Snake Bites

For as long as prospectors have been trying their hand at dredging up gold to make themselves rich, there has always been one vampire in this town. In all of those years, she has kept the criminals punished, the preachers honest, and the women safe. The men had their Christ to follow and their crucifixes to kneel before on Sundays. They had their psalms and their scripture that commanded them to do good, to do no harm, and to act like the man they followed. Yet they only saw the words penned by fallible hands that gave them dominion over the landscapes of women’s bodies. 

The men called her Lilith, but the women called her Magdalena. It was a fitting name for a being so maligned by history’s keepers—damned by association, made an example, and condemned for the sins set upon her flesh. The women looked to her like their husbands and lovers looked to Christ: someone they could be made into the image of and look to in times of trouble. 

If men saw Marys as only virgins, mothers, or whores, weren’t they allowed to place their faith in someone that saw them as something more than the extension of men? They called it The Gospel of the Vampire of Fortune Kill Landing—and they followed it down to the letter. And like all religions, I knew their faith would be shaken if they knew my truth. I was just as much a pawn as they were. 

Like Eve, hewn from Adam’s rib and molded into his perfect companion, I was made to walk the night at Gideon’s side. He saved me—just like old gods always promise to do. But salvation always comes at a price, like an unforgiving bargain made when you’re most desperate. And just like Eve, a snake lured me into the night. Two venomous fangs killed me and two fangs brought me back to life. I drank his blood and blindly made a sacred covenant, binding myself to him until the last sunrise. 

Gideon was a stranger that we met somewhere out past the Great Plains. We were westward bound and my father—a good, God-fearing man—could never say no to lending a helping hand. He wore his hat low across his brow, so its shadow cast across his face. Mama told me he wore it like that to hide the scars he got from a winning brawl with a mountain lion, but I later learned he wore it that way to hide his skin from the sun. 

Mama didn’t like him, though. She always said there was something funny about him, which was her polite way of saying there was something very wrong with him. She didn’t like how he wouldn’t bow his head when we said grace, and she certainly didn’t like the way he sometimes looked at me while Father said his prayers. Despite her feelings about him, Gideon never bothered or paid me any mind. 

I wasn’t supposed to know it, but Father had plans to marry me off to Gideon when we reached the mines. Mama tried her best to keep those plans from coming to fruition, always making a point about how little Gideon had to offer. His horse was already long dead when we came upon him, and as far as we knew it, he was nothing more than a drifter who had nothing but himself to his name. No one bothered to ask me if I wanted to marry him. I was just a mouth to feed and a body to dress. My greatest sin was one I had no control over: my mother brought a daughter into a man’s world. 

I often look back and wonder if my father thought I was too proud that day. He was always saying I was “too” something. Too stubborn, too talkative, too smart, too impulsive, and too much like him. I tried to prove my worth, and in return, I was struck down by a viper that was lurking in the brittlebush. There had been a viper lurking among us for a lot longer than that. 

After my heart stopped, they buried me beneath a crooked tree that had withered beneath the sun’s cruel glare. I don’t recall much about my death or what came after, but Gideon did his best to fill in the blanks. It was the most he ever said to me in one sitting. Mama wept, as mothers ought to do when they lose their only baby, and father hemmed and hawed about how he could’ve prevented it. 

At sundown, while my parents slept off their grief, Gideon took the shovel that buried me and crawled into my shallow grave. Now, I do recall the way his fangs felt when they pierced my skin, like the ghost of a far-off memory, and I remember the taste of the sweet copper as he fed his wrist to me. I remember both of those things, just as clearly as I remember the all-consuming need I felt to bleed my parents dry. Gideon promised me it was normal not to feel guilty after my first feeding. I had been made new, after all—I still had to learn what guilt felt like. But I never learned to feel anything at all. 

Gideon and I, along with the handful of other settlers my parents arranged to meet with, founded Fortune Kill Landing. No one asked questions about Mama and Father. The journey west was hard, and there were few people who hadn’t lost someone in their pursuit of mineral wealth. We told everyone we got married just before my parents took ill, which wasn’t exactly a lie. But our binding had no vows or promises attached to it. There was no “in sickness and in health” or “until death do us part.” Though, we were both dead and Gideon did depart. 

Three years after the town’s charter had dried, Gideon vanished into the night. The women rallied around me in a way I had never seen before. In a lawless land like the West, there was no way for me to claim abandonment—not that I could drain blood out of a turnip. They urged me to tell the world that I was a widow—to make up a story about his death. After all, men feared widows and women revered them. Who wouldn’t want to be one?  

