XVII - A Departure Into the Night

  She felt pain—worse pain than she had ever felt before in her life. Her head, her back, her arms. Especially her arms. The worst of the pain originated in her torn, aching forearms, but quickly spread all through her body. It was as if hundreds of years of malice and hatred had latched onto her arms and seeped into her body through her pores, infecting her bloodstream, and it was so terrible that the very act of being alive was utter agony.

  And so her brain did the only thing it could to protect her: it went dormant.

  Sybil sat motionless, her back pressed against a hard surface—likely a tree or a boulder, but she could not tell. She floated in a state of partial-consciousness, her mind swamped by the soothing darkness that helped to fight off her unending pain. She could not see—her eyes had grown far too heavy to open—but she could still somewhat hear what was going on around her, although any and all noises sounded both very far away and as if she heard them from the bottom of a deep body of water. She would have thought that she had been tossed into the nearby river, were it not for the steady breaths of lifegiving air that her body continued to take in even as she lay there helpless and broken, deep within the pit of her own agony. She felt the blood slowly draining from her arms in the form of two lazy, seeping rivers, and knew that if she stayed there for too long, she would surely bleed to death.

  Her mind briefly flashed to the image of her bleeding, putrid parents before it thankfully returned to the peaceful void of nothing.

  She suddenly felt compelled to open her eyes. Immediately giving in to this desire, Sybil managed to force them ajar ever-so-slightly, just enough to get a vague picture of the space in front of her. It was dark—darker even than it had been just a short while ago, before she had been attacked by the vampyre. Ahead of her, she saw the crumbled form of Felice lying on the ground, blood escaping from the side of her head where Mr. Albescu’s whip had struck her. She appeared to be unconscious, and Sybil thought her to possibly even be dead, but then, suddenly, she stirred. Sybil watched in her half-awake state as Felice sat up, her blood-matted hair drooping messily in front of her face, creating a thick curtain that obscured her features. She sat disoriented for a few moments, then slowly began to rise to her feet. Sybil could no longer keep her eyes open, and so they came slamming shut, obscuring her vision of the other girl. She was certain that Felice was about to make her way over to her and finish her off, but she was helpless to stop her. That was alright; she stopped thinking about the other girl after a few moments anyway. And so her mind snuggled back into its comfortable, warm burrow of blankness.

  Soon Sybil’s ears focused on the sounds of the struggle nearby. Mr. Albescu and Dr. Frost—the vampyre Vivienne—exchanging words. Grunting, striking. The sound of Vivienne’s laughter.

  And then the vampyre’s screams.

  Screeching, shouting, the wet, squishy sound of flesh being sliced with a sharp edge. It reminded Sybil of her father teaching her how to skin and dress animals, an activity she very much disliked, but which came more easily to her than killing did, at the very least. There was a brief moment of silence, then came the sound of splashing water.

  And then more silence.

  The quiet made her uncomfortable, and so Sybil forced her eyes open once again so she could attempt to see what had chased away all of the noise. As her swirling vision came into view, Sybil could see a shadow-cloaked form approaching her, walking slowly, as if injured—or as if savoring its approach.

  Her mind immediately went to Vivienne Frost.

  Sybil wanted so badly to get up, to run away, to flee, but her stunned, aching, bleeding body would not heed her commands. She remained a prisoner trapped within her own mind. Her heavy eyes forced themselves shut once more, and for several agonizing moments, she was certain that the vampyre was about to sink its long, terrifying fangs directly into her neck, and that would finally be the end of it.

  But then she suddenly heard Mr. Albescu’s voice.

  “It’s over, Night Owl,” he said. “You are going to be alright. Vivienne Frost has been set free.”

  ___

  Her arms ached with each pass of the needle through her flesh, and each pulling of the thread felt like fire beneath her skin. But Sybil was just glad to have the bleeding finally come to a stop.

  They were in Frost’s carriage, surrounded by her various books and apparatus on all sides. Vlad had picked her up and rushed her there following their encounter with the vampyre; he had assumed that he would be able to find sutures amongst Frost’s medical supplies, and he was correct. Sybil’s foggy mind had come back to her on the way to the carriage, and as her consciousness returned, the pain in her arms had flared up with it. She felt every stitch that went through her skin, and struggled not to scream with the overwhelming agony. A few times she failed, and was forced to shout into a pillow that Vlad had handed her in order to muffle her shouts of pain.

