Bloodline by Joel Abernathy
8
Modern Day
Northern California
Centuries passedin torturous awareness within a blackness exceeded only by the depths of my mind, which had all but convinced me that anything other than darkness was an illusion. That light was nothing more than a fantasy, just like the caress of a lover who once held and made me whole.
And yet, splinters of light formed in the velvet landscape around me as sawdust poured through the crack in the coffin lid and into my eyes. Another strike like the one that had jarred me from my eternal listlessness came down on the coffin and rang like metal hitting pine. Some solid implement eclipsed the sliver of light, and try as I might to move, my hands remained fixed to my chest by the stake that had impaled me in my infernal resting place.
“You idiot!” a woman bellowed, her accent coarse and foreign. “Just pry the lid open with the damn crowbar before you chop him up.”
“I wanna make a peephole,” the one who’d pierced the coffin complained in a drawl as thick and slow as molasses. “What if he’s awake in there?”
“It’s been over two hundred years, shithead. He’s desiccated by now. And be careful not to break anything off when you pull him out.”
Her warning made me grimace—or it would have, if my face could shift expression—but it was fair enough. The stake and the flame had taken a far greater toll on me than blood loss ever had, but my experiments had never gone to such lengths. If what this brusque woman said was true and it had been two hundred years since my internment, I was probably closer to dust than flesh.
Something hard hit the side of the coffin with a decisive whap and the hinges groaned before light blinded me. I realized I could not shut my eyes, a problem that the continual darkness had rendered insignificant. Sunlight had never burned me the way it was supposed to, but it was torture now.
“I dunno, Bobby,” the male said in a worried tone. “He looks pretty alive to me.”
“Good. Now we can get him back to Daniel.”
I tried to speak, but only the faintest gurgle came from my throat. The coffin lid fell shut once more, plunging me into the darkness I was prepared to beg for. Thank God.
The coffin lifted, and I was transported, rather unceremoniously, to a new location. This was more life and movement and sound than I had been exposed to in centuries, and it was overwhelming.
For so long, I had longed for the day when there might come an end to the waiting. The emptiness. I cared not whether it was death or release, but now that the latter was upon me, I was woefully unprepared.
The strange porters who had unearthed me stopped walking, and I felt the coffin being placed on a flat surface. A door slammed and a beastly rumble sent vibrations through the ground beneath me. When the coffin slid forward, I realized I was being taken somewhere in a great carriage. The road passed with such smoothness, and we were traveling at such a fast rate that there must have been a team of four horses up front at least, but I couldn’t hear any hoofbeats.
I heard Bobby muttering to herself now and then, such profanities as I had never heard usher from a lady’s mouth, but her companion seemed to have taken a different carriage.
Where they were taking me, I did not dare to guess. They must have surely belonged to the Hart family. Only hunters would know who I was and where to find me. Perhaps they had finally decided to put me out of my misery.
When at last the carriage drew to a halt, I heard another door close and Bobby arguing with the same man from before for a moment before the coffin was lifted out of the carriage once more. Sunlight streamed in through the cracks in the lid, allowing me to adjust more gradually to the light. Footsteps echoed as if the building was vast.
They placed the coffin down and the lid opened again, but the interior of the building was dimly lit enough that I could make out the shadows of a high, flat ceiling. It was covered in dull white paint and nothing more. No moulding, no artistry. The room was as large as the acoustics suggested, with more windows than walls. The light that came through them was a strange, twilight blue even though I could see the sun sitting in the middle of the sky amid monstrous black structures that jutted upward into the clouds like great spears.
A woman appeared above me. Bobby, I assumed. Her dark hair fell in chunky pieces around an attractive, angular face, and her clothing was utterly absurd. A leather bodice stretched tight over her muscular frame, revealing her midsection right above trousers tight enough to reveal absolutely everything. I had never even seen a saloon girl dressed so garishly.
She planted her hands on her hips and stared down at me, chewing the inside of her lip as if she was puzzling over something.
Another set of footsteps echoed off the ceiling and a brute of a man appeared at her side, draping his burly arm over her shoulder. He cocked his blond head and scratched his golden-red beard. “Doesn’t look like much of a legendary vampire, does he?”
“He’s the sire of the Thomas line. He must be good for something.”
Thomas. That was a name I had hoped never to hear again. My heart might have raced, if it had been beating at all.
“Where’s Daniel?” asked the man.
“He’s coming. I called him.”
I hadn’t heard her call a soul since they’d set the coffin down, but if their Daniel had anything to do with that bastard family line, I wasn’t in any hurry to meet him.
