Blood Oath

by Christopher Farnsworth

  He never really believed in the vampire. Not until the very end.

  THEY WERE LESS THAN a week away from port when Samuel, a shipkeeper—a boy, really, not much more than sixteen—lost his mind.

  He had spent the last day huddled on his bunk, refusing food, refusing water, refusing to move even when Adams brought the club down on him.

  Cade, who remembered what it was like to be a shipkeeper, brought the boy a cup from the freshwater keg on deck.

  Samuel took it, gratefully, and then clutched at Cade’s arm when he turned to go.

  “Nathaniel,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “We have to get off this boat, we have to.”

  Cade didn’t know what to do. Samuel’s hand felt like an iron cuff around his wrist.

  “We’re almost home,” he said. “Just a few more days.”

  “No,” Samuel said. “We have to get off this boat right now. There’s no more time.”

  “We’re almost home,” Cade said again, trying to pull away.

  Samuel sat up in his bunk and pulled Cade’s face closer. “No,” he hissed. “You don’t understand. I was out on the deck last night. I was out there—and I saw it.”

  His eyes were filled with panic.

  “It was just standing there,” Samuel said. “Like it owned the whole ship, looking out over the rail. It looked like a man, but I saw—I saw it!”

  Cade pulled away from the boy, trying to find something comforting to say. “We’ll tell Adams,” he said. “We’ll let him know, and—”

  He got no further. With a shriek, Samuel knocked him over and ran out onto the deck.

  Cade took off after him. When he reached the door, he saw Samuel, already standing at the rail.

  The rest of the crew was frozen, watching him with the same attention they would have given a shark.

  “We have to get off this boat!” he screamed at them. “All of you! We have to!”

  “Easy, boy,” one of the other sailors—Quinn, Cade remembered—said to Samuel.

  “You don’t understand!” Sam screamed, tears running down his face now. “I saw it! I saw it!”

  And then he leaped. Everyone rushed to the rail, but there was no trace of him in the water below.

  He sank like a stone.

  Cade, standing there with the others, realized they were looking at him.

  Then Adams broke the silence.

  “Sun’s going down,” he said. “I think we should get ready.”

  THERE WAS NEVER any shortage of sharp edges on a whaling vessel. What was left of the crew armed themselves with harpoon heads, lances, knives and grapnels.

  Each man was given a lantern or a torch. Two barrels of whale oil were put into the tryworks, the brick ovens on deck used to render the whale blubber. Now they were just being used to throw as much light as possible. Thick, greasy smoke filled the air.

  Cade held his torch in one hand and a double-flue iron in the other. The crew—down to sixteen, with Samuel’s abrupt exit—seemed calm. Even confident. The night was falling fast, but now they were taking arms against the invader. Perhaps they were going to die. But this way, they would die like men, on their feet, rather than like cattle selected from the herd and slaughtered.

  Then the captain announced he’d be leaving.

  He would take one of the whaleboats under full sail and head for Georges Island in Boston Harbor, and the military fort there. He would return to the ship with soldiers and guns.

  They were less than a day away. It was the best plan, he said.

  The men said nothing, because the captain had his gun drawn. He didn’t put it back in his belt until he was well away from the Charlotte.

  From the rail of the ship, they all watched him go.

  Adams decided that they should search the ship.

  They lashed the wheel into place, on course for Georges Island, and split up.

  As newer men on the crew, William, Cade and Jonas often got the worst jobs. This was no different. They were sent into the hold, to find whatever was hiding there.

  THE HOLD HAD NEVER seemed quite so big before. He should have been able to search it alone. Three of them should have been able to find anything in there.

  But the silence yawned around Cade like a chasm, and his lantern barely seemed to touch the dark.

  He gripped the harpoon iron tight in his right hand and took another step forward.

  He heard something, like a sigh, and spun around a stack of barrels.

  The thing was still feeding on Jonas. In that half-second while it was occupied, Cade got a glimpse of what had stalked them for days.

  It was taller than Cade, even hunched over. Its body seemed distorted, its head too long for its neck, its elbows bent the wrong way.

  Cade’s eyes fixed on the long, tapered claws at the end of its arms, the ones that held Jonas.

  Cade didn’t have much of an imagination back then. He never had time for it, with the hours of labor and the struggle just to stay fed.

  But he had the first and only flash of intuition in his life looking at those claws. He remembered the sound of something digging into the hull, as if it were clawing its way from the water and onto the boat.

  He realized that’s exactly what had happened. The creature had never been on the boat. But where else would a thing that hated daylight hide? A thing that didn’t need to breathe? It had latched to the underside of the ship, waiting for them to reach the open sea. Until it was too late to turn back. Every sunrise, it went back down under the waterline, safe from the sun, until it got hungry again.

  Cade was trembling. The creature’s claws worked Jonas’s chest like a bellows, pumping every last drop of blood out of the wound on his neck.

  It was the teeth that snapped Cade from his paralysis—revulsion at those long, needlelike fangs.

  Pure reflex took over. Cade remembered the harpoon iron in his hand, and screamed as he launched himself at the vampire.

