Under Her Wing, all eleven parts, revisited and edited

Part One – Innocent Blood Soaks The Streets
Part Two – Sharp Eckson This Is Your Life
Part Three – The Morning After
Part Four – Don’t Fear The Baron
Part Five – A Grimm Look
Part Six – Morning Sicknesses
Part Seven – Full Scheme Ahead
Part Eight – Moonlight and Blood
Part Nine – Red Eyed Monster
Part Ten – Live Large or Die Hard
Part Eleven – In Conclusium 1

2


The storm clouds passed over twin city Mais-Iringh, the last piece of civilisation in Grecko. They passed the many mountain paths, threatening shepherds with their blackness before finally settling down in Mierra. The Ono Forest seemed to be a popular place for storms and the town adjacent to it wasn’t very pleased about it.
Ono (as it was surprisingly named) was a strategically built town. All the houses were a metre off the ground, there were giant Lightning Rod Towers built on top of some of the taller buildings and each house had specially reinforced windows and shutters. Because you never know what might fly in…
Thunder struck the towers, illuminating the corpse of Grey Cassandra for a brief period of time. She had bite marks on her neck and her left leg had been mauled viciously. She was lying face down in a pool of blood.
“ What a mess ,” said Death as he poked her sides with the handle of his scythe. “ Ah well ,” he took out a notebook, scribbled something and swung his scythe down towards the body. It went thunk as it hit her blood-speckled back when it should have gone swoosh in the same way everything else does when it goes through something in order to separate soul from body.
“Oh, what now?” Death muttered. He kicked the corpse with a bony foot. “ Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. Wish they’d make their minds up about it all.”
He clicked his fingers for dramatic effect and disappeared. It began to rain.3


Lonely. That was the first word that sprung to mind when you wanted to describe Sharp Eckson. He wasn’t sure what it was about him that made him so … unlovable. He tried to be friendly, he tried to be sociable but it never worked out. So he spent most of his evenings at Hrugs, one of the local pubs.
Dead. That would have been another word used to describe him. A wolf had nearly killed him just before at sunset but he managed to escape by bashing it with a pipe and then running like hell down a few alleys and into Hrugs, his coat wrapped around himself to protect himself from the rain.
“ Hey! ” said Death, peering from a cardboard box by the doors leading into the bar. He checked his notebook and scribbled something with a black quill. “ That was your time! ” He sighed. “ It was much easier in the old days. People avoided me less. ” He stepped out into the street, scribbled something onto his notepad and clicked his fingers at a passing bum. The man collapsed on a heap on the ground. The man’s soul drifted out of its body and without much word, drifted into the next dimension.
“ He’ll have to do instead. ” Death disappeared once again.4

∗∗∗∗∗5

Sharp Eckson was sitting at the bar in Hrugs. The barman, Jeff Treftonson, was talking to him whilst spreading the dirt more evenly around the countertop with a filthy rag. He spat in a glass, made it dirtier with his rag and put it back with a pile of other so called ‘clean’ glasses.
“You, you know what?” said Sharp. He waved his hand around vaguely.
“No what?” replied the barman.
“I reckon, I reckon, I reckon that … that…”
“Hmmm?”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I think, I reckon. I … if you ask me, I reckon that the world is like a huge creamy berry cheesecake.” He thumped his fist onto the counter, making the glasses shake.
“I’m sorry?”
“Its, it’s, it’s round, see. And has, it’s, has … fish in it.”
“Pardon?”
“No, not fish. Big round thing ... with cream on top. Tastes like shit with beer. Starts with G … I think.”
“Meringue?”
“Yeah… yeah, yeah, that’s the one. I reckon the world is like a meringue. A great big meringue.” He made an arc with his hands.
“I thought you said it was like a cheesecake.”
“Bah!” He slammed his beer down on the bar, spilling most of it. Jeff was ready with the rag and mopped it up.
“I’m going, going … you know where I’m going?”
“No, where?”
“H … H … Home. Yeah. Home.” He stood up, fell over, stood up again with the help of barstools and staggered out. The rain had died away.
And then a flying wolf attacked him.6


Well, it wasn’t so much flying as leaping and it wasn’t so much a wolf as his pet terrier, Huffles, who had leapt with such force, he had landed on his owner’s chest, making him stagger backwards (his current state of consciousness not really helping) and crumple up on a nearby bench.
“Hey boy,” he said, trying to wrench the fluffy mutt off of his chest. Huffles was pretty much his only real friend. Barmen and shooting the breeze with strangers on the street didn’t really count as real friends.
Huffles understood him. Huffles knew when he was feeling down (i.e. most of the time), when he was lonely (i.e. most of the time) and when Huffles was not needed (i.e. never). In short, Huffles was there .
Sharp yanked the dog off of him and held it at arms length.
“How’d you get outside, boy?” he asked, in a much more sober voice. “Did I leave a window open? Ah, I must have.”
The dog yelped happily, wriggled out of his owner’s hands and began jumping around the cobbled roads.
“Right. I suppose you want feeding, yeah?”
Yelp.
“Come on, then. Let’s get home.”
He stood up, with much difficulty, snapped a large branch off a nearby tree and used it to support himself for the long lurch home.7


“Owrgh.”
Grey Cassandra opened her eyes and looked around. Well, looked down in any case. She groaned, painfully flipped herself over and lifted herself onto her elbows, finally noticing she was supporting herself in a pool of her own blood.
She slowly came to realise the numb pain in her left leg. She peered over her large chest and raised right knee to find her other leg, red with blood and jagged with bite marks.
“What … the?” she groaned. She then realised that craning her neck in any direction resulted in pain, as if her skin was ripping apart from a certain area.
She let her fingers run across her bloodstained neck, where they ran across two … dents in it.
The first words that ran through her mind were Oh and Shit.
Of course, it didn’t have to be what she thought. There were plenty of stray dogs in Ono, and any one of them could have taken an experimental bite out of her neck. Just because they were very neat and precise didn’t mean it had to be from a … she hated the word … vampire .
And then there was the case of her leg. What had happened there? Did the dogs try to take a bite out of her and then decided against it? If she had indeed been turned into a – she shuddered, well as much as one can when their muscles are barely responsive – vampire , then the dogs would not have wanted to take any sort of bite out of her.
She groaned. Now was no the time to think about this. Now was the time to get home or get to a doctor. No, not a doctor. She never trusted them. Home. Home is where the heart and the whiskey is.
Grey Cassandra, after much effort and pain, had managed to get into a kneeling position. She wiped her long hair away from her face and back behind her ears. Only a few hours ago, her hair was a beautiful redwood colour and now it was soaked in blood and rain and the closest you could get to comparing it to wood was, well, redwood soaked in blood and rain.
Cassandra considered her next move and decided on going home, that is, if she could walk. The doctor could wait until the following morning.
What a way to spend my Thursday evening, she thought. Bleeding and left for dying in the middle of the road. Hey, no one’s tried to steal my purse.
“Aaarrgh!” she screamed when she tried to stand up. The pressure on her injured leg was too much, but she didn’t let that stop her. She eventually managed to stand up, her purse slung over one shoulder, dripping with crimson rainwater.
She took a step forward and held back a scream. There was no need to yell; it didn’t take the pain away, she kept telling herself.
She had realised she wasn’t wearing her shoes anymore, but didn’t bother even turning her head back to see whether they were there or not. Right now, she needed to get home. Luckily it was only around the corner.8


I think maybe an explanation is needed at around this time, starting with Sharp Eckson.
Sharp had not always been called Sharp. He had been given the nickname a few years back, when he used to work as a candlemaker. There was no particular reason for this nickname but he had been given it anyway by is workmates, most of them he had never seen after he quit. After he left that, he became a professional composer, making music scores for most of the various musicals and operas that came from Mierra. The country was known for its great operas, as well as its supernatural beings. And as of that day, he had always signed his name as Sharp. He had only kept the name because it also had some musical quality to it. Everyone liked a name you could shorten down to #.
Of course, if you had to, you could call the actors and directors and other crew members of all the different stage productions ‘friends’, but everyone (including Sharp) would just think of them as colleagues; the sort of person you get along with at work but you wouldn’t share your dark secrets with.
But Sharp didn’t really mind; he told Huffles all his secrets. He knew Huffles wouldn’t tell anyone them.
Sharp was in his mid-twenties. No one was really sure about his age but someone once said they had attended his 5th birthday, and that would pin him down to twenty-four and that in return would say that he had first got the job making candles when he was seventeen and started making professional music when he was only twenty.
Making scores for musicals and operas gave Sharp a lot of spare time, only he didn’t have much of anything to do in that. He would just compose more music in his spare time. The idea of golfing or fishing had never occurred to him; Mierra barely had any flat areas suitable for golf and as for water, well that would mean travelling for nearly a day at least before he got to the sea. Quite obviously, there were rivers and lakes in Mierra but most of them didn’t have any fish and the other ones had No Fishing signs all around them.
He had tried to join various clubs, like the Bridge club and the Horse Breeders’ and a range of others but none of them worked out for him. So he spent most of his days either in Hrugs or at home, where the barman or the dog listened.
And that was the life of Sharp Eckson, pretty much in a nutshell.9


