Chapter 8: Taking
They were very, very close.
My skin was quivering before my eyes even opened, my jittery rodent-donated instincts almost pulverizing my body with tremors when the sun came down on my fifth night. But like a bat I needed no light, and it would take more than a sting to break my hide now thanks to the bee-hunting skunk. And soon I would slice through the woods soundlessly with the stolen blessing from the deer, knowing that I was inside a net of watchers and traps who knew me to be close. But they hadn’t found me before nightfall.
That bear-big thing that I knew only as a blur from my dream-visions was perhaps the strongest, and I feared it the most. It had not recognized that the image of a white tree plucked from my mind was taken not from the memory of where I had hidden, but from the Palantir vision in Lord of the Rings. Maybe it was an old spirit, old enough to call even the Iroquois and Micmacs newcomers like Raccoon Man, wise and dangerous in so many ways, but thankfully not literate in the extremely recent flash of events and stories.
How did they plan to kill me? Would a cross actually work to repel or trap me for a final stake, or would there be another symbol for this group? Maybe a dreamcatcher, or a special drum to chant me to dust. If one tribe guarding against the night’s inhuman beasts was Catholic and another was Micmac then it seemed that both brands of magic had some weight … which left me very confused. Even passage from life to undeath left me no closer to understanding if there was one true religion. If both groups had some miracles reliable enough to fight things like me there had to be deeper rules, one grand unified field theory of magical physics, the Catholic and Micmac icons being akin to computers made by different companies, depending on the same fundamental laws to work.
I was getting ahead of myself. I first had to actually meet a hunter from either group, see if a cross or a drum did any harm to me. Maybe one group was just fooling itself. Maybe I could keep things scientific, though I was quite certain that I had caught far more than some viral infection from the pale bitch. The inability to pass across running water before the painful cure was surely not something a virus could have done, among many other things after my change.
Out of my cave I listened, lowered and not yet exposing myself. They could be waiting for me to come out of the cave, thinking I was too dangerous in there. I slithered and crept through the darkest shadows without leaving a ripple on the pools of water at the edge of the rapids or sending a single pebble to tumble on the river’s stony beach. I hugged a tree like a hippy when the moon came down strong through broken clouds, and that was a bit of bad luck. The moon’s light didn’t hurt me – the small crescent in the sky these past nights had done nothing to me so far – but I wanted deeper darkness.
I crept from branch to branch, a huge and rag-covered squirrel with bare feet and wild long hair, and made only a tiny rustling timed with the wind as I left my little gully on the opposite side of the rapids from which I had entered. If they didn’t know about the water cure they might have not been watching the stream’s other side so carefully.
Near a road, but not entering any open space, almost as soundless as a mist through the trees. My hunger tried to ruin my concentration in moving as quickly as possible with stealth, wanting to pause and hunt. I could go hungry, I thought, though maybe that was the naïve thought of a young addict.
Passing over and under branches, my echolocation could just make out the first sign of trouble: strings that I could not see, stretching between trunks at the treeline as I moved up the hills and erratic boulders left by glaciers, now keeping me in these woods. I did not get close, but I wondered at how completely invisible they were to me. It was good that they still vibrated and thrummed in the air like ordinary strings, but that was a little bit of magic, wasn’t it? And maybe there were traps I couldn’t see or echolocate.
As it turned out, they knew I had devoured bats. Maybe a guardian of bats told them. They knew those fine strings would be ‘seen’, but would be unnerving enough to send me elsewhere, guiding me down a funnel to the real trap. They knew I was heading toward the river, so this funnel now pointed northwest as necessary. They didn’t know where I had started out from, but I was being guided to a pre-determined point for death like an animal with a smaller brain. I only knew this in the moment when I saw the second line of string traps drawing near to make the funnel’s other side, and then I was at the funnel’s point, flushed out to where they wanted me.
It was the excitable dogs, with their superior senses, who acted just a moment too early.
From the blank darkness the first lean and grey hound nearly fell on me as it jumped, a light blur in the dark that I should have seen and heard from far away upon me in a rush of snapping teeth. Their magic, as much as I had seen, was mostly concerned with making me blind.
I caught the dog by its forepaws before I even knew what it was, surprised by the suddenly effort that it took to move, as if the air was slowly turning into molasses.
The huge dog growling down at me with my hands holding it at bay had light in its eyes. Sunlight, enough to scorch my nose and leave a fuzzy orange blot in my vision that lingered, light that burned my hands as it tried to bite and free its forepaws. These choice beasts were naturally called sundogs by the hunters who used them; they were one of the few purely mortal creatures that could meet and match a vampire of my stature at night without weapons.
Almost panting, I released the dog with a hard shove and leaped back through the thickening air, nearly falling over the second sundog. Its jaws closed fruitlessly, almost catching my leg.
I tried to take to the trees, but the first dog had bounded back and this time it had my hair. Climbing up a tree, the dog dangled and wouldn’t let go, determined to scalp me. I felt bark ready to tear away under my palms and soles, clawing at the wood for a stronger hold – the dog shook its head vigorously and kept its horrible eyes open, as all trained sundogs do when they attack their intended prey. My scalp felt hot, hot as if it was under the noon sun, and there was even a smell of cooked flesh.
