Brigit's Flame -- "Reap"
Prompt: "reap"
Word Count: 2,648
Warnings: language, vague blasphemy, fantasy violence, a bit of gore
Author's Note: The people asked for a more personalized mythos for Vincent the Snarky French Vampire (his stage name), and this time I was struck with the inspiration to deliver. Some of this I made up when originally conceiving of the character a little over a year ago, but a lot of it’s completely new. Thanks, as always, to eltea, and please enjoy! ♥
"REAP"
Vincent was sipping at an extremely good-and extremely old-Merlot and doing his taxes when a small spot of bright light materialized by the roll-top desk he had purchased in 1892.
Or was it ’93?
In either case, he knew the glowing pinprick well enough to turn his chair around and shade his eyes with one almost frighteningly long-fingered hand.
Pinprick. Ooh, that was excellent; he’d have to use that.
There was a tremendous flash of searing, pure white light, glistening on the cobwebs in the darkest corners of the room, and Vincent’s foresight duly saved him both momentary blindness and an atrocious sunburn.
Leather flapped faintly, settling into place, and when Vincent refused to turn around, Maion very pointedly cleared his throat.
Extremely languidly, Vincent swiveled to give the angel a bored look.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“We need to talk,” Maion announced.
The leather jacket thing was working for him-rich brown leather it was, chocolate lightened to caramel in the creases, paired with a crisp white Oxford shirt and designer jeans. Maion’s hair was, dreadfully predictably, something out of a glossy advertisement, all rippling golden waves and nuanced sheen, and dentists would have swooned at his smile.
Oh, hell. He was smiling. This was about to get much worse.
“I’m a bit busy,” Vincent explained, returning to his drudgery.
“Nonsense,” Maion countered, tripping cheerfully nearer to peek over Vincent’s shoulder with interest. “What are you working on?”
Vincent snorted and tossed his pen onto the stack of forms. “Two hundred years in this damnable country,” he muttered, “and I still can’t make it through these things without getting a migraine.”
Maion considered. “Why don’t you get an accountant?”
Vincent merely raised an eyebrow, and Maion frowned.
“I’m not sure what your expression is supposed to mean,” he mused. “Do you refuse to hire help because you’re a vampire, or because you’re a control freak?”
Vincent emptied the wineglass.
“What do you want, Maion?” he inquired.
Maion folded his hands demurely and put on his Saint Face.
“I was sent by Management,” he intoned, “to request the return of the souls you’ve displaced.”
“As I have told you every time before,” Vincent responded, “your request will be granted with utmost alacrity the fine morning that hell freezes over.”
Impatiently now, Maion delved a hand into the pocket in the lining of his leather jacket and whipped out his crucifix, pushing it forward for inspection. Vincent steeled himself not to flinch, but the left corner of his mouth twitched, presumably just to spite him.
“Every time you lay a finger on the cross,” Maion explained, slowly, for the umpteenth time, as if Vincent was two hundred and fifty-five years younger, “you free one soul.”
“Have you ever played with hellfire, seraph?” Vincent snarled. “It burns, yes, and it leaches spirit long after the pain is gone. It’s poison. That’s my due every time I touch your God-wood. After that, as you know quite well, each soul I cede to you takes with it the strength its owner’s blood and body lent, and a part of me is repossessed and then destroyed.”
That was the thing about vampiricism-“undead” was a loose word. The condition was, in a lot of ways, closer to “super-humanity.” In the process of being Turned, one verged so closely on total annihilation that the recovery period and the subsequent need to feed upon the vitality of others pushed a new-made vampire beyond the other extreme of the spectrum.
As with everything, there was a price, and that was stranded souls. Death at the hands-well, at the teeth-of a vampire was notoriously impure, and the soul of a victim couldn’t transcend that taint until the responsible vampire had sacrificed a portion of himself for its liberty.
“Freeing half a dozen,” Vincent informed the angel, “would kill me on the spot.”
An unimpressed and undaunted Maion, however, tried the patented Puppy Eyes Maneuver.
“You could just free one a day,” he suggested helpfully. “And then take a siesta.”
Vincent shoved his chair back, drawing himself up to his full height-even with Maion, damn the bastard.
