopping on the ground, his black blood jetting into the air. Tendrils of the oldest living vampire’s whipping blood pierced the body of one of the T’sukuru who rushed to his aid, and the woman exploded into sparkling dust with a final despairing howl, drained of her vitality in an instant.
“Hurry!” Zenzele cried, and vanished into the corridor.
10
Our flight from Uroboros was, for the most part, rather anticlimactic, so I shall not bore you by recounting every tiny detail of our escape.
Since Khronos had no method of raising an alarm, we raced through the maze-like corridors of the underground city without being accosted. We knocked a few blood drinkers down in our haste, and drew a few curious stares, but aside from that, little of note occurred aside from a lot of running and some zigging and zagging.
Only the Clan Masters-- true immortals like ourselves-- would have had any chance of catching us, but even if they’d pursued us immediately, we could have easily lost them in such a densely populated metropolis. There were just too many winding corridors, too many abandoned or unoccupied chambers, and the air was too thick with the aroma of their mortal thralls to follow us by scent.
Zenzele knew a neglected route that would take us to the open quickly. It let out onto a sheer drop, she said, but we could climb down by clinging to the surface of the rock.
“Do you know how to do that?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
We climbed down on the east-facing slope of the volcano, out of view if anyone was watching from the Fen, and well away from the mortal districts below. We leapt the last fifty meters to the treetops, then climbed to the floor of the snow-blanketed forest.
There, in the cover of the forest, I embraced my savior passionately. I put my mouth over hers, pulling her tightly to my body, running my palms across her back, her buttocks. She returned my ardor, her eyes closed. She didn’t immediately answer when I asked her why she had risked her life to save me.
“Khronos will not rest now until he has destroyed us both,” I said to her.
“I do not care!” she said fiercely. “I would rather die free with you than live forever in service to that monster. When I Shared with you, I saw in your memories the life I might have. I want that, Gon. I want the peace that you had when you lived among the Tanti.”
We heard a crashing in the treetops. A moment later, Goro and Bhorg dropped to the earth nearby.
Zenzele pushed away from me. “Tribtoc?” she asked.
Bhorg leaned on the handle of his great stone hammer. “He fell,” the giant said. “Khronos himself laid hands on our companion. He pulled the poor bastard apart.”
“And what of Palifver?”
The two blood drinkers looked at one another. Almost as one, they shrugged.
“Pity,” Zenzele said, her eyes flashing dangerously. “We have unfinished business, he and I.”
But she quickly forgot her vengeance when her wolf came bounding through the snow.
“Vehnfear!” she cried, dropping to one knee.
The wolf slid to a stop and let her stroke his back, wagging his tail enthusiastically, and then he trotted over to me.
“Hail, old man,” I said, squatting down to embrace him, “you didn’t let anyone follow you, did you?”
The animal looked over his shoulder as if he understood my words, ears pricked, but he didn’t seem overly concerned. I stood and reached out with my senses, but heard no creature in pursuit of the canine.
“So where do we go now?” Bhorg asked, looking around the group.
“There is a small tribe of my people living in the Eastern Dominions,” Goro, the Fat Hand vampire, said. “If this untrained blood drinker can live in peace among his mortal brothers, then perhaps so can this one. I would like to try it, anyway. I miss my own kind. It has been many seasons since I was made into this thing that I am.”
“And what of you, Bhorg?” Zenzele asked. “Where do you wish to go?”
“My loyalty has always lain with you, Zenzele. Where you go, I go. If you will have me.”
Zenzele glanced toward me.
“I would like to return to the Tanti,” I said, “but I am afraid Khronos will expect me to do that. I do not wish to bring down his wrath upon my people. Or my vampire child Ilio. Perhaps we can go east with Goro. For a little while, at least. Draw Khronos’s ire away from my mortal descendants.”
“And then?” Zenzele asked, her eyebrows drawing together.
“We cannot hide from him forever,” I said to her. “When I threw myself at him-- when I tasted his blood-- I saw into his soul. What I saw in your god king’s mind, Zenzele… my heart cannot abide it. No, I do not intend to hide from him forever, my love…
“…I intend to raise an army against him.”
Journey’s Beginning
I’m afraid that is all I have time to tell you tonight, dear friends. The world has turned her back to the dark. Liege gleams outside my window in dawn’s candy colored light.
The sight tantalizes. It makes me want to travel, and I intend to. I intend to embark on a long journey, and quite soon! Only I need to tie up a few loose ends first.
