Chapter 12

November Twenty-first

Shortly after Balathu and Iltana left the small house with their grisly cargo, another figure approached the door. He was short, barely three inches over five feet in height, and thin almost to the point of emaciation. The severe lines of his face were complemented by a large, aquiline nose. His name was Marcus.

Although Balathu had locked the door behind him, it fell open at Marcus's touch. Stepping inside, he shut the door behind him. His eyes closed as he thoroughly searched the house in an instant with expanded senses. It was as he feared, nothing remained to reveal the fledglings' purpose or the identity of their master.

He had felt two of them enter the city the night before, an ability he had gained in the past few centuries. The Great Mother had explained it as like calling to like; the alien cells that made up an ever greater part of him recognizing their kin. So far, he could only feel the presence of others of his kind from a range of a few miles. Mother had once told him that she could sense every last vampire in the world. He had no reason to doubt her.

When he had risen this evening, there had been a third fledgling, no doubt the former owner of this house and a policeman, if the pictures on the shelf above the television were any indication. Dusk had still not turned to night when they had dispersed throughout the city. He had waited patiently for them to converge yet again. They had done so only a few hours before.

Not realizing that there was any reason for urgency, Marcus had dawdled on his way to confront them. He had even paused to watch two drunken men in expensive business suits fight artlessly outside a high end drinking establishment, cheered on by a crowd of onlookers. It always amused him to see just how thinly the veneer of civilization covered the savage beasts within.

He had been greatly surprised to discover that the only one still standing at the house was one of Utu's vampire hunters, one wielding Buzur Ud Ug no less. He had not encountered either a hunter or the ancient weapon since the fourteenth century in Venice during the height of the plague. At the time, he had been less than four hundred years old and still bonded to Mother. She had opened the hunter's gut with the holy weapon and made him eat his own liver. Afterwards she had contemptuously cast Sun's Anger into one of the canals. He had assumed that the sect and the sword, like so much else that he had known, were no longer anything more than memory and dust.

While apparently not extinct, his casual exploration of the boy's memory had revealed the Order to be on its last legs. Mother had pronounced his mastery of the zi as barely adequate, but he could do things beyond the imagining of any of the so called Masters the boy had known. The boy was a prime example: he had been sent out into the world with their most treasured artifact and yet he could not even make a plant grow without an incantation.

He wondered how the ancient religious order had formed such ridiculous notions concerning his kind. The thought of factions among his kin nearly made him laugh. While a few maintained distant friendships, he had never known any to work together without the presence of the bond.

He found the idea that the Gift made one evil offensive. Yes, the hunger required that he feed on life, but, other than the human element, that was no more evil than eating the flesh of animals. Even the human element didn't trouble him much. More people had died in single skirmishes over wealth, land or fine points of religious doctrine than his kind had killed throughout all of history. In his experience, any evil that existed after the Gift was received had already been present in life. While Mother did select children who were arrogant and had a self centered view of the world, she had, with a few notable exceptions, managed to avoid true psychopaths.

One subject on which he did agree with the hunter was that it would be a mistake to let the city's authorities know that there were again vampires among them. Balathu's efforts in that regard had been meager at best. The living room carpet was sodden with blood and gore, and several items had been broken during the brief fight. Marcus gestured, and the mostly congealed blood streamed up from the floor to form a globe that floated in the air at close to eye level. He stepped close to it and inhaled deeply before dipping a finger into the surface and bringing it to his mouth. The smell and taste revealed that none of the fledglings had been more than a few weeks old, though he had already guessed that from the ease with which they had been dispatched.

He walked the orb to the bathroom and caused it to descend into the toilet bowl. He flushed several times until the bowl was clean. Returning to the living room, he ran his hands along the broken leg of a coffee table and a cracked picture frame. When he was finished, there was no evidence that the damage had ever existed.