The Dead of Sanguine Night (2 page)

“The rest of the family will be down shortly,” Lauren said.

As if in response to her words, thumping sounded from upstairs.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked Amaranth.

“Yes, please,” Amaranth said, sitting down across from Lauren’s mother. “Thank you for sending your daughter after me.”

The woman’s eyes were milky and didn’t seem to register that Amaranth was there. Maybe she was in the grips of another vision or something. Amaranth couldn’t be sure. She’d never been around seers before.

“It’s very kind of you to accept me into your home,” Amaranth said to the grandfather at the head of the table. His eyes were dull, not quite as milky as the mother’s, but she bet his eyesight was failing. He stared straight ahead as well, taking no notice of what was happening around the table.

In fact, the entire family seemed to be vacant from their own bodies, poised around the table as if Lauren was a little girl who’d set out her favorite dolls for tea.

A moment of panic seized Amaranth. “Is there something wrong with your family?”

Lauren smiled and sat a cup of steaming water before her. The smell of jasmine filled Amaranth’s nostrils, and she took a tiny sip of the hot liquid. It soothed her throat and washed away the growing panic. She imagined there wasn’t anything so strange about the family after all. The grandfather might have lost his sight in old age, and the mother was likely still in a trance, trying to sort out if Amaranth was evil or not. Who knew what seers looked like when they were in a trance?

“Did your mother study her art at the Apothecarium?” Amaranth asked Lauren, who was busy at work behind her. Amaranth wasn’t sure that seers trained there, but with all the kinds of mancy they taught at the Apothecarium, she figured psychic forces would be among them.

“No,” Lauren said. “We don’t…agree with the Apothecarium.”

“Why’s that?”

“Just personal issues with the headmaster,” Lauren said in a tone that said she didn’t want to talk more on the subject.

“This is a very nice home you have here,” Amaranth said to the father, hoping that she might engage him in some kind of conversation. But, like the mother and the grandfather, stared straight ahead. Amaranth had the chilling thought that there might not be anything there behind his eyes, no soul, no thoughts…nothing.

Amaranth shivered and looked away. “How long until sunrise?” she asked, suddenly wondering if she would rather be out on the street than inside this house with these vacant people.

“Long enough for a good meal and a nice, long sleep,” Lauren said. Again, there was something behind her voice that said more than her words did. Whatever it was she was trying to say eluded Amaranth.

A shadow passed over the mother’s eyes, but then was gone. Amaranth leaned forward, intent on her aged face, but the shadow didn’t return. Had she really seen anything?”

“Here you go,” Lauren said, setting a plate piled high with beef and potatoes before Amaranth.

Amaranth dug into the meat. Pink juices sluiced out of the beef, adding to the pool of gravy that dominated the plate. The smell was intoxicating: onions and garlic mingling with the aroma of butter potatoes and rich gravy. Her stomach growled. She bit into the meat and wondered if she’d ever tasted anything so amazing in all of her life.

The light flickered. Amaranth looked up, and for a moment there wasn’t a silver chandelier above her illuminated with numerous candles but a tarnished chandelier that hung lopsided from the ceiling. One of the two chains that had once secured it to the ceiling dangled down to the table and cobwebs linked the old, dirty candles.

Amaranth blinked, but the image changed. It was just her imagination. The chandelier was clean and bright enough to light the room with ease. She turned back to her meal, putting the thought from her mind. It was likely that she was distraught from being caught out in the night and rescued by a kind woman with a strange family.

“Is it good?” Lauren asked.

“Delicious,” Amaranth said, looking to Lauren. The woman was at the other end of the table from the grandfather. Her hands were folded before her, but she didn’t eat, she only stared at her mother and father.

Amaranth glanced at the mother. There was something at the edge of her nostril, wriggling around, trying to creep out of the depths of her skull. Before Amaranth could think of what it could be, or why it didn’t seem to bother the woman, a maggot plopped out of her nose and onto the table.

Amaranth gasped, but when she looked at the table where the maggot had fallen, there was nothing there. She glanced back at the mother, but she just sat there as if nothing had happened.

Maybe it hadn’t,
Amaranth thought. She was growing more and more certain that she’d rather be outside, facing the terror of the night than in here with this strange family.

She trained her eyes on the plate, but the light flickered again and in the moment of darkness that blinked through the kitchen, Amaranth no longer saw juicy beef and buttery potatoes on her plate. Instead, before her sat a pile of moldy bread.

The light flared back to life and the beef and potatoes were back.

“Is everything to your liking?” Lauren asked, still not looking at Amaranth. “Do the potatoes need more butter?”

“No, it’s all very delightful,” Amaranth said.

The light failed again, and her cup of tea vanished in the darkness, replaced with a cloudy, unwashed glass filled with brackish water.

She jumped to her feet, the chair tipping backwards. In the gloom of the room, Amaranth saw the family truthfully for the first time.

Dead. They were all dead. Graying, molding, yellow blotches of skin stood out along their arms like bruises of rot. The mother’s blond hair was white and shriveled against her skull, her skin stretched to near cracking over her bones, like paper over a skeleton.

“I…I need to go,” Amaranth said. She sped from the kitchen before Lauren could react. As she did, the light flared once more, and the house was as it always had been: posh, polished, well lit, and welcoming. A comforting air suddenly surrounded her and she felt rather drowsy.

“Do you really need to go?” Lauren asked from the kitchen doorway.

The light faltered again, and Amaranth looked around her. The chairs and the couch sat half on the floor, their legs broken, their cushions dusty and moth eaten. The fireplace was cracked and cold. No fire burned from within. The room was gray, the paper peeling from the walls. The house was so ransacked that Amaranth wasn’t sure how she’d ever seen it as a welcoming home instead of a disaster with debris scattered along the floor and rat skeletons gathered in the corners.

