Judas and the Vampires (36 page)

“I think everyone should stay here tonight,” Tyreen suggested, after she closed the door behind us. “And, it’s not like we’ll be the only ones up here with our men staying with us tonight.”

“Me and Pete can use the guys’ facilities on the other side in the morning to take a shower,” added Johnny. “Unless ya’ll can’t stand to be alone for fifteen minutes!” 

“Oh, yeah, big boy?” Tyreen retorted, when he preened like a helpless female. “Who’s to say you’ll make it ‘til morning with your stank ass, be-e-e-a-a-t-c-h-h-h!!”

That got him. Stopped his comic pose and snickering grin before it erupted into one of Johnny’s loud and irritating laughs. 

They’re very much like a married couple, loving and yet so dysfunctional. But, they got things revved up for a night of distracting entertainment. Before long, we were all poking fun at each other while taking turns playing Johnny’s Guitar Hero video game, and after that a few rounds of Taboo. When Peter and I began to nod off around eleven o’clock, Tyreen and Johnny headed downstairs since neither one was ready to retire. Both of us exhausted from so little sleep the night before, I helped Peter climb up into my bed and then I snuggled close to him. Soon after, despite the lights still on and the TV muted in the corner of the room, we drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 9

“Careful…that’s it, Garvan.”

I suddenly awoke. My room was immersed in darkness.  The lights and television were off. I could hear Peter’s soft snores to my left, and I was moving toward the window…more like
floating
on my back toward the
open
window.

“What in the hell?” I whispered hoarsely, trying to get my bearings on what was happening. To my right, I could see light from the hallway beneath the door, and the shadow from one of my floor mates passing by my room. I couldn’t hear Tyreen or Johnny, snores or otherwise, which told me that neither one had returned yet.

Am I dreaming?

“It appears she is waking up….cover her mouth and let’s be on our way!”

The same voice from a moment earlier, and the Spanish accent was familiar.
Very
familiar.   

“Armando?”

“Si,” the owner of the voice whispered in response to me. “I must insist you keep quiet, dearest Txema!”

It was the same cheerful tone, and irreverent delivery from the other night. Definitely him.

“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed and finding it hard to keep my voice low. Preparing to float through a fourth floor window on a chilly night will do that to you.

“I’m grabbing your coat,” said Armando, “and your slippers, too.”

Huh?

“Where in the hell are you taking me?!” I shouted at him, or at least I shouted at the spot where his voice emanated from. I couldn’t see his face—just the outlines of his long fingernails guiding me along, as if I lay upon an invisible raft drifting through the air. 

“Some place safe.” Another voice, this time Garvan’s, and it resounded from my other side. Calm and assuring, I couldn’t see him either, only the now-familiar cinnamon scent slithering into my nostrils. “A place not far from here.”

“A place where everyone else is waiting anxiously to meet you!” added Armando.

Incredible panic overwhelmed me, and I tried to look back at Peter, still snoring in my bunk bed. Some protector he turned out to be that night, although I considered he might’ve been ‘tapped’ like Tyreen was two nights earlier.

“Ah, chérie, do not be alarmed,” Garvan said to me, his sexy voice soothing, despite the fact I felt no less terrified. Especially since I had just tried to move my arms and legs and couldn’t do it. I could barely feel anything from my neck on down to my toes. “In just a minute we will reach our destination.”

I remember how this announcement confused me. I tried to picture what campus locale was nearby—even considering the ultra-quick movements I’d seen from both vampires previously. If they planned to carry me out the window at our present drift, we might make it to the Alumni Center if we were lucky, and that’s if we allowed a few more minutes to make the trip.

However, once we cleared the window and hovered some forty feet above the ground below, they both took firm hold of my arms and shoulders. Everything suddenly sped up. Sped
way
up, I should say. It was as if we had been shot from a cannon into the sky, and we flew so fast that the lights below us became a streaming blur.

