Sanctifying Grace (Resurrection) (28 page)

His eyes bugged, wide and staring, his mouth an open O, the cords on his neck stood out in sharp relief, highlighting the drumming pulse in the artery at the side of his throat. He kicked and squirmed and thrashed and pummelled. But when I opened my mouth wide and he saw the full extent of those incredibly sharp canines, he was suddenly still. I stared into his eyes, fascinated by the abject dread I saw in them, and wished I could tell him he had nothing to fear, that I wouldn’t harm him. But even if I could make him understand, I couldn’t bring myself to say those words. They simply wouldn’t be true.

He whimpered as I stabbed his flesh and went rigid when I took my first delicious mouthful. I suckled like a babe at the breast, slurping and smacking in my enthusiasm, each swallow bringing me closer to delirium. I was ecstatic, purring deep in my throat with a dark delight, blissful, revelling in the taste, the smell, the feel, the sound of his bird-like heartbeat. I had my eyes closed with the rapture of it.

Eventually, I came back to the reality of what I was doing, and this time, it was before I had almost sucked him dry. I could happily drink more, but I wouldn’t. I would let this one live. I retracted my canines and opened my eyes to find his petrified gaze on my face. I smiled reassuringly at him. Bad move. He came to horrified life, his trance-like stillness replaced with a desperate bid for freedom. Scared he would hurt himself, I held him down until sheer exhaustion wore him out.

I could almost see him g
ive up, the acknowledgement he was about to die was written all over his defeated face. I leaned in closer. Time to try something.

I fixed my eyes on his, willing him to fall under my spell.

‘This hasn’t happened,’ I said. ‘I am not real. You’ve had a bad dream. You will go back to your camp, go to sleep, and when you wake up you will have dreamt all this.’

He stared at me in utter incomprehension.

‘Damn it!’ I muttered. No wonder Roman spoke so many languages – he needed to in order to enthral people! This one had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t even know if he could be enthralled or not. I had sensed some kind of connection whilst I was staring into his eyes, but I couldn’t tell if it was the beginnings of enthralling him.

I let him go. I jumped to my feet and stepped away from him. He looked at me for several long seconds, too scared to move, so I melted away through the trees. I heard him scramble unsteadily to his own feet and totter shakily back in the direction of his comrades. I didn’t stay to listen to their reaction. I could guess.

Shelter was of the utmost importance. I needed to find somewhere out of the sun. The sky was overcast, stars blocked by a thick layer of cloud, but I knew not being able to physically see the sun would make no difference. It would still be daylight, even if it was gloomy and cloud-dim, and I would need to hide from it. I knew instinctively that my newly resurrected body would not take kindly to the day. I had difficulty enough satisfying my hunger as it was, without adding daylight into the mix. If I thought I was insatiable now…

I ran, keeping the spines of the Beacons at my back, heading towards Brecon. Brecon meant houses and houses meant indoors.

It was much smaller than I remembered. And the castle had gone. Or not yet been built. A cluster of hovels marked the confluence of the River Honddu and the River Usk. There was a wooden bridge over the Usk, but nothing over the smaller Honddu. I used the bridge, keeping a careful lookout for people. I could smell them and hear them, but couldn’t see anyone.

A young child cried and a mother whispered words of comfort. A dog barked once and a cat
, slinking around a corner, took one look at me and fled.

I didn’t know whether I could rest here. It would be unlikely there would be any empty buildings and I could hardly hide in an occupied one.

I skulked through the village and out the other side. It took seconds. There was nowhere: I searched through my memories, but every place I could think of was modern, or relatively modern, and those buildings simply did not exist at this moment in time. There was no church, no graveyard I could hide in, no castle dungeons, no cellars.

I took a totally un-needed breath and made a decision: it would have to be t
he vegetable patch and hope no one was going to be doing any digging today, except me. I retraced my steps back through the motley selection of huts, found the bed of soft, loamy earth and knelt down before picking up a handful of soil and running it through my fingers. It had been worked to a fine tilth, the young shoots of unidentifiable plants poking through strongly.

I
selected a piece of ground which didn’t look as if it had been planted yet and dug down, using my hands as shovels. It wasn’t a traditional hole. It was more like the sort of excavation a mole might make, and as I dug, the earth filled in around me. At a depth of about four feet I stopped, completely covered. I was so grateful I didn’t need to breathe, yet for all the closeness of the soil around my face, I didn’t feel claustrophobic. I was comfortable and it all felt very familiar, and I got to thinking about whether vampires have instincts (apart from the obvious one), or whether there was some kind of built-in racial memory, because I was pretty certain I was not the first member of the un-dead to resort to wiling away daylight hours under the ground. Perhaps the lack of suitable resting places gave rise to the idea that vampires need to return to their coffins at night, somewhere underground, or the myth that they need to rest in their home soil.

I drifted and the next thing I was aware of was the call of the darkness, swiftly followed by a stabbing pain of acute hunger. I sent my senses out and up, straining to listen for any signs humans were near. I knew it was fully night, in the same way I had known when daytime was approaching, and everything told me it was safe to leave my hidey hole.

I clawed my way to the surface, breaking out through the soil like a zombie in a movie. I shed particles of damp earth as I stood up and shook myself, dog-like, scattering clumps of dirt, hearing them spatter to the ground in a dirty, solid rain.

I sniffed the air and the smells of cooking and animals wafted up my nose. And the smell of humans, close by. Food. Once more, my canines extended and I shivered at the almost erotic feel as they brushed my bottom lip. I licked their pointed ends, enjoying the sensation of soft flesh against dagger edges, imagining them sinking into a tender throat, shivering with longing.

I crept towards the nearest dwelling
, searching for the one least occupied, finding it at the furthest end of the village; one adult and a tiny child, if their heartbeats spoke true.

