Campfire Stories

Author note - originally this started off as a synopsis of back story elements and things considered canon, somewhat necessary when you’re trying to finagle twenty-two years worth of sprawling rewrites and progression into something that doesn’t contradict itself. Even though the subject matter is contradictory by nature. Unreliable narrators are the best. It ended up being somewhere between an mass-exposition and a sidestory. But as a refresher of how San Marseille is developing (and something to post on the blog) , I rather like it. And it helped me get a much better handle on the character of Nicky because Damian was proving impossible.

Growing up, Damian always wanted to be just like our father. I always thought this was a problem for a couple of reasons. First, like all of us awful orphans, Damian had never met his old man. He’d been given up some time around birth, give or take the before and after. He started out in the foster system. Skip forward a few years and he was at Saint Vitandus with the rest of us.

But that was Damian’s daddy. Not our father. Our father who art in heaven— ok, no, I can’t even do that for a joke. It is too much of a joke when you grow up in a boarding hall with institutionalised vampirism.

This is where our father comes in. Although nobody actually calls him that. Maybe Cat. But he was the closest thing to a father figure we had, him and Marie were our parentals. And us their disobedient child soldiers.

Our father wasn’t the vampire, just to be clear. More the vampire slayer. Or he certainly tried to be but in all the years he never was able to put Alexi down for good. Sometimes he’d use his face to bruise Alexi’s knuckles but his heart was in the right place. Not Alexi’s heart though, that would be on the pointy end of a stake, or the business end of a shotgun. But like I said, close but no slay.

Our surrogate father figure was Mark Rember, who showed up at the Saint Vitandus with a bunch of his friends on a summer work placement gig. And life would never be the same again.

I wonder if he ever regretted it. You go in expecting to earn a few honest dollars, next thing you know you’re neck to the jugular deep in your own twisted fairy tale because your employer is a vampire running his own summer blood camp and the week after that you’ve inherited unintentional guardianship of a dozen children in need of rehoming. Oh, and people who aren’t really people are trying to kill you. Vampires and faeries and monsters under the bed. I know, life is messed up.

A lot of people died so he probably does regret it. He never says so.

Damian wants to be just like him. He never says so either.

It always makes it harder when he lets Mark down.

My name is Nicky Szgany.

*****

Do you wanna know our history? Well, I don’t want to talk about it so here’s the cliff notes. We were born in a hospital and then we lived somewhere else. That somewhere was Saint Vitandus. A home for wayward and troubled young people. People like me and Damian. Alice and Dale. Tabitha. There were others.

They’re all dead now.

I’ll let you in on a secret, there never was a Saint Vitandus. It’s Latin for excommunication, one to be avoided, shunned, but nobody speaks Latin anymore and nobody bothered to check. If they had they might have assumed it meant the children; us. And while we had our issues, and still do, I assure you it didn’t.

It meant Alexi Kachura.

There are a lot of terrible things that can happen to children. I won’t list them. Having the blood sucked straight from the marrow of your bones is one that doesn’t make the news. Did you know bone marrow is the source of new blood cells?

Did you know it tastes better?

I know that because Alexi told me once.

Vampires need blood. Traditional problems require modern solutions but modern solutions cause present day problems. Like government regulations. Compliance. Staffing. Saint Vitandus was his farm but every farm needs workers.

One day three young adults came to work at Saint Vitandus. Marie Smith, Caolle Laines and Mark Rember. They weren’t the first or the only but at this point everyone else is dead.

Marie was a volunteer, part of her Church’s community goodwill programme. Caolle was there as part of his required community service. I don’t actually know what he did to warrant that but it was always suspicious that he could do his service at Marie’s workplace. I think Mark got dragged in to keep an eye on Caolle. He stayed because of Kerin.

Back then they were supposed to help out with the day to day realities of keeping all of us walking, talking blood-bags alive, without actually getting wise to the reality of their situation. I never understood how that was supposed to work.

But I guess it did. We were victims of our situation, our circumstance. Somehow Alexi had us all twisted up that it was our fault and that we deserved what was happening to us. It was all our fault. And nothing and nobody in the world would ever change that. No one was coming to save us.

Alice didn’t accepted that. Alice refused to believe that. Alice was the first to reach out. She was the oldest, maybe that made her the bravest or the leader or whatever. But she did. She took a chance. I wonder, if you gave her the choice, if she might not do the same again. But a few days later we were on the run, hiding out from Alexi Kachura and his minions. Yes, he had minions.

