The Mortal Touch

by Naomi Clark

  “Sure. Take care, and stay hydrated!” Lacey chirped.

  I thought of my thirst for the vampire’s blood last night and mumbled something that sounded vaguely positive.

  With work taken care of, I got up and opened the bedroom window so Elijah could fly out. Some mornings he didn’t, sticking close to me until I left for the museum. But this morning he launched himself into the overcast sky with a gleeful cackle, and I watched him until he disappeared, his black form just a smudge in the distance. A sense of isolation and loss swept over me, as it always did. I stomped it down into the spiky, bitter pit of grief inside me, as I always did, and got ready to go hiking.

  HIKING probably wasn’t the right word for the experience of traipsing through Ridderport’s godawful wetlands. There was probably a much better word, one that really captured the dismal, dirty green waters, the clinging mud, and the fetid scent of the plant life. I found myself constantly slapping at buzzing insects and stepping into ankle-deep puddles of standing water to avoid crushing frogs underfoot. Thick, trailing weeds wrapped themselves around my boots as if trying to drag me down into the bogs.

  There is something very feral about the land around Ridderport. The sea is rough and stormy, and the wetlands are quiet and creepy. It’s easy to imagine something watching you, something ancient and restless. Something that doesn’t want you there. I was a city kid through and through, and I felt like the wetlands sensed that, and they were waiting for me to make a mistake that would allow them to swallow me whole.

  Despite the bank of clouds overhead, the day was sticky and humid, and it wasn’t long before I had to strip off my light jacket and tie it round my waist. In just a tank top now, my arms and shoulders were exposed to every goddamn bug in the goddamn swamp, and I was apparently the tastiest meal around. The straps of my backpack chafed my shoulders too, and even in this dull light, I was going to get sunburnt. I hadn’t been in a great mood to start with. After an hour of trekking, I was feeling downright murderous.

  I wished Elijah was with me.

  I always wished that.

  Dipping into paranoia and melancholy, I almost missed the black ash tree standing solitary and proud in the distance. It jutted out of a patch of dark mud and thorny briars almost defiantly, soft green leaves glowing in a shaft of sunlight that had escaped the clouds. I perked up, smacked a mosquito from my arm, and headed toward the tree.

  It took another ten minutes of solid trudging to reach it. My leather boots were so caked in mud, they were probably beyond saving. They were a good pair, too, and I added that to my list of grievances to take up with the mysterious Mr. Cold, if and when he came calling.

  The ash tree was strong and healthy, with plenty of sturdy branches lower down the trunk that I could cut to make into stakes. I rested one palm against the rough bark, taking a second to close my eyes and ground myself with a few deep breaths. It was traditional to ask the tree’s permission before cutting away the branches, but that was a piece of folklore I’d never held with. I’d done this a million times and never incurred the wrath of an angry tree.

  Grounded, I shrugged my backpack off and drew out the little hacksaw I’d carefully packed in there this morning. Just as I set blade to branch, there was a sudden, hard yank on my ponytail. Jerked off balance, I dropped the saw, did a crazy, wobbling pivot on one leg, and ended up on my ass in a patch of thorn-filled mud.

  My scalp and palms stung, and my spine jarred. I took half a second to register the pain, then flipped myself around, onto my knees, looking for my attacker.

  I’ve seen some weird shit in my life. I don’t think I’d seen anything quite as weird as the creature crouching opposite me now.

  It was about four-foot-high, hunch-backed, with dark brown skin. It was covered from head to toe in knobby, knotted bumps, some jutting into dull-looking spikes, like a horned lizard. Its eyes were huge and frog-like, and wide gills flapped in its stout neck. Its mouth was a slash across its flat face, all blubbery lips and a nervously-darting tongue. With its bowed legs and stubby fingers, it looked as if someone had transmuted a frog into a person, but given up halfway through.

  We stared at each other mutely for a few seconds. My heart was racing, and I scrabbled behind me for the hacksaw. The creature didn’t look that dangerous, but it had attacked me, and I knew better than to underestimate anything inhuman.