(The first part of the suggestion, of course, was impossible, and the second slandered ethereal matter quite unjustly.)
“I will not take siestas,” Vincent told him. “I’m not going to gamble my life simply so that you can meet your quota.”
“Those souls,” Maion insisted, “will hover in Limbo until you let them go. That’s the power you wield with-” He tossed his head. “-striking impunity. Is their release so much to ask?”
“What are you going to do with them?” Vincent countered. “Put them in a little box that reads ‘Do not open until Judgment Day’?”
Arm straight, elbow locked, Maion held the oak-carved cross out to him. The proximity alone had roused the first waves of vertigo in Vincent’s ears.
“Please,” Maion said.
“You know what they say in movies with bad dialogue,” Vincent cautioned.
Perfect furrows rippled across Maion’s forehead. “What’s that?” he asked.
“‘No way, José,’” Vincent answered.
Maion blinked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said in a film,” he noted.
“Then you’re watching the wrong ones,” Vincent replied.
Maion shook the crucifix meaningfully, which Vincent doubted Christ appreciated. The poor man looked uncomfortable enough strung up as he was without anyone waving him around like some kind of banner.
“Stay on-topic, Duval,” Maion bid him.
“You should be thanking me,” Vincent retorted, “if you think about it. I’m filtering the detritus out of the gene pool. I’ve never killed anyone who was in line for canonization, as you may have noticed. It is, in fact, beautifully Darwinian, and you should appreciate my services.”
“You’re sick,” Maion decided.
“Frequently,” Vincent responded, “yes. So much venereal disease in the blood these days. Estimates are that up to seventy-five percent of sexually active people will be infected with HPV in their lifetime, many without ever being aware of it-you wouldn’t believe what that kind of abuse does to your gastrointestinal tract.”
Maion saw fit to arch both sculpted eyebrows in elegant surprise. “Maybe,” he noted, eyes wide, “you should stop eating them.”
Vincent threw himself back into his chair, pointedly taking up the pen. “Don’t you have some harp lessons to practice for?” he muttered. “Some of us are trying to run a business here.”
Maion didn’t appear to be listening. He cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”
Vincent paused in flipping through the pile for a form five pages ago, from which he needed the answer to question twenty-two, which he was to fill in here, from which he would then subtract the answer to question fourteen, which was on a different page…
Oh. Right. Maion was hearing things.
As it turned out, Vincent was hearing things, too-things rumbling in the distance and coming closer, things with many pounding feet and many rising voices.
Vincent massaged his temples.
“Probably another protest,” he remarked. “The union wants me dead-amusingly enough-but I’ve got enough security that they tend to wear themselves out and go to bother some other executive with no personal investment in pension plans.”
Maion drew the heavy, sun-proof velvet drapes a few inches aside to peer into the night.
“It doesn’t look like a protest,” he reported. “It looks more like… an invasion.”
Vincent joined him at the window, and Maion pointed unnecessarily to the vast crowd of figures caught in the floodlights as they trooped steadily up the lawn. In place of picket signs and megaphones, they hefted pitchforks and rusty swords.
And flamethrowers, by the looks of things.
“Shit,” was Vincent’s verdict.
“We might not be the only ones trying to reap those souls of yours,” Maion remarked, motioning vaguely Upstairs. “And the Archfiend’s envoys aren’t usually as polite.”
“I don’t know about that,” Vincent countered; “Belial is very civil. He goes for pinstripes and caviar these days, you know.”
Maion squinted and drummed his fingers on his bottom lip, focused on the small advancing army. “This looks very bad.”
Vincent went to the trunk next to the fireplace, retrieved the saber he’d lifted off of a dead Confederate officer during the Atlanta Campaign, and buckled the belt around his waist, the comfortable weight of the sword settling against his side.
“Shall we?” he inquired.
Maion’s bright blue eyes slid closed, and he wrinkled his nose to concentrate. Momentarily, a line of the same intense white light sizzled across his chest from his left shoulder to his ribs, flaring so that Vincent’s eyes watered, only then to fade gently into a reinforced leather baldric that secured the angel’s broadsword scabbard to his back, suspending the hilt within easy reach.
“Show-off,” Vincent decided.
“Sword envy,” Maion retorted, sauntering blithely towards the door.
