The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier (Book 1) (3 page)

I ignored the girl’s pleas for my return, as
I floated down the hallway to my beloved. When I entered Byron’s chamber, he lay
in the sarcophagus we had found him in the tomb below the cathedral. He opened
his eyes when he felt me at his side.

“My sweet Vincent,” he said. “How was it?”

“I will tell you another time. For now, I
need you to drink this.”

He sat up and took the vial I offered him. With
his beautiful sharp teeth, he tore off its cap and downed the drink. When I
handed him a second vial, he finished that off too.

“How do you feel?” I smiled, certain the
drink had revived him.

“I fear it is too late for me, sweet love,”
he said, as he lay back down.

“I will bring you more then,” I said. “The
entire man if I have to.”

As I turned to go, he stopped me, though not
with words. His mind called me back; this was our union. As bonded vampires, we
no longer need speech to communicate. He can speak into my thoughts, and I his,
but since his falling ill, he has not been able to converse with me telepathically.
I cannot express how relieved I was the power had returned. I rushed to his
side, but he was more depleted than before. That bit of telepathy had zapped
him of all the energy he had received from the blood. I searched his eyes, fearing
nothing would bring him back.

Not ready to accept his fate yet, I left him
to fetch more blood. I recruited Stephen’s help again, this time drawing from
the girl.

“Please,” she said. “We are starved.”

As are we, I thought.

I siphoned more blood from the man and when I
had taken the most I could from both of them without draining them completely,
I ordered Stephen to get them some food. The ecclesiastics had left a pantry
full of preserves and canned foodstuffs. Useless to us, they had gone untouched
since we moved in. We lost our appetite for food when we lost our only true
sustenance.

Stephen returned with a feast, and the two
humans, near fainting, gorged on the spread of viands. The food appeased them, making
them appreciate their captivity. I tossed Stephen two vials of the man’s blood before
I rushed back to Byron. “Savor it,” I said.

When I brought the new vials to my beloved,
he consumed them more reluctantly. “I have barely kept the others down,” he
said.

It pained me to hear of his suffering; I
would give my life to save my beloved.

“What can I do?” I said.

“One must resign oneself to defeat.” I could
not accept that. This was not his end. There was a way to bring him back—there
had to be.

I coaxed him to take a sip of the girl’s
blood, reminding him the sexes carry different properties. I hoped hers would impact
him greatly. He took the vial, forcing a smile. He tore off the cap and raised
the container to his lips, tipping the end up gently and letting a few drops
hit his tongue. I waited for him to take a proper swig. “Does she taste as
sweet as she smells?”

He took another swig and rolled the serum
around in his mouth as though sampling a Beaujolais. When he finally swallowed,
he grinned. “Saccharine,” he said.

I had only tasted blood that sweet once, soon
after I had become a vampire. I resided in a tomb, living among the dead by day
since it felt like the most apt place to be in the beginning. We lived in a
different world then and at night I would wander the gardens and fields,
preying on any human that crossed my path—I did not discriminate. One
evening, taking in the fresh Mediterranean air, I came upon a woman sitting
alone between two olive trees.

“Salutations, my sister.”

“And to you, my brother.”

Her belly was round and full. “May I give you
a hand?”

“No, I am well,” she said. “Just waiting for
the pass to come.”

She was about to deliver, sent out to give
birth alone in the night. It was not the custom for mothers to give birth to their
sons alone, for they would often die before hearing their child’s first cry, but
this woman and her child were abandoned.

“Shall I wait with you?” I was just a novice
then with remnants of my humanity.

When her labor began, I held her hands,
letting her use me as leverage. She squeezed me with all her might, but barely
crushed my hardened skin, and I was careful not to squeeze back. She squatted
between the trees, pushing down on her pelvis with her body’s whole force, and
the dewy grass beneath her glistened with drops of blood. The smell overwhelmed
me, and though I had wanted to wait for the baby, the sight of her torn flesh,
bloody and ripe, drove me into a frenzy. I reached down and touched the wet
grass below her. When I brought my fingers up to my lips, I was lost. My fangs tore
into her neck, and I sucked the life from her, as she delivered her stillborn child
onto the slippery grass between her legs. It was the sweetest blood I had ever
tasted—dulcet and candied.

The human girl I had brought into the
cathedral, the one whose blood stained the lips of my beloved, was pregnant.

21 September.
— Once everyone knew about
the girl’s condition, excitement filled the hours. Each of us desires to have our
way with her. Jean is the most agitated. He wants to see the baby to term,
raise it as his own and then bite its neck when it reaches the age of twelve.
He has not gotten over his Maxine. Elizabeth wants a child companion too, and
Stephen and Veronica desire draining the girl of her sweet ichor while the
baby’s heart still beats inside her.

“I’ve never tasted blood that new,” Veronica said.
“Can we please?” Stephen stroked her arm, as she spoke.

“Byron has called a meeting,” I said. “We
will hear what he has to say.”

“Has it revived him any?” Elizabeth asked.
None of them had seen Byron since he drank the vials, but she found her answer
in my pained expression. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Il s’en sortira,” Jean said.
He’ll recover.

We were gathered in the chancel, waiting for
Byron and listening to the howls of a swarm, as it glided past the building.
The humans are tucked away, deep inside the belly of the cathedral where
nothing can get at them. When Byron finally appeared, looking sallow and weak, my
heart sank. Stephen ran to his side and gave him his arm. I had offered to
bring him to the meeting, but he refused my help. I suspect his infirmity
shames him, for he often tries to hide his suffering from me.