People died. It wasn’t like the stories you hear. The movies, the TV specials. The myths and the legends and the fairy tales. There was no happy ending. Just a different kind of fear and suffering and now it wasn’t just us.

And people died trying to help us.

But they bloodied Alexi enough that he ran home, crying with his tail between his legs. They did that; Mark and Caolle and Marie. And Kerin.

Kerin Payes. She was Mark’s girlfriend. I always thought they met at Saint Vitandus but I found out later they already knew each other, and this wasn’t there first go around. Kerin was a tutor, a teacher’s assistant. She was supposed to teach us book stuff and make us smart. That’s another way they get you, going through the motions of trying to pretend to the outside world that everything was normal. Convincing us that it was. None of us paid much attention to our schooling, we were too busy trying to survive.

Boy, were we ever stupid. We should have paid so much more attention to her, to Kerin.

No one is ever who they appear to be, nothing is ever what it seems.

Alexi was part of the Kachurian family. That’s what everyone calls them. Alexi is the only vampire, vampires being an exceedingly rare kind of fae. Fae means faeries, which is what most of the Kachurians are, but it also means any kind of supernatural creature. The ones that, sucks to find out, do exist in the real world.

It’s so confusing. The fae world and the mundane exist alongside each other. Sometimes things from one world get stuck in the other. Like Alexi. Sometimes entire cities get stuck, like San Marseille, existing in this weird, quasi-real, quantum entangled state. The Night bleeds through into reality. It’s kind of messed up.

The Kachurians are from the fae world. Refugees or exiles or runaways, I don’t know. They formed together around their leader, Andianov. Before San Marseille was a thing they roamed, never settling. The real world isn’t kind to fae. It hurts them, I think. Because it doesn’t believe in them.

And they push back.

They came for us, the Kachurians. Because we’d run away from them, rejected them. And hurt them. They killed Mark’s family. His entire family. They almost got Marie’s. They got some of their friends, there were more than just the three of them back then. More people drawn into the mess that is our lives. More people who died. And then finally they got to Caolle.

They didn’t kill him. I think they planned to, but things changed. They learned something. Always with the revelations. See, Caolle is what they call a changeling. You know what a changeling is, right? A human baby is stolen and replaced with a faerie, to be raised by mundane parents. It helps them survive in this cruel world. Usually the fae come for them later, reclaim them. They say changelings always remember but Caolle was so many generations removed he had no idea. What happens to the stolen babies, I hear you ask? Sometimes they die. Sometimes they get taken in themselves by fae families, in one role or another. Children or servants or pets. Those are the good possibilities. When that happens they call them fall children.

Oh, sometimes they get sent to live in homes for wayward children. But back to Caolle.

Caolle Laines, as it happened, was actually Caolle Kachura, directly descended, though over many generations, from Andianov Kachura, head of the family.

They wanted him.

They got him.

I won’t go into how, it’s quite a story, I’m not even sure I know all the details. Lots of twists and turns, plenty of double crosses and a few outright lies. There’s something about the fae, or maybe the Kachurians, or maybe old man Kachura himself, that changes you. You lose yourself, you’re not who you were. So Caolle stopped being who he was. He stopped being a friend.

At this point we were in the middle of a war. Alexi was bad enough, finding out there were more…like him, was worse. Not just the Kachurians but all kinds of fae, the hidden world we used to think wasn’t real. Monsters under the bed. But there isn’t just one side in a war and there wasn’t in this one either.

After the Kachurians the Szgany came. You’d call them Gypsies, I suppose. They would too, but they’d be wrong, they only think that. Repeat a lie often enough and people start to believe it. Tell it for long enough and you might forget it was never the truth.

When most fae come through the Night into our world, they lose themselves. They become wild, dangerous. That’s where the stories come from. The Szgany hunt those fae down. And they’re not so keen on the rest either.

The Szgany answer to a woman named Shake. Answer. I should say, the fanatically loyal to her, the same way junkyard attack dogs are. She’s human but not. When she’s around the Night her eyes…

The fae have a name for her. They call her the Killing Doll.

