by Faith Hunter
Maggots crawled across the stone floor onto my feet.
Something clanked. Closer.
The vampire was getting free.
My eyes flew open in the darkness, like a cave, far underground. But I knew without being able to see that the vampire was no longer hanging on the wall. It had worked its shackles loose, had probably been working them loose for ages, as it was bled to feed the things in the house. And then I showed up, bleeding, the reek of lifeblood giving it the final impetus to wrench free. The maggoty feeling crossed the rock to me the moment it touched the floor. By the clanking and jangling sounds, I knew it was coming toward me. Dragging itself.
I reached out to Paka. Hurry.
But Paka was just now passing the abandoned chicken coop. They would be too late.
I rolled my weight forward and then back, the chair rising up on its back legs. I rocked forward and rocked back again, then forward, until the chair went far enough for my feet to take my weight. My ankles hadn’t been chained to the chair legs, and so, bent over, I raced, if the shuffle of feet can be called such, for the wall I had seen in the moments of light, the wall farthest from the vampire. I felt the wall growing closer, a solid force. At the last moment, I twisted my body and threw myself back, the chair legs taking the brunt of the leap and my body’s weight. They hit the wall with a splintering crack. I half bounced and rolled, bruising my knees and banging my head on the stone. Shards of dry wood pierced my side and back. It hurt, a stabbing, puncturing agony. There might be time for pain later, if I lived.
I rocked and rolled until I reached my feet again. And I threw myself at the wall, twisting to take the hit on the chair. But my aim was off, and one arm of the chair and my forearm took the hit instead. My head whiplashed and cracked. I saw more stars, white bursts of light that seemed to fall like snow. Dazed, I lay on the floor, blinking into the dark. My hair was caught under me, pulling my head back at an odd angle.
Something touched me.
The vampire laid her slimy, maggoty hand on my bare foot. Something scraped the stone beside the chair, a sound like shoe leather on rock, and I realized that the vampire was licking my blood from the stone floor, its tongue like jerky. An instant later, it bit down, fangs into the top of my foot, into the artery there. I couldn’t help the gurgle of shock and pain. Nor the thought that the churchmen had been wrong. A vampire’s bite was not pleasurable at all.
Maggots writhed over my bare foot, thrashing. Icy fire climbed up my leg, through my veins, leading to my heart and lungs. The vampire slid her fangs from me. Yes, I thought. It’s female.
Stronger already, she pulled herself up my lower leg, claws sinking into shin and calf in spiked bursts of pain, and she lifted my leg. Her fangs sliced into the back of my knee. Flame and sleet blazed through me, hot and cold, burning as brands, intense as frozen knives. I screamed. And reached. Into the earth around the house, into the stone beneath my face. Instinct. Reaching for life, for control. A charged sensation zapped through me like lightning through soil.
The vampire whipped her head back. Squealed. Rolled away. But I had her now. My blood within her undead flesh. The earth beneath us. It was all I needed. I could feed her to the earth, body and soul, if she had a soul. But she rolled away, to lie against the far, cold, concrete wall. And she sobbed.
I had heard sobs like hers before, the night my mother was brought back from the punishment house. Shattered. Beaten. Wounded in ways I hadn’t been able to imagine when I was a child. Broken, but alive. Mama had survived. So might the vampire prisoner. If I let her. If I helped her.
“I’m sorry,” the vampire whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
I lessened my hold on her. Slid the grip of my control away from her body and her blood. “Help’s coming,” I said. “Hang on.”
“Too late,” she whispered. “Can’t you hear them? Their footsteps on the stairs? They come to bleed me once again. And this time they all come. Together.”
I couldn’t hear anything, but I imagined that a vampire’s ears were far better than mine. I swallowed, trying to sense where Paka and Occam and the vampires were. Still down the road. And even after they got here, they would have to find a way into the basement and into the underground chamber. A pale light brightened around the cracks in the door. The muted sounds of male laughter followed.
“If you drink my blood, can you fight them off?”
