“Dagur.”
My name sounded like someone else’s name. My head throbbed and I squinched my eyes but couldn’t seem to rid them of the light. Her face floated before me and I grabbed for her, as everything faded to black.
*
Freyit said, “The milk thistle will strengthen the olive leaf.”
Netta’s tiny hand was wrapped about mine, tight as can be. I saw Evelina’s face first, her angelic aspect waking me to new life. When I opened my eyes, Netta leaned in to plant a kiss on my cheek, then she let go of my hand, and Evelina took her place at my side.
“You must make another choice,” she whispered in a tongue we alone shared. “The one you’ve made doesn’t suit me.”
She spoke of my transfiguration. My collapse had frightened her. She was honest when she said she couldn’t live without me, not only my blood.
I tried to speak but my dry throat let out nothing but air. Evelina put a cup of water to my lips and touched my head with her hand, warming me in an instant. My fever made the chills unbearable, though Freyit’s magic herbs were starting to take root.
“What have you learned?” I couldn’t think of much else upon waking but her lips on Finn’s skin.
“Another time, my yiós. For now, you must rest.”
I read it on her face, in her eyes, when she tasted his blood, she sensed the other, the familiar. She could only count on it as feeling, attachment she’d forged from hope.
“Is Saba safe with Finn?”
“Saba will always be safe,” she said before leaving me in my wife’s care, slipping out my door, taking my hopeful spirits with her.
“Bring Saba to me,” I told Freyit, as Netta returned to my side. He took off in an instant, rushing to give me anything I requested, my illness weighing on him, too.
“Rest, my husband,” Netta said, as she placed her head on my chest. “Let us carry the burden for you now.”
She couldn’t know how deep her words cut, as I waited for my end to come.
* * *
I woke to find Saba at my side. Her expression told me everything she was feeling, her worry apparent despite the smile she wore.
“Don’t fret,” I said, my voice just above a whisper. “This isn’t the end.”
Without a word, she dropped her forehead to the cot beside me, her shoulders heaving with emotion. I reached for her and placed my hand overtop her head, my touch only making her sadness greater.
“This doesn’t have to be, Dag,” she mumbled into the cot. “You can stay with us forever.”
“What about you, my girl?”
My question wasn’t rhetorical, its answer as knowable as any. If Evelina made me her novice, Saba couldn’t follow.
“I don’t care about that,” she said.
“And Peter? Would he care?”
Her sob was soft, but it came nevertheless, her tears a secret we alone shared. Saba didn’t often show what she considered weakness. She wouldn’t like to know others had seen that side of her.
“Peter’s gone.”
“I know,” I said. “He will return. Don’t fret.”
“I don’t understand it.” She brought her head up from the cot and looked away, her eyes drawn to the books on the shelves. “I thought something different.”
“Their ways are not ours—”
“Enough.” Her tongue scolded me with honey. “I’ve heard enough of that. This whole lifetime I’ve been made for this. You know it, Dag, as well as I do.” Her eyes searched me for the truth. She tested me, she wanted to know if I was wise to her real spirit, the one that had haunted her from the beginning.
“She is a goddess,” I said, unwilling to keep the truth from her any longer.
“Who?”
“The one who comes through you.”
“Peter’s maker?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Galla was another manifestation, her first human self before you.”
“Am I still me?”
I reached for her hand, and pulled myself up, using her strength. When my head was propped on the pillow behind me I said, “You can only be you.”
She sighed. “I don’t get it.”
“You are you, my girl. The goddess in you is also you. You are both one and the same.”
“So I’ve lived before?”
“Only you can answer that.”
“I’ve seen things.”
I nodded. “Tell me.”
She shrugged. She’d given it ample thought, I could see that plainly. But I wanted her to divulge the signs, the contents of her dreams, the messages she’d been passed from the deep.
“I only knew the truth when Peter confessed. Before that it was just a vision.”
“What did you see?”
“I don’t think he meant to show me—”
“Peter?”
She nodded. “It was the first time we met.”
“You were barely—”
“I’d seen eight seasons.”
“So young.” I mumbled the words, meant for myself, but she leaned in and said it couldn’t be helped. “What does that mean?”
“She called to him.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “The one who knows me deep down inside. I am her as much as she is me, but it’s like I have all these memories from lives I’ve never lived.”
“Are they vivid, the memories?”
“I relive them all the time. It’s like they can only exist inside of me, as if I keep them alive.”
I couldn’t imagine what it was like for my girl, so young and impressionable. At times, she must have believed she was going crazy. “Tell me about some of them,” I said.
She pulled her shoulders up and sat back in the chair Netta had placed at my side. My wife had left us, giving Saba and I the freedom to speak of the things we couldn’t share with others. Netta went off to see to her other children, those who needed her most.
My daughter took her time. Her eyes went up to the side, as she rifled through the catalogue of memories. It was plain how well she knew them.
“Do you want to know how his maker died?” Her eyes widened.
