Chapter 9

Ben Wake

It has been more than a hundred years since I've felt this way. It is 6:58 p.m. I told Ivy that I would call her 'tonight'. Does 'tonight' mean seven, or eight? I certainly can't call right on the hour. That makes it obvious that I'm fretting over what time 'this evening' ends and 'tonight' starts. But what a lifetime an hour can be!

I lost a lot of innocence within an hour of meeting Sonia Vătafu. By the time the sun set again, I became immortal and I left for war. By the time I came back from France in 1918 I thought I would never, ever feel a silly schoolboy crush on anybody ever again. I came back from the war, less than twenty years of life behind me, hundreds more in front of me, already old. My sensitivity to the sun set in quickly after I was turned, and my senses heightened in darkness. When they found out how good I was when it came to fighting at night, they were happy to let me sleep all day in a deep bunker and stalk the place between the trenches called "No Mans' Land" after dusk. It was a good place for something like me, who was no longer a man.

It is now 6:59 pm. Gazing into my past is doing nothing for me. It is not doing anything to bring my future any closer. The first future I've looked forward to in a long time.

I already know what I want to talk about when I call her. Prom is coming up. Something I never got to go to. Now I have a chance. I fret about for as long as I can stand, and at 7:18, I pick up my phone.

"Hey, Ben!" Ivy's voice is bright and cheerful as she answers.

"Ivy. How have you been this evening?"

I hear her sigh. "Carl and I had it out."

"I'm sorry." As much as I don't like Carl, I also take no joy in the loss of a friendship for Ivy. I've made few enough friends, and those that I have had, I've valued greatly. They're not something to cast away lightly.

"I know," Ivy says. "But maybe it's time. I'm moving on at the end of summer, Carl's going to stay here. We're going to drift apart when that happens, so maybe it's better for it to be a quick thing now than a slow thing later. Just grab the bandage and yank it off."

"Well, remember what we talked about last night," I remind her.

"I don't remember much about the talking last night," Ivy says. I can hear the smile in her voice. "I clearly recall being chilly on the back of a motorcycle, and I think some talking happened, and then there was this delicious, delirious blur."

"And then the ride back to take you home was chilly again," I say.

"No. I've never felt so warm in my life."

"Polar fleece is a wonderful thing." I feel a little bit guilty at that. Unless I've recently fed, I generate very little body heat. If we ever have a true future together, I'll have to learn to moderate her expectations on that count.

"Seriously, though," she says, "I do actually remember what we talked about. How many friends you've drifted away from over the years."

"Yes," I say. "If you ever need a sympathetic ear, I have two of them, always available for you."

"Not tonight," Ivy says. "But thank you."

We talk some more, small and inconsequential things. How our classes are going, what shows she's binging, and what I'm reading. Finally, I can't hold myself any longer. A hundred years alive, and waiting through an hour of small talk to ask a question is undoing me! "Listen. I don't know if this is an inopportune time to ask this, but if the answer is yes, I'll need some time to make preparations."

"What?" Ivy asks.

"Well. Are you available for Prom?"

"I am not currently going with anybody," she says. I can hear a tease in her voice.

"Would you like a date for it?"

"I'd love one," Ivy says. "So far, no boy has ever worked up the guts to ask me."

"I hardly believe that," I tell her.

"Kate and Nathan are convinced it's because I'm too perfect. Everybody assumes I'll turn them down so they never ask me. I don't believe them, though."

Her best friends are right, though. There is a certain kind of woman who carries herself with such a sense of grace and poise, intelligent and beautiful and profoundly sensible all in one, that simply seems too unapproachable. They find themselves surrounded by friends, but always alone in some ways. Perhaps that was what drew Ivy and me together. We shared that need for a certain affection.

"Enough about them," I say. "I'm trying to ask you to the prom here."

"Are you sure about that? You seem to keep asking me about it."

"I would very much like to go to prom," I say. "Would you accompany me as my date?"

"Yes," she says, without hesitation.

For the first time in a hundred years, my heart leaps up in my chest.

After we hang up, I spend the rest of the night distracting myself from what taking Ivy to prom really means by researching what I must do to prepare myself. Never having been, I discover I have a lot to learn. Clothing for myself, flowers, dinner beforehand – I'll have to find somewhere that I can hide the fact that I do not eat. I imagine she will wear a dress much to fine for a ride on my bike, but I do drive an excellent vintage Mercedes Benz.

