209. Of hunger, cruelty and a little bit of monsters

Cassandra Pendragon

Cleaning up wasn't half as bad as one might have imagined, especially since I could easily order my new prisoners around. Admittedly, crippling the ones on the upper floor had been a tad bit shortsighted, they couldn't walk, never mind climbing stairs, but gravity graciously lent them a helping hand. And if they broke a few more bones on the way down, well, I wouldn't mind.

The two girls, on the other hand… once they had realised that they were truly out of danger and had vented their anger with a kick or two to the groin of their captors, they had pretty much overcome their own trials. Working as a barmaid in the seedier parts of Free Land came with its own dangers and they hadn't been hurt, after all. The memories and images of the ones slaughtered before their eyes, especially the fate of the poor barkeep, weren't as easy to deal with, though. They put up a brave facade while they helped me tie up the humans, but their eyes always returned to the macabre display on the counter until I covered the corpse with a sheet.

Maybe it was cruel to not put them to sleep straight away but I had always believed and recently learned by experience that it didn't truly help. How had Ahri put it? A festering wound must be opened and cleansed before it can heal. I tried comforting them as well as I could, but I wasn't overly suited to the task. Children were so much easier in that regard. Their world was simpler, black and white, and they usually found their own way to cope, as long as they knew that they weren't alone. The arduous process of reconciling shattered illusions, constructed over years or even decades, with a reality that didn't care in the slightest about what we thought right and wrong, wasn't my cup of tea. I had more than enough troubles with keeping my own sanity and I didn't understand what made these girls tick, either. Simply put, I just didn't know what to say and I feared that I'd make everything worse, so I held my tongue and stuck to the problems at hand. Which were quite a bit more complex than I had anticipated.

When I contacted Ahri, I felt her thoughts, but they were in shambles, her mind engaged in keeping her fires burning. I tentatively tried to gain her attention but instead of a coherent reply, I was bombarded with scrambled images that nevertheless got her message across.

I saw flames and shadows, dancing light and eruptions of darkness, a wall of glistening, crimson heat and living torches, their outlines blurred by a haze of magic. My love was standing guard over our friends, Viyara, in her draconic skin behind her, fangs bared. They were holding back the vampires, who prowled around the cage of transcendent flames, searching for an opening. The smell of spilled blood was strong, the few human servants who had been in the banquet hall were sprawled on the ground, their necks and arms covered in puncture marks.

Somewhere along the line, the vampires had woken and the thirst had taken hold of them. The only ones who weren't a part of the mad, blood crazed tide that surged around Ahri's defences were Layla and her mother. They were pinned to the ground, wiggling to get out from under a huge, scaly paw, but however hard they struggled, they weren't a match for a dragoness in her true form and their spells were easily countered by waves of golden magic that flowed from Viyara, whenever she felt the tingling sensation of building magic.

"Fuck," I groaned. I had always known that the side Alassara and her daughter had shown me was nothing but the sweet icing, covering a much darker nature. But this? There was nothing sentient or graceful about the monsters that risked life and limb only to get a mouthful of blood. Whenever one of them got too close and touched the crimson flames, his skin lit up like tinder and no matter what he tried, the fire couldn't be quenched. Despite the danger, they never stopped their onslaught, their madness, their hunger, fuelling a dark desire to satiate a ravenous need to tear through living flesh and feast on blood. They didn't even recognise them, people we had dined with not an hour ago were reduced to monstrous embodiments of base instincts, far beyond my comprehension. Slavering nightmares given human form with bestial claws and devilish eyes. They were animals, just like their cousins had been when the Captain had died.

I watched only for the fraction of a second before I made a decision. There were only two outcomes. They had to die or they had to be fed. Counting the warriors who had survived my mum and me, I had access to nine breathing humans, excluding the priests. They wouldn't suffice to return every vampire to their usual selves, but they would be enough to feed Alassara and Layla. I sincerely hoped the queen of the night was strong enough to tame the inner demon of her subordinates, otherwise… their future would turn into ash.

"Do you have a place to stay, far away from here," I asked the girls while I was already slinging my wings around the downed humans, heaving them into the air. When they hesitated I barked:

"Answer me! Is there some place you can go?"

"I…," the older one, who had been intended as a gift to the soldiers, stammered, "I have a home. It's not that far away and small, but I can take Brianna with me. We… I think we're safe there."

