Free Blood Fugue by Joseph D'Lacey

slack-bodied.
    Kerrigan approached and knelt to check him. The boy had been knocked senseless by the force of the binder. It was the one Kerrigan had dug through the compost pile to retrieve. He’d been right too; it was a good one. Not wanting anyone to see him carrying a body along the trails, he slung David over his shoulder and carried him through the tightly spaced trees, creating his own trail to the wellspring.
    Half an hour later, they reached the wellspring glade. Kerrigan laid David down, carefully undressed him and placed a binder around his neck to keep him from re-entering Fugue while he worked on him. The boy might continue to look and behave human, but until Kerrigan’s work was complete the disease would be locked deep within him, woven into the double helix of every single cell.
    Kerrigan undressed David first and bound his hands and feet tightly with leather braids that had been blessed and dipped in wellspring water when he made them. He smudged them both before he began the purification. It was instinct that guided him — he had no manual for what he was doing, no memory of ever learning the techniques. Yet he watched his hands perform gestures and listened to his own voice utter words in a language he neither recognised nor understood.
    Using a handful of spongy moss he took water from the wellspring and bathed the boy’s body entirely from head to toe. This baptism would help to drive the Fugue from his body. He would not be immune in the future but he would at least be healed. While he mopped David’s dark skin, Kerrigan searched for signs of entry and found what he was looking for in the clefts of the boy’s groin. The flesh was withered and dry around the penetration marks. He knew what Gina must have done to distract the boy while she fed. It was always done with trickery and seduction. Every feed was a kind of rape.
    David was lucky to know he’d ‘lost something’. Most people never realised. Kerrigan doubted if Gina Priestly was aware of the Fugue in her own blood. There was a good chance she’d never find out. Whilst the Fugue was dormant, as it was most of the time, a human was perfectly safe from sunlight and binders or any other kind of control mechanism. But eventually the infection would surface like a malarial rigor and when that time came the human would recede and let the Fugue rule. For some it happened once every month. For others only one day in the year. But it always came. There was no denying the Fugue or the need it engendered.
    Kerrigan himself had always shown Fugue tendencies. It was only when he was hunting that he remembered. When he hunted he remembered it all; every Fugue he had healed, every one he had destroyed, every human life saved. But even when he was awake to the hunter within him, he never recalled where it had all begun or how he had learned the things he knew. His fear of the dark amused him in these moments, but the very next night he would be close to paralysis when the dusk faded into night.
    The boy moaned as he finished the anointing.
    ‘Almost done now.’
    Kerrigan placed a binder against the boy’s forehead and stood up. He took hold of the staff and placed its tip against the binder, pressing it hard into David’s skin. He whispered into the top of the staff and felt the vibration move downwards. His voice awoke the blood that generations of Fugue Hunters had drained from themselves and worked into the carved ancient pine. The staff hummed, its resonance passing into the bones of David’s skull. The boy began to shake.
    David opened his eyes and screamed. A cry of loss, a cry of triumph. That of the dying and of the reborn. The boy’s tears flowed freely. Kerrigan removed the staff and untied him. David curled into a foetal ball, wracked with sobs.
    ‘You can cry on the way back,’ said Kerrigan. ‘Put your clothes on. We need to get moving.’
    A few seconds earlier the moment of chill that he hated so much when he was human had arrived.