Bloodline by Joel Abernathy

12

The next day,Vern came back with a chest full of clothing and Daniel shooed him away just as quickly. He told me to get dressed because we were taking a “field trip,” whatever the devil that meant.

I was allowed a few moments of privacy to change, but as eager as I was to get out of Daniel’s much too baggy hand-me-downs, each item I pulled from the trunk filled me with more dismay than the last.

Having lived in the West for quite some time, I was no stranger to wearing animal hides, but these were preposterous. When I finally gathered the courage to try on one pair of slacks, the leather was so tight and stiff it barely seemed fit to sling over the back of a horse, let alone wear in decent company.

At the very bottom of the trunk was the one outfit that didn’t strike me as utterly absurd. The red velvet jacket had a sharp cut to it with gleaming black metal accents and the trousers, while leather, were much softer and closer to the quality I was used to. I hastily changed into them, just in time for an impatient knock at the door.

“The hell are you doing in there, having your own fashion show?”

I walked to open the door, prepared to inform Daniel that his brother’s tailoring skills left something to be desired, when the indignant expression on his face vanished. He was staring at me with such intent that I scarcely knew whether to step back or try to snap him out of it.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said gruffly, giving me a once over before he looked away and rubbed the back of his head. “Just wasn’t expecting you to be wearing that.”

I looked down at the comparatively normal attire, then back at the trunk. “If you find this absurd, I can’t wait for you to see the rest.”

“I told Vern to stick with the basics,” he grumbled, stalking into the room. He pulled out the same items I’d recently discarded and looked up at me. “What’s wrong with these?”

“Those pants are so tight I might as well not be wearing any, and the shirts are so baggy and tattered they nearly brush the floor!” I cried.

He just laughed and shook his head. “Sorry, but all the fashion houses shut down with the other luxuries. All our fabric is recycled and repurposed, so the tattered look is in.”

“Well, I suppose… can’t I just wear this?”

“You’ll look ridiculous where we’re going,” he warned me.

“A good litmus test for places I’d rather not venture.”

He rolled his eyes and stalked past me. “Just come on, the others are already waiting downstairs.”

“The others?”

“Catch and Bobby.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. So far, everyone I’d met within these sheltered walls had been kind enough, but from the way Daniel told it, the rest of the world was quite different.

“Where are we going?” I asked, reluctantly following him into the elevator.

“You’ll see,” was his less than comforting response. As the car descended, I felt a familiar dropping sensation in my stomach. All of a sudden, the lights went out, and the car lurched, sending me forward. Daniel caught me in the darkness, his eyes more keenly adjusted than mine, and I clung to him.

“What happened?” I cried.

“It’s just a power surge,” he assured me, setting me back on my feet without letting go. For that, I was grateful. “It happens.”

“And you’re fine with that?”

“No choice. This place is run on a bunch of backup generators cobbled together, and it’s more reliable than most.”

Funny how I’d existed for so many centuries without electricity, yet become so quickly dependent on it. “Won’t the car fall?”

“That’s impossible. It’s held by four thick steel cables. Even if one broke, the others would be fine.”

“I see,” I murmured. Whether it was his explanation of the technology that seemed nearly indistinct from sorcery that I found comforting or his mere presence, I couldn’t say. Either way, I was in no rush for his strong hands to leave my shoulders as the sound of my racing heart pattered away in my eardrums.

Daniel’s hand shifted, slipping down to press against the ruffled white shirt peeking through my coat. He said nothing, but somehow, I could tell he was listening.

“What is it?”

“Your heartbeat,” he answered. “It’s so fast.”

I didn’t know how to respond, and the statement wasn’t phrased in such a way that made me think he expected me to.

“Jonas had a heartbeat,” I remarked, immediately regretting it. The more information I gave him, the closer he’d be to using me for a purpose I found not only distasteful but unconscionable. Even if I could understand his reasons, siring more vampires… it would mean breaking an oath, and breaking that oath, however unintentional it had been, was the sole reason the world was in this state to begin with.

No taking it back now.

“Was it as strong as yours?” he asked.

“Not quite. The more he fed, the fainter it became.”

He didn’t respond for a moment. The lights came on before he had the chance, and when the elevator jolted back into motion, I collapsed against his chest.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, finding myself trapped in his gaze as his arm wound around my waist. He had the same look on his face as he’d had in the doorway, and now I knew why it felt so familiar. Jonas had looked at me that way once, and it made no more sense now than it had then.

My heart pounded even faster than before, and the fact that he could hear it clearly only made the matter worse. Why on earth was I so flustered?

“It’s fine,” he said, still holding onto me even though there was no longer any reason to do so.

