Chapter 35. William
william
He is flying.
William is glad Nate purchased him a seat by the window, because he cannot peel his gaze away from the clouds. He is soaring through the air, like a bird. If his heart could beat, it would be pounding.
When the plane lands and passengers disembark at the airport, William must wait in a long line with the others, until an agent asks to see his passport. “What is your business in France?” he asks in accented English.
“I do not have a business.”
“Why are you visiting us?”
“To see the Notre-Dame Cathedral.”
“How long are you staying?”
William realizes he has no idea, and he opens the email Nate sent with his itinerary. There is a return ticket for … “January fifteenth.”
“A month and a half,” says the agent. “A long time to spend in Notre-Dame. Where will you be staying?”
“I will have to find a hotel room, I suppose.”
The agent frowns with distrust, and William holds his gaze to compel him. Let me through, the vampire commands without speaking.
“Enjoy your stay,” says the agent, frowning in confusion as he hands William back his passport. “Au revoir.”
It is nighttime when he finally leaves the airport. William spots a row of cars and lines up for a ride. “Notre-Dame Cathedral,” he says, then he sits back and surveys Paris after being away for centuries.
Electric streetlights and neon signs illuminate the streets that were once dimly lit by candlelight and stars—the latter of which are now obscured by the city glow.
It feels like the past has a stronger hold here than in the United States.
Skyscrapers abound, like in New York City, yet the modern glass and steel is juxtaposed with remnants of William’s Paris, like the narrow cobblestone streets and mansard-roofed buildings.
By the time he exits the cab and beholds the cathedral, he feels once more what he felt when he looked upon his old dorm, Massachusetts Hall. Everything else has changed, but these structures remain familiar.
Floodlights make the cathedral look less solemn and more otherworldly than in his day.
There have been significant changes to the structure, but it is still undeniably Notre-Dame.
The same way a human does not look the same in old age as in youth, but one can still spot the ghost of the child in the man.
On the horizon is what appears to be a lit-up metal structure, and William recognizes it as the Eiffel Tower from the history books he read in the Huntington library. Its likeness is branded on nearly all the merchandise that gets sold here.
“Admiring the modern touches?”
William inhales the vampire’s musk before he sees him. “Lenny?” he asks, taking in the burgundy suit, gold earrings, and groomed mustache.
“Osorio,” he says. “And you must be William.”
“Where is Lenny?”
“You could say I am his gatekeeper. If he decides to meet with someone, I escort them to his lair.”
Lair?
There is a hardness in Osorio’s stare that tells William this is a different kind of vampire from the ones he met in America.
Osorio does not bother breathing or blinking for the sake of the mortals around him.
He seems as unaware of their existence as humans are of the ants navigating around their shoes.
Osorio ducks into an alley and slips around a corner. William follows. Too quickly for mortal eyes, Osorio removes a grate from the ground and casts a cautionary glance. “After you. Quickly.”
William leaps belowground. He cannot sense the stench now that he has cut off his breathing.
Osorio joins him in the sewers and restores the grate.
As William follows the vampire through the tunnel, he recalls how Anne referred to Lenny as a time capsule and how Nate described him as still living in the past. William cannot help wondering how long Lenny has been down here—is this a new hideout, or an old one?
When Osorio stops at a spot in the wall, William spies the outline of a door that would be nearly impossible to discern with human eyes. It is so heavy that even Osorio must make an effort to open it.
“Where are we?” asks William as they access a different tunnel that looks both cleaner and older. He chances a sniff, and even the air is less odorous.
“A place the humans have not yet discovered, built by the vampires of Lenny’s time,” answers Osorio. “They were particularly violent back then, which is why so few survived.”
Lenny sounds much older than most vampires William has ever known. “Why is he down here?”
“He has spent so much time underground that he does not like to venture to the surface. I am his liaison to the world. I provide him with news, supplies, blood—anything he needs.”
William tries to imagine what that must be like. “How has he not been overcome with boredom by now?”
“He has his experiments to keep him busy. He also enjoys his hunts.” At William’s perplexed expression, Osorio clarifies, “I bring him tourists to drain.”
This must be what Nate meant about Lenny still living in the past. “I thought we were all drinking from wineglasses this century.”
“Not Lenny,” says Osorio, sounding like an indulgent uncle. “He only drinks from the vein.”
“Why do you serve him?”
Osorio stops walking. “In the absence of a Stoker, he is the most powerful among us.” After studying William’s face closely, he gestures to the darkness ahead. “Keep going. You will find him.”
Osorio takes off with the speed of a magic trick.
William keeps moving forward at a quick clip, and after a while, he inhales to test the air. A heavy, ancient musk clings to the passage, and as he goes deeper, the scent grows so overbearing that William does not breathe again.
At last, there is a soft glow in the distance, and soon the tunnel spills into a cavernous space illuminated with candles. William takes a tentative inhale, and the oxygen is impregnated with a stench so sour that he can taste it on his tongue.
Aisles of stacked wooden barrels unfurl into the horizon, reminding him of how wine is aged. Yet if this is wine, then it is long past its prime.
“Hello?” he calls out, since it is unlikely that he and Lenny will be able to smell each other through this stench.
No response.
As he moves deeper into the cave, William spots an opening in the wall, and he crosses into a room that looks part laboratory, part torture chamber, and part office.
There is a desk with a feather quill, a bottle of ink, and numerous notebooks. At the center of the room is a patient bed and various medical devices. And by the far wall are four glass-paneled cells with rusty pipes overhead that could be for water or gas.
