Birth of a Killer (18 page)

“I doubt they were that cold,” Wester said softly.

“You never met them, so how would you know?” Larten sneered.

“They were your kin,” Wester said. “They shared your blood. They must have had some good qualities, or where did yours come from?”

“Don’t try to flatter me,” Larten growled, fighting to hide a warm smile.

“You know that I love you as a brother,” Wester said.

“Stop!” Larten winced. “You’re going to make me cry!”

“Shut up,” Wester snapped. “I’m serious. I love and respect you, Larten, and have always looked up to you. But I’m envious of you too. Not because you’re faster or stronger than me, or because Seba is much prouder of you than he is of me—don’t deny it.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Larten said.

Wester’s face dropped. “Weren’t you?”

Larten chuckled. “Well,
maybe
I was.”

Wester grinned, then continued. “None of that matters to me. The reason I envy you is because you have family and I don’t. I wouldn’t trade my time as a vampire for anything in this world, with one exception. If could restore life to my parents, brother, and sister, I would. If it meant giving up my powers, turning my back on the clan, Seba, and you, I wouldn’t
have to think twice. I miss them so much, even all these years later.”

“But I wasn’t as close to my family as you were to yours,” Larten said quietly.

“All the same,” Wester sniffed, “they
were
your family. If I had a chance to see Ma again, to listen to Da grumbling about the weather, to fight over some stupid argument with Jon…”

Wester fell silent. It was dawn outside. The two vampires sat in their room and watched the sun rising, the street outside coming into sharper focus.

After a while, Larten sighed and stood. “I’m going out.”

Wester nodded, asked no questions, and said nothing for a few minutes. Then, when he was sure that Larten had left the inn, he raised his voice slightly and said, “He’s gone.”

In the room next to his came a muffled response from Seba. “Good.”

Then the vampire master and his assistant lay back on their beds, separated by the thin wall, and stared anxiously at the ceiling, wondering where Larten would go and what he would find in the city of his long-lost youth.

The city had changed vastly since Larten had fled from the factory. New factories had opened for business. Old houses had been torn down and rebuilt. There were whole streets and roads he didn’t remember at all.

Yet much was as it had been, just a touch dirtier and dustier than before. The markets still existed, traders laying out their wares as they had when he was a child. Popular inns and taverns drew the same sort of rowdy customers. He passed familiar churches and government buildings.

The silk factory was gone. That surprised Larten. He had never considered the possibility that it might
have shut down or moved its premises. When he first came to the building, he thought he had made a mistake and turned around slowly a few times, searching for the factory. When he realized that he had come to the right spot, he studied the structure in front of him. Some windows and doors had been replaced, a couple bricked up and a few more added. The sign over the main door had been changed. Larten could not read the new name, but he could tell by the smell that the place had been converted into a slaughterhouse. That seemed appropriate to Larten, given the bloodshed he had experienced on his final day here.

Larten thought of entering the building and asking about the silk factory and what had happened to it, but he decided it didn’t matter. It made no difference to him whether the owners had gone out of business or moved on.

“I hope your ghost haunts this place,” Larten muttered beneath his breath, staring at the building and thinking of Traz. “I hope you became a tortured soul when I killed you, damned to remain trapped here forever. It’s all you deserve.”

Larten spat on the pavement, then turned his back on the spot where the factory had stood and stormed away, pulling the collar of his coat up high to shelter
his neck as much as it could from the rays of the rising sun.

Larten moved faster now, aware that he didn’t have much time. Even with his cap and coat, the light was starting to burn him. If he wanted to avoid a bad case of sunburn, he would have to conclude his business swiftly and get off the morning streets before the sun rose much higher. The midday world was no place for a creature of the night.

Larten hurried through the old neighborhood, familiar to him even after such a long hiatus. This part of the city hadn’t changed as much as other areas. The poor couldn’t afford to tear down and rebuild as freely as the wealthy, so they had to make do with what they had. Some old buildings had crumbled and were nothing but ruins, and a few new hovels had been constructed, but for the most part the borough had not been touched by the passage of time.

When Larten came to the small, gloomy house that had once been his home, he felt his heart tighten and his eyes begin to water. Surprised by his reaction, he scowled and blinked away the tears. He almost turned and left without going any farther, but he forced himself to skirt around to the yard at the back, so that he could not later accuse himself of fleeing from his painful memories.

The pair of barrels stood as they always had, full of water, one for drinking, the other for washing. Larten entered the yard and angled towards the latter barrel. He was not afraid of being challenged. It was late morning, and anyone who lived here should be at work. If that wasn’t the case and somebody was at home, he could simply claim to have stumbled into the wrong yard—all of the houses looked much the same from back here.

Larten didn’t give much thought to the possibility that any of his family might still live here. It had been a long time. His parents had probably died, while his brothers and sisters almost certainly would have moved out to raise families of their own.

Larten stood over the barrel and stared down at his reflection. He remembered the last time he had done this, how he had immersed his head then studied the patterns formed by the orange dye from his hair swirling in the water. Vur had been alive then. They had set off, laughing, for the factory, no idea of what lay ahead of them. If he could go back and warn those two boys of what they could expect from the rest of that day, would they believe him? Or would they dismiss him as a crank, certain that nothing so awful could happen to a pair of harmless, innocent boys?

As Larten studied his melancholic expression, someone coughed inside the house, and the back door began to open. Reacting instinctively, Larten leapt and grabbed hold of the wall to his left. He hauled himself up, then pounced onto the roof like a cat and spread himself flat. Edging forward, he studied the yard from a height, unseen and unnoticed.

