Chapter 334 - Bad Wildbach, The Present

The name of the village was Bad Wildbach. Bad was the German word for "bath". The people of the hamlet had once aspired to make their home a grand tourist destination, but the little spa town was simply too remote, its amenities too sparse and the mountains surrounding it too bleak to attract a great number of vacationers. I thought it a lovely village, small and picturesque, with its steep brown roofs and half-timbered architecture and narrow winding streets. In truth, it had not changed much in the hundred or so years since I'd visited last. The only thing that had changed was its name. It was simply Wildbach the last time I was here.

We had taken a room at the Eintracht Hotel, a cozy little inn situated on a precipitously angled street near the east end of town. Our room had a wide and nearly unobstructed view of the pine clad mountains that cuddled the hamlet. I wish I could have said the mountains looked exactly as I remembered them—how wonderful that would have been!-- but I could not. They did not. They were smaller now, more like large hills than mountains. Slumped, like tired old men. Time had broken their backs, as it breaks the back of everything and all.

Today is the last day of my life, I thought as I stood at the window and looked out upon those hills.

I expected to be more excited. Tonight I stepped beyond the veil. Tonight I plunged irretrievably into Mystery. I should have been giddy at the prospect of the strange shores I might soon wash up on, the undiscovered countries that awaited my tread just on the other side of the threshold of death. Or perhaps there was only nothingness, a lake of spaces, a wood of silence, and that was fine, too. 30,000 years is an awful long time to stand watch on the universe. An eternity of sleep did not seem too terribly frightening. In fact, it sounded quite restful. I wished to slip the yoke of time. To be free. At last.

The sun was setting. Its vermillion light tinted the snowcapped roofs a lovely shade of coral pink. I had intended to sleep after checking into the hotel. I got Lukas tucked safely into bed, lay down in the single next to his, closed my eyes and folded my hands upon my chest, but my mind resisted the tug of restful unconsciousness. Each time I felt sleep's serene envelopment, my thoughts raced away like a mettlesome horse.

Now, so near the end, I was too anxious to sleep.

It was too bad, really. A real kick in the pants, as the Americans say. Sleep can be a great comfort, especially to the weary soul. I had resented my need for sleep when I was a mortal man, thinking it a waste of time, but now that I was old (so very, very old!) it seemed more of a refuge. In sleep, there are no memories… of war or violence or loss or pain. The ghosts of all the men and women I had slain over the eons did not plague my conscience. There was only a dark weightlessness, a timeless thoughtlessness, no past or future to trouble my mind, and no regrets.

Unless I dreamed.

My dreams could be pretty unpleasant sometimes, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Lukas, on the other hand, seemed to have no trouble sleeping.

He lay on his side, knees folded up to his chest, greasy dark hair lying limp across his pillow like stalks of kelp on white sand. He slept in a fetal position, like a newborn baby, hands between his thighs to protect his groin. I wondered what past traumas caused him to regress in such a manner, and that disturbed me. I had grown too close to him. I had begun to think of him as a person rather than a means to an end. I chose him because he was a brutal, beautiful, amoral sociopath, completely bereft of human compassion. Or so I once believed. Now that I had spent some time with the man, gotten to know him as a human being, I had come to realize that his soul was a child's broken plaything. He was not an evil, unfeeling monster but merely warped by the circumstances of his past, made ugly and violent by a lifetime of physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

In sleep, his features were smooth and white and flawless, bereft of all emotion but a slight tension in the muscles of his forehead, there in the center of his brow, just above the bridge of his distinctive Roman nose. Looking down on his face, I could imagine the troubled child he had been. The troubled child he still was. He must have suffered greatly for those large somber eyes, that broad sensual mouth. I'm sure he'd fetched a handsome price.

For a moment, I imagined that he was a boy, and that I swept into his home one moonlit night and rid him of his abusive pater, much as I had killed my Paulo's brutal Roman master. Could I have saved Lukas as I had saved the soul of my beloved Apollonius? Tempered his hatred with compassion, soothed the beast that violence and depravity had set free in his soul?

