Neither Blood Nor Seed

But then the face above her, the beautiful face of Sir Walter Langham, melted into the face of the Reverend Mr James Norris, and amid a welter of confusing thoughts from her vagina (for the todger in there felt much the same, whether from the vampire or the priest), she rapidly came to the conclusion that if she could feel this good, it didn't matter which one was inside her...

...until Norris opened his mouth and spoke urgently. "Up, Cassie. Get up."

The night was cool at last, the superheated summer finally making its grudging migration south to make way for the cold, lonely autumn off the Irish Sea. Somewhere in Cassie's memory lay a glance at a weather map, one of the newsreaders the other day as she'd left the South with Davey, the two of them full of excitement as they headed north for an adventure-fuck in a mysteriously resurrected chapel.

They'd had no idea.

But the newsreader had spoken of rain in the hills, a storm popping up over Snowdonia, and she'd paid no attention because she'd expected to be home by now, manning the till at Torture By Nails And Lashes. She'd thought she'd have another exciting tale for the other girls at the salon, yet another Cassie Story about the various kinds of thrill-sex she liked to have with her many male friends.

She blinked awake in the cold with a dull throb between her legs and the Reverend Mr Norris gazing down at her, and she didn't even think as she lifted her face from the Jones' couch and smashed her lips onto his, searing him with a kiss that was half-dream, half-waking. He responded, in shock, his tongue snaking guiltily out to tangle with hers, but as they parted in a wild-eyed spatter of saliva, he didn't understand as she blurted, "Did you see him here? Did you see Langham?"

"Did I see Langham?" He rocked back on his heels where he crouched by the sofa and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his blue shirt. "No. But Owen and Mair think he's coming up the lane right now. Get up!"

She shuddered awake, sweeping the sleep from her eyes and drawing a shuddery breath as the dream fell slowly away. It had seemed so real... she'd felt him, inside her, plunging deep and hard, the best sex she'd ever had. But had it been Langham? Or had it been Norris? Or was it something else? "Yeah," she yawned, "I'm okay. I'm up."

"He's coming," Norris repeated, his eyes shifting toward where Owen Jones waited by the front door with his shotgun ready. There was a second gun ready, another elderly side-by-side, but Norris had spurned it at nightfall as they made their plans, and he intended to spurn it now. So Cassie lurched across the room, picked it up, and hefted it by the window next to Owen.

"He's by the gate," old Mair whispered in cracked Welsh from the other window. Her revolver remained steady in her hand, pointed now toward her front yard. Cassie needed a piss badly, but she knew her period was due and that her pads were back in the glovebox of Davey's wrecked car, and she just couldn't cope with any of that at present in some stranger's toilet.

There were more important things going on.

Out in the night a shape moved, liquid in the dark, the ghost of a shape flitting along the ground. It was hard to see, like a cloud or a mist, though it moved against the breeze and it did not stop, not even as it pooled at the base of the old oak tree by the stables. It held there, swirling, and then all of a sudden a tall shape stood there silhouetted against the starry sky.

Owen glanced around his parlor. "Ready?" The lights were off, but he could see everyone give him a tense nod. "All right, then." The window at his elbow gave a screech as he raised the sash and leaned out into the night air. "Bugger off, you arsehole!" he shouted out across the yard. The open window let in a strong whiff of linseed oil. "There's nothing for you here!"

A ghostly sigh seemed to shudder in from outside, almost the sound of a dry chuckle that could just as easily have been an errant breeze from the river. Owen leaned down and peered out across the yard, his pockets full of shells for the gun. Cassie remembered around that time that she had no idea how to shoot one, but of course it was too late to ask now. They all started, then, at the sound of a low, silky voice from out by the oak tree. "I wonder," said the voice, its accent obscure, "whether I might continue the conversation I was having earlier, with young Cassandra."

Her heart froze.

Beside her, she could feel the tension in Owen's body. The man practically shook with excitement. "I doubt she's got aught to say to you."

"Perhaps," the voice ventured, "if you'd send her out to chat, I'll let you live through this night." There was an unmistakable air of amusement behind the words, as if the vampire was playing out a farcical negotiation at a car-boot sale for form's sake. "Tell her Sir Walter Langham has ideas for her."

"Sir Walter Langham," Owen called back, "is more than welcome to try to come out from behind my tree and show himself."

