++The majority of vampires perish in their first year of life. At this time they are most ignorant, most unaccustomed to the new power and trappings that define their existence. Those who survive this period of vulnerability are, by necessity, the luckiest, the most cunning…and the deadliest.++

  Chapter 23

  Reggie would have loved to take a while and soak up the feeling of his transformed body, but he was unfortunately beset with a slightly more pressing concern. The woman kept swinging, and though he saw her blade move slower, now, through his enhanced eyes, it was still no trivial thing to backstep and dodge it.

  Name: Reginald Smith

  Age: 21

  Race: Blood Courtier [Inheritor Race, Tier 2]

  Class: None

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 32(+12)

  (P)Speed 32(+12)

  (P)Celerity 32(+12)

  (S)Toughness 31(+12)

  (P)Charisma 6(-12)

  Abilities:

  Blood Magic I

  Form of the Beast II

  Royal Presence I

  Traits:

  Enhanced Senses I

  Regeneration I

  Addictive Ichor

  He liked looking at those numbers very much, but was far from confident that they’d hold up if he let that enchanted sword hit him. So Reggie kept moving, slithering around the woman’s swings and carefully watching her for any sign of an opening. He tried speaking as he did, but words were now beyond him it seemed. He could feel his stretched-out jaw bones fumble with forming them, felt the snake-long tongue rolling around in his mouth, his unnaturally jagged teeth, everything. If his previous body had been uncannily animalistic, he could only imagine this new one was outright monstrous.

  But that didn’t mean talking wasn’t an option, just meant Reggie had to get the better of this woman before he could afford to do it. Her next swing was a slightly clumsy one, and Reggie saw his chance.

  Stepping in, he grabbed at her wrist and winced as talons that were a good inch or two longer than they had been sunk in along with the grip. He still held her, regardless, and knew instantly that the strength advantage was his. He twisted until she was forced to release the sword, then headbutted her.

  Nasty move, a headbutt. The human head was a damned heavy thing and the skull, especially around its forehead, was thick and well-shaped for impact resistance. Reggie could’ve smashed a rock into her face and not been any more effective. The mystery woman went down like a stringless puppet and Reggie dropped his weight atop her, transforming back into his fully human shape only after a moment spent making sure she’d been stunned completely out of resistance.

  God, he was hungry. Not very, not cripplingly, but he felt a definite snag in whatever passed for his stomach, even after draining that spider. Was it his new transformation? It seemed to do everything else more than the last one, both good and bad, stood to reason the blood requirement would be upped to.

  A concern for the future, right now he needed answers.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Reggie growled, “but you are really limiting my options here.”

  The woman stared up at him, eyes aglow with defiance so intense and molten that it almost made him fearful to touch her. Of course Reggie maintained his grip even as she feebly struggled against it. He decided to try a new tactic.

  “I could kill you right now,” he informed her.

  That seemed to get through to her at least, if only by inspiring fear instead of defiance. God, what was it with women always assuming Reggie wanted to hurt them?

  “I’m not going to,” he clarified, “not unless you make me. There’s a reason I rushed out of the forest to help you.”

  Her eyes were…not softening exactly, but growing less actively hostile if nothing else. Reggie considered that progress until the woman opened her mouth and spoke with a hateful hiss.

  “àìkú,” she spat.

  Reggie blinked. “What?”

  “You are àìkú.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

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  “Your people call them ‘vampires’.”

  “Oh, uh, yeah. What about it?”

  She started struggling again, and Reggie had to resist the urge to lean back and let her out from under him. She’d probably just attack him again if she was freed.

  “Monster,” she growled, “blood-drinker, predator, animal, demon!” her accent was strange, unlike literally any Reggie had heard before. That, and her weird word usage, didn’t exactly make it a feat to guess that she wasn’t from here. Wasn’t from anywhere he’d ever seen going by the tone of her skin.

  “I only drink monster blood,” Reggie spat, “or blood people give me by choice. I’m not a monster, and I got tired of being called one long before I stopped even being human, so kindly shut the fuck up and give me some guarantee you won’t attack me again so I can let you go and leave.”

  That had her thinking, for all of a second. Then she spat at Reggie and tried to bite him. He swore, punched her, and watched her lie back dazed for a moment. Reggie took a second to think of his next course of action, and quickly found it by sprinting off.

  He had a bit of a think about the woman as he disappeared into the woods. That, and his experience in almost dying there. Whatever she was doing near Norvhan, Reggie imagined it wasn’t something the local Circumscriber would like. He deduced this from the fact that she was walking well off from the beaten path, despite that being tantamount to a death sentence.

  She was also a crazy asshole who’d tried to chop his head off of course, so he didn’t feel the need to wish her any particular stretch of luck. Reggie was more concerned with his own luck there. Had the wolf spider not already been wounded or, more importantly, located so close to a weapon exponentially deadlier than Reggie’s own claws, he’d have certainly died there.

  Should’ve taken the damned sword, he kicked himself for the lack. He’d thought of the idea, considered doing it, but it had felt…cruel. Reggie had known powerlessness, depriving someone else of the strength to control their fate—let alone here—just felt wrong to him.

