The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier (Book 1) (19 page)

I picked the largest plants, the ones with
the most blooms. I used the rucksack as a vessel for the flowers, keeping them
immersed in the saltwater like the sibyl warned. I used the second bag for the
seeds at the base of the tubers. I spent some time pulling up the smaller
plants and stripping them of their seeds. By the end of the pruning, my body was
tired from the constant thrashing of the waves in the grotto. I tried to leave
by scaling the inside wall again, but I could not balance the bags and use my
talons at the same time, so I had to tread through the water, holding the bags
above my head, hoping to avoid the undertow a second time.

When I finally reached the opening, I was
able to carry the bags in one hand and use the other to grab hold of the outer
edge of the hollow and pull myself out of the water. I was relieved to be in
the air again—a much easier element for us to move through. With the bags
on my back, I scaled the rock, noticing the onset of dusk. When I reached the
top of the bluff, I tossed the bags onto the landing in front of me, and then climbed
up. But as I was about to swing my legs over the top, I received a blow to my
chest and throat that sent me back down. I thought I saw the boy peer over the
edge, as I fell through the air.

I slammed into the raging water and sank
straight down in the sea. The blow at the top of the bluff had not been as bad
as the thrash my body received breaking through the water’s surface. It took me
a moment to reverse the direction of my descent and torpedo out of the water.
When I finally came crashing up from the sea, I flew higher than the most
determined mullet, leaping onto the rock and scaling the bluff and over its
edge in time to see the boy making off with the bags and the girl. He pulled
her across the clearing and toward the opening in the rock on the other side of
the greenscape. I approached them undetected, as I caught up in one leap. When I
tore the girl from his hand, she screamed in horror, and he stopped, seeing me catch
her up in my arms.

“Evelina,” he said, dropping the bags to
reach for the machete at his side.

“No,” she screamed at him. “Don’t!”

I put her on the ground and faced the boy. She
clutched my boots, sobbing and begging me not to kill him. “The traitor must be
punished,” I said, my voice booming through the clearing, rebounding off the rock
face. I stepped away from the girl, taking one long stride toward the boy. I wrapped
my hand about his neck and squeezed until his face turned red and I released
him again to the ground. The girl sobbed and moaned and her distress got the
better of me, keeping me from taking his life for the moment.

He caught his breath and did not relent.
“You’re the devil,” he said. “A demon!”

“Is that so?” I found his little tirade
amusing since I was a bit of a devil, one who was going to steal his life.

“You’re going to kill Evie’s baby,” he said.

The humor in his accusation was slightly
greater than the rage I felt for him in that instant, and I released a belly
laugh.

“I saw you … you … and Evie.”

I leaned down and looked him in the eyes,
smiling with an open mouth. He cowered and turned away. “Saw what?” I asked.

“I saw you b-b-b-b…”

“Bite?” He could not say it out loud, and kept
his eyes on the ground. I turned back to Evelina, toppled over and clutching
her stomach. I flew to her side and dropped down beside her. “The baby?” I
asked softly.

“I didn’t tell him,” she said through her
sobs. “I promise I didn’t tell him—he—he—he saw them.” She
reached up and touched the two small points on her neck. I knew she had not betrayed
me. She never would—she is as much me, as I am.

“No,” she said, looking past me. As though in
slow motion, her cry warned me the foolish boy had raised his machete and was
dropping it on my head. The metal blade hit my stone skull and bounced off
without making a chink. My turn was so swift it happened outside of time and I caught
his blade up in my hand, ripping it from him before he could regain his grip on
its rebound. I launched his machete clear across the greenscape and out to the
sea. “This ends now,” I said.

“No,” she cried. “Please don’t kill him.”

“Stay out of this Evie,” he said. “Do your
worst, asshole.”

I grabbed him by the hair and dragged him
across the clearing all the way to the edge of the bluff. I ignored his wails
until he suggested he knew my plan. “I know … what … you’re going to … do,” he
said.

“Is that so?” I made him look at me, wanting
him to see the face of his death. I unleashed my iron fangs, and opened my
mouth wide. I have been told this look is the most frightening my face can
wear. For him, I did not hold back.

“Please,” he said almost breathless.
“Pleeeeease—don’t kill—”

“It is too late to beg for your life, boy.”

Wrath seized me and would not let go. I had
not felt this kind of rage since that foolish Agamemnon stole my booty. I
wanted to rip off his head too, and drain him dry.

“Ev—” I choked his words, yanking his
head back to admire the gleam of his brown skin in the twilight. I closed my
eyes, letting everything drop away, and the rush of anticipation for his blood,
satiating my insides, drowned out the girl’s cries. My throat tingled in its preemptive
hesitation, as it awaited pure pleasure. But as I was about to sink my iron
fangs into his flesh and tear into his skin with abandon, her hands covered my
mouth—her stone cold hands. “Please,” she said, “release my son.”

When I opened my eyes, I saw the face of a
vampire I did not know, though I recognized her. She was the new mother from Helgado’s
photograph, but her eyes were empty now and her skin and lips drained of color.

“Please,” she said.

Though I did not release the boy, I drew my
fangs back up, dissatisfied and dry. This was the benign presence I had felt
since Helgado’s arrival. His vampire mother had followed him, kept him safe, yanked
him through the fence, and rung the bell in the tower to call the bloodless away
from the shed. She had stalked us since leaving the villa and now begged me to
spare his life.

She stepped back from me and held out her open
palms. She would not fight, knowing I would relent with her surrender. I
dropped the boy on the edge of the bluff and stepped away from his mother. She
was different, like no other vampire I had seen. Her eyes were bloodshot, her
irises purple, her skin white like chalk, not smooth and silky like most. The
boy pulled himself up from the ground and stared at his changed mother. “No,”
he said. “No … you can’t be …”

“I am,” she said softly.

