Neither Blood Nor Seed

Norris watched Felix glide off with a curious sense of foreboding, a cemetery feeling of desolation, like he was sitting on a battlefield already overfought. Mia halted before them, her hands primly behind her back, a smirk on her face. "Hi," she said. Her voice was quite low, but very brash. It was the first time Norris had heard her speak; so far, most of her duties had involved holding the umbrella and finding Cassie some sanitary pads. "Nice place, Wales."

Norris blinked dully up at her while Superintendent Wynn cleared his throat. "It's usually wetter, just hereabouts."

"Yeah." She seemed ageless, young and beautiful, and Norris found himself wondering how long she'd served these two odd gentlemen. Years? Decades? Centuries? How had she fallen into their clutches. "Wet. For all the Wales."

A stilted silence fell over the trio, the breeze ruffling the water nearby.

"Oh," Wynn said after a long moment. "Yes. Like the cetaceans."

Mia's smirk grew. "Good man." Wynn gave the bland smile every Welshman gives when they hear North Americans make that joke. She glanced at Norris. "You're wondering about me, father."

"I am." Norris' voice came out burred, thick. "I'm wondering how a lovely lady like yourself gets involved in... well, in this sort of thing."

"Felix freed me," she shrugged. "He paid a man called Ricky for my liberty. But in the end, Ricky was the one who paid." She nodded to herself. "I am fortunate, father. This life is the best I could have dreamed of."

"Is it?"

"Entirely." She nodded down at him. "You'll find out, perhaps, just how much pleasure I take in my existence now." She spoke that same stilted way that Felix did, but her accent was more modern. Norris got the sense she was trying to copy her employer. "And how much pleasure I can give."

"Uh, what?" Norris blinked. His mind had been wandering.

"You heard me." She nodded, her eyes placid, and then turned with that feline grace she had, to stand in the mud and stare at the waiting chapel.

* * *

The rush of wind that came near ten o'clock woke Norris from a fitful doze he had not intended to take, one that he cursed himself for even as he sprang up off the soft earth with the taste of metal filings in the back of his mouth. He swept his head quickly around and saw nothing but the dark night and the distant sign of the Lakeside Pub at the top of the bank near the parking lot, a glimmer of humanity as far away as if it was on another planet. Away south glittered the far-off village of Lesser Bwgan beneath the frowning tangle of hills that guarded the lower valley.

Nearer at hand he could see nothing but the shadow of Superintendent Wynn, a comforting presence beside him, and the slighter shape of Mia standing before them with a faint air of menace about her, a set to her shoulders warning the two men that they should not try to pass her and head for the ruined chapel, its tower rearing up against the stars.

The wind came hard and fast over the still waters from the east, a gathering roar of sound and motion that left ripples in the moonlit darkness of the inky Reservoir. It blew across the ancient square in front of the church, the dust there swirling up, making a sudden shape in the darkness. The priest shuddered.

* * *

Inside, Cassie was not at all sure she wasn't about to wet herself.

The two vampires seemed quite comfortable inside the ruined church, lit by the pale glow where the moonbeams played across the floor. The stained glass had been carted away when they'd flooded the valley, and a small chunk of the roof at the doorway end had collapsed at some point; between them, Cassie could see well enough. Better, in fact, than she'd been able to see just three nights ago, when she'd braced herself against the graffiti-tagged wall so poor Davey could stick it in her.

She'd been starting to feel guilty about Dave McCormick. They'd never been anything more than friends, the kind who shared a healthy sense of adventure. They certainly hadn't been in love, though they'd enjoyed fucking each other sometimes, and when they'd come up here to the wilds of North Wales the whole thing had been his idea. He'd made the arrangements, driven the car, bought the condoms, tagged the wall in vivid pink Krylon. She'd giggled through it all, mostly because he'd been so enthusiastic; when he'd unzipped his trousers, he'd been harder than she'd ever seen him.

They'd wasted no time after that.

But then his head had gone rolling away into the night as some monster drank his blood, and now she was back here shaking in the dark. If this whole few days had been surreal, this was the weirdest moment yet. And Cassie couldn't help but feel responsible. She shivered.

"You are frightened." Zondervan, the bald vampire, so unlike the Dracula figures she'd seen in the movies; he sat on the old altar now, swinging his legs.

"No. I just have to do a piss."

"Oh." He gestured toward the shell of the building around them. "Anywhere will do, woman."

