The Long Night

Bonnie Murphy had been working on Charlie Drake for three hours.

At first, she had approached him like any other patient. Difficult, unusual, catastrophically injured perhaps, but still a patient. She had stripped away the blood-soaked remnants of his clothes, peeled back hastily wrapped dressings and cleaned the wounds one-by-one until she could properly see what had happened beneath all that blackened blood. The oxygen continued to hiss softly beside him as she worked, accompanied by the constant chatter of the EKG and the occasional clink of metal against metal. She had sutured what she could, compressed what continued to bleed and replaced the bag of blood hanging above him twice already. There were gauze packets everywhere now, crimson heaps collecting around the feet of the bed like discarded petals.

“Alright, Charlie, come on then. We are gonna do this the boring way.” Bonnie muttered, tying off another stitch along his side. “No magic, no spooky bollocks, no weird Vampire shite. Just you, me and several thousand dollars' worth of medical equipment which I am fairly certain your friends stole.” Charlie did not answer. “Nice chat.” She cut the thread.

The first problem was his temperature. Bonnie had checked it four times because she was convinced the thermometer was broken. It wasn't. She tried another. Then another. Charlie was cold. Not chilled, not hypothermic, not the sort of cold you expected from somebody bleeding out on a hospital bed. He was cold in the way meat became cold after sitting too long on a steel counter. Yet the EKG continued to insist that his heart was beating. Slowly. Irregularly. But beating.

Bonnie stared at the monitor, then back to Charlie. “Okay. Fucking odd...” She reached beneath his jaw and felt for a pulse herself. There it was, faint beneath the marble flesh. Once. Nothing. Again. Bonnie withdrew her fingers.

The second problem was his blood. It wouldn't behave. Some of the wounds clotted almost immediately while others simply refused, bleeding in slow, thick rivers which looked almost too dark beneath the surgical light. Stranger still, the blood Bonnie had drawn from him seemed to change consistency after leaving his body. She had filled three small sample tubes, labelled each out of pure habit and placed them beside the little collection of instruments. The first remained liquid. The second had coagulated almost completely. The third looked somewhere between the two. Bonnie picked it up, rolled it between her fingers and watched the blood inside shift sluggishly. “Make your fucking mind up.” She put it back.

The third problem was that Charlie appeared to be healing and dying at the same fucking time. Bonnie had watched a narrow tear across his shoulder slowly contract over the course of an hour, the edges of the skin pulling together millimetre by millimetre until only a dark seam remained. Fantastic. Brilliant. Wonderful. Then she checked the great triangular wound carved through his abdomen and found almost no progress at all. The surrounding tissue had begun to discolour.

Bonnie pressed two fingers gently against the edge and Charlie's entire stomach tightened reflexively beneath her hand. She froze. “Charlie?” Nothing. “Charlie, can you hear me?” The monitor continued its thin, rhythmic complaint.

Bonnie leaned over him. His face remained utterly still beneath the oxygen mask, mahogany hair damp against his forehead, the handsome features she remembered seeming strangely emptied of their usual nervous charm. Charlie was always doing something. Smiling awkwardly, looking embarrassed, trying to make somebody laugh, pretending he wasn't staring at her tits, stumbling over his words or suddenly saying something so sincere that it caught her completely unprepared. She hated seeing him still.

“Hey.” Bonnie tapped his cheek. “None of that now.” Nothing. She slapped him slightly harder. “Charlie.” A tiny movement passed beneath his eyelid and Bonnie almost jumped. “There you are! Come on, that's it. Wake up. Open your eyes for me.”

His lips moved beneath the mask. No sound came. Bonnie leaned closer. “Come on, sweetheart. What is it?” His mouth stopped moving.

The EKG skipped. Bonnie's head snapped towards it. Beep. Beep... Beep.

“Oh fuck right off.”

She straightened, checking the leads first. All connected. Bonnie pressed her stethoscope against his chest. There was the heart, but it didn't sound right. She had listened to thousands. Children. Adults. Elderly patients. Athletes. Smokers. People on the edge of cardiac arrest and babies who had only recently discovered what having a heartbeat even meant. Charlie didn't sound like any of them.

