by Linn Chapel
Tragically, Langley’s steady stream of poems and pamphlets ended abruptly when he died in 1820, presumably the victim of highwaymen.
The following selections of poetry were published two years before his death.
Tressa had not known about the controversies or the pamphlets or the riot, but none of that surprised her.
She turned the page to find one of Holt’s poems, On Imagination, followed by a second, The Sword Unbroken. She read them both, smiling softly to herself. The lines were forceful and yet beautifully phrased. She turned the page to find one more poem, Lines Entrusted to the Wind. Her eyes lingered on the final stanza.
In silver silence have I writ each word.
Wind! Take each line
so all my thoughts be heard!
If the wind had taken his words, it had blown them someplace far away and little traveled, she thought sadly. The out-of-print volume in her hands was the only text in which she had ever seen Holt’s name.
Everything would have been different if Holt had lived out a natural, human life, she thought. With the quality of his writing, his name would have been linked with Byron’s and Shelley’s and the other famous poets of that time. The fame he could do without, she was certain. But he must regret that his works were never read. And yet – maybe that wind was still blowing, even after two hundred years.
Tressa’s thoughts suddenly took a different turn. Holt’s writing may have ceased and his works may have been forgotten – but Holt himself was still alive, two hundred years later.
If he hadn’t become a vampire, they would have never met.
I’m glad it happened.
Feeling a terrible stab of guilt, Tressa closed the book and set it aside on a cushion, using the packing receipt to mark her place.
Where was Holt now, and was he awake yet?
Feeling weary and careworn, she leaned her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes.
To her surprise, pale dots of color appeared in her mind’s eye, even though she had intended only to rest. More and more dots came, and suddenly she was in a dreamscape, surrounded by a landscape of sand. Dry and bright, the sand stretched off as far as her eye could see. Heat pulsed in the air.
Nothing seemed familiar – no part of the environment had come from her own mind. Filled with dismay, she tried to dissolve the scene, but the too-bright sand and the waves of heat remained just as vivid as before.
Something’s wrong!
Wincing in the hot glare, she looked around for a patch of shade where she could try again to dissolve her surroundings. Amid a tangle of scrubby bushes, she caught sight of a shadowed recess.
She was still wearing her white uniform, she saw to her relief. Her clothing had not been altered, this time. And her feet were bare, just as they had been when she had curled up on the sofa to open the package. She quickly crossed the expanse of gritty sand, her soles burning, and reached the bushes. She pushed the scratchy branches apart.
A region of deep shade lay within, but there was already someone there, someone she hadn’t noticed in the shadows because of his black clothing.
With a gasp, she knelt beside him. “Holt, it’s me – Tressa!”
He was lying limply against the rocks with his eyes closed. He gave no response.
She touched his arm, and then shook it. “Holt, wake up!”
At last his eyes cracked open. The rocks around them blurred and disappeared. She could see only Holt, gazing back at her in confusion.
Suddenly everything vanished, even Holt’s face.
Tressa sat up on the sofa of her apartment, her pulse hammering. She dragged in a shaky breath, and then another.
Her mind had to be playing tricks on her. Fear was making her see things. It was stirring up the part of her that was psychic.... It was painting pictures that weren’t real.
Or maybe something more sinister was going on. For the first time, she wondered if she had been secretly dosed with any of the new pharmaceuticals.
Hugging her arms around herself, she made a resolution to inspect all of her food and drink in the future. As for tonight, her cupboards were so bare that she’d have to purchase some groceries at the neighborhood market before she could make dinner. Fresh, new supplies were bound to be safe.
She changed out of her uniform into a soft white blouse and an old pair of jeans. The comfortable clothing gave her a feeling of reassurance that she badly needed.
Night had come by that time, but Tressa’s short walk to the market passed safely enough, for her route was well-lit and traveled by other pedestrians. She purchased groceries and returned home, climbing the stairs with a tote bag in either hand. Setting down one of her bags, she opened the door and reached for the lamp.
Suddenly her hand froze in mid-air. Her apartment was no longer dead silent, for within the darkness of the living room, she could hear a steady sound.
Tick... tick... tick...
The vintage clock was running again.
Tressa reached out with a trembling hand to switch on the lamp.
Someone was in her apartment, standing on the other side of the room, near the vintage clock. She gasped, and the second tote bag slid from her hand to thud on the floor.
“Your clock wasn’t running, Tressa. I wound it for you.” Holt closed the clock case and turned around to gaze at her with tired eyes.
“Holt! Where have you been?” she choked out.
“I’ve been ill, Tressa.”
After bolting the door behind her, she ran across the room to him. A flush had spread over his cheekbones and his eyes were not only tired, but glazed with fever.
Peter’s stern warnings came back to her, but she shook them off. She could see no signs of aggression in Holt’s manner. Urging him toward the sofa, she made him sit on the cushions. “Let me look at you. I’m a nurse’s aide, remember?”
She felt his forehead. His skin was no longer abnormally cool, but hot. She felt his hands, next. They were hot, too.
“You’re feverish. What other symptoms do you have?”
