The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (74 page)

“Agáta’s child,” he said.

“Agáta died before giving birth.”

“She did, yes,” he said. “In the bathtub.”

“How do you know?”

“You and I, together, we saved the child.”

“No,” I said. “The child died when I abandoned her,
dead in the bath. You were not there.”

Laszlo Arros touched my brow and said, “We are the
reason she survived. We shifted to save her life.”

“I am no shifter,” I said.

“You think not,” he said. “But you are the son of
Thetis.”

“I have never shifted.”

“You leave it to me,” he said. “Shall I tell you the
story of Youlan …”

The Birth of Youlan

Agáta’s body floated in a pink pool made from the
bloody wound in her stomach. The baby had been torn out by the angry claws of
one unable to quench the hunger in his bones.

“What have you done?” Johann Mendel said, as he
dropped to his knees in the doorway.

Vincent would have finished off the child if Mendel
had not begged him to concede her. “She is dead,” he said.

Mendel rushed him and ripped her away, cradling the
small corpse in his arms, warming her on his chest, as Vincent escaped into the
night.

The great botanist revived the child with more than
science, thanking Augustine’s god when the spark of life returned to her sunken
eyes.

He raised her as his own, keeping her heritage and
conception a secret. She believed he was her father and loved him as a daughter
might, until the day when Laszlo Arros returned as Vincent Du Maurier.

“I have met someone,” she said to Mendel. “He is perfect,
a dream.”

“Who is this boy?”

She blushed, afraid to tell her father he was no
boy, but a man. “He is like you.”

When Mendel learned Vincent had returned for Youlan,
he did the only thing he could to keep her from him. “Come daughter,” he said.
“I have a gift for you.”

He had made no others like him, shunning the life of
blood, the endless pursuit forced upon him. He did not waver in his decision,
though, convinced it was the only thing to do, and transformed her without
regret, freezing the blood in her veins.

“What have you done to me?” She writhed when
awakened, bitterness sowing discord in her heart. “He will not want me now, not
like this.”

“Good,” Mendel said. “You are too fine for a man
like him.”

“He is no man,” she said. “He says he is my father.”

“Bad company is like a nail driven into a post,”
Mendel scolded her. “After the first and second blow, it may be drawn out with
little difficulty. But when driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold
to draw it out, it can only be done by the destruction of the wood.”

“You have destroyed the wood,” she said. “But I
shall annihilate the destroyer.”

Youlan bludgeoned Mendel, cracking the top of his
head open like an egg. But once she witnessed the end of the man who had raised
her, the one who had awakened her to blood, she longed for his presence again.

For many years, she let his final word rattle about
in her stony mind, wondering what it could mean. “Kinblood,” he had said into
her ear, as he descended into oblivion.

A Plague to
Kill Them Both

As Laszlo Arros told Youlan’s story, her rebirth and
awakening, she came into the room and stood by the entryway, watching us both.

“It is a lie,” I said.

“Which part?”

“I never saw Mendel again,” I said. “Not after that
night, not ever. Agáta died by my hand and everything inside her womb was dead
when I left her.”

“A shifter has the gift for sparking life,” he said.
“You should know that.”

“I am no shifter,” I said.

I looked up at Youlan, and asked her which of us she
believed was her real parent.

“You look the same,” she said, “but I come from you.”
She pointed to me, sitting on the bench, crushed beneath the weight of Laszlo
Arros’s tale.

“I did not bring you back to life,” I said.

“He did,” she said, grinning at my double. “He set
the spark.”

“She is loyal,” Laszlo Arros said with a wry smile.
“Exactly like you. Tell him, my darling girl.”

She smirked, and drew closer. “You taught me the
ways, father,” she said. “I understand my purpose.”

“To whom are you referring?” I asked.

Laszlo Arros shot her a stern look and she backed
off, circling us as she kept to the edge of the room.

“We did not know if it would work,” he said. “In the
beginning she embraced the change, overcame the withdrawal. She even refused
the minimal quotient, but after she made the great sacrifice, carrying the
disease within her, only blood could revive her.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“A living incubator,” she said. “Right, father?”

“That is correct, my darling girl.”

“She carried the virus to the world,” Laszlo Arros
said. “A living petri dish in which the microorganisms could be cultivated, and
bloom.”

“I am patient zero,” she said with a smile.

“She is the cause of the bloodless?” I asked.

“Chosen by you,” he said.

“I never met her before the ship,” I said.

