Zamani (13 page)

Chapter
Nineteen

New Orleans has always been
a refuge for outlaws and misfits. The hiding place for pirates and criminals of
all sorts, New Orleans had the code of silence long before Vegas packaged it up
as a catch phrase for bad behavior on vacation.
 
Lisette’s occupation in the 19
^th
century was so rooted in organized crime that it was hard to untangle.
 
Thankfully, she was merely a lower level
employee when she was turned and her exit from working the streets hadn’t even
been noticed. Working girls went missing all the time.
 
It was part of the game.

Olivia had a purpose in
turning her.
 
She knew Lisette would
be grateful and seize the opportunity for what it was—a chance to be in
control and independent in ways she never could have imagined before.
 
Olivia spent the week training her to
hunt. She was a quick study and took to mind control and suggestion techniques
quite well.
 
They were, after all,
tools of her former trade. She also had no qualms about taking what she needed
for sustenance, whether it be blood or money.
 
They were merely products on the street
of commerce, just as her tail had been when she was a working girl.

The two women spent each
night mingling with the people in the streets, picking their marks.
 
By the end of her stay, Olivia and
Lisette had ventured out in the morning business traffic, making men on their way
to their offices their marks.
 
Lisette need never worry for money again with her newfound powers of
persuasion.

Olivia also spent time
teaching her ways to identify Others and how to conceal herself. In her years
of travel, Olivia had developed some techniques of her own, and she’d learned
from some of her elders.
 
In the
beginning she assumed when she felt that strange tension grip her—a
mixture of anticipation and fear—that her father had found her.
 
It was too similar to how she felt in
his presence, and it confused her until she realized there were Others in the
world.
 
She’d laughed at herself
when she realized this; after all, she had turned Daniela without even being
aware of what she was doing or what the consequences of her actions would
be.
 
If she could turn someone
unawares, surely her father had turned people in his long lifetime, and more
than likely those had turned others.

Not long after she’d left
her father’s house she learned that this was true.
 
She was sitting in a cafe watching people
when she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise and the familiar feeling
of invisible icy fingertips just barely grazing her skin, first at the nape of
her neck, then around her chin, as if cupping it and turning her head.
 
She saw him.

He was sitting at the back
of the cafe, the corner shadowed as the sun started sinking a bit lower in the
late afternoon.
 
He didn’t appear to
be paying attention to her or anyone else.
 
Instead, his eyes were closed, a ledger in front of him, his pencil
forgotten for the moment.
 
She
didn’t understand why, but she felt compelled to take her coffee with her and
sit across from him at his table.
 
The cafe was fairly empty at this time of day, so there was really no
one who would notice.
 
She moved to
his table and sat silently and sipped her coffee, watching him.
 
His hair was chestnut brown; she wasn’t
sure how long it was, as it was pulled back and away from his face, even though
a few tendrils had escaped, falling over his brows, which were shaped and
tamed.
 
His lashes were long and
thick.
 
She felt herself blush as
she wondered how those would feel fluttering against her skin.
 
His face was finely featured, his skin
perfection.
 
She looked down at the
ledger in front of him and realized he must own the shop, as it looked like
ordinary cafe business of inventory, costs, and profits.

“So, I take it you’re newly
turned.” He spoke softly, but the words were so unexpected that she’d started
as if he’d shouted it at her. She looked up from and saw him smiling at her,
his teeth incredibly white, even against his pale skin.

She shook her head.
 
“No. I was never turned.
 
I was never turned.
 
I just was.
 
I am.”
 

He held out his hand and she
took it, halfway expecting and fully wishing him to raise it to his lips. He
shook it instead.
 
“Now that’s a new
story for me.
 
My name is
Istvan.
 
Let me refresh our cups,
and you can tell me this incredible story.”

She told him all she knew,
and they switched to wine well before her story was over.
 
He listened as she told him of her lineage,
the story of her mother’s death, of her upbringing, and finally of her loss of
her sisters, Daniela and Sasha.

“I don’t understand, though,
why I feel such affinity with other vampires I do not know.
 
Here, for instance, I felt your presence
and was both drawn to and repulsed by you.
 
Eventually the attraction was stronger, obviously.”

He smiled at her. “We simply
are aware of our own kind, especially if they are receptive to being
discovered.
 
I am lonely here, so I
tend to deliberately seek out my own kind.
 
You are not used to having to shield yourself from others.
 
You were in a way looking for me, too. I
can help you, Olivia.”
 

“Why wouldn’t I have felt
that way with Daniela and with Sasha? I never felt that sense of repulsion,
certainly.”

“You were family with them
both.
 
You turned Daniela.
 
She turned Sasha.
 
You had nothing to fear from either of
them, and you, like your father before you, held them closely in your mind, I
suspect.
 
Without training, neither
of them would have been able to stir such fear. They simply were not threats to
you.
 
They were, in a sense, forever
stuck in an infant stage in their development.
 
They had the hunger, but they had not
developed their power, nor did they know how to use it fully.”
 
He paused.
 
“Think about how in the wild it would be
easy to come upon a bear cub or a wolf cub.
 
There is no fear there, no repulsion.
The only fear is in where the mother is.
 
