Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Vampire Summer ❯ Hunter and Hunted ( Chapter 22 )

 

 

Johnny painted a picture both desperate and sad.

 

He had thought he was safe enough in this time and so he let his guard down with us. Crystal and I were both his one hope at salvation and his bane. Because we knew what he was, we endangered him, but he couldn't leave and lose his one chance at happiness.

 

His existence had always been in the shadows. He hid from the people of Lockwood, and yet he was drawn to them, attracted by their blood which gave him ecstacy and despair. In every generation there were some Smythe descendants who carried the blood, and nearly all of them had a healthy fear of what Johnny really was. For the most part, even those who knew enough to fear him still did not truly know what it was about him that they feared. As for the others, the ones like me who did not carry the blood, they knew nothing at all about his existence. I was the only one, the only outsider, no matter that I was a Smythe descendant too, who knew he was a vampire. We, the ones like me, were in the majority, and even though we did not have the right kind of blood that would make us irresistably attractive to him, we still carried the seed of it deep within our genes, and in the right combinations, could give birth to another with the blood he craved. Like Crystal.

 

Even rarer were those who carried the blood and yet did not fear Johnny and were instead attracted to him. There were only a handful over the centuries: the first Elizabeth, then Emily's grandmother Elizabeth Crew, Emily herself, poor child who reminded me so much of my Crystal, then Amelia who was my secret grandmother, and of course, Crystal. Five in three hundred years. Johnny had never yet succeeded in making any of them into what he was.

 

Perhaps that was why he kept returning to this place. He must have been so desperately lonely. But maybe it was more than that. I loved the lake, too, I always had, and Grandpa, who had moved far far away when he was a young man to escape scandal, had come back in later years and built this cottage by the lake for his family. Maybe none of us could escape it completely, this pull of the blood that linked our family through the centuries. Johnny couldn't.

 

Johnny wasn't always the only vampire. He had come here on a ship too, all those long years ago, with another vampire. Johnny wouldn't say much more than that, whether he had been a vampire all along or whether this other vampire had made him into what he was. In any case, he hadn't been born here, or in Rhode Island either. He just landed there, a parasite among the Smythes and the other Scottish families who had escaped religious persecution in their own country to settle here in the New World. He didn't know about the blood, then. His actions were guided by his mentor, who gave Johnny his name and called him son.

 

It wasn't until things got rough in this new world that Johnny's troubles began. There were wars with the local Indian tribes, and disease, and death. For vampires, who lived on the fringes of human society, it became dangerous to become too closely associated with people who ended up dying under mysterious circumstances. In 1691, John Price and his son Jonathan traveled to another outpost where some of the Smythes had settled to build a new life for themselves by the shores of a deep natural lake. It was there that Johnny met and fell in love with Elizabeth Smythe, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. Johnny and his vampire father got into a huge argument over the matter. The older vampire wanted Johnny to leave immediately with him, go back to Rhode Island, but Johnny wanted to stay. When the vampire left, Johnny remained behind, not realizing that the attraction he and Elizabeth felt for each other was because of Elizabeth's potent blood.

 

Without his companion's guidance, Johnny made one disastrous mistake after the other. He proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted in a very public manner. As a vampire, he could never marry her and live as a normal human being. In addition, he could barely resist the call of her blood, and that led to his second mistake: he confessed what he was to Elizabeth. Being young and in love, she thought she understood, and yet, when she found him lying submerged under the dark waters of the lake, she believed he had died. In saving him, she damned herself, for he came back from being buried alive and revealed the true horror of what he was to his bereaved Elizabeth. God help her, she believed then, and perhaps because of the call of the blood, she wanted to be with him forever.

 

Johnny didn't know what he was doing. He just knew he wanted to keep her. Every night he took her blood, over and over, until there came a day when she just never woke up. Johnny felt his world fall apart that night. If he had just left after Elizabeth died, he might have gone back to Rhode Island and reunited with his vampire companion, but he was stubborn, and would not go back to one who had literally turned his back on him. In his sorrow and anger, he disdained being careful and took what he wanted from the other settlers in Lockwood Village. Many died in the following years, including two of Elizabeth's younger sisters, her parents, and several cousins. It was then that Johnny discovered the lure of the blood. Some of the townspeople had blood that reminded him of Elizabeth, but when he openly approached these people, they screamed in terror, perhaps remembering that Jonathan Price had already died, or possibly because deep down they recognized his threat to them even if they didn't know he was a vampire. So he had to kill them, and their blood was so much more than ordinary blood to him.