There were spaces where there should not have been spaces. Little gaps. Moments where the heart appeared to stop completely before something deep within his chest forced it onward again. Bonnie repositioned the stethoscope. “Come on.” Beat. Silence. Beat. Silence. “Come. On!!!” Another beat. Bonnie ripped the stethoscope from her ears. “Right. Enough of this.”

She moved quickly now, checking his pupils, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, every simple, familiar thing she could cling to. Each result contradicted another. His oxygen levels were impossibly low considering he remained neurologically responsive. His blood pressure fluctuated wildly between readings. His pupils reacted, then didn't. His temperature continued dropping while sections of damaged flesh remained strangely warm beneath her fingers.

Bonnie stepped away from the bed. For the first time since everybody had left her alone with him, she genuinely didn't know what to do. She had spent most of her life learning what the Human body did when something went wrong. This wasn't a human body. That obvious fact suddenly felt far less amusing.

“Think, Murphy.” She rubbed both hands through her ponytail. Think. Blood loss. Trauma. Cardiac instability. Potential organ failure. Easy. Except his organs were apparently dead already. Or weren't. Or were dead in some bizarre functional sense which made the entire concept useless.

Bonnie marched back over and examined the abdominal wound again. She had cleaned it twice. Whatever had opened Charlie's stomach had done tremendous damage, but he should have been dead already from that alone. Perhaps the Vampirism was sustaining him. Perhaps it was fighting the damage. Maybe that was why the healing was inconsistent. Maybe he needed more blood.

Bonnie looked at the nearly depleted bag. “Okay… okay-okay-okaaaayyy.” She changed it. Again.

Blood flowed through the line. For perhaps twenty seconds nothing happened. Then Charlie's back arched. Bonnie jolted as his entire body convulsed against the bed, fingers clawing into the sheets while the monitor suddenly screamed. “CHARLIE!”

His heart rate spiked. One hundred. One twenty. One fifty. Then it violently, suddenly, crashed.

Bonnie grabbed his shoulders. “Stay with me!” Charlie exhaled beneath the mask, a dreadful, dry sound scratching somewhere deep in his throat. The monitor fell. Eighty. Sixty. Forty. “No, no, no, no.” Bonnie checked the line. Everything was correct. “Come on!” Thirty-eight.

Bonnie ripped the mask aside and opened his mouth, checking the airway. His fangs had extended. Not slightly. Fully. His gums were black with blood.

Bonnie stared.

Charlie suddenly inhaled, a horrible, rattling breath dragging into his lungs. She nearly fell backwards. “Sweet holy fucking Jesus fucking Christ!” His eyes opened only slightly. They were not gold. They were red. Not the healthy supernatural glow she had seen amongst the others, but something starved and feverish. His gaze wandered without recognition, sliding across her face before rolling back into his skull.

“Charles? Charlie, look at me!” His jaw snapped weakly at the air. Bonnie recoiled, then understood. “Blood.”

She looked at the bag. “Oh come on...” How many times did she have to bloody say it!? She understood what he needed. His body wanted blood. Real blood. Fresh blood. Bonnie stared down at her forearm. For one very stupid second she genuinely considered it. Then professionalism clawed its way back into her skull. “No. Absolutely not. We are not improvising cannibalism.”

Charlie shuddered. His pulse continued to weaken.

Bonnie started pacing. “Where the fuck are they?” She snatched her phone from the table. Nothing. No message. No call. No update. Bonnie checked again as if something might magically appear. “Where is this Hughie guy? Wherever the fuck you are, move your arse.” She threw the phone back down.

Her breathing had become shallow. Bonnie hated that. She knew panic. Knew exactly what it did to the body. Increased heart rate, narrowed thinking, destroyed fine motor control. She had talked patients through panic attacks countless times. Now she couldn't even slow her own hands.

She looked at Charlie. His chest barely moved. “You don't get to do this.” Bonnie approached again. “Do you hear me!?” She grabbed his hand. Cold.

“After all that mysterious brooding shite, after scaring seven shades of piss out of me, after dragging me into whatever this fucking world is, you are not going to die because some blonde lunatic is taking too long buying candles.” Charlie remained still. Bonnie squeezed harder. “You saved my life.”

Her voice cracked.

She looked down.

“No.”

