Chapter Text
They were a family, the four of them. Or something very much like it. Now a man in a great big coat with a great big sword had come to steal what little happiness they found in this hollow wood, playing house in a cave that wasn’t even fit for beasts.
They took turns darting in and out of the tree line, just to get a closer look at their doom. It was like a game. Maybe this was the happiness that eluded them? Was this the primal pleasure, the thrill of a hunt, that made the wolves cry at night? The world was so vibrant and new, and everything hurt so much. So, so much. All they wanted to do was run away from the pain, and find solace in one another as they lay in each other’s arms during the day and fed by night. The hunger was the worst. The emptiness, the gnawing. It never went away.
But to feed meant to kill, and that was the most enduring source of carnal pleasure. Oh, they wanted to kill more than anything. Kill…Kill…Kill…
The snow fell slowly around them as they raced to meet their doom. They could hear it: the sonorous pumping of a heart. They could already taste his hot blood on their lips, and feel it steaming down their chins and over their hands in thick ribbons.
Someone very precious told them that what was dead could never be killed. That was a lie.
They were fast, but the hunter was faster.
The first one fell on him silently, like a hawk. He was precise, swift, and missed nevertheless. It was impossible, he thought. How could I miss? He pivoted, too wide, and the stranger sliced up through his stomach and into his lungs. And there was blood, just like he wanted, but not at all how imagined. And now the snow beneath his feet was steaming, but it was the most beautiful color he had ever seen. He died too slowly, choking on his blood.
It was a terrible thing to witness. The second one screamed and clawed at her tattered dress. Her voice was lost in the wind, just like the sound of the knife flying through the air and into her broken heart.
The third moved more cautiously than her siblings. Too cautiously. The stranger met her in the clearing with a spin that sent her sprawling. It didn’t take long for her to steady herself, and her rage gave her strength. She swiped at the hunter, and the hunter blocked her with the front of his sword. She jumped left. The hunter rolled right and tossed something in the air that made her eyes burn. She swung blindly until she struck something warm. She dug in and felt flesh tear underneath her fingertips. She twisted herself around in a pirouette, arms outstretched. She had been a dancer in her previous life. The strange met grace with grace, striking her just above her collarbone.
The last thing she saw was the sky, like milk, above her. The body collapsed into the snow.
“We’ll get him, my darling,” said the fourth, not realizing that he spoke to a corpse. They were all gone. Something sharp and hot struck his shoulder and sent him flying backward into the trees. He spat and hissed like a trapped animal, which he was. The thing pinning him to the earth wouldn’t budge, no matter how much he thrashed.
He looked up at the hunter, this slayer of demons and herald of eternity, and sighed. He had a kind face for a man who made his money so unkindly. He didn’t even see the sword flash as it came down on his neck.
The stranger shook the blood from the blade and returned it to the holster tucked beneath his coat.
He could feel the storm closing in around him.
***
“He’s as good as dead, I would say.” The innkeeper wrang his apron in his hands, twisting it here and there until it finally produced a trickle of gray liquid. Satisfied, he pressed on: “And so I do say! A fool, that’s what he was. Nothing more than yer garden variety fool.”
A man clutching his tankard tighter than any hope or dream he had for himself in this godforsaken village gave a huff. That was as much of an agreement as anything, the innkeeper figured. He slapped the apron against the bar and resumed his vigorous ritual of arbitrarily pushing it around in wide circles. This, he thought, would give him plenty of time to marshal his thoughts. He only had several of them, so it didn’t take him very long. He abandoned his toiling no sooner than he had started and ran the soiled cloth across his forehand. Beads of gray liquid scintillated in the unforgiving firelight. The only thing more unforgiving was the innkeeper’s relentless chiding. He took great pride in it.
“I’m just glad ye didn’t pay him, Ricard,” he said. The Ricard he spoke to was small in every way, with a pudgy little face like a ball of pinched marzipan. Sitting high atop a barstool, he looked like an over-stuffed doll in his jerkin. His face flushed bright red.
“Well…” said Mayor Ricard, digging his equally pudgy marzipan fingers into his goatskin cap. “As it happens…well, you see, this trouble with the vampires…vampire, I mean, well it’s given us quite a bit of grief.”
“Quiet, Ricard!” Came the voice of the village constable, a man by the name of Piotr Hauch. Maybe it was the fire raging inside the inn, maybe it was the Surprise Stew, but constable Hauch was sweating. He rattled his empty tankard on the bar, annoyed.
The innkeeper clucked disapprovingly. “Ye shouldn’t have given that charlatan a cent.”
For the first time in a long time, the mayor decided to put his foot down. “I have it on good authority that he single-handedly cleared out of a nest of the buggers near the old castle!”