The doors slid open and broke whatever trance he was in. Sure enough, Catch and Bobby were waiting on the other side and we separated immediately. Bobby was giving us a strange look, more directed at Daniel than at me, but she said nothing as he led the way out into the lobby.

The ground floor was full of the same sleek surfaces and hard lines as the rest of the place, and the lobby was surrounded by tinted windows.

“We’re going outside?” I asked doubtfully, making note of the huge rifle strapped to Catch’s back. Bobby had a slightly smaller one slung over her shoulder, and I was quite sure she had plenty more weapons stashed underneath her tattered black trench coat. “Won’t you get burned?”

Bobby looked at Daniel and he nodded, as if giving her permission for something. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal the thick line of ink crawling up the center of her forearm, stretching all the way into the middle of her palm where it ended in a circle. She made a fist, and the tattoo lit up with a pale blue glow. She smirked at my gasp of shock and explained, “There are nanoparticles in the ink that form a UV shield across our skin. Doesn’t work so well in direct sunlight, but on heavy smog days, it does the trick.”

“I see,” I answered hoarsely, glancing back at Daniel. “And that symbol on your bicep?”

“It’s the VOICE crest, but it’s done in the same ink,” he answered.

“Got a few myself,” Catch said, grinning proudly. “Too much surface area for one to cover.”

Bobby snorted, waving her hand in front of the black box by the glass doors. They slid open quickly enough to make me jump, and I didn’t even want to know what technology went into making those work. I’d had my reality bent enough for one morning already, and we hadn’t even left the building.

The street outside was lined with strange black carriages, each with heavily tinted windows. The sight of them made me ill, but I was greatly relieved when Daniel led the way onto the black walkway that wound through the city alongside the wider streets.

“We’re not going far enough to drive,” he told me, as if he already knew my trepidations.

“Small mercies.”

He snorted and kept walking. Catch and Bobby fell into file behind us, and I knew better than to ask whether they were keeping watch to make sure I didn’t try to run or to protect us. Probably both.

The silhouettes of towering buildings formed an impressive skyline behind a dense layer of gray fog, and I marveled at the streets lifting off the ground in the distance to form interlocking spirals. The city itself seemed deserted, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

“Where is everyone?”

“Inside,” Bobby answered from behind me. “Daywalking ink was banned after the first prohibition, but enough vamps still have it that it’s not safe for humans to be wandering around during the day.”

“And the vampires?”

Bobby went silent.

“Most live underground,” Daniel answered in her stead. “They come out at night and that’s when things really get interesting.”

“And where are we going now?” I asked, hoping he’d finally give me an answer since we were already out and about.

“The ruins,” said Daniel, coming to a stop in front of a street blocked off by a glimmering strip of tape that seemed to be made of purple light. It was faint in the partial light of day, but I could make out the word “RESTRICTED” repeated across its surface.

I watched as Daniel passed his hand through the light and it flickered before vanishing. He walked down the deserted street and I followed along with the others. When I glanced back, the strip of light was back in place.

The buildings around us were different from the place we’d come from. There were no lights lining the sharp edges of each surface, nor glimmering images promising products I’d never heard of at a cheap price. These buildings were in decay, crumbling brick revealed behind smoother surfaces that had long since rotted.

The street grew narrower the further we went, and it was difficult to find a spot of flat ground to walk on between all the holes and jagged rocks. Once we came to the end of the road, I found myself staring down a host of decaying structures that went on as far as the eye could see. Everything from churches and homes to towering structures even greater than the one we’d come from.

I still wasn’t sure of what Daniel hoped to accomplish by bringing me out here, but if it had anything to do with the growing sense of dismay and guilt in my chest, he’d succeeded.

What lay before me was a city—no, a world—in absolute ruin that was the direct result of Enoch’s actions. And what was Enoch if not the embodiment of my sin?

“Come on,” Daniel said, walking past me. “We’re not there yet.”

I was hesitant to follow him, but the others were already up ahead and I could tell from the way Bobby was looking at me that if I didn’t go on my own, they’d force me.

The further we descended into the madness the city had become, the more the despair within me grew. For so long, I’d told myself the best way to atone for all the blood on my hands was to live a quiet life, if I had no choice but to keep on living it. To hold to my word never to take another life, whether it was to quench my thirst or the endless loneliness within.

Now I knew the truth: It would never be enough. I could never begin to atone for this.

I realized I was trembling and hugged myself, but the mild chill in the air had little to do with it. A great structure came into view, distinct from the rest, if only because it looked intact. The gray stone church had clearly seen better days, and its great twin peaks were missing a spire or two, but the arched red door had been given a fresh coat of paint within the last year at most. It was the only spot of life and color in the crumbling wasteland around us, and I stopped short as the sense of familiarity overwhelmed me.

