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

by Joseph Duncan

  “He can see the future?”

  “They are just flashes, he has said. Glimpses, images without words or understanding, but he’ll know that we are coming. I am quite certain of it.”

  The ground sloped upward as we marched, became rugged and rocky. On the far side of the ridge was a broad, low-lying marsh, the ground crusted with ice. We slogged across the marsh, then climbed another piney ridge. Lukas complained vociferously about his muddy boots, but I put him out of my thoughts. There, at the bottom of the ridge, was Engel Abbey.

  “Quit complaining and come,” I said. “Our journey tonight is finished.”

  He looked up from cleaning his boots with a stick. “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  He wrinkled his nose and snorted.

  17

  Engel Abbey was built in the 16th century. I’m not sure of the exact date it was constructed, but I know the abbey was abandoned in the middle of the 20th century, when it was struck and partially destroyed by Allied bombs during World War Two. The German army had confiscated the property during the war and was using it as a supply post when it was attacked. After the war, the Church had never bothered to reclaim it.

  It was a large complex, surrounded by high stone walls. Designed upon Cistercian principles, its architecture emphasized utility over ornamentation. Looking more like a military installation than a monastery, it had once been a large and self-sufficient community for some 200 monks, but it was a ruin now, the abode of mice and birds and one five hundred year old vampire.

  We approached from the west, leapt to the top of its thirty foot high outer wall, then dropped into the courtyard below. Though the church itself was intact, several of the surrounding buildings were utterly demolished, their walls scattered across the frozen earth, roofs open to the sky.

  I reached out with my vampire senses, scanning for Justus, as Lukas waited beside me, looking around with faint interest.

  “He awaits us in the cloister,” I said.

  I also sensed a mortal on the premises. A female, old.

  Curious…!

  “What’s a cloister?” Lukas asked.

  “This way,” I said, somewhat impatiently. Modern folk know nothing!

  We crossed the yard, passed through the colonnaded outer wall of the cloister. Justus was sitting on a bench in the middle of the interior courtyard, his hooded head and shoulders dusted with snow. He was dressed in a robe of rough black wool, a crucifix hanging from his neck, looking much as he had the first night I laid eyes on him.

  He rose as I approached him, pushing back his hood.

  “Gyozo,” he said. He was smiling. I was immensely relieved. My guilty imagination had tormented me with visions of angry recriminations and rejection.

  “Justus,” I replied, and I wrapped my arms around him.

  He hugged me back as I kissed him in the Italian fashion.

  “It has been too long.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I missed you.”

  “And I you, Justus.”

  He pulled away from me then and looked at Lukas appraisingly. “I have seen this one in a vision,” he said. He glanced at me questioningly. “I saw him kill you. You let him do it. On a mountain, overlooking a wooded valley.”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “You died.”

  “Yes.”

  It excited me to hear him say it. Excited and frightened me. So he had seen me die. It was actually going to happen. Lukas would have the strength to do it. My plan would succeed.

  “Let us go inside and speak of these things,” Justus said, nodding toward the church.

  “What did you see in the vision, Justus?” I asked as we crossed the cloister’s courtyard. “Can you tell me the details?”

  Lukas was listening intently.

  “I saw you on your knees, at the summit of a rugged mountain,” Justus said. “The wind was blowing through your hair, and that one was standing behind you. You had a dagger in your hand. You plunged it into your heart, and then you fell back and this one began to drink the blood gushing from the wound. He took the Strix from you, drew it from your body as you hacked and hacked at your own breast, preventing your injury from healing. He drained you until your flesh was nearly translucent. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever beheld. I dreamt it two weeks ago and woke screaming.”

  We passed from the cloister, climbed the steps of the church. It was a tall, gothic structure. Dark. Peaked and gray. Justus opened the door and we stepped into the narthex. Religious frescos adorned the walls on both sides of the arched doorway that let onto the nave, Christ on the right, the Virgin Mary on the left. The paintings were ancient and faded, the plaster rotted and crumbling to the floor. The interior of the abbey was lit with candles. There were hundreds of them, each tiny flame twitching fretfully on its wick.

