Bloodline by Joel Abernathy

2

Three days passedbetween the burial and the knock at the door.

The two rooms we had shared had never felt smaller. The factory carried on below—or at least, that was what I assumed, since I could still feel the vibrations of people walking around downstairs through the floorboards as I lay with my cheek pressed against them.

The grain had molded its lines into my flesh, and I couldn’t be sure of the last time I had moved. Not since Ian’s burial, most likely. With no actual need for food or drink, nor any other function of a living body to tend to, there seemed no reason to do anything at all.

There had been rumors in my day of a mechanical bird which a brilliant inventor had prompted to move by the power of running water alone. Ian’s blood was my water, and without it flowing any longer in this world, I was nothing more than a statue. I knew I had existed before him, and his lifetime was but a drop in the ocean of time I’d lived without him, but now that it was dried up, I couldn’t quite recall what I had done with myself for those endless centuries.

I had no intention of opening that door unless the person on the other side had a battering ram and a torch. In that case, he could come right in and set the whole place ablaze for all I cared. It was the one method of escape I had never had the resolve to try.

The knocking persisted, like an incessant little bird, and if the will to live wasn’t enough to rouse me from my stasis, irritation became enough.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

I rose, feeling closer to breaking my vow against taking another human life than I had in the last seventeen years. When I opened the door to find the doctor on the other side, wearing a brown leather plague mask that had only recently come back into style with the white plague, I squinted at the light from the hall.

Whether it was my eyes or the state of my tangled hair and unchanged clothes that startled him more, I couldn’t say. I only knew he was startled by the way the tempo of his heart picked up. No matter how well-groomed or perfumed a man was, the fear hormone which bled through human skin was always noticeable.

“Marcellus,” he said, his voice full of reservation. “Has it taken you as well?”

“No, but it might have had the courtesy,” I replied, folding my arms as I leaned in the doorway. “Thank you for coming by, Dr. Thomas, but I’m afraid we’ve no need of your services here.”

He reached for the leather strap behind his head and peeled the mask off, his dark hair mussed from being pressed down. His sky-blue eyes narrowed in concern behind his spectacles as they swept over me. He was a handsome man, and bright, with his own practice at the age of twenty-seven.

Granted, there wasn’t much competition in town.

“I am so sorry,” he said, reaching to touch my shoulder with his gloved hand. I only knew he was touching me because I felt the pressure, but little else. “When did it happen?”

“Three days ago.” When I saw the surprise on his face, I added, “It progressed quickly toward the end. By the time I would have called for you, he was gone.”

“And the body?”

“By the oak tree, as he wanted it.”

“He was Catholic. What of his last rites?”

“The priest came shortly beforehand.”

The troubled look on his face told me the answers weren’t enough. I knew what he was going to say before I heard the words. “You should have called me, Marcellus. You know what people will say.”

“Yes,” I laughed bitterly. “I know what they already say behind our backs. Imagine the fodder they’ll have now. Half of them think we should be dead for our sin. I wonder how they’ll justify their indignation over the rumors that I beat them to it?”

“I’m not accusing you,” he said, stepping closer. His hand was still on my shoulder, and a look came into his eyes. A thoughtful, wistful thing that filled me with rage even though it was only born of the truth. “Even if the rumors were true, it would have been a kindness.”

I jerked away from his touch. Why he looked at me that way, I would never understand, but I certainly didn’t have any appreciation for it. Perhaps the doctor was a bit too nearsighted for those spectacles of his.

“Thank you for your generous estimation of my character. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be alone.”

He frowned. “What will you do now?”

“I have a factory to run.”

“Come, Marcellus. You’re not cut out for that sort of thing.” His gaze softened to one of pity as he touched a hair that swept my jaw. “My father has been trying to purchase this place for years. You would be free to live a gentleman’s life.”

“A gentleman’s life?” I tolerated his touch only because I didn’t trust myself to give the aggression rising within me an outlet by batting his hand away. Not even a small one. “Pray tell, what might that entail, Enoch? Being your live-in ‘companion’?”

