The Donor House: Advent Story (part 17)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5
Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10
Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15
Part 16

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the two of them.” Georgina glanced around the room, looking first for Alice and then for Nick. It wasn’t unusual for the two of them to be apart, spending time with different people, so she wasn’t surprised to see them on opposite sides of the reception, Alice with Morgan and Issac while Nick was talking to Dominic. “For Nick to have been in the position where he found Alice close to death or for Alice to wake up a vampire because he hadn’t been able to let go of her. There are some people I went to school with who thought it would be romantic if a vampire changed them for love, but they watched too many of those silly soaps that, for some reason, most people seem to watch.”

Jean-Luc laughed. “A couple of weeks ago Morgan convinced me we should watch an episode together. We both thought it would be awful, but it was something to do when we were both awake, and it was worse than either of us thought was possible. I haven’t laughed so much in years and Morgan just stared at the screen with this look of stunned disbelief, as though she couldn’t accept that people were scared of vampires even though there watched something like it. One of the characters had been to an auction and come out of it fine, even though she keeps going on about how her owner was one of those vampires who liked to hold parties for their friends.”

“You mean like the parties Blake always talks about with that glazed look, as though he’s remembering every moment.”

“Exactly those. I doubt any of the writers of that program know anything about vampires, the auctions, or what it’s like to live in a community like this, especially as there are all these girls who fall into bed with one vampire and then realise they’re in love with another one, so they talk it all through, as though all vampires are utterly logical. The majority of vampires I know who have fallen for a human, for whatever reason, have always been jealous of anyone else being around whoever it was they’d chosen, whether they were human or vampire. A lot of the time they were worse if another vampires was interested. I’m sure that’s part of the reason someone decided it would be a good idea to start up the auctions – that way someone owns the human and whoever else might have wanted them has a chance to find someone else, and it stops the vampires from fighting, because there are more vampires who end up dead before their fifth birthday than there are who survive.”

“That’s something you know because you stayed with your creator?” Kisten asked.

“Really it’s something I know because of the way things work for the family I left behind. My creator’s creator, who I was always told to call grandfather, was the son of one of the second vampires. Now, I’ve heard things about those second vampires that I don’t think are true for all of them, and this was a vampire who chose to stay with his creator for over a decade. He never ended up needing human blood in the way that some of the children of the seconds have, even though he preferred it, and it was with the full acceptance of his creator that he started up the auctions. They both believed it was the right way to do things, I believe because they both lived in Egypt at a time when slavery was normal, and to have the lesser creatures serving them was right and proper.”

“Do you know if the story Issac was told was true?” Georgina had read it a couple of times and she really wanted to know for certain if that was how the vampires were originally created. “Issac isn’t certain, even though the vampire he spoke to said she was one of the first, because it’s so easy for someone to lie.”

“Unfortunately my grandfather didn’t talk much about his creator. There was a time when the hunters were more dangerous, because the vampires didn’t know so much about them, and when they chose to come to England, feeling that it was a place they could call home, he ended up being staked by someone who’d killed nearly a hundred of the ‘dread creatures’, as he called them, even though he didn’t manage to kill my grandfather. It was pure luck, really, that he escaped, so he could continue what they’d started, and from the stories he told he spent years attempting to kill that hunter. He never managed to and the hunter taught others how to kill the creatures who were beginning to take over their world.

“When grandfather did occasionally mention his creator it was to talk about the things they done, how they’d started up the auctions as both a way to stop the young vampires from fighting and to put the humans in their place, what the long journey to England was like, the plans they’d made for their future that could never come because of the hunter, and the decisions he made after the death that had changed his life forever. He’d never thought about making his own family, because his creator had been everything he needed, but that changed and that was why he chose to start working on making a family of his own, beginning with two children. They, apparently, were the wrong two humans to chose, so he ended up killing them himself and starting again, being more careful about the humans that he picked. My father was child number eight and Nick was child six, but there was a hundred years between child five and Nick, but only fifty between Nick and my father.

