Fearing that Kadija’s father would likewise return from the grave, the old man was beheaded, a stake was driven through his heart and his mouth was stuffed with garlic before burial.
A week later, Kadija’s mother went missing, and a few days after that, the village baker reported that Madame Damilan had accosted him in his bedroom.
She had climbed in his bedroom window sometime after midnight, he claimed, moving so quietly that he would not have roused if he had been sleeping. Fortunately for him, the baker was an avid reader and a terrible insomniac. He was wide awake when Mdm. Damilan hoisted herself over his windowsill.
He threw the book he had been reading (Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostril by Giorgio Vasari) at her, screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Damilan, he said, was naked and filthy, and had an empty, feral look in her eyes.
Hissing like an angry cat, she launched herself upon him, and tried to bite his neck, but he managed to fend her off and fled in his nightgown to a neighbor’s home.
When the third person went missing in the little town of Getvar, a missive was sent to Duke Zrinski for aid. Duke Zrinski’s plea to the Church was intercepted by one of our spies in Italy, and a copy of his letter sent to the Court of the Night’s Watch.
I arrived in Getvar on the very day that young friar Justus Augustin arrived, but life is full of little coincidences, aren’t they?
3
I arrived in Getvar at about ten o’clock in the evening, the moon riding high over the encircling hills, the swirling chiffon clouds limned in its silvery light. I was on horseback, as I had failed to find a coach that would take me to the besieged village. Already, rumors of their “vampire problem” had spread to the neighboring villages, ensuring that Getvar was even more isolated than it normally was, forsaken in her time of need.
The town looked as if it had been struck with the plague. The streets were deserted, the houses shuttered and dark. All was silent but for the wind hooting forlornly in the eaves and the chirruping of the night insects. I rode to the inn, a two-story daub-and-timber construction sitting at the far end of the village, and roused the stable boy to see to my steed. Our brief discussion woke the livery master, who rushed out to look after the boy’s safety, tugging up his breeches. The stable master was wearing a large old crucifix—his mother’s once, or his grandmother’s, I am sure. Christ impaled, muscles straining in torment. I’m not sure which of the stable minders stank of fear the worst, the boy or his master—the contest was too close to call.
“See that she’s well cared for,” I said to the frightened peasants, and was extra generous with my coins. I patted the horse’s rump as they led her into the barn.
I paused on the stone pathway that joined the stables to the inn and sniffed furtively at the night air. Would that I had Zenzele’s mysterious Eye I could have searched for the revenants with my mind, ascertained if there were, in fact, rogue vampires at large, but I did not, and I was not able to detect the scent of any degenerate blood drinkers.
It did not mean they were not there, only that I could not smell them.
There were two soldiers posted at the entrance of the inn. I think they were the village’s night guard, but if so, they were unwilling to abandon the little light afford by the lantern beside the entrance.
They challenged me nervously, gripping the pommels of their swords as I approached.
“Who goes there, and what business have you in Getvar?” the bolder of the two men barked.
“My name is Gyozo Vastag,” I answered in a soothing voice. “I am a scholar, sent by Duke Bokor to investigate the trouble that has befallen your village of late.”
“Duke Bokor, huh? Never heard of him.”
“He is a Hungarian nobleman,” I said helpfully. “He rules a small fief many days journey from here.”
“And why is he curious about us? You’ve not said why you’ve come—I mean, not really.”
I smiled and inclined my head a little. “We’ve had our own… troubles recently,” I replied. “I have been sent to ascertain the methods your people use to remedy such troubles. We have heard they are most effective.” It was the cover story we generally used to conceal our true motives from mortals.
“Is that right?” the soldier said, glancing toward his partner. “We’ve not had much remedy around here, unless a fellow needs remedied of a good night’s sleep.”