Daniela and Sasha were like cubs.”

He continued. “In many ways,
there was no reason for them to develop their skills; locked in your father’s
castle meant they did not truly have to hunt. You mentioned he brought quarry
to you while he kept you there, after all.
 
There was no competition, no need to develop those skills.
 
For you, on the other hand, because you
were born and raised vampire, you have advantages none of us had.
 
You didn’t have to overcome years of
normal human conditioning.”

This made sense to her; in
her father’s home, he was her only threat. No one else within those walls was
vampire until she’d turned Daniela who had in turn unwittingly turned
Sasha.
 
Her own nursemaid served as
her donor when Olivia was a child.
 
Feeding from the help had been a normal part of growing up for Olivia.
She’d been trained in the basics of hunting as she grew older. It was a game to
her, and she’d been allowed to visit the village and to take advantage of
visitors to the estate. Her freedom ended, however, when her father realized
what she’d done.
 
Daniela was meant
to be his bride, but Olivia had fallen in love with her and turned her before
he’d managed to secure the marriage.
 
As a result, he’d locked the two of them up, along with Sasha, a cousin
Daniela accidentally turned in a moment of desperation when she was separated
from Olivia.
 

Suddenly the turning of
Sasha made sense to Olivia in ways it hadn’t before.
 
Daniela turned Sasha purely out of her
need to survive.
 
The hunger—both
for the sustenance and kinship of blood--was too great for her to ignore.
 
By the time both Daniela and Sasha were
sent back to Dracula’s castle for hiding, it was too late; they were both fully
turned.
 
In the months that passed
before Van Helsing arrived, killing both Daniela and Sasha, Dracula, Olivia’s
father, kept the three of them alive by allowing them access to the castle donors
and by bringing them prey rather than allowing them to hunt freely.

Captivity was a hard
existence for all of them. In her anger of not being allowed her own freedom,
she didn’t realize without training and guidance that Daniela and Sasha would have
been unable to survive in the world.
 
They would have been careless in their feeding and would have been
quickly discovered as vampire.
 
Or
they would have gone mad from improper feeding.
 
Van Helsing had done the two of them a
favor, she realized.
 
She was the
only one capable of true survival on the outside, and she’d been too naive to
realize they needed training and education.

“So, who trained you?”

He smiled again, this time a
shadow of bitterness crossing his face.
 
“Your father. In a sense, you and I are siblings of a sort.
 
He turned me because of years of
faithful service to him.
 
I hear a
lot of secrets while serving coffee.
 
People think that no one can hear them in a cafe.
 
I also can procure a wide variety of
luxuries easily, and he found it useful and convenient to stop here when he
traveled by train.”
 
He pointed to
the cigarette case she had on the table. “I remember when he ordered that case,
for instance.” The case was silver and on it was engraved a dragon, her family
symbol.
 
She’d never stopped to
think about where it had come from.
 
She’d never stopped to think about where any of the things in her
childhood home had come from. Like her vampirism, things in her life had always
just been there.

Istvan became her first
teacher in the world.
 
She stayed
with him for a few weeks, sleeping next to him as a sister and brother might
sleep.
 
She felt comfort in having
him near, but neither of them felt romantic feelings toward each other.
 
By watching him and by working in his
cafe, she began to get her footing.
 

Olivia learned much from
Istvan, but what he could teach her was limited.
 
She felt an easy companionship with him,
and because they were kindred she’d enjoyed being in his bed and learning the
basics of the outside world.
 
Eventually,
though, she longed to put more distance between herself and her father’s
domain.
 
She was truly free for the
first time in her life: free from her father, from relationships, and from
hunger.
 
Istvan’s main value came
from lessons he taught her about the mundane issues of life in the real world.
She’d been sheltered and coddled, she realized, living with her father, and she
had to learn to survive on her own without drawing attention to herself as she
fed and gathered material wealth needed to sustain an acceptable
lifestyle.
 
The ledger that she saw
him working in that first day was a good representation of his
personality.
 
He kept notes not only
about the shop, but also about small kindnesses done for him by others, and he
sought to repay those.
 
He was as
kind in his calculations as her father had been cruel. Olivia noted this; she
was not as kind-hearted as Istvan, but she recognized the value in bartering
favors.
 

Istvan lacked the answers to
the questions she kept turning over in her mind regarding the true nature of
death.
 
Istvan noticed quite quickly
the three thin gold bands she wore on her ring finger.
 
She was wiping down tables one night,
and from his seat in the corner, he could see the light dancing off the bands
as the candle flame caught them.
 
Quietly, he said, “I didn’t realize you were married.”

Her hand stopped in
mid-swipe for just a second, disrupting the rhythm she’d built up as she moved
from table to table.
 
She barely
flicked her eyes toward him, seeing a bit of a smile on his face, feeling like
he might be teasing her.
 
She went
back to wiping the table and merely responded with an “mhmm.”

When she’d finished with the
tables, she joined him at his.
 
He’d
already poured her a glass of wine and knew she’d get around to telling him the
story if he let her decide she was ready.
 
As she sipped the wine, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Don’t tell me;
he was some lovely artist type and you devoured him.”