The Vampire’s Feeder

Lost Goods

[Yara]

I dismounted before I had decided to.

One moment I was on the horse and the next my feet were on the ground and the reins were still in my hand. The heat ahead was pressing against my face how heat often was when it had been burning long enough to own the air around it.

The road home was the most gone. I could see that from where I stood. The row of it collapsed into itself, the walls that remained standing doing so out of habit rather than structure, the orange light pouring steadily from every gap. I moved straight, toward the mill road, which ran along the further edge of town and had stone on both sides that might have held better than the timber-framed houses.

It had not held better.

I went as far as the heat allowed and then further than that, holding my arm across my face, my eyes streaming from the smoke. The flames along the mill road were lower, and there was a gap between two collapsed sections where the road itself was visible, but terribly hot and I went through it before I had time to reason myself out of it.

"Momma!" My voice came out wrong, too broken for the space and swallowed immediately by the sound of the fire. I made it louder. "It's me, Yara." I turned in a full circle, the heat pressing from every direction now.

"Anyone. Is anyone—" I trailed off, knowing how pointless that question was.

'Who the hell would be alive? It's literally hell everywhere I turn.'

But then again:

'What if they escaped?'

They had to have escape or at least, that was the thought I held onto as I moved deeper in, skirting the edges of what was still actively burning, testing each step. They must have heard it coming, or seen the sky change and gone. The roads out of Valley Town ran in three directions and people were fast when they needed to be and there would be survivors on every one of those roads right now, moving toward other towns, other villages, carrying what they could. After all, there were no bodies.

Maren, my mother, was among them. She was on a road somewhere, moving away from the orange in the sky, and she was fine.

I held the thought and kept moving despite being bathed with my own sweat.

Then I saw the first one. I almost didn't understand what I was looking at as my mind offered several explanations before the true one arrived and in the form of a shadow or maybe just a trick of the light, something the fire had done to the soil.

I crouched down, and the explanation the mind had been avoiding settled over me with a horrible, quiet finality. The shape in the Earth was a person. Or had been. What remained was an outline pressed into the blackened soil, the silhouette of a body preserved in the ground the way a body was preserved when the fire came fast enough and hot enough to take everything: flesh, clothing, and bone. The shadow of a person where a person had been.

Arms out. Head turned to one side in the angle of someone who had been running and hadn't made it far enough.

I stood up.

There was another one six feet away. And another beyond that, near the wall of what had been the baker's. I knew the baker's large physique, the outlines overlapping at the edges, and one was smaller than the others. It was the size of a child.

And when I looked ahead, the sound that came out of me was not a word. It was not anything I had produced before, from any place I had previously visited in myself.

I pressed both hands over my mouth and it came anyway, from somewhere below the hands, below the chest, from whatever was underneath all of that, and I let it come because there was nothing else available to me in that moment.

Ahead was what seemed like a spot where people had gathered to seek refuge and had been killed all at once.

"Mum!"

I called her name again. I called it until my throat protested, moving through the parts of town the fire left me, also calling the names of people I had known my whole life, names that had individual faces attached to them as well as memories.

No one answered and no one was going to answer. I understood that the longer I walked, the more clearly I understood it, the knowledge arriving not as a single blow but as an accumulation. Each outline in the soil adding its weight to the thing I was being asked to carry until I stopped in the middle of what had been the square and stood there with the bell tower tilting above me and the fire burning on all sides and understood with my whole body that I was the only person making any sound in Valley Town.

The square was where they had gathered for the procession. The square was where I had stood in the dirt and asked for pen and paper and written the most convincing lie of my life. I stood in it now with the smoke heavy in my lungs and looked at the blackened soil and did not look for what the soil might contain and turned around and walked back to the horse.

She was where I had left her, trembling still, her eyes white-edged. I took the reins and stood beside her and pressed my forehead against her neck and felt the warmth of her, the living warmth of something that was still here, and I stayed there for a moment because I needed a moment and there was no one left to see me take it.

I didn't know where to go.

That was the plain truth of it. The one place I had been riding toward for days was ash, flame, and outlined bodies.

I stood beside the horse in the orange light and tried to figure out what came next.

The knife came from behind, the flat of it positioned across my throat. An arm came across my chest, locking both of mine against my body.

Then the voice.

"Well." It was filled with glee. "Now that has to be the most extraordinary luck I've had in some time."

I knew the voice, knew it from a mountain road.

"Lost goods," he said, almost to himself, with the tone of a man rediscovering something he had given up on. The arm tightened across my chest. "Still breathing and everything. The gods do have a sense of humour after all. Haha!”