Cassie could no longer hold her tongue. "Or? Fuck off and let me get back to sleep!"

The chuckle this time was clearer, the tall shape shaking visibly with laughter. "I'm afraid not. You see, I want you." Norris felt a shudder chill his spine, crouching back from the windows. His hand went to the cross around his neck. "I could give you pleasures such as you've never dreamed of, Cassandra," he purred, and Cassie remembered her interrupted dream with a thigh-clamped gasp.

"Like you did Addie Jenkins?" muttered Mrs Jones in English, and the sound of her first shot was a thunderclap in the dark. It was impossible to see where it went, but the tall shape by the tree ducked. "I'm warning you. Begone." There came a single heavy click from the revolver, the old woman moving the hammer back for her next shot. "Or? Come on. The girl's right. It's time for bed."

"An eternal one, perhaps," Langham laughed, and then the dark shape by the tree swung quickly out into the open, across the yard to the woodpile at the corner of the old shed. A blast from Owen's shotgun nearly deafened Cassie, the buckshot whistling into the dark. "Missed, farmer."

"Bastard," Owen grunted, taking a quick second shot that scattered the woodpile in an explosion of chunked splinters. He cracked the gun open at once, sliding two more shells neatly into the chambers. "That one came close."

Norris' mouth had gone quite dry. "Can the bullets kill Langham?" he whispered, his voice seeming muffled after the gunfire.

"They're not bullets, reverend," Owen replied calmly. "It's shot. Mum's got bullets." As if to punctuate this, Mair let a second round out her window, laughing as she fired. "Good one, mother," Owen growled.

Norris realized he hadn't gotten an answer, but he thought he knew it anyway; another pair of booms rang out now as Langham sprinted back to the stables, just a bit closer now, and this time one of Cassie's barrels smoked as well. The girl looked grim, rubbing her right shoulder. "We can't shoot him to death," he pressed quietly.

"We're not trying to shoot him. We're trying to lure him." Owen nodded down at a kerosene-filled bottle on the sill. "I told you at sunset. We're going to fight him with fire." Norris sighed. He could remember nothing of the hurried conversations as the sun went down, once the Joneses had decided Cassie was not about to become a vampire. Most of the discussion had been low-voiced, fast, and in Welsh. And so far, James Norris' Welsh learning had not progressed far enough for him to learn the word for kerosene, still less Molotov cocktail. "Just keep that lighter ready, reverend, and when I take up the bottle? You light the rag."

Had the vampire detected the puddle of linseed-soaked grass just in front of the door? Mair had been adamant that if Langham wanted to get inside the house, he'd need to come in that way. She let off a third round now, muttering, "Anghenfil ffycin!" in her low, brutal hiss.

The tall darkness by the stable melted out into the night once more, hesitating, but Cassie didn't wait for it to move before she emptied her second barrel at it. At once they heard a long, wailing shriek, more anger than pain, but instead of retreating the shape snarled forward, his face almost visible in the moments that he passed through the silver moonlight.

"Reverend!" It came to Norris' gun-numbed ears as an urgent hiss, catching him as he gawked at the bounding Langham, but in that moment time seemed to slow as everything bubbled into action all at once: he saw the rag poking from the bottle Owen held out toward him, his other hand thrusting his shotgun into Cassie's hands; he felt Mair's cigarette lighter in his hand, already ripped from his pocket and sparking in the murk of the parlor; he snapped it once more with a trembling thumb, Mair's bullet and Cassie's shell exploding from the windows in one last powerless burst at the oncoming vampire as the flame of the lighter caught, wavered, and then held.

The flicker of the rag in the bottle filled the parlor with orange light, and Owen Jones wasted no time hurling it straight out the window at his own walk, just in front of his door. Right where he'd poured out two full tins of linseed oil as the sun went down.

The first rush of flame was a colorless wash of sudden heat across the front of the house as Owen's bottle shattered, but in an eyeblink the fire had taken hold of the grass verging the walk, the weeds nearby, the oil itself, spreading across the space before the door like a Bible picture of hell. It took hold of a mulberry bush in the yard, then spread from there to Langham, who had just found concealment there.

