Jasper Kent - Thirteen Years Later

Aleksei turned to face his son. His body appeared to straighten and grow a little taller, reminding Dmitry of the father of his youth. He raised his hand and held it to his son’s cheek. His lips parted as if about to speak and he seemed to look beyond Dmitry into another world.

But he said nothing. His hand dropped to his side and he walked briskly away. Dmitry trotted to catch him up, but Aleksei was walking at a phenomenal pace. Dmitry almost had to run to keep up with him.

‘Papa, tell me!’ he insisted, but to no avail. Aleksei said nothing more on the matter that night.

The Clashing Rocks let R zbunarea pass through them unmolested. It was to be expected. Those rocks had not slammed together for millennia, not since Jason had, imitating Noah, let a dove fly between them in advance of his own passage, leaving the channel in future open to all. The passenger wondered if the gods of Greece might have resurrected the custom, just for this one occasion, had they known that he was passing between the rocks that night. Perhaps they would have let him pass anyway – those ancient gods had always tended to be less… judgemental than their upstart counterparts. Anyway, the gods of Greece were dead, like all gods, and were not amongst those lucky enough for death to be inseparable from rebirth. It was with the gods who could achieve that feat that he felt most kinship, with all the hatred that kinship implied.

Soon the Bosphorus was just a memory, and the ship sailed on into the open waters of the Black Sea. He had not crossed these waters in over a decade, and then his journey had been much more direct. But even he had to bow to affairs of state, he whose own land had been long ago taken from him. That would change soon. Just a few more days’ sailing.

Aleksei lay on his back, his mind in turmoil. He felt the warmth of Domnikiia’s hand on his chest, but she was not awake. The realization had come to him even as Kyesha’s right hand had descended on to his left. The action itself had taken him back fifteen years, to that gaol in Silistria. The Turks had captured seven of them. All appeared to be local men, but they knew that one of them was a Russian spy. Aleksei had been in no mood to reveal that he was that one, but his captors had their own plans for eliciting a confession. They’d worked through the prisoners one by one. Each was taken up to a table, and a rusty meat cleaver fell upon his hand. After seven little fingers had been separated from their owners, there was still no confession. Aleksei knew enough to realize that if he did confess then his ensuing fate would be more horrific than anything he had so far experienced. He might have chosen to relieve the suffering of the other six prisoners, but he cared as little for them as they did for him.

The Turks worked their way through the line again, this time taking the ring finger of each man, but again Aleksei said nothing. Then, as the third fingers went, the confession came. It was a perfect example of the inadequacies of torture. The second man in the line – more a boy than a man – had, bizarrely, waited until he had lost his middle finger before confessing that he was the Russian spy. It was an act of desperation, born out of the false belief that nothing could be worse than the current misery.

But at least it brought some temporary relief. For Aleksei it meant that his left hand would still be of some use. For the boy who had confessed, it would mean further interrogation, the discovery that he was no Russian, and a slow death. The boy seemed to realize this too. He opted to die quickly, vainly attempting to flee the prison yard by climbing a wall, only to receive a bullet to his chest from a Turkish musket. The confusion had been Aleksei’s chance to escape, and he had grabbed it. He hadn’t stayed to see the boy die, but he hoped that that first bullet had done its work. If it had not, death would eventually come, but only after the resumption of the torture the boy had risked so much to evade.

That had been Aleksei’s perception of those events for fifteen years, but now he realized he was quite wrong. The face of that boy, which had been for so long buried inaccessibly at the back of Aleksei’s mind, was a face he had seen today. It was Kyesha. He had not aged a jot since that day, and perhaps for many years before it. The fear that had taken him – triggering his blurted confession – had not been a fear of the torture, or for the fate of his fellow prisoners, but the most primal fear that any voordalak could experience: the fear of sunlight. The torture session had gone on long into the night, and Aleksei could clearly remember that his escape had taken place as the birds sang to the new day.

The gunshot wound would have been little hindrance to Kyesha. He would have jumped rather than fallen from that high wall beside the gaol and would have hit the ground running. Even if his captors had caught up with him, they would have been no match for a vampire desperate to get under cover before the sun rose. His fingers would have quickly grown back, just as Aleksei and Dmitry had witnessed that evening. There, though, was an oddity. In what he had seen tonight, and years before when dealing with the Oprichniki, the regrowth had been fast – almost instantaneous – but back then it had not. If it had been, the soldiers would surely have noticed that his first finger had returned when they reached for his second.

Perhaps Kyesha had not been a vampire then. But if so, why did he look almost exactly the same age now? If he had not been a voordalak when in that gaol, it must have come upon him very soon after; perhaps that very night, encountering another such creature as he fled in terror. That might explain how he had survived the bullet wound, but not how his fingers had grown back. Or was the process whereby a vampire could regrow flesh and bone something that could be applied in retrospect to wounds already suffered?

Aleksei caressed his own hand and chuckled to himself. He had not, as some seemed to think, spent his whole life wishing there were some way to become restored to what he had once been. Even if there were, it would not be worth becoming a vampire. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain two fingers and lose his own soul?

Kyesha had lost three fingers that night in Silistria, but tonight he had severed only two. The discrepancy mattered little – the point had been made. Nor did it matter whether he had become a voordalak before those events or just after. What was more interesting was that tonight he had refrained from killing, up to the point of punctiliousness, even when faced with attack from both Aleksei and Dmitry. This was not, in Aleksei’s experience, the normal nature of a voordalak, but he was coming to realize that his experience – fourteen of them in all, that he knew of – might prove a poor sample of the breed as a whole.

Domnikiia muttered to herself and turned away from him on to her side. Aleksei turned too and matched the shape of his body to hers. He laid his arm across her and let his hand lie somewhere near to her belly, and he felt her hand gently curl around his. Still she did not wake, the action having become so familiar over the years that she could repeat it without the need for recourse to consciousness. He squeezed her to him.

No, it did not matter what kind of voordalak Kyesha was – he would die as they all must die, and if he had reasons for holding himself back in his own defence, then so much easier the task.

It was the seventh and final meeting place. Aleksei had been down this street only twice in the last thirteen years. It was not that he had avoided it, but it led from nowhere to nowhere in terms of the routes he wanted to take through Moscow, and he knew no one who lived in it. It had been almost totally razed by the fires in 1812, and had been in that state when he stood there then, hoping to meet Vadim, fearing he would encounter something else. There had been one visit since then, but the rendezvous on that occasion was not his.