Nothing.
There was no longer pain. There was no longer fear. There was no longer any voice in his head, his or otherwise. All that remained, timeless, without beginning or end, was the bitter cold. Had Marcus been able to think anything, he might have wondered if this was what death was supposed to be like. Both infinite and reduced to a singular point. There could be no longing. There could be no regret. There could be no Marcus.
But then, in an instant, there was.
The needle was replaced on his record of consciousness. Time began to move. The chill that had become reality itself redacted down to just the being that pinpointed himself as Marcus. Then it rushed out from him, rejecting him as he had rejected it. Consciousness came back to him instantaneously, but knowledge of the world was more gradual. He was Marcus, wasn’t he? He skipped against the lake of his own memory like a flat stone. It all seemed distant. Every memory felt like something that had happened to someone else. He felt empathy for that person, even a deep kinship with him, but more akin to the feelings one has towards his child rather than himself. A realization dawned on him: he was the worm in his own brain.
And then he wasn’t.
He was himself again, and this affection his wormself had felt for him was traded for confusion and distrust. He knew what had happened. For the second time in a single night he had been killed, and for the second time he had come back. Marcus wondered how many times that would have to happen before it finally took. If it would ever take. Maybe it would only take for his original self, and then it would just be the worm. Forever.
He could feel something rough and fibrous constricting his arms and legs into an uncomfortable kneeling position. He could hear vague noises that were barely recognizable, but distantly he considered that they might be words. He could sense the rough, dull ache of the wound in his chest receding, his blood burning as it cauterized the opening. In his mouth he tasted something sweet and warm lingering on his tongue. It was like heated and condensed milk. The worm told him that it was blood. That made him want to spit it out. But his body was too lethargic to even manage that. It took tremendous effort to just open his eyelids, allowing the details of the scene before him to fill out.
There was the woman who had stabbed him standing above him. Josephine. She held the spike she had stabbed him with coated in sizzling and dripping blood. It seemed that she and her protege had moved him somewhere else, somewhere with dirt floors and red brick walls. He was tied to a wooden post like a shanghaied captive to the mast. The worm in his brain was rattling off insults at her: murderer, disgusting half-blood, sycophantic rat, gluttonous maggot, etc. Marcus tried to be a bit more open minded.
“You will feel control return to your body slowly,” Josephine’s voice was as authoritative as her pose, “you will answer me with blinks, one for yes, two for no, until I tell you to speak, do you understand?”
Strenuously, Marcus shut his eyes before prying them open again.
“You use the name Marcus, correct?”
Again he blinked sharply. She had looked through his phone.
“You know that your soul has been tainted, yes?”
Marcus did not believe in souls, but he blinked for convenience's sake.
“Do you know where you are?”
Marcus blinked twice, it was getting easier now.
“Hmm. The fact that you’re able to move at all means that you’re a full vampyre. At the same time, your imbecilic behavior inclines me to think you’ve either been incredibly sheltered or you really are freshly turned. I’m not able to determine your bloodline from my rudimentary examination, but I can compare blood samples if need be. Were you recently made?”
One blink. She nodded. He did not like the phrasing she used, like he was some homunculus grown in a beaker. He didn’t like what he’d been made either, but he was still a person.
“Okay, ‘Marcus,’ you may speak now.” She gestured at him with the spike still coated in his blood, simultaneously belittling him and indicating that she could stab again at her discretion, “we can make this process easier for both of us if you just tell me which coven you belong to. So get to it.”
“I don’t belong to any ‘coven.’”
“So you’re unaffiliated? Well, that does make this easier for me.” She wore a terrible, shit-eating grin, “what bloodline are you from?”
“As far as I know, I’m mostly scots-irish.”
“Haha, funny,” she kicked him square in the ribs. “This little bloodsucking bitch thinks she’s a comedian. Well, let’s keep the jokes to the minimum, unless you want some more nap time.”
“Pah… fuck you!” The kick in his wound hurt, but it was her words that were turning him over to the worm’s point of view, “I don’t know what my ‘bloodline’ or any of this insane bullshit is! I have no clue how long I’ve been here, but from my perspective, less than 24 hours ago I was just a normal fucking person who wanted to hang out with his fucking friends. I was trying to ask for some goddamn help when you stabbed me!”
