Knowing what You Want
Tristan glared at Myra. “Do you know anything about this?”
“No,” she said. And thanks for making me look even more suspicious to my friends.
Tristan crossed his arms across his chest and raised his feet on the table. An uneasy silence fell over the group, and everyone tried to look anywhere else but at each other.
Sissi tucked a fiery curl behind her ear. “Tristan,” she said, chewing at her lip, “I’d like to show you something. Would you come with me for a moment?”
Myra stared at her. What the hell was she doing? Was it so difficult to at least try to avoid suspicion?
“I am busy,” Tristan grumbled. His perma-frown grew deeper than ever.
Armida laughed. “Yes, he is busy brooding and getting ready to start eating people.” She walked behind him, laid her hands on his shoulders, and placed a kiss on the top of his golden head. “Aw, dearie, you are so cute when you are worried about the Prince.”
“I am not worried,” Tristan barked. “That fool can go sunbathing if he so desires. I am done caring.”
“Of course you are,” Armida said with a smile. “Myra, dear, why don’t you join me for a cup of tea? Tristan told me you lived in horrid conditions, and so I brought you some nice tea to brighten your days.”
Myra wanted to bang her head against the stone wall. Was everyone determined to make her look like a vampire collaborator? And what—Armida and she were tea buddies now? Since when?
“What are you doing?” Tristan snapped at Armida. “You are supposed to—”
“To what?” Armida interrupted him. “Stay here and prepare myself to start drinking humans the very second the clock strikes? I’m sure you will do a fine job.”
Armida exited the room, and Myra hesitated. Following was bad, but letting the vampire wander around unsupervised was worse. She took a deep breath and followed. “What was that about?” Myra asked in a hushed voice once she was outside the Headquarters. “Do you need to speak to me? Is something wrong?”
“It is a long story,” Armida said. “Let’s make the tea first. We will have plenty of time to talk.”
Cold dread swept through Myra’s heart. Armida knew. She had somehow found out about Myra’s deception with the story for the Prince. But what would the vampire do to her now?
Myra’s heart hammered as she led her guest to the kitchen and put a kettle on the fire. Once the water had started to boil, she took the leaves Armida offered and left them to brew. While the leaves were releasing their flavors, she reached into the cupboard. Her eyes ran over the random collection of cups—small and large, white and colorful, and not a single matching pair. Myra chose a small glass mug for herself and a tall blue porcelain one for Armida.
“It is green tea with jasmine,” the vampire said, and Myra gulped, her palms sweating. Would Armida still be offering pleasantries if they were about to discuss her betrayal? Oh, yes—in all likelihood, that was exactly what Armida would do.
Myra let her fingers curl around the hot cup. The warmth seeped through her skin. “The tea is ready now,” she said, her throat tight. “You wished to speak to me?”
Armida stretched an elegant, pale arm to receive the cup Myra offered. “I know you don’t trust my beloved’s motivations. He says he wants the Wizard destroyed, and you don’t understand why. I want to show you that even if you cannot trust him, you can trust me. I have my own reasons to wish the world to be as it was before.”
“And what would those reasons be?” Myra moved her cup in a circle, letting the liquid swirl and mix with the cool air. The gentle scent of jasmine caressed her nose, and, for a moment, she was back in the Palace. “You realized you’d run out of nail polish sooner or later?”
Armida narrowed her eyes. “You confuse me with Tristan.”
“Sorry,” Myra said. “Please, go on.”
Armida ran her long, thin fingers through her hair. “Do you know how we used to live? We didn’t have a castle, or servants, or a constant and effortless food supply, but we had something we now lack—safety. Most humans were unaware of our existence. And though vampires sometimes kill each other, it is very rare. We never had to be afraid.
“But then my beloved had this brilliant vision. You see, in the past vampires were disorganized nomads, traveling in small groups. He thought we could become a structured society, a society that could rule over humans, and that could be ruled in return. And, of course, he wanted to be the one to rule it all.
“And once this came to pass, once structure and hierarchy existed among us, others began to thirst for power. They wanted to rule. They wanted what my beloved had fought for and created, without ever lifting a finger to achieve it.”