Grey Cassandra Grimshkand was a different case.
Unlike Sharp, who had been raised with a loving family until he had decided to move out and quit school at seventeen, Cassandra was an orphan and had been adopted by a psychic called Black Mother Grimshkand who loved the girl with all her heart but was so busy with whatever it was she did that she barely paid any attention to her. She had been given the title of Grey. Mother Grimshkand had said it is the title of those young psychics whose talents haven’t yet grown.
Cassandra’s psychic skills had never grown at all. That was probably because she had never had any. Cassandra was a very down-to-earth sort of person and never really held with psychic powers but she would humour her adoptive mother by attending the ‘psychic lessons’ she got and would, from time to time, observe her mother at work. It was quite interesting. People would come in and they’d talk about their problems to her and then Mother Grimshkand would take their hands and look into them. She would talk about their futures in such a vague way they were bound to come true no matter what happened. Unless they died, of course, but they’d never know.
Mother Grimshkand passed away (she had actually managed to predict exactly the right time of her death) when Cassandra was only sixteen. Cassandra lived off the money her mother had made, as Mother Grimshkand charged a lot and spent as little as she could. For a few years Cassandra was living well, but money does run out. Her friends recommended opening up a charms store. It was, they reasoned, a way of keeping her mother’s trade alive. All she had to do was stock a few strangely shaped and coloured pendants and crystals, say they increased ‘mystical aura’ by so much or something – she had learnt the lingo from watching her mother – and it was amazing how much people would spend on a so-called ‘magic crystal’.
Although at the time Cassandra had no idea how to run a business, she managed it, somehow. She had it opened on weekends and when she left school the shop was opened Monday through to Saturday.
And that was how she spent pretty much all her life. Of course, up until the time she found herself mauled half to death in the middle of the road…10

∗∗∗∗∗11

And now she lay in her quite luxurious four-poster bed, worrying about her leg and drowning the pain in whiskey.
Blood seeped through the bandages Cassandra had wound around her leg. She relaxed a bit, the bath had done her good. She would have to close the shop for a while, she admitted. But that was alright; by now she must have saved quite a few thousand Swes, the Mierran currency.
But that was the least of her worries. She kept rubbing her fingers up and down the two wounds on her neck. She still seemed quite alive, that was one good thing. But then again, how long does it have to affect you before it starts? If that was the case, maybe it was curable. Like snake venom; if you got rid of it early, it didn’t affect you.
She shuddered at the thought of the … transformation, or maybe she shuddered at the breeze that had just entered the room from the window that had been smashed only a few days back and she had never bothered to get fixed. The curtains weren’t closed, either.
She sighed. It had been dark and she had not seen who or what had assaulted her. She took a glance outside. It might not be all better in the morning but it’d certainly be a lot clearer…12


And then it was morning. The sunlight seeped in through the moth-eaten curtains, illuminating various bits of Sharp’s bedroom: a box of miscellaneous pieces of paper, an old newspaper and a plate. There was a groan from the far end and a protuberance in the old double bed shifted slightly. A smaller lump, this one covered in greasy grey fur, fell off and yelped as it hit the floor.
Sharp Eckson let out a louder groan and two arms and a head emerged from the sheets. In one slow movement, the sheets were pulled aside and a figure covered in a white and blue pinstriped pyjamas rolled off and hit the floor with a thud, much to the small dog’s despair.
Sharp stood up and scratched himself in various areas one is only allowed to scratch when it is morning.
He pulled the curtains aside and the sunlight burst into his small studio apartment, above the theatre. He had been living there ever since he had started working as a professional musician. It was where most of his work was performed, which was an advantage; it meant he didn’t have to walk very far to go to work.
Still, he complained about there being so many stairs.
After showering and breaking the fast (remains of last night’s Doshan takeaway), he sat down at his clustered desk where manuscript paper was piled, quite neatly. He took the top sheet off and glanced at the notes on it. He began to hum, tracing his finger along the page as he did so. Occasionally, he would scribble something onto the paper and would move on. Once he finished the page, he moved on to the one that was now on top of the pile.
He was quite proud of his latest work. It was the musical score for an original production he and the producer/director James Freshbutton were in the midst of making titled Baron Samedi Triumphant , a story about the Hakkan god named Baron Samedi and his triumph against a man who had defied Death too many times. Samedi had to leave his spot at the crossroads and become a ‘real person’ under the name Alex (his choice), wearing a mask to hide his skeletal face in order to get to him but ends up falling in love, an emotion he had never experienced, to a girl he was playing guardian angel to. After some events – used to build the story up a bit more – near the end, the girl rips off his mask, revealing his true face and he becomes angry and threatens to send her to the next world. Before he does, the man whom he had been hunting shows up to save her (there’s history between the two that led all the way back their childhoods) but the Baron traps him and tells Krystal (the girl Samedi had fallen in love with) to stay with him, or the man – named Paolo – will die. Krystal appeals to Samedi’s softer side, showing him compassion, pity and a bit of love. Heartbroken, Samedi lets them go, softly singing about masks and hiding.
But without the mask, Samedi suddenly realises who he is and, apologising to Krystal, finally gets Paolo just before Paolo tells Krystal he loves her. That was pretty much the basic idea.
After about an hour of scribbling on the music sheets, he stretched and made himself a cup of tea.
He sipped his tea quietly as he examined the teaser poster for Triumphant . There was Baron Samedi’s mask and a dead rose lying next to it against a light purple background. The mask and the rose were lit up by what the artist could have wanted to be a spotlight, seeing as there was a circle of darkness around the two items.
The words Yours In Death were printed in fancy letters.
That was it. All he had to do was give it to the orchestra and help them with practice. The premier was to be in two weeks and everyone was pretty stressed already and there were twice as many rehearsals going on.
It wasn’t a bad morning, Sharp contemplated. He had been awake only an hour or so and he had now had the complete score of Baron Samedi Triumphant on his desk. Granted, it had been pretty much finished last night, but now he could say it was complete. There was no better feeling for Sharp than a completed piece of music.
Yup, he thought. Not a bad morning at all.13


