A Taste of Crimson

by E. M. Knight

  Silence follows. I feel their individual presences move apart. I can picture the man stalking away.

  I motion for Beth to move and mouth, “Let’s go.”

  A minute or two later, we are on the precipice of a large opening in the cave. Firelight streams out, no doubt for benefit of the human.

  I crane my neck to look through the entrance of the place.

  The cavern is bigger than I thought. And somehow, the plane is standing right there. I have no idea how they managed to transport it, through.

  Half a second’s glance is all it takes for me to memorize the terrain and form a plan of attack. I duck my head back.

  The plane sits in the middle of it all. Near the right wall is a large pile of shimmering, glassy black rock.

  Obsidian.

  Beatrice has her back turned to the plane. She is fiddling with some sort of contraptions close to the other wall. There is a shelf of books there, a small desk, and nothing else.

  It is not the room I saw in my vision, where she keeps her “children.”

  Leaning against the plane is a tall man dressed in all black. His skin has a pale complexion already befitting a vampire. I did not catch his face, but from his posture alone I can tell he is not in good health.

  I look at Beth. “Two figures,” I mouth. I motion to her that I will go in, while she covers me from behind.

  She nods, preparing whatever spells she needs.

  “In three… two… one,” I whisper, and I burst through.

  The moment I’m on the other side, a blast of disorientation hits me.

  The floor starts to spin. It blends with the walls and ceilings. I grunt, trying to fight it off, not having any idea of what’s causing this.

  Suddenly, the lights all go out. I’m bathed in black, but it is not a black my vision can pierce.

  I stumble forward blindly, propelled by the initial momentum.

  A face appears in the air above me. It belongs to the man. I recognize the pallid skin immediately.

  I lunge for it, but it floats out of reach, almost lazily.

  Something akin to panic threatens to take hold.

  The face comes closer. I swipe at it again. My claws pass through empty air. My vision continues to spin, and a horrible dizziness grips me, overwhelming everything else.

  I stumble around like a drunk. The floating head zooms in and out of reach, taunting me with its rictus of a smile.

  Out of nowhere, the floor starts to warp. It slopes downward like a whirlpool, sucking me to the middle.

  I fall on my back and start to slide inside. My claws latch into the floor. They stay there, hooked in, but the sensation of being pulled ever downward does not dissipate.

  What the hell?

  Suddenly, a flash of blue light erupts in the room. I see things as they really are for a moment. The tall man in black is on the other side of the plane, face screwed up in concentration. Beatrice is in the same spot she was previously, face grim, gripping onto the surface of the table with her claws.

  I’m only a few feet away from the entrance, sitting on the floor like a fool, my claws sunk into the horizontal, regular surface.

  That illumination lasts only a second. The black wins out, the illusion returns, and once again, all of my senses go haywire.

  The room spins, the oily black thickens, and the floating head returns.

  Now it looks angry.

  I force myself to my feet. It’s hard to fight the overwhelming dizziness and disorientation. The moment I stand, the ground seems to shift again, threatening to pull me into the vortex in the middle of the floor.

  Yet, that brief respite offered by Beth’s counter-blast of magic assures me none of this is real. I try to disconnect from my immediate senses—sight, touch, smell, hearing—and concentrate fully on the presence that tells me the location of the man and Beatrice, relative to me in the room.

  Gritting my teeth as if against a sandstorm, I take the first agonizing step in the direction of the sorcerer.

  Every step I take is an exercise in agony. All my senses tell me that such movement should not be possible, that I am going against gravity, against physics, in my trek toward the human enemy. The black swirls and roars and engulfs me, wrapping me in a tight sheet I should have no hope of escaping.

  I sense Beth somewhere behind me, and her presence serves to reassure me of what’s real.

  Suddenly, a ball of fire flies through the air in front of me. As it moves, it burns through the black, giving me a tiny glimpse of what’s behind the curtain. It slams into a distant wall, crashing into the stone, and goes out.

