PROGENY, PART SEVEN

Read Part Six here.

The Hotel de la Paix overlooks Lake Geneva, and the bellhop made a point of opening the doors to the balcony with a grand flourish, showing off the view.  The dark waters, framed by the jagged alps, dazzled in the reflected moonlight, but I barely acknowledged the sight.  It had been three days since I had fed, and the Hunger was a dull throb in my veins.  My fangs ached with it, and the bellhop--a blonde Swiss boy with pale blue eyes--was the focus of my attention.  As he turned his head to show us the scenery, my gaze fixed on the artery pulsing in his neck.

"Thank you, it is all very lovely," Stefan said, seeing from the taunt muscles in my jaw I was fighting the urge to feed.  He stepped forward and gave the boy what little money we had left.  "And the room is perfect.  I am sure we can manage."

The bellhop nodded, smirking to himself at Stefan's urgency.  He probably assumed the boy and his "sugar daddy" wanted alone time.  Harot's Swiss solicitor had booked the room for me alone, and when I showed up with Stefan behind me the clerk, with all the cool discretion one might expect from a five star hotel, barely blinked.  "I am afraid the reservation was for a single bed, monsieur.  I would change it for you, but unfortunately there is nothing else available at this time."  I nodded, and told him my "son" and I could "make do."

"Very good, monsieur," he replied, summoning the bellhop.  He did not comment that the boy and I looked only a dozen years apart, or that with exception of dark hair had little else in common and looked nothing like relatives.

As soon as the bellhop was gone, Stefan turned towards me, rolling up his sleeve.  "Please, Master, you must feed."

It was not that I was in any danger; I could go at least twelve days before starving myself into the Dusk.  If I let it go that far, however, I would have to kill and gorge myself fully.  It was better by far to feed a little and often, to keep as full as possible.  The Hunger had a mind of its own, and could reduce the strongest of us to ravening beasts if not appeased.

"Stop calling me that," I said, my voice harsher than I had meant it to be.  "We are out in the world now, not hidden in the Clan citadel.  I told you, called me 'Damien,' or 'Rook' even."

The boy nodded, offering up his wrist.  "Yes Ma...Damien.  But please.  Take what you need from me."

Stefan was, I had rapidly learned, the best thing that could have happened to me in my flight from the Clan.  I had very poorly thought my escape out, and in retrospect I might not have made it to Geneva if he hadn't followed me.  The sun, for example, did not burn or scorch me as it might those Sired with Blood weaker than Athena's.  But still, for six hours out of every twenty-four, and always during the day, I fell into slumber.  Having no pulse, no breath, if found in that condition I could easily be mistaken for dead.  Stefan though, guarded me like a watch dog, making sure I rested in peace.  When I drew the shades and lay down on the bunk of my darkened cabin, he was there watching over me.  When I opened my eyes six hours late, he hadn't budged. He carried a switchblade with him, and I had no doubt that anyone who tried to disturb me would feel its sting...and it would likely be the last thing they ever felt.  I couldn't help mentally comparing him to a dog I once had, or immediately feeling guilty about making the comparison.  But the fact was it was true...he had the kind of single-minded loyalty you usually only found in the canine heart.

I shook my head and brushed his arm away.  "I need you strong, Stefan.  This isn't back home where you can just go and rest after I take from you.  We may have enemies here."

To my surprise he stepped forward and gripped me firmly my the arm.  It was a brave move; of course I could shake him off and throw him across the room if I wanted.  But the devoted look in his face quelled any impulse to do so.  "Mas...Damien.  I have already explained.  I am stronger than the Quick.  I can take it.  And because we may have enemies out there, it isn't safe for you to go hunt.  Please.  Feed."

He had been surprised that I didn't already know the secret of the Familiars, that my Sire hadn't told me.  It was not Athena's fault; I had fled in the middle of my instruction and I was sure there were literally thousands of things she hadn't had time to teach me.  I had assumed the Familiars were merely Quick who volunteered to be fed off of...and I was wrong.  In fact, the Familiars were no longer strictly speaking "human."  Like us, they underwent a process of transformation that infused them with a portion of our nature.  The Familiars lived longer--double the natural human lifespan--and were highly resistant to disease.  More importantly for the Progeny, they healed rapidly, and regenerated blood twice as fast as one of the Quick.  They could be fed upon more often without danger.

I took his wrist lightly, my cool fingers brushing his warm skin.  The Hunger snarled, thrashing at the bars of its cage, and my fangs slid free of their sheaths.  He looked at me and nodded, eyes wide.  I surrendered, and bit into his flesh.

That same explosion of color, of light, of being.  I floated up and out of myself and into him.  He is six years old.  His mother has been gone five days.  The refrigerator and cupboards are empty.  Yesterday he was so hungry he ate a quarter of a bag of flour.  There is nothing left and the pain in his stomach is a white hot fire.  He is curled up on the floor, weeping.  The memory is so vivid, I see it so clearly, it was as if I was there...  No, I am there, right there with him in the room.  How is this happening?  Rushing forward, I take the terrified child in my arms, holding him.  I want to find his mother and tear out her throat.  "It's okay," I whisper, stroking his hair.  "It's okay.  You aren't alone..."

With a shock like a physical jolt I yanked back my head, his blood still running down my throat.  Stefan, tears wet on his face, lowered his bleeding wrist.  "You...you were there.  I saw it.  How?"

I looked at him.  "This has never happened to you before?  With the others who fed from you?"

Slowly, he shook his head, wiping the tears from his face.  His voice was small, like the child I had seen in his head.  "No.  Never."

