I turned my own attention to my breakfast. Plates heaped with breads, cheeses, jams that Fräu Kessler made herself from her grandmother’s recipes, fresh fruits, and an egg casserole. Despite my own slender build I usually made a formidable attempt on Fräu Kessler’s breakfasts. The house cook tended to all the actual work, but it was Fräu Kessler who constructed the menus.
Only a few minutes later, Fräu Kessler hurried back to the dining room and looked at me. “Herr Lichtermann, Britta is asking for you.”
“She is?” Herr Kessler asked in surprise.
Fräu Kessler nodded vigorously. “Oh, I believe she is just fine, husband, but for some reason she wishes to see Herr Lichtermann.”
Herr Kessler regarded me with no small surprise and perhaps a little suspicion. He had hired me as his daughter’s tutor on the recommendation of a friend of someone on the Watchers Council. Herr Kessler only wanted the best for his daughter and did not know about the Watchers Council and the rampant beasts that hunted in the nights. He was convinced that his sons were getting a good primary education, but he was not so convinced Britta was getting a good secondary education from school. Part of that belief came from his friend, who had then influenced his decision to hire me.
It helped that I had impeccable credentials as a teacher. I passed Herr Kessler’s interview, as well as the much harder interview presented by the Watchers Council.
I looked at Herr Kessler with a nervousness I desperately hoped did not show. “With your leave, Herr Kessler.”
He nodded. “Of course, Herr Lichtermann. Please let me know if there is anything you need.”
I assured him that I would, then took the telegram and my leave of his table. I went through the lavishly furnished house quickly. And Fräu Kessler kept pace with me, surprising me when her short legs managed to keep up with my much longer ones.
I went up the stairs to the second floor and knocked on Britta’s door. My own room was in one of Herr Kessler’s three guest houses. Staying inside the house would have been too unseemly for the family’s modest morals.
“Who is it?” Britta asked through the door. Her voice sounded anxious and rushed, not at all the calm girl I had known from these past years.
“Herr Lichtermann,” I answered. “Your mother is very worried about you, Britta. She’s standing here with me now.” Since her parents did not know that she was in training to be a Slayer, Britta and I had had to figure out how to communicate effectively and secretly. Subterfuges like that had always made me feel guilty.
Still, how could a Watcher talk to the parents of a prospective Slayer and convince them that helping their daughter risk her life on a nightly basis would be for the betterment of all? That was why, when a potential Slayer was identified that was part of a tightly knit family, her Watcher had to approach her with the stealth of a thief. It was much simpler when a girl who was identified by the Council was an orphan or otherwise alone in the world.
“I’m fine,” Britta answered brightly. “In fact, I think maybe I’m feeling better than I ever have.”
“Then you need to hurry back downstairs to the breakfast table,” Fräu Kessler admonished. “You are worrying your poor father needlessly.”
“I will, Mama,” Britta apologized through the door. “Oh, and Herr Lichtermann, I should like very much to postpone this morning’s lessons so that we may take a ride. I think the fresh air might better clear my head.”
“Of course, Britta.” Knowing that my young charge surely wanted privacy for us to speak of the matter of the telegram, I looked at Fräu Kessler. If anything were to be done inside a German family, it would always be done through the mother. “That is, if your mother has no objections.”
Fräu Kessler studied me with pursed lips and a doubtful expression. “Has she been good at her studies, then, Herr Lichtermann, to warrant such release?”
“Yes, Fräu Kessler,” I answered. “I’ve seldom seen a student who applies himself or herself with the diligence shown by your daughter.” Thankfully, that was a very true statement, because Fräu Kessler was extremely sensitive to lies—as her children well knew.
Filled with excitement, I returned to the Kessler breakfast table and tried not to think anymore about the telegram in my pocket and Britta’s advancement to the mantle of the Slayer.
* * *
I’d become acquainted with the legend and the reality of the Watchers Council and the Slayer during the Great War.
While traveling with a dispatch in Vauquois where our army battled the French with great vigor, I came upon a German military field ambulance broken down at the side of the narrow dirt road. In those days, early 1916, the Butte de Vauquois was a bloody battlefield. Our army and that of the French strove their hardest to blow each other to pieces with mines they planted all over the hillside. Both armies had also cut long trenches through the terrain.
During my duties as a motorcycle dispatch rider, I had occasion to see dozens of men, German and French, pulled from the muck and the mud of those trenches. But never had I seen what I was to witness that night.
I had run out of fuel nearly five miles back and had been pushing the motorcycle since. The motorcycle was a Triumph Model H with the relatively new three-speed gearbox in use by the British and the Germans. It was lightweight but reliable. My only struggle was the mud that caked the road due to the rains that had flooded the area for the last three days.
I was dressed in a thick, woolen overcoat, gloves, cap, and goggles. Covered in mud and sleepless the last thirty-four hours, I wanted only to find someplace warm and dry where I could sleep for an hour or two.
When I saw the military field ambulance my spirits lifted. I thought perhaps I might be able to borrow some fuel and a little food. In my sleep-deprived state, I had failed to question why the ambulance had parked over to the side of the road.
