Psychiatry

Suffolk Mental Home: Patient Study

Patient no: 54

Name: Rendal Phibes Bathory

Gender: Female
Age: 25
Height: 5'7
Hair: Dark Brown
Eyes: Hazel
Genes: Caucasian

Blood type: A

Condition: Complex schizophrenia since childhood.

Attendant: Adam Smith.

 He’s giving me those nasty drugs again! I have to swallow, I don’t want to choke; even if I’m Loony-tunes, I don’t want to choke! I want to bite him! Bite bite bite!

Why? Why is he doing this? Why can’t he leave me alone?

 I feel so…so fuzzy! I can’t bite anymore, can’t even move! Why does this always happen? Go away, Smith, go away!

 But you won’t! You won’t go away! You keeping coming and taking my clothes off and touching me and then you touch me down there and I try to scream and scream and scream…

 But there’s something you don’t know, Smith! Not you, and not the nurses, and not stupid, stupid Doctor Pentecost! I have a secret! Even in this place, in this place where I’m never alone, I have a secret, Smith!

 And that secret will get you! It will rip you open and tear out your insides! It’ll make you sorry you were ever born! It’ll destroy you! Because I hate you, Smith! Yes, it’ll really get you!

“Oh, Smith will have to go, of course. Completely perverted; if I have anything to do with it he’ll never find work in social care again-”

 “What about her?”

 “What about her? Not much we can do now, is there?”

 “Not much we can do? Sir, if this gets out there’ll be a scandal! We’ll be shut down!”

 “Oh, honestly, Clarke, get a little perspective! With all those attacks by those psychopaths who think they’re vampires, I hardly think the country’s going to take notice of a mental patient who’s been knocked up by her attendant.”

“So what happens when the child’s born? She can’t take care of it.”

 “Is her condition hereditary?”

 “Not as far as the records and her family history show. She’s a one-off.”

“Then we’ll put it up to be adopted. Discreetly. Agreed?”

“Yes, sir.”

 “She won’t like it, Pentecost.”

 “Then she doesn’t have to know.”

I won’t let them take my baby! My baby, my baby, I won’t let them take you! Not Smith, not the doctors, not the nurses, nobody!

I’ll kill them first!

 “Any damage to be seen from Smith’s abuse?”

 “Apparently not, sir. She has at least stopped talking to herself. But, sir-”

 “What is it?”

 “Now it seems she’s talking to the baby.”

 See, I’m going to tell you a secret, baby! I know they want to take you away from me when I have you; but don’t worry, I won’t let them take you away from your mummy! It’ll just be us, just you and me; and we won’t have any nasty hurty nurses or doctors coming between us! And if we do – I’ll kill them, and I’ll teach you to kill them, so you don’t need to worry about that!

I’ll tell you another secret – I’m going to get you a present! I’ll tell one of the nurses I want a teddy bear for you! I’ll even make sure that I don’t jerk around too much, even when I really want to, so that they won’t tie me up, and they can trust me with a teddy! I’ll keep it for you, keep it all the while I’m carrying you! I’ll let you cuddle it through my tummy, yes, I will! I will get that teddy for you, my sweet, sweet baby, if it’s the last thing I do!

 Now, what shall we call the teddy? I know, I know! You don’t mind me giving it a name, do you, baby? No, of course you don’t! We’ll call it Freddy, because it rhymes! How do you like that, baby? Freddy the Teddy! Yes, it’ll be three of us, me and you and Freddy the Teddy, and no one will ever hurt us or harm us again, no they won’t!

 I love you, baby! I love you so much!

 So much!

“A toy? For the child? It hasn’t even been three months yet!”

 “Yes sir, but do you think that she knows that?”

 “Ah, good point. Oh well, I can’t see that it will do any harm. But don’t leave it with her all the time, and make sure you watch her all the time she has it, just in case she tries to swallow it. Makes sure it’s not too big, and not too small.”

 “Yes, sir. Apparently, she says she’s going to call it Freddy.”

 “Freddy the Teddy? Good grief. Well, she might as well enjoy it while she has the time.”

