25. A Chance Encounter
A Chance Encounter
“Melinoe, what do you think?” Tomasz sits on the edge of his chair, leaning toward me.
“I wasn’t listening,” I admit. They don’t mind my truths, even if they’re rude. Had I given you anything but my full attention, I would have suffered for it. Yet here I was, in the company of other vampyrs, bored of their drivel.
“The aristocracy,” Caterina reminds me. Ah, of course. The class they belong to yet decry. A system they benefit from, but act as though it is appalling. They’ve all made their wealth some way through the centuries, mostly by taking from the humans they killed.
At some point things gained value and could be sold, or perhaps they simply claimed a home and gained status by proximity. I suppose that’s how you’ve done it, a mix of coercion, theft, and trickery.
Funny how we all grew up separate, and turn to the same means for coin.
“What have they done now?” I ask, and the group laughs. Have I made a joke? It was a serious inquiry—it seems they’re always on the verge of something awful. Or having just done something awful. Or promising to do something awful.
I cannot keep up.
“Class exists for a reason,” Eloise says. “Rank is important.”
“Did you feel that way when you starved on the streets? When the price of flour went up, and never went back down?” Yusuf asks.
“Yes, I did,” Eloise says between clenched teeth. She is the youngest of the group, turned just ten years ago. “I understood it and accepted it.”
“You accepted that you starved on the streets while the rich looked down at you?” Yusuf presses.
“I deserved my position. I did not contribute,” she says, her fingernails digging into the arms of the chair she sits in.
Her ridiculous dress makes it hard for her to move about, so she’s resorted to violence on furniture.
I suspect if her outfit were less voluminous, she would fly across the room and rip Yusuf’s throat out.
I rather like Yusuf, but I wouldn’t mind a good show.
“And now that your maker has gifted you a house, clothing, anything you want—you are deserving?” Yusuf digs his fingers into the meat of her argument, his magenta eyes sparkling at her discomfort.
“Yes,” she says, with such venom I think she might believe it.
“I suppose you’ve always been of the high ranked,” Caterina says to me, her gaze intent.
She makes me wish for the five rules, for the law against writing anything down.
Caterina owns many of the printing presses in town under a male pseudonym.
There isn’t a bit of news she is unaware of, and that does not stop at human frivolity.
It includes what is said in here. She scribbles away, claiming to be taking notes for academic reasons.
Blackmail, more like it.
“No,” I say simply. When they stare, I feel I must speak, else I explode under the tension of their gaze.
I understand your silence with the acolytes now, though I don’t understand your silence with me.
Had Tomasz been the only friend I made, had we simply met in the cafe and spoke, I’d not feel so… examined.
At least the cult treated you with reverence. I am strapped to a table, looked over and dissected.
“I was a lowly servant of the temple in Delphi. Through the centuries, I have slept in caves or under overturned wagons. Sometimes we knew decadence.” I pause, the word one you would use, not me. “Sometimes we did not.”
“And your maker,” Caterina says, licking her lips. “Were they of high birth?”
I give my fleeting half-smile, sympathetic to her question.
I have not told you of this new group, and I do not know if I will.
I come infrequently, when the call for something else overrides my need for solitude.
My absences far exceed my attendance these days.
I am tired of the questions, the looks, the conversation.
I don’t care about the humans and their comings and goings. This is what they don’t understand, that these conversations are useless. In a century, this swelling resentment will be called inevitable, and whatever comes of it the natural way of things.
Repeat repeat repeat.
Margarethe knows this. I see it in the way she picks things apart.
Her ambitions are more understandable. She wishes to see a day in which God does not reign over the lives of all.
She once prayed to him, and he let her become a vampyr.
The fact that she could not return to her human ways was proof he did not exist, as she did nothing to tempt his ire.
“I do not follow cruelty,” she said once, and I admired her strength.