Armida fell silent. She traced the rim of her cup with her finger, her blood-red nail catching the torchlight. She tore her gaze from the tea and looked up at Myra, green eyes shining. “In the past fifty years, there have been two attempts on his life. Not from your so-called Resistance, not from Ila and her herbivores, but from vampires at court. He thought nothing of it, but not I. You say you don’t trust his reasons. Then trust mine. I want things to be the same as before.”
But things can never be the same, Myra thought. Humans knew about vampires now, and many had lost friends and relatives. If this plan succeeded, most of the humans in the future free world would have grown up in farms. All of them would have plenty of reasons to hate vampires, and the Prince most of all. And if Vlad’s involvement in the Wizard’s destruction came to light, other vampires would go after him as well. The Prince’s life would not be any safer in the future world—quite the contrary. But Myra said none of that.
“I trust you,” she said instead.
Armida closed her eyes, brought the cup to her face and breathed in the scent. She opened her eyes, and a sad smile graced her lips. “I knew you would understand. Can you also persuade your friends? It shouldn’t be too hard with that red-haired girl. Sissi is her name, right?”
Myra froze. “What do you know about Sissi?”
“Oh, many things. For one, I know she wants to be turned.” Armida laughed. “No, Tristan can’t keep his pretty mouth shut about anything. Not with me.”
Myra hoped that was all Tristan had revealed. “I’m not sure she really wants it,” she said. “I think she doesn’t know what she wants.”
Armida took a slow sip from her tea and placed her cup on the table. “Oh, I think she knows exactly what she wants. You are the one who is confused. Being a vampire has so many advantages that it is not even worth debating. The biggest ones are obvious—eternal life, eternal youth, superhuman strength and reflexes. And there are so many cute little skills, such as counting insanely fast, as Tristan just demonstrated.”
Myra took a small, cautious sip of her own tea. It was cool enough for drinking, and she took another. The taste of jasmine wrapped itself around her like a blanket, keeping away the stuffy stench of mold and rats. The tea tasted of a different world. A world of beauty and elegance, of music and culture. But she had chosen the Resistance, and she stood by her choice. “I still don’t see the appeal.”
“Should I list all the benefits?” Armida leaned back in her chair, throwing her arms in the air. “Very well.” She curled one manicured finger. “You never sweat. You can run, fight, and ride and do whatever you like, and you won’t stink.” She curled a second finger. “You can stuff yourself with chocolate without gaining any weight.” Armida examined her red nails for a moment before curling a third finger. “Also, you don’t get your period. That is what sold it for me—surviving your period in the eighteenth century is no fun at all.”
“Oh, it’s not, is it?” Myra drained her cup in a single sip and slammed it against the wooden table. Her tongue grew numb with the hot liquid, but she ignored the discomfort. “Honestly, I’m sick of you and Tristan whining about hard your human lives were. Life in the Resistance is in no way easier. We have no sewers or running water—we get all our water from an underground river and have to boil it before drinking. And many among us have developed bone problems from vitamin D deficiency.”
Myra stood up and walked to the basin to wash her now-empty cup. “The older amongst us claim the climate used to be much better before you all started playing with the weather,” she continued. “Now, it’s freezing cold all the time as the earth gets no sunshine to radiate back, and the only way we can heat our living quarters is by fire. And, of course, we need to have this insane system of redirecting the smoke, so that you can’t discover us easily. Perhaps the only advantage we have to the Middle Ages is that we have a better knowledge of the way diseases spread, but that’s about it.”
Armida looked away, staring at the stone wall. “My life was hard.” She fell silent, and Myra thought she would leave it at that, but then Armida spoke again. “I had an illness. A woman’s illness; something the healers in my village scorned me for.”
She fell silent again and wrapped her fingers around her teacup. “I told you it was no fun to survive your period in the eighteenth century, but for me it was beyond hard.” Armida’s voice was low and hollow as she spoke. “I bled way too much. I grew pale and weak with blood loss. And the pain was unbearable, as if someone had stabbed my belly and twisted the knife inside. I would throw up, again and again, until I could hold no food in my stomach. Sometimes, I fainted with pain. As the years passed, it grew worse. The pain was no longer only in my belly, but spread to my legs and back, always throbbing, gnawing.”