My sweet Byron, how it is difficult to see
you these days—my whole world is cankered, as thoughts of your demise
plague me. The anguish often brings me to my knees when I am alone in my chamber.
I do not feel your frequency run through me anymore and it is the most sublime
sense of abandonment.

“We must deal with the girl and her child
bravely,” Byron said to the group.

“Can we keep it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Ça suffit.” Jean chided Elizabeth as he had
Maxine.

“I have given the situation much thought,”
Byron said, glancing over at me with his electric eyes, forever burning into me
with their scrutiny. “I am not long for this world, and if we do not do
something, neither are any of you. That child may be the answer to this
plague.”

“Quoi?” Jean asked. “What can you mean?”

I knew what he meant. Byron had spoken to me
the previous night, invading my thoughts, as I kneeled in my chamber. He believes
the child will save us all; he envisions a new human race, a healthy nation
that will rise and prosper and outlive the plague. But only with our help, for
the fight will be long and difficult. With our protection, the healthy humans can
propagate a new generation, and Byron believes that the girl’s child is a
scientific sign, a guarantee in fact, that rebirth is the solution. The mortals
are the answer to our survival, just as we are to theirs. “If enough humans
survive, a resilient group can rise up and overcome,” I said.

“Exactly.” Byron looked at me when he spoke.
“We can keep her safe and her child alive and perhaps even find others to
protect.”

“But how?” Elizabeth asked.

“Willpower,” Veronica said. She was the most optimistic
of us, the one with the strongest sense of humanity. Both she and Stephen were
still young vampires, which meant they were the most capable of mustering up compassion
for a human.

“It can be done,” Byron said. “It must be
done.”

“It will be done.” I gave him my word then
and there. I wanted him to know I would suffer for him, I would starve for him,
I would be human for him.

22 September.
— When Byron asked for
the girl to be brought to him, I questioned his motives since her blood did not
appeal to him. “Is that a good idea in your condition?”

“I would like to speak to her,” he said. “It
is the only way I can know what action to take. Scientifically speaking.”

“Scientifically,” I said. “Of course
.
” I was not worried he would struggle
to resist her, but I was still annoyed.

It is difficult to explain why I feel insecure,
why I doubt him. Perhaps it is because he has grown cold and distant, and hard
toward me in ways. His affection is mute, if not dead, since nothing is left
for him. We do not talk about it, and I do not want to bring it up. I am afraid
if I raise the subject he will simply agree with me and that will be all of it.
And I am not ready for that. For now, the memory of his becoming mine consoles
me hourly. If Byron cannot await me in the realms of Hades, or at the gates of
Paradise, this moment shall be our eternity.

The gratitude he showed me at his vampiric
birth is still a comfort. After I gifted him with my power, he took my hand in
his and kissed it. He thanked me with a sincerity I had never known before. Few
show appreciation for their transformation since regret is common. At the
beginning, self-pity lingers and the novice may easily forget the miserableness
of his mortal life, causing him to mourn a chimera. But not you,
Byron—not you, my beloved. You caressed my hand at your revival, and touched
me as though I were a god who redeemed you from hell. You understood this
privileged life, this gift of immortality, from the start. You knew even before
I came for you that the vampire is superior to all other life forms—human,
especially. I will never forget that first night when you were still a bloodhungry
man and I made you mine without a second thought because I knew you were worthy
of me. From that first show of gratitude, my beloved, to this moment now, I have
not lived without you. For a century and a half, we have been lovesick and
debaucherous in our exceptional union, and you, my darling, forever the
scientist, have explored your gifts with fervor. We could never resist the
occasional bout of torture, though most were in the name of science, were they not?

When the outbreak began, in fact, Byron was
one of the first to experiment on the sick. “There is a cure,” he had said. I
knew if that were true, he would find it. “I think it is simply a rapid growth
of cells that attack the nervous system and eventually contaminate the brain,
spreading almost instantly, like some accelerated version of Proteus syndrome.”

“My darling, I am not quite as gifted in the
disease department,” I had said. “Proteus syndrome?”

“It is not a disease so much as an atypical
bone growth caused by tumors. But this affliction seems to be developing on and
around the spine and causing a type of deformation to the brain that makes it
defunct.”

“If they are braindead,” I had said, “how can
they function?”

“They are not braindead so much as automated.”

“But what makes them desire to spread their
affliction?” By then we had seen the bloodless attack the unafflicted and turn
them, as they say.

He smiled at me and winked. “Man at his very
root is steered by malice, is he not?”

At the time, Byron believed the plague was
not simply a physical contamination but also a moral one. The bloodless were
driven by a desire to find company for their misery. Like the fallen angel,
they wanted to bring a barrage of cohorts down with them.

“It is as if they suffer a social disorder,”
he had said. “Some kind of narcissism that impels them to make reproductions of
themselves.”

We would have never called them bloodless if
they had not wreaked havoc on our way of life. The affliction spread at
incalculable speeds, taking only several weeks for the plague to be considered
a full-fledged pandemic.

Byron performed dissections on the few
bloodless we could get our hands on. At the beginning, when we were still feeding
easily and Italy had only a few reported cases, he insisted on experimenting. If
there were scientific findings to be had, Byron would have them. Test subjects
were not difficult to acquire, the stink of the bloodless was easy enough to sniff
out. As I have said, when they are not in a swarm, they are harmless. A well nourished
vampire is far stronger than an afflicted human, even if it has just turned.

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

“In quarantine?”

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