10. White Walker
"You can not keep up with me," she argued with him for the fifth time that night.
"I kept up okay as an owl," he grumbled belligerently.
"No, I let you keep up as an owl," she answered. "You can not keep up. You will have to get there some other way."
"You can carry me, you do it all the time." He was clearly not going to let it go.
"I carry you over land, at low speed," she scowled at him. "You're a bit on the heavy side."
"Hey, I work out, I'm not heavy!"
"You're not fat, Andrew; you're heavy. It is not necessarily the same thing."
"Well, what if I was a mouse or a rat or something? A mouse is light."
She closed her eyes and wished again for patience. "You want me to carry a rat over the ocean? If you fall into the water, then you will be stuck at sea, and doubtless eaten within minutes."
"Just carry me in the backpack. And besides, if I fall off, I'll turn into a whale. Who's going to eat a whale?"
He had cornered her neatly.
"Fine. Be a rat. It's remarkably apropos."
He was too busy grinning triumphantly to take offense. He shimmered and altered, until he was sitting up on back legs, sniffing. She picked him up and opened the pack. He waddled inside. Not surprisingly, he was white.
She shook her head and gathered her strength. She'd ask him on the other side why he was always white.
She flew low across the water, pushing herself as hard as she could with the power she'd gathered through her feeding and meditating. The added weight was minor, but she was already taking a calculated risk. If she didn't make it into the ground... the thought did not bear dwelling on.
She pushed herself harder, streaking across the water. But the Earth was a part of her source of energy, and the further she went, the more it was buried by water. She slowed, not because of insufficient power, but because the further the Earth retreated below the water, the greater the power it took to fly.
Soon she was moving at the speed of a newborn vampire. Below her, to her surprise, she saw dolphins pacing her for a short period. She smiled. They sensed the presence of a druid, as all animals could. A whale surfaced a while later, blowing and breaching in the water to greet the druid flying overhead.
She got nearer to Africa, and the depth of the water began to decrease. Her speed picked back up, but so did her sense of urgency. She had slowed more than she'd hoped, and feared that she would not make it.
She picked up greater and greater speed until she realized that she had miscalculated. Stopping when one was moving at such a rate of speed was difficult at best when one's power was almost completely gone. But morning was fast approaching so she had even less time for niceties. She pulled the backpack out. "Change to a bird!" she cried. Then she opened it and dropped it, before gathering herself for impact.
She struck the ground with tremendous force in the province of Madhya Pradesh, just outside of Khonra. The next day, there were reports of the concussive 'boom' of her landing, and the strange white falcon that had been seen catching something in midair before landing just as the sun rose.
Rhiannon was underground, but badly broken. She could not meditate that day, for it took all of the energy of the Earth and the deathly sleep to restore her broken form.
"That was awesome!" greeted her from Andrew as she climbed out of her hole the next evening.
Dirty, miserable, and irritated, she sat and glared at him.
"What?" he demanded. "It was!"
"Easy for you to say," she growled. "I'm going to go feed."
She glamored a single victim, hating the necessity for it. She did not feed on more than one, though. She was not going to expend much energy this night. The Authority had waited this long, they could wait a while longer.
If the thought that finishing quickly would let her go back to see if Eric was fine that much sooner, she showed no sign of it and simply started walking.
"So, I had this idea, right? Wait," he scurried to catch up to her, even though she was only walking at human speed.
He dashed around her and started talking to her, walking backwards. "So you're doing this Rhiannon thing, right?"
She raised her eyebrows and gave him a sour look.
"No, I mean the legendary Rhiannon thing. With the white and all that. Yeah? So, see, here's my idea. This is great, you're gonna love it-"
"No, Andrew."
"What, you haven't even heard it yet!" he fell in beside her now.
"I'm not going along with whatever hairbrained scheme you've come up with this time."
"Awww, don't you even want to hear it first?"
"No."
"Damn. Well, listen, though, it's really cool." He hefted the backpack higher. "Okay, so you're supposed to be this druid princess, right? So-"
"I was a druid princess, Andrew. I am not one now."
"But they don't know that. They think you're a druid and you can call animals and stuff, right? So what if you didn't fly in like a vampire, but instead you ride in on a white horse?"
"A white horse?" She was pretty sure he was insane.
"Yeah, me. You know, you could ride me in there." He looked flustered. "I mean that in the horse sense, not in the... well. You know."
"You cannot seriously think that I'm going to let a twenty year old druid-"
"I'm twenty-four," he argued.
"Andrew. Listen to me carefully. You are not even an infant beside these vampires. You are insane if you think that I'm going to risk the only living druid on these escapades."
"Well, what am I going to do, hide forever? I'm trained and-"
"No, Andrew."
"Oh, come on!"
"No!"
"That's not fair!"
"And that's why you're not going, Andrew! You sound like a two year old."
"You need my help. You need animals. I can be animals. Like, I could be a hawk and fly around your head. Or a horse. I could be a bull and go on a rampage-"
"No! Damn it, Andrew!"
