DARIUS Chapter Extract

Given my grieving, you might ask if I would have chosen a different path, if I’d have denied or avoided my destiny if I could have. It would be more courageous, more admirable, to clothe myself in the armor of “absolutely not.” But that’s just an easy virtue signal—as well as a claim no one can refute because nobody else is in my head, in my heart.

The honest truth is more nuanced, more complex. In the moment my path collided with my female’s, before everything started, yes, I probably would have taken another route: If the second before we met, I would have known what I had to face, I’d have balked.

There. I admit it. That’s just the survival instinct at work, though. Nothing more than a reflex to avoid pain that fires in a nanosecond and is untempered by higher purpose and reasoning.

It is a truth, but not the truth.

One night after I first met my female, I knew over Campbell’s tomato soup and Wonder Bread toast that I would never leave her. And even after she told me to go . . . and then after she died in my arms . . . I never left her. I’ve taken my beloved everywhere with me, hoping that through my eyes she could see the beautiful thing we made together and know our daughter is safe.

I’m a male who keeps his promises. In my female’s last moments, when she knew she wasn’t going to survive, she asked me to watch over our daughter. She made me swear that I would guard our young. I would have done that anyway, but as it was the one and only way I was able to honor my mate, that vow became my connection to her and my reason for living.

I stopped writing anything down about my life after that night. But there were other recordings, photographs now, no longer my words, that documented my time. I amassed a collection of hundreds of pictures of our young, and I framed them so that those moments I could not be by our daughter’s side in person were preserved forever for my heart. From a distance, from the oculus of a camera lens held by another, I witnessed her maturation. Raised as an orphan, she was never alone, my loyal butler doing the daylight shift and I, myself, on the nighttime watch. Wherever she was, in the orphanage or out on her own in the world, we were never far from her. She could not know the truth of who her father was, however. Half-breeds are rare, and although being a human is not safe, existing as a vampire is downright dangerous.

Further, I always had the hope that her mahmen’s genes would prevail and she would never go through the transition. That was another prayer not answered. As our daughter’s time for the change approached, after years of mere worrying, I became terrified. To see any vampire through their first feeding is perilous. To get a female with mixed blood through it? There was only one male she could take from and have her best chance at surviving.

Only one purebred vampire left on the planet. Except it was like turning her over to an undertaker. Who kept his business going with black daggers and throwing stars.

It was at this critical juncture in her life that death came for me in the form of a car bomb, leaving our daughter not just undefended, but on the precipice of a life-altering, mortally dangerous change she didn’t even know was on her horizon.

So of course, I had to find a way to come back. When my time to enter the Fade came, I struck a bargain with the Scribe Virgin, the mahmen of the species, and I returned to the earth in a different form for a different life . . . with the same purpose.

And so it has been, for these most recent years, me peering through new eyes at the beautiful proof that I had known love. Unlike my destiny, our daughter has had much joy: a King who loves her, a son to call her own, a protected home, and an extended family. Everything I could have wished for her has come true, and if the cost of such a fate required my sacrifices?

One does everything for one’s children. Yet as time has changed her, it has also changed me. The foundational role of a parent is to usher their progeny into adulthood, to make sure they are set and settled, prepared to carry the torch forward past the lives of those who created them. Of late, I am beginning to think my purpose for her has been served—and the more this feels true, the more the pain of who I miss, who I am separated from, who I long for, is growing intolerable.

With the same compulsion I previously focused on my present, I now find myself returning to the past and reliving the origin story of our daughter. But it’s not about the young.

It’s about my female. Myself.

Through the course of my recollecting, I am compelled to get each and every detail of our love story right. I want all the words we shared relived with their proper tone and inflection. I want the glances, the touches, the heartbeats, cataloged. I want even the scents right. I have to remember everything. It’s the only way I can decide whether it is finally time to release myself of my duty upon the earth . . . and try to find my love on the Other Side. If she’ll have me, that is.