“Time is not relevant,” he said. “She is your weapon
of choice.”

“For what?”

“To destroy both races.”

“Nothing you say is truthful,” I said.

“Human and vampire,” he said. “Vampire and human.”

“Give me Lucia,” I said.

“I cannot do that.”

“Why?”

“You think this a scheme,” he said. “You think
yourself powerless, but you hold the cards.”

My head seemed to rot from the inside, but I fought
my rapidly waning physicality.

“We are the same creature,” he said. “You are me,
and I you.”

Insanity knocked, my sitting next to it as I was. To
speak to an exact reflection of oneself, in voice, in every physical feature,
even in mind, challenges one’s ability to beat the paradox, and I refused to let
our seams blur.

“I am an original,” I said. “The origin, and I have
no match.”

“Even as I stand here staring you in the face, a perfect
echo, still you deny me.”

“Everything after comes from me,” I said. “Even
you.”

He scoffed. “You are one blind old coot. Did you not
understand what I said about the ash?”

“You claim to be a phoenix, no? Risen from my
destruction.”

“Yes,” he said with a softer smile. “I am you.”

“There was no ash.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was no ash, no pyre, no immolation from which
you could rise.”

“Of course there was,” he said, his voice betraying a
quiver.

He stepped toward me then and reached out, soldering
his hands to my temples, pulling me into his mental sphere once again, ushering
me out of the present and into the past. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “See.”

A moving picture rose up like an image on a screen.
The frames flicked past as though set to fast-forward, each one showing the
ashy remains of my human body, centuries in the ground, nurturing the soil.
Eventually that earth passed its energy along through veins in the core, running
through as natural material and coming up to see the sky again in the seams and
grooves of the bark on a tree. That tree was chopped down and made into
firewood, all the while carrying the life energy from my original body. The
wood burned in a stove somewhere far from the coast on which my pyre was set,
and when the ash from that fire was tossed out, its energy continued its cycle
and traveled through the earth until it was absorbed once again by another
living organism, and used as ash a second time.

“It is simple physics,” Laszlo Arros said, awaking
me from my reverie. “Energy is neither added nor taken away.”

“How many times?”

“Three times my spark was set to the fire and
renewed. On the third, the god of resurrection used my spark to his purpose.”

“This?” I said, gesturing to his current physical
state.

“Immortality is costly.”

“How is it immortality if I am replaced.”

“Consider it an upgrade,” he said. “Perhaps I should
not have said you were being replaced. You will be better, rather.”

“You are saying we will become one?”

“We already are.”

“This is some sort of time slippage, or a trick,” I said.
“For you are the future me, and I the past.”

“If that makes it easier for you to understand it,”
he said, “then yes.”

“How do I get out?”

“There is no out,” he said. “You will leave here
once we have become the same.”

“Which means?”

“You have given up your lust for blood.”

I glanced at Youlan, who stood in the corner
admiring the two of us. She licked her lips when he spoke of blood.

“What if I refuse your offer?”

“Our split is impossible.”

“What does that mean?”

“I am you,” he said with a smile.

“You are me.”

“You can feel it already, your body giving in,
surrendering to the path of enlightenment.”

“This is not enlightenment.”

“But it is. To need common blood for
sustenance—or anything—is base. We must rise like a god, a phoenix,
and be reborn, better and supernal.”

“If you do not drink blood,” I said, “what is it you
feed on?”

He smiled wide with an open mouth, showing me the
singular difference between us. He had no fangs, my finest feature. “The
substance of the gods suits me fine.”

“Which is what?”

“Ah-ha,” he said. “You must become one to know.”

“I am all that I need to be.” I had let my muscles
relax, as the energy continued to pour out of me, but when our conversation
turned to blood, and the other vampire in the room seemed stimulated by the
talk, I noticed the shift in my body. I could feel my temperature rise, and my
strength return despite how weak.

“And I am you,” he said.

I rushed him then, plowing into him where he stood.
My body crashed into his, and we hit the wall behind him. A laugh rose from his
belly, but I continued to push into him with all the force I had, trying to put
him through the wall. He went limp and allowed me to exorcise my wrath. “You
cannot meld our bodies together,” he said, “if that is what you attempt to do.”

I pressed on his chest with renewed vigor and dug my
talons into his flesh. His shell was softer than mine, for lack of blood, but he
had not lied when he spoke of enlightenment. His physical body had become invincible
with his transformation, and he received my punishment as a bull bears a fly.

