The sun sank lower on the horizon, its fire pooling on the fields. Karsten watched, sipping out of a nondescript clay jug and fancied that the deepening gloom was the sun's blood congealing, turning black and rotten. He could almost detect that scent as the wind shifted direction and blew from the road in front of him.
He was brought back to himself as he became aware of a figure on the road. It must have walked into his view though he hadn't seen it, as there was no sign of a horse and a cart had certainly not happened by. Another explanation struck him and he closed one eye to peer into his jug.
It had been only a moment, but the figure was suddenly standing a few feet away from his porch when he looked back up. The man stood perhaps at a bit above Karsten's own 6'4, but every inch of him was covered by a single long, winding cloth.
"Death?" Karsten asked, hopefully. "That you? About damn time you showed up."
"Karsten Yeager?" the thing rasped, it's voice a grating intonation almost like a bagpipe being made to mimic human speech.
"Yes?"
"You are summoned," the figure intoned, reaching a hand outward. Clutched in the bony fist was a letter, complete with postage.
"I... thank you. Apparently." Karsten took the letter and patted his jacket lamely, looking for a tip. Before he found something to speed the morbid courier along, the visitor collapsed in a cloud of dust and a clatter of bone. Karsten descended the stairs of his porch and kicked the wreckage with the toe of his boot until he felt assured that there was in fact nobody in the bundle of rags. Squatting, he pulled back the hood and drew out a dusty skull. "Nice cheekbones. Good teeth. I think I have a place for you."
He tucked the victual beneath an arm and opened the letter as he returned to his single-room home. He gathered with a sweeping glance the myriad grinning skulls covering every shelf and table in the home. "Got a new one, first one in a while. I get an odd feeling that if I answer this letter there'll be more coming. Maybe even mine. Won't that make you happy at last, you devils?"
When he had found a place among his collection for his new friend, he prepared for a journey. First, he laid out his map and plotted out his course to Sandusky. He calculated that it would take just under six days, and jotted some landmarks into his journal. Packing a few changes of clothes and some basics, he resolved to leave in the morning.
There was a strange excitement in his chest. There was a definitive impression of going to war. Not the banners and gleaming buttons and tinny bugles that his comrades might remember. His war. Blood and mud and shit and shadows. Knives in the moonlight, flashes of black powder from black vales between the trees. He didn't know why the thought thrilled him, nor did he know why he was answering the summons of a dead man. He only knew that this was another milestone. This was another thing he was for.
Karsten wandered to his neighbor's house. The Widow Traast was sweeping her porch, her young children chasing each other with their sticks. "Karl!" she exclaimed with a beaming smile. "It's been more than a week since your last visit!"
"Yes, ma'am," he answered her smile with one of his own. "Been thinking a lot."
"Thinking and drinking rhyme," she intoned the well practiced phrase, "But they ain't the same thing."
"That's the point," he rejoined, and they shared a quiet laugh. "Listen, Fransien," he started, but she cut him off with a worried look.
"You don't use my whole name, ever. You're either proposing or you're leaving," she laughed, nervously.
"Leaving," he answered, bluntly. "For a time. Not sure how long. Maybe to a place I don't come back from. I have a favor to ask you."
"You know you can ask me anything," she assured him.
"If I'm not back in two years' time, burn my house down. Don't go in it. If folk come out to stop it, just have them bucketline the lawn and let the place burn. Can you do that?"
"Taking your secrets to the grave?"
"That's the idea. Though I won't go quietly, so there's a good chance I come back. Can I trust you with this?"
"Of course you can," she responded at once, her tone testy. "Now, if we're not going to see you for a while, I insist you come inside and say goodbye to the children. I made stew."
"Won't say no to that, Fritz."
For the next several hours, he regaled the little ones with tales of the war. The Confederates he painted as savage, evil, ugly. The men who fought beside him were King Arthur's knights, they were Sinbad and his Sailors, they were David fighting Goliath. It was all much cleaner and shinier than the truth, of course, but to Karsten's mind fiction often held more truth than mere memory.
When the children were put to bed, Karsten shared a bottle of whiskey with Fransein on her porch. When the bottle was about halfway gone, she leaned on the backrest and put her feet in his lap. Dutifully, he rubbed her feet with one hand while nursing a glass with the other. "Where are you going, Karl?"
"Don't know. Up Sandusky way, but I don't know where to after."
"If you don't know, why are you going?"
