BLOOD LUST

Luka and Dragan followed the Austrians into the cornfield and held their fire until the last second. There were twelve of them, exhausted, drawn-looking older men in grey uniforms staggering and stumbling under the weight of their packs, cursing and spluttering in some foreign tongue which Dragan had said was German but Luka did not know, lugging their rifles as if they were iron cannon, out of breath and pausing, now and then, to slurp greedily from a single canteen. They were dreadful figures, loathsome devils from an old folk tale labouring in the shadow of the Cer, crushing the corn as they went, stomping ungainly through the stalks with the indifference of those who felt nothing but pain. They would still shoot us if they could, Dragan whispered to Luka. The two men readied their Mauser M1899s, great weighty things that fired fast and killed fast. The Austrians were grumbling, groaning. Above the moon was high and swollen as if pregnant and the wind gently caressed the ears of corn and but for the Austrians there was silence and there would, Dragan told Luka, be silence again. Dragan gave the slightest nod of his head.

The crack of the two Mausers was all that existed in the universe and in its wake came the blood splashing out in great arcs, decorating the corn. The Austrians turned but turned the wrong way, yelping into the crops, and Luka and Dragan found their next targets and as one slammed the bolts of their rifles back and fired again. There were eight left. The clicking of the bolts rang out. “God damn you!” one of the Austrians roared in Serbo-Croatian, before a bullet exploded his throat. Now the Austrians began to fire back but without aiming. The sharp percussion of rifle fire echoed throughout the valley but Luka and Dragan kept their heads down and did not flinch. Dragan looked to Luka and smiled and Luka smiled too. They pulled back their bolts and resumed and soon the Austrians were all lying in the dirt in heaps bleeding and still.

Dragan stood. Thunderous and with thick dark beard with his black fur hat atop his head, a giant hewn of stone, he with his deeply-set demon’s eyes studied the cornfield and watched the dead Austrians. His heavy brown coat was touched by the wind but did not move. He did not move. Then he patted Luka on the shoulder. “Get up, brother.” he said. Luka shivering did so. Dragon turned his eyes to the younger man whose fur hat was too big and whose grip on the Mauser was loose. “You did well.” he said. Suddenly He turned away and peered up at the great white shape of the Cer and then into the cornfield, deep into the endless shifting crops. “We are being watched.” he said, staring directly at me. Luka started upright with his Mauser ready but he had not seen and could not. I moved. Dragan was still staring into the corn. “By what?” Luka spat. “The enemy?”

Dragan glanced about brow furrowed. “I do not know.” Now I was above them amidst the trees of the neighbouring woodland. “We should go.” Dragan said. Luka nodded. And I was with them again, within the corn. From less than a metre away I watched them and I saw them for what they really were, beneath their coats and fur hats and the thin layer of skin beyond which their true selves lived, vast interlocking patterns of sinew and bone and muscle fed by the great looping pathways of infinite blood, pulsing crimson life gushing from hole to hole, the burning core of the human soul, not an orb or a jewel or some other absurdity but liquid, roaring liquid; weren’t those ancient men correct, truly, to have found the thinking organ within the heart? Without a brain a man can live; without blood there is nothing but inert meat. Life! I saw Dragan and Luka as they were in essence, at their peak, their hearts pounding with the joy of danger, the blood full and vibrant. I bore witness to them as great hunters, virile beasts, predators par excellence-

Unable to contain myself I leapt from the corn and tore Luka apart.

Dragan drew his knife – blessed cross-iron! the old traditions still lived! that was why I was here – he gripped it with both hands and tried me but found himself lacking. The boy was delicious and died well.

I was too full for the older man. But I took his arm and let him live, for now. I thought he would die better later. And I leapt into the moon. The cornfield had been gifted two more bodies for its soil to swallow. It was the beginning, reader, of the Great War; and it was a good time to be undead.

–

I stood to attention; or rather, I pretended to. You understood that I was only a collection of impulses barely concealed within something shaped like something else; that I only deigned to even have sinew and bone and muscle because the universe required me to, that social affectations such as standing this way or that, being he or she, wearing facial expressions and using words were for ninety percent of my existence something only done by the things I ate, not by myself. I did not really consent to being a woman, and I did not really look at the chief of the general staff with eyes that were actually there, and I did not actually stand to attention. But however you looked at it I was perceived that way, for now, and that seemed to make everyone involved happy enough. It was Vienna; city of morsels. The call had come to the Fortress of the Crow and I had responded to it, and come here quicker than perhaps most of the rest of the army. They did not have a uniform for me but I had brought my own, my 1800-issue white overcoat with golden buttons and a high red collar, a dazzling shako atop my head. I wore a short skirt below it with high boots, because I did not wish to wear trousers. The chief of the general staff seemed to dislike this, but then I understood, because the chief of the general staff was an unlovely man with weak blood.

He stood there before me as I pretended to stand before him. His queer moustache was too small and his hair stuck up awkwardly in a single block, as if upon the parade ground. His look held arrogance even as he beheld me upon the cusp of his office with its grand desk and shelves of books, many written by him. A portrait of the current emperor sat upon the wall, some feeble old bald-headed fool. I smiled at the chief of the general staff. “Lady Katharina Elisabeth von Schwarzkrähe-Gottinger, reporting for enlistment, sir!” I said, although the name was not mine for I had no real name, and ‘lady’ was only a semi-truth. I did not like to be a lady, but they had recorded me as one once, several hundred years before, and so for the sake of ease a lady I would be. The chief of the general staff looked at me. “God.” he said. “You’re serious.”

I nodded. He saw a thing like a woman that was not; an impression of one, or a realistic doll, a creature that was more and yet less. It scared and enticed him, although he was not – I could read his blood – that interested in me. I suspected this man was in love with a real mundane woman, which was in some ways more dangerous than wanting to carnally embrace a hole in reality shaped like one. I held out the ancient parchment of my call to muster, which he looked at, arrogant face twitching. “This…this is signed by Francis II.” he muttered.

“Yes.” I said. I waved a long arm, showing him my splendid uniform. I mimicked a sweet smile, which made his animal brain tremble. “I am here to serve the Reich.” I said, although it was half-true. But the chief of the general staff nodded.

–

The Reich? What Reich? I was here for the dead.

