At first, I was not sure if they were real or just a figment of my imagination. I was dying, my vaunted senses fading as Lukas drained me of my Living Blood. But even in my weakened state I should have sensed them long before they drew so near.
Perhaps they were not real, I thought. Perhaps, as the veil between this world and the next began to part, my mind had conjured them up, those whom I loved the most. Or perhaps I was so intent upon my self-destruction that I had overlooked their coming. I prayed they were a hallucination. For if they had come they surely meant to interfere, and I did not have the strength, either physically or spiritually, to resist them.
At some silent signal, triggered perhaps by my recognition of them, they started up the mountain slope, moving swiftly through the dark wood. They flashed between the tree trunks, pale and silent as ghosts. Zenzele, my soul's mate, and my beloved Apollonius. Sydney and a copper-headed fledgling. Glorious Justus and poor Eternal Agnes. And Nora, with her two English paramours, the bookseller John Worthy and the punk rocker Sam Coleridge. With all their good intentions, they came, and I was too weak to cry them off.
But Lukas, his powers amplified by my Blood, had sensed them, too. His head jerked up, teeth bared, and he let out an animalistic snarl.
"Stop!" Nora shouted, fingers splayed in his direction, and Lukas froze as he drew back to leap at them, his stout body trembling. She had seized control of his mind, paralyzed him with her telepathic powers.
She would not be able to hold him indefinitely. He possessed all of my memories now, including the psychic disciplines I had developed over the millennia. But for the moment she had removed him from the equation-- long enough, I'm certain, for her compatriots to plead their case.
Was it already too late? I did not know. Lukas had drained me nearly dry. My body felt as light and fragile as balsa wood. Lighter even than that. More insubstantial. My flesh was nearly translucent now, and fractured at my slightest movement.
I turned my senses inwards, seeking out the answer, and found that, yes, I could still be brought back. If they fed me. If they forced their Blood upon me. I could still be restored.
But I did not want to live!
"Father, what have you done?" Apollonius said in a horrified voice, falling to his knees at my side.
Oh, my handsome boy! Even in the dark, his golden curls shined. His skin was flawless alabaster, his eyes the blue of a summer afternoon. I should have known he would find me. He was the most stubborn man I'd ever known!
"Do not touch him!" Zenzele shrieked, dropping down beside me. Her hands hovered like frightened birds, too fearful to alight.
At Nora's command, her lovers scooped Lukas up by the armpits and bore him quickly away. They lifted him as if he were a mannequin, his limbs rigid, though I saw that his eyes could still move. They twitched back and forth in their sockets like the eyes of a cornered beast, and his nostrils were flaring. His heels dug twin tracks in the snow as they dragged him away. Did they mean to destroy him now? But he was my salvation!
"Is he still alive?" Zenzele asked Nora. "Is he still in there?"
"Yes," Nora said, even as I felt her probe my mind. Her mental touch was feather light, as if she were afraid I would shatter into a thousand pieces if she pressed too hard. "He's there. He can hear you."
"I still live," I whispered, smiling up at my soul's mate. My voice was wispy thin. I felt my lips crack as I moved my mouth to speak. "No thanks to you," I added, teasing her gently.
"Don't you joke at a time like this!" Zenzele snapped. She gaped down at me despairingly. "Oh, look what you've done to yourself! Why, my love? Why?"
"Why?" I echoed.
"If you were so unhappy, why didn't you cry out to me? You know I would have come!"
"Or I," Apollonius said. "Turn from this path, father. Please! Let us heal you. It's not too late. Come with me to Karpathos. You don't truly wish to destroy yourself. You are just mad with loneliness. You need your family. You need your tribe."
"Yes, let us go to Karpathos. I will come with," Zenzele said, nodding and smiling at Apollonius, at me. Tears had started from her eyes, the Blood tears of a vampire. They clung in black droplets to her eyelashes, like tiny jewels.
I must look a horror, I thought. Zenzele never cried!
"We will swim the moonlit sea. We will make love every night," she went on. Promising. Pleading with me. "We will sleep each day in one another's arms, rise at dusk, dance the dark currents of the night. We will hunt the wicked, just as we have always done. Forever, my heart." She saw repudiation in my eyes and begged, her voice going shrill: "Don't do this!"
