The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Birth of Death

  Final Arrangements

  Blood Gods in Exile

  Last Rites

  Army of the Undead

  The Divided God

  Homecoming

  About the Author

  Copyright 2013 by Joseph Duncan

  Originally published under the pen name Rod Redux

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: “The Anguish of Ixion” by Jules-Elie Delaunay (1828-1891).

  2014 E-book Edition

  Published by Cobra E-books

  Metropolis, IL

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Also by Joseph Duncan

  Novels

  The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All

  The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

  The Oldest Living Vampire in Love

  Apollonius

  Menace of Club Mephistopheles

  Mort

  Hole: A Ghost Story

  Indian Summer

  House of Dead Trees

  Frankenstonia

  Novellas

  Die Laughing

  Doc Wormwood and the Lair of the Daido-Shotheth

  Nyal’s Story

  The Birth of Death

  1

  Tell me, Lukas, my cold-blooded child, my beautiful vicious protégé... what are we?

  Yes, vampires. But that is the obvious answer. That is the simpleton’s response. I am asking you what we are. What is our essence, our unembellished nature, our singular summation?

  I see that you do not know.

  You do not know the answer, or you do not understand the question.

  So let me tell you.

  We are a static screen upon which the illusion of life dances brightly, like your modern moving picture show, the cinematograph, but that is not life. The illusion does not live. It is just illusion.

  My nom de guerre, the Oldest Living Vampire, is as much a lie as it is a cruel jest. I am no more alive than the images in your television box, than the light emitting diodes in your personal computer monitor. In action we have the illusion of life, but we are as devoid of the living spark as that brick wall, the clothing that adorns your body, that overflowing dumpster you stand beside. I have not lived since the night 30,000 years ago that the nameless creature that made me what I am prized my mortal jaws apart and forced this endless curse upon me.

  Let us retreat to the fundamental idea, for it is essential that you understand this lesson.

  Life, my vicious offspring, is a continual process of birth and death, apportioned by episodes of hunger and satiation.

  From the moment of fertilization, the living cell begins to multiply, and those multiplying cells begin to differentiate, and this tissue becomes an eye, and that tissue becomes a hand, and so on and so forth until the developing fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb.

  All those cells become what they are so that the living creature, which is really just a mass of differentiated cells, a cooperative aggregation, can satisfy the essential drives: hunger and the urge to reproduce.

  A mouth so that the newborn can cry and be fed. Fingers to grasp the teat and draw it to its mouth. Lips and tongue to suck the milk from the breast. Eyes to see the organ that brings it nourishment. Intestines to absorb the nutrients it ingests. Anus to expel the waste that’s left behind.

  Hunger and satiation.

  For the next decade and a half, the cells of that aggregate being continue to multiply and differentiate, according to its genetic blueprint, until it is time for the creature to reproduce. Then, in a firestorm of hormonal secretions, its reproductive system and secondary sexual characteristics develop, and it experiences a new kind of appetite, the urge to find a mate and propagate its kind.

  Hunger and satiation, rinse and repeat, ad nauseum. From the very moment that some complex chain of organic chemicals came together in the primordial ooze-- just so!-- all those countless ages ago.

  We nosferatu do not truly live because our cells no longer reproduce, nor can we strike the spark of life in the womb of a living woman. We are cut off from that unending cycle. We are exiles. Aliens in our own world.

  Look at your hand, Lukas. In a thousand years, if you are unlucky enough to endure so long, it will look exactly as it does this night-- hard and white and gleaming-- each wrinkle, each glinting strand of hair, even the whorls of your fingerprints and that tiny comma-shaped scar on the knuckle of your left thumb, your eyes, your hair, your face, they will all be exactly as they are right now, no younger, no older, no warmer, no colder. Not one single petrified cell in your body will ever change again, and if your cold white form is ever damaged, the living blood will repair the cells exactly as they were.

  If that thought does not horrify you, it is only because you do not grasp the full implication. But don’t fret. Few vampires do. Not in the beginning.

  I suppose what I am trying to say, in my typically verbose style, is this: there is no such thing as eternal life, because life is a cycle of cellular replication. The only thing that lives in you is Death. And that unchanging form, that mass of lifeless hollow cells you call a body, is merely a shell, a conveyance, an instrument of ambulation, for the symbiotic life form that has taken possession of your body.

  When we kill, when we feed, we are merely satisfying the hunger of the creature that dwells within us. When you someday make another one of us, as I have done with you, you will only be satisfying the reproductive urge of the living blood inside you.

  You will believe those desires to be your own. You will insist that your actions are of your own volition, but they are not, not truly, and they will never be again. You are the shell of a hermit crab, the leather skins the hunter clothes his body with. I have not given you eternal life, my vampire child. I have given you Death.

