I had seen too much.
I had seen true Darkness.
My heart thudded against the fabric of my dress and the holy letter pinned there-small defense against the undead, but still a defense. I thrust down with all my might to jam the stick into the face of the creature twisting beneath me in the grass.
This was not murder, I had decided. This was doing the Lord's dirty work. Putting the dead back in the earth.
"Bonnet!"
I glanced up to see a pale face with a gaping maw hurtling toward me. I saw fangs, red eyes, little else. I flung my right hand with my remaining stake up before me, but the creature slammed against it, buffeting me back to the sea of grass. I landed on my backside, my feet tangled in my skirt. Its cold shadow passed over me, blocking out the pinpricks of starlight in violet sky. It smelled like blood.
"Food," it rasped. "Lovely food . . ." It reached toward my face, gently, reverently, almost as an intimate might. It was a very human gesture, rendered savage by the greed in the red eyes. By hunger for the blood that slipped down my arm and pooled in my palm.
"Get away from her!"
A black and white blur passed between me and death. Alex. From behind, I could see the familiar tattoos stretching across his skin: a Djed pillar, sacred to Osiris. And on his chest, an ankh made of scars, which he told me was the symbol of eternal life.
It was nothing like the carefully scripted letter pinned to my dress. It was called a Himmelsbrief, and had been made for me by my community's Hexenmeister, a petition to God on my behalf. But any symbol of divine power behaved in the same way, the way that crucifixes and holy water did. God, in whatever guise he chose, did have some power over these creatures.
The vampire reached for Alex with an expression of longing.
"Food," it whispered, with a nearly palpable sorrow.
But its hands were stilled just above the ankh burned on Alex's chest. It was as if this was an invisible barrier it could not cross. The vampire froze in puzzlement, and I could almost imagine that some thoughts still rattled around its head as it had learned what was safe to eat and what was poisonous.
"Not food," Alex responded. There was a subtle jerk at his elbow, and the flash of a silver knife plunged between the vampire's ribs. The creature clawed, scratching at the edge of the ankh. I could hear the sizzle of his flesh, a sound like bacon frying. Black blood flowed over Alex's wrist. He shoved the vampire down to the grass, and I could see his knife slashing, the black droplets of vampire blood clinging to the tips of the grass stalks like dew. I was still mystified by it, by its lack of redness, by its soft, inklike consistency. It smelled like iron, though, which was enough to tell what they had once been. Alex speculated that iron oxidized in their blood, darkening it.
That black blood was on my wrist. I smeared it against my skirt as Alex's fingers wound around my hand. "We've got to go. There will be more."
I nodded. This was no time to contemplate biology or humanity. This was time to act, to move. To survive.
We ran, hand in sticky hand, sliding through the grass like ghosts.
I could see the bright helmet of Ginger's hair and the stark white figure of the horse far before us. We'd given them a head start, which was good-Alex and I had the only really effective weapons against the vampires. Alex had his tattoos and I had the Himmelsbrief. They were more of a deterrent, Alex said, like spraying mace at a perpetrator. The startlement they created sometimes gave us enough opening to run away. Or kill.
"Where are we going?" I asked, casting my gaze about the dark landscape. It was suicide to be out in the open like this. "We can't fight until daylight."
He shook his head, mouth pressed in a flat line. "I don't know. The sign said that there was a church back there, but all we saw was burned timbers. Useless as shelter, if it was desecrated by the vamps."
"We'll have to find someplace else," I decided, nodding sharply to myself.
"How do you feel about sleeping in trees?" His face split open in a lopsided grin, his teeth white in the darkness. There were some at the horizon we could possibly reach, but none in the field.
"I'm quite sure the vampires can climb trees."
"Maybe not if we set fire at the roots . . . they don't like fire."
I made a face. "I don't much fancy the idea of being roasted alive in a tree."
"Reminds me of a movie, The Wicker Man . . ." he began.
I glanced at him blankly. I had never seen a movie.
"Never mind, then. I'll tell you later."
Ginger's horse was climbing a slope ahead of us. This part of the meadow wasn't cultivated, and the grass and weeds swelled over this rill in the earth, perhaps five feet tall, stretching east to west.
My skin prickled. In the far distance, I could see more glowing eyes gathering. They had heard us. They smelled blood. I pulled at Alex's sleeve and pointed.
Ginger had reached the top of the hillock. She was panting, and her glasses slid down over her nose. She was dressed as an Amish woman, but she was not one of my people. She was an Englisher, like Alex. She was an old friend of my family who had lost everything: her husband, her children. And she was the only part of my old life I had left. I clung to her.
The horse stared to the south. His ears flattened, and his eyes dilated black as obsidian. His nostrils flared, and his tail swished back and forth. He pawed the earth, pacing nervously. I had found him back on Amish land with an empty saddle, smeared in blood and with his former rider's boot still in the stirrup. We had discovered that the horse had a sixth sense about the vampires. Perhaps he could sense them the way dogs could sense earthquakes. Or perhaps he was merely a nervous horse and vampires were everywhere.
Alex had named him Horus, after an Egyptian god of the sky who defeated evil. Ginger and I just called him Horace.
"They're out there," Ginger said, staring out at the dark and patting Horace's sides soothingly.
"Ja. They're coming." I climbed up the hill, gazing at the flattened trail of grasses we'd left.
Alex scrambled to the top of the hill. Ginger and I made to rush down the slope on the other side, but he said: "Wait."
I looked up at him, my brows drawing together. "What do you mean?"
Alex shook his head. He squatted, and squinted to the beginning and the end of the strangely squiggling formation of land.
"Alex. We've got to go." Now it was me urging him on.