His patient expression faltered. “You speak as one who has a better offer on the table.” His tone grew soft once more. “I won’t be able to keep my father from pushing you out, and we both know you don’t have the constitution for loneliness. They’ll run you out of this town now that Ian isn’t here to protect you, and that’s if they don’t hang you first.”

My hand tightened around the doorknob, and I felt the whole thing creak under the force I wanted to wrap around his wretched neck. “And I suppose you’re here to offer your protection.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss it.” His oh-so-gentlemanly voice took on an air of warning. “The people in this town are fickle and quick to look for a scapegoat in times of trouble. The white plague came, what, a year after your arrival?”

“Threatening is beneath your station, Enoch.”

“It’s hardly a threat.” His hand traveled down to span my throat, and suddenly, he pushed me up against the door, his grip tightening.

I let him pin me. Years of sleeping in a human’s bed had conditioned me to play weak to the point where I no longer knew how much strength my diet had actually left me.

“Now, if I were to run into town telling everyone about the strange recluse with the changing eyes, that would be a threat.” He smiled benevolently, but it did nothing to touch the malice in his gaze. “Of course, if you shared your secret, I could protect you. I can be a very useful ally or a very unpleasant enemy, Marcellus. The choice is yours.”

“My secret.” I laughed, hoarsened by his grasp even though I felt no need to try escaping it. “Still on about that now, are you?”

The chiseled lines of his mouth curved downward. “You test my patience, demon. I know you aren’t human. We’ve all heard what Timothy saw that day.”

“Timothy? And here I thought we were calling him the town drunk these days,” I shot back. “Only in this town could saving a child’s life be twisted into an act of malevolence.”

“There are more stories from the factory. Accidents prevented that should have killed people. Then there’s the fact that your face hasn’t aged a day since you arrived here. You claimed to be a few years younger than I am now when you came to this place, and yet I age while you remain the same.”

“You flatter me.”

His hand tightened around my throat. “I don’t know whether you found the fountain of youth or sold yourself to the devil, but the fact that you refuse to tell a soul proves who holds the deed to yours.”

I laughed, and my nonchalance must have alarmed him because he let me go. “The devil?” I asked, unable to hide my amusement as I rubbed my neck. “Surely he came out with the short end of that deal.”

“There is a limit to my patience,“ he said coldly. “If I were you, I would not test it for much longer.”

It wasn’t the first time the doctor had shown me the true face I had always assumed lay beneath his mask, but even I couldn’t have expected the turn the next few months would take.

* * *

Whispers of witchesspread like wildfire throughout the Northeast. I did my best to keep the factory workers focused through the busy season, but even Ian’s most loyal employees began to look at me with sidelong glances as the rumors spread.

Keeping an eye on the floor while keeping a distance became a delicate balancing act. Nonetheless, business was booming, and the factory itself was flourishing more than ever. I had no doubt the fact that I hadn’t heard from the Thomas family was more because of the swath of deaths that became their problem as the pillars of the town than the possibility they had actually given up, incorrigible bastards that they were.

I should have known a storm was coming when Lucia, one of the girls who had been working for us ever since she’d left the children’s home, gave me a wary yet pitying glance on her way out the door.

While the good people of Boston proper darted back and forth, I chose to seek my supper closer to home. Now that I no longer had an Irishman at home, whose appetite for black pudding explained my constant demand for pig’s blood, I stuck with bleeding rabbits and deer if I could find any.

My instincts told me to stay out of the forest that night, but while I didn’t need to feed on blood, animal or human, it made living among prey easier. It was foolish to remain in Boston at all, but the factory and the little rooms above it were all I had left of the only life I knew that seemed worth living.

Every day, the memories that seemed so ingrained in the walls and the factory floor and the city lights seemed to fade. People seldom spoke of Ian, and why should they? He was a mortal man with no surviving relatives and only a few friends who had tolerated his existence on the thin edge of what was socially acceptable.

