Psalm of Vampires, Chapter Seven

Family History

Image of Alexander the Great by Johann Jakob Horner Public domain via Wikimedia Commons, blood-like background licensed from Adobe Stock; cover art by author

Remember when Rondell Owens called me a Greek? I’m really a Macedonian. I was born in Thessaloniki at the beginning of the fourth century B.C., not too long before the First Macedonian War. The city, which today is Greece’s second-largest city, was named after Thessalonike, who was the sister of Alexander the Great, who himself was a most famous vampire, although nobody called him that in those days. She was also my mother.

Back in those days, Thessaloniki was just a small village. Don’t ask me its original name. I have no idea.

Greek legend pegged my mother as a mermaid who morphed into a wild-eyed Gorgon if hapless ancient mariners gave the wrong answer to one simple question: Is King Alexander alive? The correct answer, legend has it, was “Ζει και βασιλεύει, και τον κόσμο κυριεύει!” Or, in the language you are reading this in, “He lives and reigns and conquers the world!”

The legend is pretty much a farce. She didn’t turn herself into a Gorgon after sailors got the question wrong, because, for one thing, she wasn’t a Gorgon and didn’t shapeshift into one, like, ever. And for another, she didn’t quiz sailors about anything.

What’s a Gorgon, you ask? If you know who Medusa was, then you know what a Gorgon was: A weird-looking chick with snakes instead of hair growing out of her scalp. A silly story made up by humans because they were terrified of the vampire world and needed mythologies to explain it all.

Humans were caught in the middle of a vampire war of epic proportions. The Wurdulacs were front and center of this war. They destroyed my uncle, Alexander, taking down his handiwork, the Macedonian Empire, in the process.

Human legend says that Alexander bathed his sister’s hair with a flask of immortal water during a quest for a fountain of immortality. Of course, Alexander didn’t need to go on such a quest, because he already was, compared to humans, immortal. He should have had a ten-thousand-year empire. Human history should look quite different than it does today.

Then, according to human legend, when Alexander died, Thessalonike was so consumed by grief that she walked into the Aegean Sea trying to end her life, but instead turned into a mermaid/Gorgon hybrid or some such. Greek mythology was filled with crazy stories like that because storytellers and historians had a lot of explaining to do.

How to, for example, explain a line of vampires called the Olympians who could tap into the lightning of a storm and destroy human villages? Oh, I know! Make up a god named Zeus. How to explain Icarus, a Wurdulac whose wings were melted in the sky by an Olympian? You get the idea. The coven that gave rise to the Zeus legend, like many, many others, was exterminated by the Wurdulacs. Those ancient years of classical Greece have been given many fanciful names, but our people call that era The Age of Vampires.

It was a period of renaissance and culture, all led by vampires. It was the vampires’ golden age. And it was all destroyed, not by humans, but by the rampaging bloodthirstiness of the Wurdulacs.

History says that Alexander died from assassination through poisoning. That’s true to an extent. He died from a Wurdulac bite, which poisoned him. If we had known during the Middle Ages that the bubonic plague originated with the Wurdulac, a lot of lives, both human and vampire, may have been spared. Students of ancient history know that it took twelve days for Alexander to die after he first got sick.

Few slow-motion poisons were available in those days. Students of human history couldn’t know that twelve days was about the amount of time it takes for bubonic plague to kill a vampire. Give or take a week or two.

Little is known about the Wurdulacs. As I mentioned earlier, some say they’re linked to the Battue. I have my doubts. Nobody is even sure if they are truly sentient beings. In my opinion, they’re just big bats with serious attitude problems. Apex predators with a savage appetite for blood and flesh, whose only purpose is to consume and destroy, like great white sharks in the sky.

One thing was certain. If a grey vampire bat of the Lyroderma lyra species was spotted outside of its usual Central Asian habitat, especially if it was exceptionally large, it meant that a Wurdulac attack was imminent. This was an inescapable fact proven over centuries of bloodletting.

I’ll never forget one dark cool night in Pella, where I spent summers at my uncle’s home. I knew my uncle as a celebrated general and later an emperor who had become the first vampire to reign over both humans and vampires. He was sure that the sole purpose of humans was to provide nourishment to a superior caste of beings – us.

He was the vampire, according to vampire history, who discovered that humans had no recollection of a simple feeding, so he issued an edict that no humans should die at the hands, or should I say, jaws, of a vampire. The penalty for violating this code was death. He believed that humans and vampires had a symbiotic relationship long before it was proven that they did, although he wouldn’t have called it that.

I was a young boy, about thirteen years old, wandering around the colonnade that supported an exterior roof that on that evening opened to a blood-red full moon. I noticed a creature I had never seen hanging by its feet from an unlit lantern on the eastern stucco wall. To my young eyes, it looked like a grey upside-down rat with wings.

