“There isn’t. Your Father has been looking, knowing you have chosen a life I would never have approved of; he has fought for you to live it out your way. There is no other solution.”
“Pardon me, Father, but this ancient vampire’s approval? We live Above World and you, sir, continue on in the Underworld - in an outdated manner, to say the least - I’m not sure I require your-”
Jessica’s Father interrupts, “He is my Father, Jessica. I never told you, because we don’t see eye to eye, obviously, and he was never the ‘family’ type. He disapproved of me raising you as a child; and so, I did go in search of an answer that would not send you away from Drew. As you never knew your mother, you could also raise your child never knowing his Father; but as I have lamented those days where Mattressa just was not enough of a mother figure, for you, I have tried, endlessly to find another way. There is no other cure to the carrying of a vampire’s baby, or raising the child, but to feed upon the mortal - or leave him behind - forever.”
The others try to console Jessica, but she is distraught to the point of an emotional upheaval so intense, she runs off, nearly at the speed of sound.
“They won’t hear my cries, into the night, this way,” she thinks; and without knowing what to do, she disappears into bat form, flying toward the coastline; dipping in to the currents of the storm, out of control in her emotions and also the speeds in which she flies during the storm, escaping the ultimatum presented to her - lose her most precious love, Drew, or lose her life and the life she is carrying inside her.
Chapter Sixteen
Forever an Underworld Queen
Daylight arrives and Jessica is asleep on the ledge of an old building, her wings wrapped around her, her eyes dewy from crying many tears. She’s in bat form and nestled between roof crevices where the downpour from the storm and the wind could not reach her tiny form, after being nearly swept away along the reckless surf by uncontrollable gusts. She awakens to worry what Drew must be thinking - his bride has run off in the night like a wild beast at the most wicked, ancient ruins - how cliché. She chews at her claws for a moment, more than slightly ashamed at the intensity of her outburst, although in light of the horrible decision facing her and the future of her son, the excessive strain seems to put her without fault from her irresponsible reaction. She drags her body to hang along the eaves. She opens out her wings, then folds them back in toward her, correctly, the muscular structure sore from flying against strong air currents, and then holding tight against her sides to keep warm, during the little amount of sleep she’s had since morning arrived.
“I’m hiding from my fate, like a child,” she thinks to herself; and determines the only way to go on is to return to her husband and tell him about the crux in their crossroads - the division Destiny has wickedly cast upon their happiness and family plan.
At the Inn, Drew awakens to find still no sign of Jessica. He takes tea in his room, and asks that the front desk continue trying her Father, though Mattressa - who has answered their calls - remains vague about his whereabouts and cannot say when he’ll be back. He paces occasionally near the windows, scanning the pane’s tiny world view to answer the question, ‘where, on Earth, is Jessica?’. After breakfast, she returns, bedraggled and bewitched, her shoulders hanging, her clothing tattered, still damp from the storm. Her hair sticks to her forehead in drenched wisps from sweat and salt air. She is forlorn and worried, burdened with the news that she carries to Drew.
“It can’t be!” he cries after hearing her out – as to why in the devil she was out - all night - in the storm.
“I’m afraid it is so,” Jessica admonishes, weary from her own denial of the facts. Drew cannot accept the finality the vampire code has set upon his life, and throws open the sash of the window, hanging his head out for a breath of fresh air.
“I’ve been thinking about what you nearly accused me of, lately,” Jessica at last, admits, “when you asked me just what I meant, if I would try to change you,” she lets her head droop into both of her hands and says, aloud, the words muffled by her palms, “into a vampire.” Drew lifts his head and looks straight out across the landscape into the open air. He slowly turns to Jessica.
“Would it work? Would I become, like you? And stay with the baby, our little bammypire?” he asks. Jessica nods her head.
“I think so,” she says at first, and then, “I am sure of it,” she tells him.
He pauses a long while, pacing around the room, thinking up all the protests he had come up with in his heart and in his mind, in case this moment were ever to arise. Now that it has, considering the alternative’s consequences, Drew lets go of his reasons, one by one, releasing his rationale - all arguments in which he’s defended mortal rights - he flails both hands into the air and says, “I’ll do it. I’ll become a seeker of the night, a vampire hunter among men.” He looks at Jessica who is peeking through her hands.
“Change me,” he says, “into one of you.” He closes his eyes, assuming she’ll just pounce right at his throat. Nothing happens. He opens his eyes and glances around the room.
“Well?”
