“I walked close to my father, leaned over him, and he wasn’t afraid. He knew I drank blood, and he knew he had blood aplenty in his warm human body, and he never once shrank from me in fear. I kissed the top of his balding head and grasped his hands.
“‘I love you dearly, Father,’ I said, the blood streaking my cheeks. ‘I always will. I will never forget you.’
“My father grasped my hands again. ‘No, James. No! I cannot let you go.’ He broke down in heartrending sobs. ‘You cannot go. You cannot…’
“I released his hands and flashed away as fast as any demon running wild in the pits of hell. Even when I was miles away I heard him weeping and murmuring my name.
“‘James… my boy…come back…my son…come home.’
“I couldn’t stand the sound of his anguish and I nearly turned back, but I saw a vision of those innocent women hanging from the ugly tree on Gallows Hill, and I remembered the terror on your face as the constable dragged you away. I couldn’t go back to him.”
James shuddered as the pain from so many years before wrenched through his preternatural body. Sarah stroked his arm with short caresses, trying to comfort him.
“Poor John,” she said. “Did you ever see him again?”
“No. Just two months later my father abandoned Salem and returned to London. He lived there for another year until he died.”
Sarah shuddered, the colder nighttime air and her wet feet finally prickling her. She looked at Grace, whose eyes were fluttering under feather-like lashes.
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” James said, “but I can see you’re cold. Let’s get you both dry and warm inside.”
In their bedroom, James dried Grace’s feet with a towel and changed her into her nightshirt and set her down in her crib. Sarah changed into her flannel pajamas, grateful that Theresa had left the pot of untasted tea on a hot plate on the dresser, along with a platter of homemade bread and fresh cheese. With Grace put to bed, Sarah poured herself some tea and sat on the bed next to James.
“Was John sick when he left Massachusetts?” she asked. “Why did he die?”
“I think he died of a broken heart.” James could hardly say the words. “After I left my father I disappeared into the woodlands again. Sometimes I forgot where I was or why I was there. Then one night as I stumbled along I saw a woman near a low-burning fire outside a thatched hut of branches. She had wild red hair and an unwashed face, and she sat on the forest floor barefoot and cross-legged. At first I thought I would hunt her, but when I approached her she turned to me so casually I had the feeling she had been waiting for me, though how she knew I was coming I didn’t know. I didn’t know I would be there myself. I can sneak up on my prey unnoticed and unheard, but somehow she knew I was there. She smiled at me and nodded.
“‘‘Tis about time,’ she said. ‘What took you so long? Have you been dallying on your way to me?’
“I thought she must have me confused with someone else. I couldn’t guess her age since she looked both young and old. She had a feathery billow of red-brown hair, which made her look young, but the straggly rags she wore were hardly stitched together and made her look old. She walked toward me with strength in her bearing, then stopped a foot away and crossed her arms in front of her chest as though she were challenging me.”
“I’ve seen that look from Jennifer a hundred times,” Sarah said.
“Exactly the same. Beneath the dirt on the woman’s face I could see she was young since she had smooth skin. Her eyes were bright and steel-gray.”
“Like Olivia.”
James nodded. “‘You’re late,’ she said.
“‘What do you want?’ I shot back. ‘I know you not.’ I turned away, but she grabbed my arm and held me more tightly than I would have thought possible from someone of her diminutive size. She came no higher than my waist.
“‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but I know you. You’re the one I’m waiting for. You’re the one who will go on.’
“‘What nonsense do you speak, woman?’ I said. ‘How can you be waiting for me?’
“‘‘Tis the prophecy,’ she said. ‘Someone tall, strong, and golden-haired, a man with skin as white as snow and as cold as the winter wind, will come. You will help him as he will help you and your future generations.’ She gripped my hand more tightly. ‘That golden-haired man is you. You are part of my fate, as I am part of yours. After you will come the man who will be the continuation of my bloodline, and we are a strong bloodline as far back as blood goes. But you know all about blood, do you not?’
