Chapter Seven
Tristan
By the next meeting with Jonas I was better prepared.
Theo had compiled all the available information on Victoria, her brother William Clement, and the company he was the head of.
In that time, I had contacted members of the Sanguine to get me information that wasn’t so readily available and assigned a tail to William.
I wasn’t taking chances that anything was going to happen to him.
He was important to Victoria so he was important to me.
A few calls and I had a better measure of Jonas as well.
I had agreed to the initial meeting with him because, frankly, I didn’t care about the fate of the Persimmon Club and Jonas seemed to be the highest bidder.
The nightclub, which once upon a time was the apple of my eye, started to be a burden in recent years due to the local police taking too much interest in it, which made me switch the Sanguine’s less legal dealings to a different place.
As a completely above-the-board business, the Persimmon Club was just barely making a profit so I decided to at least hear Jonas out.
With the introduction of Victoria, the negotiations became infinitely more complicated.
The meeting on the first day came to a close fairly quickly when it became obvious Jonas wasn’t going to accept a low offer for what I wanted.
In the face of that, I requested to postpone the negotiations until the next day to give us a chance to prepare a suitable offer.
So here I was, with the ever-reliable Theo at my side, discussing not a mere sale of a single club but what amounted to a partnership between our organizations.
Every time the prodigal son of Jonas wasn’t in the room with us I worried about Carl getting his hands on Victoria but my worries were soothed by the thought of Matthias keeping watch over her. He had made himself into a protector and he took his role seriously.
Matthias always said I was his savior but sometimes I thought he was the one to save me. Before I met him I was only dispassionately drifting through life, observing the time passing by with the eye of an outsider. Matthias made me want to step into the moment and live.
It was amusing I found the difference between being unalive and merely undead in the middle of the Second World War.
After painstakingly cutting the bond of every vampire bound to me, enduring the backlash that felt like cutting myself open, I had traveled the world for hundreds of years.
I never found a home during that time but I found solace in the ever-shifting landscapes and the flow of human life around me.
It was in my second year of exploring the astoundingly beautiful fauna and flora of North Africa when the words of a big conflict that was spreading all over the world reached my ears.
Second World War. The humans were trying to kill each other en masse.
Again. And this time Libya, the country I had planned to stay in for a few more years, had become one of the important theaters of war.
I could have moved to another country and run away from this conflict, if not for a wrench thrown into my plans: over the past two years I had tried to ingratiate myself with the local supernatural community and my hard work finally paid off.
I had gained permission to spend time among the various cat-shifter tribes and I had talks in progress with the fennec foxes.
I wasn’t going to waste that, war or no war.
That’s how two years later I found myself in the middle of an abandoned camp. The fennec foxes worried about the front coming closer to their homes and asked me to scout the situation for them. I frowned at the devastation from the bombing sprawling around what once was an oasis.
From the tents and pieces of abandoned equipment, I could see this place had been an Italian camp. The English army didn't spare anything or anyone with their airstrikes.
My eyes darkened at the destroyed homes the camp had been set around and the now polluted water source, the precious life-giving water, the gold of the desert, now mixed with oil and half-burned debris. No matter who won it was always the local population who lost.
I had thought everyone who had been living here had left because of the polluted water, lack of shelter, and the toxic fumes from the still burning remnants, but my vampiric hearing had picked up a faint heartbeat.
And then the scent of fresh blood.
My nose led me to one of the collapsed homes. The whole construction caved in onto itself, burying the people there. I used my vampiric strength to shift the debris away from the spot where I felt the fragile signs of life.
A pair of brown eyes drowning in pain greeted me.
I froze for a moment, realizing the trapped young man was conscious and that if I wanted to get him out quickly there was no hiding my supernatural strength.
Gritting my teeth I got back to work, hoping the poor sod was delirious enough, after spending at least a day under rubble, that he would chalk my prowess up to a hallucination.
Piece by piece, I freed his body. He was lucky the big pieces didn’t crush him completely but he was far from being unscathed by the experience.
I winced when I noticed his hands were tied together and connected to one of the fallen beams. A prisoner, then.
The dusty uniform confirmed the young man belonged to the English army.
As I gingerly pulled him out and his pained groans echoed around us I spotted a bloodied hand peeking out of the wreckage but with my enhanced senses I knew there was only one survivor here.
I assessed the wounds. Cleaned and bandaged what I could. It quickly became obvious to me that the young boy didn’t have much of a chance without proper medical assistance. I had a feeling a field hospital the English army had somewhere around here wasn’t going to be enough.
The young man clutched at my arm as I fed him water.
He needed urgent care. A proper hospital... or healing magic.
“Goddamit,” I swore, cursing my heart for thawing at the most inconvenient moment.
Still, I transported the boy, who looked no more than sixteen, to my car and brought him back with me to the fennec fox shifters.