 

With every kill he exposed himself, yet he couldn't drag himself away. He had tasted, and he was hooked. Finally in desperation, he journeyed back to the town in Rhode Island where his vampire friend still lived in odd harmony with the remnants of Smythes that had remained there. The old vampire turned him away, loath to allow the younger vampire to ruin what he had built up with these people. Johnny returned to Lockwood, having no place else to go, and let the soothing waters of the lake comfort him until the townspeople forgot all about Jonathan Price.

 

“Wait,” I interrupted Johnny. “You mean this wasn't the first time you recuperated under water?”

 

Johnny gave me an amused glance. “Who's telling this story?” he asked, and I shut up. The sky was lightening by the minute, and I still could hardly believe that Johnny was telling me all this. “It doesn't matter. I'm alive, and he is not,” he added, but there was a touch of regret in his tone.

 

“What happened to him?”

 

He shot me an annoyed look, but he continued with his story.

 

It seems that loneliness is a plague that affects all of us, even seasoned vampires who lose their apprentices to foolishness. John Price tried to make another like himself, not once, but several times. There were two distinct problems with that: one, he tried to bring over people who did not have the right kind of blood, and that ended up causing all kinds of problems on its own. It wasn't that he was completely unsuccessful. If the people he tried to convert had just died, there wouldn't have been the outcry that followed and `vampire' wouldn't have become a familiar name on every superstitious farmer's lips. Two, his actions brought unwelcome attention upon himself, and ultimately led to his downfall.

 

Logically, the people best suited to hunt these `vampires' were the ones who had the blood themselves. They were able to `sense' when someone wasn't natural. It started, of course, in Rhode Island, due to John Price's rather splashy depradations.

 

The lonely vampire infused some of his victims with his own blood, only to have them die anyway. A few, hardier than the rest, perhaps, actually rose from the grave as revenants. It always ended badly. They preyed on their own families and were eventually put down by the very people who had once loved them. This was what gave rise to the stories about vampire resurrections and the creative ways to destroy them that I had read about in those books at the little library.

 

“How did you know about this?” I asked Johnny.

 

“I went back to help him clean up his messes,” Johnny replied. “By that time, I no longer wanted to have anything to do with him, but I couldn't let him destroy himself like that. It's when I found out we weren't the only ones who knew about vampires. Others stepped in to wipe out the revenants or guide the townsfolk in how to do it. I stumbled across one of these vampire hunters who had actually found John and staked him out in a field in the sun. I think I surprised him when I appeared. He didn't expect another one of us to attack him in broad daylight. I killed him, naturally, and burned his body in place of John's. That's how I knew these hunters were part of the family. I could taste it in his blood.”

 

Johnny went back to Lockwood after that incident, glad to avoid the vampire hunters who could expose him for what he was. Johnny just couldn't leave the blood alone, however, and over the years he put on several identities, always variations of Jonathan Price, and insinuated himself into the town of Lockwood much as his predecessor had tried to do in Rhode Island.

 

The first time he encountered one of the hunters in Lockwood was in the early 1800's. He had become more active within the town, having had a protracted rest for the past twenty years. He was really searching for more of `the blood,' someone who could know him for what he was and not be afraid. One of the Rhode Island Smythes had come to town to marry a local girl, and in the course of his visit, he met `Jonathan Price' and reacted as all who carried the blood did—he recognized Johnny. Instead of reacting with fear or distaste, this Rhode Island Smythe had stalked Johnny purposely. He also brought up the dreaded word `vampire' for the first time in Lockwood, and those with strains of the blood, who had always been uneasy in Johnny's company, believed. It was a witch hunt of the worst kind for Johnny, and he ended up leaving town to escape all the attention.

 

“Where did you go?” I asked.

 

“If you don't know, I'm not telling you,” Johnny said.

 

From that point on, Johnny became extremely careful about letting the Rhode Island branch of the family know of his existence. He returned to Lockwood many times over the years but he remained vigilant for the one breed of vampire hunters who could actually hurt him. John Price had suffered an ignominious end in Rhode Island at the hands of the hunters. He had been living in a town with some descendants of the Smythe blood and had his own house on the outskirts of town, as if he were one of the townspeople. The hunters got him one day while he slept in his big four-poster bed, complacent in his assumed identity. As before, they dragged him out to his own backyard and staked him in the full light of the sun. Only this time, Johnny wasn't there to save him.

 

“What happened? Did he go up in a puff of smoke?”

 

Johnny frowned at me. “He died. It was an awful way to go, slow and painful.”

 

So no puff of smoke, apparently. “How did you know Kenny was one of these Rhode Island Smythes?” I asked.

 

“You mean, aside from the fact that he tried to kill me?” Johnny was still in a good mood, still answering my questions. I decided to throw him a bone.

