by Karin Cox
Although Vampires are considered immortal, “eternal life” is speculative. Several methods of dispatching Vampires are purportedly effective, including a silver stake through the heart, exposing the creatures to daylight, or forcing them to drink holy water. Vampires are known to be able to take the form of bats, although other shapeshifting behavior is unsubstantiated. There is some belief that other preternatural beings in existence are capable of destroying Vampires by dining upon them, and the Sphinx is believed to be one. Some have suggested the existence of a Vampire-like bounty hunter that nourishes itself on Vampire blood, but this author lacks evidence of a creature with the strength or endurance to fully combat the powerful Vampire.
I snorted. Gifting mortal men and women with eternity. Or damning them to hell.
When I finally slept, it was to nightmares of Joslyn and Sabine both ringed by flames, their dresses catching like incendiaries in the hellfire.
On waking at nightfall, a plan came to me. I left my room and made for the shadows. Not an hour later, I saw one: a pretty, dark-eyed blonde who worked the street. I approached her cautiously, my face still hidden by the hat, and asked her what price I might have to pay.
She laughed bawdily and smoothed a hand down over one shapely hip. “There is a price,” she said, “but for a handsome gentleman like you, perhaps I can do a deal.”
“I have the gold,” I answered and moved closer, as if to embrace her.
She pushed me back. “Monsieur, you must pay first.”
My eyes fiery, I put my hands up to her throat and pushed her against the wall. “No, you must. Take me to them, or I will take you to hell.”
“I ... I ... I don’t know what you mean.” Her pupils dilated with recognition of what I was.
My hands were still around her throat. I tightened them. “You do. Where is Beltran? Where is Gandler?”
Her hands shook as she tried in vain to loosen my grasp on her neck. She coughed and spluttered.
“Scream, or otherwise make a sound, and I will snuff out your eternal life in seconds. Come!” I pulled her back into the alley in the direction of my bedsit, not caring who saw. It was not unusual for a gentleman to consort with ladies of the night, although usually they were mortal. In every city there seemed to be them: Vampire women who turned tricks for victims and were paid in coin and blood. I had often resorted to hunting them.
Back in my room, I pushed her down on the bed and bound her hands with the drawstring from the cheap drapery. One arm subduing her, I leaned over her until my lips were close to her neck and whispered, “Now, tell me what happened to Joslyn?”
I knew what covens were like. I had watched so many over the years. The intrigues. The gossip. The scandals. Every Vampire on this island would be aware of Joslyn’s return.
“Beltran …” she began, choking the words out. Her bosoms heaved under her embroidered corset. A deadly beauty, she might have intoxicated any man but me. “She returned,” the woman said. “Joslyn, Beltran’s lover.”
I must have flinched openly because her eyes widened and she looked momentarily amused. “You did not know they were lovers?”
I glanced her neck with my fangs, splitting the skin a little. The closeness of her blood near killed me, but her amusement faded to alarm.
“She said she had been wrong. That she loved Beltran only. She begged his forgiveness.”
“I know all this!” I shouted. “Sabine—the Sphinx—is she still alive? Where has he taken her?”
“Y … Yes,” she stammered.
“What has he done to her?”
“Nothing. At least, nothing that lasts. Each day she is whole again and more ferocious than the day before.”
It turned my stomach, imagining the horrors visited on her each day anew. Nothing. I did not believe it.
“And Joslyn?”
“Beltran does not trust her.” She coughed. “To gain his trust, he said she must bring him you. Must do what she pretended to do last time: to kill you. If not, he will give Joslyn to Gandler too. Another immortal plaything, but one whose scars take longer to heal.”
“She does not know where I am,” I lied.
“It doesn’t matter. They have taken her to the place they keep the Sphinx. If she doesn’t tell them…” She shrugged.
It pained me how lightly she took their deaths, or any death. I gritted my teeth and pressed harder on her neck. “Beltran and Gandler? Where do they sleep?”
“The citadel,” she said. “They sleep in the citadel.”
“Thank you.” Then I plunged my teeth into her.