“I can’t. I can’t just change a mortal into a vampire. It’s not done that way,” she says, “I have to call the others. We ride, we hunt, we council, we agree upon changing you - bringing you in among us: only, in backwards order from that. Do you understand? You won’t just be my own vampire, for the sake of our little family. Drew, you’ll be one of us, among the ancients - the immortal, the wicked, the lonely, the self-indulgent, the terrible -”
“Stop!!” he tells her, “I’m going out for a walk. I’ll return as soon as I’ve wrapped my head around this impossible decision,” he says.
“I’ll do the right thing,” she calls out the window when she sees him walk under it, “by both of us, by all of us,” she tells him, and then she turns and slinks down the wall, her back against it, until she is crouched near the floor and cries one vampire’s tear for her victim; her choice being Drew - to leave his mortal soul and become a dweller upon the Earth, the In Between, and the Underworld, with her and their child - for eternity.
The riders are called - not by the phone at the front desk of the Inn - but by the ancient ways of radar along the sound waves carried by the wind, and by the cry of the soul and truly, this time, Jessica ‘gets’ the loneliness in the cry of a vampire. Little to no choice but to change a love of mortal status to her ancient side - a calling he never wanted to answer - forced by destiny, enchanted by a truly wicked(?) vampire. Jessica thinks about her college days, her choice of Drew; she thinks about Theopolis and how he possibly realized eons before Jessica that possibly she had been in denial - innocently (oxymoron for a vampire) enchanting Drew from the beginning. And now, she’s gotten her terrible ‘way’, like a spoiled child, he cannot say no. And, she wonders about herself - will she be more notorious than her Father that this enchantment was even more ominous? Requiring Drew to let go of his very soul without any real option with which he could ever live - making any other choice out of the question. She regrets, like a vampire, she bemoans her quest for her mortal love; but, she does what she must and collects the others for a Night Ride - to hunt and devour the soul of Drew.
All are in agreement that it must be done, and all are willing to allow Jessica the only quick, and merciful, bite to change his life long status. Poor Drew! He mistakenly thinks a walk among the stone pillars at Stonehenge will clear his mind.
More like ‘Clear!’ as paramedics call our during a restart of life after death.
Only at the fangs and sanguine life force - hands of Jessica. She descends upon him, (easy pickins’) after witnessing his poor decision to walk past dark, alone, along the country road, headed back toward the Inn. And though the Night Riders flutter about in their cloud, they too descend and cry one lonely vampire’s tear for the enchantment - and painless transformation - of their victim.
Nostramadeus, not loving bat form most of his life, rapidly transfers back to vampi
re, his usual state. When out from behind the nearest pillar pounces the Leprechaun, ready to do battle, then steal away to the reigning vampire’s Castle to rule over Underworlders as triumphant in the use of dark forces and evil. The Leprechaun uses his nearly lost magic on the unsuspecting vampire of ancient days, tossing him onto the only altar, Above World, to have ascertained a vampire’s demise - a form change. Not fair! Nostramadeus truly does love his vampire form, often using his suave looks and charms to find suitors and friends. Jessica’s Father, lets out a primeval cry at the instant the Leprechaun’s magic apprehends his own kind - his Father, really - now that this fact is known. He flies in one instant sweeping the Leprechaun up by the collar, off into the distance without a sound but the diminishing laughter of the evil Leprechaun, until only silence and darkness remain where they’d once stood.
Jessica awakens Drew with a vampire’s kiss, unaware of the unprecedented scene taking place near the stone altar, nor the catastrophes taking place among her ancestral lineage beneath the black clouds that obstruct all but a faint hint of moonlight from a full moon. Jessica’s fangs, caught in the fleeting moonbeam of light, drip with the last mortal blood of her victim, awakening him – new – a dark angel of night.
Now, she hears the urgent cries of her creed. The Night Riders descend upon the Leprechaun - not for feasting, for though he is despicable, he is a magic being - until there are no dark arts left in him, at all. Thrown out to wander the Earth as an undead, he no longer holds his magical powers against the overwhelming effort of the group, known among scientific classifications as a cloud, or swarm, of bats. Jessica joins the group to see the last bit of destruction and the force of her Father sending the remains of the sorriest, real estate con artist in leprechaun velvet, to the outlying lands, never to return in his presence, again.
“Nostramadeus, my Father, is dead,” he exalts a cry toward the moon and revaporizes in front of the stone altar where his ancient Father’s body lay.
“What does this mean, Father? A vampire cannot lose his life, or his soul. I don’t understand,” Jessica weeps.
