The Death Watch

Prologue

Eleven o’clock, December 24th, 1834
Dartmoor, Devonshire, England

He fell heavily and forwards into the snow, and as his palms stung with the contact he fought an urge to scream, to blister the surface of the world with his hatred and his impotent rage. As the muscles in his arms and shoulders buckled and trembled from overexertion, their inhuman power and stamina exhausted, he twisted and fell sideways, rolling onto his back as snowflakes gently descended and landed on his face. Unable to lift a hand to brush them away, he smiled a cruel, snarling smile, revealing a single, sharp fang, and he considered the events which had hastened the end of his life.

No! Not the end of his life! Not the end, for he knew his spirit would leave this body and its tortured and suppressed soul. It would roam the twilight world in seeking, searching for a compatible body and mind, a mind he would thrust aside and –

Heavy footsteps intruded upon his thoughts, and he realised he would die very soon. Each step shook the ground upon which he lay, followed by the scritch, scritch of snow compacted under a great weight. Inhuman, yellow eyes gazed down upon his scarred and broken form, and a deep sadness came over him as those eyes, merciless and pitiless in their fury only minutes before, grieved for the loss of another human soul. For as the body died and his soul departed, the human soul, tethered as it was, would be bound to the fate of its physical form. His killer knew this, and a great, solitary tear welled in one yellow eye, and fell to the earth amidst the rocky outcroppings of the tor. He felt like sighing, but like the others of his race, he did not breathe. He was a vampire.

Weakly, as his life ebbed away, he mumbled over the sound of the wind. “I… I would have your name, you who have slain me.”

The creature above him paused and became very still. The eyes did not blink, but the dying vampire flared in a moment of desperate animation. “Your name!

There was a shuffling noise, and the vampire realised the creature was settling itself to sit beside him. He watched, with absolute focus and fascination, how the snowflakes teased the mass of matted hair which covered the creature from top to tail. He wondered, vaguely, how he could have forgotten the smell of snow.

“Very well.” The creature shifted its massive shoulders, and the whiskered jowls of the wolf-like face snapped out deep, guttural words from a mouth ill-accustomed to speaking them. “You have fought with honour, sir, and I would claim the privilege of sitting your death watch with you.” Then the creature reared to its full height: from huge, doglike haunches rippling in the wind to the massive, barrel chest adorned only with a single tooth-and-feather fetish necklace, it stood fully ten to eleven feet tall. It threw back its head and howled, not the high, tense, eager cries the vampire had heard as it chased his scent across the moors but a low, mournful note, part of a song as ancient as the granite bedrock of Dartmoor.

“My human name you know, vampire, but the name of my soul is Bracken. You have fought well and lost, and the tale of your passing shall be sung by the bards around great fires. Of this you have my word. But now,” Bracken added, settling down to earth again, “I would have your name from you.”

The vampire stared up into the yellow eyes which, for him, were now the whole world. “Oh, no, my friend,” he grinned, showing again the empty socket where one of his fangs had been torn wholesale from his mouth. “I do believe I shall keep my soul’s name to myself! I do hope we shall see one another again, in this world or in the Shadow, and it shall be I who sends your soul to torment!”

Sickened, the werewolf stood, wincing as his aching body was subjected to the freezing wind. The vampire had begun to chuckle to himself, convulsing in pain even as he did so. “The Devil take all your kind, leech,” he said sadly, and turned his back to begin the long descent from the hilltop.

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