Chapter 249 - Final Arrangements part 6

He hadn't gone far. It wasn't his intention to escape.

I found him in the alley below, sprawled across the frizzy-headed prostitute. He was feeding on her greedily, making rapacious slurping sounds. He had one hand in her hair, the other in her panties. When I laid hands on him to pull him off the woman, he turned on me with cat-like ferocity, fangs bared, curled fingers slashing at my throat.

I struck him hard across the face.

Lukas spun across the ground and struck a garbage dumpster with a loud, almost comical, gonging sound.

Surprised and enraged, I had struck him with nearly my full strength. I had restrained myself at the last second, and he was lucky that I had. If I had slapped him with my full strength, even with an open palm, the blow would have taken his head completely off his shoulders—an injury that would almost certainly have killed him.

It very nearly killed him anyway. He lay insensate in a drift of stinking rubbish, groaning quietly.

I kneeled beside the woman and pressed my fingers to her breast. Her heart sat beneath the swell of her bosom, still as a lump of coal.

Dead.

I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to reign in my anger.

I might yet save her. I could give her the Strix. Pry apart her jaws, press my lips to hers, like some dark prince in a perverse fairy tale, and vomit the black blood into her mouth. The living blood might reanimate her, heal the damage my fledgling had done to her frail body.

It might also transform her into a strigoi, or worse, a degenerate one.

I wasn't willing to roll those dice.

I closed her staring eyes with my fingertips. Pulled up her panties… again. Rose. Walked to Lukas.

Lukas had regained consciousness, but hadn't moved from the spot where his body came to rest. He lay in the garbage, trembling violently. "Look… what you… did to me," he wheezed through gritted teeth. His head was fractured, spit like a ripe melon that had been chucked against a wall. I cocked my head to one side, watching his brain pulsing inside his skull. "You… killed me!" Lukas wailed.

"You'll live," I said unsympathetically.

It was more than I could say for his pitiable victim. Maybe she was a whore, maybe she was an addict, but it was not a sin to be ignorant and poor. She was as much an innocent as any matchgirl or beggar.

Lukas cried out as I seized his shirt and hauled him from the garbage. "Quiet," I snapped. I got down on my knees and inclined my mouth over his head. "Don't move. This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you."

I bore down with my abdominal muscles then, forcing the Strix up from my guts.

The living blood surged through my throat like razor blades. It gushed from my mouth, pattered down on my fledgling's shattered skull. Lukas squeezed his eyes shut as a warm admixture of mortal and immortal blood splashed down on his head. He hissed as it began to mend his injuries. I watched as the fragments of his shattered skull shifted back into place, as the living blood sealed the pieces back together with fresh new bone and tissue. He clenched his jaws and drummed his heels on the ground as his split flesh closed like moist, red lips.

I fell back on my rump, weakened.

Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I panted, "I healed my vampire child Ilio in much the same manner twenty thousand years ago. He had been pierced through by an auroch's horn. It was a mortal injury. He was not a very strong blood drinker, but it saved him. You are much more resilient. You will be fine."

Ilio had betrayed me, too.

Why were my fledglings always so treacherous, I wondered.

Time and time again, my beloved dark children rose up against me. All but a few. Apollonius. Sydney. Nora. Justus. Why?

And then I looked at the dead prostitute, and the answer came to me.

Because you deserve it.

A vehicle passed along the Rue du Papillon and its headlights splashed across the alley. The light flared across Lukas's staring face, the prostitute's white sprawled legs. I waited to see if the driver noticed us.

Apparently not.

The drone of the car's engine faded down the street.

Lukas rose shakily to a sitting position, his head in one piece again. He held it in his hands as he got up as if he expected it to come apart. He glared at me reproachfully. "You didn't have to hit me so hard," he said.

"I was angry. I don't like to be disobeyed."

"She was just a whore," he said.

"You are just a murderer."

"I didn't mean to kill her," he said sullenly. "I only wanted to taste her blood. See if it was different. Once I bit her, though, I couldn't stop myself."

I stood. "That is why I told you no. Now we'll have to dispose of three bodies tonight."

"Why bother?" Lukas asked. "We're leaving tomorrow evening. Why not just leave them where they are?"

The seams where his head had healed were still faintly visible, but they were fading quickly. Soon, you wouldn't even be able to see that he'd been injured.

"We hide them for the same reason we dug holes to shit in when I was a mortal man," I answered him.

He couldn't grasp the analogy.

I sighed. "When I am dead and you are on your own, you will find out very quickly what happens when you do not dispose of your dead."

"The others," Lukas said.

I nodded. "They will hunt you down and kill you if you arouse the suspicions of mortal men. We hide our dead for the same reason the hunters of my tribe buried their shit. So our prey does not suspect we are here."