Born to Bite Bundle

by Hannah Howell

  The horrors astride the horse-beasts were worse. The leader seemed the height and breadth of two men, matching the impossible size of his unnatural steed. His chestnut hair was long, thick, and fell down his back onto the horse’s rump. He wore no shirt save a chain-mail vest, and carried a broadsword that looked as though it could fell a tree with one swing. The leader’s eyes fell upon Beatrix and she winced, brought up one palm as if to ward off his penetrating and too-bright gaze. It seemed his eyes pierced her soul like a blade, and Beatrix felt naked before him, her faults, her misdeeds, written plainly in the rippling, golden air that hung between her and the massive creature.

  In the shadow of her hand, she could make out the leader’s companions: a menagerie of demons and corpse-like human monsters so vile that Beatrix felt dizzy. The reanimated dead rode with beasts from hell’s darkest legends, bloody and wounded, with horn and scale and claw where human appendage should have sprouted.

  The leader’s horse snorted, danced, jarring the dirt and bringing Beatrix’s attention back to the commander of legion. His broadsword was sheathed now, and in its place in his palm was a coil of sparkling, golden rope.

  “Beatrix Levenach,” the leader said, his voice like two boulders rubbing together, and Beatrix gasped that the giant knew her name. “I have come for the wolf. Where is he?”

  “I doona know,” Beatrix said, her voice breathy and dazed to her own ears. “He battled a vampire. I doona—”

  “Alder is a vampire.” He looked her up and down. “My vampire. And I want him returned to me. You of all people should be of little mind to protect the thing who once ravaged your ancestors.”

  “He came here for his own revenge,” Beatrix argued, even though her voice cracked. “He fought the vampire who—”

  “I well know Laszlo le Morte,” the leader interrupted. “And why Alder escaped his servitude to seek the bloodsucker.” Beatrix’s knees grew watery under the leviathan’s weighty gaze. “He has come for you as well, Levenach. You know this, yes?”

  Beatrix nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Hmm,” the leader said thoughtfully. His head swung away and where his gaze went, also went the brilliant light that surrounded him.

  Beatrix dragged her eyes from the man’s fierce countenance to that which he sought, and in that moment, she saw Alder.

  He stood over a pile of glistening clothing, and Beatrix knew at once that Laszlo le Morte was dead. Alder’s mouth as well as all his face from the nose down and onto his shirt was tarry black with vampire blood. His arms hung limp at his sides and his eyes were…resigned. He stared at the great leader with no fear.

  “Most holy Michael,” Alder said, his voice flat, and then he stepped over Laszlo’s slimy, rotting remains and fell to his knees. “Have mercy on me.”

  Beatrix’s eyes flashed up to the archangel. “Doona harm him,” she whispered. “And doona take him. Please. He was trying to make it right. He saved my life, and Laszlo is dead.”

  But Michael behaved as if she’d not even spoken.

  “Alder the White, you have broken your covenant.” Michael swung the coil of rope over his head once, and then let it fly. A perfect loop snaked across the clearing and landed around Alder’s bowed head, sealing itself over the deep scar circling his throat. “You will take your place in the Hunt once more.”

  “Nay!” Beatrix cried.

  Alder raised his head to look at Michael. “I made no covenant with you, holy one.”

  “Indeed, I took you as my hunter rather than send you on to the hell you so deserved in your mortal life. That was our covenant.” Michael paused. “But now that Laszlo le Morte is dead, I suppose you may choose your fate. Join with me again, or meet your final eternity.”

  “Nay!” Beatrix cried again and, heedless to the danger she put herself in, ran toward the archangel.

  “Beatrix, stay back!” Alder shouted.

  Rather than dance away nervously at her approach, the horse turned toward her aggressively, but Beatrix did not stop until her palms pressed against the horse’s burning side, near Michael’s calf. She hissed as her hands made contact and then screamed as Michael reached down and seized the back of her gown with one fist and pulled her from the ground.

  He held her before his face, as a man might dangle a mouse by its tail.

  “You try my patience, Levenach,” Michael said pleasantly.

