The Vampires of Soldiers Cove: One Crow Sorrow

by Jessica MacIntyre

  I sat down on the couch to decide how to go about everything when I heard a slight scratching at the back door. “Finally,” I said getting up to let the dirty little dog in. Maggie pranced in, happily tracking dirt and mud all over the clean kitchen floor, one more problem I didn’t need. “Where have you...”

  The dog had something in her mouth. “What’ve you got there girl?” Maggie dropped what she had been carrying on the floor directly at my feet and looked up at me, beaming with doggy pride. It was a severed hand. I sucked hard at the air not believing what I was seeing. Why did my dog have someone’s hand?

  The shock of seeing a hand on my floor blocked the one detail that I should have noticed right away. I stood there, horrified, trying to decide whether to panic or just pick it up and go rebury it. Obviously the little dog had found the makeshift grave we’d dug for old Emily, or perhaps it belonged to Carl, a man I had killed after I was newly turned. Really at this point, it could have been any number of possibilities as to where it came from, and if I had been burying bodies in the woods of Soldiers Cove, other vampires probably had too. Honestly, the whole place was likely one big graveyard. We had rules against killing innocents, but rules were made to be broken as they say, and if I had broken them several times in less than a year, surely the other, older vampires had as well.

  This hand didn’t belong to any one of those people however, because on it was the match for the exact same wedding ring that was still sitting on mine. Just to make sure I wasn’t going completely crazy I got down on the floor and positioned my hand next to this one comparing the rings. I spent a few moments with my eyes going from one ring to the next and there was no denying it. They were a match.

  The ring Gavin said he had lost in the woods was indeed sitting on this hand. Gavin’s hand.

  The detached hand then suddenly turned to dust with a soft swooshing sound, leaving just the ring itself sitting on my kitchen floor in a pile of ashes. I picked it up and held the ring tightly against my heart. “Gavin,” I whispered softly to myself. I might have a chance now, a chance to find my husband and get some real answers.

  “Maggie,” I called out to the dog, while at the same time opening the back door once again. “Show me where you got this.” The dog didn’t move, simply sat there and picked her ears up at the strange request. “C’mon,” I said in my best high pitched, excited doggy speak. “Show mommy where you got this, let’s go.” Maggie wagged her tail now seeming to understand and followed me out the door charging toward the woods once again.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Maggie ran as fast as she could go through the dense forest, slipping under downed trees and jumping narrow brooks. I was right behind making sure to keep sight of her. Finally she stopped at a hole in the ground. It was at least five feet deep and was really only a narrow shaft. She sat right in front of it, pleased as punch with herself, wagging her tail as if to show off all her hard work.

  “Good girl,” I said. I felt uneasy as I approached the hole. I knew I had to look but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what I saw. I took a deep breath and placed my hand against my stomach trying to quiet the nausea that was rising in the back of my throat. As I stood directly in front of it, the smell hit me. It was a pungent odor which seemed to be a combination of rotting meat and raw sewage. Perked up senses were more of a curse in situations like these.

  I covered my nose and mouth with my other hand and forced myself to look. Down the narrow tunnel I clearly saw an arm that was missing a hand. A new hand was trying to grow, but not having much success. It was deformed, mangled and twisted. I lay down on the ground and brushed away some of the dirt uncovering the arm up to the shoulder. As I did so my fingers brushed bare skin.

  It was then that I felt the burning. Shocked, I cried out and pulled my hand away. Turning it over I examined the blisters that were forming on it just as if I had touched the burner of a hot stove. Determined to continue on I covered my damaged hand with the sleeve of my sweater and brushed all the soil away that I could.

  As the ground gave way I saw the first tuft of dirty blonde hair, and I knew. This was my husband. He had lay buried out here for god knows how long. Suddenly the dreams and images of him asking me to come find him, of the darkness and despair, made sense. He had been buried alive, helpless and paralysed.

  I needed to get him out. The earth was hard packed around the rest of him and had it not been for something on his skin burning my hands I could have dug him out with just my pure strength. I needed help and tools though and as much as I didn’t want to leave him there, even for one more second, I ran back in the direction of the house.

  I needed a shovel for sure but since my tool shed had been destroyed I wasn’t sure where Ian had put anything. I ran wildly around the yard looking for places that he might have stored them while he put the broken pieces of wood in the truck. Finally underneath the new deck I found the shovel. I took off back in the direction of the woods, but stopped again. I couldn’t do this alone and I needed someone I could trust to help me. Even though Angus had changed the kill order I wanted to have a chance to get some answers myself before anyone else found out what was really going on.

  Running into the house I picked up the phone, dialing the only number I felt I could. “Rachel?” Holly answered her cell on the first ring. We had almost come to blows over Ian, but I was sure she wanted answers as badly as I did, and I knew she loved Gavin as well and would not let anything happen to him unfairly.

