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Author's Chapter Notes:
Binnemon's Backstory, includes violent deaths
Chapter ~ 19 ~ Villains

Eamon Binnemon was never the sharpest tack in the drawer, but in life he was a solid hard working citizen and a thoroughly disagreeable man. He married right after his high school graduation to the only woman who ever paid him any attention. She died after 40 years of marriage of a sudden and fatal heart attack. They never had any children and they never had much of a life, so when the opportunity came for early retirement from the postal service, he took it. With no family left, he traveled the countryside to find some small village to live out his days. His ancestors weren’t particularly long lived so he figured he would never make old bones. He thought maybe he could find a small property and run a little truck farm, or maybe make crafts if the real estate had a barn or garage. He wanted a solitary life. He was never one for making friends; he enjoyed his own company best.. The older he got the more he turned into a crusty old curmudgeon, set in his ways and intolerant of change.

With no particular destination in mind and only a few personal mementos and two large suitcases of clothing, he set out to find a new life. He rarely stayed more than a few days in one place, usually finding lodging at an Inn, a Pub or small hotel. He had no interest in what was happening in the world. Honestly, the beat generation scared him. Everyone high on something or other and all dressed in black. They all looked like they were starving. He learned quickly that small inns were everywhere but he wasn’t interested in those….they were too personal. The proprietors sought to draw one in. He just wanted to be left alone. If he found a place that intrigued him, he spent some time in their local library to learn more. Following his nose he covered quite a lot of territory and learned that for all their differences, the communities were all the same and anyplace would do. He stayed several days in The Saddle and Tack just outside of Gloucester. The room on the third floor was small but the bed was cushy and the innkeeper was an old retired postal worker too. What little conversation there was usually consisted of complaints about their former employer. The evenings had taken on the early autumn chill and he was beginning to think that this village might be the place to settle. He was comfortable at the Inn and could stay there until he found a small dwelling to purchase. The locals were quiet and kept to themselves too and the soil was fertile if farming was to be his choice.

He took supper in the pub every evening. The innkeeper’s wife was a good cook. The food wasn’t fancy but tasty and filling. He was content in his own company and usually brought along something to read. People usually understood the silent message one gave when they hid their nose in a book. If they didn’t get the idea right off, it was easy enough to say, “Sorry, if you don’t mind, I’m at a particularly good part in my book.”

One evening, a young woman that he saw there almost every night came to his table. “Excuse me, sir, but I can’t help but notice that you was takin’ your supper alone every night. Me too,” she bubbled, “and I was wonderin’ if you wouldn’t mind if I joined you at your table? Food always tastes better while you’re talkin’ I always thought.”

For a moment he just stared at her…in surprise. He knew there was nothing about him that might suggest he wanted a dinner companion. He most certainly did not. He was content alone, but he searched his mind for some way to say that without being rude and could find none. He hadn’t opened his book yet, so that ploy was out. Trapped, he gestured for her to take a seat across from him in the booth. They exchanged introductions and thus began an unusual and unexpected sort of friendship.

She told him her name was Fiona McDermott and that she lived alone about a kilometer down the road and it was too much bother to cook for only herself and that was why she came to the pub for supper most nights. Binnemon found conversation with her easy. He told her of his plan for his future and in the weeks that followed they enjoyed their evening meal together nearly every night. They talked of their lives and experiences. He was starting to feel an attraction to her and found himself altering the truth from time to time to make himself more interesting and wondered if she was doing the same.