“Is that right? Whose authority?”
And just like that, the mayor picked his foot back up. Where did I hear that again? He thought to himself. He tapped his finger on his chin.
Hauch’s low rumbling crescendoed into a drunken roar. “Never you mind whose authority, you pockmarked son of a whore! And anyway, we can’t have vampires slaughtering—” He stopped short. A nearby group of inn goers hushed themselves and turned their anxious gaze on the constable. He lowered his voice and spoke through clenched teeth: “The killings can’t go on any longer! Not a single man, woman, child or pig more!”
“I hear ye hired five different hunters in the past three months, and not one of them has returned. Six now, counting the latest one. Good hunters, at that. What ye need is a proper hunting party. That’d be Marta’s boy, Kiril, Grigore, myself of course…”
The constable slammed his tankard down on the bar. “A hunting party in the middle of winter? There’s an idea!” He spat. “I have one for you: keep your nose out of official village business! And bring us another barrel of beer before we dry out in this sauna you call an inn!”
The innkeeper slapped his apron across his shoulder and pushed his way through the roiling sea of people. Yes, yes, another barrel of beer. Some cheese, if you have it. More bread, more wood on the fire, another room for the night! All this trouble, for what? A few more coins in his pocket? He patted his pocket tenderly. Dragos, old boy, what luck!
A group crowded around the long table didn’t budge as he drew closer to the window. They huddled around a bowl of something, Dragos couldn’t recall what, as if it were their last supper. For all they knew, it was. The wind howled. Dragos wiped a window pane with his round elbow and peeked out. He hadn’t seen any thing like it in at least a decade. In fact, he could barely see it at all: the whole town had been swallowed up by a sudden blizzard. Thatched roofs sagged under the weight of snow it never intended to bear. All he could make out of the church was the tip of its wooden spire, wobbling uneasily in the wind. It wouldn’t last long, taking a beating like this. It would be a shame if the gilded cross were to snap off, and become lost in the storm. A real shame.
A rival troupe of circus performers heaved their rucksacks onto the table, tearing Dragos’ away from his fantasy and the group at the far end of the table from their dinner. They said nothing to each other. One look was enough. That was mimes for you, he thought. The tension between them was so thick you could cut it with a spoon. That reminded him: the meat pies were just about ready. Dragos whistled, and a mousy young man slunk into the kitchen.
Dragos surveyed his domain with pride. He counted forty heads, at least. Some warmed themselves by the fireplace, others crowded around the bar. Despite the act of god whipping at the village outside, or maybe in spite of it, they seemed a happy lot. They were warm. They were singing songs and telling jokes and draining tankard after tankard of ale. They were in such high spirits that they didn’t even notice the door blow open. They didn’t see the hooded stranger with the knives strapped to his chest step out of storm and into the inn. And over the roar of laughter and lute, they didn’t hear the sack slung over his shoulder hit the floor with a sickening thud.
***
It took several long moments for a hush to fall over the inn. Hauch, for all his finely-tuned detective instincts, was the last to notice the sudden change in atmosphere. He turned slowly on his barstool to face the source of all this silence.
Something heavy landed at his feet and rolled underneath him. Hauch looked down, and two cloudy, red-rimmed eyes stared blankly up at him. So, it was going to be one of those nights. There was a scream from somewhere in the crowd, and another gestured wildly in the sign of the cross.
A hooded stranger stood at the center of the room.
“I’ll have the rest now, Hauch.” He said.
“It’s y-you!” The constable stammered.
“It’s me.”
The locals had never seen their dear constable so shaken. It was almost like he’d seen a ghost. That would be silly, of course: ghosts weren’t real. Even if they were, the constable wouldn’t be so lucky. Hauch patted his tunic desperately. The stranger closed the space between them, kicking aside the severed head with his boot. He grasped Hauch by the lapels.
“My god, stop!” Said no one. This was the best thing they’d seen all night.
Hauch suddenly found what we was looking for, and procured a small velvet bug. The stranger released him.
Hauch shook its contents into the palm of his hand. He counted the coins quickly at first, and proving difficult, decided to count them more carefully. His accuracy didn’t improve. The locals watched the scene play out with a pity and disappointment spread across their face, as if any of them knew how to count. “Two…three. No, one. Shit. Seven…”
The stranger snatched the purse from his Hauch’s hands and weighed it in his own. “This will do.”
“We agreed to sixty, did we not?”
“We agreed to sixty for one head, yes.” The constable didn’t follow, and neither did anyone in the inn. Thes stranger toed at the sack with his boot. The sack fell open, spilling its contents onto the floor. Three heads rolled into crowd in every direction. No child would leave the inn unscarred tonight. “I killed four. Here are your murderers.”