It wasn’t until that first generation withered and died, that their offspring—raised to fear the wild woman that lived on the outskirts of town—started to have questions about me. 

Why was I only seen at dusk, walking to the mines with a single lantern in hand? 

Why did men who caused trouble always find themselves entombed in those same mines? With their bodies drained of blood when they finally recovered them. 

Why did so many of Fortune Kill Landing’s good townspeople get bitten by snakes while they slept? How could they never recall when it happened until they saw the two perfect bite marks on their necks? 

But most of all, they just wanted to know why their mothers sang my praises and their fathers wished me dead. 

I let them call me by their chosen names for me because my Christian name tasted like sand on my tongue. Its venom, more poisonous than the bite that felled me all those years ago. As foreign to me as the way Gideon’s tongue had slid over the letters of my name with his indiscernible accent. 

On their deathbeds, they remembered my name—not his. Only I took the memory of Gideon into the dawning of a new century. Like a widow mourning the man that made her. 

v…v

The devil rode into town on horseback right at sundown. 

With his hat pulled down low across his brow and a Henry slung across his back, the devil looked like trouble for more than just me. The Sheriff of Fortune Kill Landing didn’t take kindly to strangers looking for trouble, and neither did I—especially not from the likes of him. 

The Sheriff met him in the center of town with a hand on his pistol and two deputies bringing up his flanks. Aside from the occasional scuffle down at the mines, those bright-eyed boys didn’t have an outlet for all that righteous indignation their badges gave them. They were raring for a fight, if only Gideon wanted to give it to them. 

“All of this for little ole me?” Gideon questioned with a crooked grin and a disparaging tone. “I might be biased, but I don’t think any of this is warranted. I’m just a weary traveler looking for a little rest.” 

“I’m afraid our boarding house is full-up. I think you best be moseying on to the next town.” The Sheriff nodded towards the South. “I hear Bodie’s a real nice place.” 

Gideon made a show of lazily looping his reins around the horn of his saddle, making it clear that he wasn’t planning on moseying anywhere. “Back in my day, Fortune Kill Landing was a hospitable place.” He slid off the back of his horse and scanned each face peering through windows at him. “I can’t help but wonder what happened.” 

I might’ve been convinced to believe in God if Gideon hadn’t found me in the shadows of the saloon. I should’ve known he’d see me. He was a predator, and even though I was too, I still felt like a rabbit that a hawk had spotted in the tall grass. 

In the three short years that I spent with him, he never did his due diligence to explain what being my sire meant for me. I knew that he felt obligated to care for me, right up until the moment he took a horse and rode out of town. But what did it mean for me? All I knew was that the loss of him was more than I had felt since my body succumbed to the snake venom in my veins. His presence, however, felt like being baptized in a creek by an overzealous preacher. A hand clasped over my mouth, fingers pinching my nose closed, and my limbs thrashing in the water as my lungs screamed for oxygen. 

“I don’t plan to make trouble for you, Sheriff,” Gideon continued in his slow, good-natured drawl. He hadn’t lost his disarming charm as he traversed the decades, that was for certain. “I’ve just come back to collect a little Birdie.” His piercing gaze set upon me again. “I didn’t think you were a coward.”

I swallowed my fear and walked through the saloon doors like a predator, not someone’s prey. “I didn’t know you thought of me at all.” I had the venom now, flowing through my words. “You ain’t welcome in this town, Gideon. 

“Funny.” He said without amusement. “I seem to recall signing its charter with you in 1852.” Gideon regarded the Sheriff then, “You might want to send one of those whelps to get the charter. I would hate for you to look like a fool, out here brandishing your little pistol at someone who helped found this little town.” 

Hushed whispers echoed through the canyon of silence that swelled between us. Voices that seeped through cracked widows, from the card tables in the back of the saloon, and the doorways of businesses. This stranger that rode into town had confirmed all of their stories from all of those years ago. 

“Don’t bother with it,” I told the Sheriff, even though he looked like he wanted to run for cover. “There’s a tombstone in the churchyard that reads Gideon Murphy. Poor bastard died in 1855.” 

Gideon pursed his lips and, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve said he almost looked impressed. “I never dreamed you were sweet enough on me to give me a tombstone, Birdie. That was awfully kind of you.” 

As Gideon turned to face me, the stand-off was no longer between the Sheriff and the stranger. It was between me and him. Two shadows set against the backdrop of a dying amber sun. 

