Author's Note: The Château de Beaufort, referenced in the story, is an actual place in southern France. As far as I can tell it fell into ruin after the French Revolution, and wasn't used for anything in the 1820s, but if you know I'm wrong, please let me know!
"A new Slayer has been called."
Combeferre's uncle spoke in a low voice but though Combeferre, sitting in his armchair, pretended absorption in his volume of Fourier, he heard each word clearly. More than that—it seemed to Combeferre that he saw each word as if it had been chiseled into shining granite.
Combeferre did not hear his father's response, but his uncle kept talking as if in reply, "Not too far from here, by the look of things. Several families were slaughtered last week in Aiguilhe. It was obviously the work of vampires. The corpses were dragged from their homes, arranged round the Saint Michel chapel to frighten visitors—though the vampires did not dare actually enter it."
Combeferre clutched his Fourier in a white-knuckled grip, staring at the pages but seeing nothing at all. "How do you know the Slayer is there?" Combeferre's father asked.
"Was, not is. We think she left—fled to shelter with family elsewhere, perhaps, or to a convent. She may be a Slayer, but she is still a woman. A sudden, unexpected confrontation with pure unvarnished evil can be too much for the frailty of the sex," his uncle Henri said with a shrug. "But we know she was there for two reasons. First, we have witness accounts, though these are very jumbled. They say that a vampire gang of more than twenty first attacked their homes—but, by the time the vampires left, there were only four of them remaining. The vampires attacked at night and by surprise. It is unlikely in the extreme that ordinary humans with no knowledge of the occult could so deplete their ranks under such conditions."
"And the other reason?" Combeferre asked, abandoning the pretense of inattention, and looking up at his uncle, who was standing with his back to the fire.
His uncle looked at him with a smile. "Ah, Sébastien," he said, "I had wondered if you were listening. I should have known, you always are. The other reason is that our seeress has told us. There is a living Slayer in the South of France. The only question is, where exactly is she? And, more to the point, who is she?" Uncle Henri shook his head sadly. "We do not even know who the last Slayer was," he said, "or where she lived. Nor do my acquaintances with the Watchers in England know, though they have been even more close-mouthed than usual with us since Bonaparte. But we do know that whatever power it is that chooses the Slayer, it pays no attention to the girl's virtue or fitness for such a holy purpose. After all, some Slayers have been kitchen-maids, or prostitutes, or even murderesses. Some have been heathens and savages. Finding the Slayer is only the first step. Making her know her duty will be the more difficult part." He took a sip of brandy. "At least this time, she's a Frenchwoman."
"Have you been searching for her, then?" Combeferre asked, making his voice as light as possible.
"Yes," Uncle Henri said, frowning slightly, "and so far we have found very little, but...we are still making inquiries, mostly in the area surrounding Aiguilhe, but we will fan out from there." He shook his head. "I do feel sure we will find her. Such a woman cannot hope to stay hidden for long, and we have our best men investigating the matter." Uncle Henri took another sip of brandy. "Ah, well, let us speak of lighter matters—when do you return to Paris, my boy?"
"In four days' time," Combeferre said.
His father looked over and frowned. "I thought you were staying on another week?"
"The letter I received from my surgery lecturer this morning," Combeferre said, improvising wildly, "was an invitation to observe while he performs a new experimental surgical technique, and he is doing it three weeks from now. So I thought I would leave in four days."
"Ah," Combeferre's father brightened. "That sounds like quite an honor."
"Indeed," Uncle Henri said, "you are obviously excelling in your studies!" He clapped Combeferre on the shoulder. "Well, all the best, my boy."
Combeferre felt guilty about lying to them, but he knew there was no other choice. He could not allow the Slayer to fall into the custody of the French Watchers—not when they had such reactionary views about society, which translated directly into inhumane and unjust notions about the role of the Slayer herself.
Combeferre had been fifteen years old when he had learned of his family's secret, guarded for generations: they were one of the French families who were Watchers, sworn to a sacred trust to guide and instruct vampire slayers in their battle against the forces of evil.
He had been sixteen when he had learned that his views on the best way to uphold that trust differed strongly from those of his uncle, the senior Watcher of their line, and seventeen when he had learned to hold his peace on the subject rather than argue. Argument, in this particular case, was worse than futile—it notified the archconservative Watchers of a potential rogue in their midst. It had been a bitter moment for the young Sébastien Combeferre when he had decided to stop attempting to change the older Watchers' minds by rational persuasion, and start taking secretive action against those who did not wish to even consider what he was saying, but he thought perhaps it was an inevitable one.