"Wasn't any one thing. The messenger has me curious, and I feel a calling."
"I guess I can't argue with a calling," she chuckled, taking another sip.
He stared into space for a while, and she stared into his vacant eyes. The silence dragged on, but it was a pleasant one so neither interrupted for a while. Eventually, his quiet voice stabbed through, "Did I ever tell you about Green Eyes? Or the wood boogers?"
"Remind me," she ordered, in a voice that said yes, she remembered. She wanted to hear him tell it anyway.
He laughed and obliged. "Well, it was Chickamauga, out by a bloody little hump called Snodgrass Hill. I'd been knocked senseless. A cannonball had shattered the top portion of a tree and a big chunk of wood fell on my head. I woke up that night trying to remember my own name, lying among a carpet of corpses. I was still on the line in those days, so a lot of those corpses were wearing blue around me. I remembered my situation and began slithering around on my belly. Got word from a reb deserter who was looting the dead that Rosecrans had pulled stakes and gone to Chattanooga. I figured I'd see what the siege looked like and whether I could get in, so I started off. I rounded the corner and saw a hunched figure worrying at a dead Lieutenant.
"At first I thought it was the same deserter. It had long, black hair like he did, and the back was gray in the moonlight. The more I looked, the more I realized that it was someone else, someone not wearing a shirt. Against my better judgement, I raised my rifle and demanded that it account for itself. It turned around and I saw these... yellow-orange eyes rimmed in green fire. They were so bright I couldn't even see its face. When I put up my hand to block the light, I could make out the lower face and the body. It had a thick jaw, with gnarled teeth that were halfway to tusks. It was bare in the chest, but no breaks or interruptions; no nipples nor a navel. No blemishes either. Just gray flesh. It roared at me.
"I say it roared, but no sound came out. I could just... feel it in my chest, like a roll of thunder but nothing reached my ears. I fired one shot, and I know I took it in the belly. It flailed and squirmed like a snake when you stab it, but rapidly it recovered enough to simply decide to leave. It slipped away, looking back at me with those eyes two more times. I never saw it again."
Fransein nodded along with the story, eventually finishing her cup and pouring another. "What about the woodboogers?"
"That was much later. I was a bushwhacker by then. I heard about a little camp of rebs that were making trouble for a local Melungeon settlement. There had been some hangings and a rape or two, so Michael and I thought we'd go check it out and maybe start whittling away at them. We found them near a little homestead the locals called Watoga. Don't know why they named it, there were maybe three houses there, all Melungeons of the same family, the Collinses. Half of them had been killed by the rebs, all but one of the men. The women in those mountains, lot of them are witches. This little branch of the Collinses had three of them, so they put a skunk hex on the rebs."
Fransein wrinkled her nose with a half supressed smile. "That's a part you haven't told me before. What's a skunk hex?"
"Oh, sorry," he laughed. "Basically you soak a rag in some spices and get a skunk to spray it. Then you stuff it in a sheep bladder and make a little curse. You hide it on someone, and if the stink sticks to them they get bad luck in the woods."
"Oh, okay. So you're a hex now," she grinned.
"Suppose we might have been. We tracked them deep into the woods, and the stink certainly stuck to them. It looked like they'd moved on and were heading back to the Virginia border, or maybe to some settlement that we didn't know of. On the way, one of them got sick, so two days into the wood we caught up with the straggler. Leaving one of their own behind made it clear that they were in a hurry. The man showed signs of rabbit fever, sores all over his body, had a bad wheeze in his lungs. We wanted to be quiet but we didn't want to get close so Michael and I both put a bullet in him and moved on."
"I stil don't know how you can talk so calm about all this."
"It's easy. He was dead already without a doctor. When you get rabbit fever, you either get better or you don't. When you're barely awake in the middle of the day, sores weeping and you're wheezing like you just ran a mile there's no help for you. I just eased his passing. He'd have thanked me if he could. Anyway, we tracked the others. They'd doubled back after hearing the gunshots but we thought they might so we were creeping even before we heard them.
"There were six of them. They didn't look like regular rebs, probably just bandits wearing gray hats to give themselves an excuse to rob and rape. We didn't have the authority to do anything about that, really, but there was never a thought to letting them go. Once they satisfied themselves that they weren't being followed, they turned and ran back towards the border. It was a real foot race, like they thought they were being chased by worse than us.
