A day later, as we continued our meandering walk to Gardenia, I asked Rachel a question that had begun to bother me.

“Are we vampires who are forced to become human or are we humans who are forced to become vampires?”

I thought it was a stupid question. I don’t know what possessed me to ask it. Rachel was unbothered by it, though. She didn’t hesitate to provide an answer.

“Option number one, obviously,” she said.

“Obviously?” I asked.

“Obviously,” she confirmed.

And then I thought, I have ruined this girl.

Not long ago, Rachel was literally on the side of the angels. She was naïve, and arrogant, but essentially a good person whose disdain was reserved exclusively for those that wrought evil. Although she was self-righteous, that didn’t mean there wasn’t an element of righteousness to her character.

She'd wanted to preserve life and punish those who threatened it.

Last night, she’d torn a defenseless woman’s throat out with her teeth and drained her trembling body of blood. Then she’d tossed the corpse aside without a backward glance.

That woman had been our friend and benefactor for two months. A traitor and an opportunist, to be sure. But there still should have been some hesitation in Rachel before she committed to delivering the killing bite. But she hadn’t given Jamie so much as an opportunity to beg for her life.

It was all very tidy. Ordinarily, I would have commended Rachel for not dragging things out as so many of our kind do. The urge for sadism is strong within the vampire psyche. We’re timeless, after all, so we like our vengeance to be proportionate to our unending search for stimulation. All pleasure should be savored and extended. Satiation was best when it was gradual.

It occurred to me when I woke up this morning, that Rachel had manipulated me into increasing Cassie and Pankratz’ suffering by sparing his life. I had fooled myself into believing she’d overcome vampiric hierarchy through strength of character. But that wasn’t true at all, was it?

She’d spared Cassie because she wanted that girl to live with the knowledge that she’d killed her mother and could do nothing about it. And she’d convinced me to save Pankratz, because she wanted Cassie to grow to hate him for not being able to protect them.

Rachel had truly embraced her nature. Her answer to my question had proven it.

Why didn’t I feel proud of her? Why did I feel ashamed of myself?

Killing the people who’d assisted Jamie, and her family, shouldn’t have mattered to me. They’d attacked me first, after all. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I couldn’t forget the pain in their eyes and the fear they’d shown as the end drew near and they realized the inevitability of their own deaths.

I felt like a bully. Like a disgraceful ruffian, which I didn’t understand. Why should I care? I’ve claimed countless victims over the long years of my life. You could probably create a village using their bones as building material.

It bothered me that I was so bothered by this.

It was bothersome.

Human life has no intrinsic value aside from that which it assigns itself. It is an act of unbelievable arrogance to say that all lives matter equally, or that the loss of one is a loss for the world. From the moment of birth and onward, we are disposable and easily replaced. First there were thousands of us; now there are billions. On a macroscopic scale, we are a faceless, writhing mass that has spread itself over the surface of the continents.

We are not special. We are not unique. We are simply here, occupying space until the moment of death. Some of us are interesting, but most of us are not. How I chose to treat others shouldn’t have mattered.

But it did, didn’t it?

In the recent past, this line of thought would have been ludicrous. I was wholly a monster back then and consumed by my own excesses. I didn’t have any interest in their sufferings, beyond minimizing it to the amount necessary to keep them functional and docile. A peaceful society kept the herd pacified.

But now, I was a part of that herd. And with that inclusion came a growing sense of, well, empathy.

I may have stood apart from humanity.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t a part of…humanity.

As a vampire, I’d spent centuries disguising myself as one of them. But now that I had become one, I couldn’t minimize my deeds any longer.

I’d done an unnecessary evil to those poor fools. I knew they couldn’t win, but I’d felt justified in attacking them, anyway. All so I could kill them to alleviate the embarrassment I’d felt at being caught off guard. And although I realized their intentions for me were fueled by wicked greed, did that really give me the right to deal with them as cruelly as I had?

This was something I never would have considered before. But now it was all that I could think about. As a vampire, I was the stalking lion, concerned only with his own pleasure and hunger. I gave no thought to those who fell prey to me.

But as a man, I was simultaneously the hunted. And I could clearly see the injustice of being toyed with by a predator. The thought of dying in the manner of my own victims filled me with thoughts of fear and despair. What a sad, bleak thing it is to fall to the hungering dark.

