Dhampir

by Barb Hendee

  She bolted past Rashed, running down the short hall. She didn’t know if Rashed pursued her or not as she ran down the stone steps to the main room. Lord Corische sat at the cracked table writing on a scroll with a feather quill. Teesha ignored him and ran for the great oak doors.

  As she reached out for the iron latch, Parko sprang in front of her as if sprouting from the earth, snarling and sucking in her scent. She staggered back in reflex, but did not turn around, her eyes focused watchfully on the disheveled figure in front of her.

  “Let me out of here!” she ordered Corische. She had nothing left for him to take, nothing that mattered to her, and so no more reason for fear.

  Then she saw the enormous iron bar across the door. She hadn’t even noticed it while rushing to escape. It was wider than her own upper arm and so thick and heavy it didn’t seem possible that any one person could have lifted it alone. It was most certainly impossible for her to do so by herself.

  “Take this down,” she said, her back still to Corische. “Our pact is over.”

  “Rashed put that bar up. Even I would have difficulty removing it. Did you enjoy dinner?”

  Hatred was a new emotion for Teesha, disorienting, and it took a moment to think through Corische’s insulting chatter.

  “If you wanted a lady for your house, why didn’t you find one? Are you afraid she would detest your crude manners and lowborn airs? No, you wanted someone beneath you that you could lord over”—she looked at Parko, no longer frightened by him, then caught sight of Ratboy hovering in the corner—“like the rest of your wretched little mob.”

  She heard something slam down on the table hard enough to make it slide and grate on the stone floor. He was easy to anger. Good. She turned about to face him and saw clean, unmasked rage.

  “You live at my mercy,” he said, “at my whim. Do not forget that.”

  “Your mercy?” The madness in her laugh matched Parko’s eyes. “And what makes you believe living has anything to do with this? You murdered my Edwan, and I will do nothing to bring you pleasure. Do you understand me now? I will not grace your table nor entertain your guests nor do anything you desire. I will try to escape every day until I succeed or you tire of it and kill me.”

  Corische appeared stunned into silence.

  Teesha only blinked once, reflexively, and he was suddenly across the room at her side.

  His hand lashed out and grabbed her arm. The stale smell of him filled her with revulsion, but his grip hurt so badly she couldn’t help crying out.

  “You will do as I say,” he hissed. “I am master here. This keep may be a pathetic hovel, but I am still lord and you will obey.”

  “No,” she whimpered. “You murdered my Edwan.”

  Corische swept the floor with one foot, kicking aside the straw to reveal a worn wooden hatch with an inset iron ring. Before Teesha could resist, he jerked up the hatch and shoved her inside.

  Teesha expected to fall straight down, but instead she tumbled along stone steps in the dark. When she reached bottom finally, her head banged against a stone floor she couldn’t even see in the half-light spilling down from the open hatch. A hollow thud echoed through the chamber as the hatch slammed closed, leaving her in complete darkness.

  She sat up, feeling along her limbs for any wounds greater than bruises or scrapes. At least now she was away from him for the moment.

  A savage grunt came from the dark.

  “You will do whatever I ask,” a voice said, “because you won’t be able to stop yourself.”

  Corische had come down the steps behind her and was somewhere in the chamber.

  Teesha slid back from his voice. Finding the bottom stair with her hand, she turned to scramble upward to the hatch. Something tangled in her hair, jerking her back, and she felt fingers coil tighter just before her head was slammed to the floor.

  She couldn’t be sure if she’d lost consciousness for a moment, but she became aware of someone large crouched over her, pinning her down. The smell of Corische’s breath hit her in the face. His hand was still in her hair, pulling hard enough to hurt as her head tilted back. She tried to thrash free and cried out instinctively. Her scream was cut short as she felt canine teeth bite down on her throat.

