The Survivors

Chapter Fourteen: Nosferatu

14
NOSFERATU

Above me was a rocky and cavernous ceiling. A fire nearby threw dancing shadows on it. My side ached, and I could hardly move.
  "Ah, she wakes," a woman said to me. Her body was warm next to mine. I recognized the voice as Narcisa's. She was in her human form. She had alabaster skin, light grey-blue eyes, and long ashy brown hair flowing down her back. Her coloring was the opposite of Valentin's.
  She was tending to me. I sensed no danger—not that I had sensed it earlier either—and I even felt that she was very protective of me. It relaxed me.
  "How did you knock me out?" I asked. I was disoriented-—I hadn't slept in over six months, so waking from any sort of darkness was strange. I tried to push myself up, but my arms buckled under me.
    "An old potion that always does the trick. Don't try to sit up just yet," she said, a gentle hand on my shoulder.
  "How long have I been here?" I gritted my teeth. I was in a great deal of pain.
    "About four days," she said. Her eyes were on the flames.
  "Where are they?" I asked.
    Your vampire friends?  she thought.
    "Not vampires," I murmured.
  "They've gone," she said. My chest tightened.
  "What did you do to them?" I asked. I was laboring to speak.
  She scoffed at the question. "You mean what did they do to us," she said, facing me. "We outnumbered them, and they still killed two thirds of our family. They are quite the coven." She saw the shock on my face. "Don't be surprised," she said. "We are not immortals like you. Death is a part of us." She sighed quietly and turned back to the fire. "We saved your life, you know," she said.
    "What does that mean?" I asked. "I couldn't have died anyway."
    "You would have with that crazy lot. You aren't as strong as they are."
    "They wouldn't have killed me," I said quickly. "Couldn't have," I whispered to myself.
    "You didn't think they'd leave you either," she said, "especially not that handsome mate of yours. But here you are, alone with me. Where are they now?"
    "I don't think they've gone," I said bravely, as if speaking the words would will it true.
    Narcisa shrugged. "You can believe what you want," she said. She poked at the fire and then spoke aloud in Greek. "For men, we can make falsities and fallacies seem true, but when we want we're able to give truthful statements, too," she said. It was a line from Theogony. I looked at her wide-eyed. She laughed and nodded toward my bag; it was open and a few things were scattered about, including my threadbare book with the gold-lined pages. "Before I became a person who couldn't control whether I was an animal or a human, I went to university to study classics," she said. "A favorite of yours if it came with you on this journey?" she asked. I nodded. She changed the subject. "You know I was impressed with you back there. You never let on to the coven waiting in the woods," she said.
    "I didn't know they were there," I admitted.
    She laughed grimly. "They keep you at a distance, don't they?" she said. "You know that shield in their minds doesn't work against everyone." I perked up, interested in this. "It was only one shield and they split it several ways to each get a piece. So they had to decide what to shield. They chose you," she eased, pulling her knees to her chest. "I bet that feels good, knowing you're the only one in the world they don't want in their heads."
    "That's not it," I defended.
    "Isn't it?" she laughed.
    "They had never met anyone else who could read people the way I could," I said.
    "Pretty girl, you're off the mark. Mind reading isn't common, but it's out there. A coven that size has run into it before, I can assure you."
    "You could tell what they were thinking?" I asked her. She nodded. "Can you tell me why they have the bulwark against me?"
    "They have a secret they don't want you to know."
    "Do you know what it is?" I asked, my voice gaining momentum.
    "That's why you're here, Sadie," she said gently. "You must know the truth."
    I could make out a murky shadow coming down a hall behind her; we must have been very deep in a cave. "Valentin," she said and stood up.
    "My love," he said, walking up behind Narcisa. He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her neck. "You're awake," he said to me. I realized then that we were speaking Romanian.
  "Where are my friends?" I asked, hoping to get different answers from him.
  He sat by the fire, and extended his bare feet toward it. "You're in an awful hurry to get back to them," he said. An image of a group around a fire in icy fields shot through his mind. They knew where the Winters were, I decided. I had to get him to tell me.
  He pulled some scraps of charred meat off the stones around the fire, and ate them. "You seem like too good a girl to be hanging out with the likes of them," Valentin said. He licked his fingertips.
  "What is that supposed to mean?" I asked. I saw the image of Mark Winter ripping out a lynx's throat with his teeth flash through Valentin's mind. Until then, I hoped that image was a nightmare, not something I'd actually seen.
  "You're not violent." He looked at Narcisa and smirked. "Self-destructive and a bit of a nut job, sure, but not violent."
  They knew a lot. I didn't know how, but I didn't care. "What does that have to do with them?" I asked.
  "You don't know?" he asked.
  I shook my head. "You'd be surprised how much they haven't told me," I said.
    "In all of your morbid research, have you ever learned of the nosferatu?" she asked. I wondered how much of my journal of lists and memories and research notes Narcisa had read while I lay unconscious.
  I shook my head.
    "They are legendary here in Romania. They're said to be very dangerous creatures," she explained.
    "What are they?" I asked.
    "Shape-shifters," Narcisa said. "That's what they call us. We are born of humans. As the legend goes, if two people who were born out of wedlock produce offspring also out of wedlock, then that child will become a nosferatu."
    "Are you immortal?" I asked.
    She shook her head. "We aren't, though many legends say we're supposed to be."
    "Why are you lynxes?" I asked.
    "They're native to the environment. We can be anything with some practice," she explained.
    "Was that group your family?"
  "Not blood. We just travel together. In human form, our men are fertile, but most of our women cannot have children," she said.
    Ritka, the eretica, had said the same thing about shape-shifters. "If the men can produce offspring, who do they reproduce with, if not other nosferatu?" I asked.
