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It’s a strange thing, to recognise one’s own blood.
Its scent comes on the wind, an iron and brine medley familiar in a way he cannot name, cannot reason with, and it stops him in his tracks. He knows it, although there is no science, no logic to the knowing. He knows it the way geese know their flight south, the way frogs know their way back to old spawning ponds; newly-forged instincts thrum through his altered form and tether him to the last remnants of his shred humanity.
He knows, and that is enough.
The people of Oakhurst surge on ahead around him. Onto the castle, into war – to blood and battle, to embedded stakes and claws chest-deep in viscera – and yet he lingers, nose to the air. There is a summons of like calling to like that leaves the humans and their beating hearts a pale imitation.
The phantom memory of blood that had once pulsed through his now-inert veins, of a heartbeat deadened, resurfaces.
It almost sounds like marching.
He lops away from his companions, and if they see him they do not stop him, and if they do attempt to stop him they do not succeed. The sun sets, and he moves quicker. Through forest and undergrowth, across the stone steps that sit like broken teeth above the water, up the cliffscape beyond, all in pursuit of that tenuous scent of something that once belong to him.
Of something he wants back.
At the crest of the precipice, the scent thickens. Close. He’s close now; the smell coats his nose, crawling into his mouth and clotting his throat, until his senses are marred with the absence of what he once was. There’s more of his blood outwith him than within now, congealing in a spiderweb of blood vessels wrapped up in human form.
He sees it.
To hunt something even tangibly human is a very different beast to hunting animals. The heart sits higher, the throat lies bared; the whole form is opened out into a free-form diagram of vulnerabilities. Throat, lungs, heart, head, eyes… all set so neatly along a single axis. All so easy to sever.
And even vampires bleed.
His first lunge propels him into his quarry, claws ripping through crimson fabric, and then the flesh beyond following in matching crimson hues as he rends through long-dormant arteries. They both slam into the ground, his prey pinned beneath him, and now the air sings with the scent of blood, his blood – not the weak chicken and cow replacement left residing in his veins, but his; blood that had once pumped through his heart when it still beat – coating his claws, but it’s not enough.
He dips his head and sinks fangs into the neck.
The body convulses, as if from pain or perhaps laughter – the chest spasming – and he drinks.
The memories do not come – or, perhaps, they do; perhaps they do and they simply are indistinguishable from those already present. Perhaps it’s simply his blood, his memories, flowing back into a mind that wishes to forget; back into a mind already saturated with savagery. The image before him layers, an after-echo of another throat, warmer, alive, pulsing, overlapping with the present. The bandaged neck flickers to a starched white collar and back again.
There’s movement to his left. A glint of something scything his way.
He releases the throat only long enough to lash out with claws, and fresh blood glazes them – new blood, unfamiliar blood, not his – and he reels the strike back upon his trapped prey beneath, to slit the throat clean through–
The world explodes into light and his hand freezes, a hair’s breadth from the jugular.
The form to his left moves again, a flash of silver incoming – and then falters.
“Doc?”
Some fraction of his mind steps back from the abyss. He knows that voice, even if he doesn’t recognise its tone. For the first time, it sounds… unsure. He blinks, and names slide into place. Owen – a maybe-friend, a patient, his sire – is trapped beneath him in a grisly tableau, the tables turned from Legundo’s own turning.
And yet Owen still grins, his eyes drinking in greedily Legundo’s altered form. The side of his throat is raw, but the claw marks raking through his chest are healing already. The wounds he wears are not enough to kill him. Not yet.
And Abolish – Abolish moves closer, but does not use the silver axe. Legundo can only see him out of the corner of his eye, but the glimmer of the blade is unmistakable. He can hear his heartbeat, the sole pulse between them three; steady, save for the slightest hitch. “What happened to you?”
Legundo’s claws twitch against the paralysis, but can do little more than brush at the fine hairs along Owen’s throat. “He did.”