I ran to the second level of the home and found my uncle. I yanked on his sleeve excitedly, convinced I had discovered a new kind of animal. He laughed, patted my head, and followed me back down to the interior of the house into the open square. When I pointed to the creature, my uncle’s dark blue face turned white, which, amusingly, is how he was rendered in illustrations, etchings, and paintings long after he died (although he was known for occasionally shedding his blue skin in favor of more human colors to blend in with some cultures).

He was alarmed. He ordered his guards to cover every inch of the house, and then he ordered provincial troops to search every house in Pella. I had never seen my uncle frightened, and I don’t think anyone else had at that point either. This terrified me, so my mother told me that the bat I saw was a scout for an army of beings of cataclysmic might. This doubled my terror.

My uncle sent for a chariot, shoved my mom and me inside, and ordered the chariot to a small village southeast of the mountains of Pella on the shores of the Aegean Sea. The village eventually became Thessaloniki. I remained there, unable to witness a battle for Pella that wiped out almost every vampire in the province.

My uncle died of a bite wound, we knew, but nobody understood at that time how. I don’t remember my distraught mother jumping into the sea or turning into a snakehead, because she didn’t. What I remember instead is her rallying navies across the Aegean to seek out the home of the Wurdulacs. Nobody had any idea where they came from.

Stories came back from seamen of huge, bat-winged creatures assaulting the ships on the open seas, turning humans into dried carcasses and infecting vampires with what eventually became known as the Blood Plague. I’m guessing that those assaults at sea were where the Gorgon myth came from.

The scourge of the Wurdulacs spread. They didn’t seem interested in conquest, only death. They later spread to Rome, which inspired the Romans to also search for their origins. The Romans found the Wurdulac’s home of origin in the Seleucid Empire, which you might know as Iraq, Afghanistan, and a bunch of other places around there that still draw the fascination of modern human governments for reasons they don’t talk about.

The Romans discovered that the Wurdulacs were mostly cave dwellers originating in the Kopet Dag mountain range of Parthia, which today acts as the border between Iran and Turkmenistan.

I bring this up to correct some history you may have been taught. Human history lists several Macedonian Wars fought between Romans and Macedonians. The Seleucid Empire had been carved out of my uncle Alexander’s empire by one of his generals after he died.

The Romans, desperate to eliminate the Wurdulacs, rampaged through the region in an attempt to subdue them. They did a pretty good job of it and subdued the Macedonians and Seleucids in the process. Human historians applied numerous labels to these battles: The Macedonian Wars and the Seleucid War, for example, but those were just covers for the real thing, which was the Roman attempt to exterminate Wurdulacs.

Honing their skills as warriors against the Wurdulacs had more to do with the Romans expanding their empire than anything else. Their secrets for destroying the Wurdulacs died with the empire, though, because the Byzantines, gripped by a form of Christianity nearly as ruthless as the Wurdulacs, began a campaign to eradicate any knowledge of vampires and Wurdulacs from human thought, discourse, and literature.

This personal history of mine regarding the Wurdulacs forced a reckoning of sorts. It forced some unpleasant truths upon Daphne, it forced me to call Owens to an emergency meeting at the house so he could meet Moreland, and it forced Moreland to accept a couple of humans into our inner circle. It forced me to contact Charly, so that he, too, could meet Owens.

It forced a meeting of the minds among a group of people who would share only one thing besides the need to destroy the Wurdulacs: distrust. I even considered bringing Longtooth into this but thought better of it. The situation was volatile enough without his bloodthirsty attitude toward humans introduced into the dynamic.

I was winging it while feeling crushed that the entire process would probably send Daphne away forever. I was all too aware that her lifespan was but a sliver of mine. Longtooth and his hero Elrond were right. I would be tasting the bitterness of mortality, but ahead of schedule.

To remove some of the darkness of our plight, I catered our get-together through a local deli. The caterers filled the large square black stone dining room table with pizza and thick submarine sandwiches packed with fine Italian meats. Bowls of different kinds of salads, mostly with the vegetarian Daphne in mind, acted as a healthy countermeasure against the submarines.

Daphne had been almost silent from the moment she encountered Moreland as if she had been struck by a disease that had muted her voice and her happy persona. It wasn’t easy to watch, but I also couldn’t attend to her much because I had other balls juggling around the room. I asked her once if she was okay, but she only nodded her head slowly without looking at me.

The influencers had begun to trickle back into the estate, so I cordoned off the dining room to prevent them from trying to participate. Some of them seemed a little hurt, so I told them the truth—that the meeting was designed to brainstorm ways to find Ice Game Z’s killer. Raygun asked if he could send Wallace into the room to record the meeting. I told Raygun I’d have to kill him if I saw Wallace buzzing around. Normally Raygun would have laughed as if I was joking, but I was so earnest that he looked worried. He scurried away to the open bar near the home’s foyer.

