++It is not known why some parts of an undead’s biology remain useful to them, and others do not. With bones broken or muscles torn, they are unable to move. Destruction of the brain, certainly, slays them outright. This is, however, the extent of it. Undead do not need their other organs and often baffle the human enemies who think to slay them by attacking them. Do not consider an undead dispatched unless its head has been removed.++

  Chapter 24

  Reggie was in a bit of a panic for all of the next day, and Ludvich didn’t offer much help.

  “You have to go with them,” he shrugged, “hold off feeding for a few days or…maybe just move on to another town altogether. You knew this couldn’t last.” The old man seemed pained as he said it, but Reggie saw that it wasn’t affecting his judgement much.

  Reggie, though, wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

  “Addictive Ichor,” he began, “it’s a power I have. What do you know of that?” Reggie had been trying not to think about the idea of having slavery-juice in his blood, but now his hand was being forced. Were his morals really that flexible?

  He thought about it. Yes. Everybody wanted to kill him, of course they were.

  Ludvich seemed a lot less accepting of the notion, though. Reggie saw him bristle and tense up, eyes narrow.

  “What have you done?” he asked.

  “Nothing, yet,” Reggie told him, “I’m asking what I can do.” Sycily gave him data, raw information right from the System. Regie wanted the perspective of someone who lived in the world affected by this power too. Knowing more didn’t seem like a bad state in any situation.

  Ludvich eyed him, took his time in making a decision. He always did. That was probably how you got through life as a Witchfinder, think fast in the grimwoods and think long outside of them. His long thinking finished.

  “Some vampires have the power to control humans with their blood. They feed it to us. It’s empowering, intoxicating, but the physical need for it is so great that recipients will do anything they can to get their hands on more. They become little better than pets.”

  Reggie thought about that and tried to stretch his morals into allowing it, then started swearing.

  “Fuck, I’ll just kill them then?” the thought of fighting three trained Witchfinders and winning was not a promising one, but it was seeming now like the only one he had. Being mauled to death in the fucking woods was probably better than…whatever Ludvich just described.

  “Killing Witchfinders,” Ludvich whispered. “My whole life I served that order, now you want to kill men doing the same.” He trailed off, frowned, didn’t talk for another moment and then talked all the louder once it had expired, “it has to be done I suppose. Do it.”

  Ludvich’s usual, disturbing pragmatism ran right through Reggie like a cold wind—back when the wind had bothered him—but it didn’t end the conversation, not yet. Reggie still had concerns of his own.

  “And what about the Circumscriber? Vyngar. If they’ve shared this plan with him, a triple disappearance with me still being alive would be pretty damned suspicious right?”

  Ludvich swore. “Wouldn’t have…I wouldn’t have missed that one, not ten years ago. I’m getting old.” He seemed more angry about it than disturbed, but Reggie felt a tugging deep in his chest at the notion of time eating away at the Witchfinder.

  “Not dead yet,” Reggie snapped with more heat than he’d intended, “and hopefully neither am I.”

  Unfortunately, that death was looking more and more imminent by the moment. Reggie tried to think of some instant fix to his situation but none came to his mind. Kill the Witchfinders, risk tipping off the Circumscriber. Don’t do that, and he’d have to contend with the threat of being ambushed in the woods anyway.

  He needed something to relax him, and took the time to study his new transformation. Reggie was pleased to see that he didn’t seem quite as recogniseable in that form as his previous one. His skin greyed and thickened like tough leather, eyes growing smaller, though not affecting his vision, and ears pointed as his fangs grew even larger. Hair retreated from his head, his skull elongated and the bone spurs he’d noticed in his elbows made themselves known at his knees too. It looked almost bat-like, but…

  No, it actually was just bat-like. Reggie had heard stories of vampires turning into bats, of bats drinking human blood, was this his first step to that? To flying?

  But he couldn’t get distracted, no matter how appealing the thought of taking to air was. It wouldn’t do much to help him right now. In the end Reggie didn’t have a solution for any of his new issues and just reluctantly headed his way into the woods, hoping to find something he could kill and drain even despite the Witchfinders’ trap.

  At the very least, he did know where that trap was, which meant that Reggie could avoid it provided he just didn’t go near the area he suspected was within earshot of any of them.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  This would limit his hunting options, cripple them almost. There wasn’t all that much of the grimwood Reggie was willing to stumble through, not when he only knew of Norvhan as a nearby safe haven. Venture too far out and he might never come back, if that happened he’d stumble onto something able to kill him sooner or later.

  But now he didn’t have much choice. Reggie wouldn’t go much farther away than he had already, just a mile or two. Little enough distance that it’d add just over a minute to his sprint if he needed to scurry back.

  He still didn’t like it, but he swallowed his fear and set off anyway as the sun set. He walked out with his Witchfinder allies of course, for safety, and the three of them chatted or sulked as they disappeared into the grimwoods.

  That day, Reggie didn’t catch anything. Nothing that improved his powers to kill. He didn’t the next day, either. Nor the day after that. The limits were too steep, too suffocating. He searched and scrounged but found nothing to sate his need for more power, and had a hard time even snatching up ants to drain and keep his strength from waning entirely. Meanwhile the Witchfinders seemed absolutely tireless of what they were doing.

