by Ramy Vance
“Hold on,” I interrupted, looking up. “What did you say?”
“Skinwalkers—you know, Native American Shamanic Others … incredibly nasty, if you ask—”
“No, no—before that.”
She paused. “They were the finest alchemists—”
“Of course,” I said, standing up and slapping my forehead with the palm of my hand. I walked over to the reference books. “And you didn’t think to tell me about Dostarious before?”
“This is your expertise, darling. It’s not like you asked …”
I have to give her that one.
“Thank you.”
Dammit. Still, I thought, making sure it was firmly in my head, my mother isn’t stupid. She didn’t tell me about the alchemist Dostarious for a reason. But given how obviously desperate she is to get the amulet, I can’t figure out what the reason could possibly be …
I found the book I was looking for and flipped through it until I spotted the symbol. “That inverted bulb—it’s not the sky, it’s the alchemy symbol for …” I held out an image of an inverted jug (for lack of a better word) and showed it to my mother. It matched the symbol on the drawing. “Death. It’s not the sky that is trapping the Key of Life … it’s death.”
“Interesting …” my mother said, and the tone of her voice said she was telling the truth.
“Interesting, indeed, Mother,” I said, guiding her to the shelves that dealt with alchemy. Had to keep her looking while that interest was still piqued.
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EVEN THOUGH WE had narrowed down our search, it still didn’t mean that it was easy to find. It took forty-three boxes, a crap-load of sifting through oversized Ziploc bags and two papercuts—both mine—before we finally found the amulet.
Well, half of it, at least.
↔
“SHIT, BALLS, SHIT, SHIT!” I growled.
“Language, darling.”
“Fine—manure, testicles, scat, poo!”
“Darling—”
I threw the box I’d been holding onto the floor, not caring when its contents spilled. “Don’t ‘darling’ me. We have exactly half an amulet, which means that I’m no closer to you leaving, am I?”
I shoved the amulet at my mother. It looked like the picture—if someone had ripped it in half. My mother looked at it, feeling its grooves along its edge where it had been torn from its twin half. “This is designed to be two pieces,” she said, less as an observation and more like a statement that she’d already known.
I gave her my best what-aren’t-you-telling-me look as I pulled the amulet out of her hands.
“I knew it was two pieces, darling. I just expected them to be together.”
Something occurred to me, from when I was trying to tune her voice out. “You said they were twins?”
“Who?”
“Dostarious and whoever the other guy is …”
“Girl. Or to use your modern twang: gal. Not all twins are identical.”
“Do you think it’s possible this gal has the other half?”
If my Psychology test was on the best display of passive-aggressive behavior, I’d ace the course.
“I suppose anything is possible. I will have to make enquiries.” She reached into her purse and pulled out her cellphone. Then, sighing as if she just discovered that housekeeping didn’t turn down her room, lifted the screen and said, “No signal.”
NO SIGNALS FOR THE PAST
We stepped outside so that my mother could call her “people”—whoever they were. The first rays of light were starting to shine—we had spent the night together in the Other Studies Library’s archives. Not the first time we’d spent hours in a basement together—but if I was lucky, it would be the last.
Once outside, she tried to casually take the amulet from me—something I was definitely prepared for—but I held onto it to get a closer look and see if I could come up with any ideas as to what it was or how it worked. For something that was supposed to answer life’s biggest question (in this GoneGod world, at least), you’d think it would have speakers or something. At the very least some instructions.
My brain was also itching at another mystery. Truth was, there was something fishy about the whole thing that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. My mother was nonplussed, walking just far enough away that she could have a private phone call, but not too far away that I couldn’t listen in if I wanted.
I didn’t. Either she’d find Dostarious’s twin—an ancient ex-vampire by the name of Lizile, according to Charlie—or she wouldn’t. As she dialed whomever she felt comfortable enough to wake this early in the morning, I checked my own phone. Reconnected to the network, it buzzed three times back to back, indicating that I had two missed calls from Justin and one from Egya. No messages, and judging from the evenly spaced-out times they called, I guessed they were just checking in on us.
I thought about calling back, but it was so late—well, early, by now—they had to be asleep. Or trying to sleep. Either way, I figured it best to give them a few hours before calling.
So I put my phone and half an amulet in my pants pockets (1970s chinos, gotta love the pocket space!) and watched as my mother talked on the phone, pacing back and forth in that nervous little waddle of hers. Her movements reminded me of when I was a child and she’d walk up and down our little cabin when she was nervous about something.
And watching that same shuffle brought back a flood of memories I thought I had buried long ago.
↔↔↔
OLD SCOTLAND—THE Day Katrina Darling Died
TURNING ISN’T like it is in the movies. I wish it were, but when you’re bit, or rather infected, it’s just like fighting off any particularly bad flu. You have good days and bad days, but overall you’re heading in a downward spiral.
Except a downward spiral in this case doesn’t look like you’re getting worse. To the untrained eye, you look like you’re getting better—healthier. You can move, you’re in less pain, your fever subsides and your strength slowly returns.