It meant that, now that the Slayer had been called so close to home, Combeferre would have to find her himself.
But first he would need to extract more information from his uncle, which would require some delicacy. Combeferre could not very well go searching the entire South of France on his own, asking every person he encountered if they had just so happened to see a young girl fighting vampires. No, he must find out where the Watchers had already searched. They were not utter fools, misguided as they were.
The next morning, he casually asked his uncle, who was staying with Combeferre's parents for a visit, once more about the search for the Slayer.
"She must have come from one of the families killed at Aiguilhe," Uncle Henri said. "The vampires went there specifically to hunt her. There is no Slayer there, and our seeress tells us she was not among the dead. The Aiguilhe witnesses tell us that none of their neighbors is missing, save the dead families, so she must come from them."
"Well, then, that should make things easy for you," Combeferre said, hiding his dismay. "Surely you have found out which families had daughters of the appropriate age to be called as a Slayer."
"Yes," Uncle Henri said. "Several of them did...but they were all families of some property and prosperity. It ought not to be difficult to track the travels of a solitary young girl brought up in such a fashion, yet we still have not found her."
"Perhaps she was taken prisoner by the vampires?" That was a hideous thought, but it was no good flinching from it.
Uncle Henri shook his head. "No," he said, "The witnesses are very clear on that point. Four vampires left Aiguilhe, heading south, talking loudly about how they would wreak havoc in the future, with no prisoner in tow. The girl must have fled in terror after seeing her family slaughtered, but we do not know to where. We know where the slaughtered families' nearest relations are, though, and our investigators are traveling to question them."
"And...is someone searching for the four remaining vampires?" Surely someone was, surely even the Watchers would not sit back and allow vampires to commit mayhem while they focused solely on the Slayer—
"No," Uncle Henri said with a frown, "the search for the Slayer must come first, and all of our men are devoted to that task." Combeferre wondered if the Slayer herself would agree with that, after seeing the destruction wrought by the vampires—and then an idea struck him.
He mulled it over as he made his excuses to his uncle and left for his room. It was a somewhat unorthodox idea, but he was accustomed to entertaining such by now.
Uncle Henri and his fellow Watchers were acting upon the assumption that the Slayer was a scared and confused young girl, that her instinct in the face of grief and sheer terror—terror she had no way of comprehending, terror she could have known nothing about without a Watcher to explain her destiny to her—was to run.
But what if they were wrong?
What if the Slayer left Aiguilhe, not in flight, but in pursuit? What if her first response to slaughter and destruction was not to protect herself, but to save others by bringing the fiends who killed her family and neighbors to justice?
Of course, she would know nothing about how to do this. Staking a vampire to the heart with a piece of wood was not something a young girl with no knowledge of the occult, even if equipped with Slayer instincts, would be likely to do by accident. Nor would she necessarily be able to experiment with sunlight upon the vampires, not if they stayed in during the day. And decapitation would not be her first instinct by any means. These were all things she would need to be taught. Combeferre grinned suddenly. If he were correct, then he would enjoy teaching such a student. Pursuing the vampires would require immense bravery and persistence and probably cleverness as well, if that were what the girl had in fact done.
In that case, the correct method of finding the girl would be to hunt the vampires.
Combeferre frowned. He did not like this plan very much. It offended his scientific mind, requiring the commitment of precious time without sufficient evidence. If he were wrong about the girl's course of action, then in hunting the vampires he would lose time—time that the Watchers could use to find the Slayer before Combeferre could.
On the other hand, he had no other promising avenues to explore, and there was always an element of risk in any investigation.
But how had the girl escaped notice? Uncle Henri had said the Watchers had begun their questioning in the town where the original massacre took place. They would have spiraled outwards after that, and would certainly have heard something about a bourgeois young girl traveling alone. That would have been an unusual circumstance.
Unless she wore men's garb. In the dustiest volumes and most cracked parchments of the libraries of his father and Uncle Henri, the volumes that his father and uncle generally ignored, Combeferre had read of Slayers in the past who had disguised themselves as men in order to better fulfill their duty, free of the restrictions their societies placed upon their sex. Even some women who were not Slayers had done that precise thing.
It would be a sensible solution to the girl's problem, if she could simply pass herself off as a young man. The Watchers had not inquired about young men in the Haute-Loire region, only girls.
