The Volada glided smoothly into the anchorage of Pigadia, the main village of the island of Karpathos. Fatima, Paulo's wife, was waiting for us by the docks, leaning against a maroon sports car with tinted windows. Her glossy black hair rippled languidly in the breeze as if she were floating underwater, an almond-skinned mermaid. Fatima was dressed that evening in flared white trousers and a flower-print blouse. Though it was full dark, she was also wearing a pair of round hippy-style sunglasses.
Sunglasses at night: one sure way to spot a vampire.
She smiled when we debarked the ship and hastened down the pier to greet us.
"Canım!"
"Kuzucuğum!"
Paulo and Fatima embraced, kissing passionately, before Fatima turned to welcome Zenzele and I to the island.
"Mother." She bowed formally to Zenzele, and then she looked at me and her mouth dropped open.
"Have no doubt," Paulo said gently, "it is my maker."
Fatima had always been fond of me, and I of her, but she looked me up and down as if I were a stranger. "You said he had changed, but I never thought…"
Zenzele looked sidelong at me and I suddenly felt very self-conscious, like a man who had shown up at a party uninvited.
"It is a long story," I said.
She must have seen the discomfort on my face for she collected herself and said, "I'm sorry, father. I didn't mean to…"
"Let's go home," Paulo said, slipping an arm around her waist. "We'll call everyone together. That way he only has to tell the story once. I'm sure Gon would prefer that."
I cocked an eyebrow. Just once? But I love talking about myself!
"Yes, of course," Fatima said. She broke away from Paulo to embrace me, smiling at me with the old affection. She kissed my cheek and then drew back to examine my face more closely. "You're a lot shorter now," she said. "But still drop dead gorgeous. Let's go home. You've been away for far too long."
Home was a sprawling villa overlooking the Carpathian Sea.
Villa Carpathia perched upon a terraced garden of lemon, fig and date trees, crape myrtles, bay laurel and tall, narrow, shimmering poplars. Sunduk, Fatima's son, buzzed us through the ten-foot-tall security gates and we rolled up the hill to the colonnaded entrance. Everyone came out to greet us: Acacia and her American lover Steve Jackson, Ezra, Leonora's daughter, and Fatima's son Sunduk. All but Leonora, their aged mortal servant. They all made a fuss over my appearance, bombarding me with questions, until Paulo raised a hand and called his clan to order. "We'll tell you all what happened soon enough," he said, smiling indulgently at his family. "Just give us a chance to settle in. We've had quite an adventure."
"How is Leonora?" I asked as we filed inside the house. Paulo's mortal housekeeper did not like me very much, though I was quite fond of her. Her prickliness amused me.
"She is very old now," Ezra, her daughter, answered, staring at me with undisguised curiosity. "In two more months, she'll be ninety-three."
"She refuses to take the Blood," Paulo said. "Still works every day. Insists upon it. But she retires early now, and rarely leaves her room during the night."
In books, once a story has reached its climax, it is over. There is sometimes an epilogue or a brief philosophical denouement, a pithy quip and then "the end". Not so in real life. In real life, once an adventure is over, you just go on living. Or unliving, as the case may be. One must eat, sleep, attend to the humdrum necessities of existence the authors of fiction do not dwell too much upon. I imagine Sherlock Holmes did his laundry between mysteries. Availed himself of the lavatory. Shopped for groceries. Got his hair cut. Polished his shoes. What we call routine. But it does not make for very interesting literature.
After Paulo showed us to our room, I sat on the bed and waited while Zenzele showered and changed into clean clothes. The clothes she borrowed from Fatima, who was nearly the same size. I had clothes from a previous visit, but found, after I had showered, that they no longer fit. I was a couple inches shorter now, and more than a couple inches broader.
Zenzele watched as I tried without success to button my trousers. I chuckled uneasily and sucked in my gut, but it was no good. I finally capitulated. Shucked off the pants and put my dirty clothes back on.
"You could borrow something from Sunduk," she said, and then she strode from the room.
Sunduk knocked a few minutes later.
"Enter," I said.
He tromped in with an armload of clothing. "Mother said your old clothes no longer fit."
"It would appear so."
"Don't worry. I got you covered." And he tossed his armload of clothes on the bed.
He grinned at me expectantly, a short stout dark-skinned young man with curly black hair and a broad toothy smile. He was Paulo's fledgling and Fatima's mortal child, only three hundred years in the Blood.
Paulo had given him the Blood at his mother's request. He was a Turkish soldier at the time, stationed on Karpathos during some old war or another. Fatima, newly turned, was the consort of a brutish blood drinker named Baracka. Paulo fell madly in love with her and destroyed her domineering maker, then brought her mortal child into the Blood to please his newfound love. Their family had grown slowly over the years, welcoming first Acacia, then Ezra and finally the American Steve Jackson, Acacia's lover, into the fold.
"Yes, thank you," I said, sorting through the young man's garments. They were disconcertingly modern, very slick and artificial. I selected black denim jeans and a dark blue t-shirt with what appeared to be a green frog-like creature with pointy ears emblazoned across the chest. Below the illustration was the legend, "Judge me by my size, do you?" I did not know the reference.
"That's Master Yoda," Sunduk said at my questioning look.
"Master who?"
"Never mind," he laughed. "I'll let you get changed." He gave me a bear hug and then departed.
I took the clothes with me into the adjoining bathroom. It was a thoroughly Spartan chamber of white marble and chrome with little embellishment. Beautiful but sterile. I much prefer the grand excesses of the Victorian style in my surroundings, but it was not my home.
I disrobed and examined myself in the mirror, really looked at myself for the first time since my rebirth.
The fluorescent lighting had made a monster of me, as it does to all our kind, flesh chalk white and bloodless, eyes glinting, veins squirming beneath the surface of my skin like little black worms. I bared my fangs and hissed. Now that was scary! I looked so much fiercer now. My hair was shorter and straighter and darker. My body was shorter and broader and more densely muscled. My cock was shorter and thicker now, too. And my balls--! They dangled at least three inches below my cock, looked like two large eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. So delightfully grotesque, I thought, shaking my hips to make them swing. Every aspect of my new body seemed denser and more crudely shaped. I was still me, but it was as if I had been squashed down to fit the dimensions of the body I had stolen.
Was Lukas still here somewhere, I wondered. Did some aspect of his personality linger in my awareness, as did the personae of all the other immortals I had Shared with in the past?
I turned my attention inwards, seeking him out, but there was a curious emptiness where his memories should reside. He should be there, I felt, but he was not. Perhaps he was hiding, or perhaps I had exorcised his consciousness completely. There was no way to know for certain. Blood Possession is a very rare thing. So rare, in fact, that even I, the oldest living member of my race, knew next to nothing about it. It was very possible I had destroyed him utterly. No great loss to the world, I know, but I felt strangely ashamed of myself, maybe even a little remorseful. In some perverse way, I had grown to love the little fiend. He was so unrepentantly evil!
Enough navel-gazing, I thought.
My family was waiting.
They were dying to hear my story. Why I was moved to destroy myself. How I meant to accomplish the feat. And how I had survived the destruction of my body.
I'm sure they were curious about one other thing, too.
If I still meant to do away with myself.
I wondered that myself.