***
Jerod soon returned after completing the task, with Vanessa rushing back to her husband’s side. They met back up just as Barbara, a toddler in each arm, was leading them all into the detective’s office.
Nathaniel carefully placed the wounded detective in the chair at his desk and then retreated casually toward the front of the room where he might be able to hear anything should Michael call out. His senses offered no hint of any forthcoming danger. At least not yet.
He surveyed the room. The detective’s wife took a chair next to her husband and began to give him whatever care that she could. There was not much that she could do for him but to remain beside him. Barbara’s oldest child, Jerod, took his place beside his mother. He stood like a dutiful child that was being forced to grow up too soon, and he reminded Nathaniel of himself in that regard. Though Michael was on the premises, the young man did his best man of the house impression by standing sentinel near Barbara, but above his little brother and sister should he be needed by them, as well.
Nathaniel listened to Michael as he sent the young woman away up front. Soon he would need to change places with him, allowing him to be with his family, which all of the occupants of this tiny square room seemed to be. Too many have died already, he thought to himself. No more shall join them if I have anything to do about it. If more are to die I shall be next.
Glancing back to the room for a moment, he noticed that Barbara was studying him. He offered the slightest nodding of his head, feeling self-conscious for a moment. His body had been set to healing since the last terrible lick of fire had done its work on him, but he knew that he was far from completely whole just yet. He glanced at his clothing; his long-sleeved shirt was little more than rags upon his back; his pants were blackened now and missing large swatches here and there. He was uncertain as to the damage that remained. It felt odd that he should be concerned with vanity now, yet he was.
He recalled the last time that the two of them had been together. He turned away. That same heartache was coming back now. He tried to shake the mounting emotion. There wasn’t time for that type of nonsense now, not with Vincent out there on the loose, no doubt hunting them in earnest.
“Nathaniel,” Barbara said.
He saw her stand up and walk over, so that was reassuring. He had even noticed her muscles tense as intent became action and she headed his direction. Previously, as if in some love-blinded state, he had missed this sort of thing. The great beast that had both created as well as pursued him across the globe had taken up residence in the very house next door to Barbara, had been living there for a while, in fact, and Nathaniel had noticed nothing.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Better,” he said, which he realized could have referred to a great many things.
He had healed since the fire earlier this morning. However, it could also have referred to the dull pain in his heart from having had to leave her the day before when it appeared that he would no longer be a welcome visitor to either her home or her heart. He did his level best not to allow the latter thought to make itself obvious.
“I am unaware how badly I appear. If I am horrible to behold, I apologize.”
“Now, why should you have to apologize for anything?” she chided him. “I owe you so much. We are all standing here because of what you have done…”
“You are also in grave danger!” he snapped, cutting her off. Everyone in the room turned to watch the exchange, including Jerod and the twins. “Because of me, people are dead!” Pent up frustration spent, he lowered his voice. “Because of my presence here, this town has become haunted.”
“You have to quit blaming yourself for everything,” she interrupted him back, placing a hesitant hand upon his charred and disfigured clothing. Now it was her voice that was elevating. “He did this to you! He took you from your family and changed the course of your life. You have done the best that you could to do the right things. You and he are nothing alike. Nothing!”
Her words seemed to strike a nerve. He met them with a sigh. “I want to believe this, Barbara,” Nathaniel said, first glancing down at the delicate hand upon him, then to the lovely face that looked up deeply and powerfully into his. “With all my…” He paused as if suddenly slapped. “With all my being I want to believe that I am different, but there is no escaping the fact that we are the same, he and I. The same.”
“How can you say that?” She put her other hand upon him and shook it as if he were her child needing a stern rebuke. “You are not the same, damnit! And I’m sick of this! You have got to listen to someone other than that voice in your head. You do not know everything. There is no way that you can be the same. There isn’t!” She paused again and drew a steadying breath. “A moment ago you were about to mention your heart, but you stopped. I know that. Why? You do have a heart. I’ve seen it! Too many times! Stop acting like you don’t have one.
“Was it coincidence that you happened to be near my house the night Vincent attacked or was it a miracle of God?” At the mention of God, he began to squirm with discomfort. “Was it good fortune that enabled you to rescue not only my entire family, but my two friends as well?”