An elderly man stumbled out of the house and shuffled to the barrel of drinking water. He dipped in a mug, filled it, then drank slowly, hand trembling, drops spilling from the mug and dripping from his lips back into the barrel. When he was finished, he paused and looked up at the sky to check the weather.

The man was Larten’s father.

For a human of that time, Larten’s father was ancient. He had outlived virtually all of the people he had grown up with, Larten’s mother, and several of his children too. His skin was wrinkled and stained with dark spots and patches. He was almost as skinny as a skeleton and could not stand straight. His hair was long and untidily kept, caked with dirt. But despite its poor condition, it was a brilliant white color. Traz’s dye had kept its sheen even after all these decades.

Larten wanted to launch himself from the roof,
throw his arms around the old man, and announce his return. The pair could laugh and cry together, go for a drink in an inn, reminisce about the past, and catch up on all that had happened since their paths were so cruelly parted.

But Larten was a vampire, a creature of immense speed and power, who had barely aged since he was blooded. How to explain his youthful appearance, his aversion to the sun, his need to drink blood? If his father had been younger and healthier, perhaps they could have reconnected. But Larten sensed that he would only throw the old man’s world into disarray if he revealed himself now. His father was frail and elderly, surely not much longer for this life. It would be unfair to shock him. Better to let him live out his last few months or years in peace and quiet, troubled by nothing more than dark clouds in the sky and the threat of rain.

The old man muttered something beneath his breath, then dragged himself over to the wall that Larten had leapt onto. With much wheezing and coughing, he knelt and touched some dead flowers that had been set at the base of the wall.

“I’ll get new flowers for you soon,” Larten heard his father mumble. Then he picked out some of the decomposed petals and tossed them aside. He care
fully rearranged the others as best he could, sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and started to pray.

Larten didn’t care to eavesdrop on such a personal, sensitive scene, but he could not rise and slip away without alerting his father to his presence. He didn’t want to have to flee from his own flesh and blood, so he remained where he was, spread-eagled, trying to tune out the old man’s words and afford him as much privacy as he could.

Larten was probably on the roof no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed much longer, especially with the sun beating down on him. He breathed a sigh of relief when his father finally drew to a close, got to his feet, and retreated back inside. Larten waited a few minutes to be sure the old man would not return, then lowered himself to the ground and stepped across to study the flowers.

There was an inscription on the wall, carved into the crumbling brickwork. Larten had never learned to read, so he could not decode the sentences that his father had chipped out of the bricks. But there were two names at the bottom that he recognized instantly, having seen them written many times in his youth.

Larten
and
Vur.

His father had been saying a prayer for the two boys who had been taken from him. All these years
later, having experienced so much and having seen so many people suffer and perish, his thoughts were still for the pair whom he had lost in such unfortunate circumstances.

Larten recalled his flight from the city after he’d killed Traz. He had not gone home, primarily because the mob would be looking for him there, but also because he had assumed that his parents would not miss him, that they would freely hand him over to those who wished to execute him.

If Larten had known how much his father loved him and how great an impact his son’s departure and Vur Horston’s death would have on him, he would not have stayed away so long. He would have returned after a few years to tell his father that he was alive and doing well. The pair could have kept in touch. Larten could have dropped in on the old man every so often, provided for him, given him money, medicine, anything he needed.

Guilt consumed Larten as he stood there in the yard, staring at his name and Vur’s, remembering the past, thinking about how his father had laid flowers and said prayers for him. With a miserable, mournful moan, he staggered out of the yard, wiping tears from his eyes, fleeing as he had fled as a child, only this time not from a lynch mob but from himself
and the memories of who he had been and the people he had hurt.

Larten spent the rest of that day in the ruins of an old house, crammed into the remains of a shed, sheltered from the sun. He wept for a long time and begged forgiveness of the vampire gods, as well as the God his father had been praying to.

Eventually, as dusk was settling upon the city, Larten picked himself up, dried his cheeks, and returned to the inn. Wester was relieved to see him again—he had started to fear that his friend might never come back.

“Are you all right?” Wester asked as Larten let himself in.

“No,” Larten said, but he forced a weak smile. “You were right about family being important. I’ve been a fool. My apologies.”

“You don’t ever have to apologize to me,” Wester said. He licked his lips and thought about asking what had happened to Larten. Then he decided he should not ask such a question. If Larten wished to talk about it, he would. If not… well, everyone was entitled to their secrets.

Shortly after Larten had cleaned himself up, the door to their room opened and Seba stood outside.
“Are you ready to continue?” he boomed, acting as if he knew nothing of Larten’s absence. “All well and rested?”

“Aye,” Larten said softly.

“Good,” Seba smiled. “I have quite a difficult task in mind for the pair of you tonight. It is time I started to seriously test you. The easy nights are behind us. You will have to really buckle down now.”

Wester groaned and tried to share a rueful glance with Larten. But Larten did not react to their master’s announcement. He was staring at the floor, thinking about the choices he had made, the sad old man with the flowers, wondering if he should have been so quick to pledge himself to Seba that night in the graveyard a lifetime ago.

Several weeks later, Seba and his weary assistants arrived at a town in the middle of a festival. It was late at night, but revelers still wove through the streets, singing and drinking. Seba had planned to push on, but Wester pleaded with him to stay—it had been a long time since they’d been able to enjoy a party such as this. In a rare bow to one of his assistants’ wishes, Seba altered his plans and led them to an inn.