It was terrible morning for Cassandra. All her bones ached, her leg was stinging her and her neck … well, her neck seemed to be fine. She rubbed it where she had felt the wounds the night before. Nothing.
She didn’t know if that was normal. She had never met a new vampire, or any vampire in any case. She had seen drawings and they never showed the vampires with anything on their necks, but then again, none of them were all that accurate. Well, she wasn’t sure of that either, but it was hunch. She didn’t suppose vampires posed much nor did much modelling.
She found her makeshift crutch propped up against her bed, swung out of bed and placed all her weight on it. She limped to the kitchen where she lit her stove, filled her kettle and took the packet of ground coffee from her larder. Her pale lips curved upwards in a thin smile; everyone had heard of vampires lusting blood, but none lusting coffee.
After her coffee had been made, she limped to her bathroom where she examined her face in the mirror. She had always been pale, and she never tanned well. Her eyes too were pale, her pupils never really looking black. Her friends had often jokingly called her a vampire, but stopped after she had scowled at them for doing so.
She combed her hair back, and let it fall onto her shoulders. Her hair was black and most of it was straight. However it tended to curl a bit when it reached her shoulders. But she liked her hair; it looked unique.
Her neck looked fine. There were no scars nor scabs or anything. She sighed happily. Maybe she had only imagined the bites, maybe it was just the shock of waking up in a pool of your own blood.
Yeah, she thought, that must be it.
She limped back to the kitchen, where she drank her coffee slowly with a breakfast of biscuits and a banana. The coffee was definitely soothing her aching bones. In fact, she could barely feel any part of her body anymore until she thought about moving it and all sensation would then come back.
It felt strange, she considered. But she didn’t know what you were supposed to feel after nearly dying. As far as she knew, this was normal.
Right, she thought. What am I supposed to do? I can’t really operate the shop well, I suppose I could get help but once I start hiring staff, I have to pay them and that would mean less money for me. And that would mean having to look after some newbie who isn’t sure of what my charms did.
She smiled again. No one knew what her charms did apart from her, and she didn’t even know until the customer came in. One would ask her for, say, “something on a string to make my song take flight” and she would look through her pendants and find the one that looked best suited for the job. And there was no way she could tell anyone how her shop operated.
So I’ll shut it down for a fortnight or so. No one’ll care. Only what am I supposed to do now?
Cassandra sighed heavily. Ono was a boring town; there wasn’t much to do during the day.
She managed to get to the front door, where the daily paper was sitting atop a row of shoes. After much trouble, she managed to pick it up and opened it up back in the kitchen. Maybe there were some new events happening, or something that could keep her from killing herself out of boredom.
As she flicked through the dry pages of the Mierran Messenger , something caught her eye in the Entertainment section.
It was big, and if it were in colour, would be purple or red. It was a picture of a mask, and a dead rose in spotlight, with the words Yours in Death up at the top, in fancy letters.
At the bottom was written Coming soon, the biggest musical to come out of Sharp Eckson since his hit show Whistling Downwind. Premier tickets available now!
Cassandra had heard of this Sharp Eckson man and she was amazed at how popular he had become in only six years. From what she had heard, he had sent some music to an amateur theatre company when he was about eighteen, and they took him in. From there, he managed to grow big in the musical world and when the owner of the Ono Theatre House died, only four years ago, the new owner fired most of the staff and, after hearing his fabulous work performed in something as minor as an amateur dramatics club, hired Sharp as the new musical director.
And from there, Sharp more or less took over the company. He (and Huffles) moved in above the theatre, and began telling the staff what to do. People started to work around what he did, rather than do what the new owner – Andrew Vermin – told them to. As far as she was concerned, he was the most-loved person in Ono.14

But, had both Drew ‘Sharp’ Eckson and Grey Cassandra Grimshkand been discussing that last sentence, Sharp would have pointed a finger at her and laughed.
“Ha-ha-ha!” he would have gone.
Sharp knew he was respected amongst people as a celebrity of sorts, but he also knew that he wasn’t a very interesting person. He could never find a good conversation starter and when he did converse with someone, he would always find a way to say something to conclude it. It was as if everything he said was a full stop to the conversation. So, after a while, he didn’t even bother. He talked about the production and music, but stopped when it came to conversations involving small talk or anything outside work.
He finished binding the various copies of Triumphant and decided to head down to the theatre. The cast and crew should have started arriving by now and he was told he had no excuse for being late, on account of him living upstairs and all.
But first, he had to feed Huffles. There are some things you have to do.15


The theatre was already bustling with actors and people with clipboards when Sharp descended. They all turned towards him as he entered the room, the stairs to his home being just beyond the tickets room, in a small corridor out of the way. A few people uttered a friendly, or rather, a co-workerly “hi” and got back to whatever it was they were doing.
“And thus another day begins,” Sharp sighed to himself. Then he brightened up. He ran down to the orchestra pit, where the band was already practising ‘Standing at the Crossroads’, the first song to be performed.
“Alright, ‘No Going Back’ is finished, guy!” Sharp said, as he circled the orchestra pit.
“Finally,” a tromboner sighed, “should have been finished ages ago.”
“Shush you,” snapped Sharp. “Right, no messing about, we’ll get straight into it.” He handed out the various copies of the finished musical and took up his position as conductor.
The music began.16

∗∗∗∗∗17

The music ended just as Cassandra entered.
Sharp, the only one who was paying attention to anything else outside his work, saw her limp down the aisles.
“Yes?” he said, giving her a quizzical look. “You a production member?”
“Um, no,” she replied.
“Then I’m sorry, no members of the public allowed. No sneak previews, see. Unless you’re a member of the Messenger . Um, are you?”
“Sorry, no. I’m Cassandra Grimshkand. I’m the only member of Black’s Stone , if that means anything.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Sharp paused. “Wait, you mean the magic stone shop down in Valefor Lane?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I don’t think you’ve shopped there. I would have remembered someone like you.”
“I don’t, I just know about it. Well, anyway. I’m sorry ma’am but we can’t allow the public to preview our show.”
“Right, yeah, OK.” Cassandra said, glumly. She turned around and limped up the stairs with such melodrama she could put the prima donna of Triumphant out of business.
“Here, are you alright?” Sharp said, noticing her struggle.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she grunted.
“How about you stay here till we go to break and I’ll walk you home. How’s that sound?”
“Um, if it’s not too much trouble, of course,” Cassandra squeaked, already seated.
“No problem at all,” he said, and turned his attention to the musical score on the stand in front of him. He picked up his baton and said,
“Alright, we’re going to try the whole scene starting with Don’t Fear the Baron through to the Finale.” He turned to face the left wing of the stage.
“Roberto! Carley! Patrick! Rehearse out here! We need to see how this whole scene goes!”
Once the three actors, all in their costumes, had taken their positions on stage, Sharp let the orchestra start.18


The scene had gone perfectly, Sharp reflected as he sat at a table in Hrugs, a plate of bacon and sausages in front of him. Even the bit in ‘No Going Back’ where Krystal ripped off the Baron’s mask and he snaps back to reality and finally gets Paolo. That tricky scene where the actors have to switch through about five emotions. Even that went perfectly.
Bloody brilliant.
And then he had helped that Cassandra woman back to her house, in which she had offered a cup of beverage of his choice but he declined, saying he had to go back to work. She thanked him and, once he had gone, felt rather flustered for being arm-in-arm with the one and only Drew Eckson.
Sharp thought about this girl. She was quite good-looking, had a cute face and was very polite. He was hoping he would see her again.
He poked the cheap, probably disease-ridden food with his fork and, after a long draught of beer, finished his meal.19

∗∗∗∗∗20

Two weeks passed.
Sharp checked his clock; it was nearing in to five o’clock. He had taken a break from the bustle of the theatre as last-minute adjustments were made to get changed into his suit and to feed Huffles. Huffles was more important than the premier of his thought-to-be most successful musical ever.
He picked up the terrier and crushed him in what could only be described as some sort of hug. He put the dog down, told it to tell him to break a leg and, after grabbing a few packs of biscuits and two flasks of tea, ran down the stairs and down the aisles to the orchestra pit, dropped the tea and biscuits and ran up stage, where Roberto Pyangini, who was playing the Baron, was quietly singing ‘Standing at the Crossroads’.
“Nice work, Bob,” said Sharp. “You’re getting that final low note perfectly!” He grinned and left Roberto at it. Vermin appeared from around the corner.
“Ah, Drew,” he said, approaching the musician. “Looks like it’s going to be a full house.”
“Brilliant!”
“So let’s not have anything screw it up. The band’s good to go? I heard you only finished the music two weeks ago.”
“Well, er, Andrew, it was technically finished last month, I just made a few adjustments to the final piece. Nothing they couldn’t handle. They’ve been playing it perfectly for the last ten days.”
“And Box five?”
“Sealed as always, sir. No one’s getting in there.”
“Right, not until the reparations have been made. The floor’s a bit rickety, I heard.”
“Rickety? Sir, there’s a great big hole in the floor!”
“Should never have let that violinist and that publisher in. Who the hell carries around a phial of sulphuric acid?”
“Self-defence, maybe?”
Andrew walked away, pondering this.
It wasn’t for another half hour that the audience started to pile in. There was the general rhubarb, rhubarb as people got to their seats.
Cassandra walked down the aisle, looking for her seat number. Her leg felt fine. In fact, it had been feeling fine for the last eight or so days. When she had checked it, the wound had gone and her leg looked at good as it had ever been. Last she knew a wound like that took weeks to heal. And there was supposed to be definite scarring. Only a few things in this world could heal that fast.
Oh no …
But now wasn’t the time for that. Now was the time to enjoy the show.
A quarter of an hour later, the lights dimmed and the music started.
Sharp, dressed in tails, came up on stage and bowed. Cassandra could have sworn he was looking right at her half the time. She blushed.
The curtains opened (with much difficulty by Jim Lasciate, professional curtain-opener) to reveal a round-faced man, completely pale, wearing tails, dark glasses and a top hat. The scenery was just a cream and blue sheet and the only prop on stage was a road sign, pointing in four different directions.
The narrator, dressed in a long coat and top hat, walked onto the stage and began to tell the story. He promptly left the stage.
The stage lights brightened the second the actor took a step. No one apart from the cast and crew knew how theatre lights worked. It was one of those trade secrets. ‘Standing at the Crossroads’ began to play. The Baron sang.21

