The Old

“Train him?” Lewis said.

“That’s what I said,” Owen told his nephew, blandly. “Pass the potatoes, please.”

As Owen spooned potatoes onto the plate he added, “You should have done this a long time ago. You are well prepared to take on an student.”

“A sorcerer’s apprentice,” Chris said with only half a smile.

“Exactly,” Owen said. “Did you know, Chris, that your beloved is an initiated high priest? He has passed through the third order and into the Elders.”

“I actually don’t know much of what that means,” Chris said. “I was going to pretend to, but I don’t like to look stupid.”

“Of course,” Owen said.

“I know about Wiccans, but you aren’t Wiccans. And I think Garderians have three degrees.”

“Yes,” Owen said, “and Freemasons. And Mormons I think. And the Golden Dawn and lots of other people that don’t consist of Caucasian teenagers making videos of themselves on YouTube. Even the houses of Craft that say they have no degrees have them, but Lewis passed through his three degrees a long time ago, and he has never attained the degree of Adept.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

“Well, now you don’t have to try,” Owen said to his nephew. He gestured to Seth. “Now you have your first student.”

“If you’ll have me,” Seth said.

“Of course I’ll have you,” Lewis said. “You’re family. And, besides, you need it. I was just surprised that Uncle Owen thought it should be me when he is the head of the Clan. Of course this means eventually Seth will be taken into the clan.”

“Of course,” Owen said, dipping his bread in sauce, “and the reason I chose you is because you are becoming more powerful everyday. You always possessed skill and wisdom and power, but your power increases,” Owen said. He seemed to be thinking of something and then he swallowed, pointed to Chris and said, “So is yours.”

“What?” Chris said.

“Your kind have their own Gifts.” Owen said. “Not all the same, but much the same. Telepathy, sometimes telekinesis. Superspeed.” Owen shrugged. “Other things. Those will increase. They are probably increasing now. And Lewis’ increase by you all being together.”

“Just by being together?” Chris said.

“Lewis,” Owen said, almost ignoring this, “does he feed on you?”

“What?”

“We’re family, and not a common family, and Chris might as well be family. You all are lovers. Your lover is a vampire. Surely in lovemaking you have shared blood. If Chris occasionally drinks from you he is connected to your power. Not that our power is in our blood, but… it isn’t exactly not in our blood. And at the same time, a bloodrinker cannot drink from someone without giving some of himself, so the two of you are changed by being with each other.”

While Lewis absorbed this and Chris sat back, stretching his long legs under the table, Owen added, “Seth’s dreams… Seth’s powers, are very strong. So I need your strength. I will give you the sword. For a time at least. I will bind it to your name, nephew. You may need it.”

“You can make me if you want to,”Laurie remembers saying. He remembers the moment when he was still mortal and still fragile, not that he felt much different now, when he lay naked before another vampire, when light fingers went along his hip bone and touched his thigh, making the hairs on it thrill, when he was touched tenderly, and as a mouth bent over him, he said, “You can make me if you want.”

“It isn’t time,” he was told. “It isn’t time. If there ever will be the time.”

They’d said nothing else. They’d only made love, and Laurie remembers being so young and trembling under feelings he had never known. He had arched his neck and been pierced, not made, but he had given himself, given his blood, and something had been given to him. As long as they were lovers, long before he had finally been made, something was always given to him when he gave himself. That was what love should be.

The kill was something else. It was another type of gift. It was a gift to the greater world. Every clan throughout time had found a way to make the kill a gift. Call it justification if you will. Every species had a predator that eradicated the weak. Even animal mothers ate the smallest young when they’d born too many children. To the houses, the only question was what defined weakness.

“Weakness is evil,” Laurie murmured.

