Chapter 15. William
william
A man does not forget his own grave. Especially when he dug it himself.
“How are we going to find this thing in broad daylight and with people all over?” asks Lorena, her gaze darting around like she is afraid to get in trouble.
“Just keep watch for anyone who is paying us too much attention,” says William, approaching the redbrick wall.
“And what will you do?”
“Search.” He tilts his ear toward the wall and starts tapping each brick, one by one, and listening for the slightest difference.
“What exactly are you—?”
“Quiet,” he says sharply. “Someone is coming.”
The front door opens, and William ducks down, pretending he dropped something as a woman steps out of the building. Then he springs back up and resumes his march past the bricks, knocking on each one.
He peeks at Lorena and spies her pacing back and forth, eyes darting in every direction, like a soldier in a war zone where the bullets could come from anywhere. His lips twitch, but the impulse to smirk is smothered by a frown as he starts to run out of bricks.
He was so sure he had chosen a spot at around head height, but he is not hearing anything. Could he be wrong about where he hid the box?
Or is he wrong about this whole dimension—?
There.
As he knocks on one of the bricks closest to the corner, he finally hears it. A slightly hollower sound, too faint for human detection.
Lorena approaches him. “There’s a family heading straight to this building—”
She is cut off by a loud crack as William punches the brick hard enough to crush it without doing much more damage.
Or so he thought.
Fracture lines stretch across the wall, but he does not have time to assess the damage. He hurriedly brushes aside the broken pieces to reach for the box he buried.
Lorena is crouched low, hands over her head like a bomb just went off. The front door flings open, and right as people start to spill out of Massachusetts Hall to inspect the source of the noise, William pulls her around the corner and runs.
He does not stop or let her go until they are at the other end of the Yard. Lorena rakes in a deep gulp of air as she steps away from him.
He assumes she is only dizzy, until he registers how her gaze is fixed on the small wooden box in his hands.
“Is that—?”
She sounds too terrified to finish the thought, and he does not answer her.
His knuckles hurt more than they should from breaking that brick. He has not ingested nearly enough blood to be expending this much energy. Not after a centuries-long fast.
Lorena is still staring at the box like it is an explosive, and he tucks it under his arm and starts walking.
She falls into stride with him, and they arrive at a building with a very elevated entrance.
The steps leading up to it are so giant that students are seated on every level, doing things like reading a book, or scarfing down a meal, or checking their phones.
Across the top of the building are the words: THE HARRY ELKINS WIDENER MEMORIAL LIbrARY AD MCMXIV.
William climbs to a step that does not have many people on it and sits down. Even though he has slowed to human speed, he still moves so quickly that Lorena has only just started climbing.
Opening the box, he sees a book, a family portrait, and a letter. He swipes the letter, stuffing it in his pocket before Lorena arrives.
“What’s that?” she asks when she joins him.
William stares down at the dusty box, its paper contents yellowing and curling with time.
“Me,” he says, picking up his copy of Hamlet. The full leather binding features a geometric pattern with gold-spun text on the cover and spine. He can still recite the full play from memory.
Lorena reaches for the portrait and brings it closer to her face. William remembers they had to sit still for hours while it was drawn. There are a dozen people featured: he and his parents, his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins on his father’s side.
“You haven’t changed at all,” says Lorena, sounding breathless as she looks from him to the portrait. “Are they all vampires?”
He shakes his head. “Only four of them were at the time.”
“Why did you bury this stuff?” she asks.
“When I was turned … I struggled to accept my new identity. A friend suggested I might find closure if I buried my human self, and these things represented who I was before becoming a vampire—my family and one of my favorite books. Everything else was lost when the Legion burned down our house.”
He is not sure why he is sharing any of this with her. It has no bearing on his current situation.
“Someone actually changed our history records and erased you from it.”
Lorena’s pitch rises with every word of her question-statement. Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence, she resists the truth.
She pulls out her phone, and as she taps on some images, William wonders if she is about to break their agreement and share the recording she made of him. Then the words she is typing fill the screen:
vampires great fires of the 1700s legion of fire
Unlike the school computer, this time a list of entries populates the device. William notes how her heartbeat quickens as he leans closer to read over her shoulder. “How did you manage that?” he asks.
“The internet. It’s like this invisible web that connects the whole world.”
He takes the device from her hands. Phrases underlined in blue stare back at him, but when he reads the text excerpts beneath each line, the search terms are scattered and unrelated.
“You scroll like this,” she says, brushing her finger across the screen and making the text move. “And when you find an entry you want to read, you click the highlighted blue link.”
He skims through the list and clicks on the blue text when he reads: The Great Fires of New Orleans.
More text appears, detailing fires that ravaged the city in 1788 and 1794.
Even though the entry does not mention vampires, William is certain this was the Legion’s doing.
New Orleans has—or had—one of the greatest vampire concentrations in the world.
William returns to the results and keeps scrolling. Twenty pages later, he never comes across the phrase Legion of Fire. They have managed to remain entirely in the shadows for centuries.