Perhaps this story of mine will at long last lead to a happily ever after.

Or maybe I was wrong about everything. And nothing awaits me in the Fade.

DARIUS

May 1981 Caldwell, NY

Darius, begotten son of Tehrror, forsaken son of Marklon, decided to drive into town the night his destiny came to claim him. Two weeks before, he had directed his trusted, elderly doggen, Fritz Perlmutter, to go to the BMW of Caldwell dealership and accept delivery of a brand-new 735i. The car had been ordered about six months before, and although vampires did not celebrate the human Christmas holiday, as its arrival date drew nearer,

Darius knew all about sugarplums dancing in the head. The sweet anticipation had been an antidote to so much dread and duty in his life, and the wait had been interminable.

There had even been a delay or two, the production in Germany hitting a snag, and then the cross-Atlantic shipping taking longer than scheduled. But then, finally, the call had come in, and when Darius had returned home after a weekend away of fighting, covered in black blood that smelled like baby powder, with a gunshot wound through the meat of his upper left arm, Fritz had whipped open the back door and proclaimed that “she is being prepared and is ready to be gathered tomorrow afternoon!”

Darius had stood there on the kitchen stoop like a big dummy, his sluggish, exhausted brain failing to process whatever news had made his butler light up like a streetlamp. And then it had sunk in. Talk about your second wind.

As a doggen, Fritz could go out into the spring sunlight, and given that he was the most faithful servant on the planet, he had been as excited as his master when he’d headed off twelve hours later to pick up the new car. The last sixty minutes or so of patience had been a slog of centuries-long duration, and Darius had churned through the time pacing in his subterranean bedroom, circling his desk, his bed, his seating area. The hearth. The bath. Rinse and repeat.

Fritz had come down to report she was safely on the premises as soon as he’d gotten home, but given that the gracious Federal mansion had a detached garage, there had been no way to go see the car until the sun was under the horizon. That it was spring in upstate New York meant there had been another forever-wait, and Darius had wished, even though the nicer weather was more enjoyable, that the calendar had been closer to December 21.

Hell, in winter, he could have gone to the dealership himself.

And then it was time.

Bursting out of the back door, he had all but skipped across the asphalt court. Fritz had deliberately closed up the garage bay, and Darius had twitched through the final thirty seconds as his butler had scooted in and hit the opener.

The panels rising and revealing the BMW, inch by inch, had been like opening a present, and there had been no disappointment. The bronze metallic paint had gleamed, and those four headlights had stared back at him as if the thing were alive. Initial shock and awe over, Darius had prowled around the sedan, trailing fingertips on the cool steel, on the smooth glass, on the hood, the roof, the boot.

And it drove like a dream.

Which was why a vampire like him, who could dematerialize anywhere he wanted, chose to take the long way home sometimes . . .

As he passed through a part of town congested by newly constructed developments of mid-market apartment buildings, he turned up the volume on the stereo so Supertramp could tell him more about lonely days and lonely nights. He didn’t need the primer. Sure, he had no wife at home, but he did feel like a piece of furniture in his own life: When he was fighting lessers, those pale, soulless killers who hunted vampires, he was as animated as they came; inside of himself, though, he had become an inanimate object. He’d noticed this fossilization about a year ago, and ever since then, he’d been trying to figure out exactly what his problem was. A rereading of his diaries, whereupon he’d probed the fact patterns of his life as if he were a disinterested third party instead of the main character, had yielded nothing of note. And endless, contemporaneously penned entries detailing the fact that he was rereading his diaries hadn’t gotten him any further.

Then again, maybe it was because he already knew what ailed him and he just didn’t want to look at all that he couldn’t see ever changing.