Bonnie went to vault onto the bed, to start compressions immediately but the door to the room exploded into splinters, its mahogany face smashing into the hardwood floor. The Irish nurse tumbled down onto the ground; she jolted so hard.

Looking up with wood fragments stuck in her chocolate brown hair, Bonnie gazed upon two figures standing as vicious silhouettes in the hingeless breach.

They made entry without delay, the first… a woman in a huge cloak and these… absolutely brutal-looking…. Armoured gauntlets and boots, yet they were lined and sharp like scythes - Bonnie had no idea what to even make of her. She herself looked like she had one foot in the grave.

Her eyes, the infamous radiant gold of Charlie’s bloodline, damn near split open at the sight of Charlie - still as a corpse, for that is what he had just become.

“CHIP!!” she screamed, tears dripping down her dirty face as she threw herself at his bedside. “NO-NO-NO-NO, PLEASE, PLEASE!” She crawled up his bed, ready to embrace him in grief.

But it was the other figure, even more terrifying than this other woman. A towering man with a handsome, sharp face and neatly cut stark ivory hair. And some kind of bear-trap… helmet hybrid, opened around his head. Fast as lightning he snagged the woman with the Silver-scythe arms and dragged her, kicking, off of Charlie.

“The hell is wrong with you, don’t go grabbing him with Hermes and Artemis - You’ll cut him into ribbons. Remus - Remus - REMHILDE, LOOK AT- LOOK AT ME!” He roared as he restrained her in a tight armbar before making her look at him.

She was a snivelling mess.

“Casey won’t let him go, not like this. The Curse will keep him going, even if his heart stops. Remember the last time? He’s going to be okay, just breathe… that’s it, baby girl. Breathe easy,” he said, wiping her tears as she took deep (and very wheezy) calming breaths.

Without warning, she dropped to the ground, going limp as her muscles just seemed to give out. The Man cradled Remhilde, stroking her pitch black hair as she lay unconscious in his arms.

Slowly, surely, his golden eyes turned to gaze upon Bonnie. The piercing gilded orbs cut deep into Bonnie, filling her with a shivering dread… only, this faded quickly as he gave her a warm, reassuring smile, that of a friendly old man.

In the far corner of this makeshift operating room was a triple-wide, burgundy chesterfield. The Man stood up, walked over and placed the woman down there to rest, tucking a pillow under her black head.

Bonnie hadn’t moved to get up, and when he noticed this, he kissed his teeth “It doesn't look too comfortable down there, miss…” He leaned down, offering her a hand.

She took it hesitantly. He practically lifted her to her feet, as if she were as light as a ribbon in the wind. “Murphy. B-Bonnie Murphy, and you are?”

The Man looked her up and down.

“A rude fucker is who you are apparently,” she said, folding her arms.

He smiled to himself, a little bemusedly and Bonnie got a strange feeling, like she’d sworn in front of the head sister.

“Can’t say you’re wrong there. But, I am afraid that tonight’s events have sullied my manners. My name is Artorias Drake; it is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Murphy,” he said, without a hint of irony.

Bonnie scoffed, blinking in faux shock. “Oh riiiight, Artorias Drake hmmmm yeah. So you mean the infamous Mr Drake Senior, the commissioner? The infamous Hound of Wallace and father to none other than Roman Drake? Let me guess, you’re a long-lost cousin named after that extremely famous man?”

His blink was slow, his smile was easy. He wagged a sly finger. “...And you know about the dark society already. Good, this will make things easier. I take it you are some medical practitioner?”

The youthful, spry Artorias walked over to his… grandson, checking his pulse before resting his hand on his bandaged head.

“Something like that.” She never got the licence, yet she was his only hope.

Mr Drake sounded better in Bonnie's head than Artorias; this man was dangerous and he had an otherworldly aura to him - a wisdom and experience despite being no older than thirty. With two fingers he pushed up Charlie’s cracked lips to observe the gums, then pulled up his eyelids again.

Charlie’s eyes were now a blood-red, emanating with a dull glow.

“Looks like our boy isn’t done fighting yet,” Artorias said with a sigh of relief. He touched Charlie’s bandaged forehead again, sighing deeply as his free hand clenched into a tight fist.