Poor thing. He had no idea.

~~~

Fiona spent a good deal of time thinking about Eamon Binnemon after they became well acquainted. He was alone. Nobody would miss him or wonder about him and more importantly, it was unlikely that anyone would recognize him later. That tends to muck things up. She’d seen others deal with fledges only to have a neighbor or distant cousin see them months after they buried them. If they didn’t get to off them right away to shut them up they talked up what they saw and wild stories about demons and vampires spread throughout the community, panic settled in and it became very dangerous for the real vampires and demons. Definitely an unhappy outcome.

As near as she could tell, Binne, as he liked to be called, was the perfect candidate.

She was alone for a long time. She and Des traveled across England and Europe until after WWII. They were patient and smart and they lived well. Des had no patience for minions, as his childe, she was the closest thing to a minion he could abide. Just the two alone, they were able to maintain a low profile and move about as they chose. It was Desmond who stumbled upon the idea of drinking from the brachial. He learned about pathetic humans who offered themselves in vampire brothels. Something so mundane had no interest to him. He would have to be desperate to sink so low, but those people didn’t want to have their necks interfered with….just the brachial or even femoral…especially if some vampire sex was on the menu too. Of course, the jugular was the best choice for a quick kill, but if time wasn’t an issue….why not the arm or the groin.

Then Desmond was dusted in a stupid accident….

She turned Eamon Binnemon and she taught him about eternal life and how fragile it is. The price for eternity was unrelenting hunger and vigilance. Nowhere in creation were there more perfect examples of survival of the fittest. The lazy, the stupid, those disrespectful of their heritage never lasted very long. The old ways were the best ways, plain and simple. When vampires became creative there was a tendency to be careless and that way lay only dust.
~~~

She thought back to her own turning. Fiona was a small, plump, full-breasted woman of 33. Widowed with no children. She has suffered three miscarriages and two stillbirths before her husband died in France while fighting in the Great War. She was bitter and lonely and living with her sister Delia and brother in law Michael and their three redheaded little girls in 1918. Sometimes she was so angry that her sister was happy while she lost everything, until her nieces came and threw their sweet, warm little arms around her and told her how much they loved her. That was enough to extinguish her sorrow and help her face each day.

Tom McDermott had seen to it that she would be taken care of in the event of his death. There was a savings account and insurance that if managed properly would take care of her for as long as she lived. Not in any grand fashion, mind, but comfortable; she didn’t come to her brother-in-laws home empty-handed. She was able to contribute in a material way.

Michael Mackey worked with the butcher and while his pay was small, he came home with fresh meat every night, not the best cuts, but good enough to make fine soups and stews. With a wife, her sister and three growing girls to feed he was grateful in what were hard times.

Life had been a struggle since the war and now the influenza was all anyone talked about. Delia and Fiona worried every time Michael and the two older girls walked out the door, he to work and they to school, exposing themselves to the coughs of others. Jane, the middle girl, only eight years old had been “off” the last several days. They checked her nearly constantly for fever, but so far none was apparent. Jemima, the oldest was a hearty ten-year-old. They were constantly reminding her to behave like lady. She much preferred running and playing in the neighborhood to learning about baking and sewing and such. Julia was the baby. She was just three with chubby pink cheeks and bouncy red curls.

Fiona noticed that Delia wasn’t quite herself either and wondered if she might be with child. She always said she wanted more children. It was Michael who was the practical one denying his urges from time to time. Having the room next to theirs and the walls being thin, Fiona knew that they had a healthy intimacy in their marriage that had slowed down some.

As time passed through the summer months, more and more people were getting sick…and dying. They were no longer anonymous names on a list, but co-workers and neighbors. When news came home with Jemima that several of her classmates weren’t in school one day and Jane confirmed that the same was true for her class, there erupted an argument in the small family. The ladies no longer wanted the children to go to school. Tom, working hard and struggling to make a living understood the importance of an education. He had dreams for his girls of a better life. The women reasoned that sending the girls to school might take away any life at all. Hearing that, the girls fell to tears with wails coming from Julia. She didn’t understand at all, but knew if her sisters were afraid, she should be too.

By the time the local government began having men spray the streets with disinfectant, only Michael was leaving the house to go to work and he told them as he left one morning donning his mask that he didn’t think he’d be going to work much longer. No so much because of his concern that he might become ill, but because fewer and fewer people were coming into the shop….he added as he closed the door that Mr. Gibson, his boss wasn’t looking so good.

He came home early that day just as a large wagon with four burly men with masks were carrying out the bodies of the next door neighbors. It looked to be all of them. He stood stock still, stunned. Two adults….that would be Jim and Tess….and then six more smaller bodies….the kids. Then he saw Sadie. One weeping form stood in the doorway and watched everyone in her world thrown into the back of a wagon wrapped only in sheets. The truck pulled away and as the canvas cover ruffled in the wind behind the truck, he saw that the wagon was stacked to the top with bodies.

