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Tiger was a fool, Del thought to herself. A fool who maintained disbelief even of things he had seen – more than seen, experienced – for himself. Worse, he was easily manipulated. Some flattery, a willing ear to listen to his stories, as well as some coin to buy him drinks and he’d think someone his new best friend. Frankly, it was astonishing he’d survived as long as he had. That survival – at least, in her current annoyed opinion – made him overconfident.
She had thought him safe enough. He seemed to be settled into the cantina for the night with no signs he was likely to go anywhere anytime soon. She hadn’t even been gone that long! But when she’d returned, he was gone and Del was once again forced to search for him.
She began by asking around the cantina. The Sandtiger had left with his new friend, she was told, which she had somewhat expected. Strangely, however, no one seemed to know a name for that friend, nor could she get a good description, just something vague that could fit almost any Southron man. The one thing that was unusually consistent, however, was that everyone agreed that the man in question had unusually white teeth, a detail peculiar enough to be alarming.
At least the weather was clear and the moon was bright. Nights here were often chilly, but Del was grateful for the relief from the daytime heat and the smoky stuffiness of the cantina. Despite the late hour, the streets were not empty and she was able to trace Tiger’s progress by asking questions. It helped that he was so tall; even those who did not recognize him still remembered his passage. But asking those questions was always difficult for her. She had been South long enough now that she could mostly ignore the stares, but she would always hate the way that she had to waste time getting those she asked to actually listen to her words instead of propositioning her. Far too often, she had to resort to threats and minor demonstrations of her willingness to follow through on them before she could get the information she sought. It slowed her down and she hated it. Del was certain Tiger had gotten himself in trouble and she didn’t have time to waste, yet she had little choice.
Eventually, however, she found him: in a dark alley in one of the poorest sections of the city, apparently unconscious on the ground with a dark figure crouched over him. There was too little light for her to see what that figure was doing, but when she approached, they looked up and their face was covered in blood. Del caught a brief glimpse and shouted, but before she could get any closer, the person seemed to simply disappear, dissolving into the desert night as though they had never been there at all.
She had no time to pursue (and no way to do so if she had), so Del turned her attention to Tiger. She was able to rouse him (which was always helpful at times like this) and guide him back to their inn room. He had blood on his throat, but when she cleaned it away, the only wounds she saw were two deep puncture wounds, red-rimmed around the paler puncture marks. It looked like a snake bite, but she was certain she had seen a person.
The next day, Tiger was ill. He complained the sunlight made his head hurt. He couldn’t keep down food. But none of that was a surprise, given his drunken state the night before. It was later, when that continued through the night and he even turned down more aqivi that Del began to worry, although Tiger insisted he was fine.
The day after, he was worse. The first day, he’d been able to keep down liquids. This day, he could not. The wounds on his throat seemed worse as well: bright red and swollen, hot to the touch. He couldn’t bear light; even firelight caused him to complain that it was too bright.
Something had to be done and there was no one else to do it, so Del went out to see what she could learn. She’d asked Tiger, but he believed he’d been bitten by a venomous snake and had advised her to seek an antivenom. If she hadn’t been so certain what she’d seen, she might have thought he was right, but Del wasn’t one to doubt herself about these things. No matter what the wounds looked like, he’d somehow been bitten by something that looked like a person, not a snake.
In the South, women were not considered truly people. Girls and young women were kept at home or subject to harassment by men on the streets, as Del had learned early and often as soon as she crossed the border. But older women, bodies thickened by childbearing and skin wrinkled by the Southron sun despite their veils, considered to offer no value to anyone except possibly their own family, might as well be invisible. Men often seemed to literally not see them and they certainly did not listen to the words of such women. Men did not see them, but the women saw everything.
They made space and a society for themselves, in plain sight yet unseen because it was beneath the notice of men. At dawn on the third day, Tiger so deeply asleep he did not even stir as she went out, Del joined them by the well where they drew water for their families. She went to the market where these women purchased the day’s food.
