At Death's Door (Wraith's Rebellion Book 1) Read online

  Are not that numerous, and not as violent has you believe.

  The reason why you have these things is because generations before you fought and clawed their way through the muck. They worked hard and did what was necessary to survive.

  Even if it meant sitting across from a hipster neckbeard, to make your rent payments.

  I never said hipster neckbeard!

  You thought it. I’ve had over a thousand years to study body language. Psychic powers are for the lazy. Your body will tell me all I need to know.

  And you don’t have a neckbeard.

  The blush is endearing, I must admit.

  Standardized question, I have to ask: when were you born?

  Five thirty-seven common era.

  I think.

  My story begins in early five forty-two.

  My father was of Roman descent. I understood that my mother was not like others around us. Most were descendants of the great Roman Empire, and we were living in the dying remains, pretending we were great patriots carrying on millennia of tradition and history.

  Other than knowing that my father shared that blood, I know little of him. I cannot recall the shape of his face. I suppose I must share some part of him, but I could not tell you what.

  My mother was an outsider, however. I never learned where she came from. My skin colour is from her.

  Skin colour?

  This is not a tan.

  Oh.

  Again, with the blush. I would have thought one with that lovely olive complexion would have recognized the difference between tan and genuine pigmentation. After all, I can’t exactly sunbathe, but we’ll come to that later.

  My mother had the darker skin colour. Not a great deal darker, but perhaps Persian in origin. She had even changed her name upon marrying my father, to remain hidden.

  So much easier to disappear in those days.

  Her eyes were an incredible green colour. A shock for a village full of brown eyed men and women. Had she been beautiful, a lord or shopkeeper might have claimed her as a wife instead of a humble farmer.

  She was not blessed with looks at all. Even that, I grew up knowing. Her nose was too large to be considered beautiful, her chin too pointed. She had burn scarring on her neck and part of her face thanks to a fire in her childhood home.

  They were probably raided. The village was likely pillaged and razed to the ground, then some of the people sold as slaves. The rest would have either rebuilt on the remains or moved to a new area. That cycle would continue for hundreds of years.

  Seeing how my father loved my mother had a profound effect on myself and my brothers. Perhaps on my sisters as well.

  Those old enough to seek out lovers did not choose based on physical beauty. They chose for other reasons. My father taught us that love was not based on physical attraction alone.

  Oh, he called her beautiful and commented on her thick hair and how her eyes drew him in like sirens did sailors. I don’t recall a time when my mother did not blush and look away, embarrassed that her husband would find her attractive.

  But above all else, we learned that the mind behind the eyes was just as important, if not more so. Many physical attributes can be forgiven, let’s say, if one is clever, quick witted, and perhaps just a little sarcastic.

  My little five-year-old self was just coming to awareness. In that year, I looked around me and simply understood these things. They had been present at the time of my birth, after all.

  My first distinct memory was us sitting about the hearth one night. My father was telling a story, a myth whose origin alludes me now. I was playing with a wooden horse that had been made for my eldest brother and passed down through the siblings until it reached me.

  My mother was pregnant, her tenth child.

  She may not have been blessed with looks, but she was very lucky when it came to babes. She had only lost one, three months after birth to something in the middle of the night.

  We were a large, happy family. I could think of no better place to be, nothing that might have made me happier than being there with them. I felt so loved, even though such evenings were rare.

  At that moment, I thought nothing could ever go wrong, that we would be a happy family for all eternity.

  Perhaps I should not have tempted God.

  It was some time later, though I’m not certain how much later, when a man came to the village. He leaned heavily on a scythe and said he was looking for work as a harvester.

  Which was odd, because it was spring, we wouldn’t be harvesting for almost a whole year.

  The man spoke with my father, my eldest brother at his side. I watched from the door of our home as this stranger said things which I didn’t quite hear from that distance. He had a very strange accent, but then anyone from outside the village sounded odd to me at that time in my life.

  I heard my father explain to the man that it was the wrong season for reaping, that he should come back in the fall and we might find work for him.

  He leaned heavily on that scythe of his, seeming to grow weaker by the moment.

  My mother approached them and suggested that the man spend a night at least. She surmised that he was obviously in need of food and rest. The man said he had no way of paying us, having no coin, and my mother refused any payment.

  He was not the first man that my village took in, but he was the first that my parents took in. So, I had seen strangers in the past, but always from a distance, never up close. We were generous with them but kept them away from the children.

  The man would spend the night with us, in our home. It might have been the second most exciting thing in my life, outside of the smith’s new home.

  I quite eagerly rushed out to them and offered to help. The man offered me the scythe, and I dropped it, for it was too heavy for my little frame. My father thought it funny and picked up the scythe...

  Are you all right?

  Fine. Just thinking of a million regrets.

  Was this man important?

