Chapter 185 - Zenzele, My Love part 4

"How do I describe what it is like to devour another person's life?" I said to Lukas, sitting at my dining room table in my apartment in modern day Liege. I watched my protégé mash out his cigarette in an ashtray. He was very thorough about putting out the embers. He twisted the cigarette back and forth, grinding it until the paper turned to shreds and all its insides spilled out into the glass bowl.

He immediately lit another, and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.

"Isn't that kind of your bag?" he smirked. "Devouring lives, I mean. It shouldn't be so hard for you to describe."

I watched tendrils of smoke curl into the air, watched them rise, dissipate. An almost imperceptible haze of nicotine and tar hovered ghostlike just a couple inches below the ceiling of the room.

Smoke always makes me think of spirits. The association between smoke and spirits is pretty universal. It's why men so often incorporate incense into their religious rituals, but ghosts are rarely anything more than memories or an active imagination. It is our pasts which haunt us. More often than the spirits of those who have pierced the veil.

I said these things to Lukas, who accepted them without comment, and then I sat staring thoughtfully out my dining room window.

"The sharing is not always so intense," I finally went on, "but with Zenzele, it was as if I were there. I was aware of myself, but only in a distant, dream-like sort of way. As her life unfolded in my mind, I often forgot myself for great stretches of time. Her mother and father were my mother and father. The love she felt for her brothers and sisters was a love that I felt for all of her siblings. That little isolated hut on the African savannah was my home. My home… and when she was stolen away from it shortly after, it was my heart that broke."

"It must be strange having a woman's memories rattling around inside your skull," Lukas leered. "Tell me, Drac, what was it like having your first period?"

He always retreated to crude humor when I spoke to him of emotional matters, belittling such things as soon as I related them to him.

He has no finer feelings, I thought. Either he was born without them, or they had atrophied from lack of use.

I didn't let his vulgarity annoy me, however. His emotional retardation played an important part in my schemes.

In fact, I pitied him. How gray and cold this world must be for him! A hopeless, joyless ghetto soul, his childhood dreams rotting in the gutters like dead hobos, killed just for the fun of it.

"The sharing has a simple biological function," I said, changing the subject.

Lukas cocked his head attentively, still smiling. "And what is that?"

"Self-preservation."

Lukas's forehead furrowed. I could see in his eyes that he did not understand.

"The symbiotic organism which resides inside our veins has little in the way of natural defenses, aside from the powers it grants to the mortals that it bonds with," I explained. "The sharing is a way for the Strix to protect itself from the depredations of a more powerful blood drinker. The living blood has no physical means of defending itself, so it attacks the mind of a violent aggressor with a barrage of memories. It is a psychic attack, intended to stun an assailant. Often an aggressor cannot carry through with his assault—even if he or she should recover swiftly enough—because the sharing forges a powerful emotional bond between the two. It would be like tearing out your own heart."

Lukas nodded. "Ah! I see… Cool!"

Talk of violence always got him excited.

"It is an aspect of our biology, however, which can be exploited to various ends. It is a self-defense mechanism, but it can also be used to transfer information very rapidly. To forge a more intimate bond with a companion. To search the mind of another blood drinker for the truth, if you believe that he is lying to you. What else…? Ah, yes, languages! When I recovered from my stupor, I found that I was fluent in all the tongues that Zenzele could speak, just as Ilio had learned the language of his mortal Tanti victim."

"Can it be overcome? This self-preservation mechanism?" Lukas asked.

"Oh, certainly! As I said, the psychic assault is not always so intense. It depends on how powerful the vampire is. Physically, the little ones can be overwhelmed quite easily by a vampire like myself, while a true immortal's blood will make one fall into a stupor, especially if that immortal has lived a long time. But psychologically, to kill another vampire like that—it is a ghastly affair! To watch their flesh shrivel to dust even as their soul merges with your own. It is nearly impossible to do such a thing! A strigoi must be exceptionally cruel to kill in such a manner."

"Did your vampire child Ilio relive your memories?" Lukas asked. "I remember you said you tried to strengthen him by giving him more of your blood once."

"No. Expelling the Strix purposefully does not trigger the self-preservation response. It is how we reproduce."

"So I won't relive 30,000 years of your life when you change me."

I chuckled. "No. It never happens during the transformation."

Lukas shuddered. "That's a relief! No offense, Drac, but one life is plenty enough for me."

"It is a terrible and beautiful thing," I agreed. "There can be no lies between two who have shared so completely. Every thought, every vile and venial act, is relived by the recipient of the blood. Every moment of horror. Every illicit desire."

I thought of the memories I held inside my mind. The memories of the ones I had shared with over the millennia. My beloved Zenzele. Apollonius. Sweet, fragile Julia, who died when Vesuvius erupted. There were half a dozen more, all dear to me. All but one. They floated in the deeper recesses of my mind like faintly glowing pearls. If I wanted, I could dive down to them, retrieve them from the dark waters they drift in, but I never do it. The pain of remembering them is nigh unbearable.

"Yet, love is the only thing that comes of it in the end," I said after a moment of reflection. "Love. Without exception."