  When her mentor was finished, she took a few moments to look at the sutures in either of her arms. They were ugly, hastily applied things, but they did their job properly, and she knew that they were a necessary first step on her path to recovery. Sybil silently dreaded the day the sutures were going to have to be removed, but she forced herself to temporarily banish this inevitability from her mind. Such a time would come, she knew, but she also knew that to worry about that now would do her no good.

  The damage to her arms did not appear to be as bad as it had felt. Had her agony been an indicator of her condition, she likely would not have survived the trek back to the caravan. Sitting there, assessing the pain in her lucid state, made her realize that most of her suffering had likely come from the sheer force of the vampyre’s blow against her arms, as well as from her impact against the tree. She had been left in her state of stunned half-consciousness for some time, and when she finally came out of it, she was made privy to the true suffering that had been largely numbed and redirected by her hibernating brain. Her body would likely remain bruised and aching for at least a week or so, but she would ultimately recover.

  There were others, she knew, who would not be nearly as fortunate.

  “There,” Vlad said. “I suppose we should be grateful to the strigoi for keeping these sutures on hand, no?” He smiled at his handiwork even as his own wound remained open and bloody.

  Sybil looked at her mentor’s injury and frowned. “Are you certain you do not want me to suture your wound, Mr. Albescu?”

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  Vlad waved the suggestion away. “No, no, Night Owl. We simply do not have the time. But I shall be alright. My Plague mask, the poor thing, took the brunt of Vivienne’s attack against my face. My wound is not as deep as yours were, and thus should heal on its own. The bleeding seems to already be coming to a halt. I shall clean it once more and apply the proper bandages, but that should suffice for me. It is not nearly as grave as it might appear.”

  “Well, alright,” Sybil said. She allowed a slight pause to linger between them as she prepared herself for the disconcerting question that lingered so sinisterly in the back of her mind. “Vivienne didn’t… she didn’t infect us with these wounds, did she?”

  Vlad chuckled, shaking his head. “Certainly not, my apprentice—if she did, I wouldn’t have wasted effort on suturing your arms back together. Vampyre venom is only transmitted through their bites, and seeing as neither of us were unfortunate enough to suffer any of those, we shall both be quite alright once we heal. But it appears that we will both walk away from this ordeal with some rather nasty scars. Do not fret—this somewhat of a rite of passage in our profession, though it does not often come in such an… extreme fashion as it has visited us this eve.”

  Sybil nodded, trusting her teacher’s judgment on the matter. “And Dr. Frost—the vampyre Vivienne—you’re certain she is slain?”

  He had recounted the story of the vampyre’s defeat to Sybil while he stitched up her wounds, but having not seen the outcome of the battle herself, she was anxious that the creature was still out there, waiting for the chance to strike.

  “Yes, it is,” Vlad said. “My silver blade pierced its heart, and even if I somehow missed that crucial organ, the river should still rend it into nothing. Vivienne Frost, and all of her evil, has thankfully been purged from the world.

  Sybil frowned, hesitating for a moment. “Felice as well.”

  Vlad nodded gravely, sharing in her frown. “Yes, unfortunately we lost Felice as well. I was hoping the girl could have been saved following Vivienne’s death, but the vampyre killed her. I should be grateful to her as well. Had she not intervened, Frost surely would have slain me in a matter of moments.”

  “I wish there was more that we could have done for her.”

  “As do I, Night Owl,” Vlad said, “but sometimes death is the best outcome for one as corrupted as that unfortunate girl. This may sound cruel, and perhaps it even is, but it is unfortunately the difficult truth of the matter.” He paused. “Now, if you are willing and able, we should away from this caravan with all haste.”

  Sybil frowned again. “So soon? Should we not even wait until daylight?”

  “I am afraid we cannot afford to tarry here, Night Owl,” he said. “We must be gone from this place ere anybody can realize what has happened here tonight.”

  “Will that not cast suspicion upon us?”

  “It may,” he admitted. “There is a very real possibility that we shall be blamed for what happened here. However, the same thing could happen if we were to remain, and then we’d have to face queries from the folk here that they are not prepared to hear the answers to. But this comes with our profession. We cannot expect common folk to appreciate or understand what we do for them.”

