The Vampire Lover by Jeanne Kalogridis

Author:Jeanne Kalogridis [Kalogridis, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-06T02:00:00+00:00

I am very, very old. I am immortal, but have posed as a mortal many times. I was born in the year 1452 in Wallachia, the geographical region now known as southern Romania. I am here because I remember an incident that took place two days ago in the San Francisco Opera House: How the gold curtain came down over Madame Butterfly’s reclining form. How I turned my face away, struggling to repress sentimental tears at the opera’s inevitable conclusion. How, as the lights came up, I rose and headed for the stairs, and saw his eyes: Evergreen, the color of trees in the infinite forest. Saw his face, young and beautiful, his full moustache and hair cobalt against his pale skin.

Vlad, Prince of Wallachia, known to the world now as the Impaler. My consort, my heart. My greatest love and my greatest peril. Coming down from the balcony as I came up from the orchestra, looking like a normal mortal, like me; walking, like me, toward the stairs.

I only had an instant to register him before the automatic programming kicked in—a safety net that Jack and Bram and I had agreed to, should we ever come across danger while on an amnesiac’s sabbatical. An intentional amnesia, so that we could live a normal mortal life for a few decades, to restore us to full sanity after centuries of absorbing grief, shame, guilt and despair. As a psychiatrist, I know how repeated trauma can reshape the brain. But we are immortal and resourceful. We have found ways around it. A mental vacation from all the suffering goes a long way.

Abraham Van Helsing, Jack Seward, and me. We became as we are in order to battle the Impaler. We are immortal, as he is, but with a marked difference. Vampires feed off the life force; we feed off suffering. Vampires kill; we restore, absorbing the painful memories, the physical and psychic wounds, of a mortal’s lifetime into ourselves, leaving peace in our wake.

Jack once jokingly called us “sin-eaters,” after the old Welsh custom of consuming food and drink in the presence of a corpse in order to take on its sins. The name stuck: we are the Sin-Eaters. Except that the “corpses” whose “sins” we take on are alive, and healed physically and psychically by our intervention.

I am the opposite of what he became.

Up to the encounter in the opera house, I had enjoyed my lack of memory, of any knowledge of the pain and suffering of the last five centuries. I had relished my two decades as a modern psychiatrist, helping others. But I recognize, in the second it takes me to recall my mortal incarnation, that despite the intentionally induced amnesia for the duration of that life, I was still unconsciously obsessed with him. Still trying to help him, by helping others like him.

Worst of all, still emotionally affected by him.

No, more than that. Sick with love when I caught sight of him at the opera; swooning with joy at the sight of my beloved, risen from the tomb.

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