“Only a Leprechaun’s magic, and only at the ruins of a sacrificial altar known to have shed ancient vampire blood,” he explains, grabbing her around the shoulders and hugging her tight. He also weeps, a single vampire’s teardrop which causes the others to surround the daughter and allow him the time to remove the body of the Underworld’s once most notorious vampire, L’ornomichaelis Nostramadeus, the first.
“He is changing form, now,” Jessica’s Father tells the group, “as it is true, and of-the-blood, our creed - like a soul - cannot extinguish. He will reappear to us, in another form, to live out another vampire’s life - yet gone to us, he is.”
“He had saved my life - when killing the Witch,” Jessica recounts.
“He’d asked me to the Underworld Castle, after this family business - he called it,” Peoneastlies remembers.
“O, I’d met him many times,” says Ms. Lydia Headlong, “he knew Thaddeus Preference and I during the early days of the college.”
“I was about to accept our differences. I’d held him away for my daughter’s sake for too long,” Jessica’s Father tells the group.
Within two days, Drew is awake and imbued, entirely. He takes his first flight, at the instruction of Jessica - and Theopolis who has joined the group after hearing the news about the sad demise of the Underworld Castle’s abysmal master of the haunt throughout the ages - and its new owners, at least until the baby is born. They ride at night under the Blue Moon - the second full moon within one month, an event which occurs only several times in a decade. They pay their respects to Nostramadeus, joined also by Domina, Ickabod, Thaddeus Preference (in a rare show as a vampire) and a few others who knew the old vampire, back when.
The group holds a ceremony to dispose of his ashes over the dark and turbulent seas past Stonehenge. As bats, they dive along the cliffs and rocks at the edge of the coastline for hours upon end. Chattering, and calling in primitive sounds from the very beginnings of time Above World. Drew feels the first ancient call to his, now immortal soul - blessed and chosen by Nostramadeus through death to alert the others where they will find his new form.
“Jessica, change out of bat, quickly, you must not go into this form, again, until the child is nearly three years old,” Drew chatters for the first time; alarming Jessica at the pitch of his sounds and the seriousness of the matter - she changes. Standing along the rocky cliff, the wind whips through her long, dark hair, against the skyline, her cape flutters black shadows across the nearby rocks. She holds her ring, instinctively, as the baby moves within her. She has her family back, and now they must go to the Underworld, Drew tells her until the child is born. He will be with us, again - taking form in the Underworld, and we will know his soul to reappear near us. Jessica is proud that he has accepted Drew to tell this knowledge and her Father is also aware of how well Drew has embraced the changes he felt forced to receive.
And so, the two return to the Inn, say good-bye to the others, and descend from the old haunt of the Stygian Downs Bridge, to the Underworld Castle. Nearly as queen, Jessica serves as the best choice to reign in the relic that looms over the Underworld town as seen at a distance from the In Between; for she had been the one to answer the Witch’s summons which led to her certain demise, and Jessica’s Father had ended the schemes of the Leprechaun’s scandalous plan.
All’s well that ends well? Not quite. Theopolis had fancied himself haunting the Castle of the ages, after he’d learned the old vampire was gone, and the idea that Drew had been the one to Father the offspring immortal, just doesn’t quite fit with his first impressions of Drew. Nonetheless, he welcomes the new arrival, along with everyone else, visiting the Castle on several occasions - always eager to ask about their ‘plans’, noting just when they plan to return Above World.
Another fiasco? May you always know a vampire when you see one in the night - but a bammypire? Mattressa’s offers to watch the baby have been more fright than encouragement. She’s wondering just how she became so outnumbered; and frankly, she’s been looking, well, drained. Instead of knitting booties, she’s begun stringing garlic; and hasn’t given a thought to the feelings of Jessica by hanging it over the crib. Only the Father of Jessica’s Father once set her off guard so much as to throw out the formalities of protocol toward her employer and sensitivity to the family’s immortal status – so much so as to throw out all worries about being upfront and outwardly offensive - in light of defending her life-blood. Even a similar twinkle in his eyes has her determined to protect plasma and cell count, no matter how downright adorable, little Eduard the Terrible is.
The End.
Or, is it
The Beginning?
Farewell, dear readers!
May this series have bestowed upon you the knowledge and know-how required that you may always know a vampire, when you see one in the night.
More books by this author can be found at:
KaraSkyeSmith.blogspot.com, and
Fae-tality.blogspot.com
http://amazon.com/author/karaskyesmith
What? I’ve told you the story. What are you looking, here, for? I know, dear, curious one. I know.
Your journey will be as unique as you are!
The Nebulizer Potion and the Electric Compass (Vampire DeAngeliuson Book 3) Page 15