Chapter 20

Chapter 20

The world stopped rotating as the hill flattened out into a dog park, and the car hit a chain link fence, flattening it but coming to a stop right side up. The tires had been torn off and the roof was a mangled sheet of metal. Broken glass twinkled in the moonlight from the top of the fifty-foot descent and down the steep hill scraped bare of vegetation along the Honda’s path.

David sat in the driver’s seat, stunned but alive. The rending of metal had ceased and there was silence, save for a ringing in his ears. Acrid smells assaulted David’s nose from smoke and leaking fluids. An image flashed in his brain of the gas tank bursting into flames, the car exploding like in the movies. A surge of adrenaline cleared the fog of the accident, and he was suddenly panicked to get out of the imminent deathtrap. The driver’s side door was crunched and semi-open. With a firm push, he was able to make the gap big enough to get out, but when he tried to scramble free, he found he couldn’t move.

David panicked briefly, suspecting he might have broken something in the fall and was now paralyzed, but then he realized his seatbelt was still fastened and was squeezing his body. He reached down and unbuckled it and felt the release of pressure he hadn’t been cognizant of, and involuntarily drew in a full breath. Nothing seemed to be broken, but a throbbing, stinging sensation on the crown of his head drew his hand up to investigate. It came away bloody. A warmness ran down the back of his neck.

Okay, he thought, I’m injured, but I need to get out of the car before it blows up.

With the seatbelt undone, David leaned out of the car, gingerly pulling his legs out of the compacted area under the steering wheel. Standing next his faithful ride, he marveled. The roof had caved in further than where his head should have been. He was lucky to be alive. He knew he should have been woozy or lightheaded, but the adrenaline was running and he barely felt his body.

Just then, there were sounds of something coming down the hill. David turned and saw two figures descending rapidly, jumping and running down the near-vertical grade. A fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and David dove back into the car to grab his backpack. At first, he couldn’t find it. Not only was the vehicle a disaster, but nothing was where it was supposed to be. After a few interminable seconds, he found the pack wedged in between the passenger floor and the center console. He yanked it and thankfully it came free without a fight.

David retreated from the approaching vampires who were already down the hill. He tripped awkwardly over the chain link fence the car had landed on and headed into the dog park.

“Help!” he screamed into the night. “Somebody help me!” The park was closed after sunset. There were no owners with their dogs, and being situated at the top of the Hollywood Hills, the Laurel Canyon Dog Park was not a place homeless people bothered to hike to for a night’s sleep. David was alone.

The park was a large dusty bowl of land, and the nearest houses were fifty yards away, back up the ridge along Mulholland Drive. They were too far away. David’s only chance was down, but that meant running half a football field away from two beings who were faster and stronger and hadn’t just been in a car wreck. He fumbled with the backpack as he loped as fast as he could. He barely registered that he was limping from a leg injury that was just starting to throb. He hadn’t closed the pack’s zipper on the pack and feared that the chair legs he’d whittled had all fallen out when the bag was flying around the car, but he got a hand in and felt several of the wooden weapons inside. David prayed a silent thanks to a God he hadn’t believed in for fifteen years and wrapped a hand around one of the stakes.

A hand with nail-like claws raked across David’s back, knocking him off-balance. He tumbled into the gravelly dirt, losing the backpack as he rolled, and skidded to a stop on his shoulder. He felt the sting of deep lacerations on his back where the thin fabric of his t-shirt had done nothing to protect him and scrapes on his chin and arm from sliding over the rough ground.

Retreat was no longer an option. He screamed once again for help and scrambled to his feet to face the vampires. In his hand, he still gripped one of the stakes. He held it out like a foot-long blade.

“Oh, look, my love, the whelp has claws,” Alexander said derisively. “Are you a vampire hunter now, boy?”

“Get away from me!” David shouted, waving the stake wildly. He kept his eyes on the pair but cast quick glances around, looking for help or a way to escape. There was nothing and no one. No place to hide, not even a tree to put between them, assuming he could even make it to one.

“If we leave, how would we kill you?” Alexander replied amiably, while Roxana purred a small chuckle. “That doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”

David saw the futility of the situation and panicked. Tears once again flowed, making streaks through the dirt and grime on his face. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Roxana advanced menacingly, watching the weapon David waved at her with a keen eye. “Don’t be stupid, little boy. You know what we are. We prey on humans.”