Somewhere in the far reaches of his awareness, Nathaniel wanted to believe that he could be used for good in the world, at least in this small part of it. Yet, there was simply too much to overcome. He lived on the blood, on the lives of others! Perhaps those others were not human, but something had to die every night in order for him to survive for one more twenty-four hour period. And for all of Barbara’s talk of the scriptures, Nathaniel was not unaware of them. There was a time when he had attempted to search out some way to be in God’s good graces; some technicality that might bring him even the slightest measure of the salvation that only mortal men seemed to be able to take hold of.
He knew the verses. 2 Corinthians 6:14 read, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness”. 1 John 1: 5 read, “And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all”.
Just what more did he need to read or know? Light assured destruction for the vampire. He could not live in it. Instead, he was forced to spend his miserable existence hiding in the shadows, cowering in fear of the light.
“The Bible...” Barbara began.
“Barbara!” Nathaniel seized her wrists and pulled her off of him, allowing for his cold flesh to interrupt her thoughts. It did its intended work. "The Bible is love and life! I have read it! It is concerned with little else. I am a vampire. Undead! The Bible and its scriptures condemn me and others like me. I need not read them further. I can hear their very judgment from the rocks and the trees!” He paused. “And from you.”
“No!” Barbara said, enduring the cold vises at her arms.
She shivered and her discomfort showed through, but she did not attempt to free herself. Instead, she took those hands and reached up to Nathaniel’s scarred and singed face. She looked at him—through him, to his very soul, to that budding heart he kept refusing to acknowledge. “I was trying to tell you before about dreams that I had been having. Please let me finish.” Nathaniel sighed once again, but made no effort to stop her. “An angel was sitting with me at my dining room table. His words played to me like the most fantastic melody. He was teaching me the scriptures.”
Nathaniel started to squirm again, but Barbara kept going.
“He was not simply telling me the word of God, he was teaching me. Really teaching me! He said to me, ‘What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory’. Then he leaned forward and asked me one more question. He asked me, ‘What do you think of my Nathaniel now?’”
The vam
pire studied her, dumbfounded at this revelation.
“And there was another. I never understood it until now. I was standing in a large meadow of beautiful flowers and you were there. You were standing beneath some trees in shadow, in darkness, and I was coming to you. God’s voice was calling out to you, but you didn’t hear Him. He called you many times. ‘Nathaniel, Nathaniel!’ It was just like with Moses on the mount and with Paul before his conversion on that road to Damascus: ‘Saul, Saul?’. I was coming to you, but it was you who were supposed to come out. Not to me, but into the Light. Not sunlight, Nathaniel. The Light of God!”
He was almost powerless to move. He had once declared the scriptures off-limits, without intrinsic value to be discovered or gained. And worse, he had found the Bible to be condemning. In a sudden reversal, he could nearly envision the first ray of uncondemning Light begin to shine over the mountaintops.
4:06 a.m.
Methodically, Vincent crossed the distance between the alley and the back of the house with a cool confidence which surprised even him considering the fierce anger that had taken hold of him. Everything had been going along well, according to plan, even in light of things that spiraled out of his control, such as the fire that had engulfed the Rosen house, bringing too many witnesses with it. The meddlesome chief of police that he had dispatched with very little effort had been another.
Up until now, Vincent had weathered every storm, and certainly all of Nathaniel’s best shots, and yet, had stood the triumphant victor. As the putrid stench of burnt tires wafted over to this side of the Jackson house, clueing him to a fact that he did not need to be informed of—that all had escaped. Doubt crept into his black heart.
Doing his level best to push back that doubt, to squelch it with screams, blows, bloodshed or simply his own strength of will, he took hold of the locked back door. Paying no regard for the locked doorknob or the deadbolt above that, or even for the three metal hinges and nine bolts that held everything in place, he pulled the door through the frame, making it scream. Wood creaked, cracked, splintered and ultimately gave way in less than the time it took a human being to blink. As if he were simply walking though a doorless pedestrian walkway, he dropped the door behind him as he went.
The action did little to salve the wounds, however. What Vincent needed now, other than to quickly regain the upper hand—which obviously was not something that would be happening any time soon by the sound of things—was to shed some blood.
And a lot of it.
