Neither Blood Nor Seed

"Because your soul matters," he'd shrugged.

Now they sat together in exhausted silence in the break room, the tea hot and constant on a little side table, the two of them still twined together. Norris' arm began to fall asleep after the first ten minutes, but he could tell by the little rodent-twitches of Cassie's body that she had sunk into a fitful sleep. He'd waited there through the late morning, as Wynn had peeked into the room, through endless cups of tea and the low, disquieting mutter of yet another death, a third blood-sucked body found in the darkness before the sun rose. A shepherd.

Norris told himself he was doing nothing but providing the proper sort of pastoral care, but he was also increasingly aware that it had been a long time since he'd held a woman, in any context, and that his trousers needed periodic adjustment whenever she shifted her head on his chest.

For the millionth time, James Norris gave thanks that he hadn't been raised Catholic. Men had needs, the kind of needs that responded to lovely women. And even if it would be quite wicked indeed for him to even think of taking advantage of poor Cassie Evans, he could at least look forward to a time when he might take a wife. Maybe even a wife like her...

She stirred in his lap as Wynn poked his head into the lounge and glared bushy-eyed at Norris. "Another corpse," he nodded grimly, the official confirmation. Norris' heart sank.

"Who?"

"Peter Lovatt. A shepherd. Up by Pen Mawr." He sighed and yawned. "I'll be taking a nap. You'd do well to do likewise, parson, before your Mr Felix turns up."

"I suppose I ought to," Norris mused, laying his head back onto the vinyl couch, "just for a moment..." He was asleep before the sentence had even escaped his mouth, leaving the superintendent to look quietly at the exhausted couple for a long moment.

And then he, too, slipped away.

* * *

The swirl of dreams into which Cassandra Evans awoke, her forehead sweaty in the priest's lap, was a thrilling confusion of darkness and light. She had a sense that there was a battle going on within her skull, a silent conflict centered on the touch of a palm upon her hair. As if from a great distance, she heard a sibilant voice give a dry chuckle. "She's definitely at risk of infection, Felix."

"I would say so, Doctor. Perhaps a bit beyond 'risk.'" The other voice was low, commanding, a ripple of sound that twanged deep inside her mind. At once the conflict ended, her eyes blurring open to see two impossibly handsome men crouched before her. One, tall and bald, with a pointy chin, had his fingers spread across her forehead. The other was shorter, broader, his face giving an indistinct impression of a long-broken nose over a wise, expressive mouth. "Not affected yet, though. She's in no danger of turning. Nor is the priest."

"The priest." The bald man's voice had a curious pitch, as if he was mocking the universe. "No. Langham would not waste his time turning a priest, Felix. He'd just kill him and feed."

"He would," the smaller man agreed, and with that Cassie came fully awake at last. "She's stopped pretending," the broken-nosed man nodded. "You're awake, woman. Shall we talk?"

"No," Cassie replied indignantly, the nap giving her most of her wits back, "we shall not. Not until I've used the lavatory. And you, sir, can get your hand off me," she added with a glare at the bald one.

Who laughed. "Yes. She'll be all right." The man ruffled her hair and rocked back on his heels. He was strikingly handsome, like his friend, the two of them sending out strong sexual signals. They regarded her carefully, their eyes peculiarly dark and piercing. "Return soon, Madame. We have plans to make and little time to make them."

She fled from the room through a cloud of unreality, as if she were swimming through a thick fog to escape the break room. Her head cleared when she found the loo, even though she needed a pad and had no clue where hers were; she improvised with toilet roll. Once she was done with her business she glanced curiously out the front windows of the Constabulary. The car park held the smattering of police cars, distantly remembered from when they'd arrived, but she caught a new vehicle there now: long, black, muscular, the sort of car James Bond might have driven in the 1940s. The windows were so tinted as to be jet black.

Beside it stood a woman, slight of figure but massive in her presence, a model of patience and implacability, standing there in an old-fashioned chauffeur uniform. She had a face of immense beauty, though her expression had a hard-eyed set to it that told Cassie she'd be wisest to give this woman a wide berth.

She shifted her weight, thinking she must find her pocketbook. Her pads.