“I was… I…” The words left her, as if she had the courage to speak in this moment of anguish, but she found herself lost for words. But Artorias turned his body, looking at her from within the jagged iron maw. He gave her a nod, reassuring her. “I was… supposed to be waiting for Muninn’s brother to bring me the supplies I need for… well, what I can use to save him.”

He eyed her strangely, scratching his clean-shaven chin and rocking back and forth on his feet, allowing his thoughts to stew in his hippocampus. “Hmmmm. Yes, best to just rip off the band-aid. I suppose it was inevitable. RAVEN GIRL!”

His sudden shout made Bonnie jolt. Again, he roared. “MUNINN THE GREEN RAVEN, I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME, GET YOUR ASS IN HERE AND BRING THE INQUISITOR!” he cried. He huffed, letting his hand slip from Charlie and strolling over to the table, pulling out a chair for Bonnie and urging her to sit with a gentle hand.

She did so gratefully, although her eyes continued to flicker to Charlie’s “Corpse.”

“You know, when he was still a young lad, he would hop and skip through this house like nobody's business. I was in the nursing home of course, but every so often my Son would fetch me and we would all spend the day together. He was a shy lad in public, small and delicate, but that would never stop him - every night, thinking we never noticed, he’d climb up to the manor’s roof and stare up at the stars. It’s strange to think that roof is gone with the renovations he made. Sure, he could climb atop this mansion, but it would never again be the same, this place has changed too… much like himself.” He remained standing while he spoke, as if lost in a sea of his own thoughts; it seemed, however, that despite the grim implications of what he spoke of, he had drawn a warm conclusion for he smiled and did not elaborate further.

“You strike me as a woman who had witnessed the extraordinary before, am I correct in my thinking, Miss Murphy?” He asked as he sat down on the chair next to her.

Bonnie eyed Charlie's cold, dead corpse and the door, unable to keep her knee from skipping as she shook.

Artorias offered a calming gesture “I understand that you must have been through a lot tonight, and for that I apologise. But I can assure you that despite what your medicine had drilled into you, Charlie isn’t quite gone yet. While the Raven could be here in an instant, the Inquisitor grows slower by the trimester. We have a couple of moments to speak, so please take your time and try to stay calm. Everything is going to be okay.”

For a short while the two spoke. His questions were sharp and very specific but asked in kindness and patience. He asked after her experiences in the medical industry, her current employment at East-Wallace and her hometown in Donegal… that’s when Bonnie started to get the distinct impression that she was in a job interview, only… there was a lot more on the line than just a job.

“...And your parents?” Artorias started. “Were they close?”

Bonnie raised an eyebrow. “Was my verbal biography not enough for you, Mr Drake?”

“Oh, Miss Murphy, nothing is ever enough for me. Please, if you would be so kind as to answer the question?”

Bonnie folded her legs, trying to dislodge her discomfort. “No, they didn’t get along. I was a bastard, a girl like me with a Crabber for a father and a Holy Woman for a mother, it was never going to be a pretty life. He left us when I was still young, she died not long after.”

Artorias nodded, drinking it in. “But you were close with your mother?”

“Aye…” She hadn’t thought on her for so long, it was a painful memory, one (like all the others) she wished to simply leave behind. “...To be honest with you, Mr Drake, it isn’t something I like speaking about.”

His thumb and index finger scratched his cheek in thought. “I understand, unconditionally so,” he eventually said. “We shall speak no more of it.”

A moment of quiet followed. Artorias studied her a little longer before seeming to remember something, his golden eyes drifting down. “Ah, yes…” Reaching behind himself, he produced a small, battered bag and dropped it gently atop the table between them. The contents clinked together. Bonnie’s eyebrow immediately rose as he began removing them one-by-one: several candles, sticks of white chalk, a cheap plastic box-cutter, a little silver lighter and finally, with considerably more ceremony than it deserved, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Bonnie stared. “Where the fuck did you get those?”