“Of course, normally we’d be much quicker about it,” Alexander said, his voice lowering to a dangerous growl. “But your fear in particular is something I very much want to taste.” Alexander hissed and bared his fangs, projecting all of his hatred for Joseph at the one living human he loved. Feeding on this mortal, and making it painful, would bring his progenitor to the brink, after which he and Roxana would destroy him completely.

Roxana leapt forward, parrying a thrust David made with the stake, and swiped across his chest with her sharpened, knifelike nails. They left four long gouges along his torso. Thick blood immediately welled from the wounds. David’s scream pierced the dry night air and echoed briefly around the bowl of the canyon before falling silent.

David knew he was about to die but couldn’t reconcile the realization. He couldn’t just give up, but fighting was impossible, and running equally as futile. Every emotion seemed to be crowding in to have its last shot at his consciousness.

Despair for all the things he would never do and for the people he would never see again. Outrage that he was being singled out just because he had dared fall in love with someone. Terror beyond anything he had experienced in his life. Above it all, David felt physical pain so intensely it was making it hard to think. Fire burned through the nerve endings in his chest and back, and his head throbbed worse the more blood he lost from Roxana’s slashes.

Then, all the fury he had ever felt about the injustice and tragedy in the world focused to a pinpoint of white-hot rage at this monstrous woman who was trying to kill him. David’s thoughts coalesced into one simple directive: Live. Kill this thing in order to live. Plunge the stake he still held into her heart. If he was to die, he would take this personification of evil along with him.

David squared his body sideways, his childhood martial arts training taking over with the memory of how to move and ready yourself for attack. He naturally took on a variation of a tiger stance, left heel raised off the ground as his weight settled on his back leg. This made his front foot available for defense or attack. He raised his left hand to guard his face and pulled his right back like a bow string, holding the dagger-like stake at his shoulder.

Roxana sneered. “So the puppy is a tiger…”

Alexander stood several steps behind her and cocked his head. “Take care you don’t get scratched, my queen.”

Roxana’s sneer pulled into a humorless smile, and she kissed the air over her shoulder. This will not be difficult, said the wordless message to her lover. She turned her head to lock eyes with her soon-to-be victim, but David’s eyes were focused on her torso. Smart, for a human. Roxana feinted forward, causing David to reflexively step back. The move put him off his optimal defensive posture, and Roxana took the opportunity and struck.

David saw the move coming. Instead of dropping back, he shifted his weight onto his front foot. What would it feel like to plunge the stake into her? Would it be hard or soft? Would it get stuck? How fast would she die? Would he have time to get another stake before the other one attacked? The questions flashed in a fraction through his brain but were pushed aside by the needs of the moment. Putting momentum into his weapon hand, he sent it forward into that point of rage in the middle of the bitch’s chest, aiming directly for her heart.

Thrust. Push. Kill.

Roxana was far too fast, with hundreds of years of fighting experience compared to David’s eight. She swept up and to the side with one hand, deflecting David’s thrusting attack and grabbing his wrist at the same time. Dodging to the side, she let his momentum carry him forward, while using the thumb blade on the other hand to slice the tendons in David’s wrist. His hand went instantly limp, and the stake clattered to the ground.

David had planned on an impact to stop him, with the female’s body between him and the male bloodsucker, but now his momentum put him between them. Roxana had a grip on his wrist and he was turning, the park spinning wildly one hundred eighty degrees before stopping suddenly. He was now facing the opposite direction, and Alexander had him by his other arm.

A hand grabbed him by the hair, fingernails raking David’s scalp as his head was yanked backwards. He tried to flail, to wrest free, but Alexander’s fingers dug into the inside of the elbow of his left arm, his superior strength making it impossible to move. David saw only the grey night sky of Southern California. A smattering of stars—maybe a planet or an airplane—

and that was the last thing he would ever see. He made a choking cry as Roxana clamped her mouth over his gushing left wrist.

David felt the bite on his neck from Alexander. Compared to the rest of the pain searing his body, it was barely a bug bite. However, the pressure on his neck cut off any sound that he could make. Quickly though, the feeling in his extremities began to fade. The pain in his chest and back dulled. It didn’t go away, really, but David’s nerves weren’t screaming quite as loudly. The sky darkened. The unceasing glow of the city around his peripheral vision dimmed. A blackness crept in from the edges. He was glad to be rid of the pain. If this was what death was, it wasn’t so bad, once you couldn’t feel anything.

