Obsessed (Book #12 in the Vampire Journals) (16 page)

Caitlin made her
way down the cliff path, towards the vampire city. She’d never seen anything
quite like it. In all her travels back in time—the memories of which kept flashing
back at her in waves—she’d never seen anything like this.

The architecture
was unworldly, a combination of ancient Egyptian mud-brick temples and vast
columns, all carved into the cave sides like the lost city of Petra. It was
breath-taking, and Caitlin felt a strong sense of belonging. This is where her
people came from, where they had lived and thrived unharmed for centuries.
Along with her flood of memories, Caitlin had realized that the vampire race
was not necessarily cruel or evil. There had been good people amongst the
vampires, herself included, and she felt a great sense of loss over their
extinction.

As Caitlin
wandered through the streets of the city, this place felt abandoned, like a
giant tomb, an ode to another time. Glancing in awe at the tall buildings, one
in particular caught her attention. Something about the vast columns either
side of its wide, arched doorway, and steps leading up to it that had been worn
away by centuries of footsteps, told her that this was a place of great
importance. She felt a pull, a sensation telling her to enter.

The moment she
did, she laughed out loud. She’d found herself standing in the large atrium of
a library. Of course her body had been pulling her to this place—there was
nowhere she felt more comfortable than within the sanctity of a library.

She could hardly
believe that there were still books here in one piece. Many, she realized, were
made of ancient Egyptian paper, thick and rubbery. As she pulled down volume
after volume, she noted that every different type of alphabet was represented,
from Arabic to Cyrillic script, to hieroglyphics. It was like her dream come
true, stumbling across a forgotten library filled with books that hadn’t been
touched for centuries. It made her think of Aiden; he’d love to get his hands
on a place like this.

But Caitlin
could not bask in the moment. Images of Caleb struggling with the Immortalists
as they’d burst into her grandmother’s attic kept surfacing in her mind. She
had to find a cure for Scarlet, and find it fast; it was the reason she’d been
transported to the lost vampire city beneath the Sphinx in the first place.
Something told her the cure would be within the walls of this ancient and
forgotten library.

Caitlin looked
at the marble shelves, stacked with books. If the cure was in one of these
books she would surely die of old age before she found it. Unless…

Caitlin closed
her eyes and slowed her breath, trying to put herself into the same sort of
meditative state that always helped her sense Scarlet. There was no denying
that Caitlin herself possessed some kind of ability to sense things, and now
that her journals had been proven correct, Caitlin realized why: because she,
too, had once been a vampire. All along, her dormant vampire senses had been
guiding her, first to the castle where Scarlet had fled, then to contact Aiden
and crack the code of the sphinx, then to her grandmother’s attic and the
patterned leather box. It was almost as though Caitlin’s actions had been
written in the stars, as though they were being dictated to her by some force
beyond her control. All she had to do was stop and listen, and the world would
guide her in the right direction.

And so she did.
She stood and breathed, and cleared her mind of all thoughts. She listened to
the empty spaces around her and waited for that tugging sensation that told her
in which direction she should go.

There it was. A
pull like a magnet, weak but just about perceptible.

Caitlin opened
her eyes and followed the pull as it led her to a shelf of dusty books. Her
eyes skimmed across the spines, unable to read any of the languages. But then
she saw one book in English and knew, deep inside of her, that she had found
what she had been sent here for.

She pulled the
book down and a cloud of dust flew into the air. The book had clearly not been
touched for centuries. She had to be careful with it in case the pages
shattered on contact with her skin.

She set the book
down carefully on the floor and wiped the dust from the front. Immediately, she
jumped in shock. There, on the cover, was the same image she’d seen on her
grandma’s leather box, and in the Voynich manuscript. Only this time the
strange face on the front of the book wasn’t so surreal—it was as clear as day.
It was an image of Scarlet’s face.

Caitlin felt her
stomach roll with anguish. How had her daughter’s face come to be on this
ancient text in a lost vampire library? Once again, she thought of destiny. It
was as though everything had already been decided. No, it was more than that.
If felt as though everything that was happening now had already happened
before, as if they were living in a constant loop with history swirling round
and round, repeating ad infinitum. The life she was living was just one cycle,
one in which the outcome had been predicted before, but was not set in stone.
She could change the premonitions and prophecies. Whatever was
supposed
to happen, she still had control over whether it did or did not.

Caitlin opened
the cover and scanned the title page of the book. Looking at it made her heart
stop. The title was:
The Last Vampire
. And the author of the book was
C.
Paine.

Could it really
be true? Had she, Caitlin, written this very book in a different time and
place, during one of the world’s many different cycles of history? Had
she
been
the very person guiding her all this time?

Before she set
foot in this place, she would never have believed it. But after her memories
had returned to her, she was certainly more open to the possibility. Time, she
remembered, was not linear. She was very proof that people could move through
time on completely different trajectories than others. There was no hard and
fast law that said tomorrow must follow today. In fact, Caitlin had spent many
years experiencing yesterday after yesterday after yesterday. It was possible,
it truly was, for her to be the author of her own destiny.

She settled down
and turned the first page. The book was blank. Her heart began to thud
painfully. It couldn’t be. Why would there be no words?

