Chapter 371 - In Transit part 8

The transformation was torturous.

With so little blood left in her body, the Strix rampaged through her veins. It thundered in her brain, pierced her heart with a thousand icy talons, devouring every last blood cell in her body before commencing with the transmogrification of her mortal form. Later, Lord Venport would tell her that it was the most painful transformation he had ever witnessed, and Nora had no reason to question that assertion. She had lived it, and she never wanted to experience such agony again!

It took the remainder of the night, and most of the day that followed, for the Strix to complete its strange alchemy upon her body, transforming supple flesh to living stone, teeth into fangs, eyes into magic lanterns that could pierce the darkest shadow. Lord Venport stayed with her through the entire process, standing guard over her, consoling her as she writhed and pleaded with him for death.

"It is like the pangs of childbirth," he said to soothe her. "Soon it will be finished, and you will remember it only as a thing that happened once. The pain will be gone, and the memories will have no power over you."

To which she snarled, "How would you know what it's like giving birth? You're a man!" Grabbing the lapels of his jacket and shaking him.

Finally, mercifully, the agony abated, and she arose like a tremble-legged fawn, the newest member of that rare and clandestine race: the vampyri.

Her thoughts went first, of course, to the hunger. The need was like a living thing inside of her. It was as if her body had become the cage of a ravening beast, one that roared and rushed the bars unceasingly. She could think of nothing but feeding, and prayed that it stilled the clamoring in her mind, in her belly, the relentless, maddening hunger.

So Lord Venport, her new master, took her out to hunt.

It was dark outside when they forsook the tenement. Cold. Starless. The air was dense and soupy with fog, the moon a wooly glow in the overcast sky. Lord Venport lifted her to his shoulder and climbed to the rooftops. They went to the slums on the east end of London. There they stalked a mugger from above, taking him in a garbage strewn alley as he laid in wait for his next victim to come along. The man was armed with a straight razor and pistol, but Venport disarmed him handily and threw him to Nora's embrace.

"Quickly," Venport hissed. "Before his cries rouse the neighborhood."

The man's odor was nearly unbearable. He pleaded with her as she bore him to the ground, but she was deaf to all but the beat of his heart, the glorious rush of the blood in his veins. She bit into his neck, and for a moment it seemed that it was his heart beating in her breast, his blood rushing in her veins. The first hot spurt of blood in her mouth transported her to realms of ecstasy she never imagined existed. When she came back to herself, she saw that he was quite dead. She had, in fact, nearly decapitated him.

She wept then for a little while, cradling the dead man's head in her lap.

"Will it always be like this?" she asked. Her victim lay sprawled beside her, his head canted upon her leg. His wide eyes stared sightlessly at the lumpen sky. His neck lay open in bloodless tatters. She had savaged him with her new fangs.

"It will not," Lord Venport said gently. "You are a newly made vampyre. The Living Blood inside you, which we call the Strix, is still completing the transformation of your mortal flesh. Once it has finished the process, the hunger will abate, but only a little. You will always feel the hunger, but it will not overpower your reason. It will not dominate your thoughts so relentlessly. Eventually, you will feel more like your old self."

"And how long will that take?" she asked, pushing the mugger's head from her lap with a moue of distaste. She rose and straightened her gown as best she could. Lord Venport did not leave her side once during her agonized resurrection, not even to fetch her new clothes, and she looked like a ragamuffin from Hell, gown in filthy ribbons, hair matted, covered in blood.

Venport shrugged. "For me? A couple hundred years. But it is different for everyone. Some finish more quickly than others."

"A couple hundred years?" she said in horror.

He smiled in a self-deprecating manner. "I was not a very good vampyre," he said. "I was made this thing that I am against my will. My maker… died shortly after he gave me the Blood. I was left to fend for myself, an angry, frightened, ravenous orphan. It might have been easier if I'd had someone to train me. A mentor to show me the way. To ease the transition. But I did not. It was a great many years before I even met another of our kind. Our tribe is exceedingly rare and its members tend to keep to themselves."

