Night Falls on a Fairy Tale

Welcome!

2006-04-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this novel's fourth draft here as I write it, with print publication as the goal.

I invite you to read it, hope you enjoy it, and welcome all feedback!

Prologue: Christmas Eve

2006-04-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

London, 196-

"Uncle Ned's here!" Henry called. He turned back to the window, with its picture-frame of frost. He pressed his nose to the glass, and cupped his hands around his eyes. The pane fogged. He rubbed it clear. He held his breath, and peered into the snowy night.

The van stopped under a street lamp.

Henry smiled when he saw the red letters on the side: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP.

Uncle Ned got out. Running up the walk, he seemed dark and skinny. When Mum opened the door for him and he stepped inside, though, he was tall and smiling, wreathed in bright light. He shook snow out of his brown hair. He smoothed it from his beard. He stamped it off his boots. A dusting of flakes melted into dew all over his caramel leather jacket, tan turtleneck, and brown corduroy trousers.

Henry ran to him, squeezing between Mum and Dad. "Presents!"

"Henry!" Mum grabbed him by the arm. "I'm sorry. He's just excited."

Uncle Ned laughed. "Of course. 'tis the night before Christmas."

Henry frowned, partly because Mum shook him, but mostly because Uncle Ned only brought in a bottle of wine.

Uncle Ned knelt, face-to-face. "Don't worry. There are presents, all right. Yours is special. Big."

"What is it?"

"Henry!" Mum repeated.

But Uncle Ned laughed again. "You want to know? Well, it's a--dollhouse!"

Henry stared at him, too stunned to say anything.

Uncle Ned winked.

"No it's not!" Henry said.

"You won't get any presents at all," Mum said, "if you keep on like that."

"You don't want a dollhouse?" Uncle Ned teased.

Henry pulled a sour face and shook his head.

"We'll see about that. But in the meantime, here's something I know you'll like." Uncle Ned reached into his jacket, and pulled out a brand new horror comic.

"Vault of Dracula!" Henry accepted it with reverence. On the cover, Dracula wrestled a werewolf in a graveyard. A dead lady, almost naked, lay between them on the ground. Blood ran from her throat. The black outline of a castle loomed on a mountain in the background. "ALONG CAME A WEREWOLF!" was the caption in screaming yellow letters.

"Ugh!" Mum said. "Really, Ned, please, no more." She turned to Dad. "And you--allowing him to watch those horrid Hammer films. It's a bit much, don't you think? Filling his mind with all this ghoulish depravity." She turned again on Uncle Ned. "I mean, look at that picture. What's a boy his age supposed to make of that?"

"Oh Mum," Henry said. "it's just imaginary."

"It's revolting, is what it is. Perfectly revolting. You should fill your mind with nicer things. I hope this present isn't anything more to do with monsters."

Uncle Ned grinned. "It's a dollhouse."

"Stop saying that!" Henry said.

"All right, all right," Mum said. "Put the comic away. It's time to eat."

#

After supper, which they took in the kitchen, Henry wondered if the grownups would ever stop talking. They just sat around the table, and drank and smoked and talked.

Maggie, his little sister, finally got so restless in her high chair that they had to do something. So they moved to the lounge, where she could crawl about on the carpet.

Henry sighed, "Thank you!" The lounge was certainly a step in the right direction, a cozy room where warmth glowed from the electric fireplace. In one corner stood the telly, and across from it, the Christmas tree, with presents piled underneath. He couldn't touch those presents till morning--but he always opened Uncle Ned's on Christmas Eve.

Mum plugged in the lights. They winked all around the tree in red, green, orange, blue, pink, white, and yellow.

"Is it time for presents yet?" Henry asked.

Dad made his cross face. His eyes got big behind his thick-framed glasses. His frown made his chin all bumpy. "We'll tell you when. Not another peep about it, or you're going to your room."

Henry slunk off to a corner to read Vault of Dracula.

Dad put a record on. He plopped down beside Mum on the couch. Uncle Ned slouched in the armchair. They sat around and drank and smoked and talked some more.

Henry sniffled, but kept it quiet, to himself. He was careful not to let tears drip onto the pages of the comic. It wasn't fair for Mum and Dad to shake him and scold him just because he was excited. How could they blame him? Uncle Ned owned the Magic Toyshop, and always brought the best presents.

Last Christmas, Henry got a figure of the Frankenstein Monster, the one from the old black-and-white movies. The last time he visited the shop, he spotted a matching Wolf Man figure. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was one of his favorite movies, so it only seemed right that he should have both. How many times did he mention how much he loved that movie? He wondered if it was enough. He wondered if Uncle Ned got the hint, and regretted that he hadn't made it clearer what he wanted. Uncle Ned said his present this year was "special" and "big." Henry tried to weigh in his mind whether those words might apply to the Wolf Man figure.

Finally, finally, finally, Uncle Ned stretched, looked at his watch, and said, "I think it's time to see about some presents."

#

Still without a present, Henry waited in the nursery with Mum and Maggie.

Dad and Uncle Ned clunked around somewhere in the house.

Henry heard their voices, and strained to listen.

Dad said, "I suppose his room is the only place for it."

Henry was too uptight by now to concentrate on the comic, so he squeezed himself into a rocking chair that really was too small for him, and anxiously rocked back and forth.

"Careful, you'll tip over," Mum said. She held Maggie on her lap. She'd brought up a plate of iced gingerbread men. She waggled one in front of Maggie and chanted, "Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"

Maggie laughed. She cooed and grabbed at the biscuit. Mum let her catch it. "Wouldn't you like one, Henry?" He shook his head. He ate liquorice instead. Uncle Ned always kept a jar of it by the register. To Henry, liquorice was the flavor of the toyshop, of toys, of presents.

There was more clunking around in the house, more footsteps on stairs, more opening and closing of doors, but then, after a period of time that seemed longer than forever, the nursery door opened, and Uncle Ned looked in.

"Oh Maggie, have I got a present for you!"

"Ooh," Mum said, clapping Maggie's hands. "A present! For you!"

Henry stewed in the rocking chair while Mum and Maggie ripped the ribbon and paper off a box. Mum opened it, and lifted out a plush stuffed velveteen frog with a tiny golden crown.

"Look at that!" Mum said. "Ned, it's beautiful."

Maggie squealed. She snatched it and swung it up and down, hitting Mum once in the face.

Uncle Ned smirked. "All right, Henry, are you ready for that dollhouse?"

Henry's stomach sank. He couldn't believe that Uncle Ned would give him a--he couldn't even bring himself to think the word.

"Come along, then." Uncle Ned motioned for him to follow.

"Go on," Dad said. "This is it. Present time."

Henry followed Uncle Ned to his own bedroom door, which was closed. He clutched the horror comic, and reminded himself that at least he got one good thing tonight.

"This may be the best present I ever give you, Henry. There's not another like it in the world."

Henry took a deep breath. He twisted the knob and pushed.

Something dark and enormous dwarfed everything in his room. He stepped closer. It towered over him. With a shock, he recognized it as a snow-covered castle, on a base fashioned after a bleak mountain crag. A forest of briars sprouted from the base and twisted all over and around the castle, hiding it almost entirely from view.

Henry looked for a gap, for a way through to touch the castle, or even just to see it better. The briars seemed to bristle at the attention. They seemed to turn their long, wicked thorns at him.

From what he could make out through the forbidding veil, he'd never seen a gloomier, more terrifying castle. He held up Vault of Dracula. The castle on the cover had been drawn to look spooky, but it was a cute, silly cartoon compared to this thing looming over him.

Uncle Ned walked up behind him. "So, not bad for a dollhouse, eh?"

Henry couldn't take his eyes off it. He didn't say anything, because what could he say?

"Um, if you don't like it, I'll trade you for the Wolf Man. I know that's what you wanted, and I brought it, just in case."

Henry shook his head.

Dad and Mum came and stood in the doorway.

Mum made a spitting noise of disapproval. "No. It can't stay there. Not in his bedroom. It'll give him nightmares!"

"Where else could we put it?" Dad said. "Not the nursery."

"I'll find a place. But it won't stay there." Mum stalked away.

"Here," Uncle Ned said. "Let's have a better look." He gripped Henry by the waist, and held him up so he could see the castle from above.

Henry peered down through the canopy of briars. Parts of the castle had fallen into ruin, and other parts were smashed as if some battle had raged there. Gruesome red splatters stained the snow in places.

"All right, then." Uncle Ned set him down.

Something shiny gleamed from the base. Henry knelt to examine it. He found a brass plate, riveted into the mountain. He tried to read the engraving, but the words shimmered and swam in the reflected light. They suddenly became distinct, and snapped into clarity for him: SLEEPING BEAUTY.

Henry shivered. The words, oddly, made the castle even scarier.

He pointed at the plate and looked to Uncle Ned. "Why did they call it that?"

"Sleeping Beauty is asleep in there somewhere."

Henry looked back at the castle. He furrowed his brow.

"I mean, not literally," Uncle Ned said. "You're supposed to imagine her in there."

"Hollow inside, I'm sure." Dad stepped closer. "Amazing craftsmanship. Queer to hide it behind all those thorns."

"Well, Sleeping Beauty, you know," Uncle Ned said. "The labyrinth of briars, and all that. We should be glad they aren't strewn with skeletons and body parts, as in the tale." He winked at Henry. "Then your Mum would never let you keep it!"

"I might not, yet," she said, coming up behind them.

Dad stiffened. He adjusted his glasses, the way he always did before a disagreement. "I'm not moving it again tonight, luv."

Mum shrugged. "You were right. There's no place else for it." She shook her head at Uncle Ned and Henry. "It can stay for now, but any bad dreams, and out it goes."

Henry traced his finger over the brass plate. And he realized why the words disturbed him. They lied. As surely as he knew the castle had a story, he knew that "Sleeping Beauty" wasn't it.

I. Ash Girl

2006-04-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there was a castle. Castle Volfric was its name, and it perched on the side of the highest mountain in Wungoria. All around, mountains reared up from the forests, through the clouds. Purple crags, topped with snow, crowded close and stretched away in jagged rows against the sky.

Peasants looked up at the castle with dread and loathing, when they dared. The Count oppressed them many ways, but one was so terrible they never spoke of it. He considered every girl's virginity his due. Soldiers dragged the most beautiful brides to the castle on their wedding nights. Those who weren't virgins, he impaled and displayed.

The peasants could do nothing, so pretended not to know. They called it an honor when soldiers came to wedding feasts, and whispered too excitedly about the Count's gift. Each chosen bride did indeed come away with a silver coin--the most wealth she'd ever know in her poor life--but afterward, she stopped in the valley below, in the village of Plumj, at the little stone church, and cast the coin in a barrel just outside the door. For God's blessing or good luck, anyone would hasten to explain if someone asked.

The barrel once had been the alms box, and then a separate coffer, and when that filled to overflowing, Father Gregory poured the coins in the barrel and prayed it wouldn't fill too quickly. He knew why the brides wanted nothing to do with the coins, and he wanted nothing to do with them either.

Only the village whore spoke openly about the barrel, and then only to warn curious strangers who passed through Plumj and stopped at her cottage: "Do not disturb it, or even look at it." Thieves had come one night. Lightning struck them when their fingers touched the silver.

Nobody else acknowledged it with so much as a glance. They locked their thoughts about it deep in their broken hearts. Some believed the coins cried silently to Heaven, and others that the coins were cursed. All believed that when the barrel filled, God's wrath would overflow, or the curse would be unleashed, and a terrible Fate would befall the House of Volfric. But the barrel now stood full, and nothing had happened yet.

Jacob, a young shoemaker, let none of this trouble or deter him one Christmas Eve when he set a bowl of porridge on the hearth and recited a rhyme the old wives taught him: "Porridge for your health and life. Show me who will be my wife." He said his prayers, got into bed, and fell asleep.

Around midnight, he woke to the sound of breaking glass. He opened one eye. The glow of the hearth showed him two tiny elves, dancing in a circle and smashing what little glass he owned. He wanted to jump out of bed and stop the mischief, but he trusted the old wives, and went back to sleep.

In the morning, he found the porridge gone, and a pair of perfect glass slippers on his work bench. He carried them around to every cottage, determined to marry the girl they'd fit. He traveled all winter, far and wide, through all Wungoria. Nobody could wear the slippers.

Early that spring, perplexed and discouraged, tramping homeward through the woods, he came suddenly upon a cottage he'd somehow overlooked. The humblest in Plumj, it appeared before him now with a startling intensity. The woodcutter lived there with his wife and their only child, Katia, the washer girl.

Jacob's legs felt oddly wobbly, but he made it to the doorstep. He stood there, with one hand raised to knock, staring at the slippers in a daze and wondering how he could have forgotten Katia. Memories of her began to flood his mind.

The door swung open.

"Oh! Jacob." Katia's mother pretended surprise. She looked sorry to see him. "I didn't hear you knock. And there you are with your magic slippers."

He blushed. "Um, hello. I guess you know why I'm here."

"Yes. I've heard. But Jacob, I'm already married."

"Oh, well, ah--"

She forced a smile. "You'll find her at the river."

On the way, he tried to gather his wits and nerve. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just awakened from a long, exhausting dream.

He stepped out from the woods, into a clearing with grassy banks and a low, flat rock on which generations of washer girls had pounded laundry. He saw Katia's basket, and on the rock, a sopping wad of linen. He didn't see her. "Katia?"

"Jacob?" Her voice, behind him.

He turned. "Yaa!"

She held a stone, her arm cocked to strike. Ashes dusted her long black hair and pale skin, giving her a wild, otherworldly air. Her dark, narrowed eyes and the set of her jaw promised she could find, somewhere in her scrawny frame, the strength to break his head open if she had to. The patched tatters of her dress couldn't hide the coiled tension of her stance.

He bobbled the slippers. He dropped one, but caught it before it hit the ground. "Katia! Hi there. Why the stone?"

"Oh Jacob, it is you." She relaxed, but not completely. "You're not the first man to come looking for me here."

"I've only come to ask a favor."

"Not the first to say that either." But she held the stone playfully now, and stood with a hand on her hip. "What do you want?" She wouldn't look at the slippers.

He held them out. "Try these on?"

"I'm busy."

As she brushed by, he breathed in. Despite her appearance, she didn't smell dirty--only faintly sooty, with that most arousing scent of a girl's warm skin in the morning, before she's out of bed.

Katia smirked, and tossed him the stone.

He shifted and juggled the slippers, but caught it without breaking them.

"Hm." She nodded, impressed. With another stone, she pounded the wet linen on the rock. A cloud of dust rose from her.

Jacob remembered the first time he opened his door to find her standing there, shortly after he set up shop in Plumj.

"I'm sure my chimney needs no sweeping yet, thank you," he'd told her.

"I'm the laundress."

Only then did he notice her basket. "You're the laundress?"

"That's right. What about it?"

"Er, nothing. It's just, I'm sorry, are you . . . in mourning?"

"I sleep on the hearth, if you must know." After a moment, she added, "It's warm."

"Of course. I didn't mean to pry. And, I beg your pardon--I'm Jacob. How do you do?"

She tapped her foot. "Linens, please?"

All that day, he thought about the weird little visitor. That evening, he accepted his linens back, speechless at how clean they were.

"I'm Katia. How do you do?" She left him with a wink.

From then on, he daydreamed about her for many an hour at his bench, and looked forward to her every visit. He tried to imagine sharing a bed with her, or even an hearth. He even slept on his own hearth a time or two, just to know what it was like, and so it wouldn't seem so strange if it ever came to that.

He shook his head and wondered how he could have missed her cottage. For so long! It made no sense.

He flipped the stone over his shoulder. "Katia, please."

"Glass slippers I don't need." She thrust a foot at him. She wiggled her big toe through a hole in her shoe. "Bring me real ones and I'll put them on."

"I'll make you real ones."

"Ta-ta, then. Come back when they're finished." She pounded and pounded the linen on the rock.

"Katia, stop."

She looked at him.

"Here. Let me see your feet."

She sat on the grass. She smoothed her dress.

Jacob drew one shoe off. Even through the soot, he could tell how white her little foot would be if it were clean. He touched it.

Shyly, she curled her toes.

He knew his trade well enough to know the glass slippers would fit her perfectly.

"Just to be sure," she said, "you'd better try all the other girls, too. Oh, but you have already, haven't you? Every girl in Wungoria. I'm your last resort."

"No. No! It isn't like that. You should have been the first--the only one!"

"And yet I wasn't. How do you explain it?" She tilted her head and fixed a skeptical glare on him.

"How do I explain it? Well--" He couldn't. "I love you. Please believe me. I loved you at first sight."

"Then why bother with the slippers, hmm?"

"I feared you might spurn me. You're an awfully prickly girl sometimes, you know. I guess I wanted some kind of guarantee. I asked the old wives. They told me what to do. I thought I did it right. I don't know how it went so wrong. I'm sorry."

Katia sniffed. "I knew on Christmas Eve. About you and me. Oh yes. Believe it or not, there are ways that don't involve touching every woman's feet in the whole world. Mother poured some ink into my palm. I saw your face in it."

"What? You knew, and said nothing?"

"What should I have said while you were off caressing other women's feet?"

Something clicked in Jacob's mind. He jumped up. "Katia! I-I think I was bewitched. When I saw your cottage earlier, I felt so strange, as though a spell had broken. Your mother did not look glad to see me. And you say she knew on Christmas Eve?"

"What are you saying, Jacob? She cast a spell to keep you away? That's outrageous."

"Yes, it's true," her mother confessed, though, when they marched back to the cottage.

"Mother! Why?"

She sighed. "His love was strong enough to break it. Now we know. Believe me, you can trust him with your heart. Forgive his wanderings. That's my fault. He couldn't help it. Forgive me. And, Jacob, I hope you can forgive me, too. Forgive a meddling mother who only wants the best for her only baby girl."

Jacob walked Katia back to the river, holding her hand, thrilled at the contact, thrilled to know there was plenty more to come. She softened when he took her in his arms. Her kiss had delicious smoky undercurrents, like an exotic whisky he'd tasted on his travels.

#

Father Gregory sighed when Katia wore the glass slippers to the wedding. Only magic could have made them. They looked harmless enough, but he never took chances with enchanted things. He crossed himself, a rote token of defense.

As for her simple white dress, he had no doubts about her chastity. He wondered, though, how much she kept it for the sake of Christian virtue, and how much for the sake of heathen custom. Sleeping on the hearth, always wearing ashes--he knew enough about the "old ways" to recognize something heathenish in that.

Still, she attended Mass and made confession often. Her devotion to St. Wendoline was fervent and sincere. Every day, she visited the shrine. Sometimes she kissed the statue, and the candles all would flicker in the church. If a saint acknowledged Katia and honored her small offerings, who was Father Gregory to argue?

So it went in Plumj. So it went in all Wungoria. The people all were Christians, but they never would abandon the old ways. He'd long struggled to turn them from their pagan past. Age made him weary and indulgent. Only the evils of the castle and the mountain still disturbed him, and against those, he could only pray. He prayed for Katia and Jacob, that nothing would intrude on their happiness that night.

Katia looked so radiant. Clean and all dressed up, she was the loveliest girl Plumj had seen in many years. Only her mother, who still was very beautiful, had ever been as beautiful as she.

Father Gregory set his cares aside. He enjoyed the ceremony, and concluded with the blessing, "May the Lord sustain you, may your love never fail, and may you live happily ever after."

#

Katia stood arm-in-arm with Jacob in the church door. She smiled out at the cheering faces of the good people of Plumj. She'd done their dirty laundry for lo these many years. All those men who'd tried to feel her bottom or her breasts. All those women who hated her because those were their men. She couldn't care less about that now. Over their heads, in the distance, the castle on the mountain leered at her. Soldiers would probably come to take her there. She could guess what Count Volfric did to brides.

Her mother had refused to talk about it.

Jacob told her not to worry, and insisted he'd deal with soldiers if they came. That only made her worry more. All she wanted was to live with him happily ever after. If that meant submitting to some damnable tradition for one horrible night, she was willing to endure it. But she feared he might try something that could get him hurt or killed.

She stole a glance at the barrel of silver coins, and prepared herself as best she could to face the night ahead. Already, in her mind, she'd rehearsed what she would do if this or that happened. Now she steeled herself against nasty surprises, and held her smile as well as she could.

Beaming again, she laughed and ran with Jacob through the crowd. Everyone threw rice.

The feast was laid on the village square. The sun shone from a blue sky over the green of early spring. New blooms lent their colors and sweet fragrance. Wines and ales came up from cellars. Meat roasted on spits. Pies came fresh from ovens. Whoever could play instruments did, and everyone else danced.

Jacob seemed so calm and confident. Katia realized there was no point in worrying until soldiers arrived--and they might not, after all, as he'd told her several times. She relaxed and danced with him, kissed him often, and felt all the love any bride could wish for on her wedding day. She sipped a single glass of wine throughout the afternoon, and noticed approvingly that Jacob tempered his drinking, as well. They both might need their wits about them. She respected him the more for staying sharp and sober. Then again, she prayed he had no foolish plans in mind.

Evening soon darkened the valley. Peaks impaled the sun. It bled all over them. The moon rose--a giant, pocked crescent, incandescent with pale fire. Clouds circled the mountain. Shimmering waves of snow fell on the castle.

A scarlet carriage arrived, drawn by black horses.

The music stopped. All voices hushed, then resumed in whispers.

Two men climbed down from the carriage. They wore swords and red leather armor. They stalked directly toward her.

Everyone hurried out of the way.

Her arms and legs felt heavy. She recognized the sensation--a tension that would snap if she lashed into action.

Jacob stepped in front of her. "Hi there," he addressed the soldiers.

It was so unusual, and his tone so bold, they paused and looked at each other.

This was it, then. Whatever Jacob meant to do, now he was doing it. Men, even her father, had never much protected Katia. She wasn't used to it, and found it hard to stand and watch while Jacob acted for her. She told herself to trust him, though, and see what happened.

"I'm afraid you've come for nothing," he went on. "The festivities have tired my wife. A journey up the mountain would be too much, you see. But while you're here, why not refresh yourselves a moment?" He waved at the tables of food and drink. "Please give milord, Count Volfric, our regrets, our regards, and this token of our fealty as his humble, loyal subjects." He held up a purse. "With extra for yourselves, of course. Here, take it." He tossed the little bag to one of them.

It opened when the soldier caught it badly. Gold coins spilled everywhere.

Everyone gasped.

The soldier bent, reaching for a coin.

"Don't touch it, fool!" the other said, "How do you s'pose he got it?" He crossed himself.

The villagers all crossed themselves.

Katia wrung her hands instead, but she knew what everyone was thinking, because she thought it too--so much gold could only have come from the Devil. Her heart went out to Jacob, that he'd do such a thing for her.

It wasn't going well, though. The soldiers squared their shoulders, and came on.

Even from behind, Jacob's shock was plain to Katia. He tensed. "Wait. Stop." He turned to Father Gregory. "Don't just stand there. It's a sin. You know it is!"

The old priest hung his head. "Oh my son, you have not done well, bargaining your soul for that bag of Satan's dung."

Jacob wouldn't yield. A mere shoemaker, he was no match for soldiers. He punched them both savagely. They beat him to the ground.

"Leave him alone!" Katia ran at one soldier and tried to shove him as hard as she could away from Jacob.

The soldier struck wild, and sent her sprawling.

She jumped up. "Don't hurt him!" Much as she wished he hadn't, she loved Jacob for fighting. She'd never seen a man fight back before. All the husky village boys who tried to act so big and strong when they thought they had her cornered suddenly turned coward when the soldiers came for their brides. "I'll go!" She hoped Jacob wouldn't take those words as a betrayal. If he did, too bad. They could talk about it later. What mattered was that they survive this night together. They could still live and love and be happy ever after. "I'll go."

The soldiers turned on her.

Before Katia could thank God for a tragedy averted, her mother ran and knelt before the soldiers. "Please, not her. I'll go. Take me instead." One kicked her like a stray dog in his path.

"Mother!" Katia screamed.

Her father roared and charged.

The swords came out.

"Oh God, oh no!" Katia watched in frozen horror.

The villagers wouldn't. They covered their eyes or looked at their shoes. They covered their ears to block out the groans and blood-soggy thunks of steel into flesh.

Katia gaped at the butchered remains of her father.

The soldiers couldn't find a dry spot on his garment, so they wiped their swords on her dress. They seized her arms. They dragged her toward the carriage.

"Murderers!" She fought to wrench herself free. "God damn you!"

They tightened their grip, raising her off her feet between them. She lost a slipper.

To the villagers, she cried, "Won't you help me? Cowards! These beasts just killed my father. You did nothing. Nothing!"

"Go on to the castle!" a woman shouted. "What makes you so special? Nothing!"

The soldiers shoved Katia in the carriage.

She pushed the door, pulled it, beat it, and threw herself against it, but they barred it from outside. The windows were too small for escape. She watched her mother, her beautiful mother, struggle up from the ground.

"Ya!" one soldier shouted. A whip cracked. The carriage jolted into motion.

Jacob stirred on his back, trying to sit up. Katia clasped her hands and thanked Heaven the soldiers hadn't killed him, too.

Her mother hobbled after the carriage, holding her side where they'd kicked her.

Katia pounded the door again. "Rrgh!" The gabled roofs of Plumj quickly receded as the carriage bore her away.

She beat her fists on her head. She grabbed her hair in clumps. She'd done nothing to prevent her father's murder. While the soldiers chopped him down, she just stood there. After all that trying to brace herself for anything, she froze, too stunned and scared to act.

At the mountain, the carriage tilted back and began the steep ascent. The sun's red rays gave way to the moon's silver and the inky blue of night. She hugged herself, with only the wedding dress to warm her. The path became stone. The horses' hooves clattered. The wheels roared. She felt the difference through the seat and floor. Grass thinned. Trees crowded closer. She smelled evergreen so strongly she could taste it.

She prayed to St. Wendoline, the patroness of warriors, martyrs, virgins, and Wungoria.

The black horses drew the carriage up and up. Shafts of pale light rained through the trees. Snowflakes danced in them. Snow dusted, then blanketed, the world outside.

The carriage halted next to a small bell-tower. Katia fitted her head out the window.

Every day of her life, she'd seen the castle, but never as she saw it now. It rose before her as a dark, soul-crushing mass. Out of the solid black obscurity of the lower walls, it sprouted into a mad profusion of battlements and spires, trimmed with snow that glowed under the moon. She craned her neck to see the topmost tower, where one round stained-glass window gleamed like a demonic eye.

The church steeple of Plumj suddenly seemed puny, foolish. She seemed puny and foolish to herself. What saint, what Holy Mother, what God could help her in that place? What could she do to help herself?

The carriage waited, she realized, on a neighboring cliff, separated from the castle by a crevasse. Behind the castle, a sheer mountain wall ascended out of sight, making this the only possible avenue of approach.

Instead of ringing the bell, as a visitor might, the driver blew a horn.

The most ungodly shrieks answered from higher on the mountain. Count Volfric kept vampires there and hunted them for sport.

The driver blew the horn again. It echoed over the crevasse.

Again the vampires shrieked.

Wolves added their howls to the mournful chorus.

A titanic groan drowned out all other noises. A drawbridge fell across the chasm. The tremor when it crashed down rocked the carriage, and Katia within.

She fought to compose herself on the trip over. Once there, she'd face an awful choice. Her father's death cried for revenge. Could she kill Volfric? Probably not. But even if she did, she'd never leave alive. His men would surely rape her, most likely torture her, and finally impale her--then hoist her on the village square for all to see. No, whatever she owed her father, she owed it to Jacob, her mother, and herself to stay alive, if possible. She rubbed her aching temples. The rumble of the wheels on the planks was almost soothing. She snugged into the cushion and tried to let it calm her. She begged St. Wendoline for courage, strength, and wisdom.

Something rushed by, toward the castle.

"What? Hey!" a soldier shouted from the carriage.

Katia poked her head out again. Wind whipped her long black hair over her eyes. By the time she pushed it clear, someone on a horse had left them far behind.

A jagged, thundrous grinding noise drew her gaze beyond. An iron grille blocked the portal ahead. Torches burned behind it. Spikes protruded from it. Heavy chains, cranked from God knew where, drew the murderous thing up to clear the way. The bars sharpened to spear-points at the bottom. Just seeing them filled her mind with morbid images of them crashing through her body.

Before the portcullis rose completely, the rider dashed under, ducking in the saddle.

The carriage driver lashed the black horses faster.

Katia sank back in the seat. She'd only caught a fleeting rear glimpse of the figure on the horse. She wondered, could it be . . . ?

#

A fever almost killed her when she was very young. As she lay in bed one night, teeth chattering, she heard hoofbeats approach. They stopped outside the door. A hooded figure walked in. Her parents didn't wake, though armor clinked under the cloak. A horse stuck its head through the window--no nice, tame horse, but a monster with evil, glowing eyes. Katia and the Rider stared at each other. In the darkness, she couldn't see the face. Her fever broke, drenching her in sweat. The Rider walked out, and rode the horse away.

When she told her parents in the morning, they exchanged frightened looks. Mother crossed herself. They told her it was just a nightmare. But later, she overheard them whisper it was Death.

Some years later, she'd finished her chores early one evening, and enjoyed a rare moment to skip and play on the square.

"Get inside!" someone screamed. "The vampires are coming!"

Normally, she learned later, the mountain was too cold for the vampires to transform. Some must have wandered below the frost line. They must have felt, for once, the uncanny fluidity of form vampires inherit from the grave.

Everyone stampeded for their homes. Katia ran as fast as she could to the cottage.

She turned to slam the door, but saw the most wondrous thing--a cloud of butterflies descending on Plumj. The Rider sauntered on horseback through the village, unconcerned. Katia felt his gaze fasten on her from that distance, though again, she couldn't see the face. The butterflies floated and swirled around him for an instant, then surged toward her.

Mother jerked her back from the door. Father flung it shut. Too late! She'd already wished to see the butterflies some more.

Father peeked through a hole in the wall. "Oh God! Lord save us!"

Mother pulled the only glass jar they owned down from the highest shelf, ripped the lid away, and dumped the pickles out. Vinegar slopped everywhere. The smell came back to Katia whenever she recalled it.

"Here!" Mother had cried.

Father caught the jar one-handed. He bobbled it, but got it in both hands. He shoved the open end over the hole.

Butterflies filled the jar. They squirted through the hole like ink, and crowded so thickly their wings could scarcely quiver.

Mother screamed. She recoiled, and crossed herself.

Katia stared in open-mouth fascination. The butterflies! They were so lovely. She couldn't believe they were vampires, accursed human corpses who would tear her with their fangs and suck her blood.

Father held the lid ready. He and Mother traded fearful glances.

"Be quick!" Mother's shrill voice made Katia cringe.

Father whipped the jar around and slapped the lid on, but not before one butterfly escaped.

"Oh no! No! No!" Mother pointed at the thing, flitting up among the rafters. She ran to rip a crude, splintery crucifix down off the wall.

With a soft, underhand toss, Father pitched the jar into the fire.

The vampires screeched like all the fiends of Hell. They pattered against the glass. Their gossamer wings blackened and curled. The jar burst. Crisp butterfly parts fell into the fire and were consumed.

Father moaned, "Thank God! Thank God!" He crossed himself. Tears welled in his eyes.

A chill prickled Katia's scalp, her nape, her spine. Goosebumps broke out all over her. Something very wrong was happening. She looked up to see it.

The last butterfly wavered and grew indistinct. It hovered and expanded, pulsing, stretching.

Katia couldn't look away. She remembered every instant, though it all happened so fast.

Mother charged forward with the crucifix. "Get back!"

Katia cast her first spell, then. It was instinctive, primal. She'd befriended the spirit of the hearth. She called to it for help.

The fire flared up with a roar. It exploded toward the metamorphing vampire. A rabid foam of sparks dripped from the smoke it belched.

Katia jumped back, startled by the heat flash on her nose and cheeks. She sneezed.

The flames engulfed the vampire as it coalesced into a vaguely human shape. Katia never saw it as anything more than a screaming form of fire that quickly burned to cinders. She never even knew if it was male or female. Since that night, she often wondered what she might have seen, and tried to imagine what vampires look like.

And, since that night, she always slept on the hearth. The spirit, whom she called "Little Godmama," told her stories before she went to sleep. Katia listened intently to tales of a little princess, just a young girl like herself--and pretty like her, too--only the princess lived in a castle, not a cottage, and had many wonderful things.

"I wish I were a princess!" Katia complained one night.

"So does every little girl," Godmama said. "But be careful what you wish for! Sometimes being a princess isn't easy."

