Absolution - The First Book Of The Vampire Immortalis Trilogy (2 page)

* * *

Anna Dieterlins had just enjoyed a long hot soak in the bath and was now lying on her bed, dressed in pyjamas. She was idly surfing the Net and listening to late night talk radio. Anna had been in Melrose for almost three years now and was itching for an opportunity to move on. There was just so little to do for a twenty-something single female with no family-ties to the area or close friends to call upon. She had acquaintances, yes, but it didn't pay to have real friends in Anna's position. Anna considered herself a child of the world. She spoke seven languages fluently, had dreams in three or four, and had lived in more countries than she cared to remember. Melrose was just too quiet her and she couldn't wait for word to come of pastures new, word that she was expecting any day now.

The one thing she would miss about Melrose was the weather. Melrose certainly wasn't for sun-worshippers, that was for sure. While Spain's tourist chiefs could boast of year round sunshine, Scotland seemed to have cornered the market in dreich days. Few of the town's residents would be in agreement with her, but the long dull winters and fleetingly short summers suited Anna perfectly.

Next to her on the bed was Oscar. Oscar was a Parson Russell Terrier and not a particularly friendly example of the breed at that. Anna didn't want Oscar on the bed, but felt she had little choice but to pander to his every whim. The dog actually belonged to the old lady who lived in a house close to Anna's. Against her better judgement, Anna had been politely coerced into looking after Oscar while Mrs Anderson went on a cruise around the Mediterranean. It was Mrs Anderson who insisted on calling Oscar a Parson Russell Terrier when everyone else saw him as the common or garden Jack Russell that he undoubtedly was, complete with the tendency to bite first and ask questions later.

Oscar's ears pricked up and he began to growl. At first, Anna thought that a fox might be passing through the garden. She saw them herself most nights, using the garden as a shortcut to the golf course across the road and the fields and hills beyond. If it had been a fox, Oscar would have been off the bed like a shot to make his way down the stairs to the back door, but tonight he stayed strangely fixed to where he was. Then, quite out of character, Oscar began to howl.

Anna reached out to stroke Oscar's back in the hope of calming her temporary lodger, but as she did so, an intense throbbing pain shot through her body, momentarily paralysing her. She was prone to headaches, but this was worse than any migraine. The agony lasted for only ten or 20 seconds, but such was its intensity, it was as if she had been struck by lightning. Oscar's howling subsided with the pain, but not before every dog in the neighbourhood had joined him in what was a most unsettling primeval chorus.

For Anna to experience such agonising pain, it could only mean one thing. She went back to her laptop and quickly logged into her email account. She then fired off a short cryptic email to one of her listed contacts, Jacob.

Within seconds, Jacob had responded.

Noted. Your time has come, Anna. Godspeed.

His email came with the tag line, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Jacob has an iPhone?
Anna found that hard to believe. He was one of the oldest people she knew and wasn't exactly known for his love of technology. But she knew Jacob was right. Her time had finally come. She could now find redemption. “Better get ready to rumble, Oscar.”

* * *

“Quick!” whispered Caroline. She took her friend by the hand and ran with her across the lawn in the direction of the youth hostel's stately entrance. It was still raining as heavily as it had been when they had ventured into the town earlier that evening for a drink, but that wasn't the only reason the two friends were running. Their night out had been spoiled by the unwelcome attention of a fellow backpacker called Steve and this was their big chance to lose him.

Even when they had slipped out of Burt's Hotel while Steve was up at the bar and out of sight of their disappearing act, he hadn't got the message. Within minutes of them sitting down in the Ship Inn, he turned up like the proverbial bad penny. Steve was from New Zealand so maybe a bad cent would be more appropriate than a bad penny, but in Steve's case, it would have to be bad scent. The guy reeked of body odour.