“Is this—?”

“This is where we found you,” Daniel answered. “I take it you’ve never seen the outside?”

I shook my head, staring down the behemoth structure, its spires like the horns of a dragon ready to devour me. So this was where he’d brought me. The place where the Harts had left me to rot.

Somehow, it seemed I’d fared better than the church had.

“Come on,” Daniel told me, opening the door that led into the church. It was unlocked, to my dismay. If this place was as dangerous as he said, and so far I had no reason to believe otherwise, that seemed quite reckless.

I hesitated a moment when I realized he intended for me to go inside, looking up at the stained glass transom window above the door. “Under is one thing, but I’m not sure about going in.”

He rolled his eyes. “Trust me, if anyone was going to burst into flames walking through those doors, it’d be Bobby.”

She flipped him off and promptly crossed herself before going inside.

I reluctantly followed, hugging myself as I looked around the stone entryway. Dim light streamed through the stained glass adorning the windows of the open sanctuary, and dust rained down from the ceiling as the floorboards creaked above us.

Catch sauntered around, boredly leafing through the old pamphlets on the wall. Bobby went to sit on the rickety old bench across the room before taking out the bizarre thing I now knew was called a phone. Meanwhile, Daniel was watching me closely. I wasn’t certain what reaction he had hoped this trip would elicit, but the only one I had to offer him was unease.

“You can relax,” he said. “I didn’t bring you here to put you back in the ground.”

“Then why are we here?” I asked, watching him nervously. “Don’t the Harts still run this place?”

“They do, as a matter of fact.”

Before he had the chance to answer, a woman’s voice greeted us from the top of the stairs leading up into the vestry. I turned as she came down the steps, her blue-gray habit rustling against the floor. She was a tall, sturdy woman with piercing blue eyes and long silver hair mostly hidden beneath a white covering, and there was a cane in her right hand.

Even Bobby got to her feet and stashed her phone in the older woman’s presence.

“Marcellus, this is Sister Amelia Grover,” Daniel said, offering a hand to help her down the last step. She waved him away and walked over to me, squinting intently.

Daniel sighed. “Sister, this is—”

“I know who it is,” she said, sharp in tongue. She reached into the collar of her habit and pulled out a pair of glasses, putting them on to peer at me. “Well, let’s have a look at you.”

“I’m afraid I’m not much to look at, good Sister,” I said, my face aflame as I turned my head to conceal the scarred half of it.

Daniel seemed anxious as he watched the nun’s inspection of me, which made me all the warier. Sister Grover grabbed my chin and tilted it upward. I wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but I would happily have given it if it meant an end to the search.

She let out a low whistle, examining my scars. “Those old boys did a number on you, didn’t they?”

I blinked as she released me. “I’m sorry, I… oh, the Harts? No, this happened long before them.”

“I see,” she remarked, wobbling the head of her cane. “So, you’re the one who was shacking up with Jonas before he turned.”

I blanched at her commentary and in that moment, I was quite certain I would have happily taken a reburial over the continuation of this conversation. “I…”

“There’s no need to be bashful about it.” She snorted. “It’s the Romans who get hung up on that bullshit. Of all the sins my ancestors committed, loving another man certainly doesn’t factor among them.”

“Sister Grover is an Episcopalian nun,” Bobby said with a weary sigh.

“Oh, yes. Of course,” I said, still blushing. How many branches they’d made since the whole thing got started back in Rome. One would think they might just stick with a single denomination and call it a day. “But if you knew Jonas, that makes you…”

“His thrice-great niece,” she answered. “Among the last of the Hart line, though the less savory parts of the family tradition have been carried on by my brother.” She rolled her eyes.

“When the other hunters left for Europe, Sister Grover was generous enough to allow us to use the church as a field base,” Daniel explained. “In return, we keep an eye on the property. Despite her best efforts.”

She shot him a halfhearted glare. “I’m seventy-three and the good Lord can take me when he damn well pleases,” she grumbled. “In the meantime, I keep watch over this place, and we try to help anyone who comes through those doors.”

“We?” I asked.

“I’ve got a small team upstairs,” she answered, casting her eyes upward.

I fell silent. “Oh. You mean the angels?”

The nun’s laugh made my eardrums sting. “This one’s really fresh out of the ground, isn’t he? No, boy. A human doctor and a few vampires who didn’t have the stomach to team up with VOICE but wanted to get off the streets. Synth addicts, mostly.”