The stories grew darker. At first, the princess didn't always get her way, but then real problems troubled her, and then she found herself in danger--scarier and scarier! Sometimes when she needed help, she asked for it and got it. Sometimes she had to ask many times before someone would help her, and it wasn't always someone she particularly liked. Sometimes nobody could help her, or would, and she had to face great danger all alone. Somtimes she won, sometimes she lost, sometimes she got hurt, sometimes she hurt others, and once she even killed. Sometimes others asked her for help. Many times she gave it, but sometimes she couldn't, even if she wished to very much. Other times, she decided not to. Whatever she decided, sometimes it turned out for better, and sometimes for worse.

Katia paid rapt attention to these tales, and thought long about them the next day as she pounded laundry at the river. She tried to figure out what she would do if she were the princess, and imagined what might happen if she acted differently.

Thus, when a wandering friar, a stranger to Plumj, happened along while she was at her work, she was surprised but not shocked when he tried to rape her. She'd pictured how she would protect herself so many times, she immediately snapped into action, and killed him with her stone.

She noticed the Rider, watching her at a distance.

"Will you help me, then?" she called. She pushed the fat friar in the Rider's direction. She rolled him over once. "Take him, Death. He's yours!"

But the Rider didn't answer, only held a finger to where the lips would be in the shadows of the hood.

Katia sighed. There was nothing for it but to roll the corpse into the river. As heavy as he was, he floated on the current. He washed up on a bend, several miles down. Nobody suspected her. Or if they did, nothing came of it.

When she looked up from the task of disposing of the body, she found herself alone. Nor had she seen the Rider since. Until, perhaps, just now.

#

The carriage paused at the gatehouse.

"Who was that?" the driver demanded.

The porter answered, "I don't know. I thought 'e were with you."

"Well, 'e weren't! It's your job to make sure. If the Count is inconvenienced, mark my words, you'll be impaled."

The whip cracked. The carriage jounced forward.

The iron grille slammed down.

The drawbridge groaned up.

"DOOM!" reverberated through the castle when it shut.

The sound killed Katia's hopes. It made her mind up for her. What ever made her think she might get out alive? After the scene down in the village, Volfric would impale her as an example. But maybe she could kill him first. Or hurt him. Or at least defy him, maybe for the first time in his life. Since her death was certain, she'd rather go fighting than like a lamb to slaughter.

The carriage stopped in a wintry courtyard. Snow covered the paving-stones, and drifted high against the walls.

Katia noticed a horse, standing unattended. It looked malnourished, puffing steam at the nose and mouth, shivering from exhaustion and the cold. Poor beast--she recognized it from Plumj. So the horseman who passed them on the bridge must not be the Rider from her past. Could it be Jacob? From the beating he took, she doubted it.

A servant ran out with a lantern. He ushered Katia and the soldiers into a vast hall. It could have swallowed the church down in the village, steeple and everything. Rows of torches burned on walls and columns. Their flickers revealed only glimmers of the vaulted ceiling. She felt like a mouse creeping chair-leg to chair-leg across a giant's kitchen.

An inferno blazed in the biggest fireplace she'd ever seen. A knot of figures clustered before it. The one she'd seen on horseback--a woman!--wept and pleaded on her knees. The voice gave Katia a start.

"Mother?"

The kneeling woman, Katia's mother, looked around. "You see, my lord? Your daughter! Don't commit that outrage. God and nature would abhor it. Take me again instead."

Katia heard the words, but could make no sense of them. "What are you saying?"

"My poor, beautiful baby," her mother said, "the Count is your true father. He took me on my wedding night. This is what I tried to spare you when I cast that spell on Jacob. God forgive me for not trying harder!"

Stunned, Katia looked at Volfric. The frank gaze he returned made her quail inside. She did see in his face hints and reflections of her own. The dark eyes, especially, revealed the blood tie, with the same shape and expressiveness. In them, she could see he saw it, too.

For a man his age, his face remained impossibly unlined, his black hair impossibly untouched by grey. His devilish beard even looked almost blue. Of course, his magicians would see to his longevity and youth.

"What's the matter?" he demanded of Katia. "Every girl dreams she's secretly a princess. And here you truly are! Maybe I'll make you my Countess if you please me well enough." His laughter pealed through the hall.

She felt as though the room began to spin. The soldiers gripped her firmly. For once, she was grateful. They held her up and steady. Her legs wobbled, but she didn't fall.

"Please, no, my lord," Katia's mother said. "Let me take her place! I'll do anything you wish." And then she named acts that made Katia exclaim, "Mother!"

"Don't worry, princess," Volfric said to Katia. "You'll have your turn. And you'll do all those things for me." To her mother, he said, "Greedy sow! I'd never take a haggish slut like you again. Why the Deuce would I, with this fair young bloom, all mine to pluck? Perhaps she'll do better, and deliver me a son. Ha! He'd be twice noble--once from me, and once from her, our daughter."

"Monster!" Katia's mother sprang at him.

He beat her down. "A spear! I want a spear!"

Katia struggled. "Wait! Please! Just do with me what you will and let her go."

"I'll do whatever I will with whomever I will!" He accepted a spear from a servant.

"Don't!" Katia said. "Don't do it! There's danger for yourself."

"What danger?"

"A barrel full of silver coins in Plumj, and every one a curse with your name on it."

Volfric laughed. "There is no curse. That's just the wishful thinking of evil, envious, dung-stinking peasants."

"Father," Katia forced herself to call him. "If you harm my mother--" Her voice broke. It sounded so small and weak, like a little girl's. "--the sky will fall on you, I swear, if I have to claw it down with my bare hands."

"No, little chickee. No it won't."

Katia fought so violently to free herself, one of the soldiers pinned her arms while the other drove his fist savagely into her stomach. All breath and resistance whooshed out of her. Her knees buckled, but the men supported her. One grabbed her hair, and yanked her face up to watch.

Volfric speared her mother through the heart and out the back in a single horrid thrust. The blood was the worst of it for Katia. At first it fountained from both wounds, then slowed to a gush, a flow, and finally a dribble. The cracks in the floor became dramatically visible, as if traced by some pen dipped in scarlet ink. Her mother twitched until, after a last shudder, every trace of life departed.

Katia wept. "Kill you, I'll kill you."

Volfric let her mother drop. "Pitch her into the crevasse," he told a servant. "And the horse she rode in on. Bring me the porter who admitted her. I'll impale him on this spot. God damn me if I don't!"

A soldier jiggled Katia. "What about her, my lord? The chamber?"

Volfric looked her in the eye. "Yes. I'll be there shortly."

#

They carried her through torch-lit passages, up stairs, along dim corridors, up stairs, across galleries, and again up winding stairs, until at last they came to a chamber door, which one of them opened. They threw her inside, locked the door, and left.

Katia wiped her sleeves over her eyes. Tears still came. She dried them as best she could.

She surveyed her prison. A bedchamber. A round stained-glass window occupied nearly an entire wall. She recognized it, and understood. They'd confined her in the highest tower, behind the demonic eye.

Instinctively, she crawled to the fireplace. A fire crackled in it, but something was amiss. She settled on the hearth. Its warmth failed to welcome her. She gazed into the fire. No spirit animated it. That's what was wrong.

She pounded her fist on the hearthstone. Of course, the magicians who served Volfric would never tolerate a stray or wild spirit in the castle. No spirits would haunt the nooks or crannies. None played in the fires. It only made sense. If she could have befriended a little hearth spirit, she'd have burned Volfric to ashes, just like she burned that vampire.

She tried to concentrate, to form some plan, but her thoughts strayed to the man whose death she witnessed on the village square--the man who raised her as his daughter, though he must have known she wasn't. Did he fight like Jacob when the soldiers came for Mother? Surely not. Katia brooded on that, and decided she couldn't hold it against him. Nobody ever fought. Only her Jacob. And what had it accomplished? Somehow, she loved him more now, the woodcutter, that man who was her father--yes, her father, in every way but blood. She grieved his death more bitterly. And then Mother. That loss was so fresh, she almost couldn't feel it. Finally, Jacob. In moments, she'd die, and lose him too.

As for Volfric, though she knew it to be true, she couldn't yet accept what she'd just learned. She stood up and looked around for something to kill him with.

The door slammed open against the wall, startling her.

Volfric filled the doorway. He hesitated, but only in the manner of a beast about to pounce. Gouts of blood glistened on his bare, war-scarred torso. He gripped the frame with dripping hands. Lust flared from his dark eyes, hot enough to make Katia feel it and blush.

She lowered her dark eyes, only to see the bulge in his breeches. She held her breath, waiting while he locked the door behind him with a key, which he then slipped in a pocket. Everything he touched, he stained with blood.

"My darling little girl." His voice was half-growl, half-purr.

She cursed herself for not finding a weapon. He was no fat friar, nor one of the peasant oafs she knew well how to handle. This close, she realized how little chance she had of killing him. She wondered now if she could even hurt him.

He seized her dress with bloody hands.

"Father, no!"

His fingers tangled in the fabric. He shouted. His muscles flexed. He tore her dress completely off.

She fell back on the floor-stones.

Volfric flung himself on her. He ripped off her undergarments, until she lay naked beneath him.

She squirmed against his weight.

He glued his lips to hers. She moaned at the slimy intrusion of his tongue.

When he ended the kiss and rose from her, she saw her body smeared with blood, everywhere he touched her, from her small breasts down to her belly and thighs. She felt it sticky on her skin. Loathing paralyzed her. She could only tremble.

He dragged her to the bed, and threw her down on it.

She tried to kick him away. "I am your daughter!"

"I own every girl on my lands--her life, virginity, and cunt! You are no exception!" His fury made her flinch.

When she dared look again, he held a short whip. She'd seen whips for livestock, whips for riding, whips for driving carts and carriages, but this could serve no practical purpose of the sort. She could imagine only one use for it--punishing girls like her, reducing them to down-on-all-fours, animal submission.

She tried to fend him off, but he lit into her hard. Unable to bear it, she curled into a ball. He lashed her back so cruelly she screamed, "I yield! I yield! Oh stop! Do what you will. My father, I am yours." She wept into the pillow.

He seized her ankle. The jerk he gave it rolled her on her back and pried her legs apart. She looked at her foot in his grasp. A glass slipper still adorned it. The reminder of Jacob rekindled her defiance.

While Volfric held her open, he unbuttoned his breeches with his free hand.

Through her tears, Katia noticed the whip on the bed. Volfric must have dropped it there to keep it close.

His male weapon now stood iron-hard and unsheathed, ready to stab her to the tenderest depths. She lowered her gaze to his soft, fleshy sack.

Her bare foot still was free . . .

Volfric hunched over, bellowing in agony. Rage flashed in his eyes. He squeezed her ankle harder.

She snatched the whip and slashed desperately at his face. She struck and struck. In her hand, the leather hissed and whined as though alive.

He backpedaled, pants around his knees, hands raised in defense. He yelled profanities at her.

"My lord?" someone called through the door--one of the soldiers who brought her there.

Katia hurled a lamp.

It shattered on the wall near Volfric's head. The burst of fire and oil set his hair alight. He quickly slapped it out. The oaths he shouted made her blanche.

"My lord! We're coming!" Someone crashed heavily against the door. A crack reverberated through the chamber.

Volfric hurried to refasten his breeches. He tried to keep one eye on Katia, but fumbled with the buttons, grew impatient, and looked down.

Katia gripped the heel end of her glass slipper, and smashed the toe off on a bedpost. It left a wicked edge.

The next crash at the door splintered the timbers around the lock. Volfric looked.

Katia set herself.

A final crash sent pieces of the door sailing through the air and pinwheeling over the floor. The two soldiers stormed into the chamber. Their leather armor was a blur of red in the corner of her eye.

She charged Volfric, a slash aimed at his windpipe. She threw all her weight behind it.

Not fast enough!

He saw, and ducked.

Instead of laying his throat open to the bone, Katia gouged a chasm through his cheek.

She pivoted and ran at the stained-glass window. Her bare feet slapped the floor-stones. She cursed herself for failing. She had no second chances. The odds she faced weren't even worth attempting.

She stole one backward glance. The soldiers barreled after her. Beyond them, she glimpsed Volfric, his hand clamped on the wound. Blood pulsed between his fingers. At least the scar might be permanent.

Still running, she straightened around. The pretty window loomed gigantically before her. She dropped the glass heel, and pumped her arms for speed.

She'd once complained that none of Godmama's stories about the princess ended happily ever after.

"But then there wouldn't be any more stories," Godmama replied. "And there are always more stories. Until one day there aren't."

"And then what?" Katia had asked.

"Who knows? Maybe the princess will become a Little Godmama, telling stories to another little princess."

"Is that your story, Godmama?"

"Well, I never was a princess. But you will be. A beautiful princess in a castle all your own."

Katia had frowned. "But not happy ever after?"

"No, child. That will just be the beginning of stories and more stories."

It seemed Godmama was wrong. Katia would never be a princess--not that way. And there would be no more stories for her, either.

Now, she threw her arms ahead and dove. Colored glass exploded out in front of her. Shards sliced her. The night air chilled her instantly. Her cuts trailed streams of red through swirling snow and moonlight.

Katia gawked at the fall that would claim her. It yawned like an infinite mouth. Her stomach lurched. Her heartbeat stalled to sloppy lubs.

She dropped toward the darkness so far below.

II. Rider from the Past

2006-04-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

Icy gusts howled through the hole. Flames guttered in the fireplace, casting wild shadows on the walls.

Volfric hobbled to the window. The ache between his legs blasted waves of agony through his thighs and guts. He felt like he might shit at any moment. He held his cheek together with one hand, and each step jarred that, too.

He tried to look out. The wind made tears stand in his eyes. He turned away.

The soldiers who brought Katia from Plumj stood at a respectful distance, eyes lowered. Volfric sensed their fear. The girl's suicide must have pricked their superstition. Or perhaps they thought he might impale them.

He squeezed his cheek more firmly, the better to speak. To one man, he said, "Get the body. I would view the damned remains."

"In the hall, my lord?"

"Display her in the courtyard."

"Yes, my lord."

To the other, he said, "Bring me Fronius."

Bitter fear flashed in the man's eyes, but he hid it quickly, and bowed. "Yes, my lord."

Fronius served as Volfric's personal physician. He pushed the limits of medicine and chirurgery, and pushed beyond them through darker arts. He was apprenticed to Volfric's court magician, the necromancer Baron Rovenmare. That gave even hardened soldiers cause enough to dread him, but Fronius wore a bizarre aspect, as well. Supposedly, he'd been handsome once--the third or fourth son in a noble family. Injuries from military service deformed him into a hunchbacked goblin of a man who hid his face behind an iron mask. Bulging glass goggles covered the eye-holes, and a weird metal arm replaced the one he lost.

When he limped into Volfric's chambers and saw the wound, he said, "Never fear, my lord! That scratch will heal without a trace." He produced the tools of his trade from the black bag clutched in his strange metal fingers, and set right to work.

While Fronius stitched, Volfric seethed. In his heart, he cursed the ungrateful peasants under his protection. They had no idea what he had to do--what he had to be--to secure the peace they now enjoyed. They hated giving up the bride offering, and hated him the more if a child resulted from it. They thought he exacted it merely as some lordly privilege, to gratify the whimsy of his lusts. But he knew the ancient reason for the custom--to fortify the people with strong and noble blood.

Wungoria was a tiny land, surrounded by large, ravenous enemies who might pour over its borders any time. If it wasn't constantly in flames, a field of slaughter, with all kinds of soldiers always tramping through it, plundering and raping, that was only because the House of Volfric strove for centuries to make Wungoria a byword for horror.

When Volfric was very young, his father took every opportunity to show him the devastation marauding armies leave behind. "Look what they've done to us, my son. We must pound the cold, iron nail of fear into their hearts, or they'll do it more, and worse."

Once, his father summoned him to a table of state, and presented him to rulers of neighboring lands. He recognized the names, He'd heard his father curse them many times for one atrocity or another their armies perpetrated on his people. They smirked at young Volfric as they nodded to acknowledge him--sneering, scoffing smiles that dripped contempt. A mere child, he had to force himself not to quail visibly before the warlords, who towered over him like giants.

"Where's King Hunelagc?" one of them demanded. "There's no place even set for him."

"On the contrary," Volfric's father said. "King Hunelagc showed great courage last night. By God, he was the only man among you! While you cowered in the rear, he joined me in the hunt, and even slew a vampire. And so I've reserved a very special place for him."

Servants carried in a platter and set it on the table. On it lay King Hunelagc, trussed, spit-roasted, with an apple in his mouth. Another servant poured his blood into the goblets.

The King was carved and served to the horrified rulers. They stared at their plates, but could only bear to do so from the corners of their eyes.

"Come," the elder Volfric said. "I trust you won't insult my hospitality?"

Young Volfric watched, aghast, as the gruesome meal commenced. The rulers pushed the grisly fare around their plates, and sometimes pretended to raise some to their mouths. Even his father ate with difficulty, and turned green despite the grim resolution on his face.

Volfric grasped that his father was teaching him a lesson in statecraft, and the others a lesson in respect. He recalled all the burnt-out villages his father had shown him, that these men had to answer for. To falter at this point would be disastrous. But his father literally bit off more than he could chew, and looked ready to spit it out, and maybe vomit the rest.

For his father, for his name, for his people, for Wungoria, Volfric stifled his natural feelings of disgust, and tucked into the slab of flesh sitting on his plate. He ate noisily, with relish, drawing all attention from his father to himself. He stared around the table, meeting each ruler's eyes until they looked away, until he'd stared down every one of them, then began again at the beginning, until they all sat staring at their laps and didn't dare raise their eyes even a flicker. When he finished, he washed the meat down with the blood, and slammed his goblet on the table. He wiped his sleeve dramatically across his mouth, and belched as loudly as he could.

Later, alone in his bedchamber, he threw it all up. It would be months before he could touch meat of any kind again. He wept for what he'd done. All the fear he'd had to quash rose again to shake him through the night.

But in that moment, his beaming father flourished an arm at him and said, "My friends, behold the future of Wungoria."

Those once-proud rulers rose from that table, broken men. They returned to their own castles to dodder away their years in the oblivion of drink.

Unfortunately, their years were few. By the time Volfric could lift a two-handed sword without staggering under its weight, he had to teach a new generation of successors to fear Wungoria all over again, this time on the battlefield. That was when he learned the value of spreading Volfric seed among the peasantry. His father pointed out that Volfric blood ran in the veins of all the fiercest fighters.

Katia certainly had Volfric blood in her. That naked slip of a girl showed less fear of him than armed and armored warriors he'd faced in battle. With an army possessed of her fighting spirit--even an army of girls--Wungoria need never fear invasion. His rage at her defiance softened to regret for her death. What a daughter! He spoke in jest of making her his Countess, but what a wife she might have been to him, and what a mother to his sons. What a waste to have lost her. He began to wonder if Rovenmare or Fronius could bring her back to life.

"There, my lord," Fronius said, pushing a looking glass into his hands, interrupting his thoughts. "You see?"

Volfric looked. The gaping hole Katia had punched through his cheek was now a row of sutures and a neat red line. Gingerly, he ran a finger over it. It still felt sore, but nothing like a fresh wound.

"Apply this ointment in the morning and at night, and we'll have those sutures out before you know it."

"Thank you, Fronius. I can always count on you."

"But of course, my lord."

"One more thing." Volfric tried not to let the fear creep into his voice. "Where she kicked me--" He placed a hand protectively over his groin. "I worry for my seed. Make sure she didn't damage me down there."

"Well, let's get those breeches off." Fronius knelt between Volfric's legs to examine him. Eventually, he stood and said, "No damage, my lord. Your seed is safe. You may scatter it as you desire."

"Aaahh, my seed!" It startled Volfric, how much tension melted away at once, on hearing his physician's words. He hadn't realized how scared he was for his virility, until Fronius reassured him.

He noticed, then, something he'd been hearing for some time outside his window--the baying of hounds. It sounded like the whole pack had been turned out from the kennels and set loose through the castle.

"Come along, Fronius. I may need you again."

Volfric stomped out into the snowy night, with Fronius scampering to keep up. Torches and lanterns swarmed everywhere. The clamor of barking rang from the walls and paving-stones. He turned a full circle, taking it all in. Men ran hounds in the courtyard and on the ramparts. They lowered the poor beasts in harnesses from tower windows to treacherous high places that couldn't otherwise be reached.

In the center of it all, the man charged with finding Katia stood with her underthings wadded in his fist. He shouted orders and directed the activity. A shrill edge in his voice betrayed his desperation.

Volfric seized him by the scruff. "What the Deuce are you doing? What is this about?"

The man's trembling increased almost to a seizure. "Oh my lord--!"

A scream cut his answer short.

Volfric looked up.

A soldier slipped from an icy pinnacle. He screamed and flailed all the way down. The snow muffled the wet thud of his impact. A gruesome halo, a scarlet stain on white, ringed his broken head.

Volfric scowled at the man in his grip. "Now, an explanation."

"My lord, she's nowhere to be found!"

"What?"

"I swear! No corpse. No blood. No anything! As if she vanished in the sky."

"Vanished in the sky!" Volfric looked around again at the soldiers and hounds. They were everywhere. He shouted, "Stop! Stop it! Stop this nonsense now!"

They all froze where they stood, and quickly hushed the hounds.

"If you haven't found her yet," Volfric said, "more looking won't find her. Not here. Not in the castle. Did no one see her fall?"

"My lord, some heard the glass break, but none looked."

"None?"

"None, my lord."

"There is deviltry afoot here," Fronius suggested.

"And her husband sprang some deviltry on us down in the village!" the soldier said. "He tried to bribe us with more gold than he could have gotten any other way. Father Gregory even came right out and called it Satan's dung!"

"Then we're off to see her husband." Volfric released the trembling man, and patted his shoulder. "You've done well. Now ready my carriage." He turned to address them all, and said, "Perhaps we'll find her in Plumj!"

None smiled at this announcement. He knew they wouldn't. They'd cross themselves as soon as they thought he wasn't looking. Already, no doubt, they suspected black magic in the girl's disappearance. If they found her in the village, how else could she have got there? But first they had to get there, and the road would not be easy. The commotion in the castle had stirred every wild night creature on the mountain.

Volfric scorned such worries. He grabbed a spear, rapped the butt on paving-stones, and shouted for haste.

#

The drawbridge lowered. The portcullis clattered up. From the castle poured a torrent of black horses. Riders in red leather armor waved torches and swords.

In their midst, the Count traveled in his lordly black-and-scarlet carriage. He sipped brandy from crystal. The storm of wrath that thundered down the mountain soothed his nerves. He closed his eyes.

The carriage and horsemen roared through the valley, into Plumj. No night-watch greeted them. Even the animals cowered and kept silent. Every shutter on every cottage stood closed and fastened. Not one light peeped between two slats. Even as Volfric swore and shouted, impaled Katia's husband, set his home ablaze, and hoisted him on the village square, every other cottage remained dark and deathly still.

Volfric frowned. Jacob had told him nothing.

Nor did Fronius find evidence of any spell that might have spirited Katia from the castle. Volfric told him to check her parents' home.

Fronius soon returned, and said, "She's not there, either. The only signs of magic were common peasant charms. There was a hearth spirit, a tad livelier than most." He shrugged. "I banished it. I took the liberty, as well, of setting fire to the place."

"Good," Volfric said. "Wherever she may be, she'll find no comfort here." He gave the sullen order to return to the castle. He indulged in a last look at Jacob's burning cottage.

Once settled in the cushions of the carriage, he calmed himself with brandy. So, Katia was neither in the castle nor the village. Where could she be? He saw no point in searching further. One more option remained, though, and he determined to employ it.

The instant he set foot in the castle courtyard, he motioned for a servant to draw near.

"Announce me to Baron Rovenmare. Wake him if you must. I require his service, and shall call on him--" Volfric consulted the clock-tower. "--at midnight, in his chambers."

The servant couldn't conceal his fright, but hurried off to execute the command without delay.

Spattered gore from three impalements obliged Volfric to bathe and make another toilette. After he washed all the blood away, he noticed in the looking glass how wretchedly his hair had been singed, and how bad the bare patch looked where Fronius shaved his beard to treat the wound. He couldn't tolerate the sight of them. He fussed at them with shears and a razor for a while, before losing patience and shaving hair and beard completely off.

He put on a simple, almost priestly black garment. He refreshed himself with a supper of cold hen, bread, and wine.

Midnight approached.

Volfric armed himself against the darkness with a lantern, and turned his steps toward a remote wing of the palace that had fallen into disuse and gloomy disrepair. There, his footfalls echoed along passages, up stairs. He crossed a grey, empty gallery. A portion of the roof had collapsed. Drafts moaned through the space. A door at the far end opened onto the ramparts.

The moon had passed its apex, and declined toward a horizon of mountain peaks.

Volfric waded through snow to the battlements. He looked over the edge, down a thousand plunging feet of sheer castle wall and cliff, onto a landscape of bald crags. What a spectacle it was in moonlight. Anxious, though, to unpuzzle the mystery of Katia's disappearance, he stepped back from the brink and continued on his way.

A tower of gleaming white marble rose ahead. Reaching it always proved difficult. It stood some distance from the main palace, on a section of the wall that crumbled in places.

Despite the tower's beauty, Volfric hated it. Dark and shameful secrets led to its erection. He alone knew all of them.

#

On the birthday when Volfric attained legal adulthood, he arranged his father's death. He succeeded to the title and lands at the earliest moment he could take full control of them.

For generations on end, the wizard Elijas had watched over the family. On the day of Volfric 's triumph, Elijas made no appearance at the ceremony or feast. Everyone remarked the old man's absence. Volfric noted it himself, with irritation. He sent for Elijas, inquiring whether anything was the matter.

The servant returned, bowed, and said, "My lord, he invites you to attend him in his hut."

"Invites me?" Volfric said. "Is he ill?"

The servant bowed lower. "He did not seem so to me."

"I can imagine no other explanation." Volfric excused himself from the great hall, where the reception proceeded in his honor.

As he crossed the courtyard toward Elijas's humble dwelling, he encountered some servants loading packs on a donkey.

"What's the meaning of this?" he demanded. "I gave no leave for anyone to quit the castle at this time."

"My lord," one of the servants said, "Elijas ordered that his donkey be prepared."

There was no explaining that away. It was plainly an affront to Volfric. All of it was. He stormed into the little hut.

The greybeard sat beside the fire, smoking a pipe. He didn't stand when Volfric entered, but pointedly continued rocking in his chair.

"Elijas, your behavior astonishes me."

Elijas said nothing at first, but fixed a penetrating stare on Volfric.

The young Count clenched his jaw.

Elijas took the pipe from his mouth. "You murdered your father. I won't denounce you. Not publicly. I only take my leave of you. I won't remain under the roof of a parricide."

"Fine words from a man who served my father and grandfather."

Elijas sniffed. "There's justice enough in the reproach. Those men were no saints. But you! I've cast an eye into your future. You're a monster, and time will only make you more of one. It were better you had died stillborn."

"I think you'd better go now." Volfric"s voice quavered with rage. "Wise man, to have packed your bags already."

"I go," Elijas said, "and with me goes your peace. You can form no conception, young man, how many curses rain down on your family, or how many restless spirits seek revenge. From this day, may these troubles pass to you."

"And may the Devil surprise you on your chamber pot, you son of a buggering goat!" Volfric shouted. "Get out! If I see you again, your head on a pike!"

Volfric knew, though, how truly Elijas spoke. When he was a child, his nurses whispered legends of specters who haunted the House of Volfric. At night, those specters really tried to get him. The most awful among them was a hooded rider, galloping from great distances at terrifying speeds, bearing down, reaching out an armored hand to grab him. Elijas's magic held the Rider at bay, but never banished it entirely.

Throughout Volfric's youth, at moments when he thought he was alone, he might turn around outdoors, or glance out a window, only to see the Rider watching, watching, always watching from the darkness of the hood, searching and waiting for an opportunity, while the horse snorted and pawed the ground.

Faced with Elijas's departure, then, installment of a new court magician became the young Count's first order of business. He knew, indeed, that if he found no replacement before nightfall, he most likely wouldn't live to see the morning.

Volfric again joined his guests in the hall. Vaguely, he remembered rumors he'd often disregarded, concerning a man known as Baron Rovenmare. He turned the conversation to those rumors, which everyone took up with great enthusiasm. Rovenmare, they claimed, was a necromancer--a wizard who specialized in death. He squandered his fortune, not through gambling or riot, but through the costly pursuit of unspeakable arts. Nobody had any clue where he might be found.

Volfric ordered all his troops, servants, and castle guard to go forth at once and find Rovenmare before the sun set. This extraordinary command, delivered in the hall before the assembled guests, raised a murmur of alarm. But Volfric insisted the merriment continue. He went among the tables and poured the wine himself, in place of the servants he dispatched.

The guests remained, though uneasily. Evening stole over them. Volfric lit tapers and torches. He felt all eyes on him, on his shaking hands. He felt the fear spreading from himself, throughout the hall.

The new moon hid its face.

The outer darkness was complete.

The hoofbeats of a single horse clopped in the courtyard. An eerie clicking noise accompanied them.

Volfric stood petrified.

The great hall doors burst open.

A skeletally thin and pale man, clad all in white, rode a horse's skeleton up the steps, into the hall.

Everyone gaped.

Only the bones clicking together broke the silence.

The solitary stranger rode the skeleton across the floor. He stopped directly before Volfric.

"I'm Rovenmare. You look so startled! Did you not expect me?"

Volfric eyed the horse.

Rovenmare grinned. "She neither eats nor shits."

Volfric composed himself enough to invite Rovenmare into a side chamber. The necromancer dismounted, and retired there with him.

Was it fatigue from the day's whirl of activities? Or was it the shock of Elijas's confrontation? Or was it the terror of night wound so tightly in his heart? Did Rovenmare's bizarre arrival and appearance overawe him? Whatever the reason, Count Volfric found himself a weakened, beaten man. To his everlasting shame, he fell on his knees. He unburdened himself to Rovenmare of all his fears. He wept like a woman, like a frightened little girl. He begged the Baron to enter his service and fill the vacant office of court magician on any terms he cared to name.

Despite his embarrassed circumstances, Rovenmare made a show of much reluctance. He sat, while Volfric knelt and groveled. At last the Baron relented, so far as to name some terms he might consider. Volfric agreed to pay all his debts. And to provide him the means and leisure to continue his studies. And to install him in a tower of the purest, whitest marble, built according to strict specifications.

"You do agree to the last-named term?" said Rovenmare, amazed.

"I do!"

"Well, then, how can I refuse? I humbly accept the responsibilities of the office. From what you've told me, I had better not waste another moment! I begin at once. Now go. Rest easy. Nor curses or spirits will harm you on my watch."

#

That was many years ago. Rovenmare proved as good as his word. No curses or spirits ever harmed Volfric in that time. Even the spectral Rider who stalked him through his youth never appeared to him again.

Still, Volfric never forgot that Rovenmare saw him humiliated. He never forgave him for it, either.

The castle clock struck midnight. Volfric stood at the tower door. When the last doleful tone echoed away, he knocked.

Rovenmare answered. He looked more freakish now than when he first arrived. Depilatories and bleaches had removed all hair, even his eyebrows, and turned his skin as white as the surrounding marble. The only hair he kept was the beard on his chin. This, also, he bleached totally white. He wore it as a single thin braid down to his waist, with tiny bones woven in. If he seemed emaciated before, long periods of fasting had reduced him further toward his skeletal ideal. His robes, of course, were spotless white.

He looked twice at Volfric's shaven head. He said nothing, but the glint of approval in his eye irritated Volfric.

"My lord." Rovemare stood aside and bowed.

Volfric stepped into a blindingly white hall, illuminated not by candles but by an eerily pure and omnipresent radiance. It normally raised his hackles, but tonight Katia preoccupied him. He dispensed with all ceremony, and launched immediately into the reason for his call. He told all he knew about her disappearance.

Rovenmare steepled his fingers while he thought. He drummed the tips together. They were so bony they clicked.

"Well?" said Volfric.

"Well! No explanation leaps to mind. But I know how to find an answer. Come."

Volfric followed Rovenmare up into the tower. The winding marble stair brought them to a white chamber, in the center of which sunk a pool of water, long and broad and deep enough to swim in. Human skeletons lined the pool's bleached walls, shoulder-to-shoulder all the way around.

Rovenmare knelt at the edge, and disturbed the surface with his fingers. He muttered something to the water, or to the skeletons.

The skulls opened their jaws. They exhaled milky tendrils, which twisted together in the depths, merging into a broad, pale stain that expanded as it floated up.

"Nearer, my lord," Rovenmare said.

Volfric looked. He leaned closer.

Rovenmare whispered, "What do you see?"

A vivid scene spread over the pool's surface. Flurries twinkled like a universe of falling stars under the crescent moon. The large, round, stained-glass window gleamed, intact, unshattered. Above it, on the snowy slope of the pinnacle, perched the hooded Rider on the horse.

