Sanctifying Grace (Resurrection) (5 page)

‘So why now?’ I asked.

‘Because I have never met anyone whose life I considered worth preserving, who was able to be resurrected, and who also welcomed the idea. I have considered many worthy but not all were suitable, and for some the thought of becoming vampire was hideous to them. It would not be prudent or practical to resurrect an unwilling human. And of course, Wilfred will prove to be a real benefit to what I have in mind.’

I asked the obvious. ‘What do you have in mind?’

He sat beside me on the bed, his eyes glittering with excitement. ‘I intend to discover why vampires need human blood in order to survive,’ he announced. ‘Why only human? Why not sheep or horses or elephants? What is the link between our two species?’

This intense interest was the result of the plague, I realised. It had affected him deeply that he had not been able to feed from the infected or from animals.

‘What will you do if you find out?’ I asked.

‘It depends on what is discovered,’ he replied reasonably. ‘Although humans are numerous beyond measure now, your kind has a penchance for self-destruction. You, yourself, have told me some of what is t
o come and I have a feeling you will destroy yourselves completely someday. If you die, we die. Unless I, and my scientific men, can find other solutions.’

‘That reminds me,’ I said and I told him about World War
I and its imminent arrival. I also warned him about the Titanic.

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘Big ships are easier to hide in.’

Wil had said something similar; was he already thinking like a vampire? I hated that thought.

‘When do you intend
on resurrecting Wil?’ I asked, jealousy simmering below the surface.

‘He has some tasks that need to be performed during the day and the days are becoming longer,’ he pointed out. ‘I have to spend more time resting than I would like and in the past I, along with many of my kind, would have travelled south, where the light and the dark have equal value. The north in summer is not g
ood for us. But,’ he shrugged, ‘England and America are the places to be, where discoveries are being made, so here is where I need to be, also.’

‘You are putting a great deal of trust in Wil,’ I stated.

‘Yes. As vampires have put trust in their thralls for thousands of years. We have made use of those we enthral to do the things we cannot, or do not wish to do.’

‘But you haven’t enthralled Wil.’

‘No. He is one of those humans who cannot be enthralled. You may recollect that only those who are immune to our ‘charms’ are able to be resurrected.’

I remembered
; how could I not? I was one of those who could easily be enthralled, as Jeremiah had demonstrated so completely. I was certainly not vampire material and I wasn't sure Roman would want to resurrect me, even if I were.

‘Vampires have always used thralls – even Bram Stoker’s Dracula had one.’

I remembered he mentioned the author earlier. ‘You have read that?’ I don’t know why I was so surprised.

‘Of course. It amused me.’

‘You’ll be even more amused in the future,’ I assured him. ‘It’s not all about vampires either, there are werewolves and zombies, elves and trolls, oh, and aliens. Mustn’t forget aliens.’

‘Ah
, yes,’ he chuckled. ‘I recall when you thought Viktor and I were from another planet.’

I hadn’t forgotten.

After three days (or should I say, nights?), my sleeping pattern gradually shifted to almost nocturnal. I say ‘almost’ because I couldn’t quite manage to stay awake all night, every night. By four o’clock in the morning, I began to flag. It was March, so it started to get light at about six.

Roman slept somewhere nearby
, but this time I didn’t ask where. There was a subtle change in our relationship, which I had first noticed in
The Golden Lion
during that terrible time when I had nearly been burnt at the stake. Once, I was the only source of wonderment to him. For Roman, life had more or less carried on the way it always had for millennia, changing little and in only a minimal way over the centuries, and when I appeared to him there was nothing in his world that was more intriguing or fascinating. Then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had happened, bringing an explosion of discoveries, inventions, and new ways of thinking, and suddenly life for Roman was not as predictable as it was previously. And I was no longer the only exciting, novel, and unusual thing in his world.

I hadn’t realised this slight alteration on the way he interacted with me then, and later I was too preoccupied with being beaten and abused by my fellow man. Once again
, I recognised the irony: the apex predator, the most effective killing machine on the planet, had caused me far less harm than members of my own kind (Lettuce and Jeremiah didn’t really count – Lettuce had only talked of killing me and Jeremiah’s crime had been to let others do his grisly work for him). When Roman had hurt me, it had been unintentional, but when humans had hurt me, they had gone at it with enthusiasm and had been most definitely deliberately. I couldn’t help but linger on the differences between our species.

I had taken to waking sometime in the mid to late afternoon, then making breakfast. Because of Wil’s presence, there was always food in the house, even if it wasn’t necessarily what I would have chosen. Once Roman had risen, as soon as the light began leeching from the sky, and once he had spent an hour or two with his new best mate (nope, no hint of jealousy there) discussing the day that had just been and the day to come, he took me out to dinner.

There were a couple of small
, but respectable hotels and restaurants in Brecon and so far we had tried a different one every evening. Roman was very adept at not eating: he raised a fork to his lips, then began to speak so the fork naturally drifted back towards the plate; food was cut up and moved around, and it was only because I watched him closely I could tell not a single morsel had passed his lips. If ever a waiter questioned the amount left on his plate, Roman would praise the meal but say that he wasn’t particularly hungry. I, needless to say, ate heartily and if I couldn’t decide between two dishes, I got Roman to order one and I ordered the other so I could sample a little of both. My lover was amused by my appetite and enthusiasm for food. Having little or no interest in eating in my own world, I embraced the feeling of hunger and the satisfaction a full stomach brings. And, as I never knew when I would vanish from this time, I wanted to make the most of it. I just prayed it wouldn’t happen during the meal in plain sight of the other diners; Roman would certainly have some awkward explaining to do!

