vita & thracius ii.

Thracius

Several nights pass. Then several more. A week. Two -- and then one unremarkable afternoon, there is a messenger at Vita's door. He is plainly dressed and disinterested, a hired courier with a knapsack full of messages. He hammers impatiently on the door; when at last a slave answers, he rummages through his bag and withdraws a scrap of parchment too small and poor of quality for anyone to even bother with a scroll.

It is, however, folded over once and sealed for privacy. The wax looks like it may have dripped from any old tallow candle, off white and rancid. There is no seal.

"For the domina," the messenger says, already looking down the road toward the city. "Payment upon delivery. Two sesterces, please."

Vita

Vita waits til after nightfall the day that Thracius leaves and brings her little mice together, giving them their precious coins, putting a finger to her lips. They nod, bright-eyed and eager, the coins visible and then gone. Her mice are good at hiding things, but they know better than to hide from her.

In the days that follow, she stays at the villa. She keeps an eye out for fresh corpses. She hires a few more guards, better trained. It is expensive, but it is worth it to her. She drinks her wine, she walks her fields, and at night she runs the length and breadth of her land in black fur and lean muscle, golden eyes watchful.

She does not hunt for her enemy. She waits for him. This is the privilege of non-attachment. This is the gift -- and the lesson -- of her past. She knows what she is willing to lose.

--

But no new corpse. Not for a time. She returns to her townhouse, sick of the country, craving the energy and excitement and socializing of the city. Craving the socializing, period. She is tired of slaves and their halting, badly-accented attempts at conversation. She comes back and Doros has reports for her, so does Athamus. She goes to the baths on her first afternoon back, soaking in multiple temperatures, having oils scraped over her flesh, sighing as she returns to her richly colored tunics, a slave combing out her hair.

When she returns to the town house, entering the gates, she has barely taken five steps before Athamus comes to her, bearing the scroll, the unbroken wax. It was paid for, of course, from the allowance given to Athamus for such incidentals. Doros has marked it in the ledger, will make sure to refill Athamus's pouch when he and the widow next review her finances.

Her household runs smoothly. It took time to get it that way.

--

She takes the scrap of parchment, and then she sniffs it, walking away from her slave. She sniffs, of course, before she breaks the seal, reading the message.

Thracius

What a change the city is from her quietly lazy country life -- though to be sure, it is the labor of others that allows her such repose. Still: what a change, the rhythms and noises of the city, the hustle and bustle of crowds, the shouting of merchants in the markets, the prostitutes with their cheap jewelry all a-jangle, the priests with their bells all a-ringing. The slop of filth into the gutters and the stink of fish, the rich meaty scent of the popular street-corner eatery where Fat Claudius hawks his seared pork. The fancy perfumed and gilded litters with their fancy, perfumed, cloistered ladies -- the truly elite, whose names ring back through the centuries -- an insurmountable step above Vita's own social stratus.

All this, gone again when she returns to the townhouse. The heavy quiet of the country is a jarring change, and though she grows so bored out here, perhaps it is a welcome contrast as well. The torches were lit in anticipation of her return. There is food awaiting her, and cool water scented with flower petals.

A message, too. A scrap of parchment that smells of a certain trespassing wolf. A few lines of poor penmanship within:

Our mutual friend travels to Ravenna tonight. Black carriage, red detailing, team of six gray geldings. He will pass your estate sometime after midnight, and I will precede him by an hour.

Vita

Truth be told, she's rather surprised Thracius knows how to write. She wonders if he paid a scribe -- a cheap one -- to take his words for him, but she doubts it.

The sun is bright overhead, warming her shoulders as she pauses in the garden to read. Mutual friend. He mentions the estate in the country. She breathes in again, and a lush feeling runs through her, anticipatory and rare -- all the more pleasurable for its rareness, but that brings with it an ache.

She summons Athamus to her side with a glance, a snap of her fingers. She is going to the villa again to check the vintages. There is a tone in her voice he recognizes, from years of service: he does not gently suggest they wait another night.

--

That evening, some hours later, she has sent the slaves to bed early. Night falls late, due to the season. She tells her mice to scurry along, and then she goes into her vineyards, her fields, past them, into another form, out to the road. The moon has risen and the sun set hours ago.

Some distance from the villa, some distance from the road, she sends out a soft howl of inquiry.