"They made camp, but it took hours for them to sleep. They started a fire. We couldn't figure that one out; they obviously knew someone was coming for them but they lit a big fire like kids do. Any partisan worth his tack is going to see them. Finally, they left one of them on guard and the others went to sleep. We waited until they changed guard the first time and gave the first guard about twenty minutes to get good and asleep before Michael whistled.
"It was a quick, quiet sound. We had practiced it enough; a little sound to break up the night, but not big or loud or long enough to definitely be a person. Most rebs go to look for the source rather than waking anyone up, and this one was no different. He didn't get off a scream when we put our knives into his lungs, and nobody stirred. We waited for an hour to make sure, and then I gave Michael the signal to start creeping.
"He hadn't moved when the woods came alive. Ugly suckers, three of them, almost as tall as a grown man but just as wide. They were all black, not like they are in Africa but real black, like tar or pitch. Covered in hair from their scalps to their ankles except for their faces, hands and feet. Their skin was wrinkly and tough, no noses or lips and eyes that flashed red like coals. They stank, too. We thought the wind had kicked up the skunk hex on us at first but when these things showed up we knew better; there just wasn't any other way that they could have smelled. They had sharp stones in their hands, looked like axe heads but no handles. They set on the rebs, killing and butchering right there, and taking big bites as they went. Only two of the rebs even got out of their sleeping rolls. One took up a rifle and fired while the other one just ran straight past us. The brave one had shot a hole through the head of one of the boogers but both he and the thing he'd killed were added to the butcher's menu almost before they'd hit the ground. Michael and I could only watch it all happen. It was the first and only time I'd ever felt sorry for a reb. There wasn't anything left but bits of bone and a lot of blood, they'd taken everything they could either scoop up or eat.
"In the morning we tracked the runner. One of their victims had caught up with him, and we found his beaten body swinging from a tree. That's what happened with the wood boogers."
Fransein, quite drunk by now, laughed a little nervous laugh and they enjoyed silence again. "What brought these stories on?" she asked.
"The messenger today. He was... weird. Like a corpse made to walk to deliver the one message and breeze away. I think seeing Green Eyes may have marked me. Marked with the seltsamer, as my father used to say. Maybe there's something to that. This journey I'm about to take, I think it's what I'm supposed to do, but I don't like what I'm likely to see."
Fransein shifted so that more of her weight was on his lap. "Then let's do something natural before you go."
It wasn't the first time they'd made love. It wasn't even the first time that they'd made love on the porch, nor was it the first time that such activity had been repeated into the house and in her bed. This time there was an extra desparation to the act, a wilder element that marked the recognition that it would be some time before they saw each other again. He was reminded again of going to war. It hadn't been with Fransein that time, as she was newly betrothed to Michael Traast in those days. It had been with a slip of a girl, a traveling preacher's daughter just his age. He was off to war, she was lonely and they'd helped each other. This time was different, deeper and more meaningful.
That night, he slept better than he had in years.
***
[New York City, New York, October 19, 1866]
The room outside of the Secretary's office was unnecessarily stuffy, as if he had imported stale air for the purpose. The furniture was expensively uncomfortable, and the aide was performatively unpleasant. Dupont remembered when she'd been hired, and was left with the same impression as that day; she was a bauble. The Secretary kept her around because she was pretty to look at and rude enough to people to discourage them from bothering him.
Her accent marked her as an Austrian, though her coloration was starker than most Germans; her hair was a glossy shoe-polish black and her skin was an unhealthy, unsettling white. Her pallor was such that one could see the subtle touches of makeup in the same way one could see the paint on a canvas. There was an uncanniness about her that unsettled Dupont. Almost as though she was a thing pretending at the near-likeness of a real person.
Finally, at a signal that Dupont could not detect, the aide smirked at him. "Se direcdor vill see you now."
Dupont thanked her and slipped into the office. The Secretary sat at his understated desk, reading intently. Dupont cleared his throat, and when that didn't work, he asked, "Spencer? You agreed to see me?"
Secretary Baird started out of his concentration and beamed at Dupont. This was wrong, Baird had smiled twice where Dupont had seen and neither of them could be stated as 'beaming.' He wasn't a particularly severe or humorless man, he and Dupont just didn't get along very well. "Aaron!" he chuckled. It was a deep, phlegmatic sound. "I read your request. I denied it, of course, but you knew that already."
"Now see here!"
"We cannot be the vehicle for ignorance and superstition, Aaron. You know how it is."
