30. Intervention
Intervention
“Iknow you’re there,” I say into the dark. She’s been following me for several blocks now, weaving in and out of cramped quarters of some slum district outside of Paris. It is an easy place to hunt, where humans are not missed. It is also far from where I suspect Zora lives.
I wonder what she would do if she saw me feed? I have imagined telling her several times since the night we spoke of melancholy. Is this the best way to tell a human of our kind?
I would like to ask you, but you’ve escalated your distance.
I did not think it was possible, that your cruelty could run any deeper.
You pass by me in the halls as if I don’t exist. You give me answers that are not answers.
You leave for days at a time—to where? I do not know.
You must move about during the day, though I don’t understand how.
You won’t speak to me, you’d rather let me suffer in your silence.
I thought yelling or screaming would finally fix things, that you would be forced to acknowledge me.
I destroyed everything I could—I tore up your room, I broke every item I could find.
Most of it I didn’t recognize, you never carried things of value with you.
Still, it felt good to break something of yours.
The next day it was clean once more, as if I did nothing. Even my greatest acts of destruction were inconsequential, something easily swept into the trash and disposed of.
I thrilled at picturing you cleaning the mess, only to find a human servant doing it one time. I smelled her blood on the air as she sliced her fingers on the glass from the window in the room we once shared.
My meager joy evaporated, replaced with the rage that threatened to boil over.
Who else was I to ask? I’d abandoned Le Sang Bleu. I avoided them, purposefully attended areas of Paris that they would not go to. I left them to their petty dealings with humans and law and revolution.
And I walked through the night with Zora, stealing things, counting cards, laughing until the moon dipped below the horizon and the sun threatened to burn me alive.
It is not you or Zora that hunts me now.
“I did not expect you to be so astute,” Caterina says, stepping from the alleyway. The incessant clacking of her shoes, the way she moved too quickly—I knew it was no human that trailed me. Once I disappeared into the shadows of the alleys, where human eyesight failed, I was sure.
I expected Yusuf or Tomasz, someone trying to drag me back to Le Sang Bleu. For a moment I wondered if it was Theon, escaped from the temple before its collapse and ready for revenge.
Instead it is Caterina, her pinched face showing her displeasure at following me for several blocks.
“Have you come to hunt with me?” I ask, ignoring the barb.
“I’ve had my fill for the evening,” she says.
“Have you come to request my presence at the salon?”
“No, though I’m not sure you’d be welcomed back.”
I shrug. I’m sure I broke some unspoken rule by leaving and never returning. Perhaps there was a rule that said one must never leave until they take a vow of silence. Who would I tell of their club? You? You wouldn’t come near it, regardless of if I attended or not.
“Have you no sense, girl?” Caterina hisses.
“I am over a millennium older than you, do not think to call me girl,” I sneer. She is cutting into the time I spend with Zora. Whatever she wants, she must be quick about it. I am not patient enough for this nonsense.
“You are acting like a newborn,” Caterina snaps.
“What is this about? I have things that require my attendance.”
“Like what? Cavorting through the streets with that glog?”
I frown, trying to place the word in French. It does not exist, no matter how I mill it over. She sees my confusion and presses her hand to her face, shaking her head in dismay.
“This is why I call you girl, for this ignorance. That kresniks? La chasseuse?”
The last word I understand—hunter. It is a different phrasing than Tomasz used, he called them le veneur. The others spoke of them abstractly, like townsfolk spoke of lamia when I was human. Concepts, myths to keep from acting out, from going someplace at night.
Hunters did not exist, just as I was not lamia.
“You think I am mad,” she says. “You are a fool.”
“I will not waste my evening listening to this nonsense,” I say.
“Nonsense? It will not be nonsense when she’s killed you. It will not be nonsense when she chains you up and leaves you in the sun. It will not be nonsense when she finds you as you sleep and kills you!” Her voice rises with each accusation, until she snaps her mouth shut and scowls.
“So I am to believe that these hunters exist, despite never seeing one for eighteen hundred years? And I am to believe that Zora is one?”
“Eighteen hundred years?” Caterina breathes. It is the first concrete admission I’ve given of my age, though I am sure they’ve calculated it themselves. This confirmation sets her back, she sways on her feet and regards me anew. “Our lives are that long?”
“Longer,” I say, just to watch her sway again. My amusement ends when she regains her composure, pressing a hand to her throat.
