Outsider (21 page)

Still wearing her black jacket, she almost
unintentionally walked to the settee, the strange irises following
intensely her approach. When the pale hands grabbed her, she became
aware of the sharp nails. When the winged woman snarled, Jo saw the
shiny white fangs, and when the teeth sank into Jo's neck, Jo felt
overwhelmed by the uncanny similarity with Alkor's features, if
Alkor had been some kind of vampiric creature……. She involuntarily
grabbed at the small firm breasts barely covered by the dark rags,
and, powerless, let the could-be-Alkor creature suck blood out of
her artery. Before losing herself into oblivion, Jo Davenport
really wished, in a twisted kind of way, that it was her friend,
healer and seer to the People.

X X X X X X X

Jo's flatmates walked into their living room
approximately 20 hours later, and discovered Jo seemingly asleep on
the settee, the collar of her white shirt stained with real blood.
Unconscious and dreaming of Alkor.

"Some people love Death to death, some
people love Life for life." W. FreedreamerTinkanesh.

Antoinette was 19 when the Bastille fell in
1789 and the nobility started to really run, or suffered beheading,
or turned coloured coats, or were already lazily sipping wine with
their wealthy cousins and allies in countries watching the French
Revolution with great curiosity, but from afar. The peasants were
still at the bottom of the pile and intellectuals were trying to
run the roost. Some men were stabbed during a daily lengthy bath,
some saw the new citizens turned on them. Marie-Antoinette's pretty
head had rolled in the basket, and Antoinette looked like a
16-or-maybe-17-year-old tall scarecrow of a teenage boy, hiring his
services from farm to farm, and going under the name of Antoine. He
played the lute deliciously and his features were angelic enough to
make the farm girls giggle, but he was always too shy to follow
them into dark barns and roll in the hay.

It was 1789 and the summer was smoldering
into harvests. Antoine, slender muscles shaped and hardened by five
years of passing and hard working, was one of the hired hands
collecting basketfuls of grapes after basketfuls in Burgundy. The
day had been hot and sweaty and she was welcoming the chill of the
evening, alone at last, in the obscured light of a barn. Suddenly,
a human shape cut out its shadow in the wide open door, disturbing
the incoming remains of the darkening daylight. It had the stature
of a man and the poise of nobility on the run. She almost stopped
breathing. Paris was far away from her life, politics unknown to
her daily routine. Like everyone else, she knew, she had heard.
Whatever was throwing the French capital into turmoil didn't make
their life any easier. Uncannily, the man looked straight at her
and started walking in her direction. She did not like his possible
intentions. She started to scramble up the bales of hay, relying on
her natural agility to escape. Unbelievably the man was already on
top of her, even if hardly breathing on her neck. There was cruelty
in his deep laughter when his right hand grabbed her crotch. Then
he froze. Now silent, he roughly turned her around and pulled down
her trousers, revealing pubic hair and a tender vulva. He threw her
against a wall with blatant rage. So hard, her left clavicle
shattered.

Before she could move again and shake her
head, he was there, turning her around, and biting her neck, with
teeth so sharp, she believed him a devil. Blood spurt into his
mouth. He started slurping greedily until he sensed she was on the
verge of losing consciousness, her heartbeat almost faint enough to
stop.

"You fooled me," he growled. She did not hear
him.

When she regained consciousness, he held her
up with one hand, stared coldly into her eyes. And burst out
laughing, the sound echoing in the dark wooden barn. She tasted
blood on her tongue. The pain had left her clavicle. Her neck
didn't even feel sore. Until he bit again, pushing her against a
wall, a hand over her mouth to muffle her potential screams.

The last time she drank his blood, she
understood the kind of devil he was. One who walked the earth
forever, preferably at night, feeding on the blood of humans.

"And when you'll have fed for the first time,
you will really have become like me."