By now Evelina had made her way to us with
her face red and swollen and streaked with tears. I looked down at the boy and
smiled. He received a punishment worse than the death I had promised him. He
would suffer the humiliation of knowing his mother was not only a vampire, but
cloned with artificial venom.

26 November.
— I am transcribing Alessandra
Tarlati’s abduction and transformation as it was told to me.

“I was twenty-three when Peder Karlsson took
me from the garden of my home. My baby was sleeping in the shade of the lemon
tree and I was pulling up the weeds from between the patio stones. The prick in
my neck felt like a bee sting. Everything went dark—almost immediately.

When I woke, I couldn’t move my arms and
legs. I couldn’t even tell if I was alive or dead. I was in complete darkness.
Then I heard the girl’s voice—she asked me my name. Hers was Berenice. We
whispered in the dark, lying side by side as we were. When I finally felt the
numbness leaving me, I reached over and touched her. We held hands, as we
suffered the burns. Our throats were on fire. She was the first to say the word
blood. She wanted blood. I didn’t know it was what I wanted until she said it.
I could smell everything around me—wet snow, bark, smoke, cedar, mulberries,
cocoa, mint, basil. Everything, every scent, was right there in the darkness
with me. But the desire for blood became impossible to ignore. I was tortured,
desperate to feed. I tried to bite Berenice, but I could not move close enough
to her in the dark. I tried to catch her hand up in my mouth, but I only ever
got my own.

I lost all track of time in the darkness. I
prayed for death, not realizing it was impossible. Then one day, I began to see
through the darkness. I started to make out shapes and that’s when I saw Berenice
for the first time. She was more dead than I, a corpse in full rigor mortis. I
snapped her hand off when I pried mine from it. We were locked in some sort of crate
together, no longer human—but animals. My scream blew the lid off the crate
and I flew out of my prison, destroying the shackles that held me down.

I was not alone. Fifteen other women had been
taken with me—all of us made into this. Peder had wanted a harem of
vampires, but ended up with a brood of vipers instead. He constantly pitted us
against each another, forcing us to fight for blood. A fang match, he called it.
Several of the girls hadn’t reached their full potential and suffered the effects
of the artificial venom—some couldn’t digest the blood and starved from
the inside out. I was one of the luckier ones. I am full vampire.

We eventually freed ourselves after the
outbreak. He got weaker—he couldn’t find enough blood to feed himself and
we took off his head. We escaped and I abandoned the others, heading to the
last place I was human. The trek from the north was easy until I reached
Poland—that’s when I ran into more and more of them. Blood was hard to
come by, but I don’t need much to survive. That’s one of the perks of being a
cloned vampire. I can survive on very little blood. But now I’m hungry.”

Later.
— Alessandra was
actually starving by the time she revealed herself to me on the bluff. She had
planned on going back to a hill town several miles north of where we were, but
was afraid to leave her son alone with me.

“The town is well protected,” she said. “It’s
abandoned but populated with rabbits. They gave me a good boost when I needed
it.” Like Wallach, she feeds on animal blood to survive. “It’s just as tasty as
human blood—sort of,” she said. “I can probably digest it better than you.”
I did not argue since animal blood is something to which I will never resort.

She has a nice smile. Her fangs are always
down, and though she does not have a set of iron teeth and her claws are duller
than mine, she has something about her that tells me she can fight if she has
to. I like her, despite her petulant offspring. Evelina urged the boy to feed
his mother, but he refused. He did not take his mother’s change well, and if he
had not become so attached to the girl, he would have left. As it is, his
mother convinced me to seek out the abandoned hill town since it was much
closer than the villa.

“It’s enclosed with walls,” she said. “It’ll
be safe for the girl, and for all of us.”

We left the bluff at sunrise and walked most
of the day. We are spending the night en route to the hill town. I am willing
to trust Alessandra. I do not care whether I am led to follow her by instinct
or desperation, but she is harmless and will serve as an ally for now and
certainly keep me from killing her son, a decision upon which I am still
deliberating.

27 November.
— We reached the hill
town at dusk. It sits on a precipice overlooking the sea. Three sides of it are
enclosed with a wall that is twenty-feet of stone. The front entrance to the
town is marked with enormous wooden gates, one of which is almost off its
hinges.

I carried Evelina over the threshold, but she
had rewarded my efforts before we reached the town’s outer limits. The high
from her blood made me euphoric, as the sight of the medieval town made me nostalgic
for better days.

“I am going to inspect the perimeter,” I said.

I had the boy surround Evelina with powder in
the town’s inner courtyard, where I left them to wait for me and Alessandra, as
we swept the outer walls, checking for a breach.

A large forest, whose trees hug the stone
wall, some even hanging over it, sits on one side of the town while on the
other, a vast slope heads down toward a grouping of trees several yards away. A
drop-off leads down to the sea, protecting the town’s rear, while the interior
court and laneways are just as scenic. Cherry and lemon trees line the inside
walls, reviving the eleven stone dwellings and utility hovels that have been
abandoned for centuries. With the proximity clear, as neither vampire nor
bloodless nor human are close, the hill town feels safe and peaceful, unlike
any other hideout since the cathedral, and I have decided to call this home for
now.

28 November.
— This is as good a
place as any to make a haven for the girl. She can have her baby here. It would
be reckless and serve little purpose to return to the villa despite its
comforts. We are in the wilderness, and this abandoned town has not seen
people, let alone bloodless, for decades. Here we can build our future, little
by little. Here we can sustain human life. The girl is resolved to making this
her new home. I told her we would set her up in one of the hovels and give her
some privacy and, if she is lucky, things will start to seem normal.