  But the silence quickly stretched too thin, and I really didn’t want to sit in the mud a second longer, so as soon as I had hold of the hacksaw, I started to rise – slowly.

  “I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me,” I told it, keeping my hands up, but keeping a tight hold on the hacksaw.

  It blinked, yellow eyes thoughtful. “What if I want to hurt you?” it asked.

  Its voice was a high-pitched croak that grated on my ears, with a distinctly male timbre.

  “I guess we’d have to have a fight,” I said.

  It – he – looked me up and down and I think made the same assessment I already had. I was taller and outweighed him, and I had a hacksaw. “Fine,” he said sulkily. “But I can’t let you hurt the ash.”

  “You’re kidding me.” I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Eleven years of stake-making and I never once had a dryad come at me, and my first day back in the field –”

  “I’m not a dryad,” he huffed. “I’m a bog fae. I serve the dryad who dwells in the tree.”

  “Whatever. I really need this wood. If I ask permission, can I cut a few branches?”

  “You have to ask the dryad.”

  “Right.” I tapped my foot in the mud, and regretted it when my boot got stuck. “Can you get her for me? Wake her up or summon her?”

  His face fell. “Aliki has not woken for almost three decades. She no longer hears my calls.”

  “Then how am I supposed to ask her permission?”

  “I suppose you can’t.”

  I resisted the urge to grind my fists into my eyes. “Right.”

  Losing my temper wouldn’t do me any good. There was genuine mourning in the little fae’s eyes, and I wasn’t out to make him feel worse. I didn’t know much at all about the world of the fae, but I knew oaths were an integral part of their culture, and if the bog fae was sworn to protect this tree and its dryad, I didn’t have much hope of changing his mind.

  But goddammit, I really did need the wood.

  “There’s got to be a way to work this out,” I said. “I only need a few branches. I’m not planning to hack the whole tree down.”

  “How would you feel if I asked to chop off a few of your fingers?” he asked.

  I rubbed my forearm across my sweaty forehead, leaving a smear of mud. “Fair point. What if we...we make a trade? A bargain?” I searched my mind desperately for anything useful I knew about the fae.

  He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Are you offering your fingers?”

  I squinted back at him, not sure if he was messing with me or not. “I was thinking more a favor, or a service. That’s essentially what I’m asking for here, right? I’m asking your dryad for a favor, so she – or you – should get one in return from me.”

  He rubbed his jaw, considering my offer. I shifted my weight around impatiently, trying not to dwell on how hot and disgusting I was. All this discomfort was for a good cause, and vampires bit a hell of a lot harder than mosquitoes.

  “What do you need the wood for?” he asked after a few painful moments.

  “To make stakes to kill vampires with.”

  He nodded and went silent again.

  “That seems fair,” he said finally, to my relief. “Aliki would approve of that, I think. Vampires are anathema to nature spirits. But you will owe us a favor for each branch you take.”

  A protest burst to my lips, but I quickly choked it back. How bad could the favors be? Aliki had been dormant for most of my life, and based on the bog fae’s evident grief about that, he wasn’t expecting her back any time soon. My vampire problem was more immediate.

 
“Okay,” I said. “Five branches. Five favors. How does that sound?”

  He didn’t look happy, but with a face like a giant frog, maybe he just couldn’t look happy. Still, his reluctance was clear in the slow way he extended his hand to me, as if he was having to force his muscles to respond, and in his dole tone when he answered.

  “It is agreed. I, Dwill of the tir llosg fae, on behalf of Aliki of the Ash Grove, accept this bargain, mortal woman.”

  I shook his slimy hand, feeling I should say something equally formal in reply. “And I, Georgia Jackson of... of...Easton Road, accept this bargain, Dwill. Thank you. Really, thank you.” I sighed, feeling a weight lift. Five good young branches would give me five stakes, and if I took care of them, they’d last me long enough.

  Long enough for what, I wasn’t sure. All I was doing right now was buying myself breathing time, but that was all I really could do. I had to assume Mr. Cold would send more vampires, or come for me himself, if he thought I’d killed Beckett, or if he knew what I was. Vampires didn’t tolerate my kind in their territory.

