Page 169 of The Last Vampire
“Thank you,” he says, bringing the thermos she hands him to his mouth and guzzling it. He sets the green book between them. “Do you recognize this?” he asks.
She puts down the blood and picks up the book. She flips through the pages until she gets to the message in red ink. William half expected the words to have disappeared by now.
“Grandsire placed the manifest in my coffin before burying me,” she says after reading the passage. “I suspected he would leave you something, too.”
“He left an entire library of books, all of them blank except for this one. Keep flipping through it.” She does as he says and gets to the Legion symbol.
“What does this mean?” she asks.
“I think it is a way to let me know this text is different from the others, and he used this symbol to throw off the Legion if they found it first.”
“This can’t be the extent of his message,” she says. “There has to be more, right?”
“That is what I have been hoping, but no matter how much I stain the pages with blood, nothing else appears.”
She frowns at the symbol, falling deep in thought. Then she says, “Grandsire always liked puzzles and codes. The manifest he left me was inside a special Chinese puzzle box that was one of Feng’s own designs.” Feng was the most famous vampire inventor.
“Where are the other books?” she asks.
“In a basement room, but I have destroyed the entrance. They do not work the same way as this one.”
“Was there anything else in the room?”
“Yes,” he says, finishing what’s left in his thermos. “I will show you.”
The two of them bound to the first tower and enter his room through the window. Then he presents her with his meager possessions. She stares at theportrait of his family for a while, then she reads through the letter he found in Minaro’s office.
“That’s Grandsire’s handwriting.”
“I know.”
“The parcel he is discussing… is that meant to be you?”
“I believe so.”
Next, William shows her the three portraits with the messages on the back. “There are some words missing,” she says.
“They must have faded over time.”
“I don’t think so,” she says, frowning at the ink. “I think it’s intentional.”
Cottoning on, William leans over them and rereads his grandfather’s entry out loud.
“The most eternal among the eternal, and the sole leader ever acknowledged by the immortals. He is the architect of the Treaty, the first covenant among the species and the only instance wherein vampires have yielded to the… law.” He looks at Fabiana.
“Governance oflaw?” she suggests.
He bites down on his finger deeply with his fang, and on a blank page in the green book, he quickly writesgovernance of lawin blood before the wound heals.
The liquid gets sucked into the paper.
“It did not work,” he says.
“Maybe the passcode isn’t in his portrait or Lenny’s,” says Fabiana. “Maybe it’s in yours.”
William does not have to turn his over to know what it says.
The last.
