Bloodline by Joel Abernathy
5
Time wasa construct that had long since ceased to hold any meaning to me, but the three months that followed in the wake of Jonas’ confession made me a slave to the calendar once more.
Every morning as I watched him sleep, since he needed far more rest than I required to function, I wondered when the day would come that he left me. It had been written in the stars from the moment I’d found him lying half-frozen in the snow, but at night, as we lay entwined, it was so easy to let myself believe the lies his passionate caresses told so beautifully.
No matter how beautiful, there was no deception that could change the fact that he was a hunter--and I, for the first time in my long life, was the prey.
Whenever I attempted to ask him of his plans, if only so I could prepare myself for the separation, he grew sullen and withdrawn. In fear of losing him sooner, even if that was probably for the best, I kept my fears to myself.
Then the day came. I knew it not by the overcast sky or the crow sitting ominously outside the lofted window, but by the look in his eyes as he sat across from me at the breakfast table. Normally, I made a point of taking at least a few bites of whatever breakfast I had made while he was out tending to the animals, but my stomach was already full of butterflies.
“When?” I asked quietly. I was afraid if I spoke at full volume, I would betray my weakness.
Jonas looked up, the trouble on his face turning to confusion. “When what?”
“When are you leaving? The sun sets in about ten hours, so depending on where you plan to stay for the night, you’ll want to get moving, and Skybird will need to be fed first.”
He frowned. “How did you know I was planning on going back?”
“I’m old, Jonas,” I said with a thin smile. “A hundred lifetimes spent watching humans from a distance and you start to pick up on things.”
“I’m coming back, Marcellus. If I don’t go home and take care of things, my family will come looking for me, but this isn’t goodbye.”
“No, of course not.”
He dropped his fork, impatience etching lines into his brow. “You callin’ me a liar?”
“Absolutely,” I laughed. “You’re human. All of your promises that involve the word ‘forever’ turn out to be a lie eventually, but you can’t help it. Sooner or later, you all leave, whether it’s because you die or simply because you move on to something new.”
I had decided long ago that the single greatest gift of mortality was the ability to forget.
“I’m coming back.” His voice was rough with frustration and sincerity. It moved my heart, but it didn’t change my mind. He meant the words now, I believed that, but he would leave me all the same.
They all did. Ian. Enoch. Now him. Jonas was just another brief flicker of flame in the darkness, but I doubted I would ever find another who warmed my heart the way he did.
He was a cruel bastard. Crueler even than Enoch. He just didn’t realize it.
“Alright,” I said, standing to clear the dishes. I didn’t want the last moments we shared to be spent arguing, or worse, trying to talk him out of leaving at all. If he stayed, it would be for all the wrong reasons. And what could I give him, anyway?
These last few months had been a dream, but they had to come to an end sometime. No matter how alive I felt in his arms, no matter how anomalous my beating heart made me, I was still a vampire. He would either grow old and waste the fleeting bloom of his youth on one who could never return the life he shared alike, or he would have to surrender his mortality and all that made him the man he was. It was a losing proposition either way, and I had promised myself I would cut my losses before his became too great.
Jonas grabbed my arm before I could walk past him. When I finally met his eyes, they were full of the same grit I imagined many a vampire had seen before meeting his final death. “You don’t have to believe me, but one day soon, you’ll know that I’m a man of my word. When that day comes, I expect a proper apology.”
A laugh welled in my throat, but it might as easily have been a sob. My mouth quirked at the one corner, and I reached down to cup his sandpapery jawline. “And you shall have it, my charming liar. In your dreams as well as mine.”
He set his jaw and stood from the table. For a moment, the fire in his eyes was such that I thought he might strike me. Instead, he took me into his arms and kissed me with enough force to wound me in an entirely different way.
When he finally released me, I felt the floor shift. My world was upended once more as he donned that battered old hat and left me to rejoin the one he rightfully belonged to.
I watched as his horse disappeared over the horizon line because I always had been a glutton for punishment. When all of life was pain, you learned to mine the nuggets of pleasure within it.
* * *
Nine months.It wasn’t such a long time in the scheme of things, even to a mortal whose life was as fleeting as a dream. It was, however, enough time for a new life to mature to fruition. Enough time for seasons to shift thrice over, and for spring to turn into the first white etchings of winter.
With the first snowfall, my heart filled with nostalgia. Being separated from Jonas had been even more agonizing than being cut off from my own damnable spawn.
I couldn’t help but entertain myself with the notion that perhaps Jonas truly was my soulmate. That if I had lived out my mortal life as intended and died when I was supposed to, I would have been reborn with my soul intact and thus in a suitable condition to join with his. That we might have been friends, lovers, perhaps even brothers. I would have happily been his wife, his mistress, or the man who mended his clothes. The nature of the connection mattered less. I would have taken him any way I could get him. But none of it mattered, because he was gone, and I was adrift again.
Until I wasn’t.
One day, while I was outside shoveling the path to the barn, I saw him on the horizon. He was much too far away to see clearly, and now that my corner of the Wild West had been domesticated, it wasn’t terribly uncommon for others to come onto my land, but I knew it was him all the same. It was the strange ache in my chest that made me look up rather than continuing to shovel.
My heart leaped when I saw the golden horse come up over the hill behind him. I took off running toward him and stopped short only when I realized Jonas wasn’t alone. The look on his face turned my joy to stone as three men, one his age and two a good twenty years older at least, fanned out on the hillside. One held a crucifix in his hand.