I nodded, feeling a sudden wave of tenderness for him so intense I reached out and put my hand on his cheek.  "When I feed, I see things...memories, experiences.  It is like sharing a soul, with the blood.  My Sire said for each of us the Gift is different.  There is something in me that joins with those I take blood from.  It's like, in that moment, we fuse together."

He nodded, taking my hand and pressing his face firmly against it.

"But usually I see into your head...this time, you saw me in your head.  I don't know...maybe because I have fed from you so often that bond is getting more intense."

"I know you weren't there, back then.  Not really...but now in my head I have the memory that you were.  It's been rewritten."

"Well," I said, still feeling the intense connection to him from the blood sharing.  "I am here now, and no one is going to hurt you."

The promises we make...promises we cannot possibly keep.

Schultheiss & Staehelin was located on the Rue du Mont-Blanc, easy walking distance from the hotel even for the Quick.  My appointment with Herr Schnidrig was for ten PM.  I had no idea what his usual business hours were, but I doubted late evenings were the norm for him.  Yet he had set the time when I responded to his emails, and as Harot's agent, I had the nagging suspicion he knew exactly what my nature was.  Why else the night meeting?  I wondered how much he knew about Harot himself.

Stefan had insisted he should accompany me there, but I ordered him to stay in the room.  In all honesty, my motivations for keeping him back were mixed, so entangled with each other even I could not sort them out.  Some of it was logic...if this was a trap, some elaborate plan for Harot to ensnare me, if I didn't come back there was a chance Stefan could return to Athena and get help.  In the very least she would know what had happened to me.  But the rest...this bonding with Stefan was affecting me.  That image of him left to starve by his drunken mother burned in my brain.  I was feeling protective of him, against both good sense and my own will.  I wanted to keep him out of danger.

So I went alone.

The security guards at the door were expecting me, and within moments I was taking the lift to the fourth floor.  The law offices were empty...the computers and lights all shut off, the rooms thick with darkness.  All except one.  The green gold light of a desk lamp spilled from an open door, and focusing my senses, I could here the steady drumming of a single human heart.  If I had still been alive, I would have taken a deep breath.  Instead, I simply headed for the lit room.

Standing in the doorway, I cleared my throat.

"Ah, Herr Draegonne.  So punctual.  Ten on the dot."  Herr Schnidrig rose from the leather throne tucked between the windows and a massive oak desk, offering me a bow with his head.  He made no effort to approach me or shake hands.  Instead, he gestured at one of the smaller leather armchairs in front of the desk.  "I am Hans Schnidrig.  Won't you please take a seat?"

I nodded, slowly crossing the room.  Unhindered by the dim light, my eyes took in the man.  He was in his late fifties at least, his thick hair a gunmetal shade of grey.  Not a single strand was out of place.  He had a broad, square face, and eyes that seemed too small for it.  There was something cold in the downturned corners of his mouth, and between his hair, immaculately clean glasses, and perfectly tailored suit, I read a kind of steely efficiency in the man.  This one was unencumbered by morals or ethics.  He would perform his duties like a machine.

Sinking into the chair, I noticed the cup of tea cooling on his desk.  As he sat across from me and sipped it, I wondered if he didn't offer me one out of coldness...or if it was awareness of my nature.

"I trust you found the de la Paix acceptable?"

"Very comfortable, yes," I replied.

"Good good," he said, laying both his hands flat on the desk.  "If there are any other services you need, you may have the utmost confidence in my discretion."

He means if I need victims to feed on.  "Thank you, Herr Schnidrig.  But mostly I am just anxious to find out what this is all about."

"Of course of course," he nodded.  "I had to be discrete in my emails, you understand.  Electronic mail is so easily intercepted and read."

I nodded but said nothing, waiting for him to make the first move.

"To begin with, I have been under instruction for the last several months to reach out to you if I did not hear from my employer every three days.  The last communication I had from him was twenty-two days ago. As per his instructions, I sought you out."

I narrowed my eyes, a half dozen questions springing to mind.  I arranged them into order.  "To be clear, your employer is Simon Harrow."

The lawyer shrugged slightly. "That is not how I know him, but that is how he is known to some."

"You stopped hearing from him...is he in some sort of trouble?"

"I am sure I have no idea."

I frowned at this, then; "Why me?  What am I to him?"

The lawyer shrugged again.  "These are matters that do not concern me, Herr Draegonne.  My instructions are only that if I do not hear from my employer, I am to turn over to you ownership of two pieces of property, and possession of an account at Wegelin & Co."

"Sorry, what is that?"

"A bank, Herr Draegonne.  Switzerland's oldest."

This didn't make any sense.  I had always known the Old Man had money, but a Swiss bank account?  And why was he giving this to me?  "Is this an account he set up for me, or one that he is just turning over to me?"

"It has existed as long as I have served him, Herr Draegonne.  It is linked, I understand, to his holdings at Monte Dei Paschi di Siena and the Berenberg in Germany."

My eyes widened somewhat.  "Those are some of the oldest banks in Europe."

"Yes, Herr Draegonne.  Yes indeed.  Just as you say.  My employer's wealth is what you Americans might call 'old money.'  Its foundations predate even our modern currency systems.  And it is all now yours.  Congratulations, mein Herr.  You are now a very wealthy man."

With no pulse to start racing, and no breath to catch, I must have seemed extraordinarily calm.  Inside, however, I was reeling.  Harot was pulling me into something, some elaborate plan or trap, but I was completely blind to the shape or pattern of it.  I couldn't make sense of this.  I knew he still existed because his voice reached out to me in those moments before waking, but he was leaving everything to me as if he was dead.  I thought again of the blood this ancient monster fed to me in my crib, and clenched my hands into fists.

