Blood by K. J. Wignall Page A

ceremony.
    Did I fear the plague myself? No, I did not, even before I knew that it would leave no mark upon me, for what did I have to fear from death? Yet I could smell the plague, not in the air, but in its victims, and I chose my own prey only among the healthy.
    I didn’t understand why. Only now do I know that what I require from the living is life itself, and that there is little to gain from a life that is already on the wane. I understand now, but back then I was driven by instinct alone, and my confusion was as great as that which reigned across the whole of Europe.
    The plague receded the following year, but worse was to come in the decades that followed. The pestilence returned in 1361, in ’69, in ’78, and ’90, and each of these successive plagues struck the young most of all, children and adolescents, sometimes singling out boys, sometimes the wealthy.
    Can you understand what it was like to be trapped forever in the body of a sixteen-year-old boy, uncorrupted by time, and over those fifty years to watch the youth of the land struck down, one generation after the other? It was after witnessing all of that death that I tried to make myself a companion.
    In the winter of 1394 I befriended a servant girl. She appeared about my own age, though naturally not so tall, and I would find her most evenings in the stables, settling the horses, taking good care of them. Her name was Kate and she was my physical opposite, sandy-haired and wide-faced, her cheeks ruddy and healthy.
    She knew from the start that I was high born, but she also knew her own place and never asked me more than my name. At that time, I still wore my teeth long, but she did not comment upon my appearance nor the fact that I walked only at night. Yet for all that, there was nothing simple or even retiring about her.
    Each evening, I would ask her about the latest happenings in the city and she would tell me the news, of building works and trade, of crime, deaths and disputes, of the current Earl and his family—the great-great-grandson of my brother, fifth in a line of unwitting usurpers.
    She had the power to amuse, too, and when she realized that I did not object to the mockery of my social equals, she became even more relaxed in my company. It may not sound a great deal, but I had known no greater friend and would wait countless lifetimes for another such.
    Kate was an orphan, her parents and four brothers struck down by the last swipe of the plague’s cruel hand in 1390. So when she told me that there were rumors the pestilence had once again returned to London—rumors that eventually proved unfounded— I became concerned that she would meet the same unhappy fate as her family.
    It seemed so very simple. I knew where I had been bitten and reasoned that if I bit Kate on the arm, if I drew blood, but not enough to kill her, then she, too, would become like me. She would be saved from the pestilence forever, and I would no longer be alone.
    It makes it no easier to bear that Kate offered me her arm willingly, that she trusted me so much or valued her future so little that she was happy to risk her life on my promises.
    I wonder if she had fallen in love with me or if I had unwittingly mesmerized her, a process I still did not fully understand at that time. I’m pained to think that her decision might have been unduly influenced, that she might not have fully understood what I was asking of her.
    I drew almost no blood at all from the wound and she did not complain or cry out, but within an hour, she had fallen into a sleeping sickness. Still, I hoped, and carried her body away with me, and when the life was gone from her, I buried her in the earth in my own chambers.
    I waited sixteen years, and when I finally dug in that spot and found her bones, the rags of her simple dress, the pitiful remnants of hair, I was overcome with remorse. I burrowed like a wild animal into the soil that filled my own stone casket and I