And then Lord Venport showed her a trick.

He spat some blood into his palm and smeared it onto the dead man's injuries. As Nora watched in amazement, the ragged wounds in the man's neck mended almost instantly. So thoroughly did his injuries heal, in fact, that Nora believed it highly unlikely anyone could possibly deduce the manner in which he had died. He looked as if he were merely sleeping—except for the pallor of his flesh.

"This you must always do," Venport said, turning the dead man's head to and fro, examining his handiwork. "Mortals must never suspect that we exist, that we are not just the stuff of myth and old wives' tales." Satisfied, he rose and stepped away, leaving the man lying in the garbage.

"And if we are discovered?"

"They would destroy us," he said. "Out of fear. Jealousy. Or they would destroy themselves trying to possess our Living Blood. Probably both."

They proceeded then to the roof of the nearest building.

He instructed Nora to watch, then went to the wall and leapt upwards, clinging to the sooty bricks with his fingertips. He grinned down at her, teeth very keen and bright in the shadows, then scampered toward the roof like some kind of lizard.

Nora observed closely, watching how he moved his fingers over the roughly textured bricks, trying to discern the trick of it. He moved his fingers very lightly over the wall as he ascended, almost seemed to pluck at it with his fingertips, like he was playing an invisible harp. She went to the wall of the alley then and attempted to imitate him. To her delight, she clung easily to the wall. It was as if there were tiny barbs coating the surface of her fingertips.

He looked back at her over his shoulder and arched an eyebrow.

"It's easy," she said, scurrying after him.

Several pigeon lofts stood in a group in the corner of the roof. Lord Venport went to them and crouched forward, peering through the wires at the sleeping birds. "We are predators," he said, putting his fingers between the links. "It is in our nature to hunt and devour the blood of the living. But we are also men, and we have the souls of men. Our appetite for mortal blood can and must be employed for the betterment of mankind."

"By feeding on the wicked?" Nora asked. She was standing on the edge of the building, the wind blowing through her hair. So far down, yet she felt no fear!

"It is the only way. If you feed indiscriminately, if you kill the innocent along with the wicked, the guilt will overwhelm you. You will go mad with remorse. For an ethical creature such as yourself-- a moral, sentient being-- it is inescapable. You will destroy yourself out of horror. Or you will become the very monster that popular culture portrays us to be."

"Like Duke Crowden?"

Lord Venport nodded with a pained expression. He had taken one of the pigeons from its coop, was cradling it carefully against his breast, stroking the fowl's head with a fingertip. He replaced it in its cage very delicately then, latched the door and strode to her side.

"I did not wish to destroy him," Venport said. "Like all men, he had his flaws, but he was not beyond redemption. Or so I believed." He stood beside her, the tips of his boots dangling over the drop, staring pensively across the city.

The air was heavy and smelled of rain… or perhaps it was snow. Was it cold enough to snow tonight, she wondered. She could feel the cold, but it did not seem to affect her in any way, even though she was nearly naked. She did not quake. There was no pain. She blew out, expecting a cloud of steam to blossom from her lips, but there was no cloud. Her breath, her body, was as cold as the night air. Colder perhaps.

"Come," Lord Venport said. "Let us find some proper vestments for you. I know of a dress shop not far from here that caters to our kind. We can speak along the way."

He started across the rooftop, headed northeast.

"There are businesses here devoted to our commerce?" Nora said, leaping across an alleyway with him. She did this as fearlessly as she had climbed the building, though she stumbled a little on the landing. "Are there so many of us in London?"

"Too many," Lord Venport said grimly. "That is why I came."

He did not expound upon that. She was curious to know more but didn't press. It was hard enough just keeping up with him!

They crossed a few more roofs, then dropped down into another alley, disturbing a tabby at her dinner. The big cat scrambled away in a panic, knocking over a trash can with a clatter. They went the opposite direction, slipping out onto the fog-shrouded street.

