The Heads That Rolled

by Lucille Moncrief

  He lifted his hand, slowly, reaching for her.

  Hope stirred within her breast.

  At first, she hesitated—those claws!—but if she could have one more tender touch from the boy she’d suckled to her warm breast, lovingly feeding him from her own body when such a thing was reserved for the wet nurses of the aristocracy, she could die happy.

  She lifted her hand, and it was steady as her finger curled, nearly touching the pointed tip of his claw. Silence filled the room, and then she whispered his name, “Sebastien.”

  He leapt with nary a sound, her yelp muffled and cut short as his claws tore into her neck. He was a devil; he was a fiend; he was a wolf and a witch . . . dhamphyr, the cursed halfling. Daywalker.

  She was Christmas morning. She was the taste of heaven on earth. She was melted snow on the parched tongue of the desert sand. The fill of her blood, the dance of it on his tongue was like finally finding the right size shoes after wearing ones that were far too tight for his entire life. The blisters healed. The constriction on his being faded, to nothing. Her screams became silence in his head until there was only she, slack within his murderous arms. Weak—limp as wet straw. The mews of a newborn lamb were louder than the fading of her heartbeat in his transformed ear.

  He could hear it all, hear everything within the house, even his father’s shallow breath on the other side of the locked door. Sebastien sensed dozens of heavy boots, and the zing of the sword loosed from its scabbard upon the main stairs mere metres from his terrible crime.

  Oh, what was he? What was she? He wondered as the starbursts behind his eyes disappeared, and her body, lifeless, drained, fell to the parquet floor.

  He stared at her, with her hair come undone from her crown. Her face was hidden behind the dark locks, for she was a stranger now.

  Fingertips tingling with the coming storm in his head, a flash of lightning struck his hazy consciousness. His mother was dead, and he’d killed her.

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry, but the sound that erupted from his mouth was something else entirely. There was no name for it as her body whispered its goodbye, and the shell of her form folded into itself.

  Sebastien grasped for her, with his hands resembling some beast’s, and as the earth swallowed his mother whole, she was no more as he screamed.

  The door burst open, and he felt his fangs and his claws shrink, disappearing as his terror, disgust, and father took centre stage in the play of his baggage which would reverberate throughout the centuries.

  Pierre strode into the dining hall, his face twisted into a sneer. Red splotches peppered his countenance.

  Sebastien wanted to vomit, but Lorrette’s warm, delicious blood swirled within his core, finally at home. He hugged himself. He would hold her to him, steadfast. Her blood was the only thing left of her, and he would never let it disappear into the earth again.

  “She was a whore. And a witch. And a liar,” Pierre said.

  Sebastien almost choked on his breath.

  “But . . .” Pierre shrugged, a smirk playing on his lips. “All women are whores. And most of them lie as well.”

  A mob spilled within the room—the sans-culottes, their faded, woollen nightcaps askew, and their eyes glazed over with drink. They held spears, and pistols, and pitchforks, and all manner of sharp and malignant things.

  Sebastien’s veins seemed to collapse, and he was more afraid than ever before. He couldn’t die. If he died, what would become of her? A terror eclipsed his every thought, move, and breath as the mob grabbed him by the arms and dragged him from the room.

  “What are we?” he pleaded to know as they dragged him away from the only home he’d ever known. He fought them, stronger than he’d ever felt, and kept them from entirely getting him out into the hall.

  Pierre shook his head. “You’ve no idea how much I’ve suffered for you and that liar. What’s it like to live a lie, Sebastien, hm? My pain is now yours. You’re the witch’s and the devil’s son.”

  Sebastien looked at the man he’d called father. Every time he’d said it, that name, title, the denotation of authority, was like cutting wood against the grain. It was as if even the marrow in his bones and the tiny muscles of his tongue and lips knew the saying of the word was a lie. He was finally meeting his father, seeing him for the very first time, and he was a hideous creature, just like him. The sans-culottes took him away to prison.

