First Blood

*I’m working on next installment of how ‘how to write fast’ BUT to hold you off till then…  This is First Blood, which will be coming out from Naked Reader Press, as part of an Antho called Sisters In Blood.*
First Blood

Sarah Marques

He was not a man.

The knowledge washed over the young Rene D’Herblay, as he hid between the wall of the refectory and the side of the lectern, clutching the cross he’d taken from the wall above his bed and trembling.  And the knowledge made him shake more than the sounds coming from the refectory, in the dark: the sounds of broken bone, the sounds of fighting, the laughing of vampires, the sucking of blood.

He was not a man.  Not a real one, a fighting man, fierce and feared as his father had been.  Not even a man like his older brother, the Chevalier D’Herblay, Lord of the D’Herblay Domains and respected by farmers and tenants who looked to him for protection.

Rene might have whiled away his days in this refectory, while father read improving tests from the lectern drawing swords on his spilled soup and dreaming of commanding armies, but his family had always been right about him: small and slight, he had been made for the safe seminary and the protecting arms of the church, not for the rough and tumble, the strife and blood of the battle field.

Only now the church itself had been broached, the seminary had been broken into in the middle of the night.  First, the Judasgoats, the servants of vampires, had come, removing every holy symbol that might disturb their masters, spilling all the holy water and the salt that might have injured the vampires.

That was Rene had awakened to the sound of fighting and dying in the room and, instead of finding a sword and fighting the Judasgoats, he’d minded only his safety, grabbing the cross from the wall above his bed and running madly to the chapel, where he’d taken the holy blood from the monstrance.

Slim, slight, Rene always been told by his towering brother that he was more girl than boy, that he didn’t look like the family, that he partook a sickly and weak nature from being born of a sickly and delicate second wife of dubiously noble blood, who’d proved herself unworthy of the D’Herblay name by dying at Rene’s birth.  Usually Corin added, in an undertone, that Rene should have died with her, and good riddance.  But Rene’s build had served to preserve his life, as he’d been able to squeeze into a corner where no one would think to look for a seminarian.

And now he clutched the cross and the wine and tried to remember the word of a prayer.  Only no prayer would come.  And he was shaking so hard that the holy blood was spilling on his rough linen shirt: the only thing he was wearing since he’d been in bed when the Judasgoats came.  And the cross was leaving marks on his hand from being clutched so tightly.

Someone screamed just on the other side of the tall lectern, and Rene tried to clamp his teeth together, afraid their rattling would call attention to him and tried to form in his mind “Our father–”

“Our father–” but he never got past that, because all he could remember of his father, who’d died before Rene was five, was a stern face, a stern voice telling him not to cry when Rene had just injured himself; and a hand on his shoulder while a voice said, “Always remember that you’re a D’Herblay.  Always make our name proud, my son.  Be a man.”

And now Rene wondered, in a sudden pang of fear if he’d see his father on the other side, and what his father would say.  And would G-d look like his father?

He tried again to form the words in his mind “Our Father–”

But he couldn’t go on.  All those years he’d spent dreaming of leaving the seminary; of joining the musketeers under the assumed name Aramis; of doing great deeds.  It had all been for nothing.

He wasn’t a man.

“Oh, what have we here?” a voice sounded from above him.  And looking up, Rene saw, looking down on him, two wide staring eyes, a very pale face surrounded by a welter of dark hair, and a cruel grin that displayed two large, sharp fangs.

Rene heard the strangled cry leave his lips, as he tried to knit himself even harder with the wall, trying to escape.  But there was no escape.  Why had he thought there would be?  Most people in the seminary: his masters, his colleagues, were now dead or dying.  He could smell spilled blood everywhere, as well as the piss of fear – some likely his own, though he was too scared to be sure – why had he thought he could escape?

The vampire’s large hand plunged behind the lectern, grabbed at the back of Rene’ shirt and lifted him up until his feet left the ground.  Vampires have unnatural strength, Rene thought, his mind stupefied and amazed, as his body tried to scrabble and bring the cross in front of the vampire’s eyes – easier said than done, since the vampire was grabbing him facing away from the vampire.  Vampires have unnatural strength.  And it had to be, because though Rene was shorter than most men in his family and slimmer and limberer than most men, he was not that small for a nineteen year old.  And men shouldn’t be able to lift nineteen years olds as though they were infants.

He tried to spin, without having anything to serve him as a base to spin from, and bring the cross in front of the vampire, but all he managed was to have the corner of it show, when the vampire hit Rene’s wrist hard with his free hand.  It cracked and blinding pain communicated itself up Rene’s wrist, to his arm and shoulder.

