by Jaz Primo
“Yeah, I’m sorry I can’t stay longer,” Ethan said with a rueful look. “I’ll try to make it back up here again soon…before any battery shortages.”
I actually think that Paige was blushing.
It was easy to see how great a couple the two of them had become, and I felt very happy for them.
But I still felt guilty about my presence in New Haven causing Paige to be separated from him.
“When’s your flight?” I asked.
“I’ve got a red-eye at one-thirty in the morning,” he said. “I figured since it’s only a short nighttime hop to Atlanta, I’d fly ordinary commercial.”
That made sense. Sunset Air had excellent vampire-friendly service, but their prices were definitely the top end of premium, based upon the invoices I’d seen.
“How’s your research coming?” he asked.
Paige groaned. “Oh, no. Snore-time. You had to ask, didn’t you?”
Ethan chuckled. “Sorry about that.”
She stood up. “No, no, you history buffs have your little nerd chat. I’m going to find something chocolaty.”
He handed her some cash and she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before heading toward the bakery counter.
I told Ethan about the book I had checked out, as well as some other information I had learned. He even asked to look at the book in question.
After a few minutes of rapid leafing and scanning, he laid the tome down before him.
“Interesting. It’s an odd specialty for that time period,” he said. “You’ll want to investigate any of his European connections. That’s where all the cutting-edge studies were taking place, anyway.”
His insights were definitely helpful.
“Thanks. I will,” I said. “Was that a former interest of yours, too?”
He smiled. “Me? No. I was too preoccupied with myself at the time. But I remember having occasional discussions with colleagues.”
It occurred to me that I knew very little about Ethan’s past.
“Where you human or vampire then?”
“Vampire,” he said, lowering his voice. “Though only recently turned.”
Wow, cool.
“Do tell,” I said.
“You’re really interested?” he asked.
“Oh, very,” I said. “I’m a history sponge, remember?”
He leaned across the table toward me, so I met him halfway.
“Stop me if this gets boring.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, right. Not likely.”
“So, I was turned in—” he said.
I held up my hand. “Hey, no human backstory?”
“Even less noteworthy for that period, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Try me,” I said.
He paused for a moment, as if in silent reflection.
"I was born and raised in central Connecticut, just outside of Middleton. My father was a member of the Middleton council and my mother a midwife,” he said. “Oh, how I loved it there. I knew from the time I was a boy that’s where I wanted to live out the rest of my life. Of course, life had other plans.”
“Siblings?” I asked.
“Two younger brothers,” he said. “They took after my father, each becoming farmers in their own right when they were grown.”
“But not you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Me? Nope. I was fascinated by my mother’s midwifery skills. I even helped with deliveries by the time I had turned eight, though social modesty precluded more active participation in the advanced activities.
“As such, I spent far more time helping my father and brothers in the fields than that,” he said. “Still, I never developed an appreciation for farming.”
“Was your father disappointed?”
“Maybe at first,” he said. “But even back then physicians were highly regarded, and they earned a great deal of respect in their communities. When I expressed an interest in pursuing medicine, such as it was, my father encouraged me.
“My father used his contacts with regional clergy and managed to collect the attention of a competent physician in a neighboring county who was willing to take on an assistant,” he said. “However, it was expected that I attend college. Fortunately, Doctor Sedgwick was a kind man. He not only tutored me on basic knowledge in physiology, but sponsored my entry into medical school. Between some of my father’s savings and Doctor Sedgwick’s influence, I was accepted to Harvard.”
“Very cool,” I said. “You’re a Harvard man.”
“Snob,” Paige said as she sat down before what had to be the largest chocolate muffin I’d ever seen.
Both Ethan and I stared at it.
“Hey, stop sizing up my muffin,” she said.
He and I simultaneously broke into laughter.
At first, she frowned. Then she scowled.
“Oh, very funny, you pervs,” she said. “Get back to yammerin’ before I fang you both.”
Ethan stretched his arm across her shoulders and she snuggled beside him before delving into her snack.
“Anyway, by 1856, the year I turned twenty, I had graduated from Harvard and had fallen for a lovely young local woman named Deidre, who I’d met while attending college,” he said.
“She was a fellow student?” I asked.
“No,” Paige said. “They first saw each other on Sundays at the local church.”
I stared at her.
“What?” she asked. “Spoiler. I’ve heard this already.”
He looked at her with an endearing expression.
“Within a year, Deidre and I were married. We had a wonderful year together before she became pregnant,” he said.
“Unfortunately, and as often was the case back then, she died giving birth to our son, who subsequently died within hours of delivery. Though the midwife was experienced, there’d been birthing complications, and neither Sedgwick nor I were able to stem her internal hemorrhaging.”
He paused to take a drink of his cappuccino and I could see his eyes turn glassy. Paige reached over to hold his free hand.
“I’m so sorry, Ethan,” I said.
What a tragic event.
I thought back to Katrina’s own story of having lost her husband and children to disease within a short time of one another.
