Chapter 36 Elijah #2
‘We’ve always thought that the first vampire was made by a spell–an incantation–and that part may well be true, but Samara believes that it was transferred not by energy magic, but by a potion.’
I recoil at this concept. Potions are the lowest form of magic, usually seen as, if anything, the work of toxicologists or herbalists. Not real, true magic.
The thought of one of them having created all vampire-kind is unfathomable.
‘Samara and I have been working on it for years. We’ve created a potion, and I haven’t been able to test it, but I swear it will work, it’s just…’
Evangeline closes her mouth in a tight line.
‘You would be killed for discovering this,’ I say and she nods. ‘And you leave your research out for anyone to discover? Do you have a death wish?’
I throw the folder back on her desk, as if even holding it might be my own end. There are council members on property now, ones who would burn this lab to the ground with the pair of us strapped to tables inside if they knew she’d been working on this.
‘They suspect nothing. And it doesn’t matter because it’s fruitless.
The potion is untestable. I know there are vampires who would like to be human, few though they may be, but it’s not safe.
The potion is just as likely to kill them as it is to turn them human.
’ Jellie shakes her head. ‘It’s just a hypothesis. ’
‘How does the potion work?’ I ask. Her head snaps in my direction, concern written all over her face.
‘You can’t take it,’ she breathes.
‘I’m just curious,’ I assure her, a half-truth.
Jellie eyes me warily for a full minute before nodding.
‘Most potions are consumed orally, or olfactorily, but Samara found a tradition of injecting potions like you might a poison.’
‘How?’
‘You know–blade, needle, dipped dart, the usual suspects. But her belief is that everything revolves around the heart.’ Evangeline presses a finger against the left side of her chest where the organ sits unbeating.
‘We haven’t had the opportunity to test it–I don’t want to take it, and I wouldn’t risk anyone else.
Plus, if the council found out we’d probably be killed in short order, so we’ll likely never know. ’
We spend two minutes in the silent lab, me staring at her piles of papers representing hours and hours of research for something I’ve never let myself dream of.
I shouldn’t ask it of her, I know it will only hurt her, but now that the possibility exists in my brain, I know I’ll never be able to quiet it. I whisper into the silence, as if speaking my greatest wish too loudly will burn us both: ‘Let me be the one to test it.’
‘Elijah, no,’ Evangeline says, her voice breaking.
I rise from her desk and grip her hand with new urgency. ‘Please, Evangeline, you know I’ve longed for nothing else so much as I’ve longed for this.’
‘For her?’ she asks.
Molly’s bright eyes flash in my mind, making my chest ache.
‘For me,’ I tell her truthfully. ‘I want to taste food again, to bask in sunlight instead of retreat from it, to swim in the sparkling lake I used to watch Ada in from the shadows–I want to fear and revel in the inevitability of my mortality, I want to hold her like we might die in the morning, because we might! And then I want to grow old, as old as I can, wrinkles covering sallow skin, cataracts on my eyes, joints weakening.’
‘I can’t do it,’ she says. ‘Don’t make me try.’ Evangeline has tears in her eyes to match my own blurring my vision, both tinged red with blood.
‘I want to live, Evangeline. I want sunburn, and a cold, an ache in my back after moving boxes into a creaky old house that we’ll get splinters in our fingers trying to fix up. I want to teach a child about the world and how it can be both frightening and blessedly beautiful.’
Evangeline’s chest jumps with a sob, and she holds onto me as tightly as I hold onto her, like we both might dissolve otherwise. Over four hundred years as my sister, my closest confidant, the only person I could ask this of, the only person smart enough to have figured out the impossible.
‘I want to live,’ I tell her again. ‘I want to live.’
‘I can’t watch you grow old, brother. Can’t watch you die. I don’t want a world you’re not in.’
‘Jellie…’
‘Not to mention the potion could kill you!’ Her every emotion is spread across her skin–the fear, the urgency, the distress at this request, the biggest thing I could ask of her. ‘It’s not tested, it might not even work.’
‘Isn’t that just the thing, though? The risk?
The thing that makes mortality so tangible?
I could take your cure and die tonight or become human and die tomorrow, or die of old age, disease, a car crash–and that’s just it, isn’t it?
Humans know they could die at any time and yet what choice do they have but to live? ’
‘It would kill me, Elijah. Don’t ask this of me.’