“And they’re all…vampires, master Sehun?” Hauch asked hesitantly. There was no point in being quiet about it now.
“It’s just Sehun. And yes. Of the lesser variety, mostly. They’re all bloodsuckers at the end of the day.” The stranger grasped one by its curls, lifting it high into the air for the crowd to see. Some gasped, some gave a thoughtful sigh, someone retched. “Here’s the leader of the pack.”
The inn goers, townspeople and tourists alike, watched slack-jawed and wide-eyed as he raised the creature’s lip with a gloved finger, revealing a series of sharp canines jutting out from the gums like shards of broken glass. This produced another round of gasps, sighs, and gagging. Not to be outdone, someone permitted themselves a yelp in surprise. It was truly unusual in this village for anyone to have that many teeth.
Hauch immediately felt the most sober he had been in a fortnight, at least. Four of them. He sniffed, and straightened up.
“And that’s the end of it? No more killing?” He asked.
Sehun smiled hideously. “There’s always more killing, Hauch. Always. The nest is clear, this little family eradicated, but when the snow melts in spring…who knows?”
The Mayor did his best impression of an accordion, shrinking in on himself and expanding atop the stool. Time to be a man, Ricard, he told himself. Take control of the situation! Give the people a sense of safety, security!
This hunter must have been part bloodhound, because he sniffed out the cowardly mayor immediately.
“I have a theory you won’t like, Mayor: there’s a Nosferat roaming the mountain range. Probably staked it’s claim to it, if you’ll excuse the expression. It’ll feed on horses, it’ll feed on sheep, it’ll feed on anything it can sink its teeth into, but what the Nosferat craves most is human blood. It’ll never taste anything as sweet, and it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get more.”
Oh, damn it all! Ricard sighed. Why can’t running a village ever be easy?
Constable Hauch pressed his lips into a tight line. It was one of his more exaggerated gestures, and one he reserved for several things, including disgust and impending incontinence. He didn’t know which it would be tonight. The Mayor’s beady eyes searched the room frantically. Every gaunt-faced, snaggletoothed patron suddenly had a starved, feral look in their eyes that he didn’t like. A red-haired maiden with skin like a freshly peeled apple suddenly looked a shade too pale for normal, even for the dead of winter. Every freckle, every pair of blue eyes seemed suspicious.
Sehun continued: “…and so it travels from village to village, feeding and leaving a trail of new vampires in its wake, like our friend here.”
He tossed the severed head into the crowd and didn’t even flinch when it hit the stones with a crunch. A little less force next time, he reminded himself. More gagging.
“New vampires?” Hauch stammered.
Sehun took a seat on an empty stool and loosened the bandolier around his chest. He gestured to the innkeeper, who seemed to understand him wordlessly and scurried into the kitchen. “Yes, new vampires. Do you think they just pop up out of the ground? Oh, no, my friend. Vampires are born.”
The Mayor stopped prosecuting the patrons for a moment to ask a very important question: “Like babies?”
The hunter flashed his dreadful smile once more, and the Mayor was relieved to see that at least his teeth were straight and not the least bit sharp. “Exactly. You see, there are two main varieties of lesser vampires in this part of the world. First, there’s the moroi.” The stranger nodded toward a fleshy lump of brown hair. One of the acrobats from the circus troupe gave it a swift kick and recoiled. A pink mouth, pink eyes, bone-white skin revealed themselves. “A moroi is born when another vampire, maybe a moroi or a strigoi, bites a human. Strigoi are born from a Nosferat’s bite. The victim, bled but not tapped dry, endures their agonizing metamorphosis over the course of several days. The most unlucky bastards suffer for up to a week. They sleep through it, mostly. So soundly, in fact, you would think they’re dead. By the time they’ve turned, you’ve already buried them six feet deep and their grave is littered with those little white flowers I see growing all over the countryside. It’s a horrible way to go, really. Choking on dirt in the dark. When they finally break through the earth…well, you can imagine how they might feel.”
“But that’s not likely how babies are born at all…” The Major said.
“Enough!” Hauch pressed his fingers into his temples. “Moroi, strigoi, Nosferatu…”
“Nosferat.” Sehun corrected.
“Yes, yes. You think it’s lurking up there,” He gestured to the mountains towering over the village, or roughly where they would be if you could see anything through the blizzard raging outside the inn. “In the mountains? Why?”