∗∗∗∗∗22

Cassandra waited for Sharp at the front of the stage after the show had finished. He looked up from his music, saw her face, smiled, closed his music book and climbed out of the orchestra pit to greet her.
“Miss Grimshkand!” he exclaimed, not being one to forget names. “How did you like the show?”
Cassandra smiled.
“It was fantastic,” she said. “I loved it. I must go and see it again!”
“Really? That good? Say, how’s your leg?”
“It’s fine. It’s healed completely.”
“Fantastic! I was about to go and grab something to eat,” he lied. He had eaten a lot of biscuits during the performance. “How about I take you out?”
“Um, sure,” Cassandra replied, her voice radiating uncertainty. She really wanted to go but she didn’t want to sound too keen.
“Great. Let me just change into something more causal and we’ll get going.”23


Cassandra was waiting for him outside the theatre, looking quite flushed.
“Are you alright, Miss Grimshkand?” he asked, as gallantly as he could.
“Prefect,” she replied.
“That’s brilliant.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes until Cassandra opened up conversation about what working at the theatre was like. Sharp grinned to himself; this was like talking about work only it was to someone who didn’t think of it as talking about work as someone who was actually interested in what he did. And it turned out Sharp had more anecdotes about his work than he imagined. So far so good.
The small talk never seemed to have happened (Sharp thanked the god of avoiding small talk. He knew there was one somewhere) and they conversed all the way to the small restaurant, Le Coq Chique.
They made their way through to the reception and were quickly seated.
Cassandra looked around as the waiter was reading the specials. She had never been in a restaurant like this before; she never really had the opportunity to nor the person to go with. She went to cafés with her friends and mother but somewhere like this was quite new to her.
The curtains were made of something like velvet and the candlesticks in the middle of the tables had little curly attachments to them, giving them so much taste they verged on the edge of bad taste.
She had to admit, she loved it.
She looked at the menu whilst Sharp spoke to the waiter about something. It all looked rather expensive and each dish had at least one word she didn’t understand. She wondered why Sharp had brought her here. She concluded that he was probably rich and dined here all the time.
Yeah, that was it.24


Sharp was wondering why he had brought her here. Why hadn’t he take her to some café or anything not so … well, he wasn’t even sure what it was. It just seemed to him now that this idea wasn’t such a good one. She’d think he was asking her out on some date or something. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Or maybe it was.
Sharp groaned. Women weren’t his area of expertise. That was probably why, somewhere in the depths of his mind, he didn’t want to screw it up.
They talked more or less non-stop for the whole meal about all sorts of things. After the meal, if anyone had asked either one of them what they had talked about, they wouldn’t have been able to answer. It was one of those conversations.
Aimlessly they chatted until after the coffee at the end of the meal, when Sharp offered he walk her back to her house. She, of course, agreed.
The outside air was cool and brisk, contrasting the hot atmosphere of the restaurant. From some unknown source, came a chirping of some sort. Sharp looked up at the moon as Cassandra spoke. It was a week until a next full moon (two moons in the sky didn’t affect when there was a full moon. No one understood how it all worked so they all decided to leave it to the astronomers to figure out). Sharp realised that for the last minutes he had been thinking about moons and not on the beautiful lady beside him.
In his head, he shook his head (he would never do something so comically bizarre in real life) and went back to talking to Cassandra.25


In the depths of Cassandra’s anatomy, something stirred.
The steak had been bloody. Cassandra had always liked it that way and it been quite a while since she last had a good steak.
It had been bloody…
A group of blood cells, black, not red or white, flowed through her veins until it found it.
No one knew exactly how a vampirical transformation happened, no one had cut open any vampires to find out. But there were theories.
One of these was devised by Mr Acula, who was a doctor at a blood bank, near Mierra. He said that it was half psychological and half physical. That it happened when your state of mind was that of what a vampire is in all the time. Not by lusting blood or anything but by what was around you: night, evening dress and so on.
The second part to the theory was that it happened when someone drank blood of some sort, like for example, blood from a rare steak. He went on to say how ironic it was that the steak created the vampire and the stake would, in fact, destroy it. No one laughed.
People argued that the chances of that happening were quite slim. Some people never wear evening dress in their entire life and some always have their meat well done.
Acula then went on to say that maybe these things were put in front of you, like some minor destiny. Once you were bitten, you had to become one.
Of course, no one listened.
Chemicals spread through Grey Cassandra’s body. And in no time they had taken over everything… 26


Sharp froze in shock. He wasn’t sure what was happening. He went over to see if Cassandra was alright, a rather silly thing seeing she was clutching her head and was lying in a foetal position, trembling. She pushed him back as soon as he approached, but she kept screaming “Help me!”
Then she stopped shaking and stood up. She looked … different. He didn’t notice she was a foot off the ground.
Her skin was even paler than usual and her pupils had thinned down so much, her eyes were pretty much just white. Her face seemed to slim down more than it already was; her cheekbones stuck out and her nose was pointier.
She grinned and Sharp froze in fear at the two … pointier teeth in both corners of her mouth.
“Ssssharp,” she hissed. She extended a long, bony arm and, her feet still off the ground, lunged at him.
Sharp ducked out of the way, tripped over the kerb and fell backwards, onto the cobblestones. Cassandra was on him before he could move. She knelt on the ground, with Sharp in between her legs. She grabbed his neck and lowered her head.
Sharp tried to move but was restrained by the sudden strength Cassandra had obtained. Her arms, despite being bonier than ever, were stronger than most men he knew.
She hissed as she licked her lips and … didn’t bite.
Instead she cried. She let her head drop on Sharp’s collarbone and wept.27


Grimm was feeling rather grim.
Most people knew him as Doctor, some as Geoff but everyone knew him as Grimm, which was his surname. Practically no one knew him as Doctor Geoff Grimm, however.
He was a biologramic alchemist, that is to say, he was a biologist who liked extended titles. He focused mostly on the human body, along the lines of no matter where he was, there always a patient around, ready to test on. It was namely him.
But these days there weren’t many new things discovered about the human body. Everyone knew the brain cooled the blood and the feet did all the thinking. Everyone knew the soft mushy black stuff inside you was used to filter dirty water into clean water and the filth from the water into your urine. Everyone knew you needed your head to breathe (many victims of the guillotine would happily tell you that).
There was nothing left to discover and he was a bit down on money.
What he needed was something new.
And then, as he was strolling glumly through the empty Ono streets, he heard the screams, just around the corner.
Because he was such a curious man, he crept to the end of the block of buildings and peered around the corner.
On the grass, just off the road, a woman was lying in a foetal position and a man was gingerly trying to approach her. However, every time he tried to do so, she pushed him away, despite screaming “Help me!” every five seconds.
He kept watch as the woman stopped screaming and stood up, unfurling like a rolled-up carpet being dropped upside down.
He watched in horror as she didn’t stop when she reached full height, but kept going upwards, off the ground until she was at least one foot off.
He watched as she lunged at the man. And as she grabbed the man and pinned him down.
He watched her cry.
He slowly walked away.28


