by David McAfee
Taras looked toward the woman, who now lay still. Her heartbeat had slowed to normal, as had her breathing, leaving him to guess that she had fainted. A thin trickle of blood ran down her neck.
Grummit had done that to her.
Taras stepped over to where the man lay in the dirt and leaves. He looked down at the writhing, squirming figure and felt no pity. The man deserved to die. Taras had meted out his death sentence already; the wound in his belly surely would kill him unless some opportunistic predator smelled the blood and did it first.
A predator like Taras.
At last, he had his answer.
He reached down and grabbed Grummit by the shoulder, then hauled him to his feet. Grummit swatted weakly at him, but the man’s strength had left him, and the blow rolled off Taras’ shoulder as if it were a child’s. Taras spun the man around and embraced him from behind, plunging his teeth into the exposed throat.
The blood poured into his mouth, and Taras sighed as he swallowed mouthful after mouthful. He had been as a man wandering through the desert, his skin ablaze with the sun’s heat and his body dry as ancient bones. Now he had found an oasis, and he drank until he could not drink any more.
Strength surged through his body like lightning, feeding his muscles and his foggy mind. Until then, he hadn’t realized just how weak he had become. But as power vibrated through his body, humming with energy and vitality, his senses exploded.
The scent of the clearing poured into his nostrils like a great waterfall: the green of the tree leaves and the brown of the earthen floor. The sweat of the woman’s body, and the sour odor of urine from one of his victims. Even the smell of Grummit’s steel, tainted with old blood, found its way into his nose.
A cacophony of noise surrounded him. Birds fluttering their wings, snakes slithering across the ground, mice bounding through the brush, and many more. He heard every blade of grass that bent to the wind, every leaf that fluttered to the ground, and every insect that buzzed through the trees. He heard them all so well he could almost see them with his ears.
As the blood poured into him, the woods around him seemed to explode into light and detail. A squirrel chattered in a tree on one side of the clearing, and Taras saw it so clearly he could have counted the hairs of its tail. On the other side, a bat fluttered through the trees, and Taras saw the gnats that it chased. The moonlight bathed the whole area in a soft, surreal glow, and no shadow was too deep for his eyes to penetrate..
This was the feeling he’d had in Jerusalem after Mary’s death. This was the euphoric sensation that caused him to run down and kill dozens of people that night. Taras was more than just a predator, he was the predator. The top hunter in a world filled with prey.
He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.
He drank from Grummit until the man stopped moving, then he cast about for another victim. Not far away, the bandit Taras had stabbed through the neck writhed feebly on the ground. Without Taras’ interference the man would die soon enough, but he wasn’t dead yet. Taras leapt on him, placing his mouth over a font of spurting blood, and clamped his lips tight over the wound. In less than a minute, he had drunk a second person dry.
The only living person left in the clearing was the woman. Taras walked over to where she lay and watched the subtle rising and falling of the artery in her neck. She was already unconscious. It would be easy. He leaned over her, his hunger raging through his body. The roar in his ears drowned out most everything but her heartbeat, which still came in a slow, steady thump. He leaned in and put his mouth on her throat.
The woman spasmed, and started to scream through her gag again. Taras pulled back and saw she had regained consciousness. Her eyes went wide as she looked at his face, and Taras couldn’t help but notice the shade of her irises. They were a deep brown, like a chestnut.
Like Mary’s.
Taras stumbled back, falling over backwards in his haste to get himself away from the woman. Gods, he almost killed her! He’d been so close. He would have to be careful. Men like Hio and Grummit deserved to die, but she was a victim. An innocent. She did not deserve this.
Mary would have wanted him to help her.
She continued to scream her muffled scream, and Taras rose to his feet. He walked back over to her and grasped the spike in the ground. It came up easily, and he tossed it to the side. Then he pointed to the knife in Hio’s hand.
“It’s sharp,” he said. “Use it on your ropes.”
With that, he turned away from her. He wanted to stay and make sure she made it to safety, but the sound of her blood pulsing through her veins called to him, and he forced himself to keep walking. If he stopped again, he would kill her. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself.
He passed Grummit’s body and looked down. The bandit’s flesh looked sunken and dry, as though he’d been dead for months instead of minutes. Taras tried to feel remorse for killing him, but it wouldn’t come. Grummit had been a vile man bent on doing vile things. So were Hio and the other two bandits. In Jerusalem, in the days immediately following his death, Taras had killed without malice, pity, or reason. But this was different. Taras had simply meted out justice. That he had been able to satiate his gnawing hunger in the process was a bonus.
Taras stopped in his tracks, turning an idea over in his mind.
Maybe he didn’t have to die, after all.
Men like Grummit and Hio were everywhere. Antioch was full of them. So was the rest of the world. He knew; he had traveled through most of it in service to Rome. People everywhere murdered for money, or fun, or no reason at all. Men found sport with unwilling women, often beating or killing them in the process. Robbers would steal the bread from an honest man’s table. Powerful men and women stepped on the throats of the innocent. And there was worse. Much worse. All of them deserved justice, and Taras could deliver it to them.
