Bentley Little - The Walking

This was not how he had imagined it would turn out. His intentions had been noble, his motives pure, and in those long ago days when he'd been expelled from the last town and was riding west, searching in vain for a world that did not exist, he had even deceived himself into thinking that he was an important man and had come up with a great idea that would change the lives of his people forever.

Time had put the lie to that, however, and he now regretted that he had ever come to this place, that he had ever attempted to found a town.

That he had ever met Isabella.

Yes. He regretted that most of all. She was the source of his problems, and if he had never met her, everything would have turned out differently.

He rolled onto his side, his muscles strainin and complaining He winced as he struggled to sit up. He had got ten old and feeble. His powers were as strong as ever. If anything, they had increased with age. But his body was wearing down. He could no longer walk without pain, and if he did not weave himself a strengthening spell, his hands shook when he held something even as light as a pen.

Isabella had not changed.

He glanced down at her, lying next to him in the old brass bed. She remained as youthful as ever, her skin as smooth as alabaster, her face still informed with that wild beauty which had so captivated him on the trail outside Cheyenne all those years ago. Asleep, the covers pushed down below

her breasts--round and perfectly formed, exposed to the crisp night air, nipples jutting up proudly--she was still the most amazing-looking woman he had ever seen.

She was not like him, he knew. She was something different, something more.

Something evil.

It had taken him a long time to admit that to himself. Even after she had run off most of his original group, even after the others had died, he had still not wanted to ascribe to her the blame. He loved her. Or thought he did. And with that love came not only an instinctive desire to protect her, but a willful blindness to her failings that prevented him from seeing what had been obvious to so many others.

And when normal people had moved into the region, when she had started the purges and persecutions, when she had built the stakes, he had still refused to acknowledge what was going on, though in the dark private hours he spent alone without her company, he agonized over it all, wondering if the Isabella he saw was the real Isabella or just an idealized image that clouded his view and kept him from the truth.

The last ten years had been hell, as farmers and settlers who came to homestead in the surrounding country were systematically killed or driven off, methodically terrorized, with magic and without, and he had stood by helplessly and ineffectually as Isabella's reign of death spread across the land. Many of the witches went along with this. At least in the beginning. They approved of Isabella's approach, supported it. They and their families had been persecuted for most of their lives, and they relished the opportunity to get back at those who had done so by doing the same, tit for tat. Some did not approve, however, and those dissenters who remained, rather than sneaking away in the middle of the night to take their chances elsewhere, grew increasingly

cowed and silent, intimidated by Isabella's growing autocratic rule.

He had been intimidated, too.

Isabella opened one eye, looked at him, and the lascivious tilt of her eyebrow reminded him of what they had done earlier in the evening, acts his poor body was paying for now. She smiled at him. "Is everything okay, dear?"

He forced himself to smile back and settled onto the pillow.

"Everything is fine."

His perceptions had been slowly changing, each new act of violence eroding his confidence in his wife, but Isabella's true nature was not brought home to him until the next day.

He spent the morning alone in the house, as he too often did these days, but when Isabella did not show up to make his lunch, and when another hour, and another, passed without any sign from her, he decided to go out and search. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and while he still could not read Isabella even after all these years, his hunches had never failed him.

She was not in town, not in the bar or the mercantile or the library or the haberdashery. He did not sense acknowledgment of her among any of the houses in town, and he saddled up his horse, strengthened his tired body with a spell, and headed out on the road north.

He found her up the canyon, near the mine's abandoned first shaft, playfully disemboweling a small girl with a long serrated knife. The girl was completely silent, either shocked into soundless ness by the horror of her predicament or rendered mute by magic, and only the wild thrashing and gyrations of her mutilated body bespoke the unbearable physical agony to which she was being subjected. It had been some time since a raid had been conducted against a settler, and older scars on the girl's face and legs led him to believe that

Isabella had been keeping this child alive for some time to use as her plaything.

A baby girl.

Isabella turned to look at him, smiled, and pulled out the blood's heart, biting into it. The thrashing stopped.

Until this point he had always been able to make excuses for her. But the sight of her joyously playing with this innocent child shocked him.

She was not merely a witch overzeaiously protecting herself and her people from possible harm. She was a monster.

Something evil.

He realized now what he should have realized long before: that she was the one who had killed Jeb and drained his body.

She was the vampyr.

Except she was not exactly a vampyr. He had read up on such things in the aftermath of his friend's death, and aside from the fact that she did not age and apparently had the ability to drain fluids from a body, she did not possess any other vampyric charactdristics. She did not need blood for sustenance, nor was she incapacitated by the day and invigorated by the night. She had no fear of crucifixes, and she loved garlic.

No, Isabella was something else, and what disturbed him most was the knowledge that no matter how long they'd been together, she was a complete mystery to him.

As far as he knew, she was the only one. In all their years together, she had never made mention of missing any people from her past--aside from that story about the brothel in Kansas City, which he had never believed. She'd never appeared to be homesick for a family or any other community, had never indicated that she was waiting for someone else to show up.

He thought of the monster he and Jeb had found in the canyons. \020He thought of the Bad Lands.

Maybe she was the last of a dying breed. Maybe the beings that had populated this country before the coming of men had become extinct and she was the only one left, surviving by her wits.

Darwin again.

Everything seemed to come back to Darwin these days. If he had had the power to go against her, he would have killed her there-on the spot. He would have stopped her heart or melted her down or set her ablaze, but he did not have her strength, had never had her strength, and she knew it. She dropped the small broken body on the rocks, and he turned away from the mine, sickened, galloping back the way he'd come. He returned alone to the town, holing up in the house.

Isabella came back many hours later, clean, fresh, and visibly happy.

They said nothing to each other about their encounter, and he knew that she was counting on him not to take any action.

They did not speak during supper or after.

He went to bed alone.

Once again he awoke in the middle of the cold night with a desperate need to relieve himself. Although he had gone to sleep alone, Isabella had in the interim crawled into bed with him, and her head lay on the pillow next to his. One of her hands gently cupped his genitals. He sat up, looked down at her, and the expression of perverse contentment on her face twisted his guts into a knot. Originally, he had not intended to do anything about what had happened. Upon returning home, a sort of moral paralysis had descended upon him. But now, thinking about what she'd done what THEY'D done