Thracius

Almost at once a howl answers hers. It comes from afar -- as much as a mile or two away, up the road in the direction of the city.

Not long later, a second howl follows. Closer. And then closer still, until she can hear the rustle of foliage bending, paws on the earth.

Another wolf erupts from the vines. He is lean and long-legged, but his coat is heavy and thick. He stops a stone's throw away, forepaws planted, tail wagging low; somewhere between caution and greeting.

Vita

It is not her fault if her heart flickers, thumping in her broad chest. It has been a long time. She bites back the sort of full-throated howl that she wants to give in answer, and then she begins to trot towards the source of the answering howl. She doesn't even think about letting him know she's on her way until a second howl resounds. She yips back, acknowledging. She zigs and zags, darting from bushes to trees, copse -- she hides in shadows, leading herself for a few minutes until she and the other wolf meet somewhere in between.

It is all she can do not to sink her teeth happily into his shoulder when he emerges. She stands apart instead, shifting her weight, grunting. Her tail remains still. She chuffs at him, making a low noise in her throat. Then she advances a few silent steps, sniffing him over briefly, allowing him to do the same if he wishes. That is when her tail wags: finally.

Thracius

He stands very still while she approaches -- paws planted, head back, ears pinned. The wagging slows to a stop and he holds his tail rather stiffly out, waiting, while she sniffs. Only when her tail moves does he relax, ears coming forward, tail wagging in answer.

He sniffs too. Stretches out his neck, inspects. When they are properly acquainted he gives a little hop of his forepaws; turns on his haunches smooth and supple. His trot is long-strided and easy, covering the distance effortlessly. He leads her up a small, bare bluff -- no cover at all by day, but by night quite shrouded in darkness.

At the crest of the bluff he shifts into his near-man shape. There is a tree there, an old oak with gnarled half-bare branches. He goes swiftly to its shadow, digs among its roots.

"I have had opportunity to study our quarry," he says. "The bloodsucker is old and wily. Most days and nights he spends pulls strings from his hideout, which is so well-defended as to be nearly impenetrable. Yet tonight it seems some strange bloodsucker etiquette he is not permitted to flout has compelled him to make the journey. He knows he is in danger on the open road, and so he will travel fast and run if given the choice.

"Which isn't to say he isn't prepared for a fight. He comes accompanied by six guardsmen, well-armed. Silver weaponry. Not pure enough to truly harm us, but enough to give a nasty sting. They are stronger than mere mortals, blood-thralled, and loyal unto death."

Thracius finds what he's digging for. Grabs something -- pulls hard -- drags from the earth a ragged sack stuffed with half-dozen crude torches, little more than dry branches with one end wrapped in oilcloth.

"And then there is the bloodsucker himself to contend with," he continues. "He will be awake at this hour and at the height of his powers. Do not look him in the eye unless you wish to tempt fate. I have seen him bend the will of strong men with but a glance. Do not mistake his human appearance for human frailty, either. He is strong beyond reason, as strong as a wolf in war shape. And lastly, know that darkness is our friend only until the ambush is sprung. Then it is his ally, and he will use the shadows against you if he can.

"Take these," he passes her three torches, "and keep fire close at hand. Burn his carriage if you can. The more light, the more flame, the better. He is vulnerable to these things, as all bloodsuckers are vulnerable to our claws and teeth."

A pause. A thin smile.

"The lady has made herself quite an enemy. I wonder what it is she has done, to offend such a vengeful and ancient enemy."

Vita

After that hop, the widow-wolf huffs through her muzzle, ears flicking. It's almost a laugh. She follows him into the darkness, loping upwards. She remains as she is, furred and on all fours, even after he shifts his shape. She twitches her forepaw towards where he digs, as though to help, but not knowing what is beneath the soil stops her. She waits for him, ears swiveling, listening to the night around them.

The villain he describes does not sound familiar to her, not personally. She tries to think of places where such a creature might be hiding, some mysterious country house with higher walls than even her townhouse in the city. She wonders if his defenses are as secretive as his kind is rumored to be: ordinary-looking folk, even ones who seem weak, but are almost as dangerous as the vampire itself when revealed.

She swishes her tail, chuffing her understanding, looking around briefly while he brings out the sack. She noses forward, sniffing as he opens it, showing her what's inside, and her tail gives a flick. Her eyes come back up to his as he goes on, warning her of the creature's powers.