Shake’s right-hand man was Kako Pariss. The moment he arrived in town things got complicated. Marie became infatuated with him, which made Caolle jealous, because Caolle also had a thing for Marie, ever since they were kids. Only now he was on the other side. And Kako was trying to kill him. Which Mark had a problem with because he still considered Caolle his best friend, despite how things were going down. Things got even more complicated because of Kako’s sister, Keja.

Yes, it turned out Kerin Payes was really Keja Pariss. Kyle Pariss, as he introduced himself to us Gorgio, that means non-Gypsy, by the way, was her brother.

Yes, the love of Mark’s love was the estranged child of a Gypsy clan. The Night loves its impossible convergent coincidences.

Speaking of siblings, because family is everything, Caolle found he had a new adopted sister of his own. Marya Zaleska. And she didn’t like to share. She figured the best way to ensure Caolle to cut ties with his old life was to literally…cut those ties.

She went after Marie first. That was about the time she started going by Rie, names were too similar or something. Women are weird about that.

Marya almost killed Rie. She did run her off the road in what I’m told was a most epic motorbike duel. Things kept escalating. Shake and Andianov have a weird understanding, always stepping around one another. I’m not sure if it’s mutual fear or respect or just practicality. But their subordinates were running amok.

Andianov Kachura packed up his extended family and left town. The Szgany went their own way and Rie went with them. Not Mark though, someone had to stay behind and look after the kids.

He didn’t give up on Caolle though and sometimes he would go looking for him. One time he tracked him down to a city, a city whose name you can’t find on any map, not anymore. He almost died, again. Rescued a puppy. Fell in with a woman named Gwev, moved in with her.

No, not like that. Mark and Kerin had split but he was still hung up on her. The kind of doomed, tragic hung up they make movies about. Gwev was something else. Would it help if I told you she was a werewolf? She was also a grandmother and the puppy Mark rescued happened to be her grand-pup. That put him in good stead with her and the Blackwoods, her pack. Enough so that when the Kachurians came looking for him again he had something scarier than a pack of orphaned kids standing behind him.

Gwev is short for Gévaudan. As in; the beast of. Look it up.

We ended up living with the Blackwoods soon after that. Mark though it was the safest option. For a while it was. He and Caolle even got back to the point where they could be in the same room without trying to kill each other.

What happened next is a bit unclear. See, the city Mark had tracked Caolle to had a reputation within the fae community. The Night was strong there. And it seemed to be getting stronger. At one point it seemed like it was going to engulf the whole city. Nobody was really sure what that meant, would the whole metropolis fade away into the fae world? Would the Night spread out and take over the surrounding countryside, maybe more?

A lot of people thought Andianov Kachura was behind it. I’m not so sure but I am sure it was why he was there. It’s why Mark stayed. It’s why Rie and Shake and the Szgany were drawn there. Them and others, all kinds of fae. They were starting to overrun the city in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

And then it all stopped. Or maybe it all happened. Nobody can agree on what exactly it was because nobody can remember.

Remember, remember…

We used to sing that as kids. It was so annoying. I think he hated it.

The world changed and what was left was San Marseille.

They said Mark saved the world. The boy who saved the world. He was just a kid, really, so young. But no one was really sure. I’m not sure, he won’t talk. Nobody really remembers. It’s like we were all fae coming out of the Night. So confused.

Outside the city, the world went on like normal. Nobody believed in faeries and the faeries and goblins and monsters under the bed preferred it that way. They stuck to their bridges and shadows and hidden places. Pseudodoxia Epidemica held sway outside San Marseille.

Things were different inside the city limits. People accepted that if you went out on a misty night there would be will-o-wisps instead of street lights. If you went down past Erikson Street you’d unofficially be in Dogtown, where the werewolves lived. That was where lived, at Grace. We went from living in an orphanage to an intersectional nightclub and bar.

It was just south of the botanical gardens. I remember Tabby used to love those and we almost lost here there more than once. It was full of hungry grass and the mushroom rings where they’d hold the revels. The lotus tress and the raskovnik plants. In the spring you’d see the baby agnus scythicus, the vegetable lambs, wandering around.