"I don't want forever," I said. "I never did."
"Please, my heart, my soul, not now, not like this," Zenzele sobbed.
"If not now, then when? If not this way, then how?" I asked. "I'm tired of living, my love. I'm tired of this world. I want to see what lies beyond."
"And what if there's nothing else?" Apollonius countered. "What if it's just darkness? Endless, eternal darkness?"
"Then I shall rest," I said. "At long last."
"No!" Zenzele cried.
I saw that she could not accept it. She refused to. I reached up to comfort her. I stroked her cheek, and she took my fragile hand in hers, squeezing it though my flesh continued to crackle, little glinting pieces of me drifting away like ash.
"I have lived so long, my love," I said. "I have lived so long that life has no meaning any longer. Feeding is no pleasure. Sight, sound, touch, taste… it is all just sensation. There is no joy, no anguish. I listen to music and it is just sound. I gaze upon beauty and find myself unmoved. I have lived so long that living has become an agony for me, and even that agony is meaningless. I have lost my desire to live. You may feel the same in another ten thousand years. You may come to understand. Come, then, and seek me out, wherever my soul has flown. Perhaps I will even be reborn. Reincarnated, as the Hindus believe. I think that would be a good thing, to start afresh, a tabula rasa, no memory, no regrets."
"I don't want to lose you," Zenzele wept.
"Nothing lasts forever," I said. "Not even me."
"Gon," she said, and kissed my hand.
"My beloved," I sighed. I reached out with my other hand and Apollonius took it. "My immortal child, Apollonius. Paulo now. You were a good son. As good a son as this old fiend could ask for."
"You are a good father," Apollonius said, pulling my hand to his breast.
I looked beyond them then, to Justus and his new companion.
"Justus, you beautiful rogue," I said to him. "And Agnes. Oh, Agnes, I am so sorry for the pain I've caused you. For all the pain you shall endure. My schemes have burdened you with eternity, and for that I beg your forgiveness. It was never my intent to harm you."
Justus merely nodded at me, grinning that crooked grin of his, the one that made my heart race. Agnes said, "The sin was not yours, master."
"And Nora," I said, turning my head, seeking her out.
She stepped forward to say goodbye, to aver her love for me, tears shivering down her pale cheeks. She reached out to me, opening her mouth to speak, and then drew back her hand a little, unsure if such a gesture was welcome, or if it was even proper to make it. She glanced guiltily at Zenzele.
And in that moment of indecision, her control of my savage new fledgling slipped.
It was just for an instant, but it was enough.
John Worthy and Sam Coleridge went flying away in opposite directions, their bodies pinwheeling through the canopy of the forest. Their cries of surprise and pain echoed across the mountainside as they crashed through the winter-hardened tree branches.
With a howl of unadulterated rage, Lukas scrambled across the ground, snatched up his axe in both hands, and leapt into the sky. It seemed that he hung there, suspended directly above me, for much longer than was physically possible, eyes bulging from their sockets, fangs exposed in a maniacal grin, and in that timeless instant the stars in the heavens did seem to shift and draw together, just as I had imagined they would, and it was as if he were surrounded by a brilliant nimbus of starlight, every feature made stark and pure. For a moment, I imagined that we were connected by a ghostly umbilicus, a serpentine cord that pulsed like a living thing from his navel to mine. For a moment, I experienced a curious double vision, as if I were looking through both of our eyes at once, my own eyes gazing up at him, and his eyes glaring down at me.
Through his eyes, I saw a withered scarecrow figure, chest split open, heart exposed. My flesh was colorless and translucent, the bones clearly visible, like veins of frosted glass. I looked like a creature that had evolved in some subterranean biome. I was pathetic, repulsive. I was crumbling and falling apart.
I smiled up at him, welcoming.
Yes, my savage child, my soulless acolyte! Destroy your maker!
"No!" Zenzele shouted, moving to protect me.
But as fast as she was, she could not shield me from my psychopathic fledgling. He was already descending, the head of the axe sweeping down in a lethal arc.
At last, I thought, as the axe plunged into my chest.
My last living sight was of my hand flying to dust.