Ten minutes, twenty, forty five. I heard a church down the mountains somewhere chime nine o’clock. Smiles stayed put right beside me, as loyal a companion as he could possibly be. There weren’t any birds, no bats, no bugs, nothing in this weather, this far up the mountain. We just sat and listened to nothing for a very long time.
I was a little surprised, then, when I smelled a predator approach at the same time that I heard a car come up the gravel road, way down the base of the hill, half a mile or more away. I looked around, but still couldn’t see anyone or anything. Smiles jerked his head upwards and I followed his gaze. Just barely visible against the clouded night sky was something reflecting some light back from that damned night light in the yard. It got bigger, very slowly, and I could see that it was Cliff trying to come in for the world’s clumsiest landing.
So, that was that. He’d been turned and he’d taken a life and his Last Gasp was to fly in his own natural shape. Fuck me, I thought, It’s really real. He was such a homebody no one really knows him who’s left alive now that his mother and father are gone. I marveled for a moment. Takes all kinds. He wasn’t very good at flying, though, and he was basically spiraling down, sort of backpedaling, trying to get a handle on landing without breaking both his legs. Maybe he’d do just that, I thought, and make it easier on both of us.
The crunch of gravel got closer and closer, slowly, crunching rocks together beneath its tires as it came our way. Light car, nothing big and old and heavy, so probably not The Transylvanian. Hell, I doubted he knew how to drive, the way he acted. That was no good at all, because that meant either a neighbor - harmless - or a cop. Nobody else in the world would be up here that I could imagine. I prayed to something, somewhere, that they didn’t spot my car hidden back in the woods.
Clyde finally pinwheeled into place, more or less, on the ground. He stopped, looked around, blinked a little and then laughed a hearty, belly-shaking laugh that chilled me right to the core. Cliff wasn’t here to remember a family he’d never see again. He was returning the victor, ready to piss on their graves.
I knew in that moment that Cliff had killed Clyde himself. He’d probably done something to cause his mother’s heart attack, too, and sliced open the brake lines on his father’s work partner’s car. He’d killed them all so that he’d be free to become one of us. There was a time, it’s said, when a human wasn’t considered ready to make the transition unless they eliminated the survivors of their mortal life on their own. Cliff had lived up to that ancient tradition.
I stood up and walked out from between the trees, still hearing that car coming, and punched the palm of my left hand with the knuckles of my right, grinding them together. “Evening, Cliff,” I murmured. He spun and stared at me, then recoiled a little and looked choked. “That’s predator smell,” I said, and I smiled. “You didn’t notice it on The Transylvanian because he made you. Something about that cancels it out. Makes me wonder sometimes why more of us don’t kill our makers since they can’t see us coming, but then, all the other weird little connections probably provide some subconscious inhibition we don’t even know we have.”
Cliff was still staring at me, but he finally closed his mouth and hitched up his pants. “What do you want?”
“First, I want that amulet.”
Cliff blinked at me for a minute and then said, “How’d you know about the bracelet?”
“Long story,” I said. “I bet you’re not wearing it anymore but you’ve got it on you. Am I right?”
Cliff was too stupid to defeat the reflex of putting his hand in his left pocket, which I could see bulged a little with a circle of some sort. If he’d brought it with him then it was important, maybe something he thought gave him power. If that was the case, he would be wearing it already. If he wasn’t wearing it, he couldn’t or he thought he couldn’t. That was simple enough to work out in a hurry. Enough observation of human behaviors leads one to be able to think things through pretty quick and vampires have nothing but time to observe human behaviors.
“Second, I think I want to kill you.” I shrugged. No reason not to tell him the truth. We both started when there was a crunch of metal back down the road and a horn went off for a second. I didn’t know what that meant so I banked on it meaning a signal of some sort. That was all I needed. I swept forward, coat flung open and back like the classic vampire’s opera cape - some things we do because, you know, we have to - and leapt up to come down on top of Cliff. He put his arms up to try to protect himself, but if a kid who’s been a vampire for a decade still doesn’t really know his own strength, like the skinheads in that goth bar, then Cliff was about as steady on his feet as a toddler. I knew what it felt like, the world just overwhelming his senses, everything made out of crystal and light, everything too beautiful to look at, and him feeling so strong in the middle of it all. No, he was too befuddled by the grandeur of what the world looks like to us to be able to put up anything like a resistance. I yanked his arms out of the way before we’d even fallen to the ground, landing with my knees pinning his upper arms to the dirt. He cried out - not good in the suburbs, even ones out in the country like this - so I reached down and put one fat hand all the way around the front of his throat and leaned down, very close, to hiss at him.
That made him shut up real fast.
“Did you know who I was, before?”
“Wh... wh...” Cliff’s voice wobbled in his throat, strained, couldn’t get out. He was panting, still in the habit of breathing, still half reacting with human instinct.
“Did your father ever tell you who I was? Anything about me?”
Cliff tried to shake his head but I still had my hand around his throat, the other pulled back and the fingers arched halfway to making a fist, halfway to looking like B-movie claws. “Nothing,” he wheezed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Was it your idea or his to kill off your family?”