Volfric jumped back. "What is this?"

Rovenmare winced. "We, um, look into the past, my lord. To see what happened to the girl."

Katia exploded through the window. Colored shards of glass appeared to fly out of the pool.

Volfric threw his arms up.

The horse reared and neighed and pawed the sky.

"Oh my God!" Volfric shuddered, and crossed himself.

The Rider drove the horse over the edge. They raced down the tower's side. The horseshoes struck sparks, and stamped fiery orange prints into the stone. The cloak billowed to reveal a suit of armor. The hood still hid the face. Almost level with Katia, the horse bounded from the wall into empty air. The Rider stretched out a gauntleted hand, closed an arm around Katia, pulled her in over the saddle, and looked back. Though the shadow of the hood obscured the eyes, Volfric felt them train on him in hate and exultation. The old childhood terrors clutched his heart.

"Can it see us?" he asked under his breath. He shouted, "Can it see us?"

Rovenmare shook his head.

The horse galloped across the sky, through a chiaroscuro of moonlight, cloud, and snow. The Rider waved a gesture of contempt back toward the castle.

The water boiled. The image dissolved.

Volfric turned away. "God damn it, Rovenmare! You haven't banished that horse and fiend?"

Rovenmare hung his head. He wouldn't meet Volfric's glare. He actually blushed. "My lord, have you seen them once in the time that I have been here?"

"Yes, now! Have they lurked out of my seeing all along?"

"Please understand, complete exorcism is nearly impossible, if a spirit's identity in life remains unknown."

"Know it then! I want them sent to Hell. And I want Katia. She's mine. She belongs to me. I want her!"

Rovenmare bowed lower than he ever had before. "Yes, my lord. Your wish is my command."

III. The Legend of Wendoline

2006-04-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

Katia bolted up, suddenly awake.

A horse's head loomed, its body hulking in shadow. It stared at her with huge, blank eyes.

She scrabbled back. A mattress crinkled under her. She slammed into a corner. Mildew filled her nostrils, and she sneezed.

The horse twitched its ears.

She recognized it, then. It was just as she remembered from many years ago, the horse that looked in her window when fever brought Death to her bedside.

Conscious of her nakedness, she crossed her arms and drew her legs in. As her wits returned, the last thing she remembered was diving through stained-glass.

She looked around, and found herself in the crumbling shell of a cottage. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Orange fingers of light groped out into the room, sometimes flickering in lurid streaks over a wall, sometimes withdrawing to the confines of the hearth.

Seated before the fire, with back to her and hood drawn up, the Rider poked a log, sending sparks up the chimney.

"So, Death," Katia said. "You've taken me at last."

The Rider didn't look around. It laughed. In the voice of a girl not much older than herself, it said, "You're not dead, and I'm not Death."

Everything about these words startled Katia, not least that she'd been wrong so long in assuming the Rider was male. She felt the cuts all over her, and looked down at herself. They still hurt, but at least they'd stopped bleeding. They seemed to prove the Rider's words--she wasn't dead. She rose to her knees. "Who are you? What is this place? What happened?"

The horse snorted and twitched its ears again.

"What happened is," the Rider said, "I caught you and brought you here. This place is that fellow's cottage." She pointed.

Katia looked.

A corpse, reduced almost to a skeleton, lay on the floor. Firelight reached the gruesome relic only fitfully, in glimmers.

"Oh!" Katia pressed herself back harder in the corner.

"Don't mind him," the Rider said. "He rests in peace. And no one else is likely to disturb us. As for who I am, I only hope this doesn't come as too much of a shock."

The Rider rose. She turned to face Katia. She swept the hood back from her head.

Katia jumped up. "Saint Wendoline!"

There stood the very image she'd prayed to and adored innumerable times. There were the beautiful brown curls, there the eyes so large and brown. There was the heart-shaped face, and the only difference was the dusting of freckles nobody painted on the statues.

Katia rushed to embrace her, then remembered herself and genuflected.

"No, don't kneel," Wendoline said. "It's not like that."

Katia looked up, confused. "Like what?"

"Come, now. Upsy-daisy!" Wendoline helped Katia to her feet. Her brown eyes fixed on Katia's. "I wanted you to know, but you must never call me by name. Best if you never speak it again. If the wrong ears heard, I'd be finished."

Before Katia could express her puzzlement, Wendoline pulled her close and kissed her mouth. There was something disturbingly unchaste about it, almost like when Volfric kissed her. Strange chills made her shiver. Still, Katia had kissed the statue many times, so now that she clasped the real saint in her arms, she returned it with fervor. Their noses bumped. Her chin began to feel wet and sticky. She sensed an extra, otherworldly tingle, as if she were being placed under a spell.

Wendoline broke away, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. Katia panted for breath. Wendoline rubbed a wickedly armored thumb over Katia's lips, and licked her own. "Mmmmmm. There. My secret's safe with you."

"But, I don't understand," Katia said.

"Why don't you sit down. Please. You might come to hate me, but it's time you learned the truth."

"Hate you?" Katia exclaimed.

"Please, just sit and listen."

Katia sank to the mattress. "Hate you?"

"I am Wendoline. The 'Saint' part is a lie."

"What?"

"They lied. They lied about everything. You've heard how I drove out the northern invaders."

Katia nodded, recalling the legend with pleasure, but now also with some apprehension. "All by yourself. While Wungoria' s armies were fighting in the south and west." She knew it by heart. She'd drawn much strength from it throughout her life--even more than from Godmama's stories, because she always believed it to be true.

"That's the only true part. But God never helped me. That part is a lie. I faced them with black magic, and a sword in my left hand. That's how I defeated them."

The sacrilege stunned Katia. She crossed herself.

Wendoline wrinkled her nose at the gesture, but went on: "I never pursued them, once they fled. I never preached to them. I damn well never let them burn me, nor asked God to forgive them. What happened was, the Volfric of my day, ancestor to the one you know, heard of my victory and thought I'd make a fine mother for some good, strong Volfric bastards. I was no virgin--that's another lie--but he disgusted me, so I refused him."

"Refuse a Volfric? Ha!" Wendoline's voice turned bitter. "His magicians trapped me with spells I couldn't break. They wrapped me in chains and threw me in an oubliette beneath a ruined tower. I'd have died of thirst and hunger, but rats devoured me first. Someone made up that stupid legend to explain my disappearance. They sainted me. Everyone was happy."

Part of Katia denied this could be the true Wendoline. Part of her wondered if it were a demon, sent to lead her soul astray. A deeper part heard and recognized the ring of truth. It was another cruel loss, after all else she'd lost that night. It ripped Heaven out from over her, and left her alone beneath a cold night sky. She thought of all her prayers. No Saint Wendoline had ever heard them. No Saint Wendoline guided or protected her. Instead, her life had been haunted by this . . . apparition, who now stood before her speaking of black magic.

"I vowed," Wendoline said, "never to rest until I wiped the House of Volfric from the earth. Thus I remained, bound to this world as a specter. I tried to turn my sainthood to advantage and stir an uprising. They anticipated that. Priests told the peasants that I was a deceiving spirit--that the real Wendoline watched over and protected the Volfrics and Wungoria. Peasants are cowards, and eagerly believed it. Volfric's magicians tried to exorcise me. They thought they succeeded, and they very nearly did. That's why no one since has guessed my name, and truly banished me. But they don't need a spirit's name to guard against it. By one means or another, they've always barred my way."

Katia' s own vow to kill Volfric, the man, seemed suddenly trifling before this centuries-old vow to smash the whole House from beyond the grave. Looking up at Wendoline, she felt herself a bubble on the verge of a maelstrom. From this dizzying perspective, she thought back to the chance she'd blown earlier that night, and what it might have meant in Wendoline's far vaster drama, if only she'd succeeded.

She recalled Volfric unguarded, unarmed, all but naked, hands cupped where she kicked him, pants around his ankles. She couldn't imagine getting a better chance than that. When she considered everything that now stood in her way--the mountain, the chasm, the castle, the soldiers--she couldn't imagine getting another chance at all. He was the Count, a lord and warrior from an ancient line of lords and warriors. She was a washer girl, the merest bit player on a stage whose scale she'd only just begun to fathom.

Which made her wonder, what could Wendoline want with her? Here was no saint, she reminded herself, but a specter who existed only for revenge, who'd watched her all her life, and never helped her once before, and watched the Volfrics longer. If Wendoline stopped watching and took action, she did so for reasons of her own. If she shared Katia's goal of killing Volfric, she might very well pursue it at Katia' s expense. If she saved Katia' s life, it was no boon or favor, but a move in some unholy game of death.

"I thank you for saving me--" Katia tried to say Wendoline's name, and found she truly couldn't. The kiss had sealed her lips, indeed. "But Jacob, my husband, he fought for me. He's hurt. I'm sure he's worried for me now. He might even need help. I must go to him. I must." She stood. "I'm sorry to leave you so abruptly, but--"

"Wait!" Wendoline edged closer to the door. "We're miles from Plumj." Calculation flickered in the depths of her brown eyes.

The fire crackled. Shadows and orange light dueled on the walls.

Wendoline nodded. "I'll take you to him."

The horse burst from its corner to the center of the room. Wendoline swept up onto its back, unhindered by the armor that gleamed beneath her cloak. The two were as one, majestic together. The horse switched its tail. Wendoline held out a steel hand.

Katia looked up, to search Wendoline's eyes for some clue what she might be thinking, what conclusion she had reached. But Wendoline wore her hood up now. Darkness hid her face. She looked for all the world like Death. Katia took her hand.

Wendoline pulled her effortlessly up to the saddle's back.

Katia wished she could clothe herself, but didn't dare say anything, lest Wendoline change her mind. She prayed that, once she reached Jacob, she'd be home again, she'd be safe again, no matter how badly he was injured, and somehow everything would be all right.

"You, chimney, turn into a path up to the clouds," Wendoline commanded. Even her voice now rang hollow and sexless, from far beyond the tomb. "And you--" She stroked her horse's mane. "--straight on to the village. Hyaa!"

The horse plunged into the hearth.

Katia held tight to Wendoline.

They blasted from the chimney through the clouds to where the stars shone bright and clear. They rode, they flew, faster than any wind. The horse wound its way between the highest mountain peaks.

"I'm freezing!" Katia said.

"Just a moment longer."

They dove into a cloud.

The unexpected smack of ground beneath the hooves jolted Katia.

They tore down a mountain path. The ride on land was still enchanted, devilishly fast. They pierced the veil of mist. A blur of trees whipped by on either side. The mountain peeled away and turned into the valley.

Doubts and fears blossomed in the back of Katia's mind. She didn't have long to entertain them, but with every inch of ground, she felt she was rushing toward something darker and darker. With every heartbeat, panic rattled in her breast. She couldn't bring herself to think what seemed likely--that Volfric might have searched for her, and paid Jacob a visit.

They came first to the glowing embers that remained of the cottage Katia had lived in all her life.

"Hold!" She jumped down and ran to it. The heat it still gave off stopped her like a wall. Though it saddened and surprised her to see her home in flames, it didn't shatter her. These things happened, she knew from Little Godmama's stories, even to princesses.

"Godmama!" she cried. In the midst of the fire, she sensed a dead and vacant hearth. She turned to Wendoline. "Please, is there a spirit anywhere in there?"

Wendoline concentrated a while, then shook her head.

Katia wasted no time scrambling back up in the saddle. "Oh God, Jacob! We must find him!" Even as her heart thumped in dreadful anticipation, tears streamed down her face for Little Godmama. Katia had long since figured out that the hearth spirit was actually the ghost of an ancestor from her mother's side, a great-great-grandmother or something of the sort, who remained in this world only because of the loving attachment she formed to each new generation. Little Godmama never harmed anyone in life or death. Volfric and his men seemed determined to harm everyone. They couldn't even leave a little hearth spirit alone.

Braced as she was for the worst, Katia couldn't help herself when they reached the village square. At the sight of Jacob, displayed high on the impaling spear, she didn't wait for Wendoline to stop, but flung herself from the saddle. She landed badly, spilling in a tumble. She regained her feet and half-ran, half-staggered to him. She would have screamed, "Nooo!", but only a scratchy, halting "-o-o" came out.

Wait! Did he move? She stared. Could he still live?

No, ravens! Ravens strutted on him.

Katia charged, sobbing, shrieking, waving. "Get off! Damn you! Get off! Leave him alone!"

Reluctantly, the ravens flapped away.

Katia stopped before the figure and peered up at the face, banishing all hope that it might be someone else. Still, she sought a hint of life in Jacob's eyes. They'd rolled up to the whites, and ravens had been pecking them. His mouth froze open in what must have been a dying groan. His tongue lolled out. Ravens had been pecking at it, too.

She stretched to touch his face. She wanted to give him just one gentle, wifely touch. She wanted to pour all the love she would have given him up through her fingertips, to ease the hurt he'd suffered, to soften his hard grimace, even though it was too late. She just wanted to say goodbye.

The spear was tall, however, and he hadn't slid down it very far.

She seized his hand. She kneaded the stiff thing, trying to make up for a lifetime of caresses she'd never give him.

He dropped several inches.

It startled her. "Oh!"

She clutched his leg and wept against his thigh. As he slid down, she too slid down, until she bowed, naked, at his feet. Tendrils of her long black hair stuck in the clotting purple mud.

"I'm so sorry," Wendoline said.

"You knew," Katia said, her forehead to the ground. "You knew what we'd find here."

"I couldn't have stopped it, if that's what you're thinking."

Katia jumped up. "But you're not sorry, are you? Because now I'll do anything to kill Volfric. You knew I'd come to this. And you have some plan. Some scheme. I see it in your eyes. So where do I fit in it? You want revenge? Now so do I. He's left me nothing else."

"What do you know about the vampires on the mountain?"

Katia blinked. She didn't see what they had to do with anything. "Doesn't he hunt them, for sport?"

"Soldiers herd them to the most desolate heights," Wendoline said. "They only feed on animals. Constant cold and hunger dull their minds and keep them weak. Their wits are never clear enough to form the slightest inkling of their powers. Volfric loves to boast that he hunts vampires, but those pathetic creatures don't deserve the name."

Katia flashed back to the one she slew by calling on Godmama. She remembered the jar of helpless butterflies, trapped so easily, turning black and crispy in the fire. Perhaps Wendoline was right, but she still didn't see what it had to do with anything. "So?"

"Those vampires pose no threat to the castle. So no effort is made to keep them out! Even Baron Rovenmare has limits."

Katia shuddered at the necromancer's name.

"He can't just ward off everything," Wendoline said. "He concentrates on spirits like myself. The vampires don't rate his attention, or even his apprentice's. If one gets in the castle, soldiers deal with the nuisance. You still look confused. I'll come straight to the point. Almost nothing stands between vampires and Volfric. The right vampire could get to him. You can get to him. If you become a vampire."

Katia's jaw dropped. She looked at the horse. It stared back at her, and whinnied.

Wendoline talked faster. "You'll be nothing like those wretches! I know a place where we'll have all the time we need to get you ready. You'll be stronger and quicker. You'll master all your powers. I'll train you as a warrior and sorceress--"

Katia stopped listening and looked away, to think, to let her mind catch up with the twist in the scheme. It seemed infernally clever, too clever by half. Wendoline had obviously sought long and hard for a gap in the castle's defenses. Had she found one? Katia certainly had no better ideas.

But, become a vampire! That meant Katia would have to die. She'd be undead, a corpse without a soul. She'd dwell in night, and never see the sun. She'd drink blood. Human blood. The cross and all things holy would stand arrayed against her. She'd be damned.

She frowned over that last point. God abandoned her already. God abandoned Jacob and her mother and the man she still loved as her father. Father Gregory, that mealy son of a rat, represented God on earth. Yes, she cursed God in her heart. That was that.

The hardest part was, could she be a murderess? She thought of how she felt the time she killed in self-defense. She knew she'd had to do it, even took a certain pride in it, but deep down, her truest human feelings recoiled fron the act. As a vampire, she'd sustain herself more savagely than that. Murder and bloodshed would be her meat and drink.

She looked around at Plumj, and let herself remember how stupid, mean, and vile the villagers had always been to her. Men slapping her arse, saying things to make her blush, and always trying to trap her in some corner. Women shunning her, making up stories, and calling her a slut just because they were such ugly, spiteful shrews. She thought of all their laundry, always so disgusting. She let herself remember how they all stood by when the soldiers came. They did nothing, she was sure, to help poor Jacob. They probably thought he deserved it, for that gold.

Yes, the thought of killing them for no better reason than to sate a thirst for blood made her queasy, but she felt no pity for the lot of fools and cowards. She could bring herself to do it, to turn herself into a ravenous night-monster, to prey on them as though they were mere sheep, if that was the price of avenging those she loved.

Wendoline still was talking.

Katia held up her hand. "I'll do it. But first, we bury Jacob. Right here where I stand. This spear will mark his grave, where everyone can see it. Or pretend not to see it, just like they do that barrel! And you--" She stabbed a finger at Wendoline. "You'll lay a curse. A black magic curse to shame that coward Father Gregory! A curse his weak, worthless faith never could dispel. A plague on any who disturb the spear or grave, unto the seventh generation, death to their firstborns, and--oh, I don't know, just do it!"

Wendoline smiled. "As you say."

The village remained dark and still around them as they worked. Only the castle clock tower, tolling midnight in the distance, broke the silence. The grave was shallow, but it would suffice. Wendoline cast a hair-raising curse over it.

"There, now," Katia said. "Whatever I must do, let's get it over with."

#

Leafless trees surrounded Katia. Gnarled limbs stretched in tortured prayer toward the heavens. Lightning scarred the trunks. Roots lay in a tangle on the slope, like thousands of dead snakes. Katia stepped over them as best she could. Rock scraped the bare soles of her feet. Snow numbed her toes. Without a stitch of clothing, she hugged herself and shivered. The wind whipped and blasted her. It turned her tears to ice.

She pushed through spidery branches into a clearing, a flood of silver light.

The crescent moon hung low over a circle of enormous stones.

Katia saw, but could not believe.

Titanic blocks stood upright. Massive slabs lay across the tops, lifted there by some giant or the Devil. They looked as old as the mountain, as the earth. Some had fallen over, and some had broken or crumbled, but that only magnified the awful grandeur of those that still were whole. The snow that capped them probably had never melted since the dawn of time. Probably it never would until the Final Trumpet.

Katia hobbled through mist and swirling snow to the center. She turned, looking around. Beyond the rim of the stone circle, mountains loomed. They formed a natural ring, clearly inspiring the arrangement of the blocks.

Katia's teeth chattered. She prayed the vampires would come soon.

She heard them first. They crunched nearer and nearer through the brush, but stealthily. No deer or wolf ever slunk so quietly through brittle twigs.

Next she saw the eyes, burning, glowing red. Even the tide of moonlight couldn't dim them. They seemed to float like phantom fires. They peered through the spaces between the standing stones. Those gazes threatened to bewitch her where she stood, to smother any will to resist or flee. They reminded her what she already knew--vampires were magic.

Katia stepped back.

She heard a soft "chuff," a footfall in snow, above and behind her.

She whirled.

There, atop one of the cross-slabs, a male vampire crouched over her, as naked as she was.

She stared, gripped by a curiosity that haunted her since childhood.

Undeath had drawn the vampire's eyes deep into the sockets. They shone with a sickly radiance, like sunken candles at the bottom of a well. The hair and beard were long, matted, and filthy. The emaciated flesh showed much decay. Livid in places, dark and putrefied in others, it left no doubt that this thing was a corpse. She couldn't help glancing between his legs, at the shriveled manhood that dangled, pitiful and limp.

The vampire hissed. He threw himself at her.

She set herself to catch him.

The slam of his momentum knocked her down.

She wrapped her arms and legs around him.

They tussled.

She bit his shoulder.

He jerked back, wrenching free before her teeth could break the tough, frozen skin. His knuckles smashed across her face. Her head bounced on the stony ground. She saw stars. Her legs loosened.

He scrabbled away like a startled animal.

The other vampires swarmed on her. She writhed on her back, open and exposed. They sank fangs into her wrists and ankles, throat and thighs, breasts and stomach, anywhere they could. They crouched all around, heads down, teeth ripping, mouths sucking. Greedily, they raked her with their claws. They stabbed and tore. They drew rivers of blood. She felt their tongues everywhere, lapping at her life.

Katia struggled beneath them. Letting them drink her blood was easy. But she had to drink blood from one of them. "Nobody becomes a vampire in all innocence," Wendoline had said. "That's a lie the living tell themselves about loved ones who return. There must be an exchange of blood. If you don't take blood from one of them, you'll only die an agonizing death. You won't rise as a vampire. You'll never punish Volfric. You won't avenge your Jacob."

Weakening, in desperation, Katia lunged at the face nearest hers. It was a girl, who clearly had been young and pretty once. Katia caught the girl's lip between her teeth.

The girl tried to pull away.

Katia bit harder. Acrid blood trickled down her tongue. She could taste the girl's rotten breath.

The girl hissed. Her eyes burned a frightful red.

Katia held and bit. She pressed her lips together, and sucked.

The girl jerked back.

Katia's teeth snapped completely through the lip. It came off in her mouth with a sour spurt of blood.

The girl ran, shrieking, away.

Katia swallowed--blood, lip, and all.

Was it enough? Did she drink enough? Would she rise as a vampire in three nights?

Her vision dimmed and blurred. Numbness spread over her perforated body. The bestial slurps and grunts sounded more distant every moment.

It was finished. She could do no more. She lay her head back. She stared up at the moon. Through her tears, she saw it double. Vampires shed no tears, or so she'd heard. How strange, how fitting, that this was her last taste of humanity and life. She savored it.

As she drifted into death, she heard Wendoline's voice. A song. A lullaby.

IV. The Monster

2006-04-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Daylight flooded Baron Rovenmare's white pool chamber.

His bleached robe hung, neatly folded, over a bone chair.

Underwater, he stroked and kicked his bone-white arms and legs. The skeletons along the sides filled the pool with visions. He swam through a rippling phantasmagoria of images and sounds, faces, voices, scenes.

All night, from the moment Volfric left him, he'd pored over folios, books, and manuscripts, trying to discern the Rider's identity. He traced the specter back through Volfric family records, diaries, letters, and cryptic accounts left by previous magicians of the court. At daybreak, he felt ready to draw up a list of suspects--noblemen and knights from one likely generation, who expressed great hatred for the family, who were rumored to practice occult arts, or who died without peace or proper burial.

Now, in the water, he carried his research beyond the realm of documents. He consulted the spirits of the dead, and tried to fathom out secrets never recorded by mortal pen. But there were secrets, and there were secrets. The dead would tell all about the living, or share information that simply wasn't known, but they kept each other's secrets with a jealous, iron fury. He knew better than to ask the Rider's identity outright. They'd never reveal it, and would take solemn affront at his impertinence. But they didn't seem to mind if he sought it indirectly, so long as he honored their unstated code of propriety--a code he'd learned through trial and grievous error.

He'd only succeeded so far in crossing names off his list. He hoped that meant he was narrowing it down, and that soon he'd confirm one of those remaining. Failing that, he'd just have to go back further in the documents and draw up another list. But he had to learn that name. He had to exorcise the Rider, once and for all. Volfric's humiliating reprimand made it a point of honor. His own smarting sense of having shirked his duty made it a point of basic self-respect.

He noticed a servant waiting at the pool's edge. He swam up and popped his head above the surface.

The servant flinched, but remembered himself and bowed. "I-I beg your pardon, sir."

"What is it?"

"Sir . . ." He bowed again. "Count Volfric requests you in the laboratory." Again, he bowed. "Immediately, sir."

"In the laboratory?" Rovenmare said.

"Yes sir."

"The laboratory?" Rovenmare repeated.

"Yes sir. The laboratory. Count Volfric wants you there. At once. He seemed most impatient. Sir."

Rovenmare waved him away.

The servant bowed and hurried out.

Rovenmare despised the laboratory. He couldn't imagine why he was being summoned to it. He never went there unless absolutely necessary, and left it in the care of his apprentice, Fronius, whom he also despised.

Fronius--ugh! That hunch. That limp. Those queer metal prosthetics, grotesquely fastened to his twisted flesh. But what Rovenmare found most repulsive about Fronius was his willingness to muck around in meat and blood. He always had some decaying body part close at hand. He was always cutting into some cadaver. He seemed to love flesh as much as Rovenmare loved bone. As distasteful as that was to Rovenmare, it made Fronius the perfect apprentice for him. Everything in necromancy that Rovenmare regarded as unclean and beneath him, he simply assigned to Fronius.

He climbed, dripping, from the pool. He dried himself with a white cloth. He wiped it over the place where his genitals used to be. Fronius had removed them for him. Not a seam or bump or indentation flawed the surface. Rovenmare had to admit, Fronius's talents sometimes could prove useful, even impressive. More often than not, however, they were just disgusting.

Rovenmare put on a dingy, threadbare robe. He normally burned them when they showed the least sign of dirt or wear, but he always kept at least one that could be soiled, if necessary.

On his brilliant white tower's lowest level, where it joined the castle wall, he rolled back a spotless carpet. Thus he laid bare a wooden trap door. It looked like a filthy thing in the midst of so much white. He considered it a filthy thing. It led to the laboratory, and to Fronius's humid, dark abode below.

Rovenmare had made it explicitly clear in no uncertain terms that Fronius was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever--and yes, again--ever to come up through this door, or in any other way to besmirch the tower with his filthy presence. It was only with the greatest reluctance and revulsion that Rovenmare gripped the iron handle and pulled the nasty trap door open.

He wound down into the gloom on a rusty spiral stair. As he descended, the stench of every stage of putrefaction oozed into his nostrils, down his throat. At the bottom, he stooped under a low timber ceiling.

The laboratory conveyed a sense of vastness and claustrophobic confinement, all at once. The only light blazed from fatty candles on a heavy iron chandelier, dark from rust and soot and spattered blood. Greasy smoke hung in the air. Axes, saws, and other instruments glinted from the shadows.

On one table lay the half-dissected carcass of a bull. Its dead eyes stared vacantly. On other tables lay less identifiable hunks of sticky, rotting flesh. Blood drizzled to the floor and streamed to a central drain. An enormous tub was filled to overflowing with chopped-up human corpses and their blood. Flies, of course, buzzed everywhere. Rovenmare shuddered to imagine maggots squirming all around. Rats scritched and tittered in the shadows.

The most sickening sight to him was not quite yet a skeleton. The bones stood mostly bare, but great gobs of decaying meat still clung to them.

At this, he staggered to the drain. He retched, but his long abstention from food left him nothing to bring up. Each dry heave convulsed him more violently. He desperately wished he could vomit and be done with it, but he couldn't even drool spittle into the drain.

When he looked up, he saw Volfric and Fronius shaking their heads at him. Fronius immediately lowered his goggle-eyes, rather than meet the master's gaze. Volfric sneered.

Rovenmare dabbed his sleeve at the corners of his lips. He pulled himself together, finally, and joined Volfric next to the large central table beneath the chandelier. "My lord." He bowed stiffly. A bloodstained sheet covered something enormous on the table. "What have we here?" he muttered, knowing he wouldn't like the answer.

Fronius swept the sheet off to reveal a gargantuan, headless human form. It must have measured eight feet tall. A bloody towel modestly draped the genitals, for which Rovenmare was thankful. From what he could see, the body had been cobbled from parts of separate corpses, like those which filled the tub. Crude sutures and bolts held it together. There was no proportion in it. The arms didn't match in length or any other way, except that each was grotesquely large in its own right. The mismatched hands were huge, with mammoth, thick, square fingers. It would seem that greater care had been taken in matching the legs, but even so, they clearly came from different bodies.

Looking at the abomination, Rovenmare couldn't help imagining what putting it together would involve. He placed one hand on his stomach and the other over his mouth, and fought another wave of nausea.

"Impressive, no?" Volfric said.

"It is something," Rovenmare managed to say.

"Imagine facing this colossus in battle."

"No pleasant prospect, that," Rovenmare agreed.

"Imagine the awe it would strike in a foe's heart."

"It would probably kill the man of fright."

"Imagine if this giant were your lord."

Rovenmare looked suddenly at Volfric. "My lord!"

"Yes." Volfric grinned. "I called you here to assist Fronius in making this my body."

Rovenmare recoiled. His jaw hung open. The thought of assisting--assisting!--Fronius in anything galled him beyond words. The madness of Volfric's proposal struck him dumb. For long moments, he could only blink.

When he recovered, he said, "My lord, what you contemplate . . . I counsel you against it. I'm at a loss to understand why you desire it. And how could it be done?"

"Fronius knows," Volfric said. "That's why you're assisting."

Fronius held up a triumphant finger. "The Count's blood must be transfused into the body's veins. His heart must be placed into its chest. His head must be transferred. And with his head, his soul."

"Let's not forget one thing," Volfric told Fronius. "One hugely important thing. My manhood! That, too, you must transfer to the body. I must be able to pass on my seed."

"My lord, I did not forget. See what I've provided for you." Fronius pulled away the towel to reveal the creature's penis.

Volfric's eyes widened in awe. Then doubt and consternation flashed across his face. "But my seed! My seed! Could this organ from another man emit my seed?"

"It will, I assure you," Fronius said. "This body will be yours in every sense."

Volfric stared at the enormous penis as though hypnotized. "My seed . . ."

Rovenmare felt soiled by the discussion, by the entire situation. The sight of the gigantic male member, so fleshy and flaccid, made him gag again. He covered his eyes. "Why, Volfric? Why?"

"Ah, my dear Baron," Volfric said. "You underrate your poor apprentice. I've taken great interest in his studies and experiments. He's been most patient in explaining them to me."

Rovenmare scowled at Fronius, the simpering little toady.

"In the course of our conversations," Volfric went on, "I myself conceived this operation. Fronius assured me it could easily be done. I've hesitated to go through with it, as any man would." His expression hardened. "Last night convinced me of the wisdom of proceeding."

Rovenmare got the point. He'd failed in his duties by not banishing the Rider. Volfric had lost confidence in his protection. He recalled how the vision of the Rider in the pool affected Volfric. Yes, he'd seen real terror in the Count's eyes. Now Volfric made ready to protect himself, if necessary, in the only way he could imagine--by making himself bigger, stronger, tougher. It was the same way of thinking, no doubt, that led his ancestors to erect the ridiculously daunting castle. But just as the castle didn't keep the ghosts out, so this gigantic new body would serve no purpose against a specter. Nevertheless, it would make Volfric feel safer, and in any case, he seemed determined to go through with it.

Chagrined, Rovenmare nodded. "As you wish, my lord. Before we begin, though, one thing worries me, that you should consider. Trapping the soul in a severed head is an ancient form of torment, one of the most horrible, by all accounts. The spell has never been employed as Fronius proposes for this operation."

"That's the genius of it," Volfric said.

"It could damage you, my lord--break your spirit or unhinge your mind."

"In such a short time?" Fronius scoffed. "Only several hours, at most, while we prepare the body. I see no way around it, but I see no danger in it, either. You're strong of will, my lord. You surely can endure it."

"Yes," Volfric said. "Yes, surely I can."

#

What followed was a living Hell for Rovenmare. The entire day was occupied with siphoning the blood from one body through wheezing pumps into the other, with digging the heart out of one thickly-muscled chest and transplanting it in the other, and with chopping off the head and reattaching it to the other stump of a neck.

As blood filled the giant body, it seeped from the crude seams that joined the different parts.

"Eeugh!" Rovenmare said. "You couldn't have done a better job here, Fronius? This sloppiness is most unlike you."

"The Count came to me last night," Fronius said, "and told me he expected to proceed this morning. Time permitting, you know how much better I could do. No matter. The spells will fix it all just as it should be."

Rovenmare realized what kind of night Fronius must have had--far busier even than his own. That excused nothing. This operation had no precedent. They had no business attempting it until they made everything as perfect as could be. "Spells, eh? Are you sure you're still within your competence?"

Fronius continued working. If he reacted, if his expression changed, the mask and goggles hid it.

Eventually, they finished. They tossed Volfric's bloodless, heartless, headless corpse on top of all the others in the tub. His new body, the completed monstrosity, lay on the table, awaiting life.

Rovenmare leaned against a wall. He didn't count the tolls when the castle clock sounded, but he could tell there were a lot. Outside, it would be dark.

Fronius stood before the table. He began to read an incantation from a massive tome bound in heavy maroon leather.

Rovenmare was in no mood to pay very close attention. He felt exhausted. He felt queasy. He'd tried to warn Fronius and Volfric of the dangers, but they scorned and flouted everything he said. He couldn't help noticing, though, that Fronius was attempting an extraordinarily complex sequence of spells. He himself would not have found them easy to perform. He couldn't imagine that Fronius would be equal to the task. He sighed, and decided he'd probably better pull rank and take over, before something disastrous happened.

