The Midnight Guardian

by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  Pausing only to enjoy the scent of warm, oozing blood, she hissed an old enchantment that kept her from being noticed and used her blinding speed to glide through the theater, counting the attendees, assessing the possibilities as she slipped backstage. Two SS flunkies were there, waiting for the orator to finish so they could go home to late suppers. They looked up at her and one started to speak, but she grinned and slammed fully extended claws into both their faces, piercing eyes and brains.

  “You haven’t seen me.”

  Their heads snapped off easily and she chortled. This was fun. She helped herself to their guns, uninterested in weapons, but figuring a bit of change and surprise would be a treat for her audience.

  Listening to the orator venting his spleen, screaming about the inhumanity of the Jews and how their human-looking skins concealed ratlike bodies, encouraged her to rip open one of the men and pull out his intestines to use for tying the door shut. She was sorry she hadn’t kept him alive to enjoy that, but she’d compensate. She’d compensate.

  You’ve been very good, my beloved demon. You deserve treats.

  The necessary prep work accomplished, she hovered at the pass door to look at the audience more closely. They were mostly young, but many were middle-aged and tired-looking. Probably they felt they had to be there; it would look as though they were apathetic or worse if they didn’t show their faces at these gatherings. Brigit was disgusted that not a one of them dared say a word against all that they knew was happening, and would continue to happen. She knew there were some who didn’t completely approve, and their willingness to bow their heads and simply go as the wind blew roused the demon yet further.

  Two well-trained Nachtspeere were near the front, and this unsettled her. It seemed they were everywhere now. Residuals from the business with General von Kassell and the train, she supposed. The Nazis didn’t really believe vampires had returned to the Continent, but no precaution was being spared. Besides, the Reich had put a lot of effort into training its hunters. Some had been promoted, were being moved into more active ranks. Others were held in reserve until Britain and Russia were Nazi territory and their vampires thus ripe for the picking. In the meantime, they wanted to feel that they were still useful. Which these two were not, or not against her. Their weapons could kill only the youngest vampires. They were no threat.

  There were upward of two hundred men in attendance. That was a lot, more than she’d tackled in a long time. In fact, the last time she’d taken on so many was with Eamon, fighting for the Yorkists in the War of the Roses. Though York had turned on him as a human, he still loved the city, and the two of them had been brutal as its loyal soldiers. However, she hadn’t been a millennial then. The power that she was feeling now was exhilarating. What she was about to do was something only a millennial could do with the grace and completeness she knew she would achieve. This was going to be easy. So, so easy.

  She drifted to the back and bent over a man sitting in the last row. She snapped his neck and watched him slump forward, so that his companion nudged him.

  “Come on, look alive.”

  She bit her palm so that she didn’t laugh out loud. Not yet. Her blood was so high, she wanted to scream in ecstasy. She closed her eyes and threw back her head, letting the rush wash over her, regrouping, allowing the heat to give her even more strength.

  Three more bodies, still quick, still quiet, each death filling her with erotic giddiness, anticipating that moment, that sweet moment of realization.

  The scream.

  She had stopped to eat, and looked up from a still-pulsing neck, her fangs at full extension, the tips bloody. Blood stained her plump lips. Her eyes were red, bulging, dripping with delighted malice. Swollen veins bursting from under her skin. Even her curls straightening and rising up from the roots, drunk with energy. That was what the man saw. That, and the livid smile, the talons that had burst through the long fingers and reached for him, snapping his spine as a neat coda to the scream.

  And now the wave upon wave of screams, the beautiful chorus, operatic in its heft. She felt as if she were growing taller on its glorious noise, on that rhythmic chaos.

  It was a gorgeous, thundering, orgasmic laugh that tore out of her when they rushed for the doors, the stronger crushing the weak in their fear—yes, here was all their great ideal of brotherhood and standing together—the specter of death showing that the basest desires of humanity would always prevail in the end.

  When the doors proved impenetrable, so many of them ran up the disused wooden stairs to the light booth that the stairs collapsed, landing them in an absurd heap of limbs and cries. They retreated to the walls, scrabbling at them, screaming for someone to draw a weapon, to kill the beast. Brigit laughed harder, sank a finger into the forehead of the man nearest her and ran it all the way down through to his testicles, which burst through his trousers with amusing ease. He wriggled, still alive, and she picked him up and wrung him like a rag, sending vertebrae popping into the air like corks.

  The screams turned into moans and many men looked to the orator, fruitlessly hoping that he might be able to summon some help, there must be help to be had. Whatever this was that had come unto them, it couldn’t be real. It could not be something that the mighty Reich could not control.

  The orator stood frozen, swaying slightly, as though trying to decide if he’d fallen into some hideous nightmare. Brigit liked that. Men who want to make living nightmares for others should know one of their own. He was only a foot soldier, true, but she was still saving him for the very end. She wanted him to be nothing but fear.

  Jerking into action like a rusty biplane, one of the Nachtspeere seemed to remember what he was supposed to be. He snatched the small crossbow from its holster at his hip and aimed with more care than she might have expected, given he was gray and trembling. He fired, and Brigit caught the sharp little stake with its spear-like tip and rolled it between her palms, sending a sprinkle of wood dust to the floor.