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” She feigned shock, stifling a gasp with her fingers, “yeah, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know it doesn’t work like that. You’re either sponsored by a coven or you get scooped up by one of the unaffiliated psychos. Full vampyres aren’t made with a wrong turn through a dark alley. Maybe this is your first time encountering a real hunter, but we understand the seal just as well as you do.”
“The seal?”
“Ugh, you stupid little pest, I thought you were gonna make this easy for us!” She gritted her teeth, which seemed to coincide with the sudden appearance of a few tendrils in his field of vision, “The fucking seal! You know what it is! It’s been around since before recorded history, put in place by the first hunters. This ringing any bells? You know, I should charge you tuition for making me teach an impromptu 101 class, but I’d be too wracked with guilt over whomever you killed to get the money.”
“Just humor me on this, okay?” Marcus couldn’t think of a teacher he had ever encountered who was as unpleasant as this one. “You tell me what the seal is, and I will explain to you exactly what happened to me.”
“We’re really doing this?” She took off her glasses and wiped them on her shirt, “you know, if you weren’t so clearly incompetent, I’d suspect you of stalling for time. Fine, though, I’ll explain it to you like you’re one of those trust fund kids:
“A long, long time ago, when humanity was still confined to the Savannah, something appeared on earth that infected living organisms and gave them a taste for the blood of their own kind, thus creating the first vampyres. There are many theories as to what that something was, the tradition of my family, the Helsins, says that it was Lucifer seeking to pervert God’s creation in his own image, but some have suggested that a frozen comet struck the earth and set loose an alien bacteria. Regardless of which theory is correct, we know that the disease that resulted was particularly common to human females. Since there were no convenient castles or coffins for them to hole up in, the ones who could not find their own cave to claim would have to bury themself in the earth before dawn. Each night, men noticed that more and more of their wives and daughters would disappear with the appearance of the morning sun, while their brothers and sons simply vanished altogether. When they found their spears unable to pierce the hides of the monsters, they beseeched their remaining women to protect their purity. These women created the seal to secure their own souls, then searching out the makeshift shelters of their fallen sisters and exposing them to the sun.
"For some amount of time, though we don’t know how long, humanity was safe from all but the few stragglers that remained from the original crop, and they were unable to corrupt anyone else to their pathetic state. However, the seal was imperfect, beginning with pseudo-vampyres, familiars, and other broken things that lacked the nigh-invulnerability of their creators. Hunters rallied again, now with man-made tools that could destroy the failed children until they found the mother and tore out her heart. Then, they discovered that the seal weakened in cycles of hundreds of years, allowing full vampyres to reproduce themselves. If they timed it right, to the witching hour of a specific night, then a new, true vampyre could be born. The covens formed in order to track these cycles and preserve their lineages, but when they discovered that the spots were limited, they began to war with each other for the right to expand their ranks. In their hubris, they failed to pay attention to the hunters as we continued to do as we always have: develop new tools to subdue and destroy them. We ended the lion’s share of the eldest covens. When the modern age came, the remaining covens found the shadows no longer a perfect safe haven, so they swallowed their pride and formed uneasy truces with us to protect themselves from less known enemies. Since then, we hunters have focused on the rogue and unaffiliated for the sake of peace and ‘normality.’
“So there, I hope that’ll help you cram for the big test. The last sabbath was 24 years back, so I know for a fact that you weren’t turned two nights ago. So, now that I have indulged you, why don’t you be a dear and really try to convince me that I’m wrong, and we’ll just see if I don’t decide to decapitate you afterward.”