If she had been smaller, she would have bought or borrowed Southron clothing for herself, the better to blend in as one of them. But Del was too tall and her shoulders too broad to wear anything made to fit a Southron women (although the same could be said of clothes made to fit Southron men, most of whom she towered over as well). So she went as herself: a young, obviously Northern woman bearing a sword. She was foreign. She was both unveiled and armed. But she was still a woman and she spoke to them with the respect few bothered to offer.
She asked her questions, explaining Tiger’s situation. She answered their questions about herself; curiosity was normal and at least it was neither hostile nor threatening, not like the treatment she received from most men. None disbelieved her story; instead they discussed it among themselves until finally one of them, Khedri, told her that she needed to go see Grandmother.
“Your grandmother has seen this before?” Del asked.
Khedri shook her head. “Not my grandmother. Grandmother Amarra. She will know what needs to be done.”
Khedri led her to a house in one of the more prosperous areas of town, one of those houses built around a central courtyard. In that courtyard women were gathered: drinking tea, talking, and throwing oracle bones, a feminine counterpart to the scene often found at cantinas in the evening.
Grandmother Amarra appeared ancient: a withered husk of a woman whose weathered skin was drawn tight over her bones like the desert had sucked her dry. Her voice was dry and raspy, too, and she had to pause now and then to cough a deep, racking cough that rattled in her chest.
But the women gathered here clearly looked up to her and as they had predicted, she nodded with recognition once she’d heard Del’s tale. “Vampyr,” she said.
“What is that?” Del asked, frowning. It wasn’t a word she’d heard before.
“The corpse of a dead man possessed by an evil spirit. It hunts the back alleys, preying on the weak and the foolish.” Grandmother Amarra’s dark eyes were bright and knowing and Del did not bother to defend Tiger. He had been foolish; there was little point in denying it. He was not here to overhear and be insulted.
“What is wrong with him? Why can’t he eat or bear any light?”
“He is becoming one of them,” Mother Amarra explained. “By dawn tomorrow, he will be vampyr as well.”
“What do I do? There must be some way to prevent that, or the whole town would be vampyr by now!”
Mother Amarra nodded. “You must become the hunter in turn. Take a sharpened stick and stab it through the heart of the vampyr. Then you must cut off the head, hands, and feet with a silvered weapon. Once this is done, your man will be cured. But you must hurry. You have little time.”
Del nodded, frowning to herself. She did not know where to obtain silver weapons in the city, but she didn’t need to, for she already had one. Jivatmas were made of steel, but the steel was coated in silver. Between that and the magic of the sword, it would do. The stick, however, that was strange. “How can a stick penetrate a man’s heart without breaking?”
Mother Amarra shrugged and shook her head. “Magic,” was her only answer.
“But where do I find the vampyr?” The city was too large to find one man (or a being who passed as a man) in a single night, not when she didn’t know his home or habits.
“Take your man with you. This close to changing, the connection between prey and predator is very strong. He will find the vampyr.”
And so Del prepared. She went out of the city and found a stick: a long branch from the sort of scrubby twisted tree that could be found this close to a Southron town. She peeled the bark from it and then sharpened it carefully. Feeling vaguely ridiculous, she practiced wielding it as a weapon, taking a few practice thrusts to get used to its lighter weight and shorter length.
Tiger still would not wake, but she’d been told to expect that. He was becoming a hunter of the night, so he would not stir until after sunset.
If she failed, she’d have to kill him or meet the same fate herself. The women had been very clear on this. If the vampyr was not slain by dawn, she was to use the stick on Tiger. If she failed, but she would not.
When Tiger awoke, his eyes were fever-bright, but his skin was cool to the touch. After the lethargy of the past two days, he had a strange energy. He paced their small room, impatient to leave it, though even the smell of food seemed to disgust him.
“Come,” Del told him. “Tonight we go to slay a monster. We must cure you before it is too late.”