 Don’t worry, though, baby! I’ll get Freddy for both of us, so we can cuddle him together! And when I have you, we’ll all escape together! They think they’ll take you and Freddy away from me, but I won’t let that happen! You remember I said I’d kill them before they did that, and I haven’t forgotten, baby! I haven’t, I tell you! I’ll get us out, and I’ll them, and then we’ll all live together and be happy and safe forever!

 Here, baby, I’m holding Freddy now! Can you feel him? He’s waving his little paws! He’s saying hello! He’s saying hello to you, baby! Say hello, Freddy! Say hello to baby! He says he loves you baby! But I bet he can’t love you as much as I do! Your mummy loves you, baby! Your mummy loves you!

 Can you feel me hugging you, baby? I’m hugging you so hard now, my baby! I’m not hugging myself, I’m hugging you! You’re a part of me, and I’ll never let you go! I’ll never let them take you and Freddy away, never, never, never!

“Tell them to keep an eye out. There have been reports of more of these strange attacks. Keep an eye on the patients as well; some of them have been acting oddly.”

 “More oddly than usu-”

 “Oh…my…god.”

 “Start running, blood bag.”

 “Rendal! Rendal! Oh ,God, are you there? Rendal, let me in, let me in!”

 The door’s locked, doctor! I’m talking to baby!

 “Unlock the door! For the love of God, unlock the door! Please, God, Rendal!”

 The door’s locked on your side, dumbo! Even I know that!

 “Ren – Ren-”

 He is screaming a lot, isn’t he, baby? I wonder why? Don’t worry, baby, mummy and Freddy are here! Freddy’s waving his little paws, he can’t wait to see you, baby! Ignore the screams, baby! The doctor’s just having fun!

 “Who the hell’s that in there?”

 Language in front of the baby! Don’t you swear! That’s not nice!

 Where’s the doctor?

 “Oh, was this wanker a doctor? Didn’t do him much good.”

 “Eww, he tastes of chemicals and stuff! Yuck!”

 I told you, don’t swear in front of the baby! And put doctor’s head back on! He looks terrible like that!

 “What’s this bitch talking about? What’s she mean by a baby?”

 “Hel-lo, she’s nuts? It’s a mental asylum, for crap’s sake.”

 “Ah, who cares? Maybe she’ll taste better than that slob.”

 Don’t touch me! You mustn’t touch me! I’m in a delicate condition!

 “Yeah? We’ll see just how delicate!”

 Don’t you touch me! Get off, get off, get off, leave us alone! Now look what you’ve done, you’ve made me drop Freddy! Get off! Get-

off…

 Something’s happened. Something’s gone – or come back.

 My cheek’s sticking to the floor with something. I put out my arms, push myself up off the floor, put my fingers to my cheek, they come away dark red. It’s blood. I can feel it all over me. It’s making my clothes stick to me. It’s making my hair stick to my scalp. I’m covered in blood.

 Doctor’s lying not far away. His head’s lying near him. He still looks surprised at what’s happened to him. And sitting next to him are the two who broke in, the blue-haired girl who was licking what was left of doctor’s arm, and the red-haired man who bit me in the neck. The girl’s sitting on the man’s lap, and she’s taken her top off, and he’s playing around with her breasts and kissing them and kissing her throat, just like Smith did to me…

 Where’s baby? Where are you, baby? You’re gone! You were here, in me, and now you’ve gone! Where have you gone? Where are you, baby?

 I stand up, slowly – I feel sick. I take a step towards them. My foot lands in something, and it squishes.

 “Where’s baby?” I ask.

 They both look over at me like they’re surprised I’m standing up. The man mutters “Well, shit.” The girl scowls at me, like she hates me, though she’s the one who came bursting in and killed the doctor.

The girl says, “I thought you took enough of her blood to kill her?”

The man says, “Apparently not enough. Must have bled into her mouth by mistake. Never mind, she looks quite hot like that.”

 The girl says, “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

 “Where’s my baby?” I ask, loudly, so that they can understand me. What have they done with you? Where are you, baby?

 The girl smiles at me, not in a nice way.

 She says, “Looks like you’re standing in it, love.”

 I look down. My legs are bare, my pants are gone, there’s red running down my thighs, down to my feet, and I’m standing in some sort of strange mass of blood, I’m standing in-

 I’m standing in you.

 On the floor is you. My future.

My baby.

