The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

3. [Kallines] - 2003 - Who Are You Wanting Dead?

"It was there when I woke up this morning, look," I said, inclining my neck so that Leechtin could investigate me.

"Where did you sleep?" he asked, taking my head between his hands. His fingers slid behind my ears, into my hair, the same black hair as his own. Slowly, he declined his own head, as if drawn to the twin pinpricks on my neck. He rested his heavy head against my collar, quietened.

I remained unmoved. Together we sat on a stacked stone retaining wall, edging a small lily pond. Ahead of us, on the green water, a dragonfly watched me from the closed bud of a lily. The stone beneath me warmed me. 

My feet, dipped in the water so close to the surface, felt hot. Behind, the grassy verge crawled with harmless black ants. 

"I dug a shallow hole and slept in your woods, from early morning until past late afternoon. Until maybe two hours ago. You see now that the sun is making itself ready to go to bed," I told him. "I wake, and here is a wound upon me, as if done by an insect. Ah, but what insect bites Kallines? His skin is too thick for their teeth."

"A villain bites, but he leaves you whole," he said, his breath insubstantial against my skin.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "No 'hush, be quiet, Kallines'? A villain?"

While he laid his head upon me, I did not hold him. I sat still in the fading afternoon light, waiting for the sound of frogs to come, what sound always made him talk of the past, even to someone like me, who has always disappointed him. No matter. No matter.

He weeps the way that a stone weeps, soundlessly, still, and only at rare but understood parts of the day, parts of the year. When I was a boy, of Macedonia, a boy of long marches and little vanity, he had come to me on a spring evening. He had murmured to me, my son, my blood, and taken my hands, and told me that I was his image. He was a little mad then, more mad than now. He had woken from a long sleep. In my tent, he told me stories of an old, burning world.

It is true that we are very like, in lips, in eyes, in hair. But I was then only twenty, the son of a seamstress and a soldier, a soldier myself, obedient only until the bite. Vain. Outspoken. Too young. But older now than his children, here to remain after them as before them. I am not moved by the weeping of stones. A hard man weeps; he is still hard. A hard ear listens, but it hears. 

"A favor," he said. No breath on my neck. No sound. 

"We will see," I said.

"Only you will say that."

"But only I will do this thing, you think. I will do it if I like to do it."

He laughed, and pulling back from me, dragged his fingers gently through my hair. Passing my face, he kissed my cheek.

"Oh what you are doing?" I asked, wagging my hand. "We are not dying."

"You will find someone for me. You can bring him here."

"The matter is what? What has he done?"

"Oh, I'm," he started, "no, you are not asking that."

His hands were folded in his lap. Thin ivory linen, cut loosely, black braided leather belt.  

"Doing it?" he asked.

"Make a robe for me. I want some of your sewing."

"I will not trade it but I will do it," he said.

He opened his hand and I took it in mine. "Who are you wanting dead?" I asked.

"What his name is, I do not know. He calls himself 'Alois', but that is a false name."