Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Vampire Summer ❯ Confessions ( Chapter 10 )

 

 

He must have drunk my blood, because I didn't wake up until the afternoon. I dragged myself out of bed and made myself choke down a peanut-butter sandwich and enough water to make a big soggy lump in my stomach. But it did make me feel better.

 

I couldn't think, didn't want to think. I didn't have the energy. That's what Johnny stole from me along with my blood—my energy to do anything about him. He was a sneaky vampire. Well, if I couldn't think clearly, I would just relax for the next day or two until Crystal was back. He seemed to treat me more carefully when Crystal was around.

 

I went down to the beach at about the time all the other people were going back up for dinner, which suited me just fine. I didn't care if Johnny found me there or not. I was past caring. I didn't even trust myself to go swimming. This time I might not float back up. So I watched the sunset as it turned the lake copper, and I wasn't surprised when I felt someone sit beside me on my blanket.

 

“What do you want?” I asked. “If you take any more, you just might kill me, and Crystal will be without a mother.” I kept my gaze focused on the last sliver of sun, refusing to look at him.

 

“What are you doing here?” Johnny asked.

 

“Watching the sunset. Thinking.”

 

Johnny followed my gaze. “You've been doing a lot of thinking lately. A lot of checking about me. Why?”

 

I turned to look at him in disbelief. “Why? Why do you think? You're a vampire who's slowly killing me and wants to turn my daughter into one of the undead.”

 

Johnny smiled at that. “Is that what you think?”

 

“It's what I know,” I said, turning back just as the last piece of light was swallowed up by the horizon.

 

“Why do you care who I was?” he asked. “Why are you dredging up the past?”

 

“Because I need to know what you are,” I said. “So I can fight you.”

 

Johnny's smile grew wider. “You could just ask me.”

 

“Ok, I'll play along. What are you, Johnny?”

 

He laughed at me with his eyes, and said, “I'm a vampire.”

 

“Ooh!” I stood up quickly and stalked off towards the water. He could be so infuriating!

 

Before I could wade in, he was at my side, all humor gone. “You don't want to fight me,” he said seriously. “You'll lose.”

 

I let him lead me back to the blanket, but then I turned my back on him so I wouldn't have to see his face. I didn't want to know what color his eyes were just then.

 

“Your family has been coming to this place for a long time?” Johnny asked. His voice drifted up from somewhere behind me, no longer amused but not angry either.

 

“Yeah, since I was younger than Crystal,” I said. “My grandfather built our cottage when I was just a baby.” I thought of something. “How come we never saw you before this summer?”

 

There was no answer, and I took a quick peek to see if Johnny was still behind me. He faced away, too, staring out over the dark water.

 

“What was his name?”

 

“Grandpa? Why? He's not from around here, if that's what you're thinking. None of us are.” I waited for Johnny's reply, but there was none. I sighed. “His name was Philip Summerfield,” I said.

 

“And his wife? His father? Her father?” Johnny's tone had taken on an urgent edge, as if he really needed to know these things.

 

“You're barking up the wrong tree,” I told him, but I wondered. Why was he so interested suddenly? “Does this have to do with the photo albums you saw at Aunt Beth's house? I looked at them too, and none of them looked familiar. Like I said, my family's not from around here.” I scooted around so I could see him. “Why is it so important?”

 

Johnny turned around too, so that we were facing each other in the dark. The moon wasn't high enough in the sky yet so I couldn't see him as clearly as I would have liked. I still couldn't see what color his eyes were.

 

“Their names?” he asked again, and this time there was a distinct thread of anger running through his voice.

 

“Um, I don't know. I don't have a family tree like Aunt Beth's, with all their names in a neat little row. Let me think.”

 

Johnny didn't like that answer. He came closer and his eyes were definitely black.

 

“Grandma was a Wilson. I know that much,” I said, trying not to let him scare me. “She came from the Midwest, I think. And my mother was a Garret, although that name might have been changed at Ellis Island when her parents came over here. They're from Europe somewhere.”

 

Johnny had calmed down slightly as I began to recite my ancestry. He gave me a half-grin. “You really don't know much about your own history, do you?” he said. “Oh well, let's go.”

 

“Go? Go where?” I was bewildered at his sudden change in temperament. It was as if he didn't care anymore about who my relatives were.

