All Rotting Meat

by Maleham , Eve

  ‘But could you?’ she asked.

  ‘We could,’ Cleo said, ‘however, I would only consider it in the direst of situations. Our numbers have not yet recovered since the Eighties, and to kill so many vampires now would be a terrible waste. It would also be difficult to intervene in such a way that did not call attention to ourselves from humans.’

  ‘So, you’re just going to let Rebirth become a thing?’ Leah said. ‘They’ll probably want to expand all over the planet.’

  ‘As I said, I believe that if Rebirth declares that our species exists to the world, then every single one of us, including you, Ms Redman,’ Cleo said, ‘will be at grave risk. I’ve seen it before, when the world believed in us and most vampires lived feral or in murderous clans, that humans would arm themselves against us, and attack. My family were highly civilised, yet hunters still came after us, and my parents were killed. Please understand, however, that this is not something I blame humans for; humans and vampires are both predatory creatures, and when we are threatened, we attack. But, by hiding ourselves, we eliminate the threat, and so eliminate the risk. Now, most humans don’t believe we exist outside of fiction. My understanding is that Rebirth is mostly made up of young vampires who do not know any different, and have little reason to fear.’

  ‘The Old Hunters – are they a threat to vampires still?’ Leah asked.

  ‘They have always been a mystery to us,’ Cleo said. ‘We know that they were a sect of hunters who were adopted by the early Catholic Church, and that the church spearheaded anti-vampire technology. I believe that over the past three centuries, their sect has declined in power and authority, but most of our information about them is based on little more than rumour, since the Old Hunters have always been completely closed off to vampires.’

  ‘So, you have no idea if they’re a threat or not?’ Leah asked.

  ‘I prefer to base my verdicts on more than rumours,’ Cleo said, taking a sip of hot chocolate, ‘but I believe that there are far more pressing issues to be dealt with at the moment.’

  ‘The Old Hunters stopped Tycho before,’ Leah said.

  ‘They did,’ Cleo said. ‘However, the Blood Coup was far less established than what Rebirth has become. If the information we have both acquired is correct, then bringing down Rebirth will be complicated and dangerous. I strongly doubt that a handful of hunters, no matter their pedigree, would ever be able to do it.

  ‘I do find it worrying that Rebirth is looking for the Blood Thieves’ backing though,’ Cleo said. ‘For the most part, they have not troubled us, since they operate on the other side of the planet, but I worry that bringing them to Europe would set an unfortunate precedent. However,’ she said with a smile, taking a small bite of cake, ‘from what I currently understand, Rebirth only wanted their backing as leverage, since they anticipate that we will take action against them, and now there’s no need.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I will have someone inform Rebirth that I am now fully aware of their existence, and begin diplomatic relationships with them,’ Cleo said, smiling brightly, ‘eliminating the threat.’

  ‘And you think that’ll work?’

  Cleo gave a nonchalant shrug.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Apparently, Cecilia and Tycho are at each other’s throats,’ Leah said. ‘It’s in the file, too. There’s a power struggle going on between the two of them.’

  ‘Do you know who’s winning?’ Cleo asked, nibbling on the edge of a cake.

  ‘We believe, Cecilia,’ Leah said.

  Cleo nodded. ‘And, who is the source of your information?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t want to say,’ Leah said.

  ‘Do you trust this source?’

  ‘I believe what they brought us is accurate,’ Leah said, ‘but we don’t have access to them anymore.’

  ‘Were they discovered?’ Cleo asked.

  ‘No, but we had an agreement with them which ended.’

  ‘I see,’ Cleo said.

  ‘So, what’s going to happen now?’ Leah asked.

  ‘We will have to review the evidence you have brought,’ Cleo said, ‘and then I will make a judgement, based on that.’

  ‘But, will you act?’ Leah said.

  ‘On stopping Rebirth?’ Cleo said. ‘Well, like I said, we hold no territory in the British Isles. My biggest concerns are that Rebirth will go ahead with their intention to reveal our existence to the world, and of the Blood Thieves’ involvement,’ she said, taking another drink.

