Chapter 168 - The Vampire Thief part 2

I call him the vampire thief because he stole away two children, and in so doing, he also stole the happiness I'd enjoyed living with the Tanti.

Though I would not know it for another day or so, the blood drinker's name was Hettut. He came in the night, in the winter of my third year with the Tanti, and snatched two sleeping children from beside their dozing parents.

We found his tracks leading in from the forest to the east. From the eastern edge of the wilderness, where the great pines gave way to open meadow, he circled around the north side of the lake and struck the first lodge that he came unto.

His victims were two Tanti boys named Pudhu and Emoch. They were only a little older than my darlings. I shudder to think how easily he might have taken Irema and Aioa, and I thank the ancestors that he did not. Cruel, I know, but a grandfather cannot help such merciless thoughts.

The vampire's icy touch woke the boys as he eased them from their sleeping furs. Both of them began to scream, first Emoch, then Pudhu moments later, and their parents leapt from their bedding in horror. Though their father, a fisherman named Iltep, reached immediately for his weapons, Hettut was T'sukuru, and he flew from the lodge with unnatural speed after grinning toothily at the children's' frightened parents, head twisted strangely to one side. He vanished into the night before the man's blade could even clear its sheath, a plump squirming child tucked in the joint of each of his arms.

If we were home, Ilio and I might have been able to save Iltep's children, but we were far away when the blood drinker attacked, hunting in the snowy forest to the northwest of the village. If we had been home, Hettut might have even passed around the Tanti village, confused by the presence of other blood drinkers.

Yes, I know: if and if…! Who can really say what might have happened? The ancestors might know, but not this man.

I did have a strange sense of foreboding when I rose that evening, the sky crowded with dense gray snow clouds, or maybe I just made that up later, to spice the stew of self-recrimination, but really I think that I did. It was just a tingle in my guts. A sense that something unpleasant was bearing down on the village, and not just the storm heads creeping over the eastern peaks. I remember standing in front of my hut, sparse white flakes drifting down around me, the sky starless and thick with freight of snow, thinking there was some odd quality to the atmosphere that evening: the air was too heavy, the cold more cutting than it normally was. I dismissed it after a moment or two, and went on to Ilio's home. I wish I had investigated further, but I did not.

There was no way I could have known. There had been no sightings of the blood drinkers from the east since the fall of the Oombai three years before. Though they came up in conversation from time to time, the Tanti had forgotten about the eastern vampires just as surely as I. They didn't even really think of Ilio and I as T'sukuru anymore. To them, we were only Tanti.

It wasn't until we were returning from our hunt, our bellies sloshing with the blood of a boar, that we realized something was amiss.

"Look at that, Father!" Ilio said, pointing toward the village as we rounded the white hump of a hill. "Why are there so many torches? Everyone's running through the streets!"

(There were not actually streets in the village, just muddy strips of open ground running between the buildings—filling in with drifts of snow that night—so please do not lecture me on linguistics. The Tanti called the avenues between their homes leptruff'u, which mean throat or open passage. I simply use the modern approximation.)

I had been listening to the crunch of my feet sinking into the snow, enjoying the sound of it, the sensation of my feet punching through the crusty surface of the ice. The boar we had killed was slung across my shoulders, the warm tingle of its blood pulsing through my limbs. At Ilio's exclamation, I looked up with a frown, following his pointing finger to the sparks of light winking between the tree trunks.

"Something bad has happened," I said.

We both went still for a moment, lowering our mental defenses so that we could hear what was going on in the village. The hiss of the wind through the trees, the clatter of bare branches brushing against one another as they stirred, even the snap and flutter of the torches twinkling down there in the village, made the Tanti's voices an unintelligible babble. I filtered through the extraneous sounds, pushing them out of my consciousness until only human voices remained.

What I heard turned my heart to ice.

Women were crying out, sobbing, calling after their husbands in fear. Someone was keening, "My babies! It took my babies!" And the men, speaking in loud, angry voices: "Where is Thest?" and "Its tracks head toward the mountains!" and "We have to set after it at once!"

I heaved the boar off my shoulders. "Come, Ilio! Someone has violated the Tanti while we were away!"

I flew down the hill toward the village, my bare feet kicking up great fans of snow. Fast as I was, however, Ilio was faster. Fearing for his mortal family, he raced ahead of me through the darkness, his passage whipping snow back in my face in a sudden icy flurry.