Nonstandard Vampires

You know, if you plumb the lore on vampires, you come up with some interesting abilities that they can have. Most of which Hollywood either ignores or never really exploits. Well, this story plans to poke a few of them.

Lee Cheong knows these wrecks are a trap. He’s taken steps….

—

I closed my eyes, the better to follow the dizzying flickers of vision. There were the three main wrecks as our falcons had spied them, two smaller hulls half-sunk flanking a large junk half on its side….

Too large a junk, and that had been one of our first clues that it was a trap. No treasure ship, but at least a second-class. To sink such a ship in shallow marsh waters would be impossible without the driving waves of a typhoon, or water magic.

There had been no typhoon here for the past year. That ship had been placed. The question was, why?

Flickers from sparrows on the smaller hulls. Bird eyes might not see anything amiss, but even a sparrow’s ears were enough to catch splashes from inside wrecked wood. Something – many somethings – moved in the waters inside the ships. And they were far too large to be fish.

No voices. No way to be sure what moved was cursed or a hapless prisoner. And yet one would think that even in the darkest despair a prisoner would cry out, sob, something–

Bird noses were not so keen as a cat’s. Yet a new scent touched the wind. A hint of rusted metal… and dry wood dust.

Where?

The boldest of my sparrows flitted over to the wrecked junk, where a trickle of sawdust spilled golden motes into the wind.

I barely needed to nudge it to hop closer. This was different.

A glimmer of blue among dry-shrunk planks; a deck prism, meant to cast light below into the hold, now only catching sun half the day. The dust was not near the glass, but three or four planks away-

Far enough away for the underside of the deck to be in shadow. I drew in a breath; slowly released it, before the thread of blood-magic could be broken.

A plank was being pried at, a rusty tip of iron poking through where caulking no longer held. Slowly. Determined. Deliberate, working its way along the whole of one edge before returning along the other. Pausing only to move to the next plank over, loosening that one in turn.

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