The Last Vampire (A Short Story), page 1
PRAISE FOR J.T. GEISSINGER
“Oh wow, what a great story! I was hooked from page one!”
—Night Owl Reviews
“A sublime example of paranormal romance…one of the most exciting reading experiences I’ve had in quite a while.…Full of perfect pacing, seriously dangerous characters, and some super steamy romance…[this] should be the next book you read.”
—Books, Bones & Buffy
“Mind? Blown. Neurons? Fried. Synapses? Shredded. Medulla? Oblongata’d. Verdict? Best paranormal thriller ever.”
—Litchick’s Hit List
OTHER TITLES BY J.T. GEISSINGER
Rapture’s Edge
Edge of Oblivion
Shadow’s Edge
THE LAST VAMPIRE
J.T. GEISSINGER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 J.T. Geissinger
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by StoryFront, Seattle
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eISBN: 9781477868430
Cover design by Inkd
CONTENTS
START READING
DUSK
7:05 p.m.
7:42 p.m.
8:14 p.m.
9:23 p.m.
10:16 p.m.
10:39 p.m.
11:17 p.m.
MIDNIGHT
12:45 a.m.
1:40 a.m.
2:26 a.m.
3:58 a.m.
4:33 a.m.
5:05 a.m.
6:11 a.m.
DAWN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”
Emily Dickinson
DUSK
New York City, Present Day
Prior to 10:57 p.m. on a balmy Thursday evening exactly five weeks ago, if someone had told me I’d fall passionately in love with a woman merely from the taste of her blood I’d probably have threatened that idiot with grievous bodily harm that would involve ripping his heart straight out of his chest and devouring it in front of his dying eyes.
Oh—I apologize. I promised myself I would refrain from divulging too much of my nature too soon. But as this is a confessional of sorts, perhaps it’s better to get to the gory details sooner rather than later. “Nu bate în jurul cozii, Roman,” my mother always said. Don’t beat around the bush.
All right. In the spirit of full disclosure I admit that I have actually torn the beating heart from a man’s chest and gorged myself on his oxygen-rich blood while he lay dying and gasping in horror. And…I’ve done that on more than one occasion.
I’m a vampire, you see. We’re prone to that sort of thing.
But I digress.
Prior to that fateful Thursday, my life was ordered, predictable, and, for lack of a better word, sane. I had for twenty years held a position as a phlebotomist on the night shift in the lab at Mount Sinai Hospital on Broadway, a position I enjoyed. My work kept me occupied during hours I would normally be out hunting, and had the added bonus of providing me with an ample supply of fresh blood. I’d stopped taking blood directly from the vein decades ago—I’ll tell you more about that later—but my condition requires a steady diet of the stuff, so my job was a practical solution to the problem of keeping well fed a vampire with the bloodlust of a rabid lion and the “do no harm” principles of a physician.
Yes, I was a doctor in my former life. A surgeon, to be precise. But that was before the Gulag and the prison camp and Volkov, my Maker.
More on him later, too.
If my colleagues considered it strange that I didn’t appear to age over the past two decades, it wasn’t mentioned—at least not to my face; I’ve been told I’m quite “imposing”—and the occasional missing blood bag was overlooked, as a surprising number of things in hospitals are. My life proceeded smoothly, untouched by time, uneventful.
Until that Thursday at 10:57 p.m.
Blood comes in four major groups, as you, with a certain condition of your own, already know. The rarest of these is type AB-, which occurs in only 1% of the Caucasian population, and a minuscule .1% of the Asian population. What you undoubtedly don’t know—yet—is that each group has a slightly different base flavor. The presence of A or B antibodies in the plasma adds a citrusy tang that I don’t particularly enjoy, and the rarer the blood, the more rarefied the taste, hence my preference for AB- drawn from a female of Asian descent.
Yes, in case you were wondering—female blood is far tastier than its male counterpart. Far more complex, far more potent. I don’t know why, but it’s a simple fact: women taste better than men. Perhaps it’s all that estrogen.
So it was quite the treat for me when I spied the AB- tag on a bag labeled with your name, Maiko Himura, and that day’s date. Had I known at the time you were stockpiling your own blood for your upcoming operation, I never would have indulged. I may be a bloodsucking creature of the underworld, but I do have my scruples.
Unfortunately, I became overexcited at the prospect of an AB- dinner, and neglected to read the paperwork.
How can I describe the heaven that is your taste?
I can’t. There aren’t enough superlatives.
But for the sake of documentation, imagine a pristine, verdant alpine meadow late in the spring. Imagine endless fields of colorful wildflowers nodding in the golden morning sun. Imagine the warm, ripe scent of summer that is drawing closer, imagine a murmuring stream running clear and swift over a rocky bed, imagine deer and rabbits frolicking in long grasses and birds singing cheerfully in the leafy green boughs of trees. Imagine a rainbow glittering high and perfect over it all with a choir of angels perched atop, singing a song of love and peace in rapturous harmony.
That is utter putrescence compared to how you taste.