He walked out of the clearing and into the woods, headed back to Antioch with a newfound strength and skip in his step. He had finally figured out what the gods wanted of him.
Maybe when the time came for him to die, he would get to see Mary again, after all.
THERON
Athens, 33 A.D.
Home. Theron stepped out from the deep shadow between the two buildings, wiped the blood from his chin with his sleeve, and looked around the city. He took in the many buildings and monuments, most of which had changed dramatically in the 900 years since he’d left. Statues of heroes and gods were everywhere. The Greeks loved statues, they dotted the city like flies on a corpse, but few of them remained from when he lived here last.
Acropolis still stood in the center of the city-Athens had literally grown up around the great mound of stone-but the structures atop it were different. Gone was the ancient temple of Athena from Theron’s youth, replaced by a building of white stone columns and a triangular roof the locals called the Parthenon. Supposedly, it was intended to honor all the gods, but from what he’d been able to gather, the building was now a treasury of some sort.
Behind him, Theron’s latest victim lay unmoving, hidden deep in the shadows as rats and other vermin tended to what remained of her body. The last of her blood spotted his sleeve, and the coins from her purse now mingled with his own.
Athens was much larger than he remembered. In his years with the Bachiyr and as an agent of the Council of Thirteen, he had never once come back to his homeland. He only returned now because he could not think of anyplace else to go. He had dwelt within the walls of the Halls of the Bachiyr for nearly a millennium, and before that he’d spent most of his life in Athens, having come with his family from Macedonia as a boy.
Theron had died here, killed by a Bachiyr woman named Adonia before he had reached his twenty fifth year. The two were lovers, or so he thought, right up until the moment she sank her teeth into his neck. His father buried him in the northern section of the city, under the shadow of Acropolis so that Athena could watch over his grave. Theron had awakened underground with a coin in his mouth, and sta
rted to scream.
Adonia had been waiting, and she dug through the dirt with her hands until he was free. When she saw him she smiled, and Theron saw her fangs for the first time. In life, he had loved her fiercely, following the scent of her jasmine perfume anywhere she led him. As he woke to learn her true nature, he felt no fear. If anything, the sight made him want the raven-haired beauty even more. He took her hand and rose from his grave, spitting out the coin his father had left in his mouth for the ferryman.
Living as a vampire had taken some getting used to, but even then Athens was a large and sprawling metropolis, with plenty of people on which to feed. He and Adonia ruled the night, fearing nothing, and feeding as they pleased. For a young Bachiyr, it was an idyllic life. The pair indulged in the pleasures of the blood and of the body whenever possible, with no worries of disease or aging to get in the way. Then an ancient Bachiyr named Ephraim appeared in the city and invited Theron to join him in the Halls.
That was nine hundred years ago. Despite his enviable lifestyle, Theron had gone to the Halls gladly, leaving Adonia behind to stew in her jealousy. He had traveled the world at the service of the Council, visiting places that he would never have dreamed existed as a boy in provincial Macedonia. There was a whole other world across the ocean that no one knew existed, its knowledge a secret known only by those who lived there and the Bachiyr. He had seen wonders few men could dream of and been party to events that mystified the world, all in service to the Council.
And now he was back in Athens, and it wasn’t even home anymore.
“That damn rabbi,” he growled under his breath. “This is all his fault. He should have just died and been done with it.”
He looked at his right hand, at the black flesh there. He’d burned it when he struck Jesus in the Roman dungeon in Jerusalem. In the two months since, the charred flesh had healed, and the hand did not pain him anymore, but the black coloring remained behind. He’d tried forcing blood into it, reciting a healing psalm over it, and had even rubbed a blood-based salve onto the skin, but nothing worked. None of the healing methods he knew of could restore the color to his flesh. It remained black as freshly burned skin, a permanent reminder of his failure, and an easy method by which any other Bachiyr could identify him.
After his humiliating mistake in Jerusalem, Theron had left the city, headed east to avoid the Council’s minions. On the road he encountered several followers of the dead rabbi, and had killed every one of them. It wasn’t easy. Many of them possessed the glow which marked them as faithful servants of God, but he forced himself to operate past the discomfort and feed anyway. It was worth the pain to see the looks on their faces when they realized their faith was no match for his anger, and the fear added to the heady spice of their blood.
The farther he traveled from Jerusalem, however, the fewer such people he met. Now, in Athens, no one possessed the glow. It was as it had been before Ephraim’s betrayal, with hordes of potential victims everywhere he looked. As he watched the ordinary people pass in and out of his view, he could almost believe Jerusalem had never happened.
Until he looked at his hand.
He wandered the streets of Athens for several hours. In the older sections of the city, the street patterns remained mostly as he remembered them, though the buildings had changed. When he reached the newer sections of the city, he had to pay close attention to where he walked, lest he be unable to find his way back to the port and the ship that carried him here. In the belly of the boat was a sturdy room, reinforced with steel and completely cut off from sunlight. Until he could find a new dwelling, that would be his sanctum.
