The Purity of Blood: Volume I (36 page)

“Do we pass
inspection?” he asked playfully.

“I don’t see any
photographs.”

“No,” he shook
his head. “There’s a box of them somewhere in the basement I think, but it’s
best to keep them out of sight in case we have company.”

“How come?”

“It might be a
little difficult to explain why the Professor is dressed in a World War One
military uniform in France when he hasn’t aged more than a couple of days since
then.”

“I suppose so,”
I said absentmindedly as I picked up another candlestick.
 
I was just noticing that there seemed to be
quite a few of them scattered around the room.

“Who collects
candlesticks?”

“The
Professor.
 
I think he’s more comfortable
in candlelight sometimes.
 
He doesn’t
embrace the modern era as well as I do.
 
But then again he’s a lot older than I am.”

“I love
candles,” I said looking at the half burned beeswax candle in front of me.
 
“I used to love to watch how the light would
flicker about and make the shadows dance against the wall when I was
little.
 
Sometimes, when the power would
go out, my mother would fill the house with them.
 
It created this warm glow in every room.
 
I used to imagine that was what it must have
been like to have lived a couple hundred years ago.”
 
I was still staring at the unlit candle for
some reason.

“So what would
you like to do for the afternoon?” he asked, changing the subject.

I looked up,
roused from some strange half memory of gray eyes watching me over a
candle.
 
“Go to sleep now, Sara,” a
hushed voice said.
 
Then the candle went
dark.
 

Shaking it off I
said “How about we drive up to Mohonk Mountain House.
 
I’ve heard a lot about it, but I’ve never
been there.”
    

He had no objection, so we got in his car and headed up the
mountain.

The ‘House’, built in 1869,
looked more like a majestic yet rustic white, stone palace than a mere
house.
 
It was a lovely hotel resting on
the rocky shore of Lake Mohonk.
 
As we’d
driven up the winding road, Daniel said he’d been here many times over the past
century, but hadn’t been back for a couple of decades.
 
He sounded as if he’d like to see it as well,
curious I think to see how it might have changed in all that time.

After we parked,
we strolled through the lobby only to find ourselves drawn out the back doors
towards the view overlooking the lake.
 
When we gained the open air, we began to leisurely stroll hand in hand
through the gardens with no particular destination in mind.
 

It was
quiet.
 
The hotel didn’t seem very full
from the few people we saw lingering around in the lobby and grounds.
 
I’d been looking around with a bit of
professional curiosity.
 
My job over the
last year had been in a small hotel in Port Jefferson.
 
Without realizing it, I found myself
wondering when their busy season was up here on the mountain and what there
nightly rates were.
 
Shaking it off, I
did my best to lose my work mentality and remember that I was walking beside a
man who’d just professed to love me.

We wandered into
a small garden containing an ivy covered, two story gazebo.
 
The last of the fall flowers clung to its
base in the center of the garden.
 
Enjoying the peacefulness of the afternoon, we wandered through the
garden and up the stairs into the gazebo in silence.
 

Daniel was
silently mulling something over in his mind again.
 
Each time I stole a glance up at his face, he
seemed elsewhere.
 
I desperately wanted
to know what was occupying his thoughts so fully, but left him alone.
 
He’d tell me when he was ready.
 
Or so I hoped.
 
But really, how well did I know him?
 
In the grand scheme of things, he was really
next to a perfect stranger.
 
And yet, I
felt as if I knew him intimately.
 
How
was that possible?

As we stood
looking over the railing, he reached over and took my hand, but didn’t look
over to meet my gaze.
 
Instead, I glanced
up to see him watching a hawk flying high above us as it gracefully rode the
air currents over the expanse of the lake.
 
Still staring up at the sky, he gave my hand a gentle squeeze.
 
As simple a gesture as it was, it was a step
in the right direction.
 
It meant he
wasn’t shutting me out.
 
In return I leaned
against his side only to feel him inhale deeply then slowly exhale, his eyes
still fixed on the hawk gliding above our heads.
 
After a minute, he stepped back from the
railing.

“Come.
 
There’s something I want to show you,” he
said as he started off the gazebo pulling me along by the hand he still
held.
  
As we circled around to the far
side of the garden; I admired a rustic wooden fence made out of sticks designed
in a decorative pattern that bordered the path.
 
It reminded me of an English country garden.
 

I sighed.
 

How nice would
it be to walk hand in hand under the summer sun down a country lane in the
English countryside?
 

I sighed again,
how likely was that to ever happen?

He led me over
to the side of the main building and stopped in front of a nondescript looking
section of rock wall that made up this side of the hotel.

He pointed to
the wall.
 

“I helped
rebuild this section of the building back in 1915.”

I looked up at
him in astonishment.

“I took a job as
a day laborer when they rebuilt this section of the hotel.”
 

He took a few
steps up to the wall and pointed at something.
 

“See?” he
said.
 

I walked up to
his side and saw a roughhewn
D.B.
carved in the stone.
 

“My initials.”

Amazed, I
reached up and traced the outline of the letters with my fingers.
  
Here it was.
 
So simple, yet evidence of so much.
   

“How come you
don’t go by Bennett anymore?”

“It seems to
work out better if every so often we go by a different name.
 
If someone suspected you and really wanted to
track down your history, it just makes it a little bit harder for them this
way.
 