As his pulse slowed more and more, the absence of the constant background noise of a heartbeat made the audioscape of the city come through in sharp relief. David heard cars honking and sirens wailing. He heard dogs barking and the flying fauna making their mating and hunting calls. He heard a mountain lion roar. It was really close. Was it in the dog park? Was it going to eat his body when the vampires were done with him? It sounded almost like it was roaring right next to him…

David’s head jerked as Alexander’s mouth was torn away from his neck. The grip that the vampire had had on him vanished, and though Roxana was still holding him by one arm, David sank to the ground as darkness closed in and his consciousness left him.

Joseph had just begun to drink his second glass of cow’s blood, heated to a pleasant level in the microwave, when he heard a crash echoing faintly over the hills. He felt something deep inside of himself, too. A reverberation, like standing too close to the giant subwoofer at a concert. Whether it was a vibration in the ground or something unexplainable within him, it was jarring enough to force him to set the glass down and grab the counter with both hands.

He focused his senses. He could hear the sounds of a car rolling. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard something like this. Drunks sent their vehicles off the side of winding Mulholland Drive with some frequency. But this was different.

Joseph knew it was David.

Adrenaline surged through his body as he pushed himself from the counter and out of the kitchen, racing to the front door. He nearly tore it off its already-weakened hinges as he yanked the thick oak open like it was balsa wood. Once in the driveway, Joseph paused, forcing himself to focus all his attention into his ears, to pinpoint the direction of the crash. East. He took one breath, using it to center his mind, and ran.

He ran half a mile in just under a minute when he heard David’s scream for help ringing through the hills. Fresh from his meal, Joseph’s energy levels were at their peak, and he practically flew. His feet were a blur, his strides the length of a cheetah’s, and in another thirty seconds, Joseph made it to the fresh skid marks leading off the edge of the road. He scanned the hillside, noting the damage done to the slope by the rolling car, the tracks following it down, and then the car itself. It wasn’t on fire, but smoke was coming from the crushed engine compartment.

“No… nononono.” From the top of the hill, Joseph could see that the door of the demolished car was open and no one was inside. He said a silent thanks for that much.

The park below was several acres, and Joseph was searching for any sign of David when he heard his choked cry and located him just in time to see Alexander sink his fangs into his neck. Joseph didn’t waste a fraction of a moment. He sprinted two steps to the edge of the road and launched himself into the cool night air, traversing the fifty feet to the bottom in a controlled fall. He hit the ground hard enough to send up a billowing dust cloud and tucked into a roll to absorb the shock. He managed to get his feet under him and his momentum took him upright directly into a sprint.

A hundred feet from the trio, he hit full speed, roaring in anguish and ferocious wrath. Roxana and Alexander were so engrossed in their feeding they didn’t have time to react before Joseph reached them. With a palm strike to the head, he pulled his younger offspring away from David. Blood flew in an arc from Alexander’s mouth. He uttered a surprised hurrggghh as Joseph came to a stop and brought his other hand up to grip his progeny’s head on both sides.

Joseph saw David’s body fall limply to the ground as Roxana gaped with a rare look of surprise, blood dripping from her fangs.

With a roar of despair and savagery, Joseph tore Alexander’s head from his neck.

Roxana’s expression turned to one of shock, and she screamed in impotent hatred at Joseph, who looked down at the only vampire he had ever created. The expression on Alexander’s face was frozen in surprise, his lips still wet with David’s blood and his ragged neck spilling his own crimson gore.

“You will die for that, Bavarian!” Roxana spat, David’s blood forming a pink mist as she uttered her invective.

“You’ve taken everything from me, witch,” Joseph replied in a low growl, tossing the head to the side. “I don’t care if neither of us leaves here alive, but I swear to God you will not.”

Roxana spat out what remained of David’s blood from her mouth and wiped her lips with her sleeve as she circled, readying to fight. “I made the vampire who sired the one who sired you, Bavarian,” she sneered. “You have no hope against me.”

They circled each other. When Roxana reached Alexander’s body and head, she crouched slightly to touch his hair.

