++To be a vampire’s slave is the worst fate a mortal can suffer. Their ichor is more addictive than opium, more ruinous than any poison. The power it offers may tempt the foolhardy, but no reward is worth the price it demands.++

  Chapter 32

  Reggie was running, which he thought was a feat in and of itself.

  It was a feat in and of itself because, though his undead body was repairing itself faster than any mundane tissues could manage, Reggie still had about half a pound of lead lodged inside him, probably two pounds of meat missing, and was carrying Ludvich over one shoulder and Ajoke over the other. He’d have marvelled at his own strength normally, but right now he had more pressing concerns.

  Several of those concerns whipped past him, shredding the undergrowth. Gunshots. Pretty well-aimed, too. Norvhan must’ve had its hunters at the front of their little mob.

  Grimwoods were scary places that most people knew better than to venture through, with luck Reggie would only need to last a few more minutes before his pursuers’ good sense grew stronger than their bloodlust and called off the chase.

  That was still minutes though, at best. More gunshots churned up the space around Reggie. He winced as one of them hit his leg. It seemed like the townsfolk were passing along pre-loaded muskets, cutting away the time needed to painstakingly cram in ball, priming and propellant by carrying a surplus of readied weapons.

  It was an effective tactic, as Reggie’s stinging wounds could attest. If they kept it up then they’d get lucky. One solid shot to Ludvich would be all it took to kill the old man, Reggie knew. That would make everything he’d done here pointless.

  Fortunately, the shot never came. Reggie didn’t feel particularly grateful for that, he reckoned he was due a bit of fortune and then some. His distance from the townsfolk slowly grew as fatigue began to take its toll on them, making the stray gunshots wider and more infrequent. Eventually he’d lost them altogether.

  That didn’t make his situation much better.

  The grimwoods were not a friendly place at all, and Reggie could smell the intensity of blood-reek rolling off of Ludvich and Ajoke. It hit him like a volley of punches.

  If it was hitting him, he knew there were plenty of other nasties in this woodland that would smell it too. Reggie had been ambushed enough times since his life ended to know his new senses still weren’t the best ones around.

  One wolf spider would’ve turned his bad day into his last day, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Reggie just hauled the useless, unconscious assholes along with him and tried not to think about how beyond control his own fate had suddenly become. Fortunately, it was only a few more miles before he reached his destination. Safety. Or as close as he could hope to get here.

  The castle was waiting for him, and it seemed hungry. Wait, no. That was just Reggie. He could feel the responses his starved body made as the scent of blood overwhelmed him, and fought off the intoxication of being so close to bleeding wounds long enough that he managed to haul Ajoke and Ludvich into the structure.

  Then he ran off, hunting like he never had before.

  ***

  It didn’t take long to fill himself up, not even with how close to empty his tank had gotten. Reggie was faster and tougher now, he was one of the most dangerous predators in the grimwoods. He also wasn’t picky this time. He wasn’t looking for Attribute points and progress to his next tier, just to replenish the damned emptiness in his veins and give his body what it needed to close up all the remaining holes.

  A thousand or so times faster than normal, Reggie healed. Pushing it he could speed that to ten times faster still. So by the time he was done hunting he’d given his mangled form ten thousand hours to recuperate.

  Laughably, it wasn't enough. The pain was still there and still intense, but it was nice not to feel a breeze on his insides anymore and it let Reggie reassess his priorities. Move down one on the list.

  What was next? Simple answer there. After short-term survival came long-term. For Reggie that meant getting shelter and making sure he wouldn’t be followed to it come day.

  Ajoke had taken care of that much for him already, so he hurried back to the castle just as the last few rays of daylight stabbed through clouds and started aiming lazy blows for him. One day Reggie’d have to dodge them by the shaft. Huh.

  Today he had other concerns. By the time Reggie got back to the castle, neither Ajoke nor Ludvich had woken up. Both of them looked worse, if anything. He’d done what he could to bind their wounds but the bleeding was only half their problems. Ludvich had a fucking dent in his chest and made a weird rattling noise as he breathed, while Ajoke’s guts had been stabbed deep enough that it stunk of shit around the hole.

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  Reggie couldn’t save them. He knew smatterings of medical shit, leeches and where to stick them, how to set a bone, other stuff. Knew enough to know that he’d be useless here. What did you do with a gut wound? Fuck if he knew.

  “Sycily, I need advice, I need to help Ludvich and Ajoke. How do I do it?” He wouldn’t be alone. Sycily knew all sorts of shit, did she know something of use here?

  What do you want to know?

  “Medical shit, I need….I don’t know, how do I fix Ajoke’s guts? How do I straighten out Ludvich’s ribs?” He was overwhelmed, panicking again. Reggie felt that creeping at the back of his mind as his thoughts did a hundred miles an hour and the whole world started laughing at him.

  Funny. He thought he’d gotten past it. Maybe undeath hadn’t straightened out his head, maybe it’d just left him caring little enough that the stress didn’t blossom into more problems.

  Well he cared now.

  There is no way within your means to save either of them.