"The properties consist of his home in the United States, and one near Oppenau, Germany, called Die Nacht Palast."

Fortunately, German was a language I studied in graduate school, as many academic journals were written in it.  Die Nacht Palast translated easily in my mind.  I leaned forward in my chair.  "Surely it isn't an actual palace."

Herr Schnidrig allowed himself a small smile.  "Ah but it is, mein Herr.  The Night Palace is a fine example of Baroque architecture, and a palace indeed."

I stared, incredulous.  I had seen the house Simon Harrow lived in...I had grown up in its shadow.  It was a shambles, a rotting Victorian husk.  Yet all this time Harrow had owned a palace in the Black Forest?  The more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

"Now, and this is the important part Herr Draegonne, my employer's instructions are that you must agree to go to Harrow House in America as soon as possible.  You may reside in either property, or neither, but you must visit Harrow House within the first month of claiming your inheritance. Otherwise, you forfeit everything."

I shut my eyes, nodding.  Because that is where you are hiding, isn't it?  I don't know what game you are playing but you need me to come to you.

"What if I simply refuse all of this?"

The lawyer gave another of his little shrugs.  "That is your prerogative, Herr Draegonne.  But consider carefully.  You would be turning down many hundreds of millions of Euros."

Damien, his voice seemed to whisper in the back of my mind.  You have already sold your soul.  What have you to lose?

I opened my eyes.  "What do I need to sign?"

I left the office two hours later, deals with the devil spinning round in my head.  To clear it, I walked around in circles, up the Rue de Chantepoulet to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Genève, her flying buttresses stabbing the belly of the night sky.  Then I moved down the Place de Cornavin, turning my face upwards to feel the light rain that had started to fall.  Harot haunted my thoughts, his presence so strong he might have been stalking the streets of Geneva right beside me.  I had to figure out the meaning of these opening moves if I was ever to understand his endgame.  I asked you to help me become a vampire, my mind whispered.  Now you are turning me into Count Dracula.

I turned down the Rue de Monthoux, and suddenly froze in my tracks.  Whirling round, I scanned the street around me, but saw nothing unusual there in the dark.  Still, a slow sense of wrongness was spreading through me, silencing my thoughts of Harot's game.  Something wasn't right...I could feel it, though I couldn't in any rational way explain why.  I waited, motionless, letting the crowds pass me by.  I scanned their faces, drank in their scents, listened for their heartbeats.  There were no Shades among them, and none of my own kind...

I closed my eyes.

My focus went inward, my senses immersed in the Blood.  I followed the flow of it through the black channels of my veins.  Athena was there, of course...I caught fleeting glimpses of her hundreds of miles away.  Nothing I felt from her hinted danger.  I looked deeper.

Flashes of blackness...sickening and cruel...an animal trapped in the dark...  Is that you, Harot?  Hiding in the blood you gave to me?

Then, suddenly, another image bloomed, blinding.  I saw Stefan, facedown in an alleyway, the night rain falling on his back.  My eyes snapped open and I ran, a blur slicing through the crowds.

I let the blood pull me, that part of Stefan I had stolen earlier that still flowed through me.  I followed it through the labyrinthine streets like a red string.  Closer.  Closer.  I pushed myself harder, drawing on all the strength Athena had given me to propel myself.  I was nearly flying.

Then, turning down a narrow alley just minutes from the hotel, I found him.

I dropped to my knees beside the boy, my senses leaping on him.  His breathing was shallow, his pulse so weak it was barely a murmur.  He was alive...but barely.  I scooped him up, my fangs extending not in Hunger but in a sudden primal, territorial rage.  The vampire had not even bothered to cover its tracks.  On the boy's thoat the wound still oozed, jagged punctures surrounded by bruised and purpled skin.

Someone else had drained him, and left him inches from death.

Read Part Eight here

REVIEW: MICHAEL ROWE "ENTER, NIGHT"

Once upon a time, ages ago it seems, there was a blood-drinking undead monster people used to call a "vampire."  Maybe you have heard of it.  These beings were not preening teenage pretty boys, Swedish sex symbols, or thinly disguised sparkly allegories for Mormonism. They were personifications of disease and contagion, living dead whose rabid bite spread virulence in ever-widening circles of infection.

And they were scary motherfuckers.

Rowe's genuinely frightening Enter, Night is set in 1972, intentionally or unintentionally right around the time vampires stopped being scary and instead became personifications of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck."

Michael Rowe's genuinely frightening Enter, Night is set in 1972, intentionally or unintentionally right around the time vampires stopped being scary and instead became personifications of Erica Jong's "zipless fuck."  Starting with TV's Barnabas Collins in 1967, and culminating in Frank Langella's blow-dried and fangless Dracula (1979), the 70s were when vampires shed their less attractive attributes and handed them off to their poorer zombie cousins.  This is the decade that brought us books like The Dracula Tape (1975), Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Hotel Transylvania (1978), each of which launched a popular series of good-guy vampire books, a trend which finally reached its bloodless nadir in the Twilight frenzy.  Published right in the midst of True Blood and Twilight and Vampire Diaries mania, Enter, Night (2011) joyously and utterly rejects the post-Seventies vampire, taking us back to the days when vampires horrified rather than titillated.