“I do not have sword envy,” Vincent hissed, storming after.
Maion merely gave him a patronizing smile.
Vincent was going to kill that bastard.
If that was even possible.
For the moment, he settled with striding out onto the lawn and slotting his saber between the first invader’s ribs.
There was some charming froth-and-blood expulsion after that, which gave Vincent an excellent opportunity to examine his adversary. Even when there weren’t torches and floodlights, the dark opened cool, kind arms to Vincent’s sort, a mother to misguided children, and his night-vision was accordingly superb.
Thus it was that he discovered that he’d sunk his sword into an emaciated, half-rotted corpse, graying flesh shrunken and shriveled tight against its bones, eye sockets cavernous, mouth agape. Wizened hands with fingers curled like claws scrabbled for his shirt, and Vincent planted his foot on the creature’s chest and shoved it to the ground to pull his sword loose.
The thing was already attempting to get up by the time he’d abbreviated a second at the neck.
“Maion?” he prompted. “What exactly is going on here?”
Not far away, surrounded by a small cluster of enterprising things, Maion turned, bathed ethereally in the sapphire light cast by the deep blue flames surging along the blade of his sword. His hair was disheveled, and his grin was ever-so-slightly maniacal now.
Angels. Honestly.
“This is high necromancy,” he announced with an unholy quantity of cheer.
“It looks more like something out of ‘Resident Evil,’” Vincent said, putting the saber through a staggering form. He noticed that Maion was looking at him strangely in between two-handed strokes. “I suffer from bouts of insomnia,” he explained, tersely at best, “which leaves me with some time to kill.”
Maion took the head off of a zombie armed with a shovel. “Isn’t insomnia only applicable to sleeping through the night?”
“It’s a matter of being unable to fall asleep and stay that way,” Vincent corrected, eviscerating the nearest foe. “It isn’t exclusive to the diurnal.”
“Decapitate them,” Maion recommended, demonstrating as he did. “It’s the only thing that keeps them from coming back.”
“We wouldn’t want-” Vincent gritted his teeth and aimed for the neck. “-that, now, would we?”
Maion whirled and ran one through, then drawing deftly back to deprive it of its head, one clean slice that sent a blackened skull bouncing, blanketed in stark blue flames.
“Bit off-putting,” he agreed.
It was actually when they had hacked their way through the first onslaught that the problems started.
The second wave was the zombies with the flamethrowers, after all.
Vincent hurled himself to the ground and rolled, wet grass imparting dew that evaporated much too fast as orange flames erupted just above him. He scrambled to his feet, vampire’s grace deserting him in the heat of the moment, and it was an utter tragedy that he was too busy fighting for his life to appreciate the pun.
That just wasn’t right.
Taking a quick dance at vampire speed past the flamethrower-wielding zombie-madman, Vincent took his assailant’s head off neatly.
That done, he took his assailant’s weapon, equally neatly, the pack in one hand, saber sheathed to aim the hose with the other, and charbroiled two dozen hapless ’mancer minions before one came at him with a battleaxe.
Vincent wanted to know exactly whence the motherfucker had acquired a battleaxe.
It seemed more prudent, however, to decapitate first and ask questions later, largely in the interest of keeping his own anatomy intact.
Maion was a blur of blue fire out of the corner of his eye, but Vincent hadn’t had an unspecified quantity of millennia to build up his endurance, and an ache was gathering in his shoulders as he raised the saber again, parrying a blow from a newcomer no less enthusiastic for his clumsy gait. He’d killed at least fifty of these damn things, but they kept coming, and…
Well, that was a problem.
An even bigger problem was the sudden flare of breathtaking agony that exploded in his side as one creature’s weapon found its mark.
Vindictively, Vincent made short work of the little bastard, but the damage was done, and he had been impaled with what looked to be a fire poker.
“Maion!” he shouted over the din of footfalls and incoherent zombie moans, unable to quell a sense of a child howling for its mother. “How many are there?”
Maion fought his way through a clump, flinging headless corpses in all directions, to come close enough to admire Vincent’s wound.
“Missed your heart,” he commented, gold hair pale in the floodlights where it had become sufficiently disordered as to fall into his eyes. “But there are a lot, aren’t there?”
