Page 3 of Good Vampires Go to Heaven

“Or perhaps you would like to see how your children fared?”

When I do not respond, Satan says, “Everyone has a tipping point. Everyone.”

What I see then pushes me closer and closer to the point of madness. And I know, deep down, that he will force me to view this scene over and over, flails to my very soul.

It is too much!

Chapter 1

The Norselands, AD 1250

There’s a little bit of witch in every woman . . .

Regina Dorasdottir loved being a witch, but that had not always been the case.

Witchiness was in her blood, her mother and grandmother before her having practiced the black arts. For years, she’d fought her gifts, especially when she was teased and bullied by the village children and even the youthlings up at Winterstorm Castle, but then when she was fourteen, the ignorant village folks burned her mother, Dora Sigrunsdottir, while still alive and inside her forest hut, blaming her for a year-long famine. This, despite the fact that her sweet mother had been a good witch, providing healing potions to the sick, birthing babies, giving, giving, giving.

Regina could not claim the same goodness. After witnessing her mother’s brutal death, a bitterness and rage grew in her like a festering boil. She had to embrace her magical gifts, or explode. After a time, she rebuilt her mother’s home in the forest . . . a hovel, actually, but she did not care. It was only temporary. Eventually, she came to excel at and enjoy all that she could do, uncaring if anyone got hurt, sometimes deliberately inflicting pain on those for whom she carried a grudge. And later, over the next eleven years, she did not even discriminate in that way. Yes, she helped a great many people with her healing potions, but that became incidental. If people paid, they got her services.

She loved the power. In a time when women were rarely given authority, she had a shadowy influence over many people.

She loved making money. Forget about being paid in chickens, or barley, or mead, as many healers and midwives were. She accepted only coins, thank you very much, preferably gold, but silver would do, and occasionally copper.

She loved pretending to be an aged, skinny crone with a huge wart on her hairy chin, skin splotches painted on her skin, similar to liver spots, which village cotters referred to as devil’s spittle, and a not-so-lovely ashy gray hair. Best for a woman living alone in a remote area to appear as loathsome as possible. In fact, she had seen only twenty-five winters, her hair was an unfortunate flame red, also considered a sign of the devil. A raggedy gunna hid an embarrassingly voluptuous figure. Those folks who’d known her as a child were long gone, or unable to recognize this scary creature of the woods. They were suspicious, of course, but accepted her explanation that the original Regina was gone and she was a member of the coven (with the same name, would you believe it?) who’d come to take her place. The fools shivered at the word “coven” and asked no more questions.

She did not worry overmuch about suffering the same fate as her mother. She was hardier than her mother and more careful. Plus, she’d honed a talent with knife throwing over the years, and her knives were razor-sharp. She could pierce a running rabbit at twenty paces and gut a randy Viking bent on rape. Never openly. Best not to raise suspicions to another level.

Regina had no friends or family. She was alone, and that was how she liked it.

She enjoyed making jest of others, without their knowing. Especially fun were her threats of ridiculously impossible curses tossed at lackwit Vikings, like “Do as I command, or I’ll make your cock the size of a thimble.” Of late, she took great delight in being creative with her spells. “Have you ever seen a candle melt into a limp wick, Bjorn?” Or “Svein, Svein, Svein! May the winds blow so hard your braies fall off, and your cock gets twisted into a triple knot.” Or “The gods are displeased at your misdeeds, Ivan, and they can turn your favorite body part black as night with running boils, stinksome as old lutefisk.”

Men were so obsessed with their manparts, many of them coming to her with pleas for a magic potion to make theirs bigger, or thicker, or less ruddy. And they would try anything! Horse dung mixed with goat urine. Standing on their heads and chanting. Dipping their wicks in wax. Never once did she have a man ask to make his smaller, not even Boris the Horse who was said to resemble his namesake.

Of course, women were just as bad. Always wanting love potions. Or ways to make their breasts bigger, or smaller, their buttocks less flabby, their hips wider. Half of them wanted concoctions to help them get pregnant, the other half wanted rid of the bairns already growing in their bellies.

None of that mattered in her longtime scheme of amassing enough wealth to buy an estate in the Saxon lands and become a grand lady. Well, mayhap not so grand, but at least respectable, in a class above the cotter class. She even had a particular property in mind, a small sheepstead with a barn and fields and a lovely stone manor house. But eleven long years of skimping and saving and still she didn’t have enough. She needed a bigger influx of wealth to finally fulfill her dreams, and it would come soon with the arrival of the young Jarl Efram of nearby Winterstorm.

Ah, there he was now, just in time, leading his horse into the clearing.

“Come, come, my jarl,” she said with an exaggerated cackle, motioning the fur-clad lording to follow her into her woodland hovel. Efram, new to the jarldom on the recent death of his father, was little more than a youthling at sixteen years. “You can tie your beast to yon tree, next to the boulder.”

She could see that he was hesitant to go near the red-coated boulder, probably thinking the stains were blood. They were, but not human blood. She butchered her chickens and squirrels for the stew pot there. She cackled again, this time to show she noticed his squeamishness. Embarrassed, he looped the reins around the post, wiping his gloved hands on his braies.

With a sniff of distaste, Efram stooped to enter the low door of her home. He might be young, but he was tall. The ceiling, from which hung numerous bunches of herbs, almost touched Efram’s blond hair, which he wore in a long, single braid. Her black cat, Thor, hissed and lunged for Efram’s pant leg, and the boyling jumped, causing dried rosemary and lavender and dill to shower his head and shoulders with aromatic dried particles.

She chuckled, rather cackled, again when he shook himself of the chaff.

He was not amused and tried to kick at Thor who was already bored and scooting away to his woven pallet by the hearth, where he stretched out and proceeded to lick his private parts. Men, even feline ones, had no manners.

Inside the thatched-roof cottage was not much better than its wattle-and-daub exterior. The hard-packed dirt floor was uncovered by rushes, but she kept it swept clean and bug free. Not that the spoiled bratling, accustomed to finer fare, would notice such details.

“Where is it?” Efram demanded. “Did you make the potion?”

“I did,” she said and sat down on the lone chair beside a small table that she used both for eating and preparing herbal remedies. That left only her bed if he chose to sit down, which he did not. Probably feared fleas or lice, little knowing he had more of such up at his keep than she did here. In fact, his servants were always coming to her for remedies to rid hair and beards and bedding of the varmints.

“Well, where is it? Give it to me! I came alone, as you insisted. I have to get back to the castle before my guests arrive,” he said impatiently.

Guests, as in his uncle and entourage, who considered Efram too young and inexperienced for such a large holding. An uncle who would find out just how far his nephew would go to maintain an iron grip on his inheritance . . . if Regina helped him, that was.