I was conflicted, concerned the vampire’s death would speak to a sadness I wasn’t ready to feel. I’d seen the death of some in Vincent’s and Evelina’s notes, but those seemed trivial compared to Galla’s death. She was more than one of his vampires. She was the reincarnation of a goddess, like my daughter. I feared her death would remind me of my Saba’s fragile existence.
“Tell me whatever it is you’d like,” I said, being the brave one my daughter needed me to be.
She began with a landscape I recognized from Vincent’s journal, Galla’s time ending a century before the plague. She’d separated herself from Peter, severing their ties. He tried to follow, but she assured him she’d return.
“She’d a calling,” Saba said. “Something she believed she needed to do for him.”
“Who?”
“The one we all pine for.” The corners of her mouth turned up, but her smile was a sad one. “She saw the future in a drop of rain, and walked toward it with an open mind.” She looked to the books on the shelves. “I think she died for this.”
“This?”
“Me.”
“Oh.”
“She chose her death, a painful death.” My eyes grew wide as Saba spoke of history like a time traveler come back through a portal to report it. “She posed as a woman for a while, taking up a faith older than Peter’s. She participated in a community, she married a man, she made a life with him.”
“You’ve seen all of this?”
“I’ve felt it, Dag. The horrible death of her body, the annihilation of her soul, so she could come back as me.”
“What death?” She could see the deeper question on my face. How does a vampire die a human death?
“She gave up blood, turning to her faith to steady her. Her husband didn’t understand, but he loved her and when their time came to part ways, she mourned him.”<
br />
“They parted in death?”
“Before.” Her eyes narrowed. “You can’t know the horrors of our ancestors.”
I didn’t tell her so, but I could. I’d read about them in the histories on my shelves. There’s no shortage of men willing to record their demonic side for posterity.
“The men were sent one way, the women another. They corralled them into wagons that lurched along a track. For days, Galla sat in the darkness, the stench of human excrement, mortal misery her comfort. She awaited their death with them. The one she’d seen in her mind’s eye.”
My daughter told me how the men in uniform grouped them all and spurred them on like cattle. They were put in lines, made to wait without food and water. “They stripped them in the cold, deloused them, sent them into a chamber,” she said.
Galla’s suffering was deep, for her want of blood grew outside of her, something she no longer desired. She denied herself by the grace of her god, and the hope she’d return for him.
“She missed Peter,” Saba said. “But she pined for another.”
I didn’t have to ask who.
“They locked the airtight cells, vaults with nothing but a tease of a window on a door, a cage to block it. They were numerous in their fear, bodies packed together.”
I closed my eyes, my heart up in my throat. I’d read of this, the atrocity that scarred historic man’s twentieth century. Events of that nature were sure to be the reason their gods wreaked havoc on the planet, destroying the old world with a tidal wave to cleanse it.
“The gas came like rain,” Saba said. “Galla didn’t suffocate, or suffer the effects of the poison, but she choked on the humanity around her, so close to her, ripe and squeezed of life. She succumbed to a spiritual death, the one necessary to endure the bodily death.”
Now my eyes grew wide at the next admission. “She used her talons,” she said, “to dig out her eyes, to blind herself to the horror.” Saba’s voice was barely a whisper. “In the dark, in the stink, in the hell on earth, Galla ushered in the end.”
“How?” The question a murmur between us.
“She suffered the fire, Dag. She went with the bodies to the furnace, and lived the fire, the flames sweeping in and scorching her hardened flesh. It took time, her agony immense until the nothingness finally came.”
Saba’s eyes burned in mine, as I tried to imagine Galla’s torture. Despite the spiritual death, the agony of the fire eating up her corse was ineffable. The sadness on my daughter’s face, as she recalled that piece of her own history, a world from which she too had escaped, was unmatched in any aspect of woe ever drawn, impossible to spill on the page with mere ink. To capture an expression like that requires a blood sacrifice.
“Empathy was Galla’s finest trait,” Saba said. “She faced her demise with her heart in her hand, an offering for her one true god.”
“I see you have thought of her, deeply.”
She nodded, then looked to my shelves again, Vincent’s journals calling to her.
“Would you like to meet him?” I asked.
“Not yet. There’s time enough for that.”
“He will find you.” I wasn’t certain I believed what I said, but no truer words were spoken.
She turned to look at me again, and said, “I think he already has.”
“What can you mean?”
She smiled, the tears gone from her cheeks now. She’d reconnected with her inner strength, using Galla’s story to bolster her purpose. “Rest, Dag. You’ve got to recover.”
I touched my sweet daughter’s hand, as she bent over to kiss my forehead. She smelled of the woods, the realm to which she longed to return.
“Go,” I whispered. “Finn is waiting.”
She tossed me one more smile before she slipped out my door, bounding down the tower steps with a lightness in her being, and a string tied about her heart. To whose rib the other end was attached was a mystery for the ages.
* * *
Peter left the colony, the enclave, the world he’d forged with his kin. He couldn’t bear the thought of her with another. But bear it he would, despite himself. He didn’t tell Evelina where he was going, but she knew. She knew everything in his heart.