Venport continued to speak—lecture her, really—but Nora only granted this a portion of her awareness. The majority of her attention had been seized by the halos that shimmered around each of the streetlamps, the way the light played upon the water droplets suspended in the air, as if each were a tiny weightless jewel. Though the sky was piled with clouds like sodden blankets, she could see as clearly as if it were noon.

It seemed she could hear every beating heart in the neighborhood. She could hear the snores of every mortal around her. Their conversations. Their arguments. Their lovemaking. She found she could shut them out at will, or focus her powerfully amplified senses upon a single individual.

There, in that apartment building across the street, a heavy middle-aged man was eating pickled eggs at his kitchen table. She could not see him, but she could smell the eggs, the distinctive odor of his body, the sweat of his skin, the soap his clothes were washed in. She could hear the gnashing of his teeth, the gurgling of his stomach as his digestive fluids dissolved the masticated eggs into their nutritive elements.

It was a wonder, her new senses. She felt like a god, omniscient, omnipresent.

She realized they were in the Tower Ward, just south of Whitechapel. The spires of the Tower of London poked at the lowering sky, and the air smelled strongly of the River Thames, which she could just see through the fog in between the warehouses that lined the avenue. Before this night, the thought of traversing such a desolate street after dark, even with an escort, would have paralyzed her with terror. No longer. She felt powerful and strangely lusty, and the nameless figures they passed in the fog, mostly drunks and prostitutes, held no menace, even when they beckoned to her.

In fact, she found herself drawn to them, to the unwashed smell of them, and to the low percussive music of their heartbeats. She caught herself wondering how their blood might taste, the drunken men especially, and how easy it would be to seduce one of them, tempt him into an alley or doorway with promises of sexual favors, draw him into her arms, and then…

And then, a kiss.

A very deep kiss…!

Lord Venport sensed the turn of her thoughts and cautioned her.

"One must be very careful to guard one's thoughts when it comes to the hunger," he said. "It is very easy to be tempted to feed from the innocent. Their blood is particularly sweet. But our laws are not much different than the laws of mortal men. To kill the innocent is murder, punishable by death. To jeopardize the secrecy of our race is also punishable by death."

"And who enforces these laws? Who metes out the punishments?" Nora asked.

"I do," Lord Venport said. "And others like me. The elders of our race."

"Elders?" she said, thinking he only looked thirty years old. Maybe thirty-five. "How old are you?"

He smiled at her. "I was ancient when Sumer was in its prime. I was old when the pharaoh Khufu built his great tomb in Giza. I was made this thing that I am when men still lived in caves and worshipped storm and beast."

"So old?" she gasped. "Surely not!"

"You don't believe me?"

"Of course, I do," she said. "Why would you lie? It's just… it's astonishing, that's all. To live so long!"

"It beggars the imagination," Lord Venport agreed.

A carriage clattered by, the light of its lamps playing across his features. His eyes flashed red as the light passed over them, and then he looked at her almost shyly.

"It is hard for me to believe how old I am sometimes," he said. "Our memories, all the things we've seen, they become like dreams. Especially for the eldest of our race. We are reborn with each age, and the people that we were are like strangers we have met in passing, once, a very long time ago. But it is like that for mortal men and women, too, I dare say. In sleep, they die each night and are reborn in waking. No one is the same person they were yesterday, and the people we are now will be alien to the men and women we will become tomorrow. Time makes us all strangers to ourselves."

"But you remember it all?" Nora asked.

"Yes. For the most part," he said. "Our memories are the only thing that connect our old selves to the new, but the thread is thin, like spider silk. We live in the moment, like everyone else."

Nora was about to question him again—she wanted to know where they had come from, how her strange new tribe was born, or had they always existed, a secret nation of immortal blood drinkers?—but Lord Venport stopped suddenly and said, "Ah! Here we are. Madame Elektra's Women's Emporium."

It was a small brick-faced shop situated between two larger and more impressive storefronts. Unlike the businesses that bookended it, however, Madame Electra's boutique was open for business.