It wasn’t long before the lights below disappeared and the air around us grew even colder. Then, as quickly as Garvan predicted, we reached our destination; dramatically slowing down once we approached a cave deep within the Smoky Mountains. By my estimate, we were five to ten miles east of Knoxville. Tall cedars and eastern pines stood near the cave’s entrance, and a roaring fire glowed from within the cave. Garvan and Armando set me gently upon the ground.

My legs felt weak, and it took me a minute to catch my breath after such a frightening and exhilarating experience. I was surprised to find myself dressed in my parka, which covered much of my nightgown. I marveled at how the two had put it on me while we flew through the air, and without me being aware of this fact. Just before we landed, Armando placed my slippers on my feet.

Unlike the other night, both were dressed entirely in black, wearing leather trench coats that hung below their knees. Their boot heels clicked against loose gravel just outside the cave’s mouth.

“You are now ready to meet the princess and the rest of her entourage!” Armando proudly announced. “Right this way…please!”

He motioned for me to walk through the entrance, while Garvan joined him behind me. I could feel them withdraw as I stepped through a narrow passage that opened to a fairly large room. An immense fire burned within a large stone ring near the room’s center, and in front of it stood a tall female flanked by a slightly shorter male on her right, and a petite female on her left.

“So we finally meet, Txema,” said the taller female.  “Come…closer. Let me have a better look at you, my cousin.”

“Cousin?!”

How could this pallid woman be any close relation to me? Granted, she stood almost as tall as me with the same build, and her shoulder-length dark brown hair flowed the same way mine did—even with the same slight widow’s peak atop my forehead. But her eyes were greener than mine, like sultry emerald fires. They were similar to Tyreen’s eyes, only brighter and unearthly in their glow. 

She smiled, and the tips of her fangs peered out through her full pouting lips—also the same as mine, and my best assets, according to Peter. Her subtle head nod and amused smile let me know that she had just read my thoughts.

“Yes, it’s sort of like looking in a mirror, eh?” She chuckled warmly, and in the next instant moved from the fire to a mere two feet in front of me. (I wish they wouldn’t do that shit, as it’s extremely unsettling.) A slight lilac scent arrived with her. “You are as radiant as advertised, and you remind me of Bernadette Soubirous, the girl who put the city of Lourdes on the international map long ago.”

She stepped back with one hand on her hip, studying me, while apparently comparing me to this other name that I remembered hearing my grandmother speak of, when I was younger. The way this woman stood there reminded me of both my grandmother and Aunt Sylvia, Papa’s sister. That’s how they often stood, when ready to make a point about an issue.

“You have heard of Bernadette, correct?”

Her French accent was more pronounced than Garvan’s, but there was also some other influence in the delivery of her words. Perhaps, an older Basque touch?

“She’s the one who saw visions and had a shrine built in her honor. Thousands of people come to visit the town every year,” I acknowledged, after nodding shyly. I could tell that I suffered a huge disadvantage in terms of what she knew about me and my family. It was
her
family too, apparently, which I struggled to wrap my mind around.

“Actually, it is three million people each year that journey to Lourdes—many on pilgrimage,” she said, her eyes twinkling with the same mirth I’ve often felt when someone gets the facts wrong about a subject. “A basilica was built long ago in 1876, and an underground church was finished in 1958. The town served as a medieval stronghold for yours and my ancestors, too.”

“Oh,” I said, quietly. The warmth from the fire had reached me, and my parka had become a furnace on my shoulders and arms.

“Allow me,” she said, moving to remove my coat so quickly that I scarcely felt my arms pulled through it. “Now, that’s better, eh?”

“Yes… Thanks.”

“My earthly name was Berezi Ybarra, the great, great, great auntie to Bernadette—who is one of
your
most famous ancestors, as you’ve surely been told,” she continued, handing my coat to the other female who stepped forward after a slight nod. “But our bloodline goes very far back…further than you can even begin to imagine.”