Galician winter. Black splintered carcasses of trees, snow-dusted fields. Churned-up mud and broken field guns and discarded rifles and mounds and mounds of corpses beneath the snow. The great fortress of Przemyśl had been recaptured by the Germans and they and the imperial armies were sweeping the Russians back to their filthy steppe homeland, God willing. But that was not my business. I had eaten many Russians but only really for sport; the soldiers had chased the rest out and now I was alone here with the birds of carrion, amidst the bodies. And I once more saw things as they truly were. The blood did not die as soon as its material shadow did; it lingered, trapped between here and there. The slaughter of 1914 had been delicious but in its freshness had as well been cheap, not nourishing at all, but the trapped souls of those slaughtered just now with time had grown vast and brilliant, and so I had come back here now in the aftermath of battle – as calm settled upon Galicia, where once the war had almost been lost, the phantom blood of the dead was at the peak of its flavour, and so I unfurled my true self from the flimsy uniformed thing without and feasted. I did not feast – I did not really do any eating. But in language it is only possible to express in terms such as these. The other carrion birds fled; even these uneducated creatures could not bear the results of I slipping my bonds by even a fraction. The clouds darkened and the earth shook; the blackened cruciforms of the old trees were uprooted and flung themselves to the snowy earth in cowardice. Oh, to feed, to live, to lust, to be! It was the centrepiece of existence, of actual existence, that golden presence so obfuscated by the groaning of material concerns and the wheeze of social relations – it was the greatest high, to damn all that and simply understand one’s self in relation to the world. That great prize which all human faiths chased, unaware that the answer was simply to throw humanity aside and become a nexus of desire, to hurl one’s soul into the pit, and to feast upon the very air itself – Galicia itself screamed, reader, at my violence. And the feast was within that sound and nothing to do with it all at once.

The sharp sound of drawn metal interrupted me. I shoved myself back into the pale-white form, that porcelain humanity, and adjusted my shako and saw the intruder stalk towards me across the fields of snow and death. At first I was gleeful, because I spied the dark coat and dark fur hat – I thought that Dragan, who I had met in Serbia last year, had come for me, that it was time for another more intimate sort of feast. But the figure was too slight, though still tall and bulky – the face was youthful and I realised, by probing the blood moving beneath it, that this figure was female. An incredible, terrible thing had happened, I realised.

Just as the blood of the dead aged like wine, it was so that the blood of the living could as well age; but in a particularly wonderful way, if you knew the old methods. To kill and to feed was to indulge one’s lust – to wound the soul, to create the impression of yourself within the blood and allow it to fester, to allow the prey to get drunk upon rage and stumble through life dreaming of your perfect, impossible terror – oh, and then to feast! But this was not old Dragan who I had slaughtered the lover of in Serbia. The blood was the same and yet not. A relation! Last year I had been drunk on my own lust and had forgotten the rules, and now I would find myself haunted by a bloodline. Old Dragan had died and now the phantom presence of his blood was coming for me, would come until all of them were extinguished. It happened to us more than often, us cursed desire-driven demons.

But she came for me then and I forgot all my abstract wandering through history, for her weapon was of purest cross-iron just as her father’s – it sang in that horrid high-pitched scream to me as she unsheathed it – and she leapt forward coat flapping with the fury of a weakling who had forced themselves to be strong. Our blades clashes with a sound that echoed out across the fields. I had pulled mine from the sheath but really from nowhere and it was forged of pure non-existence, the metal hewn from unspeakable things, but it didn’t matter because her blood was stronger; because I had stupidly cursed her with strong blood because I had been thinking only of having a good meal. Her face was bovine, peasant in outlook and shape, heavy brow just like her father’s furrowed just as his had been. She glared at me over our two locking weapons. Mine was an ancient straight sword; hers was what they had called a zweihander, a two-handed blade of enormous girth and thickness, dull and ugly steel that looked, from the other side of it, like it might hurt very much.

But I could not show fear. “Little robin.” I sang, for she had rust-coloured red hair. “What are you doing with that toy?”

“I am a vampire hunter.” she grunted, hefting the enormous weapon away. Her swing almost cleaved me in two and as well nearly pulled her over, but I dodged right with the agility of the unreal and she steadied herself with deft footwork, boots finding purchase in the snow, steadying the broadsword in her grip and adjusting her posture so she was ready again. And so again she charged me. I ducked and did not kill her because she was interesting. “I am the daughter of Dragan Miladinovic, Vlatka,” she said breathlessly, “and I am the daughter of the secret arts of vampire-slaying, and so I shall slay you!” We were alone in the snow.

“You misunderstand.” I said. “I didn’t kill dear Dragan. I let him live, last year, when he foolishly tried to stop me.”

“You did!” Vlatka spat, a temper as full of flame as her hair. “He could not eat; could not drink, after he came back from battle. He could not speak of anything but the vampire, until the day he put his revolver in his hand and shot himself! And you-” She hurled her great sword at my head and I lost my temper and smacked it so hard it snapped in two. “You are a baby.” I said. “There are hundreds of thousands of men dead. Your old Dragan didn’t get any worse than anyone else. Why should I have to suffer for it? And how did you follow me here, from far-off Serbia, in wartime, at that? Do you need me so? Are you so lustful, so deranged as that?” She only lay there in the snow holding her broken sword and glared at me with her nostrils flared as if she were a mad dog. I left in a huff, my appetite ruined. I would find more corpses, I said to myself. And I forgot about Vlatka Miladinovic the vampire hunter, because I was still full of lust myself.

–

There were so many of them and they kept coming up the hillside and it was beyond anything I had imagined, reader. I had see Serbia, and Galicia – but the Italians just kept storming up the mountains, these dreadful Alpine peaks, rushing endlessly into our guns big and small, and I was there to help prevent those fools who made it to the tunnels, and so that was what I did, with blade and claw, carving through those bodies that came close and dousing myself in spilt blood, gore, organs – God, you know, they still kept coming. There had always been more Russians but the Russians knew when to stop but these peasants, barely clad, shambolic, rugged, deathless until they died – the mountains arced and curved and the ground was steep and sometimes even they fell and didn’t even scream, most of the time, and still it was so that I gloried in myself and still it was so that they indulged me. These ragged farmers below and the worn-out stick figures of the Austrians above, manning their borrowed Prussian guns and cowering in their trenches – was this still the same feast that had begun in 1914? I killed out of lust, my usual, but as well almost anger. This was not a hunt, was it? I did not have prey but prepared meals, delivered to me by overstuffed men in uniform of all states and races. Blood shone in the Alpine sun, decorating the crags and the peaks and the cliffsides. The war somehow went on.

I roared, another horde of Italians beneath my boots, and turned to the flank of the hillside where through howling machine guns and the thunder of artillery they were still coming, and – a blade sliced through where I had been and I saw her – blasted Serbian dog! Vlatka Miladinovic untold months later, sweat-soaked and panting, with a great soldier’s pack on her back, her coat flapping in the wind. Still that sword, or no, a larger one, and she swung it at my head. “Vampire!” she shouted in a voice that was louder than the guns at my back. “This time you die!”