“Because there’s no shortage of food, constable. Because it’s easy. Because these dreadful peaks in the throes of a winter storm that wraps whole villages in a blanket of snow means that you all have no choice but to wait here for weeks until it thaws even a little. Because in the spring and summer, adventurous and trusting children will tumble into the forests at the foot of the mountains…”
“Little Magda…”
“Because green shepherds still struggle to navigate the winding roads nestled in the foothills.” The stranger took a generous sip of ale. “Because the one thing a Nosferat can count on in this world is that humans believe they’re at the top of the food chain, and that they can conquer anything. It’s hubris that will get you all killed.”
Sehun leaned toward Hauch. The Mayor insinuated himself at the center of their impromptu huddle.
“You don’t want any more blood on your hands. You need a professional, someone who can hunt this Nosferat and slay it where it sleeps before it can spread its evil further.”
“You could be lying!” Hauch shouted.
“After all I’ve done to help you, Hauch, I would hope you’d have a better impression of me.”
“Piotr,” the Mayor tugged the constable’s sleeve, “Piotr, we should consider this little…theory of his. We’ve lost six people. Who knows how many more vampires have been…born. And to think, when the buttercups start to peak their delicate little heads out from beneath the snow, there may be even more bloody vampires!”
Hauch pawed at his stubbly chin. “What do you want, then, hunter?”
“I’ll take two-hundred. Seventy-five now. The rest when I delivered the Nosferat.”
“That’s outrageous! No. No! It’ll be one-hundred or nothing at all.”
“Then it’ll be nothing at all.” The stranger folded his hands in his lap. The innkeeper filled his tankard to the brim. He couldn’t hide his smirk.
The Mayor steepled his fingers. “Ah, master hunter, sir, you must understand. The winter has been especially hard on our little village, and not just because of the vampires! There was the fire, maybe you heard? Then, no less than ten sows were taken by a virulent plague that swept through the hog house!”
“It’s true! Took me best hog!” Came a voice from the crowd.
“If we’re not careful, our little village’s meager coffers will dry up…and then we’ll have a whole other matter on our hands."
“I understand, Mayor. It’s really no problem at all. This Nosferat doesn’t care about your coffers, it doesn’t care about hogs or whatever nonsense you can conjure up. When the next village over loses a child, or a few pigs, they’ll issue a contract for the head of one vampire, and I’ll gladly accept. But it’s just one vampire, and the next village will face the same conundrum you’re faced with now. They’ll twiddle their thumbs raw trying to put a price on each little life. Tell me, Mayor…when the vampire makes off with your wife, what will you be willing to pay then? What’s the price of that life?”
***
It was settled, finally, after much haggling. Sehun couldn’t be more pleased with the arrangement. Hauch's full purse rested on the counter beside him.
He raised his empty tankard. “This isn’t bad at all, mister…?”
“I’m called Dragos, friend.”
The fire had begun to die, and the storm shook the windows so hard Dragos thought they might shatter. This is the man that stepped out of that blinding, frozen chaos and plunged the village into a new nightmare. One with glowing crimson eyes, and teeth like blades, making off with pigs and children and wives and whatnot. Legion of them. A daisy chain of monsters lining the hills and erupting from the shadows.
Dragos shuddered. He didn’t know if he should fear or respect this stranger. There was no harm in both. He eyed the heads on the floor. What struck him the most was the delicacy of it…the cuts to the neck, that is. Like a surgeon. This was a dangerous man.
“Dragos, I think I’d like to stay a while. How quickly can you prepare a bath? A hot bath, as hot as the water your wife uses to dye her skirts?”
Dragos didn’t have a wife, but he understood the man’s request well enough. “Within the hour.” He waved at two of the barmaids, who hurried upstairs with armfuls of firewood.
“Excellent.” Sehun emptied a few of the coins from Hauch’s purse onto the bar, and push them across. “This should cover it.”
Dragos smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. It would more than cover it. Tonight was a terrible, terrible night. He selfishly hoped there would be many more like it this year. Maybe those damn vampires would bring tourists, or thrill-seekers looking to catch one of their own. Did this man have other hunter friends with deep pockets and a generous disposition?
Sehun loosened his bandolier a notch and leaned forward on his stool. “I’m starving, Dragos. Anything left in the kitchen I can help myself to?”
Dragos counted the coins, fully enamored. They were nice, regular coins. Not too clipped. And best off all: they were Hauch’s. “You can help yourself to whatever you like. A crock of stew, a loaf of bread…a pitcher of ale?”
“I like the way you think, Dragos,” Sehun said.
He vaulted over the bar with practiced ease. Dragos did tell him to help himself, and Sehun had no qualms with doing just that. He found the kitchen tucked at the back of the inn. It was empty, but very much alive: pots bubbled over, flames licked at a cauldron filled with…something. There was food, and that’s all he cared about.