Before Vincent could even criticize the condescension, Maion had shoved him down with one capable hand, sending him sprawling, his saber skidding across the wet grass until it hit a skull that interrupted its trajectory.
And then there was something like a nuclear explosion.
When Vincent dared to lower his arms from over his head, blinking dazedly as his sight took its sweet time in returning, it was to a vast field of sooty, smoking dead things.
Re-dead things, he supposed. Necromancy made for a complicated vocabulary.
Surveying the carnage, Maion stood in all his Glory, and Vincent remembered just how small one could feel beside an angel properly revealed.
Maion turned, all six wings’ milk-white feathers fluttering in the still air, duly noted that Vincent was alive, and slung his broadsword back into the scabbard, which then obediently disappeared. He craned his neck to examine the state of his clothing in the wake of the wings.
“Fuck,” he concluded of the various shreds. “I love this jacket.”
Maion sighed feelingly, and then he offered Vincent a hand up.
Vincent, for his part, was too dumbfounded to refuse.
Maion looked at the place the iron had gone through.
“You’re bleeding,” he observed. “If you even call it ‘bleeding.’”
Vincent swiped impatiently at the sluggish flow of thick black fluid.
“I do,” he noted. “It’s more poetic than ‘spewing ichor.’”
Maion shrugged, and the wings rose with the motion. They were mesmerizing-incandescent in the night.
“What,” he inquired, “did you do to get a particularly powerful necromancer to declare war on your person?”
“Nothing that I recall,” Vincent answered. “But I have a knack for pissing off the demons, too.”
Maion smiled. “If I didn’t know better,” he remarked, “I might be moved to think that you were on our side, Monsieur Duval.”
“You know what they say in movies with bad dialogue,” Vincent muttered, kneading at his injury.
“‘I’m on my side’?” Maion hazarded.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Don’t leave me; you are my universe,’” Vincent replied, “but I like yours better.”
“You know,” Maion told him airily, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re basically a mosquito.”
Vincent bent to retrieve his sword and punted a zombie head for good measure.
“Don’t start with me,” he cautioned. “I’m going to have to clean this up tomorrow.”
Word Count: 2,648
Warnings: language, vague blasphemy, fantasy violence, a bit of gore
Author's Note: The people asked for a more personalized mythos for Vincent the Snarky French Vampire (his stage name), and this time I was struck with the inspiration to deliver. Some of this I made up when originally conceiving of the character a little over a year ago, but a lot of it’s completely new. Thanks, as always, to eltea, and please enjoy! ♥
"REAP"
Vincent was sipping at an extremely good-and extremely old-Merlot and doing his taxes when a small spot of bright light materialized by the roll-top desk he had purchased in 1892.
Or was it ’93?
In either case, he knew the glowing pinprick well enough to turn his chair around and shade his eyes with one almost frighteningly long-fingered hand.
Pinprick. Ooh, that was excellent; he’d have to use that.
There was a tremendous flash of searing, pure white light, glistening on the cobwebs in the darkest corners of the room, and Vincent’s foresight duly saved him both momentary blindness and an atrocious sunburn.
Leather flapped faintly, settling into place, and when Vincent refused to turn around, Maion very pointedly cleared his throat.
Extremely languidly, Vincent swiveled to give the angel a bored look.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“We need to talk,” Maion announced.
The leather jacket thing was working for him-rich brown leather it was, chocolate lightened to caramel in the creases, paired with a crisp white Oxford shirt and designer jeans. Maion’s hair was, dreadfully predictably, something out of a glossy advertisement, all rippling golden waves and nuanced sheen, and dentists would have swooned at his smile.
Oh, hell. He was smiling. This was about to get much worse.
“I’m a bit busy,” Vincent explained, returning to his drudgery.
“Nonsense,” Maion countered, tripping cheerfully nearer to peek over Vincent’s shoulder with interest. “What are you working on?”
Vincent snorted and tossed his pen onto the stack of forms. “Two hundred years in this damnable country,” he muttered, “and I still can’t make it through these things without getting a migraine.”
Maion considered. “Why don’t you get an accountant?”
Vincent merely raised an eyebrow, and Maion frowned.