  “Please doona take him,” Beatrix pleaded, her fear causing her to shake in the grip of the angel. She could feel his power like the sun, penetrating her clothes, her skin, her very being. “I love him.”

  “You would love a damned creature?” Michael challenged. “One who helped destroy your entire family and even now needs you for his own selfish desires?”

  “He need not stay damned,” Beatrix said. “I know the price that must be paid for the return of his soul.”

  “And you are willing to pay that price,” Michael observed.

  “No!” Alder shouted and Beatrix heard his approaching footfalls. “I will not do it, Levenach.”

  Beatrix was afraid to look away from the archangel. Keeping her gaze steady, she nodded.

  Michael gave the rope in his other hand a jerk and Beatrix heard Alder’s strangled cry.

  “Approach me not, wolf,” the archangel warned. His next words were for Beatrix, still suspended before him in his tireless grasp. “Are you certain you understand what must be done?” he asked. “You cannot swear it and then leave it unfinished. I will not allow the wolf to exist in his present form.”

  “I know that Alder must partake of the Levenach’s lifeblood, and I swear to you that I will see it done.” Her voice was steady now with her vow.

  “If you fail in this”—Michael’s eyes flicked over Beatrix’s shoulder—“I will return and kill you both. Evil begets evil. He will not be allowed to exist, and neither will you should you aid him in his depravity.”

  “Before the night has found its end,” Beatrix promised on a whisper, “he will be whole once more.”

  “Beatrix, you know not what you vow,” Alder choked.

  “Very well.” Michael lowered Beatrix to the ground.

  As soon as she was freed, she felt Alder rush past her toward the archangel.

  “Take me with you,” Alder demanded. “Or send me on to hell. Only don’t leave me here with her. I won’t take her lifeblood.”

  Michael snapped the golden rope and it came over Alder’s head, untethering him. “Should you not do as the Levenach promises, I’ll return and I will kill her for her lie,” Michael said simply and then coiled the rope with a flick of his wrist. “You are beholden to her vow—I make no covenants with vampires.” The archangel smiled slyly.

  Beatrix approached Alder’s back, reached out a hand to touch him.

  He spun and flung her hand away and Beatrix was horrified at the anger coming from him, almost as much as the tears in his black eyes.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done, Levenach,” he choked. “You will destroy us both.”

  Beatrix shook her head. “Trust me,” she begged. “Alder, you must trust me. ’Tis the only way.”

  Michael’s horse-beast pranced again as the keening trumpet blasted through the clearing. The band of monsters that followed the archangel began a chorus of agonized screeching, as if eager to be away, but Michael had more to say to Beatrix.

  “You have done well, Levenach, in caring for your charges, and I pray you succeed with this one as well,” he said, gesturing to Alder. He looked over the clearing before the White Wolf Inn, at the bodies, living and dead, scattered on the ground. “Once I depart, the Leamhnaigh will return to their homes. They will have no recollection of the events of this night, the dead attributed only to sickness. Do I not return to kill you, it will be your duty to protect the people from Laszlo’s leavings. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Beatrix choked.

  “So be it,” Michael intoned. As the words left his mouth, a mighty gale rushed through the cle
aring, and Beatrix saw for the first time the massive span of wings unfold from the archangel’s back. The hounds took up their mournful cries once more as Michael tilted his head back and commanded, “Hunt!”

  The gust from his departure from the ground knocked both Beatrix and Alder to the dirt, and the band swooped into the black forest with a deafening roar. In a moment, the clearing was nearly pitch, the forest folk’s torches and Beatrix’s witch fire having long since suffocated in the dirt.

  They watched as the Leamhnaigh began to stir. They paid Alder and the Levenach no heed, but only gained their feet as if in a deep sleep, some working together to take up the bodies of the dead, and slowly dissolved into the night of the forest path, in the opposite direction of Michael and his Wild Hunt.

  Now alone, Beatrix looked to Alder and found him studying her with barely concealed rage on his drawn and bloodstained face. He did not attempt to hide his fangs when he spoke.

  “You’ve damned the pair of us.”