  The illusion cast around me fights to fill in the gap. While its energy is diverted, the dizziness and disorientation lessen.

  I use that to my advantage, taking a few bounding leaps closer to where the man is.

  Another fireball streams out from Beth. This one comes perilously close to me. I curse and jump out of the way, only just avoiding being hit.

  I hear a faint cry as Beth tries to communicate something, but the sound is quickly swallowed by the black.

  I surge up. The ground falls. I get the distinct impression that I’m throttling down through a never-ending pit.

  I fight through the sensations, knowing they are false, and take another labored step toward the man. For whatever reason, neither he nor Beatrice has yet moved an inch.

  Four walls fall from the sky and box me in. I roar in anger. I hit my fist against one, even as the falling sensation continues.

  It’s solid rock.

  With my strength, I should be able to break through it. But something is holding me back, preventing me from realizing my full potential.

  I try to punch through it, but the movement is all wrong. Between the feeling of free-fall and the all-encompassing, inky black, I cannot get enough power behind it. A vague sort of laughter sounds in the background, and I cannot tell if it’s real or imagined.

  Wait. Real or imagined. That’s it!

  There is no wall, just like there is no free-fall, just like there is no blackness. The sorcerer is manipulating my senses to give me wrong information.

  But what way of fighting it do I have? And why in the seven hells isn’t Beth doing more to counter his magic?

  There is no wall.

  I cling onto that mantra like a drowning man to a life vest. All my senses are wrong, but they have no relation to reality.

  Nothing I am experiencing is real.

  I drop my arm. Punching through is a fool’s errand. If I am to make it out, I have to simply understand that the enclosure isn’t there.

  I close my eyes once more and try to shut off all the extraneous noise. My gut still makes it feel like I’m falling. But deep down, I know I’m not.

  My vampire essence surges forth.

  I let it come up from the depths of my psyche, completely unleashed. The vampire relies on base instinct above all— an instinct that cannot be so easily manipulated.

  I let go of my conscious self and let the vampire take hold. Usually, this is a dangerous thing to do—it is the exact same phenomenon as when a fledgling gives in to the bloodlust. You cease to have control over your thoughts or your actions. Your ego and consciousness become as passengers on the deck of a raft throttling full speed toward a massive downriver waterfall.

  But as the vampire erupts, the illusion diminishes in its immediacy.

  There is no wall.

  My vampire growls and surges through. No wall means no holding back. We blast through the fake boundary as if it’s made of air.

  The moment we pass through, the illusion shimmers, and I get a quick glimpse of reality.

  The man has retreated into the plane. He’s started the engine. I have no idea how he intends to get out, but that is not for me to care about.

  One glimpse is all I get, because the black crashes back into me with double the force. I surrender fully to the vampire and find immunity from the warping of my senses.

  Beth, Beatrice, and
the man stand out like shining figures in the black. Something has happened to Beth, I don’t know what, but her presence is… tainted, weakened, corrupted, undergoing decay.

  Again, there is no time to consider. I have one target, and that is the man on the plane.

  I hasten toward him. The vibrations the engine makes through the air help orient me. I sense the man in the cockpit.

  Two, three, four steps, and I break out into a run. I am running blind, headfirst into something I cannot see but the vampire’s instinct guides me. I pick up speed, and at the proper moment, leap up through the air to land on the outside of the cockpit.

  Again, there are no sensations that tell me it is so. This is like the opposite of operating in a V.R. world. I see, feel, and sense nothing, but despite that, I am interacting with reality.

  I feel fear flare out from the mage. He desperately tries to counteract my proximity by increasing the strength of the darkness, the disorientation, the free-fall.

  None of it matters. None of it touches the instincts borne of the vampire inside.

  I smash through the glass. Shards—shards that I cannot see—fly everywhere. The man’s presence is so obvious it’s like a shining star. I swing into the cockpit and, with one powerful punch, slam my fist into the man’s chest.

