Patteran (1 of 3): The Black Comely
The three Marys had been dead for decades, and Sara was the only one left from that small group in the south of France. She had floated down the Agiqua on her skirt, and had spent the last fifty years at the foot of Bays Mountain, feeding on the animals and a stray tourist or three. The scientists were a tricky enemy to defeat. They took the animals before she could forage them, and they drained them of blood and dried them out for the sake of academic preservation. They were more vampires than she was, she thought occasionally as she nestled amidst the trees and feasting on bits of rabbit, stringing their bones as a bracelet.
She could not win against them. They had forced her out with their experiments and greed, and she would have to go in search of more prey. The forests were disappearing, and she would have to move further west.
The river promised safe passage, and so she slipped free of the mountains, leaving only a scrap of ribbon from her hair, tied around a bundle of leaves. The People would surely find it and know what it was, but the scientists would miss it entirely in their zeal for small woodland mammals.
There should have been a ghost nearby for her to ride, but nobody had died at that particular ridge of Bays Mountain recently enough. She found only bones and dust, but no spirits, and so she walked. Her feet were tough enough that she needed no shoes, and she felt little pain, anyway. Thousands of years ago, she would have been aware of every particular pebble, especially the sharp ones that jabbed into her soles, making travel difficult. Now, she floated well enough without need of a ghost. The pebbles may as well have been sand.
The banks of the Agiqua were a guide, and Sara stayed clear of civilization. At night, when she curled up to sleep in small forests, she could barely see the stars for all the lights of the gas stations and all-day supermarkets a scant few miles away. When she had traveled to Calais, she had been able to track individual stars as she moved northward. This country did not appreciate stars wandering through heaven, and did not care for wanderers on the earth, either. She drew a sharp-nailed finger down the belly of a squirrel, and tried to read its entrails, but it was twitching too much for her to get a good sign, and as she pressed the creature to her lips, she decided that she needed a champion for the daylight hours. She needed someone to move about when the stars were as invisible to her as they were to the rest of the county.
She knew just what sort of acolyte she wanted. She wanted a man with some spirit to him, someone who posed a challenge. The last boy, a blond skateboarder from Atlanta, had been disappointing despite how much he had mouthed off to her. He hadn't lasted until the morning light, before she had seized a limb in each of her true, four hands and pulled. His screams had not been heard in the dark, thick void of the Georgia woods, and she had replaced one of the oldest of the fifty-one heads on her garlands with the skateboarder's skull.
The squirrel convulsed against her lips, severed veins and arteries spraying blood, and she laughed. Her laughter could be heard miles away, but to most, it would sound simply like the cackling of a bird, or a lunatic noise easily dismissed as the natural weirdness of being in the middle of nowhere near the center of a busy country.
There was someone in the area who could understand, and he would come to her. He would be her servant. She would be able to command obedience, because of the reverence the People had for her. She had a brief vision of one of them baring his neck for her, his chin tilted up, his eyes begging her to sink her teeth into his neck and to share the knowledge of death and impermanence. It was a pleasant vision. They would do anything for her. They would destroy themselves for her. They would reduce themselves to empty husks in their quest for understanding and worship. It was better when they wanted to do it.
Sara tossed the squirrel away, watching it thud against a tree and then slither down in a pile of guts and miasma. It was no good for either blood or bones. She would look for a cattle farm tomorrow, if the People did not bring her food instead. She thought she saw a star twinkling above, but the way the sky started to light up was sign enough. She reached for the cover of branches she'd scrapped together, and draped it over herself, breathing in pine bark and shutting her eyes. She sank into inertia, and went cold just as the nearly invisible sunlight started to sizzle against her face.
#
The entire bar was uncomfortable with him. Joe could tell. He could see it in the way one of the rednecks seated behind him shuffled his feet, and the supposedly sly looks the guy in the trucker cap was sending his way. He knew he had found the boondocks when his mere looks drew attention. In Memphis or in Atlanta, nobody had cared enough to bother him, but in a place where people were scant and usually on the paler side of white, he stuck out.
He drew comments among his own people, too, if for the opposite reason. His mother's mother had not been full-blooded, and so he was not pure. That showed itself in brown hair instead of black, and in the small features of a WASP, mixed with the Romani blood that predominated and gave him olive skin, deep brown eyes, long fingers, and a sharp jaw and brow. He looked native to neither group. Among his people, the European influences he showed drew comments. Here in the bar, they saw him only as a minority, and a dangerous one at that.
The bartender set down the booze he'd ordered, and leaned in from the heels to deliver a warning. "Steal anything, and I'll call the cops." Joe couldn't look at the man, or he might have thrown a punch. His shoulders tensed anyway, and his jaw tightened, and then he grinned as the absurdity of such a threat came to him.
There was nothing to steal in this shack. Even if there had been, calling the county cops would have taken several miles. He would have been in the next town over by the time any theft was reported. He was not desperate enough to steal even a single piece of silverware -- not real silver -- from a low-down bar.
So let them take offense at his presence. They weren't worth getting angry about. Joe sipped the beer, and paused to taste the quality. It wasn't quality at all. That's what he got for not calling his brand, the cheapest stuff in the place. He managed to drink it down, but without much enjoyment.
He'd left the company looking for something he couldn't have exactly defined at the time. Now he could define it, but he wasn't going to find it in this bar. He wanted a change. He wanted to feel alive. He could not feel alive in the company, already thirty and expected to have been married for ten years. Those old-fashioned rules weren't for him, and he had lost the ability to pretend to follow them.
They hadn't cast him out. He had left on his own. However, if they had known what he was doing, a week after he took off, drunk in a
gadje
