++Witchfinders do not know all that the elves do, for their human minds could not weather such knowledge, but they are receptacles of elven wisdom. They know their business, and they know the dangers of this world. Absent of a Circumscriber, trust their word.++

  Chapter 11

  Finding out that he could survive being shot in the head was quite a nice surprise for Reggie, though he had to say actually being shot was probably the worst way to make that discovery. He came to with a wet face left sticky with dried blood, blurry vision and, perhaps expectedly, a throbbing headache. He was also chained up.

  His first instinct was to try struggling against them of course, but Reggie had no hope of breaking steel links, not without transforming. The thought of doing that…well, he saw Ludvich staring at him across the small room he was now dangling in. Going by the look in the Witchfinder’s eye and the gun in his arms, doing anything overtly monster-ish would be a bad idea right now.

  “Ludvich, what are you doing?” Reggie blinked for a few times before realising that he didn’t really need to blink anymore. The Witchfinder still just glared at him, meanly.

  “Don’t use my name, not in his voice. What are you doing wearing Reggie’s face?” He spat the question out like…fuck, like this was an interrogation. Which it was of course, because Reggie had watched the most paranoid man he knew grieve him after fifteen years and then decided to waddle his ass out of a bush, without having aged a day, and say hi.

  In fairness, he actually was an undead monster, so he couldn’t even say Ludvich was making the wrong call here.

  “I am Reggie,” Reggie snapped, “Ludvich it’s me.”

  “Reggie died,” the Witchfinder spat, “he burned up along with his home years ago.”

  It almost slipped his notice that Ludvich had called him by his nickname. Reggie didn’t have chance to process that, he had bigger fish to fry.

  “Ask me something only Reggie would know, then!”

  Ludvich’s glare intensified. “Oh, I’m sure you could answer. I bet you have every one of his memories, but you’re not Reggie.”

  He thinks you’re an undead abomination simply feigning humanity to lower his guard, the System helpfully pointed out.

  [How do you know you’re not?] Dvo unhelpfully suggested.

  “Ludvich, please, I…I need you.” Reggie heard his own voice break, and the sound of it somehow hardened him. He wasn’t going to cry. Not over this. He was done crying. Reggie started thinking fast. Ludvich hadn’t killed him. That was good, for the obvious reason, but it also gave him hope. If Ludvich was hesitant about ending his life, then maybe he could be talked out of doing it altogether.

  Maybe.

  Reggie’s usual tactic of threatening suicide wouldn’t work here, so he’d need something new.

  “What do you think I am now?” he tried. “What is wrong with me?” He’d hoped, by intellectualising things, he might coax Ludvich into engaging with him. Reggie realised he’d miscalculated soon, it was the intellectual side of the Witchfinder that now screamed at him to put another bullet in Reggie’s head.

  Fortunately, he answered anyway.

  “Vampire, I recognise a vampire when I see one. Read about them enough.”

  He was actually really good at his job, Reggie had almost forgotten that somehow.

  “And why do I need to die?” he tried.

  “Because you’re a heartless, soulless, vicious abomination that only wants to prey upon and hurt humanity for your own ends.”

  Well shit, why don’t you tell me what you really think? But then it wasn’t much different from what Reggie had always had said about him, was it?

  “And who told you that?”

  Ludvich was getting angry, now, which made each new question Reggie asked him a danger. Not as dangerous as being silent and letting him work up the guts to finally torch him though.

  “Trying to trick me?”

  “It was the elves, right? That’s where all your knowledge of magic and its creatures comes from, they run the institutes you studied at.”

  Ludvich glared at him, looking as if he was trying to discover some trap in Reggie’s words. “That’s right,” he said at last.

  “Okay.” Reggie nodded as much as his bonds would allow, then braced himself for the trickiest part of this conversation, “well I was murdered by the elves.”

  Ludvich looked like he’d just been punched, not a bad start.

  “You’re lying,” he snarled, then before Reggie could say another word the old man’s fist came around and smacked hard against his face. That might’ve caved Reggie’s skull in, fifteen years ago. Apparently the Witchfinder’s edge had been lost with old age. The blow only sent Reggie’s brain bouncing around inside his head, and given that the brain in question was just an inert lump of dead meat this didn’t really bother him that much.

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  Interesting, though. Apparently his consciousness was seated somewhere else. Or did it just take a particularly great amount of trauma to interrupt it? He’d have to find out later.

  “I showed them my lab, and they said that it had to be destroyed. That it couldn’t be allowed to get out,” Reggie noted that this was actually making his voice waver, the memory of what had happened, “they…they destroyed me Ludvich. Snapped me in half, shattered my spine, guts everywhere, blood—”

  —”stop,” the Witchfinder growled, “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “And I didn’t want to die,” Reggie spat, “I had a life. It wasn’t much, wasn’t pleasant, but it was mine, and they took it from me because… I still don’t even know why.” Reggie found himself thinking about that, drawing conclusions. “Because they think that humans with advancing technology are a threat to them. One of them said something about…fuck, my memory’s foggy, something about our ancestors, I think, about the weaponry they had. And elves are stronger than us, right?”

  “Much stronger,” Ludvich confirmed with a hesitant nod.

  “So maybe that’s it. Maybe the strong don’t want technology to equalise things between them and the weak. Maybe that’s why I had to fucking die.”

  Ludvich was glaring still, though it seemed not at Reggie. Not exclusively at least.

  “How did you…escape destruction?”