“Come back to me soon,” she said before he tossed himself over the embankment, into the sea below.
Their conversation had been short, her need to speak her own. He could read it all in her mind, but he let her tell him her plan to take Finn’s blood.
“Ah, he’ll grant you permission,” Peter said, knowing none could resist her.
“I must know.”
“Be careful, my sister.”
She flashed a fang but he smiled, unable to see anything but her benevolence.
“The one who has taken from him may not reveal himself in their transfer,” Peter said. “He may be too skittish, or perhaps unwilling to give up his identity.”
“Why would he hide from me?”
“I think him too changed, but if it’s Vincent, he’d—”
She raised a hand to silence him. “It’s not my beloved.”
“How can you know?”
“The boy’s heart seems untouched by a god.”
“You feel this?”
She paced the doorstep of their enclave, tying Peter up despite his wanting to fly before the sun made its way over Askja.
“I feel him,” she said.
“Who is it then?”
“I can’t say, but he is attached to me.”
“Who isn’t?”
She gave him a wry smile, her heart broken at the thought of him leaving for a time.
“His need for me is evident in the boy’s scar.”
“How can you tell?”
“The wound speaks to me,” she said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“You know, don’t you?”
She looked at her feet, and said, “I must bring him to me.”
“I don’t see why he waits to find you. Now that Finn is here, why is he not using him to get to you?”
She touched Peter’s forehead, then drew her fingertip down the side of his face. He smiled and closed his eyes. “Have I told you how important you are to me?” She asked.
Peter’s nostrils flared, his chest swelling with emotion. “Every moment.”
“Don’t be long.”
“One can’t rush the mending of a broken heart, even one as stony as mine.”
With that, he backed away, feeling her dismissal in the very blood they’d shared every day since their escape from the ship. He shot through the dark like a deer on the run from a lynx, and she turned with a flourish, biting down her ire as she went.
Once Peter had been on the move for three changes of the moon, he stopped, setting up camp on a peak at the furthest most tip of their island. He’d packed light, but removed the battenti from his satchel, placing it before him. He’d brought the tool as a means for the mortification of his hardened flesh, the only way for him to crack the shame from his heart. The flat piece of wood, studded with a common carpenter’s nails, was a reminder of the sacrifice his god had made as a man. The punishment couldn’t be considered anything in comparison, but Peter’s intentions were sound.
Before he took to the flaying of his skin, he knelt on the edge of the cavern inside which he’d raised his camp, and looked up to the sky. He called out Finn’s name, “Find me where you stand,” he said.
Peter closed his eyes and drew the young hunter’s face before him, seeing the square jaw, the long nose, the almond eyes, his sloped forehead. He envisioned him there in the space before him, inside his mind’s eye, unaware that he was able to tumble into his meditation, falling more deeply than into the young hunter’s current thoughts. Like a force that sucks the waves back into the sea after milling about on the shore, Peter’s vision was pulled into Finn’s memories, where another man raised his sights to the sky.
The man had a stalwart build, a hefty chest, solid arms and legs, and looked a giant at almost seven fe
et tall. He stood next to a chopping block, his hand swallowing the ax he held. His back was turned to Peter, but as the vampire floated between Finn’s synapses, he learned the way closer. Soon he was able to draw up to the man, to feel his brawn, smell the sweat on his brow, see the gleam in his eye. He didn’t smile, but his forehead pinched together every now and then, pulling his aspect into a healthy scowl. Peter tested his voice, insisting his phantom speak the words on his mind.
“I had a dream,” the man said with a voice too deep to be that of a ghost. Peter caught his words as though he’d registered them once before. “I had a dream you were gone, and hard as I tried I couldn’t see to your return.”
Peter decided the man was Finn’s father, speaking an augury of the abduction yet to come. The memory could only be from before he was taken.
“The energies call me forth, and bring me to your pile, and there I see you as fresh as the day you came into my life. But the sorrow, now scarred across your lips, cannot be kissed off, my wife.”
Soon a woman appeared in front of Finn’s father, her size half that of the man’s. Peter thought Finn had been the recipient of the man’s words, but this was a conversation unintended for the young hunter’s ears, his parents embroiled in a clandestine meeting of their own.
“Call me to you, my husband, and I shall claw my way back.”
The strapping man pulled the woman up into his arms, and held her as though she were a star soon to join the others in the ether.
“You shall hear nothing but my call,” he said. “But fear not, for it will be a bellow worthy of the Chief of Pain himself. I shall mourn your soul, and pine for it with every waking breath.”
The man’s head was well above the woman’s, whose face was turned aside, her head laying on his chest. He wiped a tear from his eye, she unaware it had threatened to fall.
“Keep our sons for me,” she whispered. “They know not what this life is about. They will be lost without me, and if I cannot get back, you must raise them next to you, and hold their hearts above your own. Please, my husband, I ask this of you.”
Grief For Heart: The Vincent Du Maurier Series, Book 4 Page 12