  Also, that wasn’t the sort of item you wanted people to catch you with. Humans weren’t allowed mana-infused weapons without express permission from their Warden, which Reggie did not have.

  That brought up a new worry for him though, because if that woman had such a weapon then it was entirely likely she had it because of gaining that permission, right? Or…No, because she wasn’t travelling with some big escort like a Warden’s emissary would. Had she stolen it?

  It seemed likely, and that made Reggie feel more confident about his immediate future. A thief would have a much harder time telling the people of Norvhan that, for instance, there was a vampire living in the woods near town.

  A vampire who looks like me, she’s seen my face, he reminded himself.

  [You could always kill her.] For once Dvo’s suggestion didn’t sound all that crazy. Which didn’t mean Reggie would do it.

  Once he’d found a nice and secluded spot for himself, he got back to burning his face until it was suitably unrecognizable again, then headed out in search of peelers. Reggie had an easy enough time finding them tonight, too. There were four of them, all perfectly content to let him shoot a hole in their chests and bludgeon them to death with the butt of his musket—since a perfect headshot for every kill was just far too suspicious.

  This left Reggie with the unpleasant task of carrying four peelers by himself, though. He ended up managing it. Even in his humanoid form, he now boasted a Strength and Toughness of 20. Reggie felt the weight, for sure, but it wasn’t some crushing impossibility over his shoulders. It definitely helped that he’d lightened the peelers a bit by shooting chunks out of them.

  Still, Reggie was grunting and shivering with the phantom memory of very real fatigue by the time he reached Norvhan again and stumbled in past its gates. He braced himself, made his way to Eryqai’s mansion, and prepared to be yelled at by a really mean elf for no reason. Once that was done and his eight shillings were secured, he headed back to Ludvich.

  Reggie was interrupted when someone came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He recoiled, snarling and hissing as he searched for a weapon he could use to avert the imminent attack, then realised it was just Vagryn Holt. The aging Witchfinder met his eyes nonplussed.

  “Sorry,” Reggie said hastily. He was still on edge, feeling the burns he’d hastily disguised himself with in the grimwoods and finding them…itchy. Fortunately the Witchfinder didn’t appear to be as scrutinous of Reggie’s false face as Reggie himself was, and he got to talking fast.

  “We have to discuss something, you, me and the others. Come with me now.” He didn’t await an answer, just turned and lurched off down the street without missing a step. Reggie paused only for a moment before following after him, ignoring his usual instinct to sprint away and stash his coins as soon as possible. It wasn’t like he was still weak enough for a child to mug, at least.

  The Witchfinder’s den, as Reggie had found himself thinking of it, was as scarcely-lit as ever, as if the occupants were still clinging to grimwood habits of limiting light and sound for fear of getting jumped by one of the things that went bump in the night. All of them twitched at Reggie’s arrival, paranoid spasms slowly running out of them as they adjusted to his presence.

  “Alright, tell him what you saw, Ledwig,” Vagryn grunted. Ledwig Vor didn’t waste his time before launching into an explanation, as practical in reporting as any Witchfinder was in any thing.

  Reggie sat and listened, and was glad that his body had become less prone to involuntary ticks and twitches since his death. Otherwise he imagined it would’ve been clear at a glance that he already knew of the incident Ledwig described, where he’d shot a mysterious human-shaped creature in the grimwoods and had it disappear.

  Reggie knew about it, because it had been him Ledwig shot.

  That would be an inconvenient fact to share at this particular juncture, of course, and Reggie was not really in the mood to be shot in the head again. So he kept quiet, pretended his concern was not for an entirely other reason than the men now around him, and urged Ledwig to keep talking with an abrupt gesture.

  His Royal Presence was disguising the undeath in his body, Reggie never moved through town without keeping it active, but that suddenly felt like a thin veneer against the suspicion he was watching build up now.

  “It’s a vampire,” Reggie said at once, eying the thoughtful looks he was getting and then continuing. “I’ve found animal corpses in the woods, drained of blood. That’s vampire work, right?” There was every chance, Reggie thought, that one or more of the Witchfinders had seen those same corpses themselves, especially with Ledwig being so close to him as he left the scene of one killing that night.

  So Reggie figured he might as well volunteer the drainages himself. By the lack of surprise on their faces, he saw he was right.

  “You found them too,” Barry sighed, “there’s so many, we’re dealing with an over-feeder I think.”

  “Over-feeder?”

  “Young vampires often grow fast by drinking a lot of other creatures to death,” Vagryn explained, “which means we need to hurry in hunting this one down. It’ll be getting more powerful the longer it remains at large.”

  That was a lot more information than Reggie would have liked the Witchfinders to have. What followed after that, though, was worse.

  “What are we going to do about it then?” he asked them. “Just head out together and try to find it?”

  Barry grinned at that. “No, we’re going to stake out all its likely feeding grounds instead. One of us sees it, we give a signal for the others to converge and hold it off while they do.”

  It was a good idea, and Reggie forced a smile. Despite how difficult his feeding had just become.