First Tenet
Blood is the oath of dark nothing.
Second Tenet
Appalled witness of life, blood invents death.
Third Tenet
Blood is the strength of death.
Fourth Tenet
Dreams dissolve in blood, blood dissolves in dreams.
Author’s Note:
[The Blood Creed came to me in a lucid dream years ago. Since then, a story has been shimmering into consciousness around these precepts. It’s still mostly absence rehearsing a narration by Cruz, a young, newbie vampire, and the ghost of his girlfriend, Eva. In this scene, also from a lucid dream, the undead student meets the Branded Man, the ancient slayer who made him a vampire some weeks earlier. Here, Cruz discovers that Eva’s wraith is actually a dissociated self of her vampire body, a mindless, living corpse in thrall to the Branded Man. Got that? Then, here we go…]
Eva was gone.
Across the street, rounding the corner, a large man approached. In tight, grimy tee and beat-up cargo pants, he had such massive shoulders and narrow hips, he looked like human geometry. The black knit cap pulled low over his brow only heightened his Cro-Magnon features, beardless and blunt.
I recognized that bulldog jaw, and a barb of fear twisted in my chest. Eva had delivered me to the Branded Man!
He noticed me at once. The desolation in that socketed gaze hurtled me into the next instant, where he stood very close. His hypnotic glamor swamped me in sundown iridescence, and I would have wilted with dreamy languor if Eva hadn’t shouted.
I can’t even remember what she yelled, but I leaped toward her voice. The Branded Man’s thick arm grasped the emptiness where I had stood. And I caught the bold tattoo across his deltoid, where the fabric of his filthy tee had frayed: SPQR.
From across the street, I waved him back. “Who are you?”
He stood squarely at the curb, leaning forward, ready to spring. “You know.” His voice occupied a dark body, his accent East Euro. Maybe Slovenian like Slavoj Žižek, a living philosopher I admire. Deeply reverberant, his words filled my head more like a thought than a voice: “I made you real.”
Real? How is being a vampyr more real than the life I lost? I wish I’d asked him that right then, at our first encounter. Instead, I ventured another stupid question, “What do you want?”
His voice strummed a dark chord, full of real feeling, “You.”
I backed away.
Drained of emotion, the oversize vampyr insisted in a tired voice, “I made you real.” He stepped off the curb, deliberate as a panther. “Now, I need you.”
Need? Fear cut deep, and I nearly bawled, “Stay away from me!” But a streetwalker came around the corner that moment, and I balked.
Her casual stroll stopped with a stagger-freeze, leaving her oddly still in the city’s halogen night. A street-lit manikin. She wore white moccasins, electric blue workout tights, and an ecru blouse open to the navel. Taut leather cords crisscrossed her chest stretching fabric translucent against the dark aureoles of her breasts.
Absurdly sexy, ludicrously lurid, her erotic presence surpassed illusion – but only from the neck down. She had the head of a demented street performer. Black thatch-cut Kabuki hair obscured her eyes with fringes stiff as bristles. Radish red lipstick smeared her mouth, as if crayoned by a nine-year-old.
Around her throat, a band of dun leather collared her to her profession. I wanted to warn her away from the vampyr.
Vampyrs – the Branded Man … and me.
“You don’t recognize her.” The Branded Man’s moray grin tightened.
“Eva?”
“You are her man.” The Branded Man crossed the street. “You are hers. Do not think to flee.”
The soft delivery of those dire words in the aura of the Branded Man’s glamor relaxed the taut moment, which all at once felt like a window open on a balmy sunset. I listened to him with a mild and receptive expression.
“Do you see how she is shod?” Hacksaw teeth glinted in a brief smile from up close. “Do you recognize the leather of her thongs, her neck band? Human flesh, all of it, cured and tanned. The flayed hides of the men she has lured to me.”
I stared dumbstruck, drugged by the dusk ethers around him.
“How have you eluded me, scamp?” A shadow of curiosity dimmed his murderous glare as he pressed closer. “Scores I’ve made real. None have eluded me. Only you.”
Eva’s body was standing right there. She remained unmoving, a jazzy figure of lust and violence. Didn’t this lug realize that her watchful ghost had kept me out of his grasp from the beginning?