Sharp didn’t know what to do. So he did what he always did when faced with a problematic situation.
He analysed.
Alright. I’ve got a crying girl in my arms. She happens to be some vampire thing. She didn’t look like one before but now she is. Alright. Hang on, let me check if I’m right. Yes, she certainly looks different. It could be the light. No, she was never that bony.
OK, no need to panic. She’s still crying but that’s alright. It gives me time to think things through.
So, she’s clearly a dangerous vampire who wants to suck my blood because she needs it to live, um, die, um, unlive … sort of thing. Survive. Yes, that’s the one.
I could just leave her here.
No, that’s just mean, no matter how bony and bloodlusting she is. Besides, she still hasn’t bitten me. Has she? No. I’m pretty certain she hasn’t.
Right.
I suppose I could just try to survive the walk home. I just have to get her back home and that’s it. And if she’s crying and not paying any attention to me, that’s great. Then I get back to my place and we’re all happy as Larry. Apart from her.
Goddamn it! What am I supposed to do? I’m sure there’s some long-haired druggy out there whom has some injection they could give her to … I don’t know, get her heart pumping again!
No, that’s stupid! That doesn’t exist. I’ll just take her back to her shop and that’ll be it. End of story.
He paused for a few seconds before trying to stand; he never really held a girl in his arms before and he wanted it to last, even if it was a completely wrong scenario.
He sighed. He couldn’t even feel Cassandra’s warmth.
Cassandra stopped crying a second after and looked up at Sharp, her eyes pink and blotchy. There were still tears running down her cheeks but she made an attempt to smile.
Her weak smile disappeared and, her eyes closed, she whispered “I’m ssssorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She tried to stand up, but found her muscles as weak as trodden-on jelly. Sharp helped her up and kept her close to him as he regained balance.
“Right,” he said, looking Cassandra in her strange eyes. Even in this state, they looked beautiful. “Let’s get you home.”
“Sssssharp,” she half-hissed. “I’m so sssorry.”29


“What’s going on?” Sharp asked, handing Cassandra a chipped cup and taking one from the shelf for himself.
“It’s what I feared,” she said, almost in tears again. “I … was bitten a few weeks ago. I remember, I was walking down the street, on my way home and then … I was hit on the head and I blacked out. I awoke in a pool of blood, I think mine and with that injury on my leg. It healed so quickly because I was bitten by a vampire, Sharp. I’m one of them.”
It took Sharp a minute for all this information to settle in his mind.
“I thought that sort of thing happened instantly,” he said. “You get bitten and when you awaken, you’re a vampire.”
“Well, obviously not.”
“But your leg. You said yourself it looked like a dog bite, but everyone knows dogs or any animal go for that for … um … vuh…”
“Yes, I know what you mean.” Cassandra took a long draught of tea and placed the empty cup back on the saucer. “I don’t know.”
“How about you stay here tonight? You’ve had a bad day.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Really?”
“Well, no. But I don’t want to intrude.”
“Nonsense.”
“Your dog doesn’t seem to like me.” She looked down at Huffles who was growling at and sniffing her ankle.
“He’s just not comfortable around strangers. He’ll get used to you.”
“Hmmm.”30

*****31

Sharp awoke to the sound of things frying.
He rolled off the sofa and stumbled to the small kitchen. Cassandra was up and appeared to be making breakfast.
The curtains were wide open and sunlight was pouring in through the small grime-covered window, but no connections were made in Sharp’s brain.
“Oh, morning,” she said, turning around and giving Sharp a big smile. “I thought I’d make you breakfast, as thanks for last night. And you do realise that your cold-box [because it was much easier to call it that than Magic-Powered Refrigerating Unit] is full of expired goods? I could have sworn your yoghurt said ‘Good Morning’ to me.”
“I have yoghurt?”
She took the pan off the element and with one quick flick of the wrist, turned the gas off and tipped the contents of the pan into a plate on the table.
“I have bacon?” Sharp half asked, half dribbled.
“No. I thought I’d run down to the store. It’s a lovely day today, I must say.”
“Nice and … sunny?” Things in Sharp’s mind went click.
“Yes, why?”
“Well … it’s just that … sunny? As in … a lot of sunlight?”
“Yes,” she laughed.
“Oh. Right.” Sharp dismissed it and focused on the plate in front of him.
“You’re not eating? I hate eating in front of someone.”
“Oh, no. I have to go anyway. Things to do. Shop to run, see.” She picked up her bag from the other end of the table and walked to the door. Sharp followed her.
“You want me to walk you home? Only you’ve got those great big heels on and –”
“No, no. Stay here. Your bacon’ll get cold. Thanks a lot for letting me stay here.” She opened the door. “I guess I’ll see you later then?”
“Yes. Come back anytime to Triumphant . I’ll tell the ticket lady who you are. I have the power to let anyone I know go in free,” he added with pride.
“Really? I guess I’ll have to come back then.” She flashed him a brief courteous smile.
She left and closed the door behind her, walking down the stairs to the front of the theatre. On the other side of the door, Sharp went back to the kitchen, double-tapping his heels together as he did so.
He opened a window. It really was a bright day.32


Cassandra walked back to her shop, in a state of light trance. Her mind was focusing on everything that had happened last night. It had seemed like some sort of dream. She felt the sunlight toast her skin and, for a few seconds, let her skin absorb the sunlight before unlocking her shop and stepping inside.
It was cold and dark inside. The blinds were shut and close to no sunlight was getting in. It felt uncomfortable and gloomy.
She opened the blinds, whilst in her mind something was telling her that this wasn’t right.
Then it all came back to her.
She opened the door and ran out.33


Sharp was halfway through his breakfast when Cassandra ran in. She was screaming something about being a vampire and the sun.
When Sharp had calmed her down, and told her that yes, he already knew she was vampire because she had told him last night, she told him that she had just gone from his place to hers, and then back to his again without turning into dust.
“What the hell is the matter with me?” she said, staring into Sharp’s eyes. And then he saw it.
He staggered out of his chair and fell backwards, hitting his head on the edge of the kitchen counter.
“What’s the matter?” Cassandra asked, getting out of her chair. Sharp’s face was white and a small creek of sweat was trickling down it.
“Your eyes!” he said, looking beyond her.
Cassandra stood up, slowly, and went over to the mirror in the entranceway.
Sharp heard her scream.34


She blinked. Her eyes returned to normal.
“What? What’s happening to me?” she cried, taking a seat on the couch. “My eyes, they looked … dead.”
Sharp sat down next to her and put his arm around her hesitantly. He wasn’t sure what to do in moments like this; he never had a part-time vampire in his house before.
“I don’t get it. This isn’t supposed to happen to vampires. They’re supposed to turn to dust in sunlight, I’m sure their eyes are either dead or alive, not both and I’m fairly certain I’m not supposed to see my reflection in the mirror.”
Sharp didn’t know what to say.
“I think,” Cassandra said, after an awkward pause. “I need to be alone.” She stood up and made for the door. Sharp followed her. She opened the door and, after declining Sharp’s offer to walk her home, made her way back to the shop her mind filled with so many thoughts it was hard for her to select and focus on just one.35

******36

Nearly two weeks passed and Grimm wasn’t feeling very grim at all. He had been doing a lot of sneaking around lately, much of it was to do with following Grey Cassandra Grimshkand and Drew Eckson around. He spent evenings hiding in Cassandra’s garden, watching her, waiting for her to transform again. But he saw absolutely nothing.
He was watching her restock her shelves with more ordinary rocks with boring names like Moonstone and Dragongranite when, whilst handling a rather jagged sparkly pink Pierre-de-Mon-Oncle , she scraped her hand rather badly. She dropped the rock and, blood running down her arm into her sleeve, ran into the kitchen to wash it off.
Grimm sidled over to the kitchen window to watch. She was drying her hands and was searching in a drawer for what he assumed was a bandage. He watched as she raised her arm to find it had started to bleed again. She cursed and put her mouth to the cut in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
A look of horror was painted on her face. She screamed.
When Grimm next looked through her window, he found her lying down in a foetal position. He took out a notebook, grinned, and took note.37


Sharp Eckson was scribbling down ideas for a new musical which he had temporarily titled To Starlight With No Stops In Between – a love story about greasy hairdos, white dresses and all that jazz . He was thinking about shortening it but wasn’t sure how.
As he was doodling what the leading character should look like, he heard the door slam open and someone run in. For some reason he felt it wasn’t necessary to turn around.
“Yes?” he asked.
“It happened again, Drew!” Cassandra cried, running up to Sharp’s desk. He turned around.
“It, as in … it ?”
“Yes!”
“Oh.”
“There were my rocks and cut hand bleed and I tried to stop but I realised -”
“Slow down there, Cassandra. Take a breath and tell me what happened.”
Grey Cassandra took a deep breath and told him what had happened. Sharp listened intensely and, when she had finished, took half a minute to think this over.
“I suppose you never drink blood again, then,” he said. He wasn’t sure whether or not he had tried to be funny just then. Cassandra certainly didn’t seem to think so. He kept his serious face on.
“Well, I suppose so. That makes sense, I guess.”
“You’re going to have to learn to have steaks well done, then.” He flashed her a smile. She grinned back and placed her hand on his shoulder.
“Thanks. Can … can I stay here tonight?”
From another room, Sharp heard Huffles growl.38

