"Dogs of War": A Vampire The Masquerade Story
"Only blood can wash away blood."
Balkan Proverb
Outside of Surdulica, June 1918:
The horse was dead. Sergi studied the animal with morbid fascination, observing the maggots crawling in and out of its mouth and empty eye sockets. Three years ago, such a sight would have caused him to empty the contents of his stomach. Now the dead horse was a funny thing, grinning at him with its big, white teeth. The teeth were especially prominent since all of the flesh had been stripped away from the animal's jowls.
Sergi imagined the horse drawn up on marionette strings, cavorting down the road like a monstrous, pustulent balloon, spilling its innards in a snowstorm of ticker tape.
He'd been fixated on the idea of a victory parade for the Serbian army since the beginnings of the war, but gradually the event had become very macabre in his imagination.
That was not really a surprise. Once, he'd believed that battles were glorious – that armies were comprised of proud men in beautiful uniforms with glittering sabers on their hips.
Four years in bowels of hell had sufficiently cured him of that delusion.
Wary of traps, Sergi watched his feet as he made his way up to the top of a small rock outcropping. He needed to see the lay of the land to guess where he was. Weeks ago, his unit had been mowed down by howitzers. Nearly everyone dead – and those who survived, all poisoned from drinking water too foul for the horses. All except him.
The sound of something moving in the brush caused Sergi to reach for his Mauser. Young as he was, he'd made the 1st Ban and the powers that ran everything had seen it fit to furnish him with an excellent German weapon.
Could they have known how he would come to rely on it? How it would sometimes feel more familiar to him than his own limbs?
Sergi held his breath. He waited. He watched.
The sky was gray from artillery smoke. The smell that came in on the breeze was as acrid as the rotting horse. There was a town nearby. Probably, the Bulgarians had turned it into a killing field.
Not that it mattered to Sergi. The innocents who were being raped and butchered were better off dead, delivered into God's hands. God had mercy. Man had none.
What good could he possibly do, a single ghost of a soldier staggering along behind enemy lines with no orders, not even a place to rest his head? It seemed like a very long time since Sergi had felt human. Even longer ago, he'd been convinced that he was a hero. A patriot.
Now he was only a survivor.
I am the only thing that still breathes in this place. He thought to himself.
Narodna Odbrana, those Black Hand rabble rousers, they'd promised so much! Freedom from the Hapsburgs, from all foreigners! An independent nation!
In those early days, victory had seemed as inevitable as it was now impossible. The war had gone too long, and when it ended – if it ended, there would be precious little left standing.
No one would win, least of all Serbia.
Hadn't the newspapers said something like that? It was that Bulgarian, Radoslavov. He'd said that it was over – that Serbia did not exist any longer. But the war had still gone on. Whatever typhus and artillery had not destroyed – that would be left to the Bulgarians, the Muslims, the Communists. Other enemies too. Sergi was sure that there were more of them than he could see. Like gore crows, they'd all come to pick the bones of his beloved country. And there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it.
Then, out of the corner of his eye - Sergi saw a lone Bulgarian soldier taking aim at him – a scout, moving ahead of the rest. Instinct told him to duck for cover, but he was stronger than his fear. He stood up instead, aiming his Mauser.
A suicide could not go to heaven – it was the only reason he hadn't already killed himself. Then again, Sergi no longer held out much hope for heaven. The thought of God only made him cowardly when he stared at his razor and contemplated drawing it down his wrists.
He could not kill himself, but he had strength enough to stand still and let another's bullet do the job.
Death – death and rot was all that he wanted.
He was so tired he almost envied that putrid horse.
The Bulgarian missed, but the shot came so close to his head that the force of it deafened him and he crumpled to his knees. Sergi's bullet found its mark and he heard the man fall.
He lay on his back and stared at the sky, wondering if he should feel disappointed or thankful.
After a few long moments of imagining that he was dead, Sergi slowly stood.
He went down to the river and found the man he had killed. He looked down at the dead Bulgarian. He wanted to say something, but he found himself mute.
The uniform was wrong – the insignia didn't belong on the shoulder where it had been sewn. He wasn't sure what he'd just shot, but it wasn't a Bulgarian.
Sergi began to search the soldier. The first thing he discovered was a crumpled photograph in the breast pocket of his coat – a photograph of a beautiful young woman standing on a street in a place he recognized from the last time he'd been at the pictures.
