The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (4 page)

“I have a lead at Santo Padre Gio,” he had
said one evening.

“In quarantine?”

“Yes, but Ernesto is there to let us in.”

One of Byron’s human friends was a hospital
orderly. He had been giving Byron blood, tissue samples and other sundry
medical supplies for years. Byron had known one of his ancestors in medical
school and used that as his introduction. He claimed his own great-great
grandfather had been a friend of Ernesto’s ancestor. Since he knew so many
details about the man’s family, it was easy for him to ingratiate himself with
the human. How Byron resisted digging his fangs into the boy’s neck, I will
never know. Every time I saw him that was all I wanted to do—he smelled
delicious. We had an endless influx of specimen until things got worse and
Ernesto disappeared. But the night we went to Santo Padre Gio, he was outside
smoking a cigarette from the unending chain of tobacco he pumped into his
system. He tossed the butt onto the pavement and pulled out a fresh fag before
he let us in the backdoor. Down to the basement, he led us through a hallway and
several locked rooms. “I made keys,” he said. “You’re on your own from here.”

He pointed out the direction using the mallet
he had on him for protection. The blunt hammer had become an accessory on his
newly weaponized belt. With the unlit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip,
he gave us his usual speech. “I’ve shut off the monitor but you only have a
minute or two before someone shows up.”

“Is she sedated?” Byron asked.

“No, but she’s unconscious.”

I admired his glibness. Her unconscious state
meant that she was about to change and would soon be reanimated. He should have
been frightened since his mallet was no match for the bloodless. “You never saw
me,” he said, as he headed back to his smoking section outside.

“Come Vincent.”

I followed Byron through the hall to a door
at the end. I was surprised how empty the world looked; there was not another
soul to be seen. Byron unlocked the door and we slipped in. We had already made
a plan to get her out of the building unnoticed. I would toss her over my shoulder
and we would creep through the halls with the speed only we could attain. We
would be out the door within seconds.

We found the girl chained to a bed, her arms
and legs in irons. Ernesto had given us keys for the shackles and Byron raced
to set her free. She remained senseless, as I carried her out. I wondered how
such things were possible; I could not imagine this young girl transformed into
a beast suddenly upon waking. She seemed weak, and I was strong. I still recall
it vividly. I was not convinced these things were a threat to us; their smell
of illness and death was too pungent for any vampire to desire, and so feeding
off them was out of the question. I had not thought of the other difficulty
they posed, the one we face now.

When we got back to our lab, I assisted
Byron. I placed straps about her limbs and head, as she stirred. She squirmed a
little and tried to resist the force of my hands, but failed. When she was
safely locked down, her legs twitched and her torso contorted as though she attempted
to ply herself free. When her face began to morph, her lips and nose peeling
inward, making her teeth jut out, I could hear her jaw and cheekbones crack.
Her teeth looked like any other, but they were backed by an almost superhuman
strength.

One of the affliction’s side effects, what
Byron calls its X factor, is the resilience and strength of the atypical bones.
A wolframlike hardening occurs with the heating of their fevered bodies. The
power of their jaws is like that of a crocodile’s, and they can snap their
blunt teeth shut with enormous force. I wondered if her lack of fangs enfeebled
her and stuck my hand in her open mouth. She snapped down on one of my fingers
but could not gain a grip on my hardened flesh.

“Do not play,” Byron said.

“She is too weak to be any kind of threat.”

“For now.” He looked at me intensely.

“Are they getting stronger then?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But we may weaken.”

His words stung, as he predicted something I
did not foresee. The plague was insidious, and not just for what it did to
humans, but because it robbed us of our natural resource. At the time, I could
not understand why he was so interested in finding a cure for the humans. But
now—of course now—I do. Now I see everything. He was not working to
save them; he was doing it to save us.

As I walked down the cathedral’s corridor to
fetch the pregnant girl, I thought of the afflicted one. As it went, she was
only the tip of the iceberg. After dozens of experiments, Byron had still not
made any progress. He was convinced he knew how the disease affected the humans
but not what would prevent it. He was frustrated with his lack of advancement
in the end. He had dissected spines of active bodies, as they lay on his table;
he had cut off the top of that girl’s head, peeled back her scalp, and studied
her reactions, as he touched different parts of her brain through a deformed
cranium. Byron had done his best, and had gotten ill over his obsession. He
skipped out on feedings and unless I brought him fresh blood, he would neglect
to recharge himself altogether. He was already weak when the rations ran
scarce. I blame myself for letting him become so engrossed in the dying that he
forgot how to live. Why did I not force him back to health sooner—why did
I let him obsess so?

My heart was heavy when I reached the girl’s
chamber, and I sent Stephen to check on Veronica before I entered her room
alone. We had set them up rather civilly, deciding it was useless to treat them
as prisoners. We fed them and gave them simple necessities such as access to a
lavatory, soap, fresh clothes, and medical attention. We would not resort to
savagery just because the world had ended—we found ways to continue
simple luxuries like running water. Jean had tended to the man’s dislocated
shoulder, putting it up in a sling after snapping it back into place. He found
it difficult to resist the human, but he was, as we all were, aware of the
greater good of our actions. Besides, we are not so incapable of abstaining,
even as we starve. We are far more disciplined than humans; our cruelty has
some limits.

When I entered the chamber, the man rested on
the bed with his eyes closed and the girl sat on the settee with a paperback
copy of
Paradise Lost
propped in her
lap. She looked completely different. She was revived and pleasant, appearing
fresh and clean in one of the long robes we found in the nunnery. She had
washed and combed her hair and wore it down and pulled over one of her
shoulders. She smiled when she saw me.