  “This job is just waiting most times,” Holt told him one day, “eventually the thing will make a mistake, get desperate or be forced to move on and our waiting will be up.”

  He wasn’t wrong there. Reggie was already considering abandoning Norvhan entirely.

  It was about a week of agonizing and hesitating before a new change came, the biggest one yet. One Reggie certainly had not been expecting. He was lucky, first and foremost, because the change came right as he headed back to his position in the woods—which was meant to be equally far from all three Witchfinders so he could quickly rush over to help any one of them if they met the vampire—and thus prevented him from being exposed while wandering around hunting in secret.

  Barry ended up calling out a warning, one that carried far over the trees and flooded Reggie with urgency, with fear, with…confusion. Because Reggie had been pretty sure the Witchfinders wouldn’t stumble onto any vampiric activity, on account of the fact that he was its source and had been planning on deliberately avoiding them. Whatever was causing this, he didn’t like it.

  But he still started running towards the call, because anything other than that would draw suspicion.

  Reggie felt like he was sprinting through water, moving without either transformation as he did. Felt like he was naked and weak and fragile, because he was. The musket over his shoulder was feeling less reassuring by the day as his body kept strengthening and his mind continued turning back to the sight of that clean shot bouncing off the wolf spider.

  He really hoped there wasn’t another of those creatures waiting for him up ahead.

  As it happened, there wasn’t. There was one hell of a sight though. Reggie fell out of his sprint as he saw Barry lying on the ground, clutching his side and bleeding like a stuck…human. Or a slashed human, rather. He looked up at Reggie, face already paling from the blood loss and clammy with the sweat of his agony.

  “Vampire,” he croaked, “we were right. Has an enchanted sword, woman. Odd. Skin is covered in…tar, I think, to block the sunlight. It went that way.” He indicated the direction with a nod, though Reggie barely caught it. He was already consumed in thought. Dark skin, female, enchanted sword. Could he really be that unlucky?

  Yes, of course he could. He was Reginald Smith.

  And now Reginald Smith was left with a question he needed answering. Was it better to try and let the woman get away, or give chase? If anyone else found her before Reggie did, she might tell them things, things that would get Reggie killed. If accused of vampirism, a person was pretty likely to bring up the actual vampire they’d seen less than two weeks ago if only in an attempt to clear their name.

  He swore inwardly and kept a hard face on the outside. “Stay here,” Reggie told Barry.

  “Fuck off,” Barry groaned, still bleeding and immobile. Reggie started off down the forest, and wondered for the ten millionth time why everything always happened to him.

  Something else happened to him as he moved past a tree, a shaft of moonlight catching steel and bouncing off it. The brief reflection gave Reggie a moment’s warning, let him dive and roll and just barely avoid the swing that otherwise would’ve left him one head shorter. Reggie ate shit, face smashing right into the dirt and scraping a trench in it as he rolled to his feet and went down all over again at the sensation of the woman’s sword slicing along his belly.

  “Fuck, stop!” he coughed, wincing at the bizarre sensation of entrails slopping out of him.

  The woman surprised Reggie, then, by actually stopping, though she still kept her weapon held high. The pause let him see how many cuts and scrapes still dotted her body. Human healing. It’d been a week, but there they still were. Funny how he almost felt surprised at that now.

  “What are you after me for?” she snapped, aiming her sword at him. The threat was clear enough and Reggie wasn’t in his combatively superior transformed state, which meant that a fight between them would’ve been easily in her favour even if his guts weren’t currently coiled down to the knees.

  “I’m not,” Reggie groaned, “other people are. People who are going to rip your fingers off until you tell them answers to questions about vampires in these woods.”

  “Which you think will make me expose you, so you’re here to silence me,” she growled.

  “I’m here to help you!” Reggie snapped, realising then that it was the truth. Which didn’t help him much of course, people couldn’t generally recognise the truth when they heard it.

  He must’ve gotten lucky this time, or else he was dealing with a nicer person than he’d thought. The woman swore, then dragged Reggie to his feet. “Run,” she snapped.

  “What?”

  “After me idiot, run!” and then she ran, ran fast. Reggie followed without really thinking about it. Almost tripping up on his own dangling innards was, if nothing else, a new experience, though not a pleasant one. Reggie considered trying to stuff his guts back in as the woman ran on for one moment, then sighed, braced himself, and hastily transformed. His claws made short work in slicing through the intestines and leaving him free of their snags.

  It wasn’t like he still ate any solid food to digest, right?

  Behind them, Reggie heard gunshots. Bullets whipped by his head, his body, but they were distant shots that missed him by entire yards. Clumsy shooting. One didn’t shoot clumsily when one had a musket, not with the prospect of a seconds-long reload even aided by inhuman Celerity. So the Witchfinders were far enough away that their weapons’ natural inaccuracy was simply causing them to miss by that much?

  Fine by him, a quarter-mile lead was just what he’d have wanted, and the more that grew the thicker the fog would be between them. Reggie kept running right after the woman and followed her out into the grimwoods.

  Soon enough, they were away.