Lukas Jaeger being one of those loose ends.
Our good friend Lukas lies writhing on my sofa as I type this. I try to put him out of my thoughts as my fingers fly over the keys of my trusty laptop computer, but it is difficult. He screams so loud! As soon as I wrap this up, the third volume of my memoirs, I will open my computer’s email program, write a quick note to my mortal agent in the United States, then attach the folder which contains this manuscript and send it halfway around the world.
The wonders of modern technology!
Every now and then, Lukas lets out a whoop or a sputtering groan. (We will not mention the other noxious noises he has been making the past hour or so!) If he weren’t such a murderous bastard, I might actually feel a little sympathy for him. I know how bad it hurts when the Strix is working its terrible magic on mortal flesh and bone. It feels like hot wires being threaded through your veins, like your heart and lungs have turned to ice inside your chest, but my new companion deserves it. All of it and more!
So, no sympathy from me.
Guilt. Now that’s another story. There is always guilt when one makes a new vampire. There is for me at least. Self-condemnation. Remorse. I will agonize over my decision for years. Because I know: I am responsible for every innocent life this creature takes. Every one of them. My hands will be forever tainted by the blood this man spills.
“But why?” you ask. “Why make this brutal creature into an immortal?”
First let me tell you how I did it, and then I’ll tell you why.
>
When I finished telling Lukas of our escape from Uroboros, he sat back in his seat, his cigarette a tube of ash dangling from a slightly scorched filter. There was a satisfied expression on his face, and I have to confess, it pleased me to see that he had enjoyed my tale. His eyes were distant, dreaming, as if a part of him were still standing there on the forested slope of Fen’Dagher. He glanced out the window finally and laughed, saying gently, almost as if to himself, “It’s almost daylight out. I guess we’ll have to continue this tomorrow night, yes?”
“That is all for tonight,” I nodded.
He ground his cigarette in the ashtray, though it had gone out several minutes ago, then glanced around the room. “So, uh… do you want me to stay here in your penthouse today… while you sleep, I mean, or…?”
Small talk in the lair of an immortal. Such banality was insufferable!
Before he could say another word, I launched myself across the table at him.
He flailed back from me, surprised, and our combined momentum overturned his chair. We spilled onto the floor with a thud.
“What are you--? Get off--!” he grunted.
He tried to hook his thumbs into my eyes, blind me, thinking I meant to renege on our bargain, fighting for his life. His face had flushed with blood and his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. He was looking across the floor for something, anything, he could use as a weapon, his lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Be still, you fool!” I snapped.
The ashtray--! It had fallen to the floor when I threw myself at him. He grabbed ahold of it and swung it into my temple as I tried to pry my fingers between his teeth. The dish was made of crystal, thick, too sturdy to break. Had I been a mortal man, the blow might have killed me. Annoyed, I slapped it from his hand and it went rolling across the carpet.
“Help!” he cried out, and the moment he opened his mouth, I summoned the Strix from the pit of my guts. I seized his jaws with both hands, held his mouth open, and the living blood came roaring up out of my throat.
Lukas choked and lurched beneath me, and then it was inside him.
I rose.
“Remember our bargain,” I said.
The child pornographer and murderer lay very still, his eyes wide, the muscles of his neck standing out rigidly. His lips and cheek were smeared with blood where I had so roughly pried open his mouth.
A shiver passed through his body.
Very primly, he folded his hands upon his stomach. His attention had turned inward, and I knew that he could feel it, he could feel the black blood coiling inside him. Any moment now it would lance into his heart, and then it would do one of two things: it would devour him from within… or it would make him an immortal.
I watched his face. First, a twitch. There in his cheek, right below his eye, and then his whole body contorted with pain. His back arched, and he groaned, his hands falling to his sides, fingers curling into the carpet. For a moment I was afraid that the Strix had found him wanting, that it would simply devour him, and all my schemes would come to naught.
“Gott in Himmel!” he wailed, beads of sweat squeezing out of the pores of his face.
I watched, intrigued, as the color began to fade from his flesh. His eyes dilated as the life drained out of him. All the hair on his body shifted, ever so subtly, as the surface of his skin hardened.
I watched the symbiote transform him.
His forearms whitened, then his hands, then his fingers. It was like an invisible paintbrush swiping its way rapidly down his extremities, painting them white. He grimaced and I saw his eyeteeth elongating. His jaw popped as the bones of his skull changed shape to accommodate his new fangs and increased bite radius.