Throughout the ages, life seemed to be rife with senseless tragedy.
“I was devastated, and felt lost for months afterwards,” Ethan said. “Nothing stemmed my intense feelings of loss and sadness. I think the only thing that propelled me onward was my work in medicine. In the years that followed, as I deprived Death of each potential victim, it seemed like a series of small victories, of sorts.”
That was an interesting notion to me.
“Of course, you can’t cheat Death forever,” he said. “He always seems to get his due in the end.”
I stared at him. “So, is that why you still practice medicine as a vampire today? To keep cheating Death?”
“Now? No,” he said. “I do it because I thoroughly enjoy medicine and helping others. Although there may be a small component of penance for what I am now, as well.”
I looked into his eyes, wondering why he felt that way.
“Penance?” I asked.
The edges of his mouth upturned slightly, though in a bitter fashion.
“By the time the Civil War started in 1861, I had been actively practicing medicine itinerantly from town to town. Naturally, the Union Army aggressively recruited doctors, and I volunteered my services,” he said. “I was commissioned a Captain, and spent most of my time in field hospitals.”
“Wow,” I said. “I can only imagine what you saw during the Civil War.”
“You’re a historian, so you’ve read about how brutal it was,” he said. “Still, to experience it was something else entirely.”
“Hey, I’m eating here,” Paige said.
I gave her a wan look. “Oh, please. You eat, sleep, and dream blood.”
“Yeah, true.”
Ethan sho
ok his head.
“The field hospitals were horrible places, and I still remember the stench and foulness that accompanied sounds of pure human misery. For all of the carnage on the battlefields, the carnage in the field hospitals was much worse,” he said. “For every person I managed to save, three or more died. I felt the loss of Deidre all over again with each human soul that passed, but took some solace in the few that I managed to help.”
One of the baristas stopped by our booth.
“Can I get anybody anything?” she asked.
“Maybe another Earl Grey?” I asked.
“You got it,” she said.
Ethan paused for a moment before continuing his story.
“In May of 1864, I was assigned to a smaller brigade during the Wilderness Campaign in Virginia. In truth, it was really just a series of uncoordinated skirmishes, rather than a formalized campaign, but no less bloody than any of the other major battles that I had seen,” he said. “By then, everyone was so tired of the war. It all seemed so pointless…seemingly endless, really.”
“Hey, wasn’t that was the first time U.S. Grant engaged Lee’s own Confederate forces?” I asked.
Paige held up one hand. “Down boy. Sit now. Sit.”
I gave her my best deadpan expression.
Ethan remained silent until the barista delivered my fresh cup of tea. Then he scanned the dining room.
“Getting sort of busy in here all of a sudden,” he said. “I’ll talk more on our walk back home.”
I could barely wait for us to exit the place.
Fortunately, it was a cold night and there were scarcely any pedestrians to share the sidewalk with.
Not long after we began walking, Ethan continued his story.
“One night, two soldiers conveyed a severely injured man to the surgeon’s tent, which at the time struck me as odd because most engagements ended by sundown,” he said. “The man’s body had been so riddled with musket balls I was amazed he was still alive. Apparently, he was the sole survivor from some bloodbath of a skirmish that had occurred a couple of miles outside of camp.
“I feverishly worked to remove the musket rounds from the man's body, and was amazed that he had held on as long as he had. By the time I had finished, it was nearly midnight, and I dismissed the two orderlies who had been helping me,” he said. “Given the man’s ragged breathing, I figured he had only hours to live. Not wanting him to die alone, I pulled up a chair and dozed as I sat vigil at his bedside.”
“He was the vampire,” Paige said.
I gave her a dirty look. “Spoilers, remember?”
She winked at me. “Oops, sorry.”
“Okay, so the man woke within an hour or so, and seemed remarkably recuperated despite his overly pale skin color. He told me that his name was Noah, and that he was grateful to me for saving him. Though in reality, it wasn’t anything that I hadn’t already heard from others whose lives I’d saved,” Ethan said.
“Noah?” I asked. “Hey, he wasn’t—”
“The legendary flood guy with the animals? Nah, different Noah,” Ethan interrupted.
“Oh,” I said. “Go on then.”
“He rested in one of the recovery tents for another day, and then reappeared in my tent the following night. I was amazed that he could even stand,” he said. “It was when he told me that he’d lived for over two hundred years that I doubted his sanity, much less his constitution. As if that wasn’t enough, he offered me immortality as a parting gift.”
“Man, that’s surreal,” I said. “What’d you do then?”
“I laughed at him, thinking his mind had been sadly affected either from battle trauma he had experienced or his injuries,” Ethan said. “However, he swore he could prove his claims and asked me to accompany him into the woods, where he displayed some amazing feats of strength and speed.”
“I still can’t believe you went with him,” Paige said. “Seriously? Some crazy-sounding guy asks me into the woods, and I’m dropping him with the nearest heavy piece of wood.”
Ethan chuckled. “I’m not ashamed to admit I was curious, though I still wore my service revolver.”