  Unending, unchanging Death.

  What is that? How did it all begin?

  I’m so glad you asked.

  2

  When the First One was born, long before he became the father of our race, he was unnamed. None of the children who were born to his people in that era were named, not until they had taken their first tremulous steps. That was how harsh the world was when he was born into it. In that age, nearly a quarter of all children died before the age of two, and of the ones who made it to their naming ceremony, another quarter perished before adulthood.

  Fifty thousand years ago this was-- give or take a millennia. I can only estimate the year because it was long before man learned to tally the passage of time. Time, then, was marked by the movements of the sun and the moon through the heavens, the procession of the seasons, but no further than that, no more exact.

  It was the end of the Third Interglacial Period, and the shape of Europe was very different from what it is today. Vast areas to the west and northwest, which are under the Atlantic now, were then dry land; the Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a great ice cap such as the one that covers Greenland today. This vast ice cap, which covered both of the polar regions, making them inhospitable and alien landscapes, had absorbed huge masses of water from the ocean, exposing vast tracts of land. The Mediterranean, now underwater, was a broad valley that sprawled below sea level, containing two inland seas cut off from the ocean.

  This is where his people lived.

  The climate of this Mediterranean basin was cool and temperate. The Sahara to the
south was not then a desert of baked rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile country, and the ocean was shallow and saltier. Between the ice sheets to the north and the Alps and Mediterranean valley to the south stretched a bleak wilderness whose climate varied from harsh cold to a mild gentleness, but in the years that we are speaking of, it was growing steadily crueler as the climate shifted once more toward a long and murderous chill.

  Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of Europe, wandered a range of species whose form and fancy were infinitely more diverse than the sparse animal life which exists on our planet today. There were giant elk, wooly rhinos, mammoths, and mastodons. The sabre-toothed tiger still prowled those lands, though its numbers were slowly diminishing. There were cave bears and giant sloths and raptors with wingspans the length of two grown men lying end to end. The sea teamed with life and the skies were often darkened by great flocks of migrating fowl. And then there were Men-- no less than five, maybe six distinct species-- the most advanced being the Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnon, and the Denisovans. There were a few others scattered here and there, hominids who were a little less evolved (let’s call them “almost men”) but I include them all the same.

  Our father’s people had migrated to this Mediterranean valley from somewhere in Asia, crossing the continent during the warm interglacial period when the great valley was a much more hospitable place. Unfortunately for them, within a few hundred generations the world had chilled again, and their prey, the warm-loving creatures that had tempted them to this valley, had grown scarce.

  His people hunted the great beasts that remained, the mammoth and the mighty aurochs, the giant elk, whose antlers alone spread as tall and wide as a man, and various deer and smaller mammals. They took to the caves to escape the cold, driving out the cave bear and the cave lion and the craven cave hyena. They had stone tools and they had fire. More importantly, they had their wits, a far more formidable weapon.

  They eked out a living in this unpredictable environment, but deprivation and cold, and competition with their cousins the Neanderthals, the true monarchs of this frosty world, sucked the gentleness from them just as surely as the ice caps drained the oceans of water.

  The men of that era became hard, domineering and violent, for only the strongest, the smartest or the cruelest men survived. Submissiveness was the only recourse for their women, for the bodies of women are made for gentler things: the nurturing of the young, the healing arts, the safeguarding of their culture. And, of course, the most necessary thing: birth. The women needed their strong ruthless men to protect them, to provide food for their children, and so they surrendered their power to men.

  These people called themselves the Anaki, which in their tongue meant “Two Legged”. They called the Neanderthals they shared this land with Ananaki, which meant “The Other Two Legged”.

  Their relationship with the Neanderthals was not a civil one. The Anaki were invaders, a new breed of human, and like modern men today, they believed they were entitled to whatever they desired, even though this land had belonged to the Neanderthals for countless generations. When hunting parties from both of their races chanced across one another in the field, violence almost inevitably ensued, and as the natural resources of the region grew ever more scarce, that “almost inevitable” became a certainty.

  During these skirmishes, the Neanderthals always suffered the greatest casualties. Even though the Others were physically the stronger of the two species, the Anaki were faster, better armed and more cunning than their adversaries. Their battles were terrifically violent, and if the Anaki were especially desperate for sustenance, they not only killed the Neanderthals, they ate them. A far cry from the days I walked the earth a mortal man, but I lived in an age when food was more plentiful, and the summers were long and warm.

  Khronos was born toward the end of a particularly long and cruel winter. His father, Minos, was absent when the boy’s mother went into labor, but that was probably to the child’s advantage, for his father was a brutal and demanding man, the leader of their clan. I don’t think he would have harmed the boy, but he definitely would not have helped care for the child, and he would have taxed the boy’s mother with his constant demands.

