Chapter 375 - In Transit part 12

The following night, Madame Elektra returned with Angus and three more blood drinkers, seeking an audience with Gon. The night after, there were twelve, and then nearly thirty. The oldest among them was a mere five hundred years old, a white-headed physician who was brought into the Blood during the Black Death. Most of the vampyres who came to see Nora's maker were less than a hundred years old. The Interneccion, Gon explained to her later, had all but wiped out their race. That was why there were so few old ones, and none truly ancient. No one that knew the old ways, and few who remembered the Court of the Night's Watch.

"It is why they do not follow the Edicts," he said to her, and then, in an apoplexy of guilt: "I have been murdering orphans!"

They did not allow the supplicants into their home. It would have been the height of folly to do such a thing. But Gon went out to greet them when Nora sensed them lurking in the hedges or peeking at the manor from the woods. Sometimes they fled, but sometimes they stepped forward and made their desires known to the Eternal. Most just wanted to lay eyes on her maker, to see such an ancient creature for themselves. Despite the fact that vampyres fancied themselves immortals, blood drinkers did not often live so very long. They perished of violence or misadventure, and so frequently, that the very word "immortal" was often spoken with bitter irony. Perhaps it encouraged them to see one so very old, to see the promise made flesh. Others, like Madame Elektra, asked her maker to take their blood, to preserve their memories within his Eternal form. Gon Shared with them when they asked, though she knew he did not like it. He did it out of guilt, but he also did it out of compassion. He pitied the short-lived ones. Most, he claimed, were actually descendants of his mortal blood line, or the progeny of his Children in the Blood. Her master was impetuous, vain, sometimes even selfish, but there was great kindness in him, too. He wanted to help them. He wanted to save them.

Such selflessness always takes its toll, and Nora watched as her maker's compassion drained him of his vitality, of the joie de vivre she had always found so charming. He spent his every waking moment ministering to his "orphans". He turned none away. He met them singly and in groups, taking advantage of his newfound celebrity to teach them the ancient ways.

He called it the Moonlit Path. It was both a philosophy and a set of rules. These principles, he promised his supplicants, would give their lives purpose. They would give meaning to their existence, something more than just survival and the satiation of their endless hunger.

The rules were simple, really. They must revere the living. They must feed only on the wicked. And mortal man must never learn that vampyres were real.

That above all else.

The Living Blood must always remain a secret from the mortal world. For if mortal man ever discovered the secret of their immortal blood, they would wage such a war to possess and control it that they would lay the very earth to waste.

It seemed rather practical to Nora, but Gon's acolytes welcomed it as revelation, which both amused and saddened her.

She was no more and no less impressed with her maker than she had ever been. She had shared the man's bed, had seen him at his best and at his worst. She recalled the passage in the bible: "No prophet is accepted in his hometown." Nor in the boudoir, she thought wryly. Not that they shared a bed anymore. Their relationship had remained strictly platonic—well, maybe not strictly, but mostly, for certain-- since the day Nora discovered who and what he really was. Her maker was kind to her, as he had always been, but he withdrew from her the moment that she violated his trust.

And that was what it was to him—a violation—whether she meant to do it or not. She regretted it terribly, and mourned for what might have been between them if things had been different, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She could not undo it, and she had her own affairs to look after. She pursued her interests and enjoyed her clandestine affair with the mortal bookseller John Worthy, and life went on, strangely, for the two of them, the immortal bookworm and her ancient, eternal master.

Finally, one morning, with dawn simmering on the horizon like burning coals, Gon took her aside and announced that he was leaving.

She pretended to be surprised by his declaration, though she had sensed his desire to leave growing in his mind for months by then. She pretended to be sad, and she was, a little, but she was nearly as relieved as she was unhappy. She would miss him, probably more than she thought she would, but she was ready to live on her own, and tired of entertaining all the vampyres who came seeking enlightenment from her ancient maker.

"Where will you go?" she asked, though she knew the answer already. She could see it in his mind. But because her telepathy was so abhorrent to him, they pretended she could not read his every waking thought now.

"The New World," he said, looking wistfully toward the salmon colored sky. "The American frontier, I believe. I think it will be restful for me there. The memory of that country does not run so very deep. There are not so many… graveyards."

"And what of us? What of me?"

"You will be fine," he said. He glanced guiltily at her, then returned his gaze to the horizon. "You are a bright and capable young woman. You have your books, and that handsome scholar, John Worthy. Madame Elektra will tie off any threads that I've left dangling."

"She's become a devoted apostle."

"I intend to Share my blood with her before I leave. She should know our history. It will insure she does not forsake the Path after I am gone. In my own bungling way, I have accomplished what I set out here to do. It is time to go, before familiarity tarnishes the allure I have for these English vampyres."

"I'm not sure that's possible," Nora said with a chuckle, thinking of the zealous gleam that came into Madame Elektra's eyes whenever her maker was near.

Madame Elektra had forsaken the veil and all her eccentric affectations. As it turned out it was all just a ruse, all her outlandish mannerisms, a ploy to obscure her humble beginnings. Before becoming the queen of the London Vampyre Hives, she had been a meagre botton-holer, working the night shift in one of the hundreds of squalid sweatshops that operated in the city. She was made into a blood drinker by an equally impoverished vampyre, who attacked her as she was walking to work one night, just like in the papers.

Nora knew her whole tragic history, though she pretended to ignorance, just as she concealed the true extent of her psychic powers from her maker. If she did not do this, she would become even more of a pariah than she already was. She was tolerated now because she was the Blood Child of the legendary Gon, but that acceptance was limited.

We all wear our veils, Nora thought.

"Oh, it would happen," Gon said with wry amusement. "It is inevitable. I think that is why God, if He truly exists, hides His face from us. Eventually someone would peek beneath his skirt."

"And see his feet of clay?"

"All gods have feet of clay," Gon said.