She stared at me now with a fierce look, meeting me along the stream as I’d requested. Lucia had passed her the message, a mental telepathy only the two of them shared. “I see I need to have another talk with Peter,” she said, pulling up alongside me where I sat watching my joy, my girls in the arms of their kin.
“It’s not that I want to tear them apart,” I said, my eyes locked on the scene across the stream. “Their love is true, I don’t doubt it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve heard him myself.”
“Thank goodness for small gifts.” She nudged me with her boot.
Shortly after Evelina and the others arrived with Netta, and long after Vincent Du Maurier was gone, I discovered my inheritance. My great-great-grandmother had passed along a trait only to me. I’d read about her supernatural hearing in her notes, but I didn’t realize I possessed the same gift. I could always hear conversations from my studio way up in the tower of the Second Colony of the Resurrected, but I believed the sound traveled on air. I couldn’t know I pulled it to me with my supersonic ear, letting in sound from meters to miles away. It took a while to hone, and I couldn’t have done it without Evelina’s guidance, reminding me I must be discerning about what I pick up.
“You’ll suffer for some of the things you hear,” she told me. “Especially if you misinterpret the speaker. Be wise with your gift, my boy.”
It proved handy once I’d discovered Saba’s truth.
“I don’t think Peter will risk a war with me,” Evelina said. “He wouldn’t dare awaken a daughter of mine, not without my permission.”
My eyes fell on the ravine, two of my daughters perched on Veor’s shoulders now, reaching for more acorns.
“But the priest can be foolish,” she said. “Love makes him mad. I’m thankful the little ones will be easier to control.”
“How so?”
“Saba is of her own mind. Can you not see it?”
I shrugged.
“Father’s can be daft when it comes to their daughters. You won’t make the same mistake with the boy.”
“Byron?”
She scoffed. “It’s not the name for him, believe me.”
“It’s an honor I feel is due, mormor.”
Evelina disliked when I called her that, but sometimes the term of endearment slipped out whenever I thought she was growing angry with me.
“Be wise,” she said. “Byron’s name is cursed. It belongs to him alone.”
“Would Vincent not approve?”
She looked away, her hood hiding her face, the loss of her beauty meant to scold me.
“Should we call him something else?” I asked.
She released a sigh, and said, “I will speak with Peter again, but you must talk to Saba. This can’t go on. It’s up to you to find her a match among the colonists, and quickly.”
“I can’t force her to love.”
She turned to me again and smiled. “That may work on Gerenios, but not on me. You can and you will.”
I didn’t agree but I wouldn’t cross her.
She surprised me then, reaching out to touch my forehead. The sun bit at her wrist as the sleeve of her robe slid up, but she didn’t falter. She held her hand to my skin, unmoved. “It grows more vicious, I see. You must tell Netta.”
“What am I to do?”
“You have two options, and one you have already refused.”
In the secret of our communion, as every colonist lay tucked in his bed, as my children and wife slept, as Lucia plowed Veor through the sea, as Peter knelt before his altar, Evelina and I discussed my illness and the future it would bring.
“I don’t want to change,” I’d said. “I’m ready for the end when the time comes.”
“You don’t know what death is.”
“Neither do you.” I spoke carefully, controlling my tongue with the softness of my voice. “Only he knows death.”
She understood my meaning. “Vincent knows no heaven,” she said. “Especially the one to which you are bound.”
“I must take the chance, if only to spy his angelic aspect once more.”
She blew out a gust of air, a show of frustration that was wholly artificial.
“That face is gone.”
“How can you know?” I pleaded. “He is still here. I feel him.”
She turned away, but still I saw her eyes tighten. Without her hood, she couldn’t hide from me. The candles lit about my studio made her face glow in the darkness. She looked like him, the angel I’d seen perched on my windowsill.
“Stop it,” she whispered. “I am nothing like him.”
“You are him.”
