Vampire Affliction (2 page)

Chapter Two: Smoked Out

Gertie awoke, gagging and coughing. She opened her eyes to find herself surrounded by a veil of thick, black smoke. Her keen vampire vision cut through the veil, searching for Jeno and his sister and father, but no one was in the hotel room with her.

Then the door burst open, and flames leapt into the room. Behind the flames, Jeno emerged.

“Come on!” He grabbed hold of her hand.

Together they flew toward the balcony window, but as soon as sunlight touched her skin, Gertie shrieked with pain. Never had she experienced the feeling of burning alive. She screamed and retreated into the smoking hotel.

“I know it hurts,” he said through gritted teeth, obviously suffering, too. “But we have no choice.”

Gertie writhed beside him as he pulled her into the painful rays of the sun and through the sky toward the Parthenon, hitting every spot of shade they could manage along the way. When they finally flung themselves into the relief of the caves beneath the acropolis, Gertie dried her eyes and checked her skin, sure she’d been scorched; but, there was no sign of damage from the sun.

“How am I still alive?” She caught her breath as her nerves and anxiety settled down. “Doesn’t the sun destroy vampires?”

“We can endure small doses.”

“What just happened back there?” she asked. “Is the hotel on fire?”

“Hector is looking for you.”

The sound of his name had her head spinning.

Jeno frowned. “He doesn’t yet know what you are.”

Gertie flinched. She imagined how Hector would react when he learned the truth. Would he stop looking for her? She imagined Nikita and Mamá and Babá and Klaus and Phoebe and how horrified they would be. More tears flooded her eyes, but she batted them away. What good would crying about it do? She needed to be strong. She needed to accept what she was and move on.

“I’m a vampire,” she said out loud.

She peered around the dark cave with her superior vision and was surprised by what she saw. The only other time she had entered had been that dreadful night Alexander had taken her by force, and, out of desperation, she’d come seeking Jeno. She had found him full of despair, weak, and starving for blood. As soon as she had arrived, he had swept her outside beneath the moonlight to protect her from the attacks of the other vampires, so she hadn’t had an opportunity to look around.

Now they walked down a long corridor paved with uneven stones. Along the walls hung paintings of people and landscapes and cityscapes. She admired them in the darkness with her vampire vision, finding most of them beautifully done and quite old. Two other vampires stood talking but stopped and stared as she and Jeno passed. Other tunnels branched off of the main corridor, and Jeno led Gertie through one. It had a tapestry on one wall and a mural on the other. The tapestry was frayed at the edges and full of holes. The mural portrayed a golden ram—Dionysus—amidst dancing satyrs and Maenads. They passed a few more vampires along the way. One sat reading a book in the doorway of a chamber at the end of the mural. In a second chamber, another vampire was sewing fabric by hand. She looked up and arched a brow at Gertie as they went by.

Gertie wondered why all their rooms were open.

“We can see through doors,” Jeno said in reply to her thoughts. “We get better airflow throughout the caves without them.”

Gertie and Jeno rounded another bend and passed a few more rooms full of vampires—some sleeping and others occupied in some activity, such as reading or knitting or painting. Two more vampires flew quickly by them. Despite the paved floor beneath their feet, an earthy aroma dominated the air and reminded Gertie of the smell of a newly planted garden.

As they neared the end of the corridor, Gertie heard music. It sounded like a ukulele, which made her think of Hector.

“Not Hector on a ukulele,” Jeno said. “Calandra on her citole.”

“What’s a citole?” Gertie asked.

“It’s a very old stringed instrument.”

Calandra’s voice sounded softly through the cavern walls in a slow, melancholy ballad:

I̱ agápi̱ eínai proso̱riní̱, proso̱riní̱.

Kai eseís, agápi̱ mou, eínai proso̱riní̱, proso̱riní̱.

Merikés méres éf̱chomai, epísi̱s, í̱tan proso̱riní̱, proso̱riní̱.

Sti̱ synécheia, eseís kai egó̱ tha boroúse na eínai gia pánta.

With vampire clarity, Gertie understood the words to mean:

Love is temporary, temporary.

And you, my love, are temporary, temporary.

Some days I wish I, too, were temporary, temporary.

Then you and I could be forever.

“Is she in love?” Gertie whispered to Jeno.

The music and singing abruptly stopped, and Calandra appeared around the corner with the wooden stringed instrument—a kind of square-looking banjo.

“I was…a long time ago.” Calandra turned and walked away.

Gertie followed. “You have a pretty voice.”

Calandra thanked her telepathically, adding,
You need to learn to block your thoughts. Your mind is an open book. You will hurt my brother if you cannot control your feelings.

Jeno interrupted with,
Stay out of her head.

Gertie gave him a quizzical look. “I wasn’t…”

“That was meant for my sister. But she’s right. I should teach you how to block your mind.”

They rounded another bend and followed Calandra into a room full of all kinds of interesting things. Calandra was sitting on one of two feather mattresses; on the other was the pillow Gertie had given Jeno, and it was turned to the side with the embroidered words, “I’m thinking of you.”

She glanced up at him.
You kept it?

Of course.

Across from the two feather mattresses, there was a bookcase, a writing desk, and lots of instruments and paintings and things stacked against the walls. Lined along the top of the bookcase were three framed paintings. Gertie recognized Calandra and Jeno as small children in the two outer portraits. The one in the middle was of their parents. They looked happy and young. As Gertie moved to get a closer look, she could sense Jeno’s longing for the life he might have had.

“That kind of longing does no good,” Calandra said.

Jeno cocked his head to one side. “Like you can talk.”

Gertie turned to study the other things in the room. Perched on the hutch of the writing desk was a collection of old clocks and a very old gramophone with a record mounted on the wheel.