  VI

  The ermine, Lucius Marquis, dashed along the twisted, stone staircase inside the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The air was humid and dank, settling into his fur which now had a heaviness to it to rival the atmosphere of the prison. Footsteps sounded from the landing above the ermine’s head, and he stopped, pressing himself against a riser, and held his breath as a pair of sans-culottes stepped over his head and continued their way down the staircase. The ermine’s whiskers twitched as the light from their torches, and their earnest whispers faded and dimmed as they descended. He was alone once again. Along with the scent of mold, damp, and panic, the air was laced with the smell only peculiar to that one creature the ermine so feared—the halfling dhamphyr.

  A sting of blood-red tears threatened to spill from the ermine’s beady eyes. That ignorant, infuriating Quartermayns and his father had got the ermine’s beloved mademoiselle killed. He knew he should have taken her away, made her his undead bride. He would hate himself for centuries for hesitating.

  He’d witnessed, with a sting in his breast and a burn to his skin as the sun rose high in the sky, her execution that morning. Heaviness filled his bones as the blade sang down upon her neck, and her spirit departed from this realm. As her head rolled into the cabbage basket, Lucius had fallen to his knees in the alleyway next to the Place de la Revolution and had roared along with the crowd. Such mindless, peasant lemmings.

  He shook his head as a trace of bitterness encapsulated his dead spirit. It took root deep inside of him. The gnarled, twisted roots of his acrimony strangled the last hill on which his humanity had gone to seed. His poor Therese. She had been so young. The ermine licked his chops, which still held the taste of the elder Quartermayns’ portly, unhealthy blood. A shudder shook the ermine’s delicate frame as he remembered the savour of that traitorous decrier. In his form as the lowly noble Lucius, the ermine could taste a man’s character. And Pierre Francois had been a pious coward through and through.

  On the dark stairs of the humid, rank abbey prison, the ermine held back a gag at the memory of Pierre’s blood, tasting like the fatty gristle of pork tenderloin, but lacking any richness. Draining him had been like drinking week-old scullery grease. Worse was the sound his body had made when it hit the floor—a gelatinous, squishy thud. When the elder draper had taken his last breaths, the sight of Therese Bellinger’s fearful look on the executioner’s scaffolding from earlier that morning flashed behind Lucius’s red eyes. He’d given a swift kick of his boot to Pierre’s ribs, and the man’s last breath escaped him like the sound from a dry-rotted billow.

  The ermine hurried down the stairs as the sickly smell of the vampire half-breed grew stronger. While the ermine’s possessive, competitive spirit had taken a massive blow at that morning’s execution, the joy of breaking the news of Mademoiselle’s death and blaming it solely on the half-breed gave life to his cold veins. He finally reached the end of the staircase with a bounce in his paws.

  Now that the half-breed was doomed to live a long and healthy life, the ermine was struck with glee. The thought of Sebastien’s guilt being his most faithful companion throughout the coming centuries would be a sorry treat to behold. The ermine vowed, there at the foot of the crumbling abbey staircase, that he would haunt the son of the draper. He would be the ghost of their Therese, the whisper of their doomed affair for many years to come. It was the least he could do to repay Sebastien for her death. The ermine’s whiskers and glistening, black nose flickered with devilish mischief.

  Cries of despair, and the smell of fetid, gangrenous rot assailed his sensi
tive snout. He stopped, steeling himself, before deigning to find the halfling creature and appear to him. He kept close to the weeping stone walls. Although he was confident that the draper’s son was ignorant of his power, fear and self-preservation still reverberated throughout the ermine’s bones. He stopped and waited, listening for the sound of the guards, before rushing down the dank, subterranean hallway again.

  Tiny, cramped cells flanked either side of the corridor, and they were full of prisoners. Some were asleep on rank mounds of straw, others leaned against the slick, moss-covered walls, waiting. A few lay curled into fetal balls and wracked with sobs. The ermine was sure that some were dead as he rounded a sharp bend in the veins of the abbey. The smell of the halfling assailed him, and he stopped short, looking to his right. There, at the back of a small cell, lying on his stomach and as still as a corpse, was the newborn dhamphyr.

  The ermine’s nose twitched, and his nostrils flared. Rage overcame his tiny frame, and he unwittingly began to transmogrify. Before the change could reach completion, he quickly slipped through the narrow iron bars, slick with damp, as his bones started to crackle and sizzle, lengthening into a man’s. And yet, the dhamphyr did not stir despite the racket of the ermine’s transformation.