  He’d been about to say ‘live’, then stopped himself. Reggie decided to ignore that slight.

  “Fuck you,” he snapped. Ah, okay, not ignoring it then, well he was only human. Vampire. Shit. “I don’t know,” Reggie reluctantly explained, “just woke up…buried, underground. Needed to dig my way out and then I find this smiling woman lurking outside my grave. She tells me I’m a vampire and then leaves. Didn’t even give me any information on my abilities, weaknesses, none of it.”

  “The crimson cradle,” Ludvich murmured, “that’s what they call it. To create a new vampire, an existing one must bury a fresh human corpse under three feet of soil and drip their own blood upon it.”

  “Fresh corpse?” Reggie echoed, “it’s been fifteen fucking years!”

  The Witchfinder’s brow furrowed, more in thought than anything else. “I’ve heard the time needed for a vampire to emerge can vary, it might be related to the condition of their human corpse? You mentioned…a lot of damage. Could’ve taken years just to heal yourself during the transformation.”

  “And why do I know less about vampires than fucking you!” Reggie knew that complaint, of all things, was a bit petulant right now, and swallowed it before he continued. “Alright then, you want to hear my theory? I don’t feel evil, Ludvich. I don’t want to hurt you, or anyone else. I don’t find myself uncaring about people, I don’t want to take over the world, I don’t want anything I didn’t before. I think the reason elves teach all that bad shit about vampires is because being a vampire makes humans more powerful, and, like those new explosives I came up with, they consider it a threat to themselves.”

  Ludvich just stared at him for a few moments, slowly shaking his head. “Reggie that’s…insane.” His eyes hardened. “And I’m insane for even talking to you, what am I—”

  —”you’re thinking for yourself,” Reggie snapped, “just like you did when you kept me from being burned, even as the whole town told you I should be. Keep doing it now. Please. Make the right decision just like you did twenty…forty years ago. Don’t kill me for no reason.”

  “What happened back then didn’t go how you think it did,” Ludvich murmured.

  Reggie saw something in the old man that he never had before, and didn’t know at all what to make of it.

  “Well I don’t care,” he told Ludvich after a moment, “all I care about is what you do now, and whether you’re going to kill me for no reason like the elves did.”

  Ludvich eyed him, looking…hollow.

  “The texts warn that vampires have silver tongues, that they can manipulate you as surely as you can control your own arm.”

  “That’s exactly what I’d write about someone if I was worried they had a reasonable explanation for why people shouldn’t kill them on sight,” Reggie pointed out. Ludvich met his eye with a new intensity.

  “Your parents did nothing wrong,” he said at last. “I knew it, my investigation proved it, but the townsfolk weren’t hearing it. Six thousand people and just about all of them wanted your mother and father dead, two thousand of those were strong men, used to labour. I couldn’t have fought off even a hundred. So I made a judgement call. Those people would’ve stormed your home, killed you all. All because you were born hearing voices, because you reacted to noises other children didn’t hear, because you were odd and twitchy and…different. I wasn’t going to let them kill a baby. So I manufactured your parents’ demon-worshipping and put everything on them, led them to the stake, saw them die. Gave the town an outlet for its blood-lust. Your parents would’ve died trying to save you and failing, I let them succeed. It was the only way I could leave at least one survivor.”

  Reggie didn’t know why Ludvich was telling him this, but he didn’t care. He felt himself transform without even meaning to, strained his limbs against the chains, dragged his talons against the links. It only took one weak point to break, then he was free. His lunge for Ludvich didn’t even feel like he was moving, his body seeming to jerk forwards on its own. Reggie seized the Witchfinder by his collar and hoisted him high, drew his head close, smelled the hot blood in his veins, heard his heart pounding…then stopped.

  Ludvich was staring at him, eyes cool, body still. He wasn’t resisting at all. Two guns at his side, neither drawn. No lunges of motion, no defence. Reggie blinked back the bloody tears in his eyes, forced himself calm. He retracted his talons, shifted his joints back into place, stumbled back and stared.

  “You knew,” Reggie croaked, “you knew I was…You knew it was all…They were wrong, all of them. Wrong about me, I could’ve had a normal life. I could’ve had a family. And you knew.”

  “I did what I had to to save you,” Ludvich told him. “I made a judgement call. I won’t apologise for it.”

  “Fuck you.” Reggie turned and stormed out into the night, expecting to feel his head swimming, clotted with emotion and broken thoughts. It wasn’t. Did vampirism bring some new clarity of cognition as one of its gifts? Some gift, if so. Better to be wrapped up in a daze than feel all of this un-blunted.

  [So there is no demon, it was all just you.]

  Reggie ignored the voice, he had bigger concerns right now. No shack, no lab, no prospects, right?

  No. Wrong. Because he wasn’t a human anymore. Reggie had been so busy agonising over that loss, over no longer belonging to the species that had hated and abused him all his life, that he’d not really appreciated what the change meant. Well he appreciated it now. He was stronger, faster, he could level.

  And he had a second chance to actually live without getting dragged out of his bed and put down one dark night.

  “System, I’m Tier 1, but my race is listed as Inheritor. Does that mean that I can eventually raise my race’s Tier up to 10?”

  That is correct.

  Reggie grinned. More than just levelling, he could level past demigods and titans if he lived long enough.

  “Then tell me, how do I start doing that?”

  There was going to be a fucking reckoning, and Reggie would need power to bring it.

  Day 2 of shamelessly begging the enjoyers of Eat Them All for an Advanced Review ?? — A. C.