Hunter of the Dead (4 page)

“What…?”

Then lightheadedness gave way to darkness. She fell, unconscious or dead, and collapsed to the roof. The last thing she felt was Topan finally releasing his grip on her.

***

The young girl awakened without opening her eyes. She was unclothed, but enveloped by earth and so didn’t feel naked. She lifted her hands through the soil and pressed against the wooden top of the coffin until it popped open effortlessly. She sat up and pulled her knees into an embrace, as though she were sitting in the tub at home and not halfway around the world in a box full of Guangdong province dirt.

It was either thirty seconds or thirty thousand years before she finally rose, standing up in the box so that only her feet were still covered in soil. The dirt streamed down from her crevices and back into the box. Then she slowly stepped down from the dais to the ground. Her first night here two mortals had been present to greet her with warm water, rags, and towels. Embarrassed by her nudity and by the idea of having servants, she had asked them to leave and not return.

Apparently her orders only carried so much weight in her patriarch’s manse, because someone had been by to draw a bath, and quite recently too, judging by the steam still rising from the water’s surface. She stepped into the tub and watched as the dirt fled her body and sank to the bottom of the tub. A warm bath had been a once-weekly luxury back home. Now she could have one any time she liked, for only the price of asking.

A blank envelope sat in the soapdish, propped up in such a manner that she had to take the envelope before the soap, or risk it tumbling into the water. She ripped it open.

Join me in the dining room when you’re ready.

There was no signature, but she recognized the sigil: a scar through a ruined eye. Her hand went to her heart, which now bore the same mark. Topan’s doing. But the message was not from Topan.

She pressed her hand flat against her breast. How strange it was to feel the absence of something that had been so steady and unchanging all her life. Perhaps it was like going blind. Then again, perhaps it was like being blind all of one’s life and one day being able to see. And, then being asked to explain blue. How is it possible to explain blue? Even moreso, how was it possible to describe not feeling her lungs drawing breath, her heart not beating, the blood not flowing through her veins?

She rose from the tub and stood silently on the cold tile, letting the water drip from her naked frame, her hair hung over her face like a veil. Not a shiver or a shudder crossed her shoulders, not a spot of flesh marbled with goosebumps. She could tell, distantly, intellectually almost, that she had left a warm bath for an icy tile floor, but it didn’t bother her. It was like eating spicy food with a cold; it barely registered.

She selected a green
cheongsam
with yellow trim from the wardrobe, knotted her hair, and walked down the hall to the gargantuan oaken doors of the dining hall. She pressed lightly on the crack with her middle finger and each of the half-ton doors practically flew off their hinges opening inward. As the patriarch had taught her, she slammed the doors closed behind her and barred them.

As soon as she had finished barring the doors the dull, gray fog which had had seemed to settle permanently over her senses cleared, and she was struck as though by a razor through her belly. The smell of warm, palpitating mortal flesh struck her nose first, lighting a fire deep in the pit of her stomach. Even though the dining hall was cloaked in absolute darkness it took her only a fraction of a second to spot the source of her burning desire.

Set out on the table like a feast was a boy of no more than five or six. He lay on his belly trussed up like a pig. His mouth was sutured shut and his hands and feet were bound with razor wire. As he struggled in his panic, the wire sliced deep into his wrists and ankles, filling the air with the heavenly scent of young blood.

I can almost…

As soon as she pressed the tip of her tongue to his arm he shuddered and fell still. She licked a rivulet of blood away from the child’s arm, tracing the flow up to his bonds and slicing her tongue deeply on one of the blades. As her tongue instantly repaired itself, she shook her head. The blood had tasted like milk gone sour, as though there was no longer any sustenance to be had from it once it had left his beating artery. No, the flesh had to be still living, the blood still internal to serve as sustenance.

Suddenly a queer thought struck her, a premonition, or perhaps the tickle of a sixth sense. She glanced around the room, her nose flaring as she tried to scent whether anyone else was present. There were no other mortals – she would have scented them immediately. But neither did she catch the whiff of another immortal. The patriarch, it seemed, has left this meal for her alone.

