++Witchfinder coteries are considered by most to be a sign of ill tidings, superstition and poorly applied reasoning leading people to conclude that their very presence implies the imminence of an unusually great threat. This is untrue. Such threats are often afoot, and it is only when so many Witchfinders have assembled to dispatch one that you may rest assured knowing you are safe. ++

  Chapter 15

  Reggie awoke to a new feeling in his body, some deep ache that was rapidly fading. In its place was…well, he didn’t know what it was. But he knew he liked it. He knew he liked it very, very much.

  He sat up, pushing the coffin lid off him and scraping the soil against its bottom as he crawled out. Head still spinning, he took a few coughing tries to call forth Sycily’s words.

  Evolution complete.

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 17

  (P)Speed 16

  (P)Celerity 16

  (S)Toughness 16

  (P)Charisma 9

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic I

  Form of the Beast I

  Royal Presence I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration I

  Addictive Ichor

  It was a little bit disappointing to not see any stat explosions. Had Reggie done something wrong?

  Raising your Tier doesn’t automatically improve your Attributes, Abilities or Traits. But it does increase the ceiling to which they can be improved.

  Right, he remembered something about that. Thinking about things more, it made sense. It wasn’t like every Worker ran around with Attributes in the mid 20s right?

  “So I’m Tier 2, right?”

  Correct, your temporary Tier is Journeyman.

  “So I should be able to get a maximum increase of…+30 to my Attributes?

  +30 to your Primary Attributes. Secondary Attributes will be limited to +27, and Tertiary to +24. Though you do not have any Attributes limited to Tertiary status currently.

  That would be what the new letters meant, the ones next to his Attributes. P for Primary and S for Secondary. No Tertiary. Well that was something. Reggie felt himself calming again, growing more eager to get back to empowering himself. He stumbled out from his lair, Ludvich’s basement, and into the building’s hallway. Past that, to the lounge, where he found the Witchfinder looking up at him with a sharp stare.

  “You’re awake!” he grinned, looking like he didn’t fully believe it. That was…concerning.

  “Yeah,” Reggie noted, “how…long was I out?”

  “A bloody week,” Ludvich scoffed, “did you not know?”

  A week? Reggie felt like he’d just napped for a few hours. He wasn’t even able to let the fact sink in before his damned hunger came back.

  “God, I’m starved again. Sycily, how many more things do I need to drain before I evolve again?”

  Current progress, 10/50.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Ludvich asked warily.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Reggie groaned, “I just need…eat.”

  He hadn’t really known hunger until his introduction to vampirism, but he knew it now. It was an endless thing scraping at his insides, demanding more, always more.

  Fortunately, Ludvich had already prepared for it. He’d bound a red ant near the back of his house which Reggie wasted no time in draining.

  Progress to next Tier, 11/50.

  After tasting human blood, the thing didn’t feel the least bit nourishing. Still, volume compensated for quality and after dumping about a gallon and a half of blood into himself his starvation was somewhat abated.

  Huh, am I…harder to fill up now?

  Correct, your body can store larger amounts of blood now that your Tier has increased.

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  And it uses more up?

  Waking up uses a portion of blood up, this amount is increased with your Tier.

  But my Abilities, they haven’t had their blood cost increased?

  They have not.

  So good news and bad news, but if Reggie could stay transformed for longer then it was more good in his eyes.

  “We need to talk,” Ludvich began, “regarding your staying here.”

  “Are you kicking me out?” Reggie asked instantly.

  “No,” Ludvich snapped. Then paused. “...Yes. Kind of. It’s not my choice—”

  —”I understand, in this housing market you just can’t afford to—”

  —”no, idiot,” the Witchfinder snapped, “take this seriously. It’s actually not my choice, and it wouldn’t be even if you were paying rent. We can’t hide your presence here forever. When it’s uncovered, people will have questions. Questions will lead to an examination that I don’t think is going to take very long to uncover what you are, maybe even who you are. Do you want to meet another Circumscriber?”

  Reggie shivered at that, though his dead nerves hardly felt the cold anymore a chill ran through them at the very idea. He wasn’t ready to meet another Circumscriber. Not by half.

  “Okay,” he conceded, “so what’s the plan then?”

  “I don’t know.” Hearing Ludvich say that was not categorically different to being abruptly kicked in the chest. Reggie fell down into his seat, eyed the old man and got thinking himself.

  “The woods,” he said after a moment. “I’ll live in the grimwoods.”

  Ludvich snorted. “Are you mad? You’ll be—literally—eaten alive.”

  “Firstly, I’m dead,” Reggie smiled. Ludvich did not return the expression, so he hurried in elaborating. “Secondly, I can control peelers now.”

  “What?”

  “Peelers, basic undead. They don’t attack me, and they follow instructions I give them. Little ones at least. I’m thinking maybe I gather a few up, pen them in, have them stand guard near wherever I stay.”

  The more he talked about it, the more Reggie was growing to like the idea.

  “And if a wolf spider catches sight of you?” Ludvich pressed, “believe me lad, a few peelers—a few dozen peelers—won’t do a thing to even slow one of those down.”

  Reggie swallowed reflexively, felt his throat grind and pop in atrophy.

  “Well, it’ll be temporary,” he added, “just while I get myself a proper home built.”

  “No, no, this is ridiculous,” Ludvich snapped, “you can’t build a house at all, maybe with ten years of practice but not now. You need accommodations sooner. You…Need to introduce yourself to the town.”

