Ben Wake
Out at the cabin, I find myself missing my warm days more and more. I was born and raised in upstate New York, up in the mountains. The Adirondacks are not as grand as the Rockies when seen from a distance, but up close both places are very similar. In the woods you can walk all day and not find as much as ten square feet of level ground. The trees are tough old things. Only the strong ones thrive on the thin soil of the slopes, the brutal, bitter cold winters.
Walking through the woods in the early morning was always one of my most precious simple joys in those days. The sunlight in the morning was brighter in some ways than at sunset. It always felt fresher, more filled with hope and promise. I miss looking forward to the dawn, to greeting the light, always optimistic that I was standing on the cusp of a good day. I can bundle up and wear dark glasses to go out and watch the first rays of light break over the mountains, but it’s not the same as feeling it on my skin.
I don’t know whether taking that joy vicariously through Ivy makes it any better or worse for me. A little bit of both, perhaps. I miss it in a very visceral way every time I see her eyes light up and she throws her head back and smiles. It is hard to not be happy when she is happy. It’s like her mood infects me, colors how I see everything around me. I know that the last day has been hard on her, having been completely uprooted and taken on the run, but the simple fact that she can step out of the cabin into the light and smile because it’s a beautiful world and she is alive reminds me of just how wonderful and pure her spirit is.
I sit down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She leans her head over so her cheek rests on my fingers. She doesn’t say anything, but I can see by the set of her shoulders that she still has a thousand questions for me. We didn’t talk much yesterday. I showed her around the cabin, let her know where all of the supplies were, our escape routes if we needed to make a desperate run for it. She took her time familiarizing herself with everything. At one point, she asked, “Do you ever eat real food?”
When I told her I didn’t, she took that as permission to completely rearrange the kitchen to her liking. “Since I’ll be the only one using, it…” she said. “Why do you even have all this stuff you’re never going to use,” she asked, as she moved all of the pots and pans to a different cabinet.
“To make the place look normal,” I said. “To keep up my cover as a mortal, in case I ever had to have somebody out here.”
She looked at me, studying my face for a while.
“Not because you were expecting to have to run out here with me?” she asked. “I mean, you’ve actually got a decent setup here. This is a functional kitchen and you’ve got enough staples laid up that I could actually survive here without setting foot outside for weeks. This doesn’t look like something you just threw together for show.”
“Not for you, specifically. I set this up well before I fell in love with you,” I told her. “Well before the thought that you and I would ever need to go on the run together.”
“But you were prepared to go one the run with a regular human?”
“I’ve lived among you for a long time. Even before I was hiding out from my clan, there were times when it was best for me to just live out with you, look like one of you, act like one of you. I do form connections with you, and sometimes, things happen and I have to go into hiding with one of you.”
Ivy finished stacking the pots, and went for the utensil drawers. She didn’t speak for a long time. When she finally did, she carefully shut the drawers and turned to face me. “I’m not the first girl you’ve seduced and taken out to the woods, am I?”
“Actually, you are,” I said. “What I told you on the night we first kissed, that I spend more time with places than people now, which was the truth. It has been a very, very long time since I’ve opened myself up to somebody the way I have with you.”
“How long?” she asks.
“Your grandmother was probably a young woman.”
“My grandmother was never a young woman. She was born an old curmudgeon.” Just a hint of a smile broke across Ivy’s face when she said that.
“Like I said. It’s been a very long time since I’ve let myself know love.”
She still looked uncertain.
“The last time I had to go on the run with somebody was about eight years ago. He had something the Negre desperately wanted, and was in an extremely precarious position — literally minutes from being caught when I found him. I saved his life by having a hideout stocked just like this where I could take him and lay low for a few weeks.”
“Was he kind of like me?” Ivy asked. “There was something special about him your clan wanted?”
“No. He got himself caught up in the Great War. He had information.”
“Great War?” Ivy asked.
I opened my mouth to say something.
“No,” she said. “Let me try to take in what you’ve told me already. There’s only so much I can handle in one day.”
That was yesterday. Sitting on the front porch of the cabin with her now, her cheek still resting on my hand, I don’t want to ask her yet if she’s ready to hear about the Great War. It’s not a pleasant tale, and she looks so content right now.
Ivy looks at me. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” I tell her.