There's a beat of hesitation she senses, where she realizes he wants to give these to her, and she has no hands. Vita is there again in a heartbeat; she is shorter than he is in homid, shorter still when he is in this form. She is dressed as usual: the jewel-colored tunic, though this one is looser and it ends just over her knees, as if she were far lower class than she is. What must her clothesmaker have thought, making a fine garment in the lady's size in a cut better suited to a soldier?

No jewelry tonight, though, nor sandals, nor braids in her hair. She retains, even in her rich colors and soft skin, some of the wildness of her lupine form.

She takes the torches from him, her mouth curling wryly as he comments on her enemies. "It could be anything. Purchasing a slave he wanted for himself, interfering with some trade deal. I have no acquaintances in day or night who match what you have said. Though if he truly is as wily as you say, I have only offended him through intermediaries.

"He would not be the first enemy who has lost money or influence as I have gained it," she observes, thoughtful more than boastful. "Just perhaps the first one savage enough to hire a wolf to frame my household for murder."

Thracius

"He doesn't know what I am," Thracius mutters, balling up the wrapping cloth and casting it aside. "He thinks I'm food, easily bought and easily disposed of when my usefulness is at an end."

On that note he drops down on the gently sloped ground, inching forward amongst the dry dirt and scraggly brush until he has a good view of the road. The torches he sets before him, and beside them, a small flint and dagger. The thick scent of oil wafts in their faces when the wind changes. Overhead, the stars play hide and seek -- now behind the clouds, now revealed. There is no moon. Surely that too is by design; the darkest of nights favored by the darkest of creatures.

"There," the killer-for-hire whispers suddenly, raising his hand just an inch or two to point. What he indicates is very distant still. In the darkness, the details are lost; they see only a slow-rising plume of dust. No lanterns burn. No lights gleam. No sound yet travels to them.

Vita

"Are you sure?" she murmurs, after that first mutter, that indication that this ancient beast does not know what he is dealing with. She doesn't press it. She doesn't expect an answer.

She comes with him, low, crawling, her clawless hands in the soft, sweet grass. She tips her head. She says nothing for a moment. Then, a few moments before the sound reaches his ears:

"I can hear it," she whispers, nostrils flared. "The whip. The wheels."

Thracius

Is he sure?

A flash of his eyes her way. He says nothing. Then they are side by side in the dry summer grass, taut bodies to the earth. The dust-trail grows closer.

A second flicker, his eyes, her profile. Again he says nothing. Redirects his attention toward that distant carriage. Far away. Closer. Closing fast. Hoofbeats on the stonepaved roads, built by the legions so many years ago. Straining of the animals; can almost make out their labored pant now. Can see the shape of the carriage, its boxed corners, the two hunched figures on the wagoneer's perch, two others balanced on footholds and grips in the back.

"Remember." He is beginning to change, the shape of his bones altering, fur running like wildfire over skin. "He'll run if he can. Don't let him."

Vita

Her hands flex. In a moment, they are elongating, growing, and she is becoming something else. Something larger, something inhuman. Her nose is growing, her lips lengthening, stretching back over a muzzle that was not there before. He is so close to her that he can almost hear the way bones shift under her skin. She can almost hear his fur growing.

Together they wait, and wait, because the moment is everything. The right moment. The one where he is too close to swerve away, the one before he is too far to outrun them. Her muzzle twitches. She wants to snarl but he can hear her catch it in her throat.

When the time is now, he doesn't have to hear her say the word. It's time.

Thracius

It's time.

The softest of sounds precedes motion: the sharp scratch of knife over flint, the crunch of dry earth as his claws sink in. Then he is airborne, leaping silently from the bluff toward the carriage thundering, clattering, rumbling past just below. He has the torches in hand, two gripped in his left handpaw, one held aloft in the right. The smallest flicker of flame is just beginning to catch when he leaves the ground; whips fuel-fed around the circumference of the torchhead as he's in midair.

There's a shout -- the driver's companion spotting them. And then a loud crash as he lands, his weight and momentum buckling the sturdy roof of the carriage. The torch is blazing now, and he uses it -- flames and all -- to smash the driver in the face. The horses scream. The guardsmen are climbing up over the back of the breaking carriage.

