The Cursed Blood, стр. 25
“You’ve had a good long nap,” he chuckled sadly as he puffed on the pipe between his teeth. He sounded tired and seemed like he’d aged a decade as he stroked at his beard, studying me with narrowed, shiny black eyes. “How do you feel?”
“Wretched, and my head hurts,” was all I had for him as I propped myself upon my elbows and scooted to a sitting position against the cool, age worn leather of the overstuffed arm of the sofa. Gramps grunted his understanding and pursed his lips, his right hand hefting his pipe as he offered me an understanding nod.
“Can I ask a question?”
“Obviously, better than pretty much anyone I’ve ever known,” he grumbled in reply in a poor, lackadaisical attempt at humor as he fixed me with a look that was both tired and weary. He sighed and shook his head. “But I see that wasn’t an inquiry as to your own ability to question things, particularly me, now was it?” I shook my head and again he sighed. “Well, let’s have it then.”
“Why was my mom and dad murdered?” My question seemed to deeply trouble him as all but recoiled like a snake had just tried to bite him as he sat there contemplating his pipe uncomfortably. Manx staring up at him from his spot and whining mournfully as a pregnant silence interrupted only by the ticking of the wall clock settled over the room like a wet blanket.
“It’s complicated,” he finally answered, a touch of bitterness in his low growly voice as he took a deep breath and sighed. “But I’ll do my best to tell you now as you’ll only read about it in my books at some point or another, and you deserve to hear the truth of it from me and not some damnable magic ink.”
He took out a tiny silvery knife from his boot and began to scrape out his pipe into the ashtray with what was obviously a practiced hand, despite how it trembled. He took his time with this, then gently tapped the carved wooden bowl out onto his hand and checked it in the flickering low light of the fire.
Nodding in approval of his handywork he opened the drawer built into the end table and rummaged about mumbling about the “the good stuff.” With a grunt of victorious contentment, he pulled free a beaten, cracked, faded leather drawstring pouch and began the task of refilling and packing his pipe.
He lit it with a match from the odd black logo stamped (a VERY provocatively feminine winged gargoyle wearing a monocle, top hat, and not much else) matchbox from “The Cloven Hoof Lounge” that sat by the ashtray.
He shook out the match once he had the rich tobacco in the pipe bowl burning to his liking and took a long satisfying pull, settling back into the chair’s cushions with a sigh and creek of old leather.
This is kind of his custom. Building up to things with the nettling pipe ritual of his as he sits there trying to find the best way to say things. Its maddening but one gets used to it. In a way I’ve grown to appreciate the effort he takes with the world growing less and less caring of its words and desensitized to the concept that that choosing them carefully can truly make a difference.
In this case though, things were so ugly that nothing could ever make them better.
“Darklings, well, us…have a way of rubbing the races and Fey in the wrong way,” he began with a wistful look at the fire, as if he could see old, angry ghosts in the flames. “Most, well, all of them really weren’t too fond of the idea of us in the first place when the Oldfable was first proposed, but at the time, they really didn’t feel they had a choice. It only got worse when the reality of us set in as we started to hunt the worst of them down.”
He shook his head, again puffing away on his pipe as he stared off into space. His pointer finger tapped on the pipe’s bowl as he smoked. He fell silent for moment in aggravated contemplation before continuing his answer, jabbing at the fire with his pipe for occasional emphasis as he spoke to better drive his points home.
“It didn’t matter that it was their own council that ordered the hits, or that we only wacked the worst of the worst. Well, you can imagine, just the idea of a new being that’s all but immune to magic but can see it, meddle with it, smell it, and track it all the same was enough to make them want the lot of us dead. Some of them decided to act on it, Council’s will be damned.”
“Ones like that family I saw?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered softly. “I’d honestly thought them all long dead and gone…no, no, that’s not quite right. I hoped they were all dead, and I did my damnedest to assure it.”
“What are they?”
“They are called the Vraad.” He spat out the word like just uttering it made him ill. “They are an Elder Fey. Powerful, enormously powerful. Worst still they are all but immortal unless you manage to kill them properly, and that’s no easy thing to do. Harder to slay than the blasted Vampires.”
“But you killed them?”
“I’ve killed three,” he corrected in a voice so haunted and soft that I could barely hear it over the crackling of the fire and the tick of the clock. “The feud’s been a long one, boy. So long that if it weren’t for the damned books, we would have forgotten all the names of the dead. The first attack came