Ben Wake
Watching Ivy get into Nathan’s car just pulls the heart right out of me. Seeing her get into any car at this moment would, but somehow it seems to pull at me harder that she is driving away from me with an old friend that she has known for most of her life. If she had caught a ride with some random stranger coming up the highway, it would have hurt to know that I was sending her away, breaking her heart, because we are not meant to be together. That would give me a sense that she is continuing to live her life, to keep moving on with her life after our brief happy and troubled time together. All relations between vampires and the warm have to end with the warm one moving on somehow, whether by simply leaving the relationship, dying, or turning.
But seeing Ivy greet Nathan and leave me behind. It gives me some sense that our time together was an anomaly, a step outside of the life she was living. Like she has her own path she is on, and had only briefly flirted with a different life before deciding it was not as good as the one I could give her.
I think I can understand another piece of how some of my kind become so furious and contemptuous of the warm after a while. Since I was turned, I have always been stronger than, faster than, smarter than, greater than, more than any warm mortal. For the first time ever, I feel like I am lesser than them, and it is making me furious as much as it is making me sad. It’s like this petulant child inside of me is railing against her. I was offering her a life that only a tiny handful of warm will ever have. As a vampire I can take her places, show her things, that almost nobody will ever know and see. But she is giving all of that up to live the same uninteresting and mundane life that the other seven billion short lived warm on the planet are living. All of this fury burns through me even though I am the one pushing Ivy away, I am the one who decided to send her one way while I go the other.
I sit down on the ground, my attempts to see if the hunter is out there all but forgotten. Even when I consider the possibility that she is following Ivy and Nathan, I cannot summon up any concern. I come back to myself long enough to examine my feelings and try to count how many different emotions have just blasted through me in the last few minutes. All tied to a single word, ‘Witch’, and the last thing Sonia Vătafu ever said to me.
“Someday, young Benjamin, one of us Negre is going to bed a witch, and every one of us will feel the sun. Not a one of us will escape the sun, not a single Negre, not a single drinker of any other clan. Only the one who raises the sun will escape the sun.”
When she spoke those words to me, her eyes took on the pale gray of a body drained of all blood, and her voice came from a place a million miles deep within her. She was speaking truth about the future, immutable truth. Most vampire sensings are warnings – keep walking this path, and this is where it leads. What Sonia Vătafu was speaking was not a warning, it was an inevitability. Unfortunately, some others heard the words, for she spoke them to me at the clan castle, and there are no secrets there. Papa Racoviță recognized that such knowledge is power, and has carefully hoarded it. He almost killed me just for having heard the words, but he knew that he could not keep the secret completely to himself. He needed a select few others that knew of Sonia Vătafu’s vision that would be able to recognize if the secret had spread and would be able to stamp the knowledge out for him. This information I have is probably part of how I ended up framed for a murder I did not commit, and why I was always certain that Papa Racoviță wanted me to die for it. This is why I am so dangerous to them as a renegade. This is why I need to get Ivy as far from me as possible, because if any Negre ever suspects she is a witch, they will destroy her and her grandmother.
Plus, Sonia Vătafu’s words tell of the end of all vampires. As much as I feel the ennui of immortality, I have thus far done nothing to hasten my own death. In fact, my time with Ivy showed me that even though I’m now an immortal, it is possible for me to still live and to feel genuine and real joy. Why would I choose to give that up so soon after I found it? I have to laugh at the cruel irony that I had to give up the person that taught me that so soon after learning it.
I look to my right, and see the kitchen knife that Ivy had modified into a ritual blade. It reminds me that I did send Ivy away to protect her, and that there is still more I must do for her. I owe it to her on so many levels. I need to make sure there is nothing at all on the property that would give the hunter even the slightest suspicion that Ivy is a witch, just in case she is aware of Sonia Vătafu’s words.
I pick up the knife. The symbols scratched into the handle are scored too deep for me to sand them out. I could file the handle down, but that would be immediately apparent as well. The knife needs to be destroyed. I pick up the rifle Ivy had dropped, and carry it down to the cabin. As I approach the front porch, I try to look at it with critical eyes. Witches are very secretive about their practices, and each line does things very differently. I could spend years studying them, and after all of that, still not be able to scratch the surface of all of the practices and habits and signs that are out there.
But I do have just enough knowledge to know some commonalities, and from there, I can try to extrapolate meaning from things. Like recognizing the kitchen knife for what Ivy had turned it into. Almost all lines use physical objects to focus will and intent, and almost all of them use a blade or a wand, as these are things you can aim and point with. Seeing Ivy focusing on a knife, then seeing that she had made modifications to the handle gave me just enough evidence to consider the possibility that I was watching her do magic.
So I stop before I step onto the front porch of the cabin. I noticed that when I was showing Ivy around the property on our first few days, she very quickly picked up on the placement of the stones that marked the emergency caches by the highway. It seemed intuitive to her, so I start looking at the ground. Sure enough, I eventually notice a pattern of alternating dark and light stones completely circling the cabin. Just small stones, pebbles not much larger than a quarter, with a good couple of feet between each, but the spacing between them is precise, as is their distance from the cabin. I decide to take a walk toward one of the places I’d set up to funnel the motion of any vampires on the property. Sure enough, there are lighter and darker stones flanking the path. I go back to the cabin, and notice something else. I had noticed couple of times that Ivy was moving plants around the land. She was very careful with it, only small ones. I had assumed she was just settling in for the long haul, and wanted a few of her favorite food plants and cooking herbs closer in, but in light of what I know now.
I go into the cabin, and look at the kitchen. There is one knife that she always kept in an empty can on the countertop, never in the drawer with the rest of the cutlery. There are a few other cans that hold sprigs of different herbs clustered around it. I wonder if that knife, like one I have in my hand, had been redesignated to special use, which is why it was kept separate from the other knives.
I wonder how many other clues somebody more knowledgeable in the ways of witches might pick up from the cabin. I decide the risk is too great to leave an unknown number of hints laying about. I go out and pick up as many of the carefully arranged stones as I can find on the property. I set the two knives Ivy seems to have put to different use onto the stove. With a little bit of fiddling with the propane tanks, and judicious application of cooking oil, crushed candles, and lamp oil to different areas, I set the cabin up to destroy it completely as possible.
Even though I only lived in it for a short time, those few weeks were by far the happiest of my life. I feel a tremendous sorrow knowing I need to burn it all down. But I still cannot let anything happen to Ivy. So I leave as little trace of her behind me as I take myself far, far away from Stokers Mill.
I set things up to have the cabin explode in about an hour. It takes me just ten minutes to see a car with Nebraska plates on it coming up the highway. A little bit of compulsion, and I’m on my way to Omaha.