* * *
It was only after the death of her lover, the only man whom she had ever known as a woman and the only man who she would ever love for all her long, strange life, that Ashayt pulled away from Amun Sa’s neck and realized what she had done. Feeling slow and disoriented, drugged, she touched her fingers to her lips and held them before her, slicked red with blood. How was it, she wondered, that she could see them so clearly in this dark alley?
Below her thighs, which shook still in pleasure, her lover was no longer thrusting his hips. His chest no longer rose and fell with breath. His eyes stared up and out into the night, vacant and expressionless, and if his face betrayed anything at all of the violence that had been done to him, it was nothing more than the slightest hint of confusion, as if he searched for answers among the stars and found there nothing satisfactory.
Ashayt took in a breath to scream. There was nothing else she could think to do – she had murdered her lover in a dark alleyway in the throes of passion. She was going to scream and scream until her voice died and her lungs burst, until she wept blood, until the Gods themselves relented and, begging her to cease, saw fit to bring Amun Sa back from the land of the dead.
She was going to scream, but the chuckle locked the breath in her chest and brought her up short. It was just a single, short laugh, grimly amused and darkly evil, but in that moment all of her memories flooded back into her mind, and Ashayt recalled every moment of her encounter with the thing that stood now behind her.
I will make you mine, and when next he sees you, he will not know the woman who stands before him, the thing had said, and surely this had been proven true. Amun Sa had gone into the alley not to lie with the girl from the desert, who he thought was going to marry him in six days’ time. He had gone instead to his death at the hands of some new and awful creature that had taken her place.
“I could not have hoped for better,” the thing said in its murky, disgusting voice. “The harlot and her lover, absconding into the night for one last, fatal embrace. Tell me, my dear, do you think he understood what you’ve become, when you bit him? Do you think he understood that his death was at hand, and had time to regret ever meeting this filthy, black-skinned orphan bitch now sucking his very life away?”
Ashayt was up on her feet and turning, fingers hooked into claws, before she even had time to realize she meant to attack. With a howling cry of despair and rage and hate, she threw herself at the man-thing that had done this to her, meaning to claw its eyes from their sockets and chew its foul tongue from its mouth.
The creature reached out with its right hand and slapped her, the force of it hard enough that Ashayt was thrown bodily against the sandstone wall, her face mashing into the rough surface and tearing open in a dozen places. The blow should have killed her. It should have killed her, and there were many times in the long years hence that she wished it had, but it did not, and instead she fell backward to the ground and lay there, hands covering her battered face, writhing in miserable agony.
“You’ll not lay a hand on me, whore,” it said, its voice filled with grim mirth, and it took a step forward and into a shaft of moonlight. Ashayt had taken her hands away at the sound of his footstep, and she saw now for the first time its ghastly visage. The creature’s face was a mass of scars, as if its flesh had been chewed on by rats for some extended period and then left to heal. It possessed neither hair nor eyebrows, and where its nose should have been there were only two grotesque slits, malformed and damp with mucus. One eye had gone milky and dead. The other glittered out at her with horrid, malicious glee.
Ashayt again drew in breath to scream, this time in terror, and the thing made a sort of hissing noise, slashing its hand through the air, and her throat locked tight again. What came out instead was a wheezing sound that was barely audible.
“Already you have made too much noise,” it told her, crouching down to look at her better as she lay, naked and battered, on her side in the dust. “It is a miracle that none have yet come to investigate and found you here with your dead lover. Now there will be no more. Now you will listen.”
And so the thing began to speak. It told her of the six centuries it had lived since first its master had brought it into the world under the moon, a thing to be caged and tortured, experimented upon, burnt by the sun and blinded by acids. Disfigured. Always, the blood would bring it back from the brink of death, but even the blood could do only so much, and so the thing now was forced forever to skulk at the periphery of the human world.
“I killed him, of course. My master. It took more than one hundred years – a century of torture – but at last came a moment of weakness. A moment of distraction. I put a shiv into his eye that I had made with a bone from my own finger. A small sacrifice for one’s freedom, don’t you think? As he screamed and cursed, I shoved him into a vat of viscous, oily pitch and set it alight. I stood and watched as he burned alive, and each time he struggled to free himself from the sticky, flaming mess, I shoved him back in with his own staff.
“His shrieks were like the sweetest song played by the most talented of musicians, and I savored every one of them. When at last the flames guttered to a stop, I carried the entire trough out and cast it into the merciless sea. I can think of no more fitting a burial, no better a casket. I do hope the fishes there enjoyed his remains.”
In the years that followed, the creature told her, it went north and lived for a time in the lush, green forests of that land, populated only by wild humans who had not yet formed the great cities and kingdoms of Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. At last, bored and possessed with the urge to pass on its gifts, the thing had returned to the land of its birth, and had stumbled upon Ashayt and Amun Sa one night as they had met for one of their many trysts.