New York.
An American?
There were Americans in the war? When had that happened?
Sergi wished vainly that the soldier would have lived at least long enough to tell him where the other Americans were and whose side they were on... but no, his Mauser was too good a weapon.
Perhaps, if the American had a better rifle himself - perhaps things would have gone differently.
I am not meant to die. Sergi thought grimly to himself. God won't let me.
The devil won't let me. He corrected himself. Whatever this war had become, it was no work of God's.
Sergi searched the rest of the soldier's equipment, helped himself to a torch and a pack of cheap French cigarettes. With his blanket, the American also carried a silver flask. Sergi unscrewed the cap and sniffed the liquor experimentally.
Tuica. Bad plum brandy. Only Romanians and Bulgarians could drink that shit.
"Ziveli." He raised the flask to the dead American. He didn't know how to say "cheers" in English. Maybe the soldier knew some French? "A votre sante!" He proclaimed.
To your health, you fucking Bulgarian, you American, whatever you are! The devil take this whole goddamn country and all of us in it!
Across the river, in a haze of smoke Sergi could see the shape of something familiar to him, an old church that he'd passed when his unit was still moving and not entrenched in disease and mud.
He'd gone round in a circle over the past two weeks, but that was irrelevant. The night would bring either fire or rain and he didn't want to be outside in either. As he approached the church, he saw that someone had written graffiti on the cream-colored stone.
Blood will flow.
And it had – it had flowed like water.
There were bodies everywhere, all of them many days dead. Sergi tied his scarf over his nose and mouth, turning over corpses and checking pockets for valuables, cigarettes – anything worth keeping in the land of the living. When the sun finally descended behind the hills, he crawled inside the church through a shattered window.
At first, he thought that he was alone – or at very least undetected, but then he caught sight of a human-shaped shadow moving along the opposite wall of the sanctuary.
Sergi reached for his Mauser and the American's torch simultaneously. When he shook it hard and the light flashed on, he sighed in relief – it was a statue he had seen, toppled in a strange position. Probably, it was only the force of his entry that had caused it to fall over.
He surveyed his hiding place. It was a very old church, even older than its exterior seemed to suggest. Everything was painted in the bright, Byzantine colors that had been so popular when Stephan Nemanja had built his great Serbian empire in the 12th century.
Sergi knew the blues and golds very well – he had been raised in a village not far from a monastery that was as old as this church, if not older.
For the first time in a long time, Sergi thought of his grandfather, dead more than fifteen years. He remembered the way the old man had looked at him with his peculiar orange green eyes – and remembered the nostalgic expression that had always come over his face when he sat with his grandchildren and told them stories of the old kings.
We would have been greater than the Italians, were it not for the Turks!
Stephan Nemanja, he sacrificed his earthly kingdom for a kingdom in heaven!
A damn fool thing to do, Sergi thought ruefully.
He sighed heavily and lit himself a cigarette, taking a long drag. He was alone and safe – surrounded by sightless saints. The paint had been scraped from their eyes, and strangely enough, Sergi found that defacement comforting. The peasants thought the paint could cure blindness - never mind the lead.
He paced in front of the altar for some time as he smoked, considering if he had anything that he wanted to say to God – if God was even capable of hearing him any longer. He took another drink of the foul brandy, emptied the flask and then tossed it over his shoulder. It made an unusual sound as it clattered down the stairs. It was as if it had struck something else metallic.
Picking his way over rubble, Sergi headed down towards the catacombs that lay under the church. When he was about halfway down the steps himself, he realized that the flask he had thrown had struck the silver cup which had once graced the altar of the church. He picked the cup up slowly and turned his torch to see what was at the bottom of the steps. He gasped, for the briefest of moments feeling an emotion that he'd thought was lost to him – like the very hand of the divine.
He was staring up at the most beautiful fresco he had ever seen. John The Baptist gazed at him with an expression that bored into the fragments of his soul. The saint wore a sulfur yellow lion's skin. The river that flowed around him was cobalt blue and the halo that surrounded his head was made of red madder and real gold.
It seemed a sin to touch such a beautiful work of art – which was perhaps why John The Baptist had kept his singularly focused eyes when all of the other saints in the church had long since lost theirs.
Then he realized that the saint's eyes were missing after all!