Raygun texted me moments later saying, “I’ve been having Wallace patrol Piedmont Park. I’ll have him keep at it. Will that help you guys?” with a smiley face.

I replied, “It sure would.”

Once we were all seated, I briefly described my family history with Wurdulacs almost verbatim as I described it to you. Then, Moreland started talking. I should have known it would only take a few minutes for her to ruin everyone’s appetite. “When you see them fly overhead,” she said, “you see these fast-moving bat-like creatures with engorged stomachs. How do they fly? That was my first thought the first time I saw one. Their bellies after they feed are so distended that gravity and the science of balance should send them hurtling to the ground. But instead, it seems to make them more agile. When they’re engorged like that it’s because they’re filled with as many as thirty bodies at a time — pounds and pounds of dehydrated remains crammed into their huge stomachs. Their bodies take every nutrient from the bodies they can find and continue to feed off their nutrients for several weeks until their stomachs revert to a smaller size.”

Daphne looked like she was watching Ice’s murder all over again. “That’s what happened to Z?” she asked, her eyes wider than pool balls, her mouth drawn in by terror.

“Whoa, hold on here,” said Owens. “We are assuming, probably incorrectly, that these creatures are responsible for your friend’s death. But what Mourning and his witchy woman here are describing is something different than what we saw on the livestream. These sound like, what? Monsters, to me. Animals. Creatures who may or may not be intelligent but would almost certainly not be wearing a pair of gloves and dancing a shirt with a smiley face in front of the video camera to taunt viewers. I’d argue that these creatures don’t watch TV or livestreams. I doubt they have a sense for comedy, dark or otherwise.”

“Owens is right,” I said. “We can’t discount the possibility of a Wurdulac as the ice cream shop killer, or even being responsible for the Piedmont Park murders, but a Wurdulac did not kill Ice.” Charly looked my way in appreciation as he listened to my attempt to exonerate him.

But Owens was too sharp. “No. You’re saying that these creatures leave dehydrated bodies. Right?”

Moreland nodded. “Completely. Unless, like Jade says, it’s just a bite, which happens, but usually vampires are the only ones that get bites. Their human prey is drained of all fluids and then consumed. No trace, usually.”

“The dude in the ice cream parlor was about as dehydrated as an open fire hydrant,” said Owens. “The Piedmont victims had slashed necks.”

“But what about Alexander the Great?” asked Daphne. She was pretty shaken up. She wasn’t correctly remembering my story.

“He wasn’t human, remember?” replied Moreland. “He got bit and died slowly.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. I forgot.” She looked at me, and I thought I saw a tear in the corner of one of her eyes. She was sitting next to me, and I couldn’t help myself. I had to take her hand. Surprisingly, she didn’t pull it away, but she didn’t look at me either. I felt her begin to jerk it away, but something stopped her. I hoped it wasn’t fear. The last thing I wanted on this earth was for her to be afraid of me. I gently began to pull away, but then she surprised me even more when she quickly grabbed a finger and said, “Uh-uh,” still without looking at me. I honored that request and my hand held hers more firmly.

Charly looked at me with concern. I didn’t care. Then he spoke. “That ain’t the only way they kill, detective. They can slice and dice with the best of us. Here’s the thing. There is nobody these things haven’t touched. No family, human or vampire, that the Wurdulac hasn’t damaged in some way. Maybe not this generation. Probably not, in fact. Seeing as we all thought they were long gone. But we’ve all been touched by their history.”

“The Nazis got most of the ones that the Romans didn’t, ironically enough,” said Moreland. “While the Nazis were busy exterminating their fellow humans, they were freaked out by these creatures, not understanding what they were. Everyone thought that they finished them off in World War Two. Apparently not.”

“So, we have a dual threat,” said Owens. “We need reinforcements, but I don’t know who to call. Ghostbusters?” Nobody laughed at the joke, but Owens wasn’t smiling either.

“I’ve gone through the house. I know how to sniff out these things,” said Moreland. Like I’ve said, vampires can’t sniff out fellow vampires, but the Wurdulac were something else. “There are no Wurdulac here.”

“There will be,” I said.

“There will be,” repeated Moreland.

“Then why are we here?” asked Daphne. She looked at Moreland. “If they’ve been kicking your ass for 2,000 years, then why are we here? You don’t seem to have a defense against them.”

“I can blind them,” replied Moreland.

“Aren’t they already blind?” asked Owens. “You seem to both be suggesting they are bats. What about you?” Owens looked at Charly. “You think they’re big bats, too?”

