The Lightning Vampyre

Me: Here I am again. Thanks to all you guys who are still following this! If you are still following this...

11th September 1960

"You wished to speak with me?"

Duantia indicated with her hand for him to enter Adéla's study, and his entire form emerged from behind the door, latching it silently behind him. It was about time, Eliás had had this thrust in his face for less time than it took them to make up their minds.

"We do, please have a seat."

It felt like a walk of shame. To his left, he noticed the presence of a few other Council members that were due to travel back to Venice with Shekinah in under an hour. Their cases already packed, they were already dressed for travelling, an aspect that made Eliás feel even more inferior. He was taller than each and every one of them, and at the same time he was the smallest. Eliás hated feeling small.

"Where is Shekinah?" he asked politely, noticing the High Priestess' absence. Surely it should be her passing verdict?

"She has gone to the government to undo this ridiculous dealing with the land." Said Duantia dismissively, "Now Eliás..."she began, threading her fingers together and avoiding his eye-contact briefly, "I will cut straight to the chase. Myself and the other Council members, those present and otherwise, have thought long and hard about this. I'm sorry..." she said, her words coming slowly, like had they been from any other person they would have been stuck in her throat, "The Council has declined your claim to the leadership of the Prague House."

Eliás' stomach tied itself in a knot. He had expected this. How much of a fool would he have had to have been to have even presumed that they would allow it? In fact, the anticipation of it all was enough to dull the sting of rejection to almost nothing. "Oh..." he said, processing it slowly, "May I know the reasons as to why?"

"As is your right." Said Duantia, "As Shekinah said Eliás, we like you. We like your attitude, to your work, to the safety of the House, to Adéla's wishes, We like your sense of reason, I particularly admire your ability to keep a cool head in difficult times." She opened her mouth like she was going to continue, but then half-closed it, her eyes darting to the side, before seemingly rephrasing her sentence, "But..." she said, "We feel that, while these attributes do you credit, they also hinder you."

Confusion struck him. "Excuse me?"

"We feel, Eliás, that, to the extent at which you are to the point, you lack the compassion required by a House's leader to relate to and deal with difficult fledglings, the compassion required to make you approachable."

He was silent for a moment, just to let the significance of her speech sink in. To her, not to him. "With all due respect, you have only met me once, and at a time of bereavement."

"You know as well as we do that these decisions cannot be delayed." Said Duantia. If he had gone so far as to give her the credit, she actually looked a little upset with the decision.

"If, by compassion, you mean the compassion that a woman could show?" Duantia looked offended. His brow jumped playfully and a smirk played on his lips, "I could be as gay as a picnic basket for all you know."

"That is not the point."

"Forgive me for entertaining the opinion that this decision was rather forthcoming."

"As you said, you have a right to know how we came to this decision." Said Duantia, "It is routine procedure that before we elect anyone to be an avatar of Nyx, we always check their backgrounds first."

Eliás wanted dearly to laugh. What on Earth could they find on him? "And what did you find?"

"We have done research on your qualifications, criminal record, history. Your academic record is exceptional, your university professors gave us some very noteworthy references. Your criminal record is clean, as is your background..." said Duantia, "Which is fairly foolproof, to be honest, although there is one rather large detail."

He was tired of this now. "What?"

"You were raised by your father."

He narrowed his eyes on confusion. "Yes. That's not a secret it's common knowledge."

"You were raised without a mother." She said, "Can you expect us to deem you capable of relating to girls?"

"I don't live under a rock." He said firmly, his patience wearing thin, "I work with women, I have no problem teaching girls and haven't for the past fifteen years."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Duantia shuffling papers in her hands, reordering them with precision and casting her eye over them to remind herself of their contents.

"I have here..." she said, "A copy of your mother's divorce statement."

At that moment his impatience exploded into full-blown fury. "And pray..." he said as calmly as he could, "What does that have to do with anything?"

He was doing it again. Asking questions to which he already knew the answer.

Opening the door to the staff lounge that day felt like being pushed head-first flying, all his qualms and worries on the outside becoming an actual physical force shoving against his shoulders and knocking him off balance. It took all his strength to shut the door on them.

