V-Wars

“Dearg Due,” Harry replied.

He waved at the name dismissively. “Means something to him, not to me. I and the others are terrified at the thought of sunlight, like victims of porphyria. Deb even sleeps in a crypt. But you are like Harry, too. You can travel in the light without ill effect. We need more with that skill to bring in the meals.” He had quietly moved closer all the while he was talking, and now he grabbed her wrist, his fingers like talons. “What kind are you exactly, hmm, Ruksana? And where are your teeth?” His breath was so cloacal that she grimaced and tried to yank her hand away. Instead he pulled her closer. “Far too squeamish, that much we know.” The vampires behind him laughed.

The chamber seemed to crackle, as if an electrical charge had begun circling it. She was suddenly hot, drenched in sweat, and she wrestled one arm free of him and frantically tugged off her coat. Decebal had advised to get her shoes off, too. She kicked them loose.

“Yes,” said Vincent, letting go of her. The others crowded closer, even Deb, leering as if she was undressing for their entertainment. “Let’s see what you are.”

Ruksana threw the coat aside, but still panted. She leaned her hands on her thighs and tried to regain control. The coat wasn’t enough — she continued overheating.

Panic attack, she thought and pulled her sweater over her head, dropped it upon the coat. She pressed her hands to her face — only they weren’t her hands any longer. The palms were rough brown pads, the fingers white with fur. The nails were growing as she watched, curving into black claws around the tips of her fingers. Decebal had told her not to fight the change when it came, but to embrace it, as if it was something she might master. He had been sure it would come. How had he known?

She clutched at her furred belly, but the cramps weren’t cramps — the pain radiated from a core point out into her joints like rays of sunlight. She threw back her head and howled. Her slacks became loose as her hips shifted, slimmed. But her thighs swelled with muscle and the fabric of her slacks tore. She could feel her lips pulling back from her teeth, feel the blunt snout of her nose, hear the whuff of her breath.

“What in hell?” Vincent said. “What kind of hairy vampires do they raise in Romania?” He grabbed for her again and she slashed over his arm and across his torso. Astonished, he stumbled back, staring at himself. “What?”

Deb had scrambled aside. The other two with her dropped the naked victim they’d been carrying. An instant before they could move to escape, Ruksana sprang. Her legs felt like steel springs. She caught the nearest one’s throat in her jaws, while her nails dug into his back and split him open. Violently she shook her head, throwing off jets of blood, ripping through muscle and gristle, relishing the kill. His partner fled down the narrow corridor.

A fierce shout from behind Ruksana made her whirl with her vampire victim still in her grip. Deb Arliss’s grabbing fingers plunged into him instead of her. Ruksana let the body go, leaving Deb to try to get free of it. She curled her left hand over Deb’s head, claws hooking deep beneath the jaw. For just that second she experienced something like lust in anticipation. Deb opened her mouth in a wail of combined terror and hate, and madly disentangled one arm and prepared to strike. With her other hand, Ruksana caught Deb by the hair, and the hand under her jaw yanked up. Bone snapped and skin ripped apart, black blood sprayed the low ceiling. Deb’s wail ceased.

She flung Deb’s and the other body aside. Only Vincent remained in the room. Harry was gone. He had to have fled through another doorway, deeper into The Crawl.

Vincent had stumbled over to the miniature castle. One hand pressed tight against his belly, trying to hold himself in. “This is how you thank me?” he said, and slid down until he was sitting. “By turning out to be a fucking werewolf?” He hissed in pain. “I had plans.”

She turned and bolted deeper into the maze of The Crawl. Harry was in here somewhere, loose and dangerous; but he must have been swift as well, because she found no trace of him by the time she had circled through all the rooms and come out where they had been feasting. It looked like that chamber had been a makeshift youth hostelry for a dozen cataphiles — their cooking supplies, foodstuffs, a case of bottled water, sleeping bags, and packs were still there. She found four corpses, drained, bitten or chewed upon, and the freshly denuded skeleton of a woman — that would have been Vincent’s handiwork.

She circled back to where the teenager lay in the doorway. She lifted him. He whimpered in fear. She tried to tell him she wouldn’t hurt him, but found she couldn’t form any words. She was neither wolf nor woman now.

She supported the naked boy, but had to turn sideways and edge through the narrow corridor. Vincent’s helpless cry of agony and rage echoed from behind her. Another instance of déjà vu; she thought of the cry she’d heard as Harry had led her down the passage.