Well then. Marcus tried his best to quickly process the information that he had bargained his way into. It felt, well, strange. For most of his life, Marcus just accepted the fact that there were certain things about himself that he couldn’t really talk about. The fact that he could tell when something bad was going to happen, that he didn’t like being seen as somebody’s daughter, that he always felt like the world was hostile to him. It was all just part of how he navigated the world. Except now, he was stuck in uncharted waters, and he could no longer tell the sea from the sky. So there were vampires, and vampire hunters, and magic rituals, and psychic powers, and secret covens. Fine. There was also a worm in his brain that spoke to him, and none of what she’d said explained that. By the way, what did the worm think about this? Lies and half-truths. Guess that was the usual prescription, huh? Irrespective of the truth, Marcus at least knew what his captor thought was going on. If he was going to get out of this situation and figure out what to do next, then his best bet was to cooperate for the time being.
Marcus began to recount the events of the last night he saw his friends. He stuck close to the details as he remembered them, but omitted information of his prior clairvoyance. That was more for the interest of convenience than any strategic benefit. Getting into that would just be another blind alley that he had never once seen the other side of. He told her about how the four of them had been friends for about two years, and until they had entered that library together vampires were just a stock halloween costume… for most of them. He had known something was wrong, but not enough to stop it, and when he finally saw Laura he knew it was too late to try. He talked about the mist, the tendrils, the way she puppeteered them into cutting themselves and drinking blood while she recited some metaphysical nonsense. He then finished by saying he woke up in the arms of the angel with no clue as to where he was. The worm was one other thing he decided to keep to himself. Even if it proved itself practically useless, he didn’t wanna come off as more of a threat than he already did.
“Mhm, I see.” Josephine wiped off the spike with a brown cloth before finally returning it to its scabbard, “I’ll give you one thing, I wasn’t expecting a story that elaborate. This girl, Laura, who by all indications should be an initiate, went out of her way to turn three of her friends into full vampyres? Excuse me if I’m still somewhat incredulous. Humor me this time: what’s her full name?”
“Laura Borgosi, eck-” Marcus was getting a charley horse, “I don't know if she has a middle name.”
“Thanks, sweetheart.” She sneered and typed something into her phone, “I need to step out for a second to speak with someone. I’d rather not have to go through the whole rigmarole of staking you again and then finding some blood to wake you up with, so I’m just gonna leave you here. Don’t try to take advantage of my kindness, or else there won’t be any more questions.”
He turned his head to watch her leave, but once she got far enough behind the pillar he could only hear the sound of her unlocking the door before leaving. Marcus was alone again, now in a dingy room that looked like a repurposed wine cellar. There were actually traces of that acrid wine smell still floating around him… alongside less pleasant odors. He did not want to know what they were. Rather, he was interested in discovering a way out of here. Pulling against his restraints, there was little-to-no slack to work with. It wasn’t like he was Harry Houdini anyway. He knew he could do the floating thing, but would that help at all here? Presumably no. He couldn’t see any benefit to sliding up and down the post. What else could he do? He healed fast, so he could break the bones in one of his hands until he was able to slip it free. It was an unpleasant option, to be sure. At the same time, he didn’t have to be psychic to know things weren’t gonna get better if he stayed put. There had to be something else he could try. Laser eyes? Really, it’d be pretty great to have laser eyes right now.
Okay. He could kinda grasp the basic mechanics of the floating thing, even if he didn’t understand it. He would try imagining something else. A big bowie knife sawing into the rope! Yeah, he could feel the leather in his grip, the steel slowly severing his bonds fiber by fiber! It was- it was not happening. Fuck. What had worked last time? He had imagined a bunch of water flooding a room that he already knew was not watertight. Maybe he had to visualize a change related to the specific environment. What did he know about this environment? Brick walls, dirt floor, wine smell, a single light hanging from a chain. He closed his eyes and imagined the light short-circuiting, then catching the pillar on fire. Bzzzt. There was a sensation like pop rocks crackling on his tongue. Yes, something was happening! When he opened his eyes he found the room in black-and-white, indicating that something had happened, but that the now burnt out light bulb had not exploded. Welp. That was certainly fun. It didn’t get him any closer to escaping.