“That’s unfortunate,” I said. “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see to a tankard of mead and a warm bed before I begin my investigation for Duke Bokor on the morrow. I’ve had a long journey, and I don’t know if I’m more thirsty or more tired. Perhaps I could purchase a tankard for both of you? I confess, I find the idea of armed guards standing watch near my bed a reassuring one. This village has a dread atmosphere, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“I don’t mind—your saying or a tankard of mead,” the bolder soldier said, and he even laughed a little, a quick snort. He glanced up and down the road then, as if he feared reprisal for his momentary mirth.
They shuffled out of my path and I pushed inside.
Smell of unwashed mortal flesh. A smoky fireplace. Roast mutton and mead. I would have expected the inn to be crowded, even at this hour, but the common room was sparsely populated. There was a small knot of men standing close together in the far corner of the room, gathered around what looked to be a Roman Catholic monk, but no one else save the innkeeper, a large breasted redhead with a waxy complexion washing dishes behind the bar.
“Sit where you like, sire,” she called. “Plenty of tables open tonight.”
I took off my cloak and hat and hung them from some hooks beside the door, sensing the eyes of the mortals crawling over my back. I was dressed in the modest clothing of a country lord—doublet, slashed leather jerkin and padded hose, and knee-high riding boots. My hair was tied back with a silk ribbon and a large leather satchel hung from one shoulder. I had powdered my face and hands so that my ossified flesh did not glint in the candlelight. Though I sensed the mortals were disquieted by my unexpected arrival, I did not smell alarm in their body odor. They did not suspect I was anything other than a normal—albeit wealthy—mortal traveler.
“Will it be food or drink, or perhaps both tonight?” the innkeeper asked.
“Just a tankard of mead, and one apiece for the night watch guarding your doorstep,” I said, one corner of my lips bowed up. I placed my bag on a table and sat. “I’m afraid I’d have nightmares if I ate anything so late at night. I normally retire much earlier than this.”
The men in the far corner had fallen silent at my arrival. Their conversation did not resume when I sat, as I had expected. They stared as the innkeeper brought me a tankard of ale, and continued to stare while the innkeeper waited on me, their eyes narrow and glinting.
I thanked the woman and took a sip, concealing my distaste for the mortal beverage. I could drink it. I could drink it all if I had to. I had trained my immortal body to tolerate mortal food. It was a necessity if one intended to move in the world of living men, but it was not pleasant, and I had my limits. Too much, and it would come spewing from every orifice—and quite spectacularly. Think Linda Blair in that American dark comedy The Exorcist.
“Will you be needing a room tonight, my lord?”
“Yes. Your finest accommodations.”
“I have a bed with a nice goose feather mattress. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
The innkeeper lingered. “So what brings you to the lovely village of Getvar, m’lord? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Oh, I think you know what brings me. I’ve been sent by my liege lord, Duke Bokor of Hungary, to document your vampire troubles.”
I think it was my matter-of-factness that caused her to step back more than any mention of the undead. Her eyes went wide and she glanced toward the knot of men in the far corner. They glanced back at
her, then resumed their staring of me, their faces grim.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” I said, reaching out to soothe the woman. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just… Getvar has become rather famous in recent weeks because of these fantastic rumors. We had a similar case in Hungary just this past winter. Duke Bokor dispatched me to learn as much as I can about these… creatures, so that we might deal with them more effectively the next time it occurs.”
“Oh, um, yes, m’lord. No need to apologize. I was merely taken off guard. You see, you’re not the first to come today inquiring about the demons that have plagued us. In fact, there’s another sitting right over there. Come all the way from Italy, he did.”
The crowd of men in the corner of the room parted then, like the curtains of a stage, and Justus Augustin nodded at me with a smile, quill in hand.
“Hello,” he said. “Would you care to join me?”
4
As I said before, he was a startlingly handsome young man, with bright green eyes and light beard, full lips and perfectly molded features. He waited for me to join him with a patient, curious smile, dressed in a black tunic and scapula, a crucifix hanging from his neck upon a chain. I knew by his attire that he was a Benedictine, a “black monk”, and I realized also that I was suddenly, most unexpectedly, drawn to this mortal.