  In attendance was the medicine woman of their tribe, a crone named Wali, and the woman’s mother and sister, Tora and Tran. Fang-like icicles dripped at the mouth of the cave as her cries echoed through the chamber. Her labor was long and exhausting.

  I know these things because I Shared with the God King. I tasted his blood during our battle in Fen’Dagher. Her memories are mine because he Shared with his mother, whom he would one day make into a blood drinker.

  These are old memories, the most ancient Shared memories our kind possess. I can only retrieve them with the keenest concentration, but they are there in my mind, like pearls at the bottom of a murky pool, and they will be yours as well, Lukas, when you have honored our agreement. You will then be one of only a handful of blood drinkers who possesses our race’s original memories.

  The woman named Ona had given birth twice before, but Khronos was the first of her children to survive long enough to be named. When her mate returned from a hunting expedition a couple weeks later, she held the boy out for him to see, a hopeful smile upon her face.

  Minos was a short but powerfully built man with blunt features and a great mane of kinky black hair. He unwrapped the swaddling furs from the baby’s body and examined the child with a critical eye.

  The boy, exposed to the cold, howled indignantly.

  “He is small,” Minos said, his thick lips curled back from his teeth. “He cries loud, though. That is a good sign.”

  “He is small, Minos, but he is strong,” Ona said, anxious to take the child back into her arms. She did not like the way her husband handled the baby. He had no gentleness about him, never had. Not with her, and not with his children.

  Minos pushed her hands away with an elbow. He bounced the babe in the air a few times, scowling at the infant’s cries. Turned him this way and that. When his curiosity was satisfied, he passed the child back to the woman. “Here, take him. We killed a mammoth. It is two day’s walk toward morning sun. We need some help to dress the beast and carry back the meat.”

  “Shall I come?” Ona asked, meaning herself and the boy. She didn’t really want to go. She was still exhausted from the birth, still bleeding and sore. But she felt that she should at least offer to help.

  “No. The baby cries too loud. We spotted a group of Ananaki in the lowlands the day before we made the kill. His cries might give us away, and we need meat more than another battle with the Other Men.”

  Ona nodded obediently, but really she was relieved. She returned to her hearth with a content smile as her husband gathered a group to accompany him. She pressed a nipple to her son’s mouth to quiet him. He was still howling from his father’s handling. The boy quieted, began to suckle, and she rocked him and sang a soothing song her mother used to sing to her.

  It was too soon after the birth for her husband to couple with her, as he might normally have done before departing. She was still in her bleeding rags. He left a little later, pausing only long enough to wave to her distractedly, anxious the Ananaki would fall upon the men he’d left behind.

  His lack of interest was also a relief to Ona.

  She fed well on the meat the men brought back to the cave seven days later, which meant the boy, Khronos, fed well, too.

  3

  They named the boychild shortly after he took his first steps. It was winter again. The warm season had been brief and anemic, but the child had survived. In fact, he’d thrived.

  He was strong, if small, and his father grudgingly found himself growing attached to the little boy. He did not want to love the boy, not yet, mainly because all of his previous children had died, but he found that he could not help his heart. He even erupted into laughter one evening when the baby yanked out a handful of his beard, saying to his wife, “Ha! This
one is mean as a badger, Ona!”

  His wife laughed with him and snuggled up to her husband’s side, proud that she had given her mate a strong son.

  “He will be walking soon,” Ona said dreamily, staring into the fire as father and son wrestled. “Have you given any thought to what you will name him?” Anaki men almost always named their children, unless the father of the child was unknown, or he died before the child began to walk. Sometimes that happened, too.

  “I have not,” Minos admitted. The little boy gurgled and pinched his nose hard enough to make his eyes water, and he laughed again. “Perhaps we should call him Naga,” he said. Naga was the Anaki word for badger. “Would you like that?” Minos asked the boy. “Would you like to be named badger?” He put his lips to the boy’s bulging tummy and blew a farting sound on it. The boy squealed and kicked his feet, deliriously happy.

  “We could name him after my father,” Ona suggested, stroking the matted fur on her husband’s chest.

  “Kelborn?”

  “It is a strong name.”

  “No, I don’t like it.”

  “Yes, husband.”

  Minos scowled all of a sudden and pushed his mate away. “I don’t want to talk about his name,” he said, and then he pressed the child into her arms. “It is bad luck. If there are wicked spirits nearby, they might hear our words and be tempted to harm the boy.” The spirits were jealous of the living, and disposed to torment the joyous and proud. Everyone knew that.

  “Yes, husband. I am sorry,” Ona said. She hushed the crying child, who had been startled by his father’s unexpected change of mood. “Shhh, quiet, baby. It’s okay.”

  A few days later, as Minos prepared to depart for another hunt, Ona cried out her husband’s name.