a violent beauty

10:32pm: Columbia, South Carolina. Jesu, I never thought I would find myself in the American South, but life is long-lasting. The city is home to plenty of ghosts, or at least their stories, which is beautiful news for me. There must be a dozen gullible fools on every corner ready to be taken in by a devastatingly handsome vampire. And if I'm caught on film, my blur could easily translate to a ghost in the midsts. Perhaps the South will be a wonderful new place to call home.

We had to leave the Atlantis behind and buy a small houseboat to fit through the narrow canals to Lake Marion. The previous owner's register must now be a mess, but it doesn't much matter. The boat's disgustingly small. No one would connect it to the Atlantis. I hope (no, I can't imagine) that anyone can connect either to me. After all, I'm just a ghost, a shadow.

India is going to rent a car and meet us in the city. She says she could not abide the new houseboat, but really I think she needed some time to scream into the night sky. I wanted to dock in the city, but it seems a little too much. There can't be many houseboats lining the river. Besides which, I don't want to deal with the smell of barges laden with trash. Houseboats have no insulation. My sense of smell remains keen and the toxins burn at the dead membranes of my nose.

There is significant revitalization in the city, but in the outskirts, old port industry buildings have fallen into disarray. I'll try to find an old warehouse with access to the water. Old warehouses are very "in" right now, from what I've heard in the whispers I ignore in my nightly travels. I need the water though. I've become too accustomed to being on, or in, the water during the day. There I need not fear the freak chance of fire. The longer I exist, the more I see the danger in existence. Part of me wishes I had continued toward Golconda's light. But that is the final disappointment. Ignorance is not bliss, but it is hope. It is also folly. And utterly human. I need to hunt.

3:13am: I had been throwing darts, trying to get my mind off of what I had just seen. Bullseye. Other men might have thrown up to see pieces of their friends, colleagues really, arranged on the dock to spell "CONSPIRACY." I'm not most men. Bullseye. In fact I almost laughed when I saw that the "Y" was made up of boots and clothes. They hadn't planned too well, those damned animals. Bullseye. Whoever they were. I plucked each dart from its home just a hair off of center.

Darts were no good, especially not if they forced me to recognize a slight twitch in my throw. They weren't going to take my mind off of anything. They wouldn't change the fact that I had lost several allies and a ghoul. She wasn't my favorite, Aurora, but she was mine. And she was tough as nails. I don't know if it was finally some the big dogs, maybe that damned kid's girlfriend and her "connections" after all, that finally hit their limit or something else.

We folks that made up "Atlantis" had always prided ourselves on our diversity. A Benetton ad for the occult. But we had drugs in common. It wasn't just them, but everything that came with them, especially the giant waste of time, life, unlife, and the like. But I don't think it was the Family's drug runners. There were two guys I didn't know in the human spelling bee by the pier.

As I slipped through the horrified crowd, I noticed one of the two torsos wore a necklace. It looked hermetic. It might have been placed there, but I don't know why. More importantly, I don't know who, and that strikes a nerve with me. When you're a ragtag bunch of outcasts, it's hard to know who the crime is targeting: the Mages, the Vamps, the Fairies? Any one of us has his or her own enemies and the few we have in common aren't this sloppy. They're also all too human to actually find us. Maybe we slipped up. I've always said that we've been here too long.

But whoever it was, they didn't touch the boat. They hadn't gotten that deep into the connections. If someone had pieced together the paperwork on all of us, they would have found the boat. If they had pieced together something more abstract, then the boat wouldn't have stuck out, not while no one was on it. It's swept pretty clean of all of us. Or it was. I don't have the skills to do that on my own.

But to find everyone, everyone but the four of us left, the ghouls and me, that takes some powerful kind of voodoo. It's the kind that Kindred don't have, not unless they're older than anyone walking these streets has a right to be. The thought of a Methuselah almost makes me gag like the massacre at the dock did not, but I regain my composure. I'm alive and that's not insubstantial, not after what I might have been. Unless . . . and it strikes me that maybe there had been a "Y" and he or she just isn't there anymore, now scattered like ash on the wind. But no, that would be too convenient for them. The one to replace was at the end of the word? I think they just ran out of body parts to spell their word. There were no vampires. Aurora was collateral damage for hanging out with the wizards. I never really liked them and now I actually have a reason. Bastards.

