Elixir of Flesh
Page 64
* * *
Dragomir relaxed in a large section of the pen that he’d cordoned off as his room. Two half-naked women hovered over his fat, naked body, kissing him on his hairy chest, slowly and sensually, while two guards stood at the door of his room. Stone statues and murals painted on the walls decorated his room. A rude mattress lay on the floor in the center, on which he now lay, being pleasured by his women.
In the midst of this carnal leisure, he was interrupted by a young man, who hastily ran to the door, shouting, “Dragomir, they’re attacking Mir. A lot of them. It doesn’t look good.”
Dragomir was thoroughly annoyed by this news, sitting up and dressing himself with a groan. He told his women, “We’ll have to continue this afterwards.” He commented to the young man, “Do they never learn? If they just bend down their heads and keep quiet they’ll live a long life. Now we’re going to have a whole lot of people become vampire food, again, just because they want to be contentious.”
He marched out of his room, and by the time he made it to the barred room, where a large crowd was gathered, he realized it was worse than he’d supposed. They’d somehow managed to pin Mir to the ground, with something like twenty people now holding him down. They were trying to figure out how to tie him up, with several people trying to gather rags in order to tether him to the bars.
Dragomir shouted out at them, “Let Mir go this instant! Do you all want to end up dead? Give this up, now, while you’re still alive. Did you not think this through? What are you going to do after you have him secured? Are you just going to walk out of here past the dozens of vampires out there? You don’t think they’ll be retaliation? No, no. It’ll be a retaliation far worse than anything you could imagine in here.”
At that moment, echoing through the halls of the coven, they heard a vampire screeching, “It’s Lina! It’s Lina!” in a frightened voice, followed by the voice of Lina herself, who in a screech confirmed, “It is Lina! Come and attack me!”
Oana, freed from Mir’s grasp, was standing among the group of humans in the pen when she heard the sound of Lina’s voice in the distance. She whispered to Crina, “It’s Lina.” Realizing that it was pertinent to everyone, she announced to the crowd, “Lina, the vampire who freed Nicoleta. She’s back.”
Crina recognized immediately what Lina’s return meant, and she pushed through the crowd to go directly for Dragomir. One of Dragomir’s guards was there to stop her, blocking her way and gruffly asking her, “What are you doing?”
Crina announced, “Seize him!” and several others rose up to assist her, a dozen hands grabbing the guard at once and pulling him away. Dragomir tried to run, but two men came forward to block his way and restrain him, pressing his arms behind his back and holding him in place while he struggled to free himself. Crina pulled out a large stalactite. It had a smooth, pillowy surface and, at the tip, a round, dull point. She stepped forward and drove the blunt point of her stalactite directly into Dragomir’s stomach, with enough force to pierce through the skin and deep inside him.
Dragomir cried out and collapsed with pain as blood spilled out of him, staining the stalactite and the hand that held it. Crina raised the red stalactite above her head and heard a roar of cheers from the crowd in the pen.
They shouted out just as Lina began her fleet dash from the Great Hall; just as she zipped through the door and pushed up the rock, darting out into the sunlight; just as she hastily covered her face, partially exposed without her head-covering, and ducked for cover.
The explosion that followed rippled through the ground and sent a shockwave through the air. In the pen, the loud boom caused the ground to quake and the ceiling of rock above them to shift and rain fine grains of dust upon them. The people looked warily up at the ceiling above them and Oana announced, “We need to leave. Right now. Everyone, gather what you need.”