Lucius’ master, many years ago, had taught him not to hate ghouls. He had told Lucius the fable of a spider who, when a frog gave him a ride across the river, could not keep himself from biting and killing his host, drowning them both in the rushing water.

“Ghouls aren't people,” Master had said. “They're not evil any more than a spider is evil. They're vicious, bloodthirsty animals, but you must put them down mercifully and without emotion. When you hate them, no matter what they've done, you give up logic and reason and act irrationally. You give them power over you, and then they destroy you.”

Lucius stood in the remnant of an abandoned boarding house. It was close to midnight, and through cracks and holes the light of the half moon shone here and there in soft ribbons. The boarding house’s second floor had collapsed, but the first was still largely intact, aside from the degradation of eight years in the damp of the countryside and with no hands to repair it.

The ghouls had made their nest here. In the ruins of the second floor, most likely. Completely out of sight, until it was time to feed.

Broken and rotted furniture lay all about, and peeling wallpaper hung moldy from the walls. All the windows and doors had long since been boarded up from the outside, and the ghouls likely went back and forth by climbing the outside walls, so Lucius had made his own entryway to the first floor.

Broad, shattered fragments of the house’s bar mirror shone in the moonlight. As Lucius passed before it, his reflection lit up for a moment, revealing a figure who looked, by design, quite ordinary. He was a tall man in a simple traveling cloak and an unfashionable hat, and a pair of smoked glasses perched upon his once-broken nose. Lucius bore no firearms or blades, neither in his hand nor on his hip nor across his back. Lucius’ solitary weapon was not one wielded in the hand.

Yet, Lucius was a Memory, here to hunt and slay ghouls, creatures far stronger and quicker than any human.

As far as fundamental biology went, Lucius was very human.

Lucius looked away from his reflection and leaned over to look behind the bar. His mouth twisted into a snarl. He had found what he sought, the same grizzly nightmare he saw over and over in his line of work.

Behind the bar, his prey had heaped the torn limbs and viscera of several human beings into a careless pile. The heads were missing, as would be the livers and hearts. Ghouls liked to eat those first. The rest would be left to age for a few days before they continued their feast.

They had killed these bodies within the last twenty-four hours. Lucius didn't need to look at them to tell. He knew these corpses. They were the Walker family, a trio of immigrants who had disappeared from their apartment two nights prior amid broken glass and splashes of blood. The city guard had declared it a break-in from which the perpetrators and the victims had fled, and refused to investigate further. They said all this despite the fact nothing seemed to be missing from the apartment. Valuables still remained in several conspicuous places, taken neither by the Walkers nor their attackers.

The guards, of course, did not believe ghouls existed. They were reasonable men of the modern world, after all.

But Lucius had seen the deep grooves of nails, mutated into claws, upon the walls directly inside the tiny apartment window. That was how ghouls got in. They shattered windows and scrambled themselves across shards of broken glass, leaving huge pools of blood all around which dried almost instantly.

Lucius hadn't tracked them here. It was simply the most likely place for them to hide.

In that way, in their predictability, ghouls were very much like animals, as Master had said.

The ghouls were gone for now. They would be out hunting again. They would be looking for more people who would not be missed. In that way, ghouls were intelligent. They could plan and speak like humans.

So Lucius, no matter what Master said, felt very comfortable in hating them.

He found the darkest corner of the boarding house and stepped into it. The ghouls could see far better than humans in the dark. They still relied on motion more than anything, just as humans did. With his dark clothes obscuring him, Lucius was confident his stillness would likewise protect him. Lucius prayed he had not completely misread his opponents.

Nearly two hours passed before the ghouls returned.

Lucius did not hear them as they climbed the walls of the boarding house, but once they stood on the second floor, the sounds of their footsteps, their loping strides, came to his ears and he turned his gaze upward.

How many of them were there? At least three. He couldn't tell beyond that.

A figure dropped through a hole in the ceiling. A tiny figure. Child-sized. It flailed as it fell and struck hard against the ground, but did not cry out. They must have gagged it.

Ghouls were cunning in their hunts. They kept their victims as unharmed as possible until they returned to their lair, so as to create as little a trail as possible for any pursuers. Though they left much blood at the scene of a crime, it was nearly all theirs.

The figure on the ground shuddered slowly. It would have been hurt by the ten-foot drop from up above. It would now be in horrible pain. The ghouls would know this, would laugh silently to themselves.

Every cell in Lucius’ body ached to run to the child and scoop it up, to shield it with his body and damn the consequences.

But he would not. He could not. The child was not the only victim, and if he did not kill the ghouls, this very family, or this group of friends, or whomever had been scooped up, would not be the last people the monsters would kill.