  The phone was gripped so tightly in my hands I thought I might crack it into pieces before I had a chance to get the words out. “Holly, Gavin is in the woods. I found him, buried there. I need help, I tried to dig him out but his skin is burning me. Please, please help.”

  “I’m on my way, stay there.” The line clicked and I hung up. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to run back to Gavin as fast as I could, but I forced myself to sit on the back step.

  About five minutes later Holly was in my yard. “Grab all the sheets you can,” she said. We took all the spare sheets from the linen closet and picked up the shovel.

  Arriving back at the grave I saw that she had the same reaction to the smell as I did. It stopped her in her tracks for a moment, but she pressed on forcing herself to the hole in the ground. I dropped the sheets and headed over with the shovel. “Wait,” she said stopping me. “Put these on.”

  Holly tossed me a pair of gloves and pulled out a second pair putting them on. I dug at the small hole and it quickly became wider and longer as I put all my strength and speed into it. Moments later Gavin’s form started to show. He was naked and decayed badly. Any human that would have looked at him would have understandably mistaken him for a rotting corpse. His eyes were half gone, having been eaten by maggots. Maggots that were still teeming inside his open mouth.

  “Oh my god,” I said, paralysed for a moment upon really seeing him.

  “Don’t worry, he’s probably just in a death sleep. He would have had enough common sense to will himself into one. I know it looks bad but he’ll be alright. We just need to get him back to the house.”

  “How long has he been here?” I asked.

  Holly cast her eyes down examining what she saw for a few moments and calculating what she was looking at. “At least five or six weeks,” she said. We stared at each other, then back down to the lifeless body, then back at each other. Although neither one said it both of us knew. Gavin was innocent.

  Holly spread a large sheet out on the ground and threw me another one. We both climbed into the hole, which was now wide enough for us to work in, and opened the sheet. Carefully we slid it underneath one side of him and rolled him over so that he was completely on it. As his body flipped over more maggots spilled from the nest they had made deep in his throat. The hollow of his mouth was crawling with them as well. Thankfully Holly put the blanked over his face, and then the rest of his body, cocooning him inside.

  We lifted him out and put him onto the sheet on the ground an
d wrapped him in this one too. Then, as quickly and carefully as we could, we headed for home.

  Gently, we climbed the stairs onto the deck and made our way into the bathroom where we laid the body out on the floor.

  “Run the water as hot as you can,” she said. I did so and when I turned around Holly had Gavin uncovered. The sheet she had taken away from his face was inundated with the tiny white creatures also, and some of them were making their way across my bathroom floor in an attempt to escape. Holly stuck her hand in his mouth, and what was left of his eye sockets, removing the rest and shaking the crawling larvae off her fingers between handfuls as she did.

  When the tub was completely filled I stopped the water and we gently lifted him in. He truly looked dead. Eyes half eaten and mouth open in a cold dead yawn; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I sat there unable to move or talk. The only thought that ran through my mind was that as my poor suffering husband lay buried in the ground, less than a mile from our home, I had betrayed him. I had slept with his brother, and worse, for a time I had actually believed he had tried to murder me.

  “Rachel,” Holly said noticing I had stopped moving. Her voice became stern. “You have to snap out of it. Run the hose and rinse his hair and face.” I ran the hose with straight hot water going through each and every piece of his hair as thoroughly as I could. I wanted to wash every strand, every curl. Pouring half the bottle of shampoo in his hair I then rinsed it out going through every hair again. His beautiful curls began to blur, and it was then that I realized I was crying.

  Holly reached over and put her hand on mine. She smiled a strong and steady smile at me. “He’s going to be just fine.” I nodded. We drained the tub and repeated the whole process twice more until Holly took off her gloves and touched his skin to test it. When it didn’t burn her she stood and motioned to the bedroom. “Ok, we can move him to the bed now and start the process.”

  Once we had him comfortably in the bed wrapped in blankets Holly motioned for me to sit next to him. “You’re going to wake him,” she said.

  “But how?”

  She sat on the opposite side and held Gavin’s head so that it wouldn’t move. She pointed his open mouth toward me.

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “Rachel, I’m not going to lie to you. If Gavin didn’t will himself into a death sleep, then he’s starved to death and it’s only a matter of time before he turns to ash. If he’s really alive in there your blood will wake him. He needs your blood.”

  I understood. Biting my wrist I held the stream of blood so that it poured onto his tongue. It stopped and I bit again, as deep and as hard as I could to get a good flow. I did this five, or perhaps six times, with no response from Gavin. I was desperate to see some sign of life. Something to show me that he was still in there somewhere. “It’s not working.”

  “Keep trying,” Holly’s voice was rock steady.