‘You’re tough,’ I tell her. She always has been. More than Gregory, more than me, more than anyone I’ve known.
‘You would give it up?’ she asks.
Would I give up my unending eternity for a chance to feel something real? Real stakes. Great pain, fear, heavy grief, and the unknown? Isn’t it the bitter that makes living more sweet? Aren’t the lows the keys to greater joy?
‘I’ve had a good run,’ I say. ‘Not as good as yours, but fine enough.’
‘Oh, Elijah,’ Evangeline says, and pulls me down to her for a bone-crushing hug. I embrace her back just as fiercely. ‘It would kill us to lose you.’
‘And still, you would live on,’ I murmur.
It’s the way with any loss. Grief is a heavy, lasting beast–at times I still miss my father, still miss Ada, still miss every person I’ve loved and lost. And yet.
If Gregory were here, he wouldn’t humour the conversation; he’d rage and break things at the thought, not because he hates humanity, but because he fears mortality. He fears losing me, too.
‘What if your Molly doesn’t take you back? If it doesn’t work out?’ Evangeline asks through her tears, face pressed against my chest.
‘What if it does?’
‘What if you die?’
‘What if I get to live?’ I smile at the thought.
Evangeline pulls back and looks at my eyes, her lips pulled down into a wobbling frown.
She looks like our father did, and I remember a hazy approximation of his face in hers.
He taught us how to ride horses, how to skip stones over water, challenged us to races he never let us win until we were old enough to beat him for real.
We were such a happy family, even Gregory, who I think felt Father’s loss more intensely than even Mother.
It’s no wonder that Mother did what she did to keep us, her wily three, for as long as she could.
‘Please,’ I mouth, no sound coming out this time.
And then, miraculously, Evangeline nods.
When the sun sets on winter solstice, my growing hunger reminds me that Samara, Jellie and I have been in the basement of the greenhouse since it set last night.
Samara dozes beneath a blanket on the leather loveseat in a corner, taking a much deserved break from her work.
Jellie insisted that, if I was to test their potion, she and Samara needed to ensure that it was as thoroughly checked as possible before then.
So that’s what we’ve done, combing again through research, calculating and recalculating, Samara mixing the same potion tens of times to ensure it’s the same each time.
This isn’t a regular science experiment, one that is repeatable and testable. Jellie gets one go at this, and that go is her own brother.
I stand from where I’ve been writing letter after letter in case things don’t work as she hopes.
I have been helping Jellie and Samara in any way they’ve seen fit; cross-referencing ingredients in different books, getting them blood and food.
Whatever they’ve asked, I’ve done. Gregory and Mother travelled with the council for a winter solstice event in Romania, and are set to return in two days.
Fortuitous for us to be left unbothered.
Stretching my limbs, I walk to my sister’s side, rubbing her shoulders until she stops and shuts her eyes.
‘Rest with Samara while I get us some blood,’ I tell her, and though I know she doesn’t want to stop, she pats my hands and does what I say.
The air is bitingly cold on the walk back to my mother’s house, and when I get to the kitchen, I find a couple of blood bags which I heat in warm water over the stove. I also heat a bowl of Samara’s stew for her to eat. The witch is a lovely woman, beautiful and brilliant just like Jellie said.
I’ve enjoyed these past days working with her, despite the heavy tension around the task. You could die, my sister has said so many times. Do you want that?
Death is not the purpose of this, though I suppose, in a roundabout way, it is.
It’s not that I want to die, and in fact, the thought of mortality fills me with terror, but there is excitement there, too; the mere possibility of having a natural death one day.
The possibility of living is what compels me onwards.
I haven’t told Dylan, nor Molly, Gregory, my mother–each of them would try to stop me, I’m sure of it.
Jellie has tried her best to dissuade me, and I know I could do none of this without her, but she understands me better than anyone.
She wants what I want for myself, even if it pains her to imagine it.
When the food is heated, I return to the greenhouse, pausing at one of Jellie’s long tables full of books.
I run my fingers over the soft paper of one of the leather journals she’s left open.
Her looping script makes messy notes about one of her latest projects, the same scrawl she’s had for centuries.
Evangeline has a bottomless hunger for knowledge, and she uses that curiosity to help people.
If anyone in this world could have immortality, I’m glad she was one.