"No, I'd need a... well." Mia had bought her some pads, but then kept the bag. How to explain a menstrual pad to a vampire? He'd probably think of it as a snack. "I'm fine."

"It won't be long." Felix stood by the shattered tomb with a long, ornate stake in his hand. They'd explained this to her, briefly, with the workmanlike air of people who had done all this before many times; you took the stake, drove it through the heart, the target stopped fighting, you buried him, you did the Rite. Simple. "He can feel you. He will appear."

"Does he know youse are here?" Her voice came out in a hushed, squeaky sort of way she despised.

"Usually. But you are distracting him." Again, that sense of timelessness, that this had all happened before. "We are more powerful than he is. He will come anyway. He will not resist you. You have escaped him three times. He is prideful; he cannot let you escape again." His hard eyes glittered in the moonlight. "He will come." Just then a wind came, sudden and fierce, whistling through the chinks in the walls, and Felix nodded. "You see? He is here."

"Places!" Zondervan hopped from the altar and disappeared into the shadows. "Remember, woman, just you stand there. When he enters, flee. Felix will do everything else required."

Cassie fought a strange numbness in her legs as she took her post, standing between the altar and the murky, waterlogged grave. She stared down the nave, past the piled rubble of Langham's awakening, out the cracked Norman arch toward the old pub where Norris waited for her. A comforting man, Norris. The kind of man she'd have wanted to know better, if she weren't about to be consumed by a vampire.

For Cassandra Evans felt very certain her life was about to end.

Felix and Dr Zondervan were confident. Norris was hopeful. Wynn was alert. Mia was... well. Mia was difficult to read. But Cassie herself was fatalistic. Her mind was filled with the image of her own head rolling across the ground like a Ryan Giggs strike, and even as she offered herself before the altar in the ruined chapel at Bwgan Vale, she felt nothing but terror. Felix and Zondervan had told her everything would happen quickly; she clung to that. The hope that she might never know how it would end.

She could no longer see Felix, hidden in the shadows over by the doorway.

What she could see was a dark shape, resolving slowly out of a swirl of dusty mist, turning into the same handsome, smiling man she'd seen wreathed in flames as he tried to pull her from Davey's car. His footsteps clicked loudly on the broad steps outside, and then there he was inside the chapel. The moon slanted down on him from the broken roof like a spotlight on the lead actor, and she caught her breath; she had never seen a more beautiful man.

"Cassandra," he said, his arms reaching out to her. "Come to me."

And she almost did. The numbness became a tingle, the tingle became an impulse, and her foot began to take its first step around the grave before everything suddenly became very complicated.

It rang out again, a voice of command. "Come to me."

Felix was a dark streak of shadow darting from the corner by the door, the corner where Davey had sprayed his graffiti. His low voice rang harshly through the little building. "Non puto, culus," he spat, his shadow moving with incredible speed to meet Sir Walter Langham.

And then Cassie remembered she was supposed to flee.

She twisted desperately and vaulted over the old altar, fearing that at any moment she'd feel his presence rushing up to pursue her, his fingers on her arm, her body, her neck, his presence drowning her, but she felt nothing except a chilly puddle as she landed hard on the stone floor, an old empty window just before her. It beckoned, the night beyond meaning safety, freedom. Escape.

She turned, driven by some compulsion to make sure she had space to get out, even as her legs drove her desperately forward. She saw shadows in the moonlight back by the door, a swirl of intense motion, then the glitter of Doctor Zondervan's eyes just beside her as her hands reached for the windowsill. "No need to flee anymore," he told her quite conversationally, "it's already over."

Cassie paused, breathing hard, and squinted back toward where she'd seen the whorling shapes of Felix and Langham, blinking as the scene came into slow focus: Felix, somehow taller and more imposing than she remembered him, standing with his legs apart over a huddled, twitchy shape on the floor. As she stared harder, she saw something incredible: Langham, his face molded into a scowl more desperate and fierce than she could imagine, his long fingers scrabbling desperately at the ornate stake protruding from his chest like the chapel tower above them.

"Holy fuck," she spluttered.

Felix nodded to himself, cloaked in shadow, and bent to murmur something in Sir Walter Langham's ear before he straightened once more and called out the door into the night. "Bring them in, Mia."

