Page 28 of Paying The Vampire
“If you had then it would have been a favor to us both,” I spat.
She snarled at me, all her classic beauty twisting into something angry and ugly. “I should have killed you a long time ago Cassius.”
“Well now is your chance, because otherwise I’m going to stop you and all the other vampires. I’m going to make sure that you don’t hurt anyone else.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “And what are you going to do? Walk among these halls as a lonely king?”
“If I must. I shall stand watch over this world until it dies, and then there will be no hope of you ever returning. The world will be rid of the curse of vampires.”
Her eyes widened in a mixture of fear, panic, and rage. I think this was the first time she actually believed that I could be capable of such a thing.
“Don’t do this Cassius,” the pitch of her voice changed. This time she was beginning to plead with me rather than reason with me. “You don’t want to do this. We can talk about it.”
“There is nothing to talk about Amara. One thing I have learned through all my years is that the same things keep happening over and over again. Even if I manage to convince you that this is wrong, eventually you or some other vampire will have the same idea again. Eventually there will be another war, another generation of vampires, and they will learn the same lessons. I cannot allow that to happen. I will not allow it to happen. This has to end somewhere.”
“No… no… vampires do not end.”
And then, surprising her and myself, I laughed. “That is the heart of it, isn’t it Mother? You simply cannot bear the ending now. You have spent so long living that you are afraid of dying. You cannot chase off death forever. Do you think he will be impressed by your grand tomb? Everything ends. It is the one immutable rule that governs the entire cosmos, and we are the ones in violation of that rule. We are not meant to be. We are an experiment gone wrong, am I really the only one who sees that?”
“Of course not, but what would you have us do Cassius? Shrink away into the darkness? There are many different ways of dying, and one of them is staying in this world, fading away into the mists. We must be strong and vibrant again. We must exert our strength and remind the world that we do exist, otherwise there is no point to us.”
“And now you are the one who sounds desperate, Mother. If this is who we need to be to feel important then we should not exist in the first place. All of us have worn out our welcome a long time ago. We all should have passed on and found peace in the next life. Instead we keep going here, losing a piece of our soul with every year that passes. Life is something to be cherished, but when was the last time anything new happened here? When was the last time you bothered thinking about how old you are? We have done everything there is to be done, and we have seen everything there is to be seen. I am not going to curse anyone else to be like us. I am not going to bring them into this world and make them as we are. The way forward is not to make new vampires, it is to consign vampires as a thing of the past, as people to live in stories. We will only be the stuff of nightmares from now on.”
“No… Cassius, I warn you to think about what you are doing here. You are doing something that you cannot undo. You are going to commit genocide.”
“How is this genocide when vampires are not even truly alive? We are caught in an in between world where life nor death welcomes us, and that needs to change. This is the only way Amara.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I can Amara, and there is nothing you can do to stop me. It’s already too late.” I had the artefacts arranged. I had the words ready on my lips. I had no idea what was going to happen to them once I banished them from this world into the limbo that existed between. I did not know if they would be conscious, or if they would feel anything. I did not know if they would hate me. Perhaps they would die. But it was going to be better than unleashing them upon the rest of the cosmos. Amara rushed towards me with everything she had, blazing with anger, but I spoke too quickly. As soon as I uttered the words of power, tension was channeled through the air and I saw her being caught up, as though her feet had tripped on something. She reached out towards me, her face expressing something that I thought I would never see; helplessness.
I walked past her as her scream rang in my ears. Her arms reached out to me, just as they had that first time we met. Then I had been weeping in an alley and she had held out her hand. I had taken it, thinking it odd that her skin was so cold. It was strange how that one tiny decision had rippled out and caused the rest of my life to happen.
Things could have been so different…
I walked past her as she snarled and cursed me and promised that I would face revenge. I ignored her words though. They had no power over me any longer. I looked out of the window and saw the same thing happening all over the castle. It was as though small holes had opened up in the world and a hand had emerged from each of them, pulling them in. I watched my brethren struggle and writhe as they tried to escape from this fate. Some of them hurled themselves off the edge of the castle, disappearing into the mist that surrounded the mountain, preferring to tumble to their death than be taken into the unknown. Their horrible, painful screams reverberated around the castle and I listened to them all. I closed my eyes and took all of their sorrow into my heart because I knew that I could never walk back from this. I had betrayed my own people and I would forever be an outcast, no matter how much I thought my decision was the right one.
Behind me Amara was being taken. Inch by inch she was being pulled into this other world, disappearing form sight. She strained with all her might to fight against it, but there was nothing she could do.
And then there was silence.
It surrounded me, and for much of my remaining years it would be my only companion. I walked through the castle, a little surprised at how effective the spell had been. All the vampires were gone. In the days that followed I half expected them to return, to find some way to fight against what I had done, but they never did. They were all sent to oblivion. The universe was safe, and I was the last one left.
So I sat on my throne, king of this lost world, and although I had told Amara that everything had been experienced by us, there was one thing that hadn’t.
I had never truly experienced love.
And as the years passed and as I grew lonelier and lonelier I decided that I wanted a companion to try and make this final thing happen, but I had not believed it would be the case until Willow was standing there before me, asking me to keep my promise and make her a wolf. I reached up and brushed my fingers against my cheeks, touching that part of my face that had been caressed by her lips and all I knew was that I wanted more, I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to feel like a man again, not an undead creature who wandered this lonely land like a ghoul.
But still part of me was afraid to hope. I feared it was another trick, for she had tricked me before, but when I looked into her eyes there was something new there this time, something that I could not resist or refuse, something that spoke to the heart of me. And for the first time in a lifetime I found myself smiling with a giddy feeling in my heart.
I had found my queen.
Chapter Twenty Two
Willow
Things changed between myself and Cassius after our discussion. I realized that I had been too hasty in judging him. I should have listened to him all the while. I let my prejudice about vampires get the better of me, because really he had been nothing but kind to me ever since I had arrived. Even before that, really.