Feral

by Serafini, Matt

  An insignificant end to an insignificant life.

  She drove to Fane's home, swinging the Eclipse-Spyder into the driveway and pressing past the guardhouse without stopping. Whether or not Fane's lackeys noticed the breach was inconsequential. She wouldn't acknowledge them if they did.

  Elisabeth parked behind an assortment of cars and made her way to the front door as the sky overhead cracked with the earliest shades of dark blue. She wasn't yet on the steps when she smelled blood and heard laughter.

  She wasn't sure she could face the horrors inside. Once a harbinger of change for fledglings, varcolac such as Anton Fane now spoke of Elisabeth as the huntress who lost her nerve—if they spoke of her at all.

  Sweat and other fluids combined into something pungent that, oddly, relaxed her nerves.

  This wasn't a Turning. It was an orgy.

  The door creaked, answered by the manor lord himself, a loose robe draped over his shoulders.

  "Ah, my Huntress...I sensed your advance. You cannot imagine how appreciative I am to see you here." He stood erect and without an ounce of shame, motioning for her entrance.

  Elisabeth stepped inside. The smell was worse in here. She followed it to her right, into a lengthy room littered with writhing bodies of all ages and sexes. Taking one another in angry passion. Sounds of ecstasy were as overwhelming as they were nauseating.

  Whatever company Fane kept these days, she had no desire to be a part of it.

  "What are you doing with them? Offering a glimpse into your opaque lifestyle?"

  Fane took stance behind her, his powerful hands holding her hips.

  "A little get together for my top shelf clients. A way to thank them for investing large sums of money into a new project of mine."

  "This is what you wanted me for? To play bitch for some disgusting gluttons?"

  "I wanted you at my side. I'm projecting a lifestyle to them. An image they find desirable."

  "You had me by your side when you took me from that fortress outside of Romania."

  "It was Moldavia then, lest you forget where you came from."

  "I remember it all too well. I was in your service then, for what felt like an eternity..."

  "Hardly a decade, Huntress. You accused me of taking from you the one thing you could never have...vengeance. And you decided that I was not good enough for you."

  "You took my departure personally. I left because you gave me a gift that I grew to be grateful of. It was a chance for me to start over, and that's what I did."

  "You left because Aetius won your heart."

  "What better reason?"

  "Look where that got the two of you."

  "You really are a bastard, Scythe."

  "Never refer to me in that way again."

  "A Scythe for a Huntress, then."

  "Huntress is a reference to who you are. Scythe is a name given by my enemies. Long ago. It is not who I am."

  The hypocrite.

  "Let me ask you this, Anton, do you hate that you started life as a soldier? An automaton who took orders?"

  "I proved myself, time and time again. When was the last time you proved anything?"

  "The beauty of our existence is that we are not forced into a hierarchy. I have nothing to prove to you, Anton."

  "When did the mighty Huntress become such a pithy creature? Your life has become one of seducing young girls and turning lap-dog college boys into personal toys. There is no story more depressing in our history than your own."

  Elisabeth felt Fane press against the small of her back as they faced the swinging orgy. It would be easy to castrate him here. It might not kill him, though he would suffer the greatest indignity before an audience of peers. Allen was the reason she held her tongue. And hand. Hurting Fane would spark retaliation, and it would be done through him. Not her.

  "This is not about me," she said. "You violate the one rule we're expected to follow. I hear the howling at night...I know that our numbers swell. You have admitted that you are planning a Turning. I am unclear why you want Allen, or any of those sluggish prospects in there, but I know you are looking for more than a new cache of drinking buddies."

  Fane laughed.

  "I expected your arrival to signal a return to your senses. Once more I am mistaken."

  "I came here in person to tell you that we are not allies or friends...and not enemies, either. I only want to continue my life as it was before I made the mistake of seeking refuge in Greifsfield...not for you or anyone, but because I wanted to hear the howling songs at night while living in peace."

  "Begging for mercy?"

  "Should you choose to interpret my presence as begging, then fine. It is out of respect for our past that I am here. That is all there is to say."

  "If you're not with me, Huntress, you are against me."

  An oval-shaped man waddled out from the pile of thrusting and sweaty partygoers. He approached with excitement, wearing a chubby erection that looked like a pinkie tip.

  "Anton, why have you been holding out on me?" He looked to her. "I would love the pleasure this exotic beauty could provide."

  "She is not staying, Rory."

  "You must be Rory Eastman." Elisabeth could not be bothered to mask the laughter in her voice. "Your daughter is a beautiful girl."

  The hairy man stepped close to reveal a face lined with bruises and an irritated eye. The injury was familiar. She had once taken an arrow through hers, and it had incapacitated her for days. Varcolac healed quickly, but the sting of pain lingered.

  "Come on, spend some time with me," he said, reeking of secretion.

  "Get back to the party and forget about this. She is not a common whore, and if you speak out of line again, I will make you an example..."

  Rory Eastman's eyes were hapless, pinballing between them.

  "This is how you treat your money man?" He looked to Elisabeth. "Him and me, we own this town." When his last-ditch attempt to impress went over like a lead balloon, he shrugged, defeated, and turned back to the party.

