Chapter 326 - Utah, One Week Ago part 11

It took Sydney much longer to quit San Francisco than he had anticipated. Despite his desire to be free of such encumbrances, he could not simply abandon the property, not to mention all the servants his master had hired over the last two decades. He couldn't just throw them out on the street. There was still enough of the poor farm boy in his soul to be appalled by the thought. It took, in all, nearly six months to set the vampire's affairs in order, to see that their small but loyal staff had been provided for to his satisfaction, to sell the house, and to straighten out his master's finances. Gon was, at the best of times, a careless steward, and his legal and financial situation was a hopeless tangle. Sydney donated most of the material possessions they had accumulated to charity.

At last he left San Francisco. He set out east, crossing California into Nevada and then into Arizona. He travelled by train first and then by coach before finally ending up on horseback, just as he was when he first crossed paths with the ancient vampire. As he penetrated ever deeper into what his mother once called the unsettled country, he shed his fine clothes and cultured manners as a snake sheds its skin. It was a relief, really. He felt a thousand pounds lighter. He felt that he was himself again, covered in dust and smelling of horse and leather and clothes that had been washed by the rain and sundried a dozen times over. With each mile he put between himself and the Pacific, the time he spent as a dandy in San Francisco seemed more and more like something he had dreamed rather than something that had really happened. He began to think of that fop as a character from a book, one who had traded places with a wealthy twin for a while before deciding that his old life, a life unburdened by material possessions, was the more fulfilling one.

His master had often talked about time, but it was not until he was alone that Sydney finally began to understand some of the more esoteric insights his maker had shared with him. Solitude opened up his mind, or emptied it perhaps, like slop from a pail, so that it could be filled with a clearer, purer, understanding of the universe. Sometimes it seemed that he was hurtling through a world that was frozen in time, and sometimes it seemed that it was he himself that was frozen in time and it was the world that was hurtling by him. The duality of time was a revelation to the boy.

He was constantly amazed at how quickly the country was growing around him. Towns seemed to spring up overnight, spreading across the landscape at an exponential rate. The unsettled country shrank with shocking rapidity. Once he could go months without seeing another human being. Now it seemed he could not toss a stone without rapping someone in the back of the head with it. Cities sprang up everywhere, shooting out roads like vines from which more towns blossomed and more roads shot out. Telegraph lines crisscrossed the country, then electrical power lines and telephone lines, until he imagined all the people of the nation caught up like insects in some great web of humming wires. Inside a decade, the entire country was lit up with electric light bulbs. Gas powered vehicles replaced the horse and buggy. And yet nothing really changed. The fundamental essence of all man's tools remained the same. His master would have said it was evolution, not invention. Fire was replaced by candle, which was replaced by lamp, which was replaced by incandescent bulb. Horse and buggies were replaced by Fords and Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles. Sydney found the technological progress of the mortal world amusing, sometimes even fascinating, but it did not frighten him. Like his master had said countless times, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

He kept mostly to the country, though he sometimes ventured into civilization to feed. Like his maker, he fed only on the wicked. From these victims he stole clothes so that he was not so much of an anachronism when he moved among his mortal brethren. He replaced his cowboy garb with more modern clothing—blue jeans and leather chaps and a leather jacket with a phoenix embroidered on the back. A Greek cap with chains and studs took the place of his Stetson, and some time later, a skullcap printed with the American flag took the place of that. He stole his first motorbike in 1928—a brand new pea-green Harley-Davidson JDH. If it was tuned right it could go one hundred miles per hour. Sydney fell in love.

It was like flying through the darkness, riding the Harley. The wind roaring in his ears. The road rushing by just inches below his heels. He stayed on the move, never lingering long in any one place, yet he never seemed to find what he was looking for. Or perhaps he already possessed it.

Freedom.

He never made a vampire child of his own, though loneliness sometimes tempted him to do so. His master sometimes spoke of the Strix as if it were a sentient being, a discrete entity that dwelled within their bodies, subtly influencing all their decisions. He claimed the Strix could compel them to make others of their kind, even when it was contrary to their principles, that it was some aspect of the creature's reproductive process, a life cycle that affected its hosts on a subconscious level. Sydney had never felt the urge to make another vampire as his maker described it-- as a subconscious compulsion-- though sometimes he thought it would be nice to have someone to talk to, to ride the empty highways with, to share the hunt and the day's dim dreams with. He took lovers from time to time but was never tempted to change them, to make them immortal like himself.

Until now.

Until Miranda.

He was not sure what it was about her that moved him to make her an immortal. It was not her physical appearance. She was beautiful, but no more beautiful than the countless other women he had bedded in the past. She was intelligent, self-possessed, fearless and witty, but none of these qualities had ever stirred him to give a companion the Blood. He suspected he was drawn to her because she yearned. Like him, she yearned to be free, to be a thing apart, a universe in and of herself. In that, she was something of a kindred spirit, but he had met others with that same yearning, that completeness in their own soul, and he had never given them the Living Blood.

Perhaps, in the end, it was as his maker said: the Strix was compelling him to reproduce, to finally, after 130 years, make an immortal child of his own, and all his soul-searching was simply his conscious mind trying to justify the subconscious manipulations of the parasite that dwelled within his body.

So be it.