Page 33 of The Last Vampire
The last name suits him.
“I’m Lorena Navarro. How old are you?”
“I am two hundred and seventy-six years old, yet my heart stopped beating when I was nineteen. Six months later, I was forced into a death-sleep.”
I blink. “You’re only like a year older than me,” I say, since the other number is too large to even contemplate.
“I am infinitely older than you, for I am immortal.” His jaw clenches, and I know I’m not going to get much more out of him.
“If you want to live long enough to draw another breath, you are going to tell me something useful—now.”
CHAPTER 10william
William is starting to regret that he did not kill the girl yesterday.
He will not be making the same mistake tonight.
“Like I said, I need search terms—”
“The Great Fires of the 1700s,” he says, and she takes a seat in front of a machine, then clicks a button. Heat begins to emanate from it, and the screen illuminates. When images load, the wordguestappears.
She clicks again, and more words and images come up. She keeps clicking, then she taps different letters to spell out his search request.
No entries found.
She looks back at him so he can read it for himself and says, “No results for that in our records.”
“SearchLegion of Fire.”
She turns around and types the new search words.
No entries found.
“Search—”
He cuts himself off. This is pointless. The Legion has rewritten history. They have erased vampires from recorded time—but not reality.
They cannot change what has actually happened.
“Maybe if you told me more about you, I could be more helpful,” she says. “If you’re going to kill me, what do you have to lose?”
He ignores her and turns away from the computer in frustration, thinking out loud. “Only the Legion of Fire would have the kind of societal power and global presence to alter the historical record.”
“That’s impossible,” she says, stating her opinion as fact. What an obnoxious habit.
“Think about it,” she goes on. “If there were vampires around, we would know. We have surveillance cameras everywhere, and they would’ve captured one of you by now. Isn’t it more likely that you’re from the 1700s in some other reality—?”
“Then explain to me how we are speaking the same language. Or how I recognize some of the authors in this library, like Miguel de Cervantes and Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. The only classics missing from my time are the ones by vampire authors. Shakespeare had a great rival in his day—”
“Christopher Marlowe,” she says arrogantly.
“No,” he says, and it feels oddly rewarding to shut her up. “She was a vampire author named Chanterelle Harrington who was just as talented and prolific. Only she used dactylic hexameter instead of iambic pentameter, and she only wrote about immortals.”
The girl’s eyes grow rounder with every word, and he wishes he had not said any of that. Yet he never could hold his tongue when it came to literature—it is the only passion he has ever known.
“You seriously know Shakespeare,” she says in disbelief, and he identifies something else he detests about her: how she phrases her questions as statements.
“But how couldhumansbe a threat to vampires?” she presses him. “Why didn’t you just turn more of us to make more of you?”