But when my hair burned, the dog lost its grip and fell back to earth with crisped hair in its mouth, nothing more, coughing and sneezing out the mess. With a smoldering scalp I loped through the trees away from the funnel’s end into the forest I had come through, barely making each jump as that thickening of the air persisted. I approached the spiderweb of strange strings that made the funnel’s wall, the northern wall that was now closer to the river.
There was plenty of space between the superfine strings, and when I passed through the funnel’s wall the thickening of the air stopped. The fly had escaped the web. But the dogs kept their chase, leaping the strings without pause.
Deer against hound, the chase to the river outside the intended kill-zone was close. I didn’t have enough space between me and the dogs for doubling back and false trails. When I looked over my shoulders as I ran through the woods and across the empty dirt paths there were at least five pairs of searing eyes in the dark bounding after me, each point of light leaving a will o’ the wisp comet of searing phosphene light after it, the dogs otherwise disappeared to my senses, even my echolocation. I nearly crashed into a thick maple tree as I tried to comprehend this strange ability.
Their eyes were betraying them now; they closed their eyes when waiting to ambush, but once the ambush was sprung they always kept their eyes open to bewilder and scorch the nearby vampire. It cost them now, letting me know when they split and tried to run me into one another, one howling ferociously with the other stayed silent, that hot solar pain nevertheless warning me just in time to make me dart away from the quiet beast, zigzagging through brush then long grass where startled crickets fell quiet and fled, hearing gurgling water up ahead and the splash of a frightened frog.
At last my bare feet left soil and touched the rocky beach. I didn’t slow down, intentionally kicking back to pelt any gnashing teeth behind me with a spray of pebbles. Before me the mostly-dried-out Becancour River stretched as a field of jumbled smoothed rocks with bubbling brooks sliding between them. In places along this river it would have been possible to cross without getting wet, but this wide expanse shrank as I looked uphill and past the lip of a tiny series of knee-high falls, and there the stones were finally covered and the water would reach past my knees. And that was the direction I had to go-
-right after finding myself struck to the ground with my throat crushed, but not by a surprise leap from a dog. Something at the river’s edge, invisible until this very moment, had clotheslined me with contemptuous ease as I ran, and now looked down at me.
The back of my head hit dry, unyielding rock beneath the loose pebbles hard, and my spine groaned, my legs and arms twisting to make me feel like a bag of loose sticks.
One dog came in to menace me where I fell, clamping onto one side of my face, the breath hot and rapid with the exertion of the hard run. But this level of pain was trivial against my throat, which was still half-crushed. The sundog’s bite wasn’t piercing my skin, and I thwacked the hound right in the solar plexus with one palm, not losing focus. The dog yipped and slid through gravel-fine pebbles as it fell back, and the other hounds might have been as wary of the newcomer as I was, for as she stepped closer to the pit I had made in the pebble beach while landing the sound of their scampering paws and panting breaths retreated.
I was looking up at what I guessed to be the bear-big blur in my dream. She wasn’t blurred at all now. She wasn’t as big as I had thought – that was just the glow the lady had around her.
“You … sounded male … in the dream …” Of course I knew who it was. She had hooves and black-brown eyes like a deer.
Deer Woman’s furs could have been clothing or a natural covering, and so much of her was a shifting mass indecisive between the two forms, human and animal. Around her painful white light circled like a flock of tiny fireflies to make a full-body halo, as bad as those sundogs with their eyes open for me. She didn’t look like a suited furry or a Disney anthropomorphic deer – this was more of an Uncanny Valley creepypasta biped, the female elements in the face and figure shaped to be young and attractive, with straight black hair and clear cheekbones, but sharpened in some way that made me think of sirens, succubae, and the femme fatale in a Noir film.
“Well, you were watching for a woman. I knew very quickly that you had been warned about me, and I saw that they weren’t trying hard enough to stop you. ‘Let him give the Catholics some practice’, most said once they knew you were a diversion.”
This voice was hollow, ringing, painful to my ears; it was also somewhat bored now, as if she had hoped that I would be harder to bring down.
She bent at the waist, squinting one eye to give me a huge juxtaposition for that creepily-beautiful face: it was a Popeye look. “White tree. I see it now, how lucky you were. Your mind is cluttered enough to confuse others with all its stories, as you try over and over again to think that none of this is real.” When she spoke her teeth flashed in the night, and one of her hooves crushed my right foot.
“Well, let’s cash you out properly, monster.” Her voice was still bored, like a gambler who knows she will win before the cards turn up and is disappointed because it’s not gambling when it’s so easy.
“You also need to pay for that poor dog, for cracking its rib.”
This hurt quite a lot. She rotated her hoof to finish breaking the last metatarsal in my right foot that had survived the first hit, grinding the fragments together to make my bones into a fine sand.
Clodd, what was I paying you for? I thought, once I was done bubbling and frothing and hissing, still not able to get up from the shock of her opening blow to my throat.