“I stepped away, suddenly afraid of her. ‘Be not troubled,’ she said. ‘I have no visitors here. You are in no danger from me. I have secrets of my own.’
“She turned toward the fire, waving her hands upward as though she beckoned the flames to rise and they obeyed, growing higher and hotter at her command. She turned to me and smiled.
“‘I am special,’ she said, ‘and so are you.’
“‘If you know I am special then you know more than I,’ I said. ‘I know not what I am.’
“‘Do you know how you came to be this way?’ she asked. I still wasn’t sure what to make of her, this ragged, dirty young woman living alone in a hand-made shed in the middle of the forest, but she already knew about me, so I told her about that night with Geoffrey outside the jail, and when I finished speaking she brushed my words away with her hand.
“‘You’re to stay with me,’ she said. ‘For a while.’
“‘According to whom?’
“‘According to the prophecy.’
“‘What prophecy?’ I demanded. ‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’
“‘I can read the prophecies. All my kind can.’
“‘Your kind?’
“‘Aye. Haven’t you been bothered enough about witches to recognize one when she stands afore you?’
“I laughed bitterly. ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘You’re the one they’ve been searching for. Come with me, woman, because I know some people down Salem way who’d like to show you their special tree. They searched for you so hard my wife died of it.’
“She threw up her hands as if she were annoyed. ‘No one looks for me, boy,’ she said. ‘I am good enough at my ways that no one alive knows I’m here. I’ve harmed no one. I help, not hurt. I use my potions to heal, not poison. I cannot thwart, only thrive. That foolishness down Salem way had nothing to do with my kind. It was because of human weaknesses---pettiness and fear and blackmail.’”
“She was right,” Sarah said.
“Yes, but I wasn’t willing to admit it at the time. ‘You said no one knows you’re here,’ I told her, ‘yet I know you’re here and you were expecting me.’
“‘Caught that, did you? No one alive knows I’m here. You aren’t alive now, are you?’
“I slumped under the weight of her words, and her voice softened. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘As I said, you’re to stay with me.’
I didn’t have the will to argue or flee, and it was going to be dawn soon, so I followed her into her hut. It was a tiny one-room structure, and I had to bend over to walk inside. There was a small cauldron hanging over a lit fire in the hearth, pots of herbs and liquids on a roughly chopped wooden table with three stumps for chairs and two beds of rags on the floor. She gestured to one of the beds. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see I’ve been expecting you.’
“‘Are you certain no one lives here but you?’ I asked.
“‘No one.’
“‘There are three chairs,’ I said.
“‘I am expecting another. Soon.’
“The windows were already covered with quilts, in preparation for my presence there during the day, I presumed. Along the back wall, hidden in the shadows, so much so I didn’t notice them until I was standing there, was a short, wide shelf stacked with books.”
James brushed a stray curl from Sarah’s cheek. She looked at Grace, who had pulled herself upright in her crib, standing silently, as enthrall
ed in her father’s story as her mother. She wouldn’t be going to sleep again any time soon. James took the baby from her crib, her tiny hands clutching his t-shirt in her fists. Grace didn’t take her eyes from her father’s face, and Sarah thought Grace must understand every word he was saying. Grace tugged again on James’s t-shirt and murmured.
“I think she wants you to go on with your story,” Sarah said.
“I think you’re right.” James sat on the bed near Sarah, propping Grace in a sitting position between them. “The witch gestured at the shelf. ‘You’re a reader,’ she said. ‘You will stay as long as it takes to read these books. Not a moment longer.’
“I relented and nodded. Besides, I had nowhere else to go and I thought reading might help to ease the pain of being away from my father, and from you, so I stayed.
“The woman and I hardly talked during the nights. She talked to the stray squirrels who came to eat the nuts and berries she left for them, she scribbled strange drawings and words in a language I didn’t recognize with her colored inks on paper, she chanted late into the night and bubbled concoctions in her cauldron.