My attraction to him was so fiery that I hesitated for a moment before I went to join him at his table. After years in the company of my fellow immortals in the Court of the Night’s Watch, venturing out among the living only rarely, I had almost forgotten how alluring mortal men and women can be—their ripe, luscious odor, their vitality, the poignant fragility of their existence.
I wanted him, as I had not wanted a mortal man in over a thousand years, and I think I decided, the very moment that I saw him, that I had to have him, and that I was going to make a blood drinker of him.
I cautioned myself to remain aloof to this mortal’s charms. To become involved with a mortal now would needlessly complicate my mission, but I was fooling myself. I could no more resist this handsome mortal than I could the pull of gravity.
5
“That sounds pretty gay,” Lukas snorted, his voice dripping with disdain.
“I have never understood your modern notions of sexual identity,” I replied mildly. “It seems so terribly stifling to me. It’s no wonder you modern people gobble tranquilizers like they’re candy. You have so many rules! It was not so when I was a mortal man, and was rarely so oppressive throughout all of mankind’s history. Sex is not a product to be packaged and sold to the masses, categorized and restricted like some dangerous chemical substance. True, homosexual love was frowned upon in the Middle Ages, but with a wink and a sly grin, I can assure you. Oh, the hypocrisy of all your new religions! It only makes the forbidden more exciting. And purposely so, I sometimes think. After all, you cannot sell absolution without some sin for which to be pardoned!”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Lukas replied, face twisted up in disgust. “It’s just… It’s unnatural!”
“Unnatural? Our species has enjoyed such pleasures from time immemorial. How can you condemn it as unnatural? How can love and pleasure be in any way unnatural? It is your modern death cults that I find unnatural. They remind me of the Egyptians, so obsessed are they with the end of life. Your people revere violence and oppression and war. You glory in the murder of countless billions, both in your mass media—what you call ‘entertainment’-- and in reality. No, your culture is the unnatural one, and your disgust is merely the product of a demented philosophy. You wring your hands about sex while children starve and men slaughter one another by the millions!”
6
As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me: I was powerfully attracted to the Benedictine, and he, I quickly sensed, to me. I could smell it as I approached his table, the sudden release of copious amounts of sex pheromones, accompanied by a pungent dose of shame and guilt (he was, after all, Roman Catholic). His eyes dilated as he took in my moving form, flicking furtively to my codpiece and away, his ears and neck flushing. It was all very subtle and quick, unnoticed by the men gathered around him, but to a vampire his desire might as well have been tattooed to his forehead. Lust, as I told you, was his one failing as a man of the cloth.
Introductions passed around the table. All but the priest were locals. A couple of the men claimed to have seen the vampires prowling about their village, while the others had merely gathered to hear their fearsome stories. All of the locals were on edge, and eager for the monk to tell them how they might rid themselves of their affliction.
They seemed quite impressed, and oddly proud, to hear that their woes had traveled as far as Hungary, and that a duke was intrigued enough to send an agent to gather information on their predicament. Justus was also intrigued, and wanted to know where I had studied and what credentials I might have.
I lied, of course. Everything I told them were lies, but they were pleasant lies, and those are the easiest lies to swallow. It was not long before all of the men had accepted me into the company, and Justus resumed transcribing the story of Marko Huzjak, who sold fruit and vegetables in the village market.
It seemed a few more villagers had gone missing in the weeks it took for their story to reach the Court of the Night’s Watch. A young man named Gabrijel Zuzic vanished from his bed in the middle of the night, leaving nothing of his person but a few drops of blood on his pillowcase. Two children, boys, one named Dika Jagik and another named Kazim Novoselec, had also vanished recently.
