Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Crystal ❯ Chapter 22

Crystal, Chapter 22:

 

 

“I want to go to Loch Ness.”

 

Johnny gave me a baffled look. “Why?” he asked.

 

True to my word, I had telephoned my father, and pretty much as I expected, he flat-out refused to come. `Can't you ask your mother?' he said. When I told him I wanted him to meet someone, he responded, `If he wants to meet me, he can come here.' I couldn't say I was disappointed, because I had expected it.

 

“Loch Ness is famous,” I told Johnny. And it was a loch. Had no vampires ever inhabited that notorious lake? “You've never heard of the Loch Ness monster?”

 

Johnny shrugged. “No, should I have?”

 

Uncle Robert came to my rescue. “The Loch Ness monster didn't make headlines until the nineteen-thirties,” he said. “So Johnny wouldn't have heard about it.”

 

“Oh.” Here I was in Scotland and I wasn't even going to get to see Loch Ness.

 

“Would you like to go?” Johnny spoke quietly.

 

It had been a strange couple of days since he and Lachlan and I had gone `down the road.' Not only did my father turn me down—which, in a way, relieved me. I really didn't want him exposed to all things vampire, even if it meant solving the mystery of my bloodline. He could hardly handle having a teenage daughter. I could imagine how he'd react to having a vampire daughter. At least my mother had had years to get used to it.

 

But also, none of the other blood-drinkers had yet to show up. Whether that meant there weren't any others, or that they chose not to leave the safety of their lochs, remained to be seen. I knew Johnny was disappointed. Maybe this trip was what we both needed.

 

“You mean it?” My face brightened. “You'll take me?”

 

Johnny grinned. “Lachlan can wait for the others.” He stretched and yawned. “I'll borrow Paul's car.”

 

Paul, when we told him our plan, wanted to come along, but Johnny shot him down. “I don't want you—just your car.”

 

“But what if Crystal needs me? My blood,” he added, when Johnny scowled.

 

“She has me,” Johnny replied, staring hard at Paul, and Paul backed off. He handed Johnny his keys, as if he had an actual choice. Johnny, whatever else he might seem to be, was still a vampire, and Paul knew better than to cross him.

 

I was excited. Finally, this trip felt like a vacation. We followed the maps Paul had grudgingly given Johnny, taking the main highway as soon as we got out of the hills. There was one hairy moment, at a roundabout, where Johnny started to go the wrong way, but otherwise our trip was uneventful.

 

The main road ran right along Loch Ness. In my mind I had pictured deserted country lanes and epic scenery. “Can we get off the highway?” I asked plaintively. We had driven through the night, to save Johnny from the worst of the sun, but unfortunately, that cut down on a lot of our sightseeing also.

 

Johnny obliged, turning down a side road at random, until we were just driving, trying to get lost. It was nice, but not what I had expected. We found a small restaurant that, miraculously, was open at the crack of dawn for the local fishermen. It was near enough to the loch that we could sit and enjoy a quiet breakfast while gazing at the still waters. I ate, at Johnny's insistence, while he sipped at a cup of tea. We were both hungry for blood. Maybe this road trip hadn't been such a good idea after all.

 

After breakfast, we walked to the shore and I looked out over the still, black water. “Do you believe there's really a monster in this lake?” I asked, linking my arm through Johnny's.

 

His eyes twinkled as he looked down on me. “You mean like me?”

 

I had considered it. What if the Loch Ness monster was some exaggerated version of what Johnny was? Could it be possible? I glanced up at Johnny, to see him still grinning at me. He didn't think so, obviously.

 

We got in the car and drove a little further. Once we were off the main road, a more scenic road looped around the south side of the lake. In the early morning sun, the view was everything I had hoped for. We stopped at a tiny bed and breakfast, deliberately staying away from any of the obviously touristy spots. The lady who answered the door peered at us over the top of her glasses.

 

“Aren't you a wee bit young to be traveling alone?” she said, holding the door partially closed against us. I looked with dismay at Johnny. It hadn't occurred to me that we would be considered too young to rent a room.

 

He shook his head and smiled. “Not too young,” he answered, and in a lightning move, grabbed our hostess by the neck and shoved her back inside the house. I followed, hoping no one else was around at this hour. The woman didn't have time to be afraid, and Johnny and I enjoyed our second breakfast a whole lot more than our first. We duly signed the register we found inside her tidy kitchen, and left the owner sleeping peacefully with her head down on top of it.

 

Johnny walked me to the top of the stairs, where I used the key I had found next to the book to enter a prettily made up room. The bath was at the end of the hallway, but that was all right. As far as we could tell, we were the only guests on the top floor. There were some people downstairs, but they were still sleeping, according to Johnny.

 

“I don't want you to go,” I whispered, putting my arms around his waist. I yawned. We had been up all night.

 

Johnny kissed the top of my head. “I'll be back in a few hours,” he promised. “Go to sleep.”

 

He intended to sleep under the waters of Loch Ness. I had mixed feelings about that. What if there really was a monster? I didn't truly believe it, but what if there was? I did know, from the brochures I had taken from the restaurant earlier this morning, that people combed the loch with cameras and diving equipment. What if they stumbled across Johnny as he rested instead of across the monster?

 

“Are you sure you don't just want to stay here with me?” I asked.

 

He chuckled. “I won't get eaten,” he said. “If I find the monster, I'll have him for a snack, all right?”

 

I smiled. “All right,” I said, not entirely placated. It was my stupid idea to come here in the first place. If anything happened to Johnny because of me, I'd never forgive myself. “Tonight, let's go to your loch,” I said impulsively.