“I’m fine,” Tiger protested. “I’m much better tonight. I didn’t even need the antivenom.”
She’d been warned about this, yet she was still a little surprised by how normal he seemed. “You haven’t eaten in three days,” Del pointed out stubbornly, reminding herself as much as him. It would be easy to be fooled by his apparent renewed health into dismissing what she’d seen and learned from Grandmother Amarra today, but she was determined not to let herself make that mistake. “You are not fine.”
She didn’t think he was convinced, but he knew her well enough that he didn’t try to stop her from going and of course, if she was going out hunting something in the streets, he came as well. Even knowing what she now knew, it was good to see him up and about again.
Del could not find the precise place she’d found him before; the streets in that part of town were a narrow twisted maze, tangled like the gnarled roots of the few trees that managed to grow here in the South and she didn’t know them well. The buildings here were so close together that in places she could not even see the sky. But Grandmother Amarra had been right: she didn’t need to. Tiger stopped, sniffed the air, and shuddered in a way she had seen before, though his eyes shone oddly bright in the dark. “Something’s wrong,” he said, and that was one warning Del had learned to heed.
It was well she had because the next moment the vampyr was upon them – upon her, for it must have sensed that Tiger was becoming another of its kind and largely ignored him – in a rush of wind and a brief glimpse of leathery wings that were not present when she looked again. It laughed, revealing those unnaturally white teeth, and struck out at her with long claws that she only barely dodged.
The battle was not an easy one. Del was fast, but the vampyr was faster, inhumanly so, and inhumanly strong as well, stronger than Tiger. Three times she missed with her stick. Part of it splintered on her last failed attempt, but Del counted herself lucky it had not broken entirely. But the vampyr fought only with teeth and claws like a beast instead of a sword or a knife like the man it resembled; the greater reach of swords gave Del and Tiger an advantage of their own. The vampyr might have been trying to ignore him, but Tiger fought like he was as fine as he’d claimed, like he hadn’t been sick at all, much less too sick to even leave their inn room the past two days.
And their swords were more than just swords. The vampyr’s skin when it clawed her was cold, as chill as the desert night air and it made Del wonder just how much cold it could stand. She drew Boreal and keyed her despite the attention it might draw and the risks to those who might still live nearby despite the predator in their midst. Del did her best to channel the jivatma’s power toward the vampyr and away from the buildings on either side of the alley where they fought, but she was certain she did not entirely succeed.
But her idea worked. Desert nights might be cold, but they had nothing on the winter nights in the mountains of the North. Nothing like the banshee storm. The vampyr was cold and grew colder still, its joints seeming to stiffen and freeze as the wind howled. It slowed the creature enough that it was easy to stab him with her stick. As she’d been told, once she’d penetrated the heart, the vampyr stiffened as though it experienced the rigor that came after death. From there, the mutilation was easy. Del did not hesitate, even though the creature looked a man once more. Perhaps this was who it had once been, but she did not know him and had no attachment.
As soon as she was done, Tiger doubled over, gasping, then his knees buckled and he fell. He retched, but after three days, there was nothing left to bring up. He panted, sweating despite the coolness of the night, on his hands and knees in the dust of the alley, but when he looked up at her, the strange light in his eyes was gone. “Hoolies, bascha, I feel terrible,” he complained.
Del nodded and helped him to his feet. “You need to eat. This time, you should be able to keep it down.”
Tiger scratched at the bites on his throat, then paused, surprised. “Will you look at that? The snake bite is gone.”
“That wasn’t -” Del began, then stopped herself. What did it matter? Tiger would be himself; she knew how this would go. “Let’s go back to the inn and get some dinner,” she said instead, taking his hand as they headed in that direction. His hand was cold, but it warmed in hers and she was glad to feel it for this brief moment before there were too many potential observers to maintain the contact.
As they left the alley, she glanced back once, but the body of the vampyr was gone.