"Superstition! We are talking about actual, physical remains. You cannot look at a thing and still say it was superstition!"
"One anomalous mummy is not evidence of anything."
"What about the last one, then?"
"That was dismissed, Aaron. For lack of evidence."
"But now there are two of them. Surely that warrants further analysis."
"This isn't why I called you in here today," Baird groaned. "I was just telling you in person as a courtesy. Until you find some context for a race of giants in the Americas, then I'm afraid they will have to be packed away until we can frame it in a way that doesn't reinforce fairy tales."
"Now wait just a minute... If I find a third giant body, what would you say?"
A sly grin split Baird's face. "I'd say that there is simply not enough evidence to proceed with curating the body for public consumption."
"Because you don't trust the evidence I've found, you will use that as reason to disbelieve any evidence I find going forward? Is that right?"
"More or less. Again, this is not the conversation I invited you for. I'm giving you an expedition."
"I... what?"
Baird sighed and sifted through the correspondence on his desk. As he did so, he explained, "It's very simple. An old friend to whom I am indebted has asked for a scholar. Specifically, she wanted a scholar with experience in 'strangeness and wild theories.' She had only one example, and that was you so I thought I'd save myself the trouble of finding someone like you and simply send you."
"What will I be doing?"
Baird shrugged, "Hell if I know. If you knew the favor I owed her, you would also understand why I didn't ask. I have been told that you will be gone for a while, and parts of your journey may be to remote corners of the world. Get your affairs in order, and report to our shovel man Beckham Palmer in Sandusky, Ohio."
"What if I don't go?"
"Then you're fired."
"My employment is not dependent on your good graces, Secretary," Dupont growled. He hoped it was appropriately menacing.
"No, but it is dependent on the good graces of various backers," he threw a stack of letters on the table. If all of them expressed what the top did, they were letters supporting whatever Baird decided. "Philanthropists..." another stack onto the pile, "Naturalist societies," another stack, "Politicians... I have more but you get the idea. If you don't go on this expedition for my very good friend, you simply will never work in your field again. Is that clear?"
Dupont's mouth opened and shut several times before he assented with a hiss. With nothing more to be said, he turned on his heel and stalked from the office. Glaring at the aide, he demanded, "You have an address for me?"
She cocked an eyebrow at him and appeared to consider her options for several tense seconds. Finally, she held up a sheaf of paper. "This is se address, vhat information you need, ant se accounts vis se operating budget for your expedition. If you go overbudget, you must send a formal request via post. If you are overbudget in a place vis no post... ask for compensation for expenses after. Ve expect your papers to be in order for such an instance. You must also send in reports monthly. Semimonthly at the least. Sey do not have to be detailed, your final report and journals vill be enough for sat but ve vish to keep track of your progress. Is all of that clear?"
"I suppose it was," Dupont grumbled. He took the budget papers and gaped. It was more than he'd been allowed for every expedition and dig in his career combined. He could pay for his entire career start to retirement and still have some left over with that budget. "Who is paying for this?" he asked her.
"She vill introduce herself, if she vants you to know. Oservise, it's not for me to say."
Again struck dumb, Dupont simply left the office. He stopped by his lawyer's office on his way home and made arrangements in case he never returned, and then took a carriage home on the outskirts of the city. He greeted his landlady as he passed her, and she spit in front of his feet. "Right," he noted. "Rent. I'll make arrangements tomorrow before I leave town."
"If you don't, I give your apartment away," she threatened.
"Lovely as always, Mrs. Ghorsky. Goodnight." He entered his apartment. The building was simply a home that had been partitioned into four separate living spaces. The other three tenants were immigrant families, with only Dupont living alone. He got along well enough with his neighbors, even if he could not remember their names and likely they could not remember his.
His own living space was simply two rooms; a living room and a bedroom. The living room was piled with more books than he had space for, with a half-broken chaise lounge leaning against the wall near the apartment's single window so that he could read by daylight and under the full moon. His bedroom was barely large enough to be called a closet, and boasted only his cot. His clothes were kept in a suitcase wedged beneath his cot.
He sighed, picked out a book to read and laid out on his cot. He tried not to listen to his neighbors, but it was inevitable. In a strange way, he felt as though he were connected to life because he was so near their fights, their trysts, and their families. Finding it difficult to concentrate on the book, he instead dug the fingerbone out of his pocket. It was the size of the handle of his pocketknife, and the light weight spoke of an antiquity beyond any bone he'd seen.