A low whimper emerged from the boy’s nose. The sound was long and continuous, as though he was trying to cry but with his mouth sealed couldn’t make it happen.

“Shh, shh, little one,” she whispered, running her hand through his mop of sandy hair.

With some difficulty (and not without cutting some huge gashes in his arms and legs), she leaned him back on his knees so that his hands and feet were still behind his back, but he was upright. One hand steady on his shoulder to keep him upright, she used her fingernail to rip open the stitches over his mouth.

“I hurt,” he whispered.

She wrapped her arms around him, not caring as she got entangled in the wire and her own clothes and hands were torn to shreds.

“Yes, I know.”

“I want my mommy.”

“She’s not here, I’m afraid. You must get used to that idea.”

“Will you be my new mommy?”

“I’m sorry, little one,” she said, placing a finger on his lips, “but you must be brave. Give me a kiss now.”

She pressed her lips to the child’s mouth. A loud, sickening crunch resounded through the air and she tore her head back from his face, moaning orgiastically as she chewed the child’s tongue. Part of his essence, his energy drained into her, and she felt it powering her, like turning over a motor, even as it cooled the burning hot ember of desire in her belly.

The child was trying to cry again but she bit down around his nose, chewing deep through the nasal cavity and lapping at the blood as it pooled. At that point the boy was hemorrhaging blood. She cursed herself. The patriarch had taught her to start with the extremities, but, of course, in the heat of her lust, she had forgotten and gone straight for the head.

She hoped the boy would not bleed out and turned to begin to suckle the flesh from his fingers, leaving cleaned bone and tendon jutting from his still unruined hands. Like a bowl of rice congealing and growing cold, she could taste the boy’s flesh growing more and more unappetizing as his blood pressure dropped and his heartbeat fluttered on the edge of stopping.

Frantically she gobbled down great gulps of his arms and legs, and even snatched a handful of offal, but by the time she shoved it in her mouth the child had died. She spat the intestines and liver matter back out. Even still warm, it was no good to her with the boy dead. It was the life, the life itself that sustained her.

“There was a time,” a voice dripping like molasses with pure malevolence intoned, “when our kind was not relegated to the shadows.”

Her eyes turned upward and flitted around the ceiling. She staggered backwards, shocked to see her patriarch standing with his feet flat on the ceiling.

“How long have you been there, Father Cicatrice?” she asked.

“And there will be again.”

In a smooth motion, Cicatrice fell, his feet tumbling over his head as he dropped, and he landed flat on the hard, oaken surface with an impact that would have shattered a mere mortal’s legs. He reached down and picked up the dripping ruin of the five-year-old’s corpse. To the young girl’s nose, it already stank of uselessness and decay. He tossed the carcass into a corner and gestured for her to stand and ring a large bronze bell which hung on the wall.

She rang the bell and a small doorway to the kitchen and servants’ quarters opened. A grotesque, dun-skinned creature emerged. Cicatrice called such things “ghouls” and though she had not learned their full background, she understood that they were failed immortals. She shuddered at the thought that had Topan been less skilled, or she less strong, she might have ended up one of those degenerate things, useful only as a mobile midden heap.

The ghoul delighted in its task, devouring the already dead flesh of the child, cracking bones and sucking the marrow from them, and noisily devouring every scrap. It howled over the razor wire, struggling to untangle its meal. It seemed the easy healing which was part of the Long Gift was not imparted to such base creatures.

“Who was he?” she whispered.

“The child of a deadbeat. His mother, I think, has not yet suspected he’s missing. But his father will know when the cock crows, why his young Francis never returned. And perhaps he will pay back his gambling debt to me. Perhaps he will not.”

The patriarch had an imposing figure and a terrifying visage. He wore a
tangzhuang
, every centimeter of it white like bleached bone, except for a red hourglass embroidered on the back. It looked expensive beyond all reason and might have been silk. He could have been an undertaker.