Unfortunately for him, even though he was hungry and could feed and feed well, the thought of bloodshed did not seem to be doing the trick, either. As he walked past the kitchen, the stainless steel coffee maker seemed to tease him with its sheen, laughing at his failure to anticipate more than one diversion. He sent it flying through the air with a flick of his left hand, its cord following after it like some dragon’s snake-like tail. It became entangled with a chandelier and yanked it out of the ceiling. The combined crash was deafening for someone such as he, with quite possibly the world’s most sensitive hearing. But he ignored both the sound that it made and the amazing holes that were caused in the ceiling over the dining room table, as well as the wall on the opposite side.
Vincent walked on.
Next, as outside light played off of the glass on two picture frames that hung in the short hallway just before he turned to the larger one, Vincent smashed them as well. Two shots in quick succession. The glass disintegrated instantly and what was left of the frames flew like exploded shrapnel in every direction. The glass that became embedded in his powerful hands fell to the carpet as if fearful of touching the vampire for any length of time.
Still, his fury was unabated. A third picture took the brunt of it, followed by another two as he made his way to the bedroom where he knew that he would find young Tiffany. Smiling faces beamed and then exploded into millions of tiny pieces.
He smelled the girl before he could actually see her. She was crumpled in a heap between the bed and the wall. Pieces of building debris littered the entire room, but Tiffany seemed to be buried under much of it. Vincent glanced across the room toward the shattered window. It looked as though a guided Intercontinental Ballistic Missile had decided to enter the house through it rather than a door. Lights outside the gaping maw seemed to wink at him, trying his thin patience further; however, the things he could destroy out there were too far for him to reach and eradicate just this moment, so he turned away.
Tiffany moaned steadily beneath the rubble so it was clear that she would survive the experience. Part of him wished that she had already expired while another part (the part that was violently destroying the Jackson house piece by piece) wished to help her along in that regard. And very slowly.
He leaned over and quickly threw off the glass, wood and insulation that blanketed Tiffany. Vincent towered high above her, disdain filling him while he was yet unsure of her fate. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Death for the vanquished or mercy? Vincent gritted its considerable teeth momentarily while he reached his verdict. When Tiffany came to, he forced a look of sympathy upon his taut face and knelt beside her.
“Tiffany, my dear, can you hear me?” Tiffany only moaned all the more, and there was something else, too. Vincent cocked an ear. “Tiffany?”
“I’m sorry, my master,” came a feeble voice, muted by the carpet that her head and face were pressed into. “I failed you.”
“No. No. No,” came the feigned response. He reached tenderly under Tiffany and moved her onto her back. “The fault was mine, my dear,” he lied. “It is I who has failed you.”
“You?” Tiffany asked incredulously as Vincent helped her like a father would his daughter—or a man, his lover—into a seated position. “How did you...?”
“Never mind all of that,” Vincent said, softening his voice further as he lifted her to her feet, all the while holding her gaze with his eyes and forgiving lips. “Suffice it to say that I have treated you poorly. You who have stood by my side while my son has abandoned me. You, my precious one, who I left to be overwhelmed while I amused myself with the woman.”
Vincent pulled her closer to him and embraced her. Gently, he slid his fingers up and down her back. Once she had fed again, she would begin to heal, although some of the wounds appeared to be permanent.
“Barbara never cared for you. None of them did. And what is worse, I, the one who should have loved you with everything that I am, cared little for you as well. I am so ashamed, my daughter, my love.”
Tiffany seemed to grow weaker rather than stronger, suddenly becoming limp in his arms. Vincent did not allow himself a smile, though he was quite pleased with his act. His were a great many skills, indeed.
“Please forgive me,” Vincent pleaded, moving ever closer still, his eyes appearing to water, though no water had touched his dry eyes in just over three hundred long years.
“Of course, my Lord.” Tiffany shuddered once and seemed to stifle a cry. She had only been a vampire for mere hours compared to Vincent; however, she could not have produced a single tear, either.
“Not Lord,” Vincent proclaimed. “Love.”
And as softly and as delicately as if she were a rare flower to be seen and not held, Vincent moved his hands from the small of Tiffany’s back past folds of torn flesh up to her scared and bruised face. Ignoring wounds, and there were many (a single nail jutted out from her head directly behind her left ear), he cupped her cheeks and brought her lips up to his own and kissed them. He tugged on those lips gently and then released them. Vincent swept the dry but full lips with a quick dart of his tongue like a snake feeling the air before it while in search of a meal. Before pulling away, he kissed them once again.