Caitlin ran her
fingers along the blank pages, one after the other, turning the pages
furiously. There was nothing here, nothing for her to rely on, no advice or
truths to turn to. Just nothing.

Tears flooded
her eyes. How could it be that after everything she had gone through, she was
still without the answer she so desperately sought?

Then, something
strange began to happen. A light started to glow from the pages of the open
book. The light filled the space before Caitlin, just like the memories of her
life as a vampire had appeared before her eyes the moment she’d been
transported here. Words began to dance in front of her. At first in a jumble,
but then arranging themselves into something she could read:

Time is short.
Heed my warning. Every move you make from this moment on will determine your
future. Listen. Accept. Scarlet needs her mother.

The words
floated before Caitlin for a moment before burning up and dropping to the open
pages of the book like ash.

She looked on,
frowning, needing more.

Vampire blood
holds the key. Heed my warning. Prepare for war. I beg you. Ready yourself.
Every move you make from this moment on will determine your future.

Again, the words
aligned for a moment before setting fire, burning up, and dropping to the blank
page of the book spread before Caitlin. She desperately tried to decipher their
meaning, as more words began to formulate before her.

I beg you.
Scarlet needs her mother. You are the key. Only you. Ubi amor, ibi dolor.

The last phrase,
the words written in Latin, Caitlin knew to mean:
where there is love, there
is pain.
But what did it all mean?

Caitlin watched
the final words burn up and disappear.

She sat back,
her mind reeling. She wanted more time with the words, to spend longer trying
to understand them. It seemed to suggest that everything she did from this
moment forth would be crucial to whether Scarlet could be saved.

Just then,
Caitlin realized that some of the ash from the words had collected on the page
before her. It had retained the shape of letters.

Then Caitlin
gasped. Each letter that had fallen spelled a word. Contained within the code
was everything she needed to understand what to do. The letters spelled out:

YOU ARE THE LAST
VAMPIRE

In that moment,
everything clicked into place for Caitlin. The key to saving Scarlet’s life was
to sacrifice herself. In order to save Scarlet, Caitlin had to die.

No sooner had
she come to the conclusion than the world began to swirl around her. Like a
vortex, the colors of the library merged and faded away. Caitlin felt sick and
tried to hold onto the floor, feeling as though the world were spinning so fast
she would surely fly off.

Then the
spinning stopped.

Caitlin found
herself sitting cross-legged in her grandmother’s attic, in the exact point in
time where she had left it. The sound of a scream filled her ears and she
looked up to see Caleb battling an Immortalist.

She had no time
to think.

“Caleb!”

He looked up and
she grabbed him, pulling him away from the vicious Immortalist who’d been
attacking him. The leather box lay on the floor, having fallen to the ground
when Caitlin was transported and she snatched it up and flipped open the lid.

Before she could
blink, she and Caleb were sucked into the box, and the attic disappeared from
sight.

*

Caleb stood in
the darkness, dazed, too stunned to speak. A second earlier he’d been battling
for his life and now he was somewhere entirely different, somewhere that felt
ancient and forgotten, even forbidden.

“Caitlin?” he
whispered.

He couldn’t see
his own hands in front of his face, let alone hers, but he could sense her
presence, the warmth radiating from her body, the sound of her breathing.

“Just wait,”
Caitlin said.

“Wait for what?”
Caleb replied.

“The memories,”
came Caitlin’s cryptic answer.

Caleb waited. Soon,
a strange flickering white light appeared before Caleb’s eyes, like an old
silent movie from the 1920s. The same images began playing, showing him in Italy,
Paris, London and Jerusalem. His own movie reel showed the decadence, the
beauty, and the danger. He saw Caitlin, his young love, evolve from his fiancee
to his bride, to his wife, and finally to the mother of his precious daughter.
The memories hit him like an avalanche, filling him with so many conflicting
emotions he could hardly breathe.

In the soft glow
of his memories, he turned to face Caitlin, and in the pale light she was more
beautiful than ever.

“It’s all real,”
he gasped.

Tears glistened
in Caitlin’s eyes.

“Yes,” she
whispered.

Caleb turned
back to the reel of memories as they danced across his vision. How had he lost
all of this? How had these amazing, important, incredible memories been
replaced in his mind? And why?

“Caitlin,” he
said, taking his wife’s hands. “What is happening?”

Caitlin squeezed
his hands.

“We’ve lived
another life before. A life where we were vampires, where we journeyed through
time, across the globe.”

“But how?” he
asked. “How does that make any sense?”

Caitlin shook
her head.

“It’s too much
for us to comprehend. But time isn’t a straight thing that goes in one
direction. Our lives as vampires prove that much. We travelled, once before, in
the direction of time that is supposed to be impossible. And yet here we are,
in a completely different era, with memories of a different life returning to
us. Time isn’t straight. It is everywhere, happening all at once, in a million
different combinations.”

Caitlin had
always had a brilliant mind, had always been able to grasp philosophies far
beyond Caleb’s reach, but this was more than anything he could comprehend.

“What does that
mean for us?” he said, bringing the abstract back to the here and now, to the
real and physical.

Caitlin glanced
at the floor and Caleb knew in that instant that whatever she was about to tell
him he would not like.

“Right now, on
this path of life that we are living, I have to sacrifice myself for Scarlet.”

Caleb stood
there, winded by her words, unable and unwilling to believe them.