“Oh, come on-” I may have muttered, ducking and striking back. The Italian infantry did not understand but perhaps mistook her for one of their own, and the Austrian gunners did not want to hit me; so we danced upon the mountainside, I and she. Vlatka was panting, gasping for air; I did not need air and I was fine, but for the way she swung that sword, that blade which her blood bade her to slay me with; which her blood permitted her to slay me with. Stupid! Finally I unfurled my wings and leapt for her throat and my speed tore her sword apart but she drew a dagger from her belt – pricked me, only, and I tumbled to the rock bleeding. Bleeding! Reader, I was furious. I rose and hissed at her and she bruised and gasping for air and with her baby’s knife still – still  – stood ready to fight. Fuck you, I thought, and this was vulgar, true, for someone ennobled centuries before, but you have to understand how frustrating it was. We did not comprehend long-term, we creatures of pure id. By now she was the longest friend I’d had in the world. Then a rush, a boom – the Austrians were shoving rocks down the hillside, tumbling enormous boulders into the advancing Italians. I saw Vlatka glance up in alarm and I saw the boulders slam into her and take her away, and I stood bloodied and in my ruined uniform unharmed, watching rocks crush men on all sides, and I wondered about next time.

–

I met a most interesting man in the desert and told myself I had forgotten all about her. He was an English gentleman, an army officer, and he was out here where the punishing sun met the quivering endless plains of sand in his Arabic robes and with his rifle, directing men to strike here and there at the Turks and their grand railway which cut through Hejaz. He had a strange face, not unhandsome, aristocratically gentle, with sulking, prominent lips undercut by a high forehead and large nose which added a paradoxical element of the dullard to his features; I came as a German liaison officer with the Turks, although I was not German and not a man in the same way I was not a woman, and I captured this English officer and tied him up in an emptied-out Bedouin tent and beat him with a riding crop, which he seemed to enjoy. He might have guessed after the first few hours that I was not a German officer, but I came to suspect as well he was not really a gentleman, and we found an accommodation there that I’m sure he later brushed off as a fantasy caused by a lack of water or what-have-you. But I beat him with the crop, slapped his face, stood on him and bruised him, and etc., and made him pull at my cock until I came on his face, and he seemed to have a good time with that, and I did too, for pain is like the foretaste of blood, and administered properly can create an anticipation that is almost as good as feeding itself. At night he lay there and drank his water and ate the meat I’d hunted for him, and on the third night of this I watched him from the other side of the fire, wondering if this war – this vastness, this alien terrain where horseback warriors took potshots at one another across the enormous sand, where iron monsters screeched and huffed across the desert with mobs of horses and riders in their wake, rifles cracking intermittently, scimitars whirling above their heads  – was the same as the one from earlier, that I had seen begin in Serbia that seemed as if it would never end. I wondered about Serbia.

Then in the morning I dressed in what was my left of my military uniform – now with the sleeves eaten away, the shako lost, the skirt a flimsy excuse – and put the Englishman on his horse and told him where he could ride to find his Arab friends. I kissed him on the lips, bit at him, scraped his skin with my fangs. “Goodbye.” I said tenderly. And I stood in the Bedouin camp and wondered about life, about fate, about what any of this was for-

“Vampire!” she roared, rising up in the midnight desert, a great black stallion beneath her. It was my Vlatka! She had lost her coat and wore like everyone here long billowing robes, but she had kept her father’s fur hat and she had now over her shoulder an even greater sword. “I’ve finally found you!” She leapt from the horse, ready to fight. There was a deep scar over her nose but except for that she might never have been hit by a rockslide and I found myself looking her up and down, little strand of red hair poking out from her hat, those foolish, bestial eyes fixed upon me as if I were the only living thing in the whole world. And perhaps I was. I grinned to her. “You’ve found me, then, little robin.” I snarled. “Well.” I drew my sword from my cape. “Then try your best!” And she had improved in the year since I had seen her last; she had drawn blood with great effort that time but now she cut me in three strikes, only a glancing blow but the skin that was not skin split and some of my precious essence – mere droplets but – spilt out and baptised the sand. There was an enormous swollen moon above to illuminate our play. It hurt, where she had touched me. I leapt at her wings drawn and she parried my strike, knocked me aside. I went for her throat with my claws and she kicked me with one army-booted foot in the gut – it hurt. Do you know, reader, what it means, when one of us swirling incorporate incomprehensible vortexes of raw feeling begins to hurt? It means that we have allowed someone to hurt us. Spiralling away, claws of my feet raking sand, I lunged back at once, infuriated, spilling out of myself, gouging wounds in the desert at random – not my flesh-form but the other thing, that which had been unleashed briefly in Galicia in hunger now rushing forth with furious lust-rage, barrelling towards her, this peasant brat – with a hundred arms and a thousand wings I came for her. She steady on her feet merely thrust the sword artlessly, with perfect timing. I spat out a torrent of blood, impaled upon her, and my claws tore her robes and dug deep into her waist, and the momentum of my impact carried us both onto the sand where we lay bleeding together. In this way did we embrace.

Her face was set with contempt; I did not know what my own looked like. My claws were inside of her, feeling the taut muscle beneath her rended skin, the pulse of life that passed through her every instant; her blade went through me and out the other side. Neither of us could look away from the other. Her breath which was tobacco mixed with the crimson that dribbled from her open mouth rolled over me. Her legs touched gently against mine. The tiny shape of the Bedouin tent was at our backs; the endless desert, silent and dark, lay all about us. We could both die here, I wanted to tell her. But I only snarled at her and tried to push my face into hers, to bite off her jaw. She shoved the sword deeper with an exertion that worsened her bleeding; I coughed and spat my fluids down her front, feeling a deep, existential sort of pain. “You killed my father.” she spluttered.

“That’s not why you’re here.” I said, and I wanted to elaborate that it was her blood that drove her on, but I couldn’t, and for the first time in our long-distance relationship her fierce expression relented. I did not know what her new expression meant. We lay there together beneath the moon, the pool of blood around us now intermingled, mine and hers together, impossible to ever separate again. I am ashamed to admit that I passed out first – or she remained awake the whole time until the tribesmen found us. When I woke up they told me in fearful voices, the knowledge of the supernatural that all doomed folks had deep in their blood, that they had rescued me because I was holy. They had not picked up the ugly woman with the sword. But I knew or I would see her again.

–

They were too exhausted to arrest me. It was obvious by now – my French was practiced but not enough, and I could not rid it of that haughty Austrian lilt. The soldiers knew the creature in the chateau was Austrian, or in their limited conception of things that I was German; they did not however have the energy to come in and deal with me, because the war was almost over. Of course after Arabia I had drifted to France – where else, reader, was there to go? The fields of France were swollen with blood, bursting at the seams with oceans of gore, geysers of crimson erupting from the scarred, bruised earth. I had visited so many other vistas in my long tour of the apocalypse that it seemed absurd, a kind of faux paus, almost, to not journey to the infamous vast charnel houses of the western front. But I did not feed much. I lured in a Frenchman or an Englishman now and then – not the Americans, they scared me – and acted like some lowly peon, trading body for blood, but there were no more slaughters, no more orgies. Part of it was that my empire was collapsing and here, hiding in enemy territory, I did not have sanction to fight; part of it was merely that I was tired too. My blood was tired. I dreamt only of Serbian and Galician mass graves, of that absurdity in the Alps, of my English officer’s sweaty, tragic face from below – of the sensation of my warm blood pooling around Vlatka’s body. Seeing my face in the mirrors of the old chateau, shattered and fragmented by the force of the shells that had landed here at some point, I could have sworn my mask had aged, that there were worry lines carved there into the porcelain, that my eyes were set deeper, with heavy bags beneath, that stared and stared without a spark of thought to them. Dragan’s eyes, Vlatka’s eyes! Those Balkan cowherds had cursed me with their bestial sight, I who was above man or beast; I could not stop staring, as if there was some fixed point invisible ahead that my soul was tugged towards, as if I was searching for secrets and mysteries hidden somewhere within a universe that four years ago had held no such irritating things. Some of the mirrors I had broken myself.

