Part 9

When I awoke, the power was gone.

Not the strength – that was still there, coiled in my limbs like rope pulled too tight. Not the speed, not the shadow. Those stayed. What was gone was the feeling. That intoxicating, disgusting, beautiful feeling of being more than what I was. Of being something close to a god in a world full of cattle.

It was replaced by the smell.

You know how I’ve described the smell of fear? Sweet, almost addictive? Well, there’s another smell that comes after the fear is gone, when the blood has dried and the bodies have cooled and whatever was left of the person has departed for wherever it is that kine go when they die. It’s not sweet. It’s iron and shit and something else, something that doesn’t have a name, but if it did, it would be called “what you’ve done.”

That smell was on me. In my clothes, in my hair, under my fingernails. The lake had washed away the visible blood, but the smell… the smell had settled into me like it belonged there.

I sat up in the darkness of my stolen house and I remembered everything.

The little girl. The guards. The… sounds. Not the screaming – that I could handle, I’d heard screaming before. It was the other sound. The one her body made when it hit the wall. Like a sack of wet grain dropped from a cart. A child shouldn’t make that sound. Nothing should make that sound.

But enough of that. You didn’t come here for my guilt, did you? You came for the story. So let me tell you what happened next, because what happened next is what happens when a monster makes too much noise in a city full of people who believe in monsters.

I waited until full dark before I dared to open the door. Even then, I could tell something was wrong. London at night has a sound to it – drunks arguing, dogs barking, the occasional scream from someone being robbed or worse. Normal sounds. Comforting, in their way.

That night, London sounded like a kicked beehive.

I could hear soldiers – real soldiers, not the city watch – marching through the streets. Torches. Lots of torches. And voices, dozens of them, all talking over each other. I crept to the edge of town where my house sat, wrapped myself in shadow as best I could, and listened.

“…the princess, God rest her soul, torn apart like…”

“…devil’s work, that’s what the priest said, devil’s work…”

“…saw something by the lake, moving fast, faster than any man…”

That last one made my blood – well, her blood – run cold. Someone had seen me. Not clearly, not enough to point a finger, but enough. Enough to put the idea in someone’s head that whatever killed the princess and her guards had come from outside the castle walls. Had come from the direction of the lake. Had come from the direction of my house.

I went back inside and sat in the dark, thinking. This is one of the things they don’t tell you about being kindred – well, nobody told me anything, my sire was about as useful as a blind archer – but the killing is easy. It’s the after that’s hard. The cleaning, the hiding, the constant looking over your shoulder. And when you’ve killed a princess… there is no cleaning that. There is no making that disappear.

The Beast was quiet. Isn’t that always the way? When it’s driving you to tear a child apart, it’s right there, loud and hungry and impossible to ignore. But when you’re sitting in the wreckage of what it made you do, when you’re trying to figure out how to survive the morning… silence. Not even a whisper.

I tried to talk to it. I know how that sounds – a man sitting alone in a dark house, talking to himself. But I needed to understand. In that room, with the girl, it had spoken to me. It had told me I could never make it go away. It had called itself my worst nightmare.

Was it right?

I thought about the family I slaughtered when I first woke as kindred. The old woman in the village. The vagrant in my house. The man I chased through London. And now… a child. A princess. Each one worse than the last. Each one easier than the last. And that – that was the part that made me want to walk into the sunrise and be done with it. Not that I had done these things, but that each time, some part of me – not the Beast, not some separate thing inside me, but me – had enjoyed it more.

The Beast wasn’t my worst nightmare. I was starting to think the Beast was just… me. The part I didn’t want to look at. The part that liked the fear and the blood and the power, and all the Beast did was rip away the curtain I’d hung over it.

Youu’re learrrning.

I nearly put my fist through the wall.

Sca-ared of mee? Or sca-ared of youu?

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because I didn’t know.

Outside, the marching got louder. More torches. I could smell the smoke through the walls. They were searching. House by house, street by street, they were going to search the whole city, and eventually they were going to reach the outskirts, and they were going to find a man who only came out at night, who had no family, no friends, and who worked a job that the previous holder had mysteriously vanished from.

It was time to leave.

I gathered what little I had – clothes, mostly, and a knife I’d taken from one of the robbers at the shop. Not that I needed a knife. But it made me feel… human. Like I was still a man who needed tools, and not a thing that could tear armored soldiers apart with its bare hands.

I wrapped the shadows around me like a cloak. It was easier now – so much easier than before. The princess’s blood had made everything easier. My disciplines responded like they were extensions of my own limbs. I could feel the darkness in the room, in the street, in the alleyways between houses, and I could pull it around me like water. The power the girl’s blood gave me was extraordinary, and the fact that I could appreciate that, even now, even knowing what I’d done to get it… that told me everything I needed to know about what I was becoming.

I slipped out the door and into the night. Through the streets of London like a shadow among shadows, past the soldiers and their torches, past the huddled groups of frightened kine whispering about demons and curses. None of them saw me. None of them could. I was darkness itself, moving through their world like a bad dream they’d forget by morning.

At the edge of the city, I stopped and looked back. London. My first real attempt at living among the kine. My job, my house, my little corner of something that almost resembled a life. Gone. All of it, gone, because I couldn’t control what was inside me. Or because I didn’t want to.

I turned and walked into the forest, alone, just as I had been after leaving my first village. But I was different now. Stronger. Faster. More dangerous. And more afraid – not of the world, not of soldiers or priests or mobs with torches.

Afraid of myself.

The Beast purred somewhere deep inside me, satisfied, like a dog that had been fed. And the worst part – the absolute worst part – was that I couldn’t tell where its satisfaction ended and mine began.