Holt frowned and answered slowly, “I’ve been sleeping too much. And I can’t think clearly.” He rested his head back against the cushions and closed his eyes. “I haven’t been ill in a very long time, Tressa. Something is wrong.”
“Where have you been since you left me?”
He drew in a long breath. “First I led those two men away from your place. It seemed better than confronting them, for I had begun to feel tired and ill as soon as had I left your apartment. By the time I had lured them away, I was too ill to walk any further. I found a safe place to sleep. When I woke up, I feared for your safety, so I came here.”
“I’ve been safe, Holt, just worried. Are you thirsty?”
“Parched.”
Tressa rose quickly. “I’ll get you some ice water.”
In the kitchen she found the largest glass in her cupboard and filled it to the brim with ice cubes and water. Carrying it into the living room, she stopped suddenly in her tracks, for Holt was looking at the book she had left on the sofa, English Poets of the Romantic Era.
It lay open in his hands. The white packing slip that had marked her spot rested beside him on the cushion.
Slowly, Holt raised his eyes to meet her own. Shock had drained away the flush of fever, leaving his face deathly pale. “Why were you reading this book, Tressa?”
Her pulse hammered in her ears. “Because I wanted to know more about you,” she whispered.
Holt’s eyes narrowed. “How much do you know?”
“Everything.” Everything but how you were turned.
Holt closed the book. His face was even paler than before. “When did you begin to guess the truth? Was it my eyes?”
She shook her head mutely.
“It was the coldness of my touch, then.”
She found her voice at last. Gazing at him steadily, she said, “Holt, I’ve always known.”
He stared back at her with a look of shocked disb
elief. It soon gave way to confusion and then to wariness, although he said nothing in reply. The silence stretched on.
Tressa finally crossed the room. “You’re dehydrated from fever. You need some water.”
Stiffly, Holt accepted the glass of ice water.
While he was drinking, she went to her desk where she found pen and paper to write him a message.
I’ll tell you more, but we need to go outside so that we can’t be overheard. My apartment might be under surveillance.
She brought the note to Holt, who read it with a frown. Then he leaned forward on the sofa and tried to stand up, only to fall back onto the cushions with a hand pressed to his forehead. “I’m too dizzy,” he murmured.
Worriedly, Tressa felt his face and hands again. His fever was still high despite the ice water he’d had, and when she let go of his hands, they fell limply onto his lap. She wondered if more blood would help... but would he even take it? His emotions had to be in turmoil over her recent revelation.
Suddenly, she remembered the extra supplies she had brought home from a training session with the Operation. Running to her bedroom, she searched through the bottom drawer of her dresser, found the packet of supplies, and tore the plastic open. Inside she found a spare injector and several syringes for loading it. The injector wouldn’t help Holt, for flames would emerge from the handle if she used it on him, but one of the syringes would work.
It took only a minute to fill a syringe with blood from her arm, and then she returned to the living room. Holt was wearing only a shirt tonight, so it was a simple matter to undo several buttons and pull the fabric away from his upper arm.
“What are you doing, Tressa?” he asked weakly. His eyes were still closed.
“I’m trying to help you. Hold still.”
Looking for a spot to inject him, she was dismayed to see the long, jagged scar that marred his shoulder. She’d seen scars like that in the Emergency Room and knew that it had been made by a knife. Below the scar she also saw two small, neat holes, all healed over. Bullet wounds, she realized, feeling a bit shaken.
When she saw a third healed-over bullet wound in his chest, a little gasp escaped her, for this one was located just above his heart. A cold shiver ran through Tressa as she stared at the small circular scar. Holt would have died very quickly from that bullet had he been human when he received it, she thought.
Steadying her hands, she found a spot on his upper arm that was free of scars and injected him with the syringe.
Holt’s eyes opened. His arm jerked reflexively.
“Hold still.”
He drew in a breath. “That’s not some medicine. It’s blood,” he whispered back.
Finishing the injection, she said, “Rest, for now.”
Holt sank back onto the sofa. His eyelids drifted weakly shut.
As Tressa rose to her feet, she felt a brief wave of dizziness come over her, too. Realizing that she’d had no dinner, she disposed of the syringe and brought her tote bags full of groceries to the kitchen, where she made herself a hasty sandwich.
By the time half an hour had passed, Holt seemed much stronger. He opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Silently, he buttoned his shirt and rose from the sofa. Then he nodded his head resolutely toward the door.
Fourteen
Outside, Tressa spoke only once to suggest Fountains Park as a destination. The rest of her walk with Holt passed in silence.
When they entered the quiet grounds of the park, they followed the central walkway to the pair of ornate stone fountains for which the park had been named. The water in the fountains had been shut off during the cold season, and low lights shone upon the empty basins as they walked by. Soon they arrived at an encircling hedge where they found a secluded stone bench.
Tressa seated herself on the bench and Holt joined her, but she was unhappily aware that he had chosen a spot some distance from her, at the end of the bench.