“I knew in a moment that you were to be mine,” the creature told her. “I knew it, because I could see that you loved him, and that he loved you. There could be nothing in this world more delicious than taking such love and breaking it, shattering it forever and leaving only a dead man in an alley and a whore on the ground, naked and stinking of sweat and blood and seed.”
“You are a monster,” Ashayt told him. She could feel her body already healing from the assault, could feel new strength coursing through her, Amun Sa’s last gift. Soon she would attack again, and this time she would not be stopped so easily. She would kill this thing, or force it to kill her.
The creature laughed. “Yes, a monster is what I am, and now so are you. A thing which hunts men and drinks their blood. Tell me, my dear, was it good? Did you enjoy it?”
“It was beautiful,” Ashayt growled up at him from the dirt. “It was the most wonderful, magical experience that I have ever known, and you know that it was, may the Gods damn you. May the Gods damn you and me both for it, that I might spend the rest of eternity watching you suffer.”
The creature snorted out surprised laughter at this, its single good eye gleaming in the moonlight. Ashayt could feel her limbs tensing, preparing to propel her again to her feet.
“Are you about to try to kill me again, whore?” it asked.
“Yes,” Ashayt said, and bared her new, sharp fangs. “And if you call me a whore again, when I am done bathing in your blood I will … I will shit on your corpse and leave it here for the guards to find.”
The thing favored her with a wild grin. “Oh, very good. What an enjoyable night this is turning out to be. Do you not understand how this works? It took me one hundred years of planning to kill my master, and even then it was due to luck and timing, not any sort of physical advantage. My blood is ages older than yours. I could slap you again, girl, and your head would part from your shoulders and go bouncing down the alley. I could do this, and were you not now a vessel for my blood, I would do so gladly. By all means, though, please feel free to try.”
Ashayt looked up at him, muscles still tense, and saw the truth of it reflected in his one good eye. There was no fighting this creature, not here, not naked and weaponless in
an alleyway. She felt her muscles relaxing, giving in to shaky acceptance of what was and could not be undone, and she began to weep.
“He was the only thing I ever had or wanted to have, and you took him from me,” she said to the thing that had made her a monster. “I loved him. I loved him! I would have died in his stead! I would die now, if it would bring him back.”
“I took nothing from you but your blood, and I returned that in like amount. I did not choose your victim for you, Ashayt-from-the-desert. Do not seek to place that blame on me. What you did, you did all by yourself.”
“I didn’t know!” she shrieked. “I didn’t—”
Again the thing held its hand out, silencing her as if with a thought.
“You must have known,” it hissed. “Just as I knew, when first I became what we are. Truly, I am amazed that you resisted the blood thirst for as long as you did. I expected you would wake that very next night and dig yourself out from the earth and feast upon the first human you encountered.”
“I woke in the day, and not under any earth,” Ashayt said. “I dragged myself to my feet and made my way to my home. I did not know that the thirst within me required blood, not until the very moment that I … that I took … that I … oh, my love, what have I done?”
Ashayt put her hands to her face and wept for some time, but the thing said nothing, only peered at her intently, head tilted and eyes narrowed, considering her. At last it spoke.
“What you describe is not possible.”
Ashayt looked up at him, still weeping, and bared her teeth. “You have already called me a murderer and a whore this night. Do not call me a liar as well.”
She felt for a moment the presence of the thing’s mind, overlapping hers and touching it with the gentle, knowing fingers of a lover. The sensation was both beautiful and abhorrent, and Ashayt hated the creature all the more for giving it to her.
“No,” it said. “I … you are not lying to me, girl, but this is not possible. No child of Eresh could walk under the sun, not that soon after the change. Its rays would have been painful even in the midst of your torpor. You should have burrowed into the earth instinctively, unconsciously. You would not have even woken. That was why I left you where I did, because I knew that you would do so.”
“Yet I did not.”
“No. I can hear from within you that you did not. And then you arose, under the cruel sun, and walked all the way back from that place to your farm, and even there you did not fall upon your parents and drink from them as I had thought you would. You fought the thirst.”
“What are you trying to tell me, monster?” Ashayt hissed. She pulled herself to her knees in the sand and dust, unashamed of her nakedness, furious and horrified but also now curious.
“You are not like me,” the thing said, and Ashayt heard in its voice a kind of bewildered confusion that she would never have expected. “I can feel it within you; I can almost taste it in the air. How is this possible? You are a child of Eresh! There are rules for these things.”
“I am what you made me,” she said, and the thing shook its head.
“No, you are not,” it said. “You are something new. Something different.”