Dismal; to a chorus of half-hearted booms and bangs somewhere nearby, German artillery emptying itself fruitlessly into the mud, plumes of smoke on every horizon and broken forest and field on all sides, I crept about in rags in the streets of the village, through the shell craters and old trenches, past barbed wire and ruined monsters of steel and gunpowder and petrol known as ‘tanks’. A stormy overcast sky rumbled overhead. The Americans were trooping along – they were so tall, so vast they seemed to be as inhuman as I. I shrank back from them, perhaps out of some vestigial Austrian instinct, the old world hiding cravenly from the new…the old world was full of terrors and cruelties, eroticisms and joys all beyond belief, true, reader, but weren’t they all things that could be understood, grasped as easily as an infant grasped that fire was hot after a single misguided attempt to touch it? I was unfathomable, but it was possible to understand me. But there was no force on earth, no intellect no matter how old or vast, that could understand the Americans, who did not even feed but grazed on all before them like cattle that could walk upon two feet I wandered loosely towards the front, feeling like a severed appendage that had survived the death of the body; there was little for me to do but suckle on broken men and try not to throw up at the taste.

“Wounded!” one of the Americans was crying in that bastard language of theirs. “There’s a civilian wounded here!” They were rushing by with a stretcher between them. Some of the plodding soldiers turned their heads, grey faces curious; some did not look at all. But I saw as they passed me. “Stupid woman-” one soldier mumbled. “What the hell was she doing-?” And I saw that it was my Vlatka who lay there ashen in the borrowed clothes of a Frenchman, too baggy for her, slashed open from neck to waist by a great sucking wound. I saw her bare breasts, lacerated and ruined, and the pale skin of her belly split as if by a single cruel blow. She was alive for now, gasping with bloodstained lips. Her eyes found me and then were elsewhere, seeing nothing, and they bore her away from me. I saw a glimmer of metal stuffed into her waistband and felt the tug of annihilation and realised that she had come all this way with a revolver, the cross-iron of her sword melted down into bullets, to shoot me to death, and I knew at once that it would have worked. “She’s mine!” I called after the stretcher-bearers, my voice no longer carrying the power of an ancient unknowable being but for a fraction of a moment, when the old fire returned. “She’s mine! Give her back!” But they were trying to save her life and they did not heed me but went on. I followed them to the field hospital at the rear of the lines and walked barefoot through mud and corpses and was not allowed in by the burly guards and so waited outside and waited and waited. Soon it was dark. And reader, it was so that I knew how to move in the dark.

I came in through the flaps of the tent as a shadow, passing over the guard, not for now feeding from him. And I came to the cot where she lay swabbed in bandages. I stood over my enemy as she was prostrate, barely breathing, her eyes closed. But her face was still her face. I reached out with my hand and touched her cheek which was almost cold. Her eyes found me, or my eyes found her – in the gloom of the field hospital, lit only by sheepish paraffin lamps, we were both the same, both worthless before all that had unfolded. There were millions of people dead, a world ablaze, all old certainties burned to ash; what did we have to compare to that except our private little hatred? Her fingers twitched, perhaps aiming for the revolver, which she could not reach. Her breath was a horrid wheeze. The light in her eyes was as dull as the rusted-over wrecks of the war machines outside. Millions of lives, perhaps; and what were our two, we two souls who only had each other? The war had proven a terrible wound instead of the blessing I had thought it would be, but she-

Well, reader, you know me by now. You can perhaps guess what it was I did for her, there in that terrible field hospital in October 1918. I made sure she would hate me forever.

–

Hong Kong, 1971. She came for me in the teahouse. I was sat wilting in the Tsim Sha Tsui humidity sipping a gentle cup of oolong, listening to the chatter in Cantonese around me, a language I did not and would never know. My wounds had all healed; I was beautiful again. I wore a sheer white safari suit and a pair of sunglasses, and my hair was cut short and I had made love to many handsome men last night. But I could sense something nearby, the presence of cross-iron that over the decades my physical incarnation had developed an intensely keen awareness of. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. One of those squat little public light buses rattled by outside, engine coughing. The sound of birds calling to one another from their cages came from the teahouse’s upstairs. She was nearby. I stood as she came in, as ageless as she had been in 1918, scarred and rude and with those same harsh eyes, my monster, my golem, and she in her black zoot suit with her red tie the colour of blood and her red hair tied back in a rough ponytail the rest of her hair wolfish and shaggy about her severe head, she drew the two pistols forged from her father’s cross-iron – we had learned much about one another over the decades – and clicked back the safety on each and curled one pale thick hand around each trigger.

I stood, kicking my chair back, and drew my sword made of unspeakable things, and bore my fangs to her. She scowled. “Creature.” she said in her accented English.

I grinned. “Lovely to see you again, Vlatka. My little robin.” That slight tension upon her face as I spoke; that slight blush creeping across her face. Oh, all else had ended in 1918, but for we two-! I readied my sword. She her guns. The old man who had been adjacent to my table eyed first me and then her. He got up and almost bashfully inched his way to the doorway and opened the door and slipped out. Other people moved quickly to the exits, to the stairs, mumbling and crying out. But we could only see one another, we who shared the same eyes. “This time I mean it.” she spat. “Undo the curse you put upon me!”

“I don’t want to.” I said.

“Then I will slay you.” she said.

“Go on, then.” I said. “Daughter of Dragan Miladinovic. Try your best!” And the bloodlust began anew.

And reader, we haven’t ever looked back.

BLOOD LUST

Luka and Dragan followed the Austrians into the cornfield
and held their fire until the last second. There were twelve of them,
exhausted, drawn-looking older men in grey uniforms staggering and stumbling
under the weight of their packs, cursing and spluttering in some foreign tongue
which Dragan had said was German but Luka did not know, lugging their rifles as
if they were iron cannon, out of breath and pausing, now and then, to slurp
greedily from a single canteen. They were dreadful figures, loathsome devils
from an old folk tale labouring in the shadow of the Cer, crushing the corn as
they went, stomping ungainly through the stalks with the indifference of those
who felt nothing but pain. They would still shoot us if they could, Dragan
whispered to Luka. The two men readied their Mauser M1899s, great weighty
things that fired fast and killed fast. The Austrians were grumbling, groaning.
Above the moon was high and swollen as if pregnant and the wind gently caressed
the ears of corn and but for the Austrians there was silence and there would,
Dragan told Luka, be silence again. Dragan gave the slightest nod of his head.

