Part 5-9: Julian and Charles Darwin.

Part Five of Nine: Julian and Charles Darwin.

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He could hear Charles muttering in his sleep and William’s words, “Father is not doing so well,” drove him along the hallway and into Charles’ chamber.

How did I not know? Because you were shutting him out. Censure hit him in the gut. Of course, the vampire council had been busy in recent years, and, seeing Charles’ face, he always battled with regret, wishing he’d been a more selfish vampire and turned Charles against his will...of course, their friendship would have died anyway, even then.
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He watched his friend tossing and turning in the embrace of his knotted bed sheet, his face tight with anguish, and his skin stiff with dried tears.

“Looks like I came just in time. I’m here Charles.” Julian’s low timbered whisper filtered into Charles’ brain and calmed him. Three children had died in this house in the last decade. “It is enough. You cannot let your soul die with them...it is enough.”

Leaving the room silently, Julian resolutely settled himself at the muddled landscape of Charles’ desk. His scanned the copious notes that proved his friend’s theories beyond doubt, and would be irrefutable once published, and he knew, that left to himself, Charles would do nothing with them.

He would continue to sit on them. Emma Darwin, the love of his life, was a fervent Christian and every word that Charles had written here tore a hole in her beliefs, and so Charles had already waited...and waited, for twenty years. “But, publishing the book will exorcise the ghosts for you, Charles.” Julian was sure of it.

And Julian, too, was suddenly impatient, anxious for Charles to do it; to shout from the roof tops that God was a figment of man’s imagination. Irony bit deep into Julian’s brain...natural selection.

He grinned. “What would Charles make of me, I wonder? Natural selection sucked dry and turned on its head. I must be the most unnatural being that Charles could ever imagine.”

Frustration and the need for action tugged through Julian’s frame as hunger that burned in his chest. Ruefully acknowledging that he had neglected those “unnatural” needs for too long, and having decided on Charles’ salvation, Julian set off on his own. I need to feed.

Surrendering to the uncomplicated instinct of hunting, eleven minutes later, Julian had covered thirty miles into London town, and was standing in the shadows staring across the dark cobbled street at the smoke-coloured brickwork facade of a seedy-looking tavern. It proudly proclaimed the virtues of Charrington’s fine Ales, and Julian knew that it would only be a matter of time before a young man with money in his pocket and lust on his mind would stagger out of the door with a prostitute on his arm.

Whitechapel in the East end was where the poor and the shamed clustered, and, as Julian knew to his cost, those living in the affluent West End of London were fair game to those that had no food in their bellies and a blade in their hand.

The spring loaded door of the tavern opened and a young couple tumbled through it, pausing in the yellow glow of the gas lamp mounted on the wall overhead.

Julian’s hands folded around the wrought-iron rods of the railings at his back, and a shower of rust dusted the paving slabs as he crimped the metal in his palms. He was not interested in the drunken young man, his focus was on the expanse of milk-white flesh that the woman’s low bodice laid open to display. Her face was caked with make-up, and a slash of blood-red lipstick cut a smile across her face.

They set off along the wet sidewalk, the young man weaving, and the young girl giggling coyly. Julian sauntered in their wake. He allowed them to wander out of sight, following the smell of the boy’s testosterone soaked skin. The sound of the girl’s scampering heartbeat was a revelation. She is nervous...she must be new to this. As the couple came to a fumbling halt, Julian sank into the coal-black shadow of an alcove in the alley, and swallowed down the saliva that flooded his mouth.

The young man was rough and urgent, grunting coarsely as his body pressed the girl up against the roughened brickwork of the alley wall. The fabric of her dress tore and the girl’s giggle rattled in her throat with distaste. The smell of blood blossomed in the air as the tender skin on her shoulder blade tore, and Julian’s lip curled in disgust as the girl gasped in pain.

Annoyance coloured her tone as she said sharply, “’Ere. Watch it, lover boy. That’s ‘urting me back.”

Turning his head, Julian’s preternatural sight absorbed the young girl’s shame, her face tight with revulsion as the young man’s heaving body used hers. Julian’s fingers itched to tear the boy away and make tonight his last one on earth, but he was not here to judge, he was here to use her as bait.

After the coupling, the uncomfortable seconds dragged into a minute as the young man cleared his throat, his disheveled hair casting his face in darker shadow as his clumsy fingers hurried to button the fly on his damp trousers.

Julian smiled. He wants to be gone as soon as possible, that is good.

The young man filled the girl’s palm with the weight of copper coins, snatching his fingers away as though the flesh that he had grasped with such mindless ardour only moments before, burned him, now. As Julian had guessed, he was not a gentleman. He turned his back and was striding away before the poor girl had shuffled her taffeta skirts down over her hips and veiled the glimpse of milk-white thighs, decorated with the red blotches of his clawed fingers.

Julian raised his chin and scented the air. Despite the heavy lavender scent that she drizzled over her body, it stank of sex...and fear. He licked his lips. This was it, the part where he could swoop in, finish what the young man had started, and disguise his bite as part of a frenzied attack by mutilating her corpse afterward. But that had never been the plan.

To be continued...