There were a lot of places like that, you couldn’t go for a walk in the park anymore unless you understood faerie law. Same for a café, accept a complimentary truffle at a pixie premises and you could be washing dishes for a week or walking the overnight baking shift. It was an unavoidable obligation, the rules had changed but were all mixed up. You could still end up in middle-class suburbia as easily as you could in the Echoes of Aphasia. And don’t get me started on the trains. Oh, the trains, Damian hated those. I loved them. Catch the four-one-two and you could arrive uptown twenty minutes before you actually left. Once I got there the day before. You just had to get your head around the metro timetable without breaking your brain. The markets were the same, depending on whether it was wolf moon or maybe a hare moon you could find all the different markets around town; the spider bazaar or the hollow markets. Sometimes a waxing fair in the churchyard if the moonlight was just so. That was a problem if there were seasonal gargoyles. Tricksy things, them.

Reficul was what we called the bad part of town, but also the main road there. At the very end was the Kachurian mansion, where Andianov and Caolle and Marya lived. Alexi too, until he went away. They say Andianov made him go to sleep, just like in the movies. It was part of the truce, the agreement to keep all these different groups from breaking out into outright violence. The mayor was behind that, one of them, anyway. We had two.

There was a lot of violence, at first. That first night. It all blurred, like the city. People died, or maybe they weren’t there anymore. Kerin, who I kind of miss. Her brother too. I think Caolle killed him. The Szgany left. That was another thing, most people found they couldn’t leave the city. You ended up back where you left, or if you did make it through the outskirts you forgot everything. Like when you grow up and stop believing in all these things. You walk into a room and forget you whole life was ever fantastical. Except for the Szgany, who could come and go. But the mayor wanted them gone.

We lived in Dogtown, at Grace. I guess that’s where we had to grow up. You know the saying, lay down with dogs you wake up with fleas. That happened to Dale. He caught lycanthropy and the pack didn’t take it well. It violated some kind of social law and they were constantly at him. Not when Mark could see, that’s not how bullies work. Alice and Damian tried to protect him but they had their own problems.

See, this is all a lot, right? I can see it on your face, it’s a lot. A lot to hear but imagine living through this. Imagine being a child and growing up, through this. We had trauma. As simple as that. It started to affect all of us, but Alice most of all. I think her brain tried to protect her, or maybe it was some kind of side effect of all that Night. She forgot stuff, her long term memory became non-existent. She’d forget where we lived if she didn’t write it down. Eventually Mark sent her to live with Rie, outside San Marseille. I think that really hurt him, because Alice was his favourite. And sending her away meant he’d failed in trying to protect her from the world. But San Marseille was killing her.

We kept in touch and I think she was better outside. Able to hold onto memories longer. Or maybe she got better at writing things down. She journaled a lot. She remembered us, remembered San Marseille. Most people didn’t because the perception filter around the city has this way of rationalising the impossible. We could tell someone about all the fantastical things, send them pictures, videos, letters, but outside the city the brain would justify it. It’s hard to explain. Belief is like that, in that it has nothing to do with reality. Alice retained that belief though, like the Szgany. It turned out she wasn’t alone.

Alice set the precedent. Dale got out maybe a year later. He missed Alice even more than the rest of us. And he was different, it’s hard being the only gay werewolf, I guess. Somehow Rie found him a nice normal foster family outside, somewhere so far from the Night he stopped getting his monthly furry visitor. Most werewolves don’t actually turn just at the full moon but for the Blackwoods and the like it’s hereditary, whereas Dale is a second-hand mutt.

We were next, Damian and I. Following our big brother and sister. Although by that point they weren’t anymore, because time in faerie moves different and San Marseille has one foot in that world. So Damian and I, and Tabby, outgrew Alice and Dale.

Damian has a lot of anger. So much anger in one person. Mark kept him in check growing up, helped him. Stopped him killing anyone. But there was always this smouldering resentment against the world. He couldn’t let it go. Eventually he convinced Rie to take him on, to join the Szgany. Apart from Rie and a few very rare, very controversial exceptions the Szgany stayed clear of San Marseille. But outside the city they still roamed and sought out individual and pockets of fae that straggled in from the Night.

After a lot of agonising I agreed to go with Damian. That only left Tabby back home. Our baby sister. If we stay away long enough she might outgrow us all. Now that would be funny.

*****

‘Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me any of this?’

‘Why?’ Nicky asked. He looked up, up at the sky, then adjusted his glasses. He shrugged. ‘Because it’s a good story? I get bored. There’s a lot, isn’t there? Everything that happened to me and Dee. Before joining up with the Szgany. All of which lead us here, to this moment.’

