If Codrin had been smart, that would’ve been his approach, too. But his grudge for her had rendered him careless. This extermination and scattering of his brethren was on his head, though he was certain to blame her for all that had happened.
Elisabeth wasn’t so blind to miss the lesson in his fate. She threw this logic at the wolf, arguing that the animal would destroy her by forcing this change. The wolf responded by forcing Elisabeth’s head to look once more at the waterlogged crusaders. This was the time to fight. Here they were. And perhaps their numbers were greater, with weapons that would sting like the Nightfall ambush, only worse because of the number of them, but there was one difference:
She was ready and had nothing left to lose.
The tightening pain around her skull reminded her that there were other things to worry about. She pleaded with the wolf, forcing her to recall every injury atop that mountain, reiterating that she’d been lucky to get away and may not be that way again.
They’ll run me through and then do so much worse, only there will be nowhere to run to.
The wolf hesitated.
“Hold it.” Elisabeth didn’t hear the voice until arms curled around her shoulders and, with a harsh grunt, lifted her off her feet. “What are you doing out here?”
Elisabeth thrashed and flailed her arms against the thick fabric pressing against her back.
“This one escapes,” he called.
Some of the warriors in the water already trudged toward them.
“Your skin…” He flung her back to the dirt and Elisabeth found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. The wolf sent another convulsion through her, and then animal teeth shredded her gums and forced open her mouth.
No, she thought, but didn’t have time to finish it. Her body tensed, every muscle tightening at once. The wolf stormed her bones in a single burst. They broke in unison, shuffling and chasing away the form of a skittish and frightened woman.
Leaving a huffing black monster behind.
The man on the beach took a startled step back as his compatriots reached the shore.
Elisabeth’s jaws shot outward. She rose onto her haunches, staring at him from down an eager snout.
A howl careened through the desolate Constanta streets.
Then she attacked.
***
Just like that, his dream was over.
Codrin watched from the reeds like a frightened victim. The Order of Osiris lorded above the tribe. They stabbed and hacked the waters with diligence, killing vampires that crawled through the shallows as they struggled to escape onto shore.
He might’ve held out hope if not for the wooden stakes in their fists. They used them to stab through the water. Strained hands launched to the surface, the few who’d been smart enough to make for deeper waters. Fingers stretched wide in death twinges before falling back with one final splash.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Codrin wasn’t greedy, just hungry. Leaving Rodica was always going to be a risky proposition but someone had to shepherd the blood back home. He volunteered then because he was destined for something better. Something dignified. Yet, here he crouched a failure.
Now the battle was over, except for the erupting howl from the shore. The Order of Osiris waded that way with weapons still in hand.
Codrin hadn’t intended to cower like this, but the huntress had pushed him out beyond the action during their struggle. In the time it would’ve taken him to rejoin the fray, most of the vampires had already been exterminated.
Because of that, slipping away was the only reasonable option.
I could’ve led them.
He felt nothing but regret over the way this had played out. Greatness was within his reach. Not an hour ago, he’d been supremely confident in his plan. He was so close to making the huntress suffer for her betrayal. Now, his dreams were buried deeper beneath the Black Sea than his tribe.
He swam around to an inland rivet, leaving the wolf to be hunted like the bitch that she was. As much as he wanted to see her die, escape was more important. He climbed through loose stalks, away from the action. His ongoing existence felt more like a curse. Every aspiration was stomped out, even when he tried placing the needs of the many high above his own.
Codrin really had wanted to feed his people.
If he was being honest, however, he had to admit that his desire to help didn’t stem from a place of selflessness. It was rooted in his craving to be worshipped and adored. To matter. Because of that, he’d been driven to make the huntress pay for her warped conceit. What a hero he would’ve been if he had managed to kill her and deliver her blood. Above all else, he still wanted to hurt her.
I have never tasted blood that sweet.
He should’ve been drinking it now.
He ran from the city and his mind folded over how the order had arrived so fast. It must’ve been the discharging pistols that had triggered their attention. Codrin had told his human servants that the huntress couldn’t die by conventional weapons, but that hadn’t stopped them from trying.
Was it delusions of grandeur that had forced them to act with such impatience? Kill the huntress to service their order and his tribe? Recruiting some of Osiris hadn’t been easy. The things he had to promise those degenerates. It also hadn’t been worth his time, as it turned out.
We should’ve taken the city by force.
That wouldn’t have been any easier. So dilapidated was the tribe that the first few kills would’ve posed a genuine struggle. Once they got their tongues wet, maybe it would’ve made all the difference in the world. The countryside was in drought and Osiris knew it, realizing full well that desperate ‘demons’ would make their way here. Hence their high numbers and immediate response.
Codrin had been clever, though, setting a trap for the bitch where his kind could lie in wait. When she came inside the shack, bleeding, it had driven them all to the brink of madness. She’d served herself on a platter, but even that hadn’t been enough.
Everything undone because of a couple of ill-timed gunshots delivered in haste.
The few drops of the huntress’ blood that he’d managed to steal gave him enough energy to navigate the dark morning with heightened senses. As he distanced himself from Constanta, his frustrations grew into obsessions.
