The Vampire’s Feeder

It Reeks

[Yara]

The first rule of running was not to think about running.

That was what I learned within the first ten minutes on the mountainside. How the moment I let my mind fix on the distance, on the height, on the burning in my arms and the loose shale sliding beneath my boots, I would stop. So I did not think about any of it. I thought about the next handhold, the next breath, taken slow and even through my nose so the cough could not find purchase.

It found it anyway, eventually. It always did.

I pressed my face into the crook of my elbow and let the cough come, shoulders shaking with the effort of keeping it silent, my other hand gripping the rock face with everything I had. Below me, I could hear them still searching, or at least I thought I could, the sounds distorted by distance and the wind that had picked up as the sun dropped.

Gradually, the voices faded alongside the crack of boots on gravel. They were city men, unaccustomed to climbing the harsh terrain surrounding the village, which meant they would take the path. And I was not on the path.

I kept climbing.

The mountain lion found me when the last of the light went. I had just pulled myself over a wide ledge when I heard its growl.

I turned slowly.

It was perhaps four feet away and on my right. Larger than I had expected, though I had no real frame of reference for mountain lions beyond the stories, which had not prepared me for the golden weight of its gaze or the way it crouched with every muscle coiled as if ready to spring at me.

My heart was doing something violent behind my ribs. I did not move. Maybe if I stayed very still, it wouldn't notice.

I did not know how long we stayed like that, as it could have been ten seconds, or it could have been a full minute. The wind moved through the scrub grass at the ledge's edge. Somewhere far below, a man's voice rose and then dropped again.

The lion did not look away from me. And then something happened that I could not explain and would not try to.

Its gaze, which had been sharp and fixed on its prey, shifted. Not away immediately, it kept looking directly at me, but the hunger in its eyes seemed to fade. It must have been smart enough to conclude that diving at me would send both of us plummeting to our deaths.

Then slowly, it drew back, turned, and walked to the far edge of the ledge. It stepped off into the darkness and was gone.

I waited a few minutes, exhaled then climbed to sit down where the creature had just been standing.

My hands were shaking. I looked at them and noted, distantly, that they were bleeding in several places—the skin torn from gripping and clawing and pulling my own weight up a mountain for hours. My left knee had hit the rock face at some point and the pain of it had only just arrived. There was something warm above my temple that I suspected was blood.

I had no idea when that had happened. Yet, I lay back against the stone and looked up at the sky, which had filled entirely with stars while I wasn't paying attention, and I thought, with the strange calm of someone who had moved past the part where fear is useful: 'I have to keep going.'

I did not move for a while and somehow managed to doze off.

When I woke, it was full dark and I was cold in a way that had gone past sensation into something more fundamental, and there was dried blood on the side of my face where I had, apparently, hit the rock when I lost consciousness. I did not remember doing that. My body had made that decision without consulting me.

I sat up slowly. Everything hurt.

My hands, knees, and ribs, which I suspected had taken more impact than I had registered during the climb. My head, with a migraine of its own.

I stood anyway and kept walking for a very long time after finding the path. But I didn't descend the mountain, instead, I ascended.

The castle was above me. I had not known that when I started climbing, I had simply gone up because down was where they were, but somewhere in the darkness above the next ridge there was light. Faint and cold, the kind that seeped from windows rather than fires. I fixed my eyes on it and I walked.

I could not have told you, afterward, how long it took.

My mind had narrowed to a very small line of commands then:

'One foot, then the other. Do not fall.'

And everything outside of those commands had ceased to exist. The hunger had stopped feeling like hunger at some point and had become simply a hollow where my belly used to be.

My mouth was so dry that swallowing hurt. The cough had become almost irrelevant against the backdrop of everything else that was wrong with me.

I reached the outer wall sometime in the deepest part of the night. Or was it the next night?

I knew it was the outer wall because I walked into it. I stood against the cold stone for a moment, forehead pressed to it, and then I followed it with my hands until the stone gave way to a different surface. Earth packed with snow and while I faded in and out of consciousness, I heard voices.

Two of them. Both from men passing.

I did not make a decision. There was no decision left to make, because decision-making required a self to make it from and I had run out of self somewhere on the mountainside. What I did was purely on the will to live, not caring if those two voices were friend or foe.

I reached out and I caught the first solid thing my hand found.

It was a high-booted leg. A leg.

I could not lift my head fully and my neck would not cooperate. I registered boots, the hem of a dark coat, and the fact that I was on my face on the ground.

The man above me had gone very still. When he spoke, his voice was exactly what I would have expected from a man whose boot I was clutching in the dark outside a castle at an unacceptable hour.

Cold, dry, and terribly disgusted. "What," he began, but to his companion rather than to me, "is this thing on my leg?"

There was a pause. Then the other voice which was less cold but equal amounts of condescending, replied: "Looks like a malnourished human female."

There was a brief silence and my fingers tightened on the boot.

"Throw it over the cliff," the first voice ordered. "It reeks."