We came to know about each other when I was about twenty, and I talked him out of eating me. Havoc and Nicco have never gotten along very well since Nicco ate a girl Havoc had his eyes on. She, quite honestly, deserved to die, yet Havoc thought it was in his rights to sleep with her first. So that’s when they began hovering around like a couple of roosters, and Nicco tore the head off the ox to prove how strong he was. And then Havoc was pissed because… you know, I really don’t even remember. But the girl was soon forgotten as the grudge turned to a fight over the death of an ox Havoc didn’t actually give a shit about. So, of course, that has been a subject for debate for a few hundred years. The ox, not the girl.
“I see you still haven’t wised up,” Nicco says to me before leaning in close. He takes a deep breath and quickly plugs his nose before gagging. “You have been mating with it.”
“No one says ‘mating,’” I say, really not wanting to know how he can tell.
“Fornication is much more in, right now,” Havoc says.
Now I could gag. “No. No one should ever say the word fornication.”
“So you’ve been fornicating with the creature. Shameful,” Nicco says with a tsk.
“’Ello, gov’na, I’m a posh little British vamp’iya,” Havoc mocks. “With all my righteous ideals and my biscuits.”
Nicco slowly turns to look at Havoc. It seems to take years for his head to turn from looking at me to looking at Havoc. Honestly, I want to smack them both and get on with life.
Havoc’s not done, of course. “I mean, why do you still have a British accent? Have you even been to Britain in the last two hundred years?”
Nicco rushes forward and grabs Havoc before slamming him against the wall. He lifts him up about two feet off the ground, which is honestly pretty impressive since Havoc is decently tall.
Havoc just glowers down at Nicco who looks a bit uncertain now that he’s thinking about what he’s just done.
Just like roosters. No brain. Just all dickish action.
I decide that the smart thing to do is to just ignore the entire situation. “Nicco, I’m here to check on a book. Anything unusual happen lately?”
“No,” he says as he lets go of Havoc and rushes to my side like I’ll keep Havoc from ripping him apart.
“Anyone come by?”
He shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Great,” I say as I head up the stairs. I walk down the hallway as Havoc stares at Nicco while grinning maniacally. Nicco keeps nervously glancing back at him.
I step into the library, and immediately sense that something is wrong. Because I stop suddenly, Havoc slams into me, having been watching Nicco and not me.
“We’ve been played, my dear old friend,” I say as I feel the unfamiliar magic in the air.
“That you have,” a man sitting in the corner says as he stands up. I can instantly tell that he is a necromancer, and necromancers can control one thing:
The undead.
Vampires are undead.
Nicco is being controlled.
Just my luck.
Nicco stands in the doorway, staring at the necromancer as if hypnotized by him as he walks toward us, but he’s not what has my attention. I can hear a soft humming noise that sends chills down my body. I quickly turn, my eyes scanning the library as I look for the direction of the noise, but I can’t see where it’s coming from.
Nicco walks past me, hesitating as he fights against the hold. He weakly tries to block the necromancer who seems to be wanting to escape the room instead of confront me.
“Get the fuck out of the way,” the necromancer growls as he drives a knife right into Nicco’s chest. I lunge for him, but before I can reach him, he vanishes through the doorway. Nicco staggers before dropping to his knees. I want to go after the necromancer, but I don’t have time to chase him, and I don’t have time to go to Nicco, because there’s something wrong. If the necromancer is leaving just like this, it means there’s something worse in this room, and I can hear it coming. Hear the soft humming in my ear like it’s wrapped around me. Consuming me.
“I’ll—”
I grab Havoc’s arm and stop him from chasing the necromancer. “Havoc, stop.”
“What are you doing? You’re just going to let that asshole—”
“Havoc… shut up, help me find the source of the humming.”
He looks confused as his eyebrows knit. “What humming?”
I look at him, startled. Is it just in my head? No, it couldn’t be. I’ve heard of this monster before… but it has only ever been in tales.