Now, they were finally free of him. Despite the Ship Inn being only a few minutes walk from the hostel, Steve had felt the need to relieve himself en route and had disappeared into the trees. That had been Caroline's cue to grab Debbie and run. They didn't stop running until they had crashed through the hostel's green front doors, sprinted up a flight of stairs, and reached the safety of their room. They collapsed on the floor in fits of laughter, door firmly closed behind them. Locked too.

Steve, meanwhile, was emptying his bladder around the foot of a tree. He really fancied Debbie and the beer inside him told him that he was in with a chance. Apart from the little misunderstanding when he was left behind when the girls moved between pubs, he was certain that there was a chemistry between them.

Peter Cameron had watched the two harlots and their male companion enter the hostel's grounds. Two beautiful young women, parading themselves like common prostitutes, and a drunken man dancing to their immoral tune. He had seen the man stagger into the woods and the women run towards the big house.

The sound of approaching footsteps didn't surprise Steve in the least. He assumed it was the girls up to their usual fun and games, like when they had distracted him by pointing at the TV in the pub so that Caroline could slip that dead spider into his beer. Not that he minded too much. He had swallowed the spider without even noticing and had finished what was otherwise a perfectly good pint of Carlsberg, even after Debbie and Caroline had fallen about laughing when telling him about the spider. If he was to win Debbie's heart, he had to show her that Kiwis were made of stern stuff.

The Welsh girls were safely back at the hostel by the time he was doing up his flies and any thoughts of fun and games were about to come to an abrupt end. Steve was grabbed from behind by someone much bigger than either Debbie or Caroline. Much stronger too. Steve fought for all he was worth, but was no match for Peter Cameron whose razor sharp teeth sliced into the hapless backpacker's neck with all the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. Steve began to drift away from this mortal coil. He spent his last few moments of life thinking about his mother, back in Christchurch, waiting by the phone for his call to say that he was still enjoying his travels around Europe. It was a call that now would never come. “Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat,” Peter Cameron whispered as Steve's lifeless body slumped to the ground. “May our Lord Jesus Christ absolve you.”

* * *

Anna was gasping for air. Someone was dying at the hands of a vampire. She closed her eyes tightly, struggling to see who it was, where it was, but there was only darkness. A human life was coming to an unnatural end, that much she knew, but instead of pictures, all she could hear were the whispered words,
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat
. Over and over again.
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat
. Then it was gone. A life extinguished. No matter how she struggled for some sort of clarity, there would be no pictures for Anna to see, not now the vampire's victim was dead.

Few vampires could bear witness to another vampire taking a human's life unless they saw it with their own eyes, but Anna could. It was a remarkable gift and one highly prized by the Immortalis. Had Anna not possessed it, she would have been destroyed long ago for breaking the most sacred tenet of the Codex Immortalis: vampires shall not drink human blood. The punishment for doing so was almost always death, but she had been spared, albeit by the slenderest of margins. In front of the Grand Council, her defenders had argued that, given time, Anna would be able to redeem herself if allowed to live, by using the power of her mind's eye for the good of the Immortalis.

The Immortalis called this rarest of gifts, visormortis. It allowed Anna to visualise a vampire attacking a human in real time. She was then able to replay, rewind, and even pause the visualisation, all in her mind's eye, just as some television remote controls allow you to do with TV programmes. Visormortis allowed her to identify the perpetrator, the victim, and the location of the murder.

The time had come to repay the faith that had been shown in her, not least by Jacob, but when called upon, her gift had failed her. Anna had felt the taking of a human life by a vampire, but had seen nothing. She could identify neither the hunter or the hunted.

Maybe Anna had mistakenly tuned in to a human murdering another human. That was possible, especially if she had an emotional attachment to the victim. In such cases, a vampire would literally feel the victim's pain, in much the same way that a twin can sometimes experience the pain or suffering of a sibling, even when miles apart. Such a murder would certainly explain the lack of visuals, but the pain that shot through her body less than an hour before the taking of a human life had been unmistakable. It marked the return of a vampire to this world, a vampire that would want to feed.