The crack of the two Mausers was all that existed in the
universe and in its wake came the blood splashing out in great arcs, decorating
the corn. The Austrians turned but turned the wrong way, yelping into the
crops, and Luka and Dragan found their next targets and as one slammed the
bolts of their rifles back and fired again. There were eight left. The clicking
of the bolts rang out. “God damn you!” one of the Austrians roared in Serbo-Croatian,
before a bullet exploded his throat. Now the Austrians began to fire back but
without aiming. The sharp percussion of rifle fire echoed throughout the valley
but Luka and Dragan kept their heads down and did not flinch. Dragan looked to
Luka and smiled and Luka smiled too. They pulled back their bolts and resumed
and soon the Austrians were all lying in the dirt in heaps bleeding and still.

Dragan stood. Thunderous and with thick dark beard with his
black fur hat atop his head, a giant hewn of stone, he with his deeply-set
demon’s eyes studied the cornfield and watched the dead Austrians. His heavy
brown coat was touched by the wind but did not move. He did not move. Then he
patted Luka on the shoulder. “Get up, brother.” he said. Luka shivering did so.
Dragon turned his eyes to the younger man whose fur hat was too big and whose
grip on the Mauser was loose. “You did well.” he said. Suddenly He turned away
and peered up at the great white shape of the Cer and then into the cornfield,
deep into the endless shifting crops. “We are being watched.” he said, staring
directly at me. Luka started upright with his Mauser ready but he had not seen
and could not. I moved. Dragan was still staring into the corn. “By what?” Luka
spat. “The enemy?”

Dragan glanced about brow furrowed. “I do not know.” Now I
was above them amidst the trees of the neighbouring woodland. “We should go.”
Dragan said. Luka nodded. And I was with them again, within the corn. From less
than a metre away I watched them and I saw them for what they really were,
beneath their coats and fur hats and the thin layer of skin beyond which their
true selves lived, vast interlocking patterns of sinew and bone and muscle fed
by the great looping pathways of infinite blood, pulsing crimson life gushing
from hole to hole, the burning core of the human soul, not an orb or a jewel or
some other absurdity but liquid, roaring liquid; weren’t those ancient men
correct, truly, to have found the thinking organ within the heart? Without a
brain a man can live; without blood there is nothing but inert meat. Life! I
saw Dragan and Luka as they were in essence, at their peak, their hearts
pounding with the joy of danger, the blood full and vibrant. I bore witness to
them as great hunters, virile beasts, predators par excellence-

Unable to contain myself I leapt from the corn and tore Luka
apart.

Dragan drew his knife – blessed cross-iron! the old
traditions still lived! that was why I was here – he gripped it with both hands
and tried me but found himself lacking. The boy was delicious and died well.

I was too full for the older man. But I took his arm and let
him live, for now. I thought he would die better later. And I leapt into the
moon. The cornfield had been gifted two more bodies for its soil to swallow. It
was the beginning, reader, of the Great War; and it was a good time to be
undead.

–

I stood to attention; or rather, I pretended to. You
understood that I was only a collection of impulses barely concealed within
something shaped like something else; that I only deigned to even have sinew
and bone and muscle because the universe required me to, that social
affectations such as standing this way or that, being he or she, wearing facial
expressions and using words were for ninety percent of my existence something
only done by the things I ate, not by myself. I did not really consent to being
a woman, and I did not really look at the chief of the general staff with eyes
that were actually there, and I did not actually stand to attention. But
however you looked at it I was perceived that way, for now, and that seemed to
make everyone involved happy enough. It was Vienna; city of morsels. The call
had come to the Fortress of the Crow and I had responded to it, and come here
quicker than perhaps most of the rest of the army. They did not have a uniform
for me but I had brought my own, my 1800-issue white overcoat with golden
buttons and a high red collar, a dazzling shako atop my head. I wore a short
skirt below it with high boots, because I did not wish to wear trousers. The
chief of the general staff seemed to dislike this, but then I understood,
because the chief of the general staff was an unlovely man with weak blood.

He stood there before me as I pretended to stand before him.
His queer moustache was too small and his hair stuck up awkwardly in a single
block, as if upon the parade ground. His look held arrogance even as he beheld
me upon the cusp of his office with its grand desk and shelves of books, many
written by him. A portrait of the current emperor sat upon the wall, some
feeble old bald-headed fool. I smiled at the chief of the general staff. “Lady
Katharina Elisabeth von Schwarzkrähe-Gottinger, reporting
for enlistment, sir!” I said, although the name was not mine for I had no real
name, and ‘lady’ was only a semi-truth. I did not like to be a lady, but they
had recorded me as one once, several hundred years before, and so for the sake
of ease a lady I would be. The chief of the general staff looked at me. “God.”
he said. “You’re serious.”

I nodded. He saw a thing like a woman
that was not; an impression of one, or a realistic doll, a creature that was more
and yet less. It scared and enticed him, although he was not – I could read his
blood – that interested in me. I suspected this man was in love with a real
mundane woman, which was in some ways more dangerous than wanting to carnally
embrace a hole in reality shaped like one. I held out the ancient parchment of
my call to muster, which he looked at, arrogant face twitching. “This…this is
signed by Francis II.” he muttered.

“Yes.” I said. I waved a long arm,
showing him my splendid uniform. I mimicked a sweet smile, which made his
animal brain tremble. “I am here to serve the Reich.” I said, although it was
half-true. But the chief of the general staff nodded.

–

The Reich? What Reich? I was here for the dead.

Galician winter. Black splintered carcasses of trees,
snow-dusted fields. Churned-up mud and broken field guns and discarded rifles
and mounds and mounds of corpses beneath the snow. The great fortress of Przemyśl
had been recaptured by the Germans and they and the imperial armies were
sweeping the Russians back to their filthy steppe homeland, God willing. But
that was not my business. I had eaten many Russians but only really for sport;
the soldiers had chased the rest out and now I was alone here with the birds of
carrion, amidst the bodies. And I once more saw things as they truly were. The
blood did not die as soon as its material shadow did; it lingered, trapped
between here and there. The slaughter of 1914 had been delicious but in its
freshness had as well been cheap, not nourishing at all, but the trapped souls
of those slaughtered just now with time had grown vast and brilliant, and so I
had come back here now in the aftermath of battle – as calm settled upon
Galicia, where once the war had almost been lost, the phantom blood of the dead
was at the peak of its flavour, and so I unfurled my true self from the flimsy
uniformed thing without and feasted. I did not feast – I did not really do any
eating. But in language it is only possible to express in terms such as these.
The other carrion birds fled; even these uneducated creatures could not bear
the results of I slipping my bonds by even a fraction. The clouds darkened and
the earth shook; the blackened cruciforms of the old trees were uprooted and
flung themselves to the snowy earth in cowardice. Oh, to feed, to live, to
lust, to be! It was the centrepiece of existence, of actual existence, that
golden presence so obfuscated by the groaning of material concerns and the
wheeze of social relations – it was the greatest high, to damn all that and
simply understand one’s self in relation to the world. That great prize which
all human faiths chased, unaware that the answer was simply to throw humanity
aside and become a nexus of desire, to hurl one’s soul into the pit, and to
feast upon the very air itself – Galicia itself screamed, reader, at my
violence. And the feast was within that sound and nothing to do with it all at
once.