  The instant I make contact, the illusion breaks. The man goes flying back, and when he hits the wall and sags down to the floor…

  I have full possession of all my senses again.

  My human side feels a burst of triumph, but the vampire is only concerned with one thing: the ultimate kill.

  Bloodlust fills my veins as I leap onto the crumbled man. He groans with the sound of the near-dead. My punch broke his ribcage, and, given the conversation I overheard between him and Beatrice, he lacks the constitution needed to pull through.

  Still, even if he is so weak, even if he is poisoned, I let my fangs come out and sink them into his neck.

  He gives a small kick, convulses once, and is dead.

  I break away and look at him with absolute disgust. I’d barely managed to get a quarter of a mouthful. I spit the feeble blood out, unwilling to degrade myself further.

  I hear a shriek from outside.

  In a flash, I’m on my feet, the man in black forgotten. Foregoing the broken window, I jolt to the exit door and kick it open. Fueled by the strength of vampiric rage, the kick sends the door flying. I take one look around and stagger, for a second, confusion pulsing through me.

  Beth and Beatrice are both gone. I do not sense their respective presences. But the narrow tunnel I remember having gone through is changed, now becoming an immense passageway the same width as this cavern.

  Of course. The same sort of illusion directed at me now made the inside of the cave look like something wholly different before.

  The vampire roars, hungry for blood.

  I leap to the ground and look in all directions, trying to discover where the hell the two women went. There are multiple cavern entrances around the sides.

  All run deeper into the mountain.

  I calm my mind, calling on my military training, and give the vampire full control of my body so it may use its enhanced senses to sniff out the way.

  The vampire bathes in the multitude of sensations washing over me. The stink of the dead man’s putrid blood, the sounds of the still-running engine, the lingering echo of the conflict just having concluded around me, and he strange, almost imperceptible resonance coming from the obsidian pile.

  And… there! Just off to the side, in the entrance closest to the obsidian, I get the barest whiff of Beth’s and Beatrice’s presence.

  Throwing caution to the wind, I rush in after them.

  As I run down the twisting, abandoned tunnel, I only know one purpose: to kill.

  The vampire I unleashed demands to be satisfied, and there is nothing that will taste better than Beatrice’s hot, florid blood.

  I pick up speed and feel myself gaining on the two women. It only now strikes me as odd that Beth’s presence was revealed during the fight—after all, earlier she was cloaked just like me.

  I see a gap in the wall, ahead and to my right. I race to it, then skid to a halt when I am through.

  It is the room from the vision.

  Those little cages with the strange vampiric perversions are on the outside. The creatures inside are sickly, frail, and small—the tallest would only reach to my waist.

  Nonetheless, I feel a very potent malice emanate from them.

  Beatrice spins around when I enter the room. She grimaces in disgust when she sees me—then she smiles.

  “How kind of you to join us, Dagan,” she says. “You’re just in time.”

  Something clicks above me. I look up to see a silver cage falling through the air, throttling toward me. I leap out the way—but am stopped when I hit a wall of pure Air.

  The cage lands. I’m trapped inside. I roar and grab the bars, ignoring the horrible, burning pain. I try to throw it off. It’s light enough for me to be able to do so easily—but, again, I’m thwarted by an impenetrable block of Air hemming me in.

  Beth steps forth from out of the shadows. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I had no choice.”

  My eyes nearly bulge out of my head. A mixture of shock, betrayal, and anger course through me.

  Beth walks over to Beatrice. She keeps her eyes away from me. The tell-tale blue glow of magic surrounds her, telling me exactly who is keeping me trapped in this cage.

  “Beth,” I say. She keeps moving, slowly, as if under trance, toward Beatrice. “Beth, dammit, LOOK AT ME!”

  She flinches, almost imperceptibly, when I scream. But she completes the walk to Beatrice’s side.

