Vampire a Go-Go

FORTY-THREE

As wizards go, Zabel is a better technician than he is a scholar. You can see he has little interest in reading my diary. To him it’s more useful as a component for his spell. But he knows about the philosopher’s stone-the legends, anyway. The notion that the stone holds some secret power appeals to his natural wizardly greed for power.

I suppose it’s possible that-

Did you feel that? No? Okay, sorry. Got distracted. As I was saying-

There it is again!

Don’t tell me you didn’t feel that.

I feel it tugging me so hard that I dig in my heels. Not actually my heels, of course. That’s just the outside manifestation of my resistance. If you were able to see me being dragged along the halls of Prague Castle, you’d see my heels digging in, my hands grabbing at doorknobs and window ledges, like a doomed astronaut trying to keep from being blown out an airlock. That’s what it looks like, but it’s with my mind that I resist.

I don’t fight it too long. Too strong. Some mighty hand that has reached for me, grabbed me.

I go with the flow and start to fly, sailing over the castle walls and toward the river. I haven’t been this far in decades. I stop wondering what’s happening to me, such is the awe of seeing this part of Prague again for the first time in so very long. I’m over the river now, a tour barge below me, young couples sipping wine. I am equal parts blue sky and wind.

The far bank comes into view, crowded Josefov beyond that. I have not seen the Jewish Quarter in three hundred years. I glance to the right and to the left. A half-dozen glowing streaks in the sky, ghosts like me. We converge on the same place.

A pulsing purple beacon on a Josefov rooftop. I feel like a kite being reeled in, right toward the rooftop. People standing there I recognize. I already know them, yet I’ve never met them before. Time works so strange here.

I land on the rooftop. Zabel is there, sending away other ghosts, lost souls. Confused. I don’t want this. I try to blend in, hide toward the back of the crowd. Zabel spots me over the shoulder of another ghost, and I look away.

Come here.

I shake my head no.

Yes.

I resist, but it’s no use. I float toward him. He has me now. The other ghosts fade, dissolve, dismissed. They evaporate to whatever perpetual doom they call home. It’s only me and Amy and Allen and Zabel holding my leash.

You are Edward Kelley?

I say nothing. My ghost teeth bite my ghost tongue. The pain is real.