Three Immortals Walk Into A Bar...

Levant

Fucking Tepes. He gets to nap while I have to come stateside again, and check out reports of vampire rule-breaking. How annoying. I mean, it’s the bargain we made, that he’d allow us to live, but in return we have to work for him. Honestly, he doesn’t often require our services. He’s asleep most of the time, in his comfortable and protected hidden fortress in Romania. But sometimes he awakens, checks the reports, and the tributes, and the bank balances, and the international news, and gives us an assignment.

This time I was the only one who had to go. Maria stayed back in Romania, trying to maintain control over her sisters. “Two weeks,” I told her, “only two weeks, and I’ll be back. And you know I’ll be seeing you every day in your dreams.” It’s the only way we can bear to be away from each other.

So here I am, sulking in the Atlanta airport, crouched over a pointless glass of metallic-tasting whiskey at the back of the crowded bar full of tourists. There’s apparently a storm which has caused flight delays everywhere, and what was supposed to be a nice tidy ninety minute layover has drawn out to three hours, four hours, it is starting to look like five hours. All I want to do is board the plane and fall asleep so that I can meet Maria in a dream.

I pull all the darkness in the bar to me, every shadow creeps across the floor and down the walls and out from under tables, and swathes my corner of the bar in night. It creeps up my limbs, swirling in tattoos across my skin, reaching my neck, concealing my face. The humans avoid me in my strangely dark corner, afraid without knowing why, and this is exactly what I want.

To be left alone, to wait out this infernal layover, and to be with Maria, even if it is only in our dreams. It’s all I want.

Gregor

“Any update on the flight delay?” I silently ask my Guardian, the shining wolf walking alongside me, invisible to everyone else.

“The boards will be updated soon with more time added to the delay,” Wolk replies. “The flight controllers continue to be concerned about the weather.”

Ah well. I’m in no particular hurry. I have all the time in the world, I think to myself, and Wolk laughs at me. Although, honestly, I could really do without this N95 medical grade mask covering my face. A global pandemic is not the ideal time to be flying, but my publisher wanted to have a meeting to discuss my upcoming history piece. I left my family behind to go on this business trip to New York. It should just be three days away. Assuming this layover in Atlanta ever ends, of course.

I adjust the mask and sit down at a random gate. I’ve just been pacing up and down all the different sections of the airport. I see that most people are still wearing masks, even now that vaccines have become available. But not all. Some people are too brave, or too ignorant, or too arrogant, to try to protect themselves with a mask. I could take it off, of course, it certainly isn’t for my benefit. I won’t get sick. But as I have told my family, we need to keep up appearances, and as long as masking is societally expected, I’ll do it. Besides, there is no guarantee that I couldn’t spread the disease by inhaling next to an infected person and then exhaling a particle of virus next to someone else. I try to be polite.

I settle in to do some more people watching. No place better for that than a modern international airport’s busy terminals. Wolk is also watching, as he always does, keeping track of all the people nearby. It keeps me entertained, and he has long been in the habit of monitoring my surroundings so that he can warn me of any looming danger. These days it is less necessary than it used to be, but you never know.

“Darling,” he says, after several minutes of silent observance, “there is a very unusual individual here in the airport that you should be aware of.”

“Oh?” I ask silently. We always converse in silence.

“He appears to be….”

What on earth can make my Guardian hesitate? I actually glance over at him, knowing that other people will see me staring oddly at the ground.

He appears perplexed, and says, “He appears to be a vampire.”

What?

“Seriously? An actual vampire? That’s new!” We have run across people over the years who had some characteristics of the fictional creatures, but I have never met one personally. I know England maintains a group that purports to be vampire hunters, but I’ve never really believed in the possibility of vampires actually existing. He is continuing to monitor the person, I can tell. “So," I ask, "is it more of a Bram Stoker sort of vampire? Anne Rice? Stephenie Meyer?”

“None of those,” he says, considering. “This individual appears to have functioning human body parts, flowing blood, a beating heart, but he has important physiological differences from normal humans. Primarily, he seems to maintain a strange control over shadows.”