  Teesha gasped in panic, wondering from where the animal had come, and became rigid with shock when she realized it was Corische. Air became harder and harder to take in as she heard him suck her blood through his teeth. As he continued to drink, the dark around her began to tingle on her skin. Her head swam, her breath grew shorter and shorter, until she could barely feel the air move in and out through her slack mouth.

  He pulled back suddenly, and she wheezed in a lungful of air just before she felt herself jerked up to sitting position. Her arms were still pinned to her sides by Corische’s thick legs. Both his hands clamped across the back of her head, and he crushed her face into his chest.

  The stink of his flesh made her gag, but his skin felt chilled. And there was something wet smearing against her face.

  She opened her mouth, trying to breathe, and the wetness spread across her lips. A coppery taste hit her tongue. The liquid was as cold as his skin, but she could still recognize the taste from the times she cut a finger or thumb while preparing food in the inn’s kitchen—and she’d raised the small wound to her mouth, trying to stop the drops of blood.

  Corische pressed her face tighter against his chest until she could not breathe at all, only feel and taste the slight bit of his blood escaping into her mouth. Every sensation in the dark became unreal and distant until all feeling in her body faded and her breath stopped altogether.

  Teesha awoke on the stone floor in the dark. Had it been hours or days? It felt . . . somehow felt even longer. There was light in the room, yet the hatch above was not open. Rashed kneeled over her, a small oil lamp in his hand. Something flickered across his cold features. Pity? Regret? She sat up to look about anxiously, but Corische was nowhere to be seen. A heavy wooden door with an iron slide bolt was set in the wall opposite the stairs that led up to the hatch. Otherwise, the room was empty.

  Rashed stood and opened the door to expose a long hall angling downward into the earth. Along its sides were other doors like the first, each with a slide bolt, but also looped steel at the jambs where the door could be secured with a lock.

  “This used to be a dungeon of some sort,” he said.

  Teesha was too weak and confused to either question or object when he scooped her up in his arms, lantern still in hand, and carried her into that hallway. He did not stop at any of the doors but walked to the end of the passage, and placed his free hand firmly against the end wall, careful not to drop her. The stone under his hand gave, sinking into the wall, and he reached inside to some hidden pocket of space. Teesha heard something akin to grinding metal, then the grind of stone as the hall’s end pivoted open to reveal a set of stairs angling farther downward. Rashed slipped through and descended.

  He walked on and on until finally he reached an end chamber. Within it was nothing more than five coffins. Four were of plain wood and little more than long boxes, while the fifth appeared to be of thick oak with iron bindings, crafted for the final rest, yet without any handles on the outsides of its lid.

  “This is where you must sleep now,” he said, “in a coffin with the dirt of your homeland. If you go out into the sunlight, you will die.” He set her down in one of the four wooden coffins. “You will rest here near my own. I’ve already prepared it for you.”

  And so Teesha, the carefree serving girl, was gone, and something else was born in her place.

  She learned many things over the next few nights: That she could not refuse the wishes of her master, that she needed blood to exist, that Rashed’s coffin was half full of white sand, and that she was undead. Rashed taught her everything with his endless dispassionate patience, and although she sometimes wished for the rest of true death, hatred for Corische kept her rising every night.

  He was more than lo
rd of the keep. He was a master among the Noble Dead, those beings among the undead who still retained their full semblance of self from life in an eternal existence no longer subservient to the mortality under which the living grew old and weak. They were the vampires and liches who possessed physical bodies, their own memories, and their own consciousness. The Noble Dead were the highest and most powerful of the unliving. The only weakness for vampires, however, was that they were slaves to the one who created them. Corische’s master, his own creator, had somehow been destroyed, and so he was free to create his own servants.

  Teesha found that when he gave a verbal order, she could not refuse him. Internally, she could despise him, fantasize about seeing him scorched in flames, and think whatever she pleased. But when he spoke, she could not stop herself from obeying. Neither could Rashed, Parko, or Ratboy—not that Rashed would have refused anyway. The tall, composed warrior seemed honestly loyal to his master. This revolted Teesha, as Rashed was clearly superior to Corische on every imaginable level.