 

“Do these hunters run in families?” I asked, and right away Johnny's placid gaze sharpened. I dug through the pictures until I found the one of Amelia, Lizzy and George in front of Lizzy's house. “Could this be one of them?” George was Kenny's grandfather, so it stood to reason that he had probably been a hunter also.

 

Johnny turned the photo over and read the inscription on the back. “Yes,” he answered, handing back the picture.

 

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

 

“I don't know him,” Johnny replied.

 

Johnny made it his business to know everyone in Lockwood during his sojourns there. He would know if a stranger showed up in his town. He let out his breath in a protracted sigh. “They must have called him in when Amelia almost died.”

 

Seeing photos of himself was a big shock. After Amelia left Lockwood, Johnny had disappeared in case she had revealed his existence to others. He had no idea she had shared her knowledge of him with her cousin Elizabeth Crew, nor that she had conscripted Elizabeth to take clandestine photos of the two of them together. Amelia probably believed it was all innocent at the time. According to Johnny's own admission, she hadn't truly understood what it meant when he said he was a vampire until the night he took her blood and nearly killed her.

 

He had taken Betty's address from my purse and gone to search her house the night he was captured. Betty had the blood, so she had recognized something in Johnny that ordinary people did not. At the time, Johnny had thought that was all it was. In the past, Johnny would weed out the ones who had the blood and either kill them or make them forget before they had a chance to mention their reactions when they encountered him to the wrong people. The wrong people being, he finally told me, the relatives from Rhode Island.

 

If only he had stayed away, if only I hadn't started investigating the mystery of Jonathan Price, if only he hadn't fallen so hard for Amelia that he lost all caution, he might have been saved.

 

“Did it hurt?” I asked softly, gesturing towards the still-visible faint black marks that I could see on his arms and neck. I pictured him, suffering and alone, while hordes of relatives who had the blood stabbed him over and over.

 

Johnny looked straight ahead, seeing not the dining room table but his past as it replayed across his mind. “They knew I was coming,” he said. “I was as stupid as old Jack when I walked into that house.”

 

Betty had been waiting for him, knowing he would have no choice but to come to her after he saw those pictures. She counted on him drinking her blood, the potent blood that marked her as one of those who had a connection to him.

 

“I planned to kill her,” Johnny admitted, ignoring my horrified gasp. Betty was the bad guy here, in his mind. “After I had found out everything she knew about me and Amelia. But the blood,” He looked at me, trying to find words to explain, failing. “The blood is so . . .” He gave up. “I let down my guard, and they had me. I was trussed up like a baby and hauled outside to the field behind the house and staked out to wait for morning. I guess they weren't taking any chances, because when I was on the ground, they stabbed me and watched the blood run out.” He smiled bitterly, while my stomach churned with the horror of it all. How could they be so cruel?

 

The sun had beat down mercilessly on Johnny, and he burned. At some point, his tormentors left him there to die. But they hadn't counted on the potency of Betty's blood. Johnny had freed himself with a few good wrenches of his wrists; even burned and depleted of blood as he was, he still had an amazing will to live. He was weak, and he knew he would die unless he could stop the damage and conserve what little blood he still had. Vampires live on borrowed blood. It doesn't last forever, which is why they always need to seek out more to sustain their lives. Crystal was right to push me away from him, because he would have killed me in his moment of dire need. But the waters of the lake did the trick, just like they had done in the past, I now knew. Johnny healed, and his attackers were none the wiser.

 

“How did you get from Betty's backyard to the place where Crystal and I found you?” I asked. It had been quite a distance away from Betty's place. “How did Crystal know where to find you?”

 

Johnny smiled wearily. The sun was peeking through the living room window. “I started a fire in the spot where they had tied me out to die. It burned out quickly, but not before it left a pile of ashes where my blood had soaked into the earth. I figured they would think I was too old to leave any remains. Then I got as far away as fast as I could.”

 

Which was not very far or fast. He had collapsed in a field only a few miles north of Betty's house. “And Crystal?” I reminded him.

 

“She knew I was in trouble somehow. She came. You came. You saved me. That's why I felt I owed you this story. We're done now.”

 

There was no changing his mind once Johnny had made it up. I yawned. We had stayed awake all night. “You'd better go,” I said as I got up.

 

He pulled me back down next to him on the couch. “In a minute. I have to say good-bye to Crystal.” His eyes caught mine and they were black. “Go to sleep, Lisa.”

 

I fell under his spell, or whatever it was he did that made me black out. I wondered what my blood tasted like—bland, nourishing but nothing more? I wanted to ask him why he bothered, but I was drowning and after a while it didn't seem to matter anymore.