I caught a deer that night, but the tawny beast was not the only one being hunted. When I returned home, the glimmer of torches in the mist outside the factory gave me pause. I had known this day was coming--the day Enoch had promised--but somehow, I’d thought I could foresee it.

When I turned and bolted for the forest, driven more by instinct than an actual desire to live, I heard one of the townsmen cry out, “There he is!”

The sound of flames in the darkness seemed too loud for their sticks of kindling. When I saw the flames in the corner of my eye, I realized a massive wall of fire was spreading up around me, forming a circle. I tried to rush through, but an unseen force pushed me back and onto the ground.

It was a sensation I’d never experienced before, as if there was another barrier housed within the flames. I cried out as the fire lapped at my sleeve and only managed to put it out once the shadows of the men who’d hunted me—some of whom I had employed, if their familiar chatter was any indication—surrounded me.

“The sacred circle worked,” a man I recognized as Bertrand Cole cried out. The voices of the others rose in ecstatic agreement. “He’s a witch.”

“What is this?” I hissed, getting back onto my feet. I held my burned arm close. It wasn’t healing, at least not yet. So I did have some weakness, after all. Of course it was the one element that wouldn’t afford a quick death.

“You’ll be taking no further life, you vile beast.” I recognized the voice as none other than Leonard Thomas, Enoch’s father. It seemed like Enoch didn’t have the courage to be there with the mob.

Before I could form a plan of escape, a chain flew overhead and lassoed my neck. I fought against it as three more wrapped around my torso, pulling tight. No metal should have been enough to hold me, but the moment I grabbed onto the chain, my skin bubbled and burned.

Holy water. I’d tried drinking enough to poison me, but each time, I only woke with a burning throat and a churning gut. As inadequate as it was as a method of death, it turned out to be quite efficient at restraining me.

“Douse the flames!” Leonard cried as they pulled every which way, bringing me to my knees as I struggled. “I can’t see!”

“Are we sure the chains will hold him? What if he’s a shapeshifter?” another asked. I recognized him as the father of one of the young men whose debt Ian had paid off to keep him out of the poorhouse, allowing him to work it off in fair labor.

Humans. They held it within their power to both rise to the heights of virtue and scrape the depths of depravity even the soulless dared not tread.

“Holy water’s good enough for the Wee Folk, it’s good enough for ‘im,” said one of the local fishermen, stamping out the last of the dying flames. They dragged me to my feet, and someone shoved a dirty cloth into my mouth, gagging me before they loaded me onto a wagon.

The road was full of fresh holes from the recent weather shifts, and the ride was not a smooth one, but it wasn’t long. I wasn’t surprised to find myself in front of the sheriff’s station when they dragged me out of the back of the wagon. Leonard was waiting for me at the door with a somber look on his face and triumph in his eyes.

No rights or procedures were administered that night. They threw me into a cell, still bound, and a guard I recognized as one of the newcomers who’d arrived on a ship just last week stared at me nervously from across the room.

Witch fever was rapidly spreading, but they would have been better off worrying about tuberculosis. The old wise women they would just as soon hang had a better success rate with their herbal remedies than Enoch did with all his learned ministrations.

Hours passed without a word from my guard before the front door opened. I had counted the number of rats scurrying about the station when the doctor finally showed his face. He seemed more than pleased with the sight of me bound and gagged on the floor.

“Leave us for a moment,” he ordered.

The guard hesitated, like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take orders from his ringleader’s adult child. A stern glance from Enoch did the trick.

“Well,” Enoch said, looming over me from the other side of the bars. “Whatever brand of devil you are, it looks like you’re not worth much.”

And yet, here he was, surely about to try to force my “secrets” out of me. I refused to give him the satisfaction of looking at him. The gloating was half the fun for his type.

