At Death's Door (Wraith's Rebellion Book 1) Read online

  Any chance to plug it in, we were told to. No one knew how long the job would take, or how long we’d be working straight. Best not to lose information because the battery died while walking through a park.

  I plugged the tablet into the wall socket near the floor. That was one good thing about sitting at the back of the cafe. The other tables probably didn’t have electricity to charge phones.

  As the tablet powered up, I turned on the data and turned down the brightness on the screen. Free data was tempting when one is waiting for a long period, and we had been told that we could use it for such things, but I wanted to remain alert, to catch the first glimpse if I could.

  The more detailed, the better, they had said.

  The tablet had a basic writing program and four different recording programs. One voice recognition software would even change our spoken words to written. I had used one of the recording programs to detail my travelling to the cafe and what I had ordered.

  Dark roast coffee with milk and sugar to my tastes. Less caffeine than other roasts, sure, but I didn’t want to be sipping my coffee and grimacing at the acidic taste as I was doing my job. That wouldn’t have ended well.

  That was, I had been recording until I realized Mr. Fedora was nursing his coffee. I swear he kept looking at me, but it was probably just the big sunglasses or the fact that I had been recording the most banal items on my tablet with the voice recognition software.

  Find a better word to replace banal, sounds like I’m trying to be fancy.

  I probably looked like some crazy lady, hiding in the back corner. Or like one of those cliché authors who carried recorders around to take down every ‘brilliant’ idea they had, but never quite got around to writing the actual book.

  The interview was going to get written, however. If it was the length of a book, all the better.

  They had told us to be as thorough as possible, to describe everything from what we ate to how we felt. Sight, scent, the whole thing.

  It smelled like a cafe. Coffee and the pumpkin spice scones, which were making their first appearance of the year. I loved pumpkin and pumpkin pie, but was not a fan of cinnamon. I only liked a hint of cinnamon and most places dump it in like they’re trying to hide the pumpkin.

  So, while I desperately wanted a scone, I had declined because I could smell the spice above all else. My tongue burned just at the whiff of the scent.

  The recordings I made would be compiled, edited just slightly, and released to the public to get them acquainted with our interviewees.

  Vampires.

  They didn’t like being called the walking undead, or even just undead because they claimed none of them had ever died and stayed dead. They would not submit to medical testing and refused to pay back taxes.

  Some had even provided a list of aliases, under which they had been paying taxes for all the centuries.

  When vampires had first gone public, the world had laughed it off. Apparently, April Fools was lost on them, or they didn’t pay attention to such trivial dates.

  Perhaps they had a wicked sense of humour.

  The next day people were still laughing about it when Lucrecia walked onto a morning, national talk show that was very popular.

  Lucrecia was one of two vampires with psychic based powers and the only one, she claimed, who could glamour a person, which was how she got on the show.

  And why the producer didn’t get fired for strolling through the background naked. Lucrecia had made him believe he was clothed and that the cameras weren’t on.

  A nifty parlour trick was all that might have been.

  Lucrecia had been born to nobility, or so she said. She covered her mouth when she laughed, rarely raised her lips far enough to see any of her teeth, and spoke in a calm, even manner.

  One in five vampires had power. It could be as small as glamouring a person, or as large as shape shifting to the form of a bat or wolf. The fact that Lucrecia was alert and alive early in the morning, while the sun was up, hadn’t helped matters.

  I hadn’t watched the interview, only heard about it third and fourth hand from people I knew. So, I had no idea what was and wasn’t said in that first interview, and hadn’t quite gotten around to looking it up online.

  Vampire or not, my life was not going to change.

  Except it did. Because my professor’s wife came home upon hearing the news, and surprisingly they weren’t separated like he said they were.

  Since vampires had gone public there had been lots of interest in them and their lives.

  If they had been like in the stories, I think everyone would have moved on after a week. Our vampires had to be different, though. Or perhaps they had manipulated popular culture to make certain that their true weaknesses would never be found by the common populace.

  For starters, only three of them were younger than a thousand. Even of those three, the youngest was about eight hundred and fifty. They had created a law just over a thousand years ago, banning turning.

  In the modern era, they had created a new law: thou shall not kill.

  Though they were already in talks with governments about prisoners to be executed. Some countries had leaped at the idea. Some... not so much.

  Among their supporters were youth who never wanted to get old, and rich people... who never wanted to get old. There was also most the population, who frankly didn’t care because them being public didn’t change the fact that they had existed the entire time.

  I was, for the most part, in that group. If someone needed to drink blood to survive, that was their issue. It didn’t change how safe I was or alter my life choices just because the undead were real.

  Against them were mainly religious folk. Can’t blame them, considering undead creatures sort of goes against most of their beliefs. Quite a few vampires are religious, which is interesting as I would have thought it would conflict with their more primal nature.

  Like many, however, I was curious about them.

