The Vampire Burns

by Amy Cross

  After all, why bother?

  Human lives were insignificant. They were over in the blink of an eye. And no matter how many humans died, there were always more than enough to take their place. Their deaths, however, could be useful in other ways. That was why my brother and I had ended up in Paris. There was so much pain and suffering, and we could almost absorb it through the night air itself. For an immortal, it can feel very good to be around so much death; for an immortal, death is kind of a turn-on.

  Turning, I continued my walk back toward the house. After emptying the girl of so much of her blood, I felt terribly bloated, and all I wanted was to sleep. Nightmares be damned, I was going to rest for at least twenty-four hours, and I told myself that perhaps all that warm blood would offer some comfort. Did it not make sense that a full, sated creature would sleep more soundly and more pleasantly than one who needed to be fed? That, at least, was the gamble I had resolved to take. Perhaps I wouldn't even need so much wine.

  And then, as I turned the next corner and saw the house ahead, I was suddenly confronted by a panicking soldier.

  “Halt!” he shouted in German, as he raised his gun and aimed directly at my face. “What are you doing out this late?”

  I sighed. In retrospect, that was perhaps not the best response.

  “What are you doing here?” he screamed.

  “There were bombs,” I replied, coming out with a carefully rehearsed speech that I had used several times in the past. “I thought perhaps I could help.”

  “You're not supposed to be out at night!”

  “I know, and I'm sorry, but I wanted to see what I could do.”

  “Others will do that!”

  “I know. I'm sorry.”

  I waited, but still the soldier had his gun pointed at my face. Usually, I'd have been waved on by now, but this particular soldier was clearly young and jumpy, and perhaps trying a little too hard to prove himself. I could sense the fear in his sweat, and I could see the indecision on his face, and I actually felt a little sorry for him. He was little more than a child, and even his uniform seemed too large for his small, lanky frame. He was another kid, caught up in a war for which he was ill-prepared and ill-suited.

  “Might I be on my way now?” I asked, giving him a way out of the confrontation.

  Instead of replying, he merely adjusted his grip on the gun. It was at that moment that I decided he must be an idiot. Even by human standards.

  “There's a buildng burning back the way I just came,” I told him. “I think some people are trapped in there. Perhaps they could use your -”

  “Don't tell me what to do!” he screamed, interrupting me.

  “I wasn't trying to,” I replied. “I merely wanted you to understand the situation. There are people who might yet be saved.”

  “You're not supposed to be out this late,” he said through gritted teeth, circling back around to the start of this pointless conversation.

  “I know, and -”

  “You're breaking curfew!”

  I stared at him for a moment, as I began to realize that he was a stickler for the rules and regulations. Perhaps, I told myself, it was sheer fear that was making him act this way. For all their petty insignificance, some humans possessed an extraordinary talent for irritation.

  “You're completely correct,” I told him, “but do you know what will happen if you shoot me?”

  I waited, but of course he said nothing.

  “If you shoot me,” I continued, “you'll blow away a chunk of my face. And then I will kill you. I will throttle you, and I will leave your corpse on the ground for your comrades to find. After that, with half a face, I will walk back to my home, and I will have to spend several months recuperating. My injuries will be fixed in time, but I will be significantly inconvenienced and you, meanwhile, will be dead and rotting in the ground. So, really, who benefits from such a course of events?”

  “Shut up!” he sneered. “You're trying to distract me!”

  “I'm trying to help you.”

  “You're breaking curfew!!

  “I know, and -”

  Suddenly, before I could finish, I heard a loud whistling sound, and I looked up just in time to see a bomb come crashing down and hit a nearby building. The explosion was huge, rocking the street and knocking the poor young soldier off his feet. I managed to grab hold of his gun as he fell, and then – as he struggled to get back to his feet – I grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face against the wall.

  I felt and heard his nose break, and then I let go of him and watched as he slithered down to the ground. He left a nose-sized patch of blood on the bricks.

  Above, the whir of planes could once again be heard. Evidenly the British had sent a second wave to attack the city, and I was glad of that. The soldier, although unconscious, was still alive, and I felt no great need to kill him. Instead, I arranged his gun on the ground close to his right hand. After all, there was no need to embarrass him further. Then I stepped over him and resumed my walk home.

  Another bomb exploded nearby, destroying a building, but I did not slow my pace even as the ground shook beneath my feet.

  Chapter Nine

  Chloe

  I tried again to cry out, but I was already starting to feel weak. A moment later, I felt someone unfastening the chains around my wrists, and finally I slumped down into Matthias's arms. Grabbing my throat, still desperately trying to breathe, I felt the ragged edges of the deep cut that had been carved into my flesh. Blood was flowing over my hands as Matthias lowered me to the ground, but while my throat hurt, the greater pain came from the incessant ringing in my ears.

  Nearby, Hugo was laughing hysterically, as if madness had finally shattered his mind.

  “You're not going to be okay, Chloe!” Matthias told me, leaning closer. “No-one cares about you. You're going to die here.”