In many ways, Enter, Night echoes the one truly great vampire novel of the 70s, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.  If I called it a "Canadian 'Salem's Lot" I would do so as a compliment.  Both novels feature protagonists who return to the small town they grew up in after losing a spouse, both feature an antagonist strongly resembling Stoker's King Vampire, both have something to say about the nature of insular communities.  Hell, both even have young boys who figure out what is going on before the adults do.  But Enter, Night is not merely "Kurt Barlow visits Northern Ontario."  We could, in fact, draw just as many parallels to Dark Shadows (a town named after the wealthy family that founded it, a slumbering evil awakened, etc).  Enter, Night simply manages to pay tribute to its influences and roots while still feeling fresh.

This is not an easy trick, considering how much ink has already been spilled on the vampire, and I tip my hat to Rowe for having the chutzpah to try.  One of the things that has kept me away from a  "vampire" book despite a fascination with the buggers is that 'Salem's Lot has already been written.  Really the only way to write something original about them is to reinvent the vampire (the usual route) or find a new setting to place the classic vampire in.  Rowe choses the path less taken and weaves his tale through Canadian history, so much so that "Canada" is almost the main character in the book.  From the 17th century missionary work of French Jesuits to the brutal mind-20th century "Indian school" where a Native American protagonist had his culture beaten out of him, Rowe makes sure his novel isn't 'Salem's Lot or Dracula by keeping his setting up front on each page.  

The plot is fairly simple.  A mother returns to the small town she ran off from with her (then) boyfriend and now (deceased) husband.  Pregnant at the time, the couple was fleeing his mother, the tyrannical Mommie Dearest matriarch who runs the entire town.  Now destitute after her husband's death, she is coming to stay with her wealthy mother-in-law, accompanied by her fifteen-year-old daughter and her late husband's gay younger brother (who also fled Mommie Dearest after she had him committed at the age of seventeen for six months to "cure" him of his homosexuality).  A lot of the novel's color and texture comes from this rather baroque family drama, mainly from the strong portrayals of the gay brother and the widow (the daughter reads a bit too underdeveloped and uncomplicated for a teenager, and the grandmother is a bit too stereotypically über-bitch).

The returning trio has horrible timing.  At the same time they come home, a deranged serial killer arrives as well, a voice calling to him from Spirit Rock, a spot outside of town were dogs suffer sudden panic attacks, psychopaths hear whispers, and the local Ojibwa once drew paintings of the wendigo and manitou.  What the killer unleashes there sets the rest of the novel in motion.

I want to avoid specifics, but I will say that these are classic vampires Rowe is dealing with, and in a novel commentary on Canadian history offers these monsters as just another horror European colonialism inflicted on the native populace.  The last section of the book, in fact, delves into their backstory and is a chilling tale in and of itself (one can easily see this part of the book as a movie). There are times when Rowe beats the dead analogy horse one too many times--pointing out the similarities between colonialism and vampirism, the rich and vampirism, etc--but these passages are outweighed by the genuine chills he packs into the book.  There is a scene mid-way through, between a twelve-year-old boy and his dog, that earns a Hall of Fame spot in vampire literature (the boy himself, who I mentioned briefly above, is another memorable character...he and the gay brother-in-law were personal favourites).

You know all those horror cliches about who can and who can't get killed?  Rowe never read them. 

At the risk of spoilers, another fine aspect of Rowe's storytelling is that no one is safe.  You know all those horror cliches about who can and who can't get killed?  Rowe never read them.  There were several times when my jaw dropped open.  In addition, no one seems to have ever told him you are supposed to wrap everything up neatly at the end.  Good for him.

All in all, if you like horror novels and vampires, this is one that needs to be on your list.  

PROGENY: PART SIX

Read Part 5 Here

I ran.

It reminded me of those times I ran as a child, when I was young enough to feel light and weightless, flying over the ground with a fierce, burning joy.  Now, I moved with blinding speed, as fast as I only imagined I could run back then.  Gravity barely had a grip on me.  I passed like a shadow through the trees, barely disturbing a branch or a leaf in my wake.  Stoker had been right.  Denn die Todten reiten schnell.

The Dead travel fast.

It was fifty kilometers from the Tenebrati stronghold to the nearest train station, with nothing but forested mountains between.  I made the journey in less than an hour.  As the village lights began to show before my eyes I slowed, moving in a wide circle around the community rather than passing through it.  The terminal was on the opposite side.

I had no reason to flee like this, to run off the moment Athena and the others were not looking.  There was no law in the books Alexa had given me indicating the Clan could, or would, hold me against my will.  And yet the moment my Clanmates were distracted, that is exactly what I had done, gathering my few possessions and leaping from my fifth story window, disappearing into the woods like a flash.  I couldn't articulate why I was escaping this way...but somehow I felt it important to keep Simon Harrow--or Harot, or whoever he was--from them.  Especially now.

Harot was an Outcast, and the skirmishes between the Outcasts and clans like the Tenebrati were increasing in frequency and ferocity.  Now, a battle with them had driven Kanna, one of my Sisters in Blood, into the Dusk...a sort of living death that severe injury, blood loss, or starvation could induce in us.  Athena had gathered the others to revive her, a process that like creating a new vampire cost a measure of a Progeny's potency, so I knew my Sire would be occupied tonight and in a weakened state.  If I was running to Harot--and what other choice did I have--now was the time to do it unnoticed.

I had made subtle inquires, pressing the Familiar for information on the evenings when he came to let me feed from him, and checking schedules and maps at other times.  I knew from the nearby train station I could make it to the nearest metropolis, and from there to Geneva.  The email I had received was from a solicitor there, and the first stop I needed to make on the journey home.  Tonight presented to moment I had been waiting for, and I took it.