Psst. Hm? He should close his eyes again. Ah, so someone was finally speaking up. His eyes were shut. So what’s the idea? Slip into the darkness. So simple, why didn’t he think of that! Had he ever had an out-of-body experience before? No, not unless being dead counts. It was close enough. He had to try and remember what it felt like being weightless, to be sans physical form. ‘Kay. He had to let go of his kinesthetic senses. Let go of the ability to orient his body in space. Let go of a form to balance with shifting fluids. Let go of skin to feel the world pressing itself upon him. He was a mind that could perceive and change with his environment, while his body was simply a vessel that he could gather or disperse at will. Marcus felt nothing. He neither felt the tightness of the rope, its rough-hewn texture, nor did he feel the pain of his straining muscles. But he was still there.
He opened his eyes and he saw the room as a diorama, a stage with an empty rope tied in knots around an abandoned column. With a blink he could change the surface that was his perch, achieving a perfect composite through the mind's-eye that, at the moment, was his only remaining eye. He spied the gap beneath the steel door and squeezed through it into the hallway beyond. The hallway was short with only two other doors: one that led to the boiler and another that led to a spare classroom. He moved up the stairs and through another door, discovering another sector with tall windows that revealed the midday sun. He was unable to move past their barrier, but he was able to observe the abandoned campus outside, where a gander gathered around the central fountain. It was a nice view, though still discomforting that he couldn’t get any closer. He wondered if he could just stay here until the sun set and then travel through the shadows back to Saperavi.
That would not be in his best interests for two reasons: first, Josephine would return any minute and notice that he had escaped, thus being anywhere near the interrogation room was putting him in greater danger; second, the longer he stays without a body, the harder it will be for him to remember what it feels like to have one. Hmm, did he really want to keep his body? …yeah. Even if it felt wrong, not like him, he’d soon miss being able to do things and he wouldn’t have any way to oppose Laura. So, that meant that he had to find a place to emerge within the building where he could hide out until dusk. It was summer, so that meant an abundance of abandoned rooms to hide within the university building, but, at the same time, it also meant more hours of daylight for Josephine and her friends to hunt him down. Maybe he could dip back into the shadows if he heard them coming? That seemed like a decent plan, but he also didn’t really know what he was up against. These were vampire hunters. He was a vampire. They could easily have portable, high-powered spotlights to flush him out.
Rather than fret over it any more, Marcus rapidly surveyed every room he could think of within the entire building. Empty classrooms, professor’s offices, custodial closets, bathrooms. At one point, he discovered the room where Josephine had gone by listening through the door, and he heard her say something to another woman. Although tempted to slip in and eavesdrop further, he decided against it. They could have a way to detect him in this state, afterall. Eventually, he settled on a lecture hall on the third floor, which was far from where he had been held captive, full of seats to hide under, and big enough for him to have time to react if someone entered the room. Picking a spot on the right side of the room in the third row, he willed his body to return. It was like trying to pull himself up through molasses, but gradually he started to remember the oft neglected sensations of embodiment. No longer could he blink from one place to another, he was fixed to a singular point in space until he regained the means to ambulate through physical locomotion.
The tips of his fingers manifested first, standing straight up until he found his joints and was able to grip onto the surface of the floor. His scalp, forehead, brow ridge, and eyes all rose up next. It felt like he was pulling himself out of the deep end of a pool that had no ladder. Except, again, he wasn’t wet. There looked to be little violet ripples flowing out from where his body arose. As his shoulders took shape, he had to imagine that he must’ve been experiencing what it felt like to be 3D printed from the top-down. Did he preserve the cells of his body and fibers of his clothes somewhere, or were these newly created? It made him think of the transporters from Star Trek. Your original body vaporized and a new one was constructed somewhere else, possessing the same memories and, supposedly, the same consciousness. In a sense, he was really just experiencing different variations of that over and over again. Did that make him Theseus, or Theseus’ boat?
“-into suicide, bwah ha ha.”
Music abruptly blared into the room as Marcus bent his half-formed torso towards the noise. It was that student who had been with Josephine! He had opened the door of a closet from the inside-out that Marcus had neglected to check. Goddamnit! Marcus had just assumed it was a space for the projector equipment and other A/V stuff, not somewhere a person could fit. Ian was less formally dressed today, wearing an open flannel over a green t-shirt, sweatpants, and the same messenger bag he had carried before. Marcus ducked himself forward behind a bolted desk, peeking under the armrest to watch as Ian stretched his arms above his head and yawned. Guess he’d been sitting in the closet doing… something? It was fairly dark in here, though not enough for his night vision to kick in, so it was possible that Ian hadn’t seen him. If he could just sink back down and-
“Hey!”