This, then, is how it happened:
I removed the plastic bag from the refrigerated storage unit in the lab and let it sit on the counter for precisely thirty minutes to warm to room temperature. I carefully slit open one corner with my pocket knife. I tipped my head back and lifted the bag to my lips. I drank…and for the first time in my 122 years, I believed in God.
And that, you see, is why I had to make you mine.
That is why I had to make you Vampire.
7:05 p.m.
At this point you’ll be wondering why I’m telling you this. Put simply, I want you to have what I did not: knowledge. My hope is that it will spare you the lifetime of problems I encountered before finally arriving at a deeper understanding of the true nature of my gift. And it is a gift, believe me. A more religious or superstitious man than I might consider it a curse, and there are serious drawbacks, to be sure, but immortality is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
A sorry attempt at humor. Again I offer my apologies. I’ve never been known for my wit.
Perhaps it would be best to warn you straightaway that you won’t be able to recall the events I’m about to describe to you. The past few months of your life will have been erased from your memory like a chalkboard wiped clean. Small traces will linger in your dreams, but they will be cloudy snippets at best. In a few decades, some of it will return, but there will always be a fog surrounding your final months BV—Before Vampire. I don’t know why this peculiarity exists, but it does, and it caused me a great deal of pain and confusion when I was first Turned, waking up as I did in a cold, filthy prison cell on the northernmost edge of Arctic Siberia.
With that dead body so gray and rigid on the cot beside me, smelling distinctly of rot.
The experience was, to put it mildly, traumatic.
Which is partly why I felt compelled to write this down for you. I want you to remember your life, to remember who you were before you Turned into the you who is reading this now, whose eyes are so much sharper, whose hearing is so much clearer, whose sense of smell is so astonishingly acute.
Who will never again be sick. Who will never grow old, or die.
But most of all, I want you to remember me. I want you to know me, and our story, and how we became us.
You won’t, of course. You can’t. And that is why in my heart of hearts I’m glad I’ll be gone when you awake as your new, superior self. Because watching you open your eyes and stare at me blankly, without the fire and laughter and desire I’ve come to cherish so dearly, would be a fate far worse than death, and one I could not bear.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Roman Ilyich Ivanescu. I was born in Moscow on September 27, 1891, during a freak thunderstorm. My mother was a Romanian gypsy, my father a Russian farmer. I am tall and dark and not particularly handsome, though you often liked to tell me otherwise.
I am your Maker.
I am the man who saved your life.
7:42 p.m.
The New York City Ballet was not a place I had ever imagined myself, but after drinking your blood, falling in love with you, violating your privacy by reading every word in your medical file, and discovering through copious Internet research that not only were you a principal dancer at said ball
et but you would be dancing a pas de deux to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 the following evening, I quickly made the necessary arrangements to obtain a ticket.
I dressed carefully in my best suit, cuff links shining, tie knotted perfectly, shoes polished to a mirror gleam. I arrived two hours early. I took my seat—center stage, front row—and sat there trembling like a hungry dog, fraught with the most exquisite anticipation.
Imagine my astonishment.
I had been contentedly alone for most of my 122 years, a wanderer and a loner by nature, a doctor turned dissident turned nocturnal hunter who’d overcome some extremely violent urges to drain the life from random people in order to carve out a more ethically pure existence for himself. I was alone but only occasionally lonely, satisfied with books and music and long philosophical discussions with my sole friend, Odair Onandi Delice, the night janitor at the hospital. Originally from the small Caribbean isle of Virgin Gorda, Odair, though young in human years, was a surprisingly deep well of wisdom. A hedonistic, bohemian raconteur with as many lovers as he had fingers and toes, Odair never failed to amuse and entertain me, and if he had any notions of how very different the two of us truly were, he never let on.
“You know what your problem is, Roman?” he said to me that Thursday evening as he pushed a mop around the lab, only minutes before I first drank the exquisite elixir that is your blood.
“I wasn’t aware I had one,” I answered, not looking up from the small glass tube in my hand, a donated sample I was testing for viruses and other anomalies that would disqualify it for inclusion in the blood bank. Technically I didn’t need to test it because I could smell with perfect clarity which samples were clean and which were tainted, but for the sake of appearances, I followed protocol.
“You glower.”
I glanced up to find Odair leaning on the handle of his broom, staring at me with an expression of extreme disapproval. His skin was as dark as obsidian, and he smelled—as he always did—of the sweet, acrid smoke of cannabis.
“You’ll never get a girlfriend with that sour puss, man!”
Odair pronounced “man” in the island way, as “mon.” His mellifluous accent was as charming to women as his beaming smile, his easy compliments, his dark, half-lidded eyes. He’d had most of the nurses on the night shift in his bed, and a good many from the day shift, as well.
I didn’t envy him his easy way with women. Up to that point in my existence, I’d found women utterly confusing creatures, and generally more trouble than they were worth. Lacking Odair’s agreeable personality and unable to engage in the small talk, light flirtations, and witty banter I so detested and the female sex seemed to require, I was usually deemed one of three things by any woman I happened to meet: surly, strange, or downright scary.
