The Vampire’s First Rule

Sunset left streaks of violet clouds across a horizon studded with the tiny lights of Torinsburg. Meli watched Paul from bushes nearby, armed with what she needed, her wavy black hair tightly tied back. Her back was turned to those lights—small lights, small human lives.

Paul approached the Paradise Caverns’ entrance hidden in the hills outside the city for the monthly blood offering to the Eternal Half-Lighter who, according to regional vampire beliefs, hibernated in the unexplored back end of these caverns, sustained by the offerings of the cavern guardian. Meli knew all about these caverns, acquired by the vampire community long ago to ensure privacy with no trespassing after local settlers started exploring the hills.

She saw Paul drink silently from the willing human donor laid out on the grassy shale. After having his fill, he sent the woman back down to her car. With a blood-filled mouth he approached the cavern entrance. Meli mouthed with him the old world vampire blessing he would be reciting mentally as he leaned forward.

“O Ma’at, Beloved of the nine Half-Lighters, may the feather never find its rest this night, as we hold the symmetry of its scales,

“As the Shuyet is reborn, so we rest each day,

“As the Shuyet partakes of the vital nectar drawn into this eternal heart, so we are granted immortality.”

Blood trickled from his parted lips and into the bowl hollowed from a pale block of stone as tall as his waist. The bowl had a central opening where the blood filtered down.

Meli aimed the spear and prepared to strike. He must have sensed it and tensed up, perhaps hearing the faint rustle of dried leaves on the ground. Before he could act, she sliced open his back with her spear, forcing him forward. He gripped the edges of the bowl firmly enough to protect his head, pushed away from it and twisted around to see the attacker before he crumpled to the cave floor.

He couldn’t have expected to see Meli. After his last attack, she had made him believe she was out of commission for good. Meli had hidden, allowing her wounds to heal. Her thoughts never strayed from their next confrontation.

His energy reserves drained, and he trembled. She sensed the rage burning through him like scalding syrup as he crawled backward into the cave. Three feet of the spear extended through him and dragged along with each move deeper inside. He stood and charged backwards against the rocky wall to shove the spear back through the wound enough to pull it out from the front.

Crimson saturated his eyes from iris to sclera. He grabbed the spear and tugged with all his strength until it pulled free of the wound.

His mouth wrenched open in a howl of agony.

Meli followed him in with a machete in her hand and a leather pouch fastened to her belt loop. He recognized the stink of decomposition and soil coming from the pouch as their burial grounds from the old world.

“You risk offending a Half-Lighter during an offering just to destroy me and steal my position?” He scurried from the damp wall to a spot nearer the entrance, still moving slowly, always with eyes on Meli. “What a worthless lump of dirt, not fit to be scuffed off my shoe.” 

She closed on him and replied, “I’m meant to be the guardian of this sanctuary. You don’t get to do what you like when it comes to this sanctuary, this city, or yeah, me. You started this a long time ago!”

He grabbed at the leather pouch and yanked it open in order to slow her and give him time to recuperate enough to think clearly. Dirt fell in clumps onto the floor of the cave.

 “And I’ve had more than enough,” she added and moved forward. She looked down at the dirt and her eyes glazed over, deep in memories of the sliced limbs and bone-deep wounds traded over the centuries of this dispute, of being hurt in more than one way, of the repetitive accusations. She swung the machete with impeccable aim and ripped his throat open. Then, she swung again, slicing completely through his neck. Paul’s head separated from his body and rolled to her boot.

She stared down at his face, her mouth opened in a silent gasp with nothing to say, no final words for him. Meli hadn’t actually expected to succeed.

She gathered the clumps of native soil, crouched down then jammed the dirt into his mouth, stuffing it against the roof of the mouth and tongue leaving no room. The homeland soil filling his mouth sealed his fate. With Paul’s death, her fury faded. Her own eternity on earth never troubled her much, but the thought that he was gone forever by her hand devastated her. Her nerves were on edge, and she shivered.

She had broken the first law of the Eternal Half-Lighters: Vampire cannot destroy fellow vampire.

Meli kept looking down at Paul, overwhelmed by a deepening remorse but also an urgent need to clean up the mess, to be rid of Paul and all the combined memories summoned by the sight of him.

The cave exhaled colder breath. Then came a different sound Meli had not heard in over a century. It drifted up from the lowest caverns, the susurrus so gentle in lament. It rose as a melodic undertone in words from an unfamiliar age and place, reminding her of what she feared to see ascend a second time from the back cavern. Only the gods below could help her if the Half-Lighter had awakened fully. She had acted in the heat of the moment in vengeance, and it would not be enough to justify decapitating the vampire next to her.

Paul’s eyes looked up at her from where she had left his head on the ground. Had they been open? She couldn’t remember, but she knew he hadn’t spoken those ancient words. The voice was an unmistakable part of the Half-Lighter torment that had once almost destroyed her.

She didn’t know whether to run and keep running out of state or face the broken entryway to the lower caverns with her dead rival lying next to her. She turned to flee the caves, but a voice interrupted her.

“Let me go!”

She recognized the voice, though it should have been impossible. He had just died in front of her.

She turned, sickened to see but needing to know.

Paul stood as if propped by invisible arms, his head reattached, the hole in his chest sealed in a ragged scar, the soil from inside his mouth in a small pile near his feet—a marionette of a dead vampire animated to torment her. Is that what he was?

“Is the Half-Lighter doing this?” she asked, scared of the answer.

“Meli, let me go. Please! You tried your best to kill me. You succeeded. I can’t have this happen again, and again. Stop holding me here,” he pleaded. “Just send me back into nothingness. Look at me.” His voice broke as if sobbing without tears. He shook his head as he looked at her. 

“Oh Paul. I don’t think I’m doing this at all. It can’t be. I don’t have such power.” She walked to him and rested her hands on his shoulders. “I am so sorry. I didn’t want you to die, not really. I thought I did until it was over.”

“If it isn’t you, then who?”

“I don’t know, but Paul, you’re healing. I don’t understand it, but I’m relieved.” She was surprised at her own admission, but she really did feel relief.

“If I am healing on my own then that Rule One must not be a rule about behavior. I think, well, maybe it’s impossible for us to kill each other. Can you see us healing from death repeatedly, endlessly?”

Meli gripped his shoulders tighter, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can watch you die again by my hand. Let’s just tend to the guardianship together. I think our Eternal Half-Lighter may want it that way, yes?” She felt a tingling presence and stared at the rubble in the back of the cave. Pinpoint scarlet embers swirled within a translucent mist that curled then dissipated between the rocks at the back of the cave.

A breeze carried a lilting sigh through the caverns as Meli helped Paul down the hill.

This story is featured in...

Twisted Pulp Magazine Issue #5