The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (63 page)

I recalled the mangled and desperate girl beneath Vlad’s
floorboards at the museum. Her blood had been authentic, some of the last, but
I did not doubt she was dead by now.

“I cherished her,” Peter said. “Not just her blood,
but I would have died to protect her.”

“What happened?”

“I was not here when he came for her,” he said. “I
was with Evelina.”

“You met Evelina and brought her onboard?”

“Zhi and I, and a few others.”

“Was Evelina to be Vivian’s replacement?”

He shrugged and looked away.

“Did you crave Evelina’s blood?”

He stood up and rushed across the cabin, his hands tugging
at my chest, as he gripped the lapels of my coat. The gesture surprised me
since he did not often show ire. Like a succubus, his hurt had latched on and
hardened him. “Evelina is yours,” he said.

His eyes gave him away. A hint, a sparkle on his
retina suggesting he had seen more.

“Tell me what you know about Evelina’s capture?”

“You think she was found by chance,” he said. “But
she was planted.”

“You are not talking about the hamlet with Wallach?”

He shook is head. “Pregnant and vulnerable.”

I had never questioned our having discovered Evelina
and her small group at a turn of Fortune’s wheel. Maxine had died for
discovering her. The thought of Evelina being planted there, awaiting me,
seemed incredulous. Such circumstances would have been impossible to plan.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Never mind,” he said, releasing his hold on my
collar and stepping back. “You do not believe as I do. You lack faith in my God,
the Christian God. You cannot see providence in the call of the sparrow.”

I grabbed him by the collar then, pulling him into
me, knocking my forehead up against his, penetrating his mind, and crashing
through the door of his mental shrine. Galla was there, his Huguenot mother
too, and several more cherry faces before I saw my girl. He had reserved a
special place for her portrait, hung on a corner wall behind a piece of glass just
as Da Vinci’s sitter once haunted the halls of the Louvre.

I bared my fangs and kissed Peter on the lips,
pulling the truth through his teeth. The shock of my caress made him drop his
guard, and his memories came pouring out as water through a sieve. I saw him
with Zhi, collecting Evelina and Lucia from the hamlet. She looked at ease, and
smiled at Peter, and said, “I must not leave him.”

The blow of her voice, addressing him in the memory,
spun me out of his mind and launched me back to the present where we stood face
to face. I pushed him off me, and he flew into the berth, his head slamming into
the railing. He moaned and I growled, rushing at him and grabbing his neck, sinking
my claws into the skin of his gorge.

“She doesn’t recall meeting me,” he said. “She
didn’t know me once she woke.”

“Why?”

“Those memories were erased.”

“By whom?”

“The Empress—”

I crushed Peter’s larynx, and he could no longer
speak, though I caught her name in the syllables he tried to pronounce,
Eh, vah, lee, nah.
My rage had dulled
the sound of Evelina’s approach, but when I sensed her near, I released him
with his head barely intact.

“Speak,” I said. “Quickly.”

He massaged his neck, and looked down at the deck.
“It’s not what you think,” he whispered with a gasp.

“How did she come to be a part of this?” I spoke
through gritted teeth.

“Byron arranged everything.”

“What everything?”

“I have seen it,” he said. “Deep in the recesses of
her mind there is a screen through which only I can see. She doesn’t know it.
She can’t recall. Byron saw to that. He concealed the memory, though why he
didn’t erase it, I can’t tell you.”

“What memory?”

“I don’t think you’re prepared to hear such bold
truth.”

I stepped forward and he cowered. “Tell me.”

“Promise me you won’t tell her,” he said. “It’s
concealed for a reason. She’s not strong enough to bear the weight of such
truth.”

“What truth?” My voice boomed, and shook the
bulkheads of his small compartment.

“I think Lucia is yours.”

I would like to say Peter’s confession struck me
dumb, but it was in fact the rap on the hatch that stayed my question.
Evelina’s small voice reached through metal and tugged at my heart.

“May I come in?” She asked.

Peter called to her and she broke into the
compartment, placing herself between the two of us.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It will destroy me.”

I stared down at her face, an oval scape of
holiness, and admired the halo she seemed to wear. Like Narcissus’s object in
the pool, my impossible love stared back at me. She would be my undoing.

“Do not interfere,” I said. With my ire eased, shock
crept in to steal its place.

“Peter hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said.

“How could you know?” I asked.

She reached up and touched the side of my cheek with
a cold hand. “He could never.”

Peter looked from me to her, admiring the net into
which I had been flung. “I was telling Vincent something he didn’t know, and it
angered him.”

“What?” She asked. “What was it?”

“Peter has a knack for discovering hidden things.”

“He has a habit of reading minds he shouldn’t,” she
said with a glance back at him.

Peter offered her a half-smile and she tugged at my
sleeve.

“I see,” she said. “Neither of you will tell me.”

Peter leaned close to her, and touched her hand. “My
insight isn’t always welcome, but it’s honest.”