Vita

It is in her, primitive shape that she holds now, to flinch from fire. She does not. The races she has been born to are both made by their balance of wild urges and control of same. To know when to unleash, and how: to know what instincts to indulge, and which to resist. Flinching from fire is one to rise above. Throwing herself into battle is one to lose herself in.

This is how both races survive.

--

She dives after him, almost with him, as though she were listening to his heartbeat, listening to his joints, waiting for the intimation of movement. She is close enough to him, at first, that one torch in her paw is lit from his own, and flame is catching, rising around the torches, flickering and then roaring, and she has no need to roar now.

The mere sight of the two of them is terror enough, even to one whose master is a monster himself.

Thracius lands on the roof of the carriage, Vita on its side, the claws of one handpaw sunk deep into the edge where roof meets wall, the other grasping the torch, thrusting it inside, right through the curtains.

Thracius

Those fine, gauzy, expensive curtains light up instantly. Light blazes. Something inside the carriage hisses. The driver, dazed, falls off his perch. Hits the ground by the side of the road, his own momentum carrying him along in a jumble of limbs and dust. His partner grabs for the reins, snaps them, the horses surging, the jolt of acceleration knocking one of the guardsmen back, sending him scrambling to grab onto the handles, the grips, saving himself from a nasty tumble.

The other guardsmen pulls a blade from his waist. Dull sheen and the skin-prickling awareness of silver. He slashes at Vita, shouting. Meanwhile Thracius is lighting his other torches, following Vita's example, throwing the first torch into the carriage --

-- only to see it thrown right back out. Another guardsman is climbing out through the windows, snarling, his face hardly human. Thracius ignores him. Leaps down to the wagoneer's perch, grunting as the lookout slams a silvered dagger into his side. In the next instant he has the man's head in his paw, whips around like an athlete throwing a discus; snaps the neck, hurtles the lifeless body from the carriage.

Fire is starting to lick out from the interior. Their shadows are thrown stark and black onto the ground, rippling along the road, its cobblestones, the mile-markers and roadside bushes. Thracius is reaching down, stretching as far as his rangy frame allows, straining and not quite reaching the couplings between the carriage and the team.

Vita

Something hisses. Something else, larger but not necessarily more terrible, roars in answer. The driver is left behind. The horses are still running, trying to run from the thing behind them, the thing that has been behind them this entire journey. They are wild with fear, eyes rolling back, hooves galloping in a panic.

She is not thinking about the horses, though. She is clinging to the side of a racing, unstable, soon to be flaming carriage and she has not yet gotten her footing when her skin twitches in faint warning. She swings to the side, past the side-door of the carriage, clawing madly. She almost loses her grip but doesn't. She snarls at the guard who thought he would stab her, her hind paws finding their leverage, claws digging in to wood. With her reach, twice his, she grabs at him, and her handpaw finds purchase at the most readily available spot: his face.

He is screaming when her claws dig in, and she feels his skull buckling against the points before she tears him from the carriage, throwing him to the road. He is lucky not to be trampled.

She hears noise on the other edge of the carriage, hears Thracius grunt somehow above the din, or more accurately: through the din. She sees another body fly. She wonders --

but there are more important matters at hand.

She tears off the door of the carriage, and some of the flames go with it. She has another torch; lights it from what is already ablaze.

Thracius

Debris and detritus in their wake. The vampire's thralls, some still alive and some less so. Bits and pieces from the carriage torn or fallen off, some small and unimportant and some less so. The door hits the ground and raises a shower of sparks as it buckles. Flames from the burning curtains roar in her face, almost blind her against the flash of that silvered spear thrown soaring out at her. By some combination of her luck or her reflexes its point misses her heart. Lodges, burning, in her side.

The torch in her hand blazes up. By its light she can see the interior of the carriage; all its sumptuous glory. The bloodsucker lurks in the darkest, seething shadows at the back, the sixth and final guardsman with it. In an instant Vita knows he could not have thrown that spear. That was the vampire, or it was the shadows themselves. The guardsman is locked in the vampire's grip, spine arched, legs twitching, face deathly pale, and the vampire is draining back what had long ago become its property.

It sees Vita. It does not cease its supping. There is a coldblooded boldness to that. It finishes its meal, drains every drop, casts the emptied husk at her so contemptuously and so effortlessly that Vita might have believed the guardsman weightless until he crashes into her.

Meanwhile, from the front of the carriage: a metallic snap, a lurch, a great groan of straining wood. One coupling uncoupled.

