Treasure: a Vampire Novella | The Empty World Sequence

Two

Two days had passed. It was night. In the morning another girl had been found and so the inn was empty but for its four seemingly brave and stranded guests. They were neither.

Claudia sat across a table from Treasure his left hand in hers. A candle on the table still smoked in the multicolored moonlight. The moon was full.

The landlady came from the back rooms. She went directly to the doctor's table. "My son is ill," she said, "He has taken to bed with a sudden fever. Come look at him, I beg."

"Yes. Of course I will."

The doctor rose from his seat, meeting Treasure's gaze for a moment then following the landlady into the back. There on a narrow bed lay the young man, sweating in a thin shirt that fell from his fevered limbs as he writhed. His right hand kept rubbing against his face. The bandaged wrist kept returning to his lips.

Immediately the doctor set a hand to his brow. Then he pressed the boy's head to one side, and then the other, examining the neck. There was no mark as he expected to find. And then in a sudden inspiration he tore the bandage from the boy's wrist and the two scabbed over puncture wounds.

The doctor held the boy's wrist up for all to see, "The monster comes into this very house, invited in!"

"No," cried the mother.

"I know who the monster is, the stranger, the red-haired man, It is not too late. I can save your son, but the monster must be killed."

The boy's mother just cried.

Claudia let her cloak be lain over her shoulders and went first out into the night. Her gentleman, she thought, looked very handsome in moonlight, the way his skin was revealed to be so flawless, and cloaked all in black. He led her away quickly. She didn't mind it. Already he'd whispered such sweet things to her. "Quickening shall be my name for you," he'd said as he drew her hair back behind her ears before laying on, her cloak. "Because my heart quickens at the sight of you," he'd said, "It' beat's so for you now." Such very romantic things.

At the inn Claudia's father came down the stair just in time to see his daughter walk out ahead of Treasure. He smiled, thinking that perhaps Treasure would keep her safer out there than either of them could be in the inn. And then he heard the commotion. He remained on the stair listening, watching with one eye. From the back room came the doctor with the two large men who worked at the inn behind him.

They spoke in a dialect he only half understood. The boy had been attacked by a Vampyre, they said. There was a wound on his wrist. And then the doctor said that he had proof that the monster was the red-haired man. He was entirely understandable since he lapsed into English when he did not know a proper translation. "I have seen the man's hair through my microscope, it is unlike the hair of a living man, it lives an undead life like the rest of his dead body. He has been slowly feeding off the boy. We must kill him before the lad fades or the boy will have to be treated as the other ones were."

The revelation was not a shock, but it was disturbing. His daughter was outside with the Vampyre. And then he thought, we are friends to the Nephillim, my daughter travels to Alexandria to see them. It does not make sense for a Vampyre who has a willing victim at home to go out in search of victims to kill cruelly. He does not rip their throats out and then go home to suckle at a boy's wrist, he would not have a hunger for the boy if he were the real murderer. Then he left the inn.