Chapter 18: The Journey Home

  The mortals at the phone store were fairly helpful in getting my phone fixed. They sold me a portable charging bank, power cord, and a wall wart. I was reminded, again, that even my home was so far out of date that it didn't have electricity in the walls, which means I'll have to rent a hotel room while I wait for my home to be rebuilt.

  As the clerk and I waited for the phone to charge enough it didn’t die as soon as it was unplugged, they showed me the much newer variants. The pale man went on a long ramble about all the new features. Including how they could play the latest movies all day and still have a charge. I compared the screen size to the one I had and they were almost double the size! My thumbs could barely reach across the screen.

  The only downside was that the newer phones failed to respond to my inputs. Much like Jezebel's phone, and the vending machine and automatic door, the new phones refused to do anything. One even shut off entirely!

  The clerk chuckled. “Seems you need to attune to the phone to make it work.”

  “I did not ‘attune’ to this one,” I replied as I held my purple phone for him to see. The store had more employees standing around than it did customers now, so everyone was either talking to themselves or staring at the old idiot vampire in the room. Most of them were human with one elf, and all were some variation of pale like they rarely saw the sun.

  “Well, yours is a flagship model from five years ago.” The pale human placed his hands to his hips before motioning toward the new one in my hand. “And the other one came out last week.”

  I flipped mine over, glancing at the rubbery case covering the back. “I assume because it is so old, it is not worth much?”

  “Correct.” He nodded. The clerk led me over to a case of flagship phones that were made of all different materials, including gold and platinum! He pointed to the gold one as he said, “This one is a Legendary model. Only sixty were produced before being discontinued and run around ten thousand gold.”

  I held the display model in my hand and felt the weighty device. There were five cameras on the back with two facing the front. Four speakers and finally a forward facing infrared camera. The spec sheet claimed it could run a movie at max resolution for two days straight.

  I raised a finger for the man to be quiet before I spoke. “Now, I have another question; Is there a way to watch Television shows on these devices and not just movies?”

  He nodded and explained how there were a few streaming services that provided what I wanted. Which was the ability to watch The Tortuga Chronicles or perhaps the other one that sounded interesting; Life, Death & Time: The Mysteries of the Infinite Beyond. It was supposedly based on real events transcribed from a soldier’s journal.

  The poor man was stuck in a time loop that reset upon his death, but if it was based on real events then how did he get out of the loop and why would he tell the world about it? It seemed more like a fanciful tale than anything. But it was an account of life during the apocalypse and shortly after, so I had made a note on my phone to find the episodes and watch them.

  The third interesting one was a show about the far future where people traveled from one planet to another through gates on the planet surface rather than ships. Perhaps that one was ‘real’, too, perhaps not. It didn't truly matter in the end. All that mattered was if the show was entertaining.

  But, again, I did not have time to sit around and watch television all day. I needed to get back to my house. I needed to figure out how to deal with Amelia. I needed to take a moment and look at things from a different perspective.

  While Caleb and Dinner had explained the phone to me, and playing around with it was easy enough, they never sat down and went through it in detail like the clerk did. Lyra was just as bad! She didn’t tell me there was a text-to-speech function. She grabbed it from my hand and did it herself.

  Despite that it was the clerk’s job to deal with morons like me, it was nice to have him sit me down and be very patient as I asked questions everyone already knew. Such as, “What about accessing the library? Can I read books on my phone?”

  “With an app, yeah, or you can get an ereader.”

  The man took me around the store to show me the tablets and ereaders on display along with different models of phones. I don’t know why they didn’t just ring me out for the power bank and cable, and be done with it. However, it worked, because even though I really didn’t need a new phone, I bought an ereader and a year’s subscription to an online book store. The clerk explained how to attune to it and that would require quite some time to perform the ritual. Time which I did not have thanks to the sun coming up in a few hours.

  As I turned to leave, he asked to see the phone one last time and I allowed him to. The man frowned, because it was still only at a couple percent and just sucking power like a starving vampire on a mortal’s neck. I watched him flip through the menu until he found an application he said would share my location to a circle of people I authorized. One of which was my sire. The other one being a couple other vampires I hadn’t heard of. I assumed they were vampires at least. One named Dustin and the other was Eva.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the darkness outside the windows, looking for any signs there could be a vampire just standing there menacingly or even in shadow. However, the bright lights inside the store made that impossible, leaving me to squint at the dark parking lot partially filled with cars.

  “This could be one reason your phone went through so much battery,” the clerk said. It was a surprise that he could see the phone while Caleb could not! I don’t know what sorcery he used to pierce the shadows covering the device, but he did see and interact with it just fine.

  I nodded slowly, mind not really listening even though I heard the words. Something felt off about the fact that my sire never made mention of the app. Perhaps she expected me to find it. Or, most likely, she was just keeping tabs on me in the way she always did.

