The axe struck me in the shoulder, hitting me with enough force to drive me to my knees. I fell forward onto my palms and saw my blood slash out onto the snow, black ink on white paper. The axe struck me again in the middle of the back and I collapsed onto my stomach, face buried in the snow. I put my hands beneath my body and pushed myself over.
"The heart," I croaked, and Lukas moved astride me, one foot to either side.
Already, the Strix was repairing the injuries. I could feel the Blood shifting to the wounds and stitching them closed, the pain beginning to dim.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough!
Lukas swung the axe into my chest then, cleaving my sternum in two. He struck with enough force to completely embed the blade and had to wriggle the handle to and fro to free it from my body. When the blade finally did slide clear, squealing against the bones, my blood arced into the air, painting my murderous fledgling from his ankles to his breast.
I felt cold winter air caress my heart and grabbed the edges of the wound before they could draw back together again, hooking my fingers into the meat. I must have looked like that fictional character Clark Kent when he rips open the front of his shirt to change into Superman, only it was flesh instead of shirt and tie, and there was no blue jumpsuit underneath.
The pain was terrific. It was indescribable, really. But I persevered.
With all my strength, I widened the wound, snapping back the fractured bones, exposing my black heart to the stars, to the killer standing over me.
"Drink!" I gasped, as the blood spilled out across my chest. "You must do it! Quickly!"
Lukas tossed the axe away and dropped down on top of me. Burying his face in my chest, he began to suck at the wound, devouring the Living Blood directly from my heart. I could feel his nose and chin inside of me, his teeth scraping against the organ. My heart lurched in my chest, recoiling from his touch like a timid commuter from a drunken hooligan. With each convulsion, my blood gushed into his mouth, each forceful expectoration splattering his cheeks and chest. The wound was still trying to close, but I would not be thwarted. I dug my fingers into the slick meat, pulling it open as wide as I could, even as the Strix worked to stitch me back together.
There seemed an impossible amount of blood, more than any human body could reasonably contain. It just kept gushing and gushing. Yet I could tell that I was emptying out. I could feel my strength ebbing, my senses weakening, almost as if they were collapsing inwards, the sphere of my famed sensitivity shrinking by the second. My fingers slipped from the edges of the wound. "Ancestors!" I gasped, my eyelids fluttering. Dark spots danced in my vision. I felt my arms, numb now, drop down at my sides.
But Lukas seized the wound and held it open, slurping hungrily at it. His eyes were bright and glazed, the eyes of a lunatic. My blood slicked his entire face, black and glistening. My memories must be pouring into his mind, born on the surging currents of my blood, but if they were he was unfazed by them. He should have been paralyzed by the Sharing, stunned to immobility, but he just drove at me more hungrily, like a starved predator chomping on the carcass of its prey.
"Take it," I urged him. "Take it all!"
How sexual that sounded, but vampirism is an erotic act in many ways. There is the desire and the chase, a penetration and then an exchange of bodily fluids. My mortal victims often die in a state of intense arousal, the men as hard as railroad spikes, the women weeping wet. I was rigid now as Lukas ravished me, not out of lust for my attacker but from the simple act of submitting to him, allowing him to have his way with me. The sensations were overpowering. I cried out as he thrust at me, digging deeper into my chest cavity, snapping at my heart with his teeth.
He shifted back, face glazed, and grinned down at me. Grabbing my hair, he jerked my head to one side and plunged his fangs into my neck. He tore savagely through the arteries there, nearly ripping my head off in his eagerness.
I thought of all the mortals I had fed upon so ferociously. This is what it feels like for them, I thought, and I was pleased that I should suffer in the same fashion, now, at the end. It was fitting. It was just. I wished it hurt more.
"More!" Lukas snarled, smacking his lips.
He scrambled around to the side of me and yanked me up, maneuvering my lax body as he would a life-size doll. Turning my head to the side, he bit into my neck again, this time on the other side, tearing through the flesh with his razor-sharp teeth, latching onto me like a leech.