I heard another set of footsteps, and then a tall man came into view. His hair was a bit too long and light, like Jonas’, and his face was so familiar in that way that was at once comforting and unsettling. Comforting because in a world of humans whose lifespans seemed like weeks compared to mine, familiarity was a rare gift. Unsettling because he had the angular features and sharp gaze of none other than Enoch Thomas.
This man was far sturdier with the body of a soldier rather than a city doctor, and the cut of his jaw was more defined, but the resemblance was uncanny enough that he might easily have been a brother or a nephew. Perhaps even a son, if Enoch had indulged in any philandering before his immortal rebirth.
“This is him?” There was no attempt to cover up the disappointment in his words. “Are you sure?”
“Unless you know of any other desiccated vamps buried under St. Leo’s, then yeah, that’s him,” Bobby snarked.
“You didn’t even take the stake out, Catch?”
The bigger man shrank back defensively. “Why’re you blaming me? Bobby didn’t, either!”
Daniel gave a sigh of irritation, crouching down beside the coffin. He stared down at me, frowning, as if he was studying some lifeless artifact in a museum. Perhaps that was all I was to him.
His hand closed around the stake and when he gave the first tug, I felt nothing even though it stuck in my flesh. It sounded like he was trying to pull wood from ice, and I felt something shatter inside my chest, but the moment he withdrew the stake, it left pain in the spot it had hollowed out.
Daniel raised his wrist to his mouth and tore into his own flesh. My sense of smell had been the last sense to abandon me, but it resurged with a vengeance. I thirsted for his blood with the same fervor as I had Jonas’, and as he made a fist above me and let the blood trickle over my lips, I found I wanted to drink. It went so starkly against all I had promised myself, but as the blood coated my tongue, my senses bathed in it.
In all my accursed years on this earth, I had never tasted blood as sweet, nor as potent. It was a drug and immediately, I became an addict.
My frozen flesh thawed out, and I grabbed Daniel’s arm the moment I had the mobility to do so. He made no attempt to push me away. I drank like an animal, even though I had not willingly attacked another person in centuries. The more I drank, the more human I felt. Blood always came with its dose of irony.
Daniel finally tried to pull his hand away, but my fangs only dug in deeper. It wasn’t a conscious effort to stop him, and neither was the growl tearing from my throat, muffled in his bloody flesh. He gave a sharp tug and shoved me away. “That’s enough,” he said in a voice like stone.
My head swam and my heart ached with a loneliness I had never known, not even in the coffin. His blood was still warm in my stomach. It was both more satisfying than anything I had ever tasted and not nearly enough.
The feeling was beginning to come back into my body. Unfortunately, the particular feeling was agony. I looked down and my arms were still more unnaturally pale than they had been ever since I’d been turned.
I stared up at him, feeling very much like a scolded child, while the others looked on. Bobby’s arms were folded and Catch was watching me nervously, like I might attack him. If he’d smelled half as good as Daniel tasted, he might have had reason to be afraid. He had enough blood in him to feed four vampires at least, and his eyes kept traveling the path of my scars.
“He stopped,” Bobby remarked, as if there was something strange in the cessation of my humiliating behavior rather than the behavior itself.
“I noticed,” Daniel said without taking his eyes off me. He reached out, and I froze for some odd reason, like a newborn deer. When he touched my scarred face, my recoiling shattered the trance. He stared curiously and demanded, “What is your name?”
I hugged myself against the cold, now that there was more warmth in my bones than in the room, but I didn’t dare rise from the floor. “Marcellus.” My voice was still raspy, but it surprised me I could speak at all.
His blood must have had magic in it. It certainly tasted like it.
“Marcellus what?” he demanded.
I hesitated. “I do not remember my surname, if that’s what you mean.” I wasn’t even sure I had ever had one. There was not much I remembered about my mortal life, and I may well have been the bastard child of another prostitute, for all I knew.
Daniel frowned, as if that answer displeased him. “What do you mean you don’t remember?”
His accent was so strange, just like the rest of them. So blunt and artless. It suited him in a way, except that there was more art in his appearance than in any of the great museums and galleries I had visited in my time. It was his manner that I found lacking.
“Exactly what I said, sir. When you have been around for as long as I have, you forget these things.”
Daniel stared at me, and so did the others. There was a twinkle in Catch’s eyes, as if he found his leader’s consternation amusing.
“‘Sir,’” he scoffed. “Some ancient.”
“Shut up,” Daniel muttered, scrutinizing me with those piercing eyes that were so close to Enoch’s in shade and so different in every other way it bewildered me. “You,” he barked. “On your feet.”
I moved at once, but found my body to be quite far from compliant. I caught myself on the edge of the coffin and winced. Evidently, the blood had not returned to all my extremities.