“His,” he gargled. “His! He made me. The Transylvanian made me.” Cliff was panting and struggling still but he was so very weak. He was like a paper doll. I did not feel sorry for him. I felt just a little embarrassed for all vampires, everywhere, that he might have lived long enough to represent us to someone who wasn’t.
“Did The Transylvanian tell you why you had to kill them?”
“So I’d be free,” Cliff managed. I saw tears of blood start to well up in his eyes. He stank of it: he had drunk himself fat on it after he’d been turned. I wondered what poor soul had given up their life to sate that first, awful hunger, when we feel like we’re empty inside, like the only thing we’ll ever be able to do, ever again, is drink. He started to sob, then, strangled and choked but he was crying, no doubt about it. “He said I’d be free to live forever, to find a way out.”
I didn’t ask out of what, or where. I knew. We were soaking in it: a dying town, no industry, no job but as night watchman for a factory that didn’t even make anything more, living at home with his parents all his fifty long years. Maybe he’d had a girlfriend or two, maybe he’d fathered a kid or two, maybe he didn’t even know about them. He’d been stuck here his whole life and always would be and then he’d turned the wrong corner, explored the wrong long, dark hallway at work - or maybe The Transylvanian had come to him, maybe he’d engineered the guy getting the job in the first place? - and there’d been someone ancient who could sound so strong and so wise and he’d said, Want to get away from all this stupid shit, kid? It had worked for me, hadn’t it? No doubt it worked for Cliff. I’d had money, some talent as an artist, opportunities to go somewhere and study if I wanted. Cliff didn’t have anything. He had two parents who’d gotten old enough they’d start needing care one day and he was the only one they’d ever have to give it. He’d been born and raised in their home, lived out a pathetic little life in their home and would watch them waste and die while he himself got old and started to follow their footsteps in that same drab little home. It probably felt like he’d never had a thing of his own and then
all of a sudden there he was with an offer to have the whole world, all eternity, all just for him. All he had to do was kill a few people he’d started resenting anyway.
I didn’t bother moralizing or lecturing or wondering whether I could train him better, make a better vampire out of him. I didn’t think about any of that at all. I held him still and said, very slowly, “You killed my best friend. That’s what I am. I’m the vampire who knew your father when he was young and strong and still capable of regretting his very few failures. I consider you one of them.”
I pulled my hand back from Cliff’s throat and punched him in it so hard I heard the firmer tissues, cartilage or whatever they are, splinter and collapse. That was just to keep him quiet, though, so I could separate his head from his body with my bare hands, one knee on one of his shoulders for leverage, and not have him scream bloody murder while I did so. I stopped, though, just as I started to pull so that he was straining and wriggling, and knelt back down beside him. I’d changed my mind. It was time to find out what I could do, what gift Cliff had inadvertently given me.
“This is what a vampire is,” I whispered into his ear. I shot my fangs out and bent his neck roughly to one side. If he’d been mortal he’d have asphyxiated by then, but that’s one of the nice things about being undead: try as he might to breathe out of habit, and as much panic as the failure to do so might cause in him just a couple hours after the Big Flush, he was still alive and kicking. Sort of. Alive enough, anyway. I drove my teeth into the thick flesh of his neck, hit the vein and started drinking as hard as I could.
Cliff was enough of a vampire to struggle when a mortal would have slipped into utter acquiescence and his hand came out of his pocket with the bracelet in his fingers. Something about it nearly shone in the dim light of the stars, something inside it that sang out at that moment. I paused and pulled my mouth away from his neck and some of his blood - much to my surprise - sprayed out and of course, because these things always happen, splattered right on the bracelet. For an instant it shone ruby red instead of white, and Cliff’s fingers smoked a little even though he dropped it and gargled an attempted scream through that ruined throat. My teeth drove between the folds of his neck one last time.
The Last Gasp of a mortal gives us a rush of powers, an ability to tap into something unique to each of us - Carla’s healing, Cliff’s ability to fly. I had no idea if that was also true of draining the life from another vampire. If it did, see, that suggested something weird. It meant, well, by one interpretation of the Last Gasp - and there are a lot of rumors and myths, I assure you - that we have souls, or something like them, some spark of life. Maybe it’s just what keeps us animate, I don’t know. Most vampires’ Last Gasp, according to the stories, expresses itself in some way directly related to the mortal they’ve killed. For instance, there’s a vampire in Raleigh who told me once that when she drains the life out of a human she spends the rest of the night looking like them to anyone who knew them. It’s something mystical and supernatural and none of us really understands how it works. None of us – or few of us, anyway – knows what happens, if anything, when we finish off a vampire the same way.
I felt Cliff’s life slip away and into me and I tossed his corpse to the side and sat down on my haunches. Smiles whined once and then pitched his head to the sky and howled long and high, still sitting loyally just inside the tree line. It had driven him half crazy to watch this and he couldn’t hold it in anymore.