He'd taken it in Pennsylvania, the first time he'd laid eyes on one of the ancient giants. He knew that they were there, the great chiefs of old. The natives remembered them as cannibalistic monsters, but the propaganda of rebels was always thus. He imagined what it would have been like, had these wise and unquestionably strong men survived and continued to lead their lessers. Would peace reign? What industry and artifice would be extant? He drifted off to sleep dreaming of worlds ruled by divine philosopher-kings.
When he awoke, he made final arrangements to maintain his lease and bought a train ticket to Ohio.
***
[Kennesaw, Georgia. October 1st, 1866]
"You good folks shouldn't be seen with this traitor," the pudgy man sneered. He wore a tin star that marked him as the sheriff of the town, though he was devoid of any other sort of uniform.
"Wasn't looking for trouble, Beckett," the accused traitor raised his palms reassuringly. "I've just got some business with these good folk, nothing to do with you."
"It's in my town," Sheriff Beckett growled, "so it's to do with me. Good folk got no business with you." The sheriff stood next to the table where the three sat. The restaurant was otherwise nearly empty so early in the afternoon.
"Vas iz se problem?" the other man asked, his accent nearly impenetrable.
The sheriff's face puffed red. "Germans? No..." he corrected himself, thinking out loud, "German carpetbaggers. Tell your friends to get out of my town by sundown or there's going to be problems."
"Not to vorry, sir!" the woman said, brightly. Her smile was pearly and dazzling. "Ve are shtayingk vis Herr Bischel in his haus! It iz outzide se town limits, ja?"
"Bischel's house?" Beckett mused, "Yeah, that's outside my jurisdiction. People around these parts don't take kindly to the Germans, they'll never forget Osterhaus. You might not want to be even that close tonight. Probably better to just leave now and save yourself some pain."
"Ve already have ze plan, sheriff. Sank you for your concern," she responded, dismissively.
Shifting from red to purple, the sheriff tromped out.
"You're sure of what you saw, Herr Bischel?" she asked, accent all but disappearing.
"Uh... yes. I'm sure. Reverend Ferengsi was the last to see Alouisious Hooper alive, and an hour later the boy was found without a drop of blood left in him. I wrote your... employer as soon as I could."
"More importantly," the other man asked, slipping easily into a soft Irish brogue, "You know it for a fact that the good Reverend is in the Ku Klux Klan?"
"It's an open secret. They wear masks like cowards, but they're proud of the things that they do. They talk. Ferengsi is no different. There's other talk, too. Some folk have been... separating themselves. They back out, go home, kiss their wives and children and never trouble anyone again. Reason being, if you get them drunk enough to loosten their lips, there isn't just the regular evil of it. There are other things, blood rituals, invocations of dark gods, and the Reverend Ferengsi half chewing the throat out of anyone unlucky enough to catch his interest. Problem is that this means the ones that are left will participate in anything. They're also losing sight of what's... normal. They're so warped by these things that they have difficulty realizing that anyone at all might condemn what it is that they do."
The pale man and woman looked at each other. Their resemblance had to be familial, Bischel decided; both were ghost-pale with raven-black hair and striking blue eyes that nearly glowed in the light. They were similar in height, build, and even their mannerisms were nearly identical. Their true accents were clearly whole countries removed, however, so Bischel wondered if they weren't siblings separated at birth or something of that nature.
His thoughts were interrupted by an amused question by the woman, "What is it you've done to be hated so? They called you a traitor." She sipped her coffee and grimaced.
Bischel grimaced sympathetically with her. "Yeah, sorry about that. Supplies got so low in the war, nobody could find coffee so they started making it with chicory. Some folks still make it that way so they don't have to admit that they always hated it. Folks around here are stubborn."
"I'm getting that," the pale man chuckled.
"To answer your question; I'm a Pinkerton. During the war, I gathered intelligence from local sources and updated the Union generals on what I found out. A lot of what I did was intercepting mail and reading it. The rebels often gave away their position and their destination to their girls back home."
"What's this about an Osterhaus?"
"Union general came over from Prussia," Bischel shrugged. "He and his boys did a lot of damage under Sherman. Local mythology pushed by the papers is that the Germans were responsible for half of the damage, and the other half was done by the slaves they freed. Asinine yellow papering, but effective in a town run by lunatics like Sheriff Beckett and Reverend Ferengsi. Are you sure this plan of yours will work?"
