Chapter 2: Unveiling Power
Days bled into one another in a seamless, sleepless continuity. For a being that no longer required rest, time had become a fluid, abstract concept, measured only by the slow, inexorable return of the fire in his throat. In the immediate aftermath of the kill, Elias had operated on pure, cold logic—the only antidote he knew for the horror and self-loathing that threatened to consume him. His first act as a master of his new existence was the grim, undignified task of cleaning up his own mess.
The hiker's body was a stark, accusing testament to his failure. Leaving it for scavengers or, worse, for other humans to find, was an unacceptable risk. It was sloppy, inefficient, and would draw attention he could not afford. With the cool detachment of a risk manager mitigating a catastrophic loss, he had assessed the situation. The ground was too rocky and dense with roots for a shallow grave dug by hand, even with his new strength. It would be a temporary, amateur solution. He needed something permanent.
His senses, now his most valuable asset, guided him. He followed the scent of damp stone and the sound of dripping water, a percussive beat in the silent forest, until he found it: a deep, narrow fissure in a rock outcropping, partially obscured by overgrown salal bushes. It was a wound in the earth, dark and seemingly bottomless. Perfect.
Lifting the man's body was unnervingly easy. The corpse, which would have been a significant dead weight for his human self, felt as light as a bundle of dry branches. He moved with a swift, silent grace that felt alien and yet deeply, fundamentally natural. There was no ceremony. He did not allow himself to look at the man's face again. He was no longer a person; he was a problem to be disposed of. With a single, powerful motion, he consigned the body to the dark, and the earth swallowed it without a sound. He spent another hour meticulously covering the fissure's opening with fallen logs and stones, then erasing his own tracks, using a large fern frond to brush away the evidence of his passage. It was a cleanup. A grim, necessary piece of crisis management.
With the evidence hidden, he had fled, putting miles between himself and the site of his first, monstrous sin. He moved through the vast, indifferent wilderness of the Olympic National Forest, a ghost in the perpetual twilight beneath the canopy. He was a king in a kingdom of one, his senses giving him dominion over every leaf and every creature, yet he was also a prisoner. The guilt was a constant, low hum in the back of his mind, a cold counterpoint to the returning burn of the thirst. It wasn't the guilt of a good man, for he knew he had never been one. It was the sharp, ego-driven shame of a man who had lost control. He had become a base creature, and the memory was a brand on his pride.
The thirst was a more pressing concern. It had started as a faint echo a day after the kill, but now, several sunrises and sunsets later—events he observed with a strange detachment—it was becoming a familiar agony. It was a coiled serpent in his gut, slowly tightening, its fangs sinking deeper into his resolve. He could feel its venom, a maddening desire that tainted his every thought. He heard the heartbeats of elk and deer, the frantic drumming of rabbits, but his body remembered the potent, exquisite elixir of human blood. It craved the superior vintage, and the memory of the hiker's life flooding his senses was a siren call he had to actively fight.
This fight bred a deep and corrosive frustration. He possessed physical abilities that defied the laws of physics, yet he was reduced to this—hiding, starving, tormented by his own nature. He was a god on a leash, and the leash was his own instinct. This power was useless if he couldn't wield it, if he was merely its slave.
The frustration reached a boiling point on the fourth day. He was standing in a desolate, rock-strewn clearing where a past landslide had scarred the mountainside. The sky above was a sheet of gunmetal grey, threatening a familiar drizzle. The thirst was a physical pain now, a clawing desperation that made his hands clench into fists. He was a prisoner in a paradise of power. The sheer, infuriating irony of it all was too much.
A silent scream of pure, undiluted rage built inside him. It was the same fury he'd felt when a meticulously planned acquisition was foiled by a last-minute legal maneuver, a white-hot anger at his own impotence in the face of an uncontrollable variable. But he couldn't scream. He didn't need to breathe, and the action felt foreign. The rage, with nowhere to go, festered.
He glared at a boulder on the far side of the clearing. It was immense, the size of a small car, half-buried in the earth and covered in a thick carpet of moss. It was a symbol of his predicament: immovable, ancient, and indifferent to his suffering. He wanted to shatter it, to pulverize it into dust, to vent his rage upon something solid and real. He imagined launching himself at it, striking it with all his impossible strength.