Ian stood at attention and ran over to the steps near Marcus’ aisle. Why was he so inept at hiding?! This was bad, but he could recollect himself if he just reversed his body’s trajectory back into the safety of the shadows. He closed his eyes and tried desperately to forget his physical form again… No, it wasn’t working! The stress of the situation was too much. It was very apparent that he was stuck there, and he didn’t have enough time to calm himself down and achieve any meditative state. He felt Ian grab onto his arm and start pulling him up. Marcus opened his eyes and, inexplicably, his body was reforming faster. Unable to wrest his arm away, the rest of his body sprung from the floor like an uprooted turnip and Marcus fell flat on his face in front of Ian.
“Uuh,” he groaned more from exasperation than pain.
“Sorry,” Ian crouched down on his knees, “I didn’t want you to disappear.”
“What?”
“I didn’t get to talk to you the first time,” Ian scratched his left elbow with his right hand, “thanks to Dr. Helsin.”
“You aren’t scared of me?” Marcus sat on his knees to look Ian in the eye, “you don’t want to kill me?”
“No, not really. I find you fascinating. But, wait, I do have something I need to ask you,” he opened up his bag and reached around in it for a few moments until he pulled out a crumpled slip of paper, “could you tell me what this says?”
Ian handed the slip over to Marcus. On one side it looked like normal, if yellowed, college-ruled notebook paper. On the other side, there were two symbols that he didn’t recognize. They looked to be written in heavy, dark ink with neat lines and curves. But, the longer he looked at any individual symbol, the less he could be sure on how the shapes connected. Dots expanded and contracted as if they were breathing. The spine of one letter seemed to break in half and then reform itself. Arches snaked and coiled tight before springing back. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it… and, yet, it felt like it should have meant something to him.
“Here,” Ian took the paper back from Marcus and presented it to him vertically, “I think it’s supposed to be read like this.”
The letters still shifted around, but now it felt like he could grasp them. He didn’t know what any of them were individually, or what they were supposed to sound like, but the word as a whole did communicate something to him. Witchscript. That’s what the worm called it. The meaning solidified into a familiar English term.
“It says ‘brother,’” Marcus looked over the paper at Ian, “does that help?”
“Hmm, yeah.” He examined the paper for a few moments, seemingly deep in thought, before replacing it in his bag, “I already knew what it said, but, I guess I just wanted to confirm it.”
“You can’t read it?”
“Nah, most humans can’t,” Ian rose before sitting in one of the desk chairs, “some field hunters pick up some of it, but it’s just squiggles to me. Your kind usually have to be taught it by their coven, but I guess you just have a natural affinity.”
That or a talkative babel fish.
“Well, since I translated for you, do you think you could not tell anyone that I’m here?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Ian watched Marcus stand up in front of him, “it’s not like you’ve attacked me or anything.”
“Your professor didn’t see it that way.”
“She comes from a legacy family, they’re all like that.” He adjusted his glasses, “they think you should be afraid of them or preferably dead. While everyone who isn’t a legacy is just ignorant cattle.”
“Why are you here if they’re so terrible?”
“I have my own reasons.” He sighed, “one of them is that I can’t study vampires otherwise.”
Marcus wasn’t sure he could trust anyone anymore, but if there was going to be a candidate, Ian was a pretty good prospect. He was sober and rational. Moreover, he actually treated Marcus like a person. Even the worm didn’t seem to mind him. The question was: how far out on a limb would he be willing to go for someone he just met?
“This is probably too much to ask, but,” Marcus closed his eyes and took a deep breath, “could you help me get out of here and back to Saperavi? I need to go back and try to stop what’s happening.”
“Sure,” he lifted his arms nonchalantly, “on one condition.”
“What is it?”
“You turn me once we get there.”