“After you turned Chandresh?”
“Yes.”
“Was he angry you turned him?”
“At first. But his father was there to help him, and I was there to help him, and he came around in time.”
“You did for him what Geoffrey didn’t do for you.”
“I couldn’t live with myself if I left him to figure this life out for himself. I needed to make sure he was all right. I needed to teach him how to deal with this curse.”
“How many times do I have to tell you—you’re not cursed.”
“The curse is more obvious now than ever, Sarah. We’re all suffering for it. I hope Chandresh doesn’t hate me for what I did to him. It’s because of me he has to leave Jennifer.”
“You saved his life because his father begged you to, and in a way, Timothy is your vampling too. No man with your heart can be cursed. I told you before you’re like the Tin Man. We’ve pulled the curtain back from the scary-looking wizard and found an ordinary man, and the ordinary man is telling you that you already have the heart you’ve been wishing for. That heart has been filled with undying love for me for over three hundred years, and Grace, and Chandresh, and Timothy. For Miriam’s whole family down the generations. Don’t you ever say you’re cursed again. I don’t care what the anti-vampire protestors say. I don’t care what the media says. You’re my dear and loving husband, Jamie. You always will be.”
James was silent, and he looked far away, over Sarah’s head, somewhere she couldn’t join him, like she couldn’t join him on this journey he would soon be traveling. Finally, he sighed, then continued talking as though he hadn’t stopped. “Now the others couldn’t see Chandresh like they couldn’t see me, though Ashwin saw us both. When Chandresh was strong enough, we did what we could to help the others as they continued to Oklahoma.”
“How long did it last?” Sarah asked.
“About three months,” James said. “It’s where the legend of the Cherokee Rose began. During the Trail of Tears, the mothers of the Cherokee were crying so much because they couldn’t help their children survive. They say the elders prayed for a sign that would lift the mothers’s spirits to give them strength. The next day beautiful roses grew where the mothers’s tears fell, white for their tears, with a gold center for the gold taken from the Cherokee land, seven leaves on each stem for the seven Cherokee clans. The trail was arduous, even painful at times, but they did finally arrive in Oklahoma.”
“Many died along the way, and the soldiers were brutal to them.”
“That is true, but don’t lose sight of those who survived. Remember, you said it yourself—they’re still here. It was hard going for them for a long time. They left everything behind—their politics, their social systems, their culture. They left their homes, their ancestors, everything about their way of life, but as soon as the survivors arrived in Oklahoma they began to rebuild. They rebuilt it all, Sarah. They created schools for boys, and for girls. They reestablished their culture. They had a newspaper in both Cherokee and English. They started businesses, created a new Constitution, and they thrived. The years after the removal were called the Cherokee Golden Age.”
“But then they had problems again.”
“They did, but they overcame those too. They overcame problems caused by the Civil War, problems caused by Oklahoma statehood. They’ve overcome every obstacle put in their way. People have used harsh measures to deal with the ‘Indian problem,’ and yet they’re still here.”
“They’re using harsh measures to deal with the Vampire Dawn.”
“They are.” James grasped Sarah’s hands and clasped them to his chest. “But we’ll survive. We’ll survive, we’ll heal, and we’ll rebuild. We’re immortal and we’re strong, Sarah. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I’m not immortal,” she said.
“You’re here now, so in your way you are.”
Sarah nodded. “And then when this madness is over we’ll be together again.”
“Yes. We’ll be together again.”
Sarah struggled to brighten her mood—she knew he needed to see it, she knew him so well. After her hard-won smile, she threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest.
Chapter 24
The lines of the weary, broken-hearted undead stretched down all the miles of the road as far as James could see. A storm lingered overhead in the moonless night, bringing heavy gray clouds and the fresh-air scent of early May rain. Beneath the storm they came in a cluttered throng, rows and rows of them, white-skinned, black-eyed, marching to the tempo of a common-time drumbeat only they could hear. Many stood straight-backed, eyes ahead, stoic, as though this were nothing, they had suffered worse before, they had suffered over more years than the oldest humans could imagine. Others wept openly, the blood staining them in their sadness, their white faces streaked pink. They were the elders, the wisest and the most respected, with gray in their hair and wrinkles in their faces. They were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, cousins, friends, neighbors, and anyone else you ever knew from the day you were born. Some held hands with others of their kind or with the humans they loved. The young women caught the lewd glances of the khaki-suited soldiers who didn’t hide their delight at the sight of the pretty raven-eyed girls. They walked across the narrow streets of Boston, just as others of their kind were doing in every major city in the country, passing cars whose drivers slowed to gawk and wonder, passing pedestrians who stood in rows on the sidewalks to see the undead go by. Some called for family members they couldn’t find in the crowds. Some watched their feet as though their numb legs had become detached from their torsos and they wondered how they moved. The storm in the sky left its gloominess over everything and everyone. Those heading into the train station looked around in bewilderment, as though they hardly knew why they were there. But everywhere was a heaving of sorrow so deep it cut through all the many generations these beings had seen.