Owen’s grin widens, revealing the flash of fangs. “Hello, soldier. Nice of you to finally make an appearance.”
“He’s agreed to the cure,” Abolish says. His voice is calm. Reasonable. “When he’s human, we can turn you–”
“No. No, he doesn’t get to just – he doesn’t – not after what he’s–”
The silver axe dips gently into his line of sight. “Don’t become a problem, doc.”
“He did this to me,” Legundo growls.
“And once he’s cured, we can change you back too,” Abolish says. Whatever irregularity had disquieted his heart has eased, the pulse settled back into regulated meter. The axe doesn’t move. “I don’t need to kill you.”
Owen rolls his head towards Abolish, and in the process – intentionally or not – bares his neck further. “Oh, don’t spoil the fun, Abolish. He and I both knew it would come to this. I turn him, he kills me; fitting, in the end.”
“We have a solution–”
“The good doc doesn’t want your solution,” Owen says. “Not when he’s finally stopped pretending to be something he isn’t. Tell me, Abolish; how much blood do you think a vampire has to drink to reach stage three? There can’t be many animals out in the forest now, not after that fire. In the town, maybe, but… oh, didn’t you kill all the livestock?” Owen’s gaze pointedly roams across Legundo, pausing on the blood matted in the hair, the sanguinary stains still drying in careless streaks along the coat. “Still, seems he found the blood somewhere.”
Legundo’s claws shake against the holy word keeping them in place.
And still the axe doesn’t move.
“Where have you been, doctor?” Abolish asks, and his words are as casual as they are blunt. He could be asking a colleague what they did over the weekend, exchanging apathetic banalities as they fall into awkward step, except there’s an axe in Legundo’s periphery and deliberate nonchalance in Abolish’s shoulders.
Legundo wades his mind through the past day. It’s a slog; the time after his turning is ill-focused, senses and sounds blurring into one. There’s blood… and thirst… and walls… “I went to… I was at the town,” he says eventually and that, he’s sure, is true enough.
The axe doesn’t move, but something in Abolish shifts.
Owen laughs. It’s sharp and cruel and it twists his lips to bare his fangs. “Well, that answers that question. We felt the death, wondered if it was a case of vampire-on-vampire. Who was it? Apo? Cleo?” He makes another calculated sweeping look. “By the red of your eye and the state of your coat, I’d say you’ve drunk from more than just a single vampire. How many humans did you drain dry, Legs?”
“I didn’t–”
“Don’t discredit yourself, soldier. It’s been 200 years since the last bloodbath; Oakhurst was due another. You’re just following in tradition.”
A growl rumbles through Legundo’s chest, the muscles in his jaw flexing against the paralysis. He can still taste the reclaimed blood on his lips; if he could, he would drive his fangs into Owen’s throat and take the rest.
Owen looks like he knows it. He lowers his voice, although Legundo has little doubt Abolish catches every word regardless. “I told you, you can’t escape it. You said it yourself, Legs; if being a vampire didn’t turn me into something of rage, didn’t make me hateful, then what does that make you?”
“And I told you, I am not a good man.”
“Did you kill anyone, doc?” Abolish asks.
Owen’s laugh rises. “Oh, you will have to be more specific than that. Our good doctor’s had blood on his hands long before he set foot in Oakhurst.” He drops his head back again, sending a sardonic grin Abolish’s way. “Apologies, it looks like I shouldn’t have called you away from the town, after all.”
“Have you killed anyone today?” Abolish amends without missing a beat.
Legundo’s breathing hard, although his lungs are numbed to the air. The hunger digs into the crevices of his mind, glutted with the rage that wants to shut Owen up, to stop that mouth, to rip trachea and larynx and–
“Doc.”
“No,” he snarls. “I didn’t.”
“No?” Owen echoes.
“Then there’s no need to change that,” says Abolish.
“I can be–” Legundo’s voice gives way. He tries again. “I can be useful.”
“Not like this.”