Prickles all over his skin startled Rovenmare from the daze he hadn't yet shaken off. They told him necromantic power was about to be unleashed.

Fronius slammed the book shut, raised it high above his head, and uttered the last syllable.

Through the ceiling and thick walls, Rovenmare heard the wind suddenly howl. Thunder crashed as lightning arced between the snow-filled clouds that always wreathed the mountain.

A blasphemous breath of life sighed through the laboratory. Glass instruments vibrated and tinkled. The candles flickered in the iron chandelier.

On the table, a finger twitched. One thigh flexed. Volfric's eyes rolled up, showing only whites.

Fronius and Rovenmare leaned forward.

All at once, spasms exploded through every muscle of the body. It flopped and writhed like a pile of fish dumped from a net. The heels, elbows, shoulder blades, and head thumped a horrible staccato on the table.

Fronius's mask remained as blank as ever, but he shrank into a posture of confusion and alarm.

"Fool!" Rovenmare shouted. "You haven't revived the body as a whole! You've given life to all the parts--separately!"

Fronius shrank further. He looked up to Rovenmare, and squeaked, "Can you fix it?"

Rovenmare reached into his robe and drew his wand. At his command, it turned into a flute of polished bone. He stepped before the table. The tune he played was haunting and funereal, a tune only fit to sound within the grave. The necromantic power it invoked would have chilled anyone who heard it.

At first nothing happened.

Volfric's body continued to thrash.

Faintly, the tramp of feet clattered above.

Fronius cringed and looked up.

The footsteps descended through the tower, drew nearer, grew more distinct. And then they clanged on the iron spiral stair.

Water dripped down the stairs into the cellar. Droplets splished on the floor. The drip became a drizzle, then trickles, forming puddles.

Rovenmare played faster, wilder.

The body struggled to tear itself apart.

Skeletons, wet from the pool, filed down into the cellar. They circled the table to Rovenmare's tune. Their feet clicked a snappy tattoo on the floor-stones. When the circle was complete, they began their dance--spinning, hopping, bowing, leaping.

Now the music became pandemonic.

The skeletons stomped. They whirled in crazy loops, swinging their arms, not caring what they hit. They jumped on tables. They pulled things off walls. They danced through the tub, treading corpse pieces like grapes in a winepress.

Fronius whimpered. He covered his ears.

The skeletons became absolutely frenzied. Some danced madly in faster and faster circles. Some smashed chairs. Cabinets crashed. Tables overturned. Glass shattered. The tub broke. Limbs, torsos, heads, and all manner of blood and offal spilled across the floor.

The skeletons chittered with glee. By now, they'd taken up the tune, themselves. They moaned and keened it with a frightful abandon no living voice ever could express. They gyred around the table, trampling remains, kicking them, jumping up and down on them, squashing them to gruesome, fleshy pulp.

Fronius screamed. He bowed his masked face to the ground.

Rovenmare stood, a grim figure, his flute a wand again, ready to draw on the necromantic energies generated by the Dance of Death, which turned like a wheel all around him.

At last, when the seams of Volfric's body strained to their utmost, Rovenmare lashed out with his wand.

Power discharged like lightning from the tip, surging through Volfric. He arched spectacularly, all but snapping the spine. He dropped back to the table.

Again, Rovenmare slashed, blasting more energy through Volfric.

His convulsions grew more violent, but also more coordinated. He thrashed and cried at the heart of the swirling maelstrom of power.

Rovenmare shouted. He leveled the wand and channeled every last bit of remaining energy through it.

One last tremendous heave shook Volfric, and he was whole. He leaped off the table. From the depths of his massive chest, he bellowed, "I'M ALIVE!"

Rovenmare lowered the wand. He bowed. "My lord."

Volfric didn't seem to notice. He turned away. With a mighty sweep of his arm, he cleared a swath of skeletons out of his way. They sailed through the air, crunched against a wall, and clattered to the floor as a random pile of bones.

He charged the door. He yelled, and battered it to splinters with one smash of both humongous fists. He roared, naked, out into the snowy, moonlit courtyard.

The skeletons had truly wrecked the laboratory. They'd ripped or smashed everything to bits. Many still danced, though some began to settle down.

Fronius wept on his knees. The floor around him was a mess, slick with blood and liquified flesh, littered with broken glass, metal, and wood.

Rovenmare couldn't worry about any of that yet, nor even the exhausting purification of the skeletons that would be necessary before they could re-enter the pool. First he had to see to Volfric.

He followed his raving lord into the night.

V. Vampire Woman

2006-04-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Katia woke, entombed in snow. She clawed and kicked free, into moonlight and more falling snow. Her parched throat gave her voice a tortured, ragged edge. The stone circle around her and the mountains beyond echoed her scream.

She found herself alone.

Agony at first overwhelmed thought. She only knew how stiff and sore she felt. Despite the pain, awareness dawned on her that all her wounds had healed. Her skin was smooth and perfect now--a cool, dead, pale blue. She shifted to see herself better. Her muscles protested every inch, but she managed to sit up.

She racked her murky brain for memories. The image of the vampires with their Hellish eyes came back to her. She slowly forced a trembling hand up, almost covering one eye, and saw a faint red glare on it.

Her finger- and toenails had thickened, lengthened, sharpened, and turned black.

Her tongue lay dry and heavy in her mouth. She twitched it to the side, touching the fang she expected to find there. She hadn't swallowed yet. She decided to try, though she knew it would hurt terribly. She closed her eyes, and worked her mouth and throat.

The thirst! It welled up in her at once, an emptiness as if her insides were dissolving.

Wendoline rode into the circle.

Katia sensed no blood in horse or rider. She knew that already--they were specters--but something in her groped out in hunger, and raged with disappointment. She crawled to Wendoline. "Please . . . blood!"

Wendoline turned the horse, waved for her to follow, and galloped away.

"Wait!" Katia watched Wendoline vanish into the trees. She jumped up. Excruciating soreness made her hesitate. Thirst drove her to stumble a few steps. She flopped in the snow. Groaning, she pushed herself back to her feet. She staggered until her legs grew strong enough to jog. The horse sounded more distant, leaving her behind. She snarled, ignored punishing aches, and broke into a run.

As hoofbeats lured her down the mountain and around it, toward her first time drinking blood, she wondered in the back of her mind, whom would she attack? How would she do it? What would it be like? Behind it all burned the question, what had she become? The word vampire held little meaning for her yet. A dark road of discovery stretched out of sight before her.

She raced through woods and clearings, and scrambled over jagged rock. Her bare feet were at home on even the cruelest surfaces, to a degree that seemed inhuman. That delighted and disturbed her. It was, she understood, the merest first taste of her new toughness, strength, and power, bought so dearly from the grave. It raised one final question, the only one that mattered--would she be tough, strong, and powerful enough to kill Volfric?

The hoofbeats stopped.

Katia burst through a wintry thicket of evergreens.

There on the mountain, some way below the castle, stood a cottage. It looked cozy, built of stone. Warmth shone from the windows. Smoke rose from two chimneys. Snow covered the roof and eaves.

Katia saw neither horse nor rider anywhere. She assumed they were leading her to Plumj, but apparently Wendoline meant for her to feed here first instead.

And Katia did sense blood, vital and pulsing, in that cottage. Ravenous, she prowled around it.

Garlic hung in every window but one. She loped toward it, avoiding the soft cone of orange light it shed. She gnashed her fangs to discover the window barred her way, even without garlic. She couldn't enter, or so much as touch it, without an invitation.

As if in answer to her wish, a blond little boy came to the window and peeked out. When he saw Katia, his blue eyes lit up, and he smiled with pure excitement as only children can. He threw the window open.

She needed no further invitation, and indeed couldn't resist. Instantly, she sprang inside.

He smiled up at her, more shyly now.

A start of recognition gave her pause. God only knew how many half-brothers she had, but here was one of them.

He'd been pointed out to her once or twice in Plumj. Everyone knew the boy was Volfric's favorite bastard. Katia could certainly see why. Just looking at him stirred in her an instinct death hadn't totally obliterated, that made her want to kneel and hug him.

Everyone knew, as well, that Volfric kept the mother as a mistress. The villagers whispered she was the only woman who could ever spark true love in his wicked heart. The cottage kept mother and child near him on the mountain but, just as importantly, away from the castle.

Curious how her favored half-brother lived, Katia took the room in at a glance. It was spacious, clean, and comfy--luxuries she'd never known. The stone fireplace, in particular, would have made a charming home for Little Godmama.

Poor Godmama! Undeath muted Katia's first twinge of grief, but she embraced it, and let it remind her of everything else torn from her on her wedding night. The smouldering core of all her grief and rage reignited in her heart.

But when she looked again at this boy, with whom she shared a father, she couldn't bring herself to wish him any harm. Never mind that the father was Volfric. She didn't desire this kind of vengeance. It appalled her to think Wendoline did. She cursed the specter for manipulating her need and putting her in this horrible position. She strained not to succumb to her tormenting thirst. If she could have jumped back out the window, she would have, but her leap had carried her beyond the boy. He stood between her and the snowy night.

His smile had turned to open-mouth fascination with her nudity. Hints of dread crept into his eyes as they lingered on her claws, but then his gaze fixed on the flat sections of her stomach. His hand came up, as if he wanted to trace the lines between the muscles, or maybe poke his finger in her belly-button.

Katia was intensely aware of blood coursing through him. It startled her to realize where some of it coursed. His heart pounded. His little prick stiffened. It perked up under his nightgown. The physical reaction unsettled him and Katia alike. Confusion flashed over his face. He adjusted his gown. She wrenched herself around to face away from him.

"Why did you let me in?" she demanded.

She could hear his childish shrug. "The nice old woman said you'd visit me tonight."

Old woman? Surely Wendoline in sorcerous disguise. "Who did she say would visit you?"

"A nice fairy. Aren't you? What's your name? My name's--"

"Where's your cross?" Katia cut him off. She averted her eyes from a faded spot on the wall where one recently hung, but it failed to repulse her.

"Under my pillow. She said I should put it there to keep me safe from monsters."

"What did she tell you about garlic?"

"You wouldn't come if I had any."

That much was true enough. Wendoline had tricked him into dropping all defenses. They must have been effective, if he couldn't tell a vampire when he saw one. It worried Katia that she might be warded off so easily, however much she wished she had been just this once.

"And she said don't tell anyone," he whispered. "You're my secret friend."

Katia heard him step toward her. She strove to think of some way out. Thirst clouded her mind and began to overwhelm her. It screamed through her for satisfaction. It locked her in that room, where there was blood, and wouldn't let her leave, despite a door and open window. She did what she could, and leaped as far away as possible, onto his bed in the corner.

He snatched a penny off his little table, and brought it over. "I found this beside the path. That's when I met the nice old woman."

Katia crouched awkwardly, one foot on his pillow. She dug in with her toes, her talons puncturing the fabric. She thought of the cross, a mere inch beneath her sole, hidden and useless. She pressed far back in the corner.

The boy came on. "She said you'd grant a wish if I give it to you."

Katia looked away, but still detected all those pulsing veins out of the corner of her eye. She raked her long black hair across her face.

"Here!" He held his little fist up to her and opened it.

She couldn't help looking. The shiny penny caught her eye. But then she saw the hand, plump with blood.

Logs shifted in the hearth.

Katia pounced. She yanked him off his feet.

The penny flew heads over tails over heads over tails, winking in the firelight.

Her fangs snapped in his gullet, and she ripped.

Blood sprayed the twirling penny before it hit the ground. It splashed down in a spreading scarlet puddle.

She clamped her lips around the spouting wound. She lifted the boy over her head. Blood poured down her throat, down the sides of her mouth, down her chin. It spilled on her breasts. Rivulets dribbled from her elbows, down her legs. A pool formed around her toes.

Intoxicated, she staggered and dropped the child. She sank to her knees beside him. She clawed for his heart, through nightgown and skin, but found bone in her way. She hammered her fist down on his sternum, cracking it. When she plunged in with her nails again, jagged bone edges cut her fingers, but she didn't care. She tore his chest open.

Rich scarlet blood flooded the cavity. Katia pressed her face in deep, her rump raised in the air. She slurped, impatient she couldn't drink fast enough.

The door opened.

Katia looked up.

A young woman, as blonde and blue-eyed as the boy, peeked in.

Katia hissed. Her nose and chin dripped gore.

The woman's mouth opened, but she found no voice. She stood paralyzed, as in a nightmare.

Katia lunged, but slipped in blood.

The woman blinked. She tore her gaze away. She fled through the cottage, and outside. Her white nightdress fluttered.

Katia tackled her into a snow drift.

The woman tried to scream again, in vain. She struggled, hot and living, against Katia's cold, dead, iron grip.

When Katia finished, she rolled over on her back in snow stained a pretty pink. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Instantly she spit it out--too watery.

#

Wendoline rode out of the woods.

Katia jumped up. "You!"

Wendoline acknowledged this greeting with a nod.

"You set this up."

"You're right. And you're welcome." Wendoline dismounted. "Tasty, no?"

"He was a child."

"Did that stop you?"

"I couldn't stop myself. You knew I wouldn't. Just like you knew he was my brother."

Wendoline laughed. "Oh spare me!" She swept her hood back. As she approached, her ghostly form grew tangible enough that wind began to play with her brown curls. "If it's 'brothers' you want, you've plenty more, believe me. Boo-hoo, he was a child! If you knew how many brats I've watched grow into Volfrics, you wouldn't make this pretense of remorse." Her big brown eyes looked so vulnerable and warm, especially amid her freckles, it chilled Katia to hear her speak such heartless words.

"Pretense?" Katia cried.

"Shed a tear for him, then. Go on, just one. I'd like to see you do it."

"Oh, you--"

"Look down. You cast no shadow. You're a corpse without a soul. Remorse is a habit from your life. Nothing more. Lose it."

Rage rushed to Katia's head and dizzied her. But deep down, she knew it substituted for remorse she didn't--couldn't--feel. As that sank in, the anger dissipated. It left her shaking, unsure what she felt, and wondering what it was even possible for her to feel now.

"There, there," Wendoline said. "I'm sorry, but you need to understand what you've become, with no illusions." She knelt. She packed together a clod of snow.

"What are you doing?"

"Shh. Hold still. You're a mess." Wendoline began to chafe Katia's skin, cleaning off the blood.

Katia let her.

"Vengeance always costs," Wendoline said. "Even when you think you've nothing left to lose." She rubbed the snow over Katia in brisk, rough strokes. "You're learning the price, the bad half of the bargain."

"I want to learn what it's bought me."

Wendoline kept chafing, down along Katia's calves to her feet. "Well, I know how you can find out for yourself, this very night." She glanced up.

Katia arched an eyebrow.

"We can't stay here," Wendoline said. "Among the places we can go is the tower where I died. You'll find a challenge there to show you what you're made of."

"What challenge?"

Wendoline packed a fresh clod of snow. "You'll see." Gently, she scrubbed the blood from Katia's breasts. "If you dare."

"What choice do I have?"

"We could go somewhere . . . less challenging." Wendoline wiped the last of the blood off Katia's face.

Their eyes met.

Katia suspected the challenge would be something terrible she'd have to fight--another monster, more monstrous than herself. Her shiver proved that fear, at least, remained within her range of feelings. "No. To the tower."

Wendoline gave her lips a peck.

#

The horse bore them across the starry heavens.

Katia's mind seemed frozen, suspended between two scenes of carnage--the slaughter behind her at the cottage, and the challenge ahead, which would surely be as bloody.

She emerged from her grim reverie at journey's end.

The horse descended through a silver floor of clouds which, on the underside, formed a dark ceiling over the dark earth. The moon blasted through shifting holes, to cast shifting columns of light.

A village passed below. It looked like Plumj to Katia, though she knew they were very far from Plumj.

A scrubby plain spread out before them.

A single feature rose into prominence, until it domineered over everything as far as eye could see--the ruined shell of a tower, overgrown with ivy, moss, and mushrooms from base to shattered crown. Holes in the outer wall revealed nothing but darkness. Earthen mounds, scattered stones, and grassless scars on the land were the only traces of the buildings that must have surrounded it, once upon a time.

"That's where you died?" Katia asked.

Wendoline stared at the old edifice. "What's left of me still lies beneath, in the oubliette."

They stood now on the plain. The horse found a stubble of spiny weeds to munch--from habit rather than necessity, Katia supposed.

"Hard to believe it was once a lively castle," Wendoline said. "Long before even my time."

"What happened?"

"A Volfric. What else? His army sacked the place. They massacred everyone except the tower's lord. Volfric intended something worse than death for him. As I said, they've always had magicians."

"They cursed him? The lord?"

"You can't imagine."

Katia gazed at the tower, and tried to imagine. "He's the challenge, isn't he?"

"He won't go gentle into death, though it would put him out of centuries of misery. He will fight you. He'll probably attack. And the curse makes him enchanted. That means he can slay you. Unless you slay him first. Do it, Katia. You'll be righting one of the Volfrics' many wrongs."

Katia's stomach growled. She clutched it. "How can I thirst again so soon? I drank so much."

"It's in your veins now. Those vampires drained you dry."

"I saw a village, not far from here--"

"Gorna."

"Perhaps I should feed again."

Wendoline pointed at the tower. "There is blood. Go get it."

The thought of entering that tower, naked and alone, to battle some monster in its lair, to the death, with only her bare hands, petrified Katia. And yet she did insist they come here, even after Wendoline mentioned other options. She reminded herself why--to answer the question of what she'd become, and find courage to face Volfric again. In that sense, the road to vengeance ran directly through the tower, past whatever lurked inside.

Instead of calming her, this made her more anxious, and replaced her hunger with turmoil. Her stomach felt like a jar of butterflies. It evoked that image in her mind, a childhood memory that lingered and unfolded. She even smelled again the pickle jar's vinegar. She recalled most vividly all those wings aflutter behind the gleam of firelight on glass.

Now, weird sensations flooded her--tingling, dizziness, nausea, an erotic surge of pleasure, and an alarming feeling as if she were losing control of all natural functions. She realized with a shock that her body was melting into magical fluidity.

Just like that, she was a butterfly.

Apart from the transformation itself, what surprised her most was how naturally she took to flying, and how effortlessly she held herself aloft. She winged circles around Wendoline, who laughed and applauded.

This new experience of power, unlike anything she'd known, emboldened Katia. It was just what she needed. Before she entered the tower, though, she wanted to make sure she knew how to turn human again.

Again, it came very naturally to her, and felt a lot nicer this time. She expected the disorienting sensations, which didn't bother her nearly as much. It was a delicious release from everything that constrained her as a solid body. She relished the liquid feeling.

And just like that, she stood before Wendoline, in firm, dead human flesh. "I just thought of butterflies," she said excitedly, "and all of a sudden . . . !"

Wendoline smiled. "Look at your fingers."

"Claws. I know. I've used them already."

"Not the claws. The skin."

Katia looked. The skin was unremarkable, except for having the same morbid blue pallor as every other inch of her.

"You wounded them earlier," Wendoline said. "I noticed when I cleaned you."

Katia looked more closely. She remembered now, cutting her fingers on bone while she feasted on the child. The wounds had vanished, leaving the skin as smooth and perfect as when she first awakened.

"There's something healing about metamorphosis," Wendoline explained. "As you shift forms, it tends to remake you as you should be, not always as you were. Remember that." She gestured at the tower. "I expect you'll need it. Not too much, I hope." She moved to Katia and kissed her cheek. "Go. And know that I have every confidence in you."

#

Katia flitted on butterfly wings over a labyrinth of rubble. A crater yawned above her. All the way up, the outermost rooms hadn't yet collapsed, but centuries had pulled down and hollowed out the middle.

Little moonlight filtered in. Katia found that her vision now pierced every shade of darkness. She flew a cautious circuit, and scanned her surroundings. Though she dreaded what she might see, and tried to anticipate the worst, she felt safe as a butterfly. Whatever she hunted here, she doubted it would attack or even notice her until she resumed her human form.

Nothing moved at ground level.

She gyred up through the tower, peering through holes in walls and open doors. She only saw decaying furniture and tapestries.

Something passed overhead.

For the first time, it occurred to Katia that the old lord might be a flying creature.

A horrid squeak jangled her nerves. The dark thing glided lower. Wind ruffled her wings. She caught a glimpse of skin like oily grey leather.

Suddenly, fluttering around seemed like a bad idea. She sought somewhere to land. She'd flown higher than she realized. The bottom of the tower looked impossibly distant. She darted for the nearest ledge.

Another squeak stabbed the air.

Katia risked a glance. What she saw threw her wings off rhythm.

Sulfur-yellow eyes glared between demonic pointed ears. The bald head emerged from a furry neck and chest. Bat wings spread like a canopy of death. The fanged mouth opened wide. She stared into the throat, a tunnel blacker and more awful than the grave, bearing down to swallow her.

She'd never reach the ledge in time. She burst straight from butterfly to human in mid-air.

The hurtling body slammed into her. Flesh thudded on flesh. Bones crunched in collision. The impact flung her, reeling, toward a closed door.

She crashed through rotten planks. Head over heels, she careened into a chamber. She struck something that smashed to pieces. Pain lanced through her gut. She screamed. She landed on her bare bum on the floor stones.

Beside her, a wooden wheel twirled on its rim like a coin. A spinning wheel. That's what she must have broken.

She gaped at a pointed spindle poking up out of her belly, glistening with blood. It pierced her through and through. She contemplated how nearly it missed her heart.

A squeak sent vibrations through her very fangs.

She looked up.

The lord rushed in the doorway, winged arms straining forward, claws stretched toward her. She grabbed the wobbling wheel and swung it up with all her undead strength. An explosive crack and jar of contact knocked him upright from a horizontal lunge. The wheel shattered into spokes and bits of rim. Blood trailed a crimson arc from his mouth. Katia saw it. She smelled it. She could all but taste it.

She ripped the spindle from her stomach with a yelp. Panting, trembling, she tossed it away.

The dark, batlike figure of the lord rocked on his heels. He shook his head groggily.

Katia pounced on his back. She grimaced at the fur around his throat. Hungry for blood, she bit his shoulder. The spurt tickled her tongue. Her mouth filled with the rich, hot wine of life.

He spun to cast her off. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. He threw himself back against a wall. Katia grunted, drooling precious blood. Her grip loosened, but she held on.

The lord turned wild circles through the room, shrieking his loathsome, high-pitched squeaks. He slammed Katia against another wall, at an angle that scraped skin off her back. She cried out, but didn't let go.

He whirled in a mad dance. The spinning dizzied her. She gave up trying to drink his blood. She clung to him with more desperation than strength. She'd have let go, but his squeals frightened her.

He charged at a wall, then twisted at the last moment and smashed her against it with all his speed and might and weight.

Her arms and legs flopped loose. She couldn't have held on another instant.

But the ancient stones crumbled at the impact. Katia and the lord punched through into the tower's hollow center. Suddenly, surprisingly off-balance, she flailed for something stable. Everything she grabbed, everything around her, was in motion. In a shower of debris, she teetered for a heartbeat on the lip of the abyss, then spilled with the lord over the edge.

If vampires could thank God, she would have. Anything was better than lying in a battered heap at the bat-lord's mercy, as she would have if the wall had held. This gave her a new chance, and no choice but to take it. She steeled herself to fight.

He spread his arms, unfurling his vast wings. He tried to flap them. Katia caught them by the tips. She couldn't believe the speed of her reflexes. He fought to free his wings. She tightened her grip. Her talons punctured the leathery tissue.

They spiraled downward. The tower sides blurred by. His squeak blasted her with fetid breath. She drew her knees up and slammed her heels across his face.

She let go and turned into a butterfly, unmindful of a falling brick above her. Just as she began to fly, it pressed down on her. She tried to skitter out from under it. The floor raced up. She couldn't take a chance on getting squashed. She turned human and slapped the brick away.

Before she could turn butterfly again, the bat-lord seized her long black hair in his clawed feet. The damage to his wings hardly impaired him. A few mighty flaps stopped her fall and jerked her several stories higher.

She grabbed his feet, partly to try to free herself, and partly to relieve the pressure on her scalp. She forgot about transforming, utterly distracted by the horror of a giant bat-thing dragging her skyward by the hair.

He swung her hard against a ledge.

Stunned, she fell when he released her. She traced two loopy pinwheels before crashing to the floor. Her leg broke on rubble, and she screamed.

The bat-lord landed next to Katia. Transfixed by pain, she watched him bend over her. His eyes blazed in triumph. He wheezed several stinking breaths into her face, squeaked once, then sank his fangs into a breast.

She grabbed his head, but didn't dare push away, for fear he'd tear off a piece of her. Injured as she was, she recalled Wendoline's words about metamorphosis and healing. It seemed extremely dangerous, with his mouth already on her.

She closed her eyes and willed the transformation. Her body melted, turned mercurial. The bat-lord's jaws snapped shut. She seeped out between his teeth.

And then she was a butterfly.

He champed at her furiously. She wheeled and zagged, but he was nimble and determined. She escaped his teeth each time by a wing-beat, and felt each hot snort of his nostrils.

She darted through his legs, and hastened away as he squealed in rage.

She wanted more than anything to flee the tower. Despite Wendoline's confidence, she'd proven no match for the bat-lord. Or had she? Something in her insisted she'd proven something else--how much punishment she could survive. She'd suffered much, but nothing slew her. When she turned human, she'd be whole, unharmed, in no pain whatsoever. As encouraging as that was, she still wanted to flee. Why continue fighting if she stood no chance of killing him? And something in her answered she hadn't even tried. She'd only attacked in timid half-measures, never unleashing her full vampire ferocity.

Her reasons for entering the tower hadn't changed. She had no excuse to leave it. The lord still needed release from his curse. She needed to conquer her fear. And if she had a better sense of the damage she could take, she still needed to learn what she could inflict. She needed to prove she'd gotten what she paid for.

She transformed back to human. She faced the bat-lord across the hall. Her stomach growled again. She really needed blood.

She ran at him.

He squeaked, and launched himself on powerful wing-strokes.

When they met, Katia leaped. She gashed his side. She turned to face him again, and licked blood off a claw. It inflamed her hunger all the more.

Hovering, he raked her with his toes. His wings beat. His legs lashed. He squealed. He etched bleeding crosshatches all over her skin.

She caught one of his filthy, scabby feet.

He flapped his wings frantically. The gusts blew her hair back, and raised dust from the floor.

With a yell, she swung him down on a block of rubble, just as she used to slap wet linen on the laundry stone.

He shrieked. He wrapped his wings over his head. His wild twitching and kicking betrayed his agony.

Blood-lust maddened Katia. She straddled him on her knees. With her claws, she shredded the wings in her way. She beat his head against the floor-stones until the crack of skull-plates echoed through the hall.

She dug fingers into his scalp, feeling for the fracture. When she touched it, she plunged her nails through the flesh, and pried the living creature's skull apart. His leathery skin tore as she ripped. He trembled. Something like a moan escaped his lips. His hands, or what passed for them, scrabbled over her bare body, too weak to wound her, almost caressing.

She scooped the brain out. He stiffened, arched against her, then drooped into stillness with pathetic finality.

She held the lumpy mass in both hands above her mouth. She wrung it like a sponge. Blood gushed as she squeezed it in her scarlet fists. Streams ran down her wrists and arms. She paused to lick it off.

Katia tossed the mangled brain aside. She stuck her face into the skull and slurped the blood that filled it like a goblet. She only looked up when gentle fingers stroked her hair.

Wendoline smiled down. "Very good, my dear," she said, in that lullaby voice.

Katia had the answers to her questions. She knew what death bought her, she knew what she'd become, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt she could kill Volfric, who was only human, after all.

"Very, very good."

VI. Mirror, Mirror

2006-04-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Rovenmare trudged through snow, toward the cottage on the mountain. He blinked and squinted peevishly in the morning light, and jerked his white furs tighter against the chill.

Volfric lumbered along behind, in sable furs that made him look all the more gargantuan. His head was square on top now, with stitching all around. Fronius had sawn it open to relieve the heat and pressure of a fever on the brain, then refitted the skull badly. Rovenmare tried not to dwell on it. Since the operation, almost everything to do with Volfric and Fronius exasperated him.

He especially resented being summoned to the cottage where Volfric's slut and brat lay dead, most likely killed by vampires--vampires he'd often advised Volfric to exterminate. He never thought keeping them for sport a good idea. But Volfric took pride in the night hunts, a tradition as old as the castle and a favorite entertainment for visiting nobility, and so the vampires stayed.

The soldiers who found the woman had carried her inside. Rovenmare grimaced in passing at the cavity of frozen blood they'd dug her out of. He ducked through the door.

Volfric had to stoop, squat, and shuffle sideways to enter. Inside, he couldn't straighten to anywhere near his full height.

Still encrusted with pink ice, the corpse thawed on the settle, near the fire. Her stiff posture and expression bespoke the horror of her final moments.

Volfric groaned. He turned away and hid his eyes with one monstrous hand. Tears wet his cheeks.

The red-armored soldiers in the room all stared at their boots. They dared not look directly at their lord in his grief.

Rovenmare moved to examine the woman. She'd been savaged, but not eaten, so at least that ruled out wolves. He swallowed his revulsion, and leaned closer. The pool in his tower could show him what happened, for certainty's sake, but so far he saw nothing to suggest anything other than a simple vampire attack.

Hunched over, Volfric stomped through the cottage to the child's room.

The soldiers darted fearful glances after him.

His wail shook the walls.

With pliers, Rovenmare plucked a tooth from the woman's mouth, in case he had questions the pool couldn't answer. He'd feel no qualms about disturbing her final rest, if it came to that. She did, after all, ruin his morning.

Volfric sobbed in the doorway to the little bedroom.

Rovenmare squeezed by. As he took in the gruesome scene, he actually felt his face turn a queasy chartreuse.

Blood, everywhere, even on the ceiling. The child had been mauled far worse than the mother. His entire chest gaped open.

"You were right," Volfric said in a choked voice. "About the vampires, Rovenmare. I should have listened."

"There, there, my lord." Rovenmare took a moment to steady himself, determined not to vomit. His back to Volfric, he bent over the child, and quickly extracted a tooth. Before he straightened, he spied something near the body, in a pool of coagulated blood. Wrinkling his nose, he dug and fished the object out with the pliers. A penny. He sourly pondered its significance. He'd already noted the curious lack of garlic on the window, and an empty space on the wall where a cross had clearly hung. All of that raised questions. He had a presentiment the answers would appall him. "Let's not jump to conclusions. I'll know for certain soon. But, as you say, it probably was vampires."

Volfric slumped to his knees. He bowed his face to the ground. "If it was," he said, "tonight I'll make a holocaust of them."

#

In his tower, Rovenmare knelt at the edge of his pool. Immersed within, lining the pool walls, shoulder-to-shoulder all the way around, his skeleton slaves awaited his command. He gave it: "Show me."

Their mouths were slow to open. Instead of disgorging the milky substance of their visions, they only disturbed the water. The surface churned with foam and bubbles, but revealed nothing.

Rovenmare berated them with incantations, cursed them and scourged them, all to no effect.

He scowled. If his skeletons couldn't show him what happened at the cottage, that could only be because someone's sorcery prevented it. Whatever happened, someone of profound magical talent sought to conceal it from him. That made this more than a simple vampire attack. How much more remained to be seen, but he would find out. He stood, with a grim smile. He had ways of finding out that couldn't be prevented.

At his impatient gesture, the skeletons filed up the steps, out of the pool. They weren't so steady on their feet, after the severity of his interrogation, but they didn't dare stumble. Flickers of dread danced in the hollows of their skulls, and danced the more as he imparted his instructions. When he clapped his hands, they immediately clattered off to make the preparations for calling up spirits of the dead. They didn't dare fail him again.

When they finished, he inspected the magic circle drawn for him. It had to be meticulously perfect, and it was. He stepped into it.

As the skeletons joined hands and skipped in a ring around Rovenmare, as they turned like a wheel against the clock, against the sun, as they sang their chant in voices from beyond the grave, one of them stood within, wreathed in sulphurous smoke.

"Well, come on!" Rovenmare snapped.

The skeleton hurried closer.

"Open."

The jaw lowered.

Rovenmare yanked it down further, and fitted the mother's tooth into a gap.

The skeleton shuddered. Dim, pale lights ignited in the eye sockets. They trained upon Rovenmare. In them, he saw recognition, quickly followed by terror. As if fearing the worst, the spectral eyes turned toward the pool, then lowered to stare at the naked bones of the body that housed them.

A scream pealed through the chamber in the voice of Volfric's mistress. "No!" she cried. "No, no, no! Oh God, please no! What have I ever done to you?" She struggled to throw herself down at Rovenmare's feet, but he held the skeleton firmly by the shoulders. She said, "I'll tell the Count, I will! I'll find a way. He loves me, and he'll make you set me free!"