“I am what you made me.”
“Then I have made you into a thing which I do not recognize, and which I do not know.”
“Then so be it!” Ashayt shouted, and when the thing held its hand up this time to silence her, she fought against the onslaught of its mind and forced her words out through gritted teeth. “So be it.”
“I will leave you now,” the monster told her, and Ashayt found the strength within her to grin at it.
“Have I scared you, beast? Have I made you uncomfortable? You murderous, hateful piece of camel dung … you’ve turned me into a killer. A parasite. A leech. Now, when you see these things you have wrought, you flee in terror? Is that how it is to be?”
“I do not fear you, girl.”
“Do not lie to me. Do not dare to lie to me!” Ashayt cried, and now she was standing, hands balled into fists, ready again to attack. If it was true that this creature could knock her head from her shoulders, then she would accept it. Somewhere, beyond whatever doorways were opened by death, perhaps Amun Sa would be waiting for her.
“A guard approaches from the west,” the thing told her. It glanced at the body of her lover, lying in the sand behind her, and its upper lip curled in a sneer. “If you would murder again to save yourself, or perhaps be executed for this cold piece of meat, then by all means, stay in this place. I wish to be here no longer.”
And before Ashayt could do so much as take a step toward him, the thing was gone, leaping upward and gripping the top of the wall some twelve or fifteen feet above her head, and flipping over it, disappearing into the night. Ashayt felt her anger and hatred leave with it, and became suddenly aware that she was standing naked in an alley with a dead man. She had not been delicate with her bite, and Amun Sa’s blood coated her face and breasts and stomach, the sandy ground, even part of the nearby wall. There could be little doubt as to her guilt. She must flee now, or consign herself to death.
She tried for the latter. It was the only right and proper thing she could think of to do. She had murdered her lover, even if unintentionally, and for that alone she deserved the death that would no doubt be handed to her. That she had, in the moments leading up to his death, been in a state of indescribable ecstasy the likes of which she had never before experienced made this thing that she had done somehow even more abhorrent, more obscene. She deserved to die. The Gods would want her to die. She must die. Yes, that was how it must be.
For a moment thought she had resigned herself, but at the sound of footsteps in the distance her heart leapt into furious activity, energized by fear and a simple, undeniable urge to live yet a little longer.
“I cannot,” she moaned to herself. “Oh, forgive me, my love, but I cannot go down that road with you yet.”
Energized and strengthened though she was by the blood, she knew she could not make the leap that the creature had made, and so she gathered up her dress in her arms and bolted for the mouth of the alley. She heard a cry of surprise from the guard as she burst out into the night, naked and moving at tremendous speed, and reached an arm out as she passed him, shoving him away even as she averted her face from his gaze. She knew that in this light, her tattoos served only to make her skin seem even darker than it was, and she hoped she might be mistaken not for a human, but for some foul creature of the night, like the thing that had made her what she now was.
“You there, wait!” the guard called as he struggled to his feet, but Ashayt was gone. Gone into the darkness, crashing away toward the east, toward the great river and the outskirts of the city. Behind her she left the body of her lover, and the life that she had known since she had come to this place as a child. Never would she see either of the two again.
During the burning day that followed, Ashayt took shelter in the tomb of some ancient nobleman, long since plundered and left to sink slowly into the desert. She had run for many hours, amazed at her body’s ability to sustain such effort, but with the coming of the sun she had grown weak and exhausted. She was thirsty again already, so thirsty, and she knew that there could be only one cure for the desperate need within her. The thought of it sickened her, even as excitement coursed through her body. It would be beautiful, and horrible, forever.
Sitting on the ground in the shadows of the tomb and watching as a single ray of light crept its slow path along the floor before her, she allowed herself to contemplate at last the full horror of this thing she had done. She wept, as she had in the alley, but also screamed, raged, begged and pleaded with the Gods. She beat her fists against the rock walls until they bled, until the pain of it was like white-hot iron pressing into her flesh, and still she would have continued if not for the realization that the thirst within her was bringing her perilously close to licking her own blood from her skin and from the walls. At last, lying on her side
, pink tears leaking from her eyes to fall and be sucked up greedily by the dry sand, she made the first of two vows that she would spend the next four millennia upholding.
“I will never kill again,” she told the darkness, and whatever creatures, gods or demons might be listening. “I will never, ever take another life, so long as I may live. I swear it on my own soul, though that be damned already, and on the soul of the man I love, Amun Sa, son of Hêtshepsu, my he find peace forever in the land of the dead. I will never, ever kill again.”
Exhausted, heartbroken, and more alone than she had been even in those long days and nights after the slaughter of her tribe, Ashayt laid her tired head on her arms, and she slept.