“Synth is short for synthetic blood,” Daniel explained before I could ask. “It was one of many attempts to quell the epidemic while there was still time, but it has some nasty side effects, addiction being one of them.”

“Violent psychosis being another,” Bobby muttered, looking away.

“That’s part of what we do here. Help the ones who want to get clean,” said Sister Grover.

“And the ones who don’t?” I asked.

The faint lines on her face became troubled creases. “We end up tending to their victims more often than not. Life’s not easy in the ruins. We try to be a sanctuary.”

“People who choose to live in the ruins know the risk they’re taking on,” Daniel said carefully.

I could already see the agitation on the older woman’s face. It was clear they didn’t see eye to eye on everything, which was no surprise. I could hardly see Daniel as the religious type.

“If by choose, you mean refusing to submit to mandatory bloodletting and exile by default, then yes,” the nun countered.

Bobby groaned. “Not again. You two get into this every time and if I have to hear it again, I’m going to crawl into the hole we dug Marcellus out of. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said timidly.

“Right,” Daniel muttered, clearing his throat. “I brought Marcellus here so he could meet you, and I hoped to show him the labyrinth.”

Sister Grover looked between me and Daniel, studying us both carefully. “I may be the black sheep of the family, but I’m still a Hart. I can’t just have vampires traipsing around down there. Not even you.”

“Please,” Daniel said, even though it seemed to take some effort to get the word out. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

She watched me for another moment before nodding. “He’s closer to its origin than any of us will ever be. Who knows? Maybe it’ll respond to him.”

There was more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice, but Daniel didn’t give her any time to change her mind. “Come,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder to lead me toward the sanctuary. He glanced back at the others who remained in the lobby.

“Aren’t Catch and Bobby coming with us?” I asked warily.

“Not this time,” he said, urging me on down the aisle. I stayed close as he whisked me across the black-and-white checkerboard floors, which felt appropriate enough. “Primus” was hardly a fitting term for me. More like a pawn.

When we reached the back of the sanctuary, Daniel led him to a small doorway hidden behind the altar. He took the lantern off the hook by the door and led the way down.

“Finally, a familiar bit of technology,” I mumbled.

“Time has a way of standing still on the other side of those doors,” he said, holding the lantern up once we reached the base of the stairs. His voice bounced off the stone walls around us and the first passageway soon became a series of twists and turns. He seemed to know his way through the cool matrix of stone, leading us swiftly to a clearing deep within its bowels.

A blue glow made the lantern unnecessary, so he extinguished it as the passage opened into a circular alcove filled with lush trees and hanging vines.

“What is that on the trees?” I breathed in wonder. “It’s glowing.”

“Luminous moss,” he answered. “It only grows in a few places on earth. This is one of them.”

“But we’re under the church,” I said, looking up at the ceiling that was barely visible above the foliage.

“The church was built on this spot for a reason,” he said, holding back a hanging vine so I could walk through. The trees cleared out within to form a ring around a single tree that didn’t look all that different from the others. If anything, it was a bit shorter and its leaves were of standard shape, size, and color. I stared in wonder, nonetheless, because it was the most unapologetically living thing I had seen since awakening to this wasteland. When I looked up, Daniel was staring at me closely, but he quickly looked away.

He cleared his throat and said, “This is the Tree of Life, though given its history, that seems a bit ironic.”

I turned to look at him in confusion. “What do you mean? What is this place?”

“It’s where it all began,” he answered. “Where we began, at any rate. You knew of the Hart family as hunters, but it might come as a surprise to you that they were also the original alchemists.”

I frowned. “Jonas never mentioned anything about that.”

“It’s unlikely he would have known. The Harts operate like most secret organizations. They share their hidden truths with a select few, and the rest subsist on the common knowledge of the cult.”

“Alchemists,” I echoed, mulling over the new revelation. “I thought that was all hogwash.”

He chuckled. “Maybe it was, on the surface. But they figured out the truth about vampires long before anyone else did, and before anyone knew much about genetics or pathogens, they isolated the cause of the infection to one source.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Of course, all we have are old texts that seem a mashup of pseudo science and personal logs from self-declared researchers drunk on their own tinctures, but that was before the Harts got organized,” he said flatly. “The legend goes that a band of early explorers came to this land and became intrigued by local legends about the tree that bore the fruit of immortality.”

My eyes widened. “So what, the Garden of Eden in reverse?”

“Something like that. They ignored the warnings of the original guardians of this place, of course, and wanted to see it for themselves. Their leader, a man named Leif, partook of the fruit himself and killed all his men in cold blood. Or so the legend goes,” he said, smiling at my nervousness.

