to kiss her breasts. And then she saw the throb of his neck where her caresses had caused the blood to course like a river, and he heard the hisss of her breath as her hand slid from his member to the seed-swollen source of his lust. Then, as she tightened her grip with a vampire's strength, and as her nails dug in, he tried to draw away... too late!
He saw her eyes yellow as molten gold in the night, saw the moonlight gleaming white on her mouth of knives, hich she closed on his windpipe to sever it. Perhaps, in the instant of her striking, he issued the small scream of a gelding, cut off along with his air and, less rapidly, his life ...
... And perhaps, in the smaller house alongside his own, his son Javez heard or in some way sensed his father's small scream. At any rate he woke up, and listened awhile to the silence, then came padding to investigate.
Wratha, a child of the night, saw Javez in all detail; he saw only shadows and moonbeams in his father's room, and a humped outline moving under the blanket. But he also heard the sounds of Wratha's hungry suction. It sounded like something else: like his father was with a woman! Which he was, but not in the way Javez thought it. The younger man's jaw fell open as he began to back out of the room.
Wratha stuck her head further out, tossed back her hair, and in a 'shocked' voice said, 'Oh! - Javez!' Which spoke volumes, however falsely.
He knew that voice at once, and his eyes started from his head as he whispered, 'Wratha?' Then, jaw lolling more yet, he choked: 'Father.1' And blood surging, he leaped to the bed and tore aside the blanket. What had been his father lay there ...
Stunned, Javez fell back, tripped, would have fallen. But Wratha was standing beside him, smiling her smile. She held him upright, watched his face, mouth and throat, all working in unison, doing nothing. And the knob of Javez's throat going up and down like some strange dumb bird's wattle, as he gathered saliva to cry out. But before he could gather enough -
- She showed him a splinter of ironwood stripped from a shattered tree in the mouth of the pass. And: 'Do you remember?' she said, dragging him by the hair back on to the bed with his father. 'You gave me a knife like this, upon a time - to kill myself, I suppose. But no, I used it for another purpose. And now I give it back.'
'Wratha-a-o-a!' he gurgled, as she drove the splinter deep into his groin, and drew it out; into his shuddering belly, and drew it out; into his heart, and twisted it there, and wrenched it until it broke . .. Then, when all was still, she kissed them both gently, upon their clammy foreheads, and left them sprawling in their blood where they had died ...
In the morning they were found; the tribe built up the campfire and burned them, and elected a new leader. A search was made, but nothing was found. And no one slept for long and long, because they suspected a vampire had come to them out of the swamps. They were wrong, for she had come from Starside.
And now she was on her way back.
In the hills Wratha waylaid a hunter in the night, killed him, and drew sustenance from his red-pulsing lifestream. And each time she appeased her hunger in this fashion, so the changes in her metabolism accelerated, and her undead vitality went from strength to strength. Her vampire senses developed; she felt the restless, eerie zest of the vampire and a renewed, replenished Just for life - albeit for the lives of others. In the way such passions took her, she knew that she was rare; it was as if she were a vampire born. Perhaps some credit was due Karl of Cragspire, for he contained a leech within him, grown from an egg, whose essence had mingled with Wratha's.
In the next sunup she went down into the stony gullies and bottoms of Turgosheim, between the spires of the Wamphyri with their massive scree jumbles, and under the very fapades of their manses fretted in the glooming faces of soaring ravines and jutting crags. And no warrior bothered her where she flitted like a shadow to the base of Cragspire, whose guards kept watch on the