My size and general mien of seething intensity did nothing to assist me in that regard.
Scary or not, I was still a man. I had needs. When the physical urge for a warm female body became too great, I visited a brothel on the Upper East Side whose girls didn’t care if I glowered or grinned, as long as I paid.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Odair. Thank you as always for your keen insight. These little observations of yours are so helpful for my social life.”
Odair’s brows lifted. “Was that sarcasm? Careful, man, that’s getting pretty close to humor. Next you’ll be telling knock-knock jokes. You don’t want to ruin your reputation as the man-eating wolf who escaped from the zoo.”
We shared a wry smile. Well, Odair smiled—one side of my mouth twitched. That was as close to a smile as my face allowed.
As of then, that is. Once the theater lights dimmed and the curtain lifted and the first passionate, haunting notes of the concerto began, my face transformed from the emotionless mask I’d worn for the last seventy-four years into something else altogether. I felt it. First my jaw fell slack. Then my eyes grew very wide. Then, as if lifted with invisible wire, both sides of my mouth turned up and my teeth—the canines elongating as they always did when I was aroused—made a brief, exultant appearance.
Because at that moment a ballerina danced onto the stage, and everything I had been up to that moment was consumed and destroyed in a breathless instant by the power and beauty and raw, ferocious magic that is you.
8:14 p.m.
I’ll spare you a recap of how your beauty affected me—you’ve been making good use of that face and body for twenty-five years, you know exactly how men react to you, exactly how weak-kneed and stunned you render us—and go straight to our first meeting, and the first, glorious words we ever exchanged.
“Good evening, baryshnya. My name is—”
“You have three seconds to get the hell out of my dressing room before I blow your head off.”
Ah, my heart warms to remember it.
You were gripping a rather ominous-looking silver revolver as you spoke those words, sitting soldier-straight and unsmiling in a chair before a lighted vanity, and I had no doubt of your intention. But I didn’t move to comply because I was much too surprised by the gun and the utter lack of fear I smelled on you. You were indignant and angered by my sudden, unwelcome appearance, but afraid of me, you definitely were not.
How many famous, desirable women, when surprised by a strange, glowering, six-and-a-half-foot-tall Russian in the privacy of their dressing room would feel no fear?
A moot question. Suffice it to say that you’re the only human being I’ve ever met who is utterly unafraid of anything. So yes, I was surprised into a brief, unmoving state by the gun and by your fearlessness.
Also—the bodice of your white dancing costume had gone translucent with sweat.
Forgive me. I’m only male, after all. Though my heart ceased to beat nearly three quarters of a century ago, the sight of a perfect pair of breasts can still bedazzle me.
“One.”
Judging from the tone of your voice and the way you’d lowered the sights of the gun to the general vicinity of my crotch, I guessed I’d be missing an important body part by the time you counted to three. So I improvised.
“You don’t need the operation to save your life, Maiko. The only thing you need is standing right in front of you.”
You blinked. Your eyes—an unusual deep gray, the color of storm clouds—narrowed a moment, then you sighed. You leaned back into your chair, and, with an air of practiced boredom as if you’d done it a thousand times before, cocked the hammer on the gun.
“How’d you get past security?”
I answered truthfully. “I glamoured them. It will be at least an hour before they’re useful. In the meantime your bodyguards are sleeping peacefully in the broom closet at the end of the hall.”
There was a moment’s pause as you processed that, your expression unreadable. Then you asked, “Are you the one who’s been leaving those gross messages on my voicemail?”
I shook my head.
“The flowers, then. You’re the one who always sends the black roses.”
Black roses? I didn’t even realize such a thing existed. I shook my head once again.
You rose from your chair in one smooth, swift unbending of limbs and faced me with the fierce, unblinking stare of a tigress contemplating a meal. The gun in your hand never wavered.
“Whoever you are,” you said very quietly, “I want you to know something. I want you to believe what I’m about to say to you, because I’m only going to say it once.”
I waited, watching you, hearing the blood pound through your veins, feeling the heat of your skin, smelling your sweat and your anger and the faint, overripe fruit scent of your damaged kidneys.
You said, “If you don’t turn around and walk out that door right now, I will kill you.”
And oh, my brave, darling girl, I fell in love with you all over again.
9:23 p.m.
Later you would tell me that you’d never encountered a man quite so large or intimidating, or one who seemed so comfortable targeted by the business end of a gun.
“Like a wolf,” you pronounced. “A ravenous wolf with eyes as dark as midnight and some very wicked-looking teeth.”
I mention the teeth again because if you’re not careful, they will be a problem. Don’t let your thirst go unsated too long, or those elongated canines will give you away. You’ll be having a pleasant conversation with a friend or a waiter or someone seated next to you on the bus, and suddenly he will turn his head away and the scent that will rise from his throat will be so intoxicating and overpowering you will not be able to resist. Your mouth will water, your fangs will snap out, you will pounce and you will devour.