I was not certain.

I think, perhaps, the seed was bad with Lukas. Our basic dispositions, I have come to believe, are determined as much by nature as by nurture. I do not think Lukas could ever have been a good man, only a little less wicked than he actually was. There was too much of the brute in him. Too much of the conqueror.

And perhaps insomnia is one of the side effects of a guilty conscience.

The sun had slipped at last behind the rugged hills, the sky where it had gone to earth still bloody and bruised by its passage. Lukas stirred a little and took a shallow breath, the first breath he had taken since he sank into the deathlike stupor that is what passes for sleep for our kind. Breathing is an affectation for us, a habit carried over from our mortal lives, and when we sleep we often just quit. Our bodies go still as a corpse. It is really quite grotesque to see.

I stood by the frosted window and watched him animate. It was a very subtle thing. A sort of shiver passed through his body as he emerged from oblivion. A muscle in his thigh twitched, as if he were dreaming of running. His shoulders tensed and his lips puckered ever so slightly as he began, once more, to breathe as a mortal man must do. One moment he was as still as any lifeless thing. Pale, sagging, utterly inert. He looked like a waxwork effigy. And then he was moving. He rolled over onto his back, stretching his muscular legs out, taking up the entire bed, and then he opened his eyes.

He looked like a devil.

His eyes had caught the light slanting through the window, caught it and held it like firelight in crystal goblets. He stared at the ceiling without expression for a moment, a faint grimace on his face, and then his eyes rolled in their sockets towards me, the sullen red light winking in the pupils. It looked as if there were hot coals burning inside of his skull. One look and a mortal would have run from the room, screaming his head off.

"Good evening," I said.

His lush mouth curled into a derisive grin. "Good evening," he replied. He made a mockery of my courtesy by speaking in an exaggerated Hungarian accent, like the mortal actor Bela Lugosi, who, of course you know, starred in that tasteless Universal horror movie.

I stifled a flash of annoyance.

"Do I really sound like that?" I asked, making my voice as mild as possible.

His grin wilted. "Not really," he said. He sat up and reached for his clothing. He always slept nude. It was a passive form of sexual aggression, but I was never much troubled by human nakedness, male or female. He lay back on the bed and wriggled into his pants, the muscles in his stomach and chest undulating. He tucked his pendulous genitals away, buttoned his pants, zipped his fly, then sat up and reached for his socks.

"So tonight's the big night, huh?" he said as he skewered his socks with his lily white feet. He spoke with the manner of a man making small talk. "You still mean to go through with it? You really want me to kill you?"

I smiled faintly, nodding. "I have had enough of living. I would have done this a very long time ago, but I'm a terrible procrastinator."

"I'm hungry," Lukas said, looking down at his feet. My witticism did not so much as register on his consciousness. He wriggled his toes, then cocked an eyebrow up at me. Would I allow him to feed?

"You will have to endure the hunger just a little while longer," I said before he could ask. "This town is far too small to hunt here tonight. There probably hasn't been a murder in this village in a decade."

Lukas glowered. "What do you care? In a little while you'll be dead and I'll be free to go wherever I want. Do whatever I want. Kill whomever I want."

"You will not feed here tonight for one simple reason: you'll be drinking my blood," I said. "I've explained this to you already, Lukas. The only way to destroy an Eternal is to drain them of every last drop of their blood. It must be devoured by another vampire, one who, like you, is unaffected by the Sharing. You must drink every last drop of it, and then you must destroy my remains. You'll need an empty belly to drink that much blood at once. It is not like mortal blood, which the Strix digests quite rapidly. You will be taking my Living Blood into your body. It will take time for our potashu to merge."

He tried to hide his pleasure, his excitement, at the thought of killing me. Tried and failed. But I was impressed that he had even bothered trying to hide it at all.

Perhaps he, too, was spending a little too much time in my company.

