by Jemma Chase
“Joan of Arc did the same thing,” Liam said. “She was burned at the stake for her efforts.”
“But she won,” I reminded him. “She may have died, but she saved her people.”
I wondered how Joan of Arc had felt when she knew she was going to die. Her faith had been strong, so did that mean she went without fear to her death? Or, at the end, was she only alone and afraid, ready to die because everyone who mattered had been lost to her?
I forced my thoughts onto something else.
We went on proudly, at least for a while. Hiding the Stars of David helped, though we were still regarded with the wrong sort of curiosity from most of the populace. However, we met the occasional person who believed us and thanked us for our efforts.
Not that our plan was to tell just anyone what our purpose was. Those few we rescued who weren’t more afraid of us than the ’Pire we’d saved them from were given a truthful explanation.
We told any others who asked that we’d been sent by their sovereign to try to stamp out a variety of plague. This worked in many cases. But when you’re caught ripping the heads off of supposedly upstanding citizens who just keep odd hours, then you do have some explanations demanded, usually at the point of a sword.
We were equipped to survive against most vampire-based attacks. But we weren’t protected from human weapons. And nothing can ever protect you from a mob.
Our first mob was terrifying.
We were caught clearing out a nest of vampires. We couldn’t reason with the villagers who were trying to defend their lord and his family. We had to set the vampires’ home on fire – not to destroy them but to keep the villagers at bay. They’d kept five horses and we stole them, with two carrying double.
David and Hannah were riding together. In the scramble to escape, his cloak came off and he tossed it over the horse’s neck. We rode wildly, feeling more fear of this mob than any vampire.
The villagers gave good chase, though we did manage to outrun them. But not before David took an arrow in the back.
We reached our hiding place and David fell off the horse into Marcus’ arms. Hannah leaped off, trying not to cry.
“Can you remove the arrow?” Liam asked Marcus quietly.
Marcus shook his head as he broke off what he could, so Hannah could hold David without harming herself.
“I’ll…miss you…my love,” David gasped out.
“I’ll see you in Heaven, if nowhere else,” she whispered, kissing his forehead.
David reached his hand to her face. They were like that for a moment, but only a moment. His hand fell to the ground as his eyes glazed. He looked like Violet to me, only stabbed from behind, not from the front. But the finality of death was the same.
Our first casualty came within a year of arriving. In a war, I suppose that’s a good statistic. In reality, we lost a seventh of our fighting force, and one half of a married couple.
We wrapped David in his cloak and buried him as well as we could, putting a note rolled into an empty vial into his clasped hands. We identified his burial spot with a stone marker. Maybe in time his body would be unearthed, the vial found, and somehow The Order, a thousand years from now, would know their first fallen soldier had died bravely.
At least, we hoped it was bravely. Because we felt more like marauders than heroes. In order to survive, we’d learned to loot ’Pire remains for their money and supplies, just like we’d taken the horses. But what we didn’t ask was what this might be doing to our own souls.
Hannah tried to hide her sorrow, but she and David had been together longer than I’d been in The Order. They’d lost everyone to the vampires in our time, everyone but each other.
But this loss was different – deeper, lonelier, more final. We all felt it. Surprising as it was to discover we still had some innocence to lose, but as David’s body went into the ground, there was no mistaking the loss.
We finally knew, in our souls, we would die here. Now the only questions were when and would we have completed our mission before the last of us fell?
We found no vampires for another several months. We found other mobs, though. News of us had spread, and it wasn’t good news.
The bubonic plague was devastating the population, the Hundred Years War was raging throughout the land, and yet we were targeted as more evil than either of these two horrific calamities. Liam said it was because we were tangible and could be hurt and so gave the people something to react against.
Perhaps.
“Maybe Jonathan was right – they’re distrustful because we’re women,” Hannah suggested, after yet another group had run us off before we’d found if there was a ’Pire in their midst or not. “We dress and act like you men do. Much as I hate to suggest it, maybe that’s tipping the mobs off.”
“Possible,” Liam said. “But doubtful. While this era didn’t consider women to have any authority, during these dark times even women could offer last rites to the dying. They should be greeting us with at least a semblance of joy, seeing as we’re all clergy and wearing holy symbols.”
“You’re sure them calling us whores and abominations has nothing to do with our sex?” I could admit it probably wasn’t the only reason, but the insults tossed towards Adrienne, Hannah, and me were a little more venomous than those shouted at the men.
“I’m with Liam,” Marcus said. “It’s too focused to have all these mobs after us simply because we have female warriors in our group.”
“Here.” Adrienne handed something to me and Hannah.
“What are they?” Hannah asked.
“Leather skullcaps.” Adrienne looked embarrassed. “I was going to buy them, but the mob ran us off before I could.”
I examined mine. “There’s a hole in the back for our hair.”
“I think it makes it more comfortable,” Adrienne said.
