Forty-three

I spent most of the night packing, getting ready to leave Houston since my cover was blown. As I put what few belongings I planned to take with me in my valise, I pulled out my journal and sat down for a last read of the history of my “life,” so to speak.

Halfway through, I began to realize something. In over two hundred years, I hadn’t really made much of a difference in the world in which I lived. Other than the deaths of over five thousand or so individuals, I had accomplished nothing.

Oh, I’d fought with Grant in the Civil War, alongside Pershing in the First World War and MacArthur in the second, and had a few remarkable adventures in foreign lands in between, but looking back on what I’d written, it seemed markedly little for the opportunity I’d been given.

Feeling depressed and discouraged, I put my journal down and walked to the rail overlooking the ship channel. As I breathed in deep lungfuls of the salty air, staring at stars overhead that I’d seen move through their entire course over the years, I felt useless and unimportant in the grander scheme of things.

It was time to take stock of my life, such as it was. Was I just marking time, staying alive for no other reason than that it was easier than the alternative? Why did I bother? Certainly the prospect of another two or three hundred years living alone, never feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, never sharing golden moments with someone who cared whether I lived or died, never feeling love or devotion, didn’t seem all that important to me now.

I realized I was at a crossroads in my existence. For the first time in a long while, I had some choices to make. I could pack my mementos and run away to another city, set up a new base, and continue as I had, alone and lonely and disgusted with the Hunger that ruled my life as surely as a cancer; or, I could stay where I was, hoping against hope that Tabitha would escape and come home to find me, to share with me the gift we’d been given of almost eternal life, with all the time in the world to get to know each other, to fall in love, to live as God must have intended us to live when he made us.

It was no choice at all. I walked back into my study, picked up the journal, and threw it into the wood-burning stove in the galley. As I struck a match to what had been my life, I resolved never again to take a human life to satisfy the Hunger. I would wait for Tabitha, and if the love I felt for her brought her back to me, we would live only for each other, striving in our mutual quest to end the nightmare the gift of the Vampyri had brought us, to cure the disease that made us need to kill in order to survive.

If she didn’t come—if instead the authorities found my lair—then I would die knowing that God had so willed it. Shuffling off the mortal coil would have to be better than living in constant and unrelenting self-hate and depredation.

I found I was no longer depressed. Even if I was to die that day, that one glorious last moment, when I would become a man in God’s image again, that final instant of humanness before my ancient flesh melted away, would be worth everything!