Chapter 7: A Scent of Mortality's Ending

It got kind of quiet after that. The Greek still came over weekly, but it seemed the lessons were pretty much over. Ixandarius explained that he had taught me everything a new sentinel needed to know, the rest was experience, when I asked why the lessons stopped. To tell you the truth, I think the only reason he continued to visit was loneliness. He let me bitch about the vast ignorance of freshmen and I let him regale me with tales of a sentinel's duties and the adventures they have led him on over a few millennia. It seemed a fair trade to me.

I also learned in the month following my lesson on teleportation that sprites are seriously horny and easily distracted. A few weeks after my first teleportation, Melanie knocked on my door early on a Monday morning. Needless to say, my day had not yet begun so I was thinking it was Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or salesmen of some kind. Rumpled and half-undressed with a surly expression on my face usually sent them packing.

So when I opened the door you can imagine the pained expression my face quickly converted to when the hovering sprite squealed at a piercing pitch and darted at me, changing into a squirming bundle of horny that was nearly naked and more than welcoming of my half a morning wood still tenting my shorts. I staggered backward, half-heartedly trying to fend off the assault on my lips even as her hand squirmed into my shorts, pulling me free and socketing herself to me. Her legs wrapped around me, squeezing tightly, as her hands clamped behind my head and pulled me down to her mouth. I was too tall and she too short to make that position comfortable. I found myself stumbling back to my bedroom, mostly in self-defense. I figured this would be far more comfortably done with us horizontal than trying it vertical. I was, after all, nearly a foot and a half taller than Melanie.

"Sorry," Melanie mumbled later from her place atop me, splayed like a bear skin rug before a hearth, a naughty, tired grin plain in her satiated voice. "I really didn't mean to do that but you kind of made me showing up at the door like a birthday present dressed like that. Or rather, not dressed."

This time I could remember every pulsing, slippery, writhing, clutching second of it, but it still turned my brains to goo. I scraped them together into something resembling a form and replied with, "Oh yeah?"

Melanie giggled, tightening things inside her where we were still joined, making me groan. "You are so cute. I am glad you are here now. Life was so boring around here for me," she said warmly, her arms tightening around me and her lips planting fiery kisses on my chest. "The Guardians of Atlanta, Savannah, Macon, and Charleston are all women and sooo not into the bi scene, to my regret. Of the lesser immortals around here, none of them pack the punch your hunky self does and most of them are not nearly as considerate, thinking it only their due that I visit them. Sprites, I am sure that disgusting Greek probably told you, are a bit needy and I have been told to stay away from the mortals. You are sweet and kind and loving even though you know exactly what I want when I show up."

What she was saying made me mad. Not at her but that her life, her very, very, long life, was simply one bed after another, one sex partner after another with nobody even thinking about her as a being. She seemed to be saying everyone she had sex with treated her like she was a blow-up doll, there only for her partner's pleasure.

My arms snaked around her form, holding her tiny body, as if to protect her from the consequences of her immortality. "Melanie, I ... I really don't even begin to know where to start with that," I said, my feelings bleeding into my tone. "You are wonderful and amazing and should be treated as such."

Her arms squeezed me again as I felt a wetness on my chest. "Never mind, love. You are too kind for this life by far. Forget that I said anything," she told me, her voice blanking even as it retained some of its joyousness. "You have led a sheltered life, thus far, and being a sentinel means that you will never know such degradation as can befall some of us. By comparison, I have had a good life. Even after Chicago, Ixandarius was far kinder in passing judgment on me than he could have been. Consider yourself my reward for the hardships and loneliness I have faced, if you want to cheer yourself up. After all, I do." And with that she leaned up to my face and rescrambled my brains for me with a searing kiss before resettling herself on me with a grin and a bounce.

A couple of hours later, after a playful shower, we sat eating fruit and toast (sprites being mostly vegetarian). "So, if you weren't here to derail my morning to begin with, what brought you to my door so early on a Monday morning?" I said with a grin, sipping my orange juice.

Her breathtaking smile blossomed, though it had a mournful flavor coloring it. "Actually, I was coming over to talk to you with a little more seriousness than we usually manage," she answered, her dimples peeking at me. God she was gorgeous. "Probably with more clothes, too. You don't seem to do too well when I don't have any on and I have similar problems when you show more skin."

