6. Lazarus
Lazarus
“She tried to strangle me.”
That, I look up for. Soren tosses his tweed jacket on the chair across from mine and slumps into it, pinching the bridge of his nose like a man who has earned a headache.
“You look intact,” I say scribbling the last of my notes into my translation book.
“She tried to strangle me.” His brown eyes peek through his fingertips, giving me a dead stare. “With a seatbelt.”
“I heard you the first time.” I set my pen aside carefully. Adjusting it to perfectly parallel my calendar.
“She is unwell.” He explodes a little.
“On the Vex scale.” My lips twitch.
“Don’t start.” Soren leans forward tugging on his cuffs. “Vex didn’t tell her that her car would be in the shop for the next few weeks.”
“I took his phone.”
“That explains that.”
“I had to.” This time I sit back in my chair. “How did he even get to the shop the other night?”
Soren shakes his head slumping further on the chair and spreading his legs. He’s usually so composed but the door is shut, the blinds drawn and it’s just the two of us in here right now.
He can let go.
“You’re restless,” Soren points out. He isn’t wrong. I am restless.
So I don’t give him a response. Not a meaningful yes, not a no either. Just a nod that breathes ambiguity. To answer out loud in this room gives it life, and I’m not sure I can do that.
Not with a fledgling vampire making the room feel smaller than it is.
“Hey fuckers.” The door slams open and Vex strolls in before kicking it behind him.
“How the fuck.” Soren sits up looking back and forth between us. “I left him at home.” He stresses the word. “In the basement, behind bars. Again.”
“You did do that.” Vex sits in the only other chair beside Soren. He isn’t dressed for the museum. He’s dressed for work, scuffed jeans, a white shirt with holes. “I was only marginally offended and decided to see it as a test.”
“Of what?”
“My resilience.” Vex turns to me. “I’m starving.” He draws the word out like a toddler would.
“You cannot feed from a vein yet,” I tell him before turning to Soren. “We are going to need to keep him with one of us at all times.”
“I think not.” A vein in Soren’s forehead pulses as it pumps his last feed through his body. “Laz.” He doesn’t say please. He doesn’t have to.
“Go.” I push back from the desk. “Follow me, Vex.” First I hide my translation book behind a tome and beside a bag of chocolates. Every translation from every tablet we’ve found to date about who we are, what we are.
“Daddy loves me more.” Vex taunts Soren before I look back and glare at him.
“Keep an eye on—” I pause because Vex is obsessed with her. I don’t have the heart to tell him why, just yet.
“Got it.” He doesn’t sound happy about that either but at least he isn’t on Vex duty.
“Do I need a coat?” Vex asks as he follows me out of my office and to the stairwell.
“No.” I glance at him. “Do you feel the heat?” I question as we enter the stairwell leading to South Street.
“Now that you mention it.” He smirks. “No.”
He jumps down the steps to stand in my path. “Is this my first lesson on becoming a vampire?”
May the Goddess grant me strength.
“Yes.” I push out into the night. Already the moon hangs bloated in the sky, the humid Pennsylvania air slaps me in the face as sweat beads on my forehead.
“Why do you get sweat?” he asks with genuine curiosity.
I lead him toward Center City and wait until the museum is several blocks behind us. This is the part of the conversation that takes longer than the walk.
Most of them don’t choose. The choice is taken, or it’s offered in the last thirty seconds of a life they were already losing. Occasionally I’ve been the one offering. Not all of them survive.
Before Vex, only one survived, Soren.
“I am a living vampire,” I explain.
He steps in front of me walking backward. “And I am?”
“Dead.”
“My heart beats.” He presses a palm to my chest feeling my own heart thud beneath his fingertips. “Your heart beats.”
This is where it gets complicated.
“It’s not that simple,” I say, removing his hand from my chest. “Your heart beats because mine does. You’re tied to me, Vex. My blood runs through your veins now.”
He steps back. The lines between his brows pull together. “So I’m like... a parasite?”
“No. You’re my fledgling. There’s a bond between us now.”
“Like a daddy issue?” He grins.
I reach for that well of patience Soren swears is endless.
“More like a survival issue.” I turn and continue walking, forcing him to follow. “The vampire who creates you becomes your lifeline. My death means yours.”
He catches up quickly matching my stride. “That’s fucked up.”
“It’s nature.” I glance at him. “For made vampires, it’s always been this way. The older you get, the weaker the bond becomes. On the rare occasion your heart may beat on its own terms.”
“And for you? Living vampires?”
“Born.”
