One
Given the modern luxuries boasted across their website and informational materials, I had assumed the Clotswold by Litchfield would have sent top-of-the-line, high high-end automobiles to retrieve me from the airport. You can imagine my chagrin when what greeted me instead was a buggy.
Two chestnut mares snorted their impatience, hot breath evaporating to ethereal mist, wafting past their dark eyes, twining with the long-fingered fog that wrapped choking hands around the horizon. Their driver sat stone-still, a shaggy bowl cut obscuring much of his face and, calling to mind one of those famous Liverpool boys who set the world on fire not too long ago. The buggy itself was no antique, and before I could fully embrace the dissonance of a brand-new horse-drawn carriage next to a private jet plane, I remembered what Billy had said of the hotel’s dedicated stables. The transport was meant to evoke a time long since passed for humans, but often still felt very close to my present.
That was the duality of living as a vampire, I suppose. The past had no interest in remaining solely a memory.
As Billy’s private attendant, Charles, brought my bags from the plane, the buggy door swung open on easy hinges and a familiar face beamed out at me from the cozy interior lighting.
“Alright then, Patrick?” Leslee Hawthorne, hedge witch and head landscaper of The Huxley Manor Museum and Botanical Gardens, was an athletic British woman who wore far too many crystal necklaces at once. She’d opted for her usual floor-length paisley skirt and loose white blouse, bushy brown hair framing her round freckled face like a cloud too close to the sun.
I gave her a tired smile back, nodding to the attendant to follow as I crossed the tarmac. I’d chosen a sharp suit for my travels, having never flown on a plane before. Billy, a fellow vampire and the owner of the vehicle itself—and of the museum and the horses stomping impatient hooves on the cement—had offered me the transit as a thank you for my services. I was to provide tutelage to the nest of six young fanglings that had been turned the year before in a dreadful business with a rampant ghoul. Additionally, I hoped to seek further understanding of the ghoul itself and how this mess had occurred.
Vampirism was never meant to be an illness transmitted by chance—not since those early dark days when monsters prowled free, feasting on the barely formed humankind struggling to understand fire. Long, long ago, my people agreed to a greater decorum, doling out immortality only to those deemed fit. Although admittedly, the criteria varied wildly from sire to sire.
The point remained that a wild animal turning children against their will needed further study and preventive measures. Especially in a hamlet of such a quaint size.
“It’s so lovely to see you!” Leslee squeezed me into a fierce hug as I joined her in the carriage. The plush seats were covered in soft brocade, and clever electric lights flickered like low flamesin the alcove of the ceiling. I took the seat across from her, adjusting my tie and clearing my throat at the sudden, joyous affection.
“A pleasure, always, my dear. How fare the grounds?” A smart thump on the back of the carriage signaled that my luggage was secured. The driver gave a low whistle, and we set off, the carriage barely jostling us. My mind flashed between far-off memories and Leslee’s tedious explanation of perennial planting techniques for several different blooming varietals. The last time I’d ridden in a carriage, cars hadn’t existed, much less private airplanes. There were no pinging cellular devices, no flashing tablets, no screaming screens of any kind as there are now. The world was quieter, but no less distracting.
And I certainly wouldn’t have shared the journey with a human, half-druid witch or not.
“But you don’t want to hear about work.” Leslee laughed, cutting herself off and dragging me back to the present juxtaposition. She leaned forward, eagerness glowing in her hazel gaze. “How was your first plane?”
“Quite pleasant, thank you.” I clasped and reclasped my hands in my lap, half expecting to look out the window and see peasants tilling the fields beneath the sweeping manors where their lords idled. Instead, we passed white thatched cottages with satellite dishes poking from the roofs, hatchback Volvos parked haphazardly in the drive, and twinkling electric lights dangling from eaves.
“Pleasant?” Leslee’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “You fly for the first time in your long life—private, even—and all you have is ‘pleasant?’”
“Humans continue to create modern wonders that defy the established laws of science.” I brushed my hands down the front of my suit, smoothing it. “But I will admit I greatly enjoyed Charles.”
Leslee’s gaze squinted, sly. “Enjoyed?”
“Please, Miss—”
“Ah!” She shot an imperious finger into the air, cutting me off. “It’s Leslee or my dear. Come on, Patrick, we agreed.” If I couldn’t smell the rolling moors in her blood, I would’ve assumed Leslee was American based on her insistence on informalities. But she could be endearing, in her own way.
I nodded. “My dear, I assure you that Charles and I did nothing so untoward on our lengthy journey together. We shared enjoyable conversation about a translation ofBeowulfthat Billy recommended to us both.”
“That stodgy poem he’s always going on about?” The witch rolled her eyes. “Gods, you both need to get laid.”
“I don’t imagine a good fucking will reduce Billy’s fervor for Germanic heroism, but I admire your ambition.”
Leslee threw her head back and laughed so uproariously that the many swinging crystals at her neck clinked and clanged in response. She clapped her hands together in glee.
“Oh, a Patrick joke! I thought Billy was taking the piss, but he was right. They’re better in person.”
Before I could correct her misunderstanding of my statement, Leslee was off again, gesturing out the window as we rolled by a meadow of billowing grass, the sheaths rippling like waves beneath the moonlight.
“That’s where Billy and I met for the first time! He was throwing up in the mud, because you know he had that whole business with crossing his grave dirt, and I was out looking for mushrooms, but I ended up seeing the ghoul for the first time instead and . . . ”
I scrambled for my pen and notepad in my inside pocket, jotting down Leslee’s rapid speech in my proprietary shorthand. I’d transcribe it for my research later.
As Leslee tells it, she felt called by the moon to recharge her powers and set off through the meadow she pointed out to me. Barely halfway across, toward the looming dark wood on the horizon, the grass itself parted, diverting her attention to Billy. The pitiful thing was on all fours in the mud, vomiting up coagulated blood he’d ingested from a donation bag only moments before. Later, he learned from his vampire chauffeur, an emissary from the legendary Marie Laveau, that his nausea and the following pica-like urges were the result of his grave dirt not being granted the body it was promised.
A vampire crossing his dirt is a rare but powerful affliction. Our dirt recharges our powers and enables our immortality. We must rest within it at a regular cadence or wither away to nothing. Although Billy’s case is particularly strange in that the ground in Ashbourne, the village where he was turned, seemed interested in consuming him at every opportunity. I, myself, had relied on the same chauffeur and emissary earlier that year to refresh my own dirt. We’d been in the middle of the great Leprechaun and Oceanic Court alliance—Caoimhe and Leith’s wedding, as it were—and I’d been feeling like death warmed over, as some Americans say. That was just with stale dirt. My sympathies were with Billy in his crisis, but only the vampire himself can make things right at that point.
It had taken Billy’s pinky and the destruction of the very ghoul I’d come to study to set things right. These events also resulted in Billy and Leslee’s coupling—inexplicably. But they were incandescent together, insufferably so.
