Chapter 380 - The War of the Vampires part 3

We crossed the remainder of the ice sheet without incident, running beneath the wavering green lights of the aurora borealis. I had no difficulty carrying the old man on my back. Unless we have recently fed, we vampires are remarkably light, having no fluid in our bodies but the symbiont that animates our flesh. We also do not tire, not as living men tire, but we do feel hunger, and the more energy we expend the hungrier we get. By the time we came to the leading edge of the ice sheet, its terminus, the hunger was a raging fire within my guts. All I could think about was finding something hot and wet and alive and sinking my fangs into its neck.

In fact, I was ravening for blood. We all were. We had not fed since climbing onto the glacier and we were all looking horrifically malnourished. Skin shriveled to the bones. Eyes bulging from their sockets. Fangs jutting. We had become monstrous scarecrows, mummies with canid grins and fearsome, lambent eyes.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on whose perspective you take), there was a small band of seal hunters camped near the base of the glacier, their igloo-like shelters staggered along the seashore. It was dusk, and they were butchering their catch by the last light of day, sweaty, tired, their bodies covered in seal blood. The hides of all the seals they had taken were staked outside the camp. The offal of the butchered animals lay in steaming mounds upon the snow. The coppery aroma of all that blood quite literally pushed us over the edge.

With an inarticulate snarl, I launched myself over the edge of the ice sheet, arms outspread to steer my fall.

I bound from one ice ledge to the next until I landed on the ground, spilling the old man from my back, and then I flew into the camp of the seal hunters with a snarl, tackling the first poor mortal I lay my hands upon.

He didn't see me coming, had time for just one astonished yelp before I took him to the ground.

I sank my teeth into the dense muscle of his neck, grunting and gnawing in a frenzy of need. I wrenched my head back, nearly decapitating the man, and hot blood exploded in my face. A great fount of blood gushed from his mutilated neck, and I opened my mouth, tongue thrust out, to devour it. Lost in a vermillion haze of ecstasy, I was only dimly aware of the chaos around me.

The rest of our party had descended on the hunters, racing through the camp like a pack of hungry wolves. The air resounded with the snarls of my blood-starved compatriots, the screams of dying men and the gruesome sounds of our feeding. The tearing of flesh. The crackle of breaking bones. Moist slurping and sighs of satisfaction.

I fed from the seal hunter until his heart stopped, and then I crushed his body in my arms, squeezing out every last drop. Stomach sloshing, I rolled on my back and stared dreamily at the darkening sky.

So much for saving mankind.

Eventually, after the blood ecstasy had passed, I rose gingerly to my feet and surveyed the camp.

There were dead bodies strewn everywhere, most with their throats ripped out. A couple of the men had been completely decapitated. Not a single mortal had survived our assault. Even some of their shelters had been knocked over. We had made a fine mess of it. The blood gods of Uroboros couldn't have done worse.

I walked across the bloody snow to Sunni, who had been run through with a spear. It was a terrific looking wound but posed no real danger to the pintsize Eternal. I bent to remove the weapon before it became fixed in her flesh. The Living Blood will do that if you don't remove a foreign object quickly enough-- fuse it to your body. If it stayed in there any longer we would have to tear it out.

The shaft of the spear had broken about halfway down its length with the tip of the weapon protruding from her back, but she was so addled by the blood ecstasy she was oblivious to the injury. Eyes glazed, tongue swirling languorously around her crimson smeared lips, she sat beside her victim, scooping up his blood with her fingertips and bringing it to her mouth.

"Hold still," I said, placing a hand on her shoulder, and then I pulled the spear from her ribs.

The injury healed immediately once I had removed the spear. Her eyes rolled back at me. "Thank you, Father," she gurgled, and then she returned to her feeding.

The others were similarly preoccupied. So I waited. I sat, crossed my legs, placed my palms upon my knees.

The sun continued its slow, steady descent to the horizon. The sky was as red as the snow I sat upon. I was impatient to continue, but my cohorts needed to feed. They needed the nourishment. They needed to regain their strength. Asharoth was still many days away, and I intended to drive our party just as hard as I could.

I remembered Chaumas then, and went to see if he'd been injured. He had fallen from my back when I flew down from the glacier. I was too crazed for blood at the time to care.

The old blood drinker was fine. He was on his hands and knees at the outskirts of the camp, sucking the blood from the carcass of a seal. He craned his head as I approached, eyes as featureless as pearls in the crenelated flesh of his face. He recognized me by sound and grinned a moony, guileless grin before returning to his meal, grunting and slurping at the animal's ragged neck.

Everyone was busy, happy, filling their bellies with blood.

I returned to my vigil, contemplating the problem of the Tanti's captivity. I turned the matter over and over in my mind, examining it from every angle. How do I free my people from the God King, I asked myself. How do I liberate them from Uroboros? Khronos knew who they were, of course. He possessed all of my memories through the Sharing of Blood, as I possessed all of his. He would not kill them immediately. Not all of them. They were far too valuable alive, a powerful bargaining chip he could leverage against me. Their capture was a huge tactical advantage for my enemy, one he had pursued for twenty years, and as cruel as he was, as arrogant and proud, he would not throw such a powerful advantage away, not even in a fit of pique. He would torture them, yes, probably even kill a good number of them, but he would not slaughter the Tanti outright. For now, they were safe—well, as safe as could be expected-- but try as I might I could think of no way to free them. Not without offering myself in their stead, and that wasn't going to happen again. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, and never was the adage more appropriate. We vampires coined that phrase, you know.

Vehnfear was the first to come to me. The vampire wolf loped up, muzzle red and tacky with mortal blood, and lapped at my face. I scratched his shaggy neck. "Hello, old man," I said. "You ready to hit the trail again?" He wagged his tail and sat beside me. He was much more at ease with me now that I had been restored to my true form. As was I. Sitting companionably together, we waited for the others.

Sunni came next, rubbing at her breastbone. Though her injury had healed without a trace, it still hurt. They always do. My own body still ached terribly. At the shoulders, the hips, where my limbs had been rejoined. And it felt like I had a terrible crick in my neck. Though such injuries cannot kill a true immortal, they still hurt, and that pain often lingers for months or even years afterwards. The blood had helped to lessen the pain, but I still felt like an arthritic old man.

"Sunni," I greeted her.

"Father."

She wanted to sit beside me but Vehnfear snarled warningly and the little Eternal shied away.

Eris joined us then, and Drago shortly after. Soon we had regrouped, all looking plump and fresh again, like predatory angels, blood-smeared and beautiful. We disposed of the bodies of the seal hunters we'd killed, placing them in their own boats and setting them adrift on the icy Kara Sea. And then we headed south, away from the towering glacier, away from the bloody hunting camp, away from the sky that burned green at night and the ugly, gray, ice-choked sea.

We raced towards home.

We raced to war.