  Mortals are so impatient. Shut up, and let me tell my story.

  Then stop pausing, we mortals see that as a moment to ask for more information.

  We immortals hesitate to try to remember. There is a lot inside this mind of mine. So many memories, too many things to keep separate all the time.

  We come together sometimes and tell each other the tales of before we turned. To keep them in our minds, and to keep the right order of things. Some things after I was turned are lost. Most especially, the fifty or so years after I was cast out by my Maker.

  But we will get to that in due time.

  My father carried the scythe to our home and set it against the outside wall, just beside the door. No one would try to remove the tool from beside the house. We had better tools anyhow.

  He showed the man a spot in front of the hearth, and my mother brought him some food.

  I sat at the stranger’s feet as he ate the olives and a bit of fish that had been left over from breakfast. As I stared up at him, he glanced at me.

  “Want to hear a story, boy?” he asked.

  As a young boy, having a stranger address me made me want to run and hide my face behind my mother’s skirts. Children didn’t speak to strangers who drifted into the village. If we did see strangers approaching, we were to run and find an adult immediately. Then we were to find the next adult, and the next.

  The area was relatively peaceful, but even a single stranger could cause disaster to our home. Many times, if one were ill, one would be ousted from one’s home. Any disability could end in one being booted from a village if one took a turn for the worst.

  It was up to the adults to decide whether a stranger would be allowed to stay in the village over night. Until that decision was made, we were to behave as if the stranger were a demon come to snatch us away.

  Was kidnapping a problem back then?

  I have no idea. I don’t remember, but I do remember my mother and father telling us that if we saw a stranger,
we might be snatched away. Strangers can do a lot worse than just snatch you away, however.

  This stranger was deemed harmless enough. He could barely stand on his own two feet, and he was never left alone with me.

  Without a doubt, the man had suffered some illness. The marks of it were on his face, across his body as well. Indentations in the skin, little craters in asymmetrical shapes spread across his cheeks and speckled across his forehead. The sight of it scared me because it was not normal.

  I knew what a scar looked like, and the marks on his face were nothing like the scars I had been shown by retired military men and recovering farm hands.

  My mother was unphased by the man’s scars. She even offered to help him bathe. She provided a new set of clothing. He accepted both gratefully.

  I followed them along, watching my mother tend to the stranger as she might her children. Which means I saw the rest of the man’s body, though a naked man was hardly something to gossip about.

  I will say that the scars were not just on his face. They were on his back and all over. There were other scars as well, ones that I didn’t understand at the time, but I believe they were done on purpose. A sun and a moon had been carved into the man’s skin.

  He had no tattoos and hardly any flesh on him. There were no open sores or necrotic tissue. No reason for his being weak. Besides the scarring, the man was relatively untouched by the world, which seemed an odd thing. Typically, with a sick body one expects a smell or a pustule.

  They hardly spoke a word to one another as my mother helped him undress. The pair moved in silence until my mother raised a question.

  “How long have you borne the marks?” she asked in her quiet manner.

  “Most of my life,” was his response.

  His voice was gravelly, like many pebbles sliding over one another under the weight of a horse. He spoke in short sentences, sometimes only in half-thoughts. We filled the rest in, knowing what he meant, or deciding to fill in the blanks with what we thought was going on.

  That was as far into his past that my mother pressed. She didn’t ask him where he had come from or where he would go the next day. I doubt he would have given her an answer.

  To her, it didn’t matter that this man might have been a thief or a murderer. He was in need of help, and we had plenty to fill our bellies. Therefore, we had enough to share so that another might not go hungry.

  He may have been provided with an older set of my father’s clothing, but he was happy for the outfit. The items were little better than what he had been wearing before, but they were clean. I think to him that was all that mattered.

  Over dinner, my father and the man discussed the city. We learned a little of current events.

  My brothers asked after the chariot races. They liked to follow the sport even though the information might be weeks or even months old before they heard it. To them, it was still new, something outside of farming for them to be distracted by.

  One of my sisters asked after the fashions in the city, though she was only a young girl. I think she wished to appear more grown up to the visitor. She had no idea what lace or silk was, yet she nodded humbly along as if taking it all in. I cannot recall the look that was described to her, for I was still distracted by the man’s face. My father reproached me several times, touching my arm to remind me not to stare.

  I would look away for a time, pushing my food around rather than eating it. Then continue to stare boldly at the man.

  For his part, he seemed completely unphased by this boy gawking at him. I could have been a potato on that chair, for all the attention he gave me.

  My father, about the time the stranger was answering a question on the fashion of the nobles, smacked me hard on the arm for staring. I put my eyes on my plate and dared not meet the man’s eyes again.

  The rest of my family were much more polite. Their eyes only rested on the man’s face when he spoke directly to them. Otherwise, they looked over his shoulder or whispered to one another.