The sharp sound of drawn metal interrupted me. I shoved
myself back into the pale-white form, that porcelain humanity, and adjusted my
shako and saw the intruder stalk towards me across the fields of snow and
death. At first I was gleeful, because I spied the dark coat and dark fur hat –
I thought that Dragan, who I had met in Serbia last year, had come for me, that
it was time for another more intimate sort of feast. But the figure was too
slight, though still tall and bulky – the face was youthful and I realised, by
probing the blood moving beneath it, that this figure was female. An
incredible, terrible thing had happened, I realised.

Just as the blood of the dead aged like wine, it was so that
the blood of the living could as well age; but in a particularly wonderful way,
if you knew the old methods. To kill and to feed was to indulge one’s lust – to
wound the soul, to create the impression of yourself within the blood and allow
it to fester, to allow the prey to get drunk upon rage and stumble through life
dreaming of your perfect, impossible terror – oh, and then to feast! But this
was not old Dragan who I had slaughtered the lover of in Serbia. The blood was
the same and yet not. A relation! Last year I had been drunk on my own lust and
had forgotten the rules, and now I would find myself haunted by a bloodline. Old
Dragan had died and now the phantom presence of his blood was coming for me,
would come until all of them were extinguished. It happened to us more than
often, us cursed desire-driven demons.

But she came for me then and I forgot all my abstract
wandering through history, for her weapon was of purest cross-iron just as her
father’s – it sang in that horrid high-pitched scream to me as she unsheathed
it – and she leapt forward coat flapping with the fury of a weakling who had
forced themselves to be strong. Our blades clashes with a sound that echoed out
across the fields. I had pulled mine from the sheath but really from nowhere
and it was forged of pure non-existence, the metal hewn from unspeakable things,
but it didn’t matter because her blood was stronger; because I had stupidly
cursed her with strong blood because I had been thinking only of having a good
meal. Her face was bovine, peasant in outlook and shape, heavy brow just like
her father’s furrowed just as his had been. She glared at me over our two
locking weapons. Mine was an ancient straight sword; hers was what they had
called a zweihander, a two-handed blade of enormous girth and thickness, dull
and ugly steel that looked, from the other side of it, like it might hurt very
much.

But I could not show fear. “Little robin.” I sang, for she
had rust-coloured red hair. “What are you doing with that toy?”

“I am a vampire hunter.” she grunted, hefting the enormous
weapon away. Her swing almost cleaved me in two and as well nearly pulled her
over, but I dodged right with the agility of the unreal and she steadied
herself with deft footwork, boots finding purchase in the snow, steadying the
broadsword in her grip and adjusting her posture so she was ready again. And so
again she charged me. I ducked and did not kill her because she was
interesting. “I am the daughter of Dragan Miladinovic, Vlatka,” she said
breathlessly, “and I am the daughter of the secret arts of vampire-slaying, and
so I shall slay you!” We were alone in the snow.

“You misunderstand.” I said. “I didn’t kill dear Dragan. I
let him live, last year, when he foolishly tried to stop me.”

“You did!” Vlatka spat, a temper as full of flame as her
hair. “He could not eat; could not drink, after he came back from battle. He
could not speak of anything but the vampire, until the day he put his revolver
in his hand and shot himself! And you-” She hurled her great sword at my head
and I lost my temper and smacked it so hard it snapped in two. “You are a
baby.” I said. “There are hundreds of thousands of men dead. Your old Dragan
didn’t get any worse than anyone else. Why should I have to suffer for it? And
how did you follow me here, from far-off Serbia, in wartime, at that? Do you
need me so? Are you so lustful, so deranged as that?” She only lay there in the
snow holding her broken sword and glared at me with her nostrils flared as if
she were a mad dog. I left in a huff, my appetite ruined. I would find more
corpses, I said to myself. And I forgot about Vlatka Miladinovic the vampire
hunter, because I was still full of lust myself.

–

There were so many of them and they kept coming up the
hillside and it was beyond anything I had imagined, reader. I had see Serbia,
and Galicia – but the Italians just kept storming up the mountains, these
dreadful Alpine peaks, rushing endlessly into our guns big and small, and I was
there to help prevent those fools who made it to the tunnels, and so that was
what I did, with blade and claw, carving through those bodies that came close
and dousing myself in spilt blood, gore, organs – God, you know, they still
kept coming. There had always been more Russians but the Russians knew when to
stop but these peasants, barely clad, shambolic, rugged, deathless until they
died – the mountains arced and curved and the ground was steep and sometimes
even they fell and didn’t even scream, most of the time, and still it was so
that I gloried in myself and still it was so that they indulged me. These
ragged farmers below and the worn-out stick figures of the Austrians above,
manning their borrowed Prussian guns and cowering in their trenches – was this
still the same feast that had begun in 1914? I killed out of lust, my usual,
but as well almost anger. This was not a hunt, was it? I did not have prey but
prepared meals, delivered to me by overstuffed men in uniform of all states and
races. Blood shone in the Alpine sun, decorating the crags and the peaks and
the cliffsides. The war somehow went on.

I roared, another horde of Italians beneath my boots, and
turned to the flank of the hillside where through howling machine guns and the
thunder of artillery they were still coming, and – a blade sliced through where
I had been and I saw her – blasted Serbian dog! Vlatka Miladinovic untold
months later, sweat-soaked and panting, with a great soldier’s pack on her
back, her coat flapping in the wind. Still that sword, or no, a larger one, and
she swung it at my head. “Vampire!” she shouted in a voice that was louder than
the guns at my back. “This time you die!”