“Which again is why we’re all here!”

Armando’s booming voice echoed off the cave walls, drifting up through a small shaft nestled between an outcropping of stalactites above us where the reverberations were shriller. He danced around the fire, wearing a maniacal look on his face while playing an imaginary violin. The others all snickered.

“Yes, it is the reason we’ve come,” this female, once known as Berezi, continued. “The bloodline that began thousands of years ago is now in danger of extinction. Armando and Garvan have advised me that you now know the reasons for our urgency to protect you. Due to the expanse of your Basque relatives throughout the world, less than ten years ago there were nearly one hundred females who carried the gift that our breed of vampires needs to survive, and which allows us to govern the less-fortunate of our kind. But, roughly six months ago, the gift carriers began to die. In September, the survivors numbered just fourteen… dwindling to three as of two weeks ago….”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked away, as if somehow reliving what had happened to these ‘carriers’. No doubt they bore the same birthmark as mine.

“Yes…they did,” she advised, turning to face me again, as if I had voiced my thought. 

Dressed in the same dark clothing and trench coat as Armando and Garvan, she opened her coat and pulled her sweater away from her neck. The pastiness of her skin accentuated the tiny teardrops that marked her carotid artery, near the base of her throat.

“It is the mark that we all bear—all of us who carry the gift,” she advised. “But you are now the only
living
human being in the entire world that has it.”

For the first time during our conversation, her eyes betrayed her depth of worry. This was some serious shit! An enormous burden began to settle upon my shoulders, and its weight nearly took my breath away.

“Armando called you a princess when we arrived here,” I said, looking for some distraction…something to lessen the impact of what she just told me. “My papa told me recently that the little tears on our necks were once the symbol of Basque royalty. Is that true, and is it the reason Armando said that?”

“It’s more than that, I assure—“

“Armando, let me handle this!” she scolded him, though lightly. He nodded his consent to her interruption, and she addressed me again. “Your papa is correct. Many members of the Basque royalty have been born with the same birthmark, as well as their ancestors from other cultures. Our lineage dates back thousands of years, where the carriers of this gift easily infiltrated the ruling classes of the world’s most highly developed civilizations.”

“That’s why we do not address her as ‘Berezi’,” said the petite female, who suddenly joined us, eyeing me as if I were a very rare novelty—or perhaps, more likely, as a delectable treat to taste. Her French accent was also strong, and I detected the slight aroma of roses. “She is known to us all as
‘Chanson d’ Eternelle’
, since she is the vampire who carries forth our Song forever.”

Her eyes were violet, so unusual and assuredly a byproduct of her vampire birth long ago. They flashed with desire within her small oval face that was framed by a rich halo of crimson colored hair hanging in loose curls upon her shoulders. All her other features were dainty, including her thin lips and delicate nose and cheekbones. Her similar attire of black leather trench coat, stiletto heels, and a dark sweater beneath did little to make her look fearsome. If not for the fangs and her china-doll porcelain skin—as well as those piercing eyes—she could easily pass for some men’s magazine pin-up.

“So, how should I address you, then?” I asked, not sure how to address either one at this point.

“‘Chanson’ will be fine,” said Berezi. “And, this is Raquel Meurtrier.”

She gestured playfully to the flaming redhead, who curtseyed with dramatic flair.

“Ah-hem!” Another booming male voice resounded behind the females, as the lone remaining stranger to me lifted his chin in defiance at being ignored for so long. Even so, I detected an impish glint in his amber vampire eyes.

“And this…this is Franz Blutliebhaber,” Chanson said, motioning for him to join them. 

Franz stepped over to us, completing my immersion in a mixed bath of sensual aromas. He bore more of a sage-like musk scent that seemed to go well with his strong German features. Blonde with high cheekbones and dimples framing a toothy smile, only the fangs and iridescent eyes would alert otherwise unsuspecting humans that a dangerous predator walked in their midst.