The seed knows its time

I hugged Brit and kissed her lightly on the cheek in greeting. The ocean from the sea wall was nearly beautiful, a swirl of toxic green and blue. Brit looked across the water, “It is way pretty here,” she sighed, “I think Toxia is most pretty.” Brit was right; the green blinked kaleidoscope-like over the blue water.

“You see beauty in everything, Brit,” I marveled.

“I don’t know, Joah, but it looks like a moving painting. So beautiful.” Brit’s fiery hair whipped in the wind. “Several people asked me . . . um . . . why we were married in Toxia . . . but . . . I thought the church was beautiful . . . and we live in Toxia. I’m glad Ethan did not pick anywhere else.”

I smiled at the new bride. “All weddings are beautiful, Brit. You and Ethan chose well.” The swirling water drew my focus away from Brit for a moment. “Pity that what is so beautiful is also so deadly,” I mused. “But that’s the nature of evil isn’t, it? Lucifer, son of the morning. . . .”

“I don’t really understand evil, Joah.” Brit lisped quietly. “People have told me that Vlad is evil, but he has only been kind to me.”

I do not know Vlad. I have seen him, seen the respect and fear he engenders, and seen Brit’s fondness for him. But then again, Brit sees beauty in everything. “He has always protected you and that is good. So perhaps there is some good in him. I don’t understand much of the ways of vampires, the Lady included.”

Brit began to smile and talk rapidly. “I’ve never seen him do anything horrible. He made me toys that moved. And colored with me. And gave me things just because he wanted me to have them. He helped me make a necklace that protected me . . . and always kept ice cream in his home for me. He told all of those who lived with him that I was welcome and protected. Vlad calls me his one good deed. He told all of those who lived there with him that I was welcome and protected. Vlad calls me his spawn and says I was his one good deed.”

I could not help but be drawn to the necklace around Brit’s throat. The glimmer of it both attracted and repelled me, as always. Every time I’ve tried to touch it, an indefinable something holds me back. I lifted my hand to try again, felt the same old uneasiness and dropped my hand quickly to my side. The necklace made by others for Brit. “Vlad is your father?”

Brit bit her lower lip. “I don't know," she worried. "Ethan said I should not tell anyone he said that.” She paused. “Do not say it to anyone. Okay?” She shrugged a bit, face frowning in concentration. “Pars said my parents were mortal, human like me.” I watched as Brit began shifting back and forth in agitation. “Pars took me from the hospital to the garden the day I was born.”

I had heard this story before. And again, I was puzzled about Pars and his theft of the baby Brit. The theft that Brit always seemed to take for granted as natural in the course of things. Perhaps a theft from Vlad. “How old is Vlad, Brit? How long as he been as he is?” I searched for words, trying to formulate the thoughts in my mind. “He must have been human at one time.”

“Oh, Vlad is very old. Older than Ethan. Ethan was a monk when he was mortal, for Constantine the First.”

I considered this. Vlad’s time as man born of earth would have been far too long ago for him to sire Brit. But I also knew there are other ways of fathering. “It is not,” I began slowly, “unheard of for a vampire to father a child.” I wondered how to explain this to Brit so that she would understand. “Have you ever heard of Elkiminus?”

Brit shook her head with puzzlement. “Ethan said his kind do not reproduce.”

“No, generally they do not.” How best to explain? “But Elkiminus . . . they’re half spirit, half vampire. Invisible. They possess human beings in order to take on corporeal form.”

Brit considered this for a moment. “Vlad . . . is . . . um…he is not a typical vampire. He is many and one.”

I thought of Legion and the thousands of souls in it. “What do you mean, Brit?”

Brit began to drift a bit. “He keeps those who have gone alive. Like Dr. Harlow. And Olivia. And he gives all kinds of presents. He gave Ethan a seed.”

I shifted from foot to foot, trying to find a way into Brit’s inner thoughts. I had no idea who Dr. Harlow and Olivia were, nor did I understand the seed given to Ethan. “So the seed was Vlad’s present to Ethan? Did it make him happy?”

But, as is so often the case with Brit, the moment was lost. Overtaken by the thought of Vlad’s gifts, Brit pulled a small mannequin from her pack. A toy, I thought at first, animated, yet there was no key in his back. He stepped lightly in her hand, as though he were a courtier attending the throne of a monarch.

Brit held him out to me and as he crossed in to my palm, I pushed a bit toward him. I was both shocked and surprised; this was no toy. I felt prana. But he was not unhappy. He twirled in my hand as I blew him a kiss. He walked seriously back to Brit’s hand, gave me a salute, and then leapt into her pack.

She then began coloring for me, suns and roses and happy pictures, un'impressione sull'aria. There would be no more talk of fathers and seeds today.

Brit, there is so much I want to know about you. Though you say not, you are far from ordinary. Your seemingly unintended arrival in the city . . . I suspect it was no mere coincidence and that Vlad wanted you here. Your necklace. The seed. You are a puzzle box and I want to find the key.