Chapter 7: The Birth of a Monster
The fight was awful.
It wasn’t thrilling. It was ugly, a slog of exhaustion and screaming muscles fought on the blood-slicked grass near the cliff’s edge. The moon’s violet pulse was a migraine behind the eyes, a weight that made every movement feel underwater.
Jud wanted to give up. His human body, still humming with that strange silver warmth from Benoit’s kiss, was battered. A claw had ripped deep into his thigh. Each parry with his cross sent jarring pain up his arm. He was gasping, his cassock heavy with dew and other men’s blood. Beside him, Paul fought with a terrible, silent efficiency. Paul had come to terms with the thick, cold ichor in his veins, with the lack of a heartbeat that once defined him. He channeled that void, that absence of humanity, into a single purpose: preserving the humanity of others. He wished it didn’t have to be like this—that his salvation had to be this monstrous—but he fought with a cold rage he hadn’t known lived inside him.
“To the high ground!” Paul snarled, shoving a fledgling back with a force that shattered its collarbone. He was herding the skittering horde toward the steep cliff, a dangerous gambit. Every lunge, every provocation, risked his own balance, a tip backward into the black, roaring surf below.
Riley Flynn gave him breathing room in the only way he knew how: by blatantly ignoring every shouted order. He wasn’t barricaded safely away. He was ten yards back, pistol barking, his last precious bullets meant for the vampires harrying Paul’s flanks. They weren’t killing shots, but they were a nuisance—a stinging, infuriating distraction to the horde and to their leader.
Bev Keane stood apart, her face a mask of pious fury. “Heretics!” she screamed, her voice cutting through the din. “You defile the sacrament!” Riley’s next bullet clipped the ear of a vampire about to leap on Paul. The creature shrieked, spinning toward the new threat. Bev’s composure cracked. “Enough! Tear the unbeliever apart!”
While Paul and Riley drew the main fury, Jud and Benoit worked as a grim, efficient team. They fell back toward the church, to the desperate sounds of fists pounding on the boarded-up doors where the remaining unchanged islanders huddled. A pair of fledglings were there, methodically trying to claw their way in.
“Evening, gentlemen,” Benoit drawled, his voice flat and cold. He didn’t wait for a turn. He fired, once, twice. Jud was already moving, crossing the distance as the first one fell, bringing his silver-stitched stole down like a garrote across the second’s face. It screamed, skin sizzling, and Jud finished it with a vicious, practiced thrust of his knife into its heart. Cull and whittle. It was brutal, mundane work.
They were holding out for sunrise. A fragile, desperate hope. Jud’s leg was on fire. Benoit’s left arm hung at an awkward angle, likely dislocated from a thrown body. Above them, the moon seemed to vibrate with irritation. Its light grew sharper, more punishing.
The four of them reunited in a ragged knot near the cliff path, backs to each other. The vampires, once a swarm, were now a handful. Bev’s fanatics were almost wiped out. The grass was a charnel house.
The moon’s fury became a tangible thing. The violet light didn’t just pulse; it condensed. With a sound like a thousand sheets of glass snapping, it shot a violent, coherent beam of solidified malice into the grass twenty feet away.
The earth where it struck didn’t burn. It crystallized. And from that column of awful light, something stepped out.
It was tall, and vaguely soldier-like in its bearing, but it was made of shifting, ethereal silver and deepest shadow. It had no distinct face, only a swirling suggestion of features that made the human mind recoil. This was no fledgling, no convert. This was the source. Patient Zero. The original, disgusting cancer that refused to die unless it took everything with it. The Moon’s own gangrene given will.
It moved with a slow, inevitable grace.
Jud’s new instincts, the ones that had been whispering since his healing, screamed a single command: FLEE. His human heart, the one still full of Benoit’s kiss, demanded he stand.
It was a fatal hesitation.
The being was simply there. It hadn’t seemed to move. One moment it was across the clearing; the next, its hand, formed of sharpened moonlight and void, was buried in Jud’s abdomen. Jud gasped, a wet, surprised sound. The hand withdrew, and in the same motion, a flickering edge of light traced a deep, grinning line across his throat.
Time slowed. Jud felt the warm gush down his chest, the sudden, impossible cold. He looked down at his own blood, black in the violet light, with a distant curiosity. Oh, he thought. This is stupid. His knees buckled. He collapsed onto the blackened grass, the life pouring out of him onto the roots of Crockett Island. It was a mortal death. Pathetic.
Benoit’s scream was not a sound of fear, but of pure, unadulterated agony being torn from the core of him. It was the sound of a world ending. He lunged forward, but Riley was there, wrapping both arms around him in a tackle born of sheer necessity. “You can’t! You can’t!” Riley grunted, holding the thrashing detective back.
The Cancer regarded Jud’s twitching form with an air of cold, academic interest.
Paul saw the chance. The only chance. While the being was distracted by its small, cruel victory, Paul moved. He was a blur of grief and purpose. He dropped to his knees beside his friend, cradled Jud’s head, and did the only thing left that could possibly matter.
“Forgive me,” he whispered, and bit deep into his own wrist. Thick, dark, vampiric blood welled. He pressed it to Jud’s lifeless lips, massaging his throat, forcing the corrupted sacrament into him. “Drink, Jud. Come back. Come back and be hungry.”
Jud’s body convulsed. The transformation was not a gentle embrace of power. It was an invasion. A violent rewriting. Every nerve ending ignited. His heart, which had stuttered to silence, was kickstarted with a hollow, ravenous thump. He gasped, a raw, animal sound, and sat up. His vision cleared to a painful, hyper-real clarity. The world was painted in shades of heat and scent—the iron-rich smell of his own death, the cold, ozone stink of the Cancer, the intoxicating, living warmth of Benoit and Riley nearby. He was bloodless. Trembling.
And he was so, so hungry.
But it wasn’t a general hunger. It was a specific, targeting rage. It zeroed in on the chilling, silent silhouette of the Moon’s Cancer. He was starved for the blood of the thing that had killed him.
Paul helped him stand. Jud’s wounds were sealed, but he felt utterly new, and utterly fragile. The silver warmth that had once healed him was still there, but now it was a cold fire in his veins, a battery for his new hunger.
Benoit had stopped struggling. He watched, his face ashen, as Jud turned. Jud’s eyes were no longer the kind, weathered blue Benoit knew. They were sharp, reflecting the hellish light, glowing with an inner pale fire. But when they found Benoit’s, they still held a recognition, a desperate love beneath the hunger.
“Jud?” Benoit’s voice was shattered glass.
Jud’s new voice was a dry rasp, but the words were his. “I’m here.” He looked at Paul, then at the advancing Cancer. The last of the lesser vampires were crumbling to ash, their energy seemingly sucked back into their master. “We’re it now.”
Paul nodded, his own fangs bared. Two priests. One a vampire who clung to his purpose, the other a newborn vampire who had just died for his love. They stood between a dying world and the primordial cancer that wanted to consume it.
The Cancer regarded its two new obstacles. It tilted its head.
The final silence before the storm was absolute, broken only by the distant sob of the sea and Benoit’s ragged breathing. Jud flexed his hands, feeling the terrible strength there, and focused his entire being on the cold, silver thing before him.
He was hungry.