At the base of the stairs stood three figures, all more rotten than the family in the kitchen. Whatever clothing they might have worn in death had long since faded away to dust. They were so far gone to decay that their skin was nothing more than blackened leather stretched over their bodies.

Amaranth was frozen in fear. She couldn’t move an inch. Somehow—she wasn’t sure how—breath still filled her body. She tried to will her legs to move, but they wouldn’t obey her.

“I don’t think you really need to leave,” Lauren said, leaning in the doorway of the darkened kitchen. “We haven’t eaten yet.”

Amaranth waited for the lights to come back, for the candles and the fireplace to flare to life and chase away the nightmare that she’d stumbled into, but it never came.

And then, jerkily, woodenly, the family from the kitchen joined Lauren in the doorway. Now their eyes
did
see Amaranth, and she wished they didn’t. Now their dead eyes stared directly at her and saw nothing else. The blackened figures at the base of the stairs seemed to come to life then. Slouching to the ground they crawled over the rotten floorboards toward Amaranth on all fours, like animals more than humans. The popping of their bones as they ground together and the crackling of their dry skin filled the room, and Amaranth screamed in terror, unable to do anything else.

She tried to move once more, but another power held her in place and wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t until the first of the dead fingers were tearing into her flesh, carrying away parts of her body to feed rotten mouths that Amaranth finally moved. She fell to the floor beneath the press of dead bodies.

Margaret stared out the window across from where she sat at the dining room table. Behind her, her mother, Nancy, toiled away in the kitchen. While Margaret was content with gazing out the window, Nancy would rather work away the moments until her husband, Samuel, came home with news from the council of clans.

Margaret nursed her coffee, studying her reflection in the glare of the window. Long brown hair that she wished had a bit more body, pale skin that she wished was a tad tanner, and a nose that she wished was just a hair smaller. Her brown eyes, light enough they were nearly golden was the only feature she was completely happy with.

She wasn’t as focused on her appearance as most girls. Instead, she noticed these things in passing. There was no point in worrying about things you couldn’t change, especially things that didn’t matter as much as what her family faced on a nightly basis.

“What do you think he will find?” Lincoln, her older brother, asked from the head of the table.

“Oh, who knows,” Nancy said, tossing a scrap of roast to their brindle Akita, Mitzy. The dog lunged into the air, the beef bouncing off her nose to land on the counter beside Nancy. She sat down, lifted one paw and wined until Nancy brushed the wedge of roast off the counter and into Mitzy’s waiting mouth. “All of those deaths in City Center are likely the cause for such a rushed meeting.”

“Yea,” Lincoln said. He was taller, where Margaret was shorter. His dark brown hair never looked combed, no matter how much time he put into styling it. His eyes were hazel with a kind of piercing quality that belied the humor of his nature. His mouth, while looking small, was one of his biggest features both literally and figuratively.

“What do you think could be causing it?” Nancy asked.

Lincoln looked to Margaret, the family specialist when it came to monsters and those demons that lurked in the night.

“I would say ghouls,” Margaret said. “The way the people are consumed; I don’t know many other things that lurk in the night and devour their pray the way ghouls do. The reports always make mention that it looks like the bodies have been eaten by a human. Unless we have a gang of cannibals that only strike at night…”

“And if we have cannibals,” Nancy said, “we will likely have wendigoes to deal with in the future.”

They didn’t have to debate long. The door thudded shut and moments after Mitzy started barking Samuel’s presence filled the kitchen doorway. The dog stood at his side, sniffing his legs as if wondering what great adventure he’d just returned from.

Samuel was taller than Lincoln, broad in the shoulders, narrow at the waist. Samuel had peppered black hair and deep brown eyes. His face always seemed to carry the same amount of scruff from day to day.

“A necromancer,” he said.

“A necromancer?” Lincoln asked, scooting out of his father’s chair and into his own diagonal from Margaret.

“That’s what’s been causing the deaths,” Samuel answered.

Excitement swirled in Margaret’s gut. This was something new. A new beast she would get to study. A new monster in the night that she might even get to slay.

“What do we know of necromancers?” Samuel asked Margaret. He sat down in his chair at the head of the table and Nancy brought plates of roast sandwiches and fruit from the kitchen that she sat before each of them.

Margaret took a huge bite of one of her two sandwiches before answering. “I don’t know much, just their death mancy allows them to raise the dead and control undead. If they can do more than that…”

“All right,” Samuel said, dividing his orange. “You’re going to need to research this. We don’t want to go in surprised.”

“But all of the attacks have happened in the City Center,” Lincoln said. “That’s not our territory.” Margaret saw her hopes dashed. In her excitement, she’d forgotten that the attacks weren’t happening in their district.

“The attacks are happening around Boulva Street, and the council has determined that’s our territory tonight,” Samuel said. “We are joining the other clan families in City Center to put a stop to the necromancer.”

Lincoln beamed with excitement before tucking into his apple.

“And the council of clans has given me these,” Samuel said, fishing around in his pocket. He pulled out three nubs of what looked like foam, and laid them on the table. “They’re called broadcasters. These three are linked together, allowing us to talk to one another over great distances.”

Margaret plucked one off the table and examined it.

“I was told you squish it in your fingers and push it into your ear. It will expand to fit comfortably and then it should work,” Samuel said. He didn’t sound completely convinced.

“You didn’t listen, did you?” Nancy scolded him, her hands folded on the table before her.

Samuel grinned. “It was a
long
meeting,” he said. “I may have drifted a few times.”