Myra placed her cup back on the shelf. “You had cancer? And vampirism saved your life?”
Armida shook her head. “No, not cancer, though often I wished it were. Then, at least, people would have taken me seriously, and I would have died in peace.” Her fingers tightened against the cup, turning even paler against the blue porcelain. “The walls of my womb were growing outside of it. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, and neither did the healers. All I knew was the pain.
“A century later, a ridiculous Austrian psychoanalyst called my illness ‘hysteria,’ together with other conditions he could not comprehend. Doctors of later times called it ‘endometriosis.’ The healers of my village called it ‘the maiden is too fragile.’ They told me it was all in my head, that all other women were suffering the same with no complaints, and I had to pull myself together and stop whining. They told me I was mad, and I almost believed them.”
Armida released the cup and slowly folded and unfolded her fingers. “The only person who helped me was an old, wise woman. She told me this: ‘Armida, if you believe something is wrong with you, it is. You know yourself better than these so-called healers. They dare call you fragile? If they felt a fraction of your pain, they would be screaming in agony. Instead, here you are—not screaming, but strong and proud.’ She gave me herbs—fennel seeds, clary sage, chamomile. She had to do it in secret, or the village would prosecute her as a witch. Her herbs helped, but not enough. My illness grew stronger with every passing month, and I no longer wished to live like this.
“My parents told me to keep quiet about it. It was unseemly to talk of my ‘woman’s troubles,’ and it would make me undesirable. They said I was of an age to marry, and I had the potential for a great match. They said I was exotic—a northern grandfather had given me green eyes and pale skin that turned many heads in the village. All I had to do was keep quiet. I listened to them and suffered in silence day after day.
“And then, people started disappearing. One after the other, always at night, until a body was found in the woods. Drained of all blood, with two puncture marks at the neck. ‘Vampire,’ people said. They cried in fear, but I laughed. ‘Don’t go out alone at night,’ they told each other in hushed tones. And, most often, ‘Don’t go into the woods.’” Armida’s haunted expression disappeared, replaced by a smile. “And so, one night I went into the woods.”
Myra gasped. “I always assumed it was Vlad who found you and seduced you. But it was you who went to him?”
Armida laughed. “I see. The worldly vampire and the naïve village girl. Is that what you believed? Do you know me so little? I went into the woods of my own free will, but I needed to be sure the vampire would see me and notice me. Back then I didn’t look as I do now—my hair was its natural color, dark chestnut, my nails were broken and dirty, and my hands were chafed from hard work. I took the only bright piece of clothing I had, a blue scarf, and wrapped it around my shoulders. I took a torch, left my parents’ house, and walked into the woods.
“I wondered if I should have said goodbye to my parents, and, mostly, to my little brother. But I feared if I talked to him, my resolve would break. There was no use in thinking of the past. My life as I knew it was over. Honestly, it felt as if it had never been mine to begin with.
“The darkness was so thick, you could cut through it with a knife. My torch was the only light, and I saw nothing beyond the grass I stepped on. As I walked away from the village, the sounds of the night grew. Leaves rustled as some animal ran nearby. Something cried. Something howled. My heart beat strongly against my chest, but I never looked back.
“And then, he came before me. As soon as I saw his silver-blond hair, his pretty face, and his silly frown, I somehow knew he wasn’t the one who had caused such terror in my village. He wasn’t the one I was looking for.
“‘Are you lost, girl?’ he asked, pronouncing the Italian words in a strange, clipped way.
“‘You are but a servant,’ I said and met his gaze. ‘I’m looking for your master.’
“His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. A deep, warm laughter shattered the darkness, and a man came out of the trees and stepped into my light. I gasped and raised my foot to take a step back. Instead, I took a step forward.
“I stared at him, at his raven-black hair framing a high forehead, chiseled cheekbones, lips curled in amusement, and twinkling amber eyes. ‘You’ve come here to fight me?’ he said.