 

“You wanted to know what I was,” he murmured. “Would you settle for who I was?” He didn't give me time to answer, but pulled me to my feet and up the hill, leaving behind the beach blanket and all my things.

 

I thought we would fly through the air or at least run incredibly fast like all the TV vampires, but Johnny pulled me behind him at a quick but steady pace until we reached the cottage, then he held out his hand for my car keys.

 

“You can drive?” I asked.

 

“Yes. Now get in.”

 

I got in and buckled my seatbelt. I doubted he had his driver's license. We drove to the cemetery, big surprise. Another night of scrabbling in the dark among the tombstones. He led me straight to Jonathan Price's grave. If I hadn't been to this exact grave so often, I would have had no idea where we were, because we had not brought a flashlight. Johnny had thoughtfully turned off my headlights when we arrived so they wouldn't drain the battery, and then he had pocketed the keys. I wasn't going anywhere fast tonight.

 

“Home sweet home?” I asked, just to get a reaction out of him. He smiled, and it was a wistful sort of smile.

 

“I had a good life here. People accepted me. She accepted me.”

 

“You mean Elizabeth Smythe?” I asked. Johnny nodded.

 

“Even after I told her my secret, she still swore she loved me and wanted to be with me forever.”

 

“But I don't understand. It said you drowned. If you're `alive' now, why did you let Elizabeth think you had drowned?”

 

Johnny smiled grimly, and the tips of his teeth glinted as the moon rose above us. “It must have looked that way to her,” he said. “Even though she said she understood, she really didn't. She didn't know what I was.” He looked at me with clear brown eyes. “By the time she understood, it was too late. I couldn't let her go back to the way things were.”

 

My eyes widened. “So you killed her?”

 

“I didn't mean to,” Johnny said. “I tried—with her consent—to bring her to me, but in the end I failed and she died. She died in my arms in almost the exact spot where you stood earlier this evening, at the edge of the water in the moonlight.”

 

“What does all that mean?” I asked. “'Bring her to you,' `your secret?'”

 

“Ah,” Johnny cautioned. “Tonight is not about what, it's about who. It's about Jonathan Price, who loved Elizabeth Smythe so much that he tried to do the impossible and it killed her, and in so doing, it killed a part of him, too.”

 

“Are you trying to tell me you have feelings?” I asked skeptically, although I was already beginning to believe it.

 

“After she died, I didn't want to have anything to do with people for a long time, but I have my needs. I let them believe Jonathan Price rested beneath this grave.”

 

“He doesn't?” I asked. Would Johnny tell me if he did still rest here? I doubted it.

 

Johnny laughed. “Do you really believe that?”

 

I shrugged. Maybe. “There were a lot of deaths in the years following Elizabeth's passing,” I said. “Your doing?”

 

Johnny shrugged this time. Then he frowned at me. “Just how much information have you managed to gather about me?” he asked. “Elizabeth saw me `drown.' She forgot everything I had told her about me and screamed and screamed until someone pulled my dead body out of the water. They buried me, in this hole, and forgot about Jonathan Price, the boy who had been going to marry their dear Elizabeth.

 

“I came to see Elizabeth the night after my burial, and at that moment she finally believed. She begged me to take her blood, and it was sweet.”

 

I shuddered.

 

“I left her that night, weaker, perhaps, than was wise, but I couldn't help myself.” He glanced at me and noticed my appalled stare. “I've gotten better,” he said with a wry smile.

 

“I tried not to take too much, but she searched for me night after night. She came to me at the lake, and I would leave her for her family to find the next morning. I was so very careful not to kill her too soon.”

 

“Were you trying to turn her?” I asked, using the only terminology I knew, from vampire books and movies and television shows. Johnny must have seen some of those very same shows, because he gave a short snort of laughter.

 

“I was trying to keep her,” he said. “I loved her.”

 

“But she died in the end,” I said softly. “You never meant for that to happen, did you?”

 

“No,” whispered Johnny. Abruptly he pulled my arm. “Come on.”

 

We walked through the cemetery until we came to another set of graves. I squinted in the dim moonlight. It said `Elizabeth Smythe Crew' 1800 - 1823. Next to it was her husband, Charles Crew. I didn't get the connection.

