The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4)

by Joseph Duncan

  “No,” I said. “They took his body with them.”

  Or made him into a blood drinker, I thought, but I kept it to myself.

  The degenerate ones were not like “real” vampires. They were more like the creatures that shamble their way through your popular modern horror fiction—Dracula, Carmilla, the Hammer horror films. They did not reproduce like true vampires. They could, but they rarely did. They did not have the mental faculties for such a deliberate act.

  With the ghoul, a single bite was enough to transmit the curse to a mortal victim. It was like an infection. Rather than transform immediately, if they managed to survive the initial attack, their victim languished for days, growing increasingly feverish and weak. After some time, the victim would appear to expire. It was not true death, but a sort of transformative coma. As the victim lay in his or her deathlike state, the corrupt Strix spread through their body, transmogrifying their mortal flesh into a debased analog of our own immortal cells. Their victims might lie in a deathlike trance for days, even weeks, before the transformation was complete.

  In those ancient times, man’s medical knowledge was terribly crude, so the victims of ghoul attacks were often buried alive. When the degenerate vampire finally roused, they had to claw their way from the grave. Any reason they might have had was driven from their minds by the shock of being buried alive, the horror of being forced to dig themselves from their own graves. Obviously, the vampire mythology of the Middle Ages was based more on these ghouls than the powerful race of immortals from whence their kind descended.

  Our corrupt offspring… Oh, how we loathed them!

  The footprints led away to the north, following the shore of the winding watercourse. That was why I did not pick up their scent as easily as I might have. Whether by accident or some crude animal instinct, they were moving along the creek, and the water was washing away their spoor.

  The peddler’s horse snorted, eyes rolling.

  “I am sorry, girl,” I murmured, and I drew my sword from its scabbard and struck the creature’s head from its neck.

  Justus, peering over the grassy embankment, groaned and stumbled away. He was loudly sick.

  I leapt from the creek and cleaned my blade in the grass. “The corrupt ones are moving along the creek,” I said, sheathing the blade. “We must follow in like manner. Are you going to be all right?”

  Justus nodded, still doubled over. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Yes,” he croaked. “I… I am sorry. I do not mean to be weak. It is just… I am not accustomed to seeing living creatures killed so…”

  He vomited again.

  My fearless vampire killer! I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Come, my sensitive scholar,” I said. I turned my back to him and squatted down a little. “Climb upon my back and I will carry you. We do not have the time for you to flounder through the mud.”

  “Why don’t you just take me back to the inn?” he pleaded.

  “It is almost finished,” I soothed him. “I have their trail now. Their reign of terror has come to an end.”

  Justus sighed. He put his arms around my shoulders and hooked his legs around my waist.

  “Hold tight,” I said, and then I leapt down to the muddy creek.

  14

  “They are very close now,” I said excitedly. “Be on your guard, Justus!”

  Before he could respond, Madame Damilan leapt at us from the cover of some tangled undergrowth. She sprang from the bushes with a cat-like hiss, fingers curled into claws, jaws agape. Her flesh was white as dough, her eyes like black coals pressed into a snowman’s face.

  Justus howled in terror, but I had sensed her long before we drew near. Without missing a step, I unsheathed my sword and cleaved her neatly in two, cutting her diagonally from her right shoulder to the bottom of her left rib cage. The two pieces fell to the muddy bank, arms and legs thrashing.

  “Foul thing,” I snarled, and then I doubled back and struck her head from her neck.

  The smell was unbearable.

  Justus, eyes squeezed tightly shut, was praying feverishly. It was the Lord’s Prayer. “… And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

  Too late for that, I thought. On either account.

  I raced on.

  The creek widened. It curved smoothly around to the east and then to the north again. We continued on, unaccosted, until we came upon a large, abandoned mill.

  The structure had been gutted by fire ages ago. A pine jutted from the blackened roof like a church spire. The water wheel was encased in moss and green forest growth. The building was more a part of the landscape now than an artifice of man. The scent of the ghouls was strong here. They had made the forsaken watermill their home. I was certain of it.