  Justus closed the door, turned to me. “Why do you wish to die, Gyozo? Give me a chance to dissuade you!”

  “I have not come to be dissuaded,” I replied, moving past him into the nave.

  I approached the altar, looking up into the apse, where a cruciform Christ hung suspended in the tremulous light. The figure was grotesquely proportioned. Twice the size of a real flesh-and-blood man. It was rare for Christ to be depicted naked, but this one was. Naked, erect, muscles straining, face twisted in agony. In the Scriptures, it was said that soldiers threw lots for the rabbi’s clothing, and, of course, men often become erect when they are executed. It is the most honest, human portrayal. That, I am sure, is why it is so rare to see it thus. Zealots shy from honesty. They prefer their fantasies-- how life should be, not how it actually is.

  Lukas and Justus followed after me.

  “Why have you come if you will not be dissuaded?” Justus asked. “What would you have of me before you destroy yourself?”

  I smiled, opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything I smelled the mortal woman. She leaned in from a side corridor, where her living quarters were situated.

  “Justus? I heard voices,” she said, and then she saw me and her hand flew to the collar of her nightgown, drawing it up. “Who is this?” she gasped.

  She was an ancient creature, hair long and straight and white, flesh as thin as tissue paper. Her back was hunched and her hands were knuckled with arthritis. Lukas stared at her hungrily, eyeteeth jutting over his bottom lip. Justus veered fretfully toward her.

  “It is all right, Sister Agnes. This is Gyozo, my maker. Remember, I told you about him?”

  She looked to him, her eyes wide and anxious. “This is the one who made you?” she whispered.

  “Yes, this is my maker. He has come to see me, as I told you he would. Return to your cell, sister. Everything is fine.”

  She patted his cheek. “All right, my love.” She gave us one last nervous look, then withdrew from the temple. I heard her bones grinding as she shuffled to her quarters.

  Justus turned back to me.

  “A mortal companion?” I said, arching an eyebrow.

  “Sister Agnes has lived here with me for forty years,” he explained. “Several members of her priory visited the abbey in 1974 to examine the ruins. I watched them from the shadows that day-- watched her. She was so beautiful I fell instantly, madly in love with her. I allowed her to see me that day as their group departed, but only her. She returned the next day, alone, thinking she had only imagined the sight of me, or had seen a ghost. She wanted to see if I would reveal myself again. Snuck away. Commandeered their van.” He laughed. He cherished those memories. “She is a bit of a heretic, like me.”

  “You did not give her the blood?” I asked.

  “She does not want the blood, and I would not force this curse upon anyone.”

  I frowned.

  “It is nearly dawn,” Justus said, rousing himself from his recollections. “I’m sure your fledgling would like to retire. He may sleep in the vaults beneath the church if you plan to stay.”

  “I was hoping to stay until the morr
ow. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Justus said. “You are welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  Lukas stretched his back. “I would like to get some rest,” he admitted, grinning toothily at his brother (He must rid himself of that habit!) “We walked all the way from Belgium. Drac here insisted.”

  Justus nodded, smiling dubiously at my fledgling, and gestured for Lukas to follow.

  I sat on one of the benches, contemplating Christ. How pitiable he looked, this incarnate god, knotted in helpless agony upon his cross. He gawped in anguish at the heavens as blood oozed down battered features from a crown of thrones.

  My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?

  What a wonderful metaphor for our mortal experience. It is no wonder the Christian religion flourished. Believe what you like about the Catholics, they know how to market!

  Think about it. Don’t we all suffer? Don’t we all feel abandoned? And how appropriate that the creator of the universe should come and live among his children in the flesh. Suffer the same temptations, the same pain, that we all must suffer. The Christian god is an Everyman. And yet it makes sense. No god deserves to sit in judgment of his creation lest he do it, lest he put aside his godhood and slum with his begotten.