His face was hewn from marble, expressionless, and he had one ruined eye. A scar stretched from his forehead to next to his nose, and the eye which had suffered the scratch was red throughout and useless.

His good eye, though, was the more terrifying of the two. It bore witness to the coldness of nearly a thousand winters. His bad eye suggested he had been wrong once. His remaining orb suggested it would never happen again.

Across his chest he wore a string of garlic cloves like a bandolier. He took it off and dangled it in front of her face.

“The reason you couldn’t smell me,” he explained. “Put it on.”

His Cantonese was, if anything, even better than Topan’s. She put the string around her neck like a necklace. The herb didn’t smell. Certainly it didn’t smell potently the way she remembered it smelling in life. It was almost like an anti-scent, a no-zone where she could detect nothing.

“So I’m invisible to you now?” she asked.

“Not invisible. But I can barely sense you. And I am far more powerful than any immortal you will ever encounter again.”

She moved to doff the necklace, but he held up his hand to stop her. He stepped down from the table onto a chair and then the floor.

“Leave it on for just a moment. You’re troubled.”

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Am I so easy to read?”

“No,” he replied, “In fact I find you extraordinarily difficult to read. Nevertheless.”

She nodded.

“Should I feel ashamed that I felt nothing for that child?”

Cicatrice seemed to ponder for a moment. His face was glacial. She had yet to see his expression betray any of his secrets.

“It would not be unusual for an immortal as young as you to retain some…vestigial mortal emotions. But I have found your development to be precocious, so it does not surprise me that you don’t.”

She nodded.

“What did you feel, devouring him?”

“Just the pleasure of feeding.”

“You’re lying. Holding back. An admirable trait and it will serve you well. With others. But never with me.”

Her eyes fell to the floor.

“I felt something new.”

“Tell me about it.”

She paused and closed her eyes, trying to bring the moment back. Everything now was so slow, like swimming through a morass. Time stretched out before her like an infinite plane. Any given moment lost all its power.

“As I tasted his blood, I could almost…sense it pumping through him. As though I could take the life directly from his veins.”

Cicatrice’s stare bore down on her. As always, his face was impassive, like a statue’s, but she sensed something else almost there on the periphery.

“This is the most dangerous time of your new life. This is the time when you’ll leave behind bodies and the mortals can track you if they know what they’re looking for. Sometimes the mortal authorities never catch on; other times they suspect a newborn is a serial killer. Either way in a few years the problem always resolves itself. You’ve been with me for three days. You’ve been one of us for five. I have never seen an immortal capable of sensing the life in the blood in less than a year. For you to sense it in less than a week is beyond extraordinary.”

“Then this is a good thing?”

“It might be.”

She ran a hand through her hair and realized a small piece of the boy’s nose was stuck behind her ear. She fished it out and tossed it to the ghoul, who by now was messily lapping up the last bloodstains from its meal.

“If you’re not lying to me, tomorrow I’ll teach you how to drain the life from the blood.”

“I’m not.”

“Have you given any more thought to your new name?”

She narrowed her eyes.

“It mustn’t be anything to do with my…old life?”

“That’s correct.”

“And all immortals must do this? Give up their birth name?”

Cicatrice shook his head.

“No. Some Houses do. Some Houses don’t. The Signaris have no set rule. But all members of my House must abandon all mortal weakness. We are not Signaris.”

She sucked her lower lip into her mouth.

“I’ve been thinking about a story. One that your…get told me.”

Cicatrice wrapped his hands behind his back. If he was upset by her mentioning Topan, he didn’t show it. She admired his unflappability. She wished she could replicate it one day, but feared she would always wear her heart on her sleeve.

“Which story?”

“The tale of Iði and his brothers. Of how they divided their wealth. Do you know it?”

Cicatrice nodded.

“When Topan told me that he implied that I was the treasure. ‘Iði’s shining mouthful.’”

“He’s not wrong,” Cicatrice said. “You are unique. And precious.”