 

“She is a descendant of Daniel Smythe, Elizabeth's younger brother,” Johnny explained. “She married a Crew. I had to know. When she was a young child, I tasted, just a taste, nothing more. Her blood was the same. So Jonathan Price, a different Jonathan Price to these people, made himself useful in the community and watched her grow to womanhood. But she chose him, Charles Crew. I let her keep her choice, and I stayed away from her so I wouldn't be tempted.”

 

This Elizabeth had been born around the time of the second Jonathan Price, the one mentioned in the hunting journal. “So what, you went around secretly sampling blood from descendants of the Smythe family for all these years hoping to find a repeat of whatever it was in the first Elizabeth's blood?”

 

“Something like that,” Johnny admitted.

 

“What did you do with the ones who didn't have the right blood? Kill them?”

 

“Not always,” Johnny said. “And not all at once. I took from them gradually so it wouldn't be noticed. Only the weakest succumbed.”

 

“Except when you lost your temper,” I theorized, thinking of the bouts every few decades of multiple deaths from unexplained causes. “Were there more, besides the first Elizabeth and this one? And Emily?” And Crystal, I thought to myself, although I didn't say it out loud.

 

“You don't understand,” Johnny said. “There were others, very few. But of those few, none ever accepted me except my Elizabeth, and then little Emily, and now Crystal.”

 

“Why is that so important?” I asked, angry that he had brought Crystal up. “Why does it matter if they accept you? Will that make the transition take?”

 

Johnny's eyes flashed hurt for a brief instant. “No, that's not it,” he murmured. “They liked me,” he said.

 

They liked him plus they had the right blood combination. Johnny was looking for a soul mate.

 

He wandered down a few rows until he came to Emily's grave. “She's the grand-daughter of that Elizabeth,” he said. “She had the blood.”

 

“So it doesn't matter how diluted it is?” I asked.

 

“No, the blood is the blood. But that's a `what,' not a `who,'” Johnny reminded me. “By the time Emily was born, the townspeople had forgotten the other Jonathan Price. Anybody who might have been alive to remember him was gone. I take care of my loose ends. So `Jonathan' was free to return. I didn't expect to find friendship with Jonny, Emily's older brother. We were of an age, at least in appearance, so naturally it was expected that we do things together. And it was a perfect excuse for me to be near Emily as she grew.

 

“We talked, as boys did back then, of the war and how we wanted to sneak off and join the fighting. Jonny's father wouldn't let the boys go. He needed them both on the farm. It's not surprising that Danny ended up running off to war in the end. I was never as close to Danny as I was to Jonny.”

 

“How did Emily know you were a vampire?” I asked. “She did know, didn't she?”

 

“She knew, in the same way your Crystal knows. It's in the blood. That other Elizabeth, her grandmother, she knew too but she wouldn't believe it. She died giving birth to Emily's father, you know.”

 

The way he said it. “Did you--?” I asked. But Johnny didn't answer.

 

“What happened?”

 

“I would have waited until she was at least fourteen or fifteen, old enough to make her own decision before I tried to bring her to me. But I never got the chance. She fell in the well during the day when I was not around. She was dead before I knew it, and with her, another piece of me died.”

 

“That was when you lost it?”

 

Johnny nodded. “I `lost it,' as you said, when both Jonny and Emily died. My only true friends, and one of them was my life.”

 

“But not the other,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice. Jonny Crew did not have the right kind of blood.

 

Johnny picked up on my emotions anyway. “I loved them both,” he said to me. “Jonny didn't know about me.”

 

“And if he had? Would you have eventually killed him, even though he was your friend?”

 

“Probably. Eventually,” Johnny replied, matter-of-factly. “Ready to go?”

 

Our excursion was over. Johnny led the way through the graves back to the car. As we sat inside it, and he fiddled for a moment with the radio, I asked, “Where does Crystal fit in with all this? How can she have the right kind of blood if she's not a descendant of the Smythes? And where did they get it from in the first place? What, exactly, is this blood? And all that aside, you've never successfully turned anyone yet, have you? What makes you think you can turn my daughter?”

 

Johnny backed out into the road. “All those questions are `what's.' Tonight was about who. Who is Crystal? If you are half as diligent in finding that answer as you were in finding out about Jonathan Price, you might just find out where she fits in with all this.”

 

He was being very forthcoming tonight. I might as well try for one more question. “Are you lonely, Johnny?” I asked.

 

He barked a laugh. “Always.”