  He didn’t even see Jonas after that, his friend’s body hanging on those strangely bent arms like meat on a rack. He just slashed blindly at the thing holding him.

  The vampire plucked him from the air and held him at arm’s length while it finished draining Jonas.

  It had known he was there the whole time. He was no threat.

  Cade struggled. He hacked wildly with the iron. The blade struck something.

  Then the vampire was gone. It moved too fast for him to see. Jonas sat on the floor, a great cavity carved out where his neck once met his shoulders.

  His eyes still seemed to plead with Cade.

  Cade no longer cared. His mind finally caught up with his body, and he wanted nothing more than to run.

  It was already too late.

  There was a whisper near him, and he was flying across the hold. He hit a barrel hard enough to crack it open.

  Another slight whisper in the air, and he was flying again. This time he landed on the rough planks face-first.

  The blade was gone. Dimly, he realized he was bleeding, two bloody gashes up and down his chest.

  The thing was right on top of him now. He felt himself lifted again, but only to its mouth. The breath on his neck was cool and rank, the smell of an open sewer in the rain.

  His head tipped back far enough to see that the thing had been scratched slightly across one side of its distorted face.

  A thin trickle of blood ran from the scratch, hung at the edge of its jaw—and then dripped onto Cade.

  He hadn’t even hurt it. But he could feel its rage, like the heat off a stove. Somehow, he knew it was the indignity of being touched that sparked the creature’s anger. It toyed with him, rather than simply gutting him.

  All those thoughts were retreating into the distance, getting further and further away. He knew not much time had passed, but his legs and arms were numb. He felt cold.

  Two things saved him.

  First, another light: far off, maybe a million miles away. Some last part of him knew it was William, coming bac
k for him. He was running as fast as he could, but it was all so slow to Cade.

  The vampire had to shift, slightly, to meet William’s attack.

  Then, the second thing: the ship ran aground on the rocks near Georges Island. The entire hold jerked and shuddered, and the thing at his neck was thrown away by the impact.

  He landed somewhere in a corner, the sounds of the ship’s timbers groaning under the insult of the crash. He tried to get his feet under him again. Couldn’t.

  The darkness took him then. He thought he was dead. Some small part of him was glad, because it meant he would no longer have to live in a world where things like that existed.

  He had never been so wrong.

  EVERYTHING HURT. The whole world was the edge of a razor blade, slashing at Cade, as he opened his eyes.

  He’d never before felt the millions of tiny frays in the threads of his clothes, but now they were tearing at his skin like thorns. The wooden floor of the hold was as jagged as rocks where it touched his face. His bones felt too heavy, as if they would rip through his skin like paper.

  Everything hurt. The stink of the sea just outside, as it filled his nostrils like acid. The light, where it sliced through the chinking in the hull. The air, a lead weight on his skull, in his lungs.

  But all of it was nothing compared to the emptiness at his core.

  The words “thirst” and “hunger” were far too small for what Cade felt. Too human. Even words like “lust” or “starvation” couldn’t begin to describe the emptiness, the raging need, when he woke. He had gone hungry before—his family was poor, which was how he ended up apprenticed to a whaling vessel at sixteen. And he had known thirst, when the water supplies on the ship were down to the damp wood of the barrel.

  None of it was even close to what he felt then. It was as if he was collapsing in on himself—burning down to a finer, harder point that was somehow also larger than anything else in the world.

  He could feel himself vanishing, disappearing into the void inside. He clung to whatever remained, but his body screamed in pain, and he lacked the strength to hold on.

  His heart no longer beat—it oozed. Slowly shifting the blood in his body, dripping out every precious drop. He could feel it.

  Other scents reached him. His sense of smell seemed just as acute as his vision now. Dimly, he managed to connect the various flavors and varieties of the scents with memories of people he’d known. It seemed like a very long time ago.

  There was Quinn, who chewed tobacco leaf constantly, until it flavored his whole body with a slight tang. There was Avery, who was already dying of the pox, but didn’t know it yet, didn’t feel the little animals munching on his brain, which stood out in the scent like a worm in an apple. Adams, the ship’s mate, a musk like salted jerky.

  And then, closer, more familiar, William. He knew that name. And Jonas. Random images. Sitting with them, talking, wandering the streets of Boston, looking for women and drink, with a lust that seemed almost quaint by comparison. Scenes curiously dead of any emotional resonance.

  A new, overpowering scent reached him. A rich, coppery tang in the air.

  It smelled delicious.

  All the memories vanished then, washed out in the pure, clean scent of their blood.

  He leaped across the hold, his muscles pulsing with new power. Jonas and William were piled there, like they were packages waiting for him to open.

  Jonas was dead—his blood was already slightly tainted, slightly old—beginning to turn rank. But the thing that had fed on him had left enough for another meal. And it was still warm enough.

  His canines shoved their way out of his mouth, and he tore open the flesh of his prey.

  He buried his face in the blood. It tasted wonderful.

  He drank deep, and every cell in his body screamed with something too cold, too dark, to be called joy.

  Jonas was empty too quickly. He tossed the corpse aside, turned to the other body.