“Oh, come on-” I may have muttered, ducking and
striking back. The Italian infantry did not understand but perhaps mistook her
for one of their own, and the Austrian gunners did not want to hit me; so we
danced upon the mountainside, I and she. Vlatka was panting, gasping for air; I
did not need air and I was fine, but for the way she swung that sword, that
blade which her blood bade her to slay me with; which her blood permitted her
to slay me with. Stupid! Finally I unfurled my wings and leapt for her throat
and my speed tore her sword apart but she drew a dagger from her belt – pricked
me, only, and I tumbled to the rock bleeding. Bleeding! Reader, I was furious.
I rose and hissed at her and she bruised and gasping for air and with her baby’s
knife still – still  – stood ready
to fight. Fuck you, I thought, and this was vulgar, true, for someone ennobled
centuries before, but you have to understand how frustrating it was. We did not
comprehend long-term, we creatures of pure id. By now she was the longest
friend I’d had in the world. Then a rush, a boom – the Austrians were shoving
rocks down the hillside, tumbling enormous boulders into the advancing
Italians. I saw Vlatka glance up in alarm and I saw the boulders slam into her
and take her away, and I stood bloodied and in my ruined uniform unharmed,
watching rocks crush men on all sides, and I wondered about next time.

–

I met a most interesting man in the desert and told myself I
had forgotten all about her. He was an English gentleman, an army officer, and
he was out here where the punishing sun met the quivering endless plains of
sand in his Arabic robes and with his rifle, directing men to strike here and
there at the Turks and their grand railway which cut through Hejaz. He had a
strange face, not unhandsome, aristocratically gentle, with sulking, prominent
lips undercut by a high forehead and large nose which added a paradoxical
element of the dullard to his features; I came as a German liaison officer with
the Turks, although I was not German and not a man in the same way I was not a
woman, and I captured this English officer and tied him up in an emptied-out
Bedouin tent and beat him with a riding crop, which he seemed to enjoy. He
might have guessed after the first few hours that I was not a German officer,
but I came to suspect as well he was not really a gentleman, and we found an
accommodation there that I’m sure he later brushed off as a fantasy caused by a
lack of water or what-have-you. But I beat him with the crop, slapped his face,
stood on him and bruised him, and etc., and made him pull at my cock until I
came on his face, and he seemed to have a good time with that, and I did too,
for pain is like the foretaste of blood, and administered properly can create
an anticipation that is almost as good as feeding itself. At night he lay there
and drank his water and ate the meat I’d hunted for him, and on the third night
of this I watched him from the other side of the fire, wondering if this war –
this vastness, this alien terrain where horseback warriors took potshots at one
another across the enormous sand, where iron monsters screeched and huffed
across the desert with mobs of horses and riders in their wake, rifles cracking
intermittently, scimitars whirling above their heads  – was the same as the one from earlier, that I
had seen begin in Serbia that seemed as if it would never end. I wondered about
Serbia.

Then in the morning I dressed in what was my left of my
military uniform – now with the sleeves eaten away, the shako lost, the skirt a
flimsy excuse – and put the Englishman on his horse and told him where he could
ride to find his Arab friends. I kissed him on the lips, bit at him, scraped
his skin with my fangs. “Goodbye.” I said tenderly. And I stood in the Bedouin
camp and wondered about life, about fate, about what any of this was for-

“Vampire!” she roared, rising up in the midnight desert, a
great black stallion beneath her. It was my Vlatka! She had lost her coat and
wore like everyone here long billowing robes, but she had kept her father’s fur
hat and she had now over her shoulder an even greater sword. “I’ve
finally found you!” She leapt from the horse, ready to fight. There was a deep
scar over her nose but except for that she might never have been hit by a
rockslide and I found myself looking her up and down, little strand of red hair
poking out from her hat, those foolish, bestial eyes fixed upon me as if I were
the only living thing in the whole world. And perhaps I was. I grinned to her.
“You’ve found me, then, little robin.” I snarled. “Well.” I drew my sword from my
cape. “Then try your best!” And she had improved in the year since I had seen
her last; she had drawn blood with great effort that time but now she cut me in
three strikes, only a glancing blow but the skin that was not skin split and
some of my precious essence – mere droplets but – spilt out and baptised the
sand. There was an enormous swollen moon above to illuminate our play. It hurt,
where she had touched me. I leapt at her wings drawn and she parried my strike,
knocked me aside. I went for her throat with my claws and she kicked me with
one army-booted foot in the gut – it hurt. Do you know, reader, what it
means, when one of us swirling incorporate incomprehensible vortexes of raw
feeling begins to hurt? It means that we have allowed someone to hurt us.
Spiralling away, claws of my feet raking sand, I lunged back at once,
infuriated, spilling out of myself, gouging wounds in the desert at random –
not my flesh-form but the other thing, that which had been unleashed briefly in
Galicia in hunger now rushing forth with furious lust-rage, barrelling towards
her, this peasant brat – with a hundred arms and a thousand wings I came for
her. She steady on her feet merely thrust the sword artlessly, with perfect
timing. I spat out a torrent of blood, impaled upon her, and my claws tore her
robes and dug deep into her waist, and the momentum of my impact carried us
both onto the sand where we lay bleeding together. In this way did we embrace.

Her face was set with contempt; I did not know what my own
looked like. My claws were inside of her, feeling the taut muscle beneath her
rended skin, the pulse of life that passed through her every instant; her blade
went through me and out the other side. Neither of us could look away from the
other. Her breath which was tobacco mixed with the crimson that dribbled from
her open mouth rolled over me. Her legs touched gently against mine. The tiny
shape of the Bedouin tent was at our backs; the endless desert, silent and
dark, lay all about us. We could both die here, I wanted to tell her. But I
only snarled at her and tried to push my face into hers, to bite off her jaw. She
shoved the sword deeper with an exertion that worsened her bleeding; I coughed
and spat my fluids down her front, feeling a deep, existential sort of pain.
“You killed my father.” she spluttered.

“That’s not why you’re here.” I said, and I wanted to elaborate
that it was her blood that drove her on, but I couldn’t, and for the first time
in our long-distance relationship her fierce expression relented. I did not
know what her new expression meant. We lay there together beneath the moon, the
pool of blood around us now intermingled, mine and hers together, impossible to
ever separate again. I am ashamed to admit that I passed out first – or she
remained awake the whole time until the tribesmen found us. When I woke up they
told me in fearful voices, the knowledge of the supernatural that all doomed
folks had deep in their blood, that they had rescued me because I was holy.
They had not picked up the ugly woman with the sword. But I knew or I would see
her again.