 I’ve trodden you into the padded floor.

Baby.

 Freddy’s lying on the floor, soaked in you.

 Baby.

You’re squashed into a goop under my feet.

Baby.

 “Tough break,” the girl says.

 I look back up at them.

 “You killed my baby,” I say.

 The man shrugs.

 “Hey, how was I to know you were pregnant? Turning must have booted it right out of your system. (1) It sprayed all over me as well, just as I was pulling your pants down. Disgusting.”

“You killed my baby.”

 “Your point?” The girl smirks at me, as if I can do nothing.

“You killed my baby.”

 I reach across and grab the girl by the neck with both hands. I only pull a little, but her head comes off really easily, easier than if it had been Freddy. The man jerks away, shoving her body off his lap, screaming “What the hell?” I drop the girl’s head, grab hold of the door, pull it off its hinges, swing it at him even as he tries to run, knock him to the ground; before he can get up I’m swinging the heavy door at his head again and again, squishing his head until it’s a sticky mush, spreading out all over the floor, and he’s stopped struggling, like a headless chicken.

 They’re broken.

 You’re broken.

Baby.

 I fall to my knees. I land in you. Baby. My baby. You’re gone.

 No! You’re not gone! You’re not gone! I’ll take you back into me! We can try again! This time, this time, I’ll keep you safe! I’ll keep you in me!

 Here you are, baby. Come back into me. Let me take you back in.

I pick you up in handfuls, baby, I cram you into my mouth, I swallow. I feel you travel down into my stomach, and as you do I feel new strength in me. I know it’s going to be all right. You’ll grow again in me, and we’ll be together, with Freddy, all three of us, together forever.

 I rip up the padding that you’ve soaked into, I squeeze you back into my mouth. I suck you out of my pants, out of my top, out of Freddy, squeezing and sucking until he’s bone dry. I lick my feet, my legs, and further up now I can reach; my arms, hands, under my finger nails, my toenails. I lick up every single little part of you, not missing one drop, one stain. I even suck you off the man’s hands from where you hit him when you were lost. But you won’t be lost again.

 There! You’re back, my baby! You’re back in my tummy! Are you glad to be home? I’m glad you’re back! Look, baby, look! The door’s open! We can leave! Let me just pick up Freddy, and we’ll leave! And then-

 Where to then?

 We won’t stay here. We don’t have to. Doctor’s dead, he can’t stop us anymore. No one can stop us anymore. I can pull my pants on, and pick up Freddy, and step out the door, and then we can go wherever we want, do whatever we want to do. Even if you’re never born, baby, we’ll still be together, always. You give me strength, baby.

I love you so much!

 I never even gave you a name

(1)   According to Sarah, if a pregnant woman is bitten by a vampire, there’s a chance that the baby will be born a very vampiric dhampire; but it’s far more likely that the woman will just loose the baby. Since Ren was in the very early stages of her pregnancy, the sudden shock to her body as she Turned caused her to have an abrupt, and rather messy, miscarriage.

Chapter One: The Fractured Girl

 Cain was mad. Everyone had always agreed about that. They had agreed about it two hundred years before, when he had been Colin and he had been the strange, odd one in the village whom no one had quite dared drive out; and they agreed it now when he made abnormally sharp, dangerous, and at the same time incredibly beautiful weapons. The only things that had really changed were his name and the people who agreed about him. Once it had been humans. Now it was vampires. There were no humans left around his humble little cottage to agree anything about him.

 Cain, unlike many mad people, knew he was mad, and he didn’t let it trouble him or make any effort to hide it. It made things a whole lot easier than when he had been sane; frankly he preferred to forget the times when he had been sane, or at least saner. Insanity gave him license to do whatever he wanted. When you were sane, if you did perfectly justified things like slap a stupid fledgling’s teeth out because he’d touched your half-finished work, people gave you odd looks – not that he had minded the odd looks so much, if at all; but if people stood around staring at him all the time, nothing would ever get done. Being mad made things much simpler, and allowed him to get on with what was really important – which was making weapons – without having to worry about things like manners and decency and conversation and propriety, which everyone else spent far too much time fussing over, he found.

 Regularity, however, could never be fussed over enough. Regularity measured out his existence. Regularity and exactness in his actions – those were far more important than any other factor in life.