“He spoke Italian like someone from the big cities in the far north. Did he come from Venice or Milan? Perhaps Turin? Were he someone else, I would have been self-conscious of my Calabrian dialect. The travelers who ended up in our lands made fun of the way my family spoke, although I found their own speech ridiculous. They told stories about us—claimed that we were inbred, hideous, ignorant. I always felt both fury and shame talking to them, but with this man, this monster, I felt neither.
“‘No,’ I said and took another step towards him. ‘I’ve come to ask for a favor. Take me and make me like you, or kill me. Either way, my human life ends today.’
“He frowned. ‘A suicide by vampire? You think you’re brave, coming here to meet me in the dead of night? There is no bravery in seeking death.’
“‘I’m not brave,’ I said. ‘Simply desperate.’
“His frown deepened. ‘Tell me.’
“My parents had drilled it into my brain how inappropriate it was to speak of my condition. I had only talked about it to the healers and the wise woman, but even then I had felt dirty and uncomfortable, the shame burning inside me, turning my face red. But now he was standing before me, looking at me with these warm amber eyes, and I told him everything, feeling neither discomfort, nor shame.
“‘Human ignorance knows no bounds,’ he said when I finished, and his deep voice was thick with anger. ‘These healers are imbeciles. Your world is cruel to women. I wish I could change that, but, sadly, I once made a promise not to interfere in the affairs of humans.’ His amber eyes turned soft. ‘I’ve seen your illness in others, but I fear there is no easy cure. I could surgically remove your womb, but it is very risky and will have consequences even if all goes well. Would you like me to do this?’
“I stared, uncomprehending. He was the vampire, the monster, who had come to terrorize our village and kill people, and he was offering to heal me? Tears pricked at my eyes, and I realized they were tears of joy. He had given me something I had never received in my life. Validation. My illness was real. I wasn’t mad. ‘I want no such thing,’ I said and walked towards him. I was so close to him now, I could touch him if I raised my hand. ‘I told you what I’ve come here for. Make me one of your kind, or kill me. Whatever you decide, but take me.’
“He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t usually find maidens freely throwing themselves at me.’
“I looked at him, so tall, and strong, and magnificent. Indeed, offering myself to him meant death, but I could think of worse ways to go. I grinned. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’
“He smiled back at me, and, although it was the dead of night, it seemed as if the sun had come down to kiss my face. ‘Turning you would indeed cure your pain—I’ve seen it before. Very well, I’ll do as you ask. I’ll either kill you or turn you. But which one should it be? I don’t take this lightly. I’ve lived for centuries, and I have turned only one.’ His eyes darted towards his blond companion, who was now glaring at me. ‘What do you think, Tristan? Should we make her one of us?’
“‘No,’ the other vampire said.
“‘No? So quick to judge.’ He looked at me again. ‘What is your name, my lady?’
“My legs melted when he called me that. ‘Armida.’
“His smile brightened. ‘Ah. Like in the poem.’
“‘What poem?’ I said.
“The one called Tristan snorted. ‘Can you even read and write?’
“I met his gaze. ‘Give me a blade.’
“His silly frown grew even deeper. ‘What?’
“It was the black-haired vampire who took a dagger from his belt and handed it to me with a wink. I walked to the nearest tree and cut the bark, inscribing the letters one by one. Tristan is a grumpy old badger. I looked back at them. ‘Is my spelling correct?’
“Tristan was gaping at me, but the other one, the beautiful one, the one whose smile was like sunshine in winter, was laughing. ‘It is correct,’ he said. ‘Sadly, the ability to write is not enough to make you one of us. In all my years, I’ve turned only Tristan and no one else. If you wish to join us, you’ll need to pass my test.’
“Tristan grumbled something in a language I didn’t understand, but thankfully, my beloved didn’t care for his whining. All he cared about was his test, and once I passed it, my life changed.” Armida smiled and leaned back in her chair. “I had, supposedly, been a human until that point. But, once he turned me, for the first time in years I truly felt like a human being.”
