Chapter 270 - Last Rites part 1

"We go east."

I paused to survey our environs. We had crossed the border into Germany the previous evening and were trekking through the Hambach Forest in the North Rhine-Westphalian District of Duren. It was a large forest, nearly 6,000 hectares, densely wooded with oak, hornbeam and fir. Once this forest had stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles, but most of it had been cleared in the last forty years to expand the nearby coalmines. Though the forest looked like the primeval wilderness I remembered from my mortal life, I could hear the insect whine of traffic zooming east and west on the E40, and the distant rumble of the mines, a sound I felt in my preternatural flesh more than I heard with my ears.

Lukas stopped at my side, shifted his backpack on his shoulders. A light snow was drifting down around us, the flakes tiny and delicate. Lukas's eyelashes and eyebrows were coated with the fragile flakes, like a dusting of confectioner's sugar. They did not melt because our bodies do not generate heat. I probably looked like a hoary old man, my hair and beard white.

"Are we resting?" he said, pushing back the hood of his parka.

"Are you tired?" I asked.

He shook his head, dislodging a few snowflakes from his face. "No. I feel like I could jump over the moon."

He glanced up, lips pulled back from his teeth—a habit he would have to break if he meant to move among mortals (although, now that it was fashionable among "goths" to don prosthetic fangs and fluorescent contact lenses, his outré appearance might actually go unremarked).

"If there was a moon tonight," he added.

The sky was low and gray and oddly bulgy, like wet sacks suspended from rafters. The snow smelled of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide and all manner of foul industrial pollutants, but I had chosen not to notice such things. Better to pretend. Pretend that the world was pure and fresh, unspoiled by the relentless progress of mankind. By its rapacious consumerism. Could there be a finer metaphor for mortal consumerism than the vampire?

"So what are we waiting for?" Lukas pressed, impatient as always. He was unimpressed by the glory of nature, the Douglas firs standing tall and proud all around us, their limbs weighed down with snow. The great still of the forest (minus the traffic and the throb of heavy machinery). The gently drifting snow. "Are you lost?"

I sighed, exasperated. "I merely pause to absorb the beauty of the forest," I said. "I have not walked the earth of my native land in a very long time. This will be the last time I tread upon it. Let me have my moment."

Lukas laughed at my peevish tone. The image flashed through my thoughts of striking his head from his shoulders. If I did not need him, I would have been tempted. Sorely tempted. But I did need him, so I restrained the hand itching to strike him.

"Not far from here, just on the other side of a small city named Kerpen, is an abandoned monastery," I said. "Its name is Engel Abbey. It sits at the edge of the Rhineland nature preserve, near the Schwarz Maar. It is a low, swampy, altogether unpleasant place."

"Uh-huh," Lukas said, tramping about restlessly. "So why are we going there?"

"My vampire child Justus resides there. Or did the last time I heard from him. I wish to see him before I perish."

"To say your fond farewells?"

"Something like that."

Lukas nodded. He looked around, said, "Maybe we can find something here to feed on. I'm starving." He walked away a few paces, boots crunching in the snow, scanned the dark forest for prey. After a few moments, he called out to me, "So tell me about Justus. How old is he? When did you make him a vampire?"

I could see that Lukas would not grant me the peace I longed for. He was too much a child of his times, accustomed to the constant stimulation of electronic media. Silence filled him with disquiet. Thoughtful contemplation was a foreign concept to him. He was a consumer: of information, entertainment, pleasure and plastic encased commercial goods, of innocence and the lives of his fellow human beings. I had only made him a literal blood drinker.

"Don't you want me to finish telling you of my war against the God King?" I asked.

"Not right now," he said. "I want to know about Justus."

"As you wish," I said, and since I could see that he would not let me enjoy the amity of Hambach, I started forward again, headed east.

"Justus was a Benedictine monk and a member of the Order of Light, dispatched to a small village in the Kingdom of Croatia by Pius the Fourth in the year 1564…"