“Do you know how to make coffee? I mean, I do. I make it for myself all the time, but when Grandma’s home, she always makes it for us in the morning. It makes me feel safe, like I’m in the right place and everything is fine in the world to have it ready and waiting for me in the morning. If I weren’t here with you, right now, I’d be home in bed smelling it brewing downstairs.” She reaches a hand up and wipes a tear from her eye.
“I don’t have fresh milk or creamer,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says. Of course, she does. She knows everything in the kitchen and pantry.
“When I sneak into town this evening to see if the hunter is still there, I’ll get some.”
“How do you know I take my coffee with milk?” she asks.
“When I brought you breakfast yesterday morning that was the first thing you did.”
“It seems so long ago,” she says.
“It does,” I agree.
“Even for you, who’s lived so long and done this before?”
“Even for me,” I say. “In just a few days we’ve gone from new friends, to a couple, to lovers, to hiding out together. We’ve crammed an awful lot of living into that time.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Ivy says. I look at her, wondering what I’ve missed. “Do you know how to make coffee?”
“Yes,” I say, kissing her cheek as I get up. Not only do I make her coffee, but I break into some of the other foodstuffs to make her a simple breakfast to go with it.
My relationship with food varies a lot. I will actually become violently ill if I ingest anything other than living blood. In fact, even a small amount of blood from a dead creature can kill me. Most of the time, the scent of food and drink is very off-putting to me because of that. It is another reminder of what I’d lost when Sonia Vătafu turned me, another simple pleasure that will forevermore be denied to me.
But when I choose to prepare food for someone else, if it is done from a place of caring, it strikes me very differently. There is a selflessness to creating something that is dangerous to me but nourishing for someone that I care about. I don’t know if Ivy will ever understand the depths of emotion that are opened up in me by breaking the seal on a can of coffee, filling the air with its rich, nutty scent.
When she’d asked me just a few minutes ago to make her coffee, because it would help her feel safe and cared for and like the world was right, I couldn’t think of how sick it would make me to drink it. Instead, I realize that it is a gift like very few others I could ever give. I give her something that benefits only her and not me. The mug of warm liquid I pour out and hand to her is something we will never be able to share, and that makes it all the more beautiful to me.
I sit next to her while she eats her breakfast on the cabin steps, despite the fact that I desperately want to get inside and out of the morning sun that is shining directly on us. It seems so comforting for her, though.
“Where’s your car?” she suddenly asks me.
“Stolen for a joyride last night, and abandoned miles from here. I don’t even know where it ended up.”
“How?”
“While you were sleeping, I went out, and found some dumb kids looking for trouble. I just nudged them a little bit toward some trouble that would be useful to us.”
“What if we need to go somewhere?” Ivy asks me.
“Remember our escape routes,” I say. “If we take the downhill route, we’ll hit a highway in just under two miles. If we go uphill, it’s a little more than one mile until we hit a road with real traffic. Later this afternoon, I’ll take you to the roads to show you what to do from there if you have to run without me.”
“What are the chances of that happening?”
“At night, it’s not very likely. If the sun is out, the odds of us getting separated are greater. I’ll be less able to defend you, so you might need to go on without me.”
Ivy looks at me, seeing me squinting against the bright light. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, and starts getting up. I put my hand on her arm to stop her. “I can tolerate it until you’re done with breakfast. Please.”
“I just didn’t notice how uncomfortable you are until you mentioned it,” Ivy says, looking down.
We spend the rest of the morning inside. I give Ivy a more thorough tour of the inside of the cabin and where everything is. In every room, underneath a window, there’s a false panel in the wall that conceals a short rifle loaded with silver bullets – valuable for defense against both vampires and thropes. I am relieved the first time I show one to Ivy that she is not immediately afraid of it. Her grandmother keeps guns in the house for hunting, and made sure to teach her from a young age how to respect and handle them. The two women even go out hunting together a few times a year. It is good that she knows how to fire a rifle, but I hope it never comes down to that. Hunting is different than shooting at something that looks human, or that is barreling down on you, teeth out, and howling. I had come back from France pretty jaded about killing, but still, the first time I had a mad thrope charge me, I was more scared than the first time I saw a German tank come over a trench. Machines have nothing on that howl or the look thropes get in their eyes. At least Ivy won’t have to worry about a thrope. Just Negre hunters.