“We’ve been gone too long. We should return to the group,” says Lorena, her voice distant and gaze locked on the portrait of William’s family, which she has been staring at for a while.
“I can locate them.” He holds out his hand for the portrait, and she seems to hesitate before handing it over.
William rises to his feet and pockets the piece of paper, leaving the eighteenth-century box behind on the library steps as he leads Lorena across campus toward their classmates. Since he made sure to breathe on the bus to seem human, he has the group’s scent and can pick it up.
They enter a building called the Science Center, where their classmates appear to have disbanded because their scents are no longer bound together. Then he leads Lorena toward Salma.
“Oh!” says Lorena when she spots her friend in some kind of food hall. “Let’s not interrupt.”
Salma is leaning against the wall and talking to the curly-haired boy, Trevor.
“There you are!”
It is Lorena’s other roommate, Tiffany, who a moment ago was posing for the photographer, Zach. She has just spotted Lorena and now Salma notices her, too.
The two girls leap over and grab each of Lorena’s arms. “We’ll bring her right back,” Salma says to William, leading Lorena away as if they could speak out of his earshot.
“Where did you go?” asks Salma when they have rounded the corner.
The vampire’s hearing homes in on their conversation. “He just wanted to check out some historical building, and I went with him,” says Lorena in a tone that implies it was no big deal.
“Do not downplay this, Navarro! If you’re breaking the rules, you must really like him—”
“What about you and Trevor?” Lorena cuts in. “Did I just see you two flirting?”
“Shh, I don’t want him to hear you,” says Salma. “But yes—we made out.”
The girls squeal, and it’s so loud in his ears that William has to tune them out. Then he sees that Trevor is walking toward him.
“Protein bar?” He offers the vampire some kind of snack packaged in metallic foil.
“No, thanks.”
Trevor rips open the wrapper with his teeth. “So, you’re from New Hampshire?” he asks as he bites off the top of his treat.
“I am.”
“You look familiar, but I can’t place you,” says Trevor. “Why do you think that is?”
William shrugs innocently, yet he wonders at Trevor’s tone. It is almost as if he is accusing the vampire of something. Or perhaps William is just being paranoid.
“I must remind you of someone you know,” he answers, and Trevor moves closer to him than any human should dare.
“Maybe.” The boy tips his head to the side, his body still invading William’s personal space. “Do you play sports?”
“No.”
“I’m putting together a football team.” Trevor steps back, but it is only to get a full view of William’s physique. “You have the right build. Come to tryouts.”
“No, thank you,” says William, enjoying the way Trevor’s expression hardens at the rejection. “It might interfere with Shakespeare club.”
Trevor’s look of befuddlement almost makes William crack a smile—except he is no longer aware of Lorena’s location. He walks away from the boy to do a quick visual scan of the area, inhaling deeply to isolate her scent—
And he catches a whiff of something else.
A scent both ancient and familiar.
He strides forward to follow it, yet since he must move at mortal speed, he loses it quickly. It was too fleeting a thing to chase.
The ghost of a smell.
And considering where he is, it is no surprise William’s mind resurrected this particular memory.
He spent only one year as a student at Harvard, yet it marked his peak happiness as a mortal.
It was on this campus that William first read The Odyssey and Paradise Lost, that he discovered the poems of Anne Bradstreet and the philosophies of Voltaire, that he fell in love with Cordelia and Viola, that he dreamt of a million futures and the whole world was within his reach.
It was also here that everything was ripped away from him.
NEITHER WILLIAM nor Lorena says much on the bus ride back to school.
She has been distant from the moment she laid eyes on that box. It appears she was truly holding on to the hope that he hailed from another version of reality. It is strange to consider that such an outlandish theory seemed easier than accepting the evidence before her.
A vote is once more conducted to choose a movie for the return trip, and something Lorena describes as an “old cult favorite” wins. It is called Never Been Kissed.
“Have you?” William asks her as the film begins to play.
“Have I…?” she asks, sounding as if she is coming out of a reverie.
“Ever been kissed?”
The question seems to snap her to full attention, because she swallows and blinks a few times. Her reaction makes him feel self-conscious for asking in the first place, especially since he is not sure why he did it.
“Yeah,” she says after a moment, “but I’ve never been in love.”
She sucks in her lips, as if she did not mean to share that last part. And it strikes him that they should not be confiding such things to each other. So he adjusts the volume on the headphones that were provided and tunes in to the screen.
He finds this moving picture technology quite compelling, and the film holds his interest while it plays. Yet once it is over, he feels emptier than before. Like he lost something he never had.
Upon arriving back at the manor, he slips away without anyone noticing. He heads to the library, his favorite place at the school. Dropping into an armchair that’s bathed in silver moonlight, he pulls out the letter and reads his self-authored obituary:
A Eulogy for William’s Humanity
William delighted in the pursuits of the learned, the grace of the dance, and the freedom of the saddle.
He harbored dreams of a marital union forged in love, of begetting heirs, and of penning tales sprung from his own imaginings.
But alas, all that was William perished when his heart ceased its beat.
For what creed remains to a man who is betrayed by his own blood?