So close to killing her!
So close to delivering a varcolac feast to what remained of my people!
So close to being king!
His name would have been legendary.
Now, it was scantly a footnote.
A cemetery sat at the top of a hill, enclosed by a stonewall of varying rocks and held together by gypsum. Elisabeth’s blood granted enough agility to hop it. Gargoyles took perch on each corner. Gravestones poked from the earth like crooked teeth. The further back he went, he found a village of mausoleums.
It’d be daybreak before he knew it and there was no reason to get caught in the forest once more. He approached the nearest crypt, elongated fingers curling around the metal door handle. Spending more energy than he might’ve liked, he lifted the latch and forced it outward with a grunt.
The door shrieked and swiveled. A cobweb thicker than cotton stretched out and finally tore as he stepped inside.
Codrin closed the door and pulled it tight until it came scraping against the stone jamb, deeper than it was intended to go. This way, no human could disturb his sleep. He hopped onto the stone slab at the center of the room and tried to shut his eyes.
He contemplated his options for a long while before realizing there was none.
His dream of leadership was finished. It was twice that the huntress had prevented it.
Whore.
His fingertips rubbed his torn chin where the wolf woman had chomped through. The protruding jawbone was coarse to touch. Something to remember her by.
“You don’t want me to remember you,” he whispered, and stretched out on the cold slab. The silence in here soothed him. The outside world did
n’t exist and wouldn’t intrude.
I think I’ll just lie here a while.
With his thoughts.
They were dedicated to the wolf woman.
***
Timothy was ushered into a pew and told to sit. His warder sidled in beside him and jammed the pistol against his ribs.
“Say nothing until I ask you to.”
Timothy nodded without eye contact. In his experience, men like this wanted an excuse to perform violence. Often times it was for as simple a reason as ‘he looked at me funny.’ This situation was already sensitive, with his accusations and implications driving the order to an uncomfortable place. No point in agitating it further.
They sat without speaking for so long that Timothy drifted into sleep. He dreamt of life as a university professor, where he stood behind a wobbly podium delivering a Hobbes-ian lecture. A blinding light shaped like the Star of Bethlehem radiated outward from the middle of the room, its points reached floor-to-ceiling and stretched wall-to-wall. There were students in here but he couldn’t see them. Just the light.
He delivered discourse on Leviathan’s third section, Of a Christian commonwealth, reiterating Hobbes’ philosophy on devils and demons as duplicitous notions. While he spoke, he wondered what right he had to stain the minds of those more impressionable. It was his own upbringing that had pushed him away from God, more so once Mum was murdered. But could these concepts not offer salvation in trying times?
No. I know best.
His voice was full of fervor as he pleaded with learned ears. The Bible’s institution of evil spirits kept the world ignorant and submissive, governed by fear of an afterlife that didn’t exist. He implored them to place their faith in the sovereign and in tangible concepts of salvation. Thinking that faith could do the same would only lead them to confusion.
Double vision, he and Hobbes called it.
A voice rose in interruption to challenge his concepts.
“If the Kingdom of God exists, but only takes significance at the end of all things, then why shouldn’t we offer our allegiance to Him as opposed to the sovereign? His embrace is eternal, yes? Following the sovereign may pit us against Him in instances of war and atrocity. What good is blind loyalty to a ruling body when mutual benefit is merely an illusion?”
Timothy couldn’t see the speaker, but the star’s glow had waned a little. Its pointed tips no longer touched wall or floor. He hated being challenged, especially by one of the know nothings. Garrick and Sebastian had scolded his inexperience. He took it from them because his dogma had been untested then.
Now, though, he was a survivor.
And a liar. You deny them the truth in spite of the things you’ve seen. You can never go home again. The way things were in your mind never existed anyway.
As soon as he thought it, the dissenting voice said the same aloud, demanding to know how he could sermonize an opposition to the truth.
“Vampires, witches, varcolac…you name it. They’re as real as the rising sun. Yet, you insist on keeping us ignorant? Vulnerable. Tell us how to defeat such evil. Give us something that will save our lives!”
Timothy stammered to find an answer. The truth had flustered him, in part because he knew better. He wanted to forget such horrors, not revel in them. Each time he closed his eyes he remembered everything when all he wanted to do was forget.
I wanted to absolve them of my burden. Save them from learning what no man should have to know.
The voice stood prominently against the fading light. Timothy’s fingers curled defensively around the podium, transfixed by the transference of energy from the light to the speaker. A silhouette stepped through the star’s heart, stomping it out as he came forward. The room plunged into black, save for a band of shimmering light around the shadow’s outline.
It approached with familiarity, speaking with the same passion that had defined his earlier words. This one knew his secrets, and called upon him to remember them all.
The wolves they slaughtered.
The witch they destroyed.
The vampires they fought.
“And the huntress that killed you.”