"Hush." The command in Rovenmare's tone reduced her to sobs and mewls. "I didn't call you back to make you one of them." He nodded to indicate the other skeletons, who had ceased the danse macabre, and retired to one corner of the chamber. "But the Count means to avenge you, so he needs you to tell me . . . what happened?"

She whispered, "Vampire."

"Vampires?"

"Vampire." She held up a single finger.

"What--only one?"

The skull nodded.

"Hm," Rovenmare said. "I see. Now, listen. I want you to recall exactly what happened, as clearly as you can. Do that for me now." When she hesitated, he said, "Do it!"

The skeleton had no lids to close over the glowing eyes, yet the gaze unfocused and turned reluctantly inward.

The surface of the pool displayed the spirit's memories. A door appeared. It opened. There lay the slaughtered boy. A vampire gorged herself on blood from his chest. The field of vision suddenly constricted to a tunnel, focused on the grisly sight and shutting out all else.

As Rovenmare knew all too well, emotion warped memory. This time, it exaggerated everything about the vampire. She appeared as almost nothing but a mane of long black hair, fireball eyes, and a scarlet mouth of fangs. When she lunged, waterfalls of blood cascaded from claws longer than her arms.

As the horrid scene played out, shrieks rose from the vision in the pool. The spirit echoed with her own shrieks, all through the attack, and kept on screaming even after the image on the water faded to darkness and dissolved.

Rovenmare slapped the skeleton hard enough to knock the woman's tooth free. It rattled down through the rib cage. The scream died. The knees wobbled at the spirit's abrupt departure, but before the skeleton collapsed, Rovenmare caught it with one hand by the neck. He held it up at arm's length, stared into the visage, and considered what he'd learned. Too damned little.

Even so, a sense of what happened was forming in his mind. The mother hadn't admitted the vampire to the cottage. Apparently, the child did. That was consistent with the cross and garlic missing from the bedroom. The child would not have thought to remove those protective measures on his own, so someone must have persuaded him to do so. Surely not the vampire. It most likely was the mysterious person whose sorcery prevented Rovenmare from viewing the murders directly in the pool. Well, whatever the child knew about that person, Rovenmare soon would know it, too.

He jammed the child's tooth into a gap in the skull's jaw.

A shiver ran up and down the spine. New light gleamed from the eye sockets. The skeleton cowered. "Where am I?" it said, in a little boy's voice.

"You're safe. Don't be frightened." Rovenmare knew better than to attempt a soothing smile. His skullish grins never inspired anything but horror. Instead, he held the penny out. "Here. Do you remember this?"

The glowing orbs focused on the penny.

"Go on. Take it. It's yours, isn't it?"

Timid bony fingers lifted it from his palm.

"Who gave it to you?" Rovenmare asked.

"She didn't give it to me. I found it."

"Who didn't give it to you?"

"The nice old woman."

"Did she tell you her name?"

The child thought long and hard about that.

"All right," Rovenmare broke in, "never mind about the name. But can you picture in your mind how you found the penny? Can you remember how it happened, how everything looked? Remember the nice old woman--think what she looked like. Can you remember what she said? Don't say it out loud, just think it. Just remember. Can you do that for me, please?"

Again, the child concentrated.

The pool displayed a scene--a few steps off a forest path, a penny glittered, though it lay in shadow. Rovenmare expected as much, but still gritted his teeth. Here was a damnably common, simple ruse. It might have been sweets or a toy, but this time it was a shiny coin to tempt the child, against all warnings, from the path on which Rovenmare's magic protected him.

Sure enough, the child went for the penny. Suddenly, the view shifted up, and there stood a smiling old woman who hadn't been there before. In the boy's memory, she appeared as little more than a type, as lacking in useful detail as the vampire from the mother's memory. The vagueness irritated Rovenmare's perfectionism, but he realized the image was almost certainly deceptive. The child had probably gazed on an illusion, a sorcerous disguise. Whoever this person was, she--or he, since it might not even be a woman, after all--seemed desirous of remaining unknown, and too good to bungle that by appearing in true form to the child.

The crone mumbled some things the boy only recalled as a meaningless, garbled, yet pleasant voice, but then two words stood out with perfect clarity: "good fairy."

Rovenmare watched the scene to the end, careful to note everything, since one could never tell what would later prove informative. He had no intention of resting until he'd made the most blood-curdling example of this person.

"Now," he said, "what about the good fairy?"

"She came to visit me. Just like the nice old woman said."

"Show me. Remember when she came to visit. Picture it, just as you did your meeting with the nice old woman."

The pool showed the child's room in the cottage. Through the window, the vampire floated in, beautiful, magical, utterly fascinating. The boy's idealization distorted her, but Rovenmare recognized her this time. He'd viewed this girl in his pool once before--only once, despite his efforts to view her there again.

Katia.

She'd gone missing three nights ago, in the saving clutches of the spectral Rider, and now here she was, a vampire, murdering perhaps the only two people Volfric ever loved. Rovenmare had no doubt the Rider was the "nice old woman" who arranged it. Nor did he doubt that the Rider had further plans for Katia. Perhaps the ages-old standoff and stalemate was cracking. Perhaps, at long last, a final confrontation impended. If only he knew how to hasten it.

He dismissed the boy's spirit, and left the skeletons to clean up everything.

He went down to his library and poured a snifter of strong, clear sambuca. He sipped, and savored the anise flavor. He swirled the liqueur around the glass.

So Katia figured somehow in the Rider's schemes? Now she figured in Rovenmare's, too. He'd get his hands on her, and then she'd tell him who the Rider was. Oh yes she would. He'd have it out of her, one way or another. And then the real fun would begin . . .

"Sir." A servant bowed through the doorway. "Count Volfric expects you in his chambers."

"Yes, of course." Rovenmare sloshed more sambuca into the snifter, and slugged it back at a gulp.

#

Before Rovenmare reached the door to Volfric's chambers, he overheard Fronius within, playing the toady.

"Yes, my lord," the nasty little wretch simpered. "I'll forge a pair of magic slippers. Wed the girl they fit on Walpurgis Night, and she'll be the bride of your heart's desire."

"Very good, Fronius," Volfric said, none too enthusiastically. "See to that, will you?"

"Oh yes, my lord! At once!"

Fronius dashed out, almost colliding with Rovenmare. The master considered boxing the apprentice's ears, but settled for kicking his ankle viciously enough to put him down on one knee. Without so much as a peep of complaint, Fronius got up, bowed to Rovenmare, and limped away.

Volfric sat on a couch that scarcely could support the weight of his gigantic form. He tore with yellowed teeth at a cold, rare leg of mountain ram. "Ah, Rovenmare." He waved the leg toward a silver cart loaded with decanters. "Have a drop of something." He washed the meat down with a swig from a bucket of red wine.

"Thank you, no, my lord."

"You heard us talking?"

Rovenmare answered with half a shrug.

"It's time I wed, I've decided. It's time I produced a true heir for Wungoria. Fronius had better pray my seed issues from this body, as he promised!"

Rovenmare nodded. "As you say, my lord."

Volfric lowered the ram's leg. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks. "You know, of course, he--my boy--he never could have been my heir, but I always wished . . . I always dreamed . . ." Volfric wept in earnest, blubbering, slobbering, streaming snot from his nostrils.

Rovenmare closed his eyes, disgusted at the emotional outpouring of bodily fluids.

"I loved him, Rovenmare! I loved her. I loved them both so much!"

Rovenmare had no idea why Volfric confided in him like this, but he knew perfectly well that Volfric would hate him for it later. Here was a display of weakness, and Volfric would resent him ferociously for having witnessed it.

Volfric wiped his nose on his sleeve. He leaned forward, and the couch creaked under him. "What have you to report?"

"You surmised correctly, my lord." Rovenmare looked Volfric in the eye. "Vampires."

The leg bone snapped in Volfric's fist.

#

After drinking her fill from the old lord of the tower, Katia sought a bed. Instinct compelled her inevitably to the crypt, though some human part of her that hadn't been extinguished yet felt sadness and loathing at the thought of sleeping there. Instinct compelled her to open a sarcophagus, though she knew it to be sacrilege. Instinct compelled her to climb in and share it with the mouldering bones of some ancestor of the lord. Her first day as a vampire passed miserably. She chucked the bones over the side, to make herself more comfortable. It didn't help. Her sleep was fitful, unrefreshing, and filled with evil dreams.

When she complained about it that night, Wendoline said, "You have no grave to call your own. For three days and nights, you lay where you died, with only snow to cover you."

"That's why my sleep is troubled?"

"It makes you more restless than if you'd been interred."

Water ran down the steps into the crypt. Puddles grew together where the floor had sagged and settled over years. The roll of thunder reached them as a murmur.

"Well . . . can't I be buried now?"

"No. Too late for that."

Katia groaned. "You mean, so long as I exist, even sleep won't grant me peace?"

Wendoline smiled, and her freckled face dimpled mischievously. She crooked a finger. "Come. I made you something that should help."

Katia followed Wendoline aboveground. Rain poured through the yawning crown into the tower, and ran in streams from every bit of structure that sloped, protruded, or dangled from above. Lightning made the night sky flicker black and white. Thunder crashed outside over the plains.

Wendoline led Katia into a side chamber. The roof there was intact, at least. They stopped before an ancient chest.

"First," Wendoline said, her brown eyes twinkling, "a trophy to remind you always how fatal you are, how much others should fear you, and how little you have to fear from anyone or anything." She drew from the chest a pair of boots.

Katia gasped. They were made of an oily grey batskin she recognized immediately as the hide of the lord she'd killed the night before. And Wendoline had taken the skin of his face and plastered it over the front of the left boot, frozen in what might have been either a gargoyle leer or a scream of the damned.

"You'll be no ordinary vampire," Wendoline said. "And nobody should ever mistake you for one. These boots are a symbol to set you apart. So, here. Let's see them on you."

Katia sat, and Wendoline slipped them on her feet. They rose just over the calf. Nothing she'd ever worn in life fit as perfectly as they did.

"But when I transform . . . ?" she said.

"They'll transform with you," Wendoline assured her. "The curse enchanted him, remember. The skin is magical. It will respond now to your own enchanted nature."

Katia tested it, melting up into a butterfly. She flitted here and there, amazed and joyous all over again at how wonderful it felt. A little regretfully, she turned human again. The boots were on her feet.

"And now," Wendoline said, "recall the spinning wheel you smashed?"

Katia recalled. "I didn't mean to."

"That's all right. It served its purpose long ago. It, too, was magical, you see. Someone used it to spin the very night into a thread. Who knows what she intended for it? But I found a full spool of the stuff, and while you slept, I wove you this."

Wendoline lifted a black bundle from the chest. She snapped her wrists, and a cape flared open, so lustrous it shimmered with otherworldly glamour. Smiling, she swept it over Katia's shoulders, and fastened it at her throat.

"It can serve by day as your shroud, your very own winding sheet; graveclothes to soothe, to help you rest, to make your sleep more peaceful. By night, it will be another symbol to mark you as a vampire like no other. It will serve you as armor, for weapons can't pierce it. It's even proof against some magic--though you shouldn't count on that against the likes of Rovenmare."

"It's so lovely," Katia said. "Thank you."

Wendoline still held the edges of the cape. She pulled Katia closer. Katia expected the kiss this time, and welcomed it. Wendoline slid her gauntleted arms under the cape, clasping Katia's bare body, cold steel on colder flesh. Katia reached up and gripped fistfuls of Wendoline's brown curls, to kiss her all the harder.

Wendoline whispered, "Let's see what Volfric's up to, shall we?"

"We can do that?"

"We can try. I've grown fairly adept at finding ways around Rovenmare's defenses."

#

Up, then, through the tower, through the rain. Every window, crack, and gap lit up with every flash of lightning.

Wendoline stopped at the door of a high chamber. Between booms of thunder, she said, "Lucky you didn't crash through this one!" She gestured. "After you, my dear."

Katia opened the door.

She gasped again. This was indeed a night of wonders.

She stepped into a room of little-girl pinks. Dust motes swirled at the intrusion, and made her feel as though she stepped into the past, or into a Faerie realm. A pattern of berries had been painted ages ago on the white walls. A whimsical stained glass window would flood the room with pretty light in daytime. Dolls lay here and there. The four-poster bed was just right for a child, and draped with rosy curtains.

Then she saw the skull on the floor, and near it the rest of the skeleton, still in a dainty pink dress and slippers. The bone hands clutched a plush green velvet frog with a tiny golden crown. Crusty black stains on the dress, the frog, and the faded pink rug told a grim tale. Katia pictured a soldier of the House of Volfric, in red leather armor, striking the girl's head off in one murderous stroke. She imagined it at first from the girl's perspective, but memories of slaughtering the boy at the cottage came back to her and got mixed up in her imagining. Kaleidoscopic visions of blood and death swirled through her mind. Her sympathy darkened, and her emotions twisted out of control, into the hunger she'd known the night before.

She licked her lips. She reached with the claws of her finger and thumb to pick a flake of crusty blood off the frog. Compulsively, she popped it in her mouth. It tasted horrid. She swallowed quickly, then wished she'd spat it out. The hunger abated, but from nausea, not satisfaction.

Wendoline had been talking all the while. "--more example of Volfric savagery. One more reason to wipe the House off the earth, and send them all to Hell. Anyway, here's what we came for." She strode to a pale pink cabinet and eased the doors open.

What first caught Katia's eye were the mirrors, one in the center, and one inside each door. She'd seen hand-glasses before, but never mirrors so large or perfect. Together, they formed a triptych that reflected three views of the chamber. They did not reflect Wendoline or her.

"Beautiful!" Katia said softly. "Are they magic?"

"All mirrors are magic to the dead," Wendoline said. "These are simply exquisite. I've never seen their like."

A dressing table was affixed beneath the central mirror, and a stool stood beneath it. Wendoline pulled the stool out for Katia.

Katia gazed, wide-eyed, at the dressing table. There were shiny combs, a pearl-handled brush, bits of jewelry, jars of cosmetics, and anything else a young princess might desire. She couldn't help touching the elegant objects--all so tiny!--just right for the girl whose skeleton hugged a frog doll to its breast. Katia felt herself a girl again, the washer-girl she used to be, who slept in ashes and dreamed of being a princess with a lot of pretty things.

Suddenly, fresh grief swelled within her for the loss of Little Godmama, whose stories had given her those dreams. But Godmama had warned her, too, that even princesses sometimes faced hardships and dangers, and were sometimes hurt or killed. Godmama would not have been surprised at the fate of this girl who'd really been a princess.

From behind, Wendoline stroked Katia's hair. "There, now. Let's start." Her hands settled on Katia's shoulders. She gave an affectionate squeeze. In a low, incantatory voice, she said, "Three mirrors, mirrors three, show us what we wish to see. Show us Volfric in your glass. Show whatever comes to pass."

The reflections of the chamber grew cloudy and dissolved. The mirrors looked like windows on a night of rolling fog. The fog resolved into a snowfall. Through the haze, Katia made out huge, blocky forms. Among them, she caught glimpses of motion.

"The stone circle?" Wendoline exclaimed.

It was true. Katia knew it the instant Wendoline said it. She recognized the looming masses as the ring of stones on the mountain, where she'd become a vampire. The commotion in their midst took on an air of violence. Through howling winds, she heard howls of rage and pain and terror.

She looked up at Wendoline. "Is Volfric . . . slaying vampires?"

"That must be it. Probably blames them for the present we left him at the cottage." Wendoline met her anxious gaze. "It still frightens you, doesn't it? That he hunts them like that. I'm glad you'll get to see this. You'll see how weak they are, and that he's only human, and you have nothing to fear. Mirrors, show us more."

The triptych sorcerously reached out, enfolded Katia, surrounded her with an hypnotic whirl of snowflakes, and pulled her deep into the vision. For a bewildering moment, she worried she'd been bodily transported to the scene, but then she realized she couldn't feel any of it.

Vampires swarmed like rats over a monstrous giant of a man. They scratched his coat, and tore away clumps of sable fur.

The giant bellowed. He swung a wooden stake in one fist and a torch in the other. A solid gold crucifix as large as a dwarf swayed from a chain around his neck. He shook the vampires off. He impaled and burned them as they came.

Katia frowned. Was this one of Volfric's minions? She'd never heard of anyone like this. That struck her as odd. Odder still, where was Volfric? He was the one the mirrors should have shown.

The vampires' eyes glowed red through falling snow. The wild, naked creatures crashed in waves against the giant, who stood firm and speared stake after stake through their unliving hearts.

A donkey also fought for life. Bloody scratches striped its sides. Vampires pranced around it. Some leaped on its back. One grabbed its rope. The poor beast's eyes rolled. It bucked and kicked and brayed with desperation. Wooden stakes spilled from the packs it carried.

The vampires shredded off the giant's coat and shirt.

Katia gawked at the stitching on the torso. Crude sutures everywhere joined parts from obviously different bodies into a gruesome patchwork of flesh. Stitches even circled the neck, and the bizarrely flat top of the head.

The giant turned his face straight toward Katia. She flinched, though she knew he couldn't see her. She noticed something, then--stitching in his cheek, fused into the skin, exactly where she gouged Volfric with the broken edge of her glass slipper.

The giant roared.

She almost leaped into Wendoline's arms. "The Count!"

Volfric swung a vampire into a stone upright. He drew back a mammoth fist, and squashed the vampire with a blow that seemed to shake the chamber where the women watched in horrified silence. The upright broke. The cross-slab it supported dropped toward Volfric. With a sweep of his arm, he batted the falling megalith away. It crushed a vampire when it landed, then tumbled through the circle, flattening others, until it smashed into a trilithon on the other side. The structure collapsed. Two of the blocks toppled over the thousand-foot sheer drop.

"He's not human any more," Katia said.

Wendoline stared. Her mouth hung open. She closed it, swallowed hard, and said, "It changes nothing. We'll kill him, all the same."

Volfric peeled vampires off the donkey. He snatched for another pack of stakes. The animal lay on its side, brought down, crying and kicking out its dying moments. It snapped its teeth blindly at his hand, but missed.

Volfric came up with the stakes. Few vampires remained. Most lay in mounds of impaled corpses. The naked white bodies lay one atop the other in grisly jumbles. Limp hands and feet stuck out at all angles. Dark, syrupy pools spread from the piles.

Wendoline shook her head. She waved at the mirror. "Enough."

But the scene played on. Snow continued falling. Volfric seized the nearest standing vampire--the once-pretty girl whose lip Katia bit. He swung her high. She screamed and squirmed. He slammed her on the stake clenched in his other fist. The point thunked under her breasts and ripped out through her back. He held her aloft, and roared again.

Katia moaned.

"Mirrors," Wendoline said, "that's enough!"

The scene dissolved into reflections of the chamber.

Katia's discouragement must have shown on her face, because Wendoline started talking fast. "Don't lose heart! It changes nothing. You can kill him, and you shall. Remember why you're doing this."

"I must feed." Katia ran for the door.

"Katia!" Wendoline chased her. "Remember what he stole from you. Your Godmama, your mother, and your father. And Jacob--"

"I need blood! Leave me alone!" At the doorway, Katia launched herself out into the crater-like space of the tower, where rain still poured down.

Wendoline stopped in the doorway and shouted after her, "Remember!"

VII. Night of the Bride

2006-04-25T11:15:00.001-07:00

A young plowman named Mihail listened in the dark to the rain, the thunder, and the soft breathing of Magda, his wife. She slept next to him, facing away on her side, very heavy with child. They hadn't shared the marital embrace for many weeks, and Mihail lay awake, burning for release he couldn't have with her.

Magda wasn't pretty in a way that caught other men's eyes, but she pleased him perfectly well. Her enthusiasm matched his own in bed, and satisfied him deeply. Their nights together made him happy like nothing else in life. He thought back to their wedding night. No soldiers had come to drag her off to Castle Volfric, so he had her all to himself. She'd been a virgin--nervous, but loving and eager to learn. That was probably the night she conceived, and what a night it was. They'd have a night like that again, he vowed, as soon as she felt up to it.

Mihail's thoughts took a strange turn, then. He caught himself thinking of a woman outside the cottage. She paced. She circled--seeking, searching, ravenously hunting for a way in. She didn't crave only shelter from the storm. She'd come for him, determined to satisfy lusts and hungers so intense they frightened him a little. He had no idea how he knew any of this. He simply knew it, the way one knows things in a dream, and so he guessed he must have finally dropped off to sleep.

He looked over at Magda, still serene in her own dreams. Surely it would be no betrayal of her to indulge in such an imaginary tryst? He'd merely awaken to the stickiness that came of dreams like this, somewhat relieved of his urgent need for sex.

He made no move to open the door. He didn't move at all. As is sometimes true in dreams, he found he couldn't. He could only lie still and make a wish, that this thrilling, slightly threatening fantasy of a woman would come inside and do exactly what she threatened.

A lightning flash revealed the flap of butterfly wings above the bed.

At once, Mihail understood the dreadful enormity of his mistake, but no sooner had the thought formed in his mind than the vampire formed on top of him. Her corpse-white face hovered inches over his. Her long black hair hung down, a curtain that cut him off from Magda. The monster's red eyes blazed into his. If they were windows to her soul, it already burned in Hell. Her weight pressed him into the mattress, more deliciously than he cared to admit. He cursed his foolishness for inviting her inside, dooming not only himself, but Magda and their unborn child, for surely none of them would live to see the morning. This was no dream, not even a nightmare.

The vampire hesitated, as if unsure how to proceed. She nuzzled him under the chin. He waited for the bite, expecting it to rip his throat out to the bone. Instead, with black talons, she shredded sheet and nightshirt away to bare his well-muscled chest. She raked the flesh. The furrows filled with blood. He stifled his cry, hoping against hope that if he didn't wake Magda, the vampire might not kill her.

The demonic creature straddled Mihail. Her face pressed to his chest, she lapped and sucked at the wounds she'd inflicted. He blushed for shame at the excitement she provoked in him. He caught glimpses of her body, utterly nude and pale as a sepulcher beneath her black cape. That stirred him all the more. Her crotch pressed against his as she fed. She started to rub, without seeming to realize it. He stiffened in response, and she rubbed harder, until the layers of fabric between them dampened unmistakably.

Magda mumbled. She rolled onto her back. For a heartbeat, Mihail saw the outline of her swollen belly, just visible against the night, before she rolled the rest of the way to face him. She frowned in troubled slumber. Her eyes darted disturbingly beneath the lids.

The vampire sat up. Mihail tore his gaze reluctantly from Magda's face to hers. She wiped her arm across her mouth, which left a blackish-scarlet smear. Suddenly, savagely, she kissed his lips, cutting them with her fangs, forcing his head deep into the pillow. She slipped her tongue into his mouth. He tasted his own blood on it, and nearly gagged.

She lurched up again to look down on Mihail. If she hadn't seemed aware before of rubbing against him, she ground down now with a purpose. She kept catching herself on the tip of his prick, and it would have penetrated her if his nightshirt and the sheet weren't in the way.

She pointed a bloody claw at Magda, and in a dark voice, tremulous with arousal, said, "Is this what you do with her?"

The question puzzled Mihail. He'd noticed a wedding ring on the vampire's finger, and assumed she knew what husbands and wives did in bed. He found his voice--the kiss, apparently, had broken the spell of paralysis--and said, "N-not exactly."

"Well, whatever you do, let's do it."

To think, he'd wished for that only moments ago. Now the idea made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Apart from the horror of embracing a corpse--for so she was--he feared that the sex act might bind him to this creature in some fate worse than death.

Magda groaned in her sleep.

Mihail whispered, "What if she awakens?", and prayed she wouldn't.

The vampire unclasped her cape, and draped it over Magda, covering her face in a way that horridly reminded him of a burial shroud.

"Who are you?" he said.

"My name is Katia. How do you do?" She knew enough, at least, to pull the sheet out from between them, and rip away what remained of his nightshirt. Her fiery eyes widened at what she thus revealed, as though it were the first she'd ever seen. She moved uncertainly to lower herself onto it. Mihail helped her, with a confusing mixture of resignation and morbid lust he hated himself for feeling. He put his hands on her cool, firm flesh. To his astonishment, he found it more pleasing than not. When he thrust up and she slammed down, her hymen tore. She yelped, more from surprise than pain, he thought. And then he felt her blood, chilly enough to make him shiver.

"But aren't--weren't--you married?" He took her hand, and traced his thumb over the ring.

"I was a bride. The Count murdered my groom."

Mihail couldn't imagine any bride chosen by Volfric getting away with her virginity intact. He wondered how she'd done it, and what strange road led her to become a vampire.

"I never got my wedding night," she said. "But I longed for it. And you long for your wedding night again, I know. That's what lured me to your cottage, to your bed. Maybe we can give each other something close enough."

Mihail stole a hopeless glance at Magda's veiled form.

"You love her," Katia said. For the first time, he heard human feeling in her voice. "I understand. I loved my Jacob, too, but I'll never have this with him." She leaned forward, as if to kiss him, but her eyes narrowed, and something dangerous flared in them. When she spoke, her voice was dead again--colder and harder than before, and more ominous than any living mortal's ever could be: "I mean to know what I missed. Now please, just let me close my eyes and be a bride tonight."

Lightning cast her face into relief, all angles and fangs. Mihail contemplated the afterimage that lingered in the dark. Rain drummed on the roof. He heard it dripping, somewhere in the little cottage.

She started moving.

"Here." He put his hands on her hips to guide her. "You might like it better if . . ."

She figured it out quickly enough, found her own rhythm, and rode him with growing confidence and vigor, luminously beautiful in her sensuality, intent on knowing the pleasures of which she'd been robbed. He responded to her passion, though he knew how little it had to do with him. As he watched her face, even with her eyes closed, he sensed the sadness that darkened her delight. She was sharpening her grief to a bitter point, and stabbing herself on it.

He could feel her crisis nearing--but also his own. He grabbed the sheets and held on with white-knuckled fists. He shot his seed, but fought to stay hard for her anyway.

The supernatural strength of the undead made her climax painfully violent for him. She bathed his crotch in a gush of fluid even icier than the blood from the breaking of her hymen. She cried "Jacob!" with ecstasy, but also with anguish, and this last made Mihail finally go limp.

She collapsed on him, and buried her face in his shoulder. He'd heard before that vampires shed no tears. She didn't, but there was no other word for it--she wept.

He held her, and stroked her hair as comfortingly as he could. He nudged her face to a wound on his chest where the blood still flowed. Shyly, she began to lick and suck, and it seemed to help her calm herself.

When she looked up, her mourning had turned to rage and hate. "Oh, what Volfric stole from me!" Her expression reminded Mihail what she was, and terrified him all over again. At that moment, he would not have traded places with the Count for all the riches in the world.

Magda's hand flopped against his cheek. The contact woke her. "Mihail?" Her fingers probed, grasping all over his face, growing desperate. "What's happening? Where are you?"

He held her hand. "Magda, shh!"

She sat up. The cape still shrouded her. "Mihail, I'm lost! Where are you?"

Katia reached for the cape. Her leisurely manner of drawing it down made Mihail shudder to think of a cat toying with a mouse. At last, she gave a final tug, and the uncanny black veil fell away from Magda's face.

Mihail held his breath. A shocking scene greeted his poor wife, and clearly it shocked her. But he only feared what Katia might do. No matter what he'd shared with her, she was what she was--a bloodthirsty night-fiend.

Magda inhaled to scream. Katia lashed at her with frightful speed.

Before Mihail could even cry, "No don't!", he saw that Katia hadn't clawed out Magda's throat, but had merely clapped a hand over her mouth.

Magda's eyes looked impossibly large. Katia stared into them.

Mihail found no words for his prayer. He just willed his raw, silent desperation Heavenward.

Katia smiled, showing her fangs. Her gaze still locked on Magda's, she said, "Let's talk about this."

VIII. The Devil

2006-04-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

A ruined stone church remained where plague decimated a village longer ago than anyone remembered.

Baptiste rode out to it, with nothing more to light his way than the thinnest crescent moon.

Under his wide-brimmed hat, the black locks he wore fashionably long had new streaks of grey. His meticulously groomed mustache and French-style goatee, too, had greyed despite his youth. His tattered, muddy cloak marked him as a traveler. The battered chainmail beneath marked him as someone who'd seen his share of trouble, as did the worn handle and scabbard of the sword slung across his back. The dark scarlet cross on his chest looked as though he'd smeared it on hastily with fingers dipped in blood.

Orange light glimmered from within the church.

Baptiste dismounted. He secured Luke, the trusty white steed who'd seen him through many harrowing adventures. He patted the beloved animal, spoke soothingly to him, and treated him with a piece of carrot.

With a heavy sack slung over his shoulder, Baptiste stepped inside the ruins. Before the altar, fire blazed in a pit cobbled together from rubble. Most of the sanctuary's furnishings had succumbed to time, the elements, or some other form of decay. Only one confessional stood intact.

Baptiste strode to the fire. He drew a severed head out of the sack. The face would have been coarse, ugly, and unkempt enough in life, but undeath had sucked the bearded cheeks in, and the jutting vampire fangs rendered it inhumanly repulsive. Baptiste couldn't help recalling its furious expression as he'd battled the damned creature and its fellows, but the terror that still vibrated somewhere within him, in a part of himself he'd walled off long ago, couldn't reach the nerves that would cause a normal man to shiver.

He muttered a ritual prayer over the head, cast it in the fire, made the sign of the cross, and muttered another prayer. One after another, he did the same with four more severed heads. Five vampires. All male. All vicious brutes, accursedly strong, with cunning to spare from their former lives as a band of robbers.

That done, Baptiste entered the confessional. "Your Reverence," he said by way of greeting, before making his report: "When the Cardinal and I informed the Duke of what he'd permitted to fester in his forest, he made a most generous endowment to the cathedral."

"What is that collar you are wearing?" his Superior demanded through the screen. "Take it off at once."

Baptiste hastened to unclasp the silver band around his neck. It had saved his life several times against the fiends whose heads burned in the fire-pit.

"How dare you wear the Roman collar?" the Superior said.

Baptiste rubbed a thumb over the grooves and indentations where claws and fangs had failed to reach the flesh of his throat. "It is no Roman collar, Father, but a piece of armor, without which I would surely be dead, or worse."

"It looks like a Roman collar. I forbid you to wear it." After a pause, the Superior continued, in a tone of instruction. "Your renown as a vampire slayer has spread, but with it, your bastardy has also become more widely known. That defect of birth casts no stain on the grim calling you pursue, but it may never be permitted to sully the priesthood, even if only in appearance. Never let me see you aping priestly garb again."

Bastardy. The word always stabbed Baptiste in the heart. It was one of the few things he still felt, and he struggled not to feel it.

"Do not resent the just laws of the Church," the Superior said, as if reading his thoughts. "The sin of siring a child out of wedlock merits the sternest reprobation, and therefore must a bastard be the object of his father's shame, bearing such a stigma as to render him unfit for receiving Holy Orders. And that is why I must forbid you from wearing that collar, which might give the false impression that you are a priest. It is not to punish you. It is only that we cannot risk tarnishing the priesthood, however inadvertently, with the scandal of your bastardy. Bear it with meekness, my son! Bear it with the meekness of our Lord and all the saints."

"Yes, Father."

"You must go now to Wungoria."

Frogs croaked somewhere in the distance.

Baptiste's father, too, had served the Order, hunting and slaying creatures of great power and greater evil. He went to Wungoria and never came back.

"The priest of Gorna begs our help against a vampire," the Superior said.

"Only one?"

"So he states in his letter. He fears she's quickly gaining power over the village."

"Ah, she. A woman, then."

"A vampire."

"Yes, of course," Baptiste said. "A female of the species."

The Superior shifted on the other side of the screen. "I'll tell you another reason why bastards can't be priests. The fornication in which they are conceived often leaves its stamp upon their character. Priests must be holy and pure, for they administer the very mysteries of God, and the danger is too great that a bastard will continue in his father's lustful ways."

The words hit Baptiste like a slap. "What are you saying?"

"Take care that you're not too much your father's son."

"I'll never sire a bastard! God damn me if I do, I swear it on Christ's blood!" In the darkness of the confessional, the violence of Baptiste's outburst left his ears ringing.

When the Superior responded, he lowered his voice so Baptiste had to strain to hear him: "You need no oath for that. You have your vow of chastity already."

"My father had it too."

"He broke it. Would another vow have stopped him? But his sin was not unpardonable. What undid him was keeping it a secret."

Baptiste recalled his father's sporadic, furtive visits, and the long wait for the one that never came. He remembered how his mother always worried, for she knew of his father's service in the Order. When he never returned, she grew frantic until she could stand it no longer. Though it meant betraying the secret of the man she loved and the father of her child, she went to the Superior to inquire after him. Baptiste wondered what she'd hoped would come of that. What ultimately came of it was that he himself became a slayer, following in his father's dark and bloody footsteps.

