by Karin Cox
“Half dead,” his brother corrected him. “Those screams last night suggested some life left in her.”
“The screams? They were real?”
“As daylight. And if she’s not dead tonight, you’ll probably hear more.”
I shook the bars of the cage furiously and the dwarf turned to me with a scowl.
“What is he doing to her?”
“He’s a doctor, isn’t he? He’s operating.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was evening before we truly discovered what Seamus had meant. The gigantor came for Sabine as soon as she reappeared in her cage.
Karl was half man, half giant. Built like a berserker, he appeared as dull-witted as he was enormous—a solid, bull-headed thug of a man with a jaw so sharp it could slice ham.
Dr. Gandler accompanied him. “Get her out,” he commanded, and unlocked the door to Sabine’s cage.
She pounced immediately, taking Karl by surprise, but his burly arms grappled with her, ignoring her swiping claws. Grabbing her hair, he yanked her head back and tweaked one of her nipples with the other hand.
Sabine let out a scream and made to bear down on his forearm with her teeth, but he let go of her breast and enclosed most of her throat, crushing down upon her windpipe until she went limp.
I pummeled wildly out through the bars of my cage in my struggle to reach her.
“Rest, Seraphim,” Gandler told me gruffly as Karl flung her over his shoulder and began to lope toward a tent at the other end of the camp. “I’ll take good care of her.”
Hours passed before Karl returned, but the body that lay over his shoulders was not Sabine’s. The dwarf, an incongruous sight alongside his hulking companion, unlocked the door and Karl placed the slim white body of a girl on the floor of Sabine’s cage. Wearing little but a bloodstained white gown, her body gleamed in the moonlight. Her neck was twisted awkwardly, but I would have known it anywhere. It hurt to look at it, to see it marred by the scars of my enemies.
The girl roused several hours later with a soft moan and half sat up, weeping.
“Hush,” I whispered to her, and she righted herself and crept closer to the bars. A bandage covered her right eye and the other wandered, trying to locate my voice. When she saw me, her mouth formed a perfect O.
“You,” she choked out. “You did this to me!”
“Me?” My wings flapped in involuntarily indignation. “No. My enemies did this to you. I could have saved you, remember. Could have stopped them.”
“They ... they ...” Her sobs started again in earnest. “They stopped me one day as I approached the tower. It was late, nearly sunset by the time I left the village. I knew I shouldn’t have ... it was too late. Too dangerous. But I had been thinking about what you said. About doing something about them. Ever since my uncle—”
“They killed him, didn’t they?” All along I had known it.
She nodded. “Perhaps if I set you free, I thought,” she continued. “You could rid the village of them, or at least be gone with them. I know they came for you.” She put a hand to the bandage on her head.
“But the monsters found you first?” My heart thudded in my chest with what I at first thought was empathy but then recognized for what it truly was: my blood screaming for hers. Innocent she may once have been, but she was now a Vampire, and my very veins wanted her. “They turned you?”
She nodded again. “They would have turned him too—my uncle, I mean—had they not been discovered while his body was still warm. So many...” She shuddered. “So many have they taken.”
I sat, pulling my knees up to my chest. Anger mingled with my bloodlust. “What is your name?”
“Danette.” She put her head in her hands. “Danette was my name.”
In the moonlight, I could make out a dark snake of fluid seeping out around where she sat. The thought of what he had done to her chilled me.
“How did Gandler find you?”
“The Vampire who found me outside the tower ... he was so quick. So strong. I ... I.”
My voice was thick with loathing. “He is Beltran,” I said. “A horror. You could not have escaped him. One day, I will avenge you.”
“He took me to a house in Vincennes, an evil place. There were so many of them.”
I could see the silvery hairs on her pale arm standing up in the moonlight and she rubbed at them. “They kept me there, chained, for a day or two, draining all of the blood from me. Each time it was like…”
I nodded. I knew the sharp yet sweet pain of it, the shuddering release, the intoxicating coldness, and the terror. I had seen the look of it so many times. “You do not have to explain that to me,” I told her.