********39

“Grimm. Are you sure about this?” Doctor Sameon Large asked. His voice was so cold Grimm felt his ears were going to freeze.
“Yes! She appears to be some sort of conditional vampire. Only when she does this, or does that.”
“This or that? You’re going to have to be more precise than that, Grimm.”
They were in Grimm’s laboratory. Doctor Large was elderly but no one could find that they could really say that about him. The word ‘matured’ entered their minds before anything else. He was the sort of person who didn’t rely on physical strength. He was the sort of person who could kill an elephant with a single cold look. People tried to avoid eye contact with him, probably out of fear that they would turn into stone.
Grimm gave Large a brief smile before walking over to a map of a certain region of Ono that had been sprawled out on a table and weighted down with beakers and Bunsen burners. There were lines connecting certain circled areas. One was the theatre and the other appeared to be some commercial property.
“However, I think I might be able to … er, capture her for further study. I might need a bit of help though.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and brushed his light brown hair out of his eyes.
Large thought about this for a moment.
“Fine,” he growled. “But this is your last chance. Another mess-up and you can start thinking about new career opportunities. I have had enough of you and your pathetic attempts at biology! Do you remember that green rat you brought in last week and you tried to prove that rats had the same biologic build-up of cabbages? Now what the hell was that all about? I swear to you, Grimm, that if you mess this one up, you’re going to have to start selling those green rats to keep bread on the table!”
He stormed out of Grimm’s lab, keeping in mind to close the door gently.
Grimm sighed heavily and went back to his map. He had an idea.40


There were no lights in Cassandra’s house. So far so good.
Grimm tip-toed, ducked, sidled, leapt and crawled through her front garden, like a ninja on a particular kind of drug. He reached the house and, eventually, found the window by the kitchen with the slightly warped latch that opened if you rattled it properly.
He opened the window and crept inside.
It was only nine o’clock and there were no lights on. This made things a lot easier. Grimm stood up and found a lantern. He lit it and made his way to the counter where Cassandra kept her Mierran Quality Instant coffee. He took a small tin out from his pocket and tipped the contents into the coffee jar. He closed it, pocketed the tin and extinguished the lamp.
Now he just needed to wait for Cassandra to return. He left the house and returned to the lab.41


… Time passed. Empires were built and destroyed. Worlds collapsed. Planets collided. Cassandra went home and had a cup of coffee … 42


Grey Cassandra opened her eyes and looked around. Well, looked down in any case. She groaned, painfully flipped herself over and lifted herself onto her elbows, noticing she wasn’t in a pool of her own blood.
Well, she thought. At least that’s something.
She slowly came to realise the numb pain in her left side of her brain. She wanted to clutch her head but was relying on her elbows to keep her supported.
She looked around and saw that she was in some sort of basement. There were no lights on but she found she could see everything perfectly. It was, more or less, in black and white, but everything was so clear. There was a window somewhere above her but it was far too high for her to get there. And in any case it was barred like a prison window. She saw the door and walked up to it, whilst at the same time massaging her head. There was a thin strip of yellow light coming from the gap in between the floor and the door.
She looked around the room and found nothing she could use to pry the door open, or anything she could use to club whoever had thrown her in here with.
She knocked on the door. There were a few echoed footsteps and a voice spoke.
“What?”
Cassandra paused for a second. She wasn’t sure what to say.
“Um, can you let m out? It’s quite dark in here and, um, I’m afraid of the dark. If you keep me in here any longer I might die of, um … fright, I suppose.”
“You don’t fool me, you freak! I know you!” The voice, which had started as gruff and eerie, turned shrill. “I seen you all around, changing into a vampire, walking in the sunlight, eating garlic and selling magic rocks! You aren’t afraid of the dark so shut up!”
“Who are you and why have you stolen me?”
“I am none of your concern. None of this is any of your concern.”
“None of my concern?” Cassandra cried. She was getting impatient. “How is this none of my concern? I’m trapped here in this bloody cellar and you’re going to do gods-know-what to me and this is none of my concern?”
“Well, yes.”
Cassandra tapped her foot impatiently and knocked on the door again.
“If you don’t let me out, I’ll find a way.”
“I don’t see how!”
“Well, there’s a window up there, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but I’m not dumb. There’s no way you can fit through that.”
“I can’t, but maybe I might decide to … transform. A bat can fit through that I think.”
Cassandra could feel the coldness in the guard’s silence. She could sense his fear. She grinned.
She walked up to where the window was and paced up and down the room, as if considering the best way to fly through it.
And then the clouds parted and the moon shone through…43


No one knew much about the guard outside Cassandra’s prison cell. They knew he had a name like Lionel or something like that and they knew he had been some sort of lab rat for the last few years of his life. But that’s it.
So no one really cared much when the door he was guarding burst open and giant wolf sprang out and ripped his arms off. In fact, later when they went to pick up the pieces, they would not be at all saddened as they had run out of mutilated arms to test on.
It wouldn’t make for the hardest spot-the-difference puzzle. Panel one would show a well-built man, a dimly-lit cellar hallway and a thick wooden door. Panel two would show a mangled corpse, a splintered door and a set of bloody pawprints leading into the dimly-lit hallway. Spot the differences. Go on.
The wolf padded through the catacomb of what she could smell was the old church of Fereen, a religion which was no longer practiced by anyone except those who had nothing better to do with a bottle of Absinthe and a tonne of drugged liquorice. The smell of anise incense was a dead giveaway.
She smelled the guards before she heard them. They were running down the stairs a few turns away from here. The wolf fought her instinctive urge to pounce and turned left, away from the stairs.
“The scream came from the girl’s cell!” said one of the two men.
“How do you know that? It could have come from anywhere down here!”
“Where else could it have come from?”
The wolf stayed hidden until they had gone. She slunk up the stairs. There was a scream and she heard someone shout “oh my god! His arms! Look at his arms!”
She growled and walked up the stairs, the smell of anise getting stronger. She felt her nose sting; the smell was starting to make her nauseous. In fact, every other smell was becoming weaker and the anise took over her brain. The wolf barely had time to smell the wooden club that was being brought down on her head and the man holding it.44

Grey Cassandra Grimshkand opened her eyes again. Her head felt weak. Her head was throbbing with the thought of anise. She noticed she was in a cage, in the middle of what could once have been a hall of worship but had now been invaded with tables and charts and beakers full of bubbling products.
“Miss Grimshkand!” boomed a voice from the back of the room. “You have become an even more fascinating subject than I thought! Three for the price of one, I see!”
Cassandra felt the desire to leap at him and rip his throat out. Then she realised she was human. And naked. She sat up and covered herself with her knees.
“What are you doing to me? Why am I in this cage?” she croaked.
“We need you, Miss Grimshkand. You are a most fascinating subject!”
“I know,” she said coldly. “You just told me.”
There was a hollow laugh and out from the shadows stepped a large man, whose face was not so much old as it was mature.
“My colleague Doctor Grimm here has been helping me get you, Miss Grimshkand. He’s told me all about you. You being a sometimes vampire and all that. That is, indeed, most fascinating.”
“You say that one last time I swear to god –”
“You swear to god what? There’s no way you can get out of this cage, Miss Grimshkand, may I call you Cassandra, Cassie for short?”
“No. Miss Grimshkand is fine, thank you,” she spat.
“As you wish. You cannot get out of this cage, Miss Grimshkand. You have no moonlight and you have no blood you can drink. All you are now is a nude little woman.”
Cassandra tried to scratch herself but she noticed her usually sharp nails had been filed down so much she could barely even touch her skin with them, let alone cut herself.
“Who is this Doctor Grimm? I would very much like to meet him. He doesn’t sound like a very happy person, in my opinion.”
Large laughed. “Miss Grimshkand, I would like you to meet Doctor Grimm, the man who has been tracking your every move, writing down everything to do with you and your … abnormality.”
Grimm stepped out of the darkness. He pushed his glasses further up his nose and waved at Cassandra, who scowled at him in return.
“So what do you plan on doing to me then, eh?”
“We’re going to learn how you work, my dear” said Grimm. “Do tests on you and things. Find out how you can switch from human to vampire to werewolf like that. From what we’ve seen it seems your vampirism is only … activated when provoked. Some sort of catalyst, if you will. Something similar to how you or anyone else turns into a werewolf. The moon brings on your wolf and the blood brings out the bat. The whole process might kill you eventually but it is most interesting, I think.”
“Interesting and fascinating. I’m the full package then.”
“And you’re hot,” Grimm added, with a snort. Large gave him an unimpressed look.
“We just need to do some tests, that’s all,” said Large calmly. “Maybe, thanks to you, we can solve all the questions about vampires and werewolves. Their origins, their powers. Everything. Maybe we can even find a cure. Maybe we can even find a way to insert the genes into someone and watch how they transform!”
“Although we wouldn’t actually do that,” chimed in Grimm, “because watching you transform is quite frankly the most scariest thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Cassandra adjusted her position in her cage and looked at all the beakers and other equipment. She wondered how any of this could help them find out anything about vampires but it wasn’t up to her to decide this sort of thing. Besides, she wasn’t planning on staying long enough for them to try them out.
If only there was a loose bar or something, she thought. There’s no way I’m letting them cut me open and look at me. I need a miracle.45