“If I drink you dry unto death, I could take one or two. But the blood of one is not enough for me. And even if it were, there isn’t time enough to heal, to find the strength to destroy so large a group. And they bring silver to torture me. To bind me. I can feel the poison upon them.”
“With the blood you already took from me, can’t you’un—you—can’t you hurt them? It needs to be all of them. They need to bleed. It doesn’t have to be a big injury, just blood on the floor. Can you spin like a dervish? Like one of those old-fashioned weapons—a mace, I think they called them, not to take them down, but just to bleed them. Scattering them, cutting each one. Can you do that, even if it means they get you after?”
“And you would help me after? To escape? To find food?”
“Yes.” I nodded into the dark. The vampires and the werecats are coming. I just need a bit of time. “Yes.”
“I am not strong enough to be a mace, little nonhuman female. A small flail, perhaps,” she said. “Yes, I can be a flail in the hand of my rescuer.”
I wasn’t certain what a flail was, or how I could be her rescuer, but our little chat was nearly over. Another light came on, brighter through the cracks. A man on the far side said, “Nothing in the world like it, my friend.” A jangle of keys sounded on the far wall.
Fear and maggots still slimed my skin. “Can you break my handcuffs?”
“I’m not strong enough to break the steel, not with the silver shackles I still wear.”
“Then break the chair,” I grated out. “Just get me flat on the rock. And you attack them when they come through the door. I need their blood on this rock beneath me, or on the concrete out there.” I jutted my chin to the light. “And then you can drink them dry for all I care. But . . . but stay off the floor, stay off the rock, or I might take you too.” Her death, invisible to another, but real to me, bounced and wriggled, cascading over me as she shuffled near, fear in the sounds of her movements. “Hurry!” I demanded. “Hurry!”
The stretcher between the chair’s legs broke and I tumbled back. The vampire caught me, one hand tangled in my hair, catching the back of my head. She broke the arms of the chair and I tumbled to the rock. I could feel her icy breath, fetid with rot against my face, and I thought for a moment that she would lose control and drain me. But as the door opened, she slid her hand away. With a soft pop of sound, she was gone.
Someone screamed. Several men screamed. Blood flew. The bloodlust of my magic lunged out and took me in its fist.
I stretched deep into the earth again, reached with whatever my gift was, whatever my magic might be. Reached out to the blood that flew and splattered. Eyes closed, I caught an essence of blood and darkness and dog, and essence of human male, and I took all the life forces into my grimy hand.
I fed a dog to the earth, spreading my fingers onto the rock, his body and soul into the stone. And then I took a human, screaming as he fell. That one I held still, compliant, draining him slowly, to weakness, not unto death. And let him go. He lay on the rock, gasping, drained.
Two more dogs. I gripped them both and felt them break and tear into a bloody slime. The heat and moisture of their bodies coalesced and trickled across the surface of the boulder, sucked into the earth. Dead and gone. I held their combined life force within me for a moment, making sure. Knowing. Accepting that I was doing this by choice. Not just instinct, not in fear of my life. But by choice. I gave them to the rock beneath me. Pushed their life force within the granite and the soil and the roots of the v
ine beyond the far wall. The vine stretched and put out blooms as the ground around it was saturated with the life of gwyllgi, the darkness of the dog. Other roots stretched for that life, and the somnolent thing beneath the ground woke and saw the death of the dog. It wanted more. It saw me as well. I eased away from it but gave it the body and soul of another gwyllgi. Its attention faltered, returning its focus to the life force as if recognizing a sacrifice long denied. But I was certain that it would know me again.
I held the lives of three more, not all dead, but all bleeding, all dying, pressing them into the stone of the floor, taking their blood and feeding it into the ground, more slowly this time, a steady trickle instead of a gushing flood. All but two of the males on the stone floor were gwyllgi. As was the man the vampire held trapped in the outer room. She was crouched on a table, the gwyllgi gripped in her hands. He was trying to shape-shift as she tore through his neck and sucked the life out of him.