“Can you do it?” Her uncovered left eye looked huge, a well of sorrow in the mercurial light. “Turn me back? Or make me what you are?”
I shook my head. “I am not your salvation.”
“Then I am damned.”
I looked away, out over the covered caravans. You are all damned, I thought. Perhaps we all are.
“Damned for all eternity, or at least until he dies.” She began to weep again.
For a minute, I thought she meant Beltran, but then I remembered Gandler was human—if one could call him that. Judging by the state of the girl’s body, Gandler was a monster in mortal form. The true freak amidst his freakshow.
“Gandler and his men attacked the coven. Set the coven house afire. I had thought the Vampires might leave me there. But the others set me free to fight. I was too weak, too weak to fend them off. Karl, of course...” Her hands flew to her throat and I remembered her silent prayers in the tower, the way her lips had moved slowly sometimes when she looked at me. She had been a pious girl. A good girl, and yet ... I said nothing, just nodded, knowing that I myself had struggled under the enormous man’s bulk.
“And the others fled. I was just a pawn to them. Just another plaything. They have houses everywhere, it seems.”
“Yes, they are like rats. Vermin. Always multiplying.” I hung my head. “It is my failure.”
Ignoring my shame, she continued. “Gandler seemed so proud of himself. He kept mumbling something about finally having caught one again.”
I motioned towards the blood seeping from the bandage around her eye. “What did he do to you?”
She closed her eye a minute and then reached up and removed the bandage.
The bloody hollow of her eye socket, the vacant darkness where her right eye should have been, startled me.
“He wanted to know how our eyesight is so good.” Picking up the bandage, she began to carefully wind it back around her crown and over her missing eye. “And he took blood. So much blood. It near drained me. And then...” A sob choked her. “I suppose it was no good to me anyway, what else he took.” She tugged at the hem of the gown, and I saw her good eye linger on the trail of blood. “Do ... do ... can Vampires have children?” she asked suddenly.
I remembered then that she was just a girl, little more than a child.
“No,” I whispered hoarsely, understanding what she meant. “Not in that way.”
“Good.” Sitting back, she leaned her head against the cage and wailed.
Hours later, when exhaustion finally silenced Danette, I paced my cage. Once more, I had failed. What fate might have befallen Sabine? The same fate that ruined this child? What a monster to take the eye, the looks—the womb!—of this child whose mortality had already been stolen from her. And Danette was just a girl he did not know. A stranger. He hated Sabine. What atrocity might he foist upon her?
Finally, just before daybreak, Karl and the dwarf returned. After unlocking the door, the dwarf grabbed Danette by the ankle and dragged her out of the cage. The movement of her body trailed her blood across the floor and it sickened me how much I craved it so. Had I been able to escape my own cage right at that moment, I would have ended it for Danette then, gladly. She and the world would be better for it.
Rope bound Sabine’s paws together and a trickle of b
lood ran from the corner of her gagged mouth. He body was still, only her eyes moving as Karl threw her off his shoulder and down into the cage with a thump.
The gigantor picked up Danette, who was still weak and disoriented. “Come on,” he told the girl. “Your turn again. Seems the boss has quite an appetite today.”
Before he clanged the cage door shut, he reached over and roughly tore off Sabine’s gag. “Rrrow,” he taunted.
The roar that followed was deafening, but when Sabine opened her mouth to emit it, I saw that all of her teeth had been removed and once more I vowed revenge on these freaks and their master torturer.
When Sabine’s strength returned and she finally broke free of her bindings, I discovered he had taken her claws too. The look on her face told me she did not want to discuss it. How I wished I could hold her in my arms again. Even despite the bars, the rising sun would have soon made it impossible. Within the half-hour, Sabine vanished into thin air. Only then did I lie down and sleep.