By the time Cassie returned to the lounge, running her hand through her mussed hair, the place was much more active than she recalled. Someone had dimmed the lights and drawn the shades, lending the place a fairly sinister feel heightened by that treacle-like air of thickness and unreality she'd felt as she'd left the room. The two men who'd woken her sat serenely across a table, hands folded calmly in their laps; the bald gentleman now wore glasses. Superintendent Wynn sat across from them with Bacon, the detective she remembered from the night Davey had died.

Both looked ill at ease, but nowhere near as unhappy as the Reverend Mr James Norris. He sat hunched on the cheap vinyl couch, his collar askew, elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. Wynn glanced at her as she entered. "Miss Cassandra Evans," he nodded, gesturing curtly toward the two newcomers, "these gentlemen have just arrived from America."

"Yes." She took a seat beside the priest. She'd need to use the restroom again soon, she knew. "I saw their car outside. And their driver."

"Mia," nodded the shorter man, his eyes glittering. "One of our most useful servants. I am Mr Felix, Cassandra, and this is Dr Zondervan." The bald man nodded. "We are here because someone has done a foolish thing with an old acquaintance of ours, Sir Walter Langham. I think you've met him."

"Thrice," she shuddered, thinking of the monstrosity by the drowned church, the fastidious man in the shadows near the burning car, and then the menacing shape in the Joneses' garden. "And I'm told it was my Davey's spunkbag that woke him up?"

The bald man, Zondervan, nodded tersely. "When I imprisoned Sir Walter many, many years ago, it was necessary to perform a certain rite."

"Wait. What? Right? Right of what? Like, left?"

"No. Rite. Or ritual. The sort of ritual that involves the elemental forces of life and death, the seed from a willing man and the blood from a willing woman." He shrugged as though these sorts of things were normal daily conversation. "Naturally, my rite worked. But alas, it can be undone by the same forces."

"It has been undone," Felix pointed out quietly.

"Indeed it has. Twice." Zondervan spread his hands. "One can only do so much, you see, without accounting for the stupidity of humans."

"We weren't stupid," Cassie insisted lamely, remembering Davey ravaging her in the dank chapel, "just lazy. Would have been wiser to find a refuse can for the wet flunky."

"There is, indeed, just one point on earth where your Davey's seed should never have been spilt." Felix shrugged. "He had the bad luck to choose it." His voice was odd, the rich tones of a man who spoke many tongues. A beguiling voice. "Another time, Sir Walter was raised by blood. He was more difficult to defeat then."

"When we made the Reservoir," muttered the superintendent.

"Yes. We arranged to flood the valley to keep Sir Walter from harrying Llantarff." Felix pronounced the name properly, with an accent that sounded vaguely... old-fashioned, for lack of a better term. "We came back to help then for the same reason we've come back now: we feel a certain sense of responsibility for Sir Walter."

"And why is that?" Norris demanded. Cassie laid an instinctive hand on his thigh. He was trembling like a man on cocaine.

"Because one of us made him the thing he is," Felix said simply. "It was one of our associates, a man named Godmer of Millow, but no matter. We are Godmer's clan, and thus Sir Walter is Godmer's clan. So we deal with him, whenever needed."

An uncomfortable silence muffled the room. Cassie squirmed, thinking of the toilet paper between her thighs. "Excuse me," she said shortly. "I need the toilet again."

She returned to a more decisive room, and had the immediate sense that a plan of some sort had been made. "It's settled, then," Wynn was saying as she entered.

"No." Norris sounded angry. "Not until Cassie agrees."

"Agrees to what?" She stood in the door and peered through the gloom. She wasn't sure she wanted to know, actually.

* * *

Y Fagl/The Trap

* * *

High in the hills, Sir Walter Langham watched the sun leave the land.

He had conquered this land in the thirteenth century, and he had remained ever since. When Godmer had taken him into the clan and then gone to England, Sir Walter had stayed in these mountains. When Godmer had returned with Dr Zondervan, imploring him to return to Oxford with them, he had stayed in these mountains. And when, at last, the rest of the clan had crossed the awful oceans to the New World? Sir Walter had stayed here, in these mountains. Waiting. Silent.

Buried.

And now he felt something on the cloud-wrack of the October night, the air finally cooling from the brutal summer that had left his grave brittle and dry. It had never been a restful grave, that one: not like the one he'd had in his manor, so many centuries ago, when he'd had buxom young succubi to serve him and the beginnings of a small clan of his very own.

