A Vampire Story

Captain Marks awoke the following evening from a terrible dream.  It was six hundred years prior, he was at sea, a cabin boy on his first sailing vessel.  His parents, like himself almost a lifetime later, had been taken by servants of the Nine as food.  By the time he had been taken, he had been captain of his own ship for twenty years.   That had made him valuable.  His parents hadn’t been so lucky.  He could see over and over again in his mind the unspeakable horror that they must have endured, being bled out.  Being passed around as food at a Council feast.  The groping hands.  The constant and repetitive bites.  At the neck, wrists, upper thighs where the veins ran down the legs.  Their screams the symphony that had entertained the masses assembled at the gathering.  Much like his own experience had been.  But he had been lucky, where his parents had not.  His father was a simple cobbler.  His mother, a barren housewife who couldn’t have children after her first pregnancy.  Captain Marks climbed from his hammock as the last of these images faded from his now conscious mind.  He looked around his sparse cabin, the few things that he had kept as mementos throughout history adorned the walls.  An oil portrait of the infamous pirate Black Beard, whom he had contracted to do certain jobs for the Council.  His old cutlass from the days when such weapons were a sailor’s means of survival on the high seas.  A small glass display case with several Spanish pieces of eight, all in mint condition, all from his personal treasury from years past.   He stepped into his boots, black, and made from well oiled heavy leather and began to lace them.  Captain Marks pulled on a heavy wool sweater on his way to the bridge, where he knew that it couldn’t have been more than a few brief moments past sunset.  He reached for the knob and pushed open the door.  As he stepped through and onto the bridge, he noticed there was no one there.  Before Captain Marks had managed to pull the door closed behind him, he heard a whooshing sound from off to his right.  He wheeled towards the sound, in time to see his First Mate, the man who piloted the ship during the daylight hours, swinging a large wrench at his face.  Captain Marks raised his hands to ward off the blow as he tried to drop to the ground, but to no avail.  The wrench caught him full on in the arms and he could feel the bones breaking as it struck.  The wrench pushed his ruined arms into his nose, breaking it as well, and sending him to the floor where he lay, dazed.  He tried to clear the fog from his head, but before he could get his battered body back under his control, he felt something slam through his chest.  Captain Marks tried to cry out, but he could draw no air to scream.  The last thing he saw as his eyes fluttered open was the wrench coming down towards his already smashed face.

Stephan awoke to a thud on the deck almost directly above him.  It was a hard thud, like someone falling.  There was next to no roll to the ship as it cut through the water on it’s third and final day before it reached the Atlantic.  He noticed that Kate was sleeping contentedly on her side, she still had him pinned between her and the wall like she had during the days before.  She was snoring softly, and Stephan watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.  His sensitive ears caught what sounded to him like a struggle of some sort on the deck above.  After the first thud, there was a second, louder, one that reverberated across the ceiling, like something had been used to strike the floor.  Ever so gently, he slid the blankets off of him, and wiggled out from behind Kate.  She stirred slightly as he crawled over top of her and off the bed.  He dressed quickly, pulling on only the pair of jeans that he had worn the night before.  The gun he now kept in the top of his duffel in the closet, still loaded, but he hadn’t thought that he would have a need to carry it until they arrived at their destination.  He went to the closet and fetched it, stuffing it into the front of his jeans then slipping the baldric that held his sword off the hook on the back of the door.  Too many years of being an outlaw had led him to believe that you don’t take chances, especially when it’s you that could end up paying the price for being lax.  As he dropped the baldric over his head and adjusted how the blade rested on his back, Kate stirred.  Stephan looked in her direction, and seeing her eyes open, he motioned her to be silent.  She nodded, choosing to slip from under the covers and fetch her shirt from the floor, where he had tossed it the night before.  Stephan couldn’t help but think of the feel of her naked skin beneath his fingertips as he watched her dress, trying to listen for anything on the deck above.  She really was going to be the death of him yet; he just couldn’t keep his thoughts on what was important if she was around.