Bloodline by Joel Abernathy

1

A thousand yearsis a long time to wait, and yet, wait I did. At the time, it seemed I did little else.

As it turns out, there are only so many years the bloodlust can last. After perhaps a hundred years, the hunting and biting and draining loses its effect. After a while, you realize you’ve been so busy keeping yourself alive that you forgot to ask—why?

When the Puritans set sail for the new world, I finally asked myself that question, stowed away in the bottom of one of their ships. I bound myself in a far corner with rations no one would bother looking for until the voyage was nearly over. I could hear them up on the surface, scurrying like rats, and it became a game of sorts to see if I could resist temptation whenever one came down.

None of the ship’s crew realized just how close to death they came whenever they ventured down those shabby wooden steps, but I learned an important lesson during the course of my little experiment. I learned the answer to a question that had always plagued me as my victims’ heartbeats faded and the euphoria of feeding declined. As my tongue grew numb to the taste of human blood over the centuries.

For three months and six days on that ship, I went without blood. My body was weak, and I scarcely moved, but I was alive, or whatever blasphemous version of living it was I clung to.

When one of the sailors came a step too close to look for a crate of goods they planned to trade at port, I killed him and feasted like a king before we docked. With stolen clothes and a dead man’s papers, I disembarked for America, telling myself I would be reborn in this land. How was I to know what a fitting haven for vampires it would become, its rich soil soaked with the blood of innocents and drained of its very soul?

The beauty of this new land—and the horrors of it—awakened within me a desire I hadn’t felt in so long that I scarcely remembered it from the fleeting moments of my mortal life.

A desire to do more than hunt and kill.

As it turned out, this new world had many of the same rules as the old one, and there weren’t many opportunities for a slight-looking lad who might have otherwise gotten by on his beauty, if it hadn’t been ruined by two hideous scars that rendered the right side of his face intolerable. My black hair had grown out during the months on the ship, but that only did so much to cover it. If I kept my head down, I could pass by on the streets largely unnoticed, often mistaken for a woman, but dead on, the way my lip pulled at one corner was obvious.

As I learned through trial and error, a vampire heals from all wounds except those inflicted before he was turned. I might have skipped my sire’s blood if I had known, but hindsight was twenty-twenty. Whoring was no longer enough to sustain me, so I had found other means of earning a living in the ever-changing landscape of Europe. Unfortunately, pickpocketing the corpses of my meals didn’t seem like a fitting way to commemorate my rebirth.

Eventually, after a few months of scraping by on the streets of Boston, a factory owner named Ian took pity on me and gave me a job. Despite my disfigurement, or perhaps because of the scarcity of young men of a certain persuasion and lithe figure, Ian soon became my lover.

As the years passed and my face neither changed for the better or the worse, Ian’s health declined, and I became his caretaker.

Until that day, I had subsisted on the blood of animals, a more long-term experiment made possible by the fact that I didn’t particularly care if I starved to death. A regular scientist, I had become. Professor of the profane arts.

While I was certain Ian had his suspicions about all the trips I made to “market” when the pantry was full, it was an unspoken agreement between us that he didn’t ask, and I didn’t answer.

The day he finally did ask, I knew it was his last.

As I sat at his bedside, dabbing a cloth across his moistened brow, he gazed up at me as if seeing a vision in his fevered dreams. He rarely looked at me more than he had to, and I didn’t blame him. He’d told me once in his gruff Irish way that it would be easier to forgive my disfigurement if the rest of me hadn’t been “so goddamn beautiful,” and I’d smiled and told him it would be easier to forgive his drunken ramblings if he wasn’t so goddamn pleasant the rest of the time.

That last night, as I could see the consciousness draining from his eyes—a slowed-down progression of the same phenomenon that took place at the end of every life I had taken—he reached out for me. I took his wrist to steady his arm, and he cupped my face—always the good side—in his rough, calloused palm.

“You’ve been with me for seventeen years, Marcey.”

“Has it been that long?” I asked casually, trying to hide the strain in my voice.

I had killed hundreds of humans—likely thousands, if I focused and added them up in my now-perfect memory. Granted, I hadn’t taken a human life in the time I had been with Ian, but why did this one man make me feel a weight I hadn’t known since my first victim’s heart had stopped beating?

“Aye.” His voice was rough, the fading lights in his eyes full of knowing. “I’ll not be telling yer secrets now. The factory is all I have, but it’s yours to keep or burn to the ground, if ye like. Satisfy a dying man’s curiosity, hm?”