Vampires can very nearly unhinge their jaws, you know, much like a snake.
He sucked in a sharp breath… and then he began to shake. Bloody tears trickled from the corners of his eyes as he convulsed violently on the floor.
So this is how it’s going to be, I thought, and I believe I might have smiled a little.
Sometimes the transformation is quick and painless. I have even heard vampires claim their transformation was pleasurable. From my experience, however, it is often a slow and torturous affair, sometimes taking days to complete, and it seemed my pornographer was going to be one of the unlucky ones.
Lukas belched and then turned his head to one side and vomited. Gelid blood and the liquefied remains of some earlier meal surged across my dining room floor.
“Am I… going to die?” he gulped, when he had finished emptying the contents of his belly.
“I never promised it wouldn’t hurt,” I said.
He smiled, relieved, and then his body contorted in agony again. He rolled into a fetal position, groaning, and his bowels let go with a horrendous cacophony.
I walked to the dining room windows and raised them, letting in a gust of frigid winter air, then returned to the man flailing on my floor and scooped him into my arms.
“Let’s put you on the sofa,” I muttered. “This is going to take a while.”
“Hurts--!” Lukas groaned. “So cold!”
I laid him on my couch and shifted a chair beside him. Sitting next to the writhing man, I tried to comfort him. “It will be over soon,” I said, “and then you will forget this labor, as a mother forgets the pangs of childbirth.”
Lukas said, “Aaaarrrggghhhh! Bluhhhh!”
“When the pain has passed, I will train you in our ways, as every good vampire maker should. I will show you how to hunt, and what to do with the corpse afterward so mortal men never suspect we truly exist. I will teach you how to use your preternatural skills, and then, when you are strong, we are going on a journey, you and I.”
He stared at me, his beautiful new eyes twinkling like prisms.
“You are going to be a powerful vampire,” I said. I examined the texture of his new flesh, consulted that intuitive faculty we all have which allows us to gauge the strength of another blood drinker. “The transformation seems to have stopped just short of true immortality, but if you are clever, and more importantly, lucky, you may live for several thousand years.”
He nodded, jaws clenched, but I could see the satisfaction in his eyes. More than anything else, he had feared weakness, but that was not to be. I had made a monster of this one.
“Where… are we going?” he gasped.
“To Germany,” I said. “I wish to end my life in the land that gave me birth.”
His eyebrows drew together, and I smiled.
“This is the payment I exact. This is what you will give me in exchange for your immortality,” I told him. “We are going to the Swabian Alb. We shall travel on foot, as we traveled in the old days, and I am going to finish telling you my story. And when we get there, I am going to find the place where I lived my mortal life with my tent-mate and our two beloved wives, and then you are going to free me from this eternal existence, which I never asked for or wanted.”
He was in too much pain to speak, but I could see the question in his eyes, and so I answered it for him.
“Yes, I know. I told you that I cannot die,” I said, “but that is not exactly true. There is one way that an Eternal can be killed. Only one! It is nearly impossible, but it can be done. I have seen it with my own eyes. And I believe that you, Lukas Jaeger, may be the one to do it for me.”
“H-how?” Lukas panted.
I smiled, rising from my chair. “We will speak more of it later. It is late, and I have a great many things to do before I rest. Come to me when your mortal life has passed away and we will begin your instruction. For now, I bid you adieu.”
As I bid you adieu, my cherished mortal readers. It is late, and I do have a great number of affairs to put to order before I embark on my final journey.
Do not worry. I intend to bring a journal with me so that I can transcribe all the details. I will make certain that my final words find their way into your hands.
Think of it as a compromise. No sentient creature really w
ants to die. There is a small part of me that fears what lies beyond, but I am so very, very tired of this world. It has changed too much, and I miss all those I’ve loved whom time has seen fit to erase from this plane of existence.
These memoirs shall serve-- as the works of all artists serve-- as a limited form of immortality. Though my soul shall be released, and I can finally join my loved ones waiting for me in the Ghost World, I shall live on in some small fashion in the thoughts of those who chance upon these recordings.
I hope it is enough to satisfy the tiny particle of my soul that does not wish to perish.
Strange, that I should feel so terribly excited!
Your friend,
Gon,
The Oldest Living Vampire
About the Author
Joseph lives in Southern Illinois with his wife, his two sons and all the voices in his head. He is the indie bestselling author of the Oldest Living Vampire Saga, as well as Mort, House of Dead Trees and several other horror and fantasy novels. He is currently working on his next novel.
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 36