His cycles of days and nights were always the same: Fighting. Eating. Sleeping. Feeding in a chaste way from a Chosen. Doing it again. And again. And again. As the pinwheel of time continued to spin, and humans went in and out of different fashions, fads, and presidents, he was the trudging same. Not even the noble purpose of his existence— saving the vampire race from the Lessening Society and protecting the King who refused to lead—was enough to relieve the rote detachment that blanked him like anesthesia. And this was why he not only needed a nice new car, but had to drive the thing.

Running his hand over the top of the steering wheel, he breathed in deep. He didn’t require a vampire nose to appreciate the rich perfume of hand-tooled leather, that delicious new-car smell— As he rounded a turn in the road, the movement came at him from the left, the streak the kind of thing that his peripheral vision caught and his hair-trigger instincts reacted to without any conscious thought on his part. In quick coordination, he punched the brake pedal and yanked the wheel to the right. The tires did their best to find purchase, squealing in their slow-down efforts, but there was too much mass, too much acceleration. A sickening jolt of impact registered, and then the BMW veered off the four-lane road and jumped the curb.

The tree in his headlights was enormous. The biggest arboreal anything he had ever seen. Then again, when you were about to crash your brandnew BMW, that did lend a certain distortion to things— Boom!

Like a bomb going off, the impact was loud and had shock waves. As his ears rang, he was thrown forward and the steering wheel punched back, defending its territory with the stiff arm of its column. A flop of the head later and he was close as his own nose to the windshield before a boomerang effect snapped him back into his seat.

At which point he smelled gas, heard hissing, and started cursing. As his eyes focused, he found that the trunk of the maple was just about centered between those two sets of headlights, like the blue-and-white hood ornament was a target. And what do you know, that badge was now halfway up into the engine block. With a deflation characteristic of people who find themselves in the crosshairs of chaos theory, he opened his door. The damage had not extended back far enough to affect its release, hinges, or panel, and glancing into the interior as he got out, he closed his lids against how pristine everything remained in the cockpit, the dash and seating still so fresh and new. When he was ready, he turned to— The fact that mid-pivot he caught sight of the unused seat belt seemed like a tap on the shoulder from Fate, a little reminder that this time—this time—he’d gotten away with it, but in the next accident, his head was going right through that safety glass.

Maybe he should buckle up in the future—

Freezing in his tracks, he caught the scent of fresh blood, and as he ripped his head around, he saw the human woman lying in the center of the four-lane street on the yellow line. She was tucked into a ball, crumpled as if by a fist, and he had an instant impression of a blue skirt that was the color of a morning glory, and a white blouse that was untucked.

A red sweater was tied around her waist. The shoes were brown with no heels. No stockings.

She wasn’t moving. Oh, God, he’d hit someone. That was what the jolt had been.

Darius bolted across the two lanes he’d been traveling on. As he knelt down, he touched her shoulder. “Madam?”

No response. Then again, he’d felt the impact even inside the car, had heard the terrible sound.

“Madam, I’m going to roll you over.”

With gentle hands, he unfurled her tight contraction, and as she flopped half onto her back, he didn’t like the way her head was so loose on the top of her spine. The moan was good, though. It meant she was alive.

“We need to get you medical treatment.” He glanced back to his car, which turned out to be at the tree line of a park-like area. “And I have no transport to offer—”

“Help . . .” she whispered. “He’s going to hurt me . . .”

A cold rush hit Darius on the crown of his head, and he bared his fangs. “What did you say?”

When she just mumbled, he looked across the other two lanes. A short-stack, inter-connected collection of apartment buildings was set back from the street on a rise, with a stretch of grass separating them from the road. There were lights on inside almost all of the units, but no one was out on any of the balconies, and there were privacy blinds drawn across every window—

Another flash of movement. In the breezeway of one of the building blocks, a figure ran out of the shadows—and then jumped back into the darkness as if they didn’t want to be seen. Given the shape, it was clearly a male, and Darius flared his nostrils, scenting the air.

“Please, don’t let him get me,” the woman said in a reedy voice. “He’s going to kill me.”