“Hello,” she said.

I asked her to come with me.

“Is everything okay? Are we still safe?” Her
naiveté was refreshing.

“You will not be harmed.” I spoke with a soft
tone, an attempt to reassure her, but I could not know if she trusted us yet.

“Marco,” she said.

He opened his eyes and then snorted, as he
bolted up.

“Just you,” I said.

I smiled at her with a closed mouth, not
wanting to risk exposing my fangs, especially since the aroma in the room
teased them. My teeth were itching to drop.

“I can come too if you want,” Marco said.

“Just her.” I held out my hand for the girl.
She got up from the settee and gently placed her book to the side. She came
toward me and hesitated before taking my hand. When I touched her skin, mine
tingled. I could feel the blood pulse through her veins. Pulse-pulse, it cried.
Her smell intoxicated me; that candied serum had come alive with the nourished
baby inside her. She put her hand on her belly, as though she knew my thoughts,
and looked me straight in the eye when she spoke. “Thank you for saving us.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper, and
though I knew she meant Marco, her hand on her belly was fitting all the same.
She did not show yet, and may not have known she was pregnant. I released her
hand once we exited the chamber and headed to see Byron. When we entered, he
was poised at his desk, making on he was human I suppose. I had not seen him
sit there for weeks. Though we would normally be in the shadows, he wanted to
make her feel welcome and had lit candles all around his room.

“Good evening, my dear.” He greeted her with
warmth, and I thought it was the physician in him that held regard for human
life, something he had struggled with when he first became a vampire. All that
killing, all those abuses against his Hippocratic oath, made him feel guilty
for using man so selfishly. “Please sit,” he said.

She could not be more than fifteen; she
looked like a child.

“Thank you for saving us,” she said.

“It is our pleasure, my dear.” He smiled with
his mouth closed, wanting to keep his fangs from showing too, no doubt.

We had decided against sharing our true
nature with them; we assumed they did not suspect us of being anything other
than human since they had not seen us do anything that would give our nature
away.

“Are you comfortable,” he said. “Do you have
all you need?”

“Oh yes, sir, thank you.” She shivered, as he
sat down beside her.

Byron must have frightened her. He looked
like a corpse; pale and skeletal, his eye sockets sunk into his skull. The
handsome man I once knew was gone.

She looked up at me several times during
their conversation. She smelled so good I had to stay as far away from her as I
could. I practically hugged the door by the time she sat down. Byron could see
my difficulty. “Vincent,” he said. “You may leave us if you have more pressing
things to tend to.”

He gave me the exit in kindness, but I
refused to leave him alone with her. “I am fine.”

He dismissed my unease and returned to the
girl. “My dear, we drew your blood because we had to run some tests. I am a doctor,
you see.” She smiled at him and nodded. “I hope we did not cause you any
grief,” he said.

“Umm,” she said. “We were a little scared at
first. After what happened at the trattoria and all. We didn’t know there were
still decent people out there.” She looked at me and smiled again. “We’ve seen
some horrible things,” she said. “Just horrible things going on out there.” I
suspected that comment did not refer to the bloodless alone.

“Have you come across other people?” Byron
asked.

“Several,” she said. “Yes.”

Byron waited for her to continue. He hoped
she knew where we could find others.

“We were actually hiding from some of them
when you found us.” She glanced over at me and then back at him. “The three of
us—” She stopped herself, uneasy about what happened to her missing
party. “I mean, there were three of us and then when we got here there was just
Marco and me.”

“What happened to your friend?” Byron asked.

“I don’t know really,” she said. “The last
thing I remember is your voice.” She looked at me again. “Your soft voice,” she
said to me. “It sounded like we were going to be safe. Your voice just stuck in
my mind and then I, well, I … I guess I fainted.”

“I see,” Byron said. He was as relieved as I
that she had not seen the three of us gorge on her friend. “Who was the other?”
He asked.

She took a deep breath and sighed. “I didn’t
know him really well,” she said.

“And Marco?”

“He’s my stepdad.” She wriggled in her seat,
her admission making her uncomfortable. Perhaps she was lying, or perhaps she
was ashamed of something else entirely.

Byron put his hand on hers, causing her
shoulders to quiver. “My dear,” he said. “Do you know you are pregnant?”

She looked stunned for a moment and then
closed her eyes. “Uh-huh.” She covered her face with her hands and fell into
Byron’s lap. He looked up at me, as he petted her freshly washed hair.

“Shush,” he said, soothing her with his
strokes.

The sting of jealousy touched me—just a
dart, pricking my side with the force of a pushpin. It was ridiculous really
but the sincerity in his voice and his tender touch on the girl’s hair made me
rage. He was honest in his sympathy for her. His affection for the human had
gotten the better of him and I saw him crumble beneath it. I left the room,
stifled by the show of emotion and the sickeningly sweet smell of the human.

26 September.
— This day. Today …
Today … To … Day … T … D … Y … Byron is gone and I cannot weep, I cannot die.
My reality hit me when he locked himself in the sarcophagus. All I could do was
sit by him, as he writhed inside. Only when the movement stopped, when the
thrashing ceased, did I open the lid. Nothing but ash remained. Ashes, I want
to consume. I will consume—his ashes—tonight—this night! This
night … I will make him mine again.

…
— It feels as though
the days escape me, as though there is no more reason to keep track of time’s
passing. All feels lost, though I will go on. I will go on for you, Byron. I
will push aside the feelings of pointlessness and come out from your ashes. We
lay together in your sarcophagus for long enough. The only thing that can save
me from this pain is my responsibility for the others. They need me.