Chapter 167 - The Vampire Thief part 1

Do you know what it is to love?

When you are young, and if your parents are kind, you know love as a child knows it: uncomplicated, unconditional, all-encompassing. Love, for a child, is like a primary color, bright and without nuance. Mama hugs you and tends to your boo-boos, Papa plays with you and protects you from harm. They are your world.

But it is a needy love. A helpless love.

Later in childhood, as you grow older, love for self develops. You chafe at the boundaries of your parents' safekeeping. You wriggle from their arms, seek out the world on your own terms, exploring, testing, tasting, thinking you are the first person in the world to discover this thing or invent that game. You take great pride in your accomplishments. "Look what I made, Mama!" you cry, holding up your pie of mud and twigs. "Watch me throw this rock, Papa! See how far I can throw it?" But it is a selfish love. This love sees only itself, knows only its own needs. It is egotistic. Narcissistic.

As you mature, so does your love. It is flourishing, growing more complex. There are gradations in its coloration now. Subtle shadow if your path has crossed with tragedy. Patches blanched by violence or betrayal. Wearying parents teach you empathy. Perhaps one of them sickens. You must care for them. These are lessons in compassion. Lessons in self-sacrifice. It is still a simple love. It is still a selfish love from time to time, but it is evolving, transforming—perhaps into something truly magnificent.

When the bud of youth gives bloom to passionate love, it is once more all-encompassing, dizzying in its heat, reckless in its hunger. It is the enslaving love, binding you by the shackles of carnal desire. You become a driven thing, searching desperately for fertile soils in which to sow your seed, or flinging wide your bloom to tempt the passing bee, obsessed, possessed, by the overriding, undeniable prerogative of all living things: to be fruitful and multiply, to increase the number of your kind.

And when those seeds burst forth with new life--

Love achieves its crowning glory. Selfless love, the love of mother and father for child-- unconditional, fiercely protective. This is the love that sacrifices, that leaps upon the jaws of savage beast, that starves so that the children can all eat, that toils without rest, that treks to any length, even to hell and back. This is the most profound love, and in its fading days, as blossoms wither and fall away from stem, crinkled, singed by wind and sun, it becomes the most beautiful love of all.

In the seven thousand years I had lived thus far, I'd known all loves but one. I was a baby, and knew the helpless love of a child. I was a reckless boy, and knew the rebellious love of self. I knew passionate love. Oh, yes, I was a lover! When I was a mortal man, I was a dynamo of lust. My libido was so fervid it is almost a point of embarrassment to me now, but that passion was nothing in comparison to the love I felt for my children. That love did not wane when my humanity was stolen from me. It only became tragic. I pined for my mortal family in the early days of my immortality, but I could not trust myself to venture too near to them. I was a ravening monster, a bloodthirsty beast. And so I haunted them, watching over my children from afar, and then my children's children, and their children's children. But it was only in Ilio's daughters that I was able to experience the joy of being a grandfather.

Such a profound and glorious love!

With the birth of my granddaughters, Irema and Aioa, I knew all that it was to love, but I found that the joys of grandfathering were much different than the joys of fathering, which I knew already. In grandfathering, there is not the exhaustion of constant supervision, the midnight cries, the conflicts with one's own selfish desires. I could play with my granddaughters to my contentedness, then hand them back to their exhausted parents. I could dote on them without fear or guilt of spoiling them. I was, after all, their Grandpapa! It was my job to spoil them!

And in spoiling grand-babies, I found in Valas an equal, eager accomplice. Priss's earthy father was as fond of children as I. There was many a day, when the season had returned to warmth, that we paraded our babies proudly through the village, grinning like fools as the women all cooed and made babble-talk and remarked how beautiful our granddaughters were and oh-my-how-quickly-they-are-growing! Side-by-side, my partner-in-crime and I.

I wish I could tell you everything, every little detail, of those joyous times, but I know domestic bliss does not a thrilling story make. Just know that I was impossibly happy and bear with me as I detail my final days among the Tanti. My happiness, as always, would prove unfairly short-lived. It seems to be a recurring theme of my existence. I only beg your indulgence for a little while longer so that I might immortalize my twin beauties in the pages of this tome, and then we'll get on with all the killing and the fucking.

I promise.

Irema and Aioa were uncommonly beautiful. I say this without bias, of course. They possessed the olive complexion of their father, with silky black hair and great fanning eyelashes, but the delicate features and startling blue eyes of their mother. Yorda, Valas's wife, was of the opinion their eyes would change color as they grew older, but they never did. Their eyes retained that lovely shade of winter blue until the day that I last saw them, two fine and powerful women, huntress-goddesses who fought at my side against the vampires of the east. But we are talking right now of the days before the great vampire war, when they were just two inquisitive and affectionate toddlers, always eager to climb into the lap of their cold white grandpapa.

They were so similar in appearance that people often confused one for the other, but I could always tell them apart. Irema was slightly more robust, bolder, while Aioa was the more delicate, the demure one, tenderhearted. They were so similar in appearance that Valas made necklaces for the girls, one with stones of blue for Irema, the other with stones of milky quartz for Aioa, and that worked fine until the clever little things got older and began to make a game of swapping their necklaces.

I was in love with them both, my loneliness forgotten. I had even forgotten my dream seductress. I visited Ilio and his wife every evening, playing with the little ones until it was time for them to retire. Some nights I even rocked them to sleep in my arms, sitting on the floor beside the hearth.

I witnessed Irema's first tentative steps. I thought my heart would break when Aioa called me grandfather for the first time—adda, in Tanti. I watched them play with the little dollies I made for them of wood or bone or stone, sometimes for hours, and never once did I feel the urge to kill them and drink their blood.

They grew quickly, the seasons whirling past. In the three years that followed, the old shaman who performed Ilio's wedding ceremony passed on to the spirit world, and his protégé, a young man named Kuhnluhn, took over his duties. Yorda gave birth to a little boy, and Lorn got married to a fellow named Honch. Paba, the old Neirie I'd escorted back to his Tanti homeland, died that first winter, but he died contented in his sleep beside a grandson's hearth.

One summer evening, just a few months before the vampire thief came, Irema climbed into my lap. After tangling my beard for a little while, she looked up at me very seriously, and asked, "Adda, why is your skin so cold and white?"

"I am T'sukuru, like your papa. We are different from the Tanti," I answered.

"But why?" she asked.

"That is just how it is. Why is the sky blue, little one? Why do the birds sing?"

She scowled at me. She didn't understand. "When I grow up, I want to be cold and white like you," she said, and I embraced her, sighing, "No, you do not, my beloved. No, you do not." And her chubby little arms went around my neck to hug me back, so tiny and warm, her curly black hair tickling my lips and the tip of my nose.

My beautiful grandbabies. They were my life. My love.

And then the raiders came.