I step into the middle of the library as the humming gets louder. “Havoc… she’s in here.”
Havoc looks at me in concern. “She? What’s wrong?”
I hear a giggle and quickly turn around. Suddenly, there’s a woman standing at the end of the room which had been empty just a moment earlier. She looks almost translucent with a white robe on. She’s wearing a white veil over her face, allowing me to see only her red lips hidden beneath. The entire room feels colder now that my eyes are on her. That’s when I realize that she’s not the creepiest thing in the room. The creature by her side, its body wrapped around her legs is.
It could only be described as half-human and half-snake. His flesh is as white as her cloak, his arms wrapped around her waist like a child hugging its mother. He stares at us with bright red eyes, the color contrasting sharply against his white flesh. He has a human-like chest that fades to scales which wrap around his waist. It narrows into the tail of a snake that is wrapped around her feet, the end twitching and swaying with the sound of her humming. It’s almost hypnotizing the way it moves as her humming fills the room.
“What the fuck is that?” Havoc whispers, and I force my eyes away from the creature’s tail.
I pull my hand up to call the name of fire, but nothing happens. My magic is stilled, defused as she continues to hum. And when I reach for it again, I realize I can’t even feel it. There’s nothing there. My magic is gone, and in its place is her humming. The humming is consuming my body. It’s moving over my skin, rippling around me, devouring my magic as I just stand and watch. I can feel goosebumps crawl up my arms as the sound consumes me.
“Havoc, I can’t use magic,” I realize.
“What are you talking about?” he asks as he looks over at me.
“Her humming is doing something to it.” I look down at my body. Where my magic once wrapped around me as tendrils of red and white, is just noise.
“That’s alright, I’ll just kill her,” Havoc says as he pulls his sword free and rushes at her.
“Havoc, wait!” I yell, but I’m not sure why I stop him. Am I scared of her? Scared of what she might do to him?
And then she starts to sing. It’s like I can tell it’s a song, and my brain recognizes the noise as words but at the same time, they’re something else. Something different. Something foreign yet as familiar as the skin on my body. The noise wraps around me as everything in the room shifts. The ground is no longer ground as the floor begins to move, becoming walls, and then I’m falling.
I scrabble for something to hang on to as the furniture begins to slide across the shaking floor. Her words consume me as I desperately grab for anything to hold on to so I don’t fall into the pit of darkness. Books are falling from their place as the shelves scream across the wooden floor, tumbling down onto their faces. I hit hard and realize it’s now the ceiling beneath my feet. Slowly, I struggle to stand, but the ground is shaking as I try to find purchase.
My eyes lock onto the snake-man’s as he lets go of the woman’s legs. He drops to the ground, back hitting the floor as his neck cranks back to look at me. His arms snap back, shoulder blades protruding from his back as he twists his arms until his palms are flat on the ground, elbows bowed out unnaturally. He begins to crawl along the floor, face and chest pointing up as arms reach back so he can scurry along the ground toward me. His tail snaps back and forth as I reach for my sword that is hidden by my
side and pull it free from its sheath. I hold it in the air as I turn to face him, but the hilt feels hot. When I turn to look at it, the blade begins to move, shimmering and twisting as the metal turns to scales. Quickly, I drop it as it turns into a snake.
The snake slithers across the floor, moving toward me, and I step down hard on it as I try to call for my magic. Her words are intruding my mind, and I can’t remember the words for any of my spells. I’m pleading for it to return, but I can’t even remember what my magic feels like.
Suddenly, the ground is shaking again, making the room shift, and I fall back. Painfully, I slam down onto my back as the ceiling becomes the wall, and the desk drops down next to me. I push hard against it as it slides into me, causing me to flail back against the moving ground.