I usually just go by a different
last name.”

“It must make
you feel very isolated from the world, living the way you do.
 
You see so much time pass, but try to not be
involved in any noticeable way.
 
It must
get lonely.”
 

He didn’t
answer, but looked up at the hawk again, leaving me to interpret his silence as
a yes.

With no real
destination in mind, we started to amble down towards the lake.

“Yes, it can be
from time to time,” he finally said.
 
“But I have the Professor and a few other close friends – family really,
that come and go from my life.
 
It’s not as
bad as you might think.”

“Do these
friends live like you and the Professor?”

“Yes, for the
most part.”

“Sounds like an
interesting bunch.
  
Where are they
now?”
 

My curiosity was
driving me crazy, but I tried to hide it.
 
I didn’t want to scare him away from the topic.
 
As much as he’d revealed, he seemed
predisposed to hide the vampire parts of his life from me.
 
Maybe it was just a habit formed over the
last century.
 
I hoped that’s what it was
and not that he was purposefully hiding anything from me.

“I’m not
sure.
 
Sam’s somewhere in Colorado.
 
The last time we heard from Lucy, she was in
Italy.
 
I don’t know about the others.
 
It’s odd, but sometimes they just show up on
our doorstep after we were talking about them just the day before.
 
There’s also Thomas and Lily.
 
They usually stay together.
 
You’d like them.
 
Where Sam and Lucy are more on the wild side,
Thomas and Lily are more like you.”

“Me?” I said,
shocked.

“Yes you.”
 
He laughed at my expression of surprise.
 
“Lily’s the youngest of us all.
 
She was born in the forties.
  
She was twenty at the time she was bitten
and living in San Francisco.
 
Thomas is
closer to my age, so you see they have an age difference as well.”
 
Then he winked at me.

“Who are Sam and
Lucy?”

“I guess you
could call them my family, they’re the closest thing I have to one.
 
The Professor sort of raised all of us.
 
They all spent decades with him, at different
times, changing to his lifestyle.”

“But they didn’t
stay with him like you did.”

“No, they
didn’t.
  
It doesn’t usually feel normal
for us to travel together.
 
It’s only in
rare circumstances that we find someone we want to spend a long period of time
with, and even then we take breaks from each other every so often.
 
It’s part of our nature to be solitary
creatures.
 
It was natural that they
would leave him eventually when they were ready, just like it was for you to go
off to college and begin a new chapter of your life apart from your parents.”

“Did the
Professor – make them vampires?” I asked hesitantly.

“No, Randall
feels very strongly about that.
 
Even if
they were on the brink of death, he’d never steal a human’s life from
them.
 
He would never rob them of a
natural existence even at its end.”

We reached a
stone porch lined with rustic wooden rocking chairs overlooking the lake and a
dock below.
 
In front of us an old wooden
boat gracefully skipped across the otherwise placid surface of the lake.

“Randall?”

“That’s the
Professor’s real name,” Daniel answered as we sat down.

“Oh.
 
So do you agree with him on that?”

He thought about
it for a moment.
 

“I suppose so,
but he’s had experiences that have made him feel the way he does.
 
I haven’t, so I guess I wouldn’t really know
how I’d feel until I was presented with a situation where I’d have to make that
choice.
 
I’d like to think I’d do the
right thing, whatever that was.”

“But you
wouldn’t want to make someone like you?”

He sort of
laughed and watched the boat skim across the black waters of the lake for a
moment while he thought about his answer.

“I’ve had a hundred
and five years to think about it and I don’t think I’ve been able to fully come
to grips yet with what exactly it is I am.
 
How could I do that to someone else?
 
Besides, I don’t think I could sit there and watch someone go through
the transformation.”
 

When he didn’t
elaborate, I was left to wonder what this transformation process was like.
 
Daniel seemed like a pretty tough guy.
 
How bad must it be if a vampire didn’t want
to watch it happen to someone else?

“So if you and
the Professor are different, what are normal vampires like?”

“We’re different
for a few reasons.
 
One is because normal
victims of vampires are the dregs of society, people who won’t be missed.
 
Drug addicts, hookers, criminals mostly.
 
When they survive, for whatever reason that may
be, the corruptible nature that made them who they were as humans, carries
over.
 
They in turn feed on their former
kind with little after thought for right and wrong.
 
It almost feels imprinted on us to live in
secret, hidden from main stream society, and we all abide by that – well, most
of the time.
 

“We are
ingrained with a compulsion to live in the shadows of society and not draw
attention to ourselves.
 
I’ve been told
that, like all of our more baser animal instincts, this compulsion lessens when
you live as we do.
 
This urge for
reclusiveness fades to a certain extent.
  
I guess you can see that if you look at us as a group.

“You see my
family; we were the rare victims, the ones of our creator’s necessity.
 
Normally a victim is chosen because of easy
opportunity.
 
Alone in a dark alley for
example, or found somewhere well off the beaten path, but always someone that
should they disappear no one would miss.
 
Blood hunters are of course an exception to this rule.
 
They hunt pures exclusively.
 
But even though they go after people like
you, ones that will most definitely be missed, they will usually try to make it
look like a human committed the crime.
 
Either that or they won’t leave the remains of their victim anywhere
where a human could find it even with the most extensive search.