Page 123 of The Last Vampire
William keeps moving forward at a quick clip, and after a while, he inhales to test the air. A heavy, ancient musk clings to the passage, and as hegoes deeper, the scent grows so overbearing that William does not breathe again.
At last, there is a soft glow in the distance, and soon the tunnel spills into a cavernous space illuminated with candles. William takes a tentative inhale, and the oxygen is impregnated with a stench so sour that he can taste it on his tongue.
Aisles of stacked wooden barrels unfurl into the horizon, reminding him of how wine is aged. Yet if this is wine, then it is long past its prime.
“Hello?” he calls out, since it is unlikely that he and Lenny will be able to smell each other through this stench.
No response.
As he moves deeper into the cave, William spots an opening in the wall, and he crosses into a room that looks part laboratory, part torture chamber, and part office.
There is a desk with a feather quill, a bottle of ink, and numerous notebooks. At the center of the room is a patient bed and various medical devices. And by the far wall are four glass-paneled cells with rusty pipes overhead that could be for water or gas.
Inside each cell is a human.
William stares at their faces, but none of them seem to register him. Maybe it is one-way glass. They are all on the floor, in varying degrees of uprightness. They look crumpled and wounded and half dead.
At the other end of the space is another door.
When William opens it, he freezes on the threshold.
The room is small, its only furniture a dresser and a bed. Sitting on the modest mattress is a vampire with skin as black as outer space and misty silver eyes that could be stars.
He is night personified, and a chill sweeps through William as he recognizes a face he has seen only in wanted posters and nightmares and the portrait from the LUB.
“Leonardo the Bloody,” he whispers in disbelief.
“Welcome,William Pride.”
The ancient vampire emphasizes William’s name like it is also a secret. “Have a seat.”
William sits down next to the most notoriously dangerous vampire of all time, unable to pull his gaze from those foggy orbs.
“Do you know why you are here?”
William shakes his head. When Lenny keeps waiting, he adds, “I was told you would explain what happened to our kind.”
He has to blink just to prove to himself that the ancient vampire is not somehow defying the laws of immortality and compelling him.
“That is secondary.” Leonardo the Bloody speaks slowly, like he has all the time in the world. Or, more accurately, like he has never been subject to time’s effects. “First, we must address why you are here.”
“I do not know—”
“I do,” says Lenny, now rising to his feet, slowly, like a mortal. The feigned fragility must be a ploy to make William feel overconfident. “Let me give you a tour.”
William follows the vampire into the torture lab, and he tries not to look at the four dying humans.
“I was the first of us to awaken,” says Lenny, locking his arms behind him as they walk. “Upon learning how populated the world had become and that most humans had forgotten we once existed, I felt a freedom I had not known in centuries. No more Treaty. No more Legion. No more Grandsire. It was quite thrilling.”
William knows that Leonardo the Bloody and Grandsire did not see eye to eye on human-vampire dynamics. Grandsire believed in working together to maintain a healthy food supply, while Leonardo felt there were other ways to force humans to breed more humans without needing to give them so much autonomy.
Lenny looks at his four captives, face unlined and unbothered, unencumbered by any sense of empathy. “So I did the one thing I had always been forbidden.” He turns to William, his irises so pale in this light that they look white. “I tasted Stoker blood.”
A pit forms in William’s stomach, but he keeps his expression unchanged to mask his growing unease.
“I never understood why only that bloodline was gifted with our greatest power. Nor did it sit right with me that humans of that lineage were protected so zealously by our kind that they were treated better than non-Stoker vampires.”
Lenny has resumed walking, and William does not take any more exploratory inhales now that they are in the room with the oak barrels of rotting wine.