  What was it like to watch civilizations fall? To stand on that precipice of life and death, knowing that you had only the Council to answer to?

  Their history, their experiences, it was all a jumble of interesting information which I wanted to access.

  Which was one reason why I had wanted to do the interviews.

  The interviewers had been chosen from those who applied. Some were likely sought out for the task, but I had been one of the applicants. Kind of had to after all was said and done.

  Those being interviewed had been selected ‘at random’ by the Council.

  I don’t think any of the interviewers believed that our subjects had truly been chosen at random. Obviously, some vampires were more mortal-friendly than others. Their pool of possible candidates probably dwindled so quickly that there were only one or two to randomly select for removal.

  Each interviewer had been paired with a vampire at the Council’s discretion. Four hundred names were given to the Council, all carefully selected, and all but two percent had been rejected. So, the interviewers were drawn again, and again only a few were chosen.

  I was one of the last to be chosen, and that fact wasn’t lost on me. The mortals didn’t want me in the interview. They were probably looking for ways to have me removed. A blacklisted journalist student who didn’t even make it through the second year wasn’t exactly a name one wanted attached to their articles and books.

  Though, jumping from biology in my third year over to journalism probably didn’t help my odds any. This was not my calling, they had told me, this was not my life’s work.

  They had already tried to talk me out of it once.

  I was just about the youngest accepted applicant, with only an eighteen-year-old with terminal cancer being younger than me. All the others were in their early thirties to late forties. They had lived and laughed and experienced the world some.

  I didn’t have the life experience to understand what a vampire might be trying to say to me, I think is what they meant.

>   Whatever they actually meant, I was going to make damned certain they could find no fault in my work. I would follow all the rules, abide by the odd suggestions, and try not to think about what poor fool discovered, the hard way, that going without a bra was unacceptable behaviour.

  Note to self, don’t refer to him as the undead.

  The sun was completely set when I looked up from my tablet. The only reason I even looked up was because Mr. Fedora had approached my table.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” I said, trying to sound as polite as possible, even as I knew he’d bitch about me later for being too selfish for his perfect self.

  What is it about a fedora, that made me automatically assume he was a narcissistic hipster?

  He still wore the glasses, despite the fact that the sun was completely down and the corner I sat in was almost in twilight now. I doubted he could see much with those things on.

  Up close and personal, I was ignoring the majestic beard. His aquiline nose drew my attention. That too was almost noble in nature. Never broken, or scarred. I imagined his hands were soft and for a moment, toyed with the idea that his voice would be high enough to be childish in nature.

  Like waiting for the axe to fall.

  Axe to fall? Is that the right metaphor?

  Mr. Fedora sat across from me.

  “Uh, buddy?” I asked, wondering if he was deaf or something. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  I put enough of an edge to my voice that even the barista hesitated as he placed a scone into the display case. The man glanced towards us and seemed to consider whether he wanted to interfere. After a long moment, he turned back to his scones.

  Guess he decided to let me handle Mr. Fedora on my own.

  The fedora came off, settling on the table and drawing my attention as the sunglasses followed a moment later. My eyes remained on the sunglasses and the long fingers, perfectly manicured, that hesitated as they set the dark glasses on the table beside the fedora.

  Both sat mere inches from my purse.

  I followed the fingers up.

  Up the arm, over the dark, diamond patterned vest, and to the collar of the dress shirt. It was about then that I realized that the clothing wasn’t just formal looking, it had obviously been tailored to suit his body. The clothing moved with him as his hands slipped off the table, to his lap.

  When my eyes flowed up his throat, and across that black beard of his, my heart fluttered in my chest once more. I felt as if he knew that I had been sitting there, silently mocking his fashion choices. That may have been why he came to my table, to confront me about my judgmental attitude.

  His lips were well formed, jaw hidden by the shaped facial hair. A beard like that wouldn’t have looked quite so good on a man with a pointed chin. The hair of his beard gave no hint that it was longer in some places and shorter in others. No chin could be seen through that hair.

  Above his beard that proud nose drew my eyes upward. Our eyes locked, and my breath stopped in my throat. The glasses had hidden brown eyes with a fiery intelligence behind them.

  “I wasn’t certain,” he said.

  His voice was deep, but he spoke softly. I leaned in to try to catch his words. The sound of his voice wrapped around the base of my neck and caressed down my spine. There was something so very comforting about the rise and fall of the words.

  With a voice like that, he was probably used to getting his way simply by asking and smiling ever so slightly.

  He was handsome, to say the least. Beard or no beard, he was a looker and knew it. He was the kind of man who looked at me and then through me because he was used to having the best of the best clawing over one another to get his attention.

  “Then I saw the tablet. Though, I felt it only polite to wait until you had a lull in your thoughts, rather than interrupt in the middle and ruin a sentence.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  “My name is Quintillus. I am your interview subject.”