Inside each cell is a human.
William stares at their faces, but none of them seem to register him. Maybe it is one-way glass. They are all on the floor, in varying degrees of uprightness. They look crumpled and wounded and half dead.
At the other end of the space is another door.
When William opens it, he freezes on the threshold.
The room is small, its only furniture a dresser and a bed. Sitting on the modest mattress is a vampire with skin as black as outer space and misty silver eyes that could be stars.
He is night personified, and a chill sweeps through William as he recognizes a face he has seen only in wanted posters and nightmares and the portrait from the LUB.
“Leonardo the Bloody,” he whispers in disbelief.
“Welcome, William Pride.”
The ancient vampire emphasizes William’s name like it is also a secret. “Have a seat.”
William sits down next to the most notoriously dangerous vampire of all time, unable to pull his gaze from those foggy orbs.
“Do you know why you are here?”
William shakes his head. When Lenny keeps waiting, he adds, “I was told you would explain what happened to our kind.”
He has to blink just to prove to himself that the ancient vampire is not somehow defying the laws of immortality and compelling him.
“That is secondary.” Leonardo the Bloody speaks slowly, like he has all the time in the world. Or, more accurately, like he has never been subject to time’s effects. “First, we must address why you are here.”
“I do not know—”
“I do,” says Lenny, now rising to his feet, slowly, like a mortal. The feigned fragility must be a ploy to make William feel overconfident. “Let me give you a tour.”
William follows the vampire into the torture lab, and he tries not to look at the four dying humans.
“I was the first of us to awaken,” says Lenny, locking his arms behind him as they walk.
“Upon learning how populated the world had become and that most humans had forgotten we once existed, I felt a freedom I had not known in centuries. No more Treaty. No more Legion. No more Grandsire. It was quite thrilling.”
William knows that Leonardo the Bloody and Grandsire did not see eye to eye on human-vampire dynamics.
Grandsire believed in working together to maintain a healthy food supply, while Leonardo felt there were other ways to force humans to breed more humans without needing to give them so much autonomy.
Lenny looks at his four captives, face unlined and unbothered, unencumbered by any sense of empathy. “So I did the one thing I had always been forbidden.” He turns to William, his irises so pale in this light that they look white. “I tasted Stoker blood.”
A pit forms in William’s stomach, but he keeps his expression unchanged to mask his growing unease.
“I never understood why only that bloodline was gifted with our greatest power. Nor did it sit right with me that humans of that lineage were protected so zealously by our kind that they were treated better than non-Stoker vampires.”
Lenny has resumed walking, and William does not take any more exploratory inhales now that they are in the room with the oak barrels of rotting wine.
“I wanted to know what it was that made them special,” Lenny goes on, “so I could harness and even replicate their power. That is why, for a century, I have been studying human Stokers exhaustively, searching for that X factor.”
The pit in William’s gut has grown into full-fledged dread, yet his face remains frozen in a mask of indifference. Or so he hopes.
“Yet when I could not find any differences in Stokers’ physiologies or even psychologies, I determined that the special ingredient must be in their blood. To test my hypothesis, I needed to taste as many of them as possible.”
The dread spreads through William’s body as they weave around the grid of barrels, and he begins to feel like the aisles are closing in on him.
“I set myself the task to learn how to distinguish Stoker blood from all others. Osorio keeps track of various branches of that bloodline, and he regularly delivers a Stoker to me, embedded in a group of non-Stokers, so I can practice my skills. By now, I can always identify the Stokers by their taste.”
Leonardo the Bloody looks at William, as if expecting some sort of response. “These barrels,” says William, the dread climbing his throat and threatening to spill from his mouth, “are they…?”
“Stokers, yes,” says Lenny, as if it were the most natural thing to let blood spoil in barrels for decades. “Which brings us back to why you are here.”
Everything inside William is telling him to run. Yet what are the odds he can outrun Leonardo the Bloody in his own lair?
“We have been waiting for a sign that a Stoker was placed in death-sleep with us. For all we know, it could be someone who is not even aware of their lineage.”
Lenny looks at William the way he eyed those human captives—like all he sees is a subject on which to experiment. “The reason you are here, the reason every vampire meets with me upon awakening, is so I may taste your blood and reveal your ancestry.”
Leonardo the Bloody is so close that William dares not move to avoid provoking him. Immortal bodies do not weaken with age as humans do. Like a good wine, they strengthen.
“Of course, it is possible that the transformation changes the taste of one’s blood,” Lenny adds, “which would make it impossible to identify the Stoker. I would not know, as I have yet to taste a Stoker vampire.”
William cannot stay, and he cannot go. If he runs, Lenny will think he is hiding something. If he stays, the vampire will attack him.
“This will only hurt for a moment.”
And before William can react, fangs pierce his skin, and pain as sharp as flames sears his neck. Instinctively, William shoves the vampire off him, nearly sending Leonardo the Bloody crashing into the barrels.
Yet the ancient vampire’s reflexes kick in instantly. “A feisty one,” he says, a smile slowly unfolding, exposing his bloodied fangs.
Lenny moves in, like a predator hunting, and William steps back.
“You have the pride of a Stoker,” he says, and William prepares to run in case the deranged vampire tries to lock him up or drain his blood.
“Yet a Stoker”—the fog in Lenny’s eyes flashes like an electric storm—“you are not.”