Maybe this is a consoling story when you’re at home with a book or reading it off your combox screen: the idea that there are that many fewer vampires in the world, that they had done each other in while we humans cowered safely behind closed doors with a hell of a lot of wards nailed over them. (If you find yourself so unlucky as to be living somewhere there is a sucker gang war going on, you pin a lot of wards around your house, and you do not go out after dark or before dawn for any reason.) I didn’t know what a vampire running amok looked like, but it might have looked like Con. It wasn’t just…it wasn’t…Look, if you ever have the opportunity to choose between being eaten by a tiger and bitten by an enraged vampire, take the tiger.
I was probably off in my feeble little human she’s-in-shock-wrap-her-in-a-blanket-and-get-out-the-whisky space. Humans don’t deal with extreme situations very well. Our pathetic bodies freak out. We freeze, and our blood pressure falls, and we can’t think, and all that. I stood there, staring, while Con snarled and showed me his teeth, and didn’t offer me the blanket or the whisky or the hot sweet tea. Then—maybe he remembered I was his ally, maybe he’d remembered that but had momentarily forgotten, seeing me as soaked in blood and sprinkled with the remains of a mutilated enemy as he, that I was a mere human. Maybe the snarl was the vampire equivalent of “Hot damn! Well done!”
Whatever. He stopped snarling, and…drew his face together. When he seized my slimy hand and pulled me along after him again I didn’t gibber, I didn’t collapse, and I didn’t throw up. I stuffed my knife back into my pocket, and went.
I wish I could forget how it feels, your hair stuck to your skull with blood, foul blood running gummily down inside your clothes, invading your privacy, your decency, your humanity, till it chafes you with every breath, every movement, the tug of it as it dries on your skin feeling like some kind of snare. Blood in your mouth, that you cannot spit the vile taste of away. I think I must have gone into some kind of berserker fury myself. There are things you don’t want to know you can do, aren’t there? But if you’re lucky you never find them out. I found out too many of them, all at once. I, who had to leave the kitchen at Charlie’s when they were whacking up meat into joints or putting slabs of drippy pulpy maroony-red stuff through the grinder.
Blood stings when it gets in your eyes. And it’s viscous, so it’s hard to blink out again. It may not only be because the blood stings that you’re weeping.
I have always been afraid of more things than I can remember at one time. Mom, when I was younger, and still admitted to some of them, said that it was the price of having a good imagination, and suggested I stop reading the Blood Lore series (which was past thirty volumes even then) and maybe retiring Immortal Death and Below Hell Keep from the top bookshelf for a while. I didn’t, but it wouldn’t have done any good if I had. Reading scary books is weirdly reassuring, most of the time: it means at least one other person—the author— has imagined things as awful as you have. What’s bad is when the author comes up with stuff you hadn’t thought of yet.
I’d thought it was bad when I was just reading stuff I hadn’t thought of.
And even then I’d known that sometimes it’s worse when the author leaves it to your imagination.
I stopped using my knife. I found out I didn’t have to. I found out I could do it with my hands.
It was still mostly Con, that we got through. Even warded up the wazoo and covered in bright gold cobweb I was still only human. I was still slower and weaker than any vampire. But I had Con. And I was warded and webbed, and the vampires didn’t like tangling with me. They kept choosing to tangle with Con, even though they could see—graphically—what had happened to the last vampire or twelve or twenty-seven or four thousand and eight vampires that had tangled with Con. If we ever got to the end of all this, ha ha and so on, and wanted to find our way back out of the maze, it wasn’t a thread we would have to follow but a path paved with undead body parts.
Maybe they thought they’d wear him out or something.
I still got a few. You’d think offing a few vampires would feel like doing a community service, wouldn’t you? It doesn’t. Not even when they don’t explode. That’s why I started doing it with my hands. They didn’t explode, I discovered, if I merely jammed my fingers in under their breastbones and pulled.
My vampire affinity.
I lost track. There was gore and gruesomeness and then more of it and I hated all of it, and was ready to be killed, just to get away from it, if someone would promise me, cross their heart and hope to die, very very funny, that I wouldn’t rise again. In any semblance. I still wasn’t sure about the mechanics of turning and it seemed to me that dying in the present circumstances probably wasn’t the best recipe for staying quietly in my grave afterward. Supposing someone found enough of me to bury.
I would have liked to give up. I meant to give up. But I couldn’t. Like I couldn’t stay at home and hide under the bed, I guess. Maybe it was promising Con to stick around as long as I could. Stick seemed the right verb under the circumstances. Every time I lifted one of my blood-clotted shoes there was a sticky, ripping noise.
And then everything went quiet, at least except for the noise I was making. Mostly it was just breathing. Maybe bleating a little.
One of the things that had happened during the business of savaging our way through Bo’s army was that I’d begun to know where Con was, like I knew where my right hand or my left leg was. It was a bit like unwrapping something from swathes of tissue paper, or following an idea through its development to a conclusion. You have an inkling of something, some shape or concept, and it gets clearer and stronger till you know what it is. It happened while the occasional shrieks and dead-flesh noises went on, all those near-misses with my own death. I understood that I was crazy, crazy to be still alive, crazy to be doing what I was doing to stay alive, crazy to be trying to stay alive. This knowingness about Con was a strange island in a strange ocean.
That sense of Con’s presence, of his precise location, had undoubtedly saved my life several times in the carnage, if it hadn’t done much for my sanity. But it meant that when things suddenly went quiet and I felt someone—some vampire—coming noiselessly up behind me, I knew it was Con.
Well well, said a silent voice from an invisible speaker. This meeting has heen much more amusing than I anticipated.
I didn’t have to hear Con snort. He didn’t, of course. Vampires don’t snort, even with derision. But I knew as Con knew that the voice was lying when it said amusing.
I also knew who this was. Bo. Mr. Beauregard. The fellow who had got us in all this. The fellow we were here to have the final meeting with. Him or us. I was pretty sure things had only started to get amusing, even if they hadn’t gone quite as Bo had expected so far. And while I knew vampires didn’t get tired, exactly, I knew that they could come to the end of their strength. I’d seen Con coming to the end of his, out at the lake. I didn’t know how one evening of tearing up your fellow vampires limb from limb matched against having been chained to the wall of a house with a ward sign eating into your ankle and the sun creeping after you through the windows every day, day after day, but I doubted Con was feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now. I sure wasn’t. I was missing my nice sympathetic human emergency room tech saying, “There’s nothing really wrong with you, we’re giving you a sedative and you can go home.” I was also so tired that the weirdness of my dark vision was starting to bother me again, like new shoes that aren’t quite broken in yet that you’ve been wearing too long. I couldn’t tell how much of what I seemed to be seeing was happening, and how much of it was my overstressed brain playing tricks on my eyes.