Arranging these formal traditions for the event is time consuming, but simple enough to distract me from the other tradition. There is something undeniable about Ivy, something truly rare and unique. For some reason that I don't yet understand, she draws me toward her, not only as Ben Wake, the person, but also as Ben Wake the vampire. If I am drawn to her so strongly, any other vampire that comes across her will also feel the pull.

One thing that is true about the false story I've told Ivy is that my family is very wealthy, and that I wish to have nothing to do with them ever again. I did understate my reasons for wishing to have nothing further to do to them. My family, the Negre clan are not merely terribly dishonest. They are simply terrible, truly evil. Dishonesty doesn't begin to describe them. Sonia Vătafu was a typical Negre, she went out hunting somebody to kill, just for the sake of taking a life. When I amused her enough with that one stray mention of poetry, she claimed me and turned me instead of killing me. But she did not guide me through the trauma of the change. She left me to endure it unsupported, unguided, on the stomach-churning passage across the Atlantic Ocean in a small cargo ship pressed into service as a troop carrier. I arrived in France so ill that I should have been kept in a hospital, but I found out later that one of her agents had some control over the physician that examined me and declared me a coward faking illness to avoid combat, and I was promptly sent off to the unspeakable mire of mud and blood that was the Western Front in France.

I met one other vampire in the trenches over there, but because Sonia had already claimed me, he could not help me. He knew that she wished me to either live or die as my wits and fate would have it, so he could not aid me in understanding what I was and what that meant.

It was only when I'd managed to not only survive the war, but to use my new-found abilities as a vampire to adapt and thrive, that she took her responsibility as my mama în sânge. She was there in New York to meet my ship when it arrived. She brought me to the rest of the clan and presented me as her protégé, bid them welcome me as one of their own. My survival of combat with the warm impressed them, and they made me into one of their warriors, honing me to fight vampires of other clans and thropes. The training I endured for that was worse, by far, than what I'd endured on the western front.

These thoughts bring something into very sharp focus for me. The Negre will never stop seeking me, so as long as I'm near Ivy, she is at risk. They will smell whatever uniqueness it is that I can detect in her. They will take it from her, and utterly destroy her in the process. The only way I can protect her is to claim her. And the way I claim her is to make love to her. I don't have to feed off of her or turn her. I simply need to make love to her.

Actually, making love to her is not what I really want. I want the two of us to make love together. I want to share that most precious intimacy with her, more than anything. Protecting her from the Negre is merely an added, but vital, benefit.

It is late, and I am a creature of the night. I do not sleep at night anyways, but now that I have admitted to myself how much I love Ivy, and how important it is for me to protect her, I find myself desperately needing to move around. Any other night, I would go hunt, but tonight, I do not want to take any life, not even one of the animals I have fed on exclusively since the end of the more recent Great War, the one between the vampire clans and the thropes.

I decide to go out anyways. Even if not to hunt, I just need to move my limbs, to go out and see the beauty of the world that is hidden from the night-weak eyes of the warm. All motorcycles these days are built, by law, so that the headlight must be lit whenever the bike is turned on. I'd modified mine with a switch to shut off the light allowing me to ride without artificially illuminating the road in front of me.

I ride first to the river overlook where just the night before I'd first kissed Ivy. Then I ride further down the river valley and up the roads that lead out of it, seeking more places I that could bring her, to kiss her again under the pale light of the moon and stars.

I return home just before dawn. Enough time to sleep off the first hours of daylight before I have to wake for school. This morning when I wake up, there is a certain joy to the routine of acting warm. It's probably the fact that I have somebody to make myself presentable for. After my long ride the night before, the bike very desperately needs fuel. I leave for school a little early to give myself time to gas up my loyal steed and still catch up with Ivy on her ride in.

As I pull into position behind her, I notice that she's driving a little more relaxed than the first day I encountered her on the road. I still don't know yet why she is such a fearful driver, something that she hasn't told me quite yet. When we arrive at the school parking lot, I make some excuse for us to hurry into the building. I see Carl, see a dozen conflicting emotions flash across his face. He takes the first step toward us, then stops and turns away. Ivy was right. She'd pushed Carl out entirely.

