Immortal (9 page)

As they continued their furious skirmish, I took note that the dragon’s fighting style was almost all offense. It worked out well for him. Eloise was getting more and more frustrated as her every blow, cut, and slash glanced harmlessly off his hide.

“I thought you faced one of these before!” she yelled.

“Me? No. I’ve seen them. Never fought one.”

“This would be a good time to start!”

I was completely in awe of what I was witnessing. In my lifetime I had seen some extraordinary life-or-death struggles between countless manner of beasts, some quite fearsome. This battle between vampire and dragon topped them all.

In a telling sequence, I watched Eloise bring her palm up into the dragon’s long chin, a powerful blow that unbalanced him temporarily and sent him tumbling backward. Seizing the opportunity she dove hard at him.

Then I saw what I was looking for.

The dragon brought his right forearm up in front of his chin to ward off her attack and swung hard with his left arm. It was his first defensive maneuver.

Everyone has a weakness. The trick is figuring out what it is in enough time to take advantage of it.

But before I could do anything about my newfound knowledge, Eloise made a mistake. Ducking under his left arm, she sprang forward, leaving herself open for a shot with his right arm. He swatted at her head, connecting with a devastating impact that sent her tumbling backward and exposing her belly. He followed it up quickly with a
coup de grâce
, a deep slash across her stomach, that would have been mortal had she been human.

Bleeding badly, she fell to her knees. The dragon stood over her, looking eager to finally eat something and probably feeling pretty good about having won the battle, too. But before he got around to doing something more permanent to her, I fired my crossbow bolt. It struck him in the shoulder, penetrating just far enough to get his attention. I drew my sword and slid off Archimedes’ back. The dragon looked up at me, apparently having forgotten I was even there.

“Now you face me!” I shouted, not so much to be heard as to inspire a little belligerence on his part. I wanted him to forget about Eloise and focus on me. It worked.

The dragon roared. Terrible sound, that. Made my testicles shrink. I pointed my sword at him defiantly.

“You killed a human, lumpy. That’s against the rules. Now I have to kill you.”

And then the most curious thing happened. The dragon spoke. “Kill . . . me . . . ?” he grunted. Dragons don’t really have the right equipment—brains, vocal chords—to hold a conversation, so it was a guttural rasp at best. But I understood it all right.

“Yes, kill you,” I said defiantly. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

I walked away from Archimedes—he was just about ready to panic—and staked a spot of nice open space, standing tall, in profile, sword in my right hand, behind me and partly obscured.

“K
ILL
 . . .
ME
 . . . ?” he repeated. Maybe it was the only thing he knew how to say.

With a bloodcurdling bellow he charged, arms outstretched, leading with his claws. I was expecting just that kind of attack, as it was the one he’d opened with when he first closed the distance between himself and Eloise.

Then it was all a matter of timing.

I stood my ground until an instant before his claws struck, ducked straight down, then bounced up again. I brought my free hand up under his chin, popped his head back, and exposed the one place on his entire body he saw fit to protect, his neck. Next came my sword, which I lined up point-first with the soft spot in front of his throat. His momentum did the rest.

The dragon’s charge carried us both across the snow. The sword was jerked from my grasp, and as I flew through the air, I was forced to alter my priorities slightly to make sure I didn’t end up crushed under him or the victim of a broken neck after an awkward landing. He ended up on his side a few dragon-sized strides away from me, unmoving.

I got up slowly. A sharp pain in my left side—the creature’s knee had slammed into me there when we tumbled—suggested I might have a few broken ribs to worry about in the days ahead. But I got off easy by comparison.

My sword was buried nearly to the hilt in the center of the dragon’s neck. I knelt down beside him and found he was still alive, but only just. His eyes, so bloodthirsty a moment earlier, looked sad now. Pleading.

“I warned you,” I said.

Putting the heel of my foot on his shoulder—which still had a crossbow bolt stuck in it—I managed to yank the sword free. The dragon’s head lolled backward, his body no longer obeying any commands. Then I swung the sword down at the still-exposed neck and cleaved his head from his shoulders. I could have let him suffer and die on his own, but I was feeling merciful. Also, I didn’t know enough about dragon physiology to be entirely positive I’d administered a mortal wound. Removing his head seemed pretty final, as is generally the case with most beings.

I watched the blood pour out of his body for a few seconds, then tossed aside the sword and went to check on Eloise.

There are actually a fairly large number of ways to kill a vampire. (Or, re-kill, I suppose, since they are supposedly already dead. I never entirely bought into that whole “walking undead” thing, though. I suppose that’s an argument for another time.) Chop a vampire up into enough pieces—or simply decapitate them—and they’ll stay dead. Fire works, too. And there’s the whole sunlight thing, which is extremely effective. But wooden stakes, as I’ve said, don’t work at all. Nor will gutting a vampire, although the latter will hurt a whole heck of a lot and take a very long time to heal.

Eloise was curled up in a fetal position and clutching her stomach. She’d managed to keep her intestines inside of her by holding them in manually. Not a pleasant sight. I could have finished off what the dragon had started, were I so inclined. This was probably what she was thinking when she looked up at me wearing an expression of pleading similar to the dragon’s.

I sat down in the snow beside her and pulled her head into my lap.

“You did well.”

“Did I?” she whispered, sounding very afraid. The pain must have been extraordinary.

“Yes.” I pulled back my sleeve and thrust my bare wrist under her nose. “Let me help. Drink.”

Blood kicks everything in a vampire’s system into high gear, and that includes healing. Think of it as a battlefield transfusion.