There was a terrible noise somewhere, like boulders having a fistfight. Two seconds of listening and closing my eyes against the intense brightness of the night and that yard with a night light on the other side of the house told me that it was shoes on gravel. It was someone walking up the gravel road from whatever had happened to crunch the car so bad a minute or two ago, and I could hear it like it was being piped through a sound system and I’d gotten my head shoved into the speakers.
I stood up, wobbled a little, then ran for the edge of the tree line. I had to get back to my car and get to The Transylvanian fast because I knew, deep down, that he would feel the severing of some connection between maker and made when I’d drunk the last of Cliff’s life. Everything was out of whack, though. Everything was too loud and too bright, even in the darkness. I felt disoriented and off-balance.
Then the world went away as something blossomed in the darkness: a light out of nowhere, my brain overloading, and I heard Smiles start barking like crazy.
Cliff Wilfred’s last gasp – the final extinguishing of whatever might be the contents and substance of his mortal soul – overwhelmed me there in the darkness. My power, it turns out, is to watch the information making up the life of my victim unfurl and blow apart before me like the contents of a card catalogue hurled into the wind. Sharp points of blinding light emerged from the darkness that had blotted out the world of normal reality, like the stained glass of a bombed church as seen in freeze frame, each of them a topic available to be plucked from the maelstrom and examined. I knew, deep in my bones, at the core of the part of me that came from my maker and from her maker and theirs and theirs and so on, down from whoever or whatever was the first sick bastard to become this thing we call a vampire, that I could reach out as though with my physical hands to grasp any of those shards of the life that had been Cliff Wilfred’s and instantly know everything about that topic – everything he had known and maybe a little other people had known, too. I could fully and totally realize all the details of a matter in which he was involved, from his perspective and possibly others, and also that I could only do so for one topic that in any way intersected his time on this earth. I didn’t understand why or how it worked, what mystical mechanism operated in his blood or mine or in the world around us, but I knew – no, I sensed – I could learn a lot about any and only one of the topics in the vast index of his life that spun in the darkness between two moments of time.
I could become the ultimate detective of any one thing that had happened in a life I chose to take, anything in which they had been involved, but only in retrospect and it would always mean their death.
In that interstitial space between seconds, as Cliff’s life drained away into the sewer system of my own veins, I reached out and took hold of the inexplicably crystalline shard of information I knew intrinsically to be the death of Cliff’s father – my friend Clyde – and every detail of its planning, its purpose and his execution were revealed to me in a scalding rush of emotions: hatred, resentment, admiration, sorrow and something not entirely unlike love.
Cliff had told the truth, as he knew it. He’d been lied to, and not well, but he was a moron and the lies hadn’t needed to be complicated for him to meet them halfway. He’d been working his rounds one night at the plant, doing a foot patrol around the back of the Chemical building, when he’d heard a twig snap and turned to see The Transylvanian standing there, backlit by a security light. He’d asked who was there and the big guy in overalls had told him he could ask the same; that the plant was his home and had been for decades. He told Cliff he’d had his eye on him for years and had been waiting for the opportunity to make his move. He filled Cliff up with stories of how he’d seen how wasted had been the potential of this “young man” and asked him if he enjoyed his little life in this microscopically tiny place. The Transylvanian already knew Cliff was unhappy and knew all the right things to say: that he could make Cliff strong, make him young again, give him a life of his own. It had been the bit about making him young again that made Cliff say yes: a lie, but one Cliff was so eager to believe because that’s all he’d really wanted. Cliff looked back on his own youth, spent bouncing from one minimum wage job to another, not as a tremendous waste of time, but as the happiest he’d ever been. He’d had no steady income, no sense of stability, and he hadn’t needed one. His parents were glad to keep him close and give him all the security anyone could want. They also gave him freedom, most of which had disappeared as the detritus of his dependency piled up between strata of their own rap
idly increasing needs and concerns. One day he’d woken up to find his parents old and sick, needing a caretaker, and the next he’d looked halfway to joining them. That terrified him beyond belief. If this old bastard who claimed to live at the plant, who had remarkable powers Cliff could not deny once he’d seen them at work, could make that go away, could rewind the tape to some point before that, Cliff would do anything for that. Kill? Sure, no problem. He’d do that and more if needed. The murders he committed were nothing, in his mind: victimless crimes, no more worthy of remorse than sweeping a dead spider out the back door.
Of course, it hadn’t all been about Cliff. What Cliff didn’t know was that it was about The Transylvanian tidying up before leaving the house. He’d slowly but surely spent decades building a population that knew to hide itself from the powers that be. The Transylvanian had a plan, one based on his ideas of how vampires behaved versus how they should behave and what might make one go off the deep end. The Transylvanian had built his own little fiefdom, up in the mountains, in defiance of the power structures and the inter-familial agreements and truces and cease-fires that had accumulated over centuries. He’d built a hidden kingdom running through these ancient forests, and now he wanted to come out of hiding to assert himself over the foolish and sentimental children who dared call themselves vampires in nights like these. The vampires down east had spent so long bickering and picking one another off that finally a child of the twentieth century – unthinkably young! – dared claim authority over the rest of them. The Transylvanian saw an opportunity to create chaos and then bring order, a means of conquest that’s worked time and time again across the history of the world.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 19