“No?” Owen repeats. The smile he’s worn so cavalier, gleefully heedless of the claws curling at his throat, distorts. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, no.”
“You must–”
“The vampire that was killed–” Abolish begins, cutting over Owen with brazen ease.
“Had nothing to do with me.”
“The town–”
“Are going for the castle. Last I checked,” and Legundo’s voice is hoarse, rough around the edges in a way that is more than just the thirst, “everyone was still alive.”
“Do no harm,” Abolish says.
The laugh that shudders through Legundo is unfamiliar to him; it’s no longer the soft, tired sound he’s come to know so well in his time in Oakhurst, fringed with exhaustion and rimmed with grief. There’s an edge to it, a rasp curdling at the corners. But… it still sounds fond. “Do no harm.”
The holy word is fading; already Legundo can feel its iron grip loosening on his limbs. If he were to try now, he could probably reach Owen’s throat.
“Doc – Legs – look at me.” Abolish sounds like he knows this too. There’s no urgency, no curtness, but somehow his words sound like they’ve been slouching until now, and have decided to stand upright. Legundo raises his head.
And sees himself.
Across Abolish’s face there lies a gash, torn from jaw to brow. Not deep enough to threaten fatality – he moved too fast for that – but sure enough to scar. Fresh. Too fresh to be from anything other than an immediate altercation, and Legundo’s mind reels through his single-minded bloodlust, counts the blows he dealt.
Distantly, he recalls a blind retaliatory strike, a slash rewarded with unfamiliar blood on his claws.
For Abolish’s part, the man doesn’t recoil, but there’s still the flicker of something – a flash and then it’s gone, shuttered behind that flat indifference – in his eyes when he clearly sees Legundo’s face. Bereft of a reflection, Legundo only has the expressions of his neighbours and the sensation of dried, cracked blood across his skin to reckon his face by. His glass eye is long gone – he doesn’t know exactly when his body rejected it, only that he lost it between one feeding and the next – and what remains is still unseeing. It’s not empty, though. No, he can feel the sclera growing back, the vampiric healing working to make sense of something absent, to fix that which is missing.
It's probably not pretty.
“Rough day?” Abolish asks and it almost – almost – sounds like an attempt at a joke.
Legundo works his mouth. His jaw seems unsettled, now fully freed from the binding magic, to be doing anything other than ripping into Owen’s throat. “Your face,” he manages eventually. “I didn’t–”
“I’ve had worse,” Abolish says, and it’s easy to believe him. In his off-hand, he brings a now-crimson handkerchief – once a silken white – and wipes a rivulet of blood away before it can trickle over his eye. The movement is quick, efficient. It almost hides the way his vision flickers across the more bloodied aspects of Legundo’s appearance. “Owen’s right, though. I did kill all the livestock.”
It’s difficult to tear his attention away from the wound. It’s not a perfect mirror match to his own – it jars just shy of the eyes, missing both but cutting a nasty gash across the bridge of the nose – but it’s still like meeting his reflection from nearly three decades back.
The only difference – the only difference that matters – is that the man who had run his bayonet across Legundo’s face had lived only as long as it took Legundo to return the favour.
Abolish’s axe is still unbloodied.
“My lab,” he says. “You forgot my lab.”
Abolish hums, and Legundo receives the distinct impression that, if there are – somehow – any animals remaining, the oversight won’t last for long.
“This is some sort of trick,” Owen snarls.
Legundo glances back down to Owen. The other vampire is still trapped beneath him – although a detached part of Legundo’s mind notes the way he had easily rolled his head in Abolish’s direction, and wonders if the holy word caught only one of them – and he finds his claws have withdrawn from Owen’s neck.
His fangs still ache with the desire to drink.
“Another lie,” Owen continues to hiss. “He’s lying, Abolish; just as he always does–”
“You should probably stop talking now,” Abolish says idly.