  Reggie wanted to argue, his every instinct told him to. There was a Circumscriber in town, now. Permanently. Tasked with watching over it, with killing Reggie and anything like him if they tried to show up.

  But then that wasn’t such a great threat compared to the grimwoods, right? At least here he knew he could have a chance to hide and not be randomly sighted in the street.

  Which did bring up the issue of how to not be sighted in general, because Reggie wasn’t going to bet his life that fifteen years had erased all memory of how he looked. Particularly if the elf stationed in Norvhan was among the group who’d murdered him. One hoped that was the sort of thing they’d remember.

  The solution came to him after a bit of thought, though it took him the better part of half an hour to muster up enough courage to implement it.

  “Ludvich, I need you to melt my face off.”

  Ludvich just stared at him, and Reggie realised that the suggestion may have been a bit weird without context, so he elaborated.

  “I heal fast, and cleanly, relax. See that foot? Grew it back after a necromantic angler bit it off. If I disfigure myself every day then it’ll be the perfect disguise, right? Only problem is my voice. Hm…”

  “Drink boiling water,” Ludvich suggested, clearly warming to the idea already, “should scorch the inside of your throat, assuming you’re not too durable for that already.”

  Reggie did not enjoy setting up his new disguise, particularly not the boiling part. His new body didn’t seem to register pain quite like his old one. It was still there, though. If something had registered as a ten on his agony scale before, it’d be bumped down to a mild six. Pretty useful for ignoring all the aches and stabs of normal combat.

  Drinking hundred-degree water was more like a fifteen on that original scale, though, and pressing his face down in a pool of burning oil dialled it up to somewhere past twenty. Reggie was not too proud to admit that he squealed like a stuck pig. But it worked.

  After that, he just needed a way to introduce him to Norvhan that wouldn’t arouse any of the due suspicion. Fortunately he’d given himself a pretty decent opportunity there, albeit entirely by accident and mostly through ravenous impulsivity.

  The farm animal massacre of a week ago had apparently stirred up a lot of worry among the townsfolk. Enough that there were strong demands for something to be done about whatever was responsible.

  “I’ll introduce you as a Witchfinder trainee,” Ludvich suggested, “or an applicant at least. Technically anyone can become one, and as one of the world’s few retired Witchfinders I can give you quite the recommendation.”

  Reggie liked the sound of that, in a roundabout sort of twisted way. It felt like he was somehow getting what he’d been dreaming of for most of his life.

  Of course there was nowhere for it to go, now. He knew that if he tried to start up his little business and make a life for himself as he’d planned, the elves would just kill him. On the other hand, vampirism had opened a lot of doors. Could Reggie become powerful enough to one day live openly and independent of them? Rule his own town, maybe.

  Suddenly, his Blood Courtier choice felt like it was doing a lot more for him than just helping to blend in.

  Ludvich took another day to prepare his papers and get him ready to meet with the town’s new Witchfinders, and Reggie was left to feel his nerves fraying more as he waited.

  That, and to slowly heal from the burns to his head. At the very least he got some use out of being able to see how fast his body repaired the damage; after twelve hours it seemed like the burns were partly gone already. Still disfiguring, but Reggie kept it in mind that his healing would be noticeable if he were ever out for much more than a few hours at a time.

  When they were finally ready to make his introduction, he’d spent enough time regrowing his face that he had to melt it all over again. Ludvich didn’t like that one bit.

  “Risky,” he noted, “there’s a lot of situations where this might get you found out.”

  “Hopefully I’ll be powerful enough for it not to matter by then,” Reggie shrugged, “I don’t exactly have much choice either way.”

  Hopefully. Seemed he’d been doing a lot of hoping lately, and he did a lot more as Ludvich led him through town to where the Witchfinders had set up a ‘guild’ of sorts. Felt funny to see so obvious a workplace for their profession, mostly Reggie knew of Witchfinders as isolated men dwelling in their own heavily-fortified homes.

  But he knew that cooperation was far from uncommon among them. Ludvich was actually weird among his profession for mostly going it alone, and Reggie saw a certain awkwardness in the old man as he pounded on the Witchfinders’ door. It was answered fortunately fast.

  “Yes? Oh, you,” the man inside swept an eye over Ludvich and Reggie, pausing only briefly to stare in horror at Reggie’s mangled face and scalp.

  “I’m pretty on the inside,” Reggie volunteered. That seemed to snap the Witchfinder back into some semblance of mental cohesion.

  “Come in,” he growled. Sounded like he was embarrassed to have been caught staring, maybe embarrassed to have been unnerved. Not good. Embarrassed people could get...angry.

  There were two other people deeper inside, all dressed in the standard ‘Witchfinder’s uniform’ of thick fabrics and easily-recogniseable silhouettes to prevent hunting accidents. The others were older than the one at the door, though still not quite at middle age. Neither of them looked exactly pleased to see Reggie, which was fine by him.

  “Ludvich,” said the oldest of the trio, “good to see you—”

  —”save it,” Ludvich grunted, “I brought the new applicant. You’re all clear on his abilities?”

  The man didn’t look irritated at being interrupted, which meant he probably knew Ludvich enough to expect it.

  “Clear enough,” the final man nodded. He seemed the most beaten-up, which Reggie reckoned made him either the most or least skilled depending on whether he’d been wounded by experience or carelessness. By the way he was looking at Reggie’s burns, he was trying to figure out the same thing about him.

  “Then I’ll leave the lot of you to hunt,” Ludvich nodded.