He was looking at darkness through a pair of holes!
Why would anyone need to peek into – or out of a catacomb?
Taking the butt of his Mauser, Sergi struck the fresco. It crumbled – there was no brick at all behind the plaster, only a bit of very old wood. There were even more steps behind the false wall. The American's torch fizzled and died and Sergi went for his lighter.
He took a piece of the old wood from the floor and held a flame under it until it began to burn.
When fire lit up his surroundings, Sergi saw that the stairwell on either side of him was covered in frescos even older and more elaborate than the one he had destroyed.
The frescoes told the story of a beautiful queen, surrounded by servants, courted by princes... living a life of decadence and leisure. Then her kingdom was brought to ruin and she was reduced to wandering in rags, pleading for what little charity anyone would offer her.
The story seemed unlike anything that belonged in a church, and as Sergi descended deeper into the darkness, the images became notably more sinister.
The cobalt blues and sulfur yellows faded and the palette was increasingly dominated by madder red. In one panel, the queen was stabbing a man with a wicked curved knife, and in another, the corpses of her enemies were lying on the floor all around her bed. Strange, curling tendrils of black followed her wherever she went, like veils cut from the night sky. As she sought vengeance upon the men who had destroyed her idyllic life, she was accompanied by a dark angel with a fierce countenance who whispered in her ear, his eyes always fixed on something indistinguishable, as if he knew that he was looking out on the world from inside of a fresco.
Sergi smelled something like kerosene – or another sort of oil. There was a trough filled with it that ran perimeter of the room at the bottom of the stairs.
Sergi dipped his flame into the oil and gasped as fire flared up all around him. For the first time he could see the whole of the catacomb.
It was painted the color of blood from floor to ceiling.
A man-sized skeletal angel made of bronze and wrapped in robes of red marble bent down over a Roman sarcophagus of solid porphyry – his head bent in such a way that it seemed as though he were kissing the lips of whoever it was buried beneath him.
A curse escaped Sergi. He could feel his heartbeat quickening. It had never done that before, not even when he was lying in mud and blood under a cloud of smoke and machine gun fire.
There was something unthinkably old and horrible inside of that sarcophagus. He knew it in his bones, and yet he could not stop himself from drawing closer.
The moment his fingertips touched the deep purple stone, he felt compelled to push.
It took all of his strength – and more that he did not know that he possessed to remove the lid from the sarcophagus.
Inside lay the body of the queen from the frescoes. She looked like a statue – her skin was white enough to have been alabaster and her hair was such a perfect black that Sergi found himself wanting to run his fingers through it. It was as fine as silk, and smelled like honey.
The queen looked as though she might have been laid to rest only days ago – but her garments were like nothing Sergi had ever seen. She wore exquisite silk robes the same rich violet as her porphyry sarcophagus, a circlet of gold and a fortune in pearls around her neck. Her hands were clasped firmly around the base of an ornate wooden cross which was pierced through her chest.
It reminded Sergi vaguely of a story that he'd heard before, of a cross that a mad monk had carved with six-hundred figures each no larger than a grain of rice.
The extraordinary labor had caused the monk to go blind, and it had made his last cross a priceless treasure. After all, who could put a value on something that had cost a man his life?
Though war had long since convinced Sergi that a man's life was not worth very much, it occurred to him that someone would probably pay a very large sum of money for such a cross.
He took hold of the cross and very slowly drew it out of the queen's chest. Dismayed, he observed that the cross had been destroyed – purposefully sharpened into some kind of stake.
A life worth nothing after all. He thought to himself, tossing the broken cross at the foot of the stairs.
Obviously, there was no harm in having another cigarette. Sergi sat down in the shadow of the skeletal angel and smoked.
Exhaustion was beginning to overtake him, but something kept him from surrendering to sleep. The nagging feeling that had warned him not to approach the sarcophagus was growing stronger and he stared at the marble lid where it lay on the floor, knowing that he couldn't possibly replace it. Belatedly, he noticed that the wooden cross he'd drawn from the queen's chest was not where he'd thrown it.
Sergi stood and slowly approached the cross.
Instead of lying at the foot of the stairs, it was set in a brass base with the remainder of its shattered pieces. It had been put back together, somehow – without him noticing.
A miracle. Magic. God. The devil.
Whatever had just happened was something that he had never believed was possible.