Cassie realized then that Zondervan's hand had closed around her arm, but it was not an unkind grip. When she turned to face him, he smiled. "I told you. Fights in our world are very brief. And now? The Rite." He patted her shoulder. "You rest. I'll need you soon, but not yet."

Back by the door, Norris stared down at the slowly writhing Langham, his eyes unable to move off the stake. Wynn stirred beside him. "Now, I know you never did become a doctor," the superintendent muttered, "but in your view, is this the sort of thing I should call the coroner about?"

Norris swallowed. "I think, Mr Wynn," he began, his voice a strained whine, "there's very little she'd be able to do."

"I quite agree." The two men watched as the vampire squirmed and the moon crossed the sky above the slowly spreading waters.

* * *

Y Ddefod/The Rite

* * *

"So, he's dead, right?" Cassie looked down at the quivering Langham, still staked, and frowned uncertainly. "Or, he's going to be?"

Doctor Zondervan shook his head, the moonlight glinting on his glasses. "Common misconception," he shrugged. "The stake subdues and controls him, but if it's withdrawn? He would heal as readily as he would heal from any other wound."

"Quickly?" Norris' voice sounded far too loud to him.

"You inflicted horrible burns on him last night," Zondervan pointed out. "Do you see any trace of them now?" He sighed as Norris nodded. "We cannot die. Ever. As far as I know, anyway, we will be here until eternity passes. But, for him, it will hopefully pass buried in consecrated ground, sealed there by blood and seed. And that will protect the humans from him."

That had been troubling Norris for awhile. "While I'm grateful for your help," he began slowly, not sure whether this was a bear he really ought to poke, "I can't help but wonder about that. Why protect us?"

Zondervan nodded, pondering a moment before he spoke. The church was hushed, filled with too many people and too many shadows. "You were nearly a doctor, yes? So what is the purpose of a virus?"

The question took Norris by surprise. "To... to reproduce. To spread."

"This is precisely the case. It infects its host and depends on that host to spread it to other hosts. And others. And still others, ad infinitum. And in the natural course of time, some of those hosts die from the virus. But the virus flourishes. This makes sense to you, no? As a metaphor?"

Norris frowned. "I suppose?" He glanced at Cassie, but there was no help there; she merely stared thoughtfully down at the quiescent Langham. And the superintendent had left already to supervise his roadblock up at the parking lot.

"So what happens when a virus is so strong it kills the host too quickly? Too violently? So that it cannot spread very much?"

Norris thought about ebola, the horrific violence of its outbreaks. The relatively simple quarantine. "It burns through a population and kills it, then it dies out."

"Indeed it does. Those of us who understand," Zondervan finished gravely, "realize that we cannot have a reasonable life if we kill too many of you. We will burn through you, and we will have nothing left. We also realize that although we must feed, and although we need clans, and servants, and such? You have a role to play in this world as well, and thus we should not kill you needlessly." He studied Norris closely. "Does this make sense to you, priest?"

Norris met those piercing eyes and forced himself to hold them. "How old are you, Doctor?"

Zondervan smiled. "I am a great deal younger than Felix. Younger than Sir Walter, as well. My parents were killed in the Eighty Years War when I was very young, and since then I have made my own way. Part of how I have done that is by not drawing attention from the people among whom I live, and feed." He nudged Langham with his foot. "This is a skill Sir Walter has never learned. Come. Let us get him in the ground."

During the drive from the Constabulary to the Reservoir, as Mia had piloted the sleek car over the narrow roads like she was training for Le Mans, they'd asked about the Rite. Felix and Zondervan had merely exchanged a glance. "It involves old languages," Felix had told them gruffly. "You will not get it."

"It also requires help from you," Zondervan had added, "which is why you're coming with us."

Norris and Cassie had looked at each other. "From whom?"

"From both of you." The bald man had smiled. "Or from the policeman, though he seems disinclined to assist."

"No thank you," Wynn had said stiffly, and then they'd all fallen silent. The silence had returned now as Felix and Zondervan dragged Langham along the floor. He lay quiescent, clearly not dead but also clearly not able to do much more than move his eyes about.

Norris and Cassie followed uncertainly behind Mia. At some point as they passed about halfway toward the grave, their hands met and clung together, fingers intertwined. And when Norris glanced down at Cassie, she smiled back at him. "What's next?" he wondered in a whisper.

"Can't be any more odd than what's already happened," she shrugged back, and then they shuffled to an uncertain halt by a small pile of soil and stone that had burst out when Langham had escaped three nights before. "No idea, really."

