Incorruptibles part 1

Incorruptibles part 1

Creatures who walk on the other side of reality have always been among us, you know.
Demons, lycanthropes, vampires. They have existed as long as we have.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church founded an organization to deal with the dark dwellers that threatened humanity. An elite group of clergy who’s true purpose was revealed to a very select few.
The group is called Nox Noctis Venator (Edit:This will be made correct later)
In the early years of the 21st century; the church had begun to lose faith in the necessity of the group. The upper echelons of the Vatican wanted to become more progressive, in order to keep the Catholic Church in favor with it’s congregations. The scandals of the past few years had caused a steady decline in Catholic numbers. It was widely considered that demons were nothing more than figments of human imagination, even though church libraries have been filled with accounts of one on one encounters with inhuman beings dating back to the first written language. You know how people are. They don’t want to see what they don’t understand. It’s too frightening.

However, Cardinal Galassi fought to keep the group alive. He had battled many nightwalkers when he was a young man, and he knew with unwavering certainty that the children of the darkside were still very much a threat. The Pope had known the Cardinal back when they were seminary students together in Rome, and in the end, it was friendship that saved the abbey. The Pope declared The NNV an order of anthropologists. A respectable name for people who studied demonology, don’t you agree?

Anyway, I suppose you are wondering who I am, huh? My name is Father Murasaki
Yeah, I know, I don’t look very holy. You see, these days the church is a lot more lax about the dress code. Remember how I told you they wanted to be more hip and with it? Well, having piercings and long hair is so common anymore that it’s not a big deal. It still freaks out the older gen. though, let me tell you. First time I performed communion some of the old ladies wouldn’t even take the body from me. I’m not sure if it was the lip ring or the Asian face that put them off, but I was pretty embarrassed. I still get teased about it.

So, I started out as your normal seminary dude. Studied hard, worked like a dog. I loved every minute of it. I wanted to join the priesthood since I was a kid. Maybe because the one place I always felt at home and welcome was at the local cathedral. I got my share of crap when I was a kid, being the only Japanese American in the whole freaking neighborhood.

While I was in school, I got tapped by NNV. You see, I have an interesting gift. God blessed me with second sight and that, as you can imagine, can be pretty handy when you hunt demons and vampires.
Now, like I said, I have an unusual power, so I had no trouble believing what they told me. I figured this was the best way I could serve my master. I was shipped off to their base in Eastern Europe and I studied three times as hard as I had before. I read countless texts on nightwalkers and countless tomes on how to destroy them. I was trained in physical battle and my abilities to see the unseen were honed. My teacher for that was a nun so tough the students all called her nunzilla. Yeah. You laugh, but I swear she really did breathe fire.

After graduation, I was paired up with another hunter. They call those of us who go out in the field hunters and it is perfectly apt. We hunt nightwalkers down and kill them. My partner turned out to be Sister Mari. She was the most hyper student in any of my classes. It’s like caffeine runs through that girl’s veins. But she is good at her job. She can bench-press me and not break a sweat. We were assigned to hunting vampires. Vampires are dangerous, but the methods for killing them are simple. And most of the vamps you encounter are young and stupid. Most of the old ones have been presumed to be long dead or sleeping.

Everything was gangbusters for Mari and I for the first two years we were on the job. Until the night of January 23rd 2035. That date is burned into my memory forever.

Mari and I were in a slum in Berlin. Berlin has some crazy bad slums. Never go wandering off the beaten path if you go there for vacation. There are so many homeless and druggies in the slums there, that it is a veritable smorgasbord for vamps. Easy easy prey that won’t be missed by their own mothers. Only God missed them.
And we were there to enforce His will.
See, I was stupid that night. I saw a little girl, no more than three or four standing next to a woman’s body. The woman’s throat was torn wide open and there was no more than a spatter of blood around her. Definitely a vampire victim. The little girl looked okay. She was wailing for her mommy and I felt so bad for her. I picked her up; I wanted to get her out of there before the vampire came back. And it wasn’t until she sank her perfect little fangs into my throat that I realized the big bad vamp was this tiny little girl. Total Anne Rice moment! She had to be old, because even as she started draining me, I could not see her real self with my second sight.
I blacked out, I thought that was it. I’d awake at the gates of heaven.

But. I awoke chained to a bed at the abbey. Sister Mari had managed to off the baby bat and she’d brought me home to be tended to.
I had been turned, but because my soul already belonged to god, the dark side could not take me over. I was a vampire with a noble heart.

It was not the easiest thing to accept. I would live with hunger and powers unfit for a man of the cloth. I wanted to end it all at first, but there was no way I could willingly kill myself. That’s a serious offence in the eyes of the lord, you know.

So I ended up going back to work. I was even better suited for hunting than I used to be. I could match them in strength and speed.
Everything went back to normal. At least as normal as things get for an undead vampire hunting Priest.

One thing about vamps, they know to be low profile. They know better than to expose themselves enough to allow the public to catch on to their reality. They remain the stuff of movies and books to the good citizens of planet earth.

But last week something happened that was shocking enough to catch the public eye. Oh, they don’t realize it’s vampires, they think it’s religious zealots or body thieves.

Last week, the incorruptibles began to disappear. Do you know who they are? The Catholic Saints who are said to remain untouched by decay?
Well, the first one was Saint Zita. It was a complete freak accident. A guy was on a ladder near her glass coffin, trying to replace a fitting for the chandelier in the chapel. Seems he leaned over too far and he tipped the ladder. He came crashing down, right onto Saint Zita‘s coffin. Shattered the lid into a thousand pieces and cut himself up pretty badly in the process. It was nothing life threatening, but he bled like the proverbial stuck pig. The weird thing was the blood soaked into the saint’s body like she was a human shaped sponge.
This was a little church in a little town, so they didn’t have any resources to repair her coffin immediately. They locked the chapel up nice and tight, certain that their saint would be okay with a tarp thrown over her until repair specialists were sent from the city in the morning.
But in the morning she was gone. No trace of whom took her. Not a fingerprint.
A few days later, across the country, another incorruptible body went missing. Then another.

The church didn’t know what to think of this, but we at the abbey were beginning to have our suspicions. Suspicions that filled us with a bone-deep dread. Local news reports from the towns and cities that had housed the missing incorruptibles were reporting an unusual number of bizarre deaths. Slashed throats, exsanguination. Marks of vampires.

Were the beloved treasures of the Catholic Church actually undead, risen after centuries of sleep?

We didn’t know, but we had to find out.