  Lucius, as he grew to his humanoid height and undead form, was perplexed. Had the dhamphyr been drugged? Was he dead already? Disappointment niggled the vampire. His neck snapped, and he arched his back as the change completed and claws adorned his fingertips. His fangs snapped forth, and the musty, humid air of the prison caressed his ice-cold, naked flesh.

  Sebastien Quartermayns remained still upon the cell’s frigid, wet stone floor. He sensed a presence behind him, and it was full of malignance. In his apathy and grief, he hoped it was the sans-culottes come to finish him off. A deadly breeze whispered in his ear, “She is dead.”

  Sebastien knew, with an abject sadness and fury, that his mother was gone. He flipped over onto his back with a clenched fist and threw a punch at whomever had come to taunt him. But he stopped short, his breath leaving his lungs, at the sight of a naked, fanged Lucius Tristan Marquis in front of him. He scurried to his feet. His eyes widened as he stumbled to the edge of the cell until his back hit the wall. Dizziness struck him, for he hadn’t eaten in days, and the only thing to quench his ever-burgeoning thirst had been a trickle of fetid water, which never ceased its drizzle down the abbey walls. Sebastien fell to his knees as stars danced across his vision in the dim prison cell. Glancing up at the creature, Sebastien was filled with a sense of wonder, dread, and destiny.

  Lucius took a few steps closer and leaned down, his icy breath fanning the dhamphyr’s pale, gaunt, and sickly-looking face. Courage seized him; the dhamphyr was far too weak from grief and a lack of sustenance to best him in a struggle.

  Excitement caressed the vampire from the inside out at the prospect of adding to Sebastien’s misery with news of Therese’s execution. Lucius almost laughed at the thought of telling her demise to his undying enemy. The corner of his mouth twitched, pulled by the string of his glee, and he began to quirk an eyebrow and gain a slight twinkle to his blue eyes. He grinned wide, his pearly fangs agleam, as Sebastien cowered against the wall. But the vampire’s mirth was quickly suppressed by the sounds of a gathering crowd on the ground above.

  A melting pot of voices, shouts, commands, and whoops of drunken rabble seasoned the fetid air. The stomp of boots, the cracking discharge of flintlock, and the twisting of the scabbard reached the two creatures’ inhuman ears. They glanced up quickly to the ceiling as the rafters bounced from the massive, burgeoning mob.

  “What are you, Lucius Marquis?” Sebastien asked. His throat was dry, and his voice was raspy.

  Lucius cocked his head, and his eyes narrowed at his foreordained enemy, assigned to him from time’s primordia.

  “We are two sides of the same moon. And you’re the dark side.”

  Something moved within Sebastien. He’d been resigned to death in the dark confines of the abbey. For hours he’d pondered what creature he was, for no one could tell him. Who was he, and what was he, if not the draper’s son from Montmartre? The uncertainty and the guilt of his mother’s death, the absolute hopelessness and mystery of it all made him long for the peace of the guillotine. Now that someone or something with answers had appeared, his energy became renewed. His mind turned. Before he could speak, Lucius continued.

  “You are the unfortunate outcome of an unnatural coupling. Your mother, a witch, and your father, a vampire.”

  Sebastien tensed, and his jaw ticked. His temples suddenly ached. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.

  Lucius smirked. “No, not Pierre. He was not your father. Surely you knew.” Lucius feigned an air of shock and concern, peppering his voice with rich, sarcastic tones. “You should be grateful he is not your father. That man had a horrible character.” Leaning down, with his icy breath fanning Sebastien’s face, Lucius whispered, “And he tasted as wretched as his bleak, wormlike thoughts.”

  Sebastien swallowed hard, and his terror grew.

  Lucius straightened. “Your bastard kind is evil. You’ve murdered countless, untold numbers of my people for centuries.”

  Sebastien shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, but you will. I am a vampire. The undead. I was promised life eternal. But you and your disgusting alien brethren have been stealing what is rightfully ours. If you were anyone else, I’d finished you off now.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Because there are worse things than death. Your thoughts will be with you for many centuries, dhamphyr, for you are half immortal now.”