  Without slowing, I leapt from the creek bed to a stone jetty. I raced up a flight of rough-hewn steps, hopped a rusty iron railing and bashed in the heavy oak door of the watermill with my free arm.

  Inside, the degenerate ones crouched over the tattered body of Signor Fa, the fruit peddler. There were ten of them, more than I expected. Their hands and faces were covered in tacky blood, like wolves gathered around a kill.

  So the citizens of Getvar were not the only ones who had fallen victim to the scourge! I would have to stay in Croatia longer than I had expected, range out further in my hunting to make sure all the corrupt ones were exterminated.

  Even as I thought that, I leapt upon the vile creatures.

  They were fast, but I was faster. My sword whistled through the air as the ghouls scattered in all directions. I cut down two with my first swipe, but had to pursue the rest around the mill.

  Snarling, a degenerate child leapt into the crumbling rafters.

  I sprang after the poor lad, and halved him through the middle.

  Dropping back to the ground, I saw another climbing through a hole in the wall and flew after it. I grabbed the creature by the ankle and swung it violently around. It’s head struck the ground with explosive force, and I cast the twitching remains aside.

  Before I could choose my next adversary, one of the foul creatures smashed into my left shoulder. It had chosen, in desperation, to go on the offensive.

  It struck me with enough force to knock me off my feet—and send Justus rolling across the floor.

  I leapt immediately to my feet as the ghoul, a large male with a long mane of wild black hair, closed in on me, teeth snapping. Snarling back at him, I lopped his forearms off with my sword. An instant later, his head went twirling away.

  I checked Justus. He had rolled toward the entrance of the mill. He struggled to his hands and knees, shook his head, rattled but unharmed.

  One of the degenerate ones flashed toward my mortal companion, hissing and baring its fangs. I put myself between them and caught the fiend by the neck.

  “Not that one,” I grunted as I struggled with the brute.

  It snarled and spit in my face, its eyes devoid of human thought. It had been a handsome young man once, with curly dark hair and finely molded features. Kadija Damilan, perhaps? It no longer mattered. This soulless creature was no longer human. What mortal soul it once possessed had fled its debased flesh.

  It raked my face with its dirty nails, trying to get past me, and I tore its head from its shoulders.

  Two more attacked, then a third, but they all fell to my sword.

  One left, I thought, and then I went after the creature. A child. One of the boys from Getvar.

  The poor devil was crouched in the corner of the room, paralyzed with terror. Black tears dribbled down its cheeks from a pair of wide, glinting blue eyes. It reached out to me, a supplicant, wordlessly pleading for its life.

  I must have no pity for it, I thought, raising my sword to strike. It is not a child, though it might have the form of one. It is just a diseased thing.

  “Desino!” a voice cried out behind me.

  I wheeled around, sword still held aloft.

  Desino. It was Latin for “halt”.
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  A wizened blood drinker stood in the doorway of the watermill. It was male, with hair and beard like a silver bird’s nest. It had been made a vampire in its mortal twilight, and had only a pair wicked eyeteeth protruding from ruby gums. Its flesh was crenelated like the bark of an oak tree. Old when it was made, ancient now in this second life. It held Justus in its arms, the black nails of its knuckled fingers poised at the friar’s throat.

  “Spare my little one, or I will kill your mortal pet,” the vampire wheezed in Latin.

  Justus reached out to me, eyes bulging in terror. “Gyozo!” he choked.

  The ancient blood drinker shook him, tightening its grip. “Silence, mortal!”

  I lowered my blade, eyes narrowing. “Who are you?” I asked, turning more fully toward the thing.

  “I am Papa,” it said with a lunatic’s grin. “Why do you murder my children? They’ve done no harm to you.”

  “Your children?” I replied, aghast. “Your children are diseased filth, mindless beasts who will bring the world to ruin if not destroyed!”

