It hurts.
My shoulder hurts. I can’t raise my arm higher than my shoulder, and it hurts. I’m not used to this. Maybe, just maybe, I’m a little afraid.
Who am I kidding? I’m bloody terrified.
It’s not that I haven’t experienced pain before. I have. Agony, even; far worse than this little stab wound.
There was the time in Japan, somewhere around 1680, when a Samurai cut my hand off and sliced through my chest almost to my spine. That was bad. During the French and Indian Wars a Wyandotte brave with a tomahawk split my arm from between the fingers to the elbow, between the radius and the ulna; not that I knew what the bones were called back in those days. I passed out, he assumed I was dying, and he scalped me. The pain I felt when I came round was infinitely worse than this.
At the Siege of Badajoz, when I broke through the barricade, I was shot at least a dozen times and run through with a sword twice. I had my nose shot off by a Cosa Nostra hitman in Chicago in the Thirties. Five years ago a Russian Mafiya enforcer with an Orthodox Church background sprayed my face with Holy Water and thrust a stake through my chest while I was blinded. He must have missed the heart by less than an inch.
But they all healed. No matter how bad the injury was, once I found refuge in Shadow the pain eased. This is the first time in three hundred and ninety two years that a wound has got worse as time has passed.
They knew about my powers. They were ready for me. I could have handled them anyway, if not for the mischance of the neighbours’ light coming on and pinning me like a butterfly, but they were prepared. I would have died there and then if Louise hadn’t thought to send her cat after the ball of light. Jack Robson, Jack of Shadows, the legendary Kage Ninja, saved by a teenage girl and a cat.
Saved from immediate death, that is. That knife has done something to me, something designed to counter my abilities, and I don’t think I could make it through another fight like that one.
I need to rest. I need to stay out of danger, husband my strength, and try to make it through to the lunar eclipse. I’ll be fine then. No matter what I’ve been cursed with, or infected with, my healing powers during an eclipse will cope with it.
Only one snag. The Harbingers will be back tonight. They’ll be after Louise. The Slayers are in Peru, thousands of miles away. It’s down to a handful of teenagers, a robot, and me. There’s no-one else. And I’m injured, I’m weak, and it’s getting worse.
I’ll have to call Louise. Tell her that I can’t help guard her tonight. She’ll have to get the JennyBot to sleep over with her. Maybe Donna too. It won’t be enough. They’ll break in, they’ll kill her, and Cass will come back and I’ll have to admit I’ve failed.
I think I’d rather die.
It’s always been easy for me to be a brave warrior. All I’ve ever risked is short-term pain or a quick death. Never had to think about being crippled, or blinded, or dying slowly and agonisingly. Never had to go into a fight thinking I might lose. Until now.
Sally was like that. It was a game to her. A glorious hero, never suffering more than a scratch, slaying Evil without a care. Then she met real pain, and she wouldn’t play any more. She picked up her ball and went home.
I call her anyway. I beg her to help. She doesn’t listen. Teresa could persuade her, perhaps. Maybe Cass could. But she just tells me to piss off.
Well fuck her then!
I’m better than her. She’s a Slayer, and I’m a Vampire; but she’s given up. I’m not going to do that. Ever. I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down. She can clart on drilling holes in people’s teeth until she reaches retirement age, I don’t care. I’m going to fight.
I call Louise. I ask her to come round and help me put my arm in a proper sling. I tell her to get some kiddies’ cut-out paper animals. With them stuck on the lights I can bring monsters out of Shadow to rip the Harbingers’ throats out. The JennyBot can “sleep over”; she can guard one side of the house, I’ll guard the other. I don’t think I’m up to leaping lightly over the garage roof, as I could have done in a moment before I got this knife wound.
She’s a canny lass, Louise. Brave. Very pretty, too. She’ll break some hearts when she’s older.
But she’s much too young for me, and anyway my heart belongs to another.
It was Rosa for centuries. We’d fight, we’d break up, but we always got back together again. Until that last time, when she came back from the war so damaged by what she did in France that she wasn’t my Rosa any more.
I thought my heart was frozen after that. Until I walked into a shop in Whitby and looked into those eyes, blue with a hint almost of violet, and I drowned in them. I was lost from that moment. I belong to her now. Totally.
She’s a human. An Ephemeral. Thirty years and she’ll be getting old. Fifty, sixty years, maybe eighty or more the way medical science is progressing, and she’ll be dead. I’ll still be twenty-eight. It makes no sense.
So what? Love isn’t supposed to make sense. I might die long before then. I was born in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, it would be somehow appropriate for me to die in the reign of the second. Maybe I’ll die tonight.
But if I do I’ll die fighting. And I’ll die trying to keep the promise I made.
I don’t make promises lightly. There have been some that I’ve broken, but never by choice. And I made a promise to the lady.
I told Cass I’d look after the kids. Nothing about “as long as I don’t get hurt”, or “as long as I’m not in any real danger”. Just that I’d look after them and keep them safe. No reservations, no get-out clause. I’ll keep that promise, or I’ll die trying. Simple.
It’s getting dark. Evil things will be stirring. Does that include me? I don’t know. I don’t care. Others can puzzle over ethics and philosophy; I’m just a fighter. It’s what I know, it’s what I do. Ah’m hard, me. Time to go to work.
I hope Louise chose the cut-out animals carefully. A tiger, an elephant, a wolf; that’s the sort of thing I want to unleash against the Bringers. I’ll probably end up with a teddy bear and a hamster.
It hurts.
I don’t care.
FIN