Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

and thrust its blade into her belly. This only improved her good humor, for she grabbed my wrist and dragged it along her gut, cutting herself and laughing all the while. I felt my feet leave the deck; felt her hands on my throat. In what seemed an instant, I was drowning. She held my head beneath the river—my back pressed against the side of the boat. My feet kicking wildly. I could do nothing but look up into her face. Her wrinkles smoothed by the water. Then thoughts turned from struggle, and a strange joy infected me. It would all be over soon, and I would rest. Those black eyes changing shape above me as the water began to calm. As I began to calm. I would be with her soon. It was night.
Then he came.
Abe was barely conscious when the old woman disappeared—pulled backward onto the boat. Her hands no longer holding him down, he sank gently toward the bottom of the river.
I was pulled from the depths by the hand of God. Placed upon the deck of the tiny boat next to a sleeping boy in a white gown. From this lowly vantage I watched the rest play out—slipping in and out of sleep. I heard the woman scream: “Traitor!” I saw the outline of a man struggling with her. I saw her head fall to the deck in front of where I lay. Her body was not attached to it. And then I saw no more.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
II
“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray—” *
I woke in a windowless room to a man reading by oil light. He was perhaps five-and-twenty—slender, with dark, shoulder-length hair. Upon seeing me wake, he stopped reading and placed a marker in the pages of a thick leather volume. I asked the only question that mattered. The one that had troubled my dreams.
“The boy… is he—”
“Safe. Placed where he will be found.”
His accent betrayed no particular origin. Was he an Englishman? An American? A Scot? He sat beside me in an intricately carved high-back chair, one leg of his dark trousers folded neatly over the other, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled to the elbows, and a small silver cross hanging around his neck. My eyes came around, and I traced the shape of the room by the light of his oil lamp. Its walls seemed made from stones piled one on top of the other—the space between them packed with clay. Each boasted no fewer than two gold-framed paintings; some as many as six. Scenes of bare-breasted native women carrying water from a stream. Sun-soaked landscapes. A portrait of a young lady hanging beside a portrait of an old one, their features remarkably similar. I saw my belongings carefully laid out on a chest in the far corner of the room. My coat. My knives. My ax—miraculously rescued from the bottom of the Ohio. Surrounding these, some of the most elegant furnishings I had ever seen. And books! Stacks and stacks of books of every conceivable thickness and binding.
“My name is Henry Sturges,” he said. “This is my home.”
“Abraham… Lincoln.”
“The ‘father of many.’ A pleasure, indeed.”
I tried to sit up, but met with such pain as to bring me to the edge of fainting. I lay on my back and looked down my chin. My chest and stomach were covered in wet bandages.
“You’ll forgive the intrusion on your modesty, but you were quite injured. Don’t be alarmed by the smell, either. Your dressings have been steeped in an assortment of oils—all very good for healing wounds, I assure you. Not as beneficial to the senses, I’m afraid.”
“How…”
“Two days and nights. I must say, the first dozen hours were rather tenuous. I wasn’t sure you would ever wake. It’s a compliment to your health that you sur—”
“No… how did you kill her?”
“Ah. It wasn’t difficult, really. She was quite frail, you know.”
It seemed an absurd thing to say to one whose body had been shattered by her “frailty.”
“And, I might add, quite preoccupied with drowning you. In that regard I suppose I owe you a debt of gratitude for distrac—may I ask you something?”
My silence proved a suitable substitute for “yes.”
“How many vampires have you slain?”
It was shocking to hear a stranger say the word. Until that day I had heard no one other than my father speak of them as real creatures. I thought briefly of boasting, but answered him honestly.
“One,” said Abe.
“Yes… yes, that seems about right.”
“And you, sir. How many have you slain?”
“One.”
I could make no sense of