No. This had not been the grave he'd chosen.

This had been in consecrated ground, surrounded on all sides by holy soil that had left him restless and unquiet for near three hundred years. And then again, after, when that thrice-damned Zondervan had banished him the second time; he'd found himself imprisoned there once more, bound by the blood and seed of willing men and women, and then they'd flooded him. They'd quenched the fire of his spirit in the cold mountain waters, leaving him far below the darkly ruffled night-surface where fishermen rowed, oblivious.

He'd not expected to arise from that, ever again. It had not been clear, even in the wildest fancies of his darkest thoughts, how the forces of life and death could ever again reach him so deeply. But then Europe had had its hottest summer in centuries, a summer of parched forests and raging fires, of dry rivers and the cracked-pottery mud that now made up the streets of what had once been the village of Bwgan Vale. And then the devil had sent his miracle, a quiet smack of semen upon his grave, and he'd felt the power again.

And so he'd risen, and fed, and grown strong.

The night called him with the bubbling blood of innocents all through the dales and hills of the parish, but now it was calling differently. Now there was a new note in what the lands were telling him, a scent, sharp and sweet: the scent of the girl, Cassandra.

She had given him everything, for it was she who had drained the man of his seed in the chapel. And now he needed her. He'd been close to her on the road, when he'd crashed her car; he'd been even closer at the farmhouse, in the night when his powers were strongest, but then she'd shot him.

And now he would teach her that that had been a bad idea.

He could feel her. At the chapel, near his grave, waiting for him. So he went, vaulting high into the night sky and gliding down toward the dried Reservoir on the autumn airs, the cold rain far behind him in the hills, his mind bent on her. On her skin, her neck, her blood.

Her soul.

* * *

Two days since he'd crunched across the clay-gritted bottom of Bwgan Vale Reservoir, and already the ground there was wetter. It clung to his boots and felt more slippery underfoot, and there were puddles now where there had once been nothing but dust. The rain in the hills, Superintendent Wynn noted absently to himself; it had fallen twenty hours and twenty miles ago, and already it was starting to bring the great lake back to life.

Nature. It really was something. It never ceased to amaze Wynn with its grandeur, its sheer obliviousness toward the humans living within it. We could all die tomorrow, he told himself, and the land wouldn't even notice. There was trouble in thoughts like that, but also a weird kind of comfort.

He led the little party toward the blasted foundations of old Bwgan village, toward the ancient steeple aiming toward the evening sky like a stubby finger. He already reckoned it'd be watery in there, the grave no doubt filling in, which was why DS Bacon and Parson Norris pushed wheelbarrows filled with sandbags. The idea was to pack the grave, expose the coffin, fill it with Walter Langham, and brick it all back up before the water returned once more to obliterate all trace of the vampire.

He was still having trouble admitting to himself that a vampire was what he was dealing with. But it was hard to ignore the evidence, harder still to disregard the three strange visitors from America. They strode across the sand, Felix and Zondervan in dark suits and sunglasses with their Mia trotting in between, a broad umbrella blooming from her capable hand. Behind squeaked the barrows, and Cassie Evans brought up the rear with her face set in a stern grimace.

What, the superintendent wondered, would be going through her head now? She'd come here just the other day, a flighty thrill-seeker by night, and then she'd indulged her lusts. That last time she'd come down this bank, she'd been a carefree wanderer. She returned now as a grim-faced warrior, eyes steady on the chapel that awaited her. The plan required little of her, really: she'd stand by the tomb, at the altar on the far side of the stony hole rent in the floor, until Langham came.

And then she'd scamper. "We'll take it from there," Felix had rasped in that odd accent of his. The plan was for her to dive behind the old stone altar, or to wriggle out one of the empty windows if she could, but Zondervan had been confident there would be little time.

"Fights between our kind take a long, long time in movies," he'd giggled, "but in reality they're quite brief. Want a long fight? Bring in a werewolf," he'd observed, giving every indication that he wasn't kidding. "When he sees us," he'd promised her, "Langham will no longer pay attention to you. He will understand at once the danger he is in."

"And if we do our part? He will have little time to think about it until he is already subdued." Felix sounded confident. "We will tame him. And then the good Doctor shall begin the Rite."