  Without seeming to have moved, she was upon him, her hand on his chest.

  “Didn’t any of your training suggest that such a thing might happen? Don’t you know how to fight? Or were you absent the day they went over secondary tactics?”

  He gulped. She tugged him with a force that pulled his body closer and sent his head flying across the room.

  The other Nachtspeere hadn’t moved. A trembling hand reached for his weapon. Brigit slithered behind him, laying an arm across his chest, her other hand snapping the stake in two.

  “What’s the matter, haven’t you any backbone?”

  She laid her hands on his shoulders and pressed them together, snapping out his spine.

  “Yes, there it is. Don’t you know what they say, ‘Use it or lose it’?”

  And she tore the spine out of him like a whip.

  There was a moment of quiet among the men who remained, that ineffable moment at the beginning of realization, when they knew how trapped they were, that they were stealing gulps of air in a futile echo of something that is about to have been.

  “Yes,” Brigit informed them helpfully. “You are the past tense now.”

  A middle-aged man with a set jaw stepped out from the frightened cluster, and pulled out his crucifix. He began an old incantation for the dismissal of vampires.

  Brigit smiled, liking his bravery. She admired his trust in the old ways. And, of course, had there been more of him, and had she been younger, it would have had some effect. In front of all these Jew-haters, it would have given her much pleasure to be Eamon, and show them how little the crucifix could really touch her, but now was not the time to think of Eamon.

  She slowed, and felt the glimmer of hope in the room. The catch of breath that meant there was a chance, that this quiet, gentlemanly man, with his little paunch and thinning hair and tired eyes, he could be their savior. She looked in his eyes, reading him. He was a good enough man, ordinary, the sort who did his business, kept his head down, looked after his family, and just w
anted to get by. He wanted to enjoy a tranquil life until called upon to leave it. Brigit suddenly felt a new surge of anger. Where was his good-hearted Christianity when all the trouble started, when the words became attacks, when the attacks became banishment, and now, when the banishment was becoming death? How dare he hug his nice life and gentle faith to him and look away from fear and suffering? Even if they were Jews, or Roma, or the disabled, the homosexuals, the communists, the whatever … where did the Bible say their pain should be ignored?

  She interrupted his incantation.

  “If all of you had risen up, had said no, had used all these good words, I would not be here.”

  He stared. There was only the hint of comprehension in him, but it was enough. The smell of shame wafted from his neck. It wasn’t enough to sate her, but even still, she would numb the death. She whispered an old language in the voice of seduction, a soft hypnotism and a quick lash.

  He fell before the crucifix did.

  It seemed to arouse the orator, and he began to scream anew, screaming about the evil among them, how it was real, how it needed to be destroyed, how they would do it.

  “How?” Brigit inquired. “How will you destroy this evil?”

  She began to sing tauntingly. She leaped onto the backs of the seats and danced across them, whirling like a ballerina. It was mesmerizing and bizarrely beautiful. She pulled out men hiding under the seats as she spun, slashing them through, tossing their bodies aloft with the flair of a juggler.

  “Well, go on then, destroy me. What do you have to destroy me? Where is all your might? Aren’t I just a sweet little girl?”

  She pirouetted onto the stage, pausing in the spotlight, allowing her face and body to revert briefly to its human-looking self, so that they could see. A young man cowering in the wings gasped, hardly believing how beautiful she was. She grinned at him.

  “Ever been kissed?”

  He shook his head numbly.

  She pulled him to her, popped out her fangs, and bit off his face.

  A sudden shot startled her. The bullet grazed her shoulder. The man aimed again and she pulled out her pilfered gun.

  “If you’re going to use a gun, use it properly.”

  The bullet sank between his eyes.

  One of the last remaining men took out a gun and aimed for his own head, but she wouldn’t have that. She leaped back into the audience, seized him, and kicked her foot through his stomach instead.

  There were three left. She pulled them into an embrace, her eyes locked on the orator’s. He could not see what she did, only that as she walked toward him, fresh blood dripped down her coat. He whined, backing away upstage.

  “You won’t survive, you won’t survive,” he squeaked. “We’ll get all of your beastly kind in the end. You can’t stop us. We’re too powerful.”

  “I wouldn’t lay money on that if I were you.”

  With measured, deliberate steps, she circled closer and closer to him. He clutched at the faded, worn scrim behind him, then shrieked and leaped up it, climbing all of two feet before the fabric gave way with a tired sigh and collapsed him back to the stage in a cloud of dust and thread.

  “I do hate to see a theater in disrepair. Such a waste. And you certainly know about waste, don’t you?”

  She held out a hand to help him up, then gently drew him back to the circle of light at center stage, slowly revolving, for all the world as if it were a choreographed waltz.

  “Why on earth would you leave this beautiful spotlight?”

  She slid behind him, laid her hands on his cheeks, and tilted his head to look up into the flickering bulb.

  “Even a student on his first day at conservatory knows that you play out the climax front, center, and in the light. The audience has earned that.”