Now it's just us four, motoring slowly South. I don't know where we'll go. I'm too good at darts, even after something like this, to hit anything other than what I'm aiming at. But I won't decide where to go. I have a hundred ideas, which means they're all off the table. Something big is lurking around the corner and it found us. It might not be after me, what with all the other bodies on the pier, but it might. I know too much about the mysteries of the underworld to not suspect the worst in these nights. Whoever it is, if it's after me, it might be infecting my mind. I don't want it to find me or to think that it's scared me right where it always knew I would go. I need spontaneity not of my choosing.

***

When India brought me the evening newspaper down in my cabin, I see that tonight's story didn't make the deadline. There must be electronic updates, but this is clear of the taint of those images. I don't want to see it. Hell, I don't want to see any of the paper. But when I toss it on the ground, I get an idea. It's too silly for a Methuselah to bother with: the sudoku puzzle. 6 and 9 are the most empty numbers. Not much. Until you take them to the next power: 36 and 81. That's . . . I look on a map of the Eastern seaboard . . . Charlotte. Christ, there isn't water there, and there's still room for Methuselah infection. Too easy to control that.

I toss a coin into the air and when it lands, it comes down on a blank square. Within 30 seconds, I can tell that it will be a 2 when it's filled in. 34, 81 or 38, 81. Or 36, 83 or 36, 79. These are my options. But as I do a little digging, there's only one option. The Research Triangle is too academic. I don't need all those scholars trying to route me out. And anything else? I shudder. I think I'd rather take a Methuselah than a pack of Wolves. At least I could enjoy myself a little in the city before I was killed.

And that leaves Columbia, South Carolina. At least it's my decision to go. India will flip shit. That's enough of a reason. If there's someone pulling my cords, at least this will get me close enough to where they want me to be without actually being there. If they control gravity and how a coin falls, then I'm fucked anyway. Time to find out more about my new home . . .

8:49pm: "You might be wondering how I even got to these cursed streets. It wasn’t long before Spain was feeling the effects of the Great War. With the Race to the Sea, even the Mediterranean was starting to feel hot. The little city on the Rock had become my new home. Gibraltar was a governmental nightmare even before the War, but with Britain distracted, I had more than bumbling bobbies to contend with. My people, or rather, people from my country, were slowly moving into every port city as part of new allegiances. At first I was glad to see the sorts of beauties I knew from back home. I even romanced a few in the early months of 1915. But then I got carried away and the family started talking. Ten girls in ten weeks all seduced by the same devil? I thought I was invincible. It turned out I was careless. I moved away from the bustle of the town and the girls’ angry fathers.

"One night a recently widowed young Sicilian found me asleep in a cave off the beach. She thought I was the monster who had killed her husband. I wasn’t. I almost never killed, even in those early nights. I couldn’t tell her that. I could barely run away, drugged as I was by daytime. She held a cross up to the sky as if to exorcise me. I would have laughed were the sun not burning away my flesh. My shadow even tried to outrun me to the sea. I barely found underwater shelter before I blacked out. I was lucky to have fed the night before, else I wouldn’t have survived.

"I soon awoke again in the dark embrace of the night, but I was in no shape for seduction. Over the next few nights I fed off of fish, slowly regaining my strength and my delicate complexion. One night I even made love to an octopus. Its ink was playful compared to mine. The blood eventually attracted sharks, but I enjoyed our dance. It filled me better than tuna. I think sometimes I know how the wild ones must feel, the ones who hide in the woods outside of the city. But there are dangers there far greater than a mako shark. There are dangers now everywhere.

"I found the woman on her walk home from an evening Mass. She recognized me from the cave but we got past that. I had taken enough of her blood that she was unsure of her emotions. She cried because she felt she was sinning against the ghost of her husband. I told her no woman but Mary could resist the Devil. She believed me and died with a clear conscience. But her memory still haunts me. I feel her lurking in the walls of my veins, when I have gone too long without nourishment. There are so many lurking there.

"Eventually I left the Rock and came to America. I began the journey by swimming. I was so confident in those nights and loved the feel of the ocean waves against my body. I had no idea how far it was and how little lay between me and my destination. After the third night I found a passenger liner just setting out on its voyage. I tagged along and made my way on board. At first I played at sailor. I had loved that life, but this boat was nothing like those I had worked on, and there were too many logistics to manage, too many minds to constantly alter. I found a lonely bachelor and joined him for the night. I kept him in my thrall until we reached New York. It was easier to fool one man than a hundred. I took my leave of him and he cried. I saw him over the years in the city, at bars and clubs and eventually speakeasies. He asked me once how I always stayed so young. I laughed and kissed his lips before drinking from his blood for the last time in a brothel. I had too many souls to enchant to be so tethered. The Twenties more than simply roared.