 And that was why he was here, at the bank of the little river that flowed near the now empty village, as he was every morning, on the dot, at the crack of dawn, when the sun practically grazed the top of the hills, preparing to spill out upon the land and scorch any unwitting vampire still out to ashes and dust. He ran an admitted risk; but risk was meaningless to him. So long as he brought water warmed by the first pangs of the light of the sun back to his forge, nothing would go wrong. Nothing.

 He carried the large pail that a human male would have struggled to lift with both arms effortlessly the last few paces, to the bank of the river…

…only to find that the space from where he normally drew water was this morning occupied.

 He hadn’t seen the girl before, if the slight figure was female at all. His mind, fractured as it was, could not recall this particular form, squatting ion the dim light, amongst any of the many vampires who came to him, requesting swords or maces or knives to cut and slice and smash their human prey - and occasionally each other - into pieces. In any case, all of his customers dressed impeccably elegantly. None of them would wear something like this, a pair of stained grey leggings and a matching, slightly shapeless, long-sleeved top, both of which had clearly seen better days. And none of them would let their hair grow so stained and stiff that it stuck up in clumps and spikes from their head – or if they did, then it would be with blood and not with dirt.

 He had not slowed in his pace. He never slowed; he always walked straight up to the river, stopping only at the very edge, and not even an intruder, a very out of place intruder, would stop him now. So he walked on, even as his senses were screaming this was not right, this was wrong, it shouldn’t be.

 The figure heard his approach, and straightened at once from its crouch over the river side to look up and around, right at him. A part of his mind that was still intact enough to appreciate such a thing (if appreciate was really the right word) was impressed by the madness that was so evident in the girl’s face; the set of her teeth visible between her lips, the flare of her nostrils as she drew in breath after harsh breath, and most of all her eyes, not so much eyes as two tiny black pin-pricks in the white circles in her face, but pin-pricks that nevertheless managed to nail him to the spot.

 There was silence on the river bank. Not even a bird chirped. There were no birds left to sing.

 Cain was the one to adapt to the situation first, and took another step forward, the heavy pail swinging at his side, one edge casually grinding a track in the earth beside him. The female turned around further, her eyes never leaving him, allowing him to see what she held tightly in her grasp.

 It was a stuffed toy; something Cain vaguely recalled being known as a teddy bear. He remembered seeing human children carrying them around, even when new fangled technology had come in and fried the brains of the adolescents far faster than his own mind had decayed. As far as he remembered, grown women had never held them so close, so dear.

He took another step forward. The girl leaned further over the toy, clutching it to her shallow breast, and growled like a dog – another animal he could not recall seeing in a while. Her eyes narrowed further, if that were possible. She shifted backwards on her haunches, perhaps preparing to flee, or to spring.

 He walked straight up to the space on the bank, which she had recently vacated, and without casting a second glance at her dipped the pail into the water. But as the pail filled, he did something he had never done before while filling it; he looked away, and scrutinized the woman out of the corner of his eye.

 She seemed to have abandoned her hostile air, and even her awareness of his presence. She was singing softly; crooning something akin to a lullaby, but it didn’t seem that she was addressing the bear. She rocked back and forth on her heels, and while one hand still held the toy tight over her heart, the other slipped down, to flew its fingers out over and below her stomach. From what he could see of her eyes, the tiny black points looked completely lost.

 The weight on his hand told him that the pail was full, even if his eyes were not on it. He lifted it up, brimming with water. He turned to his left – which the way he always turned when he was coming back from fetching the water – and found himself facing the girl again. As if in accordance to his movement, her hand abruptly came up to clasp the bear again, as she raised her head to look around at him.

 As Cain looked down at her, close enough to see that her eyes were not in fact black, but some shade that his decayed artist’s mind could only classify as ‘vermillion’, she stared back up at him from her crouch. Something appeared to spark in her damaged brain, and she folded her arms around the stuffed toy, holding it close to her, tucked under her chin, as if she would never release it again; like a little girl clinging onto her favourite toy.

 And perhaps such a posture would look sweet on such a child, but even to Cain’s warped brain it increased the aura of insanity that lurked around this strange, inexplicably broken young woman. This was only enhanced by what was probably her idea of a lovely smile; a grin displaying her recently grown fangs that would have made any sane person back slowly and cautiously away, let alone run for it.