The media was there, hundreds of them from all over the world, their film crews capturing the moment, their on-the-beat reporters talking into their microphones as they tried to make sense of the scene for those watching at home. A boisterous crowd blocked the way into the train station, and there were twice as many spectators there to watch the proceedings as there were those being rounded up. Cell phones and digital cameras flashed and filmed. Some in the crowd shouted curses while others shouted encouragement. Many held placards, some for, some against the vampires. The army soldiers were there, guns out, on guard, their muscles tense, their shoulders high, waiting for someone to start with them, ready to use the force they were trained for. They created barriers on either side of the entrance as a walkway for the vampires to pass through.
As the vampires and their families made their way into the train station, the armed guards pushed back the spectators who pressed forward. The people held their placards over their heads, pumped fists into the air, flashed peace signs or waves with less than five fingers. When the vampires arrived in greater numbers, the crowd broke out into a frenzy of shouts and gestures and signs and cameras.
James held onto Sarah’s arm in one hand and his duffle bag in the other, seeing everything—the advertisements for local Boston sights, the fast food stands, the newspaper racks, the ticket booths, the shouting confusion as the undead searched for where to go—through an avalanche of bleary-eyed bewilderment. He hadn’t expected the chaos. He thought the vampires would disappear as unheeded and unnoticed as the Cherokee had left the southeast in 1838. There was no fanfare then, little media coverage except propaganda to cheer the evacuations, certainly not crowds hovering to see them off. One day they lived in the southeast and the next they were gone. Sarah held her head down, staring at the ground beneath her feet, refusing to acknowledge the madness surrounding her. James pulled her into the train station since he was afraid of being separated from her in the crowd and not finding her again before he had to leave. Inside, they w
ere given directions over the loudspeaker. They were assigned trains according to their county of residence. James found the number for Essex County and brought Sarah to stand beside him. In his confusion, he looked around for Grace until he remembered Olivia stayed behind with her. He said good-bye to her at home. He looked around for Chandresh, who was boarding the same train since he had moved to Salem to be closer to Jennifer, and Jennifer was there too, but they had been separated in the crowd. Timothy was boarding the same train, as was Jocelyn, but he didn’t see them either. He realized with a nervous tick that there was something he meant to tell Sarah before he left, something important, and he shuddered when he couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered telling himself, “Don’t forget to tell Sarah…” Don’t forget to tell Sarah what?
James bit his lip. He would stay strong for Sarah. He had decided. When a single tear fell, he wiped it away quickly, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
But she saw. She looked into his blood-streaked eyes and took his dead-cold face between her hands and squeezed with all her strength. Suddenly, the early May thunderstorm broke though, and though they sat inside they could see the ferocity of the storm pelt the glass walls, the bursts of lightening flashing while the harsh water pellets hit the trains outside. Sarah shivered though it wasn’t a cold rain, the gray-cloud sky matching her grief at their impending separation. James kissed her forehead and let his lips linger.
“This will all be over soon,” he said, for himself as much as Sarah.
He found two seats on a bench near the glass doors that led to the platform outside. He slid his arm around Sarah’s shoulders, trying to comfort her. He knew her so well. He knew what she was thinking before the realization crossed her own mind, but that was their way. He guessed she could see the crack in his heart through her weary eyes. She was still recovering, still in pain, but she came with him to say good-bye, and he loved her for her strength. For the first time since they were reunited over a year before, he didn’t know what to say to make any of this better. He couldn’t make this better. He was going away when he promised he would never leave her ever.
James watched Sarah as she eyed the throng pushing forward and back, here and there, side to side, pressing against them in one moment and emptying through the glass doors in the next. Despite the cries, the yells, the whispers, the questions, James pulled Sarah close and they managed to create a moment for themselves within the confusion, like they were enclosed in a soundproof bubble.
Sarah kissed James’s hand and rested her head against his shoulder. “I remember the first time I saw you,” she said. “I mean the very first time. I was talking to my sister at supper, and I looked up and there you were, the most beautiful-looking man I had ever seen.”
“Do you recall it from your own memories? I told you that story in the library last year before you went through the past-life regression.”
“No, I remember it. I remember sitting next to Mary Grace, telling her that she was too young to help with the reaping and the plowing, and if she lost a finger or an arm in the sickle I wasn’t enough of a seamstress to sew it back for her…” Sarah’s hand went over her mouth, her eyes wide with the memory. “My sister’s name was Mary Grace. That’s where I got the name Grace.”
“That’s right. Mary died of typhoid when she was eleven years old. You were sure the baby you carried was a girl so you named her after your sister.”
“I was right.”
