Vampire Memories #5 - Ghosts of Memories (14 page)

He soon learned to live by her hours, and he did not ask any questions. Instead, he focused on playing his own role. He provided her with flattery and gratitude and company. He found he had a gift for keeping her happy.

In midautumn, after giving him lessons on social etiquette and diction, she began to show him off, taking him to the opera or late-night dinner parties or gatherings in the salons of her friends. She made up a story that he was the fourth son of a minor nobleman from the south and that she had taken him on as a protégé, introducing him into society. She even asked him about his surname, but he didn’t know what it was, so she gave him one: Lefevre.

Of course everyone believed he was sharing her bed—which was what she wanted them to believe—but on the surface, they all treated him as Monsieur Christian Lefevre, a young aristocrat she’d taken under her wing.

He loved this. He loved the pomp of the opera. He loved the barbed verbal sparing matches at dinner parties. He loved listening to the discussions of art or politics in a salon.

He especially loved the way the women looked at him, both with hunger and as if they somehow sensed he was different. This was how he figured out why Bernadette had chosen him when she might have chosen among her own caste.

The first time they walked into a salon, a wigged man wearing face powder had fallen to his knees in front of Bernadette and kissed her hand. “My love!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been hiding? My heart would have broken had you not come before long.”

Christian stared at him. The men all seemed to speak in flowery, insincere phrases, as if any and all masculinity had been bred out of them long ago. Christian was attentive and unfailingly polite, but none of these men would have demanded that Bernadette take her wig off and show them her hair. And even if they had, they would have used too many words to flatter her.

Christian’s one breathy whisper of “beautiful” was something foreign to these people. They all used too many words.

He was something new to them, and he became an overnight attraction. Bernadette did not hide her pleasure. She was flooded with invitations, and Christian came to understand that in the past few years before his arrival, her invitations had been dwindling. But now she was in demand again—because of him.

Even after learning this, his gratitude to her did not fade. He loved their apartments and the fine food and the wine and the clothes and the fascination of wealthy women. He sometimes wondered how these same women might look at him if they knew that only a few months before, he’d been cutting purses to survive and had occasionally slept in alleys with rats running over his legs.

But as time drifted by, he began to forget the streets, and he almost came to believe that he really was Monsieur Christian Lefevre, the fourth son of a minor nobleman from the south of France.

His happiness was broken only by two separate events—which both happened with some regularity. About once a week, Bernadette would slip out and leave the apartments without him. She refused to tell him where she was going, and she would sometimes be gone for hours.

This tortured him, as he feared she might be meeting someone else. He feared being replaced more than anything else, and for the next few nights, he would always work harder to please her, finding little ways to make her smile.

The other event tended to happen about once a month, and it followed the same pattern as his first night with her. She would serve him a meal, sometimes feeding him with her fingers, along with several bottles of wine, and then she’d ask him to tell her about his life before he met her. He began to loathe doing this—as he preferred to forget that life. But he would do anything she wanted, so he told her ugly, sordid stories, followed by swearing to her how grateful he was to be living here with her and how she’d saved him. After that, she would want him to kiss her mouth for a while, and he’d be enveloped by the same mind-dulling sensation of overwhelming gratitude.

Then she would kiss his wrist and he’d black out, waking up the following afternoon with no memory of what had happened after, but with a bleeding, bandaged wound on his arm. This began to trouble him more and more, as did her complete abstinence from food and daylight.

After six months, on one of these nights, he made a point of drinking less, and he somehow managed to hold on to his senses when the mind-dulling feeling of gratitude swept over him. He snatched his wrist away when she moved to kiss it. Her eyes flew to his face in surprise.

“Christian?”

“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice sounded hard to his own ears. “I don’t like it.”

She heard the edge in his voice, too. He might have joyfully turned himself into her handsome escort, but underneath, he was still the same young man who’d cut purses to survive.

Suddenly he found his head clearing even more, and he began demanding answers. “Why don’t you eat? Why do I never share your bed? Why do you always vanish before dawn? Why am I forbidden to enter your room?”

She stood up, perhaps shaken by his questions, but he couldn’t be certain. Her back was turned.

“Do you truly wish to know?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Even if the answer is difficult to believe?”

“Yes.”

She turned around. “I have never known anyone like you. You are the best of all worlds.” She paused. “What if I told you that I could make it so you never aged another day, that your current charm would increase threefold, that you could stay with me forever?”

He stood up, his heart pounding. The first part sounded like madness, but he’d do anything to ensure the last part.

She raised one hand to stop him from speaking. “There’s a price. You too will never eat food again, and you will never again see daylight.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

She moved closer. “Truly? You would want this?”

“I want to be with you.”

She closed her eyes, but he could see the stark relief in her face. Did she fear losing him, too? Was that possible?

Stepping even closer, she ran her hands up his chest. “You have to consent,” she whispered. “You have to tell me you agree.”

“I consent,” he whispered back instantly, and the open relief on her face now astonished him.

“Sit,” she said, and she moved into his lap, kissing his mouth again, only harder this time, deeper. Suddenly the sensation of gratitude began to engulf him again, only this time, it was stronger than ever before. He was so grateful to her. The feeling seemed flow through and around him. She was the fountain of all good things, and he would do anything for her. He’d let her do anything to him.

Her mouth moved to his throat, kissing his skin, and then without warning, she bit down hard on his throat, not like a love bite, but her teeth sank deeply, ripping his skin. The pain was blinding, and his hands instinctively shot up to pitch her off, but the feeling of gratitude grew even stronger, engulfing him, and he stopped.

She was drinking his blood in gulping mouthfuls, pushing him slowly down onto the couch. His body grew weaker, until he could hear his heartbeat in his ears, slower and slower until he thought it would stop. She pulled her teeth from his throat and used them to tear open her own wrist, and then she pressed it into his mouth.

