Chapter 11 #3
“Not me.” Jesse opened the book to show her that it was more like a journal, with long blocks of handwritten notes on each page.
“Minegold figures it was from someone like us, someone who knew vampires or demons enough to know how to kill them, knew how they stayed alive. He wrote some really detailed accounts. I skimmed it once.” Jesse squirmed guiltily.
“What is it?” Sophie demanded as he shifted his eyes away from hers.
“I was a horny twenty-something-year-old when Minegold first gave me the run of his library. I read lots of lore about vamps, but I didn’t like most of what I read.
No one wants to hear that nine out of ten vampires turn into soulless beasts who kill innocent people.
Half of this book is like that. The other half has some juicy stuff.
I remember putting it down in a hurry because my mother came over unexpectedly—probably with a bundt cake.
” He laughed self-consciously, hand rubbing the back of his neck as he shifted from foot to foot.
“Juicy stuff?”
“Jesse? Come and take a look at something in my ‘apothecary’, will you?” Mr. Minegold called.
“Be right back,” Jesse whispered, leaving with a lingering kiss.
Sophie turned her eyes to the skinny volume left in her hands.
The handwriting was old and faded, thick dashes and jots making words that were hard to read and definitely not spelled like they were today.
Some pages had sketches, gruesome ones of bloody fangs and long, clawed fingers. She turned those pages hastily.
One picture toward the end of the book caught her eye. If there had been bodice-rippers back in the 1500s or whenever this thing was written, the picture of the swooning female and her lover could have been on the cover.
If the lover had a tendency to bite.
“The vampires in London and Paris are different from those I met in the mountains of Russia. They blend in with society and take lovers for blood and pleasure. The humans they espouse share willingly for the release it gives to both.”
Sophie stopped, her face warm. So, biting makes people “release”? She tucked that away in the back of her mind, information unneeded just now.
She hurriedly perused another page of stuff that would have made Puritans send for the stakes and torches before she found a notation that caught her eye.
Offspring.
The legend included a sketch of a baby in a female’s arms, dark shadows hanging over them both.
“Vampires do not produce offspring as humans do. They pass their demonic “seed” through an exchange of blood with one who is already drained of their own. The new vampire appears the same age as his host and thereafter the body doesn’t age.
Dhampir are rare, almost a myth among the vampires themselves. They are the offspring of a vampire and his mortal wife or lover. They must have already consummated their union before the vampire’s turning.”
Sophie read hopefully but found nothing new to her. Her eyes were beginning to blur and burn from looking at the faded writing on aged pages. Lots of notes. Few explanations.
The last section under offspring made her arch her brows. “The demon may also choose a wife or husband of its own kind. Vampires seldom choose demons of a different sect, but if they do, compatible ones may spawn.”
Sophie’s eyes widened. Am I spawn? I’m a human. Humans aren’t spawn. Well, technically...
Sketches of deformed halflings made her stomach twist. “Breeding is unsuccessful—” She turned the page, “unless sacrifices and terrible deeds are performed to ensure the child is born whole, usually in the guise of a changeling to be raised as a human.”
Changeling? Not human. Human in disguise.
I’m every bad thing the bullies ever called me?
She barely made it to the wastebasket before lunch reappeared.
JESSE AND MR. MINEGOLD were amazing. Jesse scooped her off the floor while Minegold emptied the sick basin, wordlessly and without judgement. Jesse read the pages she shoved at him.
“I have a heartbeat and a pulse and a fricking period,” Sophie muttered into his chest, tears still flowing. “I don’t care what I am, I said that, but it was a lie. I care if I’m not human because then I lived a lie this whole time. I tricked my parents. They wanted a human child to raise.”
“Baby, if anyone tricked your parents, it wasn’t you.
And a changeling- well, maybe that has different meanings.
It might mean changed into a human. And what makes you human, anyway?
Didn’t they do blood tests? They didn’t come back from the lab and say ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t human blood, we can’t test it.
’ You’re a human. Now, I’m not, but I look like one. ” He shook his head, pain in his eyes.
“That doesn’t matter to me. Even if,” she swallowed, reaching for the tissues Mr. Minegold set beside her, “even if I wasn’t human, I wouldn’t mind if my parents hadn’t raised me thinking I was.”
“You are human. You are not changeling as when the fae leave their babes in exchange for others. This man, this book, was written almost 600 years ago. He does not know everything, nor every term.” Minegold perched on the arm of a wingback chair across from the couple.
“But I know there are other meanings for that word. Changed into. Humans can be made vampires and werewolves, even succubi and incubi. Did you know that in some cases, demons can be made human?”
“Not covered in high school biology,” Sophie replied bitterly.
Mr. Minegold leaned forward, hand in a fist. He turned it over and opened it, palm up, to Sophie.
“What’s this?” she asked, carefully taking a folded bit of cloth from his palm.
“I wore this.”
Sophie opened it carefully and smothered a gasp. It was gray and tattered, but she could still make out the six-pointed star with letters over it. “Oh, Mr. Minegold—”
“Call me Jakob, little one.” He took it back and stuffed it in his pocket. “They told us once that we were not human.”
“My parents, too. Nigerian. Armenian.”
“Ah. Because of blood or coloring. We are so very strict sometimes in how we think. We should maybe worry more about how we feel. I haven’t been ‘human’ in over eighty years, but I think I am growing more human all the time, even this weekend.
I never thought to have a son again, and now look at me. He brings me home a daughter.”
Sophie slid forward like a well-rosined bow across strings, into the older man’s arms. “I’m sorry I’m making a big deal.”