His earlier shriek, Norris realized dully, had been nothing at all. Now he screamed, a wraith of fire swirling through the yard, then writhing on the ground like a kindled worm before, with another rending cry, he took off in a gout of flame across the yard, out the gate, fleeing down the road toward the Swarle like a comet brought down to earth. By the time the sirens of the Fire Brigade filled the night, he was long gone.

* * *

Yr Aros/The Wait

* * *

Superintendent Wynn was not amused when he showed up just past midnight amid the acrid linseed smoke in the front yard. "So what's all this, Mr Jones? This is hardly the way I'd have chosen to spend tonight; it's been a difficult few days." And Wynn did look exhausted, though Norris thought his eyes looked quite keen as he took in the scene. Davis, his driver, yawned in the police car, parked beside the bleary-eyed members of the local fire brigade in their aging engine. Wynn's eyes had not missed Cassie and Norris, but he wanted answers from the householder first. His foot nudged a cast-off shotgun husk. "I'm very curious about what's been going on here tonight."

"Nothing, sir." Owen sat on his own couch, the pillow there still indented by Cassie's head from earlier, nursing a scorch mark on his right hand. "We heard a noise. So. We fired."

"Did you." The policeman's shrewd gaze lingered on on the shotguns leaning against the windowsill. "Two guns. Both ready to go. Seems like quite a precaution."

Cassie could not keep her tongue any longer. Things for her had been rough lately, in fairness, and she sat now in the protective circle of James Norris' arm. She'd had a hard time after Langham had fled, Owen taking his gun back from her twitchy fingers, and had seemed content to be held by the awkward arms of the vicar. She felt good there, both of them remembering that startled kiss as she'd woken up. But now she glared at Wynn through a sooty face. "A justifiable one, copper, wouldn't you say? Given what's been going on in this neighborhood these last nights?"

"Starting when you arrived, Miss Evans? Is that what you mean?" he snapped quietly back, staring hard at her. They held each others' gaze for a pregnant moment before the superintendent at last acknowledged Norris. "And you, parson. What's your role in all this?"

Norris gathered his wits and glared back. "I told you. In the church. When I explained about Langham. I told you then what you were up against, Mr Wynn."

Two bushy eyebrows rose quickly up the superintendent's forehead. "You told me a fairy story from a seventeenth-century bishop involving undead demons, parson. You can't possibly expect me to take action on that!"

"And yet," Norris went on, hearing the rage in his own voice, "taking action is precisely what Langham has been doing all day. He crashed Miss Evans' car, then he tried to abduct her, then he attacked this farmhouse. It was only by the nearest chance that the Joneses saw him off."

"The nearest chance." Wynn sat a long moment at Mair Jones' table, pondering the defiant and angry group on the sofa, and then he sighed. "I suppose it's too much to expect that you lot will let me take those guns back to my post? For safekeeping?"

"Far too much," Owen shot back. "What if he comes back? And my poor old mum, distraught upstairs..." Left unsaid was that Mair Jones had shoved her pistol beneath her pillow, knowing it was illegal. And knowing that Anthony Wynn, to whom she'd given piano lessons thirty years before, would never dare search beneath that pillow. "You'd leave us with no way to defend ourselves."

"Well. You've surely got more linseed," Wynn sighed, but he knew there was nothing he could do. "Just, please? If this... this person does come back? Call 999 instead of blasting at shadows out your window and trying to burn your house down?" Policeman and householder stared at each other for another silent moment before Wynn's shoulders sagged. "A word, parson?"

The night was no longer a pleasant place to be, the chilly air and smoky stench robbing it of any kind of peace. The firemen were packing up to go home as Davis snored loudly in the superintendent's car. They strolled across the withered grass, then out toward the wall and gate facing the road before Wynn spoke. "An interesting evening."

"Mr Wynn," Norris began, licking his lips, "please believe me when I tell you that nobody would have believed less in vampires before these last days. But after what happened at the Reservoir? After my research? After speaking with the Joneses and talking to Miss Evans? After what I saw tonight, in this very farmyard?" He spread his hands. "Alternative explanations do not exactly present themselves, sir."

Wynn was silent for a long while, staring down the road toward the bridge over the Swarle, then he nodded once. "If your assumption is correct," he said slowly, "then what's the next move, would you say?"