Coming round now towards the station, I stopped dead in my tracks, staring.  I was still 200 meters away, standing at the edge of the woods and the railroad tracks.  In the dark of the moonless night, and the silence, there was a woman there, wandering aimlessly around the trees.  I narrowed my eyes and my muscles grew rigid, my fangs slowly unsheathing from my jaw.  There was still time before the train, and the Hunger was twisting in my gut.  I could appease it on the way there.

And yet...

Something was wrong.  The woman moved in circles, her face blank and her eyes dead.  Her skirt was torn and her blouse shredded, exposing one shoulder and one naked breast.  Reaching out with my senses, I felt a sudden bitter chill down my spine.  My fangs retracted and I drew away in instinctual revulsion, the same way I might be repelled by a corpse.

A Shade.

The Progeny cannot sustain themselves on the blood of the deceased, nor can they just rob a blood bank and drink what has been donated.  It must come living from the veins of another.  Anything else is poison, and it repels us.  This...thing...in front of me was one of the Bloodless, one of the Living Dead.  A Shade.  Any human being the Progeny drained to death was damned to become one.  The body died, but the earthbound spirit roamed like a ghost, visible to Progeny eyes but detectable to the Quick only as a chill in the air or a feeling of wrongness.  This was one of many reasons our laws discouraged us from killing.  A dead human was not only useless to us, it haunted us, a reminder of our sin.

This girl, whomever she had been while Quick, had been killed by us and now haunted the ground where her life was ripped from her veins.

I kept my distance, wondering if this was the work of the Outcasts.

Slightly delayed by this apparition, I leapt over the four meter high fence surrounding the station with seven minutes to spare.  At the ticket booth I smiled at the old man behind the counter, ordering a single one-way ticket.  Through the glass, my mind reached out and brushed its tendrils across his.  He nodded and handed me my ticket, opening his cash drawer to deposit money he only imagined I had given him.  I nodded and walked away.

On the platform my eyes flickered over the faces of other passengers.  That was when I saw him.

The Familiar was sitting on a bench ten meters away, and when he saw me he came to his feet.  The first thing that flashed through my mind was that bad luck had placed me on the same train as him.  Now, he could run back and tell Athena he had seen me here.  The second thought flared immediately after.  Athena knew I was coming.  She sent him here to stop me.  Either way he had to be confronted.

I closed the distance between us.

"My Lord," he said quietly.  His black mop of hair hung in his eyes, and he flicked his hand across his face to part it slightly.

"You are a long way from home.  Going somewhere?"

He lowered his eyes a few moments, before looking up at me.  "I gathered from his questions that my Lord was planning a trip to Geneva."

And here I thought I had been so cautious.  "You were spying on me?"

The boy shook his head.  "No, not like that, my Lord.  I...I..."

"You were spying for Athena."

The boy bit his lower lip, and the expression I first took for fear now looked like something else.  "No, my Lord.  No one knows you are leaving.  At least I told no one."

I leaned towards him, trying to be as menacing as possible.  "Then why?  Why have you come here?"

The boy looked up at me, his dark blue eyes round and very wide.  "Take me with you."

I frowned a little, shaking my head.  There was no law among my kind limiting my freedom, but this Familiar was property.  He had the status of a herd animal or a pet.  If he was running away and I helped him, I might actually be guilty of something.  "You came to Athena of your own free will, boy.  I have seen it in your blood.  She took you off the streets.  You owe your life to her.  Is this how you repay her?"  As the words echoed in my ears I suddenly wondered which of us I was really talking to.  "Have you been so badly treated that you feel you must run away?"

The boy shook his head more vigorously.  "No, my Lord!"

"Then why?"

"Because I need to be with you," he replied, staring up at me.  "Only you."

He's taken quite the shine to you, Athena had said.  We had been at a gathering together when the Familiars were called in to provide us with our "refreshments."  The boy made a beeline directly for me, actually cutting off another Familiar headed in my direction.  Why?  I had asked.  I nearly killed him.  Athena smile knowingly at me and gave a slight shrug.  Why do the Quick fall in love with those they do?  Who can say.  But while the Kiss of any Progeny can bring pleasure to mortals, sometimes a mortal becomes addicted to the Kiss of a specific Progeny.  They crave it above all else.  Consider yourself lucky to be so desired.

I shook my head.  "It isn't safe where I am going."

"So you need me," the boy said, grabbing my hand.  Despite myself I felt a slight wave of embarrassment, glancing at the passengers around us.  "Who will protect you when you sleep?  I can.  I can fight.  They trained us to defend our sleeping Masters.  And I can be your eyes and ears.  Your servant.  I will do anything you ask...but please, take me with you.  Please."

I turned it over in my mind, weighing the pros and cons as the train rolled into the station.  In the end, I agreed.

"I've never asked your name," I said as we boarded.

"Stefan," the boy answered, looking at me as if I had just granted his fondest wish.  "Stefan."

And so, my Familiar in tow, I left the safety of my Clan behind.

Part Seven continues here.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

If you haven't watched Series 8 of Doctor Who to its conclusion, be warned.  Spoilers ahead.

At a time when kids are very likely to know a teacher--or relative--who has been to war, Doctor Who spends a series dealing with it.

Doctor Who has a lot in common with Harry Potter.  First and foremost, they are stories aimed at kids.  The Doctor was created back in 1963 to be "H.G. Wells meets Father Christmas," and has stayed fairly true to that formula ever since. Because of this, expecting Doctor Who to be Battlestar Galactica is a bit like expecting Harry Potter to be Game of Thrones.  It is meant to be whimsical, to have its absurd moments of wild imagination, and to the adults in the room, to frequently be unbelievable.  When I hear someone complain about Who's sillier moments, I wonder if they are the kind of people who also complain about the violations of basic physics in the old Warner Brothers Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons.