He gestured around him, to the makeshift Szgany camp, packs and weapons and paraphernalia strewn around. The stone ringed fire that had burned down to nothing but embers. Not a camping stove or a solar power light, an old fashioned fire to keep the dark away. It was just the two of them in the camp, Nicky and the captured fae, bound and restrained and sitting back against the outcrop of stone.

‘And I was waiting for you to work your way out of those ropes,’ Nicky shrugged.

The fae hesitated, arms behind their back, only the most frayed fragments still holding them together. Skin and fibre rubbed raw on the granite backing.

‘I had more stories,’ Nicky said, ‘but honestly I thought you’d be done by now.’ His hand lingered on the baton laid across his legs, tipped with weighted iron at the end. There were other weapons nearby, from guns to crossbows to more arcane implements. If required.

‘Your friends will be back soon,’ the fae said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘My friends are looking for your friends,’ Nicky watched them closely. ‘You sent them in the wrong direction so if you’re lucky they’re still looking and far away by now. That means you still have a chance.’

Tension on the fae’s face now, coiled anxiety set against the looming precipice of someone who had just realised they might have already lost.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Damian thinks you’re from a court. That there’s a lot more of you out there and he means to burn you out. I’m not so sure. I think it’s just you and a few others. If Shake were here it would be a different story but she’s not so we have some wiggle room. Are you out of those ropes yet?’

Slowly, the fae held up their hands in front of themselves, the severed strands still hanging from the inhuman wrists.

‘Good,’ Nicky nodded. He turned his head, listening. ‘If you’re really lucky, you can get back to your friends. If you’re unlucky, Damian already found them and you can’t help them. Either way you have to run. Head for San Marseille. You know which way?’

The fae nodded their head, almost imperceptibly.

‘You can feel it, can’t you? You should have gone there before we found you. That doesn’t matter now, though. When you cross the boundary you’re going to forget all this. If it starts to come back to you, find Mark Rember, tell him I said hello. If Caolle finds you first then…well, sorry about that. But don’t let Damian catch you first.’

‘Why? Why are you doing this?’

Nicky shrugged, standing up. ‘Because nothing is ever what it seems, my pointy Spock eared friend. And I still remember what it was like to be on the run, to have people hunting you just because you exist.’

The fae stood, edging back away from the campfire, still watching Nicky and the flickering shadows. Waiting for the trap to close.

It was not an unreasonable fear.

‘One more thing,’ Nicky told them.

The fae waited.

Nicky reached up and removed his glasses, folding the temples down and casting them into the grass.

‘You’d need to hit me. Make it look—’

The world went dark.

*****

‘Hey.’

‘Nnngh.’

‘Use your words.’

‘Ow.’

Nicky squinted and the world stared back. Dark, undefined shapes and muted colours. Perfectly normal.

‘Knocked your glasses off.’

‘Gimme,’ Nicky fumbled with his hand out in supplication. The bifocals were pressed into his fingers. He winced putting them back on, his face was tender and swollen out of all usual proportion. The world came back into focus. His dreadlocked brother included.

‘Sucker punch you while you were cleaning them?’ Damian asked him.

Nicky looked at him. ‘Ow,’ he repeated.

‘You’ll have a black eye for a week but I don’t think you have a concussion,’ Damian said.

‘Great, now we look like twins,’ Nicky said. ‘Help me up.’

Damian did not help. Nicky rolled his eyes, which hurt, but managed on his own.

‘What happened?’

‘You got knocked out.’

‘What else?’

‘The prisoner escaped.’

‘Oh good, be even more embarrassing for me if they didn’t.’

Damian shook his head. ‘Shake it off, we’re leave.’

‘Shake it off,’ Nicky repeated. ‘That’s funny.’

He took a step and the world didn’t fall away. No dizziness, that was good. There was pain in his shin, his attacker had gone low before they went high. Made sense.

The others were back as well, breaking camp and getting ready to move on. Some observed his faltering steps and waved in his direction but mostly they kept busy with their own deliberate haste.

‘Damian,’ Nicky said. ‘What happened?’

He could smell smoke. There were soot and ash stains on all of them.

‘We found them,’ Damian said, crouching down and tightening straps on a saddlebag.

‘And? What happened?’

Damian shrugged, standing up with the bags over his shoulder. ‘Does it matter?’

It was too early for dawn but beyond Damian and the camp Nicky could see the horizon stained red and orange, interspersed with billowing clouds of black.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter at all.’