When I awoke at sunset, I saw that Sabine’s words were true. As soon as the moon rose, her spirit had returned from the anchorstone and she had sprung from the dirty floor of her cage as if newly arisen. I saw the gleam of her ivory teeth as she paced, and she unsheathed her claws to scratch at the straw of the cage. As good as new, but her eyes were harder and her nostrils flared with unspoken rage. Slinking as close to the bars as she could, her sinuous body rubbed against them as she whispered, “We must escape from here, Ame.”
I knew it myself. I had spent much of the previous night pondering how we might do so.
“They will come again to torture me by night. Every night. He will not rest until I am torn limb from limb. Until he breaks me and I reveal the stone’s location just to make it stop.” She paced.
No doubt, the frustration of Sabine’s daily resurrection would goad the man further.
Part of me wished I’d had the luxury of breaking back in the tower, that I could have revealed all to my torturers to end the agony, but there was nothing I could admit to, nothing I could reveal under torture that would enable them to kill me; not unless I had taken one of them down with me.
I balled my hands into fists and struck at the bars. Damn them! I’d had enough of bars to last a lifetime. How could I protect her from behind this iron?
All of a sudden, I heard the crack of a whip, and the wagon behind me began to pull away.
“Eh oh! We’re on the roll, Seamus me lad.”
“Looks that way, it does, Sinbad.”
“Shut your stupid heads,” Kettle’s voice rang out from the darkness. “Stop standing around gandering or I’ll set Trudie on you,” the dwarf instructed a team of unkempt, slack-jawed men who stepped from the shadows. One of them held a buggy whip and harnesses, and the others led a team of small, wiry ponies, which they set about harnessing to each wagon.
“We’re on the move,” I whispered to Sabine. “Perhaps they will not come for you tonight after all.”
“Perhaps,” was all she said, her eyes fixed on the dwarf.
“Where are they taking us?” I called out to Kettle as my wagon began lurching away from Sabine’s.
“Another town. Gandler’s got some new prize pigs for folks to gawk at. Better start thinking about your act, Feathers.”
I was relieved to see that he was hitching a pony to Sabine’s wagon too. For now, she was at least remaining with me.
When Kettle strode off to hook up Theron’s wagon, I turned back to Sabine. “I wonder why they’re moving us by night and not by day.”
Sabine lay down in a corner of her wagon and rolled half onto her back in that lazy way cat’s have. Her eyes were on the ceiling and the stars beyond, the canvas having been peeled back to attach the harness. “Perhaps they’re afraid the girl’s Vampire friends might seek retribution.”
“I doubt it. He turned her just to spite me. But if Beltran learned I were here, perhaps he might come.” I slumped against the bars. The lumbering movement was strangely comforting, as was the thought that at least we were going somewhere. Out of the inky blackness, another wagon lurched up close to mine, and I noticed Theron crouched in the corner.
“We move,” he said. “I hope you’re ready for the show.”
“Where is he taking us?”
“On the road. Plenty of people will pay for a look at you two, although most will wonder how he did it. How the great scientist managed to sew the face and breasts of a woman on a wild beast. How he attached wings to a grown man. Just as they wonder whether my mother had relations with a wolf pack.” He laughed, a wild sound but not quite a howl. “I’d wonder how he did it myself, except that I sense he did not.”
His eyes raked me intently. “Oh, it is easy enough to keep Trudie as she is. So easy to enable her, to fatten her up. She’s not the brightest of women, but I pity her. Those two idiots”—he jabbed a thumb towards the Siamese twins and lowered his voice—“are naught but a frightening reminder of the dangers of incest. Some say their parents were brother and sister. But this”—he tugged at the matted beard that fell from his chin and pushed the hair back from his hirsute face—“this, he tells me, is a disease. Hypertrichosis, the good doctor calls it.”
“I call it unfortunate.”
“Yes,” the wolfman agreed. “Most. But what do you call yourself?”
“Amedeo,” I answered.
