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Pearl is the first to die.
Except, she doesn’t.
She makes a leap and misses – a stupid little mistake, mortifying, really, and the only mercy in swift deaths like these is you don’t have to live with the embarrassment afterwards. The drop is one she’s made countless times before, that the whole town has made countless times before with (almost) no incident. She’s a fighter, a monster hunter, a survivor; she’s fought werewolves and vampires and creatures of the night, and–
And her head slams into the central stone pillar of the crypt and the next thing she knows, she’s back at Oakhurst.
It takes a moment to realise exactly what happened. After all, death is one of those things you don’t expect to have a memory of. Well… vampiric housemate, notwithstanding. Close shaves? Sure. The occasional maiming? All part of the job. But death? Actual, undeniable, bucket-kicking, dust-biting, death?
Well, she had shuffled off her mortal coil, but it seems to have shuffled right back on.
Across her brow is a scar, embedded into the contours of her forehead like an old childhood wound, but she knows it wasn’t there an hour ago. It’s pale and puckered, a raised welt of skin uncannily bloodless in its formation.
She picks up her sword and heads back out.
After all, it’s not like death’s stopping the vampires any time soon.
x
When the horrors lull, if only for a moment, the folk of Oakhurst find themselves less – less in numbers, but also less in some other, intangible way. They gather in the base beneath the tavern, and where once it might have been crammed, now it is almost comfortable.
The Militia hold court at one end, silver swords at their sides, while Pearl and Cleo stand at the other, their backs to the exit. The doctor and Abolish are left at the remaining sides – perhaps by design, but more likely by intent. All the better to break up a fight, and all that.
The townsfolk are changed from their recent encounters. New scars, freshly old, peek from the edge of sleeves and beneath collars; the doctor now moves with a limp, and Sausage’s pallor has paled. (Pearl doesn’t know if Legundo’s limp is from the repeated falls or a vampire’s claws, but it’s probably rude to ask, right? It’s not like there’s a manual on post-death survival but not vampirism etiquette, so she’s figuring it out as she goes along.)
They should be planning their next move.
Instead, as so often is the case, they’ve become distracted.
“All I’m saying,” Martyn leads, dragging the reins of the conversation into definitely not castle vs Oakhurst territory, “is that back at the crypt, I was dead. Like, not just a bit bloodied, ‘let’s drag him back and slap a bandage on him’ – properly dead. Claw-across-the-throat dead.” He passes a hand, however subconsciously, across this throat, where a whitened scar now rests. There’s the barest falter in his words, a quick breath that Pearl hears. He barrels on. “Next thing I know, I’m back here. Alive.”
“Same with me!” Sausage says. “When I was with Owen and he started swinging those claws – just like, bam – and I was sure I was gonna be a goner, but then, poof, I just woke up here.”
“You thought you were going to get turned,” Cleo scorns.
“That would have been so cool,” Sausage whines. “Just think – never aging, and all those cool skills, and the fashion–”
The room dissolves into familiar chaos, raised voices bouncing off the close walls as no fewer than five people descend into the conversation with their exact thoughts on the subject. Pearl winces, but this is not the kind of discussion she can walk away from. Whether or not she likes it, there’s something funny – okay, funnier – going on right now, and she has the freshly-aged scars to prove it.
“The point is,” she attempts to reroute, voice raised just above the cacophony, “we don’t seem to be able to die.”
“That’s true,” Ren says, and the communal attention belatedly returns to the previous tangent at hand. “There be something truly wicked in the air if honest men are denied the honour of a good death.”
Martyn grimaces. “Well, I don’t know if I’d call it wicked, specs. Seems like not dying evens the playing ground against the vampires a bit.”
There’s an under-breath sigh from the doctor, but he doesn’t remind Martyn of the castle verses (now singular) town vampires distinction. He hasn’t died as frequently as Pearl has, but he looks tired all the same. He keeps his weight off his bad leg.