And then, something inside him snapped.
It wasn't a physical action. It was a mental one. A dam of pure frustration broke, and a wave of raw, focused will surged out from him, aimed at the offending rock. He felt a strange, jarring pull from a place deep within his mind, a sensation like a muscle he never knew he had suddenly contracting with violent force.
The boulder didn't tremble. It didn't crack.
It flew.
With a deafening groan of tearing earth and roots, the multi-ton rock ripped itself from the ground and hurtled through the air. It traveled the fifty-foot span of the clearing in an instant, a missile of granite and moss, and crashed into a thicket of young fir trees with an apocalyptic boom. The sound was titanic, a thunderclap that echoed through the valley. Trees splintered and collapsed, their dying cracks sharp against the explosive roar of the impact.
Silence descended, thick and heavy. Elias stood frozen, his rage completely extinguished, replaced by a profound, heart-stopping shock. His breathing, a long-forgotten habit, hitched in his chest. His senses replayed the event for him with perfect fidelity: the feeling of the mental push, the sight of the impossible trajectory, the sound of utter devastation.
He hadn't touched it. He hadn't moved a muscle. He had willed it to move, and it had obeyed.
Telekinesis.
The word, ripped from the pages of comic books and science fiction novels, bloomed in his mind. It was a canonical vampire power in some fictional universes, but not this one. Not according to the books. The vampires of Twilight had gifts, yes—mind-reading, foresight, mood control—but this raw, kinetic force was something new. Something other.
His analytical mind, momentarily stunned, rebooted and came online with a vengeance. The shock was immediately supplanted by a surge of electrifying curiosity. This wasn't just a random anomaly; it was a new asset. A powerful, unknown variable that had just been added to his personal balance sheet.
He had to test it. He had to understand it.
He turned his attention to a much smaller rock, one the size of his fist. He closed his eyes, shutting out the overwhelming visual data, and tried to replicate the feeling. He focused on the memory of his frustration, but channeled it, refined it. He reached out with his mind, searching for that same internal muscle. He found it, a tangible presence in his consciousness. He focused on the stone, picturing it rising.
He felt the pull again, but weaker this time, more controlled. He opened his eyes. The rock was floating a foot off the ground, trembling slightly as if suspended in an invisible current. A slow, cold smile spread across his face. It was the smile of a trader who had just discovered a market inefficiency no one else could see.
He began to experiment in earnest, his earlier despair forgotten, replaced by the thrill of discovery. He pushed the floating rock away from him, then pulled it back. The control was intuitive, like moving a phantom limb. The rock responded to his will instantly. He sent it zipping through the air, weaving it between trees with increasing speed and precision. It was exhilarating.
Next, he tested the limits. He targeted a fallen log, thick and heavy. It took more effort, the mental strain feeling like a heavy weightlifting session for his brain, but the log lifted, groaning, into the air. He held it there for a minute, feeling a strange energy draining from him. It wasn't physical tiredness; his body felt as perfect and strong as ever. It was a deeper fatigue, a hollowing out of his core vitality. The thirst, which had been a dull ache, sharpened noticeably.
Interesting, he thought, lowering the log gently. The power has a cost. It draws on the same energy that sustains me, the same energy the thirst seeks to replenish. It is not a free resource.
This discovery didn't disappoint him; it grounded him. Everything had a cost. That was the first rule of economics and, it seemed, of vampiric existence. Unrestricted power was a fantasy. This was a system with rules, and he was a man who excelled at mastering systems.
For hours, he practiced. He learned that fine control—like plucking individual leaves from a branch—was more difficult than brute force. He learned his effective range was roughly a hundred yards, after which his control became tenuous. He discovered that moving multiple objects at once was possible but exponentially more draining. He was a newborn in every sense, clumsy and raw, but his analytical mind allowed him to learn at an astonishing rate. He was no longer just a beast of instinct; he was a living weapon, and he was rapidly learning how to aim.