  ‘And only then?’ Leah asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ Cleo said. ‘I know that you came here to try to persuade us to join your fight, but, understand that we have no ethical objection to what Rebirth are doing, and no desire to take action on those grounds. I will approach them diplomatically, but I have no intention of starting a war. Both Feigrey and Marr are intelligent people; they already know that they cannot win a battle against us, hence why they are trying to enlist the support of the Blood Thieves, and even then, an all-out war would be devastating for all sides, and a heavy blow against us as species.

  ‘You’re a dhampir, and you came here with a human perspective; please consider it from a vampire side. If Rebirth adhere to my concerns, then any sort of conflict would end with too many lives lost over an issue most find negligible. And, also understand that whatever action we do decide to take, it will be without informing you and your group of hunters. I’m assuming that you have a plan of action already?’

  ‘We’re going to try to release what Rebirth are to the public,’ Leah said, ‘omitting the vampire part.’

  ‘That could be effective,’ Cleo said, ‘and I support you in your endeavour.’

  ‘But you’re not going to help,’ Leah said.

  Cleo shook her head, her tight coils of hair falling in front of her face. ‘This simply isn’t our place. We govern part of the vampire world; what goes on in the human one is not of relative interest to us.’

  Black leaned down and whispered something in Cleo’s ear. She looked up at him and nodded.

  ‘I am afraid that we are now out of time,’ Cleo said, rising to her feet, ‘and I have other matters to attend to now. Do you have anything else you wish to say to me?’

  ‘No,’ Leah said, ‘I think we’re done here.’

  ‘It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms Redman,’ Cleo said, dropping two air kisses on her cheeks as Black picked up the folder and hard drive she had given them. ‘I wish you a safe journey back.’

  Leah picked up her bag and headed back down the corridors and up onto the streets of Paris.

  Cleo had seemed worryingly non-committal; she wondered why the head of the Shield of Scarlet had met her at such short notice for an issue she had mostly dismissed.

  The rain was still pouring when she stepped out onto the streets.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They Weren’t Normal Exorcisms

  Poppy leaned back in her seat, stretching out her legs as the car rumbled through the Irish countryside.

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ Mitch asked. ‘Do you want me to stop the car?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’

  Her legs were aching, but it was a dull, constant ache that she could ignore. Having spent an hour crammed in the aeroplane to Cork, she had stretched and walked as much as she could while waiting for Mitch to sort out arrangements made with a hire car. They were in the middle of nowhere, patches of green, rugged fields surrounding them as they drove out west towards County Kerry. A thick blanket of cloud hung low in the sky and brushed over the tops of the hills.

  They had driven through one village a few miles back; a cluster of houses surrounding a small stretch of high street, but now they were completely alone, without a single building on the landscape. A gentle feeling of lost nostalgia rose inside her; as a child, her mother would march her and her siblings onto the train or a bus, and journey to Kent or Surrey every Saturday, so tha
t they could breathe clean air, admire nature, and feel proud to be English.

  ‘You’ve been to Ireland before, haven’t you?’ she said.

  Mitch nodded. ‘Twice, when I was a kid. We took the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin for a trip. I never understood why we had to cross a sea to see things we could see in Liverpool. My mum just wanted to go to bloody shops.’

  Poppy grinned. ‘That sounds like her.’

  ‘I was eight, though,’ Mitch said. ‘I’d probably appreciate it a bit more now.’

  ‘I quite like the countryside here,’ Poppy said.

  ‘It can’t beat Wales though,’ Mitch said. ‘We could retire somewhere like this, or move into my old mum’s house.’

  ‘God, no,’ Poppy said, ‘not that cottage.’

  ‘It’s been in the family for generations,’ Mitch said.

  ‘I know,’ Poppy said, ‘but we don’t want children, so I don’t see the point in holding onto it. Besides, what if you developed mobility issues as well? We would be fucked if we ever wanted to leave.’

  They drove through another village of brashly painted terraces, dotted by soulless, new homes, which stood out, away from the rest. The rolling hills around them began to fluctuate and peak upwards into clusters of craggy mountains, the clouds catching at their sides as a fog shifted around them.