And now the vampire spun him around, in the same movement turning away from where the cross had fallen and laughing, a great, amused laugh, “Ah, you’d be a brave one, would you?  But why fight it?  We don’t kill pretty little boys like you, you know?”  The laughter again and something in the vampire’s eye, something that Rene would think fit the word concuspiscence which he’d heard before, from his confessor, but never fully understood.  Oh, sure, he’d loved Maelis.  He’d loved Maelis a corps perdue, which was why Corin had sent him here, but he’d never looked at her as though she were fresh steak and Rene a famished tiger.  That a man, a vampire, should look at Rene that way made Rene’s gorge rise, and his mind befog with fear and disgust.  “No,” he yelled, and – to the new bout of vampire laughter – his hand that had been clutching the chalice with the holy blood to his chest, rose as though of its own accord and flung the liquid in the vampire’s face.

Laughter turned to scream, an unholy scream that rent the night in two, and Rene had time to see the vampire’s face melting like wax in the fire, as the vampire let him go.  And Rene dropped the cup and ran.

Knowing he was lost; knowing he didn’t have much time, knowing the darkness was full of other vampires, Rene scrambled away, half crawling, bent over, before he got to the door of the refectory and ran blindly along the corridor his bare feet slapping the cold flagstones, his pain-wracked right wrist cradled in his left hand.

He was going to hell.  The one thing drummed into them, over and over and over again, since they’d been in the seminary; the one thing that his priest had drummed into him at home, before the seminary, was that the bread and blood were truly parts of Christ.  They were to be preserved from desecration at all costs.  In extreme instances, the faithful was to take the communion into himself, if properly confessed, and safe it from desecration.  Instead Rene had flung it in face of the vampire.  He was going to hell.

It wasn’t until he’d run, headlong, the length of the hallway, and emerged, running, into a street covered in ice, under falling snow, that it occurred to him to wonder how different could hell be from this France where Vampires had taken over, where vampires ruled the night and good people went afraid and locked themselves in their houses at night, hoping that this time the blood suckers would pass them over; hoping to be human one more night.

Rene knit himself with the shadows of the houses and kept running.  It was very quiet out here, and every window and door he passed was heavily barricaded.  There was no refuge, and after a while, he realized his feet hurt with cold, and hurt with the burn of cold every time thy hit the frozen dirt and muck on the streets.  And he thought, distantly, as though it were all happening to some other person, long ago, that his feet would freeze.  And then the rest of him would freeze.  And he would end up dead – as dead as he would have been if the vampire had bit him.  Only in that case there was at least the possibility of a life in death and– No.  He remembered the look in the vampire’s eyes, and for the first time the phrase fate worse than death made itself clear in his head.

He kept running because his body didn’t know enough to realize he was dead, and that there was nothing he could do.  He kept running, looking frantically about for an open door, for smoke, for fire, for a hint that there might be hope, somewhere.  Which was when he saw the light behind him, and, turning around, saw the seminar and the church to which it had been attached go up in a great conflagration of fire, and vampires leaving in groups, laughing and essaying little jigs.  It was impossible not to note some of those vampires wore the same bodies that had, until recently, belonged to his masters and colleagues.

Rene’s gorge rose, and he threw up unexpectedly at his feet, a brief eruption, since all he had in his stomach was the remnants of soup and a slice of bread he’d swallowed for supper, this being advent and a time of fasting.

The vampires would come this.  They’d spread over the neighborhood, looking for fresh blood.  Wiping his mouth to the back of his hand, he scrambled into the first alley he came to.

Which was how he heard the noise of fighting, and the grunt of a man overcome by another.  And, looking ahead, he saw the man in the heavy cloak, and the vampire holding him, bending over him, about to take a bite from the man’s neck.  The memory of the vampire’s eyes, the unclean lust in them – a lust for blood, Rene guessed, more than other pleasures of the flesh – flashed into Rene’s mind.  And, blindly, Rene looked for something he could use as a weapon.  He glimpsed a flowerpot in the recessed doorway of a house.  It was empty of everything but soil and the withered twigs and leaves that remained of the flower that must have grown in it in spring.   Rene would have given something for a heavy tree trunk, but if this was all he had, then this was all he had.  He grabbed at the edge of the flower pot with his left hand and, clumsily, flung it through the air at the vampire’s head.

For a sick moment he thought he’d hit the vampire’s victim, or nothing at all.  Rene had been good at games of marksmanship and strength, but not with a left hand that felt half frozen.  But then the vase hit the back of the vampire’s head.  There was a sick crunch.  The vampire started to turn and Rene jumped back, to knit with the wall.  And then the vampire fell, suddenly, and Rene looked over him, as the vampire’s would-be victim straightened.

He was a man in his late middle age, with a fringe of white hair and a look of decided gentility, and he looked tired, as though he’d fought the vampire to a standstill.  He looked across at Rene and his eyes widened, as though not believing the form his savior had taken, then he looked down at the vampire and spat on it.  Then, reaching down, the man got the largest piece the pot had broken into.

“Monsieur,” Rene managed to say, though his words were barely a whisper, all breath and chattering teeth.  “Monsieur, we must run.  There are many of them, all around.  They’re headed here.”