 But Cain, after all, was mad.

 He was also more than averagely graceful for a vampire, which was why he was more than easily able to carry both the pail in his right hand – the hand he always used to carry the pail back in – and balance the girl slung over his left shoulder, while she carried on a conversation with the bear; apparently completely oblivious of anything around her, even the fact that she was upside down, but for the toy she repeatedly called ‘Freddy’.  

*

The two discovered a fair amount about each other in the next few weeks. For example, Cain discovered, at the cost of two fingers and a thumb, that the girl did not appreciate him trying to pry the toy bear away from her so that he could clean her up. She in turn discovered, at the cost of quite a large piece of her left cheek, that Cain did not appreciate being incapacitated for several hours while he waited for his digits to regenerate, particularly when there was a rather large order of swords he needed to complete.

 After several days in which he worked out a new system for his schedule to accommodate the venture, he looted the remaining shops that had not been destroyed in the attack that had scourged the village, for clothes for her to wear – since he strived for perfection in everything around him, he did not long tolerate the garments she was wearing when he had found her. He took some small pleasure in seeing that she looked fairly presentable (save for her eyes, there was nothing he could do about her eyes) once he had managed to persuade her to shed her old clothes and bathe, and that took a great while indeed.

 It took a great deal longer for him to find out who his new companion actually was, apart from being perhaps even madder than he was. It was a fortnight before he managed to get her to speak to something other than the bear, and another fortnight before he actually learnt her name. And it was for lack of trying, since both sides of the conversation disdained to speak when it did not suit them to do so at that point, or were easily distracted by things like odd flies that seemed to survive when nothing else did in this barren, dead place, and went buzz buzz and then squish; or had better things to do, like work for days on end upon a certain weapon pausing neither for rest nor for blood that was not drunk much in any case, or make a tea party for Freddy out of shoulder pads and shields and cut up slabs of blood jelly for cake; and each expected the other to be able to pick up a conversation weeks from where it had abruptly left off, and became angry when the other could not follow their thread of mangled reasoning.

 But – eventually – Rendal and Freddy settled into life in Cain’s now nameless house. Through extreme work and extreme idleness on both sides, Cain learnt of the girl’s history, or at least enough of it; and it comforted him to know that he at least was not alone in being constricted by a madness that was born within his own mind, rather than because of his Turning.

*

He always shut her in the attic when customers came, because he knew that while they tolerated him, they would not tolerate two mad vampires in the same house; when he could barely tolerate her himself sometimes. He had feared in an odd, disjointed way that she would protest, but to his surprise she never objected. In fact, she took to grabbing the makeshift tea set she had made for herself whenever she knew visitors were coming, and running up the stairs, waiting in the doorway for him to lock it behind her.

 “I’m used to being locked up,” she told him once, in a rare moment of clarity that she soon forgot. “And I like attics. I think we had one in our house, when I was little.”

 But just because she was upstairs did not mean she could not listen. So she could hear all his select customers talked about in the rooms below; about the fall of London, about the blood baths that had soaked the streets of the great capital of the humans; about the massacres that were spreading across America, Europe, Asia. All over the world, the hidden species was at last truly showing its claws, and Cain’s visitors wanted to show theirs as well, albeit in a far more stylish manner, as befitting the future vampire chiefs and empresses. As a result they were willing to pay exorbitant prices for his handiwork, and describe in detail what they would do with them to humans and their own kind alike, in their desire to carve their niche into the new world.

 Cain listened to them and heated his forge as they delved into a madness of their very own, and then created weapons to fuel that madness. If he was mad, then should not the world become mad around him? Humans were mad with fear, his own kind was mad on blood, and he was mad inside his own head. One great world of madness. And one especially mad person upstairs in his attic.

 “I wish he were dead,” he said once, after a particularly over-enthusiastic vampire chief had left, full of praise about the twin swords he had received in return for the payment of blood he had brought, ‘still hot from the tap’, and full of the desire to test them out on whatever human was unlucky enough to annoy him. Rendal had paid no attention, as she glutted herself on the windfall of crimson warmth that flowed from the special preserving jars that Cain did not touch. It wasn’t until later that evening that she picked up the conversation, which was remarkably quick for her.