He went into the house, sat down at the table and put his head in his hands. Janie was coughing. The sound was like a knife in his heart.

That evening, a gentleman knocked at the kitchen door selling bread. Fiona stood at the door and refused him entry but he was a most charming fellow indeed. She certainly would not let him in the house lest he be infected; she went out to talk with him. In less than a heartbeat later, Fiona was to become immortal.

With uncanny speed, the man she later came to know as Desmond shifted into a demonic visage and sank knife like fangs into her throat. Before her life force left her, he pulled away and opened a vessel in his wrist and put it to her mouth. Instinctively she pursed her lips over the open wound and lapped at what would become the only thing that mattered for the rest of her existence as her heartbeat weakened, slowed and finally stopped.

In the days that followed her sisters and nieces wept nearly constantly. Michael left the house in search of Fiona against the cries of his family that it was too dangerous. His ladies were alone.

~~~

Desmond was waiting for her when she rose. Fiona was terrified. She was overcome with a need that she could not identify. He was gentle and kind to her and opened again the wound in his arm and pressed it to her lips. She drew the nectar deeply and felt relief. Calmed, he was able to explain the change she had undergone. He was patient with her questions and answered them with as much information as she needed much as one might explain deep philosophical concepts like life, and death and good and evil to a small child. She was, he made clear, very much like a child now….reborn to a new life…an eternal life and she needed to take the first step to all her tomorrows. He took her home where she would relieve her thirst. When she started to understand what he meant, the little bit of Fiona that was left balked. Desmond told her they were all sick. Hadn’t she heard Jane coughing when she left the house? Didn’t she know that they were in for a certain, slow, agonizing death? She could release them. He convinced her that it was the right thing to do.

She knew he was right, of course….didn’t she? Such was the power of the demon now dwelling within.

They went late in the night, when she knew they would all be asleep. He stood by to support her. She went first to Delia and Tom and found Delia alone. Alone? No matter. Delia awoke immediately. “Tom? Tom, where have you been?…..” She saw Fiona, deathly pale, her eyes sunken. She reached for her sister’s hand and grasped cold dead clay. Her own face changed from puzzlement to comprehension to disbelief to horror in a matter of seconds. Before she could scream, Fiona’s mouth opened wide and revealed jagged teeth and great long fangs. Fiona pushed her back down on the bed and latched on to Delia’s throat with such force that instead of just puncturing her jugular vein she crushed straight through to carotid artery and was showered in blood pushed free in great pressure due to the panic of her rapid heartbeat.

Fiona was desperate, most of the precious fluid was escaping. She glanced at Desmond who was watching with a smile on his lips and a gleam in his eye. “Relax, little one,” he purred, “take your time.” She returned his smile with blood and bits of flesh stuck in her teeth and dripping from her mouth and turned back to lap the blood now flowing more slowly as her sister’s life ebbed. When she had drunk her fill and her sister was dead, Fiona stood and kissed Delia full on her cold dead lips and looked deeply into her eyes and saw no one there. She gently closed her eyes and positioned her back on her pillow and drew her blankets back up to her neck. Desmond smiled, “Oh, that’s lovely, kitten.”

She turned and saw little Julia, eyes wide, standing in her crib. Desmond looked at the motto on the crest he wore around his neck, Juvenis Dulcis est and smiled. What a perfect initiation for his new fledgling. “Auntie? Auntie? Where have you been? I missed you.” She said in her sweet, fresh, little girl voice. Fiona looked again to Desmond, wide eyes questioning…..after a pause, he nodded.

As Julia reached out for her aunt to lift her, Fiona wasted no time in going straight for her throat. This was a learning experience. Her little neck was so small, Fiona nearly bit right through her. When she looked to her mentor this time, it was in disappointment….she emptied so quickly, and it was so good. Unspoiled. It tasted of something special…what was it? She asked Desmond what it was that made it so different. He replied, “Hope.”

She was especially quiet when she went to Jem and Jane’s room. She didn’t want any fighting. She was hungry and not interested in fighting for her dinner. They were sumptuous, although Jane was a little off. She guessed that Desmond was right….she was sick and Fiona could taste it. Jane must have known too because there was no hope in her. Fiona made up her mind right then and there that she would only dine on the young.

After that night, Desmond was never gentle and kind again and Fiona learned what it was to be a vampire childe. Over the years she realized that Desmond had taken his position as sire seriously. He was a master vampire in the line of Lamia, one of the twelve great orders dating back to the earliest times with a particular taste for children. He’d been a hard taskmaster but she learned the old vampire ways. They may be demons, but theirs is an ancient and dignified society with more rules than Parliament and more rituals than the Vatican and as she grew in vampire years she was held accountable for learning it all and woe to she who was unprepared when her master demanded. She was beaten and tortured and raped until she got things right….and get things right, she did until at last she was a master vampire.