Vita

His coldness does not shock her, or unnerve her enough not to take advantage of the moment it gives her. She uses that moment to secure her footing, to grab the spear and yank it out of her side. She throws it out of the carriage too: one less thing that can be used against her. She snarls as she does, her lips curling back. Her ears flick: she hears what Thracius is doing, knows it will be too many more moments for him to join her.

When the vampire throws the body at her, she puts out an arm, smacks it away like she would a child's ball that came over her wall and rolled too closely to her. Only it isn't a ball; she sags a bit, but not enough to fall from the carriage.

She wants to stare him down and then remembers Thracius's words, and stops herself. She knows enough to have heard that vampires gain strength from feeding beyond simple nourishment or satiety. So she advances on him, without meeting his eyes, torch in hand, touching it to everything in the hurtling carriage she can as she moves.

Thracius

The carriage is still moving shockingly, dangerously fast. With one coupling loose, there's a new shimmying instability to the motion -- the carriage lashing back and forth on the traces. They're clattering, bumping, thundering along, and even with her preternatural balance she finds herself swaying.

Not so the vampire. As she advances, it seems to simply levitate from the seat -- hovers suspended on shadow somehow made three-dimensional, substantial. It is, as so many bloodsuckers are, both terrible and beautiful: pallid of skin, fierce of eye, with ice-cut features and an immense, alien presence. It says nothing, moves little. The shadows move in its stead, boiling around it, erupting from the folds of its rich, dark attire.

A coil wraps around her hindpaw. Another, around her wrist. More and more, swarming her like the arms of a hydra, ensnaring and entangling. One almost expects hissing, the sensation of snakeskin. Yet the shadows are silent. The shadows deaden sound. The shadows feel like nothing at all, nothing but pressure and the absence of sensation -- a strange, suffocating nightfall.

Vita

With one paw bound, one leg, she still surges forward. She holds tight to the lit torch, fire rising around the walls from curtains, from cushions. Soon they will both be in a hurtling, crashing carriage that is on fire. The thought somehow thrills her. She lunges at him, snapping with her jaws, snarling.

Thracius

It's a strange thing -- to be simultaneously surrounded by fire and utter shadow; heat and utter lack of sensation. A coil whipping around her neck now. Tightening, even as she lunges forward. Her teeth snap. The bloodsucker, for the first time, recoils.

A sudden terrible CRACK from the front of the carriage. An accompanying catastrophic deceleration, throwing her backward, lurching the carriage sideways, something breaks loose, a corner crashes down into the ground, joints creak, a wall ruptures inward. Fire roars suddenly upward, sparks spiraling toward the black sky.

Vita

Again. Straining against the cords of shadow, snarling, snapping her jaws at the creature. She is nothing if not tenacious. She shifts her grip on the torch, holds the flame to one of the tendrils. She has no idea if it will work or not.

That is when Thracius finishes his project. She is thrown, and loses the torch, though it hits the carpet and lights as much of it as it can before it begins to burn itself out. No matter: the rest of the fire is alive and well, roaring now, climbing up towards the sky, and Vita has skidded on her side against the fire, her fur is scorched and flesh is stinging, and she is still fighting the vampire's coils.

Thracius

It works. It starts to, anyway -- the flames bending around the tendril, the tendril recoiling silently but violently.

And then the world turns sideways, and things break, and fire burns, and --

the coils loosen. Perhaps the vampire is distracted keeping itself from crashing forward into her waiting maw. Perhaps it is surprised. No matter. She is thrown loose, smashing painfully into the wooden seats, her weight crashing those boards apart.

The carriage is little more than burning kindling at this point. Scraps and splinters fly as the vampire and its shadows thrash their way out of the wreckage. There's an instant where it hesitates -- then, abruptly and swiftly, it turns away. Borne aloft on a roil of shadows, it flees.

Vita

Energy strains, tightens, and then erupts: just when she thinks she is about to tear something of her own in her attempt to fight the vampire's tentacles, they are gone. Just when she might lunge for him, she is thrown to the side, claws scrabbling for purchase. Fire licks at her handpaws, but she does not feel the pain now. She refuses to. She bares her teeth and whips her head, eyes flashing, and the ends of her fur are on fire as she searches the wreckage to make sure they do not lose the vampire.