A cold hand brushed his neck and Sergi whirled around, dropping his Mauser and knocking over the cross in his panic. He stared in awe and horror at the queen – the dead queen who smiled at him. Her eyes, like the eyes of the saints in the church, were empty and completely black.
There was nowhere he could run to. The brandy he'd drunk had set in and he was clumsy – too clumsy!
He'd been ready for death when he'd seen the American from his perch on the hill. He'd been ready for death since the first time he'd killed another man to save his own life.
And now that death had come for him... he was no longer ready for it.
"Get away from me, devil!" He cursed, drawing the only weapon he could still reach – a small knife. "You can't have my soul!"
"Sergi, don't be absurd." The queen laughed. The sound of her voice was hypnotic and Sergi lost his grip on his knife as he heard her speaking his name. "We both know that you don't have a soul for me to take."
The queen moved as though she would kiss him and suddenly he found no strength to resist her. He had no idea how long it had been since he'd last felt a woman's touch. And none of the girls from his little village that he'd ever hounded after could have compared to the sleeping queen. He had never laid eyes upon a woman that he desired more. She had to be the devil.
Without thinking of the consequences, he kissed her.
She smiled again, her teeth unusually white and prominent. "Yes, childe. That is exactly what I want from you."
She kissed him in return with a force that surprised him, biting down on his lip until blood flowed. Even still, Sergi was inflamed with passion. He tore off his coat and the queen seized the collar of his shirt, pulling him down to the floor. As if his strength was nothing at all, she pinned him to the ground.
Her teeth pierced the tender flesh of his throat and he became distantly aware that the woman was drinking his blood. It didn't hurt as he expected it should, and when his heart began to slow, it felt like a blessing.
Too long, he'd struggled to sleep. Nightmares had kept him restless for years, the constant fear of enemies both real and imaginary...
He was so tired...
The nearness of death felt familiar, like the presence of an old friend.
"No! Sergi! Pay attention to me!" The queen's voice interrupted sternly, bringing Sergi back from the dark. He could no longer move his body and when he tried to breathe, his lungs failed him.
At once, he was afraid again. Dying was not like falling asleep at all!
How had he almost surrendered to it so easily? He was suddenly struck by a mad, unfamiliar desire.
He wanted to live!
"Drink this. Drink it now!" The woman ordered, pressing her wrist to his lips.
Sergi knew the taste of blood. It was part of war – sometimes the air became thick with it. But it had never tasted to him as it did at then. Visions of incomprehensible things flowed into the darkest corners of his mind. For the briefest moment he understood with perfect clarity what the frescoes that led down to the catacombs were trying to explain... and then the knowledge faded away, like a tide drawn back out into a vast, dark sea.
He was himself again – or at least he thought he was.
Sergi stared up in bewilderment at the queen who only put one finger to his lips.
"Shhh." She warned with another knowing smile. "All in good time, childe. All it good time."
Sergi did not know how much time passed before he awoke, but the dreams he had were vivid, violent, and terrifying. Visions of howitzers firing, the rotting horse on the hill, the American he'd shot through the head and so many eyeless Byzantine icons blurred together in his mind.
When he was sure that he was actually awake, he glanced around for the queen.
She was gone, and apart from the open sarcophagus, there was no sign that she had ever existed at all.
Rather believe that a woman dead for six-hundred years had risen from the grave to drink his blood, Sergi attributed his memories of the previous night to whatever had been inside the American's flask.
It had smelled like plum brandy but... was mixed with laudanum? Or something else that ought to be dispensed only by a medic? Filthy Bulgarian tuica! It had been pure idiocy to drink the shit in the first place!
His stomach churned and he sat up quickly and retched.
With the last of the brandy out of his system, he felt slightly better.
A hunger like nothing he'd ever felt before gnawed at his gut. Even if he'd had something to eat in his supplies, Sergi doubted that any kind of over-processed rations would satisfy such a craving.
He needed something he had never needed before, and he needed it badly. A familiar smell drew him up the stairs of the church.
Blood.
The coppery tang of it, the sharpness assaulted his senses like a fresh cut onion.
He put his hand to his heart.
His heart was not beating! How was he standing – how was he walking without his heart beating?
And the blood, the damnable scent of blood... why was it so strong, so all-consuming?