  The ancient blood drinker snarled in reply. It inclined its head, pressing the tips of its teeth into the friar’s neck.

  “No, wait!” I cried.

  “I care nothing for the world,” the old vampire said. “I care only for my babies. They love me, and I love them. Leave now and I will let this one live. Harm the little one and this juicy morsel dies.”

  I did not know the ancient the blood drinker, but he was obviously mad, and his blood was tainted. Though he was clever, unlike his corrupt offspring, I could not let him live. I could not let his “children” live, and I could not let him live to make more of them.

  Moving at full speed, hoping I was fast enough to kill the old maker before he could harm Justus, I sprang forward and lopped the ancient vampire’s head from his shoulders. My sword, honed to razor sharpness, sliced through air and flesh with hardly a sound, stopping a fingernail’s thickness from the friar’s stubbled skin.

  The old vampire’s eyes widened, and then his head tumbled from the spouting stump of his neck. Before his head struck the ground, I doubled back and put his sobbing offspring out of its misery.

  Eyes wide with shock and despair, Papa’s head thumped to the ground and rolled away. It came to a stop and fell to dust, even as his arthritic fingers spasmed, sinking into Justus’s larynx.

  Not fast enough!

  The ancient vampire’s fingers clenched, tearing through the friar’s tender flesh. Justus fell to his knees, choking on his own blood. Behind him, Papa’s withered frame rapidly decayed.

  “No!” I wailed. I dropped to my knees beside my beautiful mortal lover. Justus clutched at my doublet with scarlet slickened fingers. The smell of his blood was maddening. His throat was a ragged hole. He was fast bleeding out.

  “I can save you, but I must give you the Strix,” I said, holding him upright.

  He looked at me in horror and shook his head.

  “Yes, Justus,” I insisted. “I don’t want you to die!”

  He shook his head again, lips squeezed tightly together.

  His body sagged and I lowered him to the ground. I laid him down on cinders and filth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, tightening my stomach muscles. “I cannot let you go.”

  I pried his mouth open and brought forth the living blood.

  15

  “Even with the living blood, he nearly died before the Strix quickened in him,” I said to Lukas. We were tramping across a snowy field, Hambach Forest far behind us now. The lights of Kerpen winked on the horizon like Christmas decorations. “It knitted the injury to his throat as it remade him, but because it had to do both things at once, each was especially slow and agonizing. I thought I would go mad watching him writhe there in the abandoned mill. He choked on his own blood as the Strix remade him. He thrashed as his flesh turned blue, and then purple, the capillaries in his cheeks and eyes rupturing. It was terrible to behold, and it was my fault, all my fault, because I had orchestrated the whole affair. I forced him to accompany me into that battle, hoping he would beg me for the blood if he witnessed my great powers, or failing that, that he would be injured and I would have to ‘save’ him!”

  I laughed.

  “Save him, indeed! He was doomed! He was doomed the moment I beheld him. I had to have him, and I let nothing stand in the way of my desire for him. I seduced him, I destroyed his faith, and then I forced the living blood upon him.”

  Lukas seemed impressed by my ruthlessness. He gazed at me with grudging respect-- another dagger in the heart!

  “What happened then?” Lukas asked.

  “He became a blood drinker. He is not an especially powerful blood drinker, and he bears the marks of his grievous injuries—his throat is runneled like melted wax, and his face is discolored with a black filigree of ruptured capillaries—but he lives. He lived, and he lives still.”

  “No, I meant back then. What happened in Getvar? Did Justus join you when it was over?”

  “It took two days for Justus’s transformation to complete,” I answered. “I sat at his side until it was finished, accompanied him on his first hunt—a stag-- and then we returned to the village of Getvar.

  “I feared he would be angry, that he would hate me for what I’d done to him, but he was not angry. He did not hate me. He behaved as though he believed I had acted out of love. He seemed oblivious of my machinations. And, of course, he was enchanted with his newfound powers.