  What I had to do was decide if I wanted to take the fight to them. And without knowing how large and powerful Ridderport’s vampire clan was, I couldn’t make that decision. I sighed again, realizing that just stocking up on stakes wasn’t going to be enough. I couldn’t live the rest of my life on the defensive.

  “I will cut the branches myself,” Dwill said, pulling me from my reverie. He was trying to tug the hacksaw from my hand.

  I let him have it, watching absently as he bowed and apologized to the ash tree before beginning to saw. Overhead, the sun slowly clambered toward noon. Sunset was far away, but the inevitability of nightfall made my teeth ache. I’d planned to simply send any vampire that came calling home in two pieces, but reality set in as Dwill sawed.

  Whether I liked it or not, I wasn’t retired anymore.

  Chapter Five

  I started vampire hunting when I was seventeen. I was twenty-eight when I retired. Elijah and I had always agreed to get out earlier, but every year we found we were still going. Still stalking graveyards at midnight, still washing blood from our hair, still patching up each other’s wounds and agreeing that it was time to quit.

  The same thing always stopped us. Money, or lack of it. He’d always wanted a house by sea. I just wanted a house with him, and if the sea made him happy, then I’d kill enough vampires to buy him his own Caribbean island if that was what he wanted. So we kept working and kept saving, up until roughly seven years ago, when someone offered us enough money to make our dream come true.

  One job. One kill and we could retire to our house by the sea. No more vampires.

  You ever read that story, The Monkey’s Paw? Where your wish comes true, but it’s twisted and poisonous? That last job was our monkey’s paw. After it was all done, once the dust had settled and my catastrophic grief had become merely destructive, I had enough money to retire in a house by the sea, but everything else that mattered was gone... or changed.

  But hey, I’d stayed retired.

  Until now.

  By mid-afternoon, I was back home. I’d take the hottest shower I could stand to wash away the stench and mud of the wetlands, and I was ready to carve some stakes. Once upon a time, I’d had a fancy wood-carving tool set for this job. I’d gotten rid of it when I retired – but not my gun or stiletto, no – so I would have to make do with my vegetable knife. I settled myself at the kitchen table, put on a history podcast and started work.

  I’d always found wood-carving to be soothing, almost hypnotic, and I soon fell into a trance-like state as I worked. My mind drifted while my hands fell into the old, familiar motions, gently coaxing the ash branches into weapons. Would Aliki the dryad really approve, I wondered?

  Well, the chances were I’d never know. I had more immediate problems.

  I replayed Beckett’s death in my head as I shaved my ash branches down. His terror, his diseased blood. Vampires were immune to poison, at least as far as I knew. I’d never worked with it. Fire, saltwater, and staking had always done the job for me, so I’d never experimented. I knew some vampire hunters did. I’d seen basements full of undead corpses, vampires chained to the walls and pumped full of chemical compounds, with silver needles jammed in their eyes. I’d seen... worse than that too. Humans could be monsters as well.

  But I didn’t do torture. I wanted clean kills.

  Regardless, I’d never heard of poison killing vampires, but poison or magic were the only things I could think of that might have killed Beckett. Magic had always been Elijah’s field of expertise.

  I glanced anxiously out the kitchen window, wondering where he was. He never went far for long, but I was always happier when I could see him.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter what had killed Beckett. If his clan thought I was responsible, they wouldn’t care how I’d done it. And if they knew what I was...

  I ran my tongue over my teeth nervously. They were short and human right now. My triggers were specific – fresh-spilled blood awoke my father’s side. Unlike a full-blooded vampire, I didn’t need to drink blood to survive, but the instinct and the appetite burned in me just the same.

  We had other things in common too, me and my undead cousins. I was sensitive to sunlight, although nowhere near as much as the average vampire. Drinking blood made me stronger and faster, sharpened my senses. I wasn’t immortal, at least as far as I knew – and I wasn’t in a rush to experiment – but as Lacey had noted earlier, I never got sick.

