VI - The Nightmare

  Vlad watched as the first of the vampyres fell. Its head disappeared into the nearby grass, its neck spurting dark blood as its body hit the ground. Vlad heard the girl scream, her voice raw and strained; he had to ignore her agony, and focus on the task at hand.

  The battle was not yet won.

  Vlad turned to face the female vampyre now. He raised his sword in front of his face, watching through his Plague mask as blood slid down along the blade and dripped into the grass.

  The female vampyre glared at him, baring its teeth in a deadly sneer. “What’s this? A meddling sparrow of the Goddess, I presume. Here to eradicate me in some self-appointed quest that you deem your holy mission, no doubt. And you have slain my fool of a husband with little more than a flick of your wretched blade. Pity, that. I had so looked forward to our eternity together.”

  “Worry not, strigoi,” Vlad said, “The body you inhabit will not live long without her departed love. You, on the other hand, shall also be reunited with the scourge that once infected him, just as soon as I send you back to hell!”

  “Do not be so certain, little bird,” the vampyre said. “You may have caught my husband unawares, but you shall have no such luxury with me.” It laughed that most vile, familiar chuckle—the kind that seemed to vibrate the very world beneath their feet. “How fortunate that I should get to feast upon the blood of a putrid sparrow so early into my eternal life!”

  The vampyre lunged at him, its sharp claws drawn together like a deadly dagger. Vlad effortlessly sidestepped the attacking creature, and in a similar swift movement swung his sword downward in a mighty chop; the silver blade sliced clean through the strigoi’s attacking wrist, severing its hand with a violent hiss of smoke. Its clawed fingers went limp and the hand fell to the ground harmlessly; the creature unleashed a shrill, nightmarish shriek in what appeared to be some bastardized pantomime of agony.

  Vlad did not give the vampyre time to recover. He took its legs out from under it with a sweeping kick, knocking it onto its back. He pointed his glistening blade downward so that it touched the vampyre’s neck, its tip all but lunged through the monster’s waiting throat. Light smoke rose from where the blade touched the vampyre’s corrupted flesh. The fiend hissed angrily, but remained still, knowing that any movement could bring it to a hasty end.

  “Do not fool yourself into believing that a whelp such as yourself would ever be able to best me. I have slain nosferatu that have walked this realm for centuries. You are but mere vermin in comparison to what I have eradicated from this world.” The Plague doctor used the tip of his sword to pull the vampyre’s shirt away from its collar, revealing three puncture marks in the same arrangement as the ones on Mrs. Baker’s neck. “You only yet live because I allow you to—because there is information that I need to obtain from you. And obtain that information I shall. How quickly you give it to me is entirely up to your own discretion.”

  “Hah!” The female vampyre spat at Vlad; its glob of demonic phlegm failed to find its mark. “Do your worst, sparrow! You will have nothing from me!”

  The Plague doctor sighed. “Just once I would have your ilk not try my patience.”

  He lowered the tip of his sword and shoved it into the vampyre’s gut. The creature hissed and writhed in terrible agony as smoke billowed from its bubbling, gurgling belly.

  “Stop!” came a voice from behind him. Vlad looked over his shoulder to see the girl he had rescued come up and grab him by his sword arm. She pulled on it with all of her strength as tears streamed down her desperate face. “Please, spare her! Spare my mother!”

  “Stand down, foolish girl!” Vlad said. “You know not the danger you place yourself in!”

  Vlad realized too late that the girl’s interference had caused him to pull his sword away from the vampyre’s boiling gut. He turned back to face his foe as quickly as he could, but was met with a devastating, inhumanly strong kick to his torso that sent him hurtling through the air before crashing into the ground several meters away. Pain washed over his entire body, but he somehow managed to fight through it in time to sit up and return his attention to the scene in front of him. The vampyre, now risen to its knees, smirked at the girl with its set of sharp, deadly fangs, its claws on its remaining hand ready and eager to kill.

  “Your final mistake, daughter of mine!” the vampyre said. It both brought itself to its feet and dashed at the girl in the same impossibly quick motion, its claws outstretched and deadly. The girl, frozen in terror, the crossbow in her hand trained on the ground, was unable to act.

  Fortunately for her, Vlad found himself in no such state.

  He pulled his pistol from its holster behind his back, aimed it at the attacking vampyre, and pulled the trigger. The pistol’s hammer slammed down with unyielding force right before the silver ball exploded from its barrel. The projectile punctured the strigoi’s waiting rib cage, smashing through bone and sinew until it found the creature’s heart. The monster was knocked off its feet, but it likely did not feel the blow; it was dead before its body hit the ground.