The snakelike man is crawling toward me as his neck snaps to the side so he can track my movements. The shifting and turning of the room doesn’t seem to affect him because he keeps moving toward me without hesitation. I rush to my feet and race for the fireplace where I can see the glimmer of a fire poker. My foot steps down, and the room shudders as I hit the floor hard on my hands and knees. I roll as I slam into the chandelier, causing the glass to break and shower down on me. I reach for a jagged piece and grab it as I turn, but the creature is on me. He reaches out to me as his face opens up, jaw extending farther than a human’s ever should, and I realize that he is going to eat me whole. Just devour me, and there’s nothing I can do.
The creature stops suddenly, body shaking as the song stops, and the woman screams. The room shudders as it flips from one way to the other. Gravity takes hold of me as I fall and slam down onto my back, books and papers showering me as something wet sprays out around me.
I sit up and look up at Havoc who stands before me, sword stabbed right through the heart of the snakelike creature. Its body is shuddering and shaking upon the ground. The woman is at the other end of the room, where she’d been when we’d entered and is screaming. She’s holding her head as she rocks back and forth while staring at Havoc in horror.
“You alright?” Havoc asks as he pulls his sword out of the heart of the snakelike creature.
Slowly, I look around. The room is as it was when we first walked in. The books are in place, the chairs are in place, and I’m lying sprawled on the ground while snakeman’s blood soaks into my pants.
“Where’d she go?” Havoc asks.
I look up quickly but realize that Havoc is right. The woman is gone, and I can’t hear her anywhere.
“What… the fuck was that?” I ask as I sit up. Havoc gives me a hand and pulls me to my feet.
He has an odd expression on his face. “Yeah. I don’t know.”
“Fucking crazy, right?” That’s when I realize that as I was thrown all around the room, I never noticed Havoc being thrown around with me. It wasn’t until he killed the snakeman that I saw him.
He stares at me for a second and then shrugs. “Are… are you talking about yourself? Because yeah, you were acting pretty crazy.”
“What?” I ask confused.
“I mean I really don’t know if this is a good time or not, but I took a video of you,” he says eagerly as he pulls out his phone. Blood drips off his sword as he sidles up to me and presses play.
I watch a video of myself as I flip and flop around on the ground like a fish out of water. I jump up, take off running, slam into the desk, and then start flailing around on top as papers fly around me. Then I pick up a stapler and leap to my feet before promptly falling on my face.
“The stapler!” Havoc laughs. “That was the best part! When you were trying to attack the air with your stapler, I nearly died! I even got some of it in slow mo,” he says eagerly as he starts to flip through videos. “Want to see?”
I jab him right in the stomach, wishing it was his nuts. “I was having my mind fucked with, and you’re all ‘right now would be a really good time for a video’?”
“Why am I getting that I should say no?” he asks. “I killed the snakethingamajig before it reached you. I don’t see the harm in pausing for a moment and taking a video. You were the one that told me to always take a moment and capture precious moments in your life.”
Why do I even try? “Fuck you,” I snap. “That lady was like… mindfucking me, and you were like ‘oh this will make a good slow mo’?”
He shrugs. “Well… don’t knock it until you see it,” he says defensively.
I glare at him, but he just smiles at me, clearly unaware of why I’m annoyed at him.
“Um… hey, guys. Could you help?” Nicco asks from the doorway.
“Splendid,” Havoc purrs. “You’re still alive. Just in time for me to kill you.”
I leave Havoc and Nicco alone as I pass through the door and jog down the stairs. The necromancer, who seems to have thought that I was going to die upstairs and he had nothing to worry about, is sprawled out on my couch playing on his phone. He seems really into it because he doesn’t notice me until I clear my throat. He quickly looks up and drops his phone as he starts to call up the undead, but I’m on him first. I slam him into the wall as I stare down at him.
“You’re going to talk,” I inform him.
He laughs as he stares at me. “It’s too late. We’ve brought a real god to life.”
How could they not understand what they’ve done? “He is not a god. He is the devil. You don’t know that man. He’ll never stop. He’ll feast on power until he can no longer eat it. Even if that means eating you,” I say.
