++When a vampire is desperate, you will see its real self. When it is angry, fearful, when it is at the end. That is when the person-mask falls away to reveal the snarling beast below.++

  Chapter 29

  They’d come for Ludvich in the night, but they might as well have tried the day. He’d heard the crash of Reggie bursting through that wall and figured everything out himself by the lad not coming back to his home as they’d agreed.

  Coming by day, these new generation Witchfinders would’ve been able to see clearly and coordinate. They probably thought the darkness helped them, that they were suited to night-fighting, that they had the senses, coordination and wits to work through the obfuscation of mist and moon and be on Ludvich before he was any the wiser.

  They probably thought that, and they’d definitely been wrong. Ludvich was years into retirement and much of his skill had atrophied already. It didn’t matter. The fraction that was still left proved more than enough.

  He’d lurked in his upper attic and had time enough to rig two black powder charges when his attackers started sweeping the place. The first activated as one of them tripped a line down on the ground floor, blasting nails and splinters into them, scoring wounds but probably not seriously injuring a man with flesh as tough as any Witchfinder’s. It nonetheless covered the sound of Ludvich bursting his way through the roof, landing in the street below and circling back around to come upon his enemies from their flanks. He shot one and then dove into cover as their body landed. Whimpering followed, letting him know they weren’t dead.

  The remaining two were even less so.

  Ludvich had glimpsed a nock gun right before taking cover, and he finished doing the simple estimations of such a weapon’s power against his wall’s thickness just in time to roll aside as it fired. The thick wood of his home’s interior panelling burst apart into sprays of dust where seven monstrous-fast pistol balls were spat into it at once, throwing debris upon him.

  In one shot, Ludvich’s cover had been removed from the equation. He decided shortly after that the fight was no longer to his advantage. Scurrying out of the house along a floor littered with jagged shrapnel, he found that the area around it outside was no longer free of bodies. The townsfolk were coming, all of them, and at their head was the Circumscriber Eryqai.

  Ludvich didn’t put up much of a fight from there, not really. There was no fighting when you were facing down a force like that. He was quickly beaten into submission and then snatched away without much fanfare. He’d not have done any better in his prime, either. There were just limits to what one man could accomplish.

  The elves. Demigods among humans, beings greater than them. Just greater. As humans had once ruled over all the animals of earth, so did the elves now rule over them. Of course Ludvich hadn’t put up a fight, he’d barely even seen the bastard move.

  Shackled as he was, in irons thick enough that they’d have been excessive to hold him in his prime, Ludvich could do nothing but wait and listen in to receive whatever information he could scrounge from the group around him. He didn’t take long to work out that they didn’t have Reggie, nor had they confirmed his death.

  He took scarcely longer to learn that they planned a burning for Ludvich himself.

  No fear. Funny that. Most of the Witchfinders Ludvich knew were cowards when it came to their own deaths. Most men who were familiar with killing were. Years of seeing it happen to others, of making it happen, nurtured a familiarity with the end of lives that made the end of one’s own come all the more crushingly.

  But Ludvich didn’t feel that. Maybe he was just too old. Maybe a fear of death was nothing new to a man who knew he’d be lucky to see another ten winters either way. Maybe he was just weird.

  Maybe I’m dying with the knowledge that I’ve done something good.

  Reggie. He’d saved Reggie, housed him, kept him safe and let him grow strong. Ludvich, despite everything, couldn’t help but smile. Reggie was still out there, free and living, in a manner of speaking, and it was because of him.

  It didn’t change the things he’d done, the people he’d killed for no reason, the years of service to elven rule. But it was something.

  Something to think of as his heart stopped, if nothing else.

  Ludvich waited and watched them build the pyre, bit back his mounting fear as he saw it grow. It was looking to be a big one of course. You couldn’t burn a Witchfinder on a small fire, not even a retired one like Ludvich. Toughness in the mid 20s meant that Ludvich’s flesh was somewhere close to ten times as durable and heat resistant as tissue with no mana infusing it. It would take hours of exposure to kill him, and the fire would need to be searing hot just to do it even then.

  Not a fast death, not an easy one. His Toughness would protect from suffocation and leave only the heat to finish him. But the pain, Ludvich was quite sure, would end shortly into it. Once all the nerves had finished burning away they’d stop feeling, after that he’d just be waiting for his life to end.

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  Or so he’d heard, at least. So he hoped. The truth was in regards to burning to death, Ludvich had about as much personal experience as anyone else.

  He pondered that as he watched the pyre grow bigger. Five feet across, seven, ten. Then as tall as it was wide, then the stake was in, the shackles ready, the crowd jeering and guards tensing and end approaching. Ludvich was marched towards it, and he went without argument.

  Maybe killing him would rid the people of their murdering lust, maybe it’d give Reggie a reprieve from their savagery. The lad was smart. He’d run, surely. He’d cut and run. Surely.

  Ludvich was only halfway to the pyre when he found out his hope was wrong and his worst fears true. Reggie called out, an animal scream, deep and low and grating in a way no human’s voice could muster. He was bounding along the dirt road towards Ludvich as a monster.