He will run. She suspects he can run quite fast. So, when she sees him thrashing, she snarls. He rises in shadow and she begins running after him on all fours, barking for Thracius.

Thracius

Her partner in crime is working on a new project: tearing the vampire's remaining two guards to shreds. There's a spear in his back; there's blood on his teeth. When she barks he's in the process of smashing someone's head against the stone road. Turns in time to see her take off after the fleeing vampire.

He snarls. Hurtles the dead man aside and plunges after, shifting one step closer to wolf. She's ahead of him. The vampire is ahead of them both, and reality itself seems to bend around it: shadows creeping out of nowhere, sucking up from the crevices of the earth itself, dissipating again in its wake. It is heading away from the road, toward the very vineyards where all this began. Toward the tall vines and their shadows, where surely they will lose it in the darkness.

Vita

She sees where he's heading. She feels it in her bones, and it enrages her. How dare he. How dare he invade her territory yet a second time. She doesn't even know him.

Vita snaps her head on her neck, snarling. Her form changes abruptly, an eyeblink, a half heartbeat: she trades her enormous claws for shorter ones, loses her thumbs as they sink back into true -- if massive -- paws. What she loses in strength she gains in speed, and her pace quickens suddenly, like a god infused her with the ferocity of a lightning bolt.

Which, in some ways, a god did.

Thracius

Paws on the earth behind her, closing. Harsh panting breath. Thracius falls in alongside her, flanking her, like true wolves harrying prey. He's somewhat worse for wear, battered and cut and bleeding and straining. He keeps pace -- for now.

Brought you a spear. Pauses for effect. Or maybe just breath. In my back.

Vita

She expected him to be faster than her. The other wolf, not the vampire. And he must be, to catch up with her now. To catch up with her while wounded so. In an equal footrace of whatever form, she suspects he would win. There's no envy in this assessment, merely recognition. Estimation. Perhaps a bit of approval.

But there is hardly time to notice these things, much less mull them over and consider one's opinions on the matter. So they run, the female smelling like burnt fur and flesh and what must be true darkness, the male smelling of blood and oily smoke and the panic of horses. And he tells her, in snarls and snaps and growls,

that he has brought her a gift. Of a kind.

In another form, she would throw her head back and laugh. As it is, instinct wants her to throw back her head and howl. She does not. She does not warn the vampire what is coming for him. In another breath she is in yet another form, the one previous, tall and strong as a storm, dark as the very shadows that threaten to turn against them now. But she is still running, still on all fours, and just before Thracius outpaces her -- as she knows he will -- she grabs the spear from his back, grips it tight, and pulls it out. There is no time to be careful with him, or gentle, or wary that this could hasten his exhaustion, or even his death. She grabs the weapon, finds her prey as she runs,

three legs now, and then skids to a stop,

two legs now,

matches her arc to her target,

and hurls the spear like no woman of her class should be able to, like no one like her should know how to do. Like an athlete. Or worse: a warrior.

And not a Roman one.

Thracius

Spear's head tears out of the thick muscle of the shoulder. Thracius doesn't yelp, but he does fall behind. Won't be catching up again. She runs on, three paws, two, rears up.

It's a beautiful arc of motion: hindpaw through the leg, up the back, to the arm. Hot blood still glistening in the firelight, that spear soars -- passes from light into darkness into utter shadow. Disappears. She cannot follow its arc by eye. She cannot see whether she hits her mark.

Second trickle by.

Then, far away, a thump. A thud. That restless boil of shadow suddenly ceasing, dropping away, leaving only what is natural. And a body, paralyzed, face-down, that secondhand spear planted in its back square between the shoulderblades.

Vita

She wants to laugh again. Instead, she howls. It is a sound her slaves have heard before, far in the distance, and some of them wake. Others catch the eye of one of their neighbors, knowing the truth of their mistress's nocturnal doings. All of them feel a chill when they hear it. A few sleep through it.

Three, in particular, merely lift their tiny shorn heads and peer into the darkness of her hallways, listening. It is possible they even heard the spear. One of them turns a brass coin over and over in their hand, thoughtfully fidgeting more than anxiously.

--

In the fields alongside the road, Vita is on all fours again. She would go back for Thracius but the creature still lives, and that cannot be. She runs over to it, remaining in crinos, snarling as she comes to the thing, immediately grabbing its head in her claws, holding it in the mud. She waits for Thracius.