  “We returned to Getvar and told the villagers what we had done, that we had hunted down the remaining vampires and destroyed them. We even led the mayor and his cronies to the old mill to show them the remains of the degenerate ones. They burned the mill and salted the earth, and saw us off with great fanfare.

  “He accompanied me to Hungary, abandoning his order, forsaking his god, for me-- a thing that never failed to fill me with shame when I thought on it. He joined the Court of the Night’s Watch, lived among our kind, as my companion, for many years, helping us to hunt down and exterminate the degenerate ones, who were becoming an ever increasing threat to the mortal world.

  “Eventually, due mostly to the increasing numbers of degenerate vampires plaguing Western Europe, the Church took a more aggressive stance against our kind. They formed the Venatori, and began to hunt us down. It was called the Internecion.

  “The Church attacked and destroyed the Court of the Night’s Watch while we were in France. They hunted down and destroyed all but a very few of us. In the Old World, only the Eternals survived the Church’s crusade against us. The Eternals and the lucky few blood drinkers under their protection. Though there were great casualties on both sides of the conflict, I knew it was not a war we could ever hope to win. We have always been greatly outnumbered by mortal men.

  “So we fled. We abandoned our own kind and fled from Europe. We traveled across Russia and into Asia, resided in Tibet and China for a few decades, beyond the reach of the Church, where our race could still live in relative peace. The vampires of the Far East are quite an interesting breed. Very wise and enlightened creatures, though there are always a few bad apples. There always are.

  “We finally parted ways in the spring of 1662. There was no great falling out in our parting. He wished to return to Italy. I wanted to see the New World. I thought he was mad, for the Church was still hunting our kind, but he was determined to return to his homeland. We parted amicably, and have not traveled together since. Our paths have crossed once or twice in the intervening years, but our mutual infatuation was a short-lived thing. A flame that burns twice as hot burns half as long, as the saying goes. Besides, Zenzele was and has always been my soul’s mate, and I had learned that she roamed the New World and wanted to see her again.”

  Lukas snorted. “A vampire fling!”

  I smiled and tipped my head. “As you say.”

  We walked on in silence, Lukas staring down at his feet, I gazing up at the sky. The lowering clouds had moved on to th
e north, sweeping back like a curtain to reveal the endless vista of the heavens. The stars were especially bright and sharp tonight. Moonlight glittered on the snowdrifts. A vehicle zoomed by on the road at the far end of the field, its headlights gliding smoothly through the darkness. I could smell the mortal who drove the automobile, a man of middle age. Scent of cigarettes and snack food. Stale sweat gone sour in the creases on his body fat. He was dying of lung cancer, this anonymous passerby. I could smell the tumor growing inside of him. I wondered if he knew his end was near.

  Engine humming, the car diminished into the distance. The mortal passed beyond the range of my vampire senses, though the faint odor of him lingered—his vices, the disease that would kill him very soon.

  I am going to die soon, too, I thought. By choice, of course, not of some mortal disease, but it was all the same in the end.

  I realized I was vaguely frightened by the thought of dying, and it pleased me.

  So, I was still human enough to be frightened of death!

  “Why are we going to see this Justus guy anyway?” Lukas asked. “Why him and not one of your other vampire children? What makes him so special?”

  “I’ve heard he’s returned to his faith,” I answered, “and I am in desperate need of absolution.”

  16

  Dawn was not far off. The sky in the east had begun to lighten. Salmon pink clouds, faintly glowing, draped the distant hills. We had circled around the small city of Kerpen, were proceeding directly to the Rhineland nature preserve, which abutted the Schwarz Maar. Up ahead, enfolded in its wooded hills, was Justus’s lair, the abandoned monastery Engel Abbey.

  “Does he know we’re coming?” Lukas asked. “What if he’s not home? That would be a kick in the pants, huh?”

  “I’m sure he knows. I neglected to tell you one thing about him.”

  “What is that?”

  “Justus possesses a rare vampire gift. It is a mental ability, like Zenzele’s Eye. He has precognitive visions.”