Page 1 of Blood & Bedlam

Vladimir

PROLOGUEMARCH 18, 1728

Memory is in the Blood.

Something stark and commanding drags me to the surface of consciousness, and even in this self-inflicted state of desiccation, I am made to see. Nectar, hot and intoxicating, drips in a steady river across my lips, rousing me to the waking realm, but it is not the blood of my attendant rousing me in the new world I hope to make my home after months at sea. This blood is warm and terrified. The scent of salt and sweat is heavy in the air and fear, delicious fear, so thick it sits on my skin. There is a bitterness there, too, sorrow, despair—the loss of hope is a near tangible thing.

My eyes are not yet able to open, but I see everything in her blood. The memory in the droplets acts as a beacon, and I am transported, seeing through eyes and hearing through ears that are not my own. Feeling every violation of hands and mouths, the brutality of indignities visited on the women who found themselves left to the most horrific displays of inhumanity by the men on this ship. It’s an easy thing, sinking into her mind. In it, I witness her pain, the horrors unleashed upon the most vulnerable of this voyage.

This girl, Camille, boarded this ship with the same intentions as I—a fresh start. A new life, as a lady of a household, trained by the Catholic Church to the new colony. What she and her fellow Filles à la Cassette have endured is the very worst of sacrilege.

I have crossed an ocean, starved and slumbering, oblivious to the bacchanal of carnage happening above me, but I am aware now. In the haste of the captain to violate this young woman, the struggle that ensued has left the top of my coffin askew. In her strength and will of fight, the blood Camille forced him to draw to subdue her falls into the darkness.

Awakening me.

My eyes blow wide, seeing the very fabric of the universe as they do, and even with the small amount of this girl’s blood to sustain me, I am afforded movement after so long in this box. Above me, a sliver of light catches on the over-pigmented blood slowing to a lazy drip. I hear the muffled cries, smell the brutality of man in the air, and I am up before I can think even a moment more, rising silent and swift from my resting place. I see the captain from Camille’s memory in an act of open violation. He has her pinned, and rage tears through me. In one swift motion, I am at his back, and in another, my nails have become talons that tear through his flesh with ease. The pumping of his blackened heart is a beat against my palm as my fingers dig into him. The surprised exhale when I wrench him away from her is music to my ears. I move him like a marionette, manipulating his body with my grip. His hold on the girl relents, her bloodied dress falling to cover her once more. She turns, eyes struck in horror at the macabre scene.

His blood is hot as it pumps through his body, and rotten as he is, I strike. I want her face to be the last thing he sees, so I grip his chin as I draw, gnashing my teeth to make the feeding as painful as possible. I offer her this, a pale compensation for the price she’s endured, but she watches intently, chest heaving, as the light leaves his eyes. I pull back, satisfied but not satiated as her blue eyes stare into the pits that are mine. Fear that had been so potent in the air dissipates as time passes between us, and it’s a curious thing that she is not frightened of the demon before her. I work my tongue, needing to speak, but the dead man’s blood invigorating me is doing slow work.

I need more.

As if a calling from the Fates, the blood hits my ears, letting in a rushing cacophony of sound as the tissues reanimate. Desiccation is necessary for long voyages where food is not readily available, but the reanimation leaves much to be desired. Pops and crackles as loud as cannon fire smack into my skull violently, along with the piercing screams and whimpers of more women above. My body moves, fast and filled with fury along the wooden steps, up and up into the night sky.

The devastation that greets me would have stopped my heart, if it could properly beat.

The scene is a gruesome spectacle, a wild, inhumane offering to the altar of violence. Scores of men surround one woman, raping and taunting, jeering as they cover her with their fluids and piss, humiliating her in a pool of her own blood and vomit. Others are pinned beneath large, unclean bodies, clawing and crying as their own are jostled with the force of their violations.

Alcohol reeks in the air, so thick even the ocean breeze cannot quell it, and I reach inside and temper down the instinct to not harm, to not kill, one that has taken me centuries to perfect. These are not men. They are not akin to animals. They are devils, beasts, and I will dispatch them to the hells where they belong. My teeth lengthen into sharp points, cutting a line across the skin of my lips. It’s a shockingly easy backslide, the peeling back of my humanity.

I let the bloodlust take me.

They do not expect the attack, and it is a weak and pathetic defense they put up as I tear through them, one by one. I gorge myself, but I do not force my mind to see, as I have done with every other kill. I will not feel guilt over the loss of their lives, and on the deck of this ship, I become what stories have proclaimed I am for centuries in my homeland.

A demon, unstoppable, with an incorrigible appetite for blood.

I am become vampyr, and my wrath shakes both ship and sea.

When there are no more male hearts beating on this deck, I drag the beast back within as he claws and kicks and struggles to remain. The ship is bathed in blood and entrails and viscera. My skin runs red with the unclean blood of rapists and murderers.

There are four girls left, and no other life save for rats on this vessel.

I smell her instantly, the moment Camille makes her way to the deck. The others are huddled behind a cask, terrified and whimpering, but she remains steadfast, somehow unshaken. It strikes me that she has been hardened to the injustices of the world long before this night, and it’s a condemnation on humanity.

I turn, moving slowly across the slickened wood, and send my shadows leaking off to inspect the rest of the ship as I make my way toward her. She scrambles back as I approach, gripping the bloody bone in her hand and raising it between us on instinct, still so full of fight. There’s a spark of defiance in her eyes, of survival. When I am close enough for the light to illuminate me fully, in all my gore, I kneel with palms raised. We both know I could be a threat, but the gesture is meant to show the semblance of humanity.

“Has god sent you to witness?” she asks, her voice cracked and broken. I consider her words, then without my permission, my lips split and a laugh wracks through my chest. I’m struck by its foreignness, even as I shake my head.

“God has not spoken with me for a long time, little one.”

Her eyes narrow as she homes in on my words, no doubt trying to place my accent. She studies me a beat more, and then I see her shoulders relax. It throws me off guard even further when she lowers her blade.

“Who are you, monsieur?”

I regard her for a moment and then settle back on my haunches, bringing my hands up over my knees, considering. I should wipe their minds and jump ship as soon as we make port. I could take away their terror, their pain. The things I saw in that young girl’s mind … She cannot be more than twenty and four. I look to the rest of them behind me, and they are terrified and cowering. As they should be.

These women embarked here to start lives as mothers and wives, but after what has transpired here? How could they be made to endure? As though they are not altered to their very essences. The worst and most chilling part is that it could happen to them again.

That it is likely, even. In a new colony, with a shortage of women.