“Are you dying?” I blew a gust of air through my nose as I wet the cloth and wiped away the dried blood on the edge of his lips. “You might get on with it, then. It’s been a few weeks, and you know how the foreman slacks off when there’s no one on the floor.”

A ghostly smile eased across the hard lines of his mouth, and he gave a laugh that rattled like a cough. There were times when the coughing took him, and all I could do was pray that the god he had bargained with on his knees through so many late nights took him sooner. Times when I actually considered committing the one sin my conscience was clean of.

In all my years of extended death, I had never met another vampire, even though I learned of what I was through the rumors that swept through Europe and filled the pages of the day’s most salacious literature.

If there were others like me—actual monsters that lived in the shadows and fed on the blood of the living—it became clear that they didn’t want to find me half as badly as I wanted to find them. Eventually, I gave up trying. Surely I wasn’t the only one who’d ventured over to the New World, but I didn’t expect that I would find others here any easier than I had in Europe.

The idea of creating another vampire, knowledge I possessed only by the whims of fate, had often tempted me. While Ian’s Church was rumored to have secret rites for vampires, and a general tolerance for those who were willing to at least try to subsist on the Eucharist, I knew that if my soul had even an inkling of escaping damnation, it would be lost if I condemned another to this existence.

It had taken me a millennium to become human enough again to want to tame the thirst, but I’d spent centuries given over to bloodlust. Even if Ian’s diseased lungs could somehow heal through the process of transformation, I would be killing his mortal soul, and he worried enough about his other predilections.

The only mercy I could show to this man I loved in the only inadequate way that came naturally to me was to let him go.

For seventeen years, Ian had been my shelter and my world. I saw little of life outside the factory, but there was no reason to when I already knew what was out there. Rejection. Loneliness. Emptiness. It was a world I knew well, and one it seemed I was condemned to wander alone for the rest of my unnumbered days without him.

Ian grasped my hand, stronger than he’d been in a long time. There was desperation in his gaze. Pain.

“It hurts,” he said in a quivering voice. It was a rare reprieve from the bouts of coughing and blood. Self-inflicted starvation had long since deadened my instincts, even if the scent of dead and infected blood had been appealing to begin with. Now, all I felt was pity. “Is it ever going to stop?”

“Just close your eyes and rest,” I pleaded. “You always feel better in the morning.”

His hand tightened around my wrist, and for a moment, I refused to meet his gaze. I already knew the request within it.

“Look at me, Marcellus.”

He knew I was stronger than him, even in my weakened, half-starved state. There had been an accident at the factory some years earlier. One of the machines had taken a young boy’s arm, and nearly the rest of him. I’d stuck my hand in to stop the gears so Ian could pull the boy out. I would never forget the look on his face that day as he realized all the quirks and secrecy added up to a truth he didn’t want to hear—and one I didn’t want to tell.

The boy had lived, even though his arm had to be amputated to the shoulder. To this day, he maintained I was some kind of monster, and if it hadn’t been for Ian’s adamant denial, I was fairly certain an angry mob would have run me out of town. There were already tensions brewing further north around that sort of thing.

“What can I do, Ian?” It was more a plea than a question. My voice came strained and rough through gritted teeth. “What would you have me do?”

“I know you’ve killed,” he said quietly, urgently. “I saw the way you were that day when you saved the boy. His arm was crushed, and you didn’t even blink. Men have died in front of you, and you never flinch, you just look like you’ve seen it all before. Your face hasn’t changed a bit in all these years. You still look like a boy of nineteen while the rest of the world grows weary and wrinkled around you.”

I stared down at him, and for the first time, he stared back at me, making no attempt to avert his gaze from the deep scars etched into my face. Perhaps the things he saw in his fevered dreams had finally numbed him to the sight of me.

“I will not kill you, Ian.”

“Why the bloody hell not? I know you’ve done worse. I see it in your eyes. I’ve never seen that look in the eyes of a man who hadn’t been to war and done things beyond the demands of king and country.”

He started coughing again in his agitation, and I helped him sit up. The blood that spilled into his palm was nearly black. He was getting worse, but the doctor had warned he would. He was far from the only man in town who was breathing his last now that tuberculosis was as common as the cold.

“I’m not the man I was then.” My voice was too quiet, and I feared he hadn’t heard me through the coughing. When at last it subsided, his eyes met mine.

“What changed you?”

The question caught me off-guard. Ian hadn’t asked about my past in years, probably because the story changed so often when he hounded me into giving him an answer that he had finally given up. The answer that came to mind was equally surprising.

“You,” I whispered.

He laughed. I could hardly tell the difference between a laugh and a wheeze anymore, but for the sparkle in his eyes. “An old sod who runs a sweatshop? That’s what made an honest man of ye?”