Lions wouldn’t care. They were incapable of it.

But I wasn’t a lion anymore, was I? Not purely, anyway.

But I was still a murderer.

And with my failure to understand my own feelings, I had led Rachel down a similar path.

What had Rachel seen when she saw that I was about to bite Jamie? What had I looked like? Had she really killed Jamie to prevent me from transforming her? Or had she been upset that I nearly prevented her from twisting the knife in Cassie’s wounds for the rest of her life?

Thoughts like this were slowly beginning to drown me in paranoia.

Jamie’s gift wasn’t helping much.

Adding [Appraisal] to the gore grimoire had proven to be a mistake. At first, the tactical benefits made it seem like an obvious choice for acquisition. Being able to see things like class descriptions, levels, and statistics would provide endless advantages in future interactions with this world. But Jamie’s gift went even further than I realized.

For example, when I looked at Schulz, I could not only see the expected things such as his strength, dexterity, and constitution, I could see his mood. Which was [Calm]. I could scan for mental [Stable] or physical [Healthy] abnormalities. I could even measure the strength of our personal bond [Deeply Loyal]. But it was the alignment meter that I found truly disturbing to behold. [True Neutral].

This couldn’t be real, could it?

Morality can’t be reduced to this level of simplicity. You can’t just arbitrarily assign a numeric value to one of the greatest questions that has bedeviled humanity since the inception of our intelligence. You can’t just slap a number on my forehead, declare me evil, and then move on down the line. It can’t work that way. It mustn’t work that way!

And yet, when I beheld myself with Jamie’s gift, the result was always the same. I possessed a karmic value of negative five thousand.

[Evil].

“Kyler, what are you so hung up about now, asked Rachel. My [immature], [Affectionate], negative two thousand karmic value [Evil] daughter, bearing the title [Archfiend’s Apprentice].

“Nothing,” I said sadly. “Nothing serious, anyway. It just seems that I’m yet another old man who’s learned that the world doesn’t work quite the way I once believed it did.”

“Well, doesn’t that mean you learned something new?” she asked.

“It does,” I agreed.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Kyler, it seems to me that you’re always mistaking old for stagnant. There’s a big difference between the two. Growing older doesn’t have to separate you from the world. For people like us, it can make us more aware of it.”

“Do you really believe so?” I asked her

“Absolutely! But you need to stop being so fixated on how things change, and just accept that change is an inevitable outcome. That’s what I think, anyway.”

In that moment, Rachel seemed like a fount of hope to me. She represented a newer, better way of thinking. A sort of renewal that I’d never even considered before.

I smiled at her gratefully and nodded.

“Everyday that passes, your growing wisdom becomes more evident,” I said to her. “You will be a great leader one day.”

“Damn straight!” she readily agreed. “Now quit being so weird.”

“I’ll do my level best,” I promised her.

__

Some time later, the three of us became lost.

No, that’s not quite what happened.

Some time later, the three of us became ensnared in a maze.

It happened gradually, with such subtlety that even I failed to notice it at first. Schultz was the one who alerted me to our unexpected predicament. And a predicament, indeed it was.

The forest surrounding us was moving. New plants were growing at an unnatural speed, raising towering walls of green that divided and segmented the space around us, forcing us to hurry along before we were cut off from each other or enclosed in an immobile cage of brambles.

It was as though nature itself were rising against us.

“What’s going on?” Rachel asked as we ran for our freedom.

“I have no idea,” I replied. “This is a new experience for me.”

Schultz barked back at us from his position in the lead as if insisting we shut up and focus on escaping. He’s a clever dog and he was completely right about now not being the time for idle chatter.

He still didn’t have to be so rude about it.

Eventually, the antics of the plant life subsided and we soon came to large, thick-boughed oak tree that stood in the center of this mysterious maze. As we approached it, I heard the soft, sweet sounds of a girl singing an old song bluegrass song I hadn’t heard in years. I think it was called in the pines. I couldn’t be sure, however. It’s had other names.

Before long we found the one whom the voice belonged to. A pale, blue eyed young woman with short ink-black hair, dressed in an expensive looking white suit best described as a young man’s business finery. One hand was placed behind her head as she leaned against the tree. From the other, she enjoyed a treat of some kind.