 

Johnny's smile faded. He pulled me close and hugged me again. “I've only ever been there on foot,” he confessed. “I don't know how to get there by car.”

 

“But you know where it is.”

 

“I know.” He sounded so serious. Years ago, Uncle Robert had researched his ancestors and found the village where they had originated, Johnny's village, as it turned out. But the village had been decimated in the mid 1600's, when Johnny was nearly killed there. Many of the family who had lived there were killed, and the others moved away, some to America. That was all ancient history, but at this moment, looking at Johnny's face, it was still fresh in his mind. Uncle Robert told us that people had settled in that spot again, but they weren't the same people, and it wasn't the same village.

 

“The loch is the same,” I said with surety. I had seen it; I had drawn it.

 

Johnny kissed me tenderly and let me go. “Then I'll take you there,” he said. He left by the window, and I went to bed with the door locked, and hoped the lady downstairs wouldn't remember I was here.

 

She didn't. Johnny moved the car before he went under the water, and I slept until mid-afternoon. When I woke up, Johnny was beside me. “No monsters?” I whispered, touching his still-damp hair.

 

He smiled in the darkness. “No monsters except me,” he replied, stilling what I would have said with a kiss. Johnny wasn't a monster.

 

We snuck out of the bed and breakfast without having any more snacks and picked up the car about a mile down the road. It was still light enough that I could see Johnny's skin turn red. He was a stubborn vampire. He always pushed his limits with the sun. At one time, all his brothers and sisters had done the same. They braved the sun for the promise of blood and battle. But now, Lachlan was appalled that Johnny rose before dusk and only went under the lake when the pain grew too great. He learned quickly, however, much to Rose's consternation, and sometimes rose in the late afternoon to sit and take tea with her and Uncle Robert.

 

“Which way?” I asked, as we settled back in the card. Johnny had a cap pulled down low over his face, and I had the visor down and my sunglasses on, even though it wasn't particularly sunny anymore, and we started out.

 

Johnny swore in frustration after about an hour, and we pulled over so he could study the maps Paul had given us. “Stupid roads,” he growled. “They don't go where I want them to.”

 

“Can't we just park somewhere and take the way you went with Lachlan?” I asked, and he frowned at me.

 

“You can't,” he said.

 

I hadn't thought of that. Johnny could travel fast, I knew that. He'd taken me with him before. But if we had to go any distance, he would always drive. When he went with Lachlan, when he left me behind, they had not used a car. It hadn't occurred to me that he had left me behind because he couldn't, couldn't bring me with him. “Let me see,” I said, taking the map.

 

A map is like a drawing. It spoke to me. I pointed my finger to a spot to the north and east of us. “Here?” I asked.

 

“Johnny leaned over me, studying the dots and squiggles. He nodded. “Near there.”

 

“Okay, then we need to take this road, see, and then switch off right here.” I took a pen from the glove box and highlighted our route. “That should get us close enough. Then we can find a place to park and go the rest of the way on foot.”

 

We started out again, and this time, we found the right roads. Johnny relaxed as darkness settled over the landscape. “This place looks familiar,” he said. “I remember it.” With that, we parked and walked up a dark, dark road with no street lights. I still couldn't see any lake or any village, for that matter. Johnny must have been remembering the contour of the land itself.

 

He ran through the dark night, pulling me along with him faster than I thought possible. There was a town up ahead. The lights blinded me. I felt hunger build inside my chest. But that wasn't why we were here. Johnny's old village lay beyond this new town, by the shores of a forgotten loch. There were houses here, scattered on the hillside. Farmer's houses, with pastures for cattle. They smelled even stronger than the sheep. I wrinkled my nose.

 

We stopped at a place I recognized from my drawings. Johnny's loch. It gleamed in the moonlight, lonely and silent, forgotten as were the generations of dead who lay buried in the old cemetery on the top of the hill. Johnny brought me to the cemetery, which was much, much older than our cemetery in Lockwood. “My mother lies here,” he said softly. “All my friends who grew up with me before I---changed. It's been too long.” He stared across the scattered grave-markers. The ones from his youth were long since disintegrated. It had been a thousand years and more since he walked the earth as a human child. Someday, I would be standing in a graveyard, and it would be my parents, my friends who slept before me. I shuddered. Sometimes the reality of what I contemplated scared me.

 

I reached up and kissed Johnny's cheek. “I'm here,” I reminded him. I would never leave him. A thousand years from now I would still be by his side. I took his hand and led him down to the banks of his loch. This water had changed my Johnny, sustained him through time, preserved him so that I could one day meet him. For that alone, it was special to me, too. “Will you sleep here tonight?” I asked.

 

Johnny hesitated. He wanted to. “What about you?”

 

“I'll wait for you right here,” I told him. The night was warm, for Scotland. And I no longer felt the bite of cold like I used to. I'd be fine right here. “Well, maybe up there,” I said, pointing up the hill to where a little rock overhang made a natural cave on the side of the hill. It would shade me from the worst of the sun until Johnny awoke. “I'll be fine. I want to do this.” I produced my sketchpad from my bag. “I want to draw you in this place.”

 

He kissed me, reassured. There were no people nearby. I should be safe enough. “I'll come back for you before you awake,” he said, walking with me up the hill. He took off his shirt and left it for me to use as a pillow. I stopped him. Why should he ruin the rest of his clothes? I tugged at him until he took them all off, and then I gazed at him appreciatively. He was beautiful.

 

“Go,” I urged him. I got to watch him walk away. Quickly, I grabbed my charcoals and started sketching as the sky lightened around me.