“Hunters have existed for hundreds of years. They appear like humans, but they are more. Their bloodline gifts them with enhanced strength and speed. It does not match ours, but it aids them against us.”
I wave my hand dismissively. “You have no proof of their existence.”
“What proof would you like? The ashes of my maker? I did not have time to gather them as I fled the square where they burned him by the sun.” Her voice is quiet but harsh.
“I am sure that—”
“You are sure of nothing, because you have seen nothing. You are sheltered, Melinoe. For someone so old, you don’t understand anything.
You only know what you’ve read in a book, and you wear that haughty smile as if you are superior for having lived long.
You are not, you know nothing. You don’t know what it is to watch your maker dragged into a square, to hide in an attic and watch through the windows, fighting the call of sleep as the sun crests and burns him to ashes.
You don’t know what it is to fall asleep, unsure if you will wake or not, and then flee your home and hope they’ve no knowledge of you.
” She blinks rapidly though no tears come.
“And you assume they were hunters?”
“I know they were hunters.”
“You cannot—”
“Stop!” she yells, her frantic steps narrowing the distance between us.
She reaches out as if to touch me, then thinks better of it.
“I tell you this not to save you, because I don’t care what happens to you.
You are so ignorant, it’s pitiful. You think you’re too good for the rest of us, and it sets you eternally apart.
Rather than understand this is a flaw of you, you take it to be a flaw in us.
I tell you this because that huntress knows what you are, and she is biding her time to learn if there are others.
My maker thought the hunter was interested in becoming a vampyr, but he was studying us.
He was learning our weaknesses, trying to understand if there were more in the village.
They don’t kill us right away, they know that will make the rest scatter.
The more time you spend with her, the more likely you’ll let it slip that we exist. And then she’ll come for us, and I don’t think I will be lucky a second time. ”
“She does not know what I am.”
“Are you so sure? How do you explain your red eyes, Melinoe? Some of us are lucky to have eyes that could reasonably be human.” She waves at her yellow eyes.
“But you? You are a target to a trained hunter. She knows exactly what you are, even if she does not let on. She’s gained your trust so she can catch you off guard.
I hope she kills you in your sleep and leaves the rest of us be. ”
“You’ve no proof,” I growl. She has the good sense to take a step back, though she does not break eye contact with me.
“The hunter that killed my maker wore a sliver of wood from a hawthorn around his neck. That is their symbol. It is the tree that makes the stake that can kill us.” She watches my face as she says this, nodding knowingly when I don’t answer.
“A necklace is your proof?”
“Surely you’ve noticed she’s different. In eighteen hundred years, you’ve never created another. Have you a history of befriending humans? I’d think it below you. You were drawn to this human for a reason.”
“The same can be said for all of us. Why else would we be created?” I ask.
“My husband owned the largest printing press in Venice. I was a lady of the court with access to riches and information. Eloise was a pretty face that would worship the ground her narcissistic maker walked on. Tomasz and Margarethe were dying, and their maker close enough to his humanity to want to save them amongst the ruins of wars and destruction. Yusuf was the brightest mind in the Ottoman. We all have something that drew our makers to us, something more than a pretty face or quick wit. We had something to offer. I know you cannot understand this, as I am unsure what your maker saw in you.”
I was a temple mouse, an orphan serving a god I don’t recall. Or goddess?
You must see something in me to keep me all these years. As we fracture and fall apart, I wonder what that is. I, who cannot stay in one place too long. I, who longed for the company of other vampires, just to hate them. I, who nearly died and took you with me.
I, eternally unworthy, eternally hoping to be in your good graces once more.
It was not like that with Zora. She was a friend, we were equals. There was no reverence, no bartering.
But she is not talking of Zora. I do not think of turning Zora because she has something to offer me, or because she plays into my ego. I think of turning Zora so she might be free, and I might have a friend at last—one that will not die in several short years.
That is not self-serving, that is a gift I would give to her.
“Kill her. Stop playing with your food. Throw her in the Seine and watch her die if you haven’t the stomach.
Or, better yet, lock her underground. There is a series of tunnels that are not well-traveled.
She will die of starvation soon enough. You can wash your hands of her then.
But do something, or we will, because we cannot suffer a hunter to live. ”
Caterina turns her back on me, her chin high, as she disappears into the night.