“Yes, you were.” James watched the people pass by, heard the shouts as they called to each other, heard the footsteps, some quick, some slow, some shuffles, some stomps. For a moment, he thought he heard Kenneth Hempel’s heavy, plodding footsteps. This whole scene was part of Hempel’s master plan. Damn you, Hempel, James thought. This is all because of you.
“Next month is our first anniversary,” Sarah said. “Our first anniversary this time around.” The sadness was back and her voice cracked and her chest heaved. Her hand went to her stomach where she was still stitched from her surgery. When James moved to help her, she shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said.
James nodded. “I know it’s our anniversary. I never forgot you for a moment over three centuries. Do you think I could forget something from a year ago?”
“Do you think you’ll be home by then?”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
Sarah dropped her face into her hands, and James pulled her closer to him, closer, closer, as though if he pulled her tight enough they would meld and they could stay together somehow because either others would mistake him for human or her for one of his kind. Then, after giving into her grief, she sat up, her face set, her shoulders firm. She looked James in the eye and nodded.
“We’re very lucky,” she said. “Most people don’t get a second chance at love the way we did.”
“Our second chance isn’t over,” James said. “This is just a bump in the road.” James leaned his face close to Sarah, and he whispered in her ear with all the love he could channel into his words:
“I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay…”
He waited. Sarah lifted her head and said:
“The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.”
James sighed. “Do you understand why I’m doing this, Sarah? I need to know that you understand why I’m leaving.”
“They’ll hunt you down if you don’t go.”
“And the sooner I go, the sooner this nonsense will be over and I can come home.”
“I know.”
Sarah watched the white-skinned men and women boarding trains, saw their weeping families, and she looked as blank as James felt, as though everything passed by in a haze. As a new train was called and a fresh crowd brushed past on their way to the platform, Sarah grabbed James’s hand, and he clutched hers, tightly, pulling her toward him to protect her from trampling feet or grabbing hands.
“By leaving I’m protecting you, Sarah. Now the government has what they want, me, and you won’t be dragged who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long, always running, always paranoid. You can rest and recover and grow strong again without having to look over your shoulder every five minutes to see who’s there. By giving myself up, I’m setting you free. I will always sacrifice myself for you and Grace. I will give myself a thousand times over for the two of you.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “I love you.”
“I love you more.”
And he still, even as they sat in the chairs of the terminal waiting for his train to be called, even as they clutched each other as if they were the only things keeping the other from falling through the crust of the earth to the nothing on the other side, insisted that everything was going to be all right.
“This too shall end,” he whispered. He shook his head, remembering again there was something he wanted to tell her, something else, something…but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t recall what it was. Knowing there was something he couldn’t remember gnawed at him, chipping away at his brain in painful bites, and he was afraid he would be too far away before he recalled what he wanted to say and then he wouldn’t be able to tell her.
His train was called. He heard his number over the intercom and saw it flash on the screen overhead. He took Sarah’s hand and guided her through the press of bodies, paranormal and normal, the terminal buzzing with confusion and sadness and anger and every other emotion besides. As they walked past the glass doors outside to the platform where the trains waited in two long lines on either side, he gripped Sarah’s hand tightly, afraid to lose her in the dizzying maze of careworn faces. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the slick gray train that would take him away to some grea
t unknown, a prison perhaps worse than the one he saw in his mind, the one as squalid as the one Sarah knew from over three hundred years before. He stopped near the first door, unable to look into Sarah’s face, unable to see her despair. When he double-checked the number on the screen, he saw a flash of recognition, a face he knew, but it was so fast it hardly registered in his brain. Who is that, he wondered? Then the face was gone but he heard the voice, the detached, hearty, assuring voice he heard when he questioned whether or not they should bring a child into their home. And then they found Grace. James, despite the tumult of the chaos around him, despite his weeping wife in his arms, was grateful to hear the warmth then.
“You will be all right,” he heard. “And Sarah and Grace will be too.”
There was the flash of the face again, too fast even for his preternatural senses to grasp, and then the face and the voice were gone. But James felt strong again. When the call for his train echoed on the platform, James tried to step away from Sarah but she wouldn’t let him go.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
James watched the army guards direct others onto the trains, vampires being led away, a sacrifice for the slaughter. Then a stocky guard in an overlarge uniform spotted him and James knew he had to go.
“Let’s go,” the guard said. “All vampires for the next train should be boarded now.”
“No, James. No!” Sarah grabbed his arm, refusing to let him go.
“It’s all right,” James said, stroking her long dark curls, brushing her tears away with his fingertips. “I’m immortal and I’m strong. I’ll be home soon.”
The soldier drew closer, impatient now. “Let’s go!” he yelled. He grabbed the back of a nearby vampire’s shirt and tried to drag the white-skinned man toward the train. The guard’s face grew red and wet when he realized he couldn’t make the vampire move, and he turned his attention onto other undeads a few feet away. “Now!” the guard yelled at them. Then he turned to James and pointed. “Let’s go!”
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