    "There are many legends. Some say witches, some say humans. Some say nosferatu can't reproduce at all," she explained.
    "Why are you telling me this?" I asked.
    Her face grew grave. "Their patriarch," she said.
    "Anthony," I offered.
    "Yes," she said. "He is one of us. He denies it, and claims that he and his family are like you. But Valentin could read him—he can tell what a creature is by touching it—and that's not true."
    I wasn't sure if I believed her.
    "His wife is like you," she said. "A witch."
    "Am I a witch?" I asked, deciding to not assume I was or wasn't anything at this point.
    "Not a normal one, no. But that's the closest thing we could call it. She's a pureblood witch, though," Narcisa said.
    Valentin interrupted. "Does your family, do you call yourselves witches?" he asked.
    I laughed. "No," I said. "But I don't know why we hadn't thought of that. Are the Winter children nosferatu?"
    "No," she said hesitantly. "The child of a shape-shifter and a witch produces something else..."
    Then I realized it. "Vieczy," I said. I suddenly understood what they'd been trying to tell me all along.
    "That's what they call them in Russia," she said.
    "But really?" I asked.
    She bit her lower lip and looked at the ground. It was very human of her. "Vampires," she said. "Warrior vampires." She waited for me to react, but I did not. I didn't believe her. "We had to warn you. They are very dangerous. That's why we brought you here, to get you away from them."
    I didn't say anything. I had no reason to believe them at all.
    "They like violent kills, and they're very excessive. There are countless tales of covens no bigger than your friends' taking out whole villages in one feed. Their bloodlust is indecent. They're notorious for that," Valentin said. "And if you were going to mate with that boy, we had to warn you. We couldn't let you go on, create monsters from your own womb unknowingly," he added. My stomach lurched. My womb. Was this the genesis of my fear? Had I avoided mating for so long because I didn't know what I would produce? I dismissed this as soon as the thought came to me. Because how would I have known this? The cause for my unease must have stemmed elsewhere.
    Narcisa's heart was sad for me.
    I sighed. I should have known. Ritka had described the vieczy to me clearly—the temperature and texture of their skin, their skills. It fit the Winters perfectly. The only thing that didn't fit was the image I had conjured of vampires since hearing about them in the human world. I thought of fangs and bats and capes and darkness. Men with blood trickling down their lips. The haggard old eretica. The sparkling, pretty, human-like creatures in the most recent versions. None of it applied to the Winters. They didn't drink blood. They didn't have red eyes. They lived on the California coast, for God's sake! They ate regular food. They lived among humans. They loved each other like humans. Setting aside Mark and the violent images of them all fighting the lynxes, they were normal. So I couldn't trust what Narcisa and Valentin were telling me.
    But the Winters had been hiding something. That had been clear all along.
    I struggled to bring myself into a sitting position. I managed to get slightly upright with my knees bent in front of me. I let my body hang over them.
  "How can your kind be killed?" I asked them, finally returning to the reason for my quest in the first place.
    "Not unlike the way you might kill a lion. We're mortal through and through, but you would have to have strength to do it," Valentin said.
    "But the vampires do have that strength," I said.
    "Yes. It is a hierarchy," he explained. "We are just below them in strength, typically matched evenly with witches."
    "And how do you kill witches?" I asked.
    Valentin hesitated a bit before speaking, but then he allowed himself to continue. "They can be killed in some of the same ways humans can. But they won't die from basic deficiencies. They won't get sick. From injury, they'll heal quickly and easily. I obviously don't know the specifics, but most basic ways of murder would do the trick," he said. Unconsciously I thought back to my first year living among humans—a terrifying, lonely, and uncertain time before I had come to Nashville, before I had met Corrina—when all I wanted to do was die. I tried every "basic way" I could think of to do it. When none of it worked, that's when I began looking for more obscure ways to destroy myself, my kind. In remembering, images flipped through my mind—of drowning, of driving a car off a cliff, of tasting arsenic, and of tightening a noose around my neck. Narcisa looked at me, horrified. She had just seen my weakest, worst moments of life. I felt invaded.
    "How do you kill a vampire?" I asked, completing my mental list of tactics.
    Neither of them responded at first. I pressed them. It was interesting to me that they didn't want to tell me this one when they had told me about the nosferatu and witches. "Surely you must know," I urged. They kept their minds blank, quiet.
  I sat there for a long time thinking over all they had told me.
    Narcisa was watching me closely, appraising each of these thoughts as I generated them. She repeated them in her mind so Valentin could hear them. I could feel her softening as I began to turn my thoughts to Everett. "You should know," she said slowly, "that he didn't lie to you. His family has bound him to keeping their secrets. He couldn't break that trust. Family is everything to him. Just like it is to you." She was trying to comfort me, but it wasn't working. "There is more to their story," she admitted, despite disapproving looks from Valentin. "You'll have to hear it, and then you can make your own judgments. I'd give them that at least."
    "I thought you said they ran off. How do you suggest I find them?" I asked coldly.
  Narcisa looked questioningly at Valentin. We've done what we could to warn her, he said.
    "We'll take you to them," Narcisa said. "We promised your safe return if they would wait for us instead of coming after you themselves. We knew you would want to face them."
    Every part of my body was a little more alive at the idea that I could see them, that I could see him again.
    But what if Narcisa and Valentin had told me the truth? What if Everett and the Winters were not who, were not even what I thought they were?
    Narcisa eyed me as she saw the next thought flash across my mind. She reached in her woolly boot and pulled out a dagger. "I understand the need for proof," she said. "You see for yourself."
    I took the cold piece of metal in my hand.