  Rashed taught her how to feed without killing, harmonizing the thrum of her voice to the exertion of her will, until the victim became pliable and docile.

  When she asked Rashed why he cared so for mortals, that he did not wish to kill them, his reply was coldly practical.

  “Even a heavily populated area like this one cannot support four of us recklessly. We must be careful or lose our home and our food supply.”

  She came to understand that their kind developed different levels of power. Rashed thought her mental abilities were quite pronounced. His own and Ratboy’s were adequate. Parko couldn’t express himself well enough for the others to gauge his abilities, yet his senses were highly acute, even beyond the average heightened senses of a Noble Dead, and he was a constant trial for Rashed to control. Corische’s telepathic skills were so limited that Teesha sometimes wondered how he fed.

  Most of the Noble Dead developed mental abilities, but these often were dependent on the individual’s inclinations in life. Teesha had always loved dreams and memories, for her life had been filled with the best of them, and so she eventually found she could easily reach into the mind of a mortal and project sweet waking dreams and alter memories.

  The first time Rashed took her hunting was a revelation. They rode his bay gelding together for a while and then dismounted and tied the horse to a tree. Slipping through the forest, she realized they were hiding in the shadows on the outskirts of her home village. A farmer came out of the tavern and stepped into the trees to relieve himself. Teesha recognized him. His name was Davish.

  “Watch me,” Rashed said. “This is important.”

  He stepped out of the shadows. “Are you lost?” he asked Davish.

  The farmer started slightly at the sound of a strange voice, and then he looked in Rashed’s eyes and seemed to relax into a kind of confusion. “Lost? I . . . ? I’m not sure.”

  “Come. I will help you home.”

  Davish appeared to be frightened, but not of Rashed. He kept looking around as if he should know where he was but did not. Rashed reached out as if to help him, but then gripped his arm, pulled him over, and wasted no time biting down on his throat. Teesha watched in fascination.

  Rashed did not drink much and then pushed the dazed farmer toward her. “Feed, but not too much. You must not kill him. You’ll be doing this on your own soon enough.”

  Teesha grabbed Davish and began feeding, unable to stop herself, and surprised by how right the act felt. She was not repulsed at all. Then she realized how delicious his blood tasted, how warm, how strong she felt. Pure pleasure seeped through her. She could not stop.

  “That’s enough.” Rashed pulled her off. “Don’t kill him.” He laid Davish out on the ground and then used a knife to connect the holes made by his teeth, but he did this carefully and did not cut too deeply. He leaned close and whispered, “Forget.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “You simply reach inside their thoughts with your own. Force the fear, the moment, the emotion to fade.”

  And so she learned that Rashed was able to manipulate emotions, and able to create a blank space in his victim’s memory. Teesha herself learned to create dreams and manipulate more complex memories.

  Ratboy, on the other hand, hunted through his ability to blend. No one noticed him. No one remembered him. He did not hunt with finesse or by creating dreams, but he was able to feed by mentally intensifying his own innate ability to be forgotten. That was all.

  Parko quite often killed his victims, but they were mainly peasants. As master of Gäestev Keep, Corische was responsible for looking into these deaths so, of course, little investigation took place.

  Teesha hunted either alone or with Rashed. His forethought and consistently rational manner impressed her. He wasn’t exactly predictable, which would have made him mundane, but rather, he was constant. His intelligent, calm nature was the only thing she could count on besides herself in this new existence.

  Corische, on the other hand, exhibited mood swings she never learned to understand. One night, her choice of dress might please him, and on the next night, the same dress would disgust him and give him cause to humiliate her. The unwashed state of his armor and his yellow teeth sickened her. True hatred was a new emotion for Teesha, and because of this, she did not question how often it consumed her. She began to wonder about the nature of his control and to consider how she might be forced to obey her master and yet thwart him at the same time. Since she was only compelled to obey him when he gave a verbal order, a subtle approach seemed the only possibility. The answer took a month but was simple enough in the end.