In the afternoon, when the mountains above us start to shade us from the sun, I take Ivy out again. I show her again the three best routes away from the cabin that I’d identified going downhill. They run alongside small rises in the land, or large downed trees, to help keep out of sight. “We vampires can see extremely well at night – even better than you can see in daylight,” I tell her. “If we run into trouble, our best first option is to wait it out in the cabin until morning when they’re weakest. If we can’t, we do our best to stay hidden as we run to the road.”
I take her down one of the escape routes. Before we get close enough to be seen from the highway, I stop. I point out a tree stump near the road with a white boulder on either side of it.
“Right at the base of the stump is a loop of rope, nearly invisible unless you know it’s there. Pull up on the rope if you’re being chased,” I tell Ivy. “It’s the lid to a sealed chest. Inside, you’ll find flares and a pistol loaded with silver bullets. First thing, crack a flare – there’s a bright red pull cord, just yank it and drop the thing, preferably on the road. They’re magnesium so they burn bright white. Even in full daylight, it will hurt your eyes to look at it. There are some other compounds in them, too, that mimic the qualities of sunlight to some degree. It won’t weaken a vampire as much as actual daylight will, but it will help even things out a little bit, especially at night.”
“Then take the pistol and shoot at anything that moves?”
“The pistol is your last resort. Try to flag down a car while burning flares if you can. Get yourself away.”
Ivy looks around. At this time in the afternoon, there is a steady stream of traffic on this highway. Even at night, there is usually at least one car every few minutes on the road. It makes me nervous to be out by the road in full daylight.
“What are the chances it will come to that?” Ivy asks.
“Low,” I say.
Ivy gives me that look again, where she’s clearly trying to figure out if I’m lying to her.
“One of the problems with immortality, is that without the specter of death always hovering over your shoulder, you are very slow to change, and to learn, and to grow. You forget to adapt. It’s why I don’t always fit in easily when I try to blend with you. In many ways, I still look at the world the way I did a hundred years ago, I act as if people will respond the way they did, as if an action on my part will lead to the same reaction.”
“What does this have to do with whether or not I’m going to get into a gunfight on the highway?”
“Come with me,” I tell her, offering my hand. She takes it, and we start walking back up toward the cabin. “I was one of the best hunters. There is nothing any other hunter knows about finding a vampire that I don’t. I actually taught the one that was looking for your house yesterday. She’s hunting alone. When she discovers that you have fled, she’s going to assume I’ve most likely taken you far away from here. She will contact other hunters try to figure out where we’re running to, instead of searching this area in depth.”
“Is that why you had me tell Grandma to get out of town for a few days?”
“Yes. They might think we’re with her and send somebody out to check.”
“You had me tell her ‘Negre hunters’, as if that would mean something to her.”
“I don’t know exactly what or how much your grandmother knows about us,” I tell Ivy.
“She knows about a lot more than you might suspect, Ben.”
“I have figured that out. She knew the instant that we met that I was a vampire, though. If she could tell that, she probably knows about the bigger clans, at least. Anybody that knows that much knows about the Negre.”
“I guess that explains why she didn’t want me to have anything to do with you,” Ivy says.
“Yes. Relationships like ours are not easy. Her concerns are very well founded,” I have to admit to Ivy. “It’s a good thing she didn’t manage to push us apart, though. I guess we’re both lucky that you got stubborn with her.”
“I guess so,” Ivy says.
As we go up the slope, I see her examining the escape route we’re walking. She’s a very smart woman, very perceptive. I’m sure she’s figured out that I come out here occasionally and trim back some of the branches that cross the path, that I’ve cleared any stones or roots that could trip a person or turn an ankle. Her eyes constantly dart left and right, seeing what she can see, what would be able to see her.
“Is she in any danger?” Ivy asks.
“No. If they approach her, they’ll compel her to speak. They won’t need to torture her for information or otherwise harm her. It would just waste their time and not get them any closer to finding us.”
“Wouldn’t they try to use her to draw us out?”
“They would need a way to communicate to us that they have her,” I say. “For that, they’d need to find us, or she’d need to have a way of communicating with us. Neither of us has phones now.”
Ivy slowly nods her head.
“If I thought she would come to harm, I would have brought her with as well. I know that it would destroy you to lose her.”
“Thank you,” Ivy says, quietly. “I suppose this means that I can’t get any messages out to her, though, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” I say. “For now. When things cool down, we can get a message to her without giving ourselves away.”