The prostitute’s weak groans woke me just before dusk. I had drunk from her to within a heartbeat of satiety; it was not enough. When her heartbeat had become little more than the shudder before death, I forced myself to stop, biting down on my own lip in frustration. Removing her bonnet and cloak, I then bound her.
We had both slept through the day, oblivious to the knocks of the landlady. On awaking, the Vampire had crawled to the door and cowered there, but I did not move to approach her, as much as my body craved more blood.
“What is your name?” I sat up on the bed.
“Evedra.” Her brown eyes both feared and hated me.
“Tell me, Evedra, this citadel, what protects it? Lie to me and I will use and discard you. Tell me the truth, and you shall be freed when I have what I came for.”
She spat a stream of blood-tinged spittle on the floor near my bed. “Did you come for that traitorous bitch Joslyn, or the Sphinx?”
“Both,” I answered, and she laughed mockingly.
“Greedy, Cruxim.”
I rushed at her, baring my fangs. “I will show you greed.”
Her hands and feet still tied, she cried out and crouched nearer the door.
“But not yet.” I sat back on the bed. “Tell me, woman, what I must know. How many Vampires are there? Who leads them? Where are Joslyn and Sabine?”
She sighed. “Say I do. What prevents you from killing me anyway?”
“Because I have great need of you.”
Her eyes widened with disgust, and she rubbed at the bites on her neck. “You revolt me.”
“The feeling is mutual. Nevertheless, you will help me breach this citadel, and you will take me to Beltran and Gandler. When you do, I will free you.”
“You will free me,” she mocked. “As if you could. Gandler will torture you, and Beltran will kill you as well as your two sluts when Gandler is finished torturing them and Beltran is tired of raping them.”
I flew at her again, snatching her up and feeding some more until, as her heartbeat dulled to the gallop of hooves in the distance, she finally cried out for mercy. It almost felt like a sin to stop, but I wrenched my teeth from her throat and growled, “There are only two mercies I can offer you, wench. The first is to not kill you, and the second, is to. Which will it be?”
“The first. Please, the first,” she moaned. “Let me live and I will lead you to Gandler. The man is cruel and a pervert. You may have him.”
“And Beltran?”
Her brow furrowed.
“Beltran too,” I insisted, putting my teeth back to her neck.
“Yes, yes.” Her voice was weak. “Beltran too.” But her response had the timbre of a lie.
“Do not lie to me, Evedra.” I grabbed her forearms and shook her. “What love is this you bear Beltran?”
She shook her head. “No love, Cruxim. I bear him no love.”
“Liar.” I brushed her neck with my lips, and the hollow at her throat quivered. “Tell me,” I insisted. “The truth!”
“He was my brother.”
I pushed her away and returned to the bed.
“Once. Millennia ago. Before he became my pimp.” She looked no more than twenty-five, but, of course, that was deceptive.
I brushed my hair back from my face, suddenly ashamed of my treatment of her. She was my enemy, and I hated her, yet still I pitied her. “He made you … this?”
She lo
oked at the floor and then turned her dark eyes back to me. “It is better than what you would make me.”
“What?” I did not understand.
“What you made Joslyn—a traitor to her own kind.”
“Oh, Evedra,” I said, and I could not keep the pity from my voice. “He already made you that. Millennia ago.”
She fell silent for some seconds, thinking. “You love her,” she said. “She is a Vampire and you, a Cruxim, yet you love her.”
I gave her no answer but my silence.
“You love them both. How is it that you have not killed her?”
Growing weary of her already, I responded, “How is it I have not killed you?”
“I have never seen a Cruxim with so much control.”
The comment piqued my interest. “Presumably, you have not known many Cruxim.”
She turned her head to the side and studied me intently. “I am twelve hundred years old. I have met more than a hundred Cruxim. None has shown mercy. Few have even bothered with restraint. None have we been able to kill. It is only by luck, and with Beltran’s protection, that I have escaped them.”
“And what protection he offers,” I said sardonically. “What a protective sibling he is! Tell me, do you get to keep a cut of your earnings, or does your brother take it all?”