  “Nay,” Beatrix insisted, her voice still aquiver from the night’s events. She rolled to her feet and held out a hand to Alder, trying to give him a smile.

  Alder ignored her hand, gaining his feet on his own. He stood before Beatrix for a long, silent moment before walking toward the inn alone, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed.

  Beatrix wondered if, when it was all over, he would leave her forever.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alder stood in the smoke-ravaged kitchen of the White Wolf Inn, the darkness not inhibiting his wicked sight, and he waited for the Levenach to follow, as surely she foolishly would.

  The stupid woman. Stupid and foolish and…

  I love him, she’d said to Michael. To the most powerful and deadly of all of God’s justifiers, Beatrix Levenach, witch of the Leamhan, had defended Alder the White, a vampire, and for him had wagered her life and her soul.

  Alder’s eyes squeezed shut, as if denying himself of his sense of sight might lessen the burden of anguish he felt. It did not. His chest and throat tightened painfully, sensations he’d not felt in more than a century, and the cold fire of vampire tears leaked onto his cheeks and cut the black muck that was all that remained of Laszlo le Morte.

  He could not damn her, would not. Should he take just enough of her blood to redeem his own wrecked soul, Beatrix Levenach would turn from huntress to hunted, with a depraved thirst that would last an eternity, or until someone drove a stake through her heart. Her pure, magical heart that now held mortal love for an unclean creature such as Alder.

  And as much as the coward in him wanted to, Alder could not simply walk away from the inn, leaving the Levenach untouched. The vengeful archangel spoke true—he would hold to Beatrix’s oath, and return did she not succeed in redeeming Alder. Alder had seen Michael’s wrath played out for one hundred years, and he could not allow himself to think of the myriad of torturous ways Beatrix might be punished for her failure. Perhaps the archangel would even do as he had with Alder, and enslave Beatrix as a hunter in his vengeful band. The only certainty was that if Beatrix was either made vampire or left whole, Michael and his Wild Hunt would find her.

  There was only one other choice, the single thing that would ensure the salvation of Beatrix’s soul, as well as her safety from the Hunt. And that meant that Alder had only a few short hours remaining to be with the only woman he had ever loved in one hundred and thirty years. A few short hours to make up for several lifetimes. To be worth eternity in hell.

  He opened his eyes as her quiet footfalls scraped over the threshold of the doorway, and he turned to face her.

  Even after his earlier rebuff, Beatrix came to him without hesitation, and Alder took her fiercely into his arms. “I love you, Beatrix Levenach. I don’t know how that is possible, but I do.”

  The Levenach stilled in his embrace and then her arms tightened around his waist. “And I love you. That is why you must trust me, Alder. Trust me.”

  Alder said nothing. She turned her face up as if she would kiss his mouth, but Alder averted his head.

  “Let not your lips touch mine—I am soiled with Laszlo’s filth.”

  “Very well,” she said lightly. “We’ll go below and wash you clean.” She spoke as if Alder had but been toiling in a field under honorable labor, rather than dirtied by the deepest evil under God’s heaven. As if mere water could wash away his sins.

  She stepped away then but took his hand, leading him to the corner of the floor where the trapdoor to the cellar lay. Alder followed, every footstep drawing him closer to the moment when he would kill Beatrix Levenach.

  Beatrix was atremble with fear and anticipation as she led Alder once again into the inn’s cellar. The candles still stood bright sentinels in the corners, but the glow they emitted seemed different in those last hours of All Hallow’s Eve—brighter, more pure, and sparkling with silver magic and mystery. The smell of stagnant damp was no more, having been replaced with the scent of a clear running stream in a quiet forest glade, a cool breeze chasing over the stones and making the candle flames sway sensuously.

  Again she led him to the bed, this time to treat a wound more dire than the one he’d suffered from the falling timber. Alder sat without direction or comment, his long, white hair shielding his face, his shoulders hunched as if his physicality was at last catching up with his old, old age. She laid her hand against the side of his head briefly, her heart paining for the struggle she knew he felt.

  “Trust me,” she whispered again.