  Taller than his human form, his skin was grey and leathery, tight against angular bones with protrusions at his joints. His nose was a pair of slits, his ears long and sharp, his teeth sharper still. He moved like nothing worldly, tearing up the ground underfoot as if his heels were striking it with a meteor’s force. A hundred paces separated Reggie from the pyre, but Ludvich knew he’d reach his destination in only a second or two.

  Unfortunately, that was just as long as the trap needed. He saw Eryqai raise a hand and give a signal, then men emerged with guns, and the air became sharp with flying lead.

  ***

  Reggie had dirt in his mouth, blood in his mouth. He would not have been surprised if he had lead in his mouth, too, because god knew there’d been enough of that going around. His body throbbed, skin littered with the hot sting of broken dermis and exposed meat.

  But he was alive. Unalive. Whatever. He was mobile and thinking and already he could feel his flesh trying to reknit. Reggie pushed blood into the efforts of his Regeneration to help it along.

  Hey, no point in worrying about removing his burns anymore. That was nice.

  Reggie stayed where he was, lying still. Stiller than any living thing could actually. If you tried playing dead as a human there were always giveaways, twitches of muscle, the rise and fall of your chest.

  Not for him. He was undead, a vampire. If Reggie didn’t want his body to move then it didn’t, and so he just stayed there like a lump of inert meat. Waited. The lead was moving out of his shredded torso and the wounds slowly repairing, he felt strength return to him. Heard boots approaching. He waited some more. His healing continued, the enemy drew closer. A few minutes after his shooting, they were almost on him. Reggie felt a gun barrel poke him. Poke him, to see if he was dead?

  Well, it worked at least. They certainly found out whether he was dead.

  Reggie lunged up onto his feet before the shooters could react, moving faster than their thoughts. They were a pathetic lot. Weedy men with guns and vitriol, the small and mundane evils who did most of the world’s killing.

  The ones who’d killed his parents for no reason at all.

  He didn’t hesitate, just felt a surge of rage as he remembered that, remembered Ludvich’s pyre, remembered the sting of bullets. Reggie swept one arm out and sliced a man completely in half, then moved onto the next before his first victim could fall.

  It was no challenge at all. These were soft and feeble creatures. His whole life Reggie had been jealous of those born into the Worker Class, trained himself to exhaustion just to approximate strength that was common among them. But these people hadn’t even hit their limits, as Ludvich had. They weren’t even at the heights of humanity.

  And humanity, Reggie saw now, was no match at all for what he’d become. Men tried to bring their guns around on him and found Reggie slipping from the path of their barrels, lurching side to side, moving too quickly for clumsy human limbs to keep up with.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just clumsy human limbs Reggie was dealing with. There were a few dextrous human limbs on their way, the Witchfinders closing fast like thrown daggers. That, and the guns. More bullets cut through the air, fired heedless of the living bodies Reggie was crowded by. Men cried out as friendly shots found their flesh and punched holes deep through it, while Reggie felt a few pass through the corpses and hit him.

  He ignored them. Small hits, with their velocity stolen by the transit through human meat they barely even broke his skin. The approaching Witchfinders were of far more concern.

  Reggie snarled, and he heard the sound coming from his own mouth without quite recognising it. An animal noise, not his own. He didn’t care at the moment though. From the corner of his eye he saw Ludvich still being marched to the pyre as order was brought about over the rest of Norvhan.

  The rest of the killers. That’s what they were, all of them. Complicit in the murder that was to happen, so what did Reggie care about being complicit in theirs?

  Barry was the first of the Witchfinders to reach him, and the least injured, aiming his nock gun and firing. Reggie hefted a man’s corpse, shielded himself from the worst of the shot and watched the meat fly apart in his grip.

  The body wasn’t able to block the next two shots from Barry’s allies, blown open as it was by the first. Twin lead balls sunk deep into Reggie’s gut, crushing and grinding apart the innards. He felt pain stab him, ignored it. Reggie didn’t eat, he didn’t need his entrails to move or bear his weight, and even if gut wounds had bled a lot his body clung to its ichor greedily in the stagnant veins of undeath.

  Mechanical damage, that was what slowed a vampire. The Witchfinders had made a mistake in aiming for belly meat instead of leg bone. Ludvich would’ve known better than that.

  Barry wasn’t trying to reload his nock gun, he just came at Reggie with a sabre. Reggie ignored him for the time being, hurling the severed head of one townsman right for Vagryn and watched as the ten-pound weight just broke open against his face. It stunned the Witchfinder and left one gun briefly taken out of the equation.

  The other gun was still reloading, and Barry’s sabre was whipping for Reggie’s neck. He parried it, claws coming up and turning the steel away, throwing sparks into the air. Reggie stepped in and slashed, his enemy fell back. Trying to use the superior reach of his weapon to its fullest.

  It didn’t help him much. Reggie had faced a deadlier enemy with a deadlier sword in Ajoke, this mundane sabre was just a toothpick by comparison. He closed, baited out a swing then lunged back and stepped in again to scrape his claws along the Witchfinder’s chest.

  Human flesh was so fucking fragile, but Reggie didn’t feel the natural sickness that should’ve accompanied that reminder as his talons scraped open ribs and grazed the lungs beneath. He found his hunger rising, thinking only of the blood stored in that meat-sack he was perforating.

  [Drink it Reggie, it’s ours.]

  For once, he didn’t ignore Dvo.