  I wish I had been in Galilee when Christ ministered to the Jews. I would have liked to have seen him with mine own eyes, listened to one of his famed sermons with mine own ears. I’m sure, with my vampire senses, I could have pierced the veil of his human disguise-- if he was, in fact, more than just a man, if there was divinity just beneath the crust of mortal flesh. I might have seen the face of God!

  Alas, I was not. I believe I was in Thessaly at the time. I owned a grand villa on the river Pineios. I was a physician. I will never know if he was the one true god made flesh. It is hard to believe it. I have seen so many messiahs in all the millennia I’ve roamed this world. I myself was worshipped as a god, and allowed it in order to defeat my enemy Khronos. But it would have been nice to know if it were true. If Christ really was God incarnate.

  Ah, but my thoughts are running in strange circles this evening! Impending mortality has unhinged my mind a little. I feel death approaching, and my spirit cries out for its Papa.

  Justus returned to the nave.

  “I have tucked in your vicious little acolyte,” he said, not bothering to hide his distaste for my new companion.

  “I hear a lot of judgment in your voice, Justus,” I replied. “Your Catholic is showing.”

  “I don’t know how you can stand to be in its presence,” he said with a shudder. “What a perverse creature. I can practically smell its madness.”

  “It is difficult.”

  “So why him? Why did you make that… thing an immortal? We would have hunted down a creature like him in the old days. Destroyed him like the mad dog he is.”

  “He is the only one capable of ending my life.”

  “How?”

  “He must drain every last drop of the living blood from my body. The blood must be ingested by another immortal. A powerful blood drinker.”

  “But the Sharing—“

  “Yes, my memories will pour into his mind. Any other blood drinker would be incapable of destroying me. The Sharing inspires a powerful sympathy for the vampire being assaulted. It is a defensive mechanism, to keep us from devouring one another. You know this. But Lukas is a sociopath. He has no empathy. No human kindness whatsoever. I have rarely met a being so utterly devoid of compassion. He will devour my soul as he devours my life, unencumbered by sentiment or pity. He will devour me and hunger for more. And thus I will die.”

  I looked to Justus. He was standing before the altar, his eyes wide, his hands clamped over his mouth.

  Slowly, he lowered his hands. “You cannot do this!” he said.

  “I can, and I will.”

  “You… you are just lonely, Gyozo,” he whispered forcefully. “You have been alone too long. You have always had a melancholy spirit. Stay here with me. Agnes is not long for this world. She will die soon, and then you can have me all to yourself. We can be lovers again, like we once were. You will be content again.”

  “I want to die, Justus,” I said. “I am thirty thousand years old. I am tired of living. Life has no meaning for me anymore. Once, I lived to protect mortal men from our kind. I fought a war to defend them. I became a god for them. But I have become disillusioned. Man has become every bit as terrible as we. Worse perhaps! Humanity is sucking the life from this world, turning it into a poisoned wasteland, and I cannot stand to see it made so. I cannot stand to see them become like us. I want to die now, while I still love them.”

  “And what would you have of me?” he asked miserably.

  “Absolution,” I answered.

  “I cannot give you absolution for what you plan to do, Gyozo. It is true. I have found my faith again. I no longer cling to a literal interpretation of the scriptures, not like I once did. I have learned that literal belief is but the first step on a longer journey toward knowing God. It is but a stepping stone. The first foot on the path. But Gyozo, God does not approve of suicide. Suicide is a repudiation of God’s design for you.”

  “I’m not asking for God’s forgiveness, Justus. If God exists, He will judge me as He sees fit. I ask for your forgiveness.”

  Justus twitched. “What?”

  “Of all the men and women who have crossed my path throughout the eons, yours is the soul that I’ve wronged the most grievously.”

  “How can you say that? Surely, you--?”