The lights in the kitchen were on when Sharp entered Cassandra’s house, which was strange because it was nine in the morning.
“Cassandra?” he called out. There was no answer. “Cassandra, are you in the house? Your shop is closed, so I thought you might not be feeling well. Did you oversleep? Hello, Cassandra?”
He went to the kitchen to turn off the lamps and saw the coffee spilled on the ground. He went to pick it up when he realised that it wasn’t coffee. The texture was wrong. Of course, no one who used a spoon for their coffee would notice, but there was definitely something strange about it. He sniffed it. It had definite hints of coffee but there was something else in it. Something that smelled like it had been removed from the fridge after years of being left alone at the back. It was like someone had tried to make coffee out of drugs and chemical products. He couldn’t guess why Cassandra would buy such rubbish when she had such good taste in coffee.
He put down the tin and went up to her room. The beds were made and the curtains were open. No one had been in it for a while.
“Cassandra?” he called out, for no reason. He knew she wasn’t around but where could she have gone to? Why would she go home, have a cup of rubbish coffee, spill the coffee, drop the mug out of disgust, and run out of the house? The coffee wasn’t that bad, surely. Not enough for you to run away from your house and not come back for the opening of your shop.
He looked at his coffee-stained hands and, after a minute of thinking, decided to wash them. From there he went inside her shop from the entrance in her house, just to check. It was as he suspected; it was empty. Something, however, caught his eye. He took it from the shelf. Some sort of primitive instinct told him it would be useful. He pocketed it.
He went outside and wondered what could possibly have made Cassandra take off so hurriedly
Just as he was making his back to the theatre, he saw Huffles running down the road.
“Huffles!” he cried. The dog leapt and landed in his arms. “What are you doing here? Why do I keep leaving the windows open?”
Huffles sniffed the air and jumped out of Sharp’s arms. The small dog made a beeline towards Cassandra’s front door. He hit it and when it regained its ability to sit, began to bark wildly at the door. Sharp ran up to him and held him in his arms like a baby.
“What’s the matter, boy? Don’t you recognise this place? This is where the nice lady Cassie lives. You’ve been here before, haven’t you? Yes you have?”
Huffles growled menacingly at the door and made another attempt at jumping, but Sharp held him tightly.
“What’s wrong, boy?” he asked his dog. “You never act like this. Only when there’s another dog around. Do you smell another dog?”
Huffles growled in response.
“Was there someone else here? Where?”
Huffles jumped out of Sharps arms and began to sniff around the flowerbed. He barked.
“Did someone come here? Do you think they had the big dog with them and they took Cassie away?”
Huffles barked.
Sharp nodded. He was the sort of person who pretended he knew what his dog was saying but, really, he didn’t have a clue what his dog was saying. He heard, more or less, what he wanted to hear. Right now he heard that there was a rescue attempt available as well as the opportunity to be a hero. He sense adventure.
If only life were really a musical, he thought. Right now I could be singing about going into the fire or something.
“Find me Cassie, boy! Go on!”
The dog barked and, his nose on the ground, sprinted out of the flower bed and into the street. Sharp ran after him.46


The scientists were seated around the cage, looking at Cassandra and eating their breakfasts quite noisily off their laps.
Cassandra had been given a blanket through the bars so she had wrapped herself in that and every time a part of it unravelled, she would glare at the scientist who was staring at put it back without speaking.
In fact, she had decided to ignore them completely from now on.
Only problem was she was starting to get quite hungry. She wondered whether stubbornness was as important as hunger.
Nah, they wouldn’t let her starve anyway.
She waited.47


Sharp didn’t recognise this part of Ono. It was too dark for nine in the morning.
Huffles led the way past old factories and warehouses, through small alleys and back roads until they reached a run down piazza. In the centre was an old building with spires and, had they not all been boarded up or broken, stained-glass windows.
Huffles stopped when he reached the large set of double doors.
Sharp caught up and took a look at his surrounding. The building stood alone, with a circle of overgrown grass around it. It looked like whoever had built and designed the factories around the church had tried to keep out of whatever aura it may have. There was something eerie about this church, even in the bright sunlight.
He noticed a small plaque to the side of the door.48

VELCOMME TU ZE CHURTCH OV FEREEN
COM UN INN UND WORSHIPPE ZE POWERR OV ZE FEREEN
BYO ABZINTH UND LIKKORISH 49

He reread the plaque a couple of times, trying to correct the spelling. It seemed to him that every word, except perhaps Fereen, whatever that was, was spelt wrong.
Huffles was still barking at the door when Sharp bent down to pick him up. He wasn’t sure where the dog was taking him, nor did he have the faintest idea on how to get home, but he was here now so he may as well take this adventure to a more exciting level.50


Cassandra saw the man approach her not with breakfast but with a syringe. It was filled with a strange yellow syrup-like liquid. There was no way he was going to get that thing in her. Not if she could help it.
Grimm grabbed her arm but she managed to wriggle free. He stuck his hand in through the bars. Cassandra jerked backwards and snapped at his hands. He withdrew his hands, the syringe dropped in the cage and Grimm laughed. Her eyes flashed red and, for a split second, there was a hint of wolf in her face.
“Your enemies are so fortunate that your condition is not permanent. My hand would have been ripped off. And red eyes suit so few, too. How lucky of you.”
Cassandra growled and took the syringe.
“Come on,” she hissed, holding the syringe menacingly. “Stick your hand in here. I dare you.”51