She took him back to the room with the bodies, and then helped him put on clothes and a parka. Whether they were his or not, she didn’t ask. It was enough that they covered him.

Back out between the lanterns, she went left toward where Harry had told her there was water and, presumably, a way out other than the stairs into the woods, where the driver might be waiting for her.

They crept along for perhaps ten minutes, at one point passing an old rusting white sign in German: Rauchen Verboten! Something yowled in the distance, but the sound could have come from almost any direction. The passage finally opened up onto a wide expanse of arches over what looked to be an underground river. The floor protruded out in one spot, like a small jetty for Charon. Across from it there was a metal ladder.

She helped the youth start up the ladder, but this last leg of the journey he was going to have to make alone. She found that in this shape she could not climb at all.

At the top was some kind of grate that he managed to push aside. The last she saw of him was his legs disappearing out into the night.

With him gone, she walked out onto the small jetty over the black water. She looked down, hoping to see her own reflection, what she’d become. But while her vision was sharp in the darkness, there was no light source reflecting her upon the waters. She might have been a ghost hovering there, formless, attached to nothing. It seemed strange that she hadn’t changed back. Was her body warning her that it wasn’t over yet?

Keenly, she stretched her senses out for any errant detail. She heard the slosh of water as it pushed around her and dripped from a pipe far off to the right. And then finally there came the softest scuff of a step from the creature that was attempting to sneak up on her.

She turned slowly, expecting to face Harry.

Brian Childs stood a dozen feet away, as still as a statue, hoping perhaps that in the darkness she would not sense him. He wouldn’t know that she could see. Ribbons of blood covered his shirt front, suggesting that imitating a statue had proved successful with the hapless cataphiles he had hunted down. She lowered her head, still watching him, and growled.

He shifted his pose, and now waves of enchantment poured from him. She had always thought him attractive, but he appeared now stunningly handsome, his jaw sharpening, becoming curiously like Vincent’s, as if that image had been plucked from her thoughts. Hooks of desire tried to find purchase in her, but slid around her ineffectually. She imagined that any unprepared prey would fall immediate victim to his charms. He was like a closing flytrap. Such power he had. Where did it come from? All varieties of plants and animals used chemical lures and defenses. But pheromones came from fatty tissues, and generating them expended energy. Generating so much that victims swooned — that had to be exhausting. He would need to feast again to make up for it; and in her case, all that effort was wasted, although he didn’t — couldn’t — know.

Tentatively, she reached out one hand as if imploring him to take it, take her. She leaned back her head, offering her throat. Brian, or what he had become, closed the distance. Behind his glamour, she could make out the true — and more repulsive — image of him. That image, ghostly, flicked its tongue back and forth between two prominent fangs at the corners of its mouth. He hovered over her smaller form. With a gesture almost affectionate, he tilted his head toward her to feed. His eyes rolled up in anticipation.

Her fingers closed around his throat. The black claws punctured his jugular. He stared at her, wide-eyed, betrayed. The glamouring fell away, revealing skin rough as tree bark. A moment longer she held her fingers pressed tightly to his neck. Then she opened her grip and the blood sprayed out of him. In an instant he was nearly unconscious, his head rolling. She let go completely. He collapsed at her feet.

She left him and returned to The Crawl. All the while she listened but there was still no sign of Harry Gordon, no sound or scent of him. He had fled. Vincent had said unlike most of them he could go out into daylight. What was it, made him different? Made them all different? Brian was not like Vincent or Deb. He shared traits with Harry but wasn’t the same, either. As Decebal had told Ruksana while she sat in Malpensa Airport, she was their scourge, their natural predator. She still didn’t know how he knew this, but he had predicted she would transform in their presence exactly as she had done.

In the chamber where most of the bodies lay, she tore open the plastic sealing the case of bottled water. The bottles were difficult to hold, but she slit them open and poured the contents over herself, rinsing away the blood in her fur. The horror of what she’d done would not be so easy to wash away.

She opened the packs and collected clothing from them, stuffing everything into one of the cleaner rucksacks. Then she returned to the castle room to retrieve her own coat and the bag with her passport and money.

Vincent lay there on his side. He had finally lost the strength to hold himself together, and his intestines were pushing out through his black turtleneck. His eyes glittered in the light of the fat chandelier candles. He watched but didn’t move more than his lips. Only pink froth bubbled out through his horrible teeth. Tradition dictated staking vampires or cutting off their heads. She didn’t see the necessity of that. Vincent was not going to recover.