“What do you know of honesty, priest?”

He flinched and straightened his back. “How easily
it may destroy those too weak to face it.” He looked from me to Evelina, and
then reached for the deck with his eyes.

She turned to me and said, “Is this about my maker?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not Cixi, is it?”

“Perhaps Peter can tell you to whom you belong,” I
said.

“You know, don’t you?” She touched his shoulder and
he looked up at her.

“I do,” he said.

“Tell me the truth.”

He looked to me and I gestured my approval. Her
connection to me was not one I intended to keep from her.

“You are made with Vincent’s venom,” he said.

She scowled at me, and I admired the twinkle of rage
in her eye. “You were here?” Her voice rose to a screech. “You were on the ship?”
She thrust her hands at my chest and attempted to throw me back, but I did not
budge. She released a roar, as rage tore at her from the inside. “How could you
abandon me?” She asked, defeated but angered still.

“Evelina,” Peter said. “This is not Vincent’s
doing.”

“Who, then?” She raged at him and he flinched.

“Stop,” I said. “Sit.” My voice boomed the command
and she obeyed, dropping onto the berth with a sulk like that of a petulant
child. “Do not make me scold you.”

She looked up with fierce eyes that said,
I dare you.
I teetered on rage and passion,
twins from the same womb.

Much more patient than I, Peter sat beside her and
took her hand in his. “The Empress used a sample of Vincent’s venom to awaken
you to this life.”

“Was I dead?” She asked. “Was I going to die?”

Peter sighed and said, “No.”

“So she did this to me?” Her voice exploded anew,
but Peter stroked her wrist and his touch seemed to quell her ire.

“She may have,” he said.

“What do you mean? Were you there too?” Her eyes
grew wide.

“No,” I said. “Neither Peter nor I were present when
the Empress stuck the claw in your neck.”

“I thought I stole the claw.” She looked up at me,
and I drew her in. “I remember sticking my own neck. Did she do it?” She rose
and rushed to me, clinging like an injured child is wont to find comfort in a
parent’s embrace. “This is the most wretched news.” Her voice cracked and she
would have wept had she tears to shed.

“Is it?” Peter said. “Evelina, you belong to the
origin. Vincent is your maker.”

The priest sought my forgiveness with his words, but
I had yet to grant it, though Evelina’s presence dulled my sensibilities. She
had slipped her hand in mine, desperate to be connected, not realizing the
child we shared had cleaved her to me long ago.

Lucia, the Gem

The pen resisted my scrawl, as Vincent shuffled in
the darkness. I could barely finish the last stroke before the instrument was
torn from my fingers and pulled to the surface of the drafting table. The air
in the room seemed to circulate again with a renewed freshness, and the perpetual
hum in the tower, which ceased with his arrival, returned with a rumbling
through the cracks of the stony cavern. The tightening across my brow loosened
too, and the pressure in my inner ears popped.

I turned to inspect the room, getting up from the
stool to look out the window. The sun had refused to set, suspended between
night and day. Dusk would keep the orb encamped on the horizon until the stars forfeited
their shine and permitted the sky to blue.

I returned to the drafting table to read what I’d written,
but as I leafed through the pages, they proved blank. I searched the side of
the drafting table, the floor, the small shelf of books, the hamper at my side,
even inside the stove, but no trace of them remained.

Insanity nibbled at me, as the memory of him faded. I
started to forget his name, as silence replaced the tenor of his voice. And then
I was lost.

I looked around the studio where I’d worked for more
than a decade, and didn’t recognize my home. The pens I’d cherished in the can
on the edge of the drafting table, suspended from the ledge, were darts of ink
belonging to another. The glass cases, still broken on the stone floor, showed
the image of a face I didn’t recognize, and even the small mirror hung on the
wall behind me revealed a foreign aspect.

He played his trick, and I lost all sense of myself
because it was what he wanted. To turn me inside out, to show me my other half,
the foreigner who lived among the colonists, the one who feigned similarity and
fellowship.

“You are a stranger to yourself.” His voice, I
recognized. “You are the last, Dagur. The wellspring from which all else must
come.”

I searched the room for him, but my eyes grew more
and more dim, as I groped the air in my blindness. His voice caressed me, whispering
in my ear, “You are the last. The wellspring from which all else must come. She
awaits you.”

I dropped into oblivion with the vision of one face
in my mind’s eye, the mosaic I’d built in my imagination, the aspect of the
girl the vampire had saved.

“She awaits you.”

Lucia!

I woke prostrate on the stone floor to the memory of
her name whispered in my ear, “Lucia.”

Vincent sat on the window ledge in front of the glow
that deceived the onlooker with his beauty. He scoffed and smiled, and I knew
him.

“Lucia,” I said. “Who is she?”

“Evelina was impregnated with seed made from my DNA,”
he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you?” He let his shoulders slump forward,
but he didn’t relinquish his place in the light. “The world was different then,
as was human reproduction.”

