The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels by Brian Stableford Page B

his arm freely. The cut was long enough to allow them all to drink simultaneously, two on each side; if the Devil had as much blood in him as a common man, they might have taken a stomach-full apiece and still left a residue behind—but that was not what happened.
The four vampires leapt upon their prey like a pack of jackals, clawing and snapping at him and at one another. Maddened by the combination of their thirst and their proximity to the means of slaking it, they lashed out in every direction, each of them seemingly more intent on keeping his companions away from the prize than to claim it for himself.
They bit and sucked, lapped and swallowed—but for every drop they claimed a dozen were spilled on the rocky ledge. The Devil went down beneath their assault, bitten on both his legs as well as his arms, and about his face and throat as well. He sustained a dozen new wounds within a minute, a hundred within five. All of them bled with what seemed to Anthony to be unnatural copiousness—as if the vampires’ saliva had some agent within it that prevented the blood from clotting.
In his home town of Coma, and in Alexandria too—within the shadow of the library wall—Anthony had seen starving dogs fighting over a bone, but this was different. Even starving dogs retained some vestige of respect for one another, snarling and howling at the expense of inflicting deadly bites. The four vampires knew no such restraint. They did not howl and they did not snarl, but they clawed and they bit. They gouged at one another’s eyes and aimed deadly blows at one another’s throats. Their intentions were rarely fulfilled, in the immediate sense, but, as time went by and the Devil’s blood leaked away unharvested, the destruction they sought to wreak could hardly be avoided.
They were close to the edge of the cliff. One went sprawling over the edge, and then another. That left two—at which point the conflict became far less chaotic, more sharply focused.
The two vampires fought with all their might, and the Devil’s precious blood continued to ebb away.
Anthony watched, dumbfounded.
Eventually, one vampire went down for the last time—not dead, but broken in his limbs and stunned into unconsciousness. The survivor, who was by no means uninjured, immediately set about trying to lick the last few rivulets of blood from the Devil’s wounds, and to lap up the few fugitive pools that the rock had cupped. It seemed to Anthony to be a rather meager meal.
When the vampire had finished he sat back warily, supporting himself with his scarred and twisted hands, and he looked up at Anthony. His eyes were bright and wild, but not devoid of intelligence.
“You can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear, my friend,” the vampire said. “You’re one of us now.”
“Are you the one who bit me?” Anthony asked.
“What does that matter?” the vampire retorted, licking his lips avidly in search of one last drop of sustenance. “It’s done. You should come with us—we’re heading for Alexandria.”
“Us?” Anthony echoed. “I think you will be alone from now on—and deservedly so, given that you treat your friends so vilely.” “They’ll recover,” the vampire said. “They’ll be thirsty, but their bones will knit and their scratches will heal. They’ll bear me no ill will. They know that there’s strength in numbers, even if the contest that results when we find a lone victim can have only one winner. In Alexandria, it will be different. Cities were made for our kind. If you stay out here, though, alone, they’ll catch you eventually. Then they’ll behead you, and burn your body. There’s no way back from that. You’d best come with us—you have a great deal to learn.”
“You have the Devil’s blood in you now,” Anthony told the creature. “It might make you stronger, I suppose, but it’s poison nevertheless.”
“If that were true,” the vampire replied, “it would make little enough difference to me, who