smackenzie

It will hurt, but not for long, and then you will sleep, and when you wake you will be a new man. You will be immortal.

"What... what did you do to me?" Ruslan stammered. He stumbled back, away from Jan, and this time when he fell the Magyar did not catch him. He landed on his butt on the ground, jarring his tailbone and nearly falling over onto his back. His heart stuttered and skittered inside his ribcage, sputtering like water from a rusty pump. He clutched at his chest, fingers digging through cloth trying to get inside his body, trying to squeeze his heart into some steady rhythm. The world was dimming again, fuzzing around the edges like an unraveling scarf, and a strange light seemed to shine in Jan's weird yellow-green eyes.

"I have given you your key, Captain Nizharadze. Do you feel it?"

"I feel... I feel something... yes.... Yes. But what... what did you... I drank your blood...."

"So you did." Was the Magyar smiling at him? Jan crouched on the ground in front of Ruslan, leaning on his knees and eyeing the cavalry officer closely. "How did it taste?"

"Like blood, you... you silly man.... Like... blood, and... and...."

"Freedom," Jan whispered.

Pain squeezed Ruslan in its clawed grip, sharp and deep and like something twisting his insides into spaces they were never meant to fit. He moaned, unable to carry on the conversation any longer, and not wanting to.

"Yes," Jan said softly, his voice distant, "the pain. I remember. It will pass."

"It... it hurts...," Ruslan ground out between his teeth. He tried to breathe but that hurt too. Sitting still was agony, but so was trying to move. His hand tightened around the fistful of shirt; he would swear his heart was stopping.

"You are dying. Your body is rejecting its mortality in favor of the gift I have given you. My blood, captain. My blood is the bridge between your old life and your new. Blood is life."

Pain rippled through Ruslan then, lightning running through his veins and to every nerve, making his eyes bulge so he thought they would pop out of his head. His mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out. His free hand, the one not tangled in his shirt, scrabbled in the leaves on the ground, unconsciously seeking something familiar, something to which he could anchor himself. He felt his body flying apart. He couldn't breathe. He was dying.

He was dead.

Eyes stared blankly at the night sky over Smolensk. The stars glittered and spun as the last bits of Captain Ruslan Nizharadze sparked and died, as the things that made him human, that made him mortal, fled his fragile body.

He didn't see or feel or hear anything for a while and so did not know that Jan dug a shallow grave and buried him in it, covering him with dirt and leaves and twigs fallen from the trees. Jan was in some ways a traditionalist, and this was traditional, the burying of the body in the ground. The body would rise. The burial was merely a symbol. If Ruslan had been awake he would have appreciated it - he had a sense for symbolism.

* * * *

The moon was low in the sky when Ruslan awoke, clawing his way out of the dirt Jan had laid over him like a strange plant emerging from a seed. The Magyar had not buried him deeply and had not packed the earth, so it wasn't difficult for Ruslan to dig his way out.

He shoved dirt off himself, sat up, and dragged air into his lungs, and very nearly fell over again when he realized he wasn't breathing.

Not only that, he did not have to breathe.

He slapped a hand to the side of his neck, looking for a pulse and not finding it. He ripped his shirt open and felt for his heartbeat, and did not find that either. No breath, no heartbeat. No pulse. He really was dead. And if that was so, how could he possibly be alive?

Because he was alive. He felt more alive than he had ever felt. The world was sharper, dark trees standing out in high contrast against the darker night, every leaf on every branch clearly outlined, every stone on the ground, every clump of dirt, every footprint of every small woodland animal. He could see everything, hear everything, smell.... He smelled blood, and he realized he was hungry.

Some other time he would pause to wonder about that, wonder why the scent of human blood aroused such a hunger in him. (For he was hungry for something else as well - hungry for the hot tight embrace of flesh, hungry for pure animal rutting.) But the hunger for blood was stronger, overriding every impulse in his head that screamed You have gone mad - men do not drink the blood of their own kind, and he absently brushed dirt off his pants and his open jacket, threw back his head, and sniffed the warm August air. Soldiers. That way.

Ruslan slipped quietly through the trees towards the camp of the Czar's army, where common soldiers slept in their clothes on the ground if they slept at all. Tomorrow they would retreat. Barclay de Tolly and Bagration would agree on that at least, he knew. The army would pack itself up and retreat towards Moscow. Ruslan would not go with them.

The first man he came across was a Prussian foot soldier, if his dirty uniform was anything to go by, and he smelled of earth and sweat and blood. Oh, by all the names of the saints, he smelled of blood, and Ruslan's mouth watered. He was barely aware of what he did as he grabbed the man, covered his mouth before the soldier could cry out, and dragged him far enough away that no one could see. Hunger made him sloppy but hunger made him desperate, and although the Prussian struggled and cursed and flailed and managed to kick Ruslan in the shins with his heavy boots, the captain snapped his neck and plunged new fangs into his shoulder and drank and drank and drank until the Prussian was empty.