The smell of anise hit Sharp in the face like a bag of frozen peas, but he had always rather enjoyed the smell. Huffles was a little hesitant about entering, but decided that it was best not to be alone in these streets.
The inside didn’t look so much like a church. All the temples and churches Sharp knew were more or less one great big room with the occasional side room somewhere where one could pray or confess or sacrifice goats. This one reminded him more of a school building. It was an ancient hallway and on both sides were lines of doors. The hallway looked like it went on forever.
Sharp and Huffles slowly advanced down it. Occasionally Sharp would try to open one of the doors on the side, but they were all locked.
“Are you sure this is the place, Huffles?” he asked, looking around. The place looked like it hadn’t been used in years. There were pieces of paper tacked up on the parts of the walls that weren’t occupied by doors. Sharp tried to red one but the messy text and sloppy spelling made his head hurt.
He heard a man scream somewhere in the darkness ahead of him, followed by a deep laugh. There was silence for a while and then some muffled voices.
“Shhh,” he told his dog. “Or they’ll hear us.”
Slowly he crept down the hallway. He could see a large set of double doors, much like the ones at the entrance. He wondered whether he had reached the back door. Silently, he inched his way closer and closer to the door, his dog plodding alongside not really sure what was going on.
A floorboard creaked and Sharp jumped. He regained composure and pointed at the floor in an accusing manner.
“Shhh!” he told it.
He reached the door and put his ear against it. He tried to listen.
“You can’t wriggle free forever you know,” said one voice. “Just give me that syringe like a good girl and we can get along. You’ll be out in no time, I promise.”
“Go to hell.” This voice he recognised. It was definitely Cassandra’s.
“Now, now, that’s not very nice at all. If you don’t give me that syringe I’ll have to take it from you by force. You’re in no position to be doing this. There are about ten of us and only one of you. And you’re tired, hungry, weak and naked. You’re in a very weak position, so just stop playing games.”
“My boyfriend is going to kick your arse.”
My boyfriend! Sharp almost jumped up in joy. Then seriousness of the situation sank in and he regained, for the second time in two minutes, composure.
“Your boyfriend? He doesn’t even know you’re here!”
This was the time for action. Sharp considered his next move He took out the weapon he had taken from Cassandra’s shop and weighed it in his hands. It was long and pointy but he wasn’t sure how good it was against ten scientists. He looked at the massive doors; there was no way he could kick those open without severely damaging his leg. Reinforcements would be a good idea but who would come rushing down here at nine in the morning on the basis that he claimed his girlfriend was taken by what he could understand to be ten scientists in a rundown church in the middle of town. He needed friends right about now.
Right. Time for another plan. OK, let’s see…
There was a female scream.
Sharp kicked the door, hurt his foot and opened it by hand.
“Freeze!” he shouted. “Don’t anybody move!”
Grimm turned around.
“Who are you, the police?”
“No sir,” Sharp said, waving his pointed rock around. “I’m a musician.”
He finally had he time to look at the room he had just burst into. It was incredibly large, with tables laden with scientific equipment and charts. In the centre of the room was a cage. He saw Cassandra sitting in it, blood trickled down her face and she was naked, half-covered by only an old ragged sheet. The scientist who had addressed him was holding a knife and seemed to be in the middle of doing something with the cage door.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the big man at the back of the room.
“I’m Sharp.”
“Sharp? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“It’s a musical term. And,” he thrust the stone in his hand, “it’s an adjective. It describes very well what the rock is.” He felt proud of his little speech. He felt tough and full of bravado.
“You’re going to fight us with a rock?” Grimm laughed and advanced on Sharp. “Ten of us and you’re going to take me on with a rock?”
Cassandra looked up at Sharp.
“Drew!” she shouted. “Give me the rock!”
Drew nodded and ducked out of the way of the approaching Grimm. He slid the rock through the bars of the cage and Cassandra took hold of it. She held out her palm and dug the rock into it.
Ten scientists watched as she sucked on her cut.
“Oh no.” Grimm dropped his knife.
There was a squeal from Cassandra’s cage. Sharp turned around.
“Drew,” Cassandra said, staring at the rock. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. I picked it up at your store; I thought it would be a good idea. I couldn’t see any good knives in your house, this was the best thing I could find. Your pink one was broken.” He looked around. The scientists were beginning to gather around. Some were huddling together, nervously. They were definitely expecting the worse.
“Sharp,” Cassandra’s voice began to break. “This is Moonstone. I just cut myself with Moonstone.”
“So?”
“Turn around and don’t look at me. Now!”
Sharp obeyed. There was a horrible squelching sound and the sound of splintering metal. There were screams.
When Sharp turned around again, he saw not his girlfriend, but a large black-haired wolf. Grimm was fumbling around for his knife.
“Cassie, is that you?” Sharp said, looking at the wolf. Huffles, beside him started to growl at the strange wolf but stopped abruptly. He cowered behind his master.
“It is! And it’s ours!” Large screamed. “I want that wolf, dead or alive I want it!” However, none of the scientists reacted. They were too frightened to do anything. The Cassandra wolf turned around and headed towards Large, growling and drooling as it advanced. Large backed away, but hit the wall.
Cassandra pounced and hit Large, knocking him sideways. He hit the floor hard. He tried to scramble away but a paw dug into his leg, dragging him back and he found himself face to face with an angry and strangely beautiful wolf.
That was the last thing he ever saw.52


“ Freeze !” Grimm’s shrill voice filled the makeshift lab. “You there! Tell your wolf not to move or she’ll get two loads of silver shot in her!”
He stood by the cage, knife in one hand aimed somewhere vaguely in the direction of Sharp and a double-shot crossbow in the other, aimed directly at Cassandra. He looked highly distressed and his veiny hands trembled like a bomb had just erupted in his wrist.
Cassie padded towards him, as nonchalantly as one can do when one’s a wolf. Grimm’s hands jerked in mid-tremble.
“I said don’t move!” He dropped the knife and reached inside his pocket for one of his yellow syringes. “Damn it, I am not going to let you ruin my career!” He inched his way towards the wolf, taking glances at Sharp whenever he could. “I am taking this wolf and you, you are going to go! Go or die!”
Sharp felt eight crossbows aim themselves at his head.
“Leave!”
I could duck. They’d fire into thin air, they’d probably end up hitting each other, Sharp thought. It would take them a long time to reload. I could get to that knife and to that guy there. But he might see me. He might kill Cassie.
Sharp ducked.
Grimm saw it. Grimm fired.
Or would have if he hadn’t screeched at the top of his voice and collapsed on the floor.
Eight crossbows fired and hit nothing.
There was a pause as everyone tried to figure out what happened. All eyes fell on Grimm, who was crying in pain. In his leg was his knife. Blood soaked the floor underneath. Huffles backed away from the crying man and tried not to look guilty.
In one movement, Sharp swooped down, ripped the knife out of Grimm’s ankle and held it to his neck.
“Go on,” he hissed. “Move, I dare you.”
Grimm tried to look up at Sharp, but the knife was too close.
“Now I’m going to take my girlfriend and my dog and I’m going back home, make some coffee and play some piano for her. You and your team of idiots are going to stay here and clean up this mess. Then you’re going to have a fun time trying to explain to the police what happened to that fat old shit down there, may he rest in peace. We’ll see who they believe. He might not have a face anymore but with all these chemicals around, I’m sure you’ll be able to make up a lie involving them somehow.”
“But … science! It’s all in the name of science! There are always sacrifices made for science! But it’s all for the greater good!”
“You are not to touch my girlfriend ever again, do you understand?”
“But science!”
“ Understand ?”
“…yes.”
There was the sound of a crossbow being fired. The naked, now-human Cassandra raised her hands to her mouth and screamed. The bolt broke through her skull and shot out through the other end.
Sharp saw her fall. It was horrible and seemed to go in slow motion.
“Cassandra!” he screeched. “No!”
Grimm, spotting this opportunity, managed to trip Sharp up and wrestle the knife from him. He kicked Huffles out of the way and laughed. His grin was manic, his eyes were bloodshot and his knife was raised. He brought the knife down.
There was an explosion of bats and Grimm felt himself being pushed backwards by a thick black leathery cloud. Eight scientists were jostled and bustled and their crossbows were thrown from their hands.
The bats regrouped and formed looked like a leathery silhouette of Grey Cassandra Grimshkand. Eyes appeared from the cluster of bats and, like a Cheshire cat from hell, eventually the rest of Cassandra appeared.
“I think we should go,” she said. Her voice was still slightly croaky.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Sharp said. He took the syringe and threw it against the wall. It broke and the yellow liquid oozed out. Sharp and Cassandra turned towards the door and made their way, hand in hand, out, a limping Huffles not far behind.
And somewhere behind him, Grimm was on his back, hands waving around hysterically and shrieking “Bats! They’re everywhere! Bats!” over and over. His coat opened just enough for someone to see the needle sticking out of his pocket and into his chest.
The smell of anise and chemicals lingered in the air.53

************54

The Baron sang again.
The audience applauded and, for the first time since the show premiered, they stood up. Cassandra was the first to do it. Then the person behind her stood up because she couldn’t see what was going on, and eventually the whole row was standing up. Everyone else saw this and stood up on the basis that because those people were doing it, they may as well, too. Kind of like a reverse Domino Effect
Generally, that was the rule for most standing ovations. It’s seldom told because it’s quite sad but it’s true nonetheless. Most of the universe’s greatest shows are “great” only because one person thought to stand up.
But this was still the Day the Audience Stood Up. Sharp beamed with pride.55


Twenty-seven days passed. The full moon was out. Well, one of them was anyway. The second one had buggered off somewhere. Sharp lay in his bed, alone for the first time in almost a month. In a sense he felt cheated; his girlfriend was in bed with his dog, but it was better that way. He didn’t know if Cassie would get some sort of primitive dream and attempt to bite his head off in her sleep. Besides it would be far too weird. The moonlight twinkled off Cassie’s collar; black leather studded with moonstone. The tag read: Cassie. If found, leave her alone. I swear to god.
There was the occasional doggy snore from the now much larger basket and, after listening to the harmony of noise from the city below, Drew Sharp Eckson went to sleep.56

57

THE END