The bars slid open and Enoch grabbed me roughly, pinning me to the wall. He wrenched the cloth gag from my mouth and forced me to meet his eyes. “I know what you are,” he seethed. “But I don’t need to prove it. At the very least, they think you’re a witch, and you’ll be hanged by morning unless you give me what I want.”

“You don’t know what you want.” I laughed bitterly. “You’re a child reaching for a toy on a high shelf without realizing it’s a weight that will crush you when it falls.”

His eyes narrowed. “Turn me.”

It was a quiet demand, but it held the intonation of the consequences if I refused. So the doctor wasn’t entirely without merit. Perhaps he’d found the bodies of other beasts like me, the ones as good at hiding in the shadows from their own kind as from their prey. However he had come upon the information, he was sorely unequipped for the reality it opened up to him.

“No,” I answered.

He shoved me back, and my head struck the wall. My ears rang, but the damage healed almost immediately, a cruel reminder that my scars never would. “You will be hanged, and if that doesn’t work, you will be burned. Whatever immunity to death and age persists in you, there is a cure for it, and rest assured, I will find it.”

“You think immortal life is a privilege?” I rasped. “You know not what suffering is until you have lived a thousand years in vain.”

“You waste your time and your power,” he accused, leaning in close. His breath smelled of cloves, the latest herb purported to be a ward against the evil that plagued the city’s imagination. “A carriage waits outside.” He stopped to pull a wad of fresh bills from his coat pocket and waved it in my face. It was enough to buy the factory and then some. “Your freedom. I have spoken to the old woman. She knows of your kind, and the rules of transmission. All you have to do is pass the gift to me. A simple exchange of blood, and all this will be over.”

So he’d been to the one woman in this town who’d actually earned the title of witch. The one whose wrinkled neck would never be adorned with rope because her tricks would never let the fools get the best of her.

“Take your freedom,” I whispered in his ear, “and go to hell.”

He threw me onto the ground, and with my arms bound, my head struck stone again. This time, it was enough to make me black out for an instant. When I came to, Enoch was on top of me. He pulled up his sleeve with his teeth, exposing his bare wrist, and took a blade from his pocket to slice it open.

The scent of fresh human blood awakened my hunger, and I realized that my will was not as great as I once thought it was. Still, I refused to drink when he offered me his wrist. I turned my head, and he grabbed a fistful of my hair to raise it. He forced his wrist to my mouth, and I struggled against him as his blood hit my tongue.

And then it was over. Nearly two decades of self-denial, and all it took was a few drops of blood from a man I despised to render me a snarling beast sucking desperately at a wound inflicted to bring an end to everything I had worked so hard to become. Everything I had fought so hard not to be.

When I finally met Enoch’s eyes, they were full of disgust and horror. Yes, I thought. Take it in. This is the thing you want to become. This is the grace of immortality, you wicked child.

He finally wrenched his arm away from me. “Your turn,” he muttered. He grabbed the knife and brought it down into my shoulder. I cried out as the blade dug into me. Enoch closed his mouth around the wound and started feeding with greed that fit a vampire.

He would be a testament to our kind, most certainly. As he took from me the curse I had stumbled upon in my youth, it occurred to me how fitting it was that I should finally meet another vampire in this way. I had stolen the curse from my own sire’s corpse, his dead blood putrid on my lips. Now my first child, born of violation and betrayal, would be a perfect legacy of my own sins.

Enoch lifted his head, blood creeping into his ice-blue eyes. He released me and I collapsed onto my side, seeing no reason to bother moving. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him staring down at his hands and arms, as if he felt what I had that day. As if his body had been born anew, and all the world was his to explore and claim and consume.

How quickly that euphoria faded to make room for the nothingness. The emptiness. The shame.

The thirst.

In that moment, as I watched my own story retold before my very eyes, I felt closer to Enoch than I ever had to another. We were alike now, him and I. We were the same wretched, vile soul.

“More,” he seethed, looking at me in his desperation. “I need more.”