  But who were the other two vampires? Their names failed to ring a bell even when I checked the app again. I tapped Dustin’s name and my phone took me to my contact page where his last name was Idiot Fledgling #2. And Eva was Useful Fledgling #1.

  My eyebrows raised slightly, eyes widening with them at the implications. I was not Isabella's only fledgling! When did she sire more?! And where were they over the last few days? Dustin and Eva were, for a lack of a better word, my siblings. This was news to me! My sire never mentioned them once. Not at all during the whole night we spent together buying my scooter, which was now likely in police possession.

  I opened the messaging app and sent one off to Dustin: Hello, ‘brother’. Respond if you dare.

  He replied: Took you long enough. I’ve been watching you fumble about for the last thirty minutes. Get your corpse out here and let’s go home.

  The clerk showed me how to turn off the location tracking and gave me the phone back, but I didn't turn it off just yet. If Isabella was watching me through it then I needed to keep what I knew about the phone hidden. I left the store, bought Amelia’s fancy necklace, and stepped into the cold night air. There were a few cars in the parking lot of different sizes and colors. My fledgling sibling was easy to spot, because he flashed the headlights at me as I looked over a line of parked cars. He was nestled between two other cars with his nose facing the cell phone store’s window.

  Dustin’s darkly colored car was a basic enclosed four door wagon called a sports utility vehicle. It was higher off the ground than Dinner’s car, but nowhere near as tall as Caleb's. It resembled a few that I passed on my scooter and looked so… plain. Oh so very plain.

  I approached the vehicle, bag in one hand and my other hand resting close to my jacket’s open zipper. Dustin was a wildcard. I never met him, he never met me, but he was following me. It begged the question of why he was following me and why hadn’t he approached me. He could have been told to follow me, or perhaps he could have just come along and stopped.

  Only the former of those two options was the likeliest, considering my location was being shared with the three of them.

  The driver’s window rolled down at my approach, faint words flowing out from the vehicle’s stereo system as someone said, “Be warned all ye Starjammers who sail the Dark Sea, for just beyond Halifax lay a solar hurricane tracking its way through the region. It is expected to make landfall on Wednesday the 12th. Vampires are recommended to remain indoors until the storm passes on the 15th. Otherwise, you may catch a case of incidental sunlight exposure and we at the One Vampire Network are not responsible for accidental immolation. The Council says that you are on your own when the hurricane lands.”

  I cocked my head at the broadcast and listened, as Dustin didn't seem keen to speak up just yet. He sat there, head inclined toward the radio while the glow from the dashboard lights made his face look like the moon. He didn't look old like me, but I didn't expect him to. Roberto had picked me as his retainer. The Spaniard claimed I was the perfect fit even with my advanced age.

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  He was right.

  The news continued, “The OVN also recommends keeping watch on any androids or cybernetically augmented people around you, because the electronics in their bodies may be affected. Cell phones will likewise be affected by the solar hurricane. Company dropships are advised to stay grounded. Again, vampires are recommended to stay indoors even at night. Put up heavy blackout blinds and hunker down until the storm passes. Failure to do so can lead to sunlight exposure and final death.”

  “What is a solar hurricane?” I asked Dustin.

  He reached for the center console and turned the radio down. “A storm of light and solar wind capable of raining droplets of sunlight. It is both beautiful and terrifying.” Dustin's voice was fairly baritone, catching me a bit off guard.

  “How…?”

  The vampire looked at me with a dumbfounded expression. As if I just asked him something I should know already. “How are you that fucking gullible?!” he snapped. His pale blue eyes glared a bit at me before he threw a thumb behind him. “Get the hell in the car!”

  He didn’t have to be that rude, but he was. I walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. “You don’t have to be a jackass,” I replied as I climbed in and buckled my seatbelt.

  *** ***

  Dustin was gruff around the edges. That much was certain. He had good reason, because Isabella had told him that I was truly dead. At least according to him. The man recounted the tale to me as we drove through Encinar to my home. I hadn't asked how he knew where I was, because I already knew the answer.

  As Dustin told it, he and Eva were summoned to Isabella’s office the night I awakened. He arrived less than twenty minutes after I departed for home. Eva worked in the council building and was already waiting inside the office by the time Dustin arrived.

  He described Eva as a half-elven woman with a pale vampire’s complexion. The woman hails from sunny Ventros, a place that sounded a lot like the old Carolina colonies with wild and untamed forests and too many people packed inside walled off cities hiding from magical creatures and dragons. Her hair was lighter in color and her eyes a shade of hazel.

  My sire elected to have her hair colored black when Dustin last saw her sitting at her desk with even more paperwork than I remembered. She held a can of blood in one hand and an older painted portrait of me in the other. Eva had one as well.