But something else Who and Harry have in common (other than David Tennant) is a keen awareness that kids live in the real world too.  Young people might have slightly larger senses of wonder, but they also suffer, feel fear, and grapple with life's darker realities.  Harry Potter was from the start a tale of loss, opening with an orphan boy just after the murder of his parents.  And Doctor Who, a program with the concept of "time" at its very heart, has never shied away from death.  Because of this, even the lightest chapters of Harry and the Doctor's lives (say, Philosopher's Stone or Matt Smith's first series) have shadowed moments...and sometimes, as with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or Peter Capaldi's freshman series 8, the darkness gets deep indeed.

There is a lot of chatter about how "dark" Capaldi's Doctor is.  He really isn't.  The Twelfth Doctor is no darker than the Seventh who manipulated Ace in both Ghostlight or The Curse of Fenric, or the Sixth whose first act was to nearly strangle his companion.  He is no darker than the First, who might have actually killed Ian and Barbara if his granddaughter didn't stop him in Unearthly Child.  Capaldi only appears dark if you joined the saga with Tennant or Smith, the two most cuddly Doctors to ever pilot the TARDIS.  If anything, Capaldi is simply a return to form.

The real darkness is actually the series itself.

Since its return in 2005, Who has relied on gimmicks to hold each series together (something the original program never bothered with, except for rarities like "Trial of a Time Lord" or the "Key to Time").  We had Bad Wolf in the first series and Torchwood in the next, Harold Saxon followed by Returning Rose.  Then came cracks in space and time, the Silents, and the Impossible Girl.  The dramatic journey in each series was that of the Companion, and how traveling with the Doctor changed her.  But series 8 did something we haven't seen before...the episodes were largely connected by themes.  Oh sure, we had Missy popping up from time to time, but for the first time, actual themes made up the connective tissue between episodes.

The loudest and clearest was the role of the soldier.  This is hardly surprising given the fact that Britain has been entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq nearly as long as Doctor Who's big new secondary market--America--has.  We have the character Danny Pink as the most obvious embodiment of the theme, an ex-soldier with a trauma in his past that, much like the identity of Missy, the show never really bothered to hide.  But Danny aside, we kept visiting soldiers (and the Doctor's dislike for them) over and over again.  Into the Dalek has the Doctor openly condemning soldiers, and refusing to take an otherwise viable Companion along simply because she is one.  Listen reveals a young Doctor terrified of being a soldier, and a young Danny inspired by a toy one.  The Caretaker is about an alien soldier that keeps killing because no one is around to give it the order to stop, and in case you hadn't noticed, Mummy on the Orient Express has an identical plot.  Both are resolved in nearly the same way; the Doctor assumes to role of commanding officer in one and surrenders in the other, letting both soldiers finally rest.  Soldiers are also at the heart of the series finale...but we will get to that in a moment.

The other re-occurring theme concerns the Doctor trying to understand who he is.  "Am I a good man," he asks Clara early on, and she has no answer.  Likewise we still don't know if the Doctor pushed the clockwork cyborg or if he jumped.  Episode after episode has Clara asking herself this question, wondering if the Doctor is still the man she knew or if she ever really knew him at all, and twice in the series, she actually borrows his identity.  Ultimately the show is asking us, the audience, this question in the wake of the 50th anniversary year.  If you have a broom and you replace the handle, the Doctor muses in the series premier, and then replace the brush and do it over and over again, is it the same broom?  Is the Doctor the same man, or is "the Doctor" really just an identity that gets passed on, an identity that even Clara can assume?   And further, is that identity a good man ("You made an exceptional Doctor," he tells Clara, "and 'goodness' had nothing to do with it") or Danny Pink's blood-soaked general who gets to decide who lives and who dies?

Both these themes come together, and are answered, in Dark Water and Death in Heaven.   While many rolled their eyes at Missy's identity ("What, the Master again?") the simple truth is a second string villain like the Rani doesn't get us anywhere near establishing the Doctor's identity.  It takes the Master, or now the Mistress, to remind us who the Doctor really is.  Both friends, both rogue Time Lords, both characters who play God and leave death in their wake, it is only by the Mistress trying to push the Doctor over the edge and into the shadows with her that we get to the truth.  That truth is a simple one; Doctors and generals are not so different.  Part of their job description is deciding who lives and dies.  But what the Mistress has never understood, and thus ends up reminding us, is that the Doctor plays God to help while she does it for her own amusement.  In a sense, she has a point; the Doctor's hands ultimately have more blood on them than hers do.  But Doctors and psychopaths bloody their hands for different reasons.

The Cybermen, of course, tie up the soldier theme for us, just as Missy's use of them answers the Doctor's theme.  In creating an army so the Doctor can rule the universe, Missy proves herself wrong and Danny Pink right.  Danny is right...the Doctor is an officer who uses others an occasionally sacrifices their lives.  But it is not a role he cherishes, but rather a cross he thinks he must carry.  And this, of course, is at the heart of his discomfort with soldiers.  They remind him of all the people he had led to their deaths.

In the end, the issue is not that the Doctor was darker this series, it's that the themes were. As I watched this, the fact that the finale aired so near Britain's Remembrance Day didn't seem a coincidence to me.  The entire series was an exploration of soldiers, of sacrifice, of death, and of why we still engage in things like wars.  It's heavy stuff, sure, but British and American kids very likely know soldiers who have served in the Middle East, and very likely question the purpose of war.  Doctor Who may not have the answers, but still its willingness to raise the questions is commendable.  The show stokes the childlike sense of wonder in kids, but often recognizes they have adult questions too.

