Elixir of Flesh

by Joseph Kranak

  * * *

  After the final three squads returned to the coven, they presented their plunder before Asha in the Great Hall. Fane and Sil had already presented Constanta to Asha, who congratulated them on this acquisition, saying, “Of course Vad has brought us the finest catch this evening.” The next prize was a boy around fourteen, whom Asha was also pleased to see. The third prize was a young man in his early twenties. This prize was not nearly so agreeable. Not only were male humans of considerable less value than the females, but Asha also preferred them younger. Her ideal trophy would be a girl close to menarche, who would grow to be a fertile and productive mother.

  Lina, standing next to Fane and Sil in the back of the Great Hall, watched Asha pour forth a warm flow of derision as she insulted the lead vampire for his poor haul. But, this was nothing compared to the last group. Lina had yet to see Asha angry before this moment, and she watched Asha’s anger in full display when she lashed out at the leader of the empty-handed vampires.

  “You had hours to find someone. You had a whole village full of people, and you couldn’t find anything.”

  “Well, you see Asha…”

  The vampire began to spin out an excuse, but Asha cut him off, “You had your chance, and you failed.”

  Then, with a speed and dexterity that made Lina leap back from fear, even though she was some twenty paces away, Asha lunged at the vampire. In one quick movement, she pushed aside his head to expose his jugular and sunk her teeth in, while knocking his body down onto the floor with her feet. She savagely gnawed at the neck while his arms flailed about in some futile attempt to escape. Before the vampire could react, his body was already nearly drained of all life, and his muscles were twitching with his final death spasms.

  With the body now motionless and sprawled across the ground, Asha stood up and pushed him away with her foot. She wiped her lips, which were stained with blood, and she announced to all those present, “We have kidnapped tonight because we need to fill out our herd. If we cannot create a self-sustaining population of humans then there will not be enough food for all of us, and some of us will have to die. This is thereby the punishment for all those who fail. Are you all clear?”

  Lina was rendered motionless by what she had seen, but she was able to nod her head along with all the other vampires present in response to Asha’s question.

  Asha ordered one of the vampires, “Take him to the kitchen,” and two vampires carried the dead body away.

  After watching the vampire body being carried off, Asha addressed the crowd again, reminding them, “I will be leaving for Terem in a few hours and will need a volunteer to replace Vad as my personal guard, since he is currently incapacitated.”

  A few volunteers stepped forward, and Asha settled on a female vampire named Eta who, though young and thus low in the vampire hierarchy, was well known for her speed and agility. Asha dismissed the rest, and Lina ran off to see Vad.

  Vad was stretched out on a bed in the infirmary, with several visible wounds. He was propped up in bed with a bowl, from which he drank being lifted to his mouth. Vad smiled at Lina when she entered and told her, “Glad to see you’re well.”

  Lina touched her chest to feel the arrow’s exit wound and reached over her shoulder to feel the entry wound. The spots were still tender, but were already scabbed over. For such large wounds, they had healed surprisingly quickly.

  As soon as Sil had returned her to the cave, another vampire had carefully extracted the arrow from her, which was considerably more painful than the process of putting the arrow into her, especially since it had penetrated so deep through her body, just poking out the front of her chest. The arrowheads were deliberately barbed, so that they did just as much damage when being removed as when being put in. But once the arrow was removed, and she could finally relax, the blood started clotting, and she was soon on her feet.

  The process had been much worse for Vad, with five arrows sticking out of him. Pulling so many arrows out of him was vastly more painful, and the barbed arrowhead scraped against his inner flesh. With the amount he had bled he was severely weakened and passed out before all the arrows were removed. Blood was pouring out of him on all sides, and they had to clean him up and slap him awake so that he could eat some food lest he should promptly expire.

  Lea was on a bed next to Vad, and she’d been almost as bad. She’d not bled as much and had more strength, but removing the arrows was just as painful for her.

  Lina told Vad, “We were more worried about you than me. You came within a hand’s breadth of death.”

  “Old vampires like me are hardy. We worry about young vulnerable vampires. I can’t believe he shot you. What threat did you pose?”

  Lina leaned in close to Vad and said to him, “I’ve got a question.” He turned to look at her as she approached and she continued, “Asha killed one of the vampires just a few minutes ago. He didn’t bring back a victim. So, she drank his blood until he was dead. Then she ordered him taken off to the kitchen. Why?”

  Vad looked at her warily, apparently reluctant to answer her question. He confessed, in a whisper, leaning close into her ear, “She’ll eat him.”