“High birth for whom? The Christians were once slaves, now their church reigns over all. To be born high somewhere is to be born low somewhere else.” I hope they understand this, the futility of it all.
They can pick apart the pieces of this civilization until it is nothing but strands of yarn.
Then that yarn will coalesce into something else, and something else, and something else.
Reincarnation. Whatever you wish to call it.
“Yet you live in the Saint-Germaine,” Caterina says. “That is old money.”
So she’s followed me to see where I live. Tricky little cat, thinking I am still a temple rat. Did she watch me enter one building, then exit another? Climb across rooftops and scamper into a second-story window?
I doubt it.
“And you live underground,” I say with a wave of my hand. I’m rewarded with her flash of teeth, though she calms a moment later.
I will not be caught unawares like I was in Alexandria. I will know where each of them lives, where they hunt, if there are any other vampyrs lurking in the shadows of Paris. I do not want another confrontation in the street, where a man with blazing eyes offers friendship.
“I only mean to say,” Caterina says, trying to recover. But I have unsettled her, so her speech is rushed. “That if your maker had connections—”
“She is older than me, and I am older than Paris. What connections might her birth have afforded her?” I snap.
Caterina glances to Eloise and I realize my error too late.
She. I’ve let them know your gender. I had hoped to make you an enigma, one so obscure they could not worship you.
As such, you could not have any identifying information.
Now they know this, and I hate myself for the slip.
“She? Fascinating,” Tomasz says. “I was unaware your maker was of the same sex.”
“Is that so unusual?” I ask. I do not recall any information about the makers of other vampyrs, just that they’d long since separated from them.
Yet here you and I were, almost two thousand years together.
“I suppose not,” Tomasz agrees. “My maker was a man, and he made Margarethe before me. Are all your siblings female as well?”
“There is only me,” I say. This I am sure of. You told me yourself—that you and I are the only two with red eyes. I am your only creation, and your only love. You’ve made yourself my entire world, such that I would know if there was another in the interim.
“And you are still…together?” Eloise asks.
“Yes,” I allow. I should stop this line of questioning, it is another way to flesh you out. I should turn attention back to me, remind them of how extraordinary I am. So much older and wiser.
But I don’t want pitiful acolytes. I want something deeper than waxing poetic about nothing.
So I stand and leave. I do not say goodbye. I simply exit.
“You will give this to me without payment,” I coerce the merchant on the street. His wares are mostly junk. Jewelry that is made of colored glass disguised as precious gemstones. Silver painted gold, that sort of nonsense.
But there is one item of his that is real.
It’s a strand of red gemstones that sparkle under the light of the lanterns.
It catches my eye from across the market, a younger sister to the chain around my neck.
I still wear it. I’ve had it remade over the centuries—a new chain, a new clasp, polished gems. It may mirror the Ship of Theseus, but it is still the necklace you gave me the night we found the cult dead.
The merchant hands it over without argument, and I clasp it about my wrist. I hold my arm out to examine it, letting it catch the lantern overhead.
“A beautiful gift for a beautiful woman,” the merchant says.
“Merci,” I say, turning from the booth. I could afford it, I have all the coin I will ever need. But there was something thrilling about cheating a cheater.
“That was quite a show,” comes the voice of a woman to my left. I turn toward it, frowning at the human that stands too close to me for comfort. Her French is ruddy, stumbled over by her accent.
“Excuse me?” I ask. I do not need to pretend annoyance.
“I happened upon you just as he gave you that for free,” she says, nodding to my bracelet. “Tell me, what did you say to enamor him so?”
“You heard him—he thought me beautiful,” I reply. The woman’s eyebrows climb up her head, giving me a quick glance from head to toe. It is the same look everyone gives me when they see you next to me.
You, tall and pale and striking, blonde hair straight and never out of place.
Me, short and curvy and very rat-like at times. No matter what I do, I will always look like this—this age, this stature.