Exquisite dresses in vivid hues of maroon and turquoise and violet stood in the lighted show window. Past the display, shoppers browsed the merchandise. They were all vampyres, she realized. She could tell by the way they moved, by their lambent eyes and smooth pale skin.

Nora looked down at her ragged clothes and was reluctant to enter. She pulled the tatters of her bodice more tightly together, felt of her hair. It was a rat's nest, stiff with dried blood.

"Be not ashamed, my dear," Lord Venport said as he reached for the door handle. "The clientele here has seen far worse. I can assure you of that."

A silver bell tinkled above the door. He gestured for her to enter. The men and women inside—more women than men, she saw—turned to look at them. Though their eyes gleamed like jewels, their white faces bore expressions of bland disinterest, and they returned to their shopping without judgement.

Nora realized she had been holding her breath and let it out in a little sigh.

The boutique was small but elaborately decorated, the walls and even the ceiling fit with ornately carved wood paneling with gilded moldings. There was not a great abundance of clothing on display, but what there was was fantastically beautiful and superbly made-- and all the latest fashions, so far as she could tell. Among all that finery, Nora felt worse than a pauper.

A saleswoman scurried over to greet them.

"My lord, you honor us with your patronage! How may I assist you tonight?" She spoke all in a rush, wringing her hands.

Nora saw that the woman was perfectly terrified by her savior. Why the young lady should be so afraid, she could not fathom. Lord Venport had not made any overt gesture or remark that might have been construed as threatening. In fact, he affected the most genial smile, and bowed to the saleswoman in acceptance of her greeting.

"My lovely companion here has had a spot of trouble, I'm afraid," he said, "and is in dire need of some new attire."

"Well, you've certainly come to the right place, m'lord," the saleswoman gushed. "We'll get her sorted in two shakes. This way, dearie."

As the saleswoman ushered Nora towards the rear, the bell above the door jangled again. Nora looked back and saw that the store had emptied the moment her master turned away from the shoppers. Indeed, they had abandoned the establishment so quickly and quietly one might wonder if they were ever there at all!

The saleswoman didn't express her dismay, but the skin around her eyes tightened, and her lips went thin.

"Not everyone is as enthusiastic of our company as yourself, I dare say," Lord Venport observed.

"So it would appear," the woman replied. Her voice was carefully neutral.

"Fear not, madam. Your kind assistance will be handsomely rewarded."

The saleswoman searched Lord Venport's eyes. Something in his expression must have put her at ease because the muscles in her face and shoulders softened, and when she returned her attention to Nora, her smile was more heartfelt. "Follow me, love," she said. "Let's get you seen to. You look a dreadful fright. Whatever in the world happened to you?"

They proceeded to a fitting room in the back of the salon where Nora was attended by the saleswoman, the seamstress and the seamstress's assistant, all women… and all vampyres.

Nora studied them with quiet fascination as they buzzed around her like bees, answering their questions while positioning her limbs at their direction. Their movements were strangely coordinated, as if they were performing some complex dance for four partners—five, if you counted Lord Venport. They were all flawlessly beautiful and pale, their fangs cat-like and sharp, their eyes vivid gemstones set in polished marble. None asked her master to leave the room-- and Nora would have objected if they had, propriety be damned—not even when they directed her to disrobe.

Nora had always been a modest woman, but modesty seemed a triviality now. Lord Venport had already seen her naked. Duke Crowden was sexually assaulting her when the young lord came to her rescue. She disrobed, stood most brazenly upon the pedestal, shamed only by her lack of hygiene.

She accepted a damp cloth from the seamstress's assistant and scrubbed at the filth that caked her white skin. The rag came away bloody. The mugger, she thought. Nora brought the rag to her nose and inhaled. The smell was intoxicating. All four women were momentarily distracted, eyelids fluttering like moths' wings.

"There, m'lady, now don't you feel better?" the saleswoman asked, nostrils flaring at the smell of the mugger's blood.

Nora nodded gratefully.