  ‘I would like to stop hunting after this, though,’ Mitch said after a while, ‘so we can quit while we’re ahead.’

  ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

  ‘We’ll be alive,’ he said, ‘and free. It was fine when we were hunting individuals, then Leah and Khalida joined us and the game grew; we’ll be pushing our luck if we continue on after Rebirth ends. We wouldn’t just be pushing our luck; we’d be pissing on it. I’m not keen on dying a horrible fucking death, and we both know how badly we’d fare in prison. Rebirth ends – game over, we won.’

  ‘Life will be boring,’ she sighed.

  ‘What about work?’ he asked.

  Poppy raised an eyebrow, ‘they mostly stick me behind a desk, and aside from Campbell I’m not that well-liked. I cause far too many awkward conversations and far too much mandatory sensitivity training to be liked there.’

  ‘I know,’ Mitch said, ‘but who knows? Perhaps Rebirth will win, or the fight will be so bloody that by the end of it, all we’ll want to do is to move into the countryside, read books, and garden until we die.’

  ‘And if nothing can stop them,’ Poppy asked, ‘then what?’

  Mitch shrugged. ‘Then, I guess we die.’

  ‘What about the option of killing ourselves?’ Poppy said. ‘Ideally, I would prefer to fight to the death.’

  ‘Yeah, I would, too,’ Mitch said, ‘but that leaves the option of being captured and tortured.’

  ‘In that case, we would definitely kill ourselves before that happened,’ Poppy said.

  ‘Or, we could ask for vampirism,’ Mitch said. ‘Not here, of course, but we could leave the country and find someone else to turn us. We know where to find vampires. I mean, they could just eat us, but it’ll be worth a shot.’

  ‘That’s a risk,’ she mused, smiling.

  ‘Would you do it though,’ Mitch said, ‘would you choose vampirism or death?’

  ‘If I had a choice?’ she said. ‘I’d be a necromancer.’

  ‘Seriously. I’m not joking, here.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if I had a choice, I would want to be turned into a vampire, rather than be killed. I wouldn’t like to lose.’

  ‘We would lose our humanity,’ he said, ‘our empathy.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s hardly like we’re the most empathic people in the first place,’ she said.

  ‘We would be monsters as vampires,’ Mitch grinned.

  ‘We would be,’ Poppy said.

  ‘But we would have greater strength and speed,’ he said, ‘our senses would be heightened, your legs would fully heal, and we could live forever without being faced by moral qualms.’

  Poppy sighed. ‘Or we could be killed as humans, with dignity,’ she said, ‘and come up on the right side of history.’

  ‘Do you think this will escalate?’ Mitch asked. ‘If nothing stops Rebirth, they are still going to take control of a country. There has got to be some pushback.’

  ‘It’ll depend on how Rebirth will frame it,’ she said. She had lied to Khalida and told Paula Stockport the full story, knowing that Paula wouldn’t totally dismiss her. At least the full truth wouldn’t be restricted to just five people. The last she had heard from Paula was that she had tracked down some of the hunters which had scared Intuneric out of America. ‘They’ll have some support regardless of what they do. I’m not sure what their plan is, or how they will implement the takeover of the government, but regimes have had a large base of support before. This country would probably elect a government of vampires if they promised to stop immigration and have the bins collected weekly. Some people will fight back; Khalida will, no doubt, and Leah might.’

  ‘Yes, but they have a healthier grasp on life than we do.’

  ‘That’s not saying much,’ Poppy said. ‘Do you ever feel strange about it? Not being able to connect with most people?’

  ‘I connect with you,’ he said, ‘that’s good enough for me.’

  She smiled. ‘I know, but most people are not compelled to hunt down and kill someone for fun.’

  ‘Most people might,’ Mitch said, ‘if they gave it a go. We’ve been fucking killing each other from the moment we crawled out of the ocean and grew sentience; we’re not the strange ones for enjoying it.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I still think that we’re both missing something from our makeup that separates us from most people, and sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have that.’