There was no door, merely a piece of boiled leather which hung across the entrance. I pushed it aside and slipped into the darkness. Both occupants were asleep. If it was April, as it had been in my time, then night fell at around nine pm and I guessed it was probably later than that. With little in the way of light and only candles to illuminate the dark, there wasn’t much reason for these people to stay awake after sun down. I bet they rose with the sun, too.

I hesitated, natural caution combined with a worry as to how to proceed, stayed my hand. Or should I say, fangs?

The situation couldn’t last – I was far too hungry. I hovered over her
and then lunged, one hand cutting off her air supply. Her eyes opened in shock and I stared into them, willing her to be enthralled, but it was no use. I was debating whether to hit her, when she fainted, solving my problem. Temporarily, at least.

Hurriedly, I drank as much as I dared, the thirst not slaked, only held at bay, but it was enough for now. I left the child unmolested. I grabbed a skirt and shawl, dressing as fast as I could. Still uncertain of my strength and whether I could fight my way free if the whole village were alerted, and not wanting to draw undue attention to myself, I fled as soon as I finished, leaving the huddle of houses behind. I had no idea where I was going and I had no destination in mind. All I knew was
that I couldn’t stay there. I needed to keep moving.

So far
, I wasn’t too enamoured with being a vampire. I was hungry all the time, I had slept in the dirt, I had no proper clothes to wear, only the rags I had stolen, and I had nowhere I could call home. This was not how I had envisaged things.

I headed west, for no other reason than that was where I was pointing when I left the village. It was as good a direction as any.

The road was a decent one, paved and straight. I briefly considered the need to leave the highways and travel overland, but I dismissed the thought: I could hear and see everyone way before they could see me and roads had to lead somewhere. Roads meant people at some point along them.

I had travelled maybe two miles when I smelt smoke, and a further mile revealed a stone building and the even stronger scent of many humans in the same place. My mouth watered.

I moved closer, using the sparse bushes for cover, even though I knew there was no chance of anyone spotting me. It just seemed the right thing to do.

I had no intention of entering the building, so I settled down to wait for someone to come out. But again, I had that same problem of how to feed without having to incapacitate or even kill the human, and if I left him or her alive
, they would be free to raise the alarm. I had made that very mistake three times already. Whether anyone would believe their story of being attacked by a blood sucking vampire was another thing entirely, but if enough attacks happened, then people would start thinking there was no smoke without a fire. I didn’t believe word of my presence could travel that swiftly, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

I circled the walls, impatient and growing ever-more hungry, pacing a path about a hundred feet out. There was a ditch between me and the stonework, over twenty feet wide and filled with water; no barrier to me, but difficult for an attacking force to cross. The building itself was impressive and substantial: rectangular in shape, with turrets at each corner and a door set in each of the sides. It reminded me of one of those play forts Ianto had as a child. I couldn’t even begin to guess who lived there, or why they felt the need for such defences. When I reached the north side of the fort
, I paused. In front of me was a settlement, a collection of houses, workshops, and stables. This was more to my taste. I could enter all of those homes with ease.

A large house caught my eye, set off to the side; stone built with a tiled roof and verandas, it was low and spreading – a wealthy man’s house. It was also walled, but not very high. Unlike the homes in the rest of the settlement, this one was big enough for its inhabitants to have their own bedrooms. I might find someone sleeping alone. I could tie them up and gag them after I had fed … Or wouldn’t it be simpler just to kill them?

I mentally shook myself: that was the vampire in me raising its head again. The hunger, although not as acute as when I had first awoken, was still deeply unpleasant.

I scaled the wall, soft and sure footed, the shawl billowing out behind me as I dropped to the ground on the other side. I scented the air and list
ened, but there was nothing to concern me. People were abed and sleeping, as they should be in the middle of the night. A solitary candle burned in one of the downstairs rooms; other than that, everything was in darkness. There was no moon to illuminate me and the stars were obscured by bands of cloud scudding across the sky. A perfect night for a predator. A perfect night for hunting.

I pried open a shuttered window (real glass?) and flowed up and over the sill, every movement water-smooth. I wondered absently if I was now as graceful as Roman. Then I wondered where Roman was. He had always found me within a very short time of my arr
ival, which led me to think I must be having a dream, albeit a very concise and logical one. Any other explanation didn’t bear thinking about.

I glided through the rooms silent and wraith-like, heartbeats drawing me onwards. The sleeping quarters were to the back of the house. It was built around an open courtyard, Mediterranean style with a well at its centre and herbs in flowerbeds perfuming the night air. Keeping to the walls, I skirted the courtyard, enticed by the scent of humans. I guessed there were at least five, clustered together ahead of me to my left, but there were more beyond that and it was to these I headed. Of the five, two were children: I could tell by the speed of their pulse and I didn’t want to risk waking them. A squalling kid could raise the whole village!

This was servants quarters, meaner and smaller than the rooms in the main house, but stocked with food. The human kind. I entered the first bedroom I came to, hit the man over his sleeping head and sank my teeth into his neck.

Again, I probably drank more of his blood than was healthy for him, but his pulse was strong, if a little fast, and he was in his prime and healthy. He would recover.

Pleased, I decided to repeat this method until I had taken my fill. It would be a while before any one woke up, and I would be long gone. I apologised mentally to Roman and Viktor for leaving a tell-tale trail of vampire clues behind me, but with no way of enthralling anyone and needing so desperately to feed, I felt I had no option. And a lump on the head would be less a cause for concern for the locals than a swathe of dead bodies.

See? I had compassion.

I worked my way through every servant in the mansion. Even where there were two to a room. Hit one, then the other, then feed from both. Simple.