I couldn’t help but smile, which was something I tried not to do, since I imagined it was not a cheery sight. I didn’t know, as I hadn’t intentionally looked in a mirror for the better part of a century. The muscles in my face hadn’t worked quite right on the right side ever since I had been turned.

“You were kind to me,” I replied. “You took pity on me and gave me a home when I was nothing more than a stain in the gutter to the rest of the world.”

His hand sealed around mine. His grip was weak, and fading still. All humans felt warm to me, but the fever burned me through his skin.

“You looked pretty pathetic out there. Like a lost kitten. Jokes on me, innit?” he asked in that constantly teasing way of his.

God, I was going to miss this salty old fool.

I reached into the bedside table for the salve the doctor had given me. The camphor and aloe burned my nostrils as I smoothed it over his bare chest. It did little. He was too far gone for inhalants to have much of an effect, but it made me feel useful. I was distanced enough from my humanity that I couldn’t recall ever feeling as helpless as I did now.

When I used to hunt men, feeling a human fading in my grasp was exhilarating. It made me feel powerful, and the ghosts of the other vampires who must surely have performed the same ritual long before my accursed rebirth made me feel a little less alone, if only for a moment.

Now, trying to keep this mortal afloat was as draining and futile as sheltering a candle’s flame from a tidal wave. Death would take him, and I knew not whether it would be a mercy when it finally did or an act of selfishness on my part to try to stop it anyway.

Another spasm seized him, and the pain in his eyes was my answer. Holding on wasn’t selfishness, it was cruelty, plain and simple. The mere thought of exchanging blood with Ian to keep him with me was worse than that. It was the surest proof there was that I no longer had a soul. There were some amongst the clergy who might argue that I never had.

I touched his face, and the burning beads of sweat all but fizzled to smoke on my skin. I bent down to press my lips to his damp and wrinkled brow, and the perfume of death filled my nostrils. I knew it well.

“You should rest, my love. You need your strength.”

He let out a shuddering breath, and when I looked down, his eyes had fallen shut. His hand was still clasped around mine. I waited until I was sure he was sleeping, though from the way his eyes darted beneath his lids, sleep was no longer an escape from the agony. He was suffering, even in his dreams.

I let the bones in my gums break as my eye teeth extended. It was a painful shift, but the thrill of the hunt usually rendered me numb to it. I scarcely bothered when I fed on animals, as it was far more humane to kill with a sharpened blade.

My stomach churned in protest. Years of self-denial had turned the triggers of bloodlust to aversion, especially in this place of sickness and death.

For the first time since my life began anew, I buried my fangs in human flesh and felt the change come over me. Years of a humane diet had bled the color from my irises, leaving them a pale and ghastly pink that surely did nothing to allay the fears of the good townsfolk that I was one of the witches they whispered about.

Ian didn’t stir, and I was grateful he wasn’t awake to see me like this. I already looked like a monster, but in this moment, as the blood filled my eyes, I knew I must appear as the demon I truly was.

I held my breath as I bled him, willing my tongue blind to the taste of his blood. I refused to once again become the beast I had been before he met me. His heart would be the last my fangs brought to rest.

Until that moment, it had been a matter of resistance.

Now, it was a pledge I vowed to keep until my last breath.

As his pulse grew faint, as if his body was eager to give up the ghost, the fragile, petulant child within my mind raged in protest. For seventeen years, this man had been my father, my keeper, my lover, and my only friend. When he was gone, I would be alone. Trapped with no purpose in an existence that never truly ended or began but rather hovered in some ethereal limbo, in a state between living and dying.

It’s not too late, the monster chanted inside my mind. You could turn him. Make him yours forever.

I broke away before I should have, my heart pounding as if to remind me of the elixir of immortality that ran through my ancient veins.

He was fading, but so was my resolve. It was only a matter of which of us would outlast the other. I could no longer hear the breath on his lips, so I leaned in and pressed my hand to his chest.

Stilling my heart and breathing, I listened.

He was gone. My decision had been made for me. I shuddered to think of what I might have chosen, had fate given me a choice at all.

Relief lasted only for an instant before grief rushed in, filling every crack within my splintered soul. A sob that seemed to come from someone else escaped me as I threw myself onto his chest and said a silent prayer to whatever angel of death lingered in the room to take me with him. To do the deed that no blade nor stake nor poison yet had been faithful enough to complete.

God may have been deaf to the pleas of demons, but surely Death could spare a moment. I’d sent enough business her way.

She was silent, and thus I remained.