–

They were too exhausted to arrest me. It was obvious by now
– my French was practiced but not enough, and I could not rid it of that
haughty Austrian lilt. The soldiers knew the creature in the chateau was
Austrian, or in their limited conception of things that I was German; they did
not however have the energy to come in and deal with me, because the war was
almost over. Of course after Arabia I had drifted to France – where else,
reader, was there to go? The fields of France were swollen with blood, bursting
at the seams with oceans of gore, geysers of crimson erupting from the scarred,
bruised earth. I had visited so many other vistas in my long tour of the
apocalypse that it seemed absurd, a kind of faux paus, almost, to not journey
to the infamous vast charnel houses of the western front. But I did not feed
much. I lured in a Frenchman or an Englishman now and then – not the Americans,
they scared me – and acted like some lowly peon, trading body for blood, but
there were no more slaughters, no more orgies. Part of it was that my empire
was collapsing and here, hiding in enemy territory, I did not have sanction to
fight; part of it was merely that I was tired too. My blood was tired. I dreamt
only of Serbian and Galician mass graves, of that absurdity in the Alps, of my
English officer’s sweaty, tragic face from below – of the sensation of my warm
blood pooling around Vlatka’s body. Seeing my face in the mirrors of the old
chateau, shattered and fragmented by the force of the shells that had landed
here at some point, I could have sworn my mask had aged, that there were worry
lines carved there into the porcelain, that my eyes were set deeper, with heavy
bags beneath, that stared and stared without a spark of thought to them.
Dragan’s eyes, Vlatka’s eyes! Those Balkan cowherds had cursed me with their
bestial sight, I who was above man or beast; I could not stop staring, as if
there was some fixed point invisible ahead that my soul was tugged towards, as
if I was searching for secrets and mysteries hidden somewhere within a universe
that four years ago had held no such irritating things. Some of the mirrors I
had broken myself.

Dismal; to a chorus of half-hearted booms and bangs
somewhere nearby, German artillery emptying itself fruitlessly into the mud,
plumes of smoke on every horizon and broken forest and field on all sides, I crept
about in rags in the streets of the village, through the shell craters and old
trenches, past barbed wire and ruined monsters of steel and gunpowder and
petrol known as ‘tanks’. A stormy overcast sky rumbled overhead. The Americans
were trooping along – they were so tall, so vast they seemed to be as inhuman
as I. I shrank back from them, perhaps out of some vestigial Austrian instinct,
the old world hiding cravenly from the new…the old world was full of terrors
and cruelties, eroticisms and joys all beyond belief, true, reader, but weren’t
they all things that could be understood, grasped as easily as an infant
grasped that fire was hot after a single misguided attempt to touch it? I was
unfathomable, but it was possible to understand me. But there was no force on
earth, no intellect no matter how old or vast, that could understand the
Americans, who did not even feed but grazed on all before them like cattle that
could walk upon two feet I wandered loosely towards the front, feeling like a
severed appendage that had survived the death of the body; there was little for
me to do but suckle on broken men and try not to throw up at the taste.

“Wounded!” one of the Americans was crying in that bastard
language of theirs. “There’s a civilian wounded here!” They were rushing by
with a stretcher between them. Some of the plodding soldiers turned their
heads, grey faces curious; some did not look at all. But I saw as they passed
me. “Stupid woman-” one soldier mumbled. “What the hell was she doing-?” And I
saw that it was my Vlatka who lay there ashen in the borrowed clothes of a
Frenchman, too baggy for her, slashed open from neck to waist by a great
sucking wound. I saw her bare breasts, lacerated and ruined, and the pale skin
of her belly split as if by a single cruel blow. She was alive for now, gasping
with bloodstained lips. Her eyes found me and then were elsewhere, seeing
nothing, and they bore her away from me. I saw a glimmer of metal stuffed into
her waistband and felt the tug of annihilation and realised that she had come
all this way with a revolver, the cross-iron of her sword melted down into
bullets, to shoot me to death, and I knew at once that it would have worked.
“She’s mine!” I called after the stretcher-bearers, my voice no longer carrying
the power of an ancient unknowable being but for a fraction of a moment, when
the old fire returned. “She’s mine! Give her back!” But they were trying to
save her life and they did not heed me but went on. I followed them to the
field hospital at the rear of the lines and walked barefoot through mud and
corpses and was not allowed in by the burly guards and so waited outside and
waited and waited. Soon it was dark. And reader, it was so that I knew how to
move in the dark.

I came in through the flaps of the tent as a shadow, passing
over the guard, not for now feeding from him. And I came to the cot where she
lay swabbed in bandages. I stood over my enemy as she was prostrate, barely
breathing, her eyes closed. But her face was still her face. I reached out with
my hand and touched her cheek which was almost cold. Her eyes found me, or my
eyes found her – in the gloom of the field hospital, lit only by sheepish
paraffin lamps, we were both the same, both worthless before all that had
unfolded. There were millions of people dead, a world ablaze, all old certainties
burned to ash; what did we have to compare to that except our private little
hatred? Her fingers twitched, perhaps aiming for the revolver, which she could
not reach. Her breath was a horrid wheeze. The light in her eyes was as dull as
the rusted-over wrecks of the war machines outside. Millions of lives, perhaps;
and what were our two, we two souls who only had each other? The war had proven
a terrible wound instead of the blessing I had thought it would be, and there was no history anymore, for you, reader, and your kind, you had destroyed all history, but she-

Well, reader, you know me by now. You can perhaps guess what
it was I did for her, there in that terrible field hospital in October 1918. I
made sure she would hate me forever.

–

Hong Kong, 1971. She came for me in the teahouse. I was sat
wilting in the Tsim Sha Tsui humidity sipping a gentle cup of oolong, listening
to the chatter in Cantonese around me, a language I did not and would never
know. My wounds from Italy had all healed; I was beautiful again. I wore a sheer white
safari suit and a pair of sunglasses, and my hair was cut short and I had made
love to many handsome men last night. But I could sense something nearby, the
presence of cross-iron that over the decades my physical incarnation had
developed an intensely keen awareness of. The hairs on the back of my neck
stood up. One of those squat little public light buses rattled by outside,
engine coughing. The sound of birds calling to one another from their cages came
from the teahouse’s upstairs. She was nearby. I stood as she came in, as
ageless as she had been in 1918, scarred and rude and with those same harsh
eyes, my monster, my golem, and she in her black zoot suit with her red tie the
colour of blood and her red hair tied back in a rough ponytail the rest of her
hair wolfish and shaggy about her severe head, she drew the two pistols forged
from her father’s cross-iron – we had learned much about one another over the
decades – and clicked back the safety on each and curled one pale thick hand
around each trigger.

I stood, kicking my chair back, and drew my sword made of
unspeakable things, and bore my fangs to her. She scowled. “Creature.” she said
in her accented English.

I grinned. “Lovely to see you again, Vlatka. My little
robin.” That slight tension upon her face as I spoke; that slight blush
creeping across her face. Oh, all else had ended in 1918, but for we two-! I
readied my sword. She her guns. The old man who had been adjacent to my table
eyed first me and then her. He got up and almost bashfully inched his way to
the doorway and opened the door and slipped out. Other people moved quickly to
the exits, to the stairs, mumbling and crying out. But we could only see one
another, we who shared the same eyes. “This time I mean it.” she spat. “Undo the
curse you put upon me!”

“I don’t want to.” I said.

“Then I will slay you.” she said.

“Go on, then.” I said. “Daughter of Dragan Miladinovic. Try
your best!” And the bloodlust began anew.