“You have broken our contract,” the matriarch of the shifters looked at me with narrowed eyes as I held the fragile body in my arms in front of the gathering of elders.
“I know,” I said, bowing my head. I did promise not to reveal their location to any humans. “I will pay my due but, please, help him.”
The Elders shared looks; from displeasure, to pity, and even reluctant admiration. I had been a great asset to them during this war time and, while they were known to hold their grudges, they paid equal attention to settling their debts.
“We shall heal the boy,” the Matriarch agreed. “But once he is well enough he will leave and you with him, never to return.”
I felt a brief pang at losing this community, but this wasn’t home, never home. I could move on.
I bowed my head again and accepted the judgment.
The boy was put into a healing sleep and woke up three days later.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“You... speak English...” the boy said weakly, visibly relieved he could understand me. I knew the healer who had fetched me when the boy awoke spoke only Afrikaans so this reaction was understandable. “You... saved me.”
“I got you out from under the rubble, yes. Though it’s the doctors here who really saved you. I’m Tristan. What’s your name, young man?”
“Matthias, sir,” the young soldier said. “I... were there others? Where you found me?”
I nodded, then as hope swelled in those warm brown eyes I shook my head and watched how the light dimmed as Matthias understood there were no other survivors.
“Those bastards!” he spat with venom, his hands curling tight.
“The Italians took a big blow...” I tried to soothe.
Matthias made a sound between a sob and a laugh.
“No, no, that’s not it... I know the Italians who captured me got their asses kicked.
I could hear them screaming and scrambling around.
.. the bombs falling on our heads...” He swallowed hard.
“The bombs... My squad spotted the advance of the Italian forces and reported they were there before we got captured. The army brass knew we were there. At the camp. Whatever Sergeant, or Major, or fucking General gave the order to blitz this place to kingdom come knew we were there, kept prisoner. And they didn’t care. They didn’t care .”
After centuries of keeping myself on the fringe and not letting myself wallow in human emotions, whether happy or sad, I didn’t know how to comfort this pitiful creature in front of me. But if not me then who else?
I reached out a hand and laid it on the shaking shoulder.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Matthias dried his tears with an angry gesture.
“Unlike my countrymen, you didn’t fail me.
My own country killed my squad mates and nearly killed me,” His expression changed to one of resolution.
“No, not nearly . They did kill me. They expected me to die for them? Let’s make their expectations come true.
I’m not going back. I’m not going back to this war. Don’t make me.”
He looked at me as if I had any say in this matter. With desperation and hope for guidance. With trust.
I really tried not to care about him. To cut our ties once he was healthy enough and we had to leave the fennecs’ hospitality. But the young man was stubborn like a dog with a bone and he stuck to my side no matter how hard I tried to shake him.
“You aren’t human, are you?” Matthias asked one day when we were sitting in my cabin. I gave in and paid for his ticket after he had secretly followed me onto the ship, was discovered as a stowaway, and nearly thrown overboard.
“What makes you think that?” I asked wearily. Did I slip up? Getting away to source blood was getting harder with the young man dogging my footsteps but I thought I masked my actions well enough.
“One, I remember bits from how you rescued me.” Matthias counted on his fingers.
“I was buried under a whole ass house and you got me out single-handedly, without any tools to help you. Two, you tend to disappear in very shady places and you act suspiciously... And three...” Here he gave me such a dry I felt like I was back in the desert.
“...when I was convalescing, a fennec cub got into my room and changed into a human baby .”
I groaned out loud. Of course. As usually no outsiders were allowed at the fennec compound the shifters didn’t have air-tight secrecy procedures like their feline counterparts. I should have expected that during the weeks Matthias spent there he would have learned about their abilities.
“I’m not a fennec fox,” I said.
“Then what are you? Who are you?” Matthias asked, his eyes bright and focused all on me.
I told him.
I told Matthias I was a vampire and he immediately asked to become one.
My refusal to turn him was firm but I already knew then, from the moment I decided to tell him the truth, that we were irrevocably connected.
In the end, we made a deal. I wanted Matthias to experience life, to grow both his body and his mind, to have a chance to be human before he threw that away.
“I want to protect and to be strong,” he told me. “I’m never going to have a silver-quick mind like yours, Tristan, but I can hone my body.”
We traveled and Matthias trained and learned fighting styles from different cultures. He molded his body and mind into exactly what he wanted.
I killed him and brought him back to life when he was twenty-nine.
When the bond between us flared to life I was afraid. Was it going to feel like a noose around Matthias’ neck the way the bond with my Sire felt? Or like the discordant, vile threads that once connected me to Adalbert’s victims, which I inherited when I took my Sire’s power?
When Matthias opened his red eyes the bond between us sang. The joy and exhilaration at the thrum of it between us sent me to my knees. It felt right.
Like finding home after hundreds of years of exile.