“From what I was told that was because of the choices Nick had made, as well as the children who followed Nick. Normally my grandfather would have spent at least a decade with his new child, teaching them to gather the right humans for the auctions, but Nick chose to walk away. The next child was a rebound child, apparently, due to the pain that Nick’s leaving had caused, and she ended up doing the exact same thing, although it was for a different reason. Child seven didn’t walk away, even though she didn’t want to be a vampire, instead making the choice to stay with her creator so she could learn more about what she’d become. She didn’t, however, stay with him for a decade, not when she realised what he was going to ask her to do.

“You see, when Nick chose to walk away my grandfather decided the best choice would be to leave telling his new children about who he was until they’d got to know him. Child six never knew, but she was in love and becoming a vampire had given her a chance of being with him for the first time. I don’t know what happened to them. Grandfather never bothered to learn if her love had accepted what she’d become or asked her to leave as soon as he found. Back then vampires weren’t known about by the general populace, they didn’t admit to their existence until the civil war, but some people were beginning to believe there was something out in the dark, something dangerous, and they were talking about what it could be.

“I don’t know if they thought of vampires. It’s possible and there were hunters who did their best to let the world know of the danger they were facing. All they really knew for certain was that people were disappearing, normally at night, so there were those who avoided going out at night. Of course in England not going out at night when the days are shortening isn’t the easiest thing to avoid and it’s not as though the sun would kill any of the vampires, so they weren’t exactly stuck inside at times when the humans believed they would be safe from whatever it was that seemed to be hunting them.

“By the time Nick was born my grandfather already had grandchildren. The first child he counted as a child, who I’ll call child one, was nearly five hundred years old, and had chosen early on that he wanted to change more humans into vampires. He didn’t know that it wasn’t as easy as it seemed to be. Even after changing as many humans as he did my grandfather still made mistakes. So when my oldest uncle attempted to make his first child it was a failure. According to my grandfather it wasn’t a surprise. The one thing he’d never done was teach his children how to create a vampire, because he wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. He’d learnt by trial and error, because he didn’t want to be alone and as he’d always seen his creator as the only companion he needed he didn’t see why his children wouldn’t feel the same way.”

“Everyone’s different,” Kisten commented. “When I became a vampire the last thing I wanted to do was force someone else to have to go through the same pain that I did. Nick chose to change Alice because he couldn’t imagine his life without her, even though I don’t think he would ever have planned on doing something like that. Some vampires want a companion, whether that’s long or short term, while others seem to act as though they’re doing some great deed by changing a human into a vampire – they’re passing on their immortality to some poor human who would only have been able to live for one lifetime.”

Jean-Luc nodded. “Exactly. My cousin, the vampire my third uncle created, does that last thing – he finds humans he thinks would never make good vampires and changes them, before telling them he’s given them a great gift that they’d better no waste. I never wanted to turn anyone into a vampire, even though I did a couple of times in order to save lives.”

“When did that happen?” Georgina asked, wondering why he’d never mentioned that before.

“Not long after I first met Nick I was beginning to think about leaving my family behind. Even though I loved them I knew they weren’t good people, they’d always run the auctions and my father was a gatherer. He was proud of what he was, of what he was working towards, because he knew he could change his job after he’d been a gathered for a certain number of years, so that he could be a greater part of the auctions. I never wanted that. I wanted to lead a different kind of life, so I knew that my only real option was to walk away, but if I did that I knew I’d be disowned. I was never special, like Nick was, and they wouldn’t come after me to try to convince me to return.

“I’d never been comfortable with the auctions. My father tried to get me to understand that being vampires made them better than the human rabble and the auctions kept us in a position of power, but we were going to be in a position of power no matter what we did. We drink the blood of humans for our survival, which, no matter how we feel about it, technically makes us the human race’s only real predator. In a place like this we do our best to make it seem less than it is, because we don’t want to be predators, we want to be a part of the greater community, working with humans to make this work for both of is, but that doesn’t change what we are.” Jean-Luc sighed. “The auctions make us appear to the world at large to be nothing more than predators, as though we’ve all lost our humanity because of what we’ve become, but we haven’t. Every vampire is different in the same way that every human is different.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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No typos found.

I like the discussion of family and history.