“A lot of good that would’ve done you,” she said.
“Well, of course, I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Okay, okay, what happened next?” I asked.
“As you can imagine, I was stunned, as well as scared, but he reassured me that he meant me no harm.”
Ethan paused to look sidelong at me. “Much like you, he had an innocent face.”
That made me smile.
“Then the man explained the power of his saliva and blood, and it immediately occurred to me how much easier it would be to help people with such abilities,” he said. “I really hadn’t given much thought to the idea of eternity at the time, but was definitely still affected by how fresh Deidre’s loss in my life had been. Besides, I had grown so weary of the war, and the death, and the sickness. It was overwhelming in its scope.”
Paige reached out to hold Ethan’s hand as we continued our walk.
“A tempting offer,” I said.
“Yeah, so much so that I agreed to his offer. We left my unit behind in the middle of the night, and journeyed to an old cabin in the middle of nowhere, far away from any battlefields. I lost track of time, but during nearly a week of painful blood exchanges using a really odd method of transference Noah had acquired from an old Indian ritual, I was turned,” he said.
“Do you remember much about it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Towards the end of the process, I lost my faculties as if in some prolonged fever. By the time that I awoke, all I knew was that my life had been changed forever. The world looked, sounded, and felt completely different then."
"I remember something of that," I whispered.
Unlike Ethan, my body had been too weak for the turning process. I had nearly died before stemming the process by saturating my body with raw sunlight and its strong ultraviolet radiation.
“Now, I’m once again merely human,” I said.
He reached out and clasped me on the shoulder. “It wasn’t your time yet.”
“Sometimes, yet feels like never.”
“A word of advice,” he said. “Enjoy the time that you spend, no matter in what form. It’s about your journey, not your destination.”
I considered that for a moment.
“So, what happened next?” I asked. “After your turning.”
“After a few days showing me how to feed on animals, just in case people weren’t available, and then important lessons on the dangers of sunlight, I told him I felt the need to return to my unit. More than a week was a long time to be gone and unaccounted for, you see,” he said. “But I felt honor bound to return to resign my commission and not be labeled a deserter. However, Noah urged me not to try returning to my unit, particularly given that my body had been strongly craving blood.”
“That was idiotic,” Paige said.
“Hey, it was a matter of honor,” Ethan said.
“So, did you go back to your unit?” I asked.
“After a couple of days, I got up the urge to venture back just after sundown,” he said.
Then something occurred to me. “Ah, I bet the camp had moved on by the time you returned.”
Ethan’s expression darkened. “Not so much.”
We walked around the corner onto our street.
“I smelled the stench of burning flesh miles before I got close enough to see what had happened for myself,” he said. “My old encampment had been attacked, maybe only a day or so prior. It looked like a slaughter had occurred.”
“That had to be shocking,” I said.
“In truth, while gruesome, it was prophetic. I mean, it was pretty obvious that my army days were behind me by that point,” he said. “It made resigning my commission unnecessary. It was relatively common for people to be lost and unaccounted for during or following battles. I simply returned to Noah, and he helped me learn the
ways of my new life."
"And yet, you remained a doctor, didn’t you?" I asked as we reached our front porch.
“I couldn’t deny what I had become, but it didn't change how I felt about helping people,” he replied. “I just had to be a hell of a lot more careful about it. And it helped me to learn to curb my appetite for human blood. To this day, it's the one thing that I hate most about what I am now. My profession is my penance; plying my trade in return for partaking in human blood.”
Paige looked up at him with a sad expression. “You don’t need to pay penance, Ethan. You don’t owe anyone anything.”
He bent down to warmly kiss her and she reached up to hug his neck.
They were a lovely sight.
“I love you for who you are,” she said.
“Love?” he asked.
She smiled. “Yeah…love.”
I grinned as I opened the front door for us.
Paige and Ethan made their way upstairs hand in hand as I walked over to the couch to pick up the television remote.
At that moment, I longed to hold Kat in my arms.
Chapter 7
Katrina
After sundown, Alton and I made the hour-long drive on Interstate 95 through waves of cold drizzle to New London to meet with the vampire who lay territorial claim to much of the state of Connecticut. We hoped to learn more about other vampires who might be operating in and around New Haven.
I was determined to locate those responsible for attacking Caleb.
“Newton’s a bit of a traditionalist,” Alton said. “We only visited briefly at the Slovene conference, but he seemed like a sensible, though quiet, sort of fellow.”
“Benjamin Newton,” I said. “I wonder. As in, Sir Isaac Newton?”
“You sounded like Caleb just then,” he replied.
A faint smile crossed my lips.
“Not Isaac himself, per say, though Benjamin claims to be distant relative,” he said. “Mind you, I’ve never explored his claim on that.”
“Don’t you trust anyone?”
“Very few, and rarely at face value,” he replied. “I trust you.”
Benjamin Newton’s estate was rather large compared to the properties surrounding it, though most homes in the area were relatively grand by contemporary standards.