* * * * * * *

Lesson 101 of Vampiric Lore for Antoine
turned out to be on cruelty, when it comes to feeding……. The
fledgling's first meal, selected by her sire, turned out to be a
young farm girl whose innocence was just a mere memory in the hay,
and whose eyes had struck a chord in Antoine's heart. What's
cruelty at mealtime when you have eternity to love and lust, and
the smell of blood is one with power to overrun your will.

In terms of sire, Antoine turned out to be
lucky. His protector and mentor taught her everything she needed to
know, and even some more. She became Prinz Anton, travelling with
his uncle the Count of Amalia, both from an old and rich family
whose credentials involved royalties in several countries. They
spent years traveling throughout Europe, enjoying the hospitality
of the nobility and sowing decadence in their wake. The Count would
feed on young men; the prinz would feast on young women.

The vampire taught his progeny how to feed,
how to pass as human and also how to have sex with a dildo. He
taught her languages, literature, mathematics, politics, astronomy,
some astrology and more music. From humble peasant to aristocrat in
one step.

A few decades of outrageous, amoral luxuries
later, the Count of Amalia was destroyed in a rare moment of
carelessness.

* * * * * *

Prinz Anton was on the run. Even night felt
hostile. Every shadow seemed to hide a dangerous foe. Suddenly
alone, she was no longer aware of her vampiric powers. Fear
inhabited her mind. She was afraid that the simple peasants who had
found out her mentor, would capture her and destroy her, too. She
had forgotten how fast she could run and was now running. The irony
of
fight or flight
. She had forgotten she was able to fly
and thus easily cross the political borders to another country way
before dawn. To another country where no one knew her real nature.
She was not aware of how many miles she had already covered, nor
was she aware of her pursuers having given up. She was too
terrified. An animal terror that increased multifold when a foreign
body suddenly slammed her to the ground, breaking her momentum.

It took a while to the violet eyes, where
sadness and power were swimming together, to freeze the panic in
the green eyes. It took a while for the soft, husky voice to soothe
the young vampire's mind.

"Hush, fledgling. You are safe now." The
delicate, manicured hand gently caressed the disheveled hair. Prinz
Anton's body eventually relaxed in the iron embrace of the other
vampire, relaxed and fell into a mesmerized slumber.

She had dark, curly hair, long, but pinned
together at the back of her head. Her face was pale despite having
already fed that night, contrasting more dramatically with her red
lips. She was wearing all the trappings of the mid-nineteenth
century fashion inflicted on women. She picked up the sleepy
fledgling in her arms with no effort. As light as a feather.

Toni woke up the next night, in an unknown
crypt, feeling hungry and unsafe. A female vampire of amazing
beauty was standing next to the stone coffin. She radiated great
power. Toni felt outnumbered, but the face portrayed no threat,
just grief. At her feet, Toni saw an unconscious young girl.

"Feed. We shall talk afterward."

Malvina was Amalia's sister. They had been
sired centuries ago, just after the fall and decay of the Roman
Empire, and watched civilizations rise and crumble all around the
planet. Together, then separately.

"We were both so stubborn. We raged against
each other so many times. It was……. painful. We agreed to wander
the world our separate ways. On occasions, we would meet and the
festivities would destroy entire hamlets." Her alluring lips drew a
wistful smile. "Oh, he could be so headstrong! The bloody
fool!"

* * * * * * *

Under Malvina's protection, Prinz Anton
became Antonio. They traveled to the motherland of the British
Empire, where they set out to delight the high society, Malvina
with her singing, Antonio with his piano skills, in London and
other main cities across the British Isles. The opera singer and
her young brother became so popular that even Queen Victoria
invited them to her palace. Malvina, very diplomatically, explained
that her voice was very sensitive to the air of the daytime and her
majesty would certainly gain more enjoyment from an evening
performance.

Vampires they met on their path would
immediately cower in front of the ancient one and ran if left the
opportunity.

They traveled through Eastern Europe and
Russia. During the few decades they spent together, Malvina
completed Antonio's education with finances, independence, and how
to make love without a dildo.