  Both of the fledglings were looking confused at the portrait, because of course they had never seen me before, but they had seen my picture at least once. Apparently, I am in history books as the first Mayor! But they listed me as having been killed by Inquisition Agents in 1844.

  I shook my head from side to side as I waved a hand about. “Now just hold on a minute!” I exclaimed, voice echoing in the car. “I went into torpor in 1819, not 1844.”

  “You've got a phone, look yourself up if you don't believe me.” Dustin didn't even give me the courtesy of looking in my direction! He had his eyes on the road as we raced down the carpool lane with the tires humming softly through the closed windows.

  There was a strange device in the center of his dashboard just below the windshield. It was black with a few LED lights that I didn't understand the purpose of until one of them flickered and Dustin slowed down to the speed limit. A few miles later, we passed by a police car sitting on the side of the road. Once it was clear we weren't being followed, my sibling floored the throttle once again and his SUV roared down the highway.

  It would be some time before we arrived at my home, so I decided to look myself up like he said. I opened the browser and entered my name. What came back was, well, weird.

  That darned vampire museum had a full on article about me! I had to translate the years, of course, but the important information is as follows:

  Mayor Cassandra von Colterville (1685 estimated – May 3rd, 1844) was Encinar’s first unofficial vampire mayor from the year 1806 to the year 1844 when she was killed by Inquisition backed vampire hunters. Mayor Cassandra had no known offspring in life or undeath.

  Her reign was ruthless toward mortals, treating them as nothing but cattle to consume, but that was to be expected of older vampires who feared being hunted on a nightly basis. However, Mayor Cassandra was not beyond working out deals with mortals in exchange for regular tithes. But it was her bloodlust that drew the Inquisition to Encinar in the first place.

  There are some rumors among the older vampires that she was a vampire cannibal who fed from other undead rather than mortals. And those same people believe that it was another vampire who tipped off the Inquisition, because she was becoming too powerful, as all old vampire plots go. Unconfirmed stories from the old days claim that she could blot out the sun for a short time and that her voice was like a siren to any living person who heard it.

  She was life partners with Amelia Schmidt who was suspected of being the Inquisition’s initial target on the day of May 3rd, 1844. Amelia disappeared that same night and was never seen again. It is assumed that Mrs. Scmidt was buried in an unmarked grave along with Mayor Cassandra. We suspect Mayor Cassandra’s sire was killed before she came to Encinar with Lady Isabella who took up the mantle of mayor from 1844 to 1876 before being unanimously voted out.

  Mayor Cassandra’s influence can still be felt throughout modern day Encinar whose main production resource is synthetic blood. Encinar exports this commodity across the planetary system and is known as a Vampire Sanctuary.

  “This is all horseshit!” I exclaimed, gesturing at the phone, deep frown on my face. My brows furrowed as I stared at the device. “It’s all wrong. I was not ruthless! Brutality does not make for happy blood sacks. Kindness makes happy blood sacks, who create more blood sacks, who create more and soon you have cultivated a forest of food. Why would I piss off my food and make them come at me with pitchforks and torches…?”

  I slumped back in my seat and rubbed my temples. Reading that article gave me a massive migraine, because it told the world my biggest secret. One that only my sire should know. And Jean, because of course he knows. He knew back then. He told me it was foolish to do, but he didn't know my sire. He doesn't know me. He turned a blind eye as long as I didn’t kill any other vampires.

  There was nothing foolish about it. A mutual exchange of power. Power Isabella coveted, because she could not do some of the things I could do. I was, after all, the one who killed my sire’s sire, because he went mad by peering into the void between worlds one too many times.

  And he was very tasty.

  As I glanced up from my phone, I noticed we were changing lanes already. We were approaching an exit I hadn't taken before, but had seen when Bones took me out to the race. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You need to meet Eva,” Dustin said.

  “Why?” I blinked at his words. The seat was fairly comfortable, but I wanted out. I wanted to give Amelia a hug and show her my sire’s other Fledgling. I added, “The sun is almost up. There is no time for idle chit chat. You can stay in my basement during the day if you need to.”

  He half-shrugged. “Look, this is our sire’s orders. It’s just business, Cassandra. So don't take it personally.”

  “Don't take what—” was as far as I got before something slammed into the back of my ribcage and shoved its way into my heart.

  “This,” a woman said from behind me.

  She reached around the seat and grabbed my wrist. The last thing I remember was the sharp pain of her biting into it.

  The System sent me a message: You have died. Initiating automatic reincarnation protocol.

  Error: User is a vampire. User is already dead. Initiate reincarnation protocol? Y/N?