Those are the other symptoms—the ones that mean you’re getting worse.
The more telling symptoms—the ones you should be on the lookout for, if you somehow knew what you were looking for—are an aberrance to light, weight loss and not eating—as in ever.
I didn’t know what was happening to me, but my vampiric instincts were kicking in, and they were telling me to hide the more telling symptoms as best I could. So I pretended to eat. I asked that my bed be positioned so that direct sunlight never touched it (using a desire to be able to look through my bedroom door and into the house as an excuse). I also pretended to be weaker than I was.
Like I said, I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I did know was that whatever it was, it was going to change me forever. For eternity. At least until the gods up and left, but that wouldn’t come for another three hundred years.
What are the symptoms for those who do not get worse? Simple: the fever takes hold, you fall deeper and deeper into a coma and eventually you die.
Once you are bitten, you will eventually die. Whether you come back as a vampire or not.
And that is perhaps the greatest gift the gods gave us by leaving. The bite no longer kills.
↔
AS THE DAY PROGRESSED, so too did my strength grow, and much more quickly than I let on. My father didn’t notice; he was too distracted with relief that his little girl wasn’t going to die after all. My mother, however, noticed the little feats of strength that I didn’t hide as well as I should have.
Little things like pushing my heavy oak bed out of the path of direct sunlight or bringing in a bucket to better hide the food I wasn’t eating. I was sloppy, sure, but I could feel my body literally dying. Can you blame me?
She finally realized that I wasn’t eating. At all. In those early days, solid food was repulsive. I could tolerate raw meat, but barely. And as for vegetables, the thought of swallowing a potato or carrot was as physically repulsive to me then as
the thought of sucking blood from the carotid artery of a human is to me now.
Life’s strange like that. Death, too.
Given that this was eighteenth century Scotland, meat wasn’t something you ate every day, farmer or no. Meat was far too valuable on the open market, so our diet was mostly comprised of potatoes, carrots, leeks and oats. In other words, food that vampires are practically allergic to. And not an EpiPen in sight. (Tasteless joke, that. Maybe I’ll dissect my morbid sense of humor in my Psych class …)
Anyway, I got very good at hiding my food. Or so I thought. For the most part, what I did was place it in my bedpan (thankfully, because I wasn’t putting anything in my body, nothing was coming out, either) and bury it in the garden when my parents slept.
This went on for a few days until my mother—the shrewd bitch that she is—asked me to join my father and her at the dinner table.
I tried to feign an excuse that I was still too weak and tired. My father even intervened in his way, asking Mother to be gentle on the poor girl who nearly died not three weeks before.
“Pish, posh,” my mother said, waving away our objections like one might chase away an enterprising bee disturbing your picnic. “She’s fine. Come, darling, sit with us.”
We both saw the resolve in my mother’s eyes and knew resistance was futile (hah—my mother was the original Borg). I continued to feign weakness and my doting father came to my side, helping me to a seat at the dinner table.
“Eat, darling,” my mother said, putting a large ladle-sized helping of boiled porridge on my plate. I could have gagged.
“No, thank you—I’m not hungry.”
“Nonsense. You’ve eaten every dinner we’ve given you so far. Why is now any different?”
“All the movement,” I said. “I fear the walk from my bedroom to here has tired me. Father—will you help me back to bed?”
My father placed his hands on the table to help himself stand, as was his wont now, so that he could assist me. But before he could right himself, my mother whacked his hand with her ladle. “Sit.”
“Charlotte—what is the meaning of this?” my father said, rubbing the back of his hand.
“Our daughter claims that she was weakened by the walk from that room”—she pointed at my bedroom door—“to here. And yet, she is not too weak to bury these every night.”
Walking over to a basket near the main room’s hearth, she opened its lid, exposing all the food I had buried over the last few days. It was spoiled now, filled with maggots and worms, midges and other insects best left in the dirt.
“She has not eaten anything in ten days and yet she looks as healthy as any young lady her age.”
My father looked at the basket of food, speechless. Then he turned his gaze on me, a dawning realization darkening his face.
“But that is not all,” my mother said, walking to the window behind me. I was frozen in place, horrified but unable to will myself to stop her. She pulled open the shades and sunlight hit my back with the same physical impact a cart or bull might muster.
At that point in my transformation I had yet to be exposed to direct sunlight, my vampiric instincts having told me to avoid the light at all costs. And so when the warm rays of the early afternoon sun scalded my porcelain skin, I leapt and did something that—at the time—I did not know was possible. Cat-like claws extended from my fingers and I hung onto the ceiling of our cabin as if I were crawling on the ground.
That was not the only change the ambush of sunlight brought upon me. Now that the monster inside was exposed, it also showed its fangs. I hungered for the one substance on this good, green Earth that would sustain me.
Blood.
And below me stood two humans with enough blood for me to feast on for days.
Every muscle, fiber, thought and desire I possessed told me to leap at them. More than that—it gave me a strategy. Go for my father first—hobble him by severing his Achilles heel. Once he was down, do the same to my mother. With the two of them hobbled, take your time. Savor the drink.
