"What do you want to know?" Annika finally asked.
"I'm looking for information on my kind and yours. Really, on any kind that's not human. Can you help me with that?" I asked.
Annika deliberated. The one with black eyes was still waiting to pounce, but the one with the red hair was growing curious. She spoke. "I can," she said. Her mind was less callous than the others'. "You walk this way with me?" she asked, nodding toward an open expanse of land just past the houses. There was a line of thick forest a few hundred yards beyond it.
Annika's thoughts were not pleasant. She hadn't wanted the red-haired one to talk to me, but she wasn't going to stop her either. She returned to the house with the bodies, and the ravenous black-eyed one went with her.
"I'm Ritka," she said as we walked. "I have never seen your kind before, so I want to know what you are. That's why I'm talking to you," she explained. She wanted to be clear that this was no favorable gesture, only a morbid curiosity on her part.
"I thank you, Ritka. I've never seen your kind before, either, but I have heard of you," I said. "You're vampires, are you not?" I asked.
She shrugged. "You say vampire like there's only one kind. We are eretica. We drink blood, yes, but that is all we have in common with the others. We don't have teeth, and we don't hunt. We don't turn into bats, either," she said. A gruff cough escaped her lips. I think she was laughing.
"Where do you come from?" I asked.
"We all three lived in this village. A strange man came maybe fifty years ago. He was of the devil, I suppose. He offered us immortality in exchange for our souls. The three of us were already condemned as heretics, shamed for not believing in the God they all believed in. We thought we had nothing to lose," she said. Her voice grew raspier as she spoke. I sensed she didn't talk often.
"But you did lose something," I said, expounding on what she was thinking.
"We lost everything," she said. "Our souls first, but then we turned into this," she said, pulling at the loose skin on her cheeks. "It took a year or two before we were completely changed. But the bloodlust came before that. It happened to Annika first. She was making love to a traveler when she was overcome with a need for his blood. She bit at him but couldn't get it fast enough. She clawed at his neck till the blood poured out. And she drank it all. Soon her fingers began to change," she said wiggling the arthritic, hollow points of her own. "Eventually, we couldn't control it."
"What did the people in your village say?" I asked.
"Nothing they could say," she said. We killed them too quickly, she thought. I had figured as much.
"Have you known many of your kind?" I asked.
"No, but we had heard the stories, too, like you," she said.
"Have you heard stories of any of you dying?" I asked.
YOU ARE READING
The Survivors
Paranormal"It's unlike any paranormal book I've read--very smart, very fresh, and very addictive, and very still in my mind." –And Anything Bookish In 1692, when witch trials gripped the community of Salem, Massachusetts, twenty-six children were accused as w...