I left the motorcycle beneath a tree, pulled my overcoat tighter, and walked to the back of the ambulance. Even the pain-filled moaning that came from within didn’t raise alarm in my mind. I’d thought perhaps the ambulance attendants were working on some poor soul who might have fallen afoul of one of the many German and French mines that lay under the Vauquois countryside.
I knocked on the ambulance’s back doors. The noise within quieted almost immediately, and only the eerie sounds of the night remained except for occasional distant cracks of rifle fire and basso thumps of Granatenwerfer grenade launchers.
In the next instant, the ambulance’s back doors exploded open and a monster appeared before me. A weak flicker of lightning lit the garish features of the demon. The cold, cruel eyes regarded me in disdain. The monster’s mouth opened in a savage snarl that revealed pointed fangs.
As a motorcycle dispatch rider, I was always armed with both an 1888 Commission Rifle and a DWM 1914 military artillery Luger. I pulled the rifle up from my side, letting it hang from its sling, slid my finger onto the trigger as I lifted it toward the monster before me, and fired. The rifle’s heavy recoil caught me off balance and knocked me into the muddy road.
I knew that my bullet had taken the creature full in the chest, but the demon was only staggered for a moment. I’d never shot a man before, but I knew that the heavy round should have knocked him from his feet. No blood showed on his clothing. I frantically worked the bolt action and tried to feed the next shell home.
Lightning flickered across the dark sky again. When the creature leaped at me, I knew I was going to die. The demon knocked my rifle from my hands and seized me by the coat lapels, easily lifting me from the mud.
In the next moment, the vampire—as I was later told the demon was—turned to dust. I fell back to the ground. Still yelling in terror, I gazed up at the man before me who held a simple wooden stake in his hand.
I later learned the man was Alfred Gantry, a Watcher. He too had been in the ambulance. At that point, he believed himself perched on the edge of death, and perhaps he was, but he made it through the next morning and regained his strength. What he told me in tho
se few moments, though, changed my life forever.
He also entrusted me with his journal, kept meticulously, and asked that I take it to the Watchers Council for him. He gave me instructions on how to find them before he passed out. At the time I’d been certain that he’d died.
All through the night, as I sat in what I was certain was a deathwatch over Alfred Gantry, I read his journal. The rain drummed the ambulance, but I have scant recollection of it because I was so immersed in Gantry’s entries. The idea that so many demons walked through our world killing whoever they chose was appalling, and I became sworn to the Watchers Council’s cause, though I’d never before known of them.
Gantry had been on the vampire’s trail for months and had finally managed to track the foul beast to the French countryside. The foul creature had slain his charge, the Slayer that he had trained for years, all those months ago, and the Watcher hadn’t been able to give up the hunt till some kind of justice was served.
Gantry wore no uniform and thereby risked being shot by either the French or the Germans as a spy. He had been wounded in an earlier fight with the vampire and stood before me on what very nearly turned out to be his last legs.
The other man in the ambulance who had been moaning died within hours, and I listened to his fevered and wretched moaning for hours, feeling nauseated the whole time. There was nothing I could do to patch his torn neck.
I took care of Gantry throughout the night with the supplies available to me in the hospital field ambulance. No one else came along that deserted road the whole night or the next morning.
When by the next morning Gantry had recovered enough to care for himself, I extracted a promise from him to introduce me to the Council he served. Their war against the demons that inhabited our world made more sense to me than the Great War where I now currently served. The Great War, historians say, was the war to end all wars, but it never addressed the war we fought against the demons that walked among us.
After the war, I received four years of training as a Watcher, then was put into the field because the Great War had disrupted many Watchers that had already been in place, and the Council’s need there was strong. Watchers had been killed throughout Germany because they monitored the activity of the monsters drawn to the bloodiest battles.
Britta Kessler was my first assignment. My education background before the Great War proved to be a perfect cover for becoming a Watcher for a young lady who might one day become the Slayer.
* * *
“Look!” Britta exclaimed. “It’s as we talked about, Friedrich! I am stronger and faster than I’ve ever been!”
And indeed she was that. I watched her race through the forested lands north of Herr Kessler’s estates where we normally rode. She was like the wind, barely touching the ground before she was gone.
As usual when we took our rides, I’d brought along the lacquered wooden chest of weapons I’d been using to train her. All my life, my own interests had ranged far and wide. Aside from being a secondary education teacher, I was also a fencer and a pugilist. I’d even trained for a while in different Chinese fighting styles. The Watchers Council always tries to be very thorough.
But even they, with all the vast research and experience at their fingertips, can’t plan for everything. I don’t fault the Watchers Council for the horror that later occurred to young Britta and myself. If anyone is to blame, then the blame must lie with me.
We practiced with the weapons that day, from the simple stakes to the saber to the crossbow, and discovered to Britta’s delight that her already more than ordinary skills with those weapons had increased even more.
I’d never had occasion to meet an actual Slayer before. There simply is no time. A Slayer’s life is unfortunately very short, and the young women are spread throughout the world. Part of their defense and part of their effectiveness relies on them being discreet.