He was not incapable of forming attachments. When I took him from his mortal life, snatched him from the docks of the Meuse, he was a friend to two other men, his accomplices Maurice Fournier and Hans Loen. It did not take him long to betray them. He gave them to me in exchange for his own life. Criminals of the worst sort, I fed on them with special ferocity. But don't think Lukas a coward. A lot of mortals would have done the same thing, were they in his shoes. Believe me, he wasn't the first man to say, "Don't kill me. Kill that other one instead!" He wasn't even the one-hundred-and-first who had said that to me over the past thirty thousand years. Mortals can be quite cold-blooded when it comes to their survival. The instinct for self-preservation is hardwired into our brains. It is, I believe, one of our strongest instincts, surpassed only by the instinct to protect our offspring.

I did not believe some sort of friendship was kindling between us. I wasn't as foolish as that. But I thought perhaps he was beginning to respect me, or maybe it was just an appreciation for what I was: the oldest living creature on the face of the earth. Or what I had given him. Power. Long life. Enormous wealth. A secret world of wonder and dark magic.

"Will I take your memories, too?" he asked. "You've told me about the Sharing. Will I Share your life as I am drinking your blood? You've lived so long. Do you think my mind can handle that much information? What if my head explodes, or I go nuts?"

"It is very likely that we will Share," I said. "It is a common ability among our kind. Most vampires Share their memories when they exchange the Living Blood. But the intensity of the Sharing varies from vampire to vampire. It is highly dependent on the recipient's capacity for empathy. It is actually a defensive mechanism, the Sharing. It keeps us from preying upon one another. It is why I chose you for this task. Your lack of compassion. Even if you absorb my life in its entirety, you will not be moved to sympathy. Pity will not stay your hand. You will not feel guilt or shame in destroying me. You will devour my memories as easily as you devour my blood. You will have no hesitation in killing me. I have been waiting for one like yourself for many ages."

"There's no one else who can do this for you? No one before me?"

"There is one," I said. "The Eternal Baalt. He is incapable of Sharing. He was the God King's personal assassin in the time before the Vampire War. He still exists to this day, a frightening brute of incalculable cruelty. Compared to him, you are an innocent. A hapless babe."

"Why didn't you ask him to do it then?"

I shrugged. "I did. About a thousand years ago."

"And what did he say? He refused, obviously. You're still alive. So why didn't he kill you?"

"Spite," I said. "I defeated him in battle once. Tore his body limb from limb. He was brought back together again, restored much like I was restored, but he lay in a tomb of ice for several thousand years-- alive, aware-- and he's held a grudge against me ever since. He deemed it more satisfying that I should live. The thought that I must suffer on, pining for death's sweet release, was too delectable to him. He laughed in my face when I asked him to end me. He made me beg for it, on my hands and knees, and then he laughed and told me to begone."

"Sounds like my kind of vampire," Lukas chuckled.

"He would destroy you out of hand," I said. "Baalt does not feed on the living. He feeds on the living dead. Seek him out if you like, but only if you wish to die. Baalt is who the Eternals go to see when they have had their fill of living. But he and I have long been the most bitter of enemies. We share a unique enmity, have since the first vampire war, when I helped to destroy his beloved God King. He would rather I live in longing of death, suffering for all eternity, than die and know the relief of oblivion."

"You sure know how to make enemies," Lukas said.

I could not help but smile, thinking of all the enemies I had made over the ages: my maker, the Elders of the Oombai, the God King, the priesthood of Ur, the Holy Roman Empire.

"I do indeed," I said. "If only I knew why. The only thing I have ever wanted was to live and die in peace."

"I think you've answered your own question," Lukas said. He scanned the floor, found his boots and shifted around to put them on. "You didn't answer my original question."

"Will your head explode?"

I grinned, relishing the image for a moment.

"No," I said. "You might go a little mad. For certain, you will go a little mad, but it will pass. Once you've assimilated my memories, they will be there in your subconscious, like bright stones at the bottom of a murky pool, but you will have to exert your will to access them. They will not intrude upon your awareness."

