Nathan Marsh
Now that I have been on the hunter’s motorcycle, I have developed a stronger sense of her. She loves that machine, so being on it and riding it hard, like it was meant to be ridden, gives me insights into her, having some sort of shared experience with her now. Not that I can predict her actions or will be able to read her thoughts, but I will now continually orbit around her, coming ever closer if I wish. Our paths will continue to cross, just glancingly at first, but we will both find ourselves face to face with each other again, whether we wish it or not.
While I am flying high above the mountains, having set my body partially translucent since that is all the concealment I need against the twilight sky, I see what I presume is her burglar’s car heading down the highway I had just driven down. She is not in it with him.
Of course, I had hoped that stealing the motorcycle would get her to leave Carl’s property as well, but I must admit, she is quite the focused creature.
As I approach Carl’s house, it is clear she is still watching it from the woods. Even if I manage to get her away from the house now, she has been here long enough that her scent will linger in the tree line, right where Carl walks just about every day. Carl’s wolf is running perilously close to the surface right now, so his sense of smell is going to be unusually acute in his human shape.
Not only that, there is no way Carl will not notice the smell of a strange person having been inside of his house. Even if the person had done everything they could to mask their scent, a lycanthrope can pick up on astoundingly subtle olfactory hints. I would be surprised if Carl makes it more than three steps inside his door before he picks it up.
She is too good to not have accounted for this. Either she has some means of clearing the invader’s scent from Carl’s house, or she feels she can gain some advantage to him knowing somebody was there. I resume full invisibility, and move closer to the hunter, perched up in a tree about ten yards from the fence line. I give myself another really good look at her. She is wearing a camouflaged jacket and pants, and has a Bluetooth earpiece in. Around her neck are the binoculars the imp guarding Emily’s property had seen, and there is an extra set of lenses clearly attached to it. She does not look any different than on our first encounter, but I am not interested in her facial features right now. I know her presence, I no longer need to bother myself with what she looks like.
Instead, I am watching her behavior. She constantly switches between looking at the house through her binoculars, and scanning with her vampiric senses. Even without her associate inside, she is putting an intensive study into the property. While I am there, she gets a call. She has a very quick and terse conversation in English that is clearly about the remains of her motorcycle. The hunter is clearly very upset, but holds her composure, while she tells her caller to meet her a little bit down the road from Carl’s and take her back to a hotel. She glances at her watch, continues to keep an eye on the place for another forty minutes, and then finally gives up her perch. As soon as she drops down to the ground, she reaches into her jacket and pulls out a small spray bottle. A couple of quick pumps, and the air is filled with the stench of skunk, strong enough to even cover over her own scent. I do not know how this will help hide the fact that a mortal has been in Carl’s house, but at least it hides definitive proof that she was out here for an extended time.
As she walks through the woods, taking a concealed path toward the highway, she places a call. I dare not creep close enough to try and use my acute hearing to pick up what is being said into her earpiece. Even invisible, there is too much risk she would feel my presence. But I can at least pick up her half of the conversation.
I can tell immediately she is in touch with somebody in the Negre clan as she speaks Romanian, with a certain amount of deference. She is not talking to Papa Racoviță himself – she is nowhere near deferent enough to be speaking to him, or even one of his higher lieutenants, but whomever it is, she respects and fears them. While she walks, I am able to discern that she had intended on interrogating Carl, and then quietly getting rid of him. Even though my theft of her motorcycle did not get her to completely abandon his property, it at least saved his life, as she realized that both times she has been near Carl’s house, something has happened to the bike. The vampire she is speaking to seems to agree that Carl should be watched, but left unmolested until she can figure out exactly who is watching over and helping him. At no point does she imply she suspects it is my involvement. She does briefly consider it is Ben who is aiding Carl, as she has seen the two men speaking together, but she does not see how he could have come out of hiding and gotten close enough to her to take her bike without being detected. And she does use Ben’s name, confirming that she knows who it is she is after. To take him would bring her an immense amount of prestige within the Clan and I can tell she is doing her best to convince the vampire on the other end that she has everything under control and does not need assistance. She wants the glory and accolades all to herself, clearly.