I laughed bitterly. “That is the ‘gift’ you speak of. To be eternally wanting, forever in need of something that will never satisfy you, no matter how much you take. A fine gift, indeed.”

He ignored me, stalking out of the cell that had served as his delivery room. “Guard!” he cried.

The young man who’d been watching me for hours reappeared, confusion on his face when he saw the blood on Enoch’s mouth. He looked at me, and the realization that I was still bound and weaker than before seemed to confuse him further still. “Sir, you’re bleeding!”

“Run!” I cried, even knowing there was no point. Enoch was on him before I’d finished the thought, tearing into his throat with a repulsive snarl of victory. The sound of flesh and blood sliding down his throat soured my stomach, keeping even the fresh scent of human blood from arousing my appetite.

He dropped the body and turned to face me. The disgust in his newly crimson gaze gave me a flicker of hope that perhaps there was some part of him that understood what he had done. Some shred of humanity left within him to grieve the loss of the rest. Of course, it didn’t last.

“Power,” he whispered, staring down at his bloodied hands. “You possess this power, and yet you live like a rat in the rafters. Why?”

“Power gets old when you don’t,” I answered, lifting my head off the floor as he walked back into the cell. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”

Enoch grabbed me again, snapping the chains like thread before he dragged me to my feet. “You are weak,” he seethed. “And I won’t let your sickness infect me.”

“Kill me, then.” I wished for it, but the look on his face told me I had called his bluff. “But you won’t, will you? Because then you would be alone, and you know nothing.”

His eyes narrowed dangerously. “There are others.”

“Perhaps there are,” I agreed. “And yet, I’ve lived the last thousand years without meeting a single one.”

“You’re lying,” he snarled.

“Kill me, then, and search for yourself.”

He hesitated, then reached for his knife. As he brought it to my throat, still clutching my body to his, I couldn’t help but smile.

“I’m afraid it won’t be that easy. In the interest of saving you the trial and error I’ve already been through at my own expense, your surest bet is to wait until morning and have me burned at the stake.”

His jaw clenched as he listened. I could tell this wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. Evidently deciding to call my bluff, he pressed the blade into my throat, and I grunted as it split my skin. The force he was using caused his arm to tremble, and yet, the blade did not go any deeper. I supposed decapitation was one method I hadn’t tried that might work, and for a long moment, he seemed intent on trying with that dull hunting knife.

At length, he pushed me away from him, and I caught myself against the wall. I touched my neck, the skin already healing beneath my fingertips. Having recently fed from a deer, I was stronger than usual, but feeding from Enoch made it clear that animal blood was no substitute for the real thing. The newborn beast standing before me was already much stronger than I was, and I shuddered to think what he could become. The soullessness had made a lion from a lamb the very night I was turned, and Enoch already had enough of the predator within him.

For the first time in recent years, I thought of taking a life, and the only thing that held me back was the knowledge that I would certainly fail.

“What is it?” I demanded, taunting him in my own disappointment. For all the horror of being forced to bring another into this life I had only stumbled into and suffered for ever since, there had also been hope that there might finally be an end to it. “Are you too much of a coward even to try?”

“I… can’t,” he seethed, sounding as if his inability was as much of a mystery to him as it was to me. He looked up at me and raised the blade again like he intended to bring it down into my chest, but he stopped short, as if some invisible hand was holding him back.

The knife fell to the ground and Enoch let out a furious snarl, shoving me out through the open cell door. “Get out!” he bellowed, gripping the edge of the bars as if overcome by sudden weakness.

I stumbled back, watching him suffer in bewilderment. I lingered a bit too long in my confusion, and the growl he let out next seemed to come from hell itself.

“I said, get out!”

I turned and ran. True to his word, there was a carriage waiting outside in the rain. There was no driver, so I climbed onto the platform and snapped the reins, spurring the horses into a gallop.

As I drove that night, I never looked back--and I never would again for the next two hundred years of solitude.