* * * * * * *

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Antonio
found herself on her own, as Malvina had promised it would happen.
On the eve of World War I, Antonio took an apprenticeship with a
luthier in Como, at the foot of the Italian Alps. She had learned
to control her hunger and last a few nights without feeding. She
was a master of disguise and knew how to blend in. She was a
powerful vampire in front of which most of her kind would cower.
She had not only been sired by Amalia, she had also tasted
Malvina's blood.

After a few years in Northern Italy, having
mastered her craft, she became Antony and resumed her wanderings,
still passing as a young man, throughout the European continent.
She had abandoned the lute decades ago in favour of the piano and
the violin, and while in Como added the guitar to her collection of
eclectic skills. Learning could be so easy to a vampire, especially
when from such a bloodline as Antony's.

In the early 30's, she crossed the Bering
Strait and reached North America. Soon she found herself
apprenticing again, this time in California, on time to witness the
"Frying Pan" –the first electric guitar– being produced by the
Rickenbacker team, still a far cry from the popular instrument it
was about to become. Looking like such an alluring young man, she
elected to feed on every lovely film star of female gender passing
her way. Satisfaction was generally mutual.

She arrived in New York before the beginning
of World War II and started playing piano in small jazz clubs.
Throughout the war, her pale alter ego dodged drafting, pleading
poor health and coughing. This, of course, never prevented her from
feeding on the delicious jazz singers she accompanied on stage.

* * * * * * *

By 1950, she was back in California, this
time in the small town of Fullertown, hanging out in the Fender
factories, watching with curiosity the development of solid-body
electric guitars. The next year, she was one of the musicians
testing the first Telecasters and Stratocasters.

Her wanderings in the 20th century were very
much connected with guitars and she enjoyed this coincidence to the
hilt. By the late 60's, when she stumbled into the Ovation Company
in Connecticut, she had moved on through blues and tried her hand,
but not her voice, to rock 'n' roll. She was still passing as a
man, now shortening her first name to Tony, and from the shadows
contributed to the evolution of the first electro-acoustic Ovation
guitar, the Balladeer unveiled to the market in 1970. She realised
she preferred the electric, solid-body version and even built her
own.

1977 did not just witness the rise of the
punk movement; it also started the chronicle of the short-lived,
but iconic rock band Hell For Leather. Tony, as androgynous-looking
as ever, was the front person of the power trio, singing with a
voice that no one could pin down as male or female, playing mean
metal riffs on a custom-built electric guitar of a design no one
had ever seen before. The late seventies were golden and the music
outrageously arrogant. As suddenly as Hell For Leather had started
their rocket-climb to stardom, they disbanded. The 80's had to
contend without them and without solving the mystery of the voice's
gender, despite many claims. Toni especially enjoyed the
hermaphrodite theory, and returned underground.

"A-Plus. Oh, at last! Some full-bodied
vintage stuff." (Lilith Silver in "Razor Blade Smile" 1998)

Joy's eyes bore into Sid's, from the sockets
of her expressionless and generally pale face. Eventually, she
carefully enunciated her reply:

"Since when do you care?" What she wanted
tonight was Sid's tasty menstrual blood, not the University
Challenge or the Spanish Inquisition.

Sid looked away, uncomfortable, but
unresentful. She understood the vampire's reaction. Her direct
questions were similar to an invasion of privacy, especially when
Joy had only one thing on her mind and Sid knew her own desire.

On the other hand, the vampire could
understand the newly expressed curiosity. Any human would be
curious, even more if a writer. Actually, she found amusing the
fact that the green mohican had resisted the temptation so long, so
long for a human. She considered having her bloody way there and
then, unrestrained, rip the black T-shirt away, tear up the
tattooed flesh of the fragile neck (every neck is fragile), and
greedily feast on the warm spurting blood. She sighed, gently
biting her lower lip, fangs now flashing, a softer expression in
her eyes, and looked away. Bloody Death, she thought.