night's victims.
Scrawled upon a piece of bark were the sigils of those whom the Wamphyri had been seen to steal away, those who had been found slaughtered or changed, and those who were simply missing. Of the latter: by now a small number would be vampire thralls, hiding from the sun in the woods or the depths of mountain caves, waiting for the night when they could make for Star-side.
And of course there were also marks for Nana Kiklu and Misha Zanesti. They were shown as missing, too, as was Nestor. And Nathan had known that Lardis didn't have the heart to show the three as he believed them to be, dead and gone forever. No, for his own wife and son were similarly listed.
Then Lardis and Nathan had embraced, and the latter had gathered up his small bag of things and left Settlement for Twin Fords...
Nestor would remember very little of his brief flight in the fetid pouch of the stricken flyer. Even if he'd remained conscious during the trip (impossible, for the creature's gases were noxious and anaesthetizing, and it was only by a tremendous effort of will that he had stayed upright and mobile in the first place, before being taken), still he would remember very little; just darkness and clammy reek, and flexible cartilage hooks fixing him firmly in place in the pouch's confines.
As for the beast's rapid and erratic descent from mountain peaks it had neither the strength nor the altitude to surmount - the way the massive bolt lodged deep in its body snagged in the green canopy of trees to set it spinning, crashing through pine branches and brambly undergrowth, finally to come to rest shudder-ingly on a steep wooded slope over Twin Fords; and Nestor's subsequent partial ejection from the gaping slit of the pouch - he would remember nothing whatsoever of that.
The wonder was that he lived through any of it, let alone all of it ... and yet perhaps not such a wonder after all. For the flyer was of vampire stuff; Nestor had breathed the essence of its body; the oils of its man-trap pouch had got into his various scrapes and gouges. Insufficient to change him substantially, but perhaps enough to assist in his healing. That and his youth, his great strength, his will to survive - all of these things had combined to pull him through.
But healing takes time, and the greatest healer of all is sleep. Up there on the hillside over the ravaged town of Twin Fords - where the leaping, cleansing flames of funeral pyres blazed up in the night, and gaunt-eyed people went stumbling through horror and chaos in the wake of Wratha's raid, much as they did in Settlement -Nestor slept. It was the sleep of exhaustion, of traumatic physical damage, of the poisons in his system which on the one hand deadened him, and on the other supported and repaired his damaged functions. And so it was a healing sleep. It would help towards healing his body, at least...
Even so, he might have died from exposure. But the grotesque flyer was still feebly alive, its body was still warm, and only Nestor's head, shoulders and one arm dangled from the palpitating flap of its pouch. The rest of him remained inside, as yet 'unborn', in a metamor-phic womb of cartilage and quivering, insensate flesh. And all through the night the creature leaked its fluids and its life into the loamy soil, and its remaining warmth into Nestor. So that he lived.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
He lived and slept through the longest night of his life, and awoke in the hours before dawn to wriggle free of the flyer's pouch and fall a few harmless inches into springy moss and soft leaf-mould. And with the creature's broken body supported on the shattered stumps of pines, forming a sagging, diamond-shaped ceiling overhead, there he lay for a long time recovering his reeling senses. Some of them, at least.
But the one which had suffered most, and one of the most basic and important at that, was memory. So that when finally Nestor could find the strength to crawl away, sit up and examine the sources of his aches and pains, the one facet of being which he could not examine was his past. Not in any great detail. Misty faces were there, only half-recognized, distorted and grimacing in his mind's eye; scenes out of his childhood, and the early years of emerging manhood;