People didn’t know that, and this is why evil was weakness. People loved evil. They kissed it on the mouth. He sat in a movie theatre and watched Last Tango in Paris, and when an old and no longer attractive Marlon Brando had thrust cold butter up a girl’s pussy and raped her, though people had pretended to be disgusted, he saw how thrilled they were, as thrilled as they were a few years later when the same actor was the patriarch of the Corleone family and James Caan and Al Pacino murdered their way through The Godfather. It was a great movie. It was masterpiece, but people loved the killing, and when Laurie had gone down the streets, as he was going now, following this man, he remembered seeing Italians, Sicilian Americans walking down the street aping the gangsters they’d tried to distance themselves from for years. It had made Laurie’s blood boil. After all, half of his family was from Sicily, his mother had warned him not to get mixed up with people like that when he was a boy, urged him to remember he was an American.

Quickly he moved through the crowds, his eyes more on the man than ever before. The closer he came to that moment, the more his old thoughts kaleidoscoped about him. The more he could feel the pulse of the blood, the more he could smell the kill, the more his mind went back to memories, went back to that night when he had finally given himself totally, and he had trembled under a vampire’s touch, knowing it would be death, knowing it would be death like this, in an alley.

He’d researched. It had been such luck. Vampires thrived on odd luck. The luck that there was still evil in this world, and evil was a weakener. Evil existed, often, where you let it, and poisoned you and then everything that came after you. The Evil of a strong man who beat his wife over and over again, and made her put cocaine in her pussy to smuggle through airplanes, and let her go to jail when the dogs caught her, sending their kids into foster care was his evil. The evil which left him with the three children, one whom he made beat the other because if he had beaten his children it would have been child abuse. All through the day he’d thought of this moment. Last night, when he had opened his ears to hear the screams and pursued them to the window where the man was standing over his miserable ten year old, making him beat the seven year old, Laurie knew what would happen today.

There would be no comfort for this man, and perhaps no comfort for that broken family. Their lives would be saved. That little child would not be dead on the news. But his evil had weakened that family, and as the animal growl escaped Laurie’s mouth, and the strength came upon him that did not make new vampires, or exchange blood in love, but that ended life, as the man in the alley suddenly looked up and started, “WHAT THE FUCK?”… As he pulled the man to him and sank his teeth into him, and blood filled his mouth and revivified every cell of him, as his muscles tightened, and he thrilled over the struggling body he held onto, Laurie had the consolation that this evil, at last, was at an end.

“You look different,” Lynn said when he came to pick her up.

“Hopefully in a good way,” Laurie grinned at her.

She smiled at him, and said, “You know what, Mr Malone, I’m going to tell you this, because,” he held the door open for her as they left the lobby, “I don’t think you’re the kind of person who gets vain about things: You never look bad.”

“Aha! Well, thank you and, of course, you never look bad either.”

Clark Street was busy in the evening, and it didn’t seem like everyone was on their way home. It always seemed like everybody was serious about getting somewhere, and Lynn said, “You look… younger. Like you’ve been running or something. Fresh. Does that make sense?”

“I feel fresh,” Laurie said. “It’s a great night.”

“You can feel winter coming,” Lynn said. “It’s odd, how I like to feel the winter coming, but the actual winter can kind of kiss my ass.”

“I was just thinking that,” Laurie chuckled. “But I keep staying here.”

“Glutton for punishment?” Lynn said.

“I like four seasons.”

“Laurie, where in the world should we go for dinner?”

“I was actually thinking so much about us going out that I hadn’t really thought too much about where we would go?”

“Do you remember,” Lynn began, “a time when you were so young you could go to work, and then go home, shower, get dressed again and go out?”

“No,” Laurie said.

Lynn looked at him while he grinned.

“I’ve always felt like an old man.”

“Well,” Lynn said, “I was going to suggest somewhere close to home. Only I don’t know where home is. For you.”

“Oh, up in Andersonville.”

“Really?” she said.

What about you?”

“Near Logan Square? Should we take a Brown like or a Red?”

“Neither, m’lady,” Laurie said as a valet drove up to them in a red sports car and handed Laurie his keys.

“Wow, Mr Malone. I hadn’t seen you driving that, but I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“No El for us tonight,” Laurie said, opening the door, and doffing his non existent cap.