"Oh really?" I said with an over-the-top, villainous leer, wiggling my eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

"Stop that!" she groused with a shiver, her eyes lighting up. She sat with her eyes closed for a long minute or two, twitching, trying to get herself under control. "We really do need to talk about something that is more your job than mine."

I sat up straighter in my chair, breakfast forgotten. "My job as a History professor or my job as a sentinel?"

She shot me a look, one shapely brow raised, making me flush like a school boy caught without his homework. "I was visiting one of my gardens near Aiken; the mortal is an aged one from the Old Country who leaves sugared fruit out for me in a cooler the night before she knows I will be around to see her plants. Anyway, after I was done talking to her azaleas about the coming winter and making sure her rose blight was completely gone, I went to get the fruit and there was none," she said, her voice shaded with sorrow and starting to be tinged with revulsion. "I looked in all of her windows and saw her body dead on the floor of the living room, her throat torn out. I did not enter, but it looked like a very feral vampire had eaten her dry. A neighbor and the police soon showed up so I left to come here to tell you about it."

At the word "vampire" I felt a sharp pain in my neck and saw the monster that almost killed me, eating my beautiful sister, groping my mother. My hands curled into fists and I took a deep, shuddering breath to ease the feelings.

"I take it this woman will not be waking up?"

Melanie snorted. "Of course not! She was almost a century old. No anomaly lived to be that age without someone coming around to try to kill them! You were lucky to make it to your third decade. I was thirteen the first time someone tried to kill me. As it was, I barely made it to my sixteenth year before dying."

"Have you heard about any vampires in the neighborhood? Any other strange deaths like that?" I inquired.

She shook her head. "Vampires outside of New York, Chicago, LA, and New Orleans do not settle down in one area in this realm. They are naturally nomads. Those four cities are big enough that they can blend their kills in with the rest of the death that comes naturally," she informed me, reminding me that Ixandarius had told me that. "If you see a vampire-like kill outside of those cities, it is a nomad and likely a solo. They hunt in packs in Chicago and LA, and New York is more like a medieval kingdom with Lord Anzar deciding who gets to stay in the city and where they can hunt.

"As for New Orleans, well," she said hesitantly, her eyes darting up to look at me with an odd look, "have you ever been to that city? No. Well, there is a strange culture down there that seems to see more of the real world than it should and they take the occasional vampire kill found in the open a bit more casually than most cities would. There are two clans of vampires that live in New Orleans and fend off outsiders rather brutally. They have an agreement with the mortals who run that city and its surrounds. They keep a lid on the weird things and in exchange the police overlook the possibility of vampires when one of their kills is found.

"All of that goes toward me informing you that there is no city in your territory in which you should ever have to worry about vampires setting up shop except New Orleans. If there is a vampire killing people in your territory, and the guardians can't handle him or her, it is probably because it is a nomad that knows to keep moving," she informed me, her tone grim. "The bastard who killed my garden's mortal will probably not stick around long. Especially if he or she is up on the news and knows about you."

Unlike the mythology dreamt up by Bram Stoker, his successors, and Hollywood, actual vampires were apparently very easy to kill so long as you were a stronger and/or faster anomaly than they are. Hence the reason guardians and the rare sentinel were tasked with dealing with them. There were some things the horror and fantasy writers and Hollywood got right about them. They were very strong, had mental abilities that allowed them to manipulate others, drank blood, preferred the night (though Xavier de Boers proved daylight doesn't kill them), and they can move very, very fast. Melanie suggested that the one who killed her mortal was probably a new one who was not mentored by the vampire who killed him or her as a mortal. Of all the different types of anomalies, vampire and weres (mostly werewolves and werejaguars) were the ones most likely to be abandoned by their makers. Most others felt responsible for their progeny and it took explaining their situation and abilities before the young anomaly knew what their life was now about.

Ixandarius, along with explaining my new world, the strange creatures in it, my responsibilities to it, and the rules by which I had to live, also had begun teaching me how to use a sword and some rudimentary martial arts. Being a sentinel came with some natural abilities in that direction but training was also required so I could police my territory as a sentinel should. He was surprised at how quickly I picked up swordsmanship and dismayed at how clumsy I could be at other martial arts. I had the musculature for it from swimming and riding my bike (stationary, now that I lived in a furnace, rather than a real bike outside) but my coordination was not as good as it should be yet. Ixandarius' theory for that was that I was still recovering from my immolation and that when my Sight came in I would start doing better with the martial arts.