  Then he heard something. A flutter of a pulse, weak but still there.

  He stooped down to William’s throat. Saw William’s eyes open, heard him say a name with his last ounce of strength: “Nathaniel ...”

  He knew that name from somewhere. He just didn’t care anymore.

  He drank the living blood, and this was even better. He felt his own wounds knitting, felt structures shift inside himself, and knew he was taking the last steps away from what he had been.

  He knew. He just didn’t care.

  There was a noise above him. He ignored that, too. He felt, rather than heard, the leather boots on the ladder of the hold. Intruders.

  He wasn’t afraid. They were slow, and they were no real threat, his new senses told him.

  They were men. They were prey.

  He realized his mistake when he heard the gasp. They were already on top of him. Guns drawn. Frightened and ready to shoot.

  He smelled their fear, along with the rankness of their sweat, under the gunpowder and oil of their rifles.

  He dropped the body, now empty, to the floor of the hold. Already he had forgotten its name. He turned to face the men.

  Perhaps if he had been just a few minutes older in his new life, he would have sprung on them quicker. Perhaps he would have gotten farther and torn them apart, and he would have started his new life free of any semblance of humanity.

  But they were prepared, and he was too slow. They fired.

  He felt the pressure in his chest—not pain, but pressure—as the hail of bullets knocked him back.

  He saw his own blood, pumping out of the new holes in his skin. He struggled to stand and could not.

  He looked up at the man in the lead of the intruders. Saw the hate and disgust in his eyes. Saw himself there.

  Suddenly, he remembered who he was.

  Mercifully, that was when the man clubbed him with the butt of the rifle, and everything went black.

  “WHEN I WOKE UP AGAIN, I was in a cell. I met President Andrew Johnson. That’s where my second life began.”

  Zach sat on the floor, with his back to the wall. Most of the time, he hadn’t even looked at Cade. Just listened.

  “Cade,” he said, his voice quiet. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Cade said, angry now. “You were right. The point of the story isn’t that I am a good person underneath everything. I was a person. But now I’m not.”

  “That’s not true. You’re fighting it. You’re trying-”

  “Mr. Barrows,” Cade said patiently, “I killed my best friend to feed myself. And I felt nothing. I am a vampire and a murderer. Whatever else I do in this world, nothing will change that. I can fight on the side of the angels until doomsday, but I’m still damned.”

  “Then why do it? Why bother?”

  Cade’s face was entirely in shadow now, so Zach couldn’t see his expression when he spoke again.

  “Because,” Cade said, “it’s worth fighting for. That’s all that matters.”

  Zach thought about that for a long moment. But he had to admit: “I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe you will,” Cade said. “Someday.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Neither Cade nor Zach spoke for a long time. Cade checked his watch again. The light from outside was gone.

  “Sunset,” he said. “Let’s find Konrad.”

  Zach hesitated when they reached the car. Cade was in the driver’s seat, but Zach wouldn’t get inside.

  Cade got out again and looked at Zach over the roof. “What?” he asked.

  Zach looked troubled. “Why are we going after Konrad?”

  “Nothing has changed. He’s still the priority.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes,” Cade said simply.

  Zach scowled. “Ask a stupid question ...” He stepped away from the car door.

  Cade wanted to get back on the trail. Get back to the hunt. But he bit back his impatience. “I know you’re not used to speaking directly. But you need to start.”
>
  “I think maybe we should get back to D.C. Regroup. Consult with the president.”

  “There’s no time,” Cade said.

  “Someone tried to blow us up, Cade,” Zach said. “You don’t think maybe we should pause and reconsider strategy?”

  “No.”

  “So that’s it? You’re just right and I’m just wrong? You ever think that this vendetta you have against Konrad is clouding your judgment?”

  “He has the answers we need. It’s that simple.”

  “He didn’t plant that bomb, Cade. Holt did. You told me that. So why is the CIA trying to kill us?”

  While one part of his brain talked to Zach, Cade was forced to pause and reconsider. Not his course of action—Zach was wrong there—but he had been too focused on his prey. He hadn’t considered another threat.

  “You’re right,” Cade said, interrupting whatever snide remark Zach was making. “Get in the car.”

  Zach looked confused. “I am? Wait, what?”

  Cade started the engine. Zach got in the passenger side.

  They drove to the site of the safe house. Now it was abandoned, cordoned off by police tape. Nothing but rubble.

  Cade got out of the car and walked around.

  Zach followed. “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Cade admitted.

  How had Holt had managed to plant the bomb? There was no way anyone could have followed them to the safe house. He would have noticed. Vampires had been returning to their lairs for centuries—not one would have survived if it were possible for humans to track them unnoticed.

  The only answer: a traitor. And not just any traitor. Someone with access to the highest levels of the White House. Someone who knew the location of the safe house, of all Cade’s safe houses, who knew all his secrets.

  He hated to admit it, even to himself, but Zach was right. The hunt was far more complex—and dangerous—than he’d allowed himself to think.

  Worse, Cade couldn’t protect the boy. Not until he knew what he was facing.

  There was only one thing to do.