  He was nearly fainting from fear.

  “Evil … evil …” he murmured feebly.

  “No, no. That will not do. You’re to speak the speech trippingly on the tongue, or not at all. Care to try again?”

  Drenched in sweat, he slipped from her grasp to his knees.

  “Then I guess the act is mine to finish.”

  With that, she reached into his mouth, pulled out his tongue several inches, and snapped his jaws shut so that half his tongue flew across the stage. He howled through a mouthful of blood.

  “You and your kind. Such a penchant for drama. I rather think this little show is over, don’t you? Yes, I believe this was the finale. Isn’t it time the lights went out?”

  She punted him toward the spotlight. His head went straight through, sending a shower of sparks down onto the carnage.

  Brigit dropped a beautiful curtsy and exited stage left, hearing a wave of thunderous applause play her out onto the still-quiet street.

  It was with shock and horror that many in the neighborhood saw the charred remains of the theater the next day and mourned those who had perished so dreadfully. No one could comprehend how the gas main could have exploded so violently, how everything and everyone could be burned so very far beyond recognition. Arson would have been suspected, but the power of the destruction was far beyond human strength and capacity. The baffled local officials could do no more to comfort the hundreds of bereaved than to say that sometimes dreadful things happened and nothing could have been done to change it. This was easier to believe than any other possibility.

  For her part, Brigit spent that day sleeping the sleep of the untroubled dead.

  Chapter 12

  London. January 1940.

  “Something’s wrong besides the obvious.”

  Eamon jumped. Otonia had sat down next to him and he hadn’t even heard her approach. That was the gift of being so supremely ancient. She didn’t even bother to seduce her prey anymore, just took what she needed and got on with whatever else she’d set out to do that evening.

  “It’s not that I don’t enjoy my food,” she explained. “I just don’t want to miss out on anything else.”

  She dropped a hand on Eamon’s shoulder and gazed out at the city.

  “I hope this lasts.”

  He nodded, only half paying attention. He’d been brooding for several weeks now, and he knew they’d all noticed but were diplomatic enough to keep a distance. Otonia, however, had picked up on something more, and was determined to head off any trouble before an idea could take root. It was marvelous and terrifying, the way she sensed things, but Eamon was hardly in a mood to talk. This did not seem to bother the ancient leader, as she knew he was listening.

  “Funny, isn’t it, our way of thinking? Time is so different for us. Quite a luxury, although I suppose we don’t always appreciate it. We can spend centuries mulling a problem, and never get to the end of it. Perhaps we should be the ones to write philosophy.”

  He bristled slightly at her implication. “I’m not thinking—”

  “I know.”

  Her smile was kind, with deep understanding creased into every fold of her skin. Otonia was not pretty; her face was too strong-featured for prettiness. But there was something in her that made you want to look at her again. Her deep voice and intelligent eyes could hold you rapt for hours, or centuries. The others all surmised that these were the qualities that had led to her making, that she had perhaps seduced her maker, rather than the other way around. Hers was also the only face among them, besides Mors’s, that betrayed time. To give her just a passing glance, she was frozen in her early twenties, but on closer inspection, the millennia were written on her skin. The breadth of knowledge and experience in her mien was what commanded all their respect, trust, and, it could not be denied, love. Even now, when she knew that Eamon and Padraic, and the millennials in Berlin, all thought she’d made a grave error in judgment and was only compounding it, she made no apology and asked no forgiveness. Should it be needed, it would probably come. Otonia was not one to worry.

  She pulled her ever-present distaff from inside the folds of her cloak and concentrated on winding wool so Eamon did not have to feel any eyes on
him.

  “There is a lot they can do. We still have hope.”

  Eamon’s head hardly moved, but she saw it.

  “You like Mors, of course, but perhaps you don’t trust him? Not that it matters, since you trust Brigit so completely. And the fact that there were two centuries wherein they might have become more than friends, than brother and sister, but never did, that is perhaps not the same thing as being lonely and frightened and under terrible duress in enemy territory. So you think that when she comes back to you, she’ll no longer be your girl. Or not in quite the same way.”

  Of all the things he was so terrified of losing in Brigit, this was one that had only recently begun to plague him, and he suspected it did so because it was so tangible. He hated it, though, and he hated himself for it even more.

  “Worried that disaster might provoke infidelity … I honestly don’t know if she’d fall down laughing or never forgive me. It’s absurd. I feel so … human.”

  “You look human.”

  He grinned.

  “Well, that’s something. But we’re supposed to be bigger than that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you. You just miss the girl who keeps your heart safe.”

  She rose and dropped a quick kiss on top of his head.

  “No one ever said it was easy to keep the home fires burning.”

  When she had gone, he fell back on the grass and blinked up at the stars.

  Home fires. It’s more than that, though, isn’t it? You’ve always had so much more in you than that.

  He didn’t know what possessed him to relive their past in his head—it was as though writing the history in his mind was a talisman and kept her present, even when she wasn’t.

  You were so angry and so unhappy. Like me, but for such different reasons.

  But for all they had later become, he could not trawl through history without remembering how they had started, and what he had lost.