“‘How did you get so many books?’ I asked her once. ‘I don’t see many bookbinders in the forest.’ She swatted my words away since she always found my questions annoying.
“‘I haven’t always lived here,’ she said.
“‘Then why did you come?’ I asked.
“‘Because I wanted to live as I wanted to live. I cannot conform to foolish ways. My father tried to marry me off too many times, finally to an elderly widower who stank of spoiled fish and lived in room no bigger than a boot. I wouldn’t hear of it, and my father despised my stubbornness. But I wouldn’t obey. I knew of my abilities from the earliest age. My mother had them. She taught me all she knew before she died.’
“‘How did she die?’ I asked.
“‘My father turned her in for witchery while we lived in England yet. They burned her at the stake.’
“Burning convicted witches? I wanted to vomit at the thought. The hangings were horrible enough, the dungeon where you died too dreadful. But to burn them alive? The witch shook her head. ‘I know you’re suffering from the hunts,’ she said. ‘I have no right to speak such ways.’
“She sat on the dirt floor in front of the fire. I didn’t know how that meager hut stayed upright, it looked so haphazard, like sticks in a mud pie, and I wondered how it didn’t burn down whenever the fire was lit. I half-expected the cinders to catch the walls and burn the place down the way the fiery sparks caught the wood when they burned the living people alive.
“She watched me a long time, saying nothing, pulling her knees to her chin as she sat cross-legged on the ground. ‘You do not like what you are,’ she said finally. ‘You will need to make peace with it. You’re going to be this way a while.’
“‘Make peace with it?’ I said. ‘I would gladly make peace with it except I know not what I am.’
“‘You truly do not know?’
“‘I know I am unhuman. Horrid. Despicable.”
“‘You are those things only if you choose to be. Otherwise, you are vampyre.’
“‘Vampyre?’ I wasn’t even sure I knew the word. ‘What on earth are you saying, woman?’
“‘I’m saying you’re magic, vampyre. You will never age beyond what you are now. You will never grow infirm or sickly or weaken. You will always have the strength of one hundred mortal men and the speed, sight, hearing, and reflexes of the most refined hunters in the wild. Your living body is dead and yet you still walk and drink. Blood. The living force in blood is what moves you. You will live forever.’
“‘Surely you jest since you cannot mean forever,’ I said. ‘Tell me truly—when will this be over? When will I be able to sleep in peace?’
“‘I jest you not. Once you are infected with the magic, you cannot escape it, that is, unless you find magic more powerful than the one that turned you in the first place.’
“I jumped over to her, knelt by her side, shaking her shoulders. ‘Where?’ I begged. ‘Where is this magic more powerful than the one that turned me into this accursed thing?’
“‘I cannot say. It is too rare and to my knowledge it has never been done. But you never know what you will find once you begin looking.’
“‘So I am trapped like this? Dead and alive? Without my Lizzie? Forever?’ I slumped over as I realized there was nothing I could do to release myself from this curse and I would wander the nights missing you, hiding from the daylight, searching for blood to drink for the rest of time. I closed my eyes, wishing there were some way I could end myself because the thought of existing that way for eternity was too dreary.
“‘Be not mournful, vampyre,’ she said. ‘There will be better nights ahead for you.’
“‘My name is James,’ I said.
“‘Very well, James. ‘Tis about time you introduced yourself properly. I was beginning to wonder where your manners were. I am Miriam.’ She grasped my hands and didn’t flinch from my dead-cold skin. ‘Hear me, James. There will be a night when you’ll be glad you are what you are. You must believe me, or else every night from now ‘til then will be a lonely, useless burden.’
“‘When will that be?’ I asked bitterly. ‘When will I be glad for the blessings of this curse?’
“Miriam shrugged. ‘‘Tis not as if I know the date of every event ever to happen in the history of the world. Things happen in their own time. You’ll find what you’re looking for when it needs to be found. That is all.’