  I bit and held it again putting it closer to his mouth this time. He couldn’t be dead, I wouldn’t allow it. I’d will him to live if I had to. Grabbing his head I pressed it hard up against my wrist, forcing the skin of his lips to my flesh.

  “Gavin!” I said, only realizing upon hearing myself speak that I was sobbing and screaming. “Please come back. Please, please come back. I need you.”

  Just then I felt a tiny movement. His lips quivered brushing up against the skin of my wrist, he was trying to drink. I bit my wrist again and pressed it even more tightly up against his mouth as I felt him try to suck. He was weak, however, and could not summon enough strength on his own to do it, and so the flow of blood stopped again.

  I bit myself again quickly and put my wrist back to his lips. This time he was more responsive. He sucked harder but not hard enough to keep going for long. The next time, however, he had a dramatic and sudden increase in strength. The moving corpse sucked very hard, and suddenly his fangs were there, biting and sucking at the same time. He was coming back to life right before my eyes.

  I smiled at Holly who was looking pretty relieved herself. Gavin’s survival instinct took over and he was biting and sucking so hard now that I was afraid he was going to chew my wrist completely off. There was no way I could have torn myself away from him now, even if I had wanted to.

  He continued to drink and satisfy his massive and unending thirst. Gavin was getting stronger, he was coming back to me from the edge of death, but I was getting weaker. I slumped down next to him, laying my head on the pillow as I felt myself beginning to pass out. Staring up at the white ceiling I could see that it had become full of black spots, spots that were liquid and fluid, moving all around.

  I looked over at him one last time before everything went black, just as his eyes that were remarkably beginning to heal fluttered open. He stopped drinking for a moment and looked back at me. “Rachel,” he whispered. Then everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  I spent the next day and night fading in and out of consciousness. Every time I opened my eyes I’d see Gavin lying next to me, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and looking at me. Each time I awoke he looked a little bit better. I, however, felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

  Being drained was never a feeling you got used to. The cold and cramping up of your body was agony. I came around just as the sun was coming up again and realized I was hooked up to a bag of blood that was dripping into my arm courtesy of an IV. The catheter dug into my vein and I reached for it, instinctually wanting to pull it out.

  “No,” Holly said. “You need it.” The sight of the cold blood did nothing for me in terms of wanting to drink it, but I felt much better at having it run into my system.

  Gavin was staring down at me. He looked gaunt and exhausted but he was smiling. He reached over and stroked my cheek. A wave of guilt washed over me and settled in my chest right on top of my heart. He was seeing me as his loving and devoted wife, looking at me in a way I didn’t deserve.

  I reached up and touched his cheek in return, unable to look him directly in the eye. Neither one of us said anything for a long moment. “What happened?” I said, breaking the silence finally.

  He looked away, frowning as if he was searching his mind for an answer. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t remember.”

  Holly had obviously been sitting watch over us both and lifting my head I saw Daniel and Ian were there as well. “It’s not uncommon to have memory problems for a while,” she said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  He turned to Holly rubbing his forehead in frustration, squeezing his eyes shut as he did so. He was trying so hard but thinking was obviously painful for him. “I remember leaving here with Ian in the morning to go running.”

  Ian spoke up. “You don’t remember the trails? The deer blood?”

  “Deer blood? No not at all. Did I actually drink deer blood?”

  Daniel and Holly were simultaneously frowning at Ian. Ian lowered his eyes to the floor. “Yeah, I convinced you to.”

  Gavin laid his head back down on the pillow, suddenly tired. “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “But you will,” I said, taking his hand to my heart. From the corner of my eye I saw Ian, head lowered and shoulders bent, silently slip out of the room. I wanted to run after him, beg him not to go. I couldn’t imagine how we would get through this without him. We needed him didn’t we? Or perhaps it was just me that needed him and I silently cursed myself for thinking that.

  “Don’t worry,” Daniel said taking a seat on the other side of the bed. He balled up his fist and punched Gavin in the shoulder playfully. Gavin winced slightly, but smiled just the same. “We’ll find out who did this and then we’ll kick their ass.”

  “We sure will,” Holly added.

  “Kick their ass,” I echoed as I felt myself passing out once again. “Kick it good.”

  When I woke again everyone was gone except for Gavin and I. The IV had been removed and I was feeling much stronger. Not as strong as if I’d actually fed, but ce
rtainly much better after having been drained yet again.

  Gavin was sleeping soundly next to me and I put my head on his shoulder so I could listen to him breathe. He needed to remember what happened to him and soon, otherwise he was going to be blamed for all those deaths and executed. Angus needed to appease the St. Peter’s and Chapel Island vampires and if they didn’t get their due more blood would be spilled. The sooner he remembered the sooner we could prove his innocence.