by Ana Calin
“Don’t think you’re winning me over, beast,” he says, his voice rough. “If I could, I’d punch you in the face right now.”
“You can have a fucking duel, if you want, but at the moment we have more pressing things to do.” Radek hoists Lazarus from his waist, Lazarus’ arm going around Radek’s strong shoulders. Radek balances him and moves at a normal pace even with Lazarus hanging on him, as if he’s barely carrying more than a backpack, and picks a torch from the wall with his free hand.
He doesn’t need me to show him the way, he seems to know exactly where he’s going, but by his frown and focused stare I know he’s curious.
“You never come down here?” I say, my voice bouncing off the wet cave’s walls even though I keep it low, afraid I might awaken some dormant creature if I talk too loudly. The chill permeates my flesh directly to my bones, making me shiver. “I mean, how could she keep this from you?” I say in a quivering voice.
“Like I said, this is where the castle underground joins the mountain maze of caves.” He glances at me over Lazarus’s frame that hangs on him. “The last dungeons, the ones fully in the darkness, are Vlad’s territory. I never go into his territory, and he never comes into mine.”
I nod, remembering the truce between them. Victoria must have brought the women here knowing Radek would never explore this part of the cave tunnels because of his brother.
As we advance into darkness, even the torch’s light becoming feeble, anxiety sends cold sweat down my back. Radek is here, I keep telling myself, but I need the warmth of his protective body by my side or behind me in order to feel safe. With Lazarus between us, I feel naked and vulnerable. I manage to keep a grip on my breathing until the sound of slimy movement like snakes coiling onto each other makes me shudder hard, my skin creasing, the sensation that roaches climb up my legs making me scratch myself like a lunatic. I lag a little behind.
Radek stops, turning to me with Lazarus hanging on him, his now bright blue eyes a source of light additional to the torch.
“Are you all right?”
“We’re close,” I manage. “I can hear them.”
Radek looks in front of him again. “Yes, me too.”
I keep behind him and Lazarus as we approach the dungeon where the women dwell. Lazarus begins to straighten up as well, coming to walk on his own feet as he focuses on what he’s seeing in front of him. Right in front of the women’s cell both men stand by each other, looking inside, Lazarus obviously having forgotten his weakness.
“What in the world,” he whispers with what I imagine is an open mouth, but I can’t get myself to look inside. I stay behind Radek, chewing on my fingernails, wanting to steal a peek by him, but not daring to.
“Victoria,” he says, anger in his voice. He turns to me, and his luminous eyes bore straight into mine. He grips my shoulders.
“Listen to me carefully, Juliet. I. Did. Not. Do. This. I had affairs with these women, yes, but I sent them back to the surface world with houses, money, great jobs, you name it. The only thing I left inside of their minds was a hypnotically induced silence keeper, ensuring they would never talk about what they lived here. About anything they knew about me. But, Juliet, I set them free, I swear.”
“You had affairs with all of them?” I find it in myself to peek by him, trying to get a number out of the erratic group of ghost-like women dressed in rags. I can’t bear to look for long. “They must be over a dozen.” Jealousy eats at my heart like a manic rat.
“Juliet, I’m a six hundred year old monster. There have been women before you. But none of them ever meant to me what you do. You cut my heart open and slipped inside of it.” His strong hands squeeze my arms, bringing me closer. “I don’t know if this is love, Juliet, because it’s possessive, and dangerous. I didn’t imprison these women, but I would imprison you. It’s pretty much what I’ve done all this time. But I never—”
“What you did to Juliet was sick,” Lazarus intervenes, looking over his shoulder at us, his face full of animosity. “You drugged her with your powers, kept her confined. She hadn’t been out to get fresh air in such a long time that she looked like a corpse when I found her. She was almost one of these women.” He moves his attention to me. “Juliet, be reasonable. Use your head. You can’t be with him, it’ll destroy you.”
“I guess I’m gonna have to rip your head off after all,” Radek hisses, and spans to attack Lazarus.
CHAPTER XV
Juliet
“Stop, both of you,” I call, stopping them both mid-movement. I point to the cell where the women start shrieking, throwing themselves at the bars, just when I wanted to ask what exactly they were.
“With Radek’s dark powers activated, these monster-bitches can feel him,” a spiteful female voice reaches us from the dark tunnel that leads deeper into Dracula’s territory. My head snaps in its direction, and I recognize Victoria.
Dressed like some kind of warrior queen, she moves pointedly toward us. Behind her, sticky sounds and hisses grow louder. When she fully emerges into the orange light of our torch, with some of the accompanying creatures’ faces appearing behind her, I shriek and pull back, scared out of my mind. Victoria grins at me.
“Vampires,” she says. “Dozens of them.”
Radek flashes in front of me. The vampires look away at first, then tentatively back at him—they must be afraid of the midnight monster’s curse.
“Do not be afraid, his face is covered,” Victoria declaims. “He’d never risk killing his mistress,” she spits. “You see, the great prince Radek Basarab can apparently no longer imagine life without her juicy pussy. All of you guys can get a taste of it tonight.” She grins wickedly.
Radek hisses, his body flexing, the leather stretching on his taut flesh. “Just try, and you’re all dead.”
“What if he removes the mask?” A worried vampire throws in from the back.
“He might remove the mask,” Victoria says, walking toward us like a model on a catwalk. “But behind that mask, is nothing more than a normal man.”
I recognize Gruia the guard by her side, the same one who stopped me when I wanted to follow Radek on my first day here. His face is whiter than I remember, his eyes sunken, with dark circles around them, and his lips blood red like the rest of the vampires’. She must have had him ‘upgraded’ into one. It’s amazing how cliché they all look, only that they have claws and apparently very hard, white, beautiful skin, as if they’re made of bare stone.
