Death of an Immortal by Duncan McGeary

conclusions. He was completely nonreligious.
    “What irony?”
    “Well, you say you don’t believe in the supernatural, and yet here we are, vampires! The stuff of legend.”
    “But we’re completely natural,” Terrill said, certain that he was right. “We just haven’t been studied yet. We’re as real as the Neanderthals once were. We just haven’t gone extinct.”
    “Yet.”
    “What?”
    “We haven’t gone extinct yet.”
    “Maybe,” Terrill conceded. As humans became ever more numerous, vampires were being forced out of the shadows and into the light, where they were being systematically destroyed. With Michael the Maker’s blessing, Terrill had created the six Rules of Vampire for the remaining vampires to live by. They seemed to be working.
    “So we’re completely natural, like penguins or dolphins or guinea pigs. Except… why does holy water burn us, why can’t we stand on consecrated ground, and why do we flee the cross?”
    That was the flaw in Terrill’s skepticism, all right. Why should the symbols of Christianity affect them so if there was no such thing as God?
    “Because some part of us believes the old wives’ tales,” he said, not sounding completely confident in his argument. “Some part of our nature is susceptible to these symbols, whether we understand them or not.”
    That was what he told his brethren, but inside, he had his doubts. Once, he’d thrown holy water on a condemned vampire who had no reason to believe it was anything other than just water. It was alarming when the vampire burst into flames and disintegrated in moments.
    Terrill often wondered if vampires who were Muslims or Hindus or Jews had their own vulnerabilities, but he’d never found a vampire who had originated in any of those cultures. Vampires seemed to be a European Christian phenomenon.
    He also wondered if these weaknesses had existed longer than two thousand years. Michael was the oldest of all vampires, and he was twelve hundred years old. Michael never talked about the past, but he did hint that vampires had always existed.
    “Maybe we’re working for the devil,” Horsham said.
    He made it sound like a joke, but Terrill realized at that moment that the woman Mary was having a deleterious effect on his old friend.
    Horsham was breaking Rule 1: Never trust a human.
    Mary was becoming an inconvenience. No, she was becoming a danger.
    Terrill had a simple solution for such dangers.
     
    #
     
    Mary. That had been the start of his damnation. Or perhaps, because he’d always been damned but just hadn’t realized it, the beginning of his redemption. Or so he had thought for a long time. He’d tried so hard. He’d suffered physically the only way a vampire could, by refusing to feed for as long as possible. He’d thought he was succeeding. He was beginning to feel confident enough to seek human comfort.
    If only Jamie hadn’t woken him like that. If only she hadn’t trusted him.
    Terrill had broken half of the rules of his own devising. He’d trusted a human long enough to fall asleep with her. He hadn’t disposed of her remains. He had killed in his own backyard.
    He probably deserved to be caught.
    He put his fingers to the cross, and they burned. Unlike any other wound, it wouldn’t heal. He was feeling true enduring pain for the first time in centuries: pain he couldn’t fix by simply feeding.
    He was weak, weaker than he’d ever been. He needed sustenance as soon as possible. His ribs were bruised from the beating at the nightclub, and he suspected his face was black and blue as well. Those were injuries that could and should be healed if he intended to survive.
    If not, he could just wait for Horsham to find him. It wouldn’t take long. In Terrill’s weakened state, Horsham would make short work of him. He wouldn’t fight back. For Mary’s sake; for Jamie, and for all the other innocent victims.
    But Terrill found he wasn’t quite ready to give up. Not yet.
    The butcher closed at