Thracius

The spear has gone through and through, the head lodged in the earth, the wooden shaft piercing the bloodsucker's heart. Perhaps, when she reaches her quarry and grasps it, she expects resistance. Perhaps she has never seen a staked vampire before. One would hardly blame her: their races are so eternally at war that neither typically waits to kill the other. Perhaps this is her first experience, then, and it is strange and chilling -- like handling a bizarrely unrotted corpse. No body heat. No tension left in the muscles. Just a dead thing, its flesh unnaturally preserved.

Some time later, her hunting partner joins her. He is in the near-man shape already, one arm held close to his body to avoid jarring the torn flesh of the shoulder. It is easier to walk like this, and besides: he has no fear of the staked bloodsucker. Nearing it, he drops to a crouch, tipping his head to stare into the unseeing eyes.

"An admirable throw," he notes. "Let's put it out of its misery."

Vita

She has never seen a staked vampire before. She knows no lore of how to kill them; she suspects silver would do it, because that is what can hurt her so deeply. She knows fire will consume just about anything -- dead flesh, certainly, even laden with blood. She doesn't know. She cocks her massive head this way and that, turning the thing's limp head in her hand-paw a few times consideringly.

Thracius comes alongside her, wounded but walking. She looks over at him, grunting.

"Not dead?" she snarls, guttural and confused.

Thracius

"No. Sleeping. The bloodsuckers fear little, but fire and sunlight will burn them to ash, while a length of wood through the heart forces them into a deep and dreamless slumber.

"I suppose we could wake it. Attempt to interrogate it. But it will not be easy to subdue again, let alone control. Easier to kill it here and search its den tomorrow."

Vita

Sleeping. She looks down at the thing again. She sneers, her lips curling back over her massive fangs.

She doesn't ask any other questions. She just begins to squeeze the vampire's skull.

And then she crushes it in her handpaw wholesale, thinking briefly of grapes, of wine, as she feels the sensation of gray matter between her claws.

Thracius

Thracius, disgusted, is helpful: "Decapitation is also an option."

No matter. The matter between her claws is wet and cold, and then -- quite suddenly -- dry and cold, brittle, flaking, blowing away on the warm night wind. Flesh decays to dust, bones to ash; in a matter of seconds, all that remains of that ancient and powerful being is a few specks of grey, a certain smell of old decay.

Thracius crouches and presses his bloodied palm to the earth where it had lain. "You gods who claim this creature as your own," he mutters, "see its spirit safe to your underworld, that it might not rise to trouble us again. I give of my blood to make it so."

Vita

Vita ignores his disgust, but not his comment. To that, she merely grunts. She examines the brain matter on her claws, as though to confirm she has torn so much of this creature's mind apart that he could not re-form somehow, no matter how much blood he ingests. She looks at the broken bone fragments sunken into the oozing mess that was once his head, and

the fragments become dust

and the ooz becomes dust

and what is on her fingers becomes dust.

And then, with a bit of breeze, becomes nothing more than a sense-memory. She is awed. She even gasps. She is a woman again, or near enough: near-woman, with fine dark fur on her limbs and edging her features, with those still-golden eyes, with long nails that would never call themselves claws. She became this in a moment, in that gasp.

Then a huff of air. She is quite amazed, in fact. She looks across at Thracius, watching him... pray, in a sense, though that is not quite right. She does not join him. But she waits a moment, as soil absorbs blood, before she speaks.

"Come," she tells him. "You will rest at the villa as you heal," she goes on, though truth be told she clearly needs healing too. Not as much: the burns will fade quickly enough with a bit of rest. "The mice will bring you food."

Thracius

He prays, in a sense -- though that is not quite right. He sacrifices. That is right. There is a difference, tiny but profound.

At her offer, he hesitates only a second or two. "I am grateful for your hospitality," he decides. "Though you are going to have to tell me about those little mice of yours someday."

And, standing: "Lead the way, then."

Vita

That, for some reason, makes her smile. And not a wry, deprecating smile. There's warmth in it, though perhaps not for him.

Then again.

"Someday," she says, and rises. She grips the spear she threw, the one Thracius brought her in his own flesh, and hefts it out of the ground, carrying it with her.

She will outpace him now as they walk. She could, at least. She doesn't. She walks beside him, carrying the spear on her outer side, away from him, leading him back to her territory to eat, and drink,

and rest.