  I had spent almost two hours in the cafe, waiting for the very man I had attempted to ignore, even as I couldn’t help but stare. Nothing about him implied that he was a vampire.

  Looking at him, he didn’t appear to be anything more than a handsome man with a strange sense of fashion.

  He was hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Immortal, and there was a one in five chance that he had powers of some sort.

  Mr. Fedora was a vampire.

  Shall we jump right in?

  I was born the fifth son of a farmer, in a village of farmers. Agriculture was our way of life. It had been a good way of life, paying enough that we wanted for nothing. At least, we wanted for nothing that we might need to survive.

  We were aware of the nearby city, a capital, I think. Sometimes men would come to collect taxes. Sometimes my parents had to bribe the men not to keep a proper record. Like all men, the tax men of that time could be swayed with the right incentive. In their case, it was gold, wine, and on at least one occasion, a young wife from his choice of the girls in the village.

  That’s not to say that they were entirely corrupt men. They did not demand large bribes, nor did they ever go back on their promises. They asked enough that one might see it as a bribe, but not enough to take a farmer’s entire purse, so to speak.

  They were fair enough.

  I recall idolizing them for not having to work the fields. My father told me that I couldn’t be like them. He said on more than one occasion that I had no uncle to adopt and educate me, and I would never be the next emperor.

  He believed that I strove to be king of all the world, but all I wanted was a job that didn’t involve toiling in the dirt every day, planting and harvesting. I even considered becoming a military man.

  Of course, I was only five or six at the time. What I wanted to be when I grew up changed on a daily basis. In the morning, I would want to be a winemaker, by nightfall, I would decide to be a scribe.

  I wasn’t the only one with lofty fantasies of what could be. Nearly every child had them, and nearly everyone was sorely disappointed.

  While it wasn’t impossible to rise above the honourable farming jobs we had, it was all we had ever known.

  Far easier to become a farmer, than to move into a job which demanded experience, but didn’t offer that experience to anyone new.

  Sort of like today’s economy?

  Whatever do you mean?

  The whole ‘Entry level position, must have five years experience in advanced position and degree, pays shit, long hours,’ bit.

  I suppose, in a way that is true. Nearly every generation has a complaint like that. At first, it was about a type of caste system, even if they didn’t call it that.

  Farmers were always raising farmers. Tailors raised tailors. Fathers passed their profession onto their sons simply by proximity.

  By the time a boy was old enough to take a job of his own, he already had many of the skills required to do his father’s job.

  My father inherited the farm from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on for generations down the line.

  Being the fifth son and eighth child—especially being so young at the time—my chores were relatively simple. I didn’t have the strength or fine motor skills to do more, and my father didn’t trust that I could yet tell a sprout from a weed.

  We farmed wheat for sale and maintained a vegetable garden mainly for ourselves. During good harvest years, we’d sell some of the produce from the garden. During bad years, we’d sell more to try and fill the purse going to the taxman.

  The village we lived in had a population of perhaps two hundred people. There were a few specialists in the village, a small smithy, herbalist, and the like.

  The smith lived in a two-story house that I was in awe over. It was the first two-story house built in the village and was relatively new. It probably would have been the event of a lifetime, had life not taken another direction.

  The smith’s house may have been two stories, but he did
not live on both levels of the house. The ground floor was his shop and foundry. The second was where he lived with his family. It must have been terribly hot in the summer, but warm in the winter.

  Everyone else lived in two and three room, one level houses with dirt floors and thatched roofs.

  Most modern people seem to think that a dirt floor is like a sandbox, it’s not. The floor had been hammered to compress it as much as possible. With such a compression, it was quite nearly solid.

  There wasn’t dirt everywhere. We kept a clean house.

  Sweeping out cobwebs and wiping down surfaces was something that a five-year-old could do.

  We all chipped in, so to speak. We all had our allotted places in the house. We were all part of a functioning ecosystem, I’ve heard some say. If one of us died or became ill—or even moved out to start a family of their own—there was a brief turmoil.

  Everything would eventually fall back into place, however.

  The people of that time were much more adaptable. We didn’t turn our noses up because our food wasn’t cooked just so. Our world did not end because we ‘just couldn’t,’ and few had the energy to cause trouble at the end of the day.

  You are, of course, making a cynical comment on First World young adults.

  Yes, your sense of entitlement rivals that of the nobility of ages past. None of you are noble. Few have parents with enough money to buy all the latest gadgets.

  Yet you expect it constantly.

  Do you recall what happened to that nobility? The poor killed them all!

  In my day, my father was a great man for providing all of us with food. We loved him because he loved and cared for us. He would carve toys out of wood, and crudely shaped as they were, we loved the toys because he had given them to us.

  Entitlement disgusts me.

  Just because a person was born, does not mean that they deserve to have everything handed to them. If you want something, earn it. Work hard for it and be happy God smiles upon you.

  For you live in a time when disease is little, warfare is at an all time low and your violent crimes?