“To destroy me is to destroy yourself,” he said.
“See the truth.”

He reached up and touched my forehead, implanting a
vision. I witnessed Evelina leading a troop of vampires over the Nortrak. She
looked as fierce as ever, a villainy that once made me proud, but with Laszlo
Arros’s influence my skin crawled, and she repulsed me for the first time, as I
recoiled at the sight.

“How can that be?” I whispered.

My concentration broken, I dropped to the side, and
he picked me up by the collar, dragging me back to the bench.

“It is no longer who we are,” he said. “When you
leave here, Vincent, you will be a god. These creatures, those you fathered
long ago, and those you fathered most recently, are equally abominable. Bottom
feeders, blood feeders, worthy of genocide.”

“I set the course,” I said.

“It is simple evolution,” he said. “Do you not
recall our planning, our meticulous scheming to get us here?”

“There is no us.” I slammed my fist against the wall
behind me, and shut him down.

“But you willed this,” he said. “You resented your
nature, the one Thetis thrust upon you.”

“Never,” I said. “I have never doubted my
superiority, my advent as the origin. I regret nothing, not one kill, not one
awakening, not even one taste.”

“But hers,” he said.

I imagined my own look of doubt, as indecision
seemed to cross his brow.

“I will not taste her.”

“How will you resist?”

“I owe it to her mother.”

“Ah, yes, Evelina.” He scratched the side of his
neck with the edge of his fingernail as an addict betrays his wanting a fix. “Your
spawn is an abomination, too.”

“She is a gift.”

“From whom, let me guess.”

“Byron was a genius.”

“Doctor Darrow,” he said. “I know you have read our
letters. How did you find them? Enlightening?”

“He has gotten in your way, has he not?”

“Our way,” he said. “Yes.”

“You shall never destroy that side of me.”

“Which side?”

“The bloody one.”

“Byron put a kink in things, and I suppose Thetis is
to thank for that.”

“Not so,” I said. “I set the course.” I held his
gaze and managed a hard stare that would have sent an ordinary man into spells,
but rattled him nonetheless. “I want to see my child,” I said.

“Your breed stands before you.” He gestured to Youlan,
a statue in the room with us.

“Not her,” I said. “My flesh, my blood.”

“Do you regret the mother’s blood? Or was she
brought around so you would no longer desire it?”

“I did not make Evelina mine by choice,” I said.
“She was made for me.”

“Who do you think gave her the venom, if not you?”

“You.”

“Me?” He glanced at Youlan, and she raised her chin.
“I am you,” he said.

“Stop this charade,” I said. “We are not the same.”

“In here, she is still human, you know,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Inside this place, nothing that has come before is
real. Would you like to see her again, as she was with that wretched worm in
her belly?”

I scaled the wall that marked his trap and flew
overtop it. “Evelina is my counterpart, and no longer the girl she once was.”

He smiled and touched my shoulder. “Tell me about
the sparrow. Did the frequency match—exactly as we planned?”

“What do you mean?”

“The sound of her frequency,” he said. “Did you
recognize it as your own, our design?”

“No—I do not understand.”

“We came up with the marker together,” he said. “We
decided she should have a call in kind to yours, so you would know she was the
one. Your desire for her would not be enough, and of course the smell of
Lucia’s blood in her womb—your vanity project—would be gone once
she gave birth. If we did not design something for you to favor in her, to choose
her as your counterpart, you would have abandoned her before reaching me.”

“It was fixed?”

“Of course,” he said. “How else was I to get you
here?”

“You lie—all of this is a lie.”

“Granted, it is difficult to hear without recalling the
details to which you were once privy. But if you think hard enough, you will
probably remember some of our planning.”

“No.”

“Be patient with yourself,” he said. “It should come
back.”

He dropped his head, as though giving me time to
reflect.

“Nothing,” I said. “I remember none of this.”

“Poor thing,” he mumbled. “Come with me.”

“No.”

“Please,” he said, reaching for me.

We moved without moving, and found ourselves in a
new room. Youlan was gone, but I faltered when I caught sight of Evelina.

“She is a beauty,” Laszlo Arros said.

“But how?” My words tripped off my tongue, alien to sound.
“How?”

“Look at her, Vincent.”

I could not peel my eyes from the sight I beheld.
Evelina stood on a pedestal, a single tube poking out of her naked torso that seemed
to be holding her in place. “She is not real,” I said.