Blood Tint ~ Part 11

{Start with Part 1}

Blood Tint ~ Part 11

“You said… your souls ‘burn more brightly’,” Neave started, her brow knotted in thought. “Why? What does that mean?”

The three of us walked to along Sullivan Street toward Cyrano’s in the Village. Somehow we’d all three managed to shower and dress without falling back into bed again. And I think both Daciana and I liked the fact that it had been so hard to resist that temptation. We walked intertwined, one of my arms around Neave’s waist and the other around Daci’s shoulder. I was a blissful sensory mess. The light press of their bodies on either side of me, and their distinct scents, enveloped me in tactile echoes of the last day. The lights and sounds of the Village at night opened me to the colored bustling night. Fortunately, Daci, after seeing I was going to be no help at the moment, quirked a grin and looked across me over to Neave to answer.

“Do you believe in reincarnation, Neave? The migration of souls to a next generation?”

“Actually, well, yes I do,” she replied, “though with an increasing world population there still have to be ‘new’ souls with the old…”

“Yes,” Daci chuckled, “the classic problem. But if we assume that most souls become reborn as soon as possible, what happens when the world population is _decreasing?_”

“Um… A backlog? A surplus?”

“Almost exactly right, at least that’s what we think. So, imagine a time like the Middle ages, the Plague, the Red Death. More souls being freed than being born, by a fair amount, and people being people, some of those carried the fiercest will to live. The best we can tell, some of the diseases of that era – the Red Death especially – made their sufferers somehow more open to…inhabitation by another soul.”

Neave’s pace slowed as she thought, decelerating all three of us. I had been noting idly how we, walking three abreast were having no trouble making our way down the fairly busy sidewalk. People flowed around us like we emanated some kind of ‘get out of our way’ aura. Which perhaps we did. As we slowed, people moved around us like water around rocks in a stream without even a glance, much less a hostile city sneer.

“Wait. Do you mean to say that people who got sick could get possessed by the dead?”

Neave was looking over at Daci, she’d done quite an excellent job of concealing my bite marks under a bit of makeup and a gauzy scarf. On the whole she was dressed much more casually than last night, a long peasant skirt and loose white blouse – appropriately Bohemian. Daci and I were, of necessity, wearing the same things as yesterday Not that our clothes had been exceedingly lived in the last 24 hours.

“Not precisely – not possessed. The person would have, in effect two souls. The one that arrived or was created at birth, and the one that came during the illness.”

“So what then – vampires have two souls?”

“It is a little more complicated than that, but put simply, yes.”

Neave stopped – halting all of us – and looked over at Daciana.

“_You_ have two souls?”

“Yes”

Neave’s eyes were wide, I could almost feel her mind assimilating the flood new information.

“How can you tell? What does it feel like? Is it like two people in your head?”

Daci laughed lightly, “I was a farmer’s wife in what is now Romania. My husband died in my arms while I was near blind with the same fever. It’s his soul I carry. It is something I can _feel_, but no, it’s not like I can talk to him. My Mitica is gone but in spirit. I still get recollections, though – like after-images from a flash photograph…”

“It is possible that the migrating souls helped those that did survive the Red Death,” I added, after Daci paused in a rare reverie. “At an enduring cost.”

“So, the Red Death created vampires? I thought it was just a particularly nasty version of the Plague?” Neave asked as I, gently nudging us back into motion for the last block’s walk.

“More correct to say it created the conditions that enabled vampires to come to be,” replied Daci. “There is some evidence to show that symptoms of Red Death were similar to vamprism’s physical manifestations – blood and bone irregularities, near lethal sensitivity to sunlight, senses heightened to the point of pain or madness… I remember that one myself.” Daci smiled faintly. I continued.

“In modern parlance we think ‘Vampire Zero’ probably happened sometime in the early-mid 14^th century – the advent of the Red Death at a time world population was significantly dented by the plagues.

“And if I remember right there were several waves of epidemics over the centuries.”

“That’s right,” Daci said, “Each resurgence of the Red Death, another ‘generation’ of vampires. Eventually it looks like the Red Death burned itself out – it doesn’t exist today at all. But there have been rare psychic diseases since. It took vampires a long time to piece it together – over a hundred years to assemble enough collective memory.”

Neave looked a little haunted. Centuries after the events, the magnitude of it all was still daunting to hear – certainly hearing it the first time.

“Souls fleeing dying bodies into the living – and some, I’m sure still didn’t survive.” She shuddered. Daci nodded, but didn’t add anything to that. Neave looked up at me, then.

“And you, Alak? Do you know who your other soul is? Or was?”

I returned her gaze, a faint smile on my lips.

“Alak was turned, Darling,” Daci answered before I could, “He has but the one, blazing soul, but all the other delights of vampirism.”

Neave opened her mouth to ask the next obvious questions.

“The differences will, I think, have to wait,” I said, “We’re here.”

{Continued in Part 12}