The Making of Michael Bishop Read online

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  Michael awoke, cold and confused, tied to a table. The vampyr hunched over him, hands outstretched as it chanted in a language the priest did not understand, nor could he remember ever hearing it before. He jerked his head frantically from side to side to take in the room around him. They were no longer in the dungeon. “Where are we?” his voice croaked when he spoke, sounding as if he hadn’t used it in days. He wondered briefly if that was the case, if anyone were looking for him. It was a foolish thought. He wasn’t important enough for anyone to bother with.

  “I brought you to my home. We would have been interrupted had we remained where we were. And we can’t have that. You should go back to sleep, child. This next part is rather unpleasant.”

  “What are you doing to me?” Michael flexed his fingers and toes as he said the words and realized that his arm was no longer broken. All the pain was gone.

  “I am making you like me.”

  Icy shards of fear lodged in Michael’s heart. “I do not wish to be an abomination.”

  The creature laughed, a deep sound that echoed through the room around them. “Abomination? You call me an abomination.” A feral scowl contorted its features. “I am not the one that snatches people from their homes and tortures them into confessions or burns them at the stake. I am not the one who kills innocents in the name of my god.”

  “You don’t kill people?”

  “I didn’t say that, priest. But I don’t pretend there is some greater purpose to what I do. I am a killer. I don’t hide it behind pretty words and justifications.”

  “How is it not an abomination to be one of the undead, the undying?” Michael couldn’t wrap his mind around what the vampyr was telling him. Everything was changing and Michael was scrambling to catch up.

  It laughed again. “I am not dead. I am alive, so very much alive.”

  Michael frowned uncertain it spoke the truth. All of this went against everything he had been taught.

  “It is old magic, ancient blood magic, long since forgotten by the vast majority of the world.” It chuckled again. “You look surprised, priest. It is a spell which gives us our unnatural life. A spell passed in the word and the blood of those that came before. All the way back to the very first of our kind. A spell which is fed by blood. If you do not feed it, it fades and we fade with it.”

  “But I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

  “And you will. But now I must complete the transformation.” The vampyr resumed the chanting, pausing intermittently to pour something thick and bitter from a chalice into Michael’s mouth. He coughed and choked on the liquid but it went down just the same. Suddenly, white hot pain lanced through Michael radiating from his stomach to the soles of his feet and straight through the top of his head. A mournful, agonized sound filled the air and, after a moment, he realized it was coming from him. A howl of pain and anguish. Tears, cold against his fevered skin, leaked from his eyes and his ears rang.

  Just when Michael thought he would break, he heard his master’s voice. “Sleep, child.”

  And so he did.