The Excavation

At the time, I thought the blood was the important part.

My name is Elias Beauchamp. For eleven years I filmed people who carried rifles for a living: soldiers, mercenaries, militias, men who called themselves contractors because it sounded better on invoices. The Ward Group was my first supernatural embed and, according to my producer, the first time anyone had been allowed to film Gabriel Ward's team through an entire hunt.

Ward hated the phrase elite vampire hunters. Rivas loved it. Bell pretended not to.

I had been with them six weeks when a hunter cell in Lima called about a turning at an archaeological camp in northern Peru.

Lucy was the daughter of Daniel and Teresa Mercer, archaeologists who had spent most of her childhood excavating what they believed was one of the last South American refuges of the Camazotz: a vanished were-bat people whose remains survived in caves, ritual chambers, and a handful of contradictory colonial accounts.

The Mercers believed the Camazotz were extinct. Every hunter I met agreed.

The excavation lay three kilometers beyond the clinic, cut into a limestone ridge above the cloud forest. The central chamber contained a wall relief the Mercers had been arguing about for two seasons: a human figure, then a pale fanged figure drinking from a bowl, then a winged figure standing upright beneath a black sun.

Teresa called it initiation imagery.

Daniel called it a funerary sequence.

Lucy called it the reason she had spent her summer carrying buckets while her parents argued about dead bat people.

The Mercers were serious archaeologists: university grants, local permits, carbon dates, soil reports. Their emergency binder also contained the Lima hunter cell. Fifteen years of opening sealed rooms tied to stories about shape-shifters had apparently taught them that skepticism did not require stupidity.

Lima took one look at the photographs of Lucy's throat and escalated to Ward. Ward's team was already in-country finishing a hunt near the coast, and I was six weeks into the embed. That was how an internationally known combat videographer, three men carrying enough silver to bankrupt a jeweler, and a teenage girl with an archaeological field tag still clipped to her belt ended up sharing the same clinic room before midnight.

She had met Francesco in Trench Nine.

That story I got from her while Ward examined the bite.

"He was standing inside the grid," she told my camera.

Ward said, "Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"Your head is moving."

"Because Spielberg keeps asking questions."

I said, "Beauchamp."

"Same thing."

Ward touched the bruising around the two punctures on her throat. Lucy flinched.

"Tell him," Ward said.

Lucy looked back into the lens.

"It was after midnight. My parents were cataloguing in the lab. I heard something in the lower trench and thought somebody was stealing artifacts."

"So you went alone?"

"I had a flashlight."

Ward closed his eyes for half a second.

"There he was," Lucy continued. "Black coat. Boots on the fucking context layer."

Her father, standing behind me, said, "Language."

Lucy stared at him.

"Dad, I am becoming a vampire."

"Possibly," Ward said.

"Thank you, Dr. Optimism."

I asked what she had said to Francesco.

Lucy almost smiled.

"I told him to get out of the trench."

"And?"

"He said, 'I was here before your grid.'"

"What did you say?"

"I said the dead people were here before the grid too and we don't let them walk on it."

Rivas laughed from the clinic doorway.

Lucy glanced at him. "He laughed too."

Francesco came back the next night.

Then the next. By then Lucy had his number.

Sometimes he brought coffee. Once he returned a carved obsidian disk the Mercers had logged missing and refused to explain where he found it. He knew things about the excavation he should not have known and answered direct questions by asking worse ones.

Lucy had tried to make him useful. She showed him how to brush loose soil from a feature without destroying the context and made him carry two buckets because, as she put it, if he was going to trespass he could at least contribute to science. Francesco lasted nine minutes before announcing that archaeology was "grave robbing with paperwork."

"I told him we preserve history," Lucy said.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"That history had been doing fine before we showed up with little brushes."

On another night she caught him studying the three-figure wall relief. She asked if he knew what it meant.

"He said my mother's translation was wrong."

Teresa stepped closer. "He said that?"

"He said, 'Your mom's got two-thirds of it and absolutely no fucking idea what the middle part is.'"

Teresa and Daniel looked at each other.

Ward asked, "Why didn't you tell your parents that earlier?"

Lucy shrugged. "Because I thought he was flirting."

Teresa closed her eyes. Daniel muttered something I decided the documentary did not need translated.

"Did he tell you what he was?" Ward asked.

"No."

"Did you ask?"

"I asked if he was a grave robber."

"What did he say?"

"'Only if the grave owes me money.'"

She caught her parents watching and immediately looked annoyed with everyone in the room.

On the fourth night Francesco found her sitting on the edge of the excavation platform with a field notebook on her knees.

"He asked why I kept coming back," Lucy said.

"What did you tell him?"

"That it was my parents' dig."

"Truth?"

She gave me a filthy look.

"Then I asked why he kept coming back."

Ward stopped writing.

"And?"

Lucy looked down at her hands.

"He said, 'Because I like you.'"

Her mother turned away.

Lucy kept going.

"Then he asked if I trusted him."

Ward said, "And you said?"

"No."

"What did he say?"

Lucy touched the towel against her neck.

"Good answer."

Then he bit her.

She remembered pain. His arm around her shoulders. The strange heat that followed. She remembered grabbing his coat and telling him he was hurting her.

He stopped and looked at her. According to Lucy, he said, "Okay, kid. That's enough for tonight."

By morning he was gone.

By evening she had a fever.

The next day water made her throat spasm. Food tasted rotten. Sunlight through the clinic windows felt like needles pushed behind her eyes.

Francesco did not come back.

Ward opened his medical case.

Six syringes sat in black foam, each filled with cloudy amber fluid.

Teresa Mercer knew enough hunter terminology to go pale.

"Suppressant?"

Ward nodded.

"Blood-borne?"

"Presentation fits."

Daniel said, "That makes no sense. We were working on a Camazotz site."

Ward looked at him.

"Camazotz are extinct."

"We know."

"Then whatever bit your daughter is not one."

Ward rolled Lucy's sleeve up.

She looked at the syringes.

"What is that?"

"Time."

"How much?"

"Let's earn the first day before we negotiate the rest."

He injected her.

The effect took less than a minute.

Her shoulders loosened. The tremor in her hands stopped. She swallowed, stared at the water beside the bed, then picked it up and drank.

She cried before she finished the glass.

Ward capped the needle and wrote the time on white tape around the barrel.

"It doesn't cure you," he said.

Lucy lowered the glass.

Her father asked, "What does?"

"If the transformation is being driven by a Blood-borne sire, killing the sire before completion usually collapses the dependency. The suppressor delays completion. It gives us time to find him."

Lucy looked at the five syringes left in the case.

"And after those?"

Ward turned the case toward her.

"After those, you don't get to be late."

Lucy looked toward the dark ridge where the excavation lights blinked through the trees.

"Good," she said. "Because I know where he is."