"And what of the physical act?" he said, lacing his boots. "You might try to defend yourself, whether you want to or not. How do I know you won't bite me back? Or knock my head off? You're much more powerful than I am."

"I might," I conceded. "That is why we're going shopping first. I intend to take every possible precaution to insure the success of this venture. I won't destroy you before you finish the deed."

"Shopping, huh? What are we buying?"

"Chains," I said, "to bind my limbs. And perhaps an axe. Yes, an axe might be better."

"An axe?"

"To chop off my arms and legs."

"Really?"

"Or perhaps my head."

He looked… aroused.

"It won't be the first time, believe me," I said dismissively. "I have been decapitated more times than I care to count."

I turned away, made myself busy. I didn't want to admit that I was a little fuzzy on the details.

It was known among the elite of our kind that an Eternal could be destroyed. That there were so few of us gave testament to the fact, otherwise there would have been thousands of us at large. We can be destroyed. Of course we can. All things die. But the specifics of the act are murky at best, and subject to a great deal of gossip and speculation. It was possible that my Living Blood would rise up and attack him, as happened with Khronos when we beset him in the bowels of Fen'Dagher. The Living Blood had surged out of his flesh at the very last, spooling from his mouth in gleaming black tendrils to attack his foes, flashing like deadly black stingers from every orifice and open wound. I did not think anything like that would happen with me. I have never known my Blood to behave in such a fashion, to take form and attack my enemies of its own volition. But it was possible. Anything was possible tonight. But so that Lukas did not lose his nerve, I kept my doubts to myself. He might be bereft of human compassion, but he possessed one of the most highly developed instincts for self-preservation that I had ever known. If he thought the risk outweighed the reward, he would abandon me at the first opportunity. And much as I might like otherwise, I could not force him to kill me.

Boots on, he clomped to his feet. It was dark outside now and he was anxious to get on with it. "So what first?" he said. "The hardware store?"

"I took the liberty of doing a Google search while you were sleeping," I said. I had planned to leave my laptop computer in Liege, to finish my tale in spiral bound notebooks along the way, but at the last minute I had decided to bring it, and I was glad that I had. I had "surfed the web" while waiting for night to come. Looked up the address of a local hardware store.

(I had also checked Paulo's Facebook page. He made no mention of his flight to Belgium. There was a single private message from him: Call me, Father! I am worried about you! But nothing else. I had logged out quickly before anyone noticed I was online, then closed the lid of the computer guiltily, as if someone could see me from the inside of the screen.)

"There is a shop just a few blocks away," I said. "We will get our supplies there, then walk into the mountains."

"For the last time," he said, a predatory gleam in his eyes.

"For me," I conceded.

Before we went out, I flipped on the overhead lights. It had gotten dark while we were talking, the day's last light draining from the sky. I wanted to make sure we looked presentable, that we didn't send any mortals fleeing from us in terror. When the incandescent bulbs came on overhead, humming like a fly in a jar, I winced from the sight of my fledgling companion.

"What?" Lukas said.

Hunger had hollowed out his features while he slept. His eyes were dark sockets, his cheeks sunken. The veins at his temple and throat stood out, throbbing obscenely. His lips were blue and stretched taut and his fangs curved out over his bottom lip like the canines of a wolf. He was not exaggerating when he said that he was hungry.

"This won't do at all," I said. "You're a perfect horror."

"You don't look so great yourself, Drac."

"Just a minute," I said, and retrieved my cosmetics from my rucksack.

It only took a moment to make us more respectable. I tended to myself first, in the room's tiny lavatory, as Lukas watched over my shoulder. I concealed my vampire pallor with practiced efficiency—flesh-toned powder, lipstick, eyeshadow-- and then I turned to my companion. Lukas submitted with a sigh, staring at the ceiling as I made him human again.

"Must I do this every time I go out?" he asked as I coated his face with concealer.

"If you plan to avoid detection, you must," I said. "It is not now as it used to be. In the days before the electric light, our strange skin helped us to hide in the shadows, or tempt our victims into our embrace. Modern lighting reveals us for what we truly are, and it is only made worse when we are starved for mortal blood. We would be recognized in an instant if we went out in public like this, without taking a few minutes to camouflage our skin. Believe it or not, there are quite a few mortals who suspect that we exist. Hands."

