Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

The Woman in the Carriage: Part Three

Ludovic's eyes snapped open.

The fog had gone, and he could move again. Immediately he put a hand to his throat. The blood was drying, sticky in patches, but the wound was gone.

Movement rustled behind him and he turned to see the man from the carriage standing there. His hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his coat, and his face was expressionless. There was no sign of red eyes or fangs now; he just looked like an ordinary man again.

"What happened?" Ludovic croaked.

His mouth tasted horribly of blood, and his stomach turned over. He spat red onto the leaves.

"You died," the man told him, his voice as neutral as his face. "And then you came back."

"What do you mean?" Ludovic looked around, half-expecting to see his friends picking themselves off, their wounds healed like his had done. But none of them moved. There was no sign of Jehanne's body, and a bolt of terror lanced through him.

"Where is she?" he cried, scrambling to his feet.

"I buried her in the woods," the man told him.

"My friends . . ." Ludovic mumbled, sitting back down on the ground, trying to wrap his brain around what was happening.

A chill note crept into the man's voice. "If you want them buried you'll have to do it yourself. They're not my responsibility."

"Your wife killed them," Ludovic said.

In a flash the man was crouching in front of him, his eyes sparking with anger. "That was an accident. She woke up rabid – it wasn't her fault," he snapped.

"Rabid?" Ludovic repeated.

The man passed a hand over his face, suddenly looking very tired. "I suppose I should start from the beginning."

He told Ludovic about vampires.

He told him how he'd been born a hundred and sixty years ago, and had been made into a vampire when he was twenty-nine. Two years ago he'd met and fallen in love with Jehanne. Most vampires hid what they were from the world, but he'd trusted Jehanne with his greatest secret, and she still loved him. They were married within a month. But Jehanne started to want what he had – immortality. She couldn't bear the thought that she'd grow old while he never would, and finally, a day ago, he'd agreed to turn her. She should have woken up as a vampire. Instead she'd woken up as a rabid, and there was no saving someone when they'd gone that far. The only thing to do was put Jehanne out of her misery, which is what her husband had done.

Then he'd taken pity on Ludovic and turned him into a vampire too.

"You couldn't save my friends?" Ludovic asked, looking again at the bloody bodies.

"They were already dead." The man's face hardened. "I wouldn't have saved them even if I could. They weren't good people."

Ludovic wanted to argue with that, but he couldn't. Much as he considered them his friends, he wasn't blind to the things they'd been capable of. He knew there was blood on their hands.

"And I am?" Ludovic asked.

The other man coolly regarded him. "I suppose that's up to you. I've given you a second chance and I hope you'll make good use of it." He straightened up, brushing leaves from the hem of his coat. It seemed pointless considering he was covered in blood.