I take one more look at Carl just before we get to the front door. Something way in the back of my mind tells me I need to talk to him. It's a familiar voice. One that doesn't speak to me much but when it does, I have learned to always listen. I ignored it once in France, and it almost cost me my life in an extremely unpleasant manner. I ignored another time, in the late 30s while I was stalking an elder from the Ahlebri clan. I don't ignore that voice anymore.

But I also don't even know how to approach Carl right now. 'Hey, buddy. Sorry your not-girlfriend dumped you for me. How are you?'

At least I don't need to listen to the voice right now. It doesn't grab me with an immediate urgency, so I dare wait until the end of the day. I beg off from following Ivy home with an excuse that my parents and I have already made dinner plans for the night, but promise her tomorrow we can have the entire evening together. She says her grandmother will be home then, but not to worry, she can handle her.

After the final bell rings, I hurry to get to the end of the hallway where Carl's locker is. He swaps out his books and starts to leave the building. I start to follow, rapidly catching up to him. I reach out to touch him, am about to call his name, when the voice shouts, "Watch!"

I don't quite touch Carl. I don't need to for the sense to work, I just need to be close for a moment. I see an image of Carl, halfway pupped up, trapped mid-transformation in the throes of death. His throat torn out, limbs broken. I know, because sometimes the sense tells me these things. That this is Carl's fate if he stays near Ivy. He's going to be killed by a vampire. I pull my hand away and stop following. My immediate concern is that I will kill him. I can't understand why, though. I know that he will never have Ivy's heart the way I have it today. He's a thrope, but not only is the Truce in effect, but I've sworn off pelting even if it starts again. The things I did during the Great War between the vampire and werewolves took me too far from myself. I could not stand the powerful darkness dwelling within me. I cannot imagine any scenario in which I would actually harm Carl. He truly believes that I will bring great harm to Ivy, but that opinion is by no means anything I would kill him for. I wonder if perhaps my sense is telling me it would be an act of self-defense. I did see him halfway transformed. But if he were to come at me in wolf form, I would have the time it takes him to change to run from him, get a head start he'd never be able to overcome. No, there is no reason for me to kill him while he pups.

A few other students run into me while I stand still in the middle of the hallway. One of them is polite enough to say something. The rest look at me, daring to make an issue out of it, if they acknowledge me at all. I go lean up against the wall and think. If he remains close to Ivy, great harm will come to him. This I know to be true, for the sense never lies. It will not be me that harms him. This I desperately want to believe.

I do my best to recall the scene, to see if there is some detail that will give me a clearer idea of the exact threat to Carl. It takes me a moment, and I need to replay the image again, but I catch it for sure the second time. The image showed Carl's limbs broken. Since he was still transforming when he died, his hands had not yet fully changed to paws, just very furry, stubby-fingered hands with long, black nails. The right arm was draped across the chest, so that the paw hand rested over the heart, and the first two fingers were crossed. That posture is the calling card of the Negre clan, and it means that they are not done killing yet, just narrowing in on their true prey. The ultimate victim of such a hunt is left in a different position.

Now the meaning of the image is clear to me. My old clan, which I've disgraced by turning away from their murderous and ruthless ways, and which I have rebelled against by fleeing, is seeking more than just me. I don't know how quickly they will be able to find Stokers Mill – the sense does not tell me to flee now. However, the sense does make it very clear that the more time that Carl spends with Ivy, the more likely they are to use him to get to her. Whatever it is about Ivy that is so unique and attractive to vampires will be sucked out of her, leaving nothing but a joyless, soulless shell behind to linger away, fading imperceptibly across the border between life and death.

I need to brace myself to feeding Ivy more lies to get her to push Carl even farther away, for his own protection and for hers. I need to start closing up my life here in Stokers Mill and create a new identity in some other small town somewhere.

The thought of continuing to be dishonest with Ivy pains me horribly. I realize I cannot do it much longer. I promise myself that on prom night, before I claim her, I will tell her the truth about me, everything, and hope beyond all hope that she will still have me. It has to be done, for if Ivy and I are to have any future together, she deserves to know, and needs to know the truth.