The Disciple and Other Stories of the Paranormal by Jemma Chase Page A

the few who can stand
up to the ’Pires and create our own army.”
    “ Joan of Arc did the same
thing,” Liam said. “She was burned at the stake for her
efforts.”
    “ But she won,” I reminded
him. “She may have died, but she saved her people.”
    I wondered how Joan of Arc had felt when she
knew she was going to die. Her faith had been strong, so did that
mean she went without fear to her death? Or, at the end, was she
only alone and afraid, ready to die because everyone who mattered
had been lost to her?
    I forced my thoughts onto something
else.
     

     
    We went on proudly, at least for a while.
Hiding the Stars of David helped, though we were still regarded
with the wrong sort of curiosity from most of the populace.
However, we met the occasional person who believed us and thanked
us for our efforts.
    Not that our plan was to tell just anyone
what our purpose was. Those few we rescued who weren’t more afraid
of us than the ’Pire we’d saved them from were given a truthful
explanation.
    We told any others who asked that we’d been
sent by their sovereign to try to stamp out a variety of plague.
This worked in many cases. But when you’re caught ripping the heads
off of supposedly upstanding citizens who just keep odd hours, then
you do have some explanations demanded, usually at the point of a
sword.
    We were equipped to survive against most
vampire-based attacks. But we weren’t protected from human weapons.
And nothing can ever protect you from a mob.
    Our first mob was terrifying.
    We were caught clearing out a nest of
vampires. We couldn’t reason with the villagers who were trying to
defend their lord and his family. We had to set the vampires’ home
on fire – not to destroy them but to keep the villagers at bay.
They’d kept five horses and we stole them, with two carrying
double.
    David and Hannah were riding together. In
the scramble to escape, his cloak came off and he tossed it over
the horse’s neck. We rode wildly, feeling more fear of this mob
than any vampire.
    The villagers gave good chase, though we did
manage to outrun them. But not before David took an arrow in the
back.
    We reached our hiding place and David fell
off the horse into Marcus’ arms. Hannah leaped off, trying not to
cry.
    “ Can you remove the
arrow?” Liam asked Marcus quietly.
    Marcus shook his head as he broke off what
he could, so Hannah could hold David without harming herself.
    “ I’ll…miss you…my love,”
David gasped out.
    “ I’ll see you in Heaven,
if nowhere else,” she whispered, kissing his forehead.
    David reached his hand to her face. They
were like that for a moment, but only a moment. His hand fell to
the ground as his eyes glazed. He looked like Violet to me, only
stabbed from behind, not from the front. But the finality of death
was the same.
    Our first casualty came within a year of
arriving. In a war, I suppose that’s a good statistic. In reality,
we lost a seventh of our fighting force, and one half of a married
couple.
    We wrapped David in his cloak and buried him
as well as we could, putting a note rolled into an empty vial into
his clasped hands. We identified his burial spot with a stone
marker. Maybe in time his body would be unearthed, the vial found,
and somehow The Order, a thousand years from now, would know their
first fallen soldier had died bravely.
    At least, we hoped it was bravely. Because
we felt more like marauders than heroes. In order to survive, we’d
learned to loot ’Pire remains for their money and supplies, just
like we’d taken the horses. But what we didn’t ask was what this
might be doing to our own souls.
    Hannah tried to hide her sorrow, but she and
David had been together longer than I’d been in The Order. They’d
lost everyone to the vampires in our time, everyone but each
other.
    But this loss was different – deeper,
lonelier, more final. We all felt it. Surprising as it was to
discover we still had some innocence to lose, but as