“Shadows?” Huh. That’s interesting.

“Yes, his source of strength seems to be darkness itself.”

I can’t imagine how that works, and I want to ask Wolk more questions about it, when he seems to become even more surprised. I wait to hear what it is now.

“There is something even more unusual, though,” he says. “He has no Guardian.”

“What? Really? How is that possible?” Everyone has a Guardian. It is the primary characteristic of all human beings, despite the fact that almost nobody else can communicate with theirs.

“I speculate that when this person became a vampire, the Guardian took their human soul and rejoined the other Guardians, as happens at the end of every human lifetime.”

Goodness gracious. That is incredibly sad. Whoever he is, he is living without a Guardian, apparently without a soul. He is literally the living dead. I have to see him. I don’t often get the chance to witness something I have never seen before.

Before I ask, Wolk tells me, “He is sitting in a bar, in the next terminal.”

I begin walking in that direction.

Levant

From where I am sitting at the back of the bar, I can see the board with all of the flight information posted in lighted rows. I have been keeping my eye on it, hoping to see that my flight has begun boarding. Instead, I clench my teeth when the line showing my flight flashes red, and an even longer delay is indicated. I growl, and sigh, and even more shadows begin gathering in my heart. This is intolerable. At this rate Maria is going to wake up before I even have the chance to fall asleep on the plane and join her dreams. I’ll have to wait another day.

I’m considering ordering another whiskey, and trying to decide whether it would be worth it. It tastes like metal, like everything does except Maria. And the liquor doesn’t do much for me anyway. And the server has been avoiding me like the plague, ever since she braved the shadows to come back and give me my first glass, and I growled at her.

The plague, I think with an ironic huff. Half the customers come into this bar wearing one of those masks, to keep away the virus plaguing the world, but then the moment they sit at their table off comes the mask and they are all sharing air together. Utterly pointless. Good thing I don’t have to worry about such a thing. No virus can touch me.

I slouch in my seat, and growl some more, and cross my arms across my chest, and long for Maria, and feel the darkness swirling up across my skin in intricate patterns.

“May I join you?”

I glance up, shocked, and see a human male standing next to my table, holding two glasses of what appears to be the same whiskey I have been drinking, smiling at me with a curious expression on his thin, angular face. He’s clearly not an employee here, he isn’t wearing the uniform. He looks like just another passenger, skinny and casually dressed in jeans with a leather jacket, with a small backpack draped across his back.

What the fuck is this. I hate men. Why the hell would this ridiculous little human want to sit here in the darkness with me?

But, I consider, it saves me from having to track down that scared waitress to get another drink. I growl, and shrug noncommittally. He apparently takes that as assent, for he sits down across the table from me, pushes one of the glasses over towards me, and raises his eyebrows in an annoyingly friendly way.

I take the glass and have a swallow, put it back down and glower at him. I try to pull some of the darkness off of his black leather jacket, instinctively wanting to cloak myself in as much shadow as possible. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to work.

In fact, I realize that my nice corner of night here has been interrupted by his arrival, and the glare of the fluorescent lights is encroaching on the darkness which has been cloaking my table.

I frown at him.

He does not seem at all discouraged by this, or a bit afraid, or put off by my surly attitude. Humans can all sense how dangerous I am, but the fact that I could kill him in an instant with very little effort does not seem to occur to him. He doesn’t just apologize for his intrusion and leave. No, he stays. And he introduces himself, for fuck’s sake.

“I’m Gregor,” he says, with a smile, and lifts his hand as though to offer a handshake, but then he thinks better of it and his hand grasps his glass of whiskey.

He looks at me expectantly, but I’m not playing his stupid game. I remain silent but for a low snarling noise.

His lips quirk in a little smile as though he is amused by me. Amused! By me! A growl grows deep in my chest, and I consider getting up and abandoning my corner of darkness, just to get away from this annoying person.

“Please don’t go, Levant,” he says quietly.

What the fuck?