  "How, pray tell, am I against you?" Elisabeth said, relieved to see Rory disappear back into the blob of shifting bodies. "What makes you think I would want anything to do with...this?"

  But Fane was done talking. He swiveled on his heels and headed for the hall, leaving her to wonder what was so offensive about her stance. They hadn't spoken in a century, at least, and her tenure as huntress had ended well before then. None of this should've been surprising.

  He was halfway up the staircase when he turned and said, "If you're not gone in two minutes I will tell my sentries to open fire on you. Then they'll drive out to your place and execute your pup before he knows what's happening."

  Elisabeth watched him disappear, never more vulnerable. With Allen in her life, there was so much to lose. Pointless bloodshed couldn't take another lover from her.

  She climbed back into her car and headed home, enraged by Fane's overconfidence, and powerless to react accordingly. Wanting her by his side didn't sit well. It was the exact mantra the queen spouted in times of crisis. Back then, Elisabeth had been recruited to be her 'Huntress,' a lone seductress who roamed the lands collecting unsuspecting and able-bodied candidates. As such, she understood Fane's tactics and knew what to expect.

  Why didn't I sense him here?

  Because she had tried forgetting about him over the last one hundred years, and realized that she had managed to do exactly that—until he stormed back into her life as though he had never left.

  That wretch was creating an army of followers, meaning that Greifsfield wasn't going to be a quiet tourist trap in Western Massachusetts for very much longer.

  ***

  Turns out, Jack Markle didn't know all that much: missing friends and weird behavior floating around the resort.

  That meant he wasn't much help.

  Amanda figured she could've let him die and been better off for it. She worked alone and, at the very least, wouldn't have to worry about what to do with him. Or how mu
ch to tell him. His constant questions were understandable, but no less annoying.

  They'd driven back to her motel, The Mountain View, in Williamstown—a larger town directly west of Greifsfield. It was a believable base of operations thanks to its dense college population, even in the summer. Her temporary identity was an out of town grad student working on her master's thesis. Thanks to an error on her financial aid form, she was unable to secure campus residency, and the motel offered a more reasonable rate than local apartments.

  Mountain View motel's name was prettier than its accommodations. It was a roadside pit that turned a profit by catching spillover from Greifsfield and Adams. With the exception of a few check-ins over the last three weeks, there had been very little activity here, which made it perfect.

  She listened to Jack tell his story, every word, beginning with their arrival in Greifsfield nearly one month ago, and culminating with last night's run in. In between, one girl disappeared and there was the likely disappearance of another. His best friend had met a woman and had scarcely been seen since, surfacing only to say he was terrified and leaving town. The smart money was that he'd done just that.

  Or that he was dead.

  Jack asked lots of questions about her, and she dodged them. If the poor sap didn't know what was happening behind closed doors, she wasn't going to be the one to break it to him.

  Dolling out the whole story in one large chunk got him nervous. Every friend had vanished without a trace, leaving him the jittery witness to a police officer's execution. His knees shook as much as his words, even as she reminded him that she had saved his life in doing it.

  It'd taken a few hours to calm him, and they were finally at a point of uncomfortable, yet calm, conversation. As far as he knew, she was a private detective looking for a missing person. That wasn't so far from the truth. The one that had led her to Greifsfield, at least.

  "They dropped like flies," Jack said of his friends. "If you're good at finding people, then find them."

  "Kind of why we're talking."

  "First Molly, then Lucy. But Allen?" His frustration culminated in a plea to head back into town. "I should warn him...if he's still shacked up."

  "It's not a good idea. The police are looking to execute you...you realize this, right?"

  But he'd been persistent and pathetic. And now she was driving back to Greifsfield on Route 8, allowing Jack along out of fear that he'd flee and do something dumb if left alone. This line of work didn't afford loose ends, and Jack was nothing if not one of those.

  No one would know about this operation.

  They hit Greifsfield's back roads, using an address that Jack had supplied. He swore it came right from his missing friend.

  "What do we do once we get there?" Jack asked.

  Amanda weighed her response with precision.

  "You want to check up on your friend," she said. "I'm taking you to do that. I could use a few answers myself."

  "I doubt Allen has the answers you're looking for."

  She wasn't so sure.

  "Here it is," Jack said as they rolled past an over-sized, white mailbox. "That's the driveway."

  Amanda slowed, but kept moving. Through the trees, a red sports car called her attention amidst the foliage.

  Jack noticed it, too.

  "I recognize that car."

  She did a three-point turn, swinging the truck around and pulling it off the road. Her hand slipped through the slit in her coat and wrapped around the silenced Glock, flicking off the safety with her thumb, a casual maneuver that was not lost on Jack.

  "Allen isn't mixed up in whatever brought you here. He's just a dumb, horny guy who hooked up with the wrong girl. You'd be surprised how often it happens to him."