The room was full of strange furniture. It was all sharp and flat and made of the kind of leather you put on a horse’s saddle, not the kind you would use to upholster a sofa. Then, there were the strange gadgets by the sink across the room. These heathens washed their dishes in the parlor?
“Oh, for God’s sake, this is pathetic,” Bobby muttered. “He’s obviously not the vampire the Harts buried. They probably swapped him out with this guy just to fuck with us.”
“No,” Daniel murmured. “This is him. He looks exactly like the drawing. Look at those scars.”
“Drawing?” I echoed, struggling to make sense of their words. I took care to hide the right side of my face in my hair. It was a shade duller than black, as if the years had stripped some of the color from it. Or maybe it was simply the dust that covered me.
Daniel ignored my question and moved on to one of his own. “Do you know why you were buried?”
“Yes,” I whispered, grief rushing in to fill the space his blood had left. My nails cracked the coffin’s wood and Catch jumped like a mouse had run up his leg. “They tried to burn me, but they could not.”
Catch shuddered.
“Who?” Daniel demanded.
“The Harts.” I looked between them. “How did you know where I was? Are you hunters as well?”
“Hunters?” Bobby cocked an eyebrow. They were all looking at me in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I… no,” I said. My throat tightened. All the questions, all the light, all the sound was getting to me.
“Looks like he’s gonna puke up your blood, Daniel,” Catch remarked. “Maybe he’s used to the good stuff.”
“I said shut your fucking mouth.”
They were a profane lot. Profane and vulgar. Everything about them, from their words to their bizarre clothing and strange furniture. My head hurt, throbbing with every beat of my newly functional heart.
I had to get out of there. I had to get fresh air, even if the price for it was sunlight. I gripped the coffin lid and pulled myself upright. They all flinched, all drew their weapons at once. Strange pistols, blunter and smoother than any I had ever seen, just like the people who’d unearthed me.
What was this world of harsh lines and vulgar phrases and damnable brightness? I staggered toward the only exit I could see and Catch moved to block me, filling the entire space from one wall to the other. “Where do you think you’re goin’?” he asked, his voice gruff in contrast to the fear in his gaze.
Fear of me, I realized only once they were all three surrounding me. They knew what I was, but surely that meant they knew enough to have wooden bullets loaded into those guns. Perhaps a hardy teak. It wouldn’t kill me, but it would certainly stop me long enough for them to realize they had nothing to be afraid of. After all, they were the ones who’d brought me back to life in the first place.
I gave up on trying to escape and moved back, keeping the wall behind me. I collapsed against it and tried to remember how to breathe. The invisible hand around my throat grew ever tighter, and I touched it, finding my skin still papery and dry. “I know not what you want from me. I cannot give you answers I do not have. Please, just let me go.”
“Let you go?” Daniel echoed. “You are, by every indication, the oldest sire of the Thomas line. We raised you for a purpose.”
“Then state it,” I spat, losing patience. If he was going to be an insensitive clod, so could I. “And while you’re at it, you might state your full name as well rather than making demands of a perfect stranger like some barbarian.”
I waited for him to take revenge for my insolence, but instead, amusement shone in his eyes. What eyes they were, and what a beautiful face they were set in. It was a shame he bore such a strong resemblance to the man I loathed more than any other.
“A barbarian,” Daniel said with a dry laugh. He moved in front of me, planting his hands on the wall on either side of my head. He leaned in, a dangerous look in his eyes that did not have the effect on me he seemed to intend. “Let me make something clear to you, Marcellus,” he said, his tongue casting obscenity upon my name. But his voice… It was low and rough, like velvet rubbed the wrong way, raising prickles on my skin. “You are nothing more to me than a parasite. The original parasite, perhaps, but a parasite nonetheless.”
I swallowed, the taste of him still on my breath as I felt the caress of his against my forehead. He was taller than I was, even when he was bending down to match my level. Taller, broader, stronger. Everything in this world was bigger than the one I remembered, but most of all, it was his energy that engulfed me. It filled my lungs, leaving no room for air, but my head had been spinning long before that.
“And the name of the one who lowers himself to speak to a parasite?” I asked, summoning all my courage to hold his gaze. Something told me if I didn’t, I would regret it.
He stared at me for a long while, and I forgot to breathe for the duration of it. Finally, his lips curved dangerously into a smile that would carve itself into my flesh deeper than my sire’s fangs had ever gone.
“Daniel Morales,” he said, chilling my bones and turning my blood to ice once more. “Direct descendant of the Thomas line, for what little that means these days. In vampire terms, I believe that makes us family.”