It all fit together beautifully, so beautifully that Combeferre was almost inclined to distrust it—but, he reminded himself, he had no other theory.
He forced himself to think of alternate theories for about two hours, for the sake of intellectual rigor. He came up with several weaker theories, including the Slayer finding a male companion to travel with to be less conspicuous, and the Aiguilhe witnesses lying to the Watchers and hiding the Slayer from them, but no theory seemed more consistent with the available evidence than this one: that the Slayer, possibly disguised as a man, had left Aiguilhe in pursuit of the vampires who had murdered her family and neighbors and were planning to murder others.
This was the theory, then. He would go to Aiguilhe, which was south of Combeferre's family home, and travel further south from there, seeking out the Slayer. And he would do all of this without his family's knowledge.
It was a good thing Combeferre had always been frugal with his allowance and had saved much of it over the years.
A week and half later, in the small hours of the morning, Combeferre found himself at an inn in Goudet, deep in conversation with the innkeeper's wife.
She was an older peasant woman, perhaps prone to believing old wives' tales—but old wives' tales, Combeferre knew, were often how knowledge of the occult was passed on and preserved. They should not be dismissed. After studying the old Watcher journals he could get hold of, Combeferre had concluded that Watchers often came to grief by disregarding knowledge because of an unjustified contempt for its source.
"Have you had any problems, Madame, with...odd visitors, at night?" Combeferre finally asked, after the woman had had a few glasses of wine. "Visitors who seem unlike ordinary humans? With disfigured faces, perhaps?"
She turned to look at him, somewhat blearily. "Odd visitors," she said slowly. "Well..." She gave Combeferre a long, appraising look before answering. "If you mean what I think you mean," she said, "then you'll not take me for a mad old woman when I say yes, we have. We did, a few nights ago, but..."
"Yes?" Combeferre said, trying to soften the edge of eagerness in his voice. "What happened a few nights ago?"
"We were lucky," the woman said shortly. "These visitors you mention, they showed up, but then..."
"Madame," Combeferre said, feeling a spike of hope so sharp that it was painful, "did a young person, whether male or female, come here that night, and protect you from the odd visitors?"
The woman gave him another long look. "Yes," she finally said. "A lad, pretty as a picture. He saved me and my husband and three of our guests, make no mistake about that, and probably more besides, since who knows what those murdering creatures would have gone on to do. Though, mind you, he burned down our stable as he was doing it, and we had just rebuilt it." She sighed. "But it would be foolish to complain about a stable, in light of more important things."
The Slayer had discovered the efficacy of fire in fighting vampires, then. Well and good, though she would have to learn less disruptive methods of disposal.
A horrible thought suddenly occurred to Combeferre. "Were there people or horses inside the stable when he burned it down?"
"No," said the woman.
That was a relief. A Slayer who disrespected property in times of great need was necessary; a Slayer who saw men and men's beasts as mere obstacles in her path would become a monster, if she were not swiftly corrected.
And now for the most important question.
"Madame," Combeferre began, "do you know where this young man went, after he left this inn?"
"The ruins of the Château right here," said the woman, referring to the Château de Beaufort. "He said that those fiends, they had friends, and he wanted to destroy them before they hurt other people."
Combeferre rose. "Thank you most kindly for your help, Madame." He placed some money, more than he owed her for food and lodgings, on the table, and went out the door.
When he arrived at the Château's ruins it was not yet dawn, but Combeferre had prepared for this, performing a simple magic that allowed him to see in the dark, and hid his scent and sound from vampire senses. Combeferre was no sorcerer, but he had taken care to learn some basic tricks that would permit him to protect himself.
What was weighing on him at the moment was the fact that he had never actually had to use those tricks, because he had never had to personally confront a vampire before. Scholarly knowledge was not practical reality.
He stopped moving when he heard the vampires within the ruins. They were in a part that still had a roof, and from their conversation, Combeferre gleaned that they had just returned to this nest after several days of killings in a village a day's journey away by stagecoach.
"That was too close for my comfort," one of the vampires said. "It is nearly dawn. I can almost smell it."
"Oh, stop fussing," said another voice crossly. "We have arrived, after all, and now we are strengthened."
They bickered in such a fashion for nearly half an hour. Vampires could cooperate with one another, but the Watcher journals and tomes Combeferre had read indicated that they seldom actually enjoyed it.
