Chapter 165 - Life Among the Tanti part 11

Inside, I clothed myself and built up my fire, then tried to find something to occupy my mind. I was restless and melancholy, and more than a little bored.

What would I do with myself now that the boy was grown?

That was my conundrum for the next couple of weeks. When I was not worrying that Ilio would murder his new bride, I looked for something to keep me busy. I loitered at the lake, aiding the fishermen with their labors, sometimes even venturing out in the daylight to help them, though the sunlight flashing off the waves was like thorns stabbing into my eyes. I looked forward to Valas's evening visits, and even called upon him at his home when he did not show up for his nightly gossip and framash. I befriended Priss's family, ingratiating myself to them by bringing them the remains of my nightly feeding. When Ilio came to call, joining me to hunt after his bride had gone to sleep, I hung on his every word.

For a while I sent my thoughts out nearly every night, hoping to encounter the ghostly presence again. I had decided that I'd sensed another of my kind that evening at the lake, that our spirits had briefly entwined, drawn together perhaps by mutual loneliness. The idea of finding a female of my kind restoked my interest in the vampires of the east, but the time was not yet right to set off on a new adventure. I was not quite ready to give up the comforts I enjoyed living among the Tanti. Though I tried many nights to sense the spirit of the mysterious siren, my efforts were in vain, and I finally began to think that I had imagined her completely.

The unseasonable warm spell broke shortly after the wedding. Another snowstorm sprang up over the Carpathians to blanket the village in glittering white. The knee-deep ice and snow brought all activity in the little settlement to a sudden halt, and loneliness and boredom plagued me even more fiercely than before. Valas, who hated getting out in the cold, visited less often, so I took up whittling, and crafted little toys for my adopted son's children.

One of the toys, the likeness of a plump Tanti woman, was recovered in 1957 during an archeological dig and is on display in a natural history museum in France. Can you imagine my surprise when I saw a news article about the find-- and recognized my handiwork-- some 22,000 years later? The archeologist who uncovered the relic opined that it was some type of religious fertility idol, but it wasn't. It was just a little doll that I had carved for one of my grandchildren.