“No one can escape what they once were, and he is something worse than a monster.” He twists, but makes no attempt to escape. “Do you know what he did, Abolish? Or has he failed to include that particular little detail, the reason why he calls himself a monster, and yet somehow always forgets to explain why?” He scowls vindictively at Legundo. “Shall I tell him, or will you?”
Legundo’s throat goes dry. “Don’t.”
“Stop me,” Owen goads.
A bloodless altercation. Wasn’t that what they had called it? Bloodless, because no blade had been bared, no gun shot, no archetypical weapon raised, and yet there had been blood aplenty. Bloodless, in only the most bureaucratical sense.
All the blood in Owen is stolen.
Most of it is Legundo’s.
Would that count as a bloodless altercation?
“This during the war?” Abolish’s words, tinged with professional boredom, doesn’t dull the ringing in Legundo’s ears, so much as it redirects it.
He makes a sound in the back of his throat that’s meant to be a confirmation.
“Was it work?”
“Some things should never be just work,” Legundo mutters.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Did they ever give you an exact number, or did they just round it down for you?” Owen persists, lip curling with contempt. “A nice tidy figure; what do a few deaths either side matter? At least when I killed, I kept count.”
“Look, I’m not interested in who did what 20 or 200 years ago,” Abolish says. “That’s not my job. Doc, are you going to back off, or do I need to stop you?”
Legundo meets the gaze of the vampire beneath him. Despite everything, he finds himself looking for a shadow of the man he had believed he had – however briefly – known. There remain twin pinpricks along his own neck, remnants of a time when he had still hoped a peaceful solution could be found. And maybe there is an echo of that Owen left – the Owen who had drunk, but not turned – but it is buried beneath a grave’s worth of bitterness and self-sabotaged betrayal.
“He did this to me,” he says once more, but the seething ire no longer burns at the contact. Now it just aches. “To torment me, to punish me.”
“It seems to me,” Abolish says, “that you’re the one who gets to decide that. Torment or punishment or… something else.”
“He doesn’t understand,” Owen hisses to Legundo, but there’s an urgency that Legundo hears now. Blind vitriol, lashing out in desperation of striking true. “Even now, he doesn’t understand the monster Oakhurst welcomed into its midst. There’s nothing to be done but accept who you truly are.”
Abolish languidly shifts the hold of his axe. “You’re not helping.”
Owen sneers. “I never said I wanted to help.”
“He’s going to be cured?” Legundo asks, keeping Owen’s gaze, but addressing Abolish.
“He’s agreed.” There’s a surety in Abolish’s voice that Legundo believes; that, even if things change, something is coming to an end today. “This is my work, doc.”
A remnant instinct leaves him releasing a breath he could have held for eternity. He feels his shoulders loosen. His claws fall to his sides. “Thank you.”
Legundo rises back to his feet. Steps away from Owen – from his sire, patient, almost-something – and while the bloodlust doesn’t quell, it slots neatly back into place, alongside the rage and the self-righteous rancour. Like an old book fitting perfectly back into a familiar shelf.
“What are you – where are you going?” Owen scrambles up, sitting himself against the trunk of a tree. The only wound still raw is the bitemark upon his neck; the lacerations across his chest have knitted closed, but the healing has cost him. He looks gaunt. “You don’t get to just – just walk away. You don’t get to decide to be good.”
Legundo steps back again. “I’m done.”
“What makes you think I’m going to release you that easily?” Owen spits. “You think I’m going to go quietly into that good night, to bless you with reprieve after everything you’ve done? You think you deserve that?”
A wan smile rises, unbidden, to Legundo’s lips as he recalls another conversation with a very similar theme. “If we all got what we deserved, none of us would be here.”
Owen’s words come softly, almost a prayer. “Damn you, doctor. Finish this off.”
“No.”
As he turns away, Legundo passes a hand over his neck. Not the side still marred from his turning, but the place where Owen had once fed. Once, there had been trust.
“I’ve made my choice. It’s time you made yours.”