Page 134 of Life and Death

I looked away from the cross to stare at her.

“Why do you have this here?”

“Nostalgia. It belonged to Carine’s father.”

“He collected antiques?”

“No. He carved this himself. It hung on the wall above the pulpit in the vicarage where he preached.”

I turned back to stare at the cross while I did the mental math. The cross was over three hundred and seventy years old. The silence stretched on as I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of so many years.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“How old is Carine?” I asked quietly, still staring up.

“She just celebrated her three hundred and sixty-second birthday,” Edythe said. She watched my expression carefully as she continued, and I tried to pull it together. “Carine was born in London in the sixteen-forties, she believes. Time wasn’t marked as accurately then, for the common people anyway. It was just before Cromwell’s rule, though.”

The name pulled up a few disjointed facts in my head, from a World History class I’d had last year. I should have paid more attention.

“She was the only daughter of an Anglican pastor. Her mother died in childbirth. Her father was . . . a hard man. Driven. He believed very strongly in the reality of evil. He led hunts for witches, werewolves . . . and vampires.”

It was strange how the word shifted things, made the story sound less like a history lesson.

“They burned a lot of innocent people—of course, the real creatures that he sought were not so easy to catch.

“Carine did what she could to protect those innocents. She was always a believer in the scientific method, and she tried to convince her father to look past superstition to true evidence. He discouraged her involvement. He did love her, and those who defended monsters were often lumped in with them.

“Her father was persistent . . . and obsessive. Against the odds, he tracked some evidence of real monsters. Carine begged him to be careful, and he listened, to an extent. Rather than charge in blindly, he waited and watched for a long time. He spied on a coven of true vampires who lived in the city sewers, only coming out by night to hunt. In those days, when monsters were not just myths and legends, that was the way many lived.

“His people gathered their pitchforks and torches, of course”—she laughed darkly—“and waited where the pastor had seen the monsters exit into the street. There were two access points. The pastor and a few of his men poured a vat of burning pitch into one, while the others waited beside the second for the monsters to emerge.”

I realized I was holding my breath again, and made myself exhale.

“Nothing happened. They waited a long time, and then left disappointed. The pastor was angry—there must have been other exits, and the vampires had obviously fled in fear. Of course, the men with their crude spears and axes weren’t any kind of danger to a vampire, but he didn’t know that. Now that they were warned, how would he ever find his monsters again?”

Her voice got lower. “It wasn’t hard. He must have annoyed them. Vampires can’t afford notoriety, or these probably would have simply massacred the entire mob. Instead, one of them followed him home.

“Carine remembers the night clearly—for a human memory. It was the kind of thing that would stick in your mind. Her father came home very late, or rather very early. Carine had waited up, worried. He was furious, ranting and raving about his loss. Carine tried to calm him, but he ignored her. And then there was a man in the middle of their small room.

“Carine says he was ragged, dressed like a beggar, but his face was beautiful and he spoke in Latin. Because of her father’s vocation and her own curiosity, Carine was unusually educated for a woman in those days—she understood what the man said. He told her father that he was a fool and he would pay for the damage he had caused. The preacher threw himself in front of his daughter to protect her. . . .

“I often wonder about that moment. If he hadn’t revealed what he loved most, would all our stories have changed?”

She was thoughtful for a few seconds, and then she continued. “The vampire smiled. He told the preacher, ‘Go to your hell knowing this—that what you love will become all that you hate.’

“He tossed the preacher to the side and grabbed Carine—”

She’d seemed lost in the story, but now she stopped short. Her eyes came back to the present, and she looked at me like she’d said something wrong. Or maybe she thought she’d upset me.

“What happened?” I whispered.

When she spoke, it was like she was choosing each word carefully. “He made sure that the preacher knew what would happen to Carine, and then he killed the preacher very slowly while Carine watched, writhing in pain and horror.”

I recoiled. She nodded in sympathy.

“The vampire left. Carine knew her fate if someone found her in this condition. Anything infected by the monster would have to be destroyed. She acted instinctively to save her own life. Despite the pain she was in, she crawled into the cellar and buried herself in a pile of rotting potatoes for three days. It’s a miracle she was able to keep silent, to stay undiscovered.

“It was over then, and she realized what she had become.”