A mirror image stood before him; a once fresh-faced boy whose dark eyes had been deadened by a world of violence and worse. Timothy touched his fingers to his own face and rubbed his chin. Surely, this sight had to be wrong. His reflection did the same. Signs of his youth remained in the doppelganger, but they receded until the likeness was no longer recognizable.
Harsh talon gashes emblazoned the face, running diagonally and mangling his features. One eye was broken and cloudy—a runny egg with a drippy yolk. When he smiled, his teeth were missing, his gum line completely shredded.
He screamed—
And opened his eyes. Sunlight blared through the stained glass windows of St. Matthew’s, scorching his eyelids.
He was alone, at least where the living was concerned. The blood-faced traitor from last night, Brother, had been laid across the altar up front. His body stripped of Osiris’ robes and replaced by an all-white cloth that wrapped him head-to-toe like an Egyptian mummy.
His killer walked through a doorway at the far left of the altar. He approached the corpse, but stopped when he found Timothy awake and watching. Rather than continue, he nodded and flashed what must’ve been his attempt at a disarming smile.
“I have pleaded your case, thief-taker. One of our brothers has already departed for Vatican City. He is to confirm the existence of this Garrick you speak of.”
“Good news,” Timothy said.
“Certainly? If they have no record of that brother…”
“I haven’t deceived you.” He only hoped that Garrick hadn’t been the deceptive one. What if the hunter hadn’t actually been among this order?
Sebastian’s cynicism seeps in. Timothy decided it wasn’t worth it. He figured that the hunter had known too much about this world and the order to be an impostor.
“Good to hear,” the arbiter said. “I’m not in the habit of trusting strangers, believe me. If your story wasn’t so…unique, I would’ve sentenced you to die. But liars are not often capable of spiels such as yours. If you are as honest as you say, it will make the next step much easier.”
“Which is?”
Beneath the stained and sun-soaked glass, Timothy got his first good look at the guy. They were roughly the same age, only arbiter’s skin was darker, his features unmistakably from this region, even further east, perhaps. His English was good but he spoke it loud, and with a thick accent that didn’t always settle on the ears.
He extended his hand and Timothy shook it, happy for any display of camaraderie, no matter how tiny.
“Salih,” he said.
“Timothy.”
“The commotion at the docks has Constanta on edge. My brothers are not yet back, even as daylight rises. So rare to find vampires in populated areas such as this.”
“One of them comes from a band that abducted us a few days back…they were worse off than plague carriers.”
Salih nodded. “They grow bolder each night. Skirmish with the Russian Empire has left much of the countryside devastated. Survivors flocked here, and many have gone beyond the sea already. We knew it was only a matter of time before the vampires came to where their food is.”
“Is that why there are so many of you here? Garrick didn’t speak of your practices, though he implied you didn’t work in large groups.”
“Our order is small and our work is expansive. It calls us to every continent of the world. The men here are not all…hunters, as you call them.”
“I called Garrick witch-finder once and he threatened to burn me to death.”
Salih laughed. A jolly, infectious sound. “Yes, I suppose that is an insult. We do not force ourselves on farmer’s daughters once the nights get cold and lonely. Officially, we are Warders of the Dead. Put another way, Keepers of the gate. Warders guard the abyss and ensure the dead stay where they belong. Those who escape the Duat, the bey
ond, are hunted and returned by necessary means.”
“Warders,” Timothy said, turning the concept over in his mind. It made him uneasy. It was more real than he wanted to imagine, meaning it would be harder to forget.
“Sometimes my kind is required to fight alongside the warders, though our concentrations are off-battlefield. Some of us design weapons…you might have noticed that we only carry the best into combat, for example. Others, such as I, find demonic patterns and ensure that information flows to all our outposts.”
“Chroniclers?”
“Labels are not consequential.” Salih didn’t sound anxious to offer anything else, so long as Timothy knew he did more than tell stories.
“What of the Raven? She is in Constanta.” He recalled her terrible laughter from last night and shivered. “She is the one you must worry about.”
Salih spread his arm outward and made a ‘follow me’ motion. Timothy rose and walked alongside him toward the altar. They stared at Brother’s body while a man in priest robes shuffled in, his eyes staring daggers.
Timothy might’ve been intimidated by this sudden appearance, but Salih offered a reassuring nod.
“Our brother goes to his rest,” he said, watching Timothy. “Because of your accusations, we deny him assured passage to Duat, his final resting within the Realm of the Dead. If his betrayal is genuine…and let it be said that I believe it is…then it is our Father who determines his fate in the next world.”
Timothy felt those daggers turn to ice. The priest might’ve been a friend of the traitor. He didn’t know for sure and wouldn’t ask. Not while he was a prisoner in this place. It was clear that not everyone had Salih’s open mind when it came to dead brothers. Sebastian’s cynicism returned as Timothy wondered about other turncoats housed here, sitting secretly in Codrin’s employ. If so, they deserved brutal deaths, but there was no way to make that determination.
“He was marked by varcolac,” Salih said. “As good as dead.”
“The varcolac are not dumb enough to come to Constanta,” the priest said.
“This one is different,” Timothy said. “She’s here because of me.”
DEVIL’S ROW Page 18
