Free Resurrection by Ashe Barker

there in less than the blink of an eye.
    "Sweet Jesus," he breathed, "what is she?" He turned the horse's head in the direction she had taken, and he followed.
    Ged remained with Lilia for almost a year and a half. She explained to him in her soft, lilting tones how she had come upon the aftermath of the robbery to find him close to death beside his horse, his slain men scattered around him. She might have passed on by and let his fate take its course, but his eyelids had fluttered as she crouched beside him and he seemed to mutter something to her. She had leaned in, her ear beside his lips, to hear the words 'help me'. So she did, in the only manner at her disposal.
    Lilia had opened his leather tunic to bare his neck, then sank her fangs deep. Instead of drawing his life's blood from him, though, she allowed a little of her own essence to drain into his near lifeless form. Only when his breathing eased and the blood started to congeal on his wound did she lift him from the ground and prop him back on his horse. Ged had snorted at her description of having hauled him back onto his mount, but was soon to realise that her strength far outstripped his own, at least it had then.
    As he regained his own health and vigour Ged was soon more than a match for his slender saviour. Lilia had been a vampire for over a century already and had honed her skills and abilities in that time. Her own sire, the blacksmith in the village where she grew up, had taught her to use her superhuman strength and heightened senses to good effect, and so Lilia imparted that knowledge to her own turnling. Ged learned to live as vampire. He learned to hunt, and to hide. He learned to avoid the daylight as it would drain his strength more rapidly than his changed blood could restore it, and to avoid superstitious humans who would seek to destroy that which they feared and did not understand.
    And back then, a vampire was a being to be feared. They required blood to survive, and could only feed from live hosts. Human blood was preferred, though other creatures would suffice if need be. Farmers found sheep dead in their fields, their bodies drained. Wolves might be blamed, though rumours abounded about the mysterious undead creatures who roamed the darkness, striking from the shadows, an abomination to all decent Christian folk. It was said that vampires, witches, ghouls and other displaced souls were the creatures of Satan, his instruments put on the earth to wreak death and disaster on the God-fearing populace. They had to be hunted, captured, killed.
    Eventually, Lilia fell victim to a mob, trapped in the daylight and unable to escape to the relative safety of the cottage she and Ged shared in the Scottish Highlands. Too late, Ged realised she was in danger and rushed to her aid, but the ignorant peasantry had already staked her to the ground and severed her head. They were gone by the time he arrived, having left his beautiful companion to rot where she lay. Ged buried her, muttered some words he recalled from the priest at Roseworth, and then he departed the shores of Britain, not to return for almost two centuries.
    *****
    Much had happened to him in the centuries since. He had endured hardship and danger, wars, famine, disaster. He almost lost his life when London burnt in 1666, and again almost two hundred years later when an Arapaho warrior caught him in an uncharacteristic moment of carelessness at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
    Ged was a soldier by training. Warfare was what he was born to do, the only real skill he had and he could rely on it. He traded as a mercenary, spent most of those first few centuries in one battle zone or another, fighting for causes he rarely shared and scarcely understood. But where there was war there was blood, and he could feed. Survival was what mattered, and Ged did what he had to do.
    Civilisation and the inexorable march of science brought with it other options, and Ged recognised those when they presented