 “Why?”

 “Why what?” He was already working on his next piece, a commissioned axe for an up and coming prince in the south of Spain, but he had adjusted to Rendal enough that by now he could work and talk to her as he planned.

 “Why do you wish he was dead?”

 “Because he’s a fool. If he goes around killing humans and spilling their blood all over the place, soon there won’t be any humans left, and where will we all be then? In the dog house, that’s where. Blood can only go so far before it runs out. If the next person who comes in here starts talking about how many humans he’s going to kill, I shall finish the weapon he wants and then stick it through his head.”

 Rendal considered this, her knees drawn up to her chin and Freddy resting in the gap between. “So if I went and killed lots of humans, would you stick a weapon through my head?”

 “Yes,” he said, without pause.

 “Oh.” She considered further; for her, this was practically a miracle. “Cain?”

 “Yes?”

 “How many humans does it take to fill a bathtub?”

 Cain managed to remember what she meant by this, since their discussion about their names when they had first been introduced properly, that being about three months after they first met. Being asked if he was named after the first murderer, he asked if she was named after a certain countess who bathed in blood to remain young, and the idea had stuck in Ren’s mind like some ideas just somehow seemed to do.

 “Two if you’re being quick. One if you’re thorough and hang them upside down first, so they’ll drain.”

 From that time on, she always ate less of the blood that was brought to him, and instead used the rest of her share as moisturiser. Others might have been repulsed; but to the both of them it made such perfect sense.

*

After two years together, the customers, who had never been particularly plentiful in numbers in any case, suddenly stopped coming altogether. Cain was not alarmed – he knew what this absence of business meant; just because he was mad did not mean he was stupid as well – but Rendal, who spent her days in her own little world of Freddy and examining the knives Cain made and Freddy and talking to some other person Cain had never been able to identify and Freddy and blood and Freddy, couldn’t understand it, for all that she had heard through the floorboards. Her madness had destroyed some of her naivety and innocence, and kept other parts of it miraculously intact.

 She kept peppering Cain with questions and inquiries, the longest she had kept her mind on any one thing, until she had been distracted by the red lights in the south, which Cain had been aware of for weeks.

 “Cain, what’re those big shiny lights over there?”

  He came to stand beside her, and looked along her pale, bare arm, to where he knew London lay, and the humans were fighting a last battle, that he knew they could not win.

 “Look well, Rendal. Those lights are a world, ending at last.”

*

He knew the exact date that she requested to become his apprentice, since it was the night that the lights in the south had finally died away. He had come into the forge, and found her standing by the iron rack, holding Freddy to her breast with one hand, which she did whenever she was particularly thoughtful, and fingering the raw iron he used for his blades with the other. When she told him what she wanted, he had grabbed her by the leg and thrown her out of the window – he had never even allowed her in the forge by herself, let alone considered letting her make anything – but even as he heard the glass shatter and her land with a painful thud outside with some pleasure, he was already considering what she had said.

 When she limped back inside, still clutching the bear after all that, her smile that widened despite her lacerations only ensured his decision.

*

The first thing that she made, after only a week of training – for her mind had been uncommonly set for perhaps the first time since he had known her – was a sword. After watching him make dozens effortlessly, she focused all her manna as she had not since she had been turned.

 She mixed the alloy in the fires. She shaped the blade, pouring her fractured, mended will into the steel to be as straight and true as it possibly could. She attached the blade to the handle. She plunged it into the pail of sun-warmed water that she had hauled from the river. She laid it upon the finishing block.

 It was her first sword. Compared to the ones he made, it was not exactly superb. It was not even especially good. But it was her first sword.

 They looked from the sword to each other. Then they grinned like the lunatics they were. Rendal seized Freddy, and danced around the forge. Cain jigged in a fashion he thought he had forgotten. The two vampires danced together, and the bear danced between them, and they were deliciously, wonderfully happy, and wonderfully insane.

 When they had calmed a little, Cain took the sword and led Ren up into the attic, to a chest the younger vampire had never seen before, or perhaps just had never noticed. He opened it, and reverentially lifted aside the black silk that lay within, to reveal the very first sword he had made; something more likely to be worn by a cavalry-officer than the double-handed broad sword Ren’s creation resembled.

