Chapter 109 - A New Path part 1

It was dawn when I returned to the boy, but the morning light was tempered by the churning heavens, the clouds thick and gray. A cold rain lashed the plains, sweeping in twisting cold sheets across me. Ilio leapt to his feet when he saw me stumbling through the drumming deluge, my back bent, my body shot through with arrows and the broken shafts of several spears. I could not reach them all myself. He flew to me with a look of horror on his face and helped me to the thicket of evergreen trees where I'd instructed him to await me.

Sitting on a soft mound of pine needles, I allowed the boy to tend to my wounds. He pulled the spears and arrows from my flesh with a grim look on his face. Most of the wounds were deep enough to kill a mortal man.

I was no mortal, but their removal was painful nonetheless. Some of them he had to wriggle to and fro, and one was set so deep he could do naught but push it through to the other side of me and drag it out by the head.

"Is it done?" he asked. "Are you satisfied?" Tears rimmed his eyes as he asked me this—vampire tears, black and gummy.

"Yes," I said tiredly. "It is done."

He'd stripped off my wet cloak and outer coat, and watched as the living blood welled up in my wounds, slowly erasing them. Before he sat beside me, my flesh was white and flawless.

Once again, I am a gore-streaked spectacle, I thought to myself. My stolen clothes were tattered and soaked in human blood. My hands were gloved in bits of flesh and bone. My hair was dripping from the downpour, and the water that ran down my face was stained bright pink by all the human debris.

I stared south, toward the land of the Ground Scratchers, feeling little in my heart… only the physical sensations: cold, wet, exhausted.

"You need rest," the boy said finally. "Come. I made a shelter while you were gone."

He pulled me to my feet. I allowed him to escort me to the lean-to he'd constructed in my absence. It was quite large and comfortable, the floor padded with pine needles. I longed for a fire, a big, warm, crackling fire, but even for a vampire, that would have been a miraculous accomplishment in this torrential downpour.

Ilio spread out my cloak and I hunkered down and crawled inside. The boy joined me a moment later and covered the entrance with branches, blocking out the moist gray light.

"Where do we go now?" he asked in the dark.

"I don't know," I answered.

He put his head on my shoulder and I embraced him-- my boy, my son, my vampire child. "It doesn't matter," he said with a sigh. "You live. That's enough."

Listening to the thunder and the rhythmic susurration of the rain, I fell asleep.