"Good, take her and go." When they didn't moved I shouted: "go, now," supplementing my voice with a spark of energy from my core. That sent them scurrying out the door. Just when I turned around, preparing to lug my living cargo down the not so secret staircase, I heard a whispered: "thank you," behind me, but I only glimpsed a mane of blonde hair, vanishing through the closing front door. "Always," I murmured to no one in particular. Sighing, I focused on the bracelet Ahri had given me and sent it after them, the trickle of information I received through the artefact hardly more than a faint buzzing at the edge of my thoughts. If they ran into trouble, I'd want to know. With a last glance I made sure I had left no one behind and quickly exited the taproom.

On my way down, my burden began stirring and moaning, the transcendent commands slowly wearing off. Not that I particularly cared. When one began thrashing around, I smashed his head into the ceiling for good measure, silencing him as well as the rest. I had neither the time nor the patience to spare.

I was worried, not yet panicked, since I knew Ahri could hold the vampires off indefinitely, her fires as deadly to the undead as anything could be. Even the smallest spark would suffice to slowly devour them whole until not even the heart remained, and as I had learned, that would end even the oldest, most powerful of their race. No, there were two things that made me apprehensive.

First of all, why hadn't they told me as soon as the first bloodsucker had stirred? And second, why didn't I feel the telepathic connection Viyara had put in place anymore? I hadn't realised at first, but now that I was actively searching for the meandering thoughts at the edge of my perception, I only felt the warm pulses from my tattoo, but nothing more.

That they hadn't called for me, I could understand. Maybe they simply hadn't had the time. Judging from what I had seen, Ahri was much too busy keeping her flames alive, for should her concentration waver, they would become buried under an avalanche of vampires, but the absence of the already established link was another matter. I knew enough about Viyara's magic to bet that she would have easily been able to keep her telepathy in place, the few spells she was casting couldn't have taxed her that much. Something else was at play.

Maybe it was a side effect of the raging vampire's presence but I didn't really believe that, either. Was there another priest? Someone who had truly stayed back, supporting the rest from afar? Possibly. There was also a chance that it was a defensive enchantment, triggered when Alassara had awoken in a rage. But I should have seen either, shouldn't I? My second sight was still active and an act of magic, powerful enough to sever a connection made by a dragon should have stuck out to me like a burning star. Or maybe… had the dragoness been bitten? I fervently hoped that wasn't he case. If a bite effected her at all, she wouldn't be immune to the other changes it might have wrought, despite her nature. Either way, I'd find out soon enough.

I took the last couple of steps in a single jump and called out to my mum, my unburdened wings slithering forth to snake around the still living humans: "the vampires have woken and they are out for blood. We got to get down there. Come with me." Immediately, I felt her thoughts settle in close to my own, her warm presence a comforting pillar I could lean on.

"What… why haven't we heard," she asked, her tails a silvery reflection at the edge of my vision.

"I don't know. Viyara's spell has broken, but I… we'll see. Be careful, as soon as we enter Alassara's lair, we'll be on the menu as well. If we're attacked, aim for the head. I don't want to kill them, unless were forced to. Too many have died already and I assume it's going to take even the strongest vampire quiet a while to reattach a severed head." I felt her grudging consent when she fell in line behind me, her paws almost silent on the hard floor.

The constant moans, occasional curses and open snivelling from my living cargo, they had already learned that fighting against my hold would only result in more injuries, were soon drowned out by a swelling noise, muffled and still distant, but the sounds of battle and the smell of burning flesh were slowly getting stronger. The stomping of boots, the sizzling of charring skin, frenzied hisses and suppressed cries of pain and frustration became clearer the farther we ran. I was so focused on picking up even the slightest change in the cacophony of noises that I neglected my immediate surrounding. When we rounded a corner, the stairwell to the lowest floor and the banquet hall directly in front of us, I was deftly reminded why I shouldn't.

Attracted by the smell of blood, copious amounts were still dripping from the untreated wounds the humans had suffered, three vampires had abandon the unfruitful endeavour of getting through Ahri's flames and had headed our way. Their skills had been enough to silence their approach and since I had relied solely on my hearing, I hadn't seen the blurry shadows edging toward us.

"Watch out," my mum thundered in my mind when a streak of darkness suddenly rushed towards me, but instead of a bone jarring impact, I felt it crash into my wings, fangs slick with saliva.