No mention of Ivy in the call. I am hopeful that this means she had not gotten close enough to Ivy or to her home to pick up on the young woman’s specialness. If anything, this means that if the hunter starts closing in on Ben, getting Ivy away from him and making sure Ben is not taken alive is what I need to do.
With this information in hand, I leave her to meet up with her companion, and return to Carl’s house. I let myself in, and make a quick inventory. It is not my home, so I would not have his intuitive grasp of things being out of place. At least the intruder did not ransack the place. He seems to have been careful to not needlessly disrupt anything, though. I can still smell him a bit, so as soon as Carl gets here, he will know it right away. There is no art I have that will remove the scent of a mortal from the place. Even if I were to summon up an army of imps to clean like mad, to remove the person’s scent would replace it with the scent of intensive cleaning. I get the sense that now that the hunter has decided to give up on Carl for the time being, that not letting him know she was here would be best. His temper is so short lately, I do not want anything to set him off needlessly.
I go get my car, and park right across the street and wait. As his car pulls up, I step out to greet him.
“What brings you out here, Nathan?” he asks me. He seems a little calmer than he did the last time I saw him. The edge seems to be off his temper a bit.
“I wanted to know if you have learned anything new about Ivy,” I say. “Worrying about her has been keeping me up, so I decided to come up here and see you.”
“Nothing,” he says, immediately, too quickly.
I just smile at him, to let him know that I know he is lying.
“Nothing Grandma will let me tell anybody,” he says.
I can tell that is a layered lie. First, he has learned something new. And while Emily would not want him to tell anybody else what that is, he knows better than to tell her even. He has been very busy while he was out from under Emily’s monitoring. I am certain, as I watch him try not to look me in the eye that he thinks he knows where she is.
“I know a lot more than you would ever suspect,” I tell him. He has long since figured out that I know he is a lycanthrope, but he has never learned my secret. Now seems like a good time to remind him. “You know there are dangerous things out there looking for Ben, maybe even trying to find him through you. With that in mind, please tell me you were not out looking for him tonight.”
“I can assure you I wasn’t followed,” Carl says. “I am very skilled at that.”
I opt not to mention that Emily told me about her being able to track his movements, up until earlier today. “You still have knowledge that could be extracted from you, my friend. You know what you are facing, and how good they are at doing that.”
I can tell that I may have pushed him a bit too far with that. “What am I facing?” he asks me, stepping closer. Yes, I have prodded the wolf now. Time for me to back down. Share a little bit of something he already knows, but act as if I don’t know that.
“Ben isn’t the only zombie in town,” I say. I am loathe to use the slur to refer to Ben, but using Carl’s slang can make me seem a little more companionable, a little more on his side.
“I know. We’ve kind of crossed paths already.” He tells me about when she got near his car the day he confronted Ben. I know all of this, but letting him tell the tale seems to calm him, makes him feel more in control of the situation at hand.
“Just, please be careful,” I tell him. “Please.”
Carl considers this, nods, and backs down.
“I need some sleep,” he says.
I can tell he is in a fight with the wolf, but that he temporarily has control. For at least the next day or so, he should be able to keep from transforming, and will choose not to unleash it to hunt. Right now, he needs to prove to himself that he can keep the wolf calm, and he has the willpower to follow through, for now.
As long as he doesn’t smell that there was an intruder in his house. I get a sudden idea. It will be a lot of work on my part, but it is better than having him fly into a fury right in front of me, transform, and go out to rampage. I would be his first target, and things would not go well for him.
But my kind is exceptionally skilled at creating illusions. Not just visual or auditory ones, either. We can tamper with other senses. As he walks toward the door of his house, I lay an illusion or normality across his home, summoning up the unique notes of Carl’s house – his body, the food he favors, the fabrics of his furniture, the décor he keeps. I create a mirage for his nose, and steel myself for the true and profound boredom of keeping it up for the next eight hours until he leaves the house for school in the morning.
In the morning, as Carl wakes up and starts getting ready for school, I call Emily to fill her in on what I know so far. She is surprised and quite upset that Carl was able to slip free last night and go out. As we talk she raises the suspicion that he may be very close to finding Ivy, and that shedding that uncertainty about where she is and how she is doing is what has given him a small amount of calm.