Charly nodded. “I know they are. Seen one up close. Ugly, too.”

“Bats aren’t blind. Old wives’ tale,” I said. “They also use sound waves to find things in the blackest of nights.”

“How?” asked Owens.

“They emit high-frequency sound waves from their mouths and can pick up the echo from objects the sounds bounce from. The Wurdulac do the same thing.”

“And you blind them how?” Owens asked Moreland.

“She’s like a human strobe light,” I said, “except, well, not human. It blinds them and disables their sonar.”

“To that point,” Moreland said, looking at Daphne, who was sitting between Moreland and me. “We share much of the DNA of humans. We don’t like to admit it. I don’t like to admit it. But we probably share the same ancestor. The Wurdulac most certainly do not.”

“Oh,” Daphne said. “So, like Cro-Magnon?”

Moreland shrugged. “I guess.”

“Science class is over,” said Owens. “Does anybody have an idea what we can do? I shouldn’t even be here listening to all this. This meeting, this discussion, is a one-way ticket to early retirement for me. And I ain’t nowhere near my pension. Y’all know that if I whispered one word of this to anybody in the precinct, I’d be lucky to be directing traffic at the end of late-night high school basketball games.”

“But here you are,” Charly said. “Any other human would assume one of us would kill you. Your daddy killed enough of us.” It hadn’t been easy during the call for me to talk Charly into coming to the meeting after I had told him about Owens.

“Not my daddy. My grandpops. And I can’t do nothin’ about that.”

“It’s always been that way, Charly,” I said. “This tit-for-tat violence between the two races. We just gotta find a way past it. The Wurdulacs don’t care about our history.” Charly grunted in response.

When I had originally started the meeting, the introductions were cold but civil. This was an unprecedented get-together, at least in the modern era. It would have been impossible during the eighteenth or nineteenth century when vampires and humans were nearing the end of a centuries-long war. The only reason for a cease-fire of sorts was that humans stopped believing in the existence of vampires.

Human and vampire history was besotted with conflict. My uncle Alexander thought he had found a solution and had united humans and vampires into one army. But he died almost as soon as he was born, in vampire terms, and his dream died with him.

Charly, feeling combative, then turned his ire toward Moreland with a question he had asked me earlier. “This Ice fella,” he said, looking at her. “Do you know him somehow?” He didn’t ask this with a voice of curiosity. He asked it accusingly, like a lawyer badgering a witness on the stand. He then asked Daphne to play the video of Ice’s death so that everyone could see the slight blue glow against the killer’s arm.

“If you’re asking me if I killed him,” Moreland responded after looking at the video, “like I’ve said to Jade, I have better things to do with my time than pick off humans.”

“That’s one hell of an alibi,” smirked Owens. “Look, I know this can end me, given the current makeup of this table, but as far as I’m concerned, anyone with a sharp pair of canines is a suspect in all these murders. Any, and all. Including you,” he said, looking at me. “My even being here is basically a gamble that it ain’t any of you. A lot of people in my line of work wouldn’t take these odds.”

Charly shrugged, then said, “That ice cream parlor dude. He’s your first murderer.” When Charly said that, I guessed that he had gone back to the killer’s apartment and somehow confirmed he and the victim weren’t dating.

“And you know this how?” asked Owens.

“You’re a detective, right? You’ll figure it out. But he’s your man.”

I explained to Owens that all vampires have excellent scent-based tracking abilities, but that Charly’s capabilities were almost paranormal. “Check it out. You’ll find the evidence you need in the apartment. It’ll be a feather in your cap, detective,” I said. “So much so that next time I query ‘best detective’ on the internet, your name might actually show up.” Owens rolled his eyes like he does.

“Wait,” said Daphne. “You guys know who killed the woman in the park? But then, who killed the – I guess, killer?”

When I accidentally looked at Charly after she asked that, everyone else did, too. Charly shrugged. “I got a little carried away.”

“Shit man, now I have to arrest you,” complained Owens.

“Good luck with that, officer,” chuckled Charly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Owens.

“It means that the last thing you want is an irritated vampire stalking the county jail,” I said.

“So, I’m supposed to just be okay with vampire justice?” asked Owens, his voice rising.

“Wait, wait, wait,” implored Daphne. “You guys all know we’ve been sitting here barely an hour and solved two of the four crimes already, right? Can we just move on to Z now?” She wiped her eye with a sleeve, but I didn’t know if it was a tear.

“If what these two clowns are saying is true,” said Owens.

“Two?” asked Moreland. “One of them seems to have left the room.”

Charly was gone, leaving behind a broken pile of submarine sandwich on his plate.

“How the hell did he do that?” asked Owens.

“I don’t think he did,” said Moreland.