  “Why are you here, to taunt me?”

  “I came to tell you of my unimaginable pain.”

  “What do you know of pain?” Sebastien said with a grimace.

  With a quick flick of his hand, Lucius sliced Sebastien with his sharp, black fingernail across the cheekbone. “You’re still such an adolescent. Green, and full of the empty angst of youth!”

  The cut bled black as tar. Sebastien made no move to wipe it away or to retaliate. But the stirring within him began to crest a strange peak. His soul felt like the glowing coals of a long-burning fire.

  Lucius could sense a foreboding change in the air, and he took a step back as his smirk faltered.

  Sebastien ran a mud-caked hand through his lank, filthy hair as his cheek began to stitch itself back together slowly. “I always sensed you were something inhuman, Lucius Marquis.”

  “Ah. And what was it that gave it away?” Lucius asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

  Sebastien looked up at him, and even in the dimly lit prison cell, Lucius could see that his eyes had turned an even darker shade of blue. They yawned like a deep, echoing cave. A shiver of fear crested over Lucius, eclipsing his grief and his slowly ebbing delight.

  Sebastien stood. His dirty boots scraped against the rough floor of the cell. He was taller than Lucius, whose fear began to grow. But, the vampire gritted his sharpened teeth, determined to show a face of steely-eyed courage and disdain for the filthy, ignorant half-breed who’d rendered his mademoiselle cold and dead in a traitors’ mass grave. He shuddered to think of her beautiful body rotting away beneath hundreds of peasant corpses.

  Sebastien towered over Lucius, and his strength began to renew. The feeling which overcame him was otherworldly and reminiscent of a justice which longed to be served. He’d only felt this way once before as a small child.

  He’d been out in the cold, on a bleak midwinter night to escape his father’s wrath. For what, he’d long since forgotten. The snow had swirled in thick sheets around him, and his bones rattled from the frigid air. But it was the warm, encompassing embrace of the fire’s heat when he finally returned to the house and stepped over the threshold that he remembered throughout the years. The feeling was a comfort and a relief that he’d been unable to replicate since. What he felt as he towered over the strange creature in the deep bowe
ls of the abbey prison was like coming home, into the light and warmth of a welcoming fire.

  Sebastien spoke, “It was your eyes. They were unnatural.” He took a step towards Lucius, who instinctively cowered.

  “And the way you smelled.” Sebastien cringed. “Like something cold, sterile, with the life pressed from it.” He reached for the vampire, to put a hand around his reedy neck.

  Lucius dodged, tripping over a pile of hay. He scrambled to stand and get away from the advancing dhamphyr, who seemed to grow taller, meaner, stronger.

  “I’ve always wanted to kill you and couldn’t understand why,” Sebastien growled, lunging for Lucius. His talons began to grow, and so did his fangs.

  Lucius jumped away to the opposite side of the cell until his back was against the bars, and he played his trump card to slow the dhamphyr’s advance. “Therese is dead.”

  Sebastien stopped and straightened. His hands dropped to his side. Shouts sounded throughout the abbey, and footsteps pounded down the halls. Lucius could feel the captives in the adjacent cells stir even as the atmosphere in theirs grew suddenly still.

  The air left Sebastien’s lungs as if the cruel Lucius had punched him in the sensitive space right below his rib cage. Sebastien doubled over for one moment before gritting his teeth and straightening. He reached for Lucius, scratching his upper arm. Blue blood trickled down the vampire’s elbow as he dashed about the cell, parrying Sebastien’s blows. The commotion in the abbey grew, for an advancing mob of sans-culottes had breached the prison’s guards.

  Lucius knew he was hardly a physical match for the dhamphyr, but his words were sharper than swords. “The draper had her killed. It was the man you’d called ‘father’ who turned her into the Jacobins.” Lucius shouted as Sebastien landed a blow to his shoulder. The vampire fell against the slippery, mildewy wall of the cell and saw stars. He laughed despite the throbbing haze inside of his head, infuriating Sebastien further.