The sheer volume of people bustling by on their way to one errand or another, even at this late hour, was astonishing. Merchants carried their wares to storage, orators spoke on corners, hoping for coin from those seeking enlightenment, and of course, ratty beggars and gaily-dressed prostitutes were everywhere. This was good news for Theron, since they would be the largest portion of his diet during his stay. By necessity he would have to be careful to only feed on those people whom no one would miss. Beggars and prostitutes were at the top of that list. He would stick to them for his meals.
Unless he came across one of the rabbi’s followers. He had seen them on his way to Athens in other cities and villages, preaching to the assembled people of the virtues of their faith. Theron killed them at every opportunity, but how many more were there? Were teams of men and women even now spreading to other towns all over the known world, preaching the word of a single dead rabbi?
Surely not. And yet it was possible. If so, it meant a long journey for Theron, who had made it his mission to kill everyone who called himself a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.
One thing at a time, he reminded himself. First he needed a place to stay. The ship’s hold was serviceable, but not ideal. In any case, they would leave port in a few days, and he intended to remain behind. In a city the size of Athens, it should be easy for him to blend in and disappear. At least for a while. Long enough to figure out what to do next, anyway.
He wandered the streets until shortly before sunrise, memorizing the layout of the city and planning his next move. When the eastern sky began to lighten with the coming sun, he started back for the docks. In eight hours of walking he had not even covered one quarter of the city, but he had found several locations that could be useful. In a city as old as Athens, there were many secrets that few knew about. Theron, having lived in the city nearly a thousand years before, knew several of which no one living today would have any knowledge.
One of those secrets was a tunnel system built even before Theron was born. They had initially been designed as an escape, and were used as such during the invasion of Persian emperor Xerxes. Most of them had crumbled or been covered over by new structures in the centuries since. But the stone under Athens was strong, and a handful of the tunnels still existed in dark and forgotten corners of the city. If he could secure one such tunnel against intrusion, he would have his base of operations.
It would have to wait until tomorrow night, however, as he was running out of time before sunrise. The captain of the boat said he would remain at port for three days. That would give Theron enough time to secure one of the tunnels. But he would need blood, and plenty of it, to work the psalms. Tomorrow night he would have to feed again.
On his way back to the boat, he felt eyes on his back. He turned to look behind him, scanning the shadows on the city and looking for anything-or anyone-out of the ordinary. His fingers itched as his claws begged for release, but the streets behind him revealed nothing out of place. A handful of people milled about on one errand or another, but none of them paid the slightest bit of attention to him. Nonetheless, he stood his ground for several minutes, watching the people as they went about their business. He kept a mental tally of where each person was and where they were headed. When he was sure that all the people on the street had moved on, he turned his back and resumed walking. Not normally prone to imagining things, he chalked it up to paranoia about the Council and continued on his way back to the ship.
The whole way there, he had the nagging feeling that he’d missed something.
***
Theron woke to fire.
All around him, the ship’s cargo burned. Flames crackled through the hold, feeding on the wood and filling the air with smoke. Several burned and blackened bodies lay on the floor, tongues of fire licking their way across their charred skin. Had Theron needed to breathe, he would have been dead already.
He waved his hand in front of his face, trying to clear some of the smoke so he could see deeper into the ship, but it was no use. The smoke created a thick barrier even to his keen eyes, and he was forced to wander blindly through the flames, dodging aside as burning timbers dropped from above.
The heat was intense. His skin shriveled and cracked, revealing the muscles beneath just long enough for them to turn black. He staggered through the hold, trying to focus his mind beyond the pain and find a way out.
But the flames were everywhere, and the smoke made it impossible to know where he was. Was he facing the ladder to the deck? Or was he walking into the bilge room? The sickly-sweet smell of burning flesh hung in the air with the smoke.
He walked on, sometimes forced to step through a wall of fire, determined to find a way out. He hadn’t escaped from Ramah in Jerusalem just to die on a damned boat two months later. Finally, he reached the inside wall of the ship. Flames danced at his back, and his clothes had caught fire again. He patted them out and looked down the length of the ship’s inner hull for any kind of opening. All down his line of sight the wood was whole and smooth, undamaged by the flames that even now moved to hem him into a corner.
Theron turned, hoping to cut back across the rolling hold and look for another way, but the fire had closed his exit. Above him, the timbers supporting the deck crackled and charred in the heat. As he watched, a large beam snapped in half and fell to the floor, sending up a glowing cloud of sparks. there would be no exit that way.
He turned back to the hull. How thick was the wood? He had no idea, but he didn’t have much choice. Theron screamed as his claws ripped the burned flesh of his fingertips, but he grew them just the same. Then he set to work clawing at the wood. Splinters fell away as he gouged tracks in the hull of the ship, but after an agonizing few minutes, he knew it was hopeless. He was simply not making enough progress.
Theron forced some of his blood into his hands, using their energy to heal the blisters. Somehow, he resisted the urge to spend more blood healing his bubbled skin. There would be time enough to take care of all his wounds if he made it out alive. He used more blood on the muscles of his upper body, enhancing his strength, endurance, and speed. Satisfied that he had done everything he could, he began to pound on the wood of the ship with his fists, hoping to break through the hull.