“I’m not sure what your expression is supposed to mean,” he mused. “Do you refuse to hire help because you’re a vampire, or because you’re a control freak?”
Vincent emptied the wineglass.
“What do you want, Maion?” he inquired.
Maion folded his hands demurely and put on his Saint Face.
“I was sent by Management,” he intoned, “to request the return of the souls you’ve displaced.”
“As I have told you every time before,” Vincent responded, “your request will be granted with utmost alacrity the fine morning that hell freezes over.”
Impatiently now, Maion delved a hand into the pocket in the lining of his leather jacket and whipped out his crucifix, pushing it forward for inspection. Vincent steeled himself not to flinch, but the left corner of his mouth twitched, presumably just to spite him.
“Every time you lay a finger on the cross,” Maion explained, slowly, for the umpteenth time, as if Vincent was two hundred and fifty-five years younger, “you free one soul.”
“Have you ever played with hellfire, seraph?” Vincent snarled. “It burns, yes, and it leaches spirit long after the pain is gone. It’s poison. That’s my due every time I touch your God-wood. After that, as you know quite well, each soul I cede to you takes with it the strength its owner’s blood and body lent, and a part of me is repossessed and then destroyed.”
That was the thing about vampiricism-“undead” was a loose word. The condition was, in a lot of ways, closer to “super-humanity.” In the process of being Turned, one verged so closely on total annihilation that the recovery period and the subsequent need to feed upon the vitality of others pushed a new-made vampire beyond the other extreme of the spectrum.
As with everything, there was a price, and that was stranded souls. Death at the hands-well, at the teeth-of a vampire was notoriously impure, and the soul of a victim couldn’t transcend that taint until the responsible vampire had sacrificed a portion of himself for its liberty.
“Freeing half a dozen,” Vincent informed the angel, “would kill me on the spot.”
An unimpressed and undaunted Maion, however, tried the patented Puppy Eyes Maneuver.
“You could just free one a day,” he suggested helpfully. “And then take a siesta.”
Vincent shoved his chair back, drawing himself up to his full height-even with Maion, damn the bastard.
(The first part of the suggestion, of course, was impossible, and the second slandered ethereal matter quite unjustly.)
“I will not take siestas,” Vincent told him. “I’m not going to gamble my life simply so that you can meet your quota.”
“Those souls,” Maion insisted, “will hover in Limbo until you let them go. That’s the power you wield with-” He tossed his head. “-striking impunity. Is their release so much to ask?”
“What are you going to do with them?” Vincent countered. “Put them in a little box that reads ‘Do not open until Judgment Day’?”
Arm straight, elbow locked, Maion held the oak-carved cross out to him. The proximity alone had roused the first waves of vertigo in Vincent’s ears.
“Please,” Maion said.
“You know what they say in movies with bad dialogue,” Vincent cautioned.
Perfect furrows rippled across Maion’s forehead. “What’s that?” he asked.
“‘No way, José,’” Vincent answered.
Maion blinked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that said in a film,” he noted.
“Then you’re watching the wrong ones,” Vincent replied.
Maion shook the crucifix meaningfully, which Vincent doubted Christ appreciated. The poor man looked uncomfortable enough strung up as he was without anyone waving him around like some kind of banner.
“Stay on-topic, Duval,” Maion bid him.
“You should be thanking me,” Vincent retorted, “if you think about it. I’m filtering the detritus out of the gene pool. I’ve never killed anyone who was in line for canonization, as you may have noticed. It is, in fact, beautifully Darwinian, and you should appreciate my services.”
“You’re sick,” Maion decided.
“Frequently,” Vincent responded, “yes. So much venereal disease in the blood these days. Estimates are that up to seventy-five percent of sexually active people will be infected with HPV in their lifetime, many without ever being aware of it-you wouldn’t believe what that kind of abuse does to your gastrointestinal tract.”
Maion saw fit to arch both sculpted eyebrows in elegant surprise. “Maybe,” he noted, eyes wide, “you should stop eating them.”
Vincent threw himself back into his chair, pointedly taking up the pen. “Don’t you have some harp lessons to practice for?” he muttered. “Some of us are trying to run a business here.”