He gave me his hands.

"Tuck your fangs beneath your lips," I said, speaking as I would to an obdurate teenager. "Narrow your eyes a little, and try to puff out your cheeks."

Tuck your shirt in. Stand up straight. Ancestors, he was a handful!

His fangs vanished beneath his lips with a slurp. "It's hard to talk clearly like this," he said. "They get in the way."

"Now who sounds like Count Dracula?" I teased. "You must get in the habit of concealing them," I went on. "You must learn to move like a mortal as well. Suppress your new speed and strength. Practice in front of a mirror if you must. You must never allow a mortal to realize what you are, not unless you intend to feed on them or make them one of us. Most elders are not nearly as forgiving as I. There are Old Ones who scour the news looking for reckless young fledglings. They will hunt you down and destroy you if you threaten our anonymity. They won't even bat an eye. The fewer there are of us, after all, the easier it is to keep our race a secret." I saw that his attention was wandering and paused until he looked back at me. "You are not going to survive long if you do not apply yourself to my teachings," I said. "I am trying to prepare you for the life that stands ahead of you, as much as I can in the time that I have left."

And I was. I do not know why. Perhaps it was paternal instinct. I'd raised so many children, mortal and immortal alike, that it was impossible for me to abandon a single one of them, even a child as despicable as Lukas. I was not one to shirk my responsibilities. Or maybe it was just habit.

"I know," he said contritely. He had decided to take me serious for a change. No wisecracks.

"There," I said, putting away my cosmetics. "We look almost human now."

"Almost," Lukas grinned.

"Always almost," I said, leveling a baleful glare on him. "Fangs!"

"Oops, sorry." Slurp!

We left then, locking the door behind us. The corridor outside was narrow and dimly lit, with dark red carpeting and boiserie paneling. There were no mortals nearby. Not much business in the winter, it seemed. The window at the end of the hallway showed the blank brick wall of the adjacent building.

Lukas asked what I meant to do with my computer.

"Take it if you wish, or leave it," I said. "I've uploaded the final installment of my memoirs. Cleared its hard drive. I have no further need of it. Not after tonight."

He would take it.

We took the stairs down to the lobby. A heavyset man in an ill-fitting burgundy jacket glanced up at us from the front desk. He had sallow, unhealthy skin and thick black hair combed straight back from his brow. His expression was slack with disinterest. A paperback novel was open in his hands. The title of this priceless contribution to German literature was Schlampen-Internat. Slut Boarding School. At least he had the decency to put the book away as we approached. In the corner of the room, an old man was watching Im Angesicht des Verbrechens on a portable television. He hunched forward, his bulbous nose mere inches from the screen. His entire body was stained yellow from nicotine: hair, skin, eyes, nails. He glanced up at us as he fished another fag from his cigarette holder, then turned back to his program.

"Guten Abend, mein Herren," the clerk said as we walked past his station.

"Hallo," Lukas said.

"Essen zu Gehen?"

"Ja," Lukas replied, and he grinned so widely I was afraid he would expose his fangs. His nostrils flared rapidly as he took the man's scent. He was staring at the man so intensely that I elbowed him.

"Bündeln," the desk clerk sighed. He wished to return to the fantasy of his pornographic novel. "Es ist kalt draußen."

"Danke," I said, pushing Lukas ahead of me. "Gute nacht."

We passed through the doors into chilly darkness, the night enveloping us like a great black cloak. The stars were very close and bright, glinting diamonds on jeweler's felt. The streets were mostly deserted. A few German compacts chased their headlights down the bumpy avenues, VWs and BMWs and Audis. A mortal couple clomped casually by.