"I had left the world of the living to its nuclear anxieties more than ten years before he finally saw me again, in the autumn of 1957. I had not feared the eternal winter they threatened, but I shuddered to think of the explosions that would cause it. I had found sanctuary in the Atlantic and slept for years, but the blood of New York was calling to me once more. After a performance of Carmen, I received a letter complimenting me on my voice. He wrote that he wished he had heard it when we were alone those first nights on the ship. He would not have minded falling in love with a demon had I always been so sweet. He would leave everything to me when he died. I only needed to claim it. I was not sure what “it” exactly was.

"The letter was not threatening, but it was enough that I traded in my arias for rock ‘n’ roll. I did not care that he might see me again at the opera, but I knew I needed a younger, more forgetful crowd if I wanted to perform. The club managers always wanted to publicize with photos, but I told them I was like Dorian Gray – they had to paint me, and they did. It was a good gimmick, but as the rebels’ decade came to a close, I knew it was a dead end. In the 1979, video killed the radio star, but in 1963, the Polaroid camera had already killed me.

"I fled to Boston, another harbor city with enough de Lucas and Maximilianos to not stand out. No one knew what to make of my disappearing act, on-stage as well as off-. The photographs my fan had taken caused a scandal, but they didn’t trace it back to what I was. Some thought I was an alien, or a ghost, others a holograph, as if I had stepped out of the future. My guess was that Michaela, future Prince of New York knew otherwise, so I ran.

"There are many things in my 120 years of which I am not proud, but running isn’t one of them. My twenty years of work with The Family is. At first I justified it, the way I justify my existence every night, but then even selfish interests showed me the error of my ways. When every girl I kissed bled more than one opiate and half the boys carried a plague, I knew the world was going to Hell. I joined up with a motley crew of unbelievable types on the Atlantis – a few like me and even some witches and wizards. It’s been as many years since I left the family business, but I still feel gratitude when I cut off some of their supply or frighten away demand. They’re after me. I know that. And soon I’ll have to run again, probably real soon. Until these waters get too hot again, though, I’ll do what I can. What the Hell else can you do with eternity?"

I gently touch the blonde's cheek with the back of my hand and her eyes flutter up to me. At first she backs away from my touch, but then her blush warms us both. She looks down at my manicured fingers, such grooming as I now complete every evening that I plan to be in such company. We never had such needs when I was alive, but things are so different now, so vain. I love it. So does she. "What brings you here, beautiful?"

She hasn't heard any of what I have said, or at least she hasn't understood it. All she knows is that I have a beautiful accent and a hearty voice that makes her quiver when I speak Italian, or French, Portuguese, or most any other language. Maybe not Cantonese. She nuzzles against the underside of my neck and I stroke her hair while I lift her arm. She smells of lavendar and it turns my stomach, but I cannot fault her. How would she know that her natural scent is far more delectable to my refined sensibilities? I kiss my way along her arm until I reach her wrist. Then I drink.

6:51pm: “Are these the eyes you ‘dare not meet in dreams’?” I ask the boy. The English undergrad stops trying to squirm out from under the delicate sole of my Ferragamo sliders and looks to his bag. Before the effects of a bad trip made him want to beat me, he had been studying at the library. I know because I had been there too. “You seem surprised. I know my Eliot.” I laugh softly. I have seen their surprise before. I feel my tongue catch on my left canine and that quickly ends my laughter. I can tell he notices my change in demeanor. “I only bothered to memorize the ones about death, though. I had to focus most of my schooling on kicking ass.” He doesn’t get the joke and it pains me. I remember when they were intelligent, when reminders of mortality didn’t strike them dumb. I remember so much that will never return. I am glad that some of it cannot.

I smooth back my hair and lick the bruise on my lip. Blood rushes to heal broken flesh and soon the skin of my face, too, has been made flawless. A dark lock of hair falls apart from the rest and scrapes along my cheekbone. I remember the last night of my life as if it was happening this instant. My uncle had promised me the use of his boat so that I might steal my girl away from her overprotective parents for a night. They did not approve of my accent. She loved it the way that women here in America love it. She had begged me to sail across to Morocco without stopping, but I was not reckless. I also had more in mind than simply sailing. We dropped anchor off of a small island not far from Gibraltar. It was little more than a rock, but the skies were open above us and it felt safer to be near land than in the middle of the sea. I had always opted for safer.

