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Grandmother always said his pride would be his undoing one day. She used to tell him: “At home, your pride will get you into trouble. It will get you grounded. During a hunt, it will get you killed.”
She would know. After all, she’d seen what it’d done to her own husband, Lo’ak’s grandfather, on one such hunt, before he’d even been born. Still, he didn’t think her warning would catch up to him so fast. He’d only wanted to prove himself. He’d only wanted to help.
Things were getting worse out there. More civilians were going missing and turning up dead; their throats ripped out, bodies drained of blood. Groups of hunters were returning well past dawn, more of them injured than not. The worst part, though, were the ones that didn’t return at all. Everyone knew what that meant. When hunters didn’t return from a hunt, it meant they’d faced a fate worse than death. The curse of eternal life.
While most of the lore behind vampires was a bunch of Hollywood horseshit made to sell merchandise and Halloween decorations, a lot of it was rooted in truth. The surest way to kill a vampire was to put a stake through its heart, but the stake had to be made of silver, not wood. Vampires were weakened by daylight, but the older one got, the more tolerance they built up against it. It was difficult to capture a vampire on camera, but it wasn’t because they had no reflection. Rather, their bodies moved at a speed just slightly faster than a mortal creature. No modern day technology had managed to find the right shutter speed to get a clear image of them. They were just blurs, ghosts really, with dark holes for eyes and slashes for mouths.
Maybe that was why Lo’ak did what he did. Never truly seeing what he would be up against gave him the spark of bravery (naivety) he’d needed to sneak out that night, armed with nothing but a silver stake.
While he knew the facts, had heard all the stories about his family’s traitor ancestor, he still didn’t expect the absolute terror he’d feel at the first sight of Sully. He didn’t expect his heart to pound so hard it felt like it was trying to escape his ribcage and leave him behind. He didn’t expect Sully to be waiting for him. But there he was, standing on the front porch of the mansion (more of a haunted house, really). A foreboding, otherworldly presence that had Lo’ak freezing up on the spot.
Sully closed the space between them in a blink. Lo’ak didn’t even have time to scream before he was ripped clean off his feet and slammed back-first onto the damp ground. A cloying sweetness reached his nose, the scent of decaying earth and rotting flowers. He dug the fingers of his free hand into the ground, felt dirt sneak under his nails. All the nature surrounding this place was dead or dying. He would surely be next.
Sully hovered over Lo’ak for several beats, and he was still too frozen to so much as close his eyes. Sully was a spitting image of his dad, but every physical trait they shared was twisted just so. Something about him was harder, meaner, not quite right. Evil. They might have been doppelgangers, but they weren’t the same.
Sully had Dad’s brown eyes, but his pupils were a glowing red, burning like the depths of Hell in the darkness. He had Dad’s mouth, but none of the age lines that came with smiling so much. His smile wasn’t like Dad’s at all. It was hungry, cruel, and complemented by a pair of glinting fangs. Up close, they looked sharper than any demonstration or training video Lo’ak had ever seen back home. He had no doubt that if Sully wanted to, he could bite clean through his carotid artery in one go.
He’d wanted to prove everyone wrong. He’d wanted everyone to see that he was ready to go on a hunt. He was just as good— no, better — than Neteyam at being a hunter in training. He was going to show them all by going up against the monster that wore his dad’s face, and he was going to win.
Except he hadn’t won. He hadn’t even lost. Worse, he’d absolutely choked. The fear pierced right through him, stole his breath and his voice, and now he didn’t even resist as Sully pried the stake from his slack grip at his side.
“Son of a bitch! ” Sully shouted with his dad’s voice, the skin of his palm sizzling as it made contact with silver.
He chucked it into the woods without taking his red-brown eyes off of Lo’ak. It fell somewhere so far out of reach Lo’ak couldn’t even hear it land. The moonlight was sparse, but it was just enough for him to be able to see Sully’s hand heal. Right before his eyes, third degree burns that bubbled and blistered scabbed over. In seconds, Sully’s flesh had knit itself back together.
Sully flexed his like-new hand, eyes closed and teeth grit as he regained his composure. For that brief moment Lo’ak saw just his dad above him. Stressed, but trying to keep it together for his family as he so often did. But then Sully opened his eyes again. He flinched as Sully stuck his nose into the base of his throat, right where his pulse throbbed like a humming bird’s wings. Ice ricocheted through him at the point of contact, goosebumps lifting on every part of exposed skin. Sully was so cold.
With his nose still buried in Lo’ak’s neck, Sully took a long breath in. He let it out and a deep, satisfied hum vibrated through his chest. They were pressed so close together that Lo’ak could feel it in his own body.
“You smell just as sweet as he used to,” Sully said. Lo’ak had no idea who he was, and certainly had no intentions of finding out.