Huddled together in quilted parkas, they laughed as they walked past us, taking exaggeratedly large steps down the steeply sloped sidewalk. The woman was very pretty, honey blonde hair spilling from the fur-rimmed hood of her winter coat. Her male companion was stout and plain, with a bristly handlebar mustache and small, close-set eyes. Both trailed little clouds of vapor as they receded down the street, puff puff puff, like human locomotives. Lukas glided towards the woman, eyes blank with hunger, but I hauled him back to my side.

"Control yourself!" I hissed.

"What?" he said, blinking his eyes rapidly, then, "Yes, of course. Sorry."

We followed the couple down the street, walking in their scented wake. I made sure that we kept a safe distance. Three blocks down, they turned left and continued along an intersecting boulevard. Lukas and I went right a moment later.

"They just fucked," Lukas said, watching them over his shoulder. He glanced at me, grinning lasciviously. "I could smell it," he said. "I can smell everything now. The man dined on currywurst tonight. The woman drank some wine. She slept with another man recently, two maybe three days ago. He doesn't know it. He thinks she is laughing with him, but she is actually laughing at him."

"All correct," I said with a nod.

"But that is fantastic," Lukas whispered fiercely, "that I can know so much from just the smell of them!"

"When you have been a vampire longer you will be able to discern so much more. The woman, I can tell you, works at a bakery. She is a diabetic and has been for years. The man is a carpenter. He has not had work in several weeks. I can tell you the brand of toothpaste they use, the woman's favorite perfume, how far along she is in her pregnancy—"

"She's pregnant?"

"About three weeks along. It is not that man's child."

Lukas laughed contemptuously. "The fool!"

"I can tell you there is a body buried somewhere nearby. It is rotting in the earth-- someone's backyard, I imagine. It has been there about two years. A victim of murder, one must assume. If we were hunting tonight that is where I would begin my search."

"Because you only hunt the evildoer," Lukas said with a snort.

"I do have a conscience," I replied. "Also, murderers are not so badly missed when they are misplaced. Often, when the authorities investigate their disappearances, their previous misdeeds are also unearthed and it is assumed they fled to avoid arrest. If our victims' bodies are ever discovered, it is believed they committed suicide or were killed out of revenge. So you see, hunting the wicked is a pragmatic decision as well as a moral choice, and you would do well to adopt such a practice."

Not that he would, I thought, but Lukas made of show of nodding thoughtfully, as if he meant to give my suggestion serious consideration.

We traversed a side street. The houses of this neighborhood were old and small. They huddled close to one another as if to share warmth. From inside came the smell of camphor and old flesh, sausage and cooked cabbage. The street thrummed with the idiot babble of a dozen television sets, the mutterings of the elderly, most of whom were talking to themselves or to their pets. The feeling I got from the area was loneliness, stoic despair. Would these elders not be happier if they lived together, as our old did when I was a mortal man? Our elders lived in a communal shelter, the Siede. They looked after our children while we hunted and gathered. They were the glue that bound our society together. They passed on their wisdom and their skills while we were occupied with the business of survival. It gave them a sense of purpose, of community. Our old ones were never idle. They never felt worthless or alone. Not like these poor relics.

We crossed to the next street. This road was much busier, lots of automobiles zipping to and fro, farting their stinking exhaust into the crisp winter air. We walked north until we came to the parking lot of a titanic hardware store. The lighted sign over the entrance said WILDBACH WERKZEUGE. The interior was vast and brightly lit. I grabbed a red plastic shopping cart and pushed it ahead.

Inside, dozens of mortals in machine-sewn clothing fawned over shiny new tools. The women were varied and fanciful but the men all looked the same, with closely shorn hair, no face paint at all and very little jewelry. Their clothes were mostly muted in color and of a similar and dreadfully boring style. They all milled around as if they were the only people in the store, ignoring us, ignoring each other. When they did speak it was quietly and to their own mates, or to ask a question of one of the sales assistants. It made me sad to see how these modern people held one another at a distance, as if they moved in their own little pocket universes.

Their sex lives must be maddeningly mundane, I thought. No wonder they were so addicted to their television serials!