Below lay the coffin on top of its sandbags, its old timbers warped from centuries under the wet ground, the top leaning aside to admit Langham. Showing little effort, the two vampires lifted him up by the feet and the hands and carried him to the edge of the hole. "Not to worry, Walter," Doctor Zondervan purred, "we'll remove the stake before we nail you in. Just like last time."

Norris opened his mouth to speak, wondering whether that was wise, but Mia shot him a strangely hot glare and he decided he'd better not. He got the distinct impression she was there to mind the mortals while the immortals got on with the real work. Sort of a succubus-babysitter, in a way. He swallowed as he watched the two vampires bustle quietly about, drawing sigils in the muddy floor, placing candles here and there, his eyes falling naturally to the curve of Mia's behind.

Which was stupendous.

"All right!" Felix' gruff voice shook his gaze away, but he had the distinct impression everyone knew what he'd been looking at. "We shall begin. You'll hear us chant. Then we will attach silver chains to his wrists and take out the stake. Then we will nail up the coffin. Priest, you will then leave your lead case there." Norris nodded, thinking of the note he'd left inside. "And then? The seed. And the blood."

"Which shall come from both of you," Doctor Zondervan nodded, "for they must be mortal. And willing." Norris exchanged a glance with Cassie, the moment approaching at last.

"Wait. What?"

"Seed from you, blood from her." The vampire tutted. "We told you of this."

"I..."

"Not much is required. Merely a few drops of each." He produced a long silver knife from beneath his black cloak. "They go atop the coffin, then we shovel the dirt back on."

Cassandra seemed calm enough when Norris glanced over at her, but then she'd been through so much already. He felt his mouth open and then shut, fishlike. "Seed..."

"Sperm." Zondervan nodded helpfully. "You must scatter it on the coffin. It's the force of life, as blood is the force of death."

"You mean I... I must..." He trailed off lamely, every eye on him. "I am a vicar!"

"You are a man," Felix grunted, "and you can certainly produce sperm." He nodded over at Mia. "She can help you. It is one of the reasons we brought her."

Norris gaped over at Mia, now staring back at him with a smile creasing the corner of her bold eyes. "Just wait, father," she murmured, "I'll make sure you provide more drops than they need." She tossed her thick black hair over her shoulders. "I know many ways."

"You... you expect me to have sex with this woman?" His voice rose to a hoarse crescendo. The two vampires seemed confused. "I mean, I don't even know her!"

"Oh, come on." Mia's voice was silk. Suddenly, she had become the sexiest woman Norris had ever seen. Her hand was warm when she reached out to stroke his shoulder. "We don't have to fuck. We can do so many other things. I just need one load..."

"No!" he bleated, but Felix had lost patience.

"We must get on with the Rite," he reminded everyone sharply, "before the moon reaches its height." Norris stared helplessly as the vampire struck a spark from his tinderbox, the first candleflame rising in the dark. Mia's hand had become her arm, her body curving along the side of his, her hair smelling like roses.

Another candle. A third. And now Zondervan's high, oddly-accented voice was rising, muttering, a slow chanting dirge that seemed to be composed of all sorts of gutturals. Felix took one end of a long chain composed of thick shining links, now red in the candlelight, and fastened it around Sir Walter's unresisting wrists before he dropped lithely into the tomb and fixed the other end of the chain down there. A strong sense of dissociation washed over Norris, his eyes drooping as he swayed.

Cassie glanced up at him, a little nervous. She didn't like the look of that Mia bitch, not one bit, and she was not happy with the possessive way she'd taken his arm. Something about her was dark and shrouded, where Norris was bright and open; everything was wrong there. So she kept his hand in hers, and squeezed his fingers as the chanting went on, rising and falling, a weird and ancient incantation that filled the little chapel with an odd and dreadful sense of heaviness.

Zondervan finished with a nod, his hand upraised over the open sepulchre, and Felix gave one harsh tug on the chain. Langham's quiescent limbs jerked as he slid into the hole, Felix stooping to compose his body inside the mouldering coffin before he climbed out. The silence stretched, candles guttering, and Norris was very aware that both his left arm and his right hand were going numb: the women gripped him hard. At last Felix nodded up at his colleague, an old-fashioned hammer in his hand, and Doctor Zondervan lifted his voice again.