"It will," the pallid pair said at once. They laughed about the echo bieng on its toes and turned to an easier conversation about nothing. Their easy manner actually pulled the tension out of Sam Bischel's body despite the danger of the coming night.
In Bischel's home, the woman sat cross-legged on the sofa and pumped a lever on her odd rifle, over and over again. Bischel had set up sleeping berths in the hidden room of his basement, and his family slept down there to avoid any crossfire. He himself and his two co-conspirators kept a quiet vigil.
Eventually, the night was lit by fire. Looking out the windows, the three saw a bonfire had been built, and a number of men stood around it in masks and robes. Wordlessly, they set the first spur to their plan. The woman climbed the stairs to the attic while Bischel exited his home. "What's the meaning of this?" he demanded theatrically.
Not to be outdone, one of the masked men stepped forward and defiantly answered, "We've had enough of you, Sam. We're giving you and your family one chance or it's the noose." He pointed behind him, where it was now visible that along the thickest branch there hung seven nooses. Bischel was speechless for a moment; There was a noose for him, the two visitors, his wife, and their three children. It took several tense moments for Sam to find his tongue.
He focused on the masked man who had confronted him, "Henry, I know it's you, I can hear your voice. You've eaten Jenny's pork stew more than I have, and I married her."
"Ain't no legal marriage," another piped in from the back. "Ain't legal to marry out of white."
"Don't care about man's law. My marriage is between me, God and Jenny. I didn't swear an oath to have and hold to you, sheriff."
"You dare speak of God's laws?!" The leader of the little band boomed. "God made the races and He intended to keep them that way. Does the Holy Scripture not say, 'And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings'?"
"Says those things, Reverend. Doesn't mean what you think it means."
"How DARE you?!"
At this point, the pale man bumbled out of the house, appearing drunk and cheerful. "Hallo du! Ich kommen to help, ja?"
The figuratively unmasked Reverend Ferengsi raged on, "If you would lower yourself to the level of livestock, that's one thing. Advocating against the will of God is another! We must protect the white race!"
The pale man pulled up the sleeve of his nightshirt and looked at his arm and then at the attackers. He cocked a quizzical eyebrow. "I can't see your skin, lad," his true accent had slipped in, "But I'm whiter than those sheets. Maybe if you didn't piss the bed so often, those rags might have been spooky." The reactions of the mob were immediate. For the most part, they recoiled from the Reverend, as they had seen his wrath.
The Reverend tore the hood from his head and rushed the pale man. It was over quickly, with the Klansman tossing around the foreigner and hauling him up to his knees. Ferengsi lunged down with his rat-fanged mouth agape and drank deep of the visitor's blood.
The vampire stumbled backwards in shock. The blood pouring from his mouth wasn't normal; it was blue and particularly thick. "What's the matter, biter? You never suck a genuine blueblood?" He laughed and tried to pull his torn nightshirt back up onto his shoulder. It was at that moment that a rain of .72 caliber balls peppered the Klansmen. The Reverend dropped onto his back and several of his men fell. A sharp PAF! sound accompanied each of the balls that dropped onto the group. Finally, the Klansmen who had been clutching their rifles and shotguns realized that they should be doing something and made to return fire. The pale man's revolver, drawn from a holster strapped to his thigh beneath his nightshirt, blasted all four of the remaining heavily armed men. When the smoke had cleared, only the two unarmed Klansmen were standing, and they turned to run.
The pale man was joined by his associate and Bischel. They stood on either side of Reverend Ferengsi as the monster writhed and struggled. A forked tongue longer than his arm lashed around, and he tried to threaten them. Instead, all he could hiss out was a long, drawn out "WHY?!"
"You've started going into your victims' homes," the pale man noted. "You violated the hayal."
"I know nothing of this hayal!"
"That's not an excuse. You violated the terms that must not be violated. The Queen has declared you an outlaw and put a price on your head. Our hands are tied, even if we wanted to let you live. Which we do not."
The pale pair grabbed the struggling monster by the arms and dragged him to the bonfire, which they wasted no time throwing him onto. The vampire's screams tore the night, but he received no relief from passers-by.
Once the screams had died down, the pale pair waved goodbye to Beschel and would not wait until morning before setting out. They traveled East for a bit, until the time came for them to split. The pale man traveled south, and his companion traveled North. Both had orders, and they intended to follow them.