Cleo, on the other hand, has energy to spare. “The playing ground would be a little bit more even if you hadn’t driven out all the vampires,” they snap.
The conversation again breaks down into pandemonium. Pearl would liken it to herding cats, but their newfound cat is perfectly well-behaved, thank you very much. What she has here is more like herding flies. Every time you bat at them, one always manages to zig-zag away.
Cleo catches Pearl’s eye, and offers a brief, almost apologetic smile. “So you can’t die,” she says, her voice cutting through the cacophony like wire through cheese. “Is that what’s happening?”
“We can die,” the doctor says. “It’s just not permanent.”
“For now,” Martyn says.
“What are you doing, saying that all ominously?” Pearl demands. “For now? What’s that’s supposed to mean?”
“Well, who’s to say it’ll stay like this? We’re not dying, true, but it’s not like we’re not-not dying like the vampires do.” He casts a side-eye to Cleo, and then away – or, as much as he can in the tiny room. “They seem to come back, right as rain.”
“When I was talking to Owen,” Abolish begins quietly, before another round of cross-talk can take root, “he said our souls are linked to this place. That the beacons are binding us here. Perhaps that means even in death.”
“So… what?” Pearl asks. “We’re just gonna keep on coming back?”
“Not even the sweet relief of death will free us from this place, don’cha know.”
Abolish raises his shoulders in a ghost of a shrug. “Maybe. But, here’s the thing: I think every time we die, a little less of us is brought back.”
There’s an uncharacteristic silence amongst the townsfolk.
“What happens when there’s nothing left to bring back?” Sausage asks.
“Then you die,” Cleo says. “Obviously.”
“We die,” Ren says, and he makes no effort to hide the distinction.
“We do seem to… lose something in the process,” Legundo says. “Health, vitality, a piece of our soul, I don’t know, but…” He’s talking a little slower than usual, even for him, as if he’s having to reach further into his mind to draw the words out. “I don’t think this is something we can do indefinitely.”
“How many deaths do you think it’ll take before it runs out?” Abolish asks.
“I don’t know. This isn’t… It’s not anything that science can explain, that I can measure.” Legundo’s hand rubs at the space above his heart. The tail end of a wicked claw mark sits just below his Adam’s apple, as if a scalpel has been taken clean through his carotid artery. “Ten, maybe? A dozen?”
“But that means that Pearl’s halfway through!”
“I don’t know, Sausage,” Legundo says wretchedly. “Like I said, it’s not an exact science – it’s barely science at all. Maybe it depends on the individual. Maybe it depends on the death. Maybe it depends, I don’t know, on the stars in the sky! All I do know is we seem to – to lose something in the dying.”
“Or if we get close enough,” Martyn says. His hand passes over not his throat this time, but the curve of his shoulder. “Remember when I fell from the bridge?”
“I remember Apo dragging you back,” Cleo says.
It’s testament to the conversation’s weight that Martyn simply continues. “I should have died. I didn’t, but… it feels the same as my deaths. Like not all of me was brought back from the river.”
“Like the holy light of the beacons themselves kept thee from heaven’s door,” Ren offers.
“Yeah. I don’t know, it wasn’t as if I just… poofed back to Oakhurst, like, I didn’t die properly, but… maybe the beacons kept me alive. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but…” He shakes his head. “I’m just saying, don’t assume that just because you don’t die that something wasn’t left behind.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence as each member counts their near misses. Pearl doesn’t need to. She knows each new scar that decorates her skin. Maybe, as Sausage said, she is halfway through her lives. That’s okay. She’s still strong enough to go on. Strong enough to fight.
“The way I see it,” she says, “I should be dead five times over at this point. So all this yapping about how many more times we can cark-it before it sticks is just wasting time. We’re alive, we’re here, and there’s a castle full of vampires across the way that really, really want to change that.”
“Few people get a second chance at life,” the doctor says.
“Let alone a fifth,” Abolish adds.
“See? No need for all this doom ‘n’ gloom talk. Now, how about we go kill some monsters?”