“That sounds about right,” I said bitterly, hugging myself. “It makes sense the legacy of bloodshed would have started from the very beginning of our kind.”

“Whether the legends are true or not, this is as far back as anyone has ever been able to trace the vampire legends, and according to the Harts, the tree holds the hope of a cure,” he explained. “Or extinction, depending on how you choose to look at it.”

“A cure?” I asked, unable to hide my doubt.

“The tree hasn’t born fruit in thousands of years, and while all we have to suggest it ever did comes from the personal diaries of the early Hart line, they certainly take it seriously enough.”

“If that’s true, then why are we here?” I asked. “Why on earth would they leave it unprotected?”

“They didn’t. Sister Grover guards the labyrinth and the others have no idea she’s working with us,” he admitted. “There are safeguards in place that only she can remove.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s just say if we’d come down here without permission, we’d still be walking through that labyrinth.”

I cast an uneasy glance back at the darkness we’d come from and swallowed audibly. “Why did you bring me here, Daniel?”

“Because there’s something I need you to understand,” he told me, walking toward the stone ring surrounding the base of the tree. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed in any of it, I still felt a faint sense of apprehension as he stepped over that threshold. Once he made it to the other side unsmitten, I breathed a bit easier and felt like a fool for expecting anything else.

He touched a thick branch extending from the tree, shaking it hard enough for the leaves to rustle, and a few hit the ground at his feet. “This right here? This is ‘humanity’s last hope,’ according to the Harts. They remain the one and only force that might be strong enough to stop Enoch and his army, and their last, best hope for the preservation of their species is a fucking tree.”

I grimaced, looking away from his blasphemous display. “What is your point, exactly?”

“That it’s bullshit, but bullshit is all we had,” he said, shrugging. “Until you.”

I refused to meet his eyes. It was clear to me where he was going with this, and it was not a journey I wished to take again.

“The greatest irony of all this is that the Harts were right,” he continued. “The key to ending the vampire curse really was buried under this church, but it’s not a fucking miracle shrub. It’s you. Do you get that, Marcellus? Do you understand that you’re the one solid, tangible thing standing between Enoch—between the monster you created—and the end of everything?”

His words hit me like a punch in the stomach. He was right, of course. I’d killed countless people in cold blood without hesitation. Even after my attempt to atone and live a virtuous life, or at least not to live a destructive one, I was still the source of so much death. So much pain.

Daniel walked back over the stone ring, stopping in front of me. I tensed when he reached out to touch my cheek and spoke in an unexpectedly soft voice. “Everything else about this story is just make believe. Fantasy. But the monsters? They’re real, and you’d know that better than anyone.”

“I promised.” My voice broke in a whisper, forcing myself to finally meet his gaze. “I promised I would never do it again.”

“Think about why you made that promise.”

I took a deep, quivering breath. “I wanted to stop the cycle of bloodshed and death. To atone.”

“This is how,” he said firmly, tilting my chin toward him. “You can atone. You can make this right. Only you can.”

“Everything is gone,” I murmured, shaking my head. “There’s no reversing it.”

“Not everything. We’re still here, and as long as that’s true, we can fight,” he said, pulling me closer. “We can stop him, Marcellus. Together.”

“You’re asking me to raise an army. To kill Enoch,” I said shakily. “My child.”

“He’s your crime,” Daniel corrected. Even though he was right, I still felt the twinge of defensiveness that came with being his sire. “And this is your absolution.”

I couldn’t answer right away. I couldn’t even manage to speak, or make sense of what I was thinking or feeling. “And after?”

“After, you’ll be free to live the rest of your life as you see fit.”

“That’s not what I want.”

He frowned. “Then what do you want?”

“Enoch is a monster,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “But he is mine. My child. My sin. When he dies, I wish to die with him. Can you promise me that?”

He hesitated, as if taken aback by my request. “You want me to kill you?”

“I’ve tried every method. Stakes and daggers don’t work. Neither does fire, as the Harts proved, but this world is not the one I fell asleep to. If there is a way to end me once I commit this final sin, then I will give you what you wish. Is that something you can promise?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he searched my face, but I couldn’t imagine what it was he hoped to find. He’d already laid me bare in this place, the source of my suffering. “Yes,” he finally answered. “You have my word.”

My heart lurched with something I had not felt in a very long time: hope.

“How?” I breathed, afraid to speak too loudly.

“I’m not gonna give you any ideas. You just hold up your end of the bargain, and when the time comes, I’ll hold up mine.”

“Very well,” I said, staring him down. “I hope you mean what you say.”

And I hoped I had the resolve to follow through on my own promise.