"Secrets," the Superior said now. "They distract the mind. They weaken the will. Instead of turning to the merciful Mother Church for a just and holy penance, a man with secrets takes wild chances, and walks a lonely road to self-destruction. So it went with your father, I'm convinced. Wungoria is a land of many evils. I don't suppose we'll ever know which of them took him from us, but his secret made him reckless and led to his defeat. If you have any secrets, I urge you to confess them now, before you make this journey to the land from which he never returned."

"No, Father. I have no secrets to confess."

Silence followed. As it stretched on, Baptiste took affront, for in it, the Superior seemed to be calling him a liar, and waiting for him to change his tune and confess whatever secrets the old fool suspected him of harboring.

At last, the Superior sighed. "My son, you're the greatest slayer our Order has ever known. May the grace of God be upon you. Guard yourself from secrets, and come back from Wungoria."

#

Katia sensed him through the walls of her sarcophagus. She shifted the stone lid, and sat up.

There in the crypt, a naked young man hung upside-down by a chain around his ankles. Another chain cocooned his arms to his sides. He said, "Wh-who's there?" In the darkness, he couldn't have seen more than the red glow of her eyes. His eyes bulged in terror.

He'd provide her nourishment for the night. Wendoline had told her his blood would also be laced with a potion, "To relax you. You'll be glad for it."

Sounds of revelry filtered down from the tower above. They called to Katia, and awakened childhood fears. When she was young, Godmama had warned her about sabbats, not even to look if she ever caught a glimpse of one, but to run away as fast as she could. Tonight, at a sabbat, power would be bestowed upon her--power to work the black magic Wendoline taught her.

Katia slunk out of her tomb, toward the young man. He wriggled. He made weepy, blubbery noises. It sounded like he meant to plead with her, but couldn't form the words. She could tell his wits and strength were dulled, but fear began to sober him.

He was handsome. Nobody she knew. Someone must have brought him from somewhere else. She knew the local villagers, for she'd lain with most of them. It started with Mihail and Magda. She'd vowed never to harm their baby, which had since been born, and she earned their trust by keeping her word. On that foundation, with their help, she'd drawn the whole village into an erotic conspiracy of silence. They'd all been fearful and reluctant at first, which amused her when she recalled how eagerly the men of her old village always tried to get their hands on her. But she seduced them easily enough, and now they offered themselves to her freely, so long as she didn't take too much and gave freely of herself. She even included the women in the kisses, caresses, and lovemaking--something else she'd been learning from Wendoline. She had to smile at Wendoline's obvious jealousy of the bond she'd forged with the villagers, but Katia thought it smart to have their confidence, cooperation, and complicity.

She looked at this young man, so strong and appealing, like Mihail, her first and still her favorite. She wondered if he had a wife and child, too.

"Please," he said.

She laid his throat open with a wild, full-arm swing. A dripping pulp of gore dangled from her claws. She thrust her face into the ragged chasm between his chest and chin, into the explosive emptying of veins. She hadn't fed with such abandon since the night she killed the monstrous bat-lord whose skin now formed her boots. With the villagers, she had to be so careful, so dainty. All that restraint had built up into a need for this kind of frenzy. The violence of her impulse amazed her, now that she let it run unchecked, and she savored the release more than the blood itself.

The mellowing influence of the potion spread a warm euphoria through her. Dizzy, she stumbled back a step from the young man's corpse, which swayed and twisted gently on the chain. Blood still drained from the ravaged throat, coating his face and drizzling from saturated locks of hair.

As nicely as he filled her stomach, he only satisfied her by half. Accustomed as she was to taking her pleasure while she fed, the slaking of her thirst left her hungry for something else. The potion made her crave it all the more.

She giggled as she staggered up the stairs. She stood before the door to the tower's great hall. The cacophony she heard through it filled her mind with every horrible imagining she'd ever had about what a sabbat must be like. By some alchemy in the potion, the little girl's dread instilled in her by Godmama transmuted into a young woman's curiosity about what she might find on the other side of all the warnings.

She opened the door.

Chaos churned beyond. Under the phantasmal glow of stained-glass lanterns, nude women danced through swirls of incense to the tune of goat-legged pipers. She looked up. Dancers thronged every floor, and spirits circled in the air.

The dance sucked her in and swept her in a ring around the bonfire. She paid little mind to the jostle of other dancers, but hands began to reach for her, to stroke and fondle as she passed, inflaming the lust stirred by the potion.

The music grew more frenzied. The others stopped dancing. Katia couldn't. The piping compelled her to continue. The lanterns painted her with blasphemous perversions of the rainbow. She moved through a sea of hands that groped and caressed all over her body. They guided her. They pushed back when she tried to move in some directions, and buoyed her along when she went where they desired.

At last, abruptly, the music stopped, and so did Katia's feet. She stood before the altar, a massive block of rubble she'd set smooth-side-up the night before at Wendoline's instruction.

Wendoline faced her now as the Rider, with hood up to conceal her face, and the armor that fooled everyone into thinking her a man. In the Rider's sexless, spectral voice, she said, "Welcome, sister. Do you come to this altar freely, of your own will?"

The intoxicating potion, the spellbound dance, and the shoving that forced Katia to the altar made her wonder for a moment how freely she did anything tonight. The altar reminded her of the megalithic blocks of the stone circle where she submitted to the fangs and claws of vampires to become a vampire herself. Now, as then, pitiless Wendoline would lead her through a strange ordeal to grasp for dark, occult powers. She reminded herself why she vowed to kill Count Volfric, and how much she needed such powers to do so. Godmama might disapprove, but Volfric's necromancers had banished the poor little hearth spirit, and Katia would have to go through them to get to him.

"I do."

Wendoline unclasped Katia's cape, and draped it over the altar. She motioned for Katia to lie on it. When Katia did, Wendoline made her spread her legs and stretch her arms over her head. She manacled Katia's wrists and ankles, as if to a rack.

Katia tested the chains. She had no leverage in that position, and realized how much the potion weakened her. Though she had no intention of escaping, the bondage disturbed her more than she expected. Could she turn into a butterfly? Normally, the very thought set off the first tingle of transformation, but even when she pushed a bit, and then a bit more, nothing happened, and her form remained solid as ever. Another effect of the potion, she supposed. She tried the chains again. A hint of panic rippled through her. She took a deep breath. She'd agreed to this.

Wendoline led all the others in a chant. It sounded like nonsense to Katia, but as she peered down the length of her body, at the bonfire, the entrancing flames flickered to the rhythm of the voices. Her head drooped back to rest on the altar. She stared up through the tower, at level upon level of faces upon faces, staring down at her. They swam together in her vision. From the corner of her eye, she caught glimpses of Wendoline's performance of the ritual. Her eyelids fluttered shut.

In that darkness, Katia felt the manacles more starkly, and her chains called to mind the chains of the young man in the crypt. Panic threatened again, but she forced herself to think of something else--of how she might use the power she'd receive, other than in her vendetta against Volfric. She admitted to herself she'd grown quite attached to the villagers. She felt a part of their communal life in a way she'd never felt in her old village, or even in her family. As she fed on them to sate her hunger, she saw their ribs through the skin and sensed their own hunger. Willing as they were to trade their blood for nights in bed with her, she wanted to give them back something more. As Wendoline explained it, she'd receive among her powers some power over crops. She hoped to help their grains grow. She smiled and imagined the breads they'd bake, steaming right from the oven. She imagined their delight as they ate, growing healthy and strong.

A sudden flash and roar startled her. Instinctively, she tried to sit up. The chains held her down.

The bonfire blazed. The floor beneath it crumbled away. The whole conflagration fell through, into what should have been a cellar. Clouds of black smoke belched from the hole. The stench of brimstone filled the air. Otherworldly flames seethed up. Within them, a titanic form rose into view. Their gloomy light hid as much as it revealed. Katia saw nothing clearly, only a hulking mass.

From the fire, the head of a great red dragon swung out on a serpentine neck. Like the slime of birth, flames coated the skin and dripped from the beard. Katia dared for an instant to gaze into the eyes. The howling abyss of eternity gazed back.

Seven heads in all emerged, bobbing and swaying on long necks. Some had one horn and some had two. All looked Katia over just the way men always did when they thought her helpless. For the first time in her life, she truly was.

With clawed forelegs, the dragon heaved the rest of his bulk out of the pit. He shook his heads, his body, his tail--extinguishing and flinging off the sheen of fire. A stubborn patch flared on his back. He scratched it with a hind leg, then whipped a head around to lick it out.

He slouched toward Katia. As he approached, his form wavered, blurred, and shrank. The necks and heads merged into one. He stood upright to walk on two legs. His skin blackened, as if a crust of ash formed over it. With two horns and a beard, his head looked like a monstrous goat's.

He drew nearer still, and grew more human in appearance. The horns and tail remained, the black skin gave way once more to scarlet, and one foot froze into a hoof-like club. The deformities somehow heightened the archangelic beauty of his features and physique. He limped the last few steps to the altar, bathing Katia in a radiant, all-surpassing evil that raised goosebumps on every nude inch of her.

She let her eye wander down his lean torso to the manhood that stiffened and rose as he drank in the sight of her. She found it perfect--eerily so. In every contour and proportion, it embodied all her secret lusts, erotic memories, fantasies, and pleasures. She looked him in the eye again, and realized with cold, shocking certainty how transparent she was to him. She lay petrified. She'd never felt so naked.

He turned to Wendoline and said, "Ah, you. How much longer must I wait before you join me below?"

"As long as it takes to fulfill my vow of vengeance," she said. "Just as we agreed."

"I'm beginning to wonder if you've lost the will for it. And I'm losing patience."

"Well, that's too bad," Wendoline said, "because we have an agreement, and there's nothing you can do about it."

Katia gasped. Nobody else seemed to react. She didn't know which surprised her more, the tone Wendoline took with this awesome entity, or everyone's bland acceptance of it.

He smirked. "I can do anything you ask, and who knows where that may lead? It seems like only yesterday, a young man begged me to buy his soul for a little bag of gold. So he could bribe some lord not to rape his true love on their wedding night." He gestured at Katia. "Now here she lies, whoring herself on my altar for power to avenge his death. Funny, how that worked out. Who could have foreseen it?"

It took Katia a moment to absorb these words. So much had happened since the wedding, she'd forgotten about the bag of gold. She remembered all too vividly, now that he mentioned it, and his meaning was plain enough. All the bloodshed, death, and misery that brought her to this point, chained to his altar and whoring herself exactly as he said--he'd foreseen it, all of it, and with that foresight, it amused him to answer Jacob's prayer for gold.

"I'm here at your request," he told Wendoline. "I can't wait to see how this works out for you."

Even as the fearsome Rider, she looked shaken. With far less confidence than before, she said, "It's a step toward the fulfillment of my vow. Rest assured, you'll claim me soon enough."

"You speak more truly than you know."

Wendoline jerked her hand toward the altar. "Just get on with it!"

The more Katia thought about what he said, the more she hated him. She fought the temptation to strain against the chains, which would only amuse him further, but rage must have shown on her face. When he laughed at her expression, she couldn't help calling him the vilest obscenity she knew. She understood now why Wendoline's impertinent hostility provoked so little reaction from the crowd. They'd all made their deals. They'd all been through this moment. Beneath the attitude of worship, they all nursed hatred for him.

She glared at him as he knelt between her thighs. She couldn't close them, and didn't bother trying, though she felt embarrassingly wet and open. He lowered himself over her. The searing fever of his skin contrasted bizarrely with the icy tip of his prick, which bumped and brushed her as he positioned himself. Men had told her she was cold down there, too. Perhaps they were well-matched, at least in that regard. It didn't make her hate him any less.

She lunged to bite his face. Her fangs snapped on empty air.

Just beyond her reach, he wore that infuriating smirk. "I could make this so horrible for you."

"Do it, then."

"Oh, I will. But not the way you think." He inched his face closer.

She knew he teased, but maybe in his arrogance he'd slip and let her bite him. She snapped again, and missed.

He thrust in.

Katia moaned and arched up violently. She blushed under the gaze of all those watching faces.

"The most dreadful torments of my kingdom are all rooted in pleasure."

She hadn't yet adjusted to the feel of him inside her, and could think of no reply to the strange statement.

He laughed. "You can't even conceive it. You will. Before we part, you'll worship and adore me."

She snarled. Her razor fangs flashed once more. This time, they clipped a piece out of his beard. She spat the hairs at him.

His slap turned her face and bounced her head against the altar. Stars burst before her eyes. They hadn't yet cleared when he started to move.

She rattled the chains, but gave up attacking him. He tried to kiss her mouth. She gave him her cheek. He kissed that, then her neck. In spite of herself, she tilted her chin up for him. She shivered at the touch of his lips on her bared throat, and rewarded him with an involuntary, "Ah!"

She tried to lie rigid, resisting all arousal. His infernal skill began to work on her. She caught herself responding with her hips.

An alien presence intruded in her mind.

She said, "What are you do--mmph!"

Their open mouths slid and locked together. His beard wasn't scratchy on her skin, just wonderfully masculine. Though a hint of brimstone clung to him, the smoky flavor of his breath had a purer, much more pleasant tang--just the way Jacob used to describe hers, from her nights as an ash-girl sleeping on the hearth. Perhaps they were well-matched, indeed. Before she knew it, she'd twined her tongue with his. She cursed her weakness and tried to pull away, but the kiss was too deep. It melted her, even as she struggled to escape it.

The intrusive mental presence wormed through her psyche like a finger. It left an unclean residue everywhere it probed. It found her resistance, and plucked it like a chord. Her passions vibrated between fierce desires to embrace him and push him away. The contradictory urges convulsed her body. She whimpered uncontrollably into his mouth.

He broke the kiss. A cold gleam in his eye betrayed the malice of his grin.

The presence in her mind ripped and peeled something away. This flaying, this denuding, exposed her to a terrible infinity. She'd never suspected its existence, and even now wasn't sure how she was aware of it. She shrank from its vastness, which menaced her in ways she sensed but couldn't name or comprehend.

"I've removed all limits on the pleasure you can know," he said. "The only question is how much you can endure."

She felt her crisis coming on. It would be strong and sharp. She almost feared it.

His vigor would have killed a mortal woman, but she was undead, and he held nothing back. The altar, tons of stone, rocked on its uneven base.

Katia's first contraction clenched every muscle down to her toes. Her kick snapped a chain. She curled her leg around him.

She wailed through a precipitously escalating climax. She savored inhuman ecstasies. New peaks rushed to meet her, faster and faster. Too fast to savor. They fell away as he drove her to heights remoter than the stars. Her screams grew louder and tinged with apprehension. The pleasure became too much, cruel, the torment he promised, and she realized how quickly it would turn annihilating.

In the onslaught of her rapture, she began to come apart. She felt her mind disintegrating. She dug her claws into her palms and shrieked, "Please! Please!"

He paused, dangling her on the brink of madness.

"Please!" she said. "Oh please!"

She saw no mercy in his face, only the smile of a victorious marauder.

He started in again.

She screamed and thrashed desperately to offset his motion. His aim never erred. Each thrust made it harder to hold on, and threatened to nudge her completely off the edge.

Her eyes rolled up in her head. The bottom fell out of her sanity. She could do nothing to stop it.

He shouted, and blasted his seed inside her. And not only his seed, it was the power he bestowed. He filled her to overflowing. The power seeped and spread throughout her being.

Such a startling sensation, yet so concrete, and even in some ways familiar--she seized on it, clung to it, and used it as a lifeline to reel herself back from the abyss.

When he finished with a grunt, he pulled out and climbed off.

She didn't come down quickly or easily. Aftershocks exploded through her. She writhed and twisted in the chains, her free leg waving in the air. She couldn't scream the name of God, so she cried out a filthy stream of vulgar words. In a distant recess of her mind, she felt humiliation at the spectacle she presented to everyone watching, but overwhelmingly she felt relieved to survive with her wits intact.

He stood beside her and stroked her long black hair until she lay relatively still, panting and trembling.

"Aaaahh," he said, "now that was worth every ounce of gold I shat out for your precious Jacob."

She licked her parched lips. In a hoarse voice, she rasped, "You think that's all it cost you?"

He arched a pointed brow.

"Some day," she said, "I'll find a way to make you pay in earnest."

His smirk never faltered, but all the fires of Hell flared in his eyes. "Silly goose. Every instant, I pay a price that even He who exacts it can't begin to understand." He traced a finger up her side. "I said you'd worship and adore me. I'm pleased you proved me wrong. Where would be the fun in that? No, you'll serve me, just because you're mine." He stabbed a claw into her armpit.

Searing agony lanced through her. She yowled and jack-knifed completely off the altar, to the taut length of the chains.

She dropped back, limp, with no more strength or will to antagonize him further. She craned her neck, expecting to find a gruesome wound. Only a little brown mole marked the spot.

He backed away, retracing his approach precisely in reverse, and as he did, he went back through the stages of his metamorphosis, until he crouched as a dragon at the lip of the pit. He seemed to wait there for something, still and expectant. It reminded her of chilling things she'd heard about from Father Gregory--the Dragon of the Apocalypse, poised before the Woman Clothed with the Sun, to devour her baby the moment she bore it. Or something more ancient, idols to which heathen people sacrificed their children by fire.

With that thought, she noticed the sound of a baby crying. It drew nearer. Wearily, she looked around.

Wendoline approached, holding an infant upside-down by the ankles.

Katia recognized it instantly as Mihail and Magda's newborn son.

Wendoline held the baby over Katia. A dagger flashed in her other fist.

"Don't--!" Katia had to look away. She cried out at the hot splash of blood and viscera on her belly.

She looked up just in time to see Wendoline hurl the carcass to the dragon. One of the heads chomped it from the air and gulped it down. He slithered the rest of the way back into the pit. It vanished, leaving the floor whole and intact, with only a charred spot where the bonfire had burned.

With armored fingers, Wendoline poked around among the entrails, examining them carefully, her face inscrutable in the darkness of her hood. She said, "A stranger comes. He means to slay you. And . . . he has a secret."

IX. The Fearless Vampire Killer

2006-04-24T17:13:00.000-07:00

Under the moon, Baron Rovenmare paced the ramparts near his tower. His research on the spectral Rider proved as fruitless as he feared it would. Every clue misled him. He followed every thread to the inevitable loose end. Necromancy rarely failed him, but the dead told him no more than the living in this unhappy case. Nor had he discovered any trace of Katia since he learned she was a vampire. The Rider, so expert at concealing his own identity and whereabouts, had to be hiding her as well.

Rovenmare frowned, and considered how he might proceed.

A bell tolled across the chasm. It was the bell visitors rang for admission to the castle. He wondered who it could be. Count Volfric made a point of impaling anyone who rang it frivolously.

The machinery of the drawbridge rumbled. The portcullis rattled up.

Rovenmare returned to his tower. As he expected, a servant arrived shortly with a summons from the Count.

#

Volfric waited in a chamber where he often conducted affairs of state. He sat in a chair specially constructed to support his gargantuan form. He held in one hand a partially-devoured whole roast pig, and with the other he guzzled wine from a bucket. He belched.

Rovenmare bowed. "My lord."

"Have a drink. We have a visitor."

At a table laden with decanters, Rovenmare filled a goblet with sambuca. "Who?"

"Baptiste."

"Ah. The vampire slayer."

"The very same. I've heard a thing or two about the man. What do you say?"

Rovenmare took the seat to Volfric's left, and arranged himself in it with skeletal grace. He'd also heard a thing or two about Baptiste. "What's his business?"

Volfric laughed. "Something about a vampire."

Rovenmare ignored Volfric's obtuseness, and pondered the implications of Baptiste's sudden arrival. He wondered if it might have anything to do with Katia. He sipped his sambuca, and said with careful nonchalance, "I thought you slew them all."

"Not here. In Gorna."

"Gorna?" Rovenmare recognized the name. A village on the far edge of Wungoria. He tried to recall what he'd read about it.

"Well?" Volfric said.

"Let's hear what he has to say."

Volfric rang, and sent for Baptiste.

The servant said, "My lord, he refuses to disarm."

"We'll conduct ourselves with manners, even if he won't." Volfric bit off another hunk of pig flesh. With his mouth full, he said, "Show him in, arms and all."

Volfric stood. He set the pig on a platter, and wiped his right hand on his leg.

Rovenmare rose. He smoothed his white robe.

Baptiste strode in. He still wore his wide-brimmed hat.

Rovenmare winced at the affront. He sensed a skip of Baptiste's heart at the first sight of Volfric, but the man displayed no outward reaction.

Volfric swallowed the mouthful he was chewing, and set his jaw in obvious displeasure. He extended a hand. "Welcome."

Instead of shaking it, Baptiste waved a casual salute. He hadn't removed his black armor gauntlets. Silver spikes protruded from the knuckles.

"Yes, well, joining us is the Baron Rovenmare." Volfric motioned with his outstretched hand.

Baptiste looked at Rovenmare. "The necromancer. Not the first time he's come to my attention."

"You'll at least do us the courtesy," Volfric growled, "of taking off your hat." He indicated a chair for Baptiste, and resumed his own seat.

"I've done you a courtesy by coming here at all." Baptiste took off the hat. He tossed his long black hair with brazen vanity, which was also apparent in the grooming of his mustache and goatee. "Were it up to me, I wouldn't have. My Superior insisted." He perched on the edge of the seat as well as he could without removing sword or dagger.

"Please convey my gratitude to your Superior," Volfric said. "As a courtesy to him, I won't hoist you on that sword you're wearing in my presence."

Rovenmare would have loved to see that. He despised Volfric's superstitious deference to anyone connected with the Church. Almost always, the poor fools were so intimidated that they deferred entirely to him, but every once in a while someone like Baptiste came along and proved just how much Volfric would tolerate from them.

Servants wheeled in a cart laden with hot roast beef, hens, potatoes, breads, apples, wild mountain berries, and bottles of wine.

"Here we are!" Volfric forced a more relaxed and pleasant tone. "Please, take some refreshment."

"Thank you. I will." Baptiste slipped off his gauntlets. From a pouch in his cloak, he pulled out a piece of old, dried, salted meat, which he proceeded to chew.

Volfric glowered. He took a long drink from the bucket. "Now then, how can I help you?"

"A vampire plagues the village of Gorna. My Superior is mindful of the delight you take in sporting with the evil creatures."

Rovenmare smirked at Baptiste's sanctimony.

"And so," Baptiste went on, "he directed me to ask your leave before I slay it."

Rovenmare whispered to Volfric, "May I handle this?"

"He represents the Church, mind you."

"Yes, yes."

"My dear Baptiste," Volfric said, "Baron Rovenmare oversees all matters of this sort for me. He'll negotiate the terms of your request. Good night." He slurped the last of his wine, dropped the bucket, and left.

Rovenmare went to the bar and refilled his goblet. "Won't you have a drink? Or help yourself to something from the cart?"

"I never dine with devils," Baptiste said. "Nor drink with them."

"Even if you didn't come with a request, young man, you forget your manners. Nevertheless, I'd like to show you something. If you would, please, follow me."

"Follow you where?"

"Oh, come now. If I meant you any harm, you'd already be dead." Rovenmare smiled. "Or worse. I only want to show you something. And perhaps ask you a favor of my own."

"What favor?"

"Follow me, and you'll know."

Rovenmare led Baptiste through the castle to his tower.

"Amazing," Baptiste said, looking up at it. "White--the color of purity, light, goodness, God. Somehow, you make it evil."

"What I do," Rovenmare said, "is strive for a purity far above anything your stupid, vulgar faith could ever comprehend. But let's not quarrel. I can't wait for you to see this."

They ascended to the pool chamber.

Baptiste shook his head at the pool and the skeletons submersed within, lining its sides. "So. You brought me here to flaunt the horrors of your art. This has got to be the most unholy abomination I've ever seen. Well, you know who I am. You know how I must respond." He crossed himself, then whipped his sword out.

"I also know your secret." Rovenmare didn't, actually, but he knew Baptiste must have one. His kind always did. The pool would reveal it. Rovenmare smiled and pointed. "Look again."

The water turned volcanic red. Rovenmare stepped back. It meant Baptiste held his secret with a shame beyond measure. Where Rovenmare expected a single scene to play over the surface of the pool, many scenes turbulently crowded and displaced each other like boiling bubbles. At a glance they looked identical, but as Rovenmare studied them, he saw the differences. In every one, Baptiste made horrid love to a staked female vampire. The women lay unmoving, their heads and limbs haphazardly at the lifeless angles of fallen puppets. Their faces expressed grisly mixtures of terror, anguish, agony, and hatred. In contrast to their dead stillness, Baptiste raged between their legs. The frothing ferocity of his grimace was positively bestial, almost demonic.

At the pool's edge, Baptiste groaned as if he'd been war-hammered in the stomach. The sword clattered to the floor. He paled, and collapsed to his knees.

Suddenly worried that Baptiste would vomit or faint into the pool, Rovenmare banished the visions. It was all he could do not to mock with a question like, "Don't you have a vow of chastity?", but prudence dictated restraint. "There, there," he said. "Your secret's safe with me. Now, let's have a civilized discussion, shall we?"

Baptiste stared blankly at the water.

Rovenmare summoned an image of Katia, the one supplied by the spirit of Volfric's child.

Lust seized Baptiste. He made no effort to hide it.

"Her name is Katia," Rovenmare said. "I suspect she might be the vampire in Gorna. If she is, you are not to destroy her. Bring her here to me. To me, you understand?"

Baptiste looked up. His face twisted in a question he couldn't speak aloud.

"I don't care what else you do to her," Rovenmare said. "Indulge yourself to your foulest heart's desire. But I have questions before she's done away with. Urgent questions of the utmost importance. I repeat--if she's the one, you bring her here to me. Don't cross me on this, or I'll install you in my pool." He stabbed a finger at the skeletons below.

"If she's not . . . ?"

It irked Rovenmare to hear no fear in Baptiste's voice. The man acquiesced because he was off-guard and demoralized, not cowed.

"Then by all means, destroy the filthy thing. She's the only one I want. Do we understand each other?"

Baptiste nodded.

"I'll be watching," Rovenmare said. "Now take your damned sword and get out."

#

Katia paced the roof of her tower. She stopped at the edge of the crater-like hole, and let her gaze fall through it.

Things were different with the villagers. The baby's disappearance broke their trust in her. They didn't dare mention it, and pretended things were normal, but she sensed how much they feared and loathed her now.

Things were different with Wendoline, as well. Katia said nothing about the baby's sacrifice, or what it cost her with the villagers, but she'd broken off all intimate relations. Wendoline, in turn, trained her harder, with a regimen that bordered on punishment.

Katia welcomed the rigor, and pushed herself to meet it. She thought of all those centuries Wendoline frittered away, waiting for a chance to strike. Katia meant to be ready as soon as possible. She'd have her vengeance and be done with it.

She looked forward to her coming test against Baptiste, whom Wendoline called the greatest living vampire slayer.

"Make no mistake," Wendoline said, "though he's only human, he's perfectly at home in our night-world. If you don't fight in deadly earnest, he will defeat you. And if that happens--well, we've already discussed that."

Katia took every opportunity to study him in the mirror. Wendoline also told her much, having kept an eye on him since he distinguished himself as a vampire slayer years ago.

Katia blinked, back to the present. Her gaze had settled naturally on the largest object on the floor below--the altar. The sight of it filled her with memories, rage, and confusing feelings she hated to acknowledge.

Without thinking, she touched her mole, another reminder of what she'd been through. She couldn't do anything about that. But the altar . . .

She reached out with the power she'd received on it, and began to levitate it off the floor. She tested how fast she could raise it. It hurtled up through the tower. She brought it directly before her, and held it there, hovering.

Just a block of stone, and yet her emotions roiled at its nearness.

Seeing Volfric in the mirror, breaking slabs of the stone circle with his enormous bare fists, had terrified her, but now she wondered if she could match it. She'd never put her undead strength to a trial quite that stark.

Her talons made it awkward to form a fist. Wendoline trained her to punch with the heel of her palm instead, and made it a regular part of her drills. "I know you like your claws," Wendoline said, "but sometimes brute force will serve you better. If you can't slash it, smash it!"

Katia drew back and took aim--not at the altar, but through it, as Wendoline always emphasized.

She roared and struck. Her strength and the honed precision of the blow broke the block to pieces. She let the rubble fall. The sound of it raining and crashing to the ground made her smile.

Reassuring as that was, Wendoline insisted Baptiste was dangerous, and Katia resolved not to underestimate him. She needed a plan, a strategy. She knew he was coming. She knew some things about him. Crossing to look out across the plain toward the village, she leaned on a battlement, chin in her hands, and began turning over in her mind this or that surprise she might prepare to her advantage.

#

Baptiste hid behind a tree, too ashamed for even Luke, his trusty white steed, to see him. The image of Katia smoldered in his mind. He furiously polluted and abused himself until his seed splatted to the ground, utterly wasted, an abomination unto the Lord. He never used to commit Onan's sin, but since departing Castle Volfric, he stopped often to relieve himself in this manner, each time vowing he never would again.

The aftermath of his emission left him exhausted, as always. Strange, that a spasm so strictly isolated in his loins should weaken him all over.

He remounted Luke and resumed his journey through the night.

Lassitude and melancholy sapped his will. Guilt and shame dragged him down into a slough of despond. In the depths of his heart, something waited. Not the secret. Rovenmare already broke him on that wheel. This was something older.

A story.

When Baptiste was a child, his mother told a foolish tale about a foolish young man who wanted only one thing in life--to learn how to shiver. The young man faced and overcame many frightful tests. He even won a princess for his bride, but wasn't satisfied until the night she surprised him in bed by dumping a bucket of cold water and minnows all over him. "Ah!" the young man cried, shivering and happy. "Now I know what shivers are!"

Baptiste hated the tale. It made no sense to him then, and didn't still, but it took root in him somehow, and stayed with him over the years. In it, he saw a warped, jeering reflection of himself. Like the young man, he was fearless, but he bristled at the tale's equation of that with foolishness. Like the young man, he defeated horrors others couldn't face, but the young man scorned such triumphs and yearned for something ridiculous instead. Like the young man, he never shivered, but he didn't wish to, and resented the implication that he should. Though he couldn't have said why, what outraged and disgusted him more than anything was the way the tale ended.

He shook his head, and turned his thoughts again to Katia. Her image enthralled him and drove him on to Gorna. If he didn't find her there, he'd keep looking. It wasn't about slaying her in God's name any longer, if it ever was. By that standard, he should have slain Rovenmare. In all his years, he'd never seen such a monster--worse by far than Katia, he'd wager. And Volfric was worse still. What a fitting ruler for this evil land. But Baptiste no longer pretended to a holy mission. Rovenmare stripped him of that illusion. Now it was nakedly about sating his degraded and degrading lust this one last time.

He didn't know where he'd go after that. He couldn't possibly continue with the Order. The thought of facing his Superior made him ill. He simply wouldn't do it. He'd disappear. Just like his father.

His father.

Baptiste smiled bitterly. So at last it came to this. He really was too much his father's son.

He heard something, then. Voices . . . singing?

His mind cleared at once. He realized how close he must be to Gorna. He sat up straighter, and strained to hear over the clop of Luke's hooves. The voices were raised in an old harvest song. They didn't sound joyful at their work. They had a hollow, doomed quality he'd heard many times, in those who languished under bondage to a vampire.

He slowed Luke to a walk while he cranked the string back on his crossbow and loaded a wooden bolt into the groove.

Apart from the strangeness of a nocturnal harvest, it occurred to Baptiste that no crop should be ready. He looked with sudden alarm at the surrounding fields of rye, unnaturally tall and ripe out of season. A single word formed in his mind: witchcraft. He'd never faced a vampire who practiced it. He wondered if he would tonight.

He rode within sight of the harvesters, a weird tableau under the moon. None looked up, even when he drew alongside them on the road. He scrutinized them from under the wide brim of his hat. In their pinched faces and rusty motions, he saw the shadow of despair. They weren't vampires, but a vampire had been at them, every one. That she hadn't killed them could only mean one thing: she not only drank their blood, but used them to gratify her fiendish lusts. So many men--it shocked him, what a filthy slut she was. He clenched his jaw in grim anticipation of his time with her.

He waved. "Hail, fellows!"

They stopped singing and glared at him.

"Quite a crop, this time of year," he said.

The nearest man said, "A spot of luck for once."

"Luck? Luck grows rye like this?"

Murmurs rumbled through the men.

The speaker approached, pitchfork in hand. He eyed Baptiste's armor and weapons. "Listen, friend, I don't know who you are or what business--"

"I'm Baptiste. Perhaps you've heard of me. I've heard of your vampire. My business is to slay her. Judging from this rye, there's a witch among you, too."