  “No!” I shouted. “I have to -”

  Suddenly a wave of icy water hit me, waking me from the dream and bringing me gasping back to the waking world. I opened my eyes and pulled back against the wall, and then I looked up at the metal bars and saw a soldier chuckling as he set a metal pail on the floor. My heart was racing, and it took a few seconds before I realized that I must have fallen asleep and started dreaming. Sheer exhaustion must have dragged me under for a little while.

  A moment later, as I wiped strands of tangled, wet hair from across my face, I heard a voice laughing nearby.

  “There's no point looking so pathetic,” the voice said after a few seconds. “You won't persuade me. You won't trick me into believing that your are powerless.”

  Turning, I saw Klaus Zieghoff watching me from the other side of the bars.

  “The last witch I caught was almost a year ago now,” he continued. “She was young, like you, but French. She refused to give up any of her secrets, and in the end I got tired of waiting, so do you want to know what I eventually did with her?”

  Staring at him, I tried hard not to shiver. I didn't want that asshole to think that I was afraid of him.

  “I dissected her,” he explained. “I thought that maybe something in her body would be of note. Something that made her a witch. An extra organ, perhaps, or something too magical for me to even imagine. Pixie dust. Imagine my surprise and disappointment, then, as I went through her guts and found absolutely nothing of the sort. Even to a trained eye such as mine, there was no way to see what part of her body made her so powerful. I even threw her remains to my dogs, to see if they might gain anything by eating her, but of course that didn't happen. And so the mystery goes on. What makes a witch a witch?”

  I opened my mouth to reply to him, but no words came out. For a moment, I was struck by a terrible sense of fear. It was as if, deep down, my body and soul could tell that I was in the presence of pure evil.

  “Perhaps you'll be more cooperative,” he added. “Tell me, Ms. Carter, what spell brought you here to us? And why? Or were you not in control of your powers on this particular o
ccasion?”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Tell me, witch,” he continued, with an added sneer in that last word. “Your powers will be harnessed for the glory of the Third Reich, one way or another. Why not make it easy on yourself?”

  “I'm not a witch,” I stammered.

  “Yet you arrived before us in a kind of flash of light and smoke,” he replied, “just as we were performing a ritual designed to draw a witch to us. Are you telling me that this is a coincidence?”

  “I'm not a witch,” I said again, as I slowly got to my feet. I was still trying so hard to keep from shivering. “I don't know exactly how I got here, or why, but I demand to be released.”

  He smiled.

  “You have to let me out of here!” I continued, taking a step forward. “What about the Geneva Convention?”

  “I have never heard of such a thing. I have visited Geneva, but I know of no convention there.”

  I was about to tell him that he had a duty to keep me safe, when I suddenly realized that maybe the Geneva Convention was only created after the Second World War. It was in that moment that I realized I knew so little about history, and I couldn't help wishing that I'd paid more attention at school. I mean, sure, I knew that the British had fought the Nazis, and I knew that America had been involved at some point, but beyond that my knowledge was seriously sketchy. Hadn't the Russians been involved? Or were they called Soviets back then? What about Asia and Africa?

  “You're from the future,” Zieghoff said. “That part of your babbling nonsense, I believe. Tell me, what is it like there? How far has the glory of the empire spread?”

  “What year is it now?” I asked, barely able to believe that I was saying those words.

  “1942,” he replied. “Three years into the great struggle for glory.”

  “Then you've got about three years to go until you're beaten,” I told him.

  He chuckled.

  “I'm serious,” I continued. “I've seen your mansion in the future. It's a ruin, a place that people go when they want to be reminded of pure evil. History views you and all your friends as monsters. The war ended in 1945 and you were -”

  Stopping suddenly, I realized that maybe I was making a mistake. I'd seen enough films about time travel to understand that maybe it could be dangerous to give someone too much information about their own future. What if I told him things that allowed him to change the course of history? What if I'd already done that? Or was that kind of thing impossible? I'd seen so many films, with so many different rules, that I genuinely had no idea what might or might not happen. For a moment I felt paralyzed by fear, and my mind was racing as I wondered whether I'd already blundered into making some terrible changes.

  “I was charged by the Fuhrer himself with the task of investigating certain possibilities,” Zieghoff said after a moment. “If you have seen the future, then that information could be very valuable to us. Perhaps I seem like a savage to you, Ms. Carter, but I assure you that I am not. And I have developed, over the years, some very persuasive means by which I can extract information. Trust me, I will force you to tell me what I want to know.”

  I shook my head.

  “You will see,” he added confidently.

  “You already admitted you couldn't make your last witch talk,” I replied, although I immediately regretted the outburst. “I'm not a witch,” I continued. “Please, you have to understand, I'm just a normal person who somehow got caught up in a huge mess. I'm not part of whatever's happening, I'm just an innocent bystander, so you have to let me go. I know I'm British and that makes me your enemy, but I'm not even part of this war. I just want to get home.”

  “Then go,” he said. “Make yourself disappear in another flash.”

  He smiled at me.

  “As I thought,” he added, “you can't. Your powers are not strong enough.”

