Dark night, no moon above in the sky.
Laying on the coldest ground, a gust of wind made me shiver.
My eyes wide open, just turning them around black rocks surrounded me.
I forced myself to stand up, it took a deep strain. I moved some painful steps around, trying to focus on the darken shapes of the rocks.
I had been laying on top of a huge block of stone.
I descended carefully onto the ground in a small clearing, wind a constant moving leaves, tree branches around.
I moved around cautiously.
Deep night alll around.
A crow cawed from nowhere at distance.
All my senses alert.
No time for crows at night.
I felt it deep into my bones.
My own adversary was chasing me.
Slowly stepping around the clearing, some sort of stench on me, from the clothings I wore.
Not my own. Back into my own past time. My fingertips along the sleeves, along my sides. Rough texture. Some old style jacket on me. Pockets full of leaves. Trousers: moleskin tissue.
That smell: grandpa Zulfikar. My fingers reache the belt, tough worn leather. His own belt.
Moving along it I found the scabbard. His knife by my side.
Leaves flowing away from the pockets.
My smell, my grandpa smell around in the wind.
The solitary crow cawed again, from a lesser distance.
I knew he was hunting me.
I started moving around with the wind, into the bushes.
It was his own territory, I sensed it.
Some part of me, say my brain, knew it was Corsica, a deep ravine in the mountains.
Then my footsteps in the wind became clearer, sounds of hoofs.
It was me / my wild stench / the Centaur.
It was my grandpa / his own wild stench / his knife by my side.
My neck, my legs remembering this place.
It was Balkans.
It was Rumelia.
It was the land of the Romans.
It was the land I grew up on.
Grandpa Zulfikar once took me to a somewhat distant land in the same complex nation I was born.
It was Crna Gora.
We were part of a scattered tribe, back then.
Our fellow families reunited there in a valley inside the wilderness of Durmitor massif.
Some distant relatives, some young as me.
We were there to chase a wolf or a bear.
It was then, we became young men from the boys we were before.
I recalled the shadows, the trees.
My steps into the woods, now.
No noise. My hoofs like gusts of wind.
Cawing.
Nearer to me.
The crow was chasing me.
Short time to be ready for the fight.
Then I recognized it in the looming darkness.
A stand alone tree.
The whitethorn.
I reached for the strongest branch, I managed my grandpa’s knife,
It was strong. It was flexible.
I quickly polished its sides.
I carved a sharp point.
The crow landed on a tree branch just one hundred yards from the withethorn.
It became clear to me, to the strange consciousness inhabiting my body.
He couldn’t get nearer.
The whitethorn keeping him at distance with its own power.
I knew who he was now.
He was a vampire.
A Corsican vampire, the Surpatore - as Lucie the Culpadora had said.
He was my natural enemy.
Cawing again in the darkest.
Then the howl.
The vampire had set his feet on the ground.
The moslemi tzigani I am knew it from the blood, knew it from the bones.
The time of the fight had come.
A crescent moon from nowhere stood in the middle of the black sky.
No stars around.
Just the waning moon.
Time to fight. Time of death.
My hoofs moving out of my own will.
Grandpa’s long knife in my left hand.
Whitethorn javelin in my right hand.
I stepped out of the whitethorn cover.
I screamed.
I was the Centaur at war.
The wolf.
Huge.
Standing in front of a high unnatural rock.
I knew what it was. A menhir.
It was his own place from millennia.
Long before the pact between the God of light and his men.
The Book we carried with us had no power down there.
The black wolf gnawed his teeth at me.
I couldn’t afford to lose sight of his eyes.
Red burning eyes of the vampire in his own turf.
I came across.
I tried to hit him full force with the knife. Swish miss swish miss.
His paw hit my wrist.
The knife fell from my hand
His huge body above mine, the javelin my right hand still held firmly was no use at no distance from him.
My left hand desperately searching the ground for the knife.
He unveiled his face: not a wolf.
A long time dead who refused to die many centuries ago.
His enormous mouth wide open.
His fangs over me.
Then my left hand found what it had not been searching.
A silk like polished stone.
It grabbed the stone.
The stone entered the flank of the vampire.
He roared for pain.
I was able to set myself free from his weight.
I saw the obsidian rudimentary knife in my left hand.
I balanced the javelin in my right hand.
I flexed my right arm then I pushed the javelin full force into his chest, where I knew his damned heart was still beating from many centuries.
That being screamed for so long I had never imagined the vampires can do, then recoiled.
I hit him through his eyes with the prehistoric obsidian knife.
It was a horrible scene to be seen, my eyes perfectly adapted to that night.
Convulsing.
Blood gushing from his wounds in the chest , from his now empty eye sockets.
My grandpa’s hunting knife now to be seen on the ground.
I grabbed it, I severed the vampire’s neck, I took the javelin off his chest - blood, jet black blood spilling all over, then full force inside once again.
The knife finally worked again, it severed his head from the body.
I stood up on my hoofs. I reared up. I whinnied.
The Centaur had won his fight for life and death.
Pure joy in me.
A vampire from Corsica should have never defied a vampire killer from Rumelia, it was my grandpa Zulfikar to pronounce these words into my ear.
I woke up with a start, drenched in my stench, soaked in my sweat.
I barely opened my eyes: Lucie was looking at me eyes wide open, a cross held to my forehead grasped by her withered hands.
“Now you will have to kill him in this world,” she said.
Her voice calm.
Her American English amazingly perfect.
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