  Mitch shrugged as he peered through windscreen at the approaching town. ‘I don’t see the point of worrying about something we can’t fix. We’re meeting the guy’s nephew in the pub, right?’

  ‘Yep,’ she said, opening her handbag to turn on a voice recorder, as they crossed a small, stone bridge over a stream into the village.

  It was an attractive place based at the foot of a mountain, with stone buildings lining the street, window boxes around every window, and flower baskets hanging from lampposts, which were full of flowers. She felt her heart rise with the expectation of the journey ending as she saw the pub on the street, painted fern green. Mitch parked the car a few doors down.

  She picked up her walking stick and got out of the car. The air was cool and damp; she breathed in deeply, tasting the crisp freshness of it, so different to the heavy, stale air of London. Though it was a Saturday, the village high street was a quiet place. A few cars went by, a few people on the streets.

  Mitch opened the door of the pub for her, and she stepped inside. The stillness of the outside was instantly broken; there was a cheerful chatter broken off with laughter coming from all sides. They walked forwards and towards the bar. It was darker inside, with heavy wood-panelled walls, and a gentle smell of smoke from a wood fireplace. Her eyes were instantly drawn to a man sat at the back, who was half turned towards the door, and nodded towards them. He was a tall, heavyset man, approaching middle-age, with a shaggy, ginger beard and receding hairline, a long nose, and keen, close-set, blue eyes under heavy brows.

  ‘Mr Scot Owen?’ he said. ‘And your wife, Mrs Heather Owen?’

  Mitch nodded. ‘That’s us.’

  ‘Welcome to Ireland,’ he grinned, reaching out to shake their hands, his accent thickly layering over every syllable. ‘I’m Flynn McCarthy – we spoke on the phone. Can I get either one of you a drink?’

  Poppy found an empty table towards the back of the pub, while Mitch and McCarthy collected their drinks.

  ‘So,’ McCarthy said, as soon as he sat down, placing an orange juice down in front of her, ‘you want to talk to me about Uncle Rufus now?’

  ‘Father Rufus McCarthy?’ Poppy said.

  ‘Me great-uncle, yes,�
�� McCarthy said, ‘me dad’s uncle. As I said, you’d be better off talking to me first; he’s a hundred-and-two, and probably only really awake for four hours a day. As I understand, you want to span these interviews over a course of two days, right?’

  Poppy nodded. ‘On the phone, you said that he tires easily, so we thought that might be for the best.’

  ‘Seems like a lot of trouble to go to,’ McCarthy said, ‘and he ain’t a priest no more - you knew that, right?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Poppy lied.

  ‘Yeah; he was excommunicated back in the late Sixties,’ McCarthy went on, taking a long drink of beer. ‘I think everyone around here’s forgotten about it though and think he’s just a retired priest. I’m surprised you didn’t know, though, what with you being historians.’

  ‘We’re amateurs,’ Mitch said with a small, apologetic smile, ‘but we think this might be a big find for us.’

  McCarthy gave him a quizzical look. ‘It was exorcisms you were interested in, right?’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  McCarthy shrugged. ‘I’m just surprised you managed to find me uncle without learning about that, but it may have slipped by you, since the country was pretty busy dealing with other things at the time.’

  ‘What happened?’ Poppy asked, leaning forwards slightly.

  ‘Well, he killed a man,’ McCarthy said, ‘plain and simple. In daylight, in the man’s own home. This was when Uncle Rufus was at his parish in Dublin. He went into the man’s home, stabbed him, then walked to a police station to confess everything. People thought he was mad.’

  ‘Did he say why he’d killed him?’ Poppy asked, taking a sip of juice.

  ‘Never fully, only that he had heard something during confessions that had drawn him to do it, but he never said what.’

  ‘Could it have had anything to do with exorcisms?’ she asked.

  ‘It could have had anything to do with anything,’ McCarthy said. ‘Like I said, he never gave a reason as to why he’d stab a perfect stranger. I’d buy you another drink if you got him to tell you, though.’

  ‘What did he use to stab the victim with?’ Mitch asked. ‘Was it made of wood?’