  Sycily delivered the fact as she did everything else, little emotion and seemingly no care. She could’ve been talking about fixing a door rather than two people’s lives. Reggie tried not to get angry at that.

  “Fuck you,” he spat, failing spectacularly, “I don’t believe that, there has to be…” He trailed off, remembered it, and then asked a new question, hesitant despite everything. “What about my…ichor?”

  Addictive Ichor?

  “It can share some of my power with people, right? Does that include healing?” Reggie was terrified now, somehow trembling despite his body being as dead as any corpse ever buried. Sycily’s calm hit him like an iceberg and that was just fine by him. Anything to cool the wildfire of panic spreading along his thoughts.

  That is correct, Addictive Ichor grants those who imbibe in your blood a small fraction of your vampiric Traits, such as a limited version of your Regeneration I.

  “How limited?” Reggie snapped.

  It will operate at roughly the square root of your own Regeneration’s effectiveness.

  “What’s a square root?”

  It will operate at roughly one thirtieth of your own Regeneration’s effectiveness.

  One thirtieth. Reggie swore. So they could’ve gotten an extra day of healing done, effectively, if he’d already given them his blood.”

  “Will it keep them alive while it works?”

  Yes. The effects will last approximately one week without additional blood provided to them. One extra week for each additional serving.

  One week. Reggie swore again, it was the best he could do.

  Which brought up the question of whether it was worth the other effects, the mental effects. The enslaving effects.

  “What happens if I feed them my ichor and just leave?” Reggie asked Sycily, dreading the answer.

  They will want to find you. They will seek you out instinctively.

  “They’ll figure out what I did, or Ludvich will. He’ll know it was me. And that’ll give him a face to chase and a name to follow, right?”

  Yes.

  “But it won’t let them track me outside of that, if I just disappear then they’ll be okay eventually?”

  When the ichor is used up, and their healing stops, they will no longer be under its mental effects.

  Reggie nodded, more to himself. Right. As he’d hoped. As he’d prayed.

  As he’d needed to make the decision before him possible to make.

  It was a simple thing to feed them both enough ichor, maybe three pints’ worth each. That was all that Sycily told Reggie their bodies could hold. Three pints for three weeks of Regeneration, if they weren’t all better by the end of that they’d be damned close to it.

  Or they’d be dead. Do something stupid in their desperation to find him. Reggie had been told that the effects of his ichor got intense. Got bad.

  Dying was already where they were at though, so it wouldn’t get worse.

  Reggie half-expected to see them stirring moments after they drank, but of course he didn’t. Thirty times. Not a thousand like him, not ten thousand like him when he pushed his powers. Thirty times. It’d be hours at least before any noticeable difference marked itself in the pair.

  Enough time for Reggie to get away then. Hopefully neither of them starved, he’d checked and found a few food stores left where Ajoke had sheltered in the castle before. He could only guess how many days it’d last. Enough for them to recover and get more?

  They were dying anyway. Nowhere to go but up for their chances.

  Reggie’s couldn’t be more different. His chances were pretty good right now, past the bulk of his danger. He just had to make them worse for Ludvich and Ajoke’s sakes. The alternative was to let them wake up and see him, feel all the emotions his ichor would force them to. That’d change a person even once it wore off, had to. No. He left, headed out the castle and started through the grimwoods at a jog.

  His jog was faster than most men could sprint. By the time another day had come Reggie was a hundred fifty miles gone and well past reach. He’d left the grimwoods after about half of them, and the hills that emerged after were the most beautiful things Reggie had ever seen. Great mounds in the landscape like ripples on a puddle’s surface, sprawling out. Not a tree in sight, not a monster. Why didn’t anyone live here?

  The question stuck to him like he’d stepped in it and kept him company the rest of the night. Reggie didn’t find an answer. Before he could stumble onto one there was a new sight greeting him and crushing away all the wondering, a city-sight.

  Reggie hadn’t been to a city before. He knew all the ones in Engyr by name and by heart, could even find them on a map. He worked that map out in his mind now and figured he was somewhere near the middle of the country based on the settlement sprawled out ahead of him.

  Lorwick. Nasty place, big, full of people. None of these were things Reggie had heard, he saw it all with his own eyes now as he drew closer. The place reeked at a distance and reeked more by the mile, drenched in a thick miasma of human fluids and decay. It was loud, it was big. How many people lived there? Reggie couldn’t put a number to them, not even a guess.

  He’d have said millions if he tried. But that was stupid wasn’t it?

  [It is, Reggie, you’re an idiot.]

  “Shut up,” he spat, “cunt. Shut the fuck up before I scrape you out of there myself.”

  For once, Dvo did shut up. Good. Reggie wasn’t in a mood for any more bullshit. He headed closer to the city, reaching it maybe a half-hour before sunlight bathed the streets and made them deadly. There was a wall and gate here that looked much thicker than the ones in Norvhan.

  Too thick to smash through, too high to jump, and, Reggie found, a good deal more secure. Guards approached him as he drew near.

  And to think, he’d been in such a hurry to carry Ludvich and Ajoke away that he’d not even picked up Eryqai’s damned magic weapons.