It was the latter, Kazin Novoselec, that the fruit seller claimed to have seen the previous evening, as he was driving his fruit wagon home for the night.
For my benefit, he repeated his harrowing tale. In order to maintain my cover story, I asked him to hold his account for a moment as I fetched my satchel. From inside my leather purse I retrieved paper, quill and ink.
“Go on,” I said, and I transcribed his story just as my ecclesiastical counterpart was doing when I arrived at the inn.
Justus set aside his quill, and, massaging his writing hand, suggested we might compare notes later.
I nodded. “Certainly.”
“Well, as I told the good friar here,” the fruit seller went on, licking his lips nervously, “I was driving my cart home for the night. I was in a pretty foul mood, as business had been poor lately, and I was very tired and ready to have some soup and climb into bed.
“I was just getting ready to cross the Golub, a little creek to the east of the village, when I saw young Kazim stumble out of the woods into the road.
“Terrible, he looked,” the fruit peddler said. “His clothes all tattered and filthy. There were brambles in his hair and his flesh was nearly as white as bone. His eyes appeared sunken, as the eyes of people do when they’re near to the threshold of death, and his mouth was hanging slackly open.
“I reined back my horse and jumped down from the wagon, thinking the lad had gotten lost in the woods and had just found his way back out of them again. That’s what we all hoped when the boys turned up missing. That they’d gotten lost. We even searched the woods for them, brought in the hounds, but we were never able to find them.
“I think I said, ‘Hail, Kazim, your mother’s been worried to death about you.’ Or something to that effect. The boy just stood there swaying in the middle of the road, staring blankly off at the sky, but when I spoke, his head jerked around like a striking snake.
“He hissed at me then, like a cat will spit when it’s angry or frightened, and then I took note of his eyes. They weren’t normal eyes. They shone like newly minted coins. The setting sun was to my back, and it seemed the sun’s vermillion light was caught up in those eyes. They glowed red like the hot embers of a fire, and then he took off running at me with his fingers curled into claws.
“I think that he would have gotten me, that I’d have shared the same fate as him and all the rest that have went missing, only I hadn’t moved too far from m
y Nell. Nell’s my palfrey, God bless her. When the Novoselec boy came running after me, Nell got afrightened and reared up into the air, neighing and striking out with her hoofs. One of those hooves struck the boy in the crown hard enough to knock him to the ground. Laid open his skull, it did. Only there wasn’t no blood come out of him. Just a foul black fluid that smelled of cemetery gas. Nearly made me retch.
“As the boy mewled and twisted on the ground, I stepped back to the seat of my wagon and took out my rapier. I carry a rapier with me now whenever I leave the house. It’s a puny thing, really, belonged to my great grandfather, but it’ll poke a hole in you as quick as a bee sting.
“Nell kept trying to stomp the Kazim boy. I swear, that peaceful old nag had a fire in her belly that night! The boy twisted and rolled under her like a ball of snakes, but she finally managed to get him again, and he let out an earsplitting squall, like nothing I ever heard before, and leapt clear of her.
“In fact, he jumped clear across the road-- further than I seen anybody jump in my life-- and then he crouched down in the grass and hissed at me, his scalp hanging over one eye. And still he didn’t bleed. Nothing issued from his wounds but that foul black humour.
“I took my crucifix from my tunic with my free hand hand and told him to begone, that I would have no traffic with Satan or his ilk. But it wasn’t until I began to recite the Lord’s Prayer that he snarled at me and went loping off into the woods. I waited for a little while, listening to him crash through the underbrush, and then I jumped in my wagon and whipped my poor Nell all the way back to town. Nell saved me from that terrible demon-boy, but I flogged her without mercy, something I’ve never done in my life. My only defense is fear. I was terrified that night. I did not want to be on that road after dark. Or during the day, now, if I’m to be completely honest with you fellows. I’ve been sleeping here at the inn ever since that terrible evening. I’m afraid to stay at home by myself now.”
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 16