The surge of spectral energy created by a vampire resurrection would have coursed through the body of any vampire living within a ten mile radius, not just that of a visormortis. Not that there were any other vampires living in or near Melrose. There were only three in the whole of Scotland and rarely more than 20 at any one time in the entire British Isles. Vampire numbers across the entire world were so small that if vampires were to ever appear on the Red List of Threatened Species, they would do so as “critically endangered”. It had to be that way for the sake of both vampires and humans. Vampires are not born, they are created. Their numbers can only grow at the expense of humans, something that is strictly forbidden by the terms of the Pax Libertas, a document signed by the Immortalis and the Church in 451AD at a secret meeting during the Council of Chalcedon.

The Immortalis did everything within its power to ensure that the Pax Libertas was honoured. It was the only way of guaranteeing peace between humans and vampires It was why Anna and the procession of vampires before her had kept watch over Melrose for centuries. It was the same the world over. From wherever a vampire was banished from this existence, the Immortalis stood guard in case of resurrection. The slight complication was that vampires never aged and so those doing the watching could never stay in one place for too long without arousing suspicion. Three to five years was the norm for a posting.

Trust this to happen just before she shipped out and another guardian shipped in.
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat
. The words echoed in Anna's thoughts as she lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Why no pictures? Why had she not seen the Hundeprest?

CHAPTER THREE

You would be hard pressed to find a more prosperous or genteel town than Melrose in the whole of Scotland. Nestled as it is by the banks of the River Tweed, and watched over by the three summits of the Eildons, the lifeblood of the town is actually an abbey that lies in ruins. That, and the Greenyards, home to Melrose Rugby Football Club, and famous throughout the rugby-speaking world as the birthplace of the sevens game.

Melrose's small town centre consists of a triangle of roads running from the abbey to the library, the library to the Greenyards, and from the Greenyards back to the abbey. You can walk along Buccleuch Street, up Abbey Street, and down the High Street to where you started, in less than ten minutes, 20 minutes if you enjoy window shopping. For those who do not want to do the complete circuit, there is also a lovely wee alleyway called The Wynd which runs from opposite the Post Office on Buccleuch Street through to the High Street. It is home to a number of shops and the small but perfectly formed Wynd Theatre.

Typically for a Saturday, there was hardly a parking space to be had on the High Street, what with locals sourcing the ingredients for that evening's meal, and out of season tourists buying mementos of their visit from the town's gift and antique shops. Peter Cameron was in no mood for people, local or otherwise, as he made his way to the Co-Op at the foot of the High Street. He had woken up with the mother of all hangovers. He had drunk himself into oblivion on many an occasion, but never had he woken up feeling this rough. With every step he took, the contents of his head felt like they were being churned by a cement mixer.

He had vague recollections of what had happened the night before, but nothing to suggest that he had been drinking that heavily. He remembered finding the cross. How could he possibly forget something like that! The excitement of peering into his find bag was what finally dragged him out of bed.

He had made the mistake of opening the curtains to let more light into the room. Even on a dull day like this, the sudden burst of daylight made him screw up his eyes and recoil in pain, but on opening the bag, he could barely believe his luck. His big fear was that it had all been a dream, but he had indeed found a cross! A beautifully crafted metal cross that had to be hundreds of years old! It wasn't made from a precious metal, like gold or silver, as far as he could tell, and he had no idea of its precise value, but the thought of whatever money was to be made from selling it had brought him abruptly out of his slumber and bang into the land of the living.

A celebration was in order, not to mention a hair of the dog. With no alcohol in the house, a short walk to the shops was required and that's how Peter Cameron found himself on the High Street that Saturday just after five o'clock. He looked like the town's resident junkie with his unkempt mop of greasy black hair, his disheveled clothing, and the manner in which he hunched himself into the stained hooded jacket that he wore whatever the weather, but the truth was his drug of choice was always alcohol. The stronger and cheaper the better, but always alcohol.