Ruslan dropped the soldier and resisted the urge to howl. He felt wild and savage and someone totally new. Jan had been wrong - he was someone else. Captain Ruslan Nizharadze was dead and a new man had taken his place, wore his clothes and saw from his eyes.

And he was drunk. On blood, on life, on the deep unexplainable knowledge that he was free of his old life, free of the army and the Czar and the Russian Empire, free of his parents and grandfather and their backwards country. He could leave. He would leave. But he had to find Jan first, had to slake his other thirst.

He could never say later if he had found the Magyar or if the Magyar had found him. Everything was strange and different, including the passing of time. It could have been minutes or hours before they stood face to face once again.

"How do you feel?" Jan asked, a smile that could also be a smirk curving the corners of his mouth. "Can you feel it, your immortality settling on your shoulders?"

"I feel a great many things," Ruslan growled, grabbing Jan's shoulders and spinning him around to face a large tree. "I feel strong and hard. I felt blood. I want to feel you." He worked his trousers open, freeing his now painfully stiff cock. Oh, he was hungry, so hungry for this man, for any man, the blood he'd drained from the Prussian coursing through his veins and clouding his sight, thrummming in his ears like distant drums, driving him as he spread Jan's legs with his knee, as he reached around to undo the man's trousers and push them down past his hips, as he spit into his palm and slicked himself with a rudimentary lubrication, as he thrust inside again and again until he groaned into Jan's shoulder and came with shuddering, surprising force.

"See, you are alive," Jan said. Ruslan was not even breathless, although by rights he knew he should be gasping for air. His lungs did not work. Would not work. Not even for this. If he hadn't been so drunk on the blood he might have been frightened.

Jan twisted out of his grip, laughing as Ruslan swayed and his cock stood still at half-mast. He was not yet completely soft, he still had spirit in him. He could go again, and that at least did not frighten him. He blinked, though, dazed, as Jan grinned a wolfish, feral grin and pushed him down onto the ground.

If Ruslan had ever entertained any thoughts that they might still be civilized men, those illusions were shattered as Jan literally tore his trousers off, flinging the ripped cloth back over his shoulder. The Magyar pushed Ruslan's legs up and back, spread his thighs, and without a word, but still wearing that look like a rutting wolf bearing down on a helpless female, he fucked him like a savage, hard and fast and strong. Ruslan rocked with every thrust, panting out of reflex, and in what felt like no time at all Jan threw back his head and howled, Ruslan's cries joining his as they climaxed together.

"What am I?" Ruslan whispered, after Jan had pulled out and stood up and offered him a hand. "What have I become? Where do I go now?" He covered himself with his hands, reflexively modest, although two minutes before he had been on his back on the ground, screaming with pleasure as a man he'd just met fucked him roughly.

"You have heard of the vampir, yes? The upir?"

"They walk the night and suck the blood from men...." For once Ruslan wished he had listened more closely to his grandfather's folktales. He had always thought them silly superstitions, but evidently they were true.

"Westerns call us vampire. We feed off the living. Sunlight can harm you, fire can kill you. A crucifix, holy water, garlic - these will hurt but not kill. A stake in the heart will render you dust. That is all you need to know."

"All...? How did this happen? Will I look like this forever? Will I never age?"

"You will be...how many years have you?"

"Twenty-four."

"You will be twenty-four for eternity. See, your wounds have healed. I promised you would be young and strong forever, did I not?"

"You did...."

"As for where you will go, you may go anywhere, childe. Leave this place. Leave your clothes, your arms, your blades. Take nothing of your old life when you embark upon your new."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. You have already lost your pants." Jan grinned, this time less feral and more human, and Ruslan could actually grin back. The change was nearly complete, the turning from mortal to immortal. He needed one last thing.

"A new name, even," he said. "I wish a new name, to mark the death of my old self and the birth of this new me."

"As you wish. You may change that too, as it pleases you. You are no longer bound by the same rules as mortal men. You are freed. Do you wish to travel with me for a time, or will you go your own way?"

The question was sudden and took Ruslan a bit by surprise. He had not thought that far, had indeed not thought any farther than finding another man's clothes and sneaking off before daybreak.

"I would travel with you, if you will have me," he said. Better to start out with someone who had experience in these things.

"I will. Have you a name?"

Ruslan thought. A new name for a new life.

"Aurelian," he said finally.

And thus died Captain Ruslan Nizharadze of Odessa, cavalry officer in the First West Army of Czar Alexander, within sight of the burning city of Smolensk, thus was born in his place Aurelian, vampire.

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