“My brother takes whatever he wants,” she said with a trace of bitterness as she smoothed down her skirt. “He always has.” For a second, she looked almost mortal.
“He always will,” I said. “Unless he is stopped.”
“And I am to believe that you will stop him? You—out of all the Cruxim who have failed, who continue to fail—you will stop him? He knows now, Cruxim, about your weakness. What a valuable piece of information that was. And there are many thousands of us here.” She shook her head. “No, Cruxim. You will not stop him.”
I approached her again, calmly this time. “Then I have no use for you.”
She put up her hands, still bound. “There is nothing you can do, Cruxim, to save me. I am damned.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “As is Joslyn. He damned you both. I cannot save you, Evedra.” The words hung heavily on me. “But I can spare you.”
“For the price of my brother.”
“There is always a price, Evedra. Every prostitute knows that.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Unbind me,” Evedra pleaded before she set about telling me the information I required. “If I am to trust that you will spare me for this betrayal, you must trust me enough to remove these.”
It sounded fair. Sitting her on the bed, I stood by the door and listened as she recounted the citadel’s defenses, its access points, and the army of Vampires under Beltran’s command who protected it. As she spoke, the enormity of my task became clear.
The citadel had been built to contain sixteen thousand people for a year-long siege, and there were thousands of Vampires within its walled enclosure. Ramparts that protected the citadel itself were equipped with guardhouses and cannon, and inside, dry ditches prevented a headlong attack on the solid, square citadel building. Even flying in would be almost impossible by day due to the cannon. By night, even if my approach were secretive, the bats would surely raise the alarm.
“I cannot think how you mean to do it, Cruxim,” she warned me.
“We,” I told her. “We mean to do it.”
Satisfied that she was telling the truth, I bound her again and cut a strip of sheet to use as a gag. Of course, she protested, but trust or no, I was not fool enough to leave a Vampire, and especially one related to Beltran, alone and ungagged in a boarding house at dusk. I lit the lamp for her and took up the jar of whale oil.
“I am sorry,” I whispered, before turning for the door. “Be safe here, and quiet. I will return within the hour.”
Immediately, I made my way to the Eglise St Martin. The temperature had dropped with the sun, and the stone was cool against my skin as I alighted on the windowsill and pulled myself into the tower, hoping beyond hope that the Vampires who had slumbered there by day on my earlier visit still remained.
The room was emptier than before, but not by much. The room’s inhabitants still slept, but the cage full of mortals had gone. I crept further in and, once certain they were asleep, I began my work.
The oil shone in the candlelight as I made runnels of it back toward the fire and poured it toward a pile of them who lay together in one darkened corner. Then I fluttered up to the rafters. The movement of my wings made a gentle hum in the room, but I tried to slow their flapping so I could hover before the dangling Vampires, my teeth bared.
The first made barely a whimper as I drank my fill of him. When, his life having flowed away, his body made to sink to the floor, I clutched him up and placed him down gently. Five Vampires I dispatched this way before those in the corner began to stir and I had to put the rest of my plan into fruition. Quickly, I flew to one more of the dangling creatures, hovering below him, my mouth at his throat. He wore a long cloak of burgundy velvet, which wrapped his cold body as his blood gushed into me and enlivened me. With one hand, I painted the cloak’s hem and seams with the oil. He stirred and called out, as if awaking from a nightmare, and I took his last droplet of blood and let him plummet, lifeless, to the marble floor below. He landed close to the fire. His cape caught with a great whoosh of flame that licked along the oil on the floor to catch at the clothes of the Vampires in the corner. Soon, the flames also ignited the heavy drapes. Smoke curled upwards into the rafters, where it coiled among the beasts that dangled there. Screeching and screaming as the blast of heat hit them, they dropped like bees stunned by the apiarist’s smoker. I snatched one up greedily, and then another. Everywhere Vampires rushed for the exit. I flew among them like the angel of death. Most failed to notice me in their haste to avoid the flames. Each pushed others out of the way in the rush to the windows. Only one seemed to notice me among them.