  “A waste of a silver ball, that,” Vlad said, his pistol smoking in his hands. He looked at the corpse of each strigoi, then bowed his head before he spoke again. “Both of you have been set free.”

  The silence that followed was heavy on the wind. The girl stood completely still over the corpse of her mother, which bled dark liquid from the wound in the side of its body. Nearby, the burning cottage spit flames and smoke up into the air, the crackle of the inferno growing louder the more involved the building became.

  And then the girl began to scream.

  She sank to her knees as shrill, terrible wails escaped from her gaping mouth. Gushing tears rolled from her eyes and down her cheeks and nose, landing on her exposed tongue and jumping to their deaths from her dribbling chin. She tried to speak at least twice, but her words were lost to her guttural, ugly sobs.

  Vlad walked over to the youth. He looked down at her, his masked eyes twin pools of darkness. “Listen to me, my girl. We must away from here posthaste.”

  She ignored him as she continued to sob.

  “Girl!”

  His voice was loud, sharp, startling. The girl did not go fully silent, but she looked up at him as she continued to whimper quietly. “We must away. You will have time to mourn the loss of your parents, but that time is not now. I must get their corpses to the blaze that is currently consuming your home, and then we must retreat into the forest ere your entire village arrives and begins conjuring questions about what happened here on this very dark night. Am I understood?”

  The girl nodded. “Good,” Vlad said. “Now, I must tend to your parents. Prepare for our imminent departure, and do so with prudence; I do not believe that you or I shall ever return to this village again.”

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  Vlad set off to begin his task, but was stopped when the girl spoke. “Why did you do it, sir?” she asked. Her voice, small and distant, was strangled by choking sobs. “Why have you slain my parents? They were taken by some unknown madness, but they needn’t have perished. How could you be so cruel?”

  The Plague doctor sighed once more, feeling something like pity that softened his hardened speech. “You may not realize it yet, my girl, but by slaying your parents, I have done them an immense kindness tonight. To have allowed them to persist as they were would have been the greatest cruelty of all.”

  And without saying anything further, he turned and began his work.

  ___

  The night was indeed dark, and it was very, very cold. There was a distinct, pestering chill on the wind that continued to stab at them like stilettos of ice despite the campfire that blazed between them. Vlad already knew that he would endure yet another night of meager sleep, if he was awarded any at all.

  There was a heavy, festering silence that hung between them like a miasma in the air. Vlad watched the girl, Sybil, as she stared into the fire for what felt to him like several eternities. Cold sweat clung to his face and hair, which chilled his exposed skin despite the warmth of the nearby fire. Elpis, unhitched from the coach that was hidden in the shadows beyond their camp, stood nearby, lazily chewing on grass.

  “Vampyres,” Sybil said, not taking her eyes from the fire. Her lips seemed to fumble over the word. “Could such vile creatures truly exist in this world?”

  Vlad offered her a kind smile, but he very much doubted that she would have taken any comfort from the gesture had she looked up from the fire in order to witness it. “You may not be surprised to learn that questions like yours seem to find me rather often.”

  “And you… hunt these creatures? Creatures like the one who turned my parents?”

  Vlad nodded. “Indeed I do. And at present I pursue that specific creature, as a matter of fact.”

  Sybil finally looked up from the blaze. “What do you mean?”

  “Your parents were turned by a strigoi that I have dubbed Three-Fang, on account of a mutation in its dental structure. I have been chasing this particular monster for some time, which is what led me to your village. Unfortunately, your wee outburst—the one which nearly cost you your life, mind you—forced me to destroy the vampyre that was once your mother before I could glean any information regarding its master’s whereabouts.” He shook his head regretfully. “And thus my search must begin anew.”

  “I will not apologize for trying to save my mother’s life,” Sybil said.

  “Nor would I expect you to,” Vlad said. “You could not have known her life was well beyond saving. And I suppose you cannot be blamed entirely for how things came to pass. I was too complacent with that fiend. Believing it to be of no threat to me, I allowed myself to query the creature before properly restraining it—a foolish mistake indeed.”

  “‘Query’,” Sybil repeated. “Is that what you call what you did to her? And my mother was a she, Mr. Albescu; not an it.”