  Lina stepped back with some shock, but Vad gestured for her to come close to him again and listen. “Have you heard of vampire wares?” he asked.

  Lina nodded, saying, “I’ve heard of them. They’re medicines made from vampires.”

  Vad continued, “Vampire wares make humans who consume them healthier and stronger. They work the same for us. If you ate another vampire, you’d become much stronger and healthier too.” Lina wrinkled her nose at the thought of eating vampires.

  Vad then told her, even quieter and more confidentially, “I told you Asha killed all of the vampires older than her to become our leader. She didn’t just kill them. She ate them. Older vampires make the most potent vampire wares. They make one dramatically stronger, faster, healthier and hardier. Asha vastly surpasses the next oldest vampire in all these. That’s why no one could usurp her. She’s simply too strong. And she just grows more so as time passes.”

  “Do people want to usurp her?” Lina asked innocently.

  Vad simply laughed and flashed a smile. “I can’t speak for the minds of all vampires,” he said, “but I don’t think so. She’s made many changes that have improved this coven.”

  “How did she improve the coven?” Lina asked.

  “There it comes again. That endless string of questions,” Vad said, smiling again and giving Lina a wink, “You’ll make me talk until I grow hoarse.”

  Nonetheless, Vad explained to Lina: “Asha took control of the coven about forty years ago. It’s hard to keep track of time after living for more than a century. When you get as old as I am, time will change.

  “Back then, the coven was different: more disorganized, more chaotic. We had no steady food supply. When we’d get hungry, we’d gather raiding parties and grab whatever humans we could and just gorge on their flesh until we were sated. And since we were careless, we’d accidental infect people all the time and get picked off by vampire hunters, of which there were many. The caves were just a place to hide out during day. No one really took care of this place. It was a mess. We lived like animals, always getting into vicious fights. Even worse, the human populations in the surrounding villages were in decline. We were overgrazing our herd.

  “Until Asha seized power. To do so, she had to kill a very ancient vampire, a man about five centuries named Luce. Luce was fierce and intimidating. He was also hard and intense and more than willing to kill any vampire that offended him. Asha wasn’t the first to try and kill him, but she was the first to succeed.”

  Vad paused to rest, relaxing in his bed and taking a few breaths. He was clearly short on strength at the moment.

  Finally Lina had to ask, “How did she kill him?”

  “No one knows for sure but her and Luce,” Vad answered, “Rumor is she coerced one of his guards who let her enter his room
when he wasn’t there, and she hid. Since he was paranoid, he would check every corner of his room before sleep and always locked the door with a full guard to protect him. The only place she could hide was in the toilet, by which I mean down the hole of the toilet. After he was asleep, she crawled out of the toilet with a blade strapped to her back, quietly approached the bed, and decapitated him. She swung down so hard on his neck, the blade sliced completely through his mattress down to the stone floor. Then she drank his blood. After that it was easier to kill the five other vampires that stood between her and the leadership.”

  “How did she crawl out of the hole of the toilet?” Lina asked, “It’s not that big.”

  “She’s a svelte woman,” Vad said, shrugging his shoulders, “And flexible. That’s what they say. So, after she takes control, she changes everything. First, she thinks there’re too many vampires. We had maybe one-twenty or one-thirty vampire in here. Slowly she killed them off, either by deliberately sending them in the way of the vampire hunters or just killing them for crimes or incompetence. She wanted to bring the coven down to exactly sixty-one vampires. She regarded sixty-one as the perfect number. She wanted to keep it permanently at that number. Though you being brought in was unusual, you were brought in to replace Tan, who’d died recently. She also had to stop us from infecting humans and had to try and eliminate all the vampire hunters to keep them from picking us off.

  “She made us kidnap humans instead of killing them. We expanded the caves, and she barred off a huge section of our caves to contain them. She wanted to eventually accumulate enough that we could maintain a stable breeding population. To feed the humans we had to persuade some local farmers to give us grains in exchange for protection.

  “Inspired by the techniques of the apothecaries, she helped craft new ways to process dead humans, so that we would eat the whole body instead of just the blood. And she also cleaned up the caves so that they looked much nicer, adding new rooms and giving us all assigned work, which was essential, since we were now spending more time down here and were trying to build a self-sustaining community.”

  “Has she succeeded?” Lina asked.

  “Mostly,” Vad said, “We’re finalizing an agreement that will end vampire hunting. And as you saw, the number of humans we have is in the hundreds and could sustain us indefinitely, if they were cooperative and bred like we want them to, which they don’t. There’s always new problems, but we’re coming close to achieving Asha’s goal.”