  That was it, really. There were probably thousands of others like me across the globe. Dhampirs, the vampires called us. Mongrel. Half-breed. All the usual charming slurs elitist old men like to hurl at people who scared them. Vampire or mortal, some things were universal. Probably most other dhampirs lived regular, if slightly strange lives. Some probably hunted vampires, as well. We were uniquely suited to it, after all.

  And some, many, died brutally at the hands of their parents. I knew that because my father told me so when he tried to kill me. Told me I wasn’t the first mongrel he’d put down. Told me I wouldn’t be the last. Told me all that casually, dismissively, while he tried to throttle me.

  I never met a vampire that liked a dhampir. I didn’t expect that to change here in Ridderport.

  So I wasn’t going to rule out Mr. Cold just wanting me dead. My existence was enough to warrant it. Beckett’s death might be a convenient catalyst for it.

  I finished the last stake, my hands aching. I set it down and wriggled my stiff fingers, looking at the mess of wood chips and shavings on my kitchen table. A dry, warm perfume wafted from the stakes and the shavings. It melded with the soothing voice of the podcast host as she told me why Hatshepsut was Egypt’s most powerful ruler, creating a cozy little cocoon in the kitchen, a world where sharply-pointed stakes were never needed.

  Outside, the sun was firing off a few final, spectacular rays. Nightfall would creep in slowly, darkening the ocean before it stole over the town. Thick shadows would pool along the cobbled streets, providing endless cover for vampires to hunt in.

  If my visitor from last night was telling the truth, some of them might be hunting me.

  I ran my finger over the point of a stake, wondering what the smartest move was – staying put or heading out. The house wasn’t invulnerable, but it was defensible. Out on the streets, I was more vulnerable. And I hadn’t hunted alone for a very long time. I was bound to be rusty. So while part of me itched to get out there and stalk the streets, instead, I cleaned up the mess from the wood-carving and ordered a pizza.

  As I placed my order, I heard a tapping at the kitchen window. Elijah perched on the sill, hammering his beak against the glass insistently. He gave a disgruntled caw when I opened the window for him.

  “T’is some visitor tapping at my chamber door,” I said. “Have you been hanging out at the plutonium shore?”

  He hopped onto my shoulder and nipped gently at my ear. I think it was his way of telling me I
wasn’t funny. I allowed myself a melancholy smile and sat back down at the table. The stakes were still there, feeling like both an omen and an accusation, and Elijah bounced onto the table to examine them.

  The kitchen table, a cheap flat-pack affair in ugly blonde wood, was scarred from years of him scratching around on it. The set of chairs that came with it were the same. I ran my fingers along the gouges in the wood, tracing random patterns left by busy crow feet, and I talked.

  “I wish I’d kept your journals. I bet there’d be something in there about vampires and poison, right? Or spells that might kill them. I know you didn’t agree with torture either, but you hunted with Varnham for three years – you must have picked some shit up, right?”

  Elijah sat down in the middle of the table, watching me with bright, alert eyes.

  “I’m not planning to get involved in whatever’s going on,” I assured him. “I just feel so out of my depth right now. I should have just ignored Beckett and his friend last night. I’m retired, after all.”

  I don’t know if crows are capable of sarcasm, but the little harrumph Elijah answered me with definitely sounded sarcastic.

  “This is temporary,” I stressed, tapping one of the stakes. “For one thing, I’m not trekking through the fucking swamp to trade favors with faeries every time I need a stake. As soon as I can get this Mr. Cold off my back, it’s back to normal.”

  He began preening. It felt dismissive. I sighed and checked my takeout app to see how far away my pizza was. Still too far away to get excited about, I decided, and set about cleaning the kitchen instead.

  I was a passable cook, mostly thanks to tips from Bea and Hayden, but I was lazy about clean-up. My sink was always just one extra plate away from disaster, and the kitchen was probably the most neglected part of the house. The walls were the same off-white shade they’d been when I moved in. Harbor Gray, the realtor had assured me, very stylish, very classic. I hated it, but re-painting it was a job that kept slipping further and further down my priority list. The furniture was cheap, and the appliances were all second-hand, mismatched and barely functional.