I turned back to Jonas, the last piece of me that hadn’t broken the day he left shattering. “I guess I owe you that apology, after all,” I said once he was close enough to hear. My voice was hoarse, but the pain ended there. The rest of me was already freezing over, and I cursed the day I had ever allowed this man to thaw me out, but it wasn’t him I resented for the betrayal.
Most of all, I blamed myself.
“Just come quietly and you won’t be hurt,” he said gruffly as his family surrounded me. Two of them were holding chains surely drenched in holy water, while the third held a stake in the hand that wasn’t holding the crucifix.
I had fed little, but I had a fifty-fifty shot at killing three of them before the one I could never bring myself to harm, even now, got those chains around me. I just lacked the will to try.
“No daywalker charm?” the oldest demanded as he looped his chain around my neck and yanked it tightly enough to shift my footing.
“I told you, he doesn’t have one,” said Jonas. His eyes never left me, but the coward wouldn’t look into mine. I lifted my head to make it easier for him.
“But he’s not from the east coast.”
The obviously false statement caught me off-guard, but Jonas made no attempt to correct it. His face was blank, like he didn’t even want to acknowledge it. Perhaps he’d forgotten. He was sharp, but was it really a surprise, considering he’d never cared about me in the first place?
“He’s an anomaly,” Jonas replied.
“Sure is uglier than most,” the other young one snorted. Jonas’ brother. It must have been. The cut of their jaws and the shade of their hair were too similar.
Jonas’ mouth hardened into a stern line, but he said nothing.
“You were right about him being tame, at least. Come over here, Berne, take care of his wrists,” the old man demanded.
I turned to face the middle-aged hunter, and he stopped shy of me when I held out my arms. He gulped and circled around, grabbing one of my wrists to pull it behind my back and then the other, binding them both.
“What’s to say these’ll work on him if a stake won’t?” Berne demanded.
“They will,” Jonas said firmly. He reached for me, and I stepped out of his range. The old man gave me a hard shove, and I staggered down the hillside toward the wagon they had waiting.
I planted my feet and turned to face Jonas. “The animals.” He owed me that, at least.
“I’ll have someone come for them,” he said with a curt nod.
They opened the wagon door, and Berne threw me inside before I had a choice in the matter. The interior of the wagon was dark, but sunlight slipped in through a few gaps where the canvas folded over itself. I heard them arguing about who would take the reins for a moment before the harsh snap of leather on flank started the wagon on its rambling journey.
I leaned back against the wooden seat and closed my eyes, trying to allow any feeling to come to the surface. Betrayal, pain, hatred, it didn’t matter. Just something other than the emptiness that had overcome me the moment I realized why Jonas had returned to me after all these months.
If it was merely a matter of killing me, they would have done it by now, assuming they knew how. They could have locked me in my cabin and burned it down, but they hadn’t for a reason. Their whispered conversation that I could hear even through the rattling of the carriage wheels and the horses’ hooves on the packed dirt road only confirmed it.
They planned to take me back for study. To learn why I was so unlike the other things they hunted, and to discover if perhaps there was some way I might be used against them. At least now I knew what Jonas had seen in me. All I had ever been to him was a specimen.
The journey was long, but not nearly as long as I had imagined. By the time we reached our destination, I wasn’t sure which hurt more: Jonas’ betrayal, or the fact that he had been a relatively short distance away all along.
When Berne opened the door, I stepped out willingly even though there seemed to be a void inside me, swallowing up every last bit of the energy I reserved for normal tasks, such as walking. He grabbed the chain around my neck and led me like a dog into a colonial estate that looked quite charming and domestic from the outside. The ghostly echoes of the sacred land it had been erected on had another story to tell.
I was led through the fine parlor up a set of carpeted stairs where Jonas appeared at the top. He stared down at me as a golden statue erected to pass down judgment on my fate. I chose to look instead at the damask papering on the walls in apathetic defiance.
“In here,” he said, opening the door to a room as finely furnished as any other part of the house I’d seen.
Berne stopped and frowned. “You sure about this? We could at least use the cellar.”
“The cellar is thirty feet wide. We’d never be able to sustain the ward. Besides, he’s not like the others.”
Verne snorted in disbelief, giving me a push inside the room. I frowned, staring up at the invisible thing that seemed to loom over the doorway. It was an innate sense more than anything else, and when I reached out, the electricity that pricked my fingertips confirmed there was some dark work at play.
I had seen a witch’s magic only once, and only then in the aftereffects of the tincture she had given to ward off the bleeding sickness in a young mother. There had always seemed to be more psychology to it than mysticism, but it was far from the only instance in which I had been proven wrong that day.
“It’s a seal,” Jonas said sternly. “You won’t be getting through it, so save yourself the effort.”
“And what do you intend to gain by keeping me here?” I asked, keeping my tone measured and my head held high.
I could tell Jonas was weighing his response carefully, and Berne was watching him even more intently. “You’re going to be studied,” he finally replied. “We believe your blood has properties that could prove useful to us, and if you give it willingly, you can count on fair treatment.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you can count on us taking it either way. Don’t be a fool.” The hardness in his tone was far more cutting than his words. He reached through the doorway, evidently unburdened by the effects of the magic, and slipped the chain from around my neck before unbinding my wrists. “This is a far better life than the one you’ve led, and you’ll be treated much better here than any of your kind could expect elsewhere.”
“Your kindness astounds me, Jonas,” I said bitterly, slamming the door in his face. I felt him linger on the other side for a moment, but whether he chose to let his indignation slide or he simply didn’t want to risk losing his temper on his latest acquisition, I heard both men walk away.
Once again, I was alone, but unlike the last nine months I had spent in solitude, this loneliness knew no depths.