Pressing his ear against the wall, Combeferre wondered uneasily where the Slayer had gone. Surely they had not killed her before leaving? Surely she had come here to find them already gone to the other village, and perhaps...lost their trail? She was unaccustomed to pursuing prey, after all.
Or perhaps she did pursue them, and was killed at the other village for her trouble.
Combeferre blinked, and turned his gaze away from the wall and to the heavens. He suddenly noticed that some time had passed, that the dawn's light had touched the sky and was growing brighter by the second, infusing the entire world as far as the eye could see with a rich golden sheen.
All at once, he heard the vampires scream out, in a cacophony of what sounded a great deal like unbearable pain.
He heard a thump on the ground several lengths away from him. A large stone had fallen from above. Combeferre looked up to the outer roof of the room the vampires were in.
On top of the roof was a boy with long blond hair, wrenching another stone away. He—no, she, Combeferre corrected himself, for this must be the Slayer—flung the stone to the ground (a good distance from Combeferre, which he appreciated), and turned her attention back to prying up another stone from the roof.
The vampires' screaming grew louder. They could not flee, Combeferre realized, remembering what he had seen of the ruin on first inspection, for there was no adjoining room with a roof. Fleeing would only burn them faster. His admiration for the Slayer grew. She had planned this well. She must have found their empty nest and studied the ruins before concocting this scheme.
The Slayer, with a grunt of effort, pulled up another stone, which must have sent another large patch of sunlight into the vampires' nest. She then dropped from the roof into the room below.
Combeferre frowned, and ran around until he found an opening in the ruins and climbed in. He followed the sounds of screaming until he found the room, with three flame-ridden vampires—
—and a fourth, who had wisely fled to a shadowy corner when the Slayer had removed the first stone, and who was now exchanging blows with the Slayer.
And doing far too well at it for Combeferre's comfort. The girl was bold and ingenious, and of course had the strength of a Slayer, but she had no training whatsoever. She fought with ferocity and some native talent, but she was taking too many blows for Combeferre to feel assured of her victory.
Luckily, Combeferre's spell was still effective, and the fourth vampire's back was to him. He fished in his bag for a short sharp sword (and made a mental note to have a weapon in hand the next time he ran into a room full of vampires) and, with a quick prayer that his knowledge would translate well to practice, sliced through the vampire's neck with one swift move.
The vampire exploded into dust, and Combeferre was now face to face with the Slayer.
"Thank you," she said, looking astonished.
The sun grew brighter, and therefore so did the flames upon the remaining vampires. The Slayer, with all the merciless composure of an avenging angel, watched them burn.
When they were dust, she turned back to Combeferre. "I am very grateful for your help," she said, "but who are you, and why are you here?"
Combeferre had a perfect introductory speech composed and memorized for this precise occasion, all of which he naturally forgot the second the Slayer's eyes fixed on his. He would have to improvise. "Mademoiselle—yes, I know you are a woman—my name is Sébastien Combeferre," he said, "and I am here because I felt you may be in need of information about your new powers."
The girl just looked at him silently. Combeferre took that as an invitation to continue. "Mademoiselle, I realize that this may be difficult for you to believe, but you have been given these abilities as a holy trust—we know not how, or from what heavenly powers precisely, but we know they are meant for the aid and salvation of all of mankind." His Uncle Henri would have put it differently, and talked about social order and the like. But Combeferre was speaking from his heart, and he did not wish to recite the usual reactionary Watcher formulae. "You are a vampire slayer, gifted with superhuman strength and skill so that you may destroy predators of humanity like the ones you just killed. And I am here to be your Watcher—that is, your guide and source of information, if you need one. If you'll have me, that is," Combeferre added awkwardly.
The girl suddenly smiled. It was wholly unexpected-she had been completely impassive, until that point, and her smile was radiant. Combeferre blinked. "I plainly have need of a guide, since I know nothing of these...creatures, or of any of this," she said. "And you have saved my life today. So I accept your offer with thanks, Monsieur Combeferre."
Combeferre smiled as well, feeling happier than he had felt in years. "And your name, Mademoiselle?"
"Of course—forgive my lack of manners, I am still in some...confusion," said the girl. She did not look confused in the slightest, and Combeferre wondered if she were even capable of looking so. She was not loud or improper in her speech or address, but she had a self-possession wholly unusual in anyone her age, which Combeferre judged to be sixteen or seventeen. "My name," she said, "is Gabrielle Enjolras."