  Sybil looked around at the various items in the carriage, including the tightly stacked books and folios. “Should we not at least search through Frost’s research to see if she… if it wrote down anything about Blight Bane?”

  Vlad shook his head. “Something else we do not have time for. Such a task would take hours that we cannot spare. But I highly doubt that Frost would have left any notes about the remedy—the vampyre would not have done anything to jeopardize the pawn it possessed in the form of the elixir. Still, it is possible that I am wrong, in which case I pray to the Mother that somebody in this caravan will manage to find that research, and will thus be able to create more of the life-saving Bane. But until that time comes, we are forced to assume that it is lost.”

  Sybil considered his words. She was not satisfied with them, but she understood the truth in them. In the end, all she could do was accept them with a nod. “Very well.”

  Vlad took a few moments to clean and then dress his own wound with some cloth he found in Frost’s carriage. He wrapped the material around his head in a diagonal pattern, running along the length of his wound. The cloth quickly developed a thin red line along its surface where the blood came through, but it seemed to mostly stop any bleeding that still remained. When he was satisfied, he led the way out of the carriage and into the cool nighttime air.

  They crept their way through the caravan in silence. Both Plague doctor and apprentice knew the importance of remaining undetected, and so they focused all of their efforts into not making a sound until they reached their coach at the rear of the caravan. The promise of sunrise kissed the edges of the distant horizon, but they still had plenty of time to make it to their destination and depart under the cover of darkness.

  Sybil spotted two of Mr. Brant’s sentries carrying what appeared to be a corpse away from a carriage, guided by the light of a torch held by a third man. She could not make out any details on the body, but through the torchlight she could see that they appeared to have recovered it from Mrs. Guthrie’s carriage. And as far as Sybil knew, ever since the passing of her husband, the old woman travelled alone.

  She wondered how long it would take them to find the two bodies they had left behind among the trees. Sybil imagined them rushing to wake up Mr. Brant, who would hardly notice that his musket was missing in the panic, and would only remember it again when he found it lying on the ground near the two newly deceased. He and his men would then be forced to carry both corpses through the caravan, where mortified travellers, awakened by the commotion, would slowly be made to realize the grim reality that they now lived in: that their savior doctor was missing, never to be seen by any of them again, and her assistant and the caravan leader were both dead.

  Two more bodies for the cadaver carriage.

  Vlad and Sybil finally reached their coach. They hastily broke their camp; Sybil put out the fire and gathered up their bedrolls while Vlad roused Elpis from her sleep and slipped the groggy horse back into her harness. When they were ready to depart, they climbed into the front of the coach and Vlad quickly took up the reins.

  Which is when Sybil spoke.

  “I cannot help but feel as though we are abandoning these people to a horrible fate.” Vlad looked at her, and she went on. “We’ve condemned them by slaying the one person who could save them, and now we’re disappearing into the night, leaving them with nothing but unanswered questions. It… it does not feel right.”

  “I agree,” he said, “and yet it is the only option we have. There are times when no path is the correct one, Night Owl, but still a path we must take if we wish to move forward. The nature of our profession is one that will send us down many paths that we will not be proud to walk. Some of those paths will force us to grapple with our own morality. This is a burden that we cannot avoid. You will often resent the things you are forced to do in the name of the people that you protect.”

  Vlad met her eyes with his own, and held her gaze for several unblinking seconds before speaking again. “And so, Night Owl, I will ask you this: After all that you’ve experienced this long, dreadful night, and with the knowledge of the countless hardships that yet wait ahead of us, are you still willing to follow me down this dark, dangerous, and thankless road?”

  Sybil did not need to think about her answer. She had done more than enough of that on their walk back to their coach. “I am,” she said, maintaining their eye contact. “I wish to see this road to its end, no matter where it may take us. I wish to follow the path of the Plague doctor.”

  Vlad considered her response for some time. At length, he nodded. “Very well,” he said with a smile. “Then we shall continue on to the village of Fenwick, and to Avice’s forge.”

  He looked forward and flicked Elips’ reins, encouraging the horse to move and beginning their path away from the caravan that had a short while yet to rest before it awoke to the truth of what Vlad and his apprentice had done to them.

  “It is there that we shall make a proper Plague doctor out of you.”