So Lucius stood still, keeping his breath shallow, and watched as a much larger figure, infinitely more powerful, unnaturally graceful, fell from the ceiling to the ground like a bird of prey swooping down to pluck up some infant forest creature.

One foot slammed into the ground, the other into the small of the child's back.

Lucius forced his eyes away from the child. It took everything he had not to scream out his rage and hatred—both for the ghoul and for himself. He could have saved the child. It had been within his power. As he always did, Lucius had put the mission above his feelings. As always, he despised himself more than any of the ghouls for doing so.

Lucius fixed his gaze on the ghoul’s head and ignited his right eye.

The ghoul immediately swiveled in Lucius’ direction as a high-pitched whine filled the air. From its perspective, it would have seen the smoked glass bubble in front of Lucius' right eye before a single spark of light and then an invisible blow struck it directly in the face.

Lucius watched with gritted teeth as the creature was hurled backward by the radiation emanating from his right eye, the radiation which shut down the regeneration factor of ghouls and vampires alike, the ancient power that had allowed humans to revolt against their vampire masters so many centuries ago.

The ghoul opened its mouth and screamed, alerting its companions to danger.

The rest leaped down through the hole in the ceiling, leaving their prey above. There were five in total, so long as none of them stayed above, which in Lucius’ experience was unlikely. They did not have an instinct for leaving guards. They would all have jumped to confront their attacker, whom they would surely assume to be nothing more than an outraged witness to their crime, or perhaps the city guards.

They were not expecting a Memory.

Lucius took a step forward to draw their attention to him. His right eye burned in his skull. That was the power of a relic, the power to exude tremendous amounts of energy while replacing the functions of the human body. Sure, the cancer would kill him before he was sixty.

He still had at least a decade left.

He would make the most of it.

Lucius’ second eye ignited, the left one. The remaining glasses lens melted into slag as a heat ray erupted from behind it. The energy itself was technically invisible, but it ignited the gases and microscopic particles in the air as it passed, giving it the appearance of a line of fire that swept across each ghoul, scorching and melting their skin and flesh in a mere moment…

As well as the wood of the building in which they all stood. The air filled with heat and screams as the ghouls fell back upon one another, clawing at the green and purple flames with which ghoul flesh burns. The first of them ignited completely and died in moments, the ghoul which Lucius had initially struck. He had nullified that one's regeneration, but had not done so for the others.

Lucius’ right eye was nearly cool enough to use again, but now his left eye burned, sending a migraine through his skull.

Lucius could not help himself anymore. He bellowed in rage as he rushed into the midst of the ghouls, shoving this one out of the way, slamming that one into the ground, until the crumpled form of their child victim lay within arm's reach. Lucius scooped up the child and dashed for the entrance he had previously made and then re-hidden, a simple cut-out around the edges of the original door to the boarding house.

He now kicked the door down and hurtled outside. Lucius ran twenty feet before placing the unconscious form as gently as possible onto the grassy ground. Then he turned and ran through billowing, rancid smoke back into the building. He hoped the ghouls would still be fighting the pain of their wounds, but they seemed to have batted out most of the flames. The largest ghoul, a creature nearly seven feet tall, its flesh even lumpier and its hair even spinier than that of its more ordinary kin, bared its teeth at him.

“Mem’ry!” it growled. “I've wanted to eat one of your kind for a long time! They say relics tenderize your flesh, make you the tastiest things in the world!”

“I've heard the opposite,” said Lucius, and unleashed his right eye into the ghoul’s chest. The creature seized as its regeneration vanished. It fell to the ground as though struck with a sledgehammer.

The three others broke up and dashed at Lucius from different sides, slobbering and snarling all the while.

He leaped backward through the doorway, forcing them to bunch up as they approached, and then speared another heat ray through the lot of them.

His right eye flashed for only a moment whenever it bathed a target in spectral radiation, but his left eye burned for almost two seconds if he pushed it to its fullest extent.

He did so now. The fire in Lucius’ head grew hotter even as a hole melted through the chests of two ghouls loping through the doorway in single file. They fell to the ground and curled up like burned spiders, incapable of so much as screaming at the pain which tore them apart from inside.

Lucius put a hand to his belt and pulled out a painkiller needle, which he slammed into his thigh. The burning quickly dissipated from his head, but it likewise slowed his reflexes considerably.

And of course, it did not reverse the physical damage he did to himself by heating his eye sockets to searing temperatures.

Lucius pulled his canteen of water from his belt, threw back his head, and poured the liquid directly into his eyes. Steam burst with a hiss from the metal relics, cooling them far more quickly than the night air could have.

The water gone, he hurled the canteen to his feet and burst his right eye at the two burning ghouls and the one other creature who scrambling its way through the doorway, the third of the remaining ordinary ghouls who had chased him but who had evaded his heat ray.