For his part, Lord Venport sat and watched the whole affair with a bemused expression, his eyes half-lidded as if he were faintly bored, but he smiled and nodded when they complimented his new ward, and offered his opinion on the outfits they selected for her when his opinion was sought. Apart from that, he kept his own council, and allowed Nora to choose the garments that pleased her, saying only that she should not worry about the price, and that she should purchase a week's worth of outfits.

"You will need them," he said. "You can never again return to your uncle's home. Your wards would perceive the changes that have been wrought upon you in an instant. Intimate relations are the first sacrifice we children of the night must make on the altar of immortality. A stranger you may fool, but not your close relations."

"Not even to put their minds at ease?" Nora asked, horrified. "Not even to say goodbye?"

"If they so much as suspect what you have become, their lives will be forfeit. Many of us still remember the Interneccion, when the Church, in secret, sought to exterminate our race. Those who did not experience it personally are offspring of the survivors, or have Shared with one who survived the harrowing. There are powerful immortals in this city who will destroy anyone or anything that threatens the secrecy of our race."

"Could you not protect them?" Nora asked.

"I could try, but despite my great powers I am just one man," Venport said.

Nora's attendants paused during this exchange, but only for the sake of politeness. They saw the way Nora hung onto Lord Venport's every word, her expression earnest and somewhat dazzled, and turned their faces away to smile at one another in a condescending manner, taking satisfaction in their superiority.

Nora barely noticed their smug grins. She was too impressed by the lexicon of her new reality: Interneccion, Sharing, Living Blood… For the first time, she sensed the scope of the new world she had taken her first faltering steps onto, and wondered at its history and the mysteries that might soon be revealed to her. It was like discovering a secret library stocked to the ceiling with tomes of rare and forbidden knowledge!

A voice issued quietly from the back of the fitting room: "He speaks, of course, of the Prime Edict."

Nora started at the sound of the woman's voice. It was a sweet Contralto, like the ringing of a crystal goblet, yet for some reason it was powerfully commanding.

Nora's attendants came instantly to attention. They stepped aside in deference as the owner of the voice moved into the chamber.

A woman with a waspish figure, all dressed in black, glided around the bend, entering from some unseen ingress. Her features were hidden behind a veil of black lace, and she held her arms out at her sides, elbows bent, palms forward, fingers pointing upwards, as she walked. The pose was an affectation. Nora was perceptive enough to recognize it as such, but she couldn't guess why the woman would do such a thing.

Lord Venport rose as the strange woman passed. Her movements were silent but for the rustle of her dress "Madame Elektra," he said with a bow.

"Lord Venport."

Madame Elektra barely acknowledged her master—a flick of the fingers of her right hand—but continued on to stand beneath Nora, gazing up at her. The room grew perceptibly cooler as she drew near. Were she still alive, Nora's flesh would have rashed into goose pimples.

Madame Elektra examined Nora silently, her face an enigma behind the folds of her dark veil. All Nora could make of her features was an occasional flash as the woman's luminous eyes shone through some tiny gap in the stitching of the lace. She smelled of lavender and funereal soil. Nora crossed her arms in front of her breasts.

"Newly made," Madame Elektra said at last, as if she were speaking to herself. "So new we can smell the amniotic fluid. How old are you, child?"

"I'm… sixteen," Nora stammered.

"No, child. We do not inquire of your mortal age. We mean how long have you been dead? A day perhaps? Surely no more than a week?"

Nora looked to Lord Venport, unsure if she should answer the woman.

Lord Venport stepped forward. "Surely, Madame Elektra, you of all people should know it is impolite to inquire of a woman's age." He spoke as if in jest, but the dark clad woman was not amused.

"A woman, perhaps, but this is no woman," Madame Elektra replied, faintly annoyed by his impertinence. "Barely more than a child, we'd say. Did you make this one, Lord Venport? If so, you may run afoul of the Court yourself. You know the rule against giving the Blood to children."

"It was not I who caused this one to be made an immortal," Lord Venport said. It was not exactly true, Nora thought, but not exactly untrue either.

"But she has your Blood," Madame Elektra said. "We can smell it in her."