  She would become exactly what he claimed to want.

  Half a year passed, and Teesha made only small changes at first. She took up fine needlepoint and hired a talented local woman to come three times per week for lessons. She asked Corische for money and ordered fine dresses in the styles that most often seemed to please him. And he began to smugly revel in her efforts.

  Since her master was masquerading as a feudal lord, he could not completely ignore his duties. A good portion of land profits remained in his purse, so he collected rents and even occasionally sat in judgment over peasants who were accused of petty crimes. But in that first year, he had a new barracks built on the north side of the keep, and afterward forbade any of the soldiers to enter his home. A competent middle-aged soldier named Captain Smythe, along with Rashed, handled the typical workload required for overseeing a fiefdom with four villages.

  One night, when Corische and Rashed were leaving to collect rents, Teesha watched Rashed lift the iron bar off the door. He was physically the strongest creature she had ever known, an immortal incarnation of bone and muscle. But she had also begun to see through his cold dispassion, catching him at times staring intently at one of her needleworks or the small items she’d ordered for the making of a proper noble household. Rashed hungered for the trappings of the living. She saw no shame in this, and knew she could use his hunger to her advantage. Teesha decided that night to accelerate her plans.

  First, she had every room above the cellar cleaned by hiring a temporary housemaster, allowing him to believe she and Corische were a pair of lazy nobles who debauched all night and slept all day. She ordered tapestries, braid carpets, and muslin bedding for the two small guest rooms, a chandelier with forty candles, silver goblets, and porcelain dishes. Every night, she had a roaring fire laid in the pit to create an illusion of life and warmth. Although she told herself this was all simply a ruse for Corische’s benefit, she began to see layers of herself she’d never realized before. Weren’t taste and style simply learned skills that the wealthy taught their children? Isn’t that what she’d always believed? Back in the tavern with Edwan, Teesha cared for nothing beyond warmth, love, and the friendship of others. She’d worn one dress in the summer and another in the winter. Why had that never bothered her? Why hadn’t she seen how much more there was to desire? She hated Corische, bu
t part of her appreciated how his curse had opened her eyes.

  Corische watched with a growing arrogant satisfaction as day after day she slipped deeper into the role he expected of her. And she watched Rashed’s fascination grow as the cold keep slowly changed into a living place. She even found that she derived some comfort from pleasing him. And he was the only one she entertained any interest in pleasing.

  Eventually, Corische stopped taking notice of all the things she did. She was doing what he wanted, and he made little or no comment on it. Rashed, on the other hand, could not hide his growing approval, which seeped out for a blink or two to wash away the grim coldness of his features. He’d ask where she’d found the latest tapestry or how she would use the strangely shaped flowered vase. Once, he even complimented the knotted pattern she was stitching into a pillowcase.

  Then one late evening, when Corische was out, she slipped downstairs to spot Rashed alone in the main room, unaware of her presence. A wrapped and tied bundle of new cloth she had ordered was sitting on the table, and he was trying to peek inside without leaving any trace that he’d been inspecting it.

  For a moment, Teesha forgot about Rashed’s place in her half-formed plans and stood entranced by his bizarre obsession with mortal trappings. A forgotten softness filled her briefly while she watched him. Firelight almost gave his face color, and he looked so handsome standing by the table, as curious as a boy about her bundle. Then she remembered herself and shook off the feeling. She must think of him as a tool. He would be her instrument, and she could not let emotion sway her from using him.

  In another month, Corische began to invite guests to the keep—at first only a nearby lord from a neighboring fief, then a few others as the visits were a success. Teesha could see he sought to improve his social standing and rise in mortal political ranks. After the year’s end, she stepped up her studies, using house accounts Corische put at her disposal to order scrolls and books.