“Cruxim!” it screamed in a high, unnatural voice, more piercing than a falsetto. “Cruxim. Catch him!”
But the others were too concerned with evading the flames to pay him any notice, and I quickly ended his commands with my teeth in his neck. The bloodlust made me impervious to the cinders and smoke until I felt the rasp of my lungs and sought the exit myself.
Outside, gray smoke billowed from the church and Vampires spewed from the exits out into the dark of early evening. Some of them hurried to transform themselves into bats, but I flung myself upon them. Five, ten, fifteen … thirty—even I could not say how many I consumed, but I caught them then in terror. I swooped down on them as they fled, blacked with soot and fearful in the darkness, and I carried them to Lucifer. Of course, more escaped me, and those who did not, set up such a great howling that every Vampire in St Martin de Re had to know of the inferno. They rolled on the ground, slapping at their hair and clothes and screaming. And with each scream, more appeared. Like a thunderstorm that darkened the horizon over the Breton Strait, they massed in the air above the citadel. Seeing their approach, I dropped to the ground and hid my wings. I pulled my hat down low and hurried for the side street just as the foul wind of their wings battered the church, sending the cinders scattering.
Without looking back, I rushed back to Madame Bourret’s boarding house.
Evedra was sitting up. She had obviously been listening at the door, as when I’d turned the key I had heard her scurrying away. She had worked the gag down, and I wondered whether she had screamed out in my absence. If she had, it seemed no one in Madame Bourret’s boarding house had paid any mind to a prostitute screaming in the room of a wealthy man, which attested to the character of my new residence.
“I am hungry,” were the first words out of her mouth. “I must feed.”
She looked paler than usual and her lips were blue and drawn.
“Very well. I have a task for you.” I untied her and helped her to her feet. “Undress.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“Undress,” I instr
ucted again as I unbuttoned my shirt.
“I will not fuck you, Cruxim.” She sounded incredulous. “No matter the price.”
I laughed at that. It felt good to laugh; it seemed an age since I had been amused. “Just undress.” I unbuckled my trousers and slid out of them.
With some hesitation, she turned her back to me and said, “I need help.”
I moved her silky blonde hair off her neck, trying to ignore the blue vein that marred her skin’s ivory smoothness, and set about unfastening her corset. The buttons on her brocade bodice were tiny, her outfit expensive. She had a slim little waist above those shapely hips, and I wondered momentarily whether all of this might be in vain.
When her dress hung unbuttoned, I turned away again, not wishing to be further drawn by her blood or the voluptuousness of her bosom.
Naked, I moved to the washbasin and cleansed my face of soot. I wet my hair, smoothing it back and plaiting it into a braid at the nape of my neck. I could feel her eyes upon me, assessing my naked body. Vampire she was, but she was all whore, and I knew what she expected. Had I been a mortal, I would almost have hated to disappoint her.
I turned suddenly and caught her in her appraisal of me. Evedra blushed and covered her breasts with her hands. Looking down, she fumbled with her pantaloons.
“Leave those on,” I instructed. “Here.” I picked up my trousers from the floor and threw them at her, followed by my shirt.
“What?”
“Put them on. Over the top.”
Her eyes remained upon me as I strode to the bed, where she had carefully laid out her bodice and petticoats.
Laughter burst from her when I put a leg into the first petticoat. “I never pegged you for a pervert, Cruxim. But, very well, let’s play dress ups.”
“Shhh,” I cautioned. “Now you must help me with these infernal buttons.” I shrugged into the bodice. The top of it bit into the underside of my wings, and it was too small: only the lowest buttons would fasten.
She laughed again as she attempted to pull it tighter around my waist, and then she ran her hands gently over my shoulders, over my wings. “Sir, I fear you’re too big,” she said provocatively. It seemed a well-practiced lie. “Far, far too big.” She slid a hand around my waist, headed for my groin. Her touch, cold as it was, made me hungry; I stepped away from it abruptly, and she remembered who I was. What I was.