Chapter 49. William #2
“I did what you asked,” she reports.
“Thank you,” he says, bringing the thermos she hands him to his mouth and guzzling it. He sets the green book between them. “Do you recognize this?” he asks.
She puts down the blood and picks up the book. She flips through the pages until she gets to the message in red ink. William half expected the words to have disappeared by now.
“Grandsire placed the manifest in my coffin before burying me,” she says after reading the passage. “I suspected he would leave you something, too.”
“He left an entire library of books, all of them blank except for this one. Keep flipping through it.” She does as he says and gets to the Legion symbol.
“What does this mean?” she asks.
“I think it is a way to let me know this text is different from the others, and he used this symbol to throw off the Legion if they found it first.”
“This can’t be the extent of his message,” she says. “There has to be more, right?”
“That is what I have been hoping, but no matter how much I stain the pages with blood, nothing else appears.”
She frowns at the symbol, falling deep in thought. Then she says, “Grandsire always liked puzzles and codes. The manifest he left me was inside a special Chinese puzzle box that was one of Feng’s own designs.” Feng was the most famous vampire inventor.
“Where are the other books?” she asks.
“In a basement room, but I have destroyed the entrance. They do not work the same way as this one.”
“Was there anything else in the room?”
“Yes,” he says, finishing what’s left in his thermos. “I will show you.”
The two of them bound to the first tower and enter his room through the window. Then he presents her with his meager possessions. She stares at the portrait of his family for a while, then she reads through the letter he found in Minaro’s office.
“That’s Grandsire’s handwriting.”
“I know.”
“The parcel he is discussing … is that meant to be you?”
“I believe so.”
Next, William shows her the three portraits with the messages on the back. “There are some words missing,” she says.
“They must have faded over time.”
“I don’t think so,” she says, frowning at the ink. “I think it’s intentional.”
Cottoning on, William leans over them and rereads his grandfather’s entry out loud.
“The most eternal among the eternal, and the sole leader ever acknowledged by the immortals. He is the architect of the Treaty, the first covenant among the species and the only instance wherein vampires have yielded to the … law.” He looks at Fabiana.
“Governance of law?” she suggests.
He bites down on his finger deeply with his fang, and on a blank page in the green book, he quickly writes governance of law in blood before the wound heals.
The liquid gets sucked into the paper.
“It did not work,” he says.
“Maybe the passcode isn’t in his portrait or Lenny’s,” says Fabiana. “Maybe it’s in yours.”
William does not have to turn his over to know what it says.
The last.
“The last vampire?” she asks, which had been his first guess as well.
He writes the phrase in blood, and it vanishes.
“The last Stoker?” he wonders, and she nods, so he writes it.
Again, nothing.
“I do not think this is the key,” he says in frustration.
“Try … the last hope.”
William frowns at Fabiana. It is the same word Lorena used to describe him. He cannot imagine being anyone’s hope, but for lack of other ideas, he writes it down:
The last hope.
The words are absorbed once more. It did not work.
Then red ink fills the full page:
My dear William,
I harbor no illusions that you will ever forgive me for that which I have wrought upon you. Yet, rest assured that I would not have taken this course for any lesser cause than the vampires’ very survival.
I confess only to you that the enchantment I intend to employ is fraught with uncertainty. Should it falter, I cannot let it mark the extinction of our kind.
Herein lies your destiny: To be the seed of a new vampiric society.
Our last hope.
I am well aware that you never sought the mantle of leadership, just as I did not in my own youth. Yet, those who desire power the least are oft the most fit to wield it.
My most fervent wish is that you might reimagine your notion of family, broadening it to embrace the whole of our kind, as I have done. The vampires are your brethren, and they will follow your lead.
In my prolonged existence, I have come to perceive the grievous errors of our ways. We cannot persist without humankind, though they can endure without us. Therefore, the burden falls upon us to devise a way to coexist.
This noble endeavor, I entrust to you, for you are singularly equipped to undertake it.
Ever since I beheld you, I discerned that your heart was unlike any other. It was the first moment in my weary existence that I sensed I had found a worthy heir. Though I cannot claim to love, for such sentiments have long since fled my heart, I shall avow only that which I know to be true:
I wholeheartedly believe in you.
Thy proud Grandsire
William loses count of how many times he reads the letter.
For too long, he hated his grandfather. He thought the ancient vampire’s actions were selfish and cruel.
Yet it turns out he was wrong.
Grandsire’s actions were the ultimate expression of love.