Blood by K. J. Wignall

better!” Still with a tone of accusation, she said firmly, “Who are you, Will?”
    â€œI’ll tell you everything, but first we have to get away from here.”
    Eloise shook her head again, a little too vigorously, and he realized she was still in shock, as he supposed any normal person would have been. “Why on earth would I go anywhere with you? I’ve got nothing to fear from the police.”
    â€œIt’s your choice.” He thought about it, wondering what was best for both of them. And even if she unknowingly had some part to play in whatever was now happening to him, the best thing he could do for Eloise was to leave her right there. “Actually, you should stay, but I have to go. Please forgive me—I didn’t mean for you to see any of this and I shouldn’t have let you. I’m sorry.”
    She nodded sadly, even though she looked as if she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. He picked up her bag and handed it to her, and without saying anything, he walked away.
    â€œWill?” He turned. “I’m safe, aren’t I? That thing, it won’t come back.”
    â€œNo, it won’t. You’re safer away from me.”
    â€œWho are you?”
    â€œI can’t tell you, not unless you come with me.”
    She stared back at him, and he knew they didn’t have very long, that he had to get away from there quickly. But he didn’t rush her because he knew that she’d seen things she should never have witnessed, and that right now, she was making the biggest decision she would ever make.

10
    Don’t think I have not wished for a companion through the unending ages of my life. I have so much wanted someone to talk to, someone who would not outgrow me, and whom I would not outlive. And I have tried, but even those humble efforts met with tragedy.
    I did not know it as I scrabbled through the earth from my rotten coffin, as I tumbled into the chambers that have been my refuge ever since, as I came to understand the physical changes that had accompanied my strange preservation, but the year was 1349.
    Thirteen forty-nine in the year of Our Lord, though Our Lord was not much in evidence at that time. It was a century of famine and war and revolt, and above all, it was a century of pestilence. The famine had been and gone whilst I was still in the grave, as had my father in the winter of 1263, and my half-brother early in 1320.
    I knew none of this. I knew none of the history that had elapsed. I knew nothing of what I now was. If I had risen again in a time of happiness, a time of prosperity, I suspect I might well have perished before learning how I could survive alongside those who still lived by day, but I arose in the autumn of 1349 and ventured out into my beloved city in the nights after the plague had arrived at its gates.
    I have often wondered since if it was the very stench of the Black Death that had roused me in the first place. When I first saw the panic that filled the city, the corpses that fell almost too quickly to be buried, the stench, and the squalor, I couldn’t help but connect it all with the burning witches, as if their execution had set the world upside down.
    Little did I realize that life had returned to normal after that awful night, that good seasons and bad had come and gone in the years since. The world had not ended in October 1256—it just appeared that way to me.
    Given how inexperienced I was in procuring the blood I needed, given that I only understood that need little by little, the plague became my friend, bringing mayhem and fear to the city in order that I might walk through it unnoticed.
    In the midst of all that horror, my torn and bloodless victims aroused no great suspicion—as far as the people were concerned, the Devil was at work across the entire land—and anyway, the plague left its corpses even more disfigured than I left mine. All were buried together, most without