~~~

Binne proved to be an apt pupil. Eager to please he thus avoided a good deal of the traditional torture necessary in the instruction of a fledge, not because Fiona was a woman. She was a ruthless as one could imagine and had the strength of ten men, but because Fiona was faithful to heritage of the family Lamia and would put him in his place with chains, ropes, handcuffs, whips, crops….anything handy actually for relatively minor infractions just to make sure he understood how tenuous his existence truly was.

But Binne was headstrong. He had ideas of his own and lacked the sense to think them through to the probable outcome. As a result, Fiona had been spending much of their time together cleaning up the messes he made. She was so sure he would be a good candidate. An older man in retirement should have gained the wisdom that comes with age and experience. Not so in Binne’s case. Evidently he wanted to make up for years of caution by using his eternity frivolously. His eternity would be over sooner than later if he continued in the same reckless manner. Fiona taught by example in her cautious ways and attention to detail. She did not like to use stories of mistakes made by great vampires that had gone before, but the time had come to tell Binnemon of how his grand sire met his end.

~~~

She and Desmond had been stalking a theater group. People spending long nights at their little theater getting ready to put on a presentation of Dracula. They struck up a conversation with the director at the deli-restaurant across the street from the theater and led her to believe that they were specialists in the paranormal….it was true….and they agreed to sit in on a rehearsal and give them some advice regarding their authenticity. Eighteen people counting cast and crew and three weeks until opening night. If they were careful, Fiona and Desmond could stay at the theater and take them all at their leisure, one by one. They would start with the lighting crew. Good idea, but it didn’t work out.

During the very first rehearsal, Desmond was taking his role way too seriously and was displeased with the way the actors were attempting to use the stake. It was one of those fake prop retractable stakes, but it was only 1948 and the technology of that sort of thing was sketchy at best. Desmond climbed into the open casket…full of good humor and gave instructions as Fiona looked on. The actor playing Von Helsing brought the stake up and plunged it (as instructed) into Desmond’s chest. Desmond opened his eyes in a brilliant moment of realization. The stake hadn’t retracted and had broken the skin above his sternum. Before Desmond could open his mouth, Von Helsing raised his mallet and drove the stake home. Desmond of Lamia, the master vampire vanished in a cloud of dust.

Fiona only had a moment and acted quickly. In the chaos that followed, she was able to kill all five on stage and exit the building through the stage door dragging one of the stagehands after her for a snack later. Not bad, she thought. It wasn’t a total loss, too bad about Desmond. Good thing he taught her well.

Vampires aren’t likely to mourn over one another. They are only concerned with the “now.” Their motto, it’s been said, is Ut Volo Sumo Habeo, to want, to take, to have. They invented instant gratification. As long as they stay out of the sun and get a good meal at least every couple of days not much will trouble them and even then, not for long. Not even the loss of one who was a partner for thirty odd years.

Desmond didn’t teach her everything she needed to know though. Not by mistake either. He chose not to pass on what would later be vital information for Fiona and her childe. Over the years he heard legends about vampire slayers. Always a young girl with superhuman strength who was endowed with abilities to sense vampires and then hunt them down to kill. It was a legend. He never believed it. He never saw a slayer himself and never knew anyone who had. Why clutter up her mind with tales of a monster’s monster. She couldn’t teach what she never knew; all she knew was that she and her childe were doing just fine.





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