His plan is to take off from Hanover on Saturday and abandon Huntington for good. While there, he will have to force Lorena to erase the video from her cloud storage. Then he will decide what to do with her.
He removes his possessions from their hiding place and lays them all out. A new piece of paper sticks out from the pages ofHamlet,one he slid in there, but he cannot bear to look at it right now.
Instead, he focuses on the portraits. They are small enough to fit in his pants’ pockets, but he will need to remove them from their frames. He pops the drawings free of their holders, and when Grandsire’s flips over, William sees something on the back.
Ink.
He cannot believe how foolish he has been. How could it not have occurred to him to do this sooner?
It is the girl’s fault. She has been too great a distraction.
He will be better off without her.
GRANDSIRE
The most eternal among the eternal, and the sole leader ever acknowledged by the immortals. He is the architect of the Treaty, the first covenant among the species and the only instance wherein vampires have yielded to the… law. Known to some as the Savior, he united… era of dire discord and famine, when it seemed the vampires’ source of sustenance might vanish from the earth. His true name… swallowed by the passage of time, yet it is through his bloodline that his kin shall endure.
Some of the words have been smudged, but William still gets the overall meaning. In any case, he knew all this already.
He sets down the portrait and picks up Leonardo the Bloody’s:
LEONARDO THE BLOODY
To endure eternity requires a mind of unyielding strength. It is said that Leonardo the Bloody was born in the first millennium and is, or was, the second eldest being… upon the earth. He and Grandsire were thought to be close companions until Grandsire… the Treaty. Leonardo, deeming an alliance with humankind a profanation, railed against it. Marked as the Legion’s most wanted, he was driven into hiding and has yet to emerge. To this day, it remains unknown whether the Legion… down or if his own kin found him first.
Only one portrait left.
William studies his face before turning it over. Something tells him that he does not recall posing for the artist because he never did. They must have been spying on him.
He cannot imagine what lofty words could possibly be written on the back, especially in context of the legendary Grandsire and Leonardo the Bloody. He flips the paper over.
He stares at the ink for a long time, even though there are only two words:
The last…
That is all.
There might have been a third word, but it has been rubbed off. The last…what? The last of his family? Of hiskind?
The last vampire.
The phrase has the ring of truth. The evidence has been staring him in the face this whole time. He has been unable to pick up the scent of any immortals, and there are no records that vampires ever existed.
BecauseWilliam is the last of his species.What other possible distinction would make his portrait worthy of hanging beside their most famous icons?
A terrible loneliness steals over him as he processes his cosmic aloneness. He has nowhere to go. No community waiting for him. No family left to find.
William picks up the group portrait, and when he looks at his parents, the sinking sensation in his chest prompts him to open his mouth and suck in air. Yet the human reflex does nothing to calm him because he does not need to breathe.
They are gone.
He holds the parchment to his chest. He wishes he could at least shed a tear for them, yet vampires do not cry.
There is no one left on earth to mourn his parents properly.
He does not know how long he sits there, hugging the paper, except that the sky is an inky black that signals the dead of night. Yet unlike the horizon, his insides are no longer heavy or dark.
There are new sensations budding inside him that seem to have taken root in the past few hours. New feelings he did not allow himself to explore before.