She closed her eyes, and leaned in, touching her lips to my forehead. I felt lost when she pulled away. “Let me open your eyes,” she muttered. “Let me bring you into the light, let me make you mine in every way.”
Her offer wasn’t really a betrayal to my wife, for I was dying. Freyit had confirmed it. The closest we had to a doctor, he understood my anatomy better than his own and discovered my ailment when I called him to check on me. For weeks on end, I’d woken with a nosebleed. Fatigue wracked me, too, climbing the stairs to my studio an impossible feat at times. Then the bruising on my skin appeared, and despite how much she’d soften her bite, still I blued. Soon I developed a rash, tiny red spots on my lower back and chest. We’d old medical tomes, and Peter was the one to translate them, but Freyit made the diagnosis, explaining the incurable disease to me as best he could.
“It’s in the marrow, just like the fox. Yellow and mucky,” he’d said.
“Has it got a name?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Call it what you will, it’s still killing you.”
Our conversation was short, with only Gerenios and Peter as witness. The two figures who’d raised me, neither of them capable of contracting a human blight.
I told Evelina first, Netta second. “Your death will kill me,” my wife had said.
Evelina’s view was different. “A mere obstacle to overcome,” she said. “Your death is nothing.”
At first, I was hurt by it. Then I understood. My transfiguration would usurp my death, destroy the thing that’s destroying me.
“I can’t face the darkness,” I said.
“It’s not dark forever.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I was tender in my explanation. “My affection for you is greater than my love of the others.” It’s true because she deemed it so. I loved her fiercely, a serf of her own making. “But I can never bring myself to drink the blood of my wife and my children,” I said.
She smirked. “Spoken like a true Scot.” She meant Byron, but she may as well have meant another.
“I leave Netta and the girls in your hands,” I said. “You must preserve our legacy.”
“You think he’s on the other side, don’t you?”
I asked her what she meant.
“Our god is gone, Dagur. He’s abandoned us and he’s not waiting for you on the shores of some magical place. Some Paradise forged from memory. Believe me.”
She held my hand, squeezing it tightly, and I felt some consolation at her touch. I didn’t want to leave her most of all.
“Be mine,” she said. “Let me give you the gift, my yiós.”
To be called her son was an honor, but I was not so easily won over. “My decision is made,” I said. “There’ll be no more talk about it.”
“If you stay with me, if you let me make you mine, I promise you we’ll greet him in his return together.”
Her offer tempted me by the hour, but Vincent had left his mark on me, scarred me deeply, burrowing into the cavities of my brain, making me fear myself and the monster I’d become. My love for Netta, my adoration for my daughters, my eagerness to see Saba settled, all of it bound me to humanity, and the gift my blood was to my kin.
* * *
The ice floe drifted with the current, swift to the place its pilot yearned to go. The vampire had built an enclave for Finn,
a tent covering from the wind and sun. But he stood tall at the floe’s edge, captaining his raft with his will, and the gifts his god had given him. He let the coordinates guide him, the picture of her face a firm memory to hold on to. He remained invincible now, having survived the crush of the false ones. New blood raged within him, the blood of a warrior’s son, he could taste it on his lips.
“We will see her soon,” he spoke in a whisper to the unconscious boy.
Finn had been out of it since the vampire put him on the iceberg, and pushed off from the shore. He’d seen his homeland grow fuzzy, as the floe carried him further away. He groaned for his ornery father, wishing he’d remained at his side as he’d been instructed to do. But Finn couldn’t be tied down. He longed for adventure, and when he was freed to check the traps, he couldn’t resist going out alone. The sun hung low in the sky, the forest alive with night dwellers, Finn fearless in the land he knew well. He couldn’t know the lesson to come.
“She will enjoy your drink,” the vampire bellowed.
Finn was in and out, listening with closed eyes. The beast that had attacked him was no four-legged creature, but a man of exceptional power. His bite was sharper than the fang of the isbjörn, an animal one didn’t dare cross. He felt the fur of that same creature wrapped around him now, as he sank into its warmth. Its reek of flesh and blood didn’t scare him, but his stomach rumbled with an ache that could only be satisfied with food.