  “There, there,” Beatrice coos, putting an arm round Beth’s shoulders. “It’s not so bad now, is it? Giving up your lover is a small price to pay for guaranteed immortality—which is, after all, your birth right, dear child.”

  Beatrice takes hold of Beth’s face and gently kisses her forehead. Beth fights through a shiver when Beatrice’s lips touch her skin.

  “You made the right choice,” Beatrice whispers, looking Beth in the eyes. “And you, Dagan—” she turns to me, “have once again proven yourself about as intelligent as a stack of twigs. I must thank you for getting rid of that pesky human for me. He was becoming quite a bother with his pathetic, sniveling desire for our blood.”

  “Beth,” I say. “What is this?”

  The silver is starting to exert its effects, making my senses woozy. The discomfort from being surrounded by the damned metal is quickly becoming too much to bear.

  Beatrice lets Beth go and strolls over to one of her waist-high cages. She takes a vial of blood out of her pocket and drips a few drops of it inside.

  The sickly vampire creature scrambles to lap it up from the floor, as quick as it can, before it’s lost in the cracks.

  Beth is standing there extremely stiff. She won’t look at me, but the conflict is clear in her rigid posture…

  “Beth,” I say. “Beth. Beth!”

  She steels herself, hands clenched into fists, and turns to me. Something washes over her face—a sort of false reserve, that I know is entirely false.

  Her eyes move upward to meet mine.

  When she speaks, her voice is dead.

  “I had no choice, Dagan,” she says in monotone. “The prophecy is clear. Two are born. One survives. Beatrice found me before I met you. She knew the prophecy in and out. She promised me guaranteed life and power. She promised me that I would be the one to survive.”

  “She lies,” I snarl. “I know her! She lies, she’s tricked you, let me out!”

  I slam my shoulder against the cage. It rattles as far as the blanket of Air around it lets it go.

  Beth keeps her eyes fixed onto me. “I’m afraid I cannot do that. Goodbye, Dagan.”

  She turns away.

  “No,” I say. “Beth, no!”

  The only woman I’ve ever let in keeps her back to me.r />
  Rage of an incredible sort boils inside and suddenly erupts. I go mad, thrashing against the silver bars, trying to break out, doing everything in my power to get free.

  It’s all wasted effort. There is no way for a vampire to beat magic with strength alone.

  After a few hopeless minutes, I sag back, my will sapped from me.

  Beatrice is still slowly moving around the outside of the room, dropping the precious bits of blood to her twisted creations. She’s almost completed the circuit. Beth remains unmoving.

  And then I realize that her shoulders are hitching. Is she… crying?

  “Beth, you don’t have to do this,” I implore. “Remember the ancients. If you are afraid, they can help! I won’t let you go. Get me out of this cage, and together, we will do what we have to do!”

  No response. It’s like talking to a wall.

  Beatrice’s soft laughter sounds from the side.

  “Do you think it’ll be that easy?” she asks. “My dear Dagan. I was the one who gave this girl the gift of her memory. When she awoke from her slumber, she had no idea who she was. I revealed it to her, after I found her, because only I knew from whence she had come.” She walks over to me and reaches out for the metal bars. Her fingers brush up against the layers of Air and are stopped.

  “You were the final piece necessary for the revolution,” she says. “When my children feed on blood as strong as yours, fresh hot, lurid, straight from the source… there will be no power on earth capable of stopping them.”

  One of them starts to cry. It’s a horrid sound, piercing my ears and rattling my brain, worse than any silver. I throw my hands over my ears and cower back.

  “So sad,” Beatrice notes, looking at me. “Yet so predictable. Who’d have thought sound waves of an exact frequency could have such debilitating effects? You can learn to protect yourself from it, of course—but it takes more willpower than you are currently in possession of.”

  The sound increases, pulsing into me. It’s horrible, unrelenting, and unstoppable. Covering my ears does little good. The vampire inside of me howls with pain.

  I collapse into a small ball, huddling in on myself, feeling so weak, so frail, and so pathetic.