“Thank you. This should help us hide a little, and they’ll be good for battle, too.” We had no armor for our heads, and in a fight, even the smallest advantage could turn the tables. The idea of hiding, at least in a small way, didn’t seem as outrageous and insulting as it had only a short while ago, either.
Hannah hugged Adrienne. “I’m glad you found these. From a clean shop, too.”
“I’m glad we didn’t have to buy much gear in this time,” Liam said. “Most of what I’ve seen is even worse than I’d expected.”
“I’d glad we were inoculated against the diseases,” Jonathan said. “The skullcaps are wonderful, and the rest of us should find our own as soon as possible. I’d also like to find somewhere we can rest and regroup, if only for a short while.”
None of us argued with Jonathan’s desire. But shelter from the world was hard to find, and not what we’d traveled back in time for anyway.
We were forced farther north, towards the Alps, to escape our newfound reputations as much as to avoid the fighting and the oppressive death. There were times, when we went through a town with more dead in the streets than were still living, that I wondered if the vampires weren’t a better option than the Black Death.
But bubonic plague didn’t play with its victims, didn’t get joy from their pain. The plague we were here to fight was much worse than the Black Death. Though it wasn’t spreading as fast we knew it would last far longer.
The vampire plague would outlast the Hundred Years War easily, and it would rage longer and further than the Black Death, too. The vampire plague would prove the adage right – slow and steady would win this race.
Unless we stopped it.
“Maybe the ’Pires don’t like the cold,” Marcus said. “We should go back south.”
“Their influence is here,” Jonathan said. “At least, if the standard reactions to our presence are any clue.”
“But unless we can find vampires here, influence means nothing.” Hannah shook her head. “I agree with Marcus – we should go back.”
“We need to go back with a better plan than we’ve had,” I said. “We can’t afford to be scattershot anymore.
”
“David always said there’s got to be a pattern,” Liam reminded us as we huddled around our campfire. The men had found skullcaps, too, and all of us were wearing them for warmth.
“But we haven’t found it in over a year,” Jonathan pointed out. “We’re finding ’Pires, yes, but they’re in random locations.”
“If the rumors are true, we should have gone to Romania, not France,” Adrienne said. “Perhaps that’s what’s wrong.”
“No, the scientists knew what they were doing,” Liam countered. “We’re at the point in time when the vampires started to spread and in the general area where the spread started – all the research shows it. We have to find the pattern. Perhaps it’s in how they travel.”
Marcus shook his head. “Vampires don’t wander around, especially the ones of this era. Sunlight is still deadly to them. ’Pires of this day nest.”
“So how are they spreading?” Adrienne asked. “How did they leave Romania? And why can’t we find the pattern?”
I remembered what Armand had taught me when I’d first joined The Order. “We’re not looking in the right places or in the right way. We’re not thinking like they think.”
Hannah nodded. “We’ve been here a year, but we’re still thinking like ’Pires from our time, not this one. We need to regress our thinking somehow, to match how those of this era think, reason, and react.”
“The only nests we’ve found have been family groups,” Adrienne said. “If we look at it like the plague it is, maybe it’s something passed through bloodline.”
“No,” Liam said. “We’ve found plenty of solitary ’Pires. It’s not that.”
“Then how is it spreading?” I asked. “We can go for days without seeing another person.” At least, another living person. The dead were all around us any time we neared even the smallest populated area.
“Because we’re forced to travel through the forests now.” Hannah grimaced. “Though even when we were safe traveling on the regular paths we could go a day without coming to a village.”
“So, does that mean the vampires are traveling along the regular roads?” Jonathan asked. “And if so, how? I haven’t seen an overabundance of coffins being transported, and without that protection, they can only travel at night.”
“There are no spare coffins to be had. The dead are in mass graves or rotting in the streets,” I pointed out. “In fact, coffins would stand out and give us something to investigate.”
“The ’Pires are spreading.” Adrienne sighed. “We need to determine how and soon. Before they turn the few who aren’t succumbing to the bubonic plague.”
“We know they didn’t overtake the population,” Liam said. “That’s not our risk.”
Adrienne shook her head. “We’ve changed things, by coming back in time. The history books you studied never mentioned a small group of people accused of being demons roaming the French countryside, but those history books won’t be written for hundreds of years. By coming to the past we’ve changed it. We don’t know what we’ve done, not truly.”
An animal howled in the distance. It was a lonely sound, especially so because no other responded. A shudder went down my spine. I looked at the five others with me. We were all we had here. Losing David had been bad enough. I didn’t want to lose any of the others.
Marcus took my hand and squeezed it gently. “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”
I nodded as the others offered reassurance I wasn’t sure any of us believed. The animal howled again, alone in the endless night.
Another thing we hadn’t foreseen in the far future was that the vampire race’s fatal weakness to gold was built over time. By the twenty-fourth century it was a certain weapon. In this time, not as effective by far.
Fortunately, the Nightsticks still worked well for killing vampires. However, we’d been trained to expect just carrying a Nightstick would create real vulnerability in any ’Pire, and this was no longer so. The stunning power still worked in the Middle Ages, but only at close range, and less effectively if the vampire was strong.