I listened for her and heard only the city.
The giant glowered at my silence. “I did not find you here by chance. Nor with prowess. You came to me.” His grunt punched me, “Why?”
Why had Eva led me to this paralyzed moment? To see that she wasn’t a ghost. My mind whirled. She was undead!
“Cruz.” Her whisper slipped by, close and filigreed with winter’s scent. Her tone, shaken and dim, carried her shock. “That’s not me. That’s not who I am.”
My attention sharpened to see if the large vampyr heard her too.
He didn’t. His lock-stare never wavered, challenging me to answer him.
Eva’s chill perfume cut through the bull vampyr’s glamor. “Distract him. Ask for help. Quick.”
“Your creed,” I croaked and edged away. “I heard about that. You have a code, right? That’s why I’m here.” I gestured at the moon sylphs and spectral dancers cavorting alongside a passing taxi and admitted, “Nothing makes sense since you attacked us.”
“You came to me – for this?” His tone of thick suspicion red-flagged imminent violence.
“To know more, yeah.”
“I do not believe you, scamp.” The long-shouldered vampyr lunged.
And an icy gust of Eva’s scent pushed me sideways. The mauler charged past and collided with a parked car so forcefully it rocked onto two wheels. Echoes of the collision caromed down the street flogging car alarms.
I paused, wondering if I didn’t have to run away. Was that his glamor that held me fast? Of course. Under its mesmeric power, I earnestly believed he might actually help me. “What is your creed?”
He slither-sprinted at me, intent – even furious! – and again Eva whirled me away, just inches from his desperate grasp. “Cruz, let’s go! Don’t taunt him.”
“I’m not taunting you,” I shouted at him. “I need to know. You took an oath.”
I could see the Branded Man grapple his rage down. “Answer me then, who is your god?”
“There is no god.”
“No divinity?”
“Only in imagination.”
“Then, we have sworn the same oath.” He gave a barely perceptible nod. “Our blood is not avowed to heaven or to hell, neither to gods nor to demons. For us, blood is the oath of dark nothing.” His brutal stare narrowed. “Now, answer me this, what is death?”
“The end of life.”
The Branded Man pointed to Eva’s body. “You witnessed me kill her. I thrived on her blood. Now, here she stands. Death took her – and blood took her back. Do you see?” He half-smiled with an ethereal weirdness. “She died in the mangrove forest. She died under me. When you fled bawling, I took her blood. And blood has kept her at my side since.” The other half of his grim smile locked into place. “For a nightwalker, she has tremendous charms, which have proven time and again a reliable lure for the prize.”
“The prize? You mean people.”
“The prize of the vampyr. But first, you must grasp the truth of death.”
“What is that?”
“Life eats life. Is this not appalling? Who is appalled? Who witnesses this abhorrence? The one who is not eaten. The blood that flows through generations immemorial. The blood that has never died.” A shard of interest glinted in his deep eyes. “Do you grasp this truth?”
“Yeah, it’s the selfish gene. The individual organism lives until it dies. The genes just keep on going, like you say.”
“Thus, the Blood Creed declares: The appalled witness of life, blood invents death.”
He waited for my nod.
“I get it.”
“Then, we are agreed on the first two truths of the Blood Creed.” The carats of his gaze brightened. “And so, I inquire, whence the strength of death?”
“Huh?”
“What makes death strong?”
“It’s inevitable.”
“In your own words, only for the individual is death inevitable. Blood itself never dies.” He looked for my comprehension. “Countless deaths have made blood strong. Blood is the strength of death.”
“All right. So?”
“So, we are agreed on three tenets of the Blood Creed.” Across his unblinking eyes, light squirmed like parasites.“Now, answer me this: What are dreams?”
“Vampyrs don’t dream.”
“Oh, we do. You just haven’t yet learned how. And when you do, you will claim your true authority and power.”
“What do vampyrs dream?”
“For all dreamers, dreams reach for what we cannot have. When we wake after the day is spent, when our night begins again with hunger, dreams dissolve in the real needs of the blood.” His harsh countenance tightened. “And I tell you this, blood disperses into dreams; dreams coagulate into blood. So it was for the blood of the men who pursued their flesh’s dream and whose flesh now adorns our undead sister.”