“Wait, wait, wait the fuck up.” The bond between us flexes, that specific hot pressure that means he’s about to argue. “You were born, with little baby fangs and shit.” He tugs at the strands of his hair. “I have so many questions.”
“In a way.” This is usually my favorite part. The lore. The history. The archaeology of the thing.
Tonight the words sit on my tongue like a meal I no longer have an appetite for.
I understand, suddenly and with no warning, why some of the oldest among us beg for death. The monotony of existence becomes too much.
“So born vampires, like you, create made vampires.” He concentrates so hard he nearly walks into oncoming traffic. I grip him by the collar and tug him backward. He carries on like death isn’t out to get him. “The undead.” He looks at me finally. “I don’t like that word.”
“Not many do.” I press the crosswalk button.
“Why press it at all? We can just speed walk through the intersection.” That explains how he got to the museum so fast.
“It is imperative you act human as much as you can.” I look around noting the lack of traffic and people wandering around at two in the morning.
“I don’t want to.”
“Then you die,” I say simply, not to scare him but to arm him with the truth.
“How?”
“There are but a few ways to kill a vampire. During the day when the sun weakens us. A simple decapitation.” It is why many of us choose to walk at night. Not because the sun kills us. But that it renders us weak. Slower to heal, easier to kill.
“Safe room during the day.” He nods. “Got it.”
“There are those who hunt vampires like you who break the rules. We call them the Goddess’s hunters.”
“Goddess.” He pauses. “Goddess.”
“Do you remember her?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “But yes? More like a feeling.”
“By design.”
“Can you explain it?”
“I’ll get there,” I say though he looks eager to understand everything now. “In time.”
“Just lay it all out.”
“One thing at a time. The order matters.” We finally walk again as I chew on what to explain next.
“You are terrible at this.”
“At what?”
“Explaining anything.”
He’s not wrong. “I haven’t had to do this since Soren.”
“How old is he?”
I glance at Vex. “Over two hundred.”
“You haven’t made—”
“Lower your voice.”
“—a vampire in over two hundred years.” He whisper-yells before breathing. “You are bad at this.”
“I don’t take it lightly.”
“Why are you annoyed at that?”
I glare at him.
“Noted.” He jams his hands in his pockets as we continue our stroll. “What can I know? Right now I mean.”
“Calliope.” He stands a little straighter. His hands come out of his pockets. He scans the street for her before turning back toward the museum.
It’s just as I suspected.
“I don’t see her.” He frowns trying to understand.
This is why we don’t tell fledglings everything all at once. It breaks their brains. Giving them small digestible pieces allows them to naturally enter their new world.
Unfortunately I doubt that’s going to work for Vex.
“Vampires are, cunning creatures,” I begin. “Over the centuries the worst of us felt as though the other half owed us.”
Vex chuckles. “Listen, Daddy Laz.” He steps in front of me pressing a palm to my chest. I pause because I am beginning to realize that where I once saw a pest might be so much more than that.
“I get it. You born vamps have an edge the rest of us don’t.
So I’m guessing the born treated the made like shit. It’s no different than humans.”
So much more indeed.
“Tell me Vex. Why waste that brain on auto mechanics?”
He scoffs dropping his hand. “What you see as meaningless, I see it as…” A secretive little smile creeps up his face. Crooked, of course like him. “Take archaeology, right.” I nod indulging him. “You research your origin story.”
“How…” I slip before catching myself.
Vex winks. “An engine is the whole fucking story. It’s all there.
But it’s more than that. Knowing how that was put together, blows my mind.
” He gives me a little chuckle just when I think he’s done.
“But what you don’t get is learning how something is built is just the beginning of the story.
It’s the parts that make the whole. And realizing those parts are a whole story themselves. It’s beautiful.”
“Who are you, Vex?”
“Just a guy you found in a parking garage, dying.” He turns away too fast for it not to be something.
It’s okay, I have an eternity to figure this man out. And I will.
“All of that to say that in order for a born vampire to exist, a bride too must exist.” I take his lead, going back to the story, the first class for this young fledgling.
“A bride.” He skips a few times before doing a perfect pirouette. Interesting. Then he spins back to me. “Calliope is a bride.”
I give him the smallest of nods. Nothing more. More would indicate all that I cannot say about Calliope.
“Oh how wonderful.” He faints right there on the sidewalk on South Street.
“Get up,” I scold him like he’s a child. A common occurrence with this one. “Before you roll on a needle.”
“A syringe can’t kill me.” He frowns. “Can it?”
“Do you want to test it?”
“That should be in this conversation, Laz.” He gets up so fast that if he weren’t a vampire he’d faint all over again.
“Now—”