I raised my right arm as he continued to drain me. My flesh had shriveled completely to the bones, was becoming strangely translucent, like milky quartz. Beneath the surface of my skin, the dark threads of my veins shrank and faded from sight. There was a terrible pulling sensation in my chest-- my heart!-- and I was suddenly too weak even to hold up my arm anymore. I let it drop and gave myself over to death, surrendering to it in relief.
At long last, I die!
Eyya, Nyala, Brulde… my lovers, I return to you!
Father, prepare a place for your son in the Ghost World.
I come!
At long last, I come!
And then he was gone and I slumped onto my back. I felt perversely abandoned. I managed to raise up a little and saw that Lukas had stumbled away a short distance.
My bespoke killer was doubled over, retching loudly. He had drunk all he could, all his belly would hold, and was vomiting into the frozen grass. Black blood on white snow, hissing as it oxidized.
I reached out a trembling hand, meaning to call him back to me, to urge him on, and saw that my flesh had begun to fracture. Fascinated, I brought my hand closer to my eyes. I watched as the surface of my skin continued to spiderweb, hairline cracks zigging and zagging away from the joints, tiny pieces flaking and falling away from the bones.
It had begun.
My final dissolution.
I was coming apart, crumbling to dust.
For an instant: abject horror and disbelief.
Even now, after so many millennia, a part of me did not wish to die, that old animal instinct for survival. A hysterical voice in my head cried out, "No, not yet!" But it was easy to push the thoughts down, to suppress the survival instinct that was, like all living creatures, hardwired in my brain.
It was time for me to die.
I relaxed onto the frozen earth, looking up at the sky. He would return and finish me. I needn't call him back.
I gazed up at the stars, white pinpricks of light in the dark expanse of the heavens. My people once believed the stars were the campfires of our deceased ancestors, as if the night sky were an inverted black plane suspended over the world of living men. I think it comforted us to believe that our dearly departed remained so close to us, just up there, on the other side of the world. It is still a comfort, though I know that it is not true.
So many stars!
All men look to the night sky in wonder, especially when they are young and the world is still a revelation to them, but that wonder is pale appreciation of the vastness, the splendor, the ultimate mystery of the universe our world tumbles through like a pebble cast through eternity.
Our universe is a great pyrotechnic show of sizzling pinwheels and shooting bottle rockets and vast exploding fireworks. It only seems still and silent because we are so small and our time here so brief.
A vampire's senses can penetrate that vast outer darkness a little more deeply. For us, the night sky is dense and brilliant with stars, a milky glowing haze of winking lights. Yet even my preternatural senses, a hundred times more acute than the senses of a mortal man, can only perceive a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of one percent of all that lies beyond the thin skin of our atmosphere.
I gaped up at the night sky, seeing it as if for the first time because it was the last, and wondering what mysteries waited beyond the veil of what little of the universe my finite senses could perceive.
Lukas had finished vomiting my blood. Still crouched over, he turned and grinned at me, eyes and teeth gleaming in his gore streaked his face. He swayed a little, caught himself, then stumbled back in my direction.
"I can feel you inside me," he said haltingly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Your thoughts. Your memories. There's so much! I can't really…"
I returned my gaze to the night sky as he fell to his knees beside me. He pushed my head to one side and lowered his mouth to my neck. I winced as his teeth ripped into my flesh. He was a brutal one, this child. No finesse. A crude lover who speared you all at once. He latched onto my neck and started sucking.
I could no longer see the sky. That was a disappointment. I would have liked to gaze upon the stars as I perished. I had a suspicion they would move as my flesh gave up the spirit, that they would come together, condense into a blazing corridor of light. Instead, I stared down the icy slope of the mountain as he fed upon me, grunting and slurping like a wolf on the tattered belly of a lamb.
So bare, the trees, winter bald and black.
So this will be my final sight, I thought, but that was not so bad. And it had its own austere beauty, that skeletal woodland. A penitential purity. Perhaps it was all I deserved.
That was when I saw them.