Lucius stepped back to the doorway. He shoved aside the remains of the two dying ghouls and grabbed the head of the third, whose healing he had just disrupted but which was otherwise unhurt. He carried no other weapons on his person, and tried in most cases to avoid hand-to-hand combat, but he was capable at the task when it was required.

Thankfully, once their healing was neutralized, ghouls’ bodies became far weaker than they ordinarily were. Lucius kicked the back of the ghoul’s leg, sending it flailing to the ground, and forced into a headlock. It scraped its claws against his arms and head, cutting him deeply, but Lucius threw all of his weight into a twisting jerk and broke the ghoul’s neck.

A fist slammed into Lucius’ head. He released his prey and tumbled sideways into the grass directly outside the building that was now completely ablaze.

Back-lit by fire, the biggest of the ghouls, the one whose regeneration was neutralized but whom Lucius had not attacked beyond that, snarled and walked forward with heavy footfalls. Its skin had melted in the fire, and it bore the bulbous and greasy appearance of a demon out of nightmare.

“You little monster!” it roared. “You killed them all! You came into my house and you killed my family!”

Lucius couldn't react fast enough to prevent the ghoul from reaching down and grabbing him by the face. It lifted him easily, his whole body dangling from his head and neck above the ground.

Lucius ignited his left eye, burning a hole through the back of the ghoul’s hand, but it did not let go. It grabbed onto the back of his head with its other hand and shook him.

Lucius clapped both his hands to the creature’s forearm and tried to brace his neck and shoulders as much as possible so that his neck would not immediately snap. He kicked at the ghoul’s chest, but his blows seem to do nothing.

“I’ll break your neck!” the ghoul bellowed. “I'll eat you alive! I'll tear you apart and eat your organs bit by bit while your brain’s still awake! I'll pull your eyes out and crush them under my feet! Even that's too good for the likes of you!”

Then suddenly Lucius was on the ground, every bone in his body throbbing, despite the painkillers.

He staggered to his feet and saw, against the roaring flames, the silhouette of a man beating the ghoul with a length of wood or metal. He was nearly a foot shorter than the ghoul, but he struck it again and again without ceasing. He seemed to have broken the ghoul’s kneecap, for the creature kept trying and failing to rise from the ground. The man beat the ghoul’s skull, breaking its bones and limping out of the way of its clumsy, heavy grabs until the thing fell to the ground and stopped trying to rise. It mumbled, all the while, about killing every disgusting human in the world.

Lucius finally dragged himself back to his feet, hobbled to the ghoul, and burned a heat ray directly through its skull.

It stopped moving.

Lucius wheezed, the acrid smoke of the building wracking his frame with coughs. The boarding house was entirely consumed in flames and would be reduced to ashes soon. There were no other buildings around. They stood about five miles outside the city. This had, after all, been a boarding house for the undesirables whom had, in the old days, not been allowed inside the city walls at all. People like Lucius’s grandparents.

Lucius turned to the man who had saved him. The fellow had clearly escaped from the second floor. He must have dangled himself from the edge of the building and then allowed himself to fall down.

The man paid little attention to Lucius. He had dropped the length of metal which was his improvised weapon and had hobbled over to the child who lay, unmoving, upon the ground. The man knelt and took the figure in his arms, drawing it close to his chest. His shoulders shook with what could only be silent weeping.

Lucius approached from behind and undid the man’s filthy gag.

He half expected the man to strike out at him, but he did not react. “Was there anyone else?” Lucius asked.

“My wife,” said the man in a hoarse voice. He rocked back and forth on his heels and faced neither Lucius nor the burning building.

Lucius turned and looked up at the Moon, She whom the emperor and his faith decreed gave blessing to the strong, to those whom She ordained to rule over the weak.

She who had once been the goddess of the vampires themselves.

“If you want revenge,” Lucius said quietly, “go to Nodinium. Find Bethany Street. Talk to the doctor there, the one with the sign claiming he can restore lost memory. Don't bother trying to speak to anyone else about this, or you'll end up like everyone else who rants about monsters.”

He began the long trek back to town without awaiting a response.

Lucius knew better than to blame a creature’s nature for its acts of evil. Rather, he knew better than to excuse evil by blaming it on an unchangeable nature. All men were evil by nature. Lucius had learned this lesson long ago.

The idea that some were evil by birth and others noble, whether that distinction arose from station of birth or the twisted transformations of ghouls and their masters, those were the same words which the rich and powerful used every day to justify their authority over those less fortunate, those simpler and of baser birth.

Lucius would, until the day he died, judge every creature, whether they be spider or human or ghoul or vampire, by their actions.

He judged himself most harshly of all. His penance, he had long ago decided, was that he kept on fighting until the day he was permitted to die.