It was fun to spend time as a ‘normal’ couple, doing the things I would have taken for granted in a human relationship. My usual experiences of Roman’s various worlds had been having glorious sex with him and getting beaten up, so this was a welcome change and one I could seriously get used to.

I finished my breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee that would see me through until dinner, which was usually nine o’clock or later, and wondered what to do between now and my lover’s emergence. I was at a bit of a loose end; there was only so much reading I was prepared to do and I was bored, which was quite a novel experience for me in Roman’s world. I was also restless, needing to do something, anything, rather than sit there waiting for him to wake, and then he would want to spend time with Wil (definitely not jealous, uhuh, not me) and I had to do something with myself until he found the time to be with me. So I took his gun, the Winchester, some bullets and the target with the single neat hole in it and I went out to play.

I wouldn’t say I was familiar with guns
, but I knew one end of a rifle from another. My father, like most farmers, had the odd shotgun or two safely locked in a cabinet in the boot room (ammunition hidden elsewhere) and had taught me how to shoot with the same attitude as he had taught me how to drive a tractor, or to castrate male lambs, or how to use the baling machine. It was merely a piece of equipment on the farm which I needed to be able to handle. And it was because of his instruction, I knew which end to stick the bullets in, and although I’d had more fun with the baler (there was something very satisfying about loose silage going in one end and huge, fat, wrapped sausagey bales coming out of the other), I had been a decent shot.

I wasn’t interested in guns per se: they were far too simple and deadly for my taste and I much preferred the complexity of big machinery with hundreds of moving parts, but at least I knew how to handle a shotgun. And, considering there were no large lumps of engineering to play with, I would have to make do with the rifle.

I soon discovered I wasn’t half as good as I remembered being, and not a fraction as good as I had hoped to be. I kept missing the target, for a start.

After several rounds
, I began to get the hang of the Winchester. It was a nice bit of kit. My father’s shotgun had to be loaded whilst the gun lay broken in half over the crook of your arm and would only take two cartridges. This sleek-barrelled promise of death took nine, and they slid into its side with a satisfying
snick
. I could fire each shot by using the lever to load another bullet into the chamber.

I had asked Roman about the noise and how come his neighbours didn’t complain, but his house was rather out in the sticks, his nearest neighbour half a mile away. The house was nestled in the foothills of the Beacons, near Brecon itself, and probably with a Brecon postcode (if such a thing had been invented yet), but far enough out of town to be considered rural. Also, the sound of firearms in this part of the country was not unusual
, what with farmers shooting at rabbits and foxes, and the army having a base nearby.

The noise was starting to bother me, though, and after three rounds
, I called it a day. My ears were ringing and although I had improved after the first few shots, the target was reminiscent of a sieve. No neat single entry hole for me.

I put the gun back where I found it and checked out what other mischief I could get
into. I had already explored the house, a four-bedroomed, three-receptioned square box of a building. Apart from the study, I had found little of interest, so it was to the study I was drawn, with its shelves of pamphlets, books, and publications and its variety of interesting artefacts. I recognised one or two from
The Golden Lion
, the astrolabe especially. I dawdled around the room, picking up anything and everything that caught my attention, trailing my fingers across the spines of the books, feeling their leather smoothness interrupted by the embossing on the titles.

The desk was a clutter of papers
, all with unrecognisable symbols and mathematical formulae. Instinct told me it was probably Wilfred’s work. I picked up a sheet and examined it, but it made no sense whatsoever, so I glanced at several others, all with the same result.

‘What are you doing?’

I jumped. ‘Oh, hi. You startled me.’

‘I said, what are you doing?’

‘Trying to decipher these,’ I held up a sheet of paper.

‘Why? What business is it of yours?’

I didn’t like Wil and I certainly didn’t like his attitude, but then, he had caught me rifling nosily around his desk.

‘None,’ I conceded, ‘but I was only being curious. It wasn't until I looked at this that I realised it was probably yours and not Roman’s.’

‘Of course it is my work!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t expect
Roman
to produce work like this.’ There was scorn in his voice and a certain lack of respect for his elders (and Roman was much, much older than Wil), which I found disconcerting. Then I got it.

‘You think you’re better than him, don’t you?’

Wil didn’t quite manage to hide the smirk.

‘You do! How can you think that?’

‘Madam.’ He was stiff and formal with suppressed anger and dislike. ‘Roman is but a boy when it comes to science. He helps me with my work and he is my patron, but he can never be my equal when it comes to scientific matters.’

I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. He’s probably forgotten more than you’ll ever know.’ I said that purely for effect
, because I suspected Roman never actually forgot anything.

‘Oh
, I don’t doubt it, but it’s all historical, you see. In the past,’ he clarified, just in case the silly little woman didn’t know what historical meant. ‘I am only interested in the present and the future. We, and by that I mean my fellow scientists, know and understand more about the world and its working that has ever been understood before.’

‘Bet I know more than you do,’ I muttered childishly under my breath.

‘Now, take our Mr Fabius, for instance,’ he continued.

‘Who?’ I had no idea who he was referring to.

‘Mr Fabius. Mark Fabius.’ Suddenly he burst out laughing, one hand dramatically slapped to his chest. ‘You don’t even know his name,’ he spluttered. ‘This is priceless!’

‘Who is Mark Fabius?’ I asked through gritted teeth, but I didn’t really need to ask – I could guess: the tone of his voice spoke volumes.

‘Marcus Fabius Gaiaus, to give him his proper Roman name, but Mark Fabius is what he goes by. Surely you knew that?’