 Under his instruction, Ren laid her sword by his, to be covered by black silk once more. The sword would never be used.

 Over the next few years, Rendal would make many more swords. But, just as with her first, flawed creation, like him, she could never find perfection in what she did. The curse had claimed her as well.

*

One evening, Cain sent Rendal to get the water instead of him. By this time, they had worked out a meticulous rota – she would get the water in the mornings, and he would fetch it in the evenings. This was primarily because Rendal was easily distracted by watching the sunsets, which she claimed were far more beautiful than sunrises, and she would waste hours of the night watching the moonlight on the stream. But now, he was glad it would take her so long.

 He still wouldn’t say he cared for her, even after so many years, but he could no longer deny that a master should look after his apprentice. And he had looked after her. If he had not found her that very day, more than two decades before now, who knew what might have happened to her, who knew what fate might have been hers? She might have gone further south, and been wiped out in the battles that had scourged much of southern England. She might have been killed by a gang of humans or vampires alike. He felt responsible for her. And he would not let her suffer his inevitable fate.

 He heard a step ringing on the path outside, and bent over the sword. It was finished, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make a few last minute adjustments before it was taken. He only hoped it would be retrieved. But, alas, there would be nothing he could do about that.

 Face it, like the madman you are.

 Face, it, don’t give in.

 He could not help gritting his teeth as he felt the sword plunge through his back.

Interlude One

 I carry the pail up the path, towards the house. I know I’ve taken a long time, but the sparkly lights on the water were so pretty! I love the light of the sun on the water when it’s setting, especially when it’s a red night – it reminds me of all the blood Cain lets me drink, and the red light fading to the moon’s white shine reminds me of my smoothy smooth skin after I’ve washed off the blood; and it reminds me of you, baby, the last time I saw you, before I took you back to keep you safe. Watching the sun sparkles until they finally die away, even into the darkness that’s always and always there in the corners of my eyes, makes me feel even closer to you, baby; closer even than you being in my tummy.

 Of course, it makes me hungry as well, but I’m sure you don’t mind, do you? I need to drink a lot, so you’ll always be big and strong and smart! But don’t worry, we’re nearly home, and then we’ll see Freddy again! Won’t he be happy to see us? And we’ll have a nice long drink of blood, and then Cain says I can forge another sword! I can’t wait to try it out on something, preferably something soft so I can hear it go squish! I can smell the blood already, we’re going to have such a fun night and the door’s open and there’s an arm lying on the porch.

 I think it’s Cain’s.

 The blood I can smell already is his.

 I walk forward, the arm is beckoning to me, and its first finger is curled invitingly.

 I feel you kick within me, baby; the queasy kick of an empty womb.

 I step over the arm, only to see something even more terrible. Freddy!

 Freddy.

 Freddy’s lying in two pieces near the door, like much of the stuff in the hall that’s been broken or trashed, his little eyes looking at us for help that wasn’t there, his stitched mouth straining for the scream that won’t come. We left him behind, once, and we didn’t come in time to save him.

 They broke him.

 They didn’t have to do that!

 I want desperately to stop, to tell myself that that’s enough, that I don’t want to see what comes next, but the smell of blood is drawing me on.

Don’t be scared, baby! I’m here for you!

 The forge is a mess. The place has been trashed, there’s things lying all over the place in pieces. The weapons have been overturned. All the good ones are gone, and the rest have been broken or smashed.

 Someone’s been a naughty boy! Look at this mess! And they’ve taken the blood, all the blood’s gone! The jars are gone, I can smell! The only blood that’s left is Cain’s!

 Cain’s lying by the fire. The fire’s gone out. His eyes are wide. If his head was still on his shoulders, he’d be looking right at me. His right hand is still curved, around what he must have been working on when the end came. But his hand is empty now.

I reach out, down, touch it, feel the luke warmness of the blood still clotting upon his fingers. It’s not there. It’s gone.

 The sword he was working on! Where is it? Where’s it gone? He was finishing it off as I left – we were going to dunk it finally with the water I brought! It was nearly done! The sword for the big, BIG client! It’s been stolen! They took it! They took-

 “Is it for an important person?”