Together, though, we decide it is not going to last very long at all.
Part of why I am so much stronger than either Ben or Carl is that they are descended from my bloodline. More than three thousand years ago, some humans mated with demons. The unions usually produced no children. Some produced offspring that ran closer to their demonic parent, these children were the succubi and incubi. Some ran much closer to their human parents, which produced the occasional heroic mortal, the kinds we remember now in old tales – Gilgamesh, Hercules, Cu Chulainn. All of those children of mortal and demon were sterile, though. The children created no children, and thus the bloodlines of humans remained uncorrupted by our influence.
Until one woman bore twins from a liaison with a demon. One could not abide the sun, once he was weaned from his mother, he could not eat grain or fruit or even meat. The only thing he could survive on was living blood. The other child was a feisty, hairy young woman, short tempered and strong. Like all women, the moon affected her humors. When it was full, it drew great power from a very deep well, and she took on the form of a wolf and ran amok through the woods around the village. Their mother did her best to hide her children’s oddities, separating the three of them farther and farther from the village, from any towns or other people, going high into the mountains to try and raise them.
When three people live in complete isolation from others, one of two things will happen. They will draw closer, raising each other up, combining their strengths to form a powerful union that nothing can shake. Or they will turn on each other. The slow resentment will build, silently. Hatred will whisper some dark commentary on every interaction. Distrust will grow, suspicion, bitterness. This family took that path, and one night, the twins broke out into an incredible amount of violence against each other. Their mother did what any loving mother would do – for she did truly love her two children, the product of a night spent with a lover who showed her pleasures she had never imagined before, and had never come close to since. She stepped between them to try and stop their fighting.
They did stop their fighting, only long enough to tear her to shreds and devour her. When they were down to the last few bones, they looked at each other, blood and gore dripping from their mouths, faces slimy and dark from offal, eyes gone far past madness. Each blamed the death of their mother on the other, and they resumed their brawl with each other. The continued biting and tearing and rending at each other until the blood drinker saw his chance to flee. The wolf was fast, but it did not have hands and nimble fingers. It could run, but it could not climb. The blood drinker scaled up a tree, close to a cliff, and leapt over to it. By the time the wolf calmed enough to change back into her human form, and found the tree her brother had climbed, the cliff he had scaled, he had found a river to cross and she lost his scent.
For years, he hid, she hunted. He found that by giving his blood to others, they would become like him. She discovered that her bite could infect the blood of others, and they would become like her. The twins created their small armies of soldiers, sent them after each other, each trying to eliminate the other. It did not take long for both of the twins to be slain, but their descendants lived on. The blood drinkers never did gain the ability to reproduce, to have children of their own. They could only turn others by giving up their own blood. The wolves, though, could turn others either by the bite, or if two wolves mated, they could produce a pup.
Today, there are a few thousand of each scattered around the world, living secret lives and still carrying on the silly sibling squabble of their first ancestors.
The wolf bloodline is tolerable to us. The wolves are stronger and healthier than humans, more perceptive in many ways. Yes, they are very temperamental, but most have been raised to hunt and fight vampires. They are not born killers, and those that have been raised in isolation from the war with the vampires learn young to control their transformations, and to keep their higher functions intact when changed. The vampire line, however, is corrupt. Individuals like Ben who have learned to control their hunger and maintain their respect for mortals are by far the rare exception to the rule. The vampire blood carries tremendously dark potential in it, and coupled with immortality, almost all of them become irretrievably evil. This is why my kind usually kills vampires on sight. It was only the sense I got that Ben needed to live – much like the hunter pursuing him – that kept me from slaying him the second he set foot in Stokers Mill. If I had known then what I know now, that Ivy would fall in love with him, I would likely have done it anyway, and trusted the future to sort itself out.
But here I am. Ben lives, the hunter that is after him lives. I spend all night putting an illusory stink in Carl’s house so he will live. All because Ivy is somehow tied up in the convergence of all of us.
As Carl leaves his house, I call Emily back. “I have something to bring you. Be a dear, and do not try to figure out what is in it. But get some into Carl’s food the first chance you get. It will completely suppress the wolf for a few days.”