  “I don't have any powers,” I told him. “You have to believe me. I'm just me, I'm just Chloe Carter from Britain and I don't know how I ended up here. There's nothing witchy about me at all!”

  “Your predecessor in this cell said much the same thing,” he replied. “For your sake, Ms. Carter, I very much hope that you are able to prove your use to me. Otherwise, I might have to try another dissection project. My prevous failure has not deterred me. On the contrary, it has given me several new ideas to explore.”

  He looked me up and down for a moment, and then he turned and walks away.

  “Wait!” I shouted, rushing to the bars and trying to force the door open. “You can't leave me here! It's not fair!”

  Zieghoff disappeared from sight, and a moment later the guard slammed the main door shut.

  “You have to let me out of this place!” I screamed, with tears streaming down my face. “I'm not a witch!”

  Chapter Ten

  Matthias

  I tried again to cry out, but I was already starting to feel weak. A moment later, I felt someone unfastening the chains around my wrists, and finally I slumped down into Matthias's arms. Grabbing my throat, still desperately trying to breathe, I felt the ragged edges of the deep cut that had been carved into my flesh. Blood was flowing over my hands as Matthias lowered me to the ground, but while my throat hurt, the greater pain came from the incessant ringing in my ears.

  Nearby, Hugo was laughing hysterically, as if madness had finally shattered his mind.

  “You're not going to be okay, Chloe!” Matthias told me, leaning closer. “No-one cares about you. You're going to die here.”

  “No!” I shouted. “I have to -”

  Suddenly my eyes flicked open, and in an instant I emerged from the dream and found myself slumped in a chair in front of the window. Morning had arrived, bringing a gray sky and light rain, but I felt distinctly out of sorts. I began to sit up, but I found that I lacked the necessary strength, so I remained slumped for a moment as I picked over the details of what had been an unusual, and very vivid, dream.

  But had it been my dream?

  The more I thought about it, the more I felt as if the dream had belonged to somebody else. I had often entered the dreams of others, of course, as a means of finding out more about them or even just as a way to pass the time. Now, however, it was as if my mind had inevertently drifted into somebody else's dream, and – even more strangely – that dream had been about me. Which, of course, was clearly impossible, since I'd never experienced any of the events that had occurred in the dream.

  So where had the dream come from? Whose dream had I dreamed?

  Chapter Eleven

  Chloe

  Sitting alone in the cell, as cold morning light streamed through the window and light rain fell outside, I told myself that I'd finally figured out what was happening.

  I was dreaming.

  That, I figured, was the only logical explanation. I'd fallen asleep, or maybe I'd been hit on the head while I was at the Zieghoff mansion, and now I was unconscious and the whole time travel thing was just some kind of weird dream. I pinched myself, in a desperate attempt to force myself to wake up, but nothing happened.

  “Please,” I whispered, “I just want to get out of here. Just let me wake up.”

  I pinched myself again. Of course, there was no miraculous moment of recovery.

  Then again, I was starting to consider another theory. If the time travel was part of a dream, what about the vampires I'd supposedly met in the present day? Was it possible that the whole drama with Matthias and Hugo and Belinda had also been a dream? In which case, I figured that maybe I'd been asleep for even longer. In fact, I was starting to wonder whether such a long and detailed dream was possible, unless I'd somehow fallen into a coma. Had my long-standing fear of brain tumors finally turned out to be prescient?

  I pinched myself yet again, whlie promising myself that this time I wouldn't stop until I forced myself to wake up. I tried to open my eyes, even though they already seemed to be open, and finally I held my breath in a last-ditch attempt to trick my body into reacting.
>
  Suddenly, hearing a key in the lock, I turn and saw that the door was swinging open.

  “Hey!” I said, as soon as I saw the woman from earlier. She was carrying another metal cup of water into the room. “I need you to listen to me! I know how to get out of here, but I need your help!”

  She knelt down and slid the cup between the bars.

  This time, however, I rushed at her and grabbed her by the wrist before she could pull back. She tried to twist free, but I made sure my grip was firm.

  “I still think this is a dream,” I told her, even though she was refusing to look at me, “but just in case it isn't, I need you to get a message to the British embassy in Paris. Or whatever counts as an embassy right now. You get the idea.”

  She twisted her arm the other way, but again I held strong.

  “This might be life or death!” I said firmly.

  She muttered something in French, something I could barely hear.

  “Dream or not, I need to get out of here,” I told her. “You can understand that, can't you? You understand English, right? Please, tell me you understand English.”

  She twisted her arm again, and again but I refused to let go.

  “Please,” she said finally, “stop. If anyone sees us, I'll be shot.”

  “I knew it!” I gasped. “You do speak English!”

  “They told me not to talk to you,” she replied. “You're a witch.”

  “I'm not a witch,” I said with a sigh, while still holding onto her wrist. “Witches don't even exist.”

  “That's exactly what a witch would say,” she pointed out, staring at me now with an expression of fear. “If other strange things can exist, why not witches?”

  “What other things?” I asked.

  “Why should witches not be real, when vampires walk the streets?”

  “Vampires?” I hesitated at the mention of that word. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”