“Well, hello there, Rachel,” she called from her lazy perch above. Her long bangs shifted to cover one side of her face as she spoke, granting her face an aspect of carelessness that added to her androgynous appeal.

“Hello,” Rachel said in reply. “Stranger, do we know you?”

“Not quite,” she replied with a welcoming smile. “But I’d very much like to change that.”

As she spoke, I saw that her hand was coated in red as she lazily lifted a strawberry to her lips to eat. She closed her eyes to savor the taste of the fruit and licked unselfconsciously at her fingers after swallowing.

“Delicious,” she said. “Say, would you like one for yourself? I brought plenty with me. Enough for everyone to enjoy.”

“Are they good?” asked Rachel.

“They’re the best,” she assured her. “Even tastier than you imagine.”

“We’ll pass, thanks,” I said to her before Rachel could accept her offer. “As kind as you are, we’re strangers to you. It would be rude to take from you when our needs have already been met.”

“Even when freely offered?” she asked.

“It would also be foolish to accept gifts from strangers,” I said.

“Then why be strangers?” she inquired. “My name is Elphie Cross, her name is Rachel, and your name is Kyler Evans. There! Now everyone knows everyone else. No secrets left to ponder.”

“Except the mystery of how you discovered our identities,” I replied with a creased brow. “Would you care to elaborate?”

Instead of responding to that, she ate another strawberry. Then she grinned with crimson smeared teeth and said, “It’s funny that we should encounter each other beneath the shade of a tree. Some of my favorite verses from the good book described a meeting that happened under similar circumstances.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rachel asked.

“Well,” said the stranger. “I can’t quote it in its entirety, but something-something, knowledge of good and evil, something-something, surely ye shall be as gods, something-something, ye shall live forever. Are you sure you still don’t want one?”

“Quite,” I said before Rachel could speak. “I will say however, that your selection of produce seems to run counter to most versions of this story.”

“Does it?” laughed Cross. “We don’t even know what the fruit of knowledge was. No one does! It could have been anything at all! Dates, grapes, strawberries. Goodness, could you imagine that? God banishing Adam and Eve for the sin of strawberry robbery? I wonder how sweet the fruit tasted when the gates of Eden slammed shut behind them.”

“You’re clever in your word selection,” I said. “Even if what you’re saying is utterly pointless.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Cross.

“I truly do,” I replied.

“I knew from the moment I saw you that we wouldn’t agree on much,” she said sadly. She then jumped from the tree and landed nimbly on her feet. “It’s a shame when someone mocks my dearly held beliefs of the moment. It makes me feel so unwelcome.”

“Your beliefs of the moment?” I asked her.

“It’s prudent for a young woman to keep herself open to life’s possibilities,” Cross said demurely.

“My apologies, then,” I said. “I assumed you were speaking out of love for the sound of your own voice.”

“Do you like my voice as well?” she asked shyly.

“It’s not unpleasant,” I conceded.

“That makes me happy!” cheered Cross. But then she gave me a stern look and said, “You doubt my love of the good book?”

“I do,” I nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Anyone could draw the same conclusions I did with a little imagination,” she said defensively.

“As long as they’re willing to forsake the facts, everyone can be right about everything,” I nodded.

Cross clapped her hands in delight.

“Hurrah! You do understand!” she beamed. “That’s why I prefer ignorance to knowledge, and opinion to fact. There’s quite a bit of leeway between believing something and knowing it, wouldn’t you say? And in that dark middle ground, that’s where those like me have the most fun.”

“Of course, you realize that strawberries are harvested from fields, not orchards,” I replied as I maneuvered myself between Rachel and this chattering fool. “They aren’t grown on trees like the fruit of knowledge.”

Cross noticed what I was doing and grinned merrily at me before saying, “Meh. Most experts believe Genesis is allegorical anyway.”

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there,” I said.

“I’d be very impressed if you were,” she said with a wink. Then she turned to Rachel and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Rachel said with a slowly blossoming blush.

“I take it you’re the party responsible for guiding us into this maze?” I asked impatiently.

“I am,” Cross replied. “Sorry for herding you like that. I normally prefer getting closer to others by relying on my charm.”

“I think you’re charming,” Rachel said without guile.