“That sounds like something Olivia would say,” Sarah said.
“Yes.”
“Was she more pleasant to be around after that?”
“Miriam became an invaluable friend to me. She showed me how to live more comfortably this way. She taught me how to use my instincts to their best advantage. She showed me where I might find willing donors if that was how I wanted to live—without killing. She taught me how I needed to make peace with myself because I wouldn’t get any farther along until I did.
“‘There’s nothing you can do to change what you are,’ she told me. ‘You can’t go back and change that night. You can’t tell the bad vampyre man to leave your human neck alone. You can’t bring your wife back to life. You are what you are. Vampyre. Since there’s nothing you can do to change it, you might as well accept it and learn to live with it for as long as it lasts.’”
“Theresa said you saved Miriam from people who wanted to harm her,” Sarah said. “What happened?”
“About a month after I arrived I was woken up by voices. I pulled the quilts back from the window and saw five men surrounding Miriam, grabbing for her, pulling her arms, tugging at her skirts, taunting her, making rude gestures at her. They were very drunk, I could smell the liquor on them, and they were very dirty and ragged, as though they had been traveling for some time. Miriam held herself with dignity, and she didn’t seem afraid, though she looked toward the house to make sure I was there.
“‘There he is,’ she said, ‘the one who will save my life and take yours.’
“The oldest of the men laughed the loudest. ‘Him?’ the man said. ‘He can’t take one of us, let alone all. We shall take you as we want you…’
“‘And do we want you…’ said a leering black-bearded man, who licked his lips to emphasize his point.
“‘…and then we’ll knock your friend’s brains out because we can.’ The face of the oldest man was well lined, like a map of the underworld where every evil intention was marked. He grabbed Miriam’s wrist, dragged her to the ground, and kicked her in the back before I pounced on him. The others charged toward me but I flipped them off as easily as if I were flicking flies away. I made a show of the older man, snapping his back and biting his neck and feeding until the others disappeared into the maze of the trees…”
James stopped to watch Sarah’s expression. “It’s all right, James,” she said. “Keep talking.”
“Miriam was all right, just som
e scrapes and bruises. She wasn’t all that concerned. ‘You see,’ she said. ‘‘Tis the prophecy. You were here to save me from those wretches. You are serving your purpose well, James.’ Then, just two weeks later, the moment I read the last word of the last book there was a knock on the slab of wood she used as a door.
“‘At last,’ she said, ‘he is here.’ She opened the door and there was a red-haired, dark-eyed young man who smiled when he saw her.
“‘James,’ Miriam said, ‘I’d like you to meet my husband. What is your name, husband?’
“‘Matthew,’ he said. Matthew stepped into the hut and looked at her like he had known her all his life. He hardly acknowledged me, he was so consumed by staring at Miriam. She opened the door wider for me to pass.
“‘Good-bye, vampyre. You will know my children, and their children, down the generations. They will help you find your way.”
“‘Thank you,’ I said.
“‘You needn’t thank me,’ she said. ‘I was merely fulfilling the prophecy, as you will fulfill your end as well.’ Miriam took my hand. ‘We are intertwined, you and I. We will always be connected, even when I am gone and you are still here.’ She stepped aside so I could pass. ‘Blessings on you, James John Wentworth. Peace be with you. And always remember…you will return, James. You will.’
“I stepped outside and she closed the door behind me. Even as I flashed away I heard her kissing the man who had appeared out of nowhere. He must have been the third chair, I thought, though we weren’t in the house together long enough to use them. There were years when I struggled to make sense of her words. They were hard to accept at times.”
James smiled. There was such joy in his eyes, such love, that Sarah’s heart swelled at the sight of him. “And now here you are,” he said. “Both of you. Miriam was right—I have returned.”
“Now I understand why you and Olivia and Jennifer are so close. Miriam helped you find your way then, as they help you now. As they’ve helped me. And now Theresa and Francine are helping us.”
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