  This friend sounded like an ideal mark for these things. Jack might've been confused as to why he had showed up on his doorstep looking to get out of town. Without context, it was baffling. Sure, Allen might've realized what type of trouble he was in and wanted to run, but it was just as possible that he and his new girlfriend were trying to lure Jack out of hiding and kill him.

  These things always shat where they ate, and Amanda was certain that Jack's friend wasn't his friend any longer.

  "Relax," she said. "We're going up there to talk."

  "You seem determined to dislike whatever he has to say."

  "This." She tapped the gun from over the top of her coat. "This is a necessity. After last night, I thought you'd understand that one can't be too careful in this town."

  "I realize that. You didn't get to where you are by flying blind, right? That's why I'm asking you for your word. Promise that nothing happens to Allen. He's a friend and he deserves a chance."

  The sincerity in his voice stirred stitches of sympathy, but she refused to acknowledge them. It was dedication that was hopelessly misguided. The things inside this house were likely scheming their deaths as they approached.

  No, it wasn't the best decision to bring Jack here, but she had to trust that she could protect him if things went bad.

  Things always go bad.

  They walked down the driveway's length, her Doc Martens crunching compacted gravel spread. She stepped into the nearest patch of grass and continued moving without the noise and Jack followed her head. The creatures were prone to super-sensitive hearing, and she didn't intend on giving them any more of an advantage than necessary.

  They already know we're here.

  If Allen was here, she may be able to extract him at gunpoint. A kid that age would break with a gun jammed down his throat, and she'd know everything he did before lunch.

  If Allen's bitch decided they were trespassing and came out to greet them with hostility, then Amanda had a magazine full of silver to welcome her back.

  ***

  For Allen, the guilt wouldn't leave.

  There had been moments yesterday that he already counted among the greatest in his life. While wrapped in the arms of his goddess, he hadn't known words that could accurately convey the sensations, physical or otherwise.

  But those times were fleeting and, once the euphoria drained, heaps of guilt remained.

  Elisabeth knew this, asking him if a bear feels guilty for sinking its teeth into an innocent doe, or if a cat drowns in remorse after it slaughters a blue jay. She was freshly returned from her rendezvous, looking at him with a cocked eyebrow and roving eyes. She searched for something that could be found on his face. An answer to the question of whether or not he had it in him.

  "You're at the top of the food chain now," she said. "Enjoy it."

  Coping with guilt had never been easy. He'd spent an entire summer afflicted by it after handing in an English paper that his cousin had written. Allen's professor loved it so much that he made the entire class analyze it over two sessions. He'd even taken him to lunch to discuss the assignment's most insightful theories. Six months had passed and the guilt clung to him like mildew to a shower curtain. He'd been a fraud, and if it had taken the better part of a year to get over that, what hope was there now that he was a murderer?

  "It gets easier, my love. You probably think that I've been a monster for so long that I no longer understand your struggle..."

  "I don't think you’re a monster."

  "You're sweet. But don’t you? If you could see the wrought expression on your face...you want your victims to forgive you for the things you've done, but that won't take away the reality, Allen. You did them."

  She touched his elbow. Her warm fingertips glided along his arm, prompting him to close his eyes and focus on the soothing properties of her voice.

  "I was like you once. Understand that varcolac live a long time, and without the burden of decay. My life started as a peasant at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Yes...I am old."

  Allen, betrayed by his expression, attempted to backpedal but Elisabeth shushed him and he let her continue.

  "I was taken from my mother by men who carried out atrocities in the name of God. A victim of those atrociti
es, I was near death when a varcolac found and rescued me. He wasn't doing it to protect me, rather he wanted another instrument of death. Someone to bring chaos and hatred to the world, to defy the fools who had stolen me, and also their edict. By that point, I wanted to do it."

  Allen sat in stunned silence, listening: the revelation of her age, her expansive life, her turning. Everything prompted questions, but he wouldn't interrupt again. Elisabeth rarely spoke of her past and he wanted to know all there was to know of it.

  Her eyes welled. Her bottom lip quivered amidst recollections of her first year as a wolf: dreams that threatened her sanity, the searing pain of each new transformation that filled her with pain so great she came to be terrified of the change.

  "I understand your conflicts, Allen. I endured them all. You are varcolac same as me," she said.

  "I've never heard that word," he said.

  "It is not common in this country to refer to our kind as such," she said. "And old word from a more superstitious time."

  Allen moved closer and slid an arm around her. Elisabeth took him up on the quiet offer, leaning her head against his shoulder.

  "Keep talking," he whispered. "You've had this bottled up for so long. I need to hear this, and I want you to feel like you can say it to me."

  "I did not bring it up to win your sympathy. I want you to understand. My bloodlust had been provoked to a point where I wanted to hurt people. Admittedly, that made the beginning easier, but you will one day feel the same as I do now."

  And he believed her.

  "I need to know that you are with me."

  "I am," Allen said. That was more or less the truth. He didn't trust her when it came to Jack and Lucy. Something about how she glossed over their names in conversation propelled suspicion that she might try and eliminate them. Her outlook on humanity wasn't particularly generous, and he guessed that killing them would be her way of untethering him from their world. There had to be a way that he could protect them.