"One and the same," the man said, wary, but less hostile. "One and the same."

So the vampire was a witch. She gave herself up in fornication to the Devil, like the very Whore of Babylon. Lust! Baptiste's fingers, sweaty in the armor gauntlets, itched to probe her body for witch-marks.

That she'd grow crops for the living was unusual, but not unheard of. He'd seen bargains between vampires and their prey, just never on the scale of a whole village. A whole village--as he absorbed that idea, he wondered aloud, "What of your priest?"

"We've not seen him lately."

"You don't sound sorry."

"His God--your God--never cared for us like this!" The man waved at the rye.

Baptiste made a derisive, spitting noise. These people knew what a wretched price they paid, and he was in no mood for a theological debate. "Tell me her name." He shifted in the saddle, impatient to move on.

"Katia."

"Cheer up. You'll be free of her by morning."

They looked frankly doubtful and more hopeless than before.

Baptiste spurred Luke and raced to meet his last vampire. How fitting that she'd be the most beautiful, and most dangerous as well. Thoughts of witchcraft, terrible and thrilling, rushed through his mind. A quieter concern pulsed beneath. He didn't fear defeat. He worried he'd have to decapitate her. That was how he slew male vampires, because it was easiest and he had no reason not to. Staking was more difficult and risky, but he preferred female vampires with their heads on. He'd taken his pleasure from headless ones before, but with Katia, that wouldn't do.

If worse came to worst and he cut her head off, at least she could be restored, so long as he didn't burn the parts. He didn't know how to restore a vampire, but Rovenmare would. Of course, Rovenmare had his own intentions for Katia, and wasn't the sort to do favors out of kindness. Baptiste hated the thought of asking him for anything, and knew it would cost dearly, but resolved to do it if he had to.

He came to the village, a silhouette of gables and chimneys against the starry sky. He decided to go first to the church, to search the rectory for anything informative or useful the missing priest may have left behind. He steered Luke in the direction of the steeple, down a gingerbready street of half-timber buildings. Hearth fires gleamed in faint orange lines through shutter slats. The only real light fell from the moon. Luke's steps echoed in the quiet, narrow lane. Baptiste held the crossbow ready.

As he rode along, he had an idea. If he asked Rovenmare for anything, why not ask for everything? He didn't want just one time with Katia. He wanted to keep her for himself, always, to take again and again as often as he pleased. He wouldn't be returning to the Order, so why not? He could retire to some remote, abandoned dwelling--he knew of several from his travels--and keep her in the cellar. She'd be a worthy secret, his and only his. She'd never grow sick or fat or old. She'd be desirable forever. And she'd never bear him children, so he'd never sire a bastard. He wanted to control her. He wanted her to love him. Oh yes, he'd sell his soul for that. Could Rovenmare grant such a wish? Baptiste would ask. It no longer mattered whether he beheaded her or not. What he wanted of her now went far beyond that question, and he'd pay any price for it.

"Baptiste," a female voice called from above.

He heard in that voice the telltale huskiness, eerie and seductive, imparted by death and the grave. He snapped the crossbow to his shoulder, aiming. An instant's glance--glowing red eyes, the flash of fangs--confirmed the figure on the rooftop as a vampire. He fired at the heart.

She used her cape as a shield. Absurdly, it stopped the bolt. She thrust her hand at him in a sorcerous gesture.

He tossed aside the crossbow and whipped a crucifix up. The spell meant for him struck it like lightning. It softened and squished in his armored fist. He looked. He held a toad. He'd squeezed its guts out its mouth.

"Ugh!" He threw it away.

Katia laughed. "Ah well, that would have been too easy. You're welcome for the warning."

Baptiste blushed. Evidently she expected him--through some form of divination, he supposed--and could have caught him unawares. He knew vampires well enough to feel no gratitude. She only warned him to toy with him. Gazing up at her, he looked forward to making her regret it.

Perched atop the gable's peak, she was both more frightful and lovelier than the image from the pool. A breeze ruffled her wild black hair and cape. Her claws looked murderously sharp. Her nude, slim, pale body was a vision in the flesh of everything he craved. One of her boots sported the skin of a hideous face.

"I know why you're here," she said.

He smiled at his new plans for her, and drew a wooden stake. "You don't know the half of it."

"No," she said, "you don't know the half of it."

Something stirred ahead in the darkness of an alley.

Baptiste couldn't peer at it without taking his eyes off Katia. He eased Luke backward, to get out from under her and gain a better vantage.

"You think you're here for me," she said.

A male figure slouched into view, though still obscured by shadows.

Baptiste guessed it was the priest, reduced by Katia to a vampire or, more likely, a walking corpse. Not much of a surprise, and certainly not the nastiest ever thrown at him. "Like I said, you don't know--"

The figure shambled fully into moonlight. It looked nothing like Baptiste expected. It wore no priestly garb. It had decayed almost to bits. Worst of all, it struck an uncomfortably familiar chord in him. Despite a tightening knot of dread in his stomach, he forced himself to study the half-rotted face. One eye was nothing but a socket of dried goo, but in the one that hadn't completely putrefied, he detected a flicker of intelligence and soul. As he fixed on it, it swiveled to meet his gaze. In that instant, through the film that blighted it, the eye betrayed an astonishing maelstrom of emotions--shame, guilt, mournfulness, profound humiliation, and a strangely personal hatred.

"That," Katia said, "is why you're here."

The shock of recognition rocked Baptiste. He couldn't find the voice to say, "Father!"

Katia leaped down behind the corpse. She put her boot in its back, and shoved it forward onto hands and knees. "Finding him wasn't easy. You're welcome again." She pronounced an incantation. Her fingers wove a spell over the pitiful form.

A groan erupted from the worm-eaten throat, tongue, and lips. The arms elongated--a sickening sight that conjured visions of the rack. Not all the skin stretched. Some ripped with a dusty pop. The legs straightened. The hands and feet gnarled to stumps, and hardened into hooves. The torso lengthened. Bulges rippled through the flesh, pushing and molding it. The grate of bones formed a horrid counterpoint to the gurgle of bubbling meat. Every metamorphic burst spurted the stench of decay into the air. Black fur sprouted wherever skin remained. The nose and jaw thrust forward into a muzzle. Two bumps rose on the forehead. Points punctured through. They grew, branched, and twisted into antlers. The one good eye ignited as a red orb of hellfire. Where Baptiste's father knelt, a demonic corpse stag now pawed the ground.

Katia sprang up on its back, her own hellfire eyes blazing. "Now we're even, in a way. You've met my father, too."

Through a haze of stunned horror, Baptiste barely heard her words. They made no sense to him. "What?"

"Count Volfric. My father. I'm a bastard just like you. Hyaa!"

The stag blasted smoke from its nostrils, and charged.

Baptiste chucked the stake.

Katia thrashed it aside with her cape.

The stag speared its antlers into Luke, goring the noble steed ferociously enough to lift him off the ground.

Thrown from the saddle, Baptiste looped through the air to crash flat on his back. The impact slammed the breath out of him.

The stag bellowed, Luke screamed, and Katia cackled as he lay there fighting to suck wind. He heard a staccato of wet thunks. When he struggled to his elbows, he saw the stag stamping and trampling Luke. Blood gooshed where the hooves pierced the hide. Katia goaded the monster on to wilder fury. It bit off and swallowed a hunk from Luke's side.

Baptiste wheezed in, out, in. "Oh God, Luke."

The stag--his father--leered at him with that demon eye, and devoured the flesh of the only living thing he cared about.

His sword had fallen just out of reach. He lurched to seize it.

Katia noticed him on his feet. She drove the stag to charge. Pounding toward him, it radiated in purest form all the bitterness, rage, resentment, and disgust for him his father never entirely concealed all those years ago.

The clarity seared and cauterized even as it severed a diseased and swollen growth within Baptiste--the burden he'd carried all his life of a conflicted, sentimental longing for his father. Whatever her intentions, Katia was right. This was exactly what he sought, and the reason he was here.

The lowered antlers hurtled toward him.

He lunged out of the way. He yelled and swept the sword around, cleaving the stag's head off at a single stroke.

The light died in the eye. The head turned human before it hit the ground, and disintegrated before it stopped rolling. The body tripped and tumbled, reverting and crumbling to dust. Katia was nowhere to be seen.

Emotion jolted Baptiste, too strong and raw to name. From the top of his head, descending through his body, his muscles untensed in a pattern that felt like iron bands loosening. A new ease and freedom flowed through him, but also a disturbing softness.

He couldn't think about that now. He knew what came next. Vampires loved to pounce from behind. He set himself for it.

She jarred him harder than most. If he hadn't pushed off on one heel, if he weren't pivoting already, if he hadn't done this hundreds of times, if it weren't second nature, she'd have flattened him on his face. He barrel-rolled with her to land on top. The sword plunged through her heart with the momentum she supplied. She howled in shock and pain--but a sword was not a stake.

She bit his neck. He swore and jerked away. His sword made a poor cane in the dirt road, but it helped him stagger up and gain some distance. Blood seeped under his chainmail, bathed his shoulder, and trickled down his back. He'd never been bitten before. His silver collar!--he always relied on it to protect his throat at such close quarters. His God-damned Superior made him take it off.

He turned to see a ragged piece of skin he'd left behind in Katia's teeth. She rose unsteadily, one hand clutching her wound, and tried to put on a brave face. She sucked the dangling ends into her mouth. She worked her jaws to squeeze out every drop of blood. Then she popped the morsel out on the point of a claw, and daintily flicked it in his direction.

He rushed her, slashing to decapitate.

Her hands flashed in a snaky motion. She caught and trapped the blade in her claws. Just like that, she snapped half the length off. He knew a practiced move when he saw one. Someone had trained and drilled her to do that. For an instant, she looked surprised it worked.

He smashed his spiked mail fist into her face.

She snarled through her blood. She raked to disembowel. Her claws clanged off his armor, sparking, knocking him back a step, but not cutting to flesh.

He swung the remnant of the sword. Whole, it would have lopped her head off. It still gashed half her neck open. Stolen blood rushed out. She dropped to one knee. The fire dimmed in her eyes, and the only thing that glowed in them was fear.

He stepped up, sword raised to finish her. He saw her hand moving, again aimed at his torso. He knew his armor could withstand her claws, and began to bring the sword down. Only she didn't rake this time. She punched with the heel of her palm.

Baptiste emerged from a daze, ears ringing, sore all over, on his back in a pile of rubble. The last thing he remembered was the blow, like a battering ram. His guts felt injured, perhaps mortally. He looked around. He was indoors. The wall before him--he must have crashed through it. Luckily, he struck the flimsy, white, wattle-and-daub panel, not one of the solid timbers that framed it. He wondered how long he was out, then saw the flicker of butterfly wings against the starry sky, and realized with a start it had only been a moment.

He flopped over and dragged himself deeper inside. He vomited blood, but kept crawling. He seemed to be in the inn. There were tables and benches, and stairs to an upper story. An old woman gaped at him from the bar.

He sensed the whisper behind him of Katia returning to human form. The metamorphosis would undo all his efforts. She'd be healed and whole, as if he never touched her. He prayed that would make her overconfident and careless.

He scrambled to the hearth, where he could arm himself with fire.

She spoke another incantation.

Thankful for his gauntlets, he reached for a burning log to heave at her. He saw a ripple in the flames--she must have invoked the hearth spirit--in time to jump back before they whooshed up.

The bar-matron screamed.

Desperation propelled Baptiste up the stairs. He kicked the first door open, and leaped to the window, crashing through the shutters. He landed badly in the street below, and hurt his ankle.

He scurried on hands and knees for poor Luke's carcass. If he could only reach the saddlebags . . .

Katia winged beside him as a butterfly, and transformed again to human. He resisted the pointless temptation to defend himself, and crawled faster. Inwardly, he cringed in expectation of the death-blow, but he wouldn't stop until she stopped him. From the corner of his eye, he watched her boots keep pace with him for one step, then another.

She said, "How do I compare to other vampires you've faced?"

"You're the fairest of them all."

She moved to block his path. He summoned his last reserves of strength to die fighting. But she tipped his chin up with her toe so their eyes met, and said, "As a warrior, I mean." Before he could think of anything to say, she leaned forward and asked, "How would you bet if I fought Volfric?"

"Volfric?" A vision of the monstrous Count flashed through Baptiste's mind. At Katia's feet like a beaten animal, gazing up into her burning eyes, he couldn't doubt her power and savagery, and yet, so close to her, he couldn't help noticing how small she was, how young and pretty she must have been in life. A glint drew his attention to the wedding ring she wore. So she'd been a bride. Whatever led to her death and resurrection as a vampire had to be tragic and wrong. If it involved Volfric--her father, she claimed--so much the worse. Rovenmare's interest in her boded worst of all.

A pang of compassion startled Baptiste. It was such a new sensation, it broke his train of thought. He didn't reject it immediately, but then he recognized in it the softness that came over him earlier. Fierce loathing roared through him for the weak, tender feeling. He scorned himself for feeling it.

"Well?" Katia said.

"I pray to God he slays you, you stinking, vicious whore!"

Her eyes turned darker scarlet.

"Was your husband not enough to sate your filthy lusts? You cast your marriage off in death, and spread your lust around to a whole village. You craved new lusts, more ghoulish and extreme." This recitation aroused him.

Katia still hadn't reacted.

He wasn't done yet, however. After a deep, painful breath, he shouted at her, "Now you lust for blood, the most perverted lust of all!"

She seized his belt and collar, hoisted him over to Luke, and slammed his face in the wound where the stag had eaten the flesh. His whole head plunged into the scalding pit of gore. Blood rushed up his nose, all the way into his mouth. He strained against Luke's body and fought to free his head. Her iron grip held him fast. He couldn't endure the taste of blood much longer on his tongue. Half-panicked, he blew to clear his nostrils. Thick bubbles tickled his cheeks. In a moment, he'd inhale, and there was nothing he could do.

She yanked his head out. "Seductive, isn't it? Can you feel the lust?"

He just managed to snort, splutter, and gasp before she forced his head back in.

He groped among the saddlebags. His fingers closed on a cloth pouch. Frantically, he whipped it up and shook it, praying it would open in Katia's direction.

She released him.

He pulled his head out and scrabbled backward, choking and gagging and trying not to vomit. He wiped his face with the tatters of his cloak.

Katia writhed on her back, coughing and blinking. She slapped at the light powder that dusted her hair, face, arms, and breasts. Baptiste couldn't smell, but it had to be the garlic. He hobbled back to Luke, and drew a stake from the quiver. He hopped toward Katia on his one good leg, genuinely astonished to still be alive, with victory in reach. He let himself fall forward, the stake aimed at her heart.

Despite the garlic and her agonized expression, her eyes widened in alarm. She cocked her knee up and back for a kick. Baptiste gazed directly upon the gates of carnal heaven he so dearly wished to enter. In that instant, her foot blurred into motion. The stake would never reach her heart. The inches it still had to travel might as well have been infinity. The heel of her boot smashed across his jaw, twirling him aside and twisting him face-up.

Everything went dark. He waited for his back to hit the ground.

Something stranger happened.

The armor and clothes dissolved off his body. He kept falling, naked, through empty black space. He feared he was dead and falling to Hell.

Two red eyes glowed above him. The gleam of fangs came next. Katia formed over him, straddling him as he dropped. She lowered her mouth to the wound on his neck. He hadn't the will to push her away.

When he ravished the other vampire women, a stake through the heart immobilized them. This was something new. Katia's cold, dead body, stretched on top of his, was animate and active as she sucked. Though he should have been impotent with horror, he hardened. She teased him, rubbing without taking him inside her. She lay flat on his chest, and over her shoulder, he watched her bottom move. He began to shift her cape aside, the better to see her. Through the fabric, a firm, round buttock bumped his palm. He wouldn't have thought he could stiffen any further, but he did.

"You whore," he moaned.

She sat up. "You should be happy. You wanted this, no? Not exactly? I know how you like it, but trust me, this is better." She aligned her crotch with his and slammed down hard, joining their bodies in one abrupt motion.

He opened his eyes as if waking from a dream, but only one thing changed--instead of falling through a featureless void, he and Katia soared among the stars above the village. She rode him like a witch rides a broomstick to a sabbat.

Every cunt Baptiste had known had been for him a still, calm grotto in which he could find release quickly or at leisure, exactly however he pleased. Katia's slimy, drooling quim engulfed his manhood to the root with no hope of escape. Constantly in motion, it squeezed and sucked more greedily than her mouth had sucked his blood. It assaulted him with a life all its own, and possessed the whole rest of her body as a slave to its purpose and will. To support its urgent demands, her hands, elbows, knees, and feet sought purchase and leverage all over him, and adjusted often to accommodate new angles, different depths, varied rhythms--whatever made the torment sweeter.

A dark, looming form rose into view off to the side. He looked to see the church's bell-tower, and realized they were descending. Instinctively, he glanced around. At first he thought they might land among the graves, but it soon became clear she'd lower him directly onto the churchyard's spiked iron fence. He wanted to struggle and shout, but his will deserted him as before, and he lay beneath her as helpless as all the vampire women he'd staked.

They paused to hover just above the spikes. He felt the points on the skin of his back.

Katia stopped moving. She made a visible effort to compose herself. She hadn't reached her crisis yet, and trembled on the verge of it. "You never answered me," she said, in a voice still quavery, but closer to normal. "So I'll ask again. Be honest! Me or Volfric--who would win?"

"Volf-AAUGH!"

The spikes burst through his stomach, but the top cross-rail stopped his fall. The points only protruded an inch from the wounds, but his back almost snapped. The penetration spurted blood onto Katia's face and breasts.

She caught a glob on her finger, and lasciviously licked it off.

"You're wrong," she said. "Now then, where were we?" She rested her hands on his shoulders, and leaned some of her weight onto them. She began moving again.

He held his torso absolutely rigid against the strain on his spine. If he relaxed or lost control of his muscles in the slightest, she'd break him backward over the fence.

He hadn't long to wait before she was grinding down in earnest. Her cries melted into one continuous moan.

Suddenly her voice caught. She froze and tensed.

Baptiste couldn't imagine what might happen next--he could only dread it.

And then, from between her legs, a flood of chilly fluid gushed.

It was the most uncanny thing he'd ever felt. For the first time in his life, he shivered.

X. Pitchforks and Torches

2006-04-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

An image of Baptiste's broken corpse lingered on the pool's surface. Rovenmare dismissed it. He turned away and drained his goblet of sambuca.

"Damn it!" He hurled the goblet at the far wall. The clatter of impact didn't satisfy him, so he stormed to a nearby chair and kicked it over. He stood there, fists clenched, actually trembling.

He'd observed the fight in a sour mood from the outset. After all the endless, grinding, frantic, futile effort he'd devoted to finding Katia, it galled him to think the Church might have located her without even trying, simply through a village priest's word-of-mouth. Seeing her in the pool finally ended his search, to his relief, but also confirmed that the Church's grapevine succeeded where all his magic failed, to his far greater chagrin.

Then, Baptiste's death came as a shocking inconvenience. It meant Rovenmare couldn't solve the problems of Katia and the Rider from the comfort of his tower. The performance of his duties had never required him to travel farther than walking distance from the castle. He'd expected Baptiste to bring Katia to him, but now he would have to journey all the way across Wungoria to her.

The thought of being so far from his tower made him feel naked enough on its own. The thought of then facing the Rider, and perhaps walking into an ambush, turned his eagerness for a final confrontation into queasy anxiety. He'd slowly come around to admitting that a simple exorcism would probably never suffice to dispatch the Rider. That specter had been anchored in this world too firmly for too long, with far too daunting a command of the black arts. Even if Rovenmare learned the Rider's identity, a head-on, full-blown, all-out magical duel seemed inevitable.

Few walked away from such duels unscathed. Rovenmare knew as well as anyone how scathing they could be. His revulsion for flesh and blood was not a natural facet of his personality. A vanquished foe inflicted it on him through a dying curse many years ago. At first, Rovenmare had no clue what had been done to him. In the days and weeks that followed, as the nature of the curse became clear, worry began to wear on him, and concentrated into near-panic. The nausea that overcame him when he handled flesh and blood threatened to cripple his pursuit of necromancy, which was certainly the purpose of the curse. Despair brought him to the edge of madness, but on that brink, inspiration showed him a way forward. He saw in bones a power and purity no other necromancer had ever quite appreciated. Thus, injury from a duel he actually won had warped the whole course of his life--for the better, it so happened, but he couldn't count on turning any more curses to such advantage. As confident as he felt that he could banish the Rider, he feared he'd come away very much the worse, even in victory.

This train of thought did nothing to improve his mood. He found the bottle of sambuca and chugged directly from it, until his nerves steadied enough that he could begin preparing to depart.

He descended through the tower to a window, and threw it open. He rang a bell to summon Fronius.

Normally, the hunchback responded at once, appearing in the snowy courtyard directly below the window to await instructions. This time, he didn't.

Rovenmare rang again, then again, harder, with mounting irritation. "Fronius!" He rang the bell furiously. The lateness of the hour shouldn't have mattered, but no amount of ringing brought Fronius out. Rovenmare stomped to the trapdoor, and flung it open. The darkness below irritated him further. He snarled an incantation, casting sorcerous illumination to light his way. His steps clanged down the iron stairs. "Fronius! When I ring, attend me instantly, no ma--!"

His voice died at the sight of the clean, empty space. Where he expected to see the filthy, crowded laboratory, he saw nothing. Not a bloodstain or speck of dirt remained. He blinked. He stepped into the chamber, alert for any hint of illusion or enchantment. But no--Fronius had simply cleared everything out. Rovenmare didn't like it. He couldn't imagine his apprentice without all that rusting equipment and rotting flesh to play with. The absence of those things, and of Fronius, disturbed him. Here was one more unwelcome surprise.

"Coming, Master," Fronius called from a distance, through the broken door that hadn't been replaced.

Snow drifted in. Rovenmare peered out through the opening.

Fronius hobbled across the courtyard as fast as his legs could carry him. "You rang, Master?"

Rovenmare waited until he ran inside. "Where were you? What's the meaning of this?"

Fronius bowed, his breathing labored behind the iron mask. "Master, the Count lodges me elsewhere until I can restore the laboratory." The mask's goggles made his eyes dark liquid blobs, impossible to read.

Rovenmare sensed there was more to it than that, but the urgency of getting underway to Gorna preoccupied him. He'd have to sort Fronius out later. "Never mind. Let's review the castle's defenses. You'll be responsible for them until I return."

"Return, Master?" Fronius looked and sounded astonished.

"That's right. I'll be away." Rovenmare hoped he spoke truly when he added, "Don't worry. Not for long."

#

Katia flew back to the tower as a butterfly.

Wendoline waited inside as the Rider, armored, cloaked, and mounted. The horse stood ready to burst into motion at her signal.

The instant Katia resumed human form, Wendoline commanded in the Rider's spectral voice, "Climb on."

"I won, you know."

"You played around, then panicked when he almost slew you. More than once. Congratulations. Now climb on."

The harsh assessment struck a raw nerve and rang too true. Katia was in no mood to hear it. She felt shaken and embarrassed enough already over the close calls she foolishly permitted. Somehow, she still hadn't rid herself of all Baptiste's garlic powder, a painful irritant. Although transformation healed her wounds, memories of them were still fresh as sensations. And ultimately, glutting on blood after such a brutal fight left her desperate to collapse into her sarcophagus and sleep. Struggling not to snap at Wendoline, she replied, "Why? Where are we going?"

"Away. Now hurry and climb on!"

"But why?"

Wendoline dismounted with a great show of exasperation.

Katia clenched her jaw and put her hands on her hips.

"We've grown conspicuous here," Wendoline explained, as if to a child. "To stay would be reckless. Don't shake your head at me like that."

Katia stopped, but remained defiant. Wendoline could always give a reason why they should do things her way. It always sounded sensible and true. And yet it always left Katia feeling manipulated. This time, she decided, she'd have none of it, no matter how Wendoline tried to bully her.

Wendoline continued, "If Rovenmare should find us--"

"Good! I hope he does. Let's kill him and be done with it."

"After that pathetic showing, you can't be serious. We're nowhere near ready for him."

"Like you said, I played around. Against him, I wouldn't."

"You're still so far from ready, it's not even worth discussing. Now come along." Wendoline reached for Katia's arm.

Katia slapped her hand away. "Maybe you're not ready. Maybe you never will be. Maybe you've schemed and watched and waited so long--"

"Too long to squander the only chance we'll get."

"--you forgot how to do anything else. I don't know if you're afraid of Rovenmare, or afraid to put this whole thing to the test, or afraid to finish it, because, what then? But the Devil was right--"

"Mind your tongue, girl."

"--you've lost your nerve."

Wendoline drew her hood back, baring her brown curls and flashing her enormous brown eyes. In a tremulous human voice she said, "Even if every word of that were true, the fact remains, you are not ready."

Katia recognized the ruse, having fallen for it too many times. Wendoline could seem so soft and vulnerable when it suited her, but she was the hardest, most calculating person Katia had ever known. Katia hardened herself, and said, "Why can't you be honest, just once, about your motives? The real fact remains, you only want to separate me from the villagers."

"Oh, is that what you think? You think this is about them? Well, all right. Let's discuss it."

"Let's!"

"I know you don't believe me," Wendoline said, "but they will turn on you."

"You've surely done your part to make it happen."

"Meaning what?"

"You know what. Their baby!"

"Baby? The brat we sacrificed?"

"The one you murdered."

"You're cross about that? That's why you've been so sullen toward me? All this time, I feared you hated me for . . . all the rest of it."

"I agreed to all the rest of it. I never agreed to the murder of that child."

"Your power came at a price. I shouldn't have to tell you that. You know who set it, too. How dare you blame me?"

"Oh no you don't." For the first time, Katia could see the deception in Wendoline's argument, right in the moment, when she could throw a response back in her face. Wendoline may not have set the price, but she knew what she was doing when she chose the victim. "You could have got a baby from any other village. You meant for them to fear and hate me. Now they do. But that's not enough for you, is it? Because I still lie with them when I feed, and you can't stand it, jealous shrew, can you?"

"Why do you do it?" Wendoline looked and sounded genuinely stricken. "To hurt me? Is that why you did that with Baptiste? You knew I was watching. You want the truth? It works. You hurt me. I'm jealous. I admit it. Yes I wish you'd stop. I do want you away from those stupid, stinking yokels."

Katia's resolve almost melted. It probably would have, if she hadn't caught Wendoline at her usual tricks just the moment before. No, she wouldn't be taken in this time. Wrong as it felt, she forced herself to sneer.

"You want the truth?" Wendoline went on. "You want me to be honest?" She grimaced. "Can you understand how long I was alone? All those centuries, without a single kind word. Or touch. Or kiss. Not one. And then there was you. My feelings . . . what can I do? I know I muck it up. I know my jealousy pushes you away. I'm sorry. I can't help it. And I am afraid to finish this. You ask what happens then?--I lose you, that's what. The Devil will take me, and that will be the end of it. Oh Katia, after all those years alone, can you blame me for trying to hold on to this love? Because that's what it is for me. I lo--"

"Stop! That's enough." Katia chopped the air with her hand. "You promised me revenge. That's the only reason I've become this. That's the only reason I've submitted to every horrible ordeal. You should have let me fall, if you don't have the steel to see it through."

Wendoline ran to her horse. Before Katia could react, she jumped on and rode away.

As the hoofbeats quickly receded, Katia realized two things. She'd finally heard some honest truth from Wendoline, and she wasn't ready to face Rovenmare alone.

#

"Remember our friend Baptiste?" Rovenmare asked Volfric. "He's dead. The vampire of Gorna proved too much for him, it seems."

Volfric smiled, then guffawed. "Good!" He raised his cask of wine in mock salute, and drank a toast. "But this vampire, is he a problem?"

"Not yours, my lord." Rovenmare resisted the temptation to correct Volfric about the vampire's sex. "I'll see to it."

"Why haven't you seen to it already?"

"Well, I must reach Gorna first."

Volfric jumped up, sloshing wine. "You're going to Gorna?"

"It can't be done from here."

"But you've never left the castle. You--I'll send soldiers. Surely they can put it down."

Rovenmare savored the terror in Volfric's voice. He took it as a rare admission that Volfric still valued his service and respected his power. "No. Where Baptiste failed, ordinary soldiers won't succeed. But never fear, my lord. The defenses I've established around you and the castle are sound. They will remain so in my absence, which won't be long. And . . ."--he grinned--"you'll still have Fronius."

#

Rovenmare oversaw the tedious uncrating of four horse skeletons. He hated the delay, but it couldn't be helped. If he loathed human flesh and blood, that of beasts disgusted him still more. He couldn't bear the thought of living horses hitched to his white coach. Only skeletons would do. Then, he knew how unwisely he expended precious magical resources animating them--resources he would surely need against the Rider--but again, he had no choice.

Eventually, the coach-and-four was ready to depart. A skeleton from the pool, robed and cowled in white, sat up on the box and drove. Across the top, three more skeletons reposed in white caskets.

A detail of Volfric's soldiers in red leather armor rode escort on war horses.

Rovenmare sat alone in the white carriage, surrounded by grimoires he consulted in hasty preparation. He sipped often from a bottle of sambuca, trying to calm himself enough to concentrate without becoming too intoxicated. Absorbed in his studies, he paid no attention to the passing countryside. He scarcely noticed when they stopped, except nights, when he slept. They traveled by day, and thundered into Gorna at high noon.

The fields and streets were empty, and the shutters closed on every cottage. Only a few women peeked out.

The soldiers knew their orders. They drew their swords. They kicked in doors. They herded everyone into the church.

Rovenmare waited at the altar. He held a goat-skulled staff of bone. Two white-robed skeletons stood at ominous attention on his left, and two more on his right.

Under his gaze, the entire village was quickly seated and silent. The women sat rigid, holding their children quiet and still. Dazzled by sunlight, the men blinked and squinted and struggled to wake up.

"I'm Baron Rovenmare, here on behalf of Count Volfric, your lord. I've come to slay the vampire, Katia. Does anyone object?" He looked around, prepared to set his skeletons on anyone who did object.

But one woman begged, "Oh please, sir, deliver us from her evil."

Another burst into tears. "She took our baby."

That woman's husband stood and said, "We're with you, sir. I'm Mihail, at your service."

The other men rumbled, "Aye," and rose in accord.

Rovenmare nodded. He didn't wonder how these people invited Katia into their lives. In the beginning, they probably saw her in the same idealized way the child did, just before she murdered him. Inevitably, she visited tragedy upon them, and reduced them to anemic husks. Their eyes brimmed with guilt and shame, as only country people's can when they've violated their provincial, prudish mores. They'd indulged in sexual license--eagerly, no doubt, and with a corpse, no less. Now they felt dirty. In any case, they were ready to be rid of her. That much could not be plainer. "Good. All right, then. Lead me to her."

Their faces, already pale, turned ashen, as if he'd just pronounced their doom. But they didn't hesitate in moving to obey him.

"What's the matter? Why the long faces?"

"Please forgive us, sir," Mihail said. "We've grown to fear her so."

"It's daylight. She's sleeping."

"I beg your pardon, sir, but it's always night at the tower."

That wasn't possible in any literal sense, but Rovenmare could imagine a few ways the effect might be achieved. They all involved enchantments that would be costly in time and effort to dispel. He couldn't afford to bother with anything like that so soon before facing the Rider. "Well . . . get torches and arm yourselves, if you like. Quickly."

The men reassembled on the square, wielding stakes, scythes, pitchforks, and torches. When Rovenmare gave the order to move out, Mihail led them at the front of the procession. Rovenmare could guess how passionately he'd embraced Katia, by how passionately he seemed to hate her now. As the tower loomed into view across the fields, Mihail shouted courage to the men, and they shouted it back, until their terror turned to fury, and they merged into a single surging mass--that most blood-ravenous of creatures, a mob.

Rovenmare rode on the box-seat of his carriage, next to the skeleton who drove, curious to see how day would turn to night.

Up to a point, he had a clear view of the tower, with the sun shining on it from a blue sky.

Then mist swept in from nowhere--first as isolated wisps, then as swirling bands, until it enveloped them completely. Rovenmare understood. The mist was bewitched. Time flowed differently inside it. No matter when a man entered it, and no matter how fast or slow he moved, he'd arrive at the tower precisely after nightfall.

And so it happened. The procession carried on. The mist soon cleared. They'd traversed most of the remaining distance to the tower, but now the moon shone down from a starry velvet sky.

#

Katia's eyes flashed open in the darkness of her sepulcher.

Someone approached the tower. Wendoline had insisted that Katia help cast the protective spell, so both of them could sense when someone triggered it. Katia sensed it, all right. Every man from the village tramped through the mist. They didn't mean her well. So this was it. They turned on her, as Wendoline predicted. She supposed Wendoline must sense it, too. She wondered how Wendoline felt about it.