PROGENY, PART FIVE

See Part Four here.

I sat in a garden of brambles and creepers, the sky above me a luminous void.  It was never really black any more.  To my new eyes, even the darkest, moonless night was a dim, steel blue, and the stars blazed so intensely I could now read comfortably by their light.  This was balanced, I suppose, by the day, when the sky overhead burned white hot from horizon to horizon, and direct sunlight felt like a million needles prickling my skin.  I didn't burst into flame, as my kind did in Hollywood movies, but it was uncomfortable and I couldn't function without sunglasses.

I had no idea where I was.  The garden was fenced in with stone and wrought iron, but everything inside its walls was decayed.  There were a few dead trees, a dried up fountain of cracked stone, a wooden gazebo half devoured by termites and rot.  It slowly came to me, as I rose to my feet, that it wasn't a garden at all.  Through the high, yellowed grass I could see shattered tombstones and a few crumbling vaults.  A lichen covered angel, her face eaten away by time, stared at me.  It was a cemetery, and one that had been ignored a century at least by the look of it.

There is such power in you now.

The voice was that of a man, deep and though speaking English, vaguely European in accent.  I turned slowly in a circle, looking for him.  Nothing escaped my sight; not the beetles scurrying in the dust nor the spiders in their webs, not the cracks in the stone walls nor the rust on the iron bars.  But the source of the voice was hidden to me.  He was near, but entirely invisible.

You have Athena to thank for that.  You have been Sired so close to the Source, far closer than I...

I narrowed my eyes.  "Harot?"

Ah... the voice purred.  You recognize my voice.

"How could I?"  I asked.  "I've never actually heard it."  I started walking slowly among the ruined graves, my gaze relentless, penetrating every nook and cranny.  He was right, of course.  My Sire was a First Generation and I a Second.  That placed me two steps away from the Patriarch of my Blood Line, and three from Lachiel himself.  As far as the Progeny went, the blood flowing in me was incredibly potent, ringing with the echoes of the magic which made my kind.  In the weeks I had spent with Athena and my Clan, I had been learning to harness this great Gift.  It seemed inconceivable that someone could be so close to me and yet still hide from my sharpened senses.

Have you not?  Have you not indeed?

An image burned in my brain so clearly, so intensely, and so suddenly I was certain it had just been placed there.  I saw a child in a crib.  I saw a tall, lanky shadow leaning over the infant.  I saw drops of blood fall on the baby's lips, the shadow encouraging it to suck...

"You?  You fed me your blood?  All those years ago?"  A spark of anger ignited in my belly and started shouldering there.  "Why?"

Why indeed.  There is only one way to know the answer, young Master Draegonne.  Come home to me.

My eyes snapped open, staring at the closed lid of the box I lay in.  There was not, for me, any line between waking and my 'slumber.'  Unlike my breathing days, there was no struggle to shake off sleep.  One moment I was, for all intents and purposes, a corpse.  The next I was fully alert.  And my repose was never troubled by dreams.  That made this vision, this telepathic conversation with Harot, all the more disturbing.  It had been happening with increasing strength and regularity the last week or so.  Harot was somehow reaching out to me, calling me to him.

I climbed from the box and went to the window, staring out at the sky.  The moon was nearly full, and even behind the thick clouds and pouring rain the night was luminous to me.  Each falling rain drop glittered like a diamond.  I drew in a breath; though I no longer needed to breathe, I could still do so for the purpose of scent.  Thousands of layered odors, from the rain and the earth and the garden below, mingled in my brain.

I knew I should go to Athena with this, or even Alexa or Decem.  I understood the bonds of blood that now held us, and I knew my Sire and clan would aid me.  I like to think that I would have confided in them, like a reasonable creature, if I hadn't first checked my phone.

Go ahead.  Check it.

Athena liked to pretend she didn't understand the modern world.  She had, on several occasions, made reference to the Internet as "that web thing."  As a being nine centuries old one might even be tempted to believe her.  But I was no fool.  Her ancient mind drank in information like blood, but she was wise enough to never show her full hand.  Besides, the clan's lair had full wi-fi, and excellent wi-fi at that.

I used it now, taking my smartphone from the drawer where I kept it.  My phone service had been terminated, but I could still use the wi-fi here and I still had my Google address.  I checked the mail now, rapidly, scanning until I saw something from attorneys I did not know.  I read the email a dozen times in the space of thirty seconds.  By the end of that minute, I had made up my mind.

I would leave tomorrow.

Tonight it was not possible.  Decem, by Brother in Blood, was transforming his own Get this evening.  The Tenebrati were gathering in the Chapel again to bear witness and welcome her, and this time I would be part of the ceremony rather than the recipient.  So I pushed Harot from my thoughts and dressed in a long black sherwani, the outfit that spoke the most to me from those in the wardrobe provided for me.  When the Familiar came to summon me, I was ready.  I noticed it was the boy I had attacked before.

He seemed fully recovered, but still I lowered my eyes in shame.  "I wanted to say...about the last time...I..."  I stammered like an idiot, trying to think of an apology sufficient for nearly killing him.  But the boy just looked at me, his eyes glinting in the candlelight.  Wordlessly, he started to unbutton his shirt.