"Do you intend to lodge a formal complaint?" Venport asked, putting a little menace in his voice.

Madame Elektra did not reply. Instead, she addressed Nora: "Heed the lessons of your maker, child. You are lucky to have a Blood Father as venerable as Lord Venport. It is a sad fact that the young of our species are all too often abandoned by their makers, left to fend for themselves in a cold and compassionless world. We have the Edict of Secrecy, the Edict of Innocence and the Edict of Clean Blood, but there is no Edict to punish those who do not rear their own young. There would be far less lawlessness among our kind if we did."

"An unfortunate upbringing does not justify anarchy," Lord Venport said, showing his fangs. "If you are speaking of Duke Crowden—!"

Madame Elektra rounded on Lord Venport. "We are aware of the Duke's failings. We make no excuses for the deficiencies of his character, nor do we protest the severity of his punishment. The law is the law. We only express our grief at the outcome. So far as we are aware, the Duke never Shared his immortal blood. His experiences, all his memories, are lost to us now!"

"A tragedy, yes," Lord Venport acknowledged. "Would that the Duke had chosen a better path."

Madame Elektra dismissed Venport with a sniff, addressing Nora once again. "Such a fragile thing," she said. "Not very strongly made, I think. It is well that you have such a powerful protector, child." Her tone was syrupy sweet, despite the implied threat.

Nora gazed down, unsure what to say or do. She sensed that the woman hated her, hated her bitterly, but what was the source of such caustic resentment? She had never met the woman before tonight.

Without warning, Nora was assaulted by an image of the veiled woman crushing her skull. It was like a waking dream, or a fever hallucination: Nora, crying out in terror and pain as Madame Elektra seized her head and pulped it between her powerful white hands.

For a moment, Nora's vision doubled, and she saw both the world as it was and the terrifying image of her own destruction, one laid over the other, like an object glimpsed at the bottom of a reflecting pool. The dark-veiled woman sinking her fingers into the flesh of her temples, driving them like spikes through the bone, digging deep into the moist brain matter within and then tearing her head apart like a rotten melon. At the same time, she heard Madame Elektra's voice in her head. It was as though the woman were whispering in her ear, a venomous litany: pretty little thing kill you crush you make you not so pretty-pretty anymore oh how we would love that for what you did what you did to the duke! It was the manifestation of that rarest of vampyre gifts, the first fitful expression of her telepathic powers, and Madame Elektra's hatred rocked Nora back on her heels.

Nora yelped and put her fingers to her temples, swaying on the dais. It was like nothing she'd ever experience before. She felt as though she were losing herself, drowning in those alien thoughts, and her ears began to ring as if reality itself were oscillating at a very high frequency, as a wineglass will sing right before it shatters from a resonating sound wave.

She must have been inside Madame Elektra's mind, and her master's mind as well—it would be decades before Nora completely mastered her so-called gift—because both of them twitched very subtly and drew away from her.

Venport scowled and stepped immediately back toward her, reaching out as if he feared she might fall. Madame Elektra retreated to the far side of the room. She shook her head, veil swishing back and forth, and then glared at Nora through black lace.

"What was that?" she demanded. "I felt a presence in my mind. There was a voice, only it was not my own. What did you do to me, you horrid little creature? You… you little bitch!"

 "I… I don't know!" Nora stammered. She took Lord Venport's hand and stepped down from the platform. "Oh, my head!" she said, clinging to his chest. "It aches terribly!"

"Get out!" Madame Elektra spat. She slashed the air with an arm, pointing towards the door. "Take your merchandise and GET OUT!"

The saleswoman and seamstress were goggle-eyed. The seamstress's assistant fled with a cry, seeming almost to vanish from the room.

Lord Venport placed himself between Nora and Madame Elektra, an arm encircled protectively round her shoulders. He snatched up her new dresses as they sidled from the room.

"Get out!" Madame Elektra shouted once more.

On the sales floor, he paused only long enough to take his wallet from his jacket. He placed several notes on the counter.

"More than enough," he said, and then they slipped out onto the foggy street.