The requirements had been explained to Norris, Wynn, Bacon, and Cassie, but the four of them had avoided talking about it. And now they worked, as the sun sank in the west, shoring up the grave and laying their ambush. Bacon was the first to be sent home, just at dusk, having spent an hour filling sandbags. "I didn't become a copper to do this shite," he grumbled in Welsh.

"Quite right. You may go home." The superintendent had clapped him on the shoulder. "And, well, perhaps it would be wise to keep silent about this part of the investigation? At least until it's complete."

"No worries, Guv." Bacon had spat on the ground outside what had once been the Bwgan Vale British Legion hall. "I plan to go home, drink, and pass out. Mind if I take tomorrow morning?"

"Do," Wynn nodded, and as the detective climbed the distant bank, Norris stared after him.

"You okay, padre?" Cassie held out a dented water bottle toward him.

"Fine, love," Norris sighed. His palms ached where the blisters were beginning to form from the shoveling, but they were almost finished. He had written a careful note to include in the lead case, which Bacon had had a tinsmith repair earlier in the day. "I'm worried about you."

"And I'm worried about you." The smile she gave him lightened his heart, giving him pleasant feelings in his loins and his mind. "Just as long as we both get through this, no?"

"God's will," he nodded. Her smile was affectionate, with more than a hint of her usual sauciness, and he was having memories of her nude body rising from the fold-out bed in the vicarage. Memories that were, so to say, spiritually suspect. "I do hope you'll be okay in there tonight," he added, nodding toward the church. The two of them sat on a low wall that had once bounded the front garden of the local pub. The priest had been told he was going to stay right there until everything was over, along with Superintendent Wynn.

Felix and Zondervan had made it clear that they were the ones who would handle Sir Walter. And the only help they needed would come from Cassie, fleetingly. "Don't misunderstand," Felix grumbled as he surveyed the puddled plain where the village had stood, "you're important later on, during the rite. But by that time we shall already be finished with him."

Norris had glanced at Wynn, who looked away. He clearly wanted nothing to do with all this. "You seem quite confident," Norris ventured.

"We have defeated him twice before," Felix pointed out. His face took on an air of stony beauty, the beauty of an angel of death. "He is strong, but we are stronger. He knows this as well as we. And he has weaknesses." He nodded over at the chapel, where Doctor Zondervan was gesturing amicably as he spoke with Cassie. Zondervan, on the whole, did not seem at all vampiric, but then Norris was beginning to realize he might not be a very good judge of such things. "He will not be able to stop himself from taking the girl."

"Which he must not do." Norris hoped he sounded as forceful as he felt. Felix shrugged, as if it did not much matter to him. "He must not, Mr Felix."

The vampire peered back with those disquieting eyes. They had such a sense of depth to them. "The girl is lithe. Nimble. If she listens to us and pays attention, she will not die." He hesitated. "If he is able to turn her, then of course we must obliterate her."

"No."

"We must." Felix sounded firm. "You are new to this world, priest. You must accept that you do not know these things as well as we do." He nodded to the side, where Mia had posted herself in the shadow of the crumbled council building. "She will stay here with you."

"Is she..." Norris had no idea how to ask, and Wynn was no help whatsoever. He swallowed. "Is she like you?"

"She is a servant of our clan," Felix said, as though that explained everything. "She is a skilled woman, of great value in many, many ways. We found her in America and liberated her; she is very modern." He shrugged. "She can operate a car, for example."

Norris wondered at the use of the word liberated. The superintendent spoke for the first time. "You don't drive, Mr Felix?"

The vampire smiled, a curiously grim expression. An old expression. "I have walked this earth for many, many years. Many. And when I say walked, I mean walked. More footsteps than I can remember. I have walked this land, and other lands. When one becomes a being such as I am, one seldom sees the need to hurry." He nodded. "Time means something different to us. And footsteps measure the time well for me."

The statement was perfect, the kind of sentence that seizes a man and wrenches his attention aside. Norris was still pondering it as the sun gave up the last of its glow, and all of a sudden Felix was giving a strangely formal bow. "Gentlemen." He summoned Mia with a glance, the woman slinking among the ruins with an oddly catlike sinuousness. "I shall leave you. Please stay out of the chapel; it is no place for the living this night. When the doctor and I are finished we will return."