The chill of what Katia sensed next made her quiver and cry out--horse skeletons, animated by a power not of the Devil, but of Death. That could only mean one thing. The next moment confirmed it. Baron Rovenmare's presence entered her awareness as a beacon of deathly magic.

She kicked the lid open. She shot up as a butterfly, out of the crypt, up through the tower, to the rooftop battlements facing toward the village.

She turned human in time to see the first faint outlines of the villagers, and the flicker of their torches. She didn't see the mist, as that enchantment affected only them, so they seemed to take form out of thin air and grow solid as they drew closer.

Of course Mihail came first. He looked up. She realized the moon silhouetted her from behind. That and her glowing red eyes made her instantly visible. He pointed and yelled, "There she is!" An echo rolled out from behind him--the emerging mob answering his shout.

Katia watched them advance, with their torches and weapons. Though only the wooden stakes could harm her, the pitchforks and scythes worried her too. So many gleaming points and blades, all for her. Though they couldn't destroy her, she still would feel the pain, and felt a hint of it now in fearful anticipation.

Volfric's mounted soldiers followed the mob. Their red armor called to Katia's mind the worst memories of the worst night of her life. Lust to slaughter them welled up in her, but turned to ice as the horse skeletons phantasmally appeared. She couldn't have anticipated how the sight of them would horrify her. It wasn't just that they bespoke a power far superior to hers--even to a vampire, even to a witch, magic itself remained dreadful and uncanny. They drew a bone-white carriage. A white-robed skeleton held the reins. Beside him sat a skeletal white figure who could be none other than Baron Rovenmare himself.

#

Rovenmare jumped down from the carriage. The driver joined him. The carriage door opened, and the other three skeletons stepped out.

Mihail, utterly berserk, ran straight into the tower with torch aloft and pitchfork on his shoulder. The mob stopped short of following him. They congregated outside, shouting threats and oaths up at Katia.

Rovenmare tried to keep an eye on her as he looked around for any sign of the Rider.

A flash of light snapped his full attention to the sky. Katia had cast a spell at him. The raw, awkward outburst marked her as a neophyte, and unprepared. To call it a bolt of power would suggest something too clean and precise. The blob of undefined magic squirmed and yowled and turned sickly colors in its flight. That made it all the more grotesquely spectacular than if she'd cast it properly. The villagers and soldiers gasped and crossed themselves. Even Rovenmare experienced a subtle, fleeting thrum of horror, for magic was never a trifling matter.

He swatted the thing aside with his goat-skulled staff. Toadstools sprouted every time it bounced, until it came to rest, fizzling in the grass, spitting out centipedes and toads and locusts and a pair of bats. An abortive half-formed rat crawled out of it, and promptly died. A blackbird raised its head and wings, and cawed its death throe as the bubbling mass collapsed. The steaming dregs melted and soaked into the earth.

A direct hit would have been exceedingly nasty. Rovenmare had the discipline not to waste time thinking about it. Alert for more attacks, he briskly led the skeletons inside. They hurried from the portal to the center of the hall, over and around chunks of debris. He held his staff ready. The skeletons formed a defensive ring around him, then moved out in a spiral, searching the shadows, wary of ambush.

He peered up through the crater hollowed out from centuries of collapsed floors. At one point in his research, he explored the possibility that the Rider might be the old lord of this tower. He confirmed, however, that the old lord died only recently, and then in the bat-form he'd been cursed with for so long. The Rider or Katia probably put the miserable thing out of its misery when they moved in.

One skeleton descended to the dungeons and crypt. The others followed Rovenmare up the stairs. Each peeled away to search a different level. They hunted the Rider floor by floor, room by room. As if in a dream, Rovenmare looked and looked, and couldn't find what he sought.

He came to the closed door of an upper chamber. He opened it, into what had once been a little girl's room. A pale pink cabinet lured him in. The residue of magic was thick and unmistakable on it.

Standing before it, he reached for a knob with one hand, while raising his staff in the other. He shifted his stance, the better to spring out of the way if necessary.

He threw the door open.

Something moved.

He jumped back, staff aimed, an incantation on his lips. Blinding white power glowed from the goat skull, ready to discharge.

Nothing came out of the cabinet.

He squinted.

Mirrors. He saw his own motion reflected in mirrors.

"Whoo." He relaxed. He opened the other cabinet door.

The most perfect three mirrors he'd ever seen shimmered with that residue of magic.

He understood. His image had most likely appeared in these mirrors before, observed by the Rider and Katia. They couldn't possibly have viewed him in his marble tower, but he wasn't so sure about the rest of Castle Volfric. How long had they watched? How often? What had they learned? He knew this much--the whole while, he learned nothing. Nothing, until that fool Baptiste tipped him off to their whereabouts. He still couldn't begin to guess the Rider's name.

"Damn it!" He smashed the mirrors with his staff. "Damn it!" He grabbed the cabinet and threw the whole thing over. "Damn it!"

He stalked out to the crater and looked down at his skeletons. They shrugged and shook their heads.

He looked up. He'd almost reached the top. "Where are you, Rider? Show yourself."

#

It scared Katia, the contemptuous ease with which Rovenmare literally slapped her spell down. Before she could cast another, he and his skeletons crossed to the tower, and entered. Suddenly faint with apprehension, she wobbled on her feet. She steadied herself with a hand on the parapet.

"To Hell, you demoness!", someone shouted. The mob took up the chant and waved their torches: "To Hell! To Hell! To Hell!"

She bared her fangs and hissed. But in her shock and confusion, the rhythm of the lights down there almost hypnotized her.

The racket of ascending footsteps snapped her out of it. She wrenched herself around to face the stairs. She knew before she saw him it was Mihail. He was her first. As she'd experienced other men, he remained her favorite. She admired his tenderness and care for both herself and Magda, his wife. Though she wouldn't say she loved him as she once loved Jacob, she felt for him an affection and attachment far beyond mere lust. He burst onto the rooftop in a frenzy of rage.

"Mihail!" She flung a hand up, partly reaching out to him, partly begging him to stop. "Wait! I didn't kill your baby!" They'd never spoken of it to each other. She had nothing to lose by mentioning it now, but feared it was too late. Still, she had to try connecting with him somehow.

"Liar!" He threw his torch at her.

She blocked it with her cape. It extinguished on contact.

He charged.

She implored him with her hands spread, palms up, completely vulnerable, "Mihail, please! Let me finish with Rovenmare, and then we'll talk abou-gghr!"

He speared his pitchfork upward into the smooth, pale flesh between her breasts and navel. The prongs sank full length, punching bloody holes out through her back. It hurt worse than she expected. His muscles bulged. He grunted from exertion. Her boots left the ground. The sweep of his thrust hoisted her over the parapet's edge.

Impaled on the tines, she dangled high above the mob.

A triumphal cheer assailed her from below.

For a heartbeat, she and Mihail stared into each other's eyes. Her blood ran down the shaft toward his hands.

He shifted to dump her.

She slid off the tines. At the last instant, she grabbed the tip of one.

He gripped the pitchfork too firmly to let go when she yanked, and so he tumbled over with her. They plummeted together.

He seemed to realize she'd just sealed his fate. He stabbed at her again with the pitchfork. She blocked it with her cape this time. She maneuvered him beneath her, tore the weapon from his grasp, and poised to fork him when they landed.

The mob shrieked in unison. The waving sea of torches scrambled to part for them.

They struck the ground, Mihail first, flat on his back. The tines penetrated him with all of Katia's strength, weight, and momentum. His blood spurted explosively against her thighs, the underslope of her breasts, her downturned face. The pitchfork severed him in two. The halves folded gruesomely around it like a book slammed shut, then flopped apart. Blood and guts sloshed from the open ends.

Katia snorted out blood and wiped it from her eyes. She straightened.

Village men surrounded her. Their eyes mirrored the blaze of their torches. The length of their weapons let them attack from a safe distance, beyond the reach of her claws. The cape protected her back, but her front remained exposed. Cruel points relentlessly punctured her body, and gleaming blades sliced her again and again.

In desperation, she snatched a man's scythe. She soon understood why Death was imagined to carry one. In her hands, it cut men down like rye. A squishy mound of lopped-off parts and corpses piled up beneath her boots. She twirled in rapid circles on it, slashing any who drew near.

She heard a whistle and swiveled to look. A chain whipped around her throat. Off balance, she kept turning, and tried to bring the scythe around. Her eye followed the chain to the bony fist of one of Rovenmare's grinning skeletons.

Another chain wrapped around her ankles.

"Aaughk!" She found herself jerked off her feet, suspended, stretched taut between two skeletons. The scythe flew from her hands as she clawed the air for any clue which way was up or down.

Two more skeletons rushed in and grabbed her arms. They pulled them to the sides, and braced against her strength in tug-of-war stances.

Frightened cries gurgled in her constricted throat.

"Hold her," Rovenmare commanded.

The chains and grips tightened. Her spine and muscles strained under the pressure. She felt they might pull her apart, as horses quarter criminals.

Rovenmare stepped up, leaning over her. He pressed a stake into the skin above her heart, and yelled, "Where is he?"

She couldn't answer. She could only wonder, He?

"Who is he?" Rovenmare's eyes bulged. "I'll have it out of you, don't worry." He raised the stake in a wild motion that set his braided beard swinging.

Katia fought to wriggle. The skeletons held her fast.

Rovenmare didn't so much stab her as throw himself on her point-first.

She cringed, and would have screamed if it were possible.

The stake slammed through her heart.

The few surviving villagers sent up a shout. They sobbed for joy. They fell on their faces, and they wept. "Thank God! Thank God!" Those who could, embraced. Some whooped and danced. Even those bleeding their lives out on the ground trembled with emotion.

Katia saw and heard it all, though she couldn't move. Her mind shrank from the understanding of how completely Rovenmare had her at his mercy. He could torture her as he pleased--even destroy her.

She did the only thing she could. Silently, she prayed. To Wendoline.

#

Back in the village, Rovenmare ordered the women to scrub Katia clean.

He went to the church, and descended to the vault. His skeletons waited there, having prepared the cramped, dank space for the ritual. Circles, swirls, arrows, and stars formed patterns on the floor, traced with chalk or sprinkled powder. White candles formed patterns in the patterns. Rovenmare inspected their work, and of course found it impeccable.

Two skeletons went to fetch Katia. They carried her in and arranged her limp body in the master pentacle. Her head and limbs corresponded to the five points of the star.

The women had done well. Even Rovenmare couldn't fault their work. They'd scrubbed Katia as clean as any corpse in his experience.

She was no ordinary vampire. He'd never seen such a healthy specimen with his own eyes. Curious, he gave her leg a trial touch with one fingertip. The flesh was cool and firm, which made it less repulsive. He flattened his hand along her hip, and slid it over the muscles of her stomach. He stopped at the stake. Small as her breasts were, they still looked too soft for his comfort.

He leaned over her face. "Who is he?" He stared into her vacant eyes. No longer the fiery orbs of the undead, they were the same dark brown they'd been in life. "Who is the Rider? You can't speak, but you will tell me. And then I'll find him. And I'll send him to Hell." Her eyes showed no response, but he sensed her inner turmoil.

The skeletons raised their hoods. They seated themselves at the pentacle points near her hands and feet.

Rovenmare mixed various ingredients in the mortar of a skull, and mashed them together with a pestle of bone. He mixed in liquids, and recited necromantic incantations. He poured the finished potion out on Katia's torso. It hissed on contact. Vapors steamed off her skin.

He took his place on a white silk pillow at the pentacle point nearest her head. "Now, then." He took up a wand of bone. "Who is the Rider?"

The vapors gathered into a cloud. Within that cloud, an image coalesced, very dimly at first, but Rovenmare coaxed it with the wand through degrees of clarity. The corners of his mouth turned down at what he saw: two figures, nude, entwined in intimate embrace, kissing and caressing. Such carnality revolted him, but he'd endure it, if only he could learn the Rider's name. He easily recognized one partner as Katia. He couldn't believe his eyes when the other turned out to be a woman, too. He watched, stunned, as they writhed together in Sapphic love.

His mind raced to figure out what might have gone wrong with the spell, for something surely had. He wondered if counter-magic was involved. Had Katia or the Rider foreseen this method of interrogation, and cast a spell against it, to project this image instead of anything that might give the Rider away? The Rider had always been so meticulous in guarding his identity, Rovenmare supposed that wasn't impossible. But then who was this woman? He analyzed the vision with rapid, darting motions of the wand. He could find nothing amiss, and yet something had to be.

Something began to nag at the back of his mind.

He noticed the skeletons watching him.

"What?" he snapped. "Why do you gape at me?"

"Master," one said, in a grating voice from the other side of death. "Do you not see?"

"See what?"

The skeletons would elaborate if they could. When they didn't, he knew better than to ask again. He also knew better than to disregard anything they called to his attention. He couldn't imagine, though, what this scene of women licking each other's genitals could possibly have to do with the Rider.

The mystery woman neared her crisis. She threw her head back, moaning loudly. At a loss for anything else to focus on, he closely examined her face. It did look familiar, and that's what nagged at him. She wore the most intense expression of erotic bliss. That, too, struck an eerily familiar chord for him, which perplexed him all the more. Where could he have seen this face with that expression?

"Oho! That's it!" He dropped the wand and jumped up so abruptly he kicked over candles and broke the spell. The startled skeletons sprang to their feet. "That's it, that's it, that's it!" He danced a jig around the crypt. "Saint Wendoline." It fit. The woman's expression matched the one in every depiction of Saint Wendoline's martyrdom. All of it fit. The name, the face, the armor and arms, the magic, the history with the House of Volfric, the tower. Yes, every bit of it fit.

No wonder her identity had proven so elusive. He assumed all along the Rider must be a man. But even if he hadn't, even if he ever suspected Wendoline, the court magicians of her day left records claiming to have exorcised her. They must have been mistaken.

"That's it. It has to be. No wonder. No wonder." He caught his breath, and barked orders at his skeletons. They hastened off to fulfill them.

He strutted to Katia and knelt beside her. He smoothed some hair back from her forehead. "Well, well, well, my dear. It's finished. You're finished, and Wendoline is finished. I don't know where she is, but I know how to draw her out. She'll come for you." He chuckled. "Oh yes she will. And when she does--" He whipped his hand across his throat in a cutting motion. "Finished!"

XI. Along Came a Werewolf

2006-04-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Peter prowled through the woods toward the inn. He moved upright on long, semi-wolfen legs. He swept the last of the branches aside with hairy, spindly hands. His ears perked. His nose twitched. He growled, but these humans weren't for killing. He had another use for them. He shifted the sack off his back.

A door creaked. Footsteps approached.

When the drunk staggered around the corner, Peter was human, dressed in motley, complete with cap and bells.

"Whar--!" the drunk said. "Almost wet myself! You gave me quite a scare."

"You're very fortunate I didn't mean to," Peter said. "Boo!"

They laughed.

The man pulled it out and pissed. "So what for're you skulking around out here? And dressed like that."

"I just did what you're doing. I'm Peter. On my way to Castle Volfric. I hope to be jester to the Count. Pleased to meet you."

The name of Volfric sobered the man. He squinted at Peter.

Peter smirked. Everyone knew Volfric impaled his last court jester. A crier rode through Wungoria with the man's head on a pike, and called all fools to audition at the castle.

Peter practiced his audition at every tavern, inn, and hall along the way. He joked, sang, juggled, and did acrobatic feats as if the drunken sods were Volfric. In deadly earnest, he kept them laughing and perfected every detail of his act. Audiences loved him.

As usual, tonight, he earned a meal, a drink, and a mat on the floor.

He lay near the hearth. A painted wooden carving of his head topped his scepter, with a velvet cap to match his own and bells that jingled when he shook it. He looked himself in the face--handsome devil, if he did say so. Like him, the scepter was more than it appeared.

He set it aside, and took up his lute. He plucked the strings in lulling melodies. Soon, all those around him breathed deeply in their sleep.

More softly still, he played a song of beauty lost, beauty longed for, and love he hoped one day to know again. He lowered his voice to a whisper, until he only mouthed the words.

Hoofbeats outside interrupted him. He stopped and listened. Someone arrived on horseback and dismounted.

The door opened. Moonlight framed a hooded figure, who stalked directly to Peter. Despite the peremptory tread and clank of armor, nobody else awoke.

Peter put the lute down. He reached for the scepter.

The figure stopped before him. "What a lovely song," it said---in a young woman's voice, to his surprise. "I beg your pardon. I couldn't help overhearing it. What if I could show you such a beauty, such an object for your love?"

"You mean yourself?"

The hood shook side-to-side. Night and shadow hid the face. "No. Her name is Katia."

"Hmmmm." Peter grinned. "I smell a trick or trap."

"My, what a keen nose you have. You're right. A trap. For me."

"I confess, your offer does intrigue me. I'm afraid, though, I have business at the castle."

"This is on your way," the woman said.

"Where?"

"Gorna."

"Gorna! That's so far out of my way--"

"Rovenmare is in your way!" Her armored fist rang against her armored palm. "I know who you are, Peter, what you are, what you want, and why. The Baron is an obstacle you'll never pass alone. If you don't understand that, you're more fool than you pretend to be."

Peter stared at her.

"He, Rovenmare, awaits me in Gorna," she continued. "He holds Katia there. I will kill him. But I need you to free her while I do it."

The more Peter considered the strange proposal, the more preposterous every word of it sounded. Rovenmare in Gorna? Still, this was no ordinary visitor, whoever she might be.

"One night," the woman said. "Surely you can gamble one night on a fool's errand?"

He laughed. When she put it that way, how could he refuse?

#

Peter's mirth deserted him when the woman's horse carried them into the sky. Few tales in his repertoire mentioned flying horses. Those that did were frightful, even to a werewolf. Most concerned the Rider who haunted Castle Volfric.

The horse ran them to Gorna before he could change his mind. He'd experienced such speed before, once. He didn't like it this time, either.

They touched down outside the village and rode in.

"Promise me," the woman said over her shoulder, "you'll free Katia, whatever happens."

"What do you mean, 'whatever happens'?"

"Promise!"

"All right. I promise. Just tell me one thing. Who are you?"

She slumped a moment, but straightened again. "It's no secret any longer. My name is Wendoline."

"Wait. Wendoline? You mean--?"

"Yes and no. It's a long story. We're here."

Two large fixed torches burned in the village square. What little feeling remained in Peter that this might all be a lark evaporated at the grisly scene they lit--a girl staked through the heart and nailed to a cross. She wore a cape and boots and nothing more.

"There! Go! Now!" Wendoline said.

"But," Peter said. "But I don't think . . . Is she alive?"

"She's a vampire. Take her down and get away. Hurry!"

Peter slid off the horse. He jogged across the open ground, more uneasy with each step. His plan gave him confidence, but this was no part of it. The bells on his costume jingled. His palm sweated around the scepter.

At the foot of the cross, he hazarded his first good look at Katia. Her black hair draped straight down from her lolling head. Her dark eyes stared in the vacant manner of a corpse. Between her lips, he could just make out the points of fangs. For all that, she was beautiful as Wendoline promised. That part was no trick. Her face struck him as uncannily familiar, as if he'd seen it before, perhaps in dreams.

His sensitive ears caught noises he recognized. The leather armor Volfric's soldiers wore made distinct creaks and squeaks as it flexed and rubbed. Peter heard a chorus of these sounds on every side. Wendoline did mention a trap.

She also mentioned Rovenmare. Years ago, Peter's mother scared him off to bed with threats of the White Baron. Since then, he'd heard and told many tales of the necromancer. He wouldn't want to be a character in any of them. Though Wendoline was right, that his plan put him on a collision course with Rovenmare, he hadn't figured that part out yet, and didn't like to think about it.

The sounds of bows and crossbows snapped Peter back to the present. He considered going wolf, but decided to save that for a surprise, if necessary. He closed his eyes, relaxed, and let his instincts time his move.

He burst into flips, handsprings, zigzags, and dodges. A chatter of twangs sent arrows and bolts criss-crossing around him. All missed.

Red-armored soldiers poured into the square.

Peter twisted the scepter's head. A sword snicked from the shaft.

The soldiers converged on him.

Fiendish speed and strength propelled him through a whirlwind of slaughter. Severed heads trailed corkscrews of blood away from toppling bodies. He caught the heads and juggled them, juggled the scepter-sword, and hurled the heads, beaning other soldiers off their feet.

A glimpse of white at the far end of the square stopped him in his tracks. He dropped everything.

A freak who could only be Rovenmare rode a horse skeleton slowly into view. Here was the fabled Baron--thin, thin, thin, and white, white, white, just as Peter's mother said, but starker and more dreadful in life than Peter ever imagined. He held a goat-skulled staff of bone. A fishnet bag of slimy brown bones hung from the saddle.

Peter broke into a cold sweat.

The soldiers also froze. They faced the other way. Peter smelled their fear. He glanced back, and saw Wendoline as they did--cowled in black, sword in hand, a vision of Death. The sight dispelled all doubt about the company he kept tonight. Saint or not, she was the Rider.

She spurred her horse to charge.

The soldiers scattered.

Rovenmare blasted white fire from the staff. Wendoline answered with hellfire from her sword.

Peter dove from between them. The fires met before he hit the ground, and exploded. For an instant and eternity, he hung suspended, bathed in the eruption of sorcerous energies. The air shimmered. Rovenmare's death magic rippled through him. The icy wave stopped the beating of his heart. But a wave of Wendoline's power triggered his metamorphosis. The dark power within him awakened and flashed through him, melting and reshaping him. His heart pounded back to life. The explosion swelled and expanded as he fell. Small rocks floated in its updraft. It snuffed the torches and knocked them cockeyed. The concussion blunted Wendoline's charge. Her horse lowered its head against the blast-wind. Her hood blew back. Her brown curls whipped. Her eyes narrowed. Grass died on the square in a quickly-spreading circle. At last, Peter landed on all fours, more wolf than man--and not dead, to his trembling relief.

A jarring stillness followed.

Peter bolted for the cross. He shed the tatters of his costume as he ran. The duel commenced noisily behind him. It cast eerie lights and shadows on Katia's pale body. Only when he reached the cross did he look back.

The mounts circled each other with a savage, stamping gait. Rovenmare and Wendoline fenced with streaks of white and blood-red lightning.

In flashes, Peter caught peeks at Wendoline's face. He recognized the soft, pretty features of the saint, hardened by rage. With her cloak thrown back, all in armor from the neck down, she looked steel through and through. Here, he understood, was the truth behind the Wendoline of legend.

Recalling his promise to her, he rose on hind legs, shifted his mutable form to stand upright, and turned his forepaws into hairy, monstrous hands. Carefully, he snapped the cross off at the base.

An incandescent maelstrom raged between Wendoline and Rovenmare as they went round and round. Stray bolts and deflected blasts set fire to buildings around the square. Wendoline pressed forward, but Rovenmare kept his distance, pulling the fight in elliptical loops.

Peter lugged the cross to the edge of the square, safe at least from the horses' hooves. Strong feelings welled up in him--pity for Katia, rage and disgust over what had been done to her. The nails looked horrendous. The stake immobilized her. He pulled it out first, in case she could somehow free herself at once from all the rest.

She couldn't. She could only voice a weak, hoarse mewl. The torment Peter heard in it wrenched his soul. Her eyes didn't glow as a vampire's should, either.

"Let's get you free." He worked his fingers for a grip on the nail through one hand. Katia squeezed her eyes and mouth shut. He began to pry it out. "All right. It's almost over."

He looked to see how Wendoline fared.

She shouted an incantation, tore her cloak off, and swung it at Rovenmare. It shuddered to life. It burst into blackish-red flames. The hood scrunched into a mockery of a head. The ends flapped as wings. Each beat fanned the stench of brimstone, leaving no question what kind of spirit she cast into the cloak. It flew at Rovenmare like no bird, bat, or insect of this world. Peter imagined a flock of such things in flight across some gloomy abyss. He caught an impression of a face within the fabric of the hood--mercifully indistinct, for what little he could make of it stirred a sudden loathing in him for the cloak. Though he knew it had been plain and harmless around Wendoline's shoulders on the ride to Gorna, the memory of touching it horrified him now.

Rovenmare swept his staff at the dead soldiers. They shot up in the air and glommed together as a giant floating hand. Some corpses formed the palm, and some the fingers. Rovenmare flexed his free hand into a fist, as if trying on a glove. The giant hand mimicked the motion. Where the bodies lacked joints corresponding to his knuckles, bones cracked. Peter winced at the staccato, but what really disturbed him was the practiced thoughtlessness of Rovenmare's action--as though he'd conjured so many such hands that he broke them in that way by rote. The pressure squished things around inside the bodies. When the hand opened again, blood poured from the neck stumps and other wounds.

Under Rovenmare's control, faster than Peter would have thought possible, the hand seized the flapping cloak. It crumpled the fabric into a wad that would have been most painful to any living creature, and the cloak truly seemed to feel it. Only the hood stuck out, whipping side-to-side, struggling and straining, and worst of all, whining. Blackish-red flames blazed through the gaps between the fingers. Greasy smoke billowed from inside the fist. It reeked of burning leather, flesh, and brimstone. Rovenmare gritted his teeth and clenched his raised fist even tighter. The cloak's scream made Peter's fur stand on end.

The first nail popped loose. Katia gasped. She twitched her hand. It flopped from the wood into the dirt. Peter dashed to her other hand, and started on that nail.

The giant hand released the cloak, which fluttered down, inanimate once more. Badly damaged by the spirit's fire, the hand looked all the more ghastly. Charred particles rained from the smoldering palm. Only blackened skeletons remained of several fingers. In the light of the buildings that burned around the square, Peter had never seen anything so hideous.

It reached for Wendoline.

She pointed at Rovenmare. He shifted his staff to parry. A black beam from her finger shattered the goat skull and struck him in the eye. He cried and dropped the staff.

The giant hand fell apart. Corpses thudded to the ground.

Black energy fizzed in Rovenmare's eye. He stabbed a finger in and plucked it out. A black aura crackled around the eyeball. Before he could throw it away, the black energy leaped back into the socket, and slurped its way straight back into his head. He slapped a hand over the bloody cavity and shrieked.

Peter swore. The second nail came free.

Wendoline pointed at Rovenmare's mount. She gestured as if pulling a loose thread. The horse skeleton collapsed beneath him into a pile of bones. She shouted, "Hya!", and spurred. Her horse raced to trample him. He grabbed the bag of bones and lunged out of the way. Red-hot hooves pounded the remains of the horse skeleton to smoking bits.

Wendoline slashed at Rovenmare's throat. He jerked back, and she only chopped his beard off. Still backpedaling, he tucked the bag under one arm. The horse snorted fire. He threw his other arm up to shield himself. The blast incinerated sleeve and flesh. With no muscles to support it, the skeletal arm dangled from his shoulder. As he scrambled for dear life, his limp bones flapped in a grotesquely comic manner.

Peter laughed. After so much tension, he needed to. He knelt at Katia's feet, and wormed two fingers through a hole in her boot to get at the last nail. That didn't work, so he clawed the leather to widen the hole. When he looked up again, he saw nothing to laugh about.

He'd no idea where the white-robed skeletons came from, but four of them surrounded Wendoline. They whipped chains around her neck, her sword arm, her horse's neck, and one of the horse's hind-legs.

Rovenmare staggered a few steps to relative safety. Somehow, he reanimated the bones of his arm.

Wendoline turned ghostly. Peter saw through her and the horse. He imagined they could pass through walls like that. When the chains didn't fall away, he didn't like the flicker of alarm in her expression. He feared the trap she sprang had caught her. She turned solid again and strained against the chains.

Rovenmare gesticulated at her with his skeletal arm, and swayed the bag of bones like a censer. He babbled an incantation as fast as he could move his lips.

Peter sensed a difference, a whole new urgency in Rovenmare and Wendoline alike, as if the duel hinged entirely on this ritual. At the heart of it was that bag. The rotten bones set it apart from the spotless white of Rovenmare's other tools and accoutrements. It occurred to Peter they might be Wendoline's.

The skeletons tugged this way and that, keeping Wendoline and the horse off-balance and occupied. They wouldn't let her gesture to cast spells, and spoiled her aim when she lashed out with raw magic. Her sword blinked from her left hand to her right, for all the good that did her. She hacked at the chains, to no avail. The skeletons jeered. They yanked the chains, and danced beyond her reach.

Rovenmare grew more smug with every word he spat at her.

Peter nervously wondered how many words remained, and what they portended. Such questions made him all the more impatient to free Katia. She'd twisted her torso off the cross. Only the nail through her feet still bound her to it. He couldn't grip the head, no matter how he tried. Blood in her boot made it too slippery. He snarled.

Through sheer martial rigor, Wendoline began to wrest control of the struggle away from the skeletons. She constrained and dictated the rhythm of their movement, but her desperation grew increasingly apparent.

Given time, she could free herself, Peter knew, but time was running out. He almost couldn't watch without running to help her. He weighed his odds of charging Rovenmare. He had a clear path, and Rovenmare seemed thoroughly absorbed in the ritual. If only Peter got to him, once he sank his teeth in, that would be the end of it. But he hadn't freed Katia yet. Wendoline anticipated this, he realized, when she insisted on his promise.

At wits' end, he braced the cross with one shaggy foot, and grabbed Katia's ankles. "I'm sorry. This'll hurt." He pried her legs up. Her mouth stretched in a cry stifled only by her weakness. At least she was free of the cross. He scooped her up and set her down well clear of it, then hurried to get the nail out of her feet.

Wendoline flourished her sword in a figure-eight that struck the skull and hands off a skeleton. That freed the horse of one chain. It bucked onto its forelegs and smashed its hind-hooves through another skeleton's ribs and spine.

Katia quivered in Peter's arms. She retched up clots of blood. Most importantly, she regained some strength and movement.

Rovenmare's voice rose alarmingly. His motions became frenzied, but also triumphant.

Peter had to act. He eased Katia down, and nerved himself to charge one of the scariest men in the world.

Wendoline chopped a third skeleton to pieces.

Katia said, "Help . . . her!"

Peter rushed at Rovenmare as a wolfish blur, shapeshifting as he ran. Fluid muscles grew strongest the instant he needed them. His paws adjusted to the battle-scarred ground.

The horse reared. It tossed its head, and slung the last skeleton high into the air.

Rovenmare shouted a syllable--the final one. It filled the square, and echoed with a potency far beyond its volume. Peter's sharp, enchanted hearing caught an otherworldly resonance he'd heard in the cloak's demonic voice. He dreaded what would happen next, whatever that might be. He sped up anyway, as if it weren't too late.

A cataclysmic tremor rocked the earth. It heaved Peter headlong into a bouncing roll.

The ground fissured open beneath the horse and Wendoline. A blast of brimstone smoke obscured them, but as it mushroomed overhead, a fiery glare underlit them from the chasm's depths. Wendoline screamed. The horse neighed and scrabbled frantically, but for once, the power of flight was not enough. A stronger power dragged them down.

Peter tumbled toward the fissure too fast to stop himself. Over the side he went, from night air into scorching heat that rose in waves palpable enough to ruffle his fur. His stomach queased as he began to fall. He shot out an arm as long as he could stretch, and grabbed the ledge with the biggest, strongest hand he could form. It held. He dangled.

The last skeleton fell from the sky. It pinwheeled its arms, but couldn't reach a ledge. It dropped, screaming, past Peter. He couldn't help following it down with his gaze. Beyond it, Wendoline and the horse continued to plummet. Beyond them--

He looked up and away. That glimpse of Hell would haunt him ever after. Nor could he shut out the eerie hum he now recognized as distant, endless, countless voices screaming. He still lived, though, and Katia still needed help.

Rovenmare stalked to the ledge and threw the bag of bones into the chasm. Peter guessed that bag was Wendoline's last hope. He tried to catch it with his foot. His claws tore the fishnet. The bones spilled loose into the abyss.

Rovenmare looked startled to see him hanging there. For the skip of a heartbeat, Peter locked stares with the necromancer. Rovenmare's pitiless eye and gruesome socket almost made him lose heart, but his life depended on pressing his slim advantage of surprise. He poured everything he had into a snarl so chilling, even Rovenmare cried and jumped back.

Peter grabbed the ledge with his other hand. He hoisted himself half out of the pit, and risked a glance back. Fully and angrily recovered, Rovenmare spread his arms. Peter kicked his legs over the edge just as Rovenmare slammed his palms together, flesh to bone.

The fissure crashed shut.

Not the faintest seam remained.

The awful finality overwhelmed Peter. He ran. He snatched up Katia and ran. He swung her onto his back. "Hold on!"

She wrapped her arms and legs around him.

He dropped to all fours and ran and ran and ran.