“His tricks don’t work on me. I payed him myself.” Without taking her hoof off my smashed foot, she parted her furs below her neck. There was a limp red pelt covering her cleavage, the fox that had conducted my conversation with Clodd last night.
She finally got off my foot, and she actually posed with the damn thing like a runway model.
The hypocrisy was what finally made me mad. The pain was something less to me now, for even a few days had erased that part of my humanity. Pain was a signal, even the pain of my throat and my foot starting to become only as ‘bad’ to me as a blaring car alarm.
But the hypocrisy, the way rules were ignored or twisted around by these ‘guardians’! Getting killed for euthanizing a dying deer simply seemed like a very strict rule, no quarter given to monsters, harsh but more acceptable than this guardian killing and skinning a fox. It was like the Don’s world, where a horse’s severed head would send a message, the least respectable characters demanding respect.
And the pain of dying to a fake guardian, a corrupt cop who didn’t deserve her badge or her magical strength and aura … well, this was hurt pride, because I did not deserve to fall to someone as loathsome as her. I don’t think I was terribly prideful as a human, slowly getting beaten down into taking disrespect from an ever growing number of people.
But now? Take out social obligation, take out money, take out disappointing parents, and why the hell was I tolerating any of this hypocritical shit lying down? Every stupid or annoying or dishonest person in my human life who I had needed to tolerate and had failed to strangle for their obvious fuckery could now be properly punished.
I floated like Regan, uncompelled by the power of Christ, and then I punched the pretty lady right in her smooth jaw. Those black deer eyes were amused as I rose, then rolling around after my strike, which snapped back her head. I realized in the next moment that my arm was burning, but her white firefly aura hadn’t scorched me as much as perhaps she had thought it would. I sliced through her aura again with another punch, the pain of the burning aura not overcoming the pain of seeing this hypocritical bitch still standing.
I beat her like a parent of a previous generation, punctuating my words with fists.
“Your … fucking … name … will … be … Cruella!”
Both of my forearms were scalded pink – but I was laughing, and though Deer Woman was still on her feet she was tilted and dented, one eye swollen shut.
“You hit like a drunk.”
I reconsidered her modernized, whitened name. Maybe it should have been Vicky LaMotta. Her teeth cracked right for it.
In a more rational corner of my mind, I was trying and failing to explain any of this. Was she a glass canon, hitting hard but unable to take it back? Or did me being right, feeling right, knowing I was right, do something to her power against me?
The pain of my shattered foot was gone – it had stopped resembling a pancake and was now rising back into shape like a loaf of bread, the itching feeling of healing accompanied by a growing itch at the back of my throat. Yes, I could measure expenditure of whatever ‘calories’ I took from blood very accurately when I was sinking from the yellow into the orange, starting to get low and sputter.
While my body healed my mind was almost totally succumbing to the frenzy of delivering a righteous beating, and more. I seized the fox pelt and tore it off, breaking a cord of gut around her neck. She fell then, and lay on the stones as a bruised heap, her one open eye glaring up.
“… I see.” Her voice wasn’t affected by this body’s injured form at all, and none of my blows had affected her hateable bored attitude.
“You were a weak doormat in life, so now with a bit of power you’re Napoleon. Like those cops on viral videos. My normal magic is for wretches like you trying to hunt with murderous intent, but you still hit like a human. Offended by manners, prideful … too human, too stupid for magic. You haven’t drawn a drop of blood, and still you claw at me.”
“That so?” I muttered. I really wanted a drink.
I stopped floating and set weight back on my stomped foot – almost normal. The spirit’s words helped me slow down, helped me think, the opposite of it’s taunting intention. The rational part of my mind was now blossoming into something cold again, dissecting this nonsense into a rough sketch of sense. The taking of blood did so much more than what the chemical content of blood suggested was possible. So blood itself was not important. It masked another kind of taking, the true taking that fueled me.
So what did I really take by taking blood, and could I take that true fuel by taking something else on the more mundane level if she had no blood to give me? So much of magic white or black was stuck in a muddle of symbolism, blood taken for good or ill in communion or vampirism, and symbolism was so often just drawing constellations between random dots. The fox pelt was one symbol, and maybe that held some fuel for me; but it was a symbol taken from Fox Man by her, already drunk from. I needed to take something fresh from her.
“Bingo,” I whispered, not even noticing other taunts Deer Woman was giving me.
She finally winced, and soon screamed – but not for long.
I wanted a second trophy, and many American tribes had shown how it was taken from a human. Desecration, insult, counter-insult, and righteousness – this mixture and this state of mind made even the fireflies jittering at the top of her head with their points of sunlight almost painless. And as with sinking my teeth into hot flesh with a galloping heart, I could feel the taking, the rush or power and the reduction of my thirst as I gripped her hair hard, and tore off the false woman’s scalp to the pink bone.
There was no blood, of course – and once it had left her the scalp in my hands was a desiccated dry thing, like an old piece of bread, and no longer trailing long black hair. The body I had pulverized and de-spirited was simply the husk of the deer I had consumed two nights before.
Chapter 9: Blood-Red Pill
Image credits: Tenburgen, Judicieux, Sheila Sund, Artaxerxes