Věra's head turned as she heard the latch, her eyes homing in on the dark circles under his eyes and his weary stride. "Are you alright?" she asked, "You look awful."

"It's been a long day." He said, collapsing into a chair with a sigh.

"Coffee Eliás?" asked Serafina from her post by the kettle.

"Oh please." He said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back, flexing his jaw a little. Might as well tell them what they were dying to hear. "Duantia spoke with me this morning." He said, "She and the other Council members have come to a decision."

Lýdie sat on the edge of her seat. "And?"

"And..." he shifted his weight in his own, "I'm not the High Priest of Prague."

Her face fell, as did those of others around the room. "Why?"

"Um..." he rubbed the side of his head, focussing on a random point in the rug before the fire. "Apparently they thought I lacked the compassion to properly relate to girls."

"But you're not callous, that's ridiculous."

His facial response was minimal when it would normally have been maximal. "When checking up on my background they found evidence that I would be."

"What?"

He sighed. "Duantia managed to get hold of my mother's divorce statement. It reads that my father was an abusive man and that he often locked her up in a closet for hours on end." The confused faces stared, "And that I was raised entirely by a man who was 'abusive towards women', is therefore proof that I lacked a proper upbringing and hence the proper 'compassion' required for the job." The room remained silent. "He didn't." He said, "None of that is true."

"What did you say?"

"I demanded the right to defend myself, and my father." He said as Serafina passed him a mug of steaming coffee, "So I told them." He took a sip, "I told them the truth."

Věra leaned in a little, like she wanted to ask him what that was but wasn't rude enough to dare.

"If you want to know." he crossed one leg over the other, glancing at his knee before facing all of them, "My mother was a courtesan." He said frankly, a small ironic smile on his face like he was telling them something sickly-sweet, the words stiffening the air, "A woman of good breeding but rather lacking in morals, shall we say. They married because their parents told them they were going to, as was done in those days." He looked down for a moment, "And while he was at work all day, she would invite rich noblemen to her bed for whatever they would pay her."

Silence. Eliás was not accustomed to shame, only to the solid fact. Why should he be? It was not his shame. He only disliked how some, the very few humans who knew it, thought it was a sin he had to carry for his mother. A beautiful socialite to the public, an upmarket prostitute behind closed doors.

"Do you know?" he asked them, leaning his head on the side of the chair and letting the soft cushioning ease his headache, "There is scarce evidence to suggest that I am even my father's child." More silence. "I haven't got a clue who my biological father is, and neither had she." he said, "All I know is that there's not one person with red hair in my mother's family or in my father's."

"God..." Věra whispered.

He nodded. "I know." He said, "My father was not an abusive man, not towards her, not towards anybody. He was a doctor, he spent his entire life helping people. He never laid a finger on her. She told him that I was his." He said, briefly picking up a strand of his fringe, "But it quickly became obvious that I wasn't. So, he divorced her when I was two, she lied on the divorce statement to gain financial damages from him, and then she left one night and never came back."

"She left you with your father?"

He nodded. "Trust me, I would rather have been left with him." He said, his eyes softening, "He raised me on his own, even though I wasn't his. Whenever I asked him about all this when I was older he would always tell me that I was his son, no matter whose sperm had got there first." The simple thought brought a smile to his face and almost tears to his eyes, "I was so proud to be his son." He sighed again, "And when I hear those lies believed by intelligent people like Duantia..." he flicked his hand into the air as if it represented the fleetingness he was trying to describe, before falling limply down to his lap again, "It makes me think the world has gone to pot." He sipped from his mug again, "You know..." he shook his head to himself as he gazed into the crackling fire, "I never considered my mother to have any part in my life at all. And suddenly a few lines written a hundred years ago have come back to kick me up the arse."

"I'm sorry." Said Věra, "I can't stand how this all comes down to the same wretched argument."

"I'm a man." He finished emptily.

The heavy sombre note refracted through that stiff air that held all of them in suspense. It was at a time like this that Eliás wished that Friedrich would offer a little of his timeless advice, but even the Horse Master was unable to do anything but sit quietly.

"So what do we do?" asked Věra, her head in her hands.

"I suppose the Council will send us a High Priestess." Said Anděl, "But I don't think there are too many people jumping up and down at the opportunity to come here or learn the language. Replacing Adéla will take a while."