 “Indeed.”

 “How important?”

 “If he pleases him, he could rise up and wipe out that insipid little prince of New London in an instant – and the twit would lie down and bare his throat to the sword, what’s more.”

 “Wow. Pretty important, then?”

 “I need to make sure it’s perfect.”

 A memory, from his blood! A memory from the taste, even after he’s dead! Wow! You have to be good to do that! I can remember from tasting his blood on my fingers!

The perfect sword. For the perfect, important, mystery client. It took him ages and ages. He spent more time on it than any other sword.

 And it’s gone. It’s been stolen.

 They broke Freddy. They stole the sword. And they killed Cain.

 Who has done this?

 Who has done this?

I put the pail down, I don’t want it to spill, don’t want his blood to be watered down. I fall to my knees, letting my nose take over. A scent, a memory from ages back – a scent that sticks in my nose. The foul smell of burning, not the fire of the forge but the fire that melts flesh and chars bone.

 The scent of New London.

 I crawl over to Cain’s head. I reach forward, pick him up, my fingers supporting him under the neck. I look into his dead eyes, and they look back at me.

 “Who has done this?” I ask him. He might not be able to answer now, but he can answer in another way.

 I lean forward, press my lips to his, giving him the snog of his life! I never kissed him in life, so this makes up for it! If he were still alive, he’d probably be loving this! Then again, he’d probably be clawing my face off!

 But there’s more to this. I can taste the last blood he shed, just before he died, the blood that came to his lips after getting stabbed through the back. I lick his lips, gathering the sweet-sour taste. As soon as it touches my tongue-

 “But we do not see why you cannot forge a sword for our prince now!”

 “I am in the middle of a very important commission at the moment.”

 “But when your commission is complete, surely you will make him the sword he wishes?”

 “What will he use it for?”

 “It…it will be a symbol of his power. Surely it would be an honour for you-”

 “For me? Nah. What honour is there in making a toy for an overgrown child? What honour is there in having a symbol of how much blood you’ve spilt?”

 “Surely that’s the point of a weapon, sir?”

 “No, that’s not the point. I don’t make weapons so that people can kill. I make them so they don’t have to kill. Even if your prince didn’t have to kill, he’d kill anyway.”

 “So you will not make him a sword?”

 “I will not make the prince of New London a sword. You know why I will not, I am sure.”

 “Very well. We shall see, Sir Cain. And our master shall see as well.”

I bite on Cain’s lips at the memory of his voice, tasting the blood that no longer flows in death; then my tongue goes past, my teeth following. I feel the coolness of his tongue, the taste of it. I bite down-

 Who has done this?

 A face. A face surrounded by long, flowing, golden hair. Pale, beautiful, gorgeous, smiling, far away, holding the sword. Beautiful. Male, but beautiful. And smiling.

I know his name.

 Thaddeus. Thaddeus Catesbury. The prince of New London.

 I know you, my enemy. I know you. And we will meet again.

 They will all pay! They’ll pay for breaking Freddy! They’ll pay for stealing the sword! They’ll pay for killing Cain!

 But you’ll pay, Catesbury, because you gave the order.

 I give Cain’s tongue a last lick, and then withdraw my own. I desperately want to eat it – he won’t need it where he’s going – but I owe him that much. I will sew his head and his arm back on, before I burn him. Wherever he is going, he’ll go in one piece.

 But that doesn’t mean he needs his blood.

 Oh, he is clever! Only a mad person would think to leave a message in their blood – not on the walls, but simply in the blood! As I lick his head, his lips again, the clean stumps of his neck, the pool of blood around him, I know what he meant to do!

  He sent me away, so I would live. He let them kill him, so I would live. He let them shed his blood for me to drink, so I would live, and thrive. As I take his last gift to me, the gifts within the blood flow into me. He has given the weapons I will need to defeat our enemy. I know now what we will do.

 We’ll plan, baby. We’ll plan, Cain. We’ll plan, and we’ll grow, and when we’re ready, we’ll take back the sword, and we’ll take care of Catesbury and those who killed you, Cain. I know we will.

 But first thing’s first; we need to fix Freddy! And I know just how we’ll do that! We’ll make it so he can never be hurt again, won’t we? Won’t we?