"How are you going to be a proper Druid Princess without animals? You need me."
He was tugging at her resolve, and that was dangerous for him.
"Do you have any concept at all of just how dangerous any of this is?"
"Of course I do. But they've already killed my kind off once. I want to make a difference before they get me. You forget, I agreed to any of this because I owe Eric. You don't own me. If you're not going to treat me like I have some intelligence, then I'll leave tomorrow while you're asleep."
Her fangs clicked out and she hissed at him. "You'll die without me."
"See?" he demanded. "That's what I'm talking about. Like I'm too stupid to take care of myself."
"I asked you not to leave your apartment. You left. You then provoked the gang that attacked you the first time..."
"That was over a year ago. People grow up, you know. And I didn't know how serious it was then. I didn't think I'd be killed and shot. Now I know how many people want to kill me. That's an advantage. Well, not people wanting to kill me, but knowing about it, I mean."
Rhiannon pressed her fingers against her forehead.
"Alright. I will look for a way for you to help me when I look the situation over."
"YES!" he yelled, as if he had just won a major victory.
And, she supposed, in a way he had. That she was considering even thinking about giving him a part in the scheme to warn off the Authority was insanity. Part of her wished she'd not released their assets after finding out about Andrew, but there was nothing she could do now.
Besides, who knew what havoc it might have played on the vampire world if she'd not done so. And havoc in the vampire world always spilled over into the human world.
They traveled for another hour, until Andrew asked, "Do you still think about him?"
She didn't need to ask who he meant. "All the time. One might think that a year is not so long when you're old, but time is relative to the emotions involved. It just as well have been forever."
"He's pretty pissed at you."
"Yes, Andrew. How kind of you to remind me."
"Part of it is me, huh."
"Yes, most likely. Not you specifically. But harboring a druid... serious, serious offense to vampires."
He prodded her rib with his elbow, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. "Maybe he's just jealous."
She fanged and hissed at him.
"Heh, sorry," he said sheepishly. "Sometimes I forget that you're a big bad nasty vampire. You're so little!"
Her eyes narrowed and she glared at him.
"Oh, come on. We could die soon. Lighten up!"
"You find impending death to be reason for levity?"
"More fun than being a grumpy asshole all the time. For the rest of us, anyway," he muttered as he stopped to rummage in his pack.
"I heard that."
He trotted to catch up to her.
"So yeah, you've never really told me how old you actually are. Inquiring minds want to know, you know."
"No, I haven't."
"Please?"
"Not polite to ask a lady her age, Andrew. Not even for a druid."
"Why is it a big secret? You look like you're about, like, I dunno, twenty-two."
She sighed. "I don't tell because it's nearly impossible to know. As each new civilization dawns after a crisis, they create their own calendars and base it off of their own memories of events. The current calendar isn't even based on astronomy as they once were. You know how old you are because you have a fixed date for when you were born. But I was born in the third year of the scorpion. So how old am I?"
"Uh. That's not a real year."
"Not anymore. But if people still told time by the stars, it would be a perfectly logical date. The nearest I can figure is that my birthday was something like eighteen thousand, three hundred years ago. Give or take. And I was twenty-seven when I was turned. The world was in Scorpio in the precession of the equinoxes during my birth, and now we are on the edge of Aquarius."
"Holy shit, that's old!"
She chuckled. "Very."
"How did you live so long? Why hasn't any other vampire done it?"
"I mostly hid and almost never kill. I'm a very shy, retiring sort of vampire."
"You're noble, too."
She glared at him.
"Er, for a blood sucking, murderous beast. And all that. I meant." He blinked and looked away, clearly embarrassed. "Sorry."
"I suppose that 'noble' is as accurate a description of a druid princess as any, but it's important to understand that I am no longer that woman."
"So, you were like, really powerful?"
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. "What is it with you humans? Always with the questions. Why, why, why? What, what, what? Where, who, when?" She shook her head. "Is it really necessary for you to know?"
"Well, you said you can't drink my blood anymore because I'm a druid. So what was the vampire going to do to you?"
"Druid flesh is the only flesh that vampires can eat. And, apparently, it is very sweet. And, if the stories are true, also unusually filling and powerful." She clicked her fangs out. "Shall we test to find out?"
"Whoa, hey! No!" he jumped away.
"Then stop nattering at me."
He fell silent immediately, and Rhiannon picked him up and flitted for several hours, careful to avoid human settlements and launching into the air when the terrain impeded her. Andrew bore it at first, but then he transformed into a house cat, and she nearly dropped him. It did, though, make traveling quite a bit more comfortable.
Several nights later, they were at the shore of the Mediterranean in the mountains of Algeria; Chréa National Park..
She sat down, watching him meditate an invitation to his dinner. When the wild boar arrived and he killed and began to clean it, she asked him, "So why all the white?"
"Oh. Well. Cause, you know. The whole white lady thing you got going on. It matches."