Maion didn’t appear to be listening. He cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”
Vincent paused in flipping through the pile for a form five pages ago, from which he needed the answer to question twenty-two, which he was to fill in here, from which he would then subtract the answer to question fourteen, which was on a different page…
Oh. Right. Maion was hearing things.
As it turned out, Vincent was hearing things, too-things rumbling in the distance and coming closer, things with many pounding feet and many rising voices.
Vincent massaged his temples.
“Probably another protest,” he remarked. “The union wants me dead-amusingly enough-but I’ve got enough security that they tend to wear themselves out and go to bother some other executive with no personal investment in pension plans.”
Maion drew the heavy, sun-proof velvet drapes a few inches aside to peer into the night.
“It doesn’t look like a protest,” he reported. “It looks more like… an invasion.”
Vincent joined him at the window, and Maion pointed unnecessarily to the vast crowd of figures caught in the floodlights as they trooped steadily up the lawn. In place of picket signs and megaphones, they hefted pitchforks and rusty swords.
And flamethrowers, by the looks of things.
“Shit,” was Vincent’s verdict.
“We might not be the only ones trying to reap those souls of yours,” Maion remarked, motioning vaguely Upstairs. “And the Archfiend’s envoys aren’t usually as polite.”
“I don’t know about that,” Vincent countered; “Belial is very civil. He goes for pinstripes and caviar these days, you know.”
Maion squinted and drummed his fingers on his bottom lip, focused on the small advancing army. “This looks very bad.”
Vincent went to the trunk next to the fireplace, retrieved the saber he’d lifted off of a dead Confederate officer during the Atlanta Campaign, and buckled the belt around his waist, the comfortable weight of the sword settling against his side.
“Shall we?” he inquired.
Maion’s bright blue eyes slid closed, and he wrinkled his nose to concentrate. Momentarily, a line of the same intense white light sizzled across his chest from his left shoulder to his ribs, flaring so that Vincent’s eyes watered, only then to fade gently into a reinforced leather baldric that secured the angel’s broadsword scabbard to his back, suspending the hilt within easy reach.
“Show-off,” Vincent decided.
“Sword envy,” Maion retorted, sauntering blithely towards the door.
“I do not have sword envy,” Vincent hissed, storming after.
Maion merely gave him a patronizing smile.
Vincent was going to kill that bastard.
If that was even possible.
For the moment, he settled with striding out onto the lawn and slotting his saber between the first invader’s ribs.
There was some charming froth-and-blood expulsion after that, which gave Vincent an excellent opportunity to examine his adversary. Even when there weren’t torches and floodlights, the dark opened cool, kind arms to Vincent’s sort, a mother to misguided children, and his night-vision was accordingly superb.
Thus it was that he discovered that he’d sunk his sword into an emaciated, half-rotted corpse, graying flesh shrunken and shriveled tight against its bones, eye sockets cavernous, mouth agape. Wizened hands with fingers curled like claws scrabbled for his shirt, and Vincent planted his foot on the creature’s chest and shoved it to the ground to pull his sword loose.
The thing was already attempting to get up by the time he’d abbreviated a second at the neck.
“Maion?” he prompted. “What exactly is going on here?”
Not far away, surrounded by a small cluster of enterprising things, Maion turned, bathed ethereally in the sapphire light cast by the deep blue flames surging along the blade of his sword. His hair was disheveled, and his grin was ever-so-slightly maniacal now.
Angels. Honestly.
“This is high necromancy,” he announced with an unholy quantity of cheer.
“It looks more like something out of ‘Resident Evil,’” Vincent said, putting the saber through a staggering form. He noticed that Maion was looking at him strangely in between two-handed strokes. “I suffer from bouts of insomnia,” he explained, tersely at best, “which leaves me with some time to kill.”
Maion took the head off of a zombie armed with a shovel. “Isn’t insomnia only applicable to sleeping through the night?”
“It’s a matter of being unable to fall asleep and stay that way,” Vincent corrected, eviscerating the nearest foe. “It isn’t exclusive to the diurnal.”
“Decapitate them,” Maion recommended, demonstrating as he did. “It’s the only thing that keeps them from coming back.”
“We wouldn’t want-” Vincent gritted his teeth and aimed for the neck. “-that, now, would we?”