  I shook my head. “You are the only one, in thirty thousand years, whom I forced this curse upon against his will. I gave you the blood when you told me you did not want it. I raped you with immortality, as I was made a monster, knowing what it would do to you, what this existence would do to your soul. I was selfish and lustful and would not be dissuaded, by you or by my own moral code, and for that I am eternally sorry. I hope you can forgive me.

  “And if I don’t forgive you, Gyozo? Will you still kill yourself? Perhaps, if you stay with me, you could win my absolu--”

  “No! I leave here on the morrow. Either forgive me now or damn me, Justus, but I won’t be put off. I have no time for childish games.”

  Justus stared at me, black tears welling up in his eyes. They spilled over, running slowly down his discolored cheeks, the tarry black tears of a vampire.

  “Of course I forgive you, Gyozo,” he whispered. “In truth, I have never held it against you. Even that night, when I was dying and told you no, I wanted you to give me the blood. I wanted to be with you. I was just too afraid to ask you for it, for my own soul’s sake.”

  I rose, tears stinging my eyes. “But I tricked you. Forced myself upon you--!”

  “You gave me what I wanted, free from culpability. If you must be forgiven for doing that, my friend, then you are forgiven. I never regretted that you made me an immortal. Not for a moment in five hundred years.”

  He embraced me and I embraced him back. I felt lighter, as if a great weight had fallen from my shoulders.

  “Come, Gyozo. Lay with me as we once lay together. Sleep with me one last time before you go.”

  I nodded into his shoulder, allowed him to lead me from the altar.

  As we headed toward the side passage, walking toward his room, I wiped my tears from my cheeks, looking at the black fluid for a moment before smearing it on my pants. “What of Agnes?” I said. “Won’t she be jealous?”

  “Our days of sinful lust are long in the past,” he said with a wistful smile. “All that remains between us now is love, pure and unconditional love. She will understand. She will be happy for me, because I am made happy by you.”

  He opened the door of his tiny monk’s cell, gestured for me to enter.

  We woke that evening to screams.

  18

  It was Agnes.

  As her cries echoed through the church, Justus and I flew from his cot. We raced side-by-side down the corridor and into
the nave. It was still day. Tinted sunlight blazed through the stained-glass windows of the apse. Agnes was lying in the aisle, halfway between the altar and the door of the narthex. She was clutching her throat, her ancient lungs giving birth to a surprising loud shriek. Kneeling over her, wiping his lips on his sleeve, was Lukas.

  “No!” Justus roared.

  Lukas’s head jerked up as we sped toward him, eyes oozing black. He leapt to his feet and bolted down the aisle, vanishing with a bang out the front door of the church.

  We did not pursue him, but knelt down over the screaming woman.

  “Agnes!” Justus moaned, checking her body for injury-- her throat, her limbs. There were no bite wounds. “What did he do to you, Agnes?”

  The old woman drew a breath, either to speak or howl in pain some more, and then she choked, her throat convulsing, her back arching off the floor. Her arthritic fingers scrabbled at Justus’s bare chest. Her eyes stared blankly at the vaulted ceiling. And then her flesh began to blanch.

  I realized what Lukas had done then and gasped, “Ancestors, no!”

  “What is it, Agnes? What is wrong?” Justus shouted. He was confused. He couldn’t find any injuries. He hadn’t yet realized what Lukas had done to her.

  Then he saw the fangs sliding from her gums, gums that hadn’t hosted natural teeth in at least a decade.

  Tears welled in his eyes. “Oh… Oh, Agnes,” he moaned, sitting back.

  “Justus, it hurts!” Agnes whimpered, the timbre of her voice changing as the living blood worked its way through her body, as it transformed her, one aged cell after another.

  Justus shook his head. “No, no, no…”

  “He snuck up behind me,” Agnes wheezed, writhing helplessly on the floor. “Forced me to drink his blood!” The Strix reached her eyes, and they grew glassy, began to twinkle in the sunlight like jewels. Her fangs were fully grown now, narrow and sharp, like long white thorns. “Oh, it hurts!”

  “Get out,” Justus said to me.

  “Justus, I’m so sorry.”