Artorias ignored the question completely. He turned one of the candles between his fingers, examined the chalk, then picked up the box-cutter and thumbed its little blade out with a click. “Candles for light, perhaps… although there is plenty of that here already. Chalk for writing, yet you have pens. A blade too small to defend yourself with, strong spirits and something with which to make flame.” His eyes slowly lifted from the collection and found hers. There was something mischievous behind them, but something older too, something which made Bonnie suddenly rather aware that this man had probably seen more strange rites than she had seen drunken weekends. “An interesting little collection for a woman of medicine.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Oh, I am quite certain you do.” He pushed the blade back into its casing and placed it neatly beside the bottle. “What interests me is which of these things are meant for Charlie…” His thumb rested thoughtfully against the corked neck of the whiskey before his gaze settled upon Bonnie again. “…and which are meant for you?”

Bonnie’s face tightened. Artorias smiled, seemingly satisfied by whatever answer he had found in her expression alone, and began arranging the strange little assortment into an unnecessarily tidy row across the table.

“...And Charlie? If he’s… if he’s not quite dead, well then - well just how the fuck does that even work?” she asked hastily, unable to contain the question any longer.

Artorias placed his hands neatly on the table. The gloves were dark with dark brown stains. “A very good question, one I fear would take far too long to answer comprehensively. However, let me put it like this. Charlie’s entire biological system as you understand it functions on a different level to ours. One because of what his mother was and two, what his father was. These two natures battle within him constantly, although both states of being do nothing to sully the benefits of his existence; each, regardless, stands as an opposing force.

When the hourglass is full, with the sand at equal levels within each chamber, the equilibrium is balanced and all is as it should be. The issue with Charlie is that his Hourglass is filled with molten glass instead of sand and both chambers are full to the point of bursting. Thus his biology is in a constant state of flux. On one side, he was born mortal, a mortal with our family’s bespoke qualities, yes, but mortal all the same. On the other side, he has within him the blood of an immensely powerful vampire and has undergone the complete process to become undead, much like his fellows. His body has no idea what to do with itself the majority of the time - that isn’t even factoring in the Wager…”

Bonnie's ears pricked up, now that sounded important. “Wager, what wager?” All of this was beyond fascinating but all of it was also incredibly sinister. There was something big behind this, one big crutch that put everyone Charlie encountered in danger.

Artorias smiled, wagging his finger at her. “Now, now, young lady, that would be telling.” He grinned.

Okay, so the fucker just wasn’t going to tell her, after all that!? “Look, I get that we just met and you don’t trust me but-”

Artorias arose from his seat. “And I believe that will be them coming in right about now.”

Sure enough, Moonie tiptoed through the door, looking grimly at the broken doorway. Close behind was Rose, whose eyes fixed on both the unconscious Remhilde and then Artorias, who gritted his teeth in a restrained glare.

“What the hell happened in here? Are you out of your mind, Mad-Dog? You could have hurt him!” Rose growled, striding over to Charlie’s side despite her encumbrance. While Rose checked Charlie over, Moonie threw herself down on one knee.

“Lord Shuck, please forgive me, Rose was having a power nap a-and-” Muninn flinched as Artorias scooped her up from her crouch.

“Alright, alright, cut that out, will you? Honestly, you’re as bad as that brother of yours,” he said lightly.

Moonie compulsively brushed back the loose curl in her blonde ponytail before her eyes and nostrils began to suddenly spasm. Bonnie watched carefully as the Vampiress snorted and clicked, pulling back the violent gesture with a tight face. “S-Sorry, My lord, I… I can’t always.”

“Come sit. We have something very important to discuss.”

For the next ten minutes, Bonnie watched Muninn’s soft, kind features drop into a look of absolute horror. “The Watch was broken, and when it was… something in him changed…”

Tears, red and thick as blood, crawled from her eyelids as she clutched her lips.

“We fought them off the best we could but… there were too many and our exhaustion too great. He stayed behind so that Remhilde and I might escape. But I must say, I do not know his fate, grim as it may seem.”

The blonde girl’s grey eyes flashed a ruthless crimson; she nodded, her face twisting. “Oh, it seems grim, does it? My brother is dead… yeah, that could seem a bit grim to me-ah.” Her eyes widened and Artorias, realizing that it had just hit her, leapt over the table, snagging the blonde undead by the wrist before she could rush off.

“Don’t, Muninn!” He roared.

“STOP, STOP LET GO OF ME!” she hissed monstrously, Bonnie damn near flying off her chair as Artorias struggled.