  To put it plainly: they did not stare.

  I risked several glances, but not at the man’s face. Instead, I looked at his plate. The dish was still almost half full when the rest of us were about to clear ours. He made motions as if he were eating, but slipped the food away somehow. It was hard to catch, but I was certain of what he was doing.

  When I turned to my father and opened my mouth to tell him about the naughty thing that the stranger was doing, he shook his head gravely.

  I suppose to him the stranger was slipping food away to take on the road with him. It may have been an insult to bring up the action. A wound to the man’s pride. He was trying to prepare for a future where food was uncertain, while at the same time attempting not to insult his hosts by doing so blatantly.

  My father was not slow in the least. He was considered quite intelligent.

  Others would often stop and ask his opinion on crop rotation, or the coming year. He would answer with all the gravity that he held during major decisions in our home. The one who asked the question would thank him and move on.

  He would have known what the man was up to, and had the choice of calling him out on it. He decided not to comment.

  Was your father a community leader?

  I’ve never thought of it that way. The others did not give him a special title, nor did he receive preferential treatment. They simply trusted in his wisdom.

  I suppose in many ways that made him a leader whether he claimed to be one or not.

  There was no council or lord of the village. At least, not that I recall. We simply did things the way they had always been done, and everything worked out, just as it always had.

  We should have questioned. We should have been more suspicious.

  Strangers always bring danger.

  The gut instinct of mortals to push strangers away has saved more than one life, and for good reason. Stranger danger, I believe it was called when you were a child. That has been true throughout history.

  Except children are more likely to be hurt by someone they know, rather than a stranger.

  It’s more difficult in this world, especially in the first world countries, to get away with so much as littering without someone seeing. Imagine kidnapping a strange child! The biting, scratching, screaming, not to mention what the child does to you as you try to get away. Or the police once they pull the mother off you.

  You sound like you’re talking from experience there.

  Another time perhaps.

  Oh, don’t look at me like that. A vampire has to eat. Coffee and rocks disguised as biscotti do not provide the necessary substance I need to survive.

  But, a child?

  I said another time.

  ...Okay.

  You don’t have mace in your purse. It would also be ineffective against me.

  Where was I?

  Your father being a leader of the community.

  Right. Which led back to the dinner with the stranger.

  I said nothing about him taking food because my father cast me such a look. When dinner ended, the children cleared the table as my father took the man to the hearth and other things were spoken of. Things that I didn’t understand at the time, but did make my brothers uncomfortable.

  What they spoke about were names and places, dates even.

  War.

  My brothers might have been used in that war, was why they were upset. To my little mind at the time, I thought very little of it. Adult talk that had nothing to do with me, could not touch me.

  That life of ours was still forever and ever. I would always be the littlest. I would always be in my mother’s skirts. Nothing could change that, not war, not even the stranger.

  The next day he would leave and things would return to normal. Forever and ever would return.

  Eventually, I was sent to bed, though I only pretended to sleep. The adults talked about adult things at great length as I tried only to pretend. The day had held a great deal of excitement and had worn me o
ut. I believe I did slip into sleep a few times, snapping out of it at the rise or fall of their voices.

  Snippets of things reached me, though I recognized little of what was said.

  I only know what they were speaking about because of years later. Learning second hand about just how close such a thing was to my home was surprising.

  What I did catch was talk of sickness. Only a rumour, no confirmed sightings. The man had been turned away from several villages who had been taken by disease.

  The two of them paused in their talk. I am almost certain that they were glancing about to see if anyone was paying attention to them. Their voices lowered, and I had to strain to hear over the crackle of the fire.

  The villagers had thrown stones at the man when he approached. They had tried to scare him off, not that it took much to convince him after being told there was illness there.

  A being in a black robe had been spotted around the villages shortly before the sickness appeared.

  He carried a scythe and wore a mask all of white, cracked through with black they said.

  The reaper, Death.

  They claimed the man had been the robed figure that had been spotted loitering around the village. The man had had no safe place to put his head on many nights because villagers had threatened him at every turn.

  “I’m surprised you’ve not heard all about it,” the stranger said, voice raising ever so slightly.

  I believe no news had come from other villages of late. That part is foggy. I may have just created that image or overlaid a memory from the winter previous.

  No one had need to go to another village. Sometimes people visited our village to see the smith, but most families stayed in the area. Once or twice a year one might visit another village.

  As they spoke, my little world got a little bigger. I had known about the city, but I had believed that it was the village and the city, and that was the whole world. Nothing existed outside of that.

  But to learn that there were many villages, just like mine, between me and the city was eye opening and terrifying all at once. There were many forever and evers, many little boys just like me with mothers and fathers just like my mother and father. And they all lived in houses just like mine.