Norris' shaking hand reached into his pocket, maneuvering past old Mair Jones' lighter to grasp his phone. He thumbed it awake and checked it quickly, finding an email forgotten in the confusion of the fight at the house, and delayed by the shoddy cellular service in any case. But the address seemed to ring a distant bell, so he opened the email and studied it quietly.

When he'd dialled the number late that afternoon, as Mair Jones held her unwavering pistol on Cassie and Owen watched him bull his way through British Telecom's maze of menus, he'd reached Felix' trust in the far-off United States. A woman's voice had answered. She'd sounded young and capable, like a Hollywood receptionist or the personal assistant to a billionaire. "I, um, I'm not sure quite what to say," he'd stammered.

But she'd saved him. "May I ask whether you got this number in an unusual way?" Her voice had been gentle. Efficient. American. Norris had thought about the little note falling out of a piece of centuries-old paper in a sealed box within a vampire's drowned grave and decided that qualified as an unusual way. "If you could just leave an email address where we can reach you with further information? That'd be great!" And then the email had come in the night, unnoticed amid the confusion of the fight at the house, and delayed by the shaky reception in any case.

The email listed a charter flight arriving in Liverpool. Car-rental details. An ETA. He read it as he sat there with the superintendent. "I think I might have an answer for you, Mr Wynn. But it seems there might be a wait, unfortunately."

* * *

Reeling, his flesh smouldering, the tall dark shape lurched up the gaunt height of the Pen Mawr, looking down over the narrow vale where the Swarle glinted on its long journey toward the Lledr. In the staggering figure's wake lay a vole, three squirrels, and a fox, all drained, all dead.

He needed better blood.

The fire had done much damage. Nothing that couldn't be undone, naturally; in the course of his long life, Sir Walter Langham had taken worse damage. But his strength was fading, his vengeance a hot fire in his breast, and he needed real blood. But this was a poor place to find it, he knew.

He'd been to this hill just once before, in those lost days when he'd been alive, marching through as a part of the army of Edward I. The land then had been wilder, greener, darker, with untamed spirits lurking everywhere. Now it was boring. But here he remained, and one thing had not changed: two o'clock in the morning was a bad time to find a human roaming the slopes of the Pen Mawr.

He paused, breath rattling, and glared down into the valleys below, seeing lights twinkle here and there. He remembered a time when all this land had been in darkness, and not long ago as Langham reckoned these things: he'd never seen any light but fire before Felix and that bastard Humphreys had put him to sleep long ago, then again when Felix had returned before the waters came, after the glazier's blood had woken him from his troubled sleep. But now the lights beckoned, meaning people.

He turned and stumbled down the slope. He was in no shape to confront anyone, not with the smell of linseed still fresh in his nostrils, his skin still crisping from his muscles, but he had no choice. He needed blood.

So he went toward the lights.

A sheep would be found the next morning, dead along with its owner, the grizzled shepherd lying beside his animal, his body drained of all its blood. Clawmarks had gouged his neck, but tentatively. Weakly. The bruising was there, though, just as it had been on Davey McCormick and Adam Rees.

The shepherd had a look of mild confusion on his stone-white face. As if he'd heard his flock panicking and gone out into the night to check, perhaps.

* * *

Y Dyfodiad/The Arrival

* * *

Superintendent Wynn hadn't even blinked when Norris had suggested bringing the young woman back to his vicarage. "No," he'd said bluntly, "I'll hold her in the Constabulary. For her own safekeeping," and this time Cassie had not put up a fight. A sleepless night of vampiric horror, a shoulder bruised by the battering of the shotgun, and the shuddering grate of her car crash, to say nothing of the residual memory of seeing her nude friend's head bouncing across the mud, had at last come home to roost in her overtaxed mind.

So she'd slipped meekly into the back of Wynn's police car. But Reverend Mr Norris had insisted on going along.

She'd sprawled across the backseat, clinging to him in a way that melted his heart, the grasp of a soul in need of spiritual support and of a woman in need of a man. Her head wedged itself firmly against his shoulder as Davis piloted the car over the hills through the watery morning sunlight, and the smell of her hair stirred long-dormant feelings in his heart and his body; he didn't even think as he draped his arm around her and held her close. And when the car finally pulled into the neatly-verged little parking lot outside Headquarters, he'd held her hand as they stumbled into the station.

"Why are you taking care of me?" she'd managed as she'd staggered into the station.