Gathering her resolve, she finally spoke. “The night we met, I wasn’t really lost, Holt. I was volunteering for a secret organization that goes by the name of Operation M. It was founded for the purpose of tracking and intercepting vampires.”
Holt shifted in his spot at the end of the bench. In a voice that was drained of all emotion, he asked, “Were you supposed to stake me through the heart – or destroy me with fire?”
“No! I’m trying to explain, but first you need to know more about Operation M.”
Holt listened in silence as she told him about Dr. Hayes and the early experiments with vampire blood. It had all happened before she had arrived in town, but she had learned about the experiments from Peter.
Working with samples of both human and vampire blood, Dr. Hayes had performed one experiment after another until he had finally observed the biological process of elimination that enabled vampiric blood cells to replace human cells.
Dr. Hayes had never performed his experiments upon human subjects, of course. He had restricted himself to using only vials of stored blood, but once he had observed the dominance of vampire blood cells, he’d realized that he’d found the physiological basis for the widespread changes of the turning process, the changes that caused a human to become a vampire.
At that point, Holt murmured, “Operation M.... The M must stand for Metamorphosis. Then I was meant to provide more samples of blood to further the investigation into this metamorphosis. Was I supposed to remain free – or be destroyed in the end?”
“Holt, you’re right about the M – the full name of the organization is Operation Metamorphosis – but you’ve got the rest of it all wrong! There’s a third kind of blood, a rare strain that Dr. Hayes added to his experiments. From some clues he received from Peter, he suspected it might have a strong effect on vampire blood, and eventually he found that he was right. In the same way that vampire blood can dominate human cells, this rare strain can dominate vampire blood. You were meant to be given a dose of it with an injector the night we met, only I couldn’t seem to do it.”
Holt was silent. Finally, he said, “I don’t understand, Tressa. Did you inject me with some of this blood tonight in your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“But how did you obtain this rare blood? And why would it help my sudden illness?”
She ran a hand nervously through her hair, surprised that he hadn’t guessed. “Holt, the blood comes from me. I carry that rare strain. You’re ill because your body has been metabolizing the blood you took from me many days ago.”
She heard his quick intake of breath in the darkness. “So, you were awake, after all.”
“I was awake, but my thoughts were far away each time.” In places where strange elements had intruded – she could still picture the time-worn book with its pages turning and the wineglass filled with some dark red liquid. She had even spotted Holt himself. But she’d only confuse him if she tried to recount each and every detail, so all she said was, “I know what you did to me when you thought I was mesmerized, Holt, and it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that you’re starting another metamorphosis.”
“To weaken my powers?” Holt stood up abruptly. “Then you have only condemned me to death, Tressa. There are others of my kind who won’t hesitate to kill me when I have lost my powers,” he said darkly.
“No, it’s nothing like that!” she cried. Then she said very clearly, so that he couldn’t misunderstand, “Holt, you’re turning human.”
A growl of denial surged through the night air. “That’s impossible, Tressa.”
“No, it is possible. Peter and I are half-Mysterium. Our blood is different because of that.”
“Half-Mysterium,” repeated Holt, sounding very doubtful. “Whatever you may mean by that, it’s surely another impossibility.”
“It’s true, Holt. Our mother is human, but our father is a full-blooded Mysterium,” she explained, willing him to believe. “Our blood is a mix of human and Mysterium blood. It’s the Mysterium cells that are changing you.”
&nb
sp; “They are? And why don’t they change you as well?” he asked dryly.
“Because they look and act very human. Dr. Hayes calls them ‘human-seeking’. He says that they pull themselves into forms that mirror human cells. He thinks it has something to do with the way a Mysterium is born into this world, but there’s no time to go into that now. All you need to know is that for someone half-human, like me, the human cells coexist peacefully with the Mysterium cells.”
Holt reached out to finger the strands of her hair. Thoughtfully, he said, “Your hair is finer than a human’s. I have always wondered about that.” She felt the strands settle back against her cheek as he removed his hand. “Your scent is different, too, which has puzzled me even more. I knew there was something different about you from the very beginning, Tressa, but what you’ve told me is too hard to believe.”
More facts were needed, obviously. She began with the details of Peter’s strange and unnerving experience a few years ago.
Peter had never believed in the existence of vampires until one night, when he had been walking down a street in New York City after seeing a show. That was when he’d been attacked by a real vampire. Immune to the vampire’s mesmeric powers, Peter had been conscious of everything that had transpired.
Shaken and angry after the predation, Peter had watched his attacker disappear at lightning speed into the shadows. There had been nothing Peter could do but return to his lodgings, feeling weak but unharmed. Having encountered a vampire hadn’t really surprised him, though. Peter was the son of a Mysterium, and he was aware that there were other beings in the world besides humans.
Peter had assumed that he’d never see his attacker again, so he had been stunned when, a week later, the very same predator had sought him out and pleaded for his help.
The young Asian vampire had been weak and confused. His body temperature had risen greatly, for he had developed a high fever. Peter had taken pity on him, but not before sharpening some wooden stakes as a precaution. Armed with them, Peter had provided a bed and fluids – and even food, when it was requested, to Peter’s astonishment.