Observing Britta glorying in her newfound abilities as she was now, I realized how hard it must be for the girls who become the Slayer to keep their amazing abilities secret. To suddenly wake up one morning—or be seated at the breakfast table, or wherever else these young women may be when they inherit the Slayer’s abilities—has to be a heady experience.
That morning, much to my chagrin and my own delight, Britta bested me in every practice. Two days ago, that had not been so. That allowed me to pinpoint the passing of the last Slayer, though I didn’t mention that to Britta.
The young woman I faced in our mock combats handled me as easily as if I’d been a child just learning to do the things we had done for the last year. In fact, no matter that I was in the best shape of my life at thirty-four, I was soon left winded and panting while Britta acted as though she could go on for hours.
Finally, I ruefully called a truce.
“What’s wrong?” Britta asked.
I continued putting the weapons back in the chest and didn’t much feel like looking at her. I know I should have been proud of the way she conducted herself, of the amazing abilities she suddenly exhibited, but my own pride stung. “We’ve done enough this morning,” I declared. “If we stay here any longer Fräu Kessler will start to become worried. I’d rather not endanger the relationship I enjoy with her.”
“Now that I am the Slayer, you mean?”
I looked at Britta then to let her know she should be more properly contrite. But, you see, the Slayer is always a young woman inexperienced in so many things. She is hardly ever more than a child. “Yes,” I told her bluntly.
Britta helped me tie the chest to my horse again. “If it helps,” she said in a more properly chastened voice, “I was getting tired there at the end.”
“Were you?” I didn’t properly understand the physical changes the Slayer went through, and no one I’d ever talked to on the Watchers Council knew either, but I thought perhaps she should have been stronger.
Britta started to answer, but I saw the hesitation in her face that marked the beginning of a lie. Over the last two years I’d gotten almost as skilled as Fräu Kessler at picking out Britta’s attempts at lying. Thankfully, the lies Britta told were only small ones concerning her own well-being. Her lies were usually over such things as whether or not her feelings were hurt. Above all things, Britta was a very private person.
“Well, not really,” she admitted. “But I thought it might make you feel better if I told you that.”
I smiled a little at her. Over the past two years, I had developed a fondness for Britta. Watchers aren’t supposed to become personally involved with their charges. Although I knew from reading the records of past Watchers that even that edict had been broken over the years. However, the close proximity forced on to me by acting as her tutor as well as her Watcher had taken away much of the distance that such a relationship might usually entertain.
“No,” I told her, attempting to keep the rancor from my voice, “once I get past my own hurt pride, I realize that you should be quite well prepared for any of the monsters that you may now meet. I choose to take pride in my part in that.”
“You’ve met a vampire.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment. “What was it like?”
“It was,” I assured her, “quite possibly the most frightening thing I’ve ever done. And as I have told you, I would have died that night had it not been for Alfred Gantry.” I took my glasses from my jacket pocket, cleaned them, and put them on. “That experience quite literally changed my life.”
Britta took the small bag of treats that she had packed that morning from her saddlebags and sat on a fallen tree at the clearing’s edge where we normally sat to catch our breaths after a workout. Some days we worked on lessons there or I tried to answer some of the seemingly interminable questions my young charge had. Thankfully, Britta was a bright student and interested in most things I taught her about, even the subjects that had nothing to do with vampires and demons. She remained curious about the wanderlust inside me that had driven me from my home at an e
arly age and through two different universities before the Great War. I’d lived the kind of life that she only dreamed of.
Looking back on events now, I feel certain Herr Kessler knew his oldest daughter very well. I think he knew that I would bring more to Britta than simply a book education. We talked of the places I’d been, the people I’d met, and the things that I’d seen.
We sat on a fallen tree and ate apples and strong cheeses, then washed that down with a bottle of cool spring water. I could tell Britta was thinking deeply but I knew better than to ask. She would only talk whenever she was ready, and I respected that.
“Do you think, that when the time comes to face a monster, that I will be brave?” she whispered.
Her question took me by surprise. After two years of working with someone, you’d think you knew him or her. Then again, after a lifetime of living with yourself you would think you would know yourself also.
“Yes,” I said. “I think you’ll be very brave.” After all, how could she not be brave? I’d trained her.
But I knew how she felt. We’d been in training together for two years and had not seen any of the demons that she would now be responsible to hunt. To be truthful, it was somewhat disconcerting to know that she was now the Slayer, yet there were no enemies about.
Those of you who are Watchers who have had Slayers in the past probably know what I’m talking about. The moment a Slayer comes into her own, the demons begin to seek her out. Not to say that they intentionally hunt for her—although I’ve heard that some have spent time hunting Slayers—but a Slayer and those she hunts always seem to find each other.
“I wish I knew for sure,” Britta said.
“You’ll know soon enough,” I told her. I didn’t know how prophetic that statement was or how close the demons were.
“Did you know her?”
“Who?” I asked even though I knew precisely whom she was talking about.
“The girl who was the Slayer before me.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know who she was.” I believed that, because it was two years since I had last known of a Slayer. Given the longevity, or lack thereof, of a Slayer I really doubted it was the same young woman.