Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Joseph hung up the phone from his call to David. His heart felt like a ball of lead in his chest.

He had spent all day dealing with the emergency surrounding the destroyed Tetractys lab, taking calls from the company’s security chief and head lawyer. They assured him they could handle almost all of the necessary red tape and paperwork caused by the attack. He was sufficiently insulated from the police and other law enforcement scrutiny. The only thing was, as Rafaél’s only official living relative, he would have to authorize certain elements pertaining to the care and handling of his remains. Identification wasn’t necessary, or even possible, visually. They had used dental records and would confirm with DNA analysis. Rafaél had believed that the American funerary industry was a giant scam, so there was no need to debate the potential of an open casket. He had already arranged to be turned into a tree or some such environmentally sustainable thing.

Joseph liked the idea of Rafi being a tree. It was a living thing that would grow and be there. A live thing Joseph could go to and see and touch, unlike the cold solidity of a granite headstone. He wished there were trees he could visit for the handful of other people he’d lost over the centuries. The only other loss in recent memory had been Rob, and his family had taken their son’s body and not allowed his “roommate”, as they called Joseph, to take part in the funeral. Joseph had only visited his grave, tucked away in the corner of a medium-sized cemetery in Augusta, Georgia, once.

Joseph had not slept all day. He knew he should rest but was not tired. As the sun set, he walked from his house to Mulholland Drive, which snaked along the top of the Hollywood Hills from just west of the Hollywood Sign all the way west to Calabasas about twenty miles away. Joseph decided to head west, because it was longer, and walked.

Over the course of his life, Joseph found that walking outside was the best way to clear his head. He had walked through the forests and fields of Europe, through jungles in India and South America, though deserts and savannas of Africa, and more. Most humans had no idea what the world was like at night. It was not, until very, very recently, the domain of man. And the night, as they say, was still very dark and full of terrors.

The thing Joseph missed most in this modern world was the stars. Los Angeles had a lot going for it, but in the last century, light pollution had obliviously erased billions of stars from the night sky. Joseph could still see more than most, especially when he focused on wider wavelengths of light, but they still counted only in the hundreds. They were his friends, though. Permanent fixtures in the sky, looking down on the Earth and marveling at the folly of mankind and its treatment of the planet. Joseph felt a kinship with the stars. His extended life was to a human what a human’s was to a mouse. Very few lifeforms on Earth knew what it was to live so long as vampire kind. But the stars… they looked on life itself and saw it as a blink of a cosmic eye. Humans thought of stars as forever things, but even stars were finite in their existence. They were born, they lived and grew and had families in their planetary bodies, and they died. And just like living things, they died in different ways. Sometimes slowly and quietly, shrinking into dense balls of matter. Others died violently, explosively, spreading their elements across the cosmos. We are all made of star stuff, Joseph thought, looking upwards. Sometimes he wished brilliant humans were made vampires. Carl Sagan would have made wonderful use of immortality.

Joseph rambled along the backbone of Los Angeles, occasionally passing a jogger or a dog walker, until the hour approached midnight. He had passed Coldwater Canyon hours ago. Had looked over the sprawling estates of Bel Air and Benedict Canyon. Passed Beverly Glen, and the ostentatious strip mall that catered to the super wealthy yet still had a Starbucks. He walked until he crossed the fourteen lanes of the 405 freeway, which was currently unclogged and running smoothly, and into the Santa Monica Mountains. He saw and smelled the scorched trees of fire seasons past, which had pushed right up into civilization. Wealth could not protect from nature’s fury, or the wrath of a changing climate that humans blindly instigated.

As he walked, Joseph thought of David. Their time together was unquestioningly wonderful. He felt connected with him in a way that surpassed any emotional attachment Joseph could remember. But surely all this was too much to make the average human deal with, wasn’t it? Just look what happened to Rafi…

Lost in thought and keeping a brisk pace in an attempt to tire himself, Joseph was soon surprised to reach another highway. Road signs indicated it was the 101 freeway. Joseph had thought that Mulholland continued along the spine of the mountain range, but realized he hadn’t driven it this far in some time. He turned around, noting that he’d have just enough time to get back to the house before sunrise.

The return journey was occupied predominantly by thoughts of Alexander and Roxana. Joseph had offered them half his company during their confrontation in the park, thinking he could give them enough to sate their desire for wealth, but when his anger foolishly sent him into a trap, they increased their demand to all his wealth. “A bargain,” they’d said, throwing his own words in his face. The problem was Joseph didn’t know how much they knew. Rafi was the one who could have moved things around to make it look like the vampire couple were getting a lot when they would only be touching a small bit of Joseph’s actual fortune. But now, they’d proven a willingness to destroy huge amounts of Tetractys to get what they wanted, which indicated they were aware of its reach. Worse, they were perfectly happy to kill anyone Joseph cared about until he capitulated. They had turned the tables on him and given him a week to accept their demand.

There were potential solutions to his vampire problem. One was, of course, to attempt battle with Alexander and Roxana. Joseph knew he could dispatch Alexander without difficulty. Joseph was older and stronger, and the younger vampire had no discipline. He had never taken to the combat training Joseph had offered after his turning. Roxana, on the other hand, was a different matter entirely. She was far older than either of the males, and besides being stronger, she was vicious. An outcome where Joseph emerged victorious from combat with the bloodsucking couple seemed extremely unlikely.

The other problem with this action would be repercussions among the vampire community at large. Vampires simply did not kill other vampires without consequences. There were too few of them, and the odds of successfully turning a human made it difficult to make more. Accidents happened, and the rare vampire hunter still roamed the world, so vampire-on-vampire violence was forbidden in a strict if unspoken code.

Joseph considered wiping the slate clear. Leaving his life in Los Angeles and going into hiding. He had been alive over five hundred years. It seemed like a waste to cast all that progress away, but without the fear of mortality pushing him, throwing everything away was a real possibility. He could rebuild his life. What would the next hundred years look like on this planet? Humanity was on the precipice of either taking major leaps in technology or near-absolute destruction. In five hundred years, they could be traveling the stars, which would certainly make keeping to himself easier. On the other hand, a lot of Joseph’s work was meant to help keep a darker future at bay. Joseph’s business and technology empire combatted climate change, cured disease, researched sustainable energy and food production, and funded anti-corruption campaigns in governments around the world. What would happen to the planet without that positive influence?

Joseph thought about the impossibility of turning David as he’d suggested. It was a nonstarter, of course, but Joseph’s mind wandered nonetheless. He imagined what it would be like to have a partner, as so many others of his kind had, who he could travel through history with, passionately and unconcerned with the trivial matter of aging and death. There were thousands of vampires in the world. But just as in the rest of nature, only a fraction were homosexual. Then half of them were female. Pickings were slim. This is why Joseph so acutely felt the truth of Decimus being a curse. Without it, it would be so easy to find a human to love who would embrace immortality, turn them, and be happy. Of course, then the world would be absolutely overrun with nightwalkers.

These fantasies of an immortal life together with David took him all the way back to his house, and despite the tragedy of the last day, Joseph couldn’t help but smile as he stepped up the two stairs of the front stoop and raised his hand to unlock the oak front door.

That big, heavy, oak front door with no doorknob, the fancy new electronic keypad security system, and cold-rolled steel deadbolt lock.

It was wide open.