Spell Bound - Kelley Armstrong [99]
“I didn’t want to go,” she said. “A recently occupied war zone? Do I look like a Green Beret? And the story was just as ridiculous. If those dead men were anything, they were clearly zombies, and the blood-draining a separate incident. If the council felt the need to send anyone, it should be a necromancer. But, no, I know the language and I’d made the mistake of admitting I was familiar with the region, so they chose me.”
The council had offered to send another delegate to accompany Cassandra, but she’d refused. She was French, invulnerable to bullets, and able to knock out attackers with her bite. The gravest danger she’d face was having to forgo hot baths and clean clothes.
So off she went.
“Despite my misgivings, I soon came to believe we did indeed have a vampire. I found two living victims and both had healed bite wounds on their necks. Both had been in the forest. Both had seen a man in an American uniform. Having heard the rumors, they ran. The soldier gave chase and brought them down. He bit their necks. They struggled. Eventually, they weakened and passed out.”
“Sounds similar to a vampire attack, but it’s not quite right,” I said.
“Exactly. Which is what troubled me about both accounts. The vampire’s saliva should have induced a quick lack of consciousness and mild retrograde amnesia.”
That meant they’d pass out fast, and wake up forgetting the attack.
She continued. “That didn’t happen here. Moreover, what they described sounded more like a zombie than a vampire. The soldiers were dressed in filthy and ragged uniforms. Their skin was gray and they smelled of decomposing flesh.”
“Maybe an earlier evolutionary form of vampires,” I said. “Like those Shifters the werewolves found in Alaska. There could be a pocket of early vampires in that region, and they infected the soldiers. That would explain human legends about vampirism being transmitted by a bite. Plus, if they really are rotting, it would explain why outside supernaturals didn’t know about them. Instead of being semi-immortal, they actually rot and die fast.”
“That was my thought. I wanted to discuss it with the research expert at the council. At the time, though, it wasn’t a simple matter of making a call on my cell phone. The war might have ended, but communication with America was still difficult. From a small village so far from Paris, it was impossible. So, I continued gathering evidence while making forays into the forest, hoping to spot one of the creatures. Several times I saw a figure, yet I didn’t detect any pulse of life. If I gave chase, it ran. I even once tried running away, to see if that would entice it, but it went in the opposite direction.”
“As if it sensed another predator.”
She nodded. “Then, a week after I arrived, a man came to the village inn where I was staying. He introduced himself as Guy Leray. He was the man you met as Giles. He took a room, and had the innkeeper introduce us. I’d been pretending to be a journalist from Paris, investigating the vampire soldiers. Leray said he was a writer and planned to pen a lurid novel on the case. He hoped we might share information. I told him, since he’d only just arrived, that would seem a one-way exchange. He apologized and withdrew. The next morning, he met me as I left my room, and offered me a lead. He’d heard of an unreported attack. Would I care to accompany him to interview the victim? I did. There was nothing new to this latest victim’s story, so I reciprocated by offering Leray a few useless tidbits from my own investigation. Over the next few days, he pursued my company relentlessly. It was not a romantic pursuit. Nor was it a professional one. The man made me uneasy, and I began to suspect he was a supernatural, one who perhaps knew what I was.”
“But he wasn’t a vampire himself.”
“No. He gave off the pulse of life. Then came the news that a hunting dog had found a shallow mass grave. When the villagers dug, they found the soldiers, all in a state of decomposition that suggested they’d died when they’d first