She sat up, coughing. Her throat hurt. She'd been coughing for a long time, it seemed to her now.
It was dark. She opened her eyes, but it made little difference. A small patch of light glimmered to her left, so faintly she could almost be imagining it.
She felt a slim, hard sleeping mat below her, and a blanket heaped around her waist and legs, fallen down as she'd sat up. The numbness in her wrists seemed to be the only thing remaining from her dream.
Where am I? What happened...
She shuddered violently, remembering Luke's eyes as he slashed her, cutting her open like a hog, slicing the life from her to spill on the ground, like so much wheat.
I should be dead, she thought. Her hand went to chest, her collarbone, her stomach. When she realized what she was tracing, her breath stopped.
It's where Luke...where it happened. It's a scar. Just a scar...
The scar was well healed. For all she could tell in the dark, it should be five or ten years old, at least. She knew it had not been there yesterday.
Was it yesterday? How long did I drift? Maybe I've been sleeping under a hill with the little people, like the Ripper man...maybe that's why the scar healed.
Then another thought, from the practical,sinister part of her mind, suggested an alternative.
Or maybe Leo made me a...a...
The thought wouldn't complete itself in her mind, but she knew. Oh, she knew. No one healed from a blow like what Luke had done. She should be dead. No fairies had come to rescue her and heal her in some magical underground cavern. Vampires could make others like themselves, she knew from almost all the stories. Sometimes it was called a "gift". They saved your life, and made you into a monster.
She began to weep, as certainty filled her. She had never been very religious, but she knew that there could be no more good in her life, now. She had become an inhuman predator, forced to prey on the innocent mortals in the world.
But I don't feel like a monster.
Aside from the numbness in her wrists and her sore throat, she felt perfectly normal. A little cold, maybe.
Cold? It never gets cold here in summer. Not ever. They said the seasons are fixed now, hot and cold in their proper places...whatever that meant.
She rose to her feet, slowly. Blood rushed in her ears and the world was swallowed by sparkles. She swayed, feeling weaker than she could ever remember. Then the sensation ebbed, slowly, into nothing.
She seemed to be wearing an overlarge shirt. No, more of an...underlarge dress? A smock, maybe? It was strange to her. She knew it was not hers. It smelled faintly of something familiar...
Leo, she thought. Leo smells like that. Funny smell. Not like a man usually smells...I guess I know why.
She reached out, feeling for a wall. There was nothing. A few tentative steps in the direction of her bed, and her hand encountered something...cold. It felt like polished wood, but there were no seams or cracks anywhere as she followed it around the room. And wood shouldn't be that cold.
She came to what had to be a doorway, from the feeling in the air currents around her, pinching off and then flowing again. The wall's surface never changed. She was approaching the faint light, now, but she still had no idea what it was.
She was listening to her breathing, loud and frantic no matter how she tried to be quiet. Her nerves were so keyed up that she expected the first noise or object she encountered to burst her heart.
Instead, she froze at the sound of a throat being cleared.
"Can I get some light, please?" A familiar voice in the darkness, only a few feet away.
Instantly, the room was filled with soft white light, like moonlight, apparently coming from the ceiling itself. She squinted in pain as her pupils adjusted.
Looking up, she found Leo, eyes staring back at her, seated in a strange chair before a strange desk with very strange devices arranged upon it. His hair was white and he seemed shorter and stockier, but it was Leo, she knew. His face was crossed again and again with old, white scars.
My God, she thought. He looks forty years older. I must have slept under the mountain with the Ripper man after all. That could, almost, explain the strangeness all around her, the light from the ceiling, the odd texture of the walls and furnishings, a dull grey without seams or imperfections.
She could not believe it so easily, not when she had already given in to the idea of being an immortal fiend.
"What...happened to..." She seemed unable to add anything more specific to the question.
It seemed that he understood anyway. He smiled with one side of his mouth, in that grim way we had. The smile was familiar from the many days she'd spent in his presence, before her discovery. "If you mean what happened to me, the truth is that this is my real appearance. The Leo you knew was an illusion. People today seem to respect a younger version of me a bit more, and that helps my work.
"If you mean, what happened to your village, they're fine. Sort of. They think they scared me away, and they're celebrating the vanquishing of evil, or whatever. At the same time, they're mourning you and your...fiancee."
"...Luke?", she whispered softly.
"Yes...I'm afraid I've always had a bad temper. When he cut you down like that in a fit of his own stupidity, I...became angry. I don't know if they've been brave enough to come back and bury what was left."
"Luke...Oh, Luke." She could hardly believe it. After all he'd done, she should have felt relief at his death, but instead...she felt hollow inside. She still held love for him, it occurred to her.
Leo's face seemed granite-hard. After a moment of silence, he said simply, "I'm sorry."
He took a short breath, and then continued. "The whole mess could have been avoided, should have been...if only I was more careful. Or just not so damn arrogant. We think of you people as sheep, you know. Sometimes we forget that sheep have teeth, too."
Sheep? Yes, that seemed right. How foolish they had been. She started to say so, but he interrupted her, not noticing her intention.
"And as for what happened to you...as you may have guessed, I 'fixed' you up. I have made you...more than human. Or less. The only way to save your life was to make your blood...something like mine.
"But not," he continued, interrupting her second attempt to cut in, "as you imagine. I have not given you the 'dark gift'. I would not have if I could, but I cannot. Because, you see..."
He stared into her eyes then, and something of a twinkle appeared in his own. His mouth formed the closest thing to a real smile she had ever seen on his face.
"I am not, after all, a vampire."
At that moment, just as confusion rushed back in to her head, swirling to fill its familiar place, the wall behind Leo...changed. There was a shifting, liquid flow which made her eyes ache, and the wall became a window to...someplace else. Someplace not in the room behind the wall. Someplace brightly lit, even more so than the place she was now in.
A man was standing there, in the "window". He seemed tired and sad, and far too thin to be healthy. His face was not as scarred as Leo's, but still had its fair share, more than she had seen on anyone before.
He seemed very, very familiar. Very important.
Leo turned and looked at the screen. If he gave any other signal of attentiveness, Krissa couldn't tell.
"Found something", the thin man said. "Draknese. We need research. You're going to Angelica Prime."
Leo grunted and the man's image vanished with it's window, replaced by dull grey.
Krissa didn't know what to make of such magics, but she remembered seeing the man's face...on a coin.
"Mother of All!", she swore suddenly. "The Harbinger..."
It was too much. It was all too much. Reality had left her for a place where nothing made sense, surrounded by the legendary and the impossible.
"My real name is Big Red", Leo was saying, until he noticed her state. Quick as thought, he moved behind to catch her as she fell, reality denied, swimiming in blackness once more.