While she was distracted, Joseph cast a glance at David and tried to ascertain if he was still alive. It looked like he might be breathing, but he couldn’t hear a heartbeat from here, and didn’t dare take focus away from Roxana. He looked back at her as she rose to standing and saw David’s backpack on the ground a dozen yards behind her, the stakes strewn across the dirt.

Joseph already knew Roxana was quicker and more powerful than he was, but when he made the mistake of blinking, she moved so fast that she closed several feet in the time it took for his eyes to open. His reaction time was reduced to nearly nothing, and he was barely able to get an arm up to defend himself before her talons swiped across his forearm. A tenth of a second later, she would have sliced his face open.

He pushed away with his damaged arm and dropped, countering the movement with an uppercut using the other arm. He almost missed Roxana completely, only catching her under the arm she had used to attack. The impact sent her into a tight spin, and Joseph allowed his momentum to carry him forward into a diving roll. He got to his feet as fast as he could, using his senses to hear where she was before he turned to see her. She was cradling her forearm. Joseph didn’t dare hope he’d broken anything, but even if he had, she was dangerous enough to emerge victorious from this battle. Joseph didn’t dare risk a glance to see if David was moving or even alive, but the smell of his blood filled Joseph with passionate wrath.

“My night father is dead, Roxana, as is the one who sired him,” Joseph snarled. “You will join them shortly.”

Roxana moved her arms in a showy demonstration of form, sinking to the ground in a variation of a Shaolin stance, and Joseph thought she appeared very much like a scorpion. He adopted a defensive stance of his own. His left arm was oozing blood where she had gotten him, red fluid dripping steadily into the dry ground. He didn’t want to move towards her so he egged her on, tilting his good hand up and giving her the “come on” gesture he’d seen in so many movies since the kung fu revolution began. He suspected Roxana wasn’t the movie type.

She took the bait, rising up slightly from her stance. She spun in a circle on her approach, trying to confuse him with the extra movement. Joseph had a moment to wonder how foolish she must think him before Roxana released a cloud of dust from her hands. It hit him directly in his face. She had fooled him, somehow loading up on sand and dirt without him noticing. Granules of grit dug into Joseph’s eyes. He staggered backwards away from the attack, but it was too late. She was already on him.

Her first impact was a kick directly to his knee, and Joseph felt the kneecap pop as the two large bones separated. He howled in pain as Roxana followed through with a clawing swipe at his jugular, but his reflexive motion to pull in his arms and protect his face succeeded in blocking her. Joseph pushed out with both hands and made contact with the mass of her torso, sending them tumbling away from each other.

He rolled back, the pain in his leg sending lightning bolts of agony through his body. He tried to disconnect the pain with a trick he had learned from one of his many teachers over the last centuries. Imagine a light switch attached to whatever body part has been injured, the old man had said, and simply turn it off. This worked very well for small injuries, but in this case it only muffled the trauma.

Joseph dared not expend too much time. Roxana was undoubtedly readying another attack. Blurred with dust and watering uncontrollably, his eyes were useless, so he ignored them. Instead, he reached out with his other senses and found her immediately. Mostly he heard her, but he also smelled her spicy scent, and even felt her movement in the ground, as her feet crunched the dirt and gravel.

She really was more powerful than he. Faster. Deadlier. Joseph only had one hope that he could think of. He crawled away, pulling with his arms and pushing with his one good leg, his injured leg trailing limply behind, screaming at him with each inch he dragged it along the dry ground.

As Joseph crawled, he felt Roxana launch herself into the air, meaning to pounce on him like a puma. To anyone else, she would have appeared silent, moving into the air along an arc, her claws outstretched to tear at his flesh and rip out his heart, but Joseph could hear her. Her dress rustled in the wind, her long black hair fluttering behind her. He heard her breath as she exhaled at the effort of launching herself from so far away. This was her killing blow, and she was putting every ounce of her power behind it.

Joseph reached his goal, however, and while he tracked Roxana’s path through the air behind him, he grasped in each hand a sharpened stake from their resting places in the dirt. Squeezing tight, he rolled over to face the sky, contracted his core, and propelled his torso upward, thrusting his weapons up with as much force as he could create. Roxana saw too late what was happening and tried to shift her body, but she was too committed to the attack. The stakes speared through both sides of her ribcage and into her heart.