“I didn’t do it for you!” I knew he was just trying to get a rise out of me, and I took the bait. “I did it because I was a woman alone and you knew what that meant for me.” 

The Vampire of Fortune Kill Landing was nothing more than a scorned woman. All that faith and trust they placed in me had been poured into the well of their own misfortune. 

Gideon tilted his hat back so I could see his face, still scarred, still handsome, and still somehow honest too. “You didn’t need me, Birdie. I gave you life and I set you free.”

I wanted to scream, but I kept my voice steady instead. “You call this free?” 

“Your name is on the charter of this town—you own this land.” He held out his arms in a grand gesture as he turned slowly where he stood. “You can cross every threshold for your needs. You can even dance on my grave if you want to because that pretty little chapel ain’t on consecrated ground. They can’t keep you out if you own the land. Didn’t I tell you that?”

I never knew that there was supposed to be something that kept me from entering homes. I had just always been able to. The town thought they had a snake problem, but they had a me problem. I, on the other hand, had a Gideon problem. 

“You never said shit.” I snarled, fangs bared and anger brewing. “You’ve said more right here, right now, than you did the whole last year you lived in my house. So don’t try to make me feel little because I didn’t know what you think you told me.” 

If he thought he could just ride back into town and tell me the sun had always shone brightest in the middle of the night, he had another thing coming for him. 

“Did you ever think that maybe that was my time? Maybe I was meant to molder in a shallow grave until the coyotes ravaged my bones. So if you’ve been riding around feeling high and mighty for saving me, you’ve been thriving on a lie.”

He was winning the stand-off. I took shot after shot, but he remained right where he stood. I didn’t even know if my words had pierced him in any way that mattered. I surveyed the darkened stretch of road around us and found that the Sheriff and his boys had abandoned their cause. Someone had put out the lanterns that hung outside the shops, and the saloon was eerily quiet. The townspeople didn’t want to get involved. I couldn’t blame them. 

“I will concede that you had no choice,” Gideon took off his hat and held it to his chest as he took two short steps toward me. “I had no say in what I became and I passed that pain on when I made you. That’s the curse of this gift. You gain the world, but you lose a little piece of your free will.”

“I haven’t gained the world.” I accused, holding my hands up to keep him from getting any closer to me. “I love Fortune Killing Landing, but it is a wide spot in the road to somewhere better.”

“But it’s yours.” Gideon insisted, trying to disarm me with his kind eyes. “You and I are the only names remaining on that charter, Birdie.” 

“Magdalena.” 

“What?”

I tilted my chin up proudly, “My name is Magdalena.” 

“Pretty name.” He smiled. 

It irked me that he didn’t even bother to taste the name for himself. I was still a little birdie in a cage, even if my cage stretched to the edge of town. Freedom was an allusion. Like a fool, I had remained right where he left me—secretly hoping that my wait would be worth it. 

“Why now?” 

Gideon offered a nonchalant shrug to that question. “Times are changing. There are wars brewing across the ocean, the government’s getting its grubby hands on the mines, and it's getting harder for folks like you and me to slip through the cracks.” 

“I’m not afraid of change.” All I knew was change. Women had to be malleable. We had to bend, but never break, to fit into the impossible roles the world saw for us. “Are you afraid, Gideon? Did you come running back to me, thinking I would save you from a changing world?” 

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “And what if I did?” 

“I’d say the same thing the Sheriff told you. I hear Bodie’s nice.” I hissed out. “This town ain’t big enough for two vampires.” 

Gideon stared at me for a long, quiet moment, and then he nodded his head and placed his hat back on top of it. “I’ll be back in a few years, Magdelena. Maybe you’ll have changed your tune by then.” 

“Even if I change my tune, that song will never be for you.” Despite my words, I watched the way his muscles stretched as he climbed back on his horse. I let the thought of him staying settle for a brief moment before I brushed it away. “Goodbye, Gideon.” 

 He tipped his hat toward me. “Goodbye, Magdalena.”

When the sun rose tomorrow, I would still be the Vampire of Fortune Kill Landing and the memory of Gideon Murphy would still be buried beneath a headstone in the old churchyard. Maybe it was time for Birdie to be laid to rest beside him, to finally receive the grave she never had before. If the women of Fortune Kill Landing could worship me and the snake bites I gave their wicked men, then I could worship the woman a snake bite robbed me of becoming. 

“Gideon!” I called out, and he steadied his horse to look back at me. “Thank you.” 

He smiled, knowingly.