“But you’re not human.”

“Of course I am,” he said. “I am both human and
vampire.”

“I thought you were a god?”

“I am godly, though not yet divine.”

I sat up and my head spun. I waited a moment before
dragging myself across the stone floor to my cot, where I pulled myself up and
laid down my head. Vincent did nothing to help, but gazed at the saffron sun on
the horizon.

“We must begin again,” he said.

“The night refuses to come.”

“She is here,” he said. “But in disguise.”

I took a few deep breaths with my eyes closed, and
then braved a standing position, crossing the room to my drafting table,
unaided. I sat on the stool and picked up the pen, a familiar instrument once
again.

“It was in the third letter,” Vincent said. “His
confession.”

He pulled the token from his pocket, as he retreated
to the chair in the corner. I couldn’t see him anymore, though I wanted to study
his aspect anew, his confession having sunk like a stone in the pit of my
stomach. I could taste the bile of truth, and fidgeted on the stool as he
unfolded the treasure. More was to come. I did not doubt the letter would
enlighten me, but I heard the rapid crinkling of paper as he crumpled it in his
hands. He sighed and whispered my name.

“You may face me,” he said.

I swallowed hard, as my body obeyed the sound of his
voice.

“Why does my confession bother you so?”

His aspect, stewed in darkness, allowed me to
imagine the supernal face I’d witnessed in the light.

“I can’t say—” My voice got caught in my
throat.

“Lucia was brave,” he said. “As was her mother. A
line of resilient women.”

“And her father,” I said, unsure of what I meant.

“Every male donor serves a purpose.”

“How could you not know?” I asked.

Vincent stood up and came forward, out of the
darkness again. When he stepped into the light, he appeared younger and more
beautiful.

“You are seeing beneath my skin,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you wonder how it is possible?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would like to know.”

He held the letter out to me. “Take it,” he said.

I rose from the stool and crossed to him on wobbly
legs. Close enough to touch, his sorrow crushed my heart but I couldn’t say
why. My difference from the other settlers struck me at that moment. I was more
like Vincent than any of them.

I took the letter and he commanded me to read it.
“Aloud,” he said.

It was written in Italian, a language my guardian
had taught me to read and write, but never speak.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Yes, you can.”

The fanciful script was Byron’s without a doubt, as flourished
and artful as Vincent had claimed in his journals.

I began with the first word, “Burn,” tripping over
its pronunciation. It took several tries before I caught the flow and read with
ease, my voice shaking in front of my audience. Mine didn’t rumble off the
stone walls like his.

“
Burn this once you have read it,”
I said, reading the opening
line a second time.
“I have burned those you sent me. You
must know this will be our final piece of correspondence. I have set things
right—no, straight, sorry.” I fumbled but Vincent didn’t react. “You will
never understand, but once I suspected your true intent, I took precautions to
save him. The sample I gave you is not his …” I paused at the strange word.

“Gem,” Vincent said.

I looked up, and he
gestured for me to continue.

“His venom,” I read, “is
potent, but its ability for mutation is not where Vincent’s deity lies. There
are things you do not know, things you cannot know about my—”

“Beloved.”

“Vincent.” I glanced
up at him, but he gazed at the floor. “Things I know all too well,” I
continued. “This secret, I have kept it to myself, but shall use it to ensure
his immortality.”

Vincent shifted his
position, seeming to move closer. I lost my place when I looked up at him again.
“Continue,” he said.

“It is too late for
you. The end is come. The solution to Vincent’s salvation rests in my hands and
I shall coddle it, make it viable, bring it to life. Believe me when I say, he
shall never die. But you and I shall only meet in death. Prepare yourself. Yours,
etc., B. D.”

Vincent snatched the
letter from my hands, holding it up to the window as though trying to see
through it.

“Should I record it?”
I asked, meekly.

The sun had morphed
into a vermilion sphere, infernal and foreboding, bloodying the landscape.

“What did Byron mean
the solution to your salvation rests in his hands?”

He crossed to the oil
lamp on my drafting table and held the letter above its flame, dipping the page
into the tongue, permitting the fire to lick at Byron’s admission and eat up
the evidence of his treason. Vincent held the burning paper in the palm of his
hand and watched it shrink to ash, letting the burnt pieces fall to the floor.
Then he stepped on them, grinding his heel into the ash, making charred streaks
on the stone.

He smiled when he
looked at me again and I cringed at the metal points of his teeth. His ugly features
had returned, his grief buried in a tomb of wrath. His monstrous aspect was
never really gone—anger would always own the deepest part of him.

“There is more,” he
said. “Sit.” He gestured for me to return to the stool, as he stood at the
drafting table. I obeyed when he motioned for me to approach with a single
finger. He kicked the stool out with his boot and tapped the top of it. I sat
and he put his hand on my shoulder, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, “This
is the seed—yours as much as mine.”

I looked down at the
clean parchment and picked up the pen.

“Let us begin with
Byron, shall we?”