Maion whirled and ran one through, then drawing deftly back to deprive it of its head, one clean slice that sent a blackened skull bouncing, blanketed in stark blue flames.
“Bit off-putting,” he agreed.
It was actually when they had hacked their way through the first onslaught that the problems started.
The second wave was the zombies with the flamethrowers, after all.
Vincent hurled himself to the ground and rolled, wet grass imparting dew that evaporated much too fast as orange flames erupted just above him. He scrambled to his feet, vampire’s grace deserting him in the heat of the moment, and it was an utter tragedy that he was too busy fighting for his life to appreciate the pun.
That just wasn’t right.
Taking a quick dance at vampire speed past the flamethrower-wielding zombie-madman, Vincent took his assailant’s head off neatly.
That done, he took his assailant’s weapon, equally neatly, the pack in one hand, saber sheathed to aim the hose with the other, and charbroiled two dozen hapless ’mancer minions before one came at him with a battleaxe.
Vincent wanted to know exactly whence the motherfucker had acquired a battleaxe.
It seemed more prudent, however, to decapitate first and ask questions later, largely in the interest of keeping his own anatomy intact.
Maion was a blur of blue fire out of the corner of his eye, but Vincent hadn’t had an unspecified quantity of millennia to build up his endurance, and an ache was gathering in his shoulders as he raised the saber again, parrying a blow from a newcomer no less enthusiastic for his clumsy gait. He’d killed at least fifty of these damn things, but they kept coming, and…
Well, that was a problem.
An even bigger problem was the sudden flare of breathtaking agony that exploded in his side as one creature’s weapon found its mark.
Vindictively, Vincent made short work of the little bastard, but the damage was done, and he had been impaled with what looked to be a fire poker.
“Maion!” he shouted over the din of footfalls and incoherent zombie moans, unable to quell a sense of a child howling for its mother. “How many are there?”
Maion fought his way through a clump, flinging headless corpses in all directions, to come close enough to admire Vincent’s wound.
“Missed your heart,” he commented, gold hair pale in the floodlights where it had become sufficiently disordered as to fall into his eyes. “But there are a lot, aren’t there?”
Before Vincent could even criticize the condescension, Maion had shoved him down with one capable hand, sending him sprawling, his saber skidding across the wet grass until it hit a skull that interrupted its trajectory.
And then there was something like a nuclear explosion.
When Vincent dared to lower his arms from over his head, blinking dazedly as his sight took its sweet time in returning, it was to a vast field of sooty, smoking dead things.
Re-dead things, he supposed. Necromancy made for a complicated vocabulary.
Surveying the carnage, Maion stood in all his Glory, and Vincent remembered just how small one could feel beside an angel properly revealed.
Maion turned, all six wings’ milk-white feathers fluttering in the still air, duly noted that Vincent was alive, and slung his broadsword back into the scabbard, which then obediently disappeared. He craned his neck to examine the state of his clothing in the wake of the wings.
“Fuck,” he concluded of the various shreds. “I love this jacket.”
Maion sighed feelingly, and then he offered Vincent a hand up.
Vincent, for his part, was too dumbfounded to refuse.
Maion looked at the place the iron had gone through.
“You’re bleeding,” he observed. “If you even call it ‘bleeding.’”
Vincent swiped impatiently at the sluggish flow of thick black fluid.
“I do,” he noted. “It’s more poetic than ‘spewing ichor.’”
Maion shrugged, and the wings rose with the motion. They were mesmerizing-incandescent in the night.
“What,” he inquired, “did you do to get a particularly powerful necromancer to declare war on your person?”
“Nothing that I recall,” Vincent answered. “But I have a knack for pissing off the demons, too.”
Maion smiled. “If I didn’t know better,” he remarked, “I might be moved to think that you were on our side, Monsieur Duval.”
“You know what they say in movies with bad dialogue,” Vincent muttered, kneading at his injury.
“‘I’m on my side’?” Maion hazarded.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Don’t leave me; you are my universe,’” Vincent replied, “but I like yours better.”
“You know,” Maion told him airily, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re basically a mosquito.”
Vincent bent to retrieve his sword and punted a zombie head for good measure.
“Don’t start with me,” he cautioned. “I’m going to have to clean this up tomorrow.”