“I was hoping you might!” Cross said as she took Rachel’s hands into her own. “I think your hair looks amazing by the way.”

“’I’ve always thought so too!” Rachel preened.

“Get a room,” I said irritably before I could stop myself, put off as I was by this burgeoning meet cute being shamelessly displayed before my cynical eyes.

“Hey, we’re still getting to know one another,” Cross said with a tisk, as she stepped closer to Rachel. “Although that doesn’t sound like a bad way to end the night. Sadly, I’m currently on the job.”

“And that job consists of what?” I asked her.

“Gathering you into one spot so that you can be collected,” said another woman’s brisk voice as a new stranger stepped into view. Like Cross, she was dressed in white business attire, differentiated by the white cape she wore over her shoulders.

In contrast to her associate, her hair was platinum blonde and tied back in a braid, with sharp amber eyes that took in everything before her from beneath a pair of expensive looking wireframe glasses.

Belted at her waist, I couldn’t help but notice, was a curved scabbard with the customary hilt of a Japanese Katana. That told me one of two possible things about her personality: the first was that she might have been one of the innumerable buffoons I’ve encountered over the years who believed that Japanese swords were unmatched instruments of death and that wielding one in combat made her invincible.

I’ve seen so many of those people die that I’ve lost count. Rapiers aren’t nearly as pretty as Japanese blades, but they’re far easier to stab someone with. Katanas are primarily slashing weapons meant to be wielded while wearing full armor or used to spring a surprise attack with a fast draw. When used correctly, they produced excellent results, but prolonged engagements can put their users at a disadvantage, especially if the weapons their opponents wielded gave them a reach advantage.

The second possibility was that this young woman was an extremely skillful duelist whose talent compensated for a katana’s shortcomings. There have always been warriors who are extremely dangerous no matter the tool they chose. This stranger might have selected a Katana as a means of displaying her superiority.

Well, I suppose there was also a third option; that her sword was purely a symbolic display of authority. I couldn’t yet decide. She seemed far too comfortable wearing it, though. People who wear swords are often people who use swords. It was best not to underestimate her.

With that in mind, I kept my body language neutral while bringing my hand within reach of Spiteful’s grip.

“Another new acquaintance. What an exciting evening for meeting people,” I said dryly as the woman continued to approach us. “I assume you have business with us?”

“Not me. My master,” she said. “Cross, are you certain these are the ones?”

“I’m positive,” her associate said. “They closely match the descriptions provided. And look how calm they are in our presence! Especially this one,” she said as she pointed toward me. “Not a hint of fear! Like he doesn’t recognize us at all. If anything, he’s exuding minor annoyance.”

“Arrogance,” the sword wielder said with a disapproving frown.

“Impatience,” I corrected her. “And justly so! My friend and I were keeping to ourselves before Miss Cross here so rudely waylaid us. Apparently at your behest, if I’m not mistaken. Common courtesy dictates that you should at least introduce yourself and explain your intentions. Otherwise, this could be misconstrued as banditry.”

“My name is Alvidia Brask,” the sword wielder said with narrowed eyes. “We came seeking you out in the name of Regent Perius Norus. Cross and I serve as two members of the regency’s five Valkyrie, and we speak and act with our lord’s full authority. You would be wise to curtail any further flippancy, boy.”

Her tone bothered me.

I wanted to kill her on the spot.

Goodness, can you understand my confusion? Just a little while earlier I was feeling the colossal burden of having taken several human lives. The guilt had been strangling me like a hungry python! But now look at me. I was practically quivering with the desire to cleave this arrogant warrior in half due to her impertinent addressment.

WHAT is my deal?

Something was wrong.

My confusion over my own inconsistency was what made me decide to spare these fools. Never kill when you’re uncertain about your mental condition. If you can’t be sure you’re making the right choice, then it was better by far to avoid committing to an extreme reaction.

Cooler heads would always prevail.

“Hey, Alvidia? I don’t appreciate the way you’re speaking to my friend,” Rachel said angrily as she stepped into the other woman’s space and prepared to square off. “You might want to back down before you get hurt.”

In response, Alvina gave Rachel a cold smile and placed her hand over the hilt of her sword.

I took a moment to look at the sky and gave a mournful sigh.

Sometimes it felt like fate really didn’t have my back.