You deserve it.
Truly you do.
Those were what my instincts told me; my heart, fortunately, was a very different story. What I saw below me were the two people I loved more than anything else in this world or any other. And when my eyes locked with my father’s, and I saw the pain in him, the pain caused by saving and then damning his only daughter for eternity, I knew that I could no more hurt them now than I could run into the light and end it all.
I dropped from the ceiling into a dark corner of the room and began to cry.
Nay—to say the expression of pain that came out of me was simply crying is to say that the ocean is filled with a single teaspoon of water. I didn’t simply cry. I howled. I grieved. I wailed.
I lamented.
The mind is a funny thing. In those tears I momentarily forgot why I was crying, and my thoughts were thus filled with a deeper hurt.
Why, thought I, weren’t my parents coming forth to comfort me?
That was their way. Their lot. To scoop me up when I fell, to hold me when I grieved. To love me unconditionally.
Looking up at them I saw love in my father’s eyes. I also saw confusion and hate and rage and fear. I think it was that last expression that hurt me the most. Vampire or not, I would never hurt him. Couldn’t he see that?
At least that was what I believed in that moment.
In my mother’s eyes I did not see the same raw mix of emotions. Her eyes were, instead, hollow. Empty.
After a long moment, I finally managed to get my own emotions under control. “It’s not my fault,” I said.
They were the only words I could think to say.
So I chose to be silent, and we all sat in it. Blessed silence.
But the blessed are only blessed for so long before the good fortune leaves to aid another. Our blessed silence was broken by three simple words spoken by my mother.
“Cast—her—out.”
↔
DESPITE MY MOTHER’S commands to do so, my father did not cast me out. Not immediately. He knew that the light would burn me, and having mercy on me—or perhaps unable to reconcile his guilt for not arriving sooner and saving me from such a fate—he let me stay in the dark corner of our little, once-happy home until dark.
In that time, I sat silent. My mother paced, careful not to get too close to me. My father … my father just sat there, his eyes burning through me as if he were trying to work out the formula to an impossible equation.
I did not move from my corner for hours, even after the sun set. I suppose I had hoped that if I was quiet enough, good enough, they would let me stay.
But Hope is a fickle bitch, only gracing the very few she deems worthy. An hour after sunset, my father hobbled to my corner and offered me his hand.
“Harold,” my mother cried out, “she is not to be trusted. She’s a monster, an animal, a—”
“Enough, Charlotte!” he yelled, whipping around to face her. Then, shaking his head, loosing a tear from between closed eyelids, he whispered, “Enough.”
He held out his hand again and eventually, seeing no other choice, I took it. Gently helping me to my feet, he guided me out of the front door of a home that I once called my own. Never again, I knew.
Outside, he gave me one last look as a final tear rolled down his cheek and quietly, lovingly closed the door. With that gesture, my father made it perfectly clear.
I was no longer his daughter.
I was no longer welcome in his home.
I was a monster.
Cast out and alone, I did what any no-good creature of the night does … I sulked off into the darkness where monsters like me belonged.
And I cried some more.
TRUTH YOU CAN’T EAT
“Excellent!”
My mother’s cheerful voice brought me back to the present day with a crash. She was frantically writing something down while simultaneously trying to keep the phone to her ear, hold her purse
and walk toward me.
She managed her awkward multitasking quadrathlon quite well. Evidently she got what she wanted, hanging up the phone, letting it drop in her purse before handing me a piece of paper with an address on it. “I found Lizile’s address, and wonderful, wonderful news! Excellent news! She lives not six hours from here. Thank the GoneGods for small miracles, even when such things no longer exist. Six hours. We could be there by lunch!”
My mother gave me a smile like she just won the lottery.
I didn’t return it. My memories of those three words still echoed in my head.
Cast … her … out.
“We?” I asked.
That one little word wiped away the smile from my mother’s face. Attempting to save face, she rolled her eyes. “We, me, you—whatever and whoever—someone can be there by lunch.”
“So go,” I said.
I half expected some protest. Some snide retort. But instead she simply held out her hand.
I stared at it. “What?”
“The amulet—half of it, at least. I need it.”
“What? Not coming back once you retrieve the other half?”
My mother shook her head. “Best I keep going and get the whole thing to HQ. Besides, we never know when those Cherub nuts might strike again.”
“Indeed,” I said, scanning her face for some betrayal of what she was really thinking. I saw nothing and had to admit that she could possibly mean what she was saying. And yet …
Cast … her … out.
My mother continued to hold out her hand. I continued to stare.
Until eventually: “OK, Mother—I’ll give you the amulet … but you have to do something for me first.”
Another eyeroll. “What?”
I smiled. I’d finally found my ace. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. An Other named Mergen. He’s kind of a legend around here.”
↔
MERGEN WAS the avatar of the Turkish god of wisdom. In other words—whenever someone on Earth was lucky (or unlucky, depending on what you did) to meet one of the Turkish gods, you never got to meet the actual guy. You met their avatar.