Read Online Wuthering Bites by Sarah Gray - Free Book Online

health did the slayer have a chance. The vampires had drunk so much of his blood and the blood of other parishioners who must have had a nip or two to fight the cold that the creatures became so in their cups that they could not put up their usual show of strength.”
    â€œSo the gypsy slayed them both?”
    Mrs. Dean rose to shovel more coal into the fire. “One through the heart with his silver-bladed sword. The second, he would have but the beastie leapt from a window and vanished into the chestnut woods. The slayer tried to assemble a group to go after him, but none of the parishioners had the fortitude.”
    â€œThe nerve of them, to enter a house of worship,” I observed. “Five dead in such a short time.”
    She peered at me over her shoulder from where she crouched before the fire. “Aye, sir, come to dinner, as it were. If not for the gypsy slayer, they might have drained the entire congregation.”
    â€œAnd you take this tale to be the truth?” Mrs. Dean, being the sort she was, I wondered if her stories needed to be taken with a grain of salt.
    â€œTrue as earth, word for word as I heard it.” She settled back in her chair and picked up her stitching again.
    â€œFrightening that the vampires should be so bold as to invade a place of worship on a Sunday,” I pronounced.
    â€œIndeed. It makes me nervous to sit through service ever since.” She snipped a bit of thread between her sharp little incisors and I took note that she seemed to have unusually fine teeth for a woman her age. None blackened or broken, and none missing that I could see. It was a rare condition among those of her class.
    â€œI’ll sit by no strangers, I wager that.” She touched her throat. “Sad, indeed, that one cannot even feel safe in church.”
    â€œBut you were telling me about Mr. Hindley’s new wife.” I redirected her back to the tale that interested me most. “When she first arrived at Wuthering Heights.”
    That I was. I must say I had no impulse to sympathize with her. We don’t take to foreigners, here, Mr. Lockwood, unless they take to us first. If that’s one thing we’ve learned from the infestation, and the tales that come from towns like Crumpton-on-Ween, it’s that the unknown should not be welcomed. That’s how they first got in, you know, though few care to admit it. From their own ravaged countryside they came, making noises of changed ways and feeding off animals. But it’s still humans they prefer, though in a pinch they will take a sheep or two, even dogs.
    Young Earnshaw was altered considerably in the three years of his absence. He had grown sparer, and lost his color, and spoke and dressed quite differently, so differently that some whispered with wonder if he had already fallen under the spell of the beasties. They were in the cities as well, you know, despite what the young missus might have said. But I never thought he had been made vampire. Nor did I think he had followed with the training to fight them that his good father—God rest his soul—had sent him to obtain.
    On the very day of his return, Hindley told Joseph and me we must thenceforth quarter ourselves in the kitchen, and leave the house for him. The young missus expressed pleasure, at the beginning, at finding a sister among her new acquaintance. She prattled to Catherine and ran about with her, and gave her all sorts of presents. Her affection tired very soon, however, when she learned how the young miss traipsed about the moors, near daring the vampires to take her, even lifting a sword, on occasion. Eventually the wife withdrew her affection from Catherine and grew peevish, and then Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred he held for Catherine and Heathcliff. He drove the boy from their company to the servants’, deprived him of his school books, and allowed him only pease