The woman is not beautiful either, so it is cruel that she should say something like this about me. Her dark hair is unkempt, she dresses like a common boy, and she carries a heavy satchel that might be as old as I am.
“I dislike your implication,” I say, turning to move from her.
“What implication is that? That you must be very clever to talk a man such as he out of his goods?” she presses, falling into step with me.
I consider breaking her neck and throwing her into the shadows of the street, but it is too public. I’ll have to lead her to one of the quiet arcades, where the unsavory people there will look the other way.
“The implication that he should not have given me anything,” I say, walking faster. She lengthens her stride to keep pace.
“I am a burgeoning cheat myself,” she says. “It’s why I dress like this—the rich usually avert their eyes lest I sully them with my suspected poverty.”
I regard her outfit from the corner of my eye but keep walking.
“It is how I keep out of sight. But you—you do not worry about that. You dress…” She trails off, another insult I’m sure she’s quieted. “Well, as someone who does not wish to blend in.”
“I hate the fashion here,” I say.
“Is this the fashion of your home?” she asks.
I whirl on her, coming face to face. She sees my eyes and freezes, her own widening at the unnatural color.
Her mouth falls open, a quiet “oh” escaping.
Her fingers go to the pendant around her neck, a sliver of wood on a chain.
She rubs the wood rhythmically, thoughtfully.
Then she blinks twice and a smile slides across her face, replacing her shock.
“Leave me be. Forget you saw any of that, forget me,” I compel.
“I will remember that for as long as I live,” she says. “Teach me how to trick a man from his precious earnings and I will leave you be.”
It is my turn to be shocked.
“Leave me be,” I repeat, leaning more into the coercion I’ve spent over a thousand years easily performing.
“Teach me and I shall,” she retorts. “We both know it’s not your beauty he admired.”
Why isn’t it working? My anger flares, but underneath it is a morbid curiosity. Your words from so long ago come forward. One day there may be a barrier… a reason for our gift not to work. We must always be prepared.
Is this what you meant? That there were times the compulsion fails? Or was it people that it fails to work on?
How had we travelled for so long and so far, and this is the first I’m seeing of it?
“Zora,” she says, giving a curtsy while I stare at her, mouth agape. “You are not the first that is too charmed to speak.”
“What?” is all I can muster.
“My name is Zora,” she says, slower this time, as though speaking to a simpleton.
“Melinoe,” I reply, my words far ahead of my thoughts.
“We shall meet tomorrow, under this arcade, an hour after sundown. How does that sound?” she asks.
“No,” I reply, taking a step toward her. Do I steal her away to the house, lock her up and study her? Starve her until she’s too weak to resist compulsion? How do I best understand what allows her to evade compulsion?
“Then you’ll never get this back,” she says, holding up the bracelet I’d just secured from the merchant. I close my hand over my naked wrist. How did she take it from me without my knowing?
“Thief,” I hiss.
“The two of us, I think,” she says with a wink.
I reach out to grab my bracelet back but she’s uncommonly quick for a human.
I pause, opening my senses to her. Her heart beats in her chest, her eyes are a dull brown—she is human.
There is something about her that separates her from the others in the street, but I cannot place what it is.
“And you’ll show me how to do that?” I ask, pointing to the bracelet wrapped within her fingers.
“An even trade of skills?” Zora considers, tapping her cheek as though in thought. “I accept.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I agree.
“Tomorrow,” she says.
I wait a few moments before following after her. I will hunt her into a shadowed corner and then I will take my bracelet back. Perhaps I will feed on her, or maybe I’ll just kill her. I hadn’t decided yet.
She’s gone. Somehow I’d lost her—no, she’d lost me. I listen, I smell, I try everything I know to find her, but she is a ghost in the night. I’d never had to work hard to find my prey, compelling them meant they never fought me. I was sorely out of practice for a real hunt.
I stand beneath a lantern and smile, then laugh.
Perhaps there is something to the affairs of humans after all.