This lesson was confirmed when we lost Adrienne. She’d gone scouting alone. When she didn’t return as scheduled, the rest of us went after her. We found her in a field, crucified and drained of all blood.
We could tell from the footprints there had been many around her. They’d taken her Nightsticks and the rest of her gear, including her horse, but left her cloak alone.
“How did they drink her?” Marcus asked. “Our blood is poison to them.”
“They didn’t have to drink her to drain her.” Liam pointed to the wet earth around the bottom of the crucifix.
“But her wards and charms,” Jonathan protested. “They should have helped her. The ’Pires shouldn’t have been able to touch her.”
Liam and I examined Adrienne’s body. “They sliced open her feet.” I felt bile in my mouth as I said this. “They must have watched her blood drain, watched her die.”
“Why?” Marcus asked. “I’ve never seen a ’Pire in this time desecrate a body in this way.”
“It’s a message,” Hannah answered. “They know about us now and they’ll fight back differently than they have.”
“We’re going after them.” I wasn’t going to wait around for them to come to us. I couldn’t allow them to do this to Hannah, to the others…to Marcus.
The others agreed and we followed the tracks to a secluded chateau. No lights burning, but we didn’t assume the inhabitants were asleep.
We raided the chateau and found a clan of twenty vampires – they looked like a group of families, probably the chateau’s owners and their servants.
They were trying to determine what Adrienne’s gear was, some of them playing with the metal vials of holy water. They were avoiding her Nightsticks, but didn’t seem bothered much by them. Two wore her jewelry, and some were fingering Adrienne’s gold, gold that had been blessed by all of us. The ’Pires weren’t affected at all.
We attacked, and two tried to fight back using the Nightsticks. It took a few minutes, but their hands began to burn away and we were able to wrest the weapons back with ease.
They didn’t fight in an organized fashion, and though the eldest male seemed to be the leader, he wasn’t much of one. “Keep him alive,” I called to Liam, just before he dealt a killing blow.
“Why?”
“I want to ask a question.”
Liam shrugged but did as I’d asked. He held the ’Pire with a stake at his heart as the rest of us dispatched the remaining clan members. The ’Pire seemed unperturbed.
“Who made you?” I asked as the last of this clan were beheaded and their bodies put onto a pyre.
He shook his head, as if he hadn’t understood me. I’d spoken in French, but we were close to the Alps, so I tried Italian. He looked confused. I tried German.
“I will not say,” he replied.
“How long have you been made?”
“I was there in the first and will be there in the last.”
“Why did you doom your family to this fate? You turned them into demons, abominations in the eyes of God.”
He smiled. “Eternal life is not doom.”
“None of them will now have eternal life. Nor will you.”
He laughed. “Nor will you. You are the abomination. Your blood and your body, they are not of this world. We died so that we could be resurrected, to live forever. You are the demons. We killed your sister demon and crucified her according to the laws. We will be rewarded, in this world and the next.”
“What do you call yourselves?”
“We are those who live by night.”
“Vampires?”
The ’Pire shook his head. “We are not Romanian.”
“What are you?”
He smiled wider. “We are your death. We know of you, and we will wipe you abominations off the face of the Earth.”
“I’ve heard enough,” Liam snarled. He ripped the vampire’s head off. We tossed his rema
ins onto the rest and watched them burn.
“Is he right?” I asked Hannah as we reclaimed all of Adrienne’s gear. “Are we the abominations?”
“No.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Remember the future, the world we come from. The vampires are the enemy, the vicious, bloodthirsty demons who destroyed our lives and our world. Just because the ’Pires of this time are less organized or trained doesn’t make them holy.”
We waited until the vampires were nothing but ash, then returned to bury Adrienne.
As with David, we wrapped Adrienne in her cloak and buried her, with her charms and another message put into another empty holy water vial, again telling The Order how their warrior had died.
However, we were shaken in ways we hadn’t been before. By Adrienne’s death, yes, but more by the fact we weren’t as strong as we’d thought. We’d known our weapons weren’t working as well as they had in our own time, but they were much less effective here than we’d realized until now.
Worse than this, our faith was shaken. While we all tried to discredit what the vampire had said, it was impossible to ignore. And now there were only five of us left against a vampire population that knew what we were here to do.
We continued on, but the ’Pires were on the offensive now. We no longer had the element of surprise, and many times were attacked when we thought ourselves safe. They killed the horses, too, which slowed us down, both in terms of attack and retreat.
Interestingly, our holy symbols had more effect after Adrienne’s death. We had no idea why, and we’d still not found the pattern that would help us identify and find their source, but even a small help was better than none.
But small helps aren’t much good in a war where one side outnumbers the other by thousands.
At first we questioned every ’Pire we could, before we killed them, but either they knew nothing of what we asked, refused to answer, or said as the other ’Pire had – that we were the abominations, the demons, and they were holy.
Soon we stopped questioning.