As I moved through this echoing cathedral of commerce, Lukas followed me like an obedient dog, staring raptly at all the well-fed mortals. I had a feeling several of these mortals would go missing in the next few days, after I was dead and my bloodthirsty new protégé was free to do as he pleased. But what could I do about it? I was not willing to abandon my plans. I had waited too long to die as it was. I roamed, listening to the bland department store music, feeling that I too had been sealed in plastic blister packaging.

"The axes are over here, I think," Lukas said helpfully, pointing at one of the great signs suspended from the metal rafters.

"Thank you," I said sarcastically.

I let him choose the axe, then selected a large hunting knife. I plunked several sturdy chains into my cart, tossed four industrial padlocks on top of them and then we strolled to the checkout area.

"Will that be all tonight?" the cashier asked, after scanning our items with a shimmering laser beam. She was young and pretty, eyes painted blue, lips a bright bloody red. She looked as if she had been brutally beaten, but that was what modern men find attractive, I suppose. That freshly beaten look.

Lukas stared at her with smoldering eyes.

"Yes, thank you," I said, slipping my wallet from my back pocket.

She did not bat an eye at our purchases. Chains and padlocks, a knife, an axe. Might as well throw in a couple shovels and a bag of lime. I don't think she would have cared.

I paid in cash and carried my items out into the parking lot.

"I have her scent," Lukas said, grinning at me as I circled around behind the building. I was headed toward the western hills. "I'm going to find her tomorrow night and fuck her, and then after I fuck her I'm going to kill her."

"She has children," I said.

He shrugged, still grinning.

What could I do?

Lead him into those hills and kill him, I thought.

It would be easy enough. One blow to take off his head, then pluck out his heart and pulp it in my fist. I wouldn't even need the axe. It was the right thing to do, the moral thing. Forsake my plans and spare the world the depredations of this brutal man-child. He wouldn't suffer much. It would be over in an instant.

But… I could not.

It was too late for that. Besides, some other elder would end Lukas quickly enough. He was much too careless. Too brazen and defiant. He would be hunted down and killed in a fortnight.

There was a fenced in lot behind Werkzeuge where stacks of lumber and building supplies, too large to be displayed indoors, were kept. Construction vehicles dozed under a blanket of fresh snow. We leapt the chain-link fence and crossed the shopping center's back lot, our feet crunching in the drifts.

"Should I tell you how I was rescued from the God King?" I said.

"What's the point?" Lukas asked. "Once I drink your blood, I'll have all of your memories. It seems redundant."

"You may not," I said. "The Sharing is not always total. Sometimes it does not happen at all. Or you do not retain the memories after you experience them. They fade from the mind like dreams upon awakening. Besides, it gives me comfort. It gives me a sense of finality. I think 'closure' is the current fashionable term. If nothing else, it will give us something to talk about as we complete our journey, as we go to the final resting place of my mortal husband and wives."

"They're still out there?" Lukas said, nodding to the hills that hulked, black and featureless, over the village. "Even after thirty thousand years?"

"They've always been there," I said. "Eyya, Nyala, Brulde… I purchased the land where their remains are interred several hundred years ago, transferring the property from one identity to the next over the three or four centuries that followed. They are just dust now, of course. They fell to dust many millennia ago. But that is where I mean to die. This body will fall to dust, too, once you have killed me, and I would have my dust mingle with theirs, the three that I loved most in this world. Together. At long last, and until the end of time."

Lukas didn't reply for several minutes after that. I think he was contemplating the oceans of time that I had swum, that I spoke so casually of now. Thirty thousand years. Imagine that, if you can. Nearly all of human history! Or as long as we were technically "human", as we think of it now.

Finally, he spoke: "So tell me how you got away from the God King."

I smiled. "But of course," I said. I hopped across a drainage culvert. We were coming to the edge of town. Bad Wildbach sprawled behind us, gleaming beneath the endless heavens. Before us, the dark humps of the Swabian Jura, still rugged and wild after thirty millennia. If not quite so grand as I remembered.

"It was my granddaughter who saved me," I said. "My beautiful Irema."