He grins at me. “Then I will gladly offer up my heart.”
I drag him into the bathroom while planning on how I’m going to throw in some water torture techniques Havoc might have shared with me as he flails and kicks at me. I toss him in the tub before turning the water on and plugging the drain.
“I’ll never speak,” he says as he grins.
He doesn’t stop grinning even when I grab the showerhead and spray him in the face. I’m not much for waiting at this point, and the tub is taking too long to fill. He just laughs. “He is a god now. He’s immortal. He cannot die.” The man’s not even fighting. He clearly knows he is no match for me.
“Everything can die,” I say. “And I will kill him.”
He’s laughing maniacally, so I spray him in the face again. The water is so hot it’s leaving his face red and blotchy.
“Tell me where they are,” I say as I pull the showerhead back.
“My god will come when you are ready for him.”
“He is not your god,” I yell as I hit him with the showerhead.
He grins as he sinks down into the water, and I hear something crunch.
“Fuck!” I yank him forward, but the man is already shaking.
His body convulses as the small capsule he bit down on, falls out of his mouth.
There’s a soft knock on the door, and I turn to look at Havoc as he walks in. The convulsing, dying man in the bathtub doesn’t seem to faze him.
“I… feel like you’re mad at me, and I’m not quite sure why,” he says.
I stare at him in shock. “Really? You seriously can’t fathom WHY?”
He looks very confused. “I didn’t kill Nicco since I thought you might be happier to do it yourself.”
This man. “What? Why would I kill Nicco?” I ask as I stand up and look over at Havoc.
“Well for one, he betrayed you and for two, he’s creepy as fuck.”
“I’m standing right here,” Nicco says from over Havoc’s shoulder. Even I jump this time.
“Fuck, he’s so creepy,” Havoc says.
Nicco sighs. “I deeply apologize, but as I was saying while you continued to spew threats at me, I had no control. You know vampires have no control over a strong necromancer. He wanted me to behead you, but I was able to fight that.”
I take a deep breath. “Are you alright, Nicco?”
He lifts up his shirt and looks at the big hole in his chest. “Well, there’s a bit of a hole, but I think I’ll be fin
e.”
“Let me check how deep it is,” Havoc says as he stabs his finger into the hole.
Nicco growls and leaps at Havoc as I turn the showerhead on the both of them. They jump back, so I turn the water off.
“Why did you do that?” Havoc asks as he wipes the water away from his face.
“So how long has the book been gone?” I ask.
“Oh… about a month now,” Nicco says.
“The necromancer has lived here that long?” I ask.
“He has. He was an alright kid but had horrible taste in music. Do you mind if I eat him before his blood completely congeals?”
“He killed himself with poison.”
“Poison won’t hurt me,” he says as he slips between me and the vanity and grabs the dead man. I walk out, leaving him to do as he wants and head upstairs. Havoc follows along quietly behind me, like I might forget about his presence and the anger still burning brightly in my heart.
I walk into the library and stop, startled. The body of the snakelike creature is gone. “Can you hear if anyone is still here?”
“No… and it was dead, I’m certain of that,” he says as he walks over to the spot. There’s a footprint in the blood. It is petite and barefoot, clearly the woman’s.
“I’m going to go set up a barrier. Get this cleaned up,” I say as I head out.
I set a barrier up around the house, but I know without regular maintenance, it’ll fall like it had the last time. Hopefully, it will keep people far away for now. After making sure Nicco is alright and then calling Johnson about the body, I get in the car.
Havoc quietly gets in beside me as I drive.
“Are you mad?” he asks softly, like he finally understands the situation.
I ignore him as I keep driving, but as soon as I see a Dairy Queen, I pull off. I park my car and look over at him.
The look of pure relief on his face almost makes me forgive him. He’s clearly upset that I’m mad at him. “You’re really getting ice cream? I thought you were mad at me,” he says as he reaches for the door handle.
Happy Endings Page 16