Just as I was sucking the life out of the men in my grasp. I let the humans go, knowing they were too drained to be a danger. They were broken now. Diminished, but alive. And I fed the gwyllgi to the earth. Jackie. Fighting, Screaming. Howling. Dead. At last.
If they hadn’t been planning on torturing a starving vampire and likely hurting me in other ways, I might have felt guilt and shame, but I felt nothing. Nothing at all.
I understood that the humans whom I had not totally drained had once been important people, considered so by themselves and by others. Now they crawled away, panting, hearts racing, aged and ruined and near empty of life. The dog with the vampire was conscious, fighting, yowling. Still alive somehow, but not for long.
Through the open door, I saw Occam leap into the outer storage room, Paka on his heels a little to the side, hunting formation. Occam saw the feeding vampire and screamed, altering course for her and her prey.
“No!” I shouted. “Occam! Paka! No!”
They skidded on tough paw pads, sliding on the concrete floor, claws extended, scratching, bodies bunching tight to change direction. Almost as one, they stretched into leaps and practically flew through the opening into the dark to land on the stone. One of the vampires was right behind them, her maggoty death-slime energies powerful. I might have gagged at the sensation, and I know I thrashed in horror when she picked me up bodily, the chair remains dangling from my handcuffs. It was like being carried by death herself, black shroud and sickle and rotting flesh, though my eyes told me she was flesh and blood and blond and beautiful, and familiar. Every footstep was an agony and I heard my own moan as she sped outside.
Rick said, “There,” pointing into dark shadows cast by security lights.
She set me on the grass out back. Broke the cuffs with a simple twist of her powerful hands. She threw the wood away and pulled the shards out of my back and side and the skin of my arm, tossing splinters and stakes deep into the woods beyond the landscaped lawn. The earth felt the wood fall and the blood splatter, and the roots reached up, taking my blood into the ground, hungry, much like the starving vampire who still fed on the dog.
When I was free of wood and shackles, the blond vampire stepped away, staring down at me. “I don’t know what manner of creature you are, but if my blood would help I am happy to off—”
A sick, oily, foul taste coated the back of my mouth and I gagged at the thought of rotten meat.
The vampire laughed, as if she knew what I was feeling and thought it was funny. It was a nice laugh, completely at odds with the blood-sucking, dead thing she was. But she seemed to understand and stepped away. The distance helped ease the sensation-thought-taste of rotten meat that glazed the back of my throat.
From the ground, I felt movement. Something pushed up through the soil, pliant and supple and full of life. Around it, other things pushed through. They were rootlets, seeking my blood. In the warmth beneath me, they burst into leaf and slithered around my body, into the tiny cuts. For a moment it hurt as if I was being pierced again, sharp and cutting. But they were healing me with the life I had sent into them. Dog of darkness life. Potent gwyllgi life, something out of mythology found to be real. I had taken, and now I was being given to. Healed. I relaxed into the roots and vines and they coiled into me, sharing.
Symbiotic. The word was there, and I understood it fully. The land and I were symbiotic, needing one another. Though I still didn’t know how it worked, or what I truly was. Beneath the ground, the life there pulled in the souls it had captured and . . . swallowed them. Swallowed them whole. I heard Jackie beneath the earth, his soul screaming and thrashing. And Roxy, weeping like a child as the darkness sucked him under. Unlike Brother Ephraim, they were subsumed, as if eaten.
Occam was suddenly there, human shaped and steaming in the cold air, naked and beautiful in the stark light and shadows. “Nell. Nell, sugar?” His hands feathered along my body. “I smell your blood. Where are you hurt? Nell? Sugar?” When I didn’t answer fast enough, he growled, the vibration quivering through me.
I breathed out softly. “I’m gonna be fine, Occam. I just need to rest here awhile. But not too long. Okay? I’ll tell you when.”
“I take it we’ll need to cut you free again?” Rick asked, something curious and amused and slightly mocking in his tone.
“Soon.” I wasn’t injured as badly as I had been when I was shot. This was more flesh wounds than organ damage. But I did wonder how many times I could be healed this way before growing leaves instead of hair, and the thought made me laugh softly. “Put some clothes on, Occam. It’s cold out.”