A bloody tear streamed down her cheek. “Thank you,” she said, baring her fangs.

It took her a few minutes to get her fill. She finished around the same time Lord Harsigny reached the clearing.

Another day, another meal with mushrooms in it. I think they scored a deal with a mushroom merchant or something because lately that’s all I’m getting, and it’s a little tiresome.
 

   
Might just be I’m going crazy with so little to do. Even prisons come with libraries, you know? It’s like they
want
me to sit around and plot ways to escape. And I am seriously considering escaping.

Granted, even if I get out of my cell, I still have to contend with the guards I can’t possibly overpower, the fence, and the desert. Not the best odds in the world.

*
 
*
 
*

Brenda, the vampire hooker, reached her limit at around the same time spots started to appear in my vision, which worked out pretty well for both of us. (This is another thing most people don’t understand about vampires. Their limit is about four quarts. Only malevolence or severe starvation would lead them to consider overfeeding.) I reached across the bed and slowly pried my wrist from her mouth. She was half asleep, so I helped her the rest of the way onto the bed and then, very lightheaded, I lay down next to her.

It had been centuries since I’d thought of the late Francois Etienne de Harsigny. Like so many thousands that came before and since, he was someone I called friend. That’s the truly shitty thing about being immortal, in case you were wondering. Everybody dies eventually. Even the vampires. Some of them end up slain by stupid mortals who think they’re acting in the name of whichever god is fashionable at the time, but most end up as suicides somewhere around the three hundred year mark. The way it works is you spend the first century doing all the things you always wanted to do, the second century doing things you never thought you’d want to do, and the third century doing whatever’s left. Then one night you look around and realize that not only have you done everything there is to do, but you’re no longer interested in doing any of it ever again. Suddenly death seems like an interesting option, if only because it represents the one experience left on your checklist. Compounding the problem, vampires young and old routinely suffer from depression. Never being allowed to see the sun ever again has that effect. And as I’ve said, I’ve been there a few times myself.

Another unfortunate fact about immortality could best be explained by Harsigny’s reaction to the scene in the clearing. There I was, his trusted friend, nursing a vampire in the snow next to a slain dragon. After all this time, I can still see the stunned expression on his scarred face.

Historically, mortal humans haven’t dealt well with the unknown. Their usual reaction is to kill what they don’t understand. Harsigny, willing up until that point to ignore the obvious fact that I never aged, was forced all at once to come to the only conclusion his ideology would allow him. His trusted friend was some sort of demon. And for a God-fearing fellow like him, my apparent demonhood was something he wasn’t willing to overlook. (Considering what real demons are like, this was a bit of an insult, but I let it go on the basis of the fact that Harsigny had clearly never seen one.) Thus, my days in Coucy-le-Chateau came to an abrupt end, all thanks to my charitable decision to rid Picardy of a human-eating dragon. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

Harsigny was gracious enough not to run us through right then and there—which was good, as I didn’t particularly want to have to kill him, too—and he did let me keep Archimedes. He even gave us some gold in exchange for the guarantee that we’d leave immediately and never return.

History wasn’t particularly kind to him, and so, while I’m quite certain he’s passed on, I don’t know when or how because there’s no historical record of his existence. Enguerrand de Coucy I do know about. He lived many more years after my hasty departure before dying in the Battle of Nicopolis. I regretted not speaking to him one final time before I left, if only to apologize for leaving.

Eloise and I traveled from Picardy through the Holy Roman Empire and into Italy, where we witnessed the church schism firsthand. Boredom eventually led us to Egypt, where I regaled her with tales of pyramids and sphinxes and long-dead kings. Eventually we drifted apart, although I can’t for the life of me remember why.

As I trailed off to sleep beside my new friend Brenda, it occurred to me—not for the first time—that death was the only constant in my life. If it weren’t so depressing, I’d laugh at the irony.

*
 
*
 
*

Brenda nudged me awake with a glass of orange juice in her hand. “You okay?”

I sat up slowly and took the glass. “What time is it?”

“Daytime,” she said. It was impossible to tell with the windows masked.

“Yeah, but what time is it?”

“Dunno. I don’t own a watch. What do I need one for?”

True enough.

The juice was cool and tasted supermarket fresh. “Where’d this come from?”

“I have a cooler under the bed,” she explained. “I like to keep juice on ice, just in case. I figure the Red Cross gives OJ to its donors, I should do the same thing, you know?”

“Do you charge extra for it?”

“No, silly, it’s free,” she smiled. “You know . . . you taste, um, you taste really good. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“I bet you say that to all the boys.”

“I’m serious! It’s really weird, your blood it’s, like . . .”

“Old,” I offered. “I have heard it before. I’m a very old vintage.”

Brenda smiled again. She had quite a nice smile. Had she reached her mid-twenties, she would have been a brilliantly attractive young woman. I wondered what made her decide to arrest her development younger than that. Eighteen, I guessed. Possibly it wasn’t her decision, but that was very unusual. When you meet a vampire nowadays you’re generally meeting one who chose the life.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“A little lightheaded,” I said, “but that’s the worst of it. Can you hand me my bag?”

The bag was one of those nondescript army duffel bags. I bought it off an RAF paratrooper in 1952. It contained seven of my lives.

About two hundred years ago, I realized if I was going to continue to travel freely about the planet, I was going to have to officially establish myself. Back in the day a guy could wander from place to place, and his word was pretty much the only identification he ever needed. Now I need a passport, name, and nationality to get from country to country and sometimes from state to state or town to town. Fortunately, every lawful society has an unlawful element, so it’s usually not that tough to pick up a new ID whenever I need one.