“Hush now. It’s not a ‘big deal’ to want to know your story, your heritage.
Some people try to steal it from you, some try to hide it for your own good.
I doubt your father thought it would go well if he handed you to your parents with a reminder that your father was a vampire and your mother was a. .. something else.”
Sophie stayed, head on his shoulder for another moment before Jesse pulled her back.
“You never told me to call you Jakob,” Jesse muttered, half-accusingly.
“It sounds odd if my s— if I—”
“You ought to make him an uncle. Uncle Jakob sounds nice.” Sophie sniffed in heavily.
“She speaks the truth. And...” Mr. Minegold pulled something from his other pocket. “Feel like giving a little blood to the old vampire, dear?”
“What?” Sophie blinked in surprise.
“Come with me.”
THE “APOTHECARY” TURNED out to be an old-fashioned canning pantry, but aside from a few jars of pickles and peach preserves, the shelves were filled with things that would have shocked most 1950s housewives.
“In this line of work, sometimes you fight dark magic with light magic. This,” he shook the little bottle from his pocket in front of Sophie’s eyes, “this is Bindwort. Mixed with a drop of blood from the being in question, it shows remarkable things.”
“Like what?” Sophie tore her eyes away from
“To be blunt, this thing is like a monster identifier,” Jesse sighed.
“When something comes to town and we don’t get there in time, we mix blood or slime or whatever traces we find left behind with Bindwort.
Toss in a match. Do a spell of revelation and watch the smoke take form.
We can’t ask your parents or your birth parents these questions.
So... Uncle Jakob,” Jesse rolled the name experimentally off the tongue, “wondered about this. Want to try?”
“How much blood?” Sophie asked with some slight trepidation.
“A drop. Watch.” Minegold lit a match and threw it into a small metal bowl on the counter just outside the pantry.
Jesse dropped in a handful of the Bindwort, which smelled like a mixture of orange and sage.
Taking one of the seemingly endless tacks he used for maps and the like, Minegold poked his ring finger and let the drop of blood fall into the smoking bowl while he muttered something in a language Sophie didn’t recognize.
It could be Hebrew, Greek, or Latin for all she knew.
Two forms started to appear in the smoke. The first was a smoky, undefined version of Minegold’s human face. Alongside it rose another visage with elongated canines and feral eyes, bright beams of red in their centers.
“Man and vampire. What I was. What I am. Shall we see what the smoke tells you?” He held out another pin.
Before she could change her mind or think too hard about it, Sophie jabbed the thumb of her left hand with the pin and let her blood flow into the bowl.
Minegold chanted again, eyes riveted above the bowl.
“It’ll be okay. It’s okay, always okay as long as we have each other,” Jesse murmured, lips pressed against her hair, arms fastened around her waist.
“Look!” Sophie pointed as her own face appeared and hovered, a misty form that blurred and shifted as the smoke kept flowing as the fire burned.
“Oh. Human. That’s good. I guess—”
“Wait.” Minegold held up his hand.
Slowly, like the curtains parting as a show began, the wavering face split, becoming two faces. One was angular and red-eyed, sharp teeth in a snarling smile. “Oh, God.” Sophie’s knees buckled. It’s real. It’s true. My dad was a vampire and my mother—
The other half of the smoke took longer to form, slowly articulating not just a face but a tiny, curvaceous body made of glowing orange flames, swirling, tiny tongues of fire all over her skin as she danced, hands circling and swaying.
Tiny horns nestled in flowing hair. “What is that?” Jesse breathed out.
“Ifrita!” Minegold gasped.
Sophie looked at the older man, unsure if he’d spoken a word in a foreign tongue or if that was a kind of creature. “What?”
“Ifrit. A fire-demon, related to the djinn.”
“Gin?”
“You call them genies. Ifrits are similar in nature. Ifritias are the females, and they are extremely rare. Natural temptresses, they live in deserts and offer wishes at terrible prices, or seduce... well. That is the nature of many demons, my child, to grant wishes and seduce. Even vampires. We look quite handsome.” He tried to laugh but it faded fast.
“Fire... and Vampire. Don’t mix.” Sophie felt hollow as she watched the flaming woman dance. The smoking male face seemed to watch, eyes glowing brighter. “Hey? Did that move?” She tried not to scream, but watching the figures in the smoke move was a whole different level of creepy.
“I think—” Jesse’s voice died away as the dancing flame seemed to notice her smoky audience, sashaying close to him, but he drew back.
“Shh. They cannot be together.”
“Well, I’m here so they must have worked it out,” Sophie hissed crossly. She watched the forms circle one another now. Suddenly, without warning, the flames went out. A new face emerged, every bit as seductive, but still. The smoky couple intertwined.
“She gave up her powers for him. But... ifritas are not mortal. They cannot live as humans.”
“I don’t think she did,” Jesse pointed to the hazy couple. The gray woman grew more and more translucent. Her middle grew larger while the rest of her shrank. A tiny spark appeared in the center.
“That’s me,” Sophie whispered, understanding.
The three figures watched in silence as the rest of the tale was told. The spark grew and left the body of the woman, who promptly fell to ash. A fine mist drifted down, making the fire in the bowl hiss and sputter.
The vampire began to grow fainter as well.
“He can’t live without her.” Jesse’s arms tightened. “I know the feeling.”
Sophie nodded, the lump in her throat preventing speech. Only the spark was left now. The spark slowly grew into a pale, pale girl made of white smoke. The fire had burnt out.