The Penumbra Children
an excerpt

The Traveling Shovel of Death Scene-
Fleur tossed in her sleep. She sat up, wide-awake and uncertain as to why. The bedroom door was open…. She slipped her shoes on and walked into the main living area. Dog was at the door, growling.
He turned, saw her, and sat directly in front of the door, barring her access.
“Is something wrong?” Fleur asked.
Dog glared at her. His usually warm brown eyes frightening in the dwindling firelight.
“Do you need to go out?” A crash sounded from the direction of the landing field. “Colonists?”
Dog growled.
“Someone’s out there. They must be sleep-walking.” Fleur tugged at Dog’s scruff, trying to move him from the door. He outweighed her but that hadn’t been an issue earlier. “Why couldn’t the colonists want small dogs?” she grumbled. “Come on mutt, let me out.”
“Dog growled, low and menacing.
Fleur snarled back. “Dog. Guard babies. Guard Dog. Guard!” She pointed at the closed bedroom doors. “I’ll go investigate. You stay and guard the children. Understood?” She glared at the mutt until he moved. He sulked over to the doors and lay in front of the bedrooms.
“I’ll be right back,” Fleur promised. “It’s just someone wandering in their sleep. I’ll show them back to their house and it’ll be fine.”
She closed the door behind her, shutting it firmly. Stepping onto the porch Fleur hesitated, wondering if leaving the house was the best decisions. The house was made of stone, the glass the unbreakable kind you found on forward viewing ports on ships, and the locks would have at least slowed someone down. She looked at the lock, okay… it might slow Ogden and Aster down for a good half-minute. They were good with cheap locks and plastic ID cards; possibly good at a criminal level, but it would take the average person at least a minute.
She stepped off the porch and almost tripped over the basket of seeds. “Look! A shovel!” the little cynic inside exclaimed.
She didn’t need a weapon, not to deal with sleep walking colonists… But she picked it up anyway. Weapons were not something one should turn down. Not if one was going to wander about a strange planet at night.
“It was easier in Francesca,” Fleur said. Francesca where there were streetlights, and laws, and a curfew of the eighth hour of the evening, the eighth hour, when all doors were locked and anyone found outside was shot without question or warning. It had been, well miserable really, but safe in it’s own way. Since she had never had a reason to go out after hours there had been no reason for the law to worry her.
Now she felt worried. Fleur hefted the shovel in her hands and wondered if it was really worth bringing. Shooting a pirate who wanted to make sex slaves of her children was one thing, but hitting someone deranged with disease? She told herself she would only aim for the knees.
She walked through the thick fog, wishing she had more light than the moons that erratically peeped through fast moving clouds. Wind howled through the trees, it moved the fog but didn’t move it away. She jumped as something touched her ankle, a leaf blown by the wind.
“Hello?” a voice called in the distance. Fleur opened her mouth the shout back and words failed her. The voice sounded, wrong. Was that possible?
“Come out and play!” another voice cajoled.
Yes. That sounded very wrong indeed. Come out and play at night? That wasn’t a colonist, it couldn’t be.
Fleur rolled the shovels shaft in her hands, feeling the weight.
“Hello.” The voice came from behind her.
Fleur turned, leading with her shovel, and hit the person behind her.
He stumbled back, cursing under his breath. He was dirty, matted hair, torn clothing, unshaved, unkempt, and there was blood, dried blood on his hands.
Fleur shook herself. “Not blood,” she muttered. Of course not blood. What kind of person had dried blood on their hands? She was letting the dark and fog get to her imagination.
“What do you want?” she asked, a little louder and with a aristocratic lift of her chin.
“Blood,” the man said. “We like blood.”
“Seriously?” Fleur laughed. “Really, I didn’t mean to hit you,” she apologized. “The weather was making me edgy. Did you just land? Are you part of the colony?”
“Need food,” the man said, straightening. “Need blood.”
“We have some food rations but no blood I’m afraid. The colony is not well stocked.”
He hissed. “Take your blood.”
Fleur lifted the shovel, holding it like a sparring stick. “My blood is not for sale.”
“For take!” he yelled. Moonlight flashed off elongated incisors.
“Vampire?” Fear rolled over Fleur. “A real vampire? A blood-eater?”
“Blood-eater,” a new voice echoed in the darkness. “Blood taker. Come sweet creature, give us what we wish.”
It was a seductive offer, momentary bliss and a break from all her sorrows. The voice was tender, inviting, promising her things she wouldn’t confess of wanting in her darkest dreams. The children would be… Fleur snapped back into a combative position.
“No,” she said. “You need to leave.”
“And if not,” a woman dressed in elegant rags walked toward her. “If we stay?” The wind rose, the strangers clothes swirled in the tempest, fluttering like tattered silk.
Fleur narrowed her eyes and fought to keep her mind focused. “If you will not leave I will kill you again. I have a carbon recycler that needs feeding. Imagine how well your body will care for my colonists.”
The vampire made a face of disgust. “How very crass. Using human remains for molecular fodder?”
“As opposed to cannibalism, yes,” Fleur said, “I can see the moral difference.”
“Come with us,” the woman said. “You’ll be happy.”
Fleur stepped forward and swung the shovel, the blade cut through the neck. Blood came out in arcs of dark liquid as the woman screamed. The male that has first approached rushed Fleur. She ducked, then stood, ramming the handle of the shovel into his spine.
“No!” the woman with the bloody neck screamed. She rushed to her fallen companion.
“Behind you!” Fleur turned at the command of the new voice, she had no choice. “Lift the shovel!”
She did, her arms obeying without her permission.
A threadbare vampire impaled himself on her shovel’s blade and staggered backwards.
Two bodies landed at her feet, males she hadn’t seen before.
A third male walked out the darkness. He was dressed much better than the others. Impeccable, unrelieved, black. Clean-shaven, well groomed, and powerful. Fleur stepped back. She could feel his aura predatory and tightly controlled, she gasped for breath, unsure of how to fight this new menace.
He raised an eyebrow.
The aura was gone. No power, no menace, just a well-dressed man standing in the middle of some midnight carnage.
“Behead the woman and the others will not rise,” he said.
Fleur looked at the woman whose neck was already healing.
The well-dressed man held out a hand. “If you can not, give me the shovel and I will. Unless you wish to fight them again.”
Fleur pulled the shovel closer. She looked at the vampire. The woman wasn’t powerful now, weakened and fearing for her life. Fleur felt pity, and then she felt a great deal of disgust.
“Another death will have little meaning to my stained soul,” the man said. “If you wish to remain pure…”
“I do not wish to relinquish my weapon,” Fleur snapped.
“Than I urge you to act quickly.”