“What was the test?” Myra asked.
Armida shrugged. “This is a long story for another time.”
Myra stared at her. Seriously? Were all vampires alike in sharing bits and pieces of their stories, just enough to spark her curiosity, and then leaving the rest hidden? “Fine. So you’re telling me vampirism was good for you because it helped you overcome your condition and you felt like a human. You’re as bad as Tristan.”
Armida laughed. “This is a serious accusation.”
“You had a debilitating illness,” Myra said. “Many people live with that without complaint. And your solution was to turn yourself into a monster who hurts others. Vlad was right about one thing—nothing about what you did was brave.”
“I never claimed to be brave,” said Armida. “But I have always known exactly what I wanted, and I always took it without hesitation. You should do the same.”
“Oh? And what do you think I want?”
Armida waved her hand in the air, indicating the room around them. “To get away from this. You complain about contaminated water, lack of nutritious food, vitamin deficiencies, cold. Becoming a vampire would solve all that.”
“For me, perhaps,” said Myra. “But I wouldn’t doom others. And you can’t tell me you have no regrets. Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t have kids?”
“Not at all,” Armida answered with a shrug. “This was never something I planned on. I mean, I see the appeal—to have these small creatures that are a part of you, to teach them your ways, to watch them grow and learn and discover and develop—yes, I do believe that would be fun. But it was never something I particularly dreamed about, and I wouldn’t call my life empty or lacking because I have no children.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that you don’t have the option to change your mind?”
“It is not as impossible as you say,” Armida said. “My beloved and I have toyed with the idea of picking a human baby to raise as our own. Then we would turn her as she comes of age. Of course, there is no way to know what she would be like when she grows up, but we can do our best in selecting the biological parents. And we’re not in a hurry. We can keep trying until we are fine with the results.”
Myra’s stomach turned. “Are you really doing this or just discussing hypothetically?”
“So far, it is only in the realm of fantasy,” she said. “I think Tristan might be jealous if we do it. He likes being the only child.”
“It’s funny you should say that,” Myra said. “He is older than you.”
“In centuries, yes,” Armida said. “But in maturity—not by a long stretch. And, speaking of the devil, let us return to the others before our silver-haired marshmallow goes ballistic.”
Myra followed Armida out of the kitchen, her thoughts running through the tale the vampire had shared. Vlad had made a promise not to interfere with the human world? But the Nightfall was the ultimate interference. What had changed? “So why did the Prince destroy the world, if he had promised to stay away from human affairs? And don’t tell me it’s because he thought our world was cruel to women.”
Armida walked down the dark corridor, her boots clumping against the stones. “Perhaps not.” She looked at Myra sideways. Her hair caught the light of a lone torch and shone like spilled blood. “Though it might have played a role. Have you heard of a death by a thousand cuts? If I plunge a sword through your heart, you’ll die. But if I simply cut your arm, short and shallow, you’ll live. But what if I cut again? And again? If I cut enough times, you’ll die. It was the same for the Prince—many little things piled up to push him over the edge.”
They reached the door to the Headquarters, and Armida stopped in her tracks. “He disliked how humans ran this world. Being a human is so difficult, always fighting to have food and clean water, a shelter from the cold and rain, and battling against diseases of the body and the mind. And yet, instead of uniting to fight it all together, humans always found ways to oppress each other and make each other’s lives even harder.”
Myra narrowed her eyes. This was hardly an explanation. It was too generic, too impersonal. It sounded as if Vlad had wanted to save humans from themselves, just like the robots and aliens in those science fiction books she had read, but when she had thrown the suggestion at him, he had denied it. But if that was not the case, then both Vlad’s decision to destroy the world and his current desire to restore it seemed like the random choices of a madman. And if all he did was random, then what was stopping him from randomly deciding to betray them?
No—there had to have been something specific that had pushed him to destroy the world. Something personal and logical. Or perhaps a thousand somethings, as Armida had suggested. And until she learned what it was, she could never trust him enough to fight beside him. Pressing her lips together, Myra placed her hand on the doorknob and turned it.