“Furious? Why?” asked Alex. “You’d just saved his life”
“He’d been ready to die. He thought that he’d set me up in a nice house for life and that I could just forget about him. I let him know how stupid that was, and after a major screaming match, which shook the walls, he finally saw how much he meant to me. Just goes to show how stupid boys can be, no matter how long they’ve been around,” she said with a hint of sadness.
Alex could see Michelle was leaving much unsaid and simply waited in silence for her to go on.
“We had come very close to losing each other. It was guilt that brought the emotion out of us. I don’t even want to think about how he would have felt if I had died trying to save him. He feels that because a human life is so short, it is more special than an immortal’s. To him, the idea of a human dying to save a vampire is lunacy. But that’s not the real issue. He would have viewed it as his fault for wanting to see me one last time.”
“Wow, so you guys can rip into each other when you want to?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Were you scared to say that stuff to him?”
“Nope. I told you I am not a tweenie that lets her man walk all over her. If Dante is being a prick I let him know, but it rarely ever happens. That was probably the biggest and last argument we ever had.”
Michelle rose to clear the plates before Alex took over, letting her sit back down.
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-two.”
“No, I mean… How long has he been thirty-two?”
“He was born in 1759, so what’s that—” Michelle counted in her head. “Roughly two hundred and fifty years.”
Alex closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “Amazing.”
“That is actually middle of the road for a vampire. On average, taking in world-wide age statistics, he would be considered a teenager. But in Australia he’s probably one of the ten or so oldest.”
“How long has he been here?”
“Well, he came here in 1790. He was a part of the Second Fleet.”
“You’re kidding me. He was a convict? Was he a vampire then?”
“Oh, no. He was turned after he got here. That happened in January 1791.”
“What did he get sent over here for?”
Michelle paused before answering and suddenly looked uneasy. “Murder.”
“Oh,” said Alex. She shifted nervously, not sure if she wanted to ask the next question. But she found herself unconsciously leaning forward, her curiosity getting the better of her. “Did he do it?”
“Yes. But,” she cringed, looking at the change in Alex’s face. “It’s not the way you think. Oh hell…” she said. “Okay, look. Dante was born in Spain. His birth name was Alejandro, and his family was extremely poor. He actually doesn’t remember much of his early years. In fact, he told me once that his first strong memories were of his time in the military. He excelled and became a knight—for want of a better word—extremely quickly because he saved the life of a wealthy landlord’s daughter. And he was only a kid. Maybe five or so at the time,” Michelle said, giving Alex an ‘impressive huh?’ look. “So as a reward, I guess the landlord paid for him to go to the best schools and study under masters of combat, eventually landing him the cushy title. But the thing was, Alejandro never cared about any of that. He cared about the daughter, Rosa Lita,” Michelle spoke the words with an air of mystery, spreading the fingers of her hands out. She had heard this name quite a bit, Alex guessed.
“He studied and stayed with the landlord because he was helplessly in love with her. The landlord found out, though, and warned Alejandro to keep away. You know how it goes. ‘No daughter of mine will end up with a common soldier’ blah blah. Anyway, Alejandro left the decision up to the daughter. That only if she did not love him, would he leave.”
“Did she love him?”
Michelle upturned her hands. “She must have, because they were planning to run away together. They knew if they left at the same time, someone would notice and there’d be no way they’d get past the border into France. So the idea was, Alejandro would set off for London, far away from the landlord’s jurisdiction and wait a month there for her.”
“Did she make it?”
“Oh she made it, but she wasn’t alone.”
“Oh no… her father?”
“Worse,” Michelle replied, her eyebrows rising quickly. “So there he was, in the dead of night, waiting at the designated dock with flowers and an engagement ring to surprise her. He’d even paid off a fisherman to let him use his boat to meet up with a passenger ship later. Everything was ready, no one was around. Then he saw her. She was running to him. Calling out to him. It seems her father’s jurisdiction reached further than they thought,”
Michelle paused. Alex began to sense where the story was going.
“She started screaming for help. She was being chased by something Alejandro couldn’t see or hear. He ran forward, only to see that ‘something’ spring out from the shadows behind her and bite her. We know what it was, of course, but Alejandro didn’t at the time. All he saw was his beloved, dead at the hands of this monstrous thing. So with every ounce of hate, love and strength he had, he plunged his sword deep into the vampire’s chest. Which the worst thing he could’ve done.”
“It was?”
“Yes. Because you can’t kill a vampire by stabbing them, remember?”
“Oh, right. I’m still not completely clear on how this works. I mean I’ve heard of the