“Forell,” he mumbled. “Forell.”
The vampire bent down and tucked his head into the tent. Finn sat up, eyes open.
“Did you speak?” The vampire asked.
To Finn, his captor’s sounds were indecipherable, so he grunted. “Fisk,” he said again.
“What is this you speak?” The vampire asked him in four different languages before the boy perked up at the sounds of one he recognized.
“I said trout,” Finn said.
“Is this fish?”
“Food. I need food.”
The vampire barked a laugh, the din lost among the waves. He was struck by the young hunter’s insolence. “Food!” He cried. “Me first.”
He lunged at the boy, toppling the tent over to sink his teeth into his quarry once again. After a long haul on the newest vein he desired to tap, he sat on the tip of the ice floe, levitating as he was wont to do. Soothed by the silence of the young hunter, and the lull of the sea, and the aurora that crowned the landscape, he pictured the face of his little one. The wrath of her irons, the ire in her eyes, the smile that could slay a dragon, all made him grin. She awaits me too, he thought. He sensed their closeness, the proximity of her spirit a smidge on a landscape built out of water. The next spot of land was hers.
Hours passed before the young hunter stirred again.
“My what a resilient one you are,” the vampire said. “I would have thought your gods had taken you by now.”
“Food,” Finn muttered.
“Will the blubber of a seal do?”
The vampire stood tall on the floe, then launched his body up and over the edge, down into the depths of the sea. He’d spotted the mammal only moments before, waiting for him in the foamy cold, beckoning him to the hunt. He plied the water with dexterity, and caught the seal up in his claws, a hand of five pointy spikes, set into the slippery skin of his flipper. The seal marked two things. The young hunter would eat well for many days, and the floe was nearing shore. Soon it would bank up on the island that held the vampire’s little one.
“Eat,” the vampire said, tossing the carcass of the fish-eater on the ice. The sheet wobbled, and the young hunter dug in his nails.
In the quiet of his feigned unconsciousness, when the vampire wasn’t watching, Finn had torn out the nails of the isbjörg’s paws, weaponizing his own hands. He held the sharp points between each finger, close to his knuckles, their terror facing outward, ready to strike. Finn couldn’t know how useless his plan was, that the bear’s claws were no match for the vampire’s talons. But he’d learn.
“Eat,” the vampire said again, pushing the carcass on him.
Finn looked at the seal, a whale of a meal sitting before him, and his stomach turned. His anger burned inside him, and came up as vomit. He retched over the side, into the sea, his stomach a wasted and empty treasure chest.
The vampire chuckled. “What’s the matter, don’t you eat raw fish?”
The flesh hadn’t been the problem. Finn was used to eating fresh catch directly from the stream, but only after it was deboned. He’d had plenty of experience stripping the carcasses of beavers and foxes and even the odd wolf, but this lump of blubber, whose eyes stared up at him, dead and alone, seemed too much to bear.
Finn shook his head at his captor, and turned his back on him, waiting for him to get close. Soon, he thought, I’ll stick you with my own points. He rested his head on his knees, listening to the sounds of movement behind him. The ice floe wasn’t too large, but big enough for him to have his own end, the vampire the other. The covering his captor had made him had blown over, sitting in a pile at his side, but he refused to set it up again, preferring to see the beast when he came.
Finn let his mind wander, thoughts of his father ripping into him with a jagged edge. He’d disobeyed the man, and now he paid the price.
“You must listen with your eyes, not your ears.” His father had tried to show him how best to hold his spear, but he insisted on finding his own grip. “Your petulance will cause you great pain,” he’d said.
So it did, for the one chance he had to lace his spear through the only wild boar he’d ever see in his lifetime was wasted. His grip faltered as he made his move, and the pig stabbed him with his left tusk, its point ripping through his thigh, leaving a scar he’d forever see adorn his skin.