“Drink,” she whispered.

That was the last thing he remembered.

When he woke up again, he was lying on the same couch, but only one candle was lit. He had a sense that some time had passed, but he didn’t know how much. The candle glowed too brightly in his sight. He could see colors in the flame he’d never noticed before.

“Christian?”

Bernadette was suddenly kneeling beside him. He could hear a beetle making its way across the floor.

“What did you do to me?” he whispered.

She smiled. “Given you a new life. A life with me. Forever.” He felt her hand upon his head, stroking his hair in a way she’d never done before. For some reason, he didn’t like it, and he wanted her to stop. But he said nothing.

The first fifteen years passed quickly as Christian became comfortable with the term “vampire.”

He had so much to learn, so much to discover about himself. Bernadette had not been wrong that his charm would increase threefold, but when his telepathy began to develop, he reveled in the power. How had he ever existed without it? To know what everyone was thinking put him at an advantage beyond his previous imagining.

Bernadette also taught him how to hunt, how to feed, how to blur a victim’s memory.

She’d been slightly unsettled at first that he did not develop something she called “a gift” quite in the way of other vampires. Her gift was to exude an overwhelming feeling of gratitude in her victims. He’d felt this from her himself, so he knew how strong it was—especially when she used it in full force.

But no element of his personality swelled into an aura when he hunted. Instead, he was gifted with a mental power of emotional suggestion. He could plant an impulse inside the mind of a mortal and make the person
feel
as he wished.

“Is this so unusual?” he asked. “Can others of our kind not do this as well?”

“To a point,” she answered. “We can make mental suggestions in order to do things like put a victim to sleep or of course to blur memories, so we can feed safely. Some of us can use quick mental impulses to both confuse and lure someone off alone.” She hesitated. “But I’ve never known a vampire who could go inside a mortal’s mind and plant an emotional impulse the way you can, any emotion you choose in the moment. Your ability is unique.”

He liked that. He liked being unique.

She also taught him that there were a number of others of their kind and that they existed by four laws—laws that he must learn and never break. She made him recite them back to her:

First Law: No vampire shall kill to feed. This ensures our safety and secrecy.

Second Law: No vampire shall make another until reaching the age of one hundred years as an undead, and no vampire shall ever make more than one companion within the span of a hundred years. The physical and mental energy required is so great that any breach of this law will produce flawed results.

Third Law: No vampire shall make another without the consent of the mortal.

Fourth Law: The maker must teach the new vampire all methods of proper survival and all four of the laws in order to protect the secrecy of our kind.

With the exception of the first law, they all seemed far too removed from himself. But she was so serious about these laws that he obeyed and memorized every word. His main function in life was to please her. That never changed. If anything, it increased. He loved this new life even more than the one he’d begun when he’d first come to live with her.

Now he was the absolute toast of dinner parties or evenings in a salon, although it took him a little while to learn how to properly push food about on a plate and pretend to eat. With the possible exception of the silent servants taking the plates, no one seemed to notice that he never consumed anything.

He knew what every lady wanted to hear. He knew what every man thought of him. He could read five or six minds simultaneously, and he could pick lines of poetry he’d never even read from someone’s mind or draw upon political opinions regarding topics he knew nothing about. He could discuss art he’d never seen. He became the sum total of everyone in the room, and everyone thought him brilliant. His pale skin glowed and his eyes glittered, and women adored his young face and his wavy, steel gray hair.

He owed all of this to Bernadette.

Then in 1788, his happiness was tarnished again when a dark feeling came over him one night while he was out walking in the streets. For some reason he could not explain, he suffered from a sensation that something horrific was coming…not to him personally, but rather to Paris itself. The mood of the people around him had changed, and he sensed hunger and hatred as never before.

So when he arrived at home that night and Bernadette suddenly announced that they were leaving the city, he looked at her in confusion, but he did not argue.

“Why?” he could not help asking. Had she felt the same dark premonition?

But she said nothing of darkness looming over the city. Instead, she told him that the circle of the “right people” there in Paris was not infinite, and although they had changed their core group of friends several times, some members of the Parisian elite were beginning to notice that she never aged.

He hated the thought of leaving their beautiful apartments, but he did understand. Christian was a survivor.

“Where will we go?” he asked.

She smiled. “It’s time you met some others of our kind. I thought we’d go to Harfleur first, to visit an old friend. Then I’ll take you to Italy.”

Any lingering regrets over leaving the apartments fled, and excitement flooded through him. He’d never expected this.

Italy.

Unfortunately the visit to Harfleur to visit Bernadette’s old friend turned out to be less than exciting.

A drafty stone manor an hour’s ride from the nearest village was hardly Christian’s idea of society. Worse, the vampire they’d come to see was an aging Norman crusader named Angelo, and he could not have made a bigger contrast to the affluent men of Paris. He wore long breeches, heavy boots, and a wool tunic. His hair hung down his back, and his face was so preternaturally pale, he could barely pass for human.

Worse, he looked Christian up and down in poorly hidden disgust.

To Christian’s shock, Bernadette laughed like a girl. “Don’t be fooled. He’s not the dandy he appears to be.”

“Mmmmmm?” Angelo grunted, sounding unconvinced.

“I’ve been training him. He’s a lovely companion.”

Christian did not enjoy being spoken about as if he weren’t standing right there; nor did he appreciate being compared to a lap dog in training, but he said nothing.

However, within a few nights, Bernadette seemed to realize he was bored and miserable. Although what had she expected when there was nothing to do here and no one interesting to converse with? No one at all to admire him? She called the visit short, much to his relief.