His grin gleamed in the moonlight and he cocked his head just like a dog. “Very well then. You are close-mouthed, Amedeo.” He paused. “I trust that. And the feline?” He nodded to where Sabine’s wagon lurched behind mine.
“Watch your tongue. Sabine is no animal.”
Theron nodded. “Nor am I.” He lowered his voice further still. “What I want to know is what you two intend to do about it.”
“About what?”
Theron spread his hairy hands at the procession of carts. “About this little sideshow. None of us has the strength to stop Karl. But you two ... it doesn’t take a genius to recognize you’re different. Stronger. Supernatural.”
I did not know how to respond to that. Could this hairy stranger be trusted? Could any of them? It was too soon to tell.
“I saw her, you know. They took out her teeth. Removed her claws. And yet, here she is again. Unchanged. Leonine. Feminine. And wholly unnatural. And you? If they pluck out those feathers, what will happen?”
I stared straight ahead, watching the jostling rump of the pony in front of me. “I will not be able to fly.”
The wolfman’s eyebrows quirked up. “So it is true then?”
“Yes.”
“Then Gandler’s Circus has both angel and devil, and who shall win the battle for our poor mortal souls?”
“No abomination shall triumph over the Father of all creation.” Even as I said it, it felt false to me. Already, Beltran and his abominations were terrorizing Europe, and my Father was an absent one who had long ago abandoned his son.
“And that pitiful, screaming girl,” Theron asked, “what do you make of her?”
“An abomination,” I answered. “Though one not of her own choosing.”
“It is true then also that you feed on Vampires?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm,” Theron said thoughtfully. “Then what, Archangel Amedeo, eats you?”
“Regrets,” I answered. “Only regrets.”
And the moon above our wagons seemed as large and blue and brimming as Joslyn’s eyes once had.
CHAPTER NINE
At least there were no screams that night, only the constant creaking of the wagons and the intermittent jogging farts of the ponies. Sabine was quiet, brooding, and for a time I was too, considering Theron’s words and how I might act upon them.
“When we reach our destination,” I called out to him after a while, “how does he exhibit us? In the wagons? In chains? Or in a tent?”
“Sometimes all three. But we’re heading for Provins this time, city of the greatest fairs Europe has known. My guess is that there is
to be some sort of showmanship. Gandler is a man who likes to be admired. But above all else, he needs his curiosities to fund his research, not to mention to be its subjects. A good show ensures a fat purse.”
“I know something of this Gandler,” I admitted. “His research is into vampirism. Blood disorders.”
“Yes.” Theron nodded, and a flag of hair flopped into his eyes. He flicked it away from his face with one hand. “Hence the girl, the bloodletting.”
“He seeks a cure for vampirism?” I found it hard to believe.
“I think not.” Theron gripped the bars. “He seeks an injection, an easy way to exterminate them.”
“Then we share the same vision: angel and devil.”
“Do innocents suffer for your ambition, Angel?” His tone came harsh to my ear.
My lips formed the word “No,” but then I thought of Joslyn, and of Danette lying wombless somewhere in the night, and the objection died on my tongue. “Not if I can help it,” I said instead. With a scowl, I kicked the bars. The clang made the pony skitter off the path, and it kicked back until Kettle was upon us, running a baton down the side of the wagon and swearing at both Theron and me to get on the floor. He cracked the dun pony that hauled the wolfman’s wagon with the baton, to hurry it up, and it pulled away. We said no more to each other that night.
All of the next day, the procession stumbled on without a break until the affronting smell of us preceded our little band. The ponies were near to lame before Kettle ordered a stop and replaced some of them with others from a nearby village. These new beasts of burden were a mismatched lot, some oxen and a few plow horses, a few fit only for boiling into soup, but once they were harnessed, we continued.
“Could’ve organized some grub, couldn’t he?” Sinbad complained loudly. “Even fecking Trudie will fade away to a Hungerkünstler at this rate.”
“There’s naught but bread until we get to Provins, I heard,” said his brother, “and Kettle says that’s for the horses.”