As the grey light of day began to fade into the deep, velvety dark of a moonless night, he finally allowed himself to stop. The energy drain was significant, and the fire in his throat was now a raging bonfire, demanding attention. But he felt a sense of control he hadn't experienced since his rebirth. He had an ability that was his own, something he could hone and master.
He sat on a dry, flat rock, the one he had first levitated, and his hand went to his pocket. He withdrew the Elder Wand. In the chaos of the kill and its aftermath, he hadn't given it proper consideration. Now, in the quiet of the forest, he examined it.
It was exactly as he remembered from the lore. Fifteen inches, elder wood, with a Thestral hair core he couldn't see but knew was there. It felt cool and smooth in his hand, and yet it thrummed with a latent power that made the air around it feel heavy. It was a focal point of immense energy, and he, somehow, was its master. The last time he'd seen it, it had been in the hands of a fictional boy wizard on a movie screen. Now it was here, a tangible piece of one fantasy dropped into the middle of another.
As he focused on the wand, the phantom library in his mind became clearer. It was Voldemort's knowledge, a vast and terrible archive of magical expertise. He probed it, not with fear, but with the curiosity of a scholar. He sought out simple things first. A cleansing charm. Scourgify. The incantation and wand movement flowed into his mind with perfect clarity. Hesitantly, he pointed the wand at his blood-and-dirt-stained shirt.
"Scourgify," he whispered. His voice was a rasp, unused for days, but the wand didn't care.
A jet of pale light shot from the wand's tip, and in an instant, every speck of grime and every dark stain on his clothing vanished, leaving the fabric pristine. He stared, amazed. The effect was perfect, instantaneous, and, he noted, had caused almost no discernible energy drain.
This was a different kind of power. His telekinesis was raw, elemental force, like using a sledgehammer. Magic was a toolkit of surgical instruments.
He delved deeper into the mental archive. He saw incantations for shielding charms (Protego), disarming spells (Expelliarmus), and binding curses (Incarcerous). He saw complex transfigurations and the elegant, deadly simplicity of cutting curses. And then he saw the darker things. He saw the incantation for the Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra, and felt a cold echo of the absolute, soul-sundering intent required to cast it. He saw the intricate, horrifying genius behind the creation of a Horcrux.
He felt no emotional connection to this knowledge—no echo of the rage, fear, or ambition of the man who had accumulated it. It was simply data. Cold, hard, and terrifyingly useful. He, Elias Kane, would never have split his soul. It was a fool's gambit, creating vulnerabilities where none needed to exist. But the knowledge itself? The strategies Voldemort employed to instill fear, to command loyalty, to dismantle power structures? That was a language he understood perfectly.
He saw the Dark Arts not as a moral failing, but as a high-risk, high-yield investment. The potential for power was immense, but the potential for corruption, for losing control in a different, more insidious way, was equally great. It was a tool to be handled with extreme caution. But to discard it entirely? That would be a strategic folly. He was a man who believed in a diversified portfolio.
A plan began to form in his mind, the first true strategy he had conceived since his rebirth. He had two distinct, powerful assets: his innate telekinesis and this inherited magical expertise. They were the keys to his survival, and more, to his independence. He could use magic to create a shelter, to remain hidden, to protect himself. He could use telekinesis for defense, for manipulating his environment, for hunting.
He would survive. He would use these gifts to impose his will on his new reality. The guilt over the hiker remained, a cold, hard stone in his memory. It was a reminder of the price of failure. But it was no longer his defining feature. It was a lesson learned.
He stood up, the Elder Wand held firmly in his hand. The forest around him was no longer a prison. It was a training ground. The thirst still burned, a constant, pressing demand, but it was no longer his sole focus. It was simply one more variable to be managed.
He would hunt soon. Not a human. He wouldn't allow another loss of control like that. He would try the Cullens' method. He would hunt an animal. It would be a test of his discipline, his control, and his new abilities.
His cunning nature, honed in the boardrooms of New York, resurfaced with a cold, sharp clarity. He was no longer just a victim of circumstance. He was an agent of change in a world he understood better than its inhabitants. He had the knowledge, and now, he had the power. And in the world of Elias Kane, knowledge and power were the only things that ever truly mattered.