A strangled scream, a shower of hot, crimson blood that drenched me to the bone and one of my captives was gone, his neck a gaping hole while a vampire, its skin torn to shreds where it had pushed through my wings, gleefully swallowed mouth after mouth from the precious fountain. "Damn it," I cursed and stumbled backwards, the force of the impact strong enough to throw me off balance. I used my free wings to brace myself against the walls while my mum shot past me. The air in the passage began to vibrate when she started growling, a deep, rumbling sound that reminded me more of a gargantuan bear than a small vixen. Her threat wasn't heeded, though, and the two remaining vampires didn't even hesitate before they flashed forwards, their outlines a confusing mixture of slithering shadows and nimble movements.

One of them followed in his brother's footsteps, lunging upwards to reach the squirming humans. The other one went for me, whether on instinct, enticed by the blood matting my fur, or by design, I couldn't say, but his charge was immediately brought to a halt when a fine web of crystallised light entangled him. My mum was working her magic on him, conjuring threads of moonlight form thin air and using them to make the vampire dance like a puppet on a string, until she managed to sling a band of woven light around his neck and cleanly ripped his head off.

In the meantime his brothers learned a lesson that should have been ingrained in their very essence: don't attack the glowing being with a curtain of palpable power behind her back. Without hesitation, I plucked them from the air, their snakelike movements, faster than a mortal eye could have followed, appeared slow to me when a fresh wave of energy surged through my veins and bolstered my perception. I wrapped my unoccupied wings around their legs and smashed them, head first, into the closest wall. Even above the sounds of battle and fire that flowed up the staircase and the frantic, panicked screams of the soldiers I still held in my embrace, I heard the nauseating crack when their skulls and vertebrae were pulverised on impact.

An overwhelming wave, smelling of rot and decay, flowed over us when their dark blood sluggishly spread across the floor, resembling nothing more than heated, bubbling tar. With a thought, I discarded the decapitated human and threw him at the fallen vampires. Maybe his blood would speed up their recovery, maybe it wouldn't. Truth be told, I didn't really care. While I was fed up with being seen as prey, their appearance had mainly served to remind of a crucial oversight on my part.

I exhaled slowly and relaxed my tensing muscles. "Silence," I hissed, shutting up the screaming soldiers as effectively as if I had gaged them. When I could hear myself think again, I focused on all my sense but instead of trying to get a better understanding of what was going on below me, I wanted to know if there were still vampires left alive through the other parts of the lair. There would be no heartbeat to hear, but the distinct smell of the undead should be enough for me to tell. And then I paused again, remembering what my mum had confidently claimed before. Her senses were much more acute than my own, probably even sharper than what I could accomplish with the help of my core.

"Mum," I immediately said, "we have to make sure none of them leaves. There's no telling what they might do if they got out of here. Can you smell them? Are there still some left on the upper floors or did they all burn?" She slowly shook her head, her eyes never wavering from the bloody bundle we had turned our assailants into.

"I… maybe. Their scent is still strong, but… that might as well be the last trace of their demise. There are so many smells… it's just impossible to say for sure."

"That's what I feared," I groaned. "Right, can you guard the exit? Just make sure no one slips past you. If anything happens, call for me. I'll be there in an instant." That got her attention and the glowing, silvery orbs with their catlike pupils finally left the mutilated bodies to settle on me.

"There's no need. Just release a few of them," she indicated the humans. "Either they'll be hunted by the ones up here or their wounds will attract more of those, who are stuck below us. They won't escape either way and you don't need all of them, do you?"

"I don't, but isn't that…"

"Don't tell me you're suddenly feeling bad for them? You intend to turn them into a meal but you're objecting to a hunt? Screw that, Cassy. They were dead as soon as they accept this mission. Don't let arbitrary distinctions suddenly cloud your judgement. We need their blood spilled and this way, they can at least die running. Look at them. You've broken them already, either way." She was right. The mix of my transcendent commands, their desperation, panic helplessness, and for some of them, the pain from their wounds, had rendered most insensible. They were staring at me, some sprayed with the lifeblood of their headless comrade, with blank eyes, fear and resignation the only emotions left in gazes that seemed almost dead. Only two of them still had some fire left, their eyes filled with hatred and defiance, the exact same expression I had always worn when I had been forced to face a fiend, far stronger than me.