"We need to figure out how scare off these communists otherwise there won't be a House of Night." Said Eliás.

"Goddess I hope Katja arrives safely..." Anděl mused, his face every bit the concerned father's, "Her driver's only bringing her to the end of the street."

So the House of Night was such a paragon of evil now that it was forbidden to go through the gates, even at the expense of a young woman's safety? Eliás felt warmed – Anděl, who in Eliás' fledgling days had always been private, strict, and – not quite cold, but still pretty cool nonetheless. Helping Lýdie raise her Jewish great-nieces, all that were left of her human family, Anděl had unwittingly taken on the role of the girls' father, and actually found that it had suited him. Whereas Lýdie's role had been that of a fun-loving aunt, almost sisterly as opposed to motherly – presumably because she felt it wasn't right to try and replace the girls' real mother – Anděl, having never met the family and never really having had one of his own – his father had been a clergyman –must have been repressing some urge inside him to give children what he had never had himself. Lýdie had often attributed his desire to teach to that. He had taken to the fatherly role like a fish to water, and although he had at first remained oblivious that he had gills, so to speak, he had come to love those girls like their father. Eliás smiled for the first time that day - he knew what a wonderful thing it was for a man to show a father's love towards a child that wasn't theirs. He often wondered if Anděl and Lýdie now missed Díla and Katja now that they had flown the nest.

"Is Katja coming?" asked Friedrich, as brightly as he could for a man who survived on all of four hours of sleep a day.

"Yes, she's staying with us for a while." Said Lýdie, "She wanted to be here for Adéla's funeral but couldn't get the time off university."

"So why isn't Díla also descending upon us in this ungodly time?" asked Eliás.

Lýdie shrugged. "Apparently Katja says she's got news but wants to tell us in person."

"Which means that Díla doesn't want her to tell us." Said Anděl.

"I haven't seen Katja in years... How old would she be now?" Friedrich enquired.

"Twenty-five." Said Anděl, "She looks as old as us now!"

"Hm..." said Lýdie, giving a sly grin, "I think she's been waiting until she's old enough to officially take a shine to you Eliás."

For the first time in a long time, Eliás' expression was truly blank. "Me? She hated me."

"She hated Biology." Lýdie explained, "She only took it because you were teaching it."

"See it's these sorts of things that freak me out, she's just a kid." He said, "What was it, all of five minutes since she came here?"

Anděl nodded. "Yep."

Lýdie flapped a hand at his arm. "Katja's grown up now, she can do what she wants."

Eliás rolled his eyes. "Oh, should I be taking that into consideration?"

"Dr. Svboda!!!"

As the last of Eliás' Fourth formers filtered out of his classroom for the end of the day and he gathered up his lesson notes, he saw a shadow move across the bleached-white sheets of paper falling through his fingers. He looked over his shoulder and came face to face with a mop of rose-blonde hair and a cheeky grin.

"Katja?" His eyes narrowed. "Is that you?"

She nodded. "Oh yes. I'm back!"

He hadn't seen her since she left the House of Night aged eighteen and gone off to university... So why wasn't she still a child? She was a sad reminder in a way of how time passed for humans. He had known her ever since she was eight, that little girl who came to talk with the Germans during the wartime, yet it was only now he was noticing what a beautiful girl she was, especially for a human...

Whilst diverting himself from that train of thought, he shook himself out of his little trance. "So what are you doing here, voluntarily in the Biology lab?"

Her cheeks flushed pink when she felt his eyes fall on her. "Actually I wish I was just coming here to see you, I was told to bring a message to you."

"Yes?"

"As I walked through the gates the driver of a really fancy car helped me with my suitcases up the steps. He said he was waiting for none other than High Priestess Shekinah and could I please enquire as to her whereabouts? He thought you would know."

"But I thought she had left hours ago." He said, "The other Council members did..."

She raised an eyebrow. "Council members???"

"Long story."

"Well, I hope she turns up, he's been waiting for four hours out there, and it's not like Shekinah to be untimely."

"No it isn't." He said. She had only gone to sort out the land dispute...

His heart stopped.

Oh no.

R&R!