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“Unless he’s a vampyr?”
Tucker let out a long sigh.
“Okay…so who do you want to talk to first?”
49
Athelinda didn’t remember being turned.
Occasionally, fragments of her human life would come back to her. Sunlight. A strange sensation of warmth, which she thought might be joy or love. Music sung in a soft, lilting voice.
Afterward, there was darkness, violence and blood. Many turned children didn’t survive for long. They were killed by their own families out of shame, or abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Athelinda had been lucky, in a way. After she had killed her mother—an act of impulse and unreason she still occasionally felt pain about—she had been found wandering the streets and taken in by a traveling freak show.
This was back in seventeenth-century England, where child vampyrs were still curiosities, especially beloved of aristocrats and royalty. She had been dressed all in black, placed in a coffin in a cage, and people would gasp in breathless terror as the pretty blonde child drank the blood of small animals.
But then the puritanical, religious movement began to grow. To be entertained by vampyrs was seen as evil and satanic. Vampyrs were seized and culled. Athelinda had only narrowly escaped with her life after some of the other performers took pity on her and smuggled her out.
She had found herself on a boat to another country. The journey lasted weeks. And then a sickness descended. Most of the others on board didn’t make it. Athelinda arrived with a ghost ship of corpses and made her escape before anyone found out that many had been drained of their blood.
The new country was vast, busy and full of human stench. The streets bustled with people, carts and horses. America. A place Athelinda had heard talked of, often in a state of wonder.
But Athelinda found nothing wondrous about its mass of filthy streets, the chorus of coarse voices or the vampyr heads displayed in shops. She walked by night till the buildings and bustle of bodies lay far behind her. Now she had her freedom, she wished to preserve it.
For a long while she traveled alone, keeping to the forests and wilderness on the edge of towns. She taught herself to build a basic shelter and to hunt to survive. Not just animals. Any creature who ventured into the wilderness was fair game for her.
She made her way farther and farther north, following the darkness and the cooler weather. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, she met other vampyrs. Initially distrustful, they had formed a loose alliance and began to travel together. To her surprise, Athelinda realized that she found comfort in others of her kind.
In the way that most colonies grew, they added more members, and Athelinda became an unofficial leader. She was one of the oldest. She was also fierce and brutal. Being turned so young, she had less humanity to ease the edges off her bloodthirst and fury. But she also learned that such desires needed to be controlled. Murdering humans was seen as barbaric among other vampyrs. It reinforced the view that they were beasts and monsters. More to the point, it was bad for the colonies. Dead humans attracted unwanted attention.
Athelinda learned to curb her desires. Mostly.
For a while, their colony was nomadic, traversing the country by horse and cart or boat, but like all creatures, the urge to put down roots, to create a more permanent home, grew. Somewhere they could build a community and be left alone. That was how they found themselves in the mountains here. Cold, dark and isolated, away from the human hunters. The local Dghelay Teht’ana population had accepted, or perhaps respected, them. The “night walkers,” they called them.
The Colony built their settlement from scratch. Cut trees, sawed wood. Relationships were formed, children and then grandchildren born. Athelinda mellowed. They had found a home where they could live, untroubled.
And they did, for almost two hundred years. But it couldn’t last. Humans were like a plague. They infected everywhere. When huge copper reserves were found in the mountains, men and their machines followed. The Colony was driven from its settlement into the woods. But that wasn’t enough for the humans. Next came the hunting parties. They raided on the brightest of days, when they knew the Colony was most vulnerable. They killed, tortured and captured those they thought they could make use of. Like Athelinda.
She found herself at the mercy of men’s desires and depravities. Chained, in a child’s bedroom. Pink ruffles and cuddly toys. They dressed her in a gingham frock with a lace petticoat that itched, and white ankle socks that made her feet sweat. Her long blonde hair was tied up in two bunches.
“Pretty as a picture,” Bonnie, the toothless hag who ran the whorehouse, would cackle, blowing pungent cigar smoke into Athelinda’s face.
“Now you make nice with your daddies when they come.”
Athelinda did not make nice. But she didn’t fight either. Bonnie took pleasure in punishing those who stepped out of line. She would remove fingers, eyes and sometimes limbs for transgressions. Athelinda had heard that she once hung a girl from a pole outside for seven days straight, not quite letting her die. Eventually, she slit her open from throat to pubis and hooked out what was inside her with a hot poker. Punishment for getting pregnant.
Athelinda wasn’t sure if it was true. She heard these stories from the servant boy who brought her sustenance and cleaned her wounds. The boy liked to talk, and she listened, storing the information. In her own way, she was fond of the boy and only occasionally considered killing him.
While most humans looked alike to her, she began to recognize the faces of her visitors. Some were more palatable than others. Rough, but bearable. But there was one who even Athelinda feared. Good-looking with a thick head of fair hair, sharp blue eyes and a tall, lean physique. His smile was easy, but his eyes were dead. Athelinda recognized evil when she saw it. She’d seen those desires reflected in her own eyes.
The first time he visited her, he brushed her hair and then choked her with his belt. The next visit, he brought a knife. Another time, he used flame. He always had a new torture, each more extreme than the last, in order to derive his pleasure. And each time he knew she would be waiting, for she would not die.
On the worst day, Bonnie had to call for a doctor. Through a fog of brutal pain and blood, Athelinda was vaguely aware of their conversation:
“Just put her down.”
“No, she makes me good money. Joseph pays well. We need to keep her.”
“Then it will take time. I can give her drugs, for the pain. But there’s no guarantees. The scars should heal eventually…at least on the outside.”