He heard voices speaking in English and remembered belatedly that he'd left his Mauser in the catacomb along with his knife and all the rest of his gear.
Without his boots on, however – he could move very quietly, and he doubted anyone was specifically looking for him. He clung to the shadows, making a quick appraisal of the three men who had just walked into the church.
One of them was wounded. That was where the scent of blood was coming from, the scent Sergi couldn't ignore. The wounded man was bleeding through his bandages and looked ready to fall at any moment. Sergi could hear the wounded man's heartbeat pounding like thunder.
He vaguely recalled how the queen had held him down and drained his blood – and remembered with clarity how she'd pressed her wrist to his lips and bid him to drink from her.
That was what he needed, he realized with no small amount of shock.
He needed blood.
Sergi gritted his teeth and tried to purge the feeling welling up inside of him – the last thing he needed to do was charge three armed men like a mad dog... but his will felt feeble in comparison to the hunger.
He steeled himself and waited, clenching his fists as the wounded man passed right behind him. That was when he saw the queen. She moved like a shadow behind the columns on the other side of the church, caught sight of Sergi and putting one finger to her lips.
With impossible speed, she flowed out from her hiding place, swiftly disarming the first soldier and breaking his neck. Then she set upon the second, throwing him up against the altar and tearing into his throat.
Blood dripped on the pale-colored stone. The wounded man cursed incoherently and tried to run for the door. Sergi moved to stop him.
At such close range, the scent of so much blood around him and the rapid, thundering of his pulse was impossible to resist. Sergi seized the wounded man's wrist and drew him in close. Somehow, he knew exactly how to find what he wanted. The carotid artery.
His teeth effortlessly broke the wounded man's skin.
At the first taste of blood, he could no longer contain himself. Nothing in life had ever made him feel so completely alive! He drank deeply, even as the wounded man's heart, already weak, began to slow.
The blood!
It was pure ecstasy!
It was everything.
The sluggishness of the wounded man's pulse began to make Sergi feel tired himself. Still, he could not draw away. The hunger he felt was not sated. He needed more, more than his victim's body could supply.
"Stop." The queen ordered, putting her hand on his shoulder. "You've taken all you can, you'll draw no more that way."
Sergi stumbled back, staring at the three dead soldiers. He was used to killing, but only as a matter of necessity. He'd never taken pleasure from the act before and he knew that nothing could ever erase what he had just done.
Worse still, he needed more blood. The hunger was dulled somewhat – but it was not gone.
With practiced ease, the queen approached the first of the men she had killed and cut into his chest with her delicate, pale hands. She took out his heart and squeezed it into the silver cup – the same cup that Sergi remembered from the altar.
She offered it to Sergi as if it were the wine of communion and he drank it gladly, despite the fact that he knew that it was human blood. Human blood that a monstrous fiend in the shape of a woman had squeezed from a dead man's heart.
For him.
All he could think was that it was very... considerate of her. She knew what he needed, and she was giving it to him. It occurred to Sergi belatedly that he did not know the first thing about his queen, not even her name.
"Who are you?" Sergi asked.
"My name is Senka, childe." She replied. "I would have told you before I embraced you last night but I was very hungry."
Senka. Why did that name sound so very familiar?
Sergi found himself nodding obediently. If what he'd just felt himself was any indication whatsoever, such a hunger could not be resisted for very long.
He was beginning to suspect something that would have seemed thoroughly impossible to him if the taste of blood were not still in his mouth.
The business with the sarcophagus and the broken cross – the stake he'd found in Senka's chest was beginning to make sense.
"You're a vampire." He observed.
"Oh no, childe!" She laughed. "That's very crass. Entirely inappropriate."
"You're not a vampire?" Sergi paused.
"Childe, we are Lasombra!" She informed him. He'd never heard such a word spoken before. It made him think of the skeletal angel in Senka's tomb and of how her eyes had appeared when she first woke, filled with nothing but blackness. They were a lovely orange-green color now and made her look even more like a Nemanjic Empress than she had in her sarcophagus.
"You made me like you?" Sergi paused. There was more he wanted to say, but he felt that it would be better to wait and see what Senka would tell him first.
"You were already like me." Senka smiled. "I merely showed you a wall. You were the one who chose to make it a door."
Sergi stared at the fresco of John The Baptist that he had destroyed with the butt of his rifle and smiled slightly himself.