"Wait!  What are you..." I was completely taken aback, as he let the shirt fall to the floor behind him, a smile on his lips.  He could not have been older than seventeen or eighteen, just wiry muscle and bone under smooth pale skin.  There was no hair on his chest, and only the barest wisps of it in a dark line below his navel.  He took a few steps towards me and turned his head, offering his throat.  He was breathing hard, but something told me it wasn't from fear.  Despite having nearly killed him, he was offering himself to me again, and I remembered his erection the last time I fed on him.  He gets off on this, I thought, feeling attracted and repulsed at the same moment.  He likes being used.

I put my hands on his bare shoulders, feeling the warmth in his skin.  At the same time I could feel his pulse, throbbing through his body.  My fangs unsheathed themselves, my grip on him tightening.  I tried to keep Athena's warning to me in the front of my mind, and lowered my lips to his exposed throat as gently as possible.  The skin was slightly fuzzy against my lips, and when the fangs broke it, it was like biting into a peach.

The boy moaned out loud and pressed himself against me.  His arms wrapped around my torso and clung to it.  I held him just as firmly, my lips closed in a tight seal over the wound I had made, my tongue flicking against it again and again to keep the blood flowing.  Just like before, the boy's thoughts opened to me.  He had volunteered for this duty...trading with the girl who had been assigned to me since I attacked him.  I like the handsome American, he had told her, it is my joy to serve him.  And though, since my Change, I had not myself felt any stirrings of sexual desire, I could feel his desire for me flowing in the blood.  I could feel him rocking his body gently against mine, grinding his pelvis against me hip as I sucked.  I could feel the heat building in him.  Suddenly, with a sharp cry, his fingers dug into my back and I felt the orgasm that rocked through him, felt it as if I myself had just come.  Releasing my grasp I pulled away, licking the wound again to close it.  The warmth and heat of the life I stole from him surged through me, I felt superhuman, like I could punch through concrete or leap skyscrapers.

The boy took my hand and pressed it against his own cheek, kissing the fingers before releasing it.  He hurried back into his shirt and composing himself, gestured towards the door.  In the close quarters of the room, and with my sharpened senses, I could smell the semen running down his leg, and saw the stain of it on his trousers.  Neither of us said anything.  I simply followed him out of the room.

I had been, by that time, to a handful of such gatherings.  Athena had brought me with her to one gala and introduced me to Lord Aurelius, the founder of the Raven's Claw.  At another she introduced me to her own Brother in Blood, where Aurelius was in attendance again.  On both occasions Athena's actions had raised questions in my mind.  Why had she accepted me?  Why had she taken it upon herself to Sire me?  She was a Clan Ruler, a First Generation, a creature nearly a millennium old.  What had caused her to transform a brash young American who had come begging to be saved from death?  The way in which she was so careful to present me to Aurelius, and her bloodkin, only deepened my suspicions.  Was she grooming me?  If so, for what?  I was bound to her now eternally by blood, my Mother in Darkness.  And yet, she was the Queen on a chessboard where I was just a meager pawn.  I had no idea what her endgame was.

No, not a pawn.  A voice in my head whispered.  I didn't know if it was Harot's or my own.  Chess ranks Pawns and Knights and Bishops as minor pieces.  It continued.  There are only two major pieces.  The Queen and the Rook.

And then, as if she heard what I was thinking, Athena looked up at me from clear across the room.

The Familiar led me into the Chapel, and for some reason I felt a stab of embarrassment.  I am sure everyone in the room could smell the fresh sex still wet on the boy.  So what?  You fed.  It is what you have been reborn to do.  Squaring my shoulders I glanced around and greeted the crowd.  Decem was there, and presented Isabel to me, the mortal he was about to change.  Summoning my Old World vampire charm, I took her hand and kissed it, much to Athena's amusement and the amusement of most the people in the room.  I recognized others as well.  Maximilian was there, as he had been at my turning.  There were some other familiar faces as well.

As the crowd continued to gather I wandered about, listening.  I was growing used to what I know considered "vampire speech," the eerie, ultra-frequency whispers the Progeny shared when they wished to be unheard.  As there had been at the last two gatherings, there were whispers all around of the Outcasts, and growing tensions with them.  The "white queen" I had met in the Progeny Castle, I now knew, was one of these clanless  Outcasts, and like the barbarians at the gates of Rome there were an steadily increasing threat.  Now, it seemed, I had missed an actual battle.  A skirmish had broken out between my Clan and the Outcasts the night before, and Athena herself had fought...much to the shock of many present.  I didn't fully understand vampire politics yet, but I knew chess.  You don't risk the Queen without good cause.

But she kept you out of this fight, the voice whispered again.  Is she protecting you?

There were other buzzings.  Some I had also heard.  There was gossip that Lachiel, the Fallen Angel who unleashed both the vampires and the shapeshifters on the world, was preparing to unleash Slayers...humans empowered to hunt and kill us.  No one seemed certain why, but Lachiel was inscrutable and capricious.  Perhaps he liked to sow conflict.  Perhaps he only wanted the strongest of his Progeny to survive.  None knew the answer, or if the rumor was even true...but many buzzed about it nevertheless.

We gathered finally around the altar, forming a circle.  The rest...I cannot speak of.  Isabel was changed as I had been, and to repay my debt to Decem I offered my own blood to assist the change.  It was important to me to repay that debt, because as the ceremony concluded I knew it was the last I would see of him for awhile.  America was calling me back, Harrow House was calling me.  I knew the pull would only grow stronger the more I tried to resist it.

The evening drew to a close and we welcomed Isabel to the fold, and as I said my goodbyes for the night I could feel Athena's eyes watching me.  If I had been wise, I would have confided in her.  Instead, I played right into Harot's trap.

Read Part 6 Here