Bloodline by Joel Abernathy

Prologue

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.

Nietzsche

6th Century A.D.

It wasa night at the encampment like any other when the nameless soldier called me into his tent.

I’d long since lost track of who I belonged to when my original master had sent me out onto the battlefield with his eldest son, and from there, in a series of drunken trades, I was certain I had become the most prolific whore in all of Greece.

The official bill of sale mattered little. The soldiers had their marching orders, and I had mine. The job wasn’t as cushy as being a temple prostitute, but it was better than living on the streets. For an uneducated youth at the age of nineteen, there were few better options that didn’t end in a bloody death on the front lines.

I fell asleep that night beneath a drunken oaf of a man, but the tent was warm, and the wine left in his flask would grant me peace until morning. When the folds of the tent rustled and a heavy arm lifted off of me, I was too dreary to think much of it.

People came and went. The veil of every tent might as well have been the veil between life and death, for there were never as many occupants returning to their tents the following night as there had been peeling them open in the morning.

I opened my eyes when a shadow eclipsed the pale glow of the campfire bleeding through the canvas. At first, the sight of the pale, wounded man seemed to be a dream. The wound in his bare chest was hardly the kind a man survived for a matter of minutes, let alone long enough to rise and wander about. Whether he hadn’t noticed me or simply chose to ignore me, I couldn’t say, but I watched in half-awake fascination as he leaned over my comatose client as if whispering something in his ear.

The ungodly sounds he made as the soldier’s body remained limp and face down brought me fully awake, but I was still convinced I had to be dreaming as he lifted his head and revealed a grizzled face covered in blood.

The wound in his chest began to heal before my very eyes.

Before I could let out the scream in my throat, the devil caught me by the neck and opened his stained red mouth to reveal fangs as sharp as knives before he bit into me.

The blood welled in my throat, drowning out the scream. I thrashed and fought against him with all my might. I was no soldier, but my limbs were sturdy and my will sharp. Nonetheless, even in his wounded state, he was stronger. As his fangs plunged deeper into my neck, he held my face in his claw-like hand, and his sharpened nails dug harder into my flesh the more I struggled.

“Such a pretty boy,” he rasped in a voice that came from the bowels of hell. I wished he’d go back to feasting on me when his bloody eyes met mine. Anything but having to meet his gaze. There was something unnatural about those eyes, beyond the color itself. “Almost a shame to drain you. Unless you weren’t so pretty…”

I screamed in agony and realized only as he dragged his claws down my face that his hand wasn’t mutated. He had merely dressed his fingers in two curved blades to resemble a beast’s claws. Two searing lines etched deep into my flesh, cutting through the muscle, but a spasm of pain allowed me to strike and break away from him. Upon looking back, I became certain it was only because he had been so gravely wounded.

There was no other way for a mortal to fight off a deathless beast. Whether it was fortune or the beginning of a curse, I remain uncertain to this day, but the staggering vampire fell back against my master’s spear, and I watched as the light left his soulless eyes.

For a long while, I stood there, clutching my bleeding neck and staring at the corpse as if it might somehow rise again. Was this real? Was any of it, or had my entire life since being loaded onto a slaver’s caravan as debt collectors passed my father a written bill of sale been nothing more than a dream?

What possessed me to sink to my knees and touch the blood glistening on the tip of the spear sticking out from the creature’s chest, I do not know. Perhaps I had the presence of mind to make the connection between the consumption of blood and the partially healed wound in his chest. There were rituals at the temple that hinted at as much, even if the results were never so clear.

In any case, I only know that the blood called to me, a song it has been singing in all the centuries that have elapsed since.

The sticky blood clung to my fingers. I drew them into my mouth, and that taste of forbidden fruit, as bitter as it was, marked the final blow to my ailing innocence.

Having slain my unwitting sire, I would not learn the name for the creature I had become for several long and bloody years. Nonetheless, I became that very night what I will remain forevermore: a vampire.