I backed out of the room I wasn‘t even sure that I knew what humanity was anymore. The night outside was ominously silent despite the howling of dogs in the distance. I stepped very quietly out into the little clearing as Abdul began to babble again. Compared to his cell lit everything up with a putrid green light. I didn’t see anything in the bushes or up the path but the sense of being watched was pervasive. I went around the concrete building slipping in the growth behind it and down towards the riverbank. The water was cold, so I walked quickly and quietly north along the bank. My brother’s barn weapon caches were somewhere to the east and I could hear people or vamps yelling behind me and off towards the village. I stopped once to pull my shirt back on over my shivering body as the sounds of the discovery of Abdul’s guard rose behind me in an awful bellow. The night’s cold had drawn out my excitement and anger and only left me with a reflection on how weak the camp had left me. I longed for the fireside, a full belly and even some conversation. It wasn’t long before leaves crunching, grunting and barking voices came up along my right side scouring the woods. I crouched against the side of a large tree crushed against the cold earth hoping that they wouldn’t hear my teeth chattering as they passed me. When they’d gone on, I resumed walking north but more slowly and more quietly so that I wasn’t surprised when the sounds of pursuit began to approach me from the south. I pressed northward more quickly but by then voices were coming back down the river. I recognized some of them, the vampires that were my brother’s right-hand men. I turned perpendicular to the river hoping to skirt the vampire’s coming from the north before the vampires from the south caught up to me. I moved as a trot, as quickly as I could in the dark and the underbrush and I still fell several times in a cacophony of crackling leaves and sticks. My legs were trembling, and my throat was burning with the night air when I saw a vampire trotting along under the trees moving like a breeze that didn’t disturb branches or the leaves. I saw his eyes first, two glints of moonlight moving under the trees. I crouched down in some brush as still as I could be, hoping he’d move away, but without warning he dashed towards me and I had sprung away. I’d made it a couple of steps when a bramble caught the bottom of my pants and my chest slammed into the ground knocking the wind from me. I sprung immediately to my feet but could get no air and as I started to run again, ripping the briar through my ankle I was knocked to the ground again my knee and scraped my knee against a rock in a burning burst of pain. Then a white light bloomed in my eyes and my face hit the ground as I passed into darkness.
I awoke to the pain of my wrist being bent as an icy hand pinned it to a bed. I twisted trying to slide my arm free, but another hand grabbed me and pulled my other arm back to the bed. My eyes cracked open and I could see my brother standing at the end of the bed smiling a weak smile that did not reach his eyes and drinking deeply from a wide mouthed jar filled with the village’s homemade beer. In the weak light that seeped in through the cracks in the walls he was ghastly pale, even more so than the vampires that were holding me down. He paced back and forth along the width of the bed a couple of times his boots’ thudding against the wooden floorboards was the only sound over my rasping breath. My chest ached with every breath and my head throbbed. My brother shook his head and muttered to himself as he paced, then stopped and drank deeply from the beer before turning to me. His eyes shone with a sinister boyish glee as if I were an ant and he was contemplating plucking my hind legs so that he could watch me stumble and fall as I tried to walk across the floor.
“Brother.” The white scars on his neck twinkled and flashed as he spoke. “You can’t even begin to imagine the power I possess.” I stopped struggling. He stood so that my rising and falling chest was like a ridge that he stood just behind. “No other human has had this power.” He quieted a bit. “Perhaps no other human can.”
“What are you talking about,” I spat. I lay quietly conserving my energy for any moment when I might be able to break free, but if the vampires hadn’t been holding me down, I would have throttled his speckled neck.
“When you killed our mother, you had no idea what you were doing,” he said coldly. “She could have been alive today, just greater than she was.”
“She was turning, and you know it. The thrall sickness was ravaging her body; soon it would have taken her mind as well.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. Maybe she would have turned, or maybe she would have lived and become something even more glorious. If she would have turned you could have killed her then. I can’t believe that you are afraid of a single newly formed vamp lying right in front of you. But you couldn’t wait. Your own fear and selfishness wouldn’t even allow her that chance. What if she had had power like me, then she could have been the matriarch that we all needed. She would have had wisdom, experience, and power. With her knowledge of the time before and her charisma we could have been something. He paused. “Well, now