“Yes, it works,” Jeno said. “Would you like to hear it?”

He wound the crank and then set the needle on the record. Although the sound emanating from the machine was far from high quality, it was nevertheless amazing to Gertie that something so old could be so well preserved.

“Kind of like me?” Jeno teased.

Calandra laughed from where she sat, cross-legged on one of the feather mattresses. In the next moment, Jeno took the needle from the record, and his sister returned to strumming her citole, humming lightly.

“You and your sister share this room?” Gertie whispered to Jeno.

“Oh, we really need to help her learn to block her mind,” Calandra said, making Gertie aware that her concerns about privacy had been overheard, loud and clear.

Jeno laughed. “It might be more amusing not to.”

Gertie punched his arm but couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across her face. She was glad for the distraction from all the conflict at odds inside of her. “So what are all these gadgets lined up along the wall?”

“Those are Calandra’s instruments,” Jeno said.

“And Jeno’s clocks,” Calandra added.

The instruments were easy enough to recognize—they were made of wood in various shapes and sizes and had any number of strings—but the other objects didn’t quite resemble clocks.

“Time keepers,” Jeno explained. “Very old.”

“Jeno’s obsessed,” Calandra said.

“With clocks?” Gertie asked.

“With time,” Calandra clarified. “You would think it wouldn’t matter to an immortal, but it matters to Jeno.”

“It should matter
more
to people with eternity spread out before them than to those whose life is but a brief candle,” Jeno said.

Gertie wrinkled her brow. “As poetic as that sounds, I think I’m going to have to side with Calandra on this one.”

“Tell her your analogy,” Calandra prompted with a laugh.

“Analogy?” Gertie asked.

Jeno put his hands on his hips. “Okay. Suppose you’re in a waiting room for five minutes. You could sit there and do nothing or read a few pages of a book or listen to music—it wouldn’t matter. Five minutes isn’t much time to endure, right?”

“I’m with you so far,” Gertie said.

“Now, imagine you must wait in that same room for an entire week, or a month, or a year. You could just sit there, but the minutes would seem to drag at an intolerably slow pace and you might even go mad with boredom; but, if you divide the time up into shorter segments and assign an activity to each one, you will speed up time and enjoy the wait.”

“Is that what you do with these clocks?” Gertie asked.

“Oh, yes,” Calandra inserted. “He has a regular routine and doesn’t like it when he’s made to get off schedule.”

“I like my schedule,” Jeno said.

“It helps him to forget what he really is,” Calandra said with a snort.

“Like that’s easy to forget,” Jeno chided.

“So what’s your schedule?” Gertie asked.

“I sleep each day from dawn until nine o’clock in the morning.”

Gertie arched a brow. “Only a few hours?”

“That’s all I need.”

“So you wake up automatically, without an alarm?” Gertie asked.

“I use the water clock, there, by my bed.”

Gertie had believed the two bowls, with water dripping from the higher to the lower, to be a decorative fountain.

“The bottom reservoir is full at nine o’clock in the morning,” Jeno explained. “Then the overflow drips on my head and awakens me. I pour the water back into the top basin each morning, and the process begins again.”

“Don’t you have to eventually add more water?” Gertie asked.

“Yes. Every so often. I try to keep the top basin full.”

“Okay. Then what?” Gertie crossed her arms.

He took a pocket watch from the top of the writing desk. “Then I wind up this pocket watch.”

“A pocket watch?” Gertie giggled. “But you have no pockets!” She was still adjusting to her x-ray vision and to the knowledge that Jeno—and most of the vampires—never wore real clothes. He created the illusion of clothes. Where would he keep a pocket watch?

“Touche.” Jeno smiled wide.

So glad you find my thoughts entertaining
, she said in his head.

“For your information, I wear the chain around my neck.” He put it on to demonstrate.

Sexy.
The watch hung down to his abs, just above his belly button.

“Oh, please!” Calandra said. “Get back to describing your schedule!”

“Sorry.” Gertie managed to blush.

“So I take this pocket watch down to the Underworld where I serve Lord Hades.”

Gertie’s eyes widened. “Lord Hades? You never mentioned you know Hades. Oh my gosh, how exciting! Will you introduce me to him?”

“I rarely see him, and I don’t know if I could arrange for you to meet him, but you could come with me, and perhaps by chance…”

“What do you do in the Underworld?”

“I take care of his horses. Before my mother took our lives, that’s what we did. We had a farm, and Calandra and I took care of our horses.”

“Do you go with him, then?” Gertie asked Jeno’s sister.

“I used to,” Calandra said. “For centuries, we went together. I probably will again. I just have other interests now.”

“She’s very good at writing songs,” Jeno explained. “And she performs them at some of the local bars.”

“I didn’t know that. For mortals, too?”

“For everyone,” she said. “For anyone who will listen.”

“She’s very talented.”

“Oh, stop.”

Gertie smiled at the siblings. It was obvious they cared for one another. It made her miss Nikita and Klaus, and even Phoebe.

“When my pocket watch stops ticking,” Jeno continued, “I know it’s time to come back. It lasts three hours. So I always return around noon.”

“And then it’s bath time,” Calandra said.

“What?” Gertie laughed, trying to imagine it. “Don’t tell me you have a bathtub down here.”

Jeno smiled. “I bathe in the pool down the hall.”

“You have a pool?”

“A natural spring—the last of what remains of Poseidon’s gift to this city—feeds into a large basin. That’s where I get the water for this clepsydra.” He pointed to the water clock. “I’ll show it to you later.”

“He bathes for exactly a half hour,” Calandra teased. “No matter how dirty he gets with Hades’s horses, it’s always the same.”