  “You mustn’t think of the abomination which I slew as your mother, my girl,” Vlad said. “That body no longer belonged to the woman that you loved. And yes, while my methods of querying the creature may seem cruel, you must remember that the monsters I battle are no longer human, and thus do not deserve to be treated with the same respect awarded to the living.” When Sybil did not respond, Vlad went on. “I must say, I am quite surprised that they both turned and you somehow managed to survive without getting infected yourself. How did you accomplish such a feat?”

  “My parents grew ill,” Sybil explained. “I went out hunting so I could find them food. When I returned home, well… you know the rest.”

  Vlad smiled unconcernedly. “Quite the night owl you are, staying out so late on your own.”

  “I had no other choice. They were going to die from their affliction without proper nourishment. I could not have known that they were already doomed.”

  “Certainly not. But you showed great bravery in your efforts to save them from their plight, regardless of the outcome.” He paused. “This does not explain how you remained free of infection, though. Their transformation did not begin and end during your excursion; Three-Fang would likely have been feeding on them for at least a handful of days.”

  Sybil appeared to hesitate before responding. “My… The thing that was once my father said that he had purposely spared me so that my parents could be the ones to change me after they had turned. I can only assume that he refers to your Three-Fang.”

  “It most certainly does,” Vlad agreed. “Perhaps this is some sort of cruel tradition practiced by these barbaric creatures, or perhaps Three-Fang wanted to leave them something to feed upon after they turned. Despite all that I have learned about them over the years, strigoi still manage to behave in ways that baffle me at times.”

  “That… that monster was feeding on them right under my nose,” Sybil said. “I believe I even saw it skulking around our home, but I had dismissed what I saw as conjurings of my imagination. Had I known the truth of what was happening, perhaps… perhaps I could have saved them.”

  “Doubtful,” Vlad said bluntly. “By the time one is fed upon by a strigoi, it is already too late. A single bite infects you, and this infection eventually leads to certain death. Whether or not you come back as one of them is determined by the intentions of the creature that feeds upon you. And besides, you would have been no match for a nosferatu as old and as powerful as Three-Fang. It would have slain you easily, and you would have only shared in your parents’ fate.”

  “Perhaps I should have shared in their fate,” Sybil said. “At least then I would be with them now.”

  Vlad shook his head. “No. No, you must not say such things. Your parents are at peace now, but even the brief time they spent as undead abominations likely felt like a century of torment for their eternal souls. You should not wish that fate upon anybody, least of all yourself.”

  Sybil did not respond to this. A long time passed during which they both sat listening to the fire. At length, the girl spoke again. “So what will you do now, Mr. Albescu?”

  “I shall begin my quest anew,” he said. “I must hunt more strigoi until I find another that bears Three-Fang’s mark. I shall continue to pursue that vile creature of the night until one of us has perished. Such is the life I lead.”

  There was another pause while Sybil considered his words. Her next sentence was one that he never could have anticipated. “In that case, I wish to go with you.”

  He looked askance at her. “You know not what you ask of me.”

  “I do,” she said plainly. “Three-Fang took my parents from me. I cannot rest until the monster is dead. In that, our goal is the same.”

  “That may be true,” Vlad said, “but even so, you do not understand what joining me would mean for you. The existence of a Plague doctor is far from a pleasant one. Nor is it one of glamor or fame. We thanklessly live our lives skulking in the shadows, where we slay the world’s most despicable evils all so that the greater public may remain blissfully unaware that such evils even exist. One might consider it an even worse life than that of the creatures we seek to destroy. I am not certain that you are prepared to endure the horrors of such a world, should you choose to step into it fully.”

  “I am,” she said, her face stern and her eyes dry. “I am prepared to endure them all. And besides, I have no other option. I cannot return to my village; you said as much yourself. Nor can I go back to living a normal life after all that I had learned tonight. Should we part ways, I will never be able to satisfy the need for vengeance that so incessantly burns a hole in my aching heart.”

  It was Vlad’s turn to allow a pause, during which he fell into a state of deep, silent contemplation. After a short while, he spoke. “Very well. I suppose you did manage to fend off those creatures until my fortunate arrival, so perhaps there is some hope for you as a Plague doctor’s apprentice.”

  Sybil perked up at this. She stared at him intently from where she sat on the other side of the fire. “So I may go with you?”

  “You may, Night Owl,” Vlad said. Meeting her gaze, he could see the angry flames that danced beyond the dark pools of her pupils. They kept their eyes locked on one another for several long moments before he spoke again. “Just so long as you do not blame me for the unending nightmare that your life is about to become.”