“Listen to me, Muninn, LISTEN! The Invocation of Conquest means that the enemy could strike at any time, any place. The rules are all moot now; if the Moores don’t kill you, then any of the others certainly will. There is nothing you can do,” he explained.

Muninn’s monstrous visage slowly dissipated, alongside her rage. Instead, she fell to her knees and it was Bonnie who rushed to her side, wiping the blood off of her cheek as she wept. “He’s all I have. Everything is gone, dead and turned to dust; everyone died off, ran away, or beat me bloody, and he was the only one I had after all this!!!? Now he’s fucking gone! YOU LEFT HIM BEHIND!”

“Come on now, sweetheart, don’t start with that now…” Bonnie whispered, trying to comfort Moonie, but another voice echoed, one low and hoarse, only just audible.

“Oh but it wasn’t him we left behind, was it, Leech?” All of them gazed over. Rose’s blue eyes narrowed with contempt as Remhilde, barely sitting up on the couch, spoke out. “He would have been just fine if that Stopwatch didn’t get cracked. One little dent in that put him half in the grave, but not completely…” She stifled a brutal cough, wiping her bloody lips. “Something was reaching out from inside him, like an annoying caterpillar. Don’t tell me… that Glamouring him and expecting anything else but doom to follow makes a lick of sense - because it fucking doesn’t.”

Moonie looked terrified, as if she were a deer with its hooves stapled to a highway. At first she said nothing, but after Bonnie helped her stand she seemed to experience a wave of resoluteness. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. And I am done with this. I am gathering the other Loyalists for a search party. I don’t care what you say, Charlie would never allow his friend to be left behind.”

Artorias went to rest a hand on Muninn’s shoulder but she flinched away. Sighing, he spoke. “Do as you will, Muninn. It is your clan after all. Despite what you may think I do understand…”

Moonie began to walk away.

“...Take your time and your vengeance if you must, but it will not bring him back.” Artorias’ final word made Moonie pause in the fractured doorway, although only seconds later she vanished down the decorated hall.

A gloomy silence followed.

“Alright… phew, okay, that’s enough of this. No more delays. I need to get started straight away,” Bonnie said, a grim look on her face. She had hoped against hope but… there really was no choice now. She’d have to go all the way.

“Good.” Rose moved over to Bonnie. “What can we do?”

“Count me out of the we. I think I’ll pop a lung if I move another inch!” Remhilde muttered, letting herself fall back down into the couch.

Bonnie cringed. “I… need all of you to leave and swear to god that you won’t come back in?” she said in a single breath, her voice picking up an octave with every word.

Remhilde groaned deeply.

Artorias’ face scrunched up with discomfort and Rose’s cold stare betrayed nothing. All, however, hesitated.

“You lot don’t trust me all that much so I will say this for ya: Under no circumstances can anyone enter this room. When it begins, strange things might happen or-or you may hear some odd stuff but it’s all part of it. Now, I know that’s a lot to take in for a stranger, but if the rules are broken, then… well, he ain’t waking up again. Got it?” Bonnie managed to get it out in the clearest way she could.

The three seemed to study her, like ancient crows overlooking a newborn babe, trying to ascertain its nature which was so different and mysterious to theirs.

“I will help the grumpy one out; you will follow. Put that back on and bar it shut; allow no other creature inside.” Rose spoke, commanding Artorias as if she were his superior officer.

He did not like that much at all. “Yes, good idea. You and I are due for a little chat, anyway, aren’t we, Strigga?” His jaw was tight and in his gaze was death and hatred.

“Speak all you wish, Dog. But it will be done outside of this room. Go.” Rose growled, completely unstirred by the Mad-Dog’s vicious gaze.

Rose held Remhilde up as they both waddled, Artorias waiting for them with the unhinged helm effortlessly under his arm. Rose peered at Bonnie, who gave her a quick wink. As the three disappeared behind the door which was thrust harshly back into place, Bonnie felt a deep sense of hesitance.

Here she was, about to do the one thing she had sworn she would never do again, not even for her own mother. But this time was different; this time it was someone worth saving. She made a new vow to herself then that she would fix Charlie or die trying, so that she could see more of this wicked world she had wandered into.

Turning to the ritual items on the thick-grained, polished table, Bonnie reached behind her back and unzipped her dress. It was going to be a long night.