When my uncle took me into his crew, it had been rough. I grew up quickly and coarsely, but I had no choice. I caroused as well as the rest of the sailors on board, but I was never one of them. My father had been an aristocrat, my uncle told me. My blood was too rich for the life he had in mind. When we reached Spain, I found other jobs. I worked as a deckhand on the beautiful vessel of a wealthy but perverse monsignor. I fell in love with the ship until he fell in love with me. He soon had convinced me to work as a servant in his home. He thought the salt air and constant exposing was aging me too quickly. I was at first drawn to the pay and then to the ladies of the villa. They are all dead now, but they were beautiful then. And they taught me pleasures I never could learn from my master. They taught me many other things as well: poetry, music, dance, and a love of mischievous wit to name a few. But they were soft and only knew the domestic arts. It was a merchant’s daughter, Francesca, who taught me what I would need to survive: bargaining, how to manage my money, making a quick getaway, and deception. Kicking ass came later.

Francesca and I had made love at sunset and lay naked in each other’s arms on the prow of my uncle’s boat as the stars began to shine. The moon was high but it was almost empty, providing very little light. A scraping sound roused me from my foggy reverie. I could feel that the night was cool now, too cool to be so exposed. I began to draw in the anchor when I saw that we had drifted toward the rock and bumped against it with every wave. It was beginning to ruin the finish. My uncle would be angry for sure. I turned back toward Francesca to ask her to help, but I could not see her. I am glad that it was so dark. I do not wish to have that image burned into my mortal soul. It was bad enough the next night when I saw her ruined body through undead eyes.

I was aware of my monstrous new existence almost as soon as I awoke that night. Shortly after the sun had set the next evening, I opened my eyes to darkness. It was all I could remember from the night before, darkness and laughter. And fear of course. I thought it was that night and that I lay trapped beneath living shadows on the prow of my uncle’s boat, but it was not shadow that trapped me. It was rock. I gasped for breath, but no breath came. It did not need air, but I would also find none, trapped as I was at the bottom of the sea. It was determination and the power of my vampiric blood that saved me from spending an eternity in a watery grave. I escaped from that nightmare of a fate and swam quickly to the surface. I was on-board and crying tears of blood over Francesca’s mutilated body when I heard scraping against the side of the boat. It was not a rock but the fingers of the fiend I would later understand to be my sire. I smelled the spicy sweetness of his blood across the length of the boat and was on him almost as soon as he stopped smiling.

The Beast already knew what I had yet to learn. I took the life of my weakened sire with a ferocity I have yet to encounter again. As I drank his lifeblood, I could taste the floral blush of Francesca’s spirit. I cried over her body again before I pushed it into the sea and let the creatures of the deep erase what had been done to her. The fiend I left exposed on the deck of the boat, although I had already killed him and consumed his soul. I had no idea then that I had broken a covenant, but I would do it again if my Beast did not beat me to it this time.

“I sent your picture to my girlfriend,” the junkie finally sobers up enough to say. I had blocked him out of my mind while he babbled in fear under my foot. He had looked ready to vomit, but now he props himself up on his elbows and then against debris in the alleyway. “She’ll find you.”

I watch him fumble with his shirt, but too little of it remains to be of use to his modesty.

“She has connections,” he stammers. He tries to put away his phone, but I am soon on top of him, a knee in his withering crotch. The phone clatters to the ground and I worry that he will piss himself and ruin my pants. They’re new, to me, and I find it troublesome to replace my clothes these days. I never know what will last more than a few months. I trust that to the fashionable men I take them from.

“Via via,” I say. I want him to tell her and for her to tell her friends and them to tell theirs until finally the connection is made. I trace a finger along his bare stomach and across a sensitive nipple. He cannot help but laugh, but the terror returns to his eyes as my fingers move to his chin and my hand covers his neck. I could break it, but it would accomplish nothing. Sweat breaks at his hairline and I can smell the poisonous taint of drugs. Every enforcer of the law says to cut off the supply. But it’s a class war they’ll always deny. But just cutting off demand is futile. Better to breed fear and distrust, let the well poison itself. Let the sheep learn some self-respect.

“It won’t do you any good,” I whisper into his ear, ending the sentence with a lick to the base of his ear.

He moans despite himself.

“The photo, I mean. Don’t get too distracted now. After all, I’m just a figment of your imagination.”

“Why me?”

“Drugs kill.” I bite into the artery of his neck and taste the bitter tang of heroin. It feels like acid boiling down my throat, but he could use a little detox. I know the last thing he will see will be my body melting into shadows as they paint phantasmal horrors along the brick of the alleyway.

Unsteady on my own feet now, I leave him to his nightmares. It is better this way, better that he seems to learn on his own. Life has so many lessons and there are so many teachers. I am but one of them and there are many worse. The Mob may find that another nightmare has cut off a small segment of their demand, but it is hard to find one shadow in the middle of the night.