“Okay. Nell, sugar. If you’re sure.” A drop of his sweat landed on my cheek and steamed in the night air.
Rick squatted down beside me and asked softly, “Whose house are we at, Nell?”
I chuckled just as softly. “The gwyllgi home of Roxbury Thomas Benton, the fourth.”
Rick cursed softly and stood. And then they were all gone, except the lanky blond vampire, who now crouched on a low brick garden wall, her weight on her toes and her fingertips, her knees bent into what, on a human, would have been an awkward crouch.
She was one of the vampires who had crossed my land to help Jane Yellowrock attack the church and rescue a captive vampire. She had been at Mira Clayton’s home too, and she had carried me out of the basement, her fangs extended and her eyes all black. Her head was tilted oddly on her neck as she studied me. “Jane called you Yummy,” I said, finally remembering.
“Jane said you were a fairy, one of the little people. Maybe a wood nymph, woodsy magic.”
“Mixed with human,” I said. “At the time, mostly human.” I brought up the one of the words she had used to describe me. “Yinehi. Evil, soul-sucking yinehi.”
“Fairies aren’t evil, and you aren’t exactly a fairy,” Yummy said. “Fairies are private, though, yes. Elusive, preferring the woods to all other things.” Her head cocked the other way. “They sacrificed to the mother earth. Fed her. Fed her powers that slept deep within. And they taught the Celts to do the same, to continue the tradition.”
Well, that sounded like me for sure. I smiled without humor, feeling the anguish her words brought. “A tradition of murder.” That felt right, deep within me. I was a creature of blood and death. I had to accept that, after all the lives I had taken tonight. And learn how to live with it. Despite it, maybe. “Tell them it’s time to cut me free. And then I want to go home. I’m . . . tired. So very tired.”
“You may have anything you want. Tonight the Human Speakers of Truth have taken a blow,” Yummy said. “And you gave us back one of our own. We are in your debt. Ming of Glass has announced, ‘Clan Glass owes you a boon.’”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It is the very best thing. Your life will never be the same.”
But I had a feeling that was the case no matter what a maggoty blood-sucker might have to offer me.
NINETEEN
We left the
estate on the North Carolina side of the line and drove sedately back into Tennessee. It was a long drive, and I slept the whole way, my body cuddled in my bloody coat on the van seat, safe with these people, who knew what I was and still seemed to accept me. They talked, their words a background hum that promised more safe, safe, so forever safe. The vampire Yummy was behind us, driving a lovely gold-flake 2015 convertible she called a Ferrari LaFerrari, a car she said was worth a million dollars, which surely was a joke, the vehicle having been liberated from Roxy’s garage. My awareness of her was strong, nauseatingly strong, in North Carolina, but as we rode, that perception faded to nothing. In the car at the rear were the other two vampires, one of them the freed prisoner.
We drove into Oliver Springs long after midnight, and into a crime scene ringed by media vans and reporters and county and state and federal vehicles. Rick rolled down his window and a sheriff’s deputy met us at the edge of the crime scene tape, saying, “Thanks for the tip. We got them all and we got Anne Rindfliesch, safe and sound.” Anne Rindfliesch was Girl Four, I remembered.
When the deputy went back to work, Yummy sauntered up. She stopped at the van, where she leaned her head inside, without touching the body of the vehicle, which I appreciated. “They found seven women inside, some from families who ‘left the church’”—she made little quotation marks in the air—“some from Knoxville, all of them in bad shape, three of them pregnant.” She focused on me. “They have been there a long time, and have suffered horribly. I offer my blood and my gifts of healing should they deign to accept them.”
To Rick, she continued, “The police also found forty-two Human Speakers of Truth in the warehouse. They had been imprisoned there by Jackie and his splinter faction, some for as much as a week. There were also five mature human-dogs and a number of juveniles, all of which seem to be male. Either they kill and eat their own female offspring or they breed true along the male line only.”