He touched the seam on his flesh as he floated on the ice, thoughts of his father as near as ever. Tears welled in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. He swallowed hard, and pushed the pain away.
The smoke pulled him from his daze, and he turned to witness the impossible. His captor tended to a compact fire, sitting on a bed of ice. He watched in awe as the vampire bent over the burning embers, fanning the heat into flame. Soon Finn felt that heat, and it drew him in.
“Come,” the vampire said. “I’ve made this for you.”
Finn remained cautious, his bear claws tucked at his sides, as he crawled across the floe to bathe in the heat he’d been craving since his capture.
The vampire used his talons to tear at the seal’s flesh, and threw some of the pieces on the flames. Again his magic defied logic. Finn stared in amazement at the meat turning about on an invisible spit.
“How,” he could only mumble.
The vampire tapped his temple with the tip of his claw and said, “It’s all in the mind.”
Finn tapped the side of his head with his palm, loosening the cobwebs knit inside. He was imagining all of it, he was sure. But when his nose took in the cooked seal, and his eyes gazed on its gilded skin, his mouth watered. That first touch of flesh to lips was ecstasy. He warmed his mouth, letting it sit on his tongue before swallowing it whole, chunk after chunk with abandon.
“Pace yourself,” the vampire said. “It is all yours.”
Finn narrowed his eyes, suspicious of the beastly man who refused to eat the tasty fish.
The vampire chuckled. “Do not worry for me,” he said. “I am well fed.”
The words raised hackles on Finn’s neck, and his appetite shrank to nothing. He tossed the mound he held in his hand into the water, and scuttled back to the tent, where he could keep a safe distance from his attacker.
It was colder there, away from the fire, and Finn suffered its loss almost immediately. But he reinforced his resilience and tightened his hold on the claws he’d tucked away as he ate, burying himself in the skin coat the vampire had made for him.
He woke to heat, his body naked but toasty. The vampire had stripped his chest bare again and laid him next to the fire, keeping the fla
mes alight for him. Finn rolled to his side, and ran a hand down his front. For a moment, he’d forgotten where he was, thinking he was on his cot next to his two brothers. When he came to, he sat up. He touched one hand with the other, feeling his heart sink.
“Looking for these?” The vampire smiled, Finn seeing a different aspect than the one on the frightening beast he’d encountered in the forest. He resembled a man more now than before. He held his hand out, his claws poised, the ten bear nails sitting in the palm of his oversized hand. He may have looked like a man but he was much bigger than Finn’s father.
The vampire tossed the claws over his head, into the deep sea. Finn kept a stoic face, one he’d seen his father wear when he was angry. He wouldn’t admit his attempt at treachery.
“Would you like to give it a go?” The vampire said.
Finn shook his head.
“You may learn a thing or two.”
The vampire stood over Finn, his physique far more intimidating than his shorn head.
“Give it a go,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”
Finn’s heart pounded in his chest, his anger swelling in his belly, his mouth filling with spit and fear. He believed it was the end for him, so he decided to go down with a fight. He stood up, and faced the beast, man to man, hand to hand. He let rip a roar from deep inside his gut, his throat tearing with rage. The vampire matched him, crying out with a call of his own.
“That’s it,” he roared. “Show me what you are made of new man. Let me see your animal.”
Finn dropped his weight to his haunches, and flexed the muscles he’d carved with his many seasons on the hunt. He yelped again, then threw his body forward, into the enemy, plying his chest into the man he thought a beast.
The vampire’s roar was playful, as he let the young hunter take the first shot. He writhed in the pleasure of the boy’s arms about his waist, his cheek up against his solar plexus. The boy’s rage felt good against his skin, and he was aroused. His irons ripped through the night sky, exploding from his mouth like a bullet from a gun, the pleasure tearing him up.
“Yes,” he shouted. “Drown me if you can.”
Grief For Heart: The Vincent Du Maurier Series, Book 4 Page 3