She writhed over Joseph, meaning to inflict as much damage as she could in her final moments. She made several deep cuts in his arms and chest before he lurched upwards again, throwing her much lighter body to the side and scrambling like a three-legged crab in the other direction to put distance between them.

Roxana landed gracelessly in the dirt, but refused to die. She got her arms under herself and pushed up onto her knees. She hissed and spat, a cross between a rabid cat and a viper, screaming words in Arabic that Joseph didn’t understand. Once on her knees, she grasped the stakes protruding from her chest as if she meant to pull them out and use them as her own weapons, but they were embedded too deeply, and her life was fading too quickly.

The two-millennia-old vampire stopped suddenly. A look of confused sadness replaced the twisted rage on her face. She looked around the park that had served as their battlefield and found Alexander’s body and head, laying a few feet from each other. Using a colossal amount of effort, Roxana crawled over to his corpse, picked up his head, and cradled it as she collapsed into a sitting position next to him.

Joseph’s watering eyes began to clear his vision, and he could make her out as she stroked Alexander’s hair into place.

“Goodnight, my beautiful batal,” she whispered so quietly Joseph could barely hear. “I will see you soon…” Moments later, she slumped forward as much as the stakes would allow, and with a final wheezing breath, died.

Joseph focused on her for a moment to be sure she was gone, and then turned his attention to David. He pushed himself onto one leg and limp-hopped over to where his beloved lay in the dirt.

David was surrounded by blood. A growing pool of it had formed under him, and his clothes were drenched with it. His chest was moving imperceptibly, and his breath was so shallow it was almost undetectable. His heartbeat was similarly weak, the muscle fluttering desperately in his chest to pump what little blood was left in his system.

Joseph knew there was no hope to get him to a hospital in time. He felt the déjà vu of a moment he had already experienced, and he knew the outcome. There was only one slim chance, but Joseph refused to allow himself to hope.

He placed one hand gently under David’s head and lifted him slowly, pulling himself underneath his once-beautiful man. With David’s body leaning against him, Joseph bent his head down and said, “I’m sorry, David.”

He was sorry for the pain David had endured this evening. He was sorry for what he was about to do to him. He was sorry if it didn’t work, and, perhaps most of all, he was sorry if it did.

Joseph leaned further down and wrapped his lips around the jagged wound Alexander had left, and he drank. David was already unconscious, thank goodness. He wasn’t aware of what Joseph was doing. What Joseph had sworn he would never do. Joseph listened to David’s breath and his heartbeat. He let the awareness of David’s life consume him until he was conscious of nothing else in the world. The city fell away, and it was just the two of them, alone in the universe.

Just as David’s heart was about to stop from lack of blood to pump, Joseph ceased drinking and placed his arm, where Roxana had gouged several deep cuts, over David’s lips. His blood flowed into David’s mouth, over his tongue, and down his throat. He was too weak to swallow, but if it worked, that shouldn’t matter. Whatever happened in the one-in-ten moment to turn a human into a vampire happened with only a few drops of ingested blood, once the human was drained of their own.

Joseph heard David’s heart stop.

The last shallow breath leaked slowly from his lips.

Joseph waited. The tears in his eyes from the dust and sand became tears of anguish, which were thicker, and hotter. They fell onto David’s skin, mixing with the grime and blood as Joseph gently rocked them both, praying to a God he believed had forsaken him five centuries ago.

He thought of Robert, the last man he’d fallen in love with, whose death mirrored this moment so eerily. Rob had been beaten to death because he dared to be gay, and as he lay battered and dying in a different park in this same city, Joseph had found him, and tried for the first time in centuries to turn a human being, to save him. He had failed, and that failure had ushered in decades of solitude.

The sounds of the modern city reasserted themselves in Joseph’s awareness. Wild animals that had been frightened away by the commotion following the car crash slowly crept back, some returning to nests and burrows, others enticed by the rich scent of blood.

And Joseph waited.

The minutes crept by agonizingly, but after what seemed like an eternity, David’s heart began to beat. Once, then another, then slowly but steadily. His eyes crept open, their hazel irises now speckled with amber and dark purple. They looked searchingly at the sky, confused, until finally, they found Joseph.