“You’re still injured,” Cleo says. “You need to rest.”
“I’m fine,” Pearl says breezily. “It’s never stopped me before.”
Cleo scoffs. “Oh, it’s stopped you. Four times, to be exact.”
“Aw, come on. I would have died from the falls even if I had been at full health.”
With that, there seems to be some unspoken agreement that the meeting has come to its natural end – or that killing monsters is a more comfortable topic than personal mortality – and the inhabitants start for the ladder and the tavern above. Pearl and Cleo start first, with the Militia close behind. The doctor lingers. He’s definitely slower than he once was.
At the tavern’s door, Pearl stops, and is nearly trampled in the process. She pats her belt in the patented way of someone double checking their pockets. “Oops! Left my sword back there. Just… if I could squeeze past…” Despite the grumbling, the Militia shuffle to let her by, and she drops down through the trapdoor.
She expects to bump into the last two occupants, but she’s halfway to the bottom when she hears voices.
“…whether to mention this in front of the others,” comes Abolish’s low voice, “but I don’t think that the, uh, lessening is the only thing we need to worry about with this new development.”
Pearl pauses.
“You mean what happens if we succeed in finding a way to leave?” the doctor asks. There’s a sigh, and it sounds as if he’s finally sank onto one of the chairs. “It’s a big ‘if’, Abolish. Look at us, look at the state of the town. Look at how many deaths we’ve accumulated over the last few days and how little we have to show for it.”
“We have the cure,” Abolish persists.
“And if the vampires have no interest in being cured? If it’s not just Scott, but every vampire who’s turned another that we have to kill? What then?”
“Let’s just say we do.”
“Sure. Let’s just say that, through some crazy, impossible miracle, we succeed,” Legundo says. “The vampires are dead, everyone’s human, the beacons are consecrated, and we’re free to leave. Let’s just say that. Then what happens to everyone who has been brought back by the beacons?”
“Maybe nothing.”
The doctor sighs, and there’s a dull thud that sounds like his elbows are propped atop the table. “But if it was maybe nothing, we wouldn’t be discussing it,” he says. “We both know there’s a chance that the beacons are all that’s keeping some of us alive. For those of us affected, we might still be barred from leaving Oakhurst.”
Pearl shifts as quietly as she can on the ladder, adjusting her balance. Perhaps she shouldn’t be eavesdropping like this, but… well, it would be too awkward to announce herself now.
“There’s also a chance,” Abolish says, and his voice is lower still now, apologetic, even, “that the beacons will lose their power entirely.”
“We always knew death was a possibility,” Legundo says. “As Pearl put it, some of us should be dead several times over.” There’s a pause. “Some of us should have been dead a long time back.”
Abolish doesn’t answer immediately. Pearl wishes he would. Or that he would at least drop something loud and ear-splitting so she can shimmy back up the ladder without risk of being heard. Her sword can wait another day.
“Are you okay, doctor?”
The laugh that comes is brittle, cracked at the edges. “No. But what other choice do I have but to keep going? It’s not like I can die my way out of this. Not yet.”
Abolish seems to consider this. It’s just Pearl’s luck that she’s stuck eavesdropping on the two most ponderous inhabitants of the town. She hopes Cleo doesn’t come looking for her soon.
“There’s also the other side of the equation,” Abolish says, and he sounds like he’s dragging his verbal feet through the mud. “Of what happens if we lose – if we do die? For good.”
“Then we die, Abolish. For good.”
“And what if it’s only our bodies that the beacons are losing a little each time?” The questions are pointedly rhetorical, as if Abolish doesn’t want to be the one to put voice to the answer. “What if it’s only our physical health that’s being left behind?”
“What if our souls are intact?” Legundo asks.
“What if, if we do finally die for good, the beacons still don’t release us?”
“Conscious, trapped for all eternity with nothing but your own thoughts,” Legundo says softly. He gives a hollow laugh. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”