  He said naught.

  Beatrix let her hand fall away and then removed herself to the shadows of the cellar to gather her supplies. He had not so much as shifted his weight in the time she’d left his side. She sat on the edge of the bed and dipped a rag in the bowl of blessed water.

  “Take off your shirt,” she commanded gently. When he delayed, Beatrix let the rag fall into the bowl and reached both hands for the ties over his chest.

  Her action moved him from some trance, for he raised his arms and pushed her hands aside before they could touch him.

  “I’d not have you serve me,” he growled. “I am not worthy, Levenach.”

  Beatrix could not keep the bittersweet smile from her mouth. “Oh, I think you are.”

  He raised his eyes to her for only a moment, and Beatrix glimpsed such pain in those black, bottomless depths that she was forced to swallow before she could speak again.

  “Throw the shirt on the floor. We’ll burn it in the morn.”

  She was saved from his hopeless gaze as he pulled the blackened and stiff garment over his head and let it fall to the cold stones, his wrists dropping to his knees, defeated.

  Beatrix kept her silence as she once more took the rag in hand and reached out to take a tentative swipe down Alder’s right cheek. The sticky black demon’s blood disappeared beneath the blessed water as easily as wind dispersing a pile of dry, dead leaves. Encouraged, Beatrix scooted closer on the mattress.

  He did not look at her as she washed him, only continued to stare at the space between his soiled boots, but Beatrix could not help the welling of emotion she felt as she smoothed the rag over the white skin of his face, neck, and chest. How had she come to care so deeply and so quickly for a creature she was sworn to destroy? Did Alder’s coming to the Leamhan forest mean that they were fated to be together?

  Or would her ancestors exact a high penalty for her blood betrayal?

  Beatrix could not yet know. She would continue to fulfill her obligation—now that the king of the vampires was dead, it was her duty to care for those touched by his evil. To Beatrix’s mind, no one more deserved mercy and reward than Alder the White, who had not only saved her life, but perhaps her soul. She loved, when she had never thought that emotion to be in reach of the Levenach. The fear that ran through her was not because the great well might witness her act of mercy as an abomination, but because once Alder was whole again, he would leave her at the inn as he had found her—alone.

  “There,” she sa
id quietly, setting the bowl and rag on the floor and sliding them under the edge of the bed. She waited a moment and then took a deep breath. “Are you ready to have done with this, then? We only have a little time left.”

  He turned his head—still bowed—slowly, slowly to look at her. “I cannot do this, Levenach. I have not the strength. The courage.”

  “I doona—” understand had hovered on Beatrix’s lips until she once more looked into his eyes. The cellar around her seemed to fade to black night, making a tunnel of clarity from her eyes to Alder’s, and in that narrow corridor, Beatrix saw.

  She saw herself in Alder’s embrace, similar to the way Laszlo le Morte had held her captive in the clearing. Alder’s face was buried in her neck as a lover might do, only Beatrix’s own expression was not one of passion, but of horror.

  He drank from her, and she watched as her life flooded out of her body, her skin tightening and going gray over her decimated flesh, her limbs falling limp; her eyes widening, blanking. Alder raised his head, his own skin now a healthy pink beneath the tears on his cheeks and her blood on his lips. He laid her dead body gently on the ground, stood aright with a ragged yell…

  And burst into flames.

  Beatrix started, gasped, on the bed, and the cellar once more came into reality around her.

  “You would kill me?” she whispered.

  “I would not make you what I now am by only taking enough of your lifeblood to retrieve my own soul. It would damn you, Beatrix. But do you not fulfill your promise to Michael, he will come for you, and his punishments are worse than death, many times over. I care little for my life now, but you—Beatrix, you are yet pure.”

  Beatrix’s head spun with the madness of what Alder was telling her, and he continued to speak as she tried to make sense of it all.

  “I love you and would suffer the rest of a mortal or unnatural life for you, but we cannot share the same eternity. I must do what I can to save you. Out of my love. Can you understand?”

  And then the crazy pieces slid into place and at last, Beatrix did understand. She smiled at him.