She stops in front of Radek, and I swear I could scratch her eyes out. She stares steadily up into his beautiful eyes with her own small witch-like irises in the middle of by contrast huge eyeballs, her nose long and pointy, dripping into her thin-lipped mouth that’s the same size as the base of her nose. It strikes me how much she has in common with the German leader that killed millions years ago.
“Can you be sure, Victoria?” Radek says calmly, holding her gaze. “What if I still retain some power? Will you take the chance?”
Victoria’s resolve wavers. She steps back from Radek, but she’s still facing him in a confrontational manner.
“I’m sorry I found you about to attack that poor human, Radek,” she says mockingly, motioning toward Lazarus. “It’s not his fault that he fell in love with your Juliet. She’s a little bitch, she teased him, turned him on.”
“The only bitch here is you, Victoria,” I react from behind him, stepping forward. “What have you done to those poor women? How did they end up in this state?” I point to the zombie-like creatures treading on each other to reach the bars and get closer to Radek.
Victoria laughs. “Why do you ask me that? Don’t you see, it’s him they go nuts over.” She points to Radek.
“But it wasn’t me who put them here,” Radek says commandingly. “I sent them back to their lives, with more than they ever had before. They weren’t so drained of life as they are now, they would have recovered perfectly under the sun. You put them in here, and the infection spread so much that th
ey became female versions of the Black Monks.”
“Yes, but you see,” Victoria says wickedly, “I couldn’t let them return to their lives after having watched them get from you everything you owed me. I served you all these years, Radek! I loved you and craved you despite the beast you turned into every night.”
Radek snorts. “You loved me, you say, but at the same time you despised everything I was—for I am the beast as much as I am Radek the Handsome, Victoria. What you loved was only the beauty.”
He turns to me and winds an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. “While Juliet loved the monster as much as she loved the prince.” He squeezes me lovingly. “Forgive me for everything I’ve said and done, Juliet, but please try to understand. I was jealous. I’m insecure, for obvious reasons, and my kind of love is possessive, and very restrictive. I can’t bear to know other men around you, I fear all of them are trying to take you away from me.”
Victoria is boiling with rage and jealousy. Compelled to look from Radek into her face, I see her eyebrows that remind me of Morticia Addams arch upward as she gets ready for an attack.
“Well, let’s see how long you can keep her for yourself, dark prince,” she spits. “Let’s see if you can protect her without the monster’s magic to fight off other forces of evil.” She looks over her shoulder at the vampires she commands. It’s no rocket science she made a pact with Dracula.
“You can have her, boys,” she calls, her voice hoarse, then looks full of vengeance back at us. “You can have them all.”
The vampires give out a collective cry of war, a screech that’s so loud and sharp that it scratches my eardrums. I cover my ears with my hands, crouching away from them, and into Radek’s body. In a flash, he takes me in his arms and turns around, protecting me like a shield with his back as the vampires throw themselves at us like a huge wave. He withstands it like a block of concrete, but Lazarus isn’t as lucky.
To my horror, I watch the vampires befall him like termites. They hold him down and bite into him, while the young man struggles and screams, the blood squirting out of him. The scene goes through my heart like a blade, and I scream, giving it all I have. I scream until I no longer have the strength or voice to do it, becoming a mass of jelly in my lover’s arms, with my eyes on the other man who loved me and is now dying because of it.
Radek
THE VAMPIRES HIT AND bite into me, claw at me, tearing the leather, but their claws can’t cut into my skin. They scratch against it like nails against stone.
“My God, they’re going to kill you, too,” Juliet calls among their screeches and hisses. The desperation in her voice pierces my heart like thorns. After they bit Lazarus she turned in my arms and buried her face at my chest, sobbing hard, trying to blot out this horrid reality.
“You’re safe,” I say in her ear. “My flesh is as thick as theirs, they won’t get through my body to yours.”
But I can’t withstand them forever, that’s a fact. They bump into my back like missiles, one after the other, sometimes two at a time, and I’m starting to lose balance. I open my inner channels and begin scanning the town for places I can teleport us to but, to my shock, there is none. I still have my power over the dimensions, I can feel it there as strongly as before, the map of this town being part of my ancestral body. I can feel remote places the way I can feel my own limbs. It’s something else that blocks escape, something like wards against my powers.
Victoria laughs.
“Trying to teleport your lover away from this? Think again, master of dimensions. Even if you do have some power left over them, Dracula has placed all his vampires under a spell that protects them from your power of imprisoning them in a different dimension, and now they’re spreading like cobweb over the town, preventing you to teleport anywhere they are. Even if that protective spell is temporary, it’ll hold enough until you are killed.” She bites that last word greedily.
“Vampires can mingle in easily tonight, since it’s the night of the Christmas festival, and everybody is wearing a mask or vampire make-up,” she continues with obvious enjoyment. “You can’t teleport anywhere in this town, because everywhere there’s a ward against your powers, ensured through the presence of one or two vampires. And since you’re surrounded you can’t get over the barrier of wards in Bran, and teleport farther.”
She laughs an evil, echoing laugh as the vampires wear me down. Unable to withstand their weight anymore, I fall to one knee, still protecting Juliet with my body, wishing for a sword or an axe. Blades and axes are my specialty, I’ve killed many Ottomans in my brother’s name a long time ago. Now I could reap through these bastards, or at least a good part of them.
Juliet has already given in to the idea of death, I can feel it. Her sobs have slowed. Her fingers claw into my leather jacket because she’s still scared, but she’s willing to