  Error: Unable to initiate reincarnation protocol. User is recommended to visit the nearest Imperial Spellchemist as soon as possible and have their standard issue data pad replaced with a non-faulty model.

  Initiate emergency survival protocol? Y/N?

  Y.

  Initiating emergency survival protocol…

  User Status: Transferring consciousness to new Host.

  I dreamed of falling through a dark abyss with no escape, unable to stop myself or see where I was going. It didn't even feel like I was going anywhere. I could have been in the SUV still or maybe laying at home in my coffin. I don't know. The last thing I truly remembered was a vampire biting my wrist after someone said ‘It’s not personal’.

  Oh but it was. To bite me without my explicit permission was a crime worthy of death. It didn't matter who was doing the biting. It could have been Isabella for all I cared. She knew better. My sire had seen me devour four other vampires, including two who were more powerful and far older than she was. And those were the ones she knew about.

  There were many vampires I drank from and just as many who provided me with the ultimate sustenance. They fueled the void, using me as a gateway to the realm beyond undeath while their dying souls empowered me.

  Supposedly, there was a light at the end of a tunnel situated between worlds. If I was truly dead, as the System claimed, then falling through the void for an eternity would be the best case scenario and my troubles were over, but the confused System said it was transferring me to a new host.

  I planned to live for an eternity and so far I'd done just that. Even if I slept for most of my nearly four hundred years. I wasn't about to allow some pompous fledgling to devour me and get away with it. I’ll bide my time and strike when they least expect it. First things first; integrate with their body.

  As I fell through the abyss, I focused on my surroundings and let my arms melt into the darkness. My legs followed suit. It was like falling asleep in a dream. Only instead of sleeping, I felt… something. Blood rushed through my system and out, then back in again.

  The feeling felt like when Isabella and I shared blood between us. She used to bite me all the time. We held an agreement to share power between each other at one time, but something happened. I don't know what caused it, but I do recall now that she stopped drinking my blood and kept feeding me hers.

  Oh how blind I was to not see it. Jean was right. She was controlling me. And I was no longer useful to her.

  *** ***

  I fell for what seemed like hours before I splashed through the veil of darkness and came to a stop on something soft.

  My eyes blinked open and I beheld an eerie sight. An arcane ceiling fan slowly swirled the air above me in a fairly dark room. My revolver and holster lay on a desk along with the items I had purchased at the store. Next to them was Dustin’s jacket and the floor was covered in two sets of clothing; one male. And one female judging by the cut of the pants and the heeled boots next to a garment that looked like it would fail to hold my flat bust in place.

  Slowly, I sat up and looked at my hands. They were withered, yes, but not terribly so. I looked to be recently dead by two decades at the most. Possibly three and a half. My skin was still fairly intact with long pink nails aside from the two in the middle on one hand.

  Lightly colored hair partially obstructed my vision, as was normal. What was most unusual was the fact that I had a pair of nice breasts hanging off my chest!

  They were large enough to be easily cupped in my hands and lifted up. I stared wide-eyed at them as they rested in my hands. They were truly attached to me and not an amalgamation of manipulating skin and clothing to get the appearance of a small set.

  So it was Eva who consumed me.

  I couldn't recall where she was in the car until I focused on the memory and saw it from her perspective. Eva had been lying in wait the whole time Dustin was sitting in the parking lot. The half-elf used her powers to obscure her appearance in the back seat. I was so blind to not see her.

  ‘Come on…’ Dustin had muttered quietly. ‘Why is she still in there?’

  They originally followed me into the parking lot and waited while I browsed the two stores. Both of the vampires were holding hands and rubbing their thumbs against each other.

  ‘So I go invisible, you lure her into the backseat, I stake her and… that's it?’ Eva replied, her voice coming from my own throat in the memory.

  ‘That's it.’ Dustin nodded.

  Eva cocked her head. ‘Can I drink her dry?’

  The man shrugged. ‘We’re supposed to behead her.’

  ‘That's boring though. I'm gonna drain her and take her power.’

  Dustin glanced back at Eva. ‘Be careful, Eva. She's powerful enough that our sire is afraid of her surviving this. We can’t fuck this up.’ His soft expression reminded me of the look Amelia gave me before she closed the coffin last week. It hurts to see him like that and know what my plan for him is, but they thought they could kill me.

  They thought wrong!

  Eva was awakening from daysleep. I could feel her shifting around in her own mind. Her worries were an easy thing to exploit. The woman’s hunger for power even more so. All I had to do was wait for her to bite into Dustin again. Just a little nudge and she’ll succumb to her hunger and be consumed by mine.

  Once my hunger overtakes her, I will have full control. Until then, I observe.

  I slowly and gently laid next to my next victim and closed my eyes, retreating into the darkness. Just in time for Eva to awaken from a daymare of her own.