He wished Sully would have just killed him right there. Let his pride be his undoing like Grandmother said. But no, instead he hauled Lo’ak up, and in a strangely tender motion brushed the soggy leaves and crumbling soil off his back. Then he dragged him inside, down corridors and through what felt like a dozen different rooms. The dilapidated mansion in the middle of the forest was a maze of darkness so late at night. But Sully marched them through without missing a beat, sure of himself at every turn even as Lo’ak stumbled over his own feet. All the while he kept a tight grip on the back of Lo’ak’s neck.
The house was silent except for their footsteps. All the stories said that Sully had a companion, his sire. Where one was the other was never far. That’s what made them so hard to kill. For vampires, with age came power. And as old as Sully was, his sire was double that. Miles Quaritch was a monster of urban legend. He was the origin of bedtime scary stories, the reason children were afraid to sleep with their closets open at night. He was the boogeyman, the grim reaper, the devil’s right hand man, all wrapped up in one person.
Of all the nights Lo’ak had chosen to come here, he’d chosen the night Quaritch wasn’t home? It just didn’t sound right.
Powerless and half blind from the darkness, Lo’ak barely avoided tripping up a series of staircases and then down another hallway. The temperature suddenly dropped. He had enough of his wits about him to recognize that this part of the mansion was darker, quieter, more run down than the rest of the place. The carpet below him was old and dirty, but less worn than it was in other areas, as if no one had come this way in a long time. Finally, they stopped in front of a room. The door was shut tight, and its hinges groaned loudly as Sully twisted the doorknob and shoved it open with one hand.
Their feet kicked up a cloud of dust as they entered, and Lo’ak’s lungs seized on his next inhale. He broke into a coughing fit and bit his tongue as Sully shoved him down on the ground in the center of the room. The taste of iron filled his mouth.
“Stay,” Sully commanded, as if Lo’ak were some stray animal he picked up from the street. As if Lo’ak had any choice in the matter at all. “Don’t scream. It’s annoying.” Then he backed out of the room and shut the door. He didn’t lock it.
As soon as his coughing subsided, Lo’ak pulled the collar of his shirt over his nose to try and filter some of the dust. It wasn’t just the dust that bothered him, but also the smell that emanated from the entire room. It came from the filthy carpet beneath his knees, from the walls and their peeling, outdated wallpaper, from the bed pushed into the far corner of the room right next to the window.
The window.
Lo’ak ran over to it and pushed the threadbare, moth-eaten curtains to one side. Was Sully so stupid to have trapped Lo’ak in a room with a direct escape route? The glass was caked in dirt, and he scrubbed at it with his hoodie sleeve. Gray moonlight spilled into the room.
His heart sank.
He was at least four stories high somewhere at the back of the mansion. The ground outside was a black void that promised certain death or major injury should he try and jump. No wonder Sully hadn’t bothered to lock the door. There were only two ways out of this room: out the window to fall to his doom, or out the door to get lost in the maze of corridors and risk facing the wrath of a literal vampire. Those weren’t options at all.
Grandmother had been right. Everything everyone ever said about him had been true. He wasn’t ready to be a hunter. He wasn’t prepared to face down danger. He was a foolish child, a wannabe warrior, and now he was going to die here. A small part of him hoped that Dad would wake up in the morning and know instantly where he’d disappeared to, but that was just as foolish. He’d been sneaking out of the house as soon as he turned fourteen, so confident in his own abilities that he hadn’t even left a note.
The dingy mattress shrieked under his weight as he fell onto it. It was stripped bare of pillows and sheets, the edges chewed up by long gone rodents. He stared at his knees as defeat surrounded him on all sides, swallowing up everything except the ever present fear. There were all sorts of stains on the mattress, probably diseases too, but one between his thighs caught his eye. It was darker than the rest, and as he scooted back he realized the stain was also much larger.
He drew his legs up onto the mattress and crouched on the balls of his feet even as the ancient bedframe moaned in protest. All colors in the bedroom were desaturated from the moonlight, but as his eyes adjusted he could tell this stain might have been a reddish brown. It spread over the entire upper half of the mattress, and when he peaked over the edge he noticed it pooled onto the carpet just below him. Nausea pooled in his stomach. That rank smell wafted up his nose again, and it set off alarm bells in his brain. Something terrible had happened in this room.
He stood from the bed and crouched down low to the floor, searching. Dragging his fingers along the wall, he felt a groove just behind the base of the headboard. He wedged his pointer and middle finger between the bars and the wall and felt the grooves continue, a series of deliberate loops and lines. There was something carved into the wall behind the bed. Lo’ak dug his heels into the carpet and leaned all his weight into shoving the bed frame away from the wall. It was heavier than it looked for how old it must have been, but he managed to slide it a few inches from its spot. Enough to see the entire carving, and to realize that they were letters.
They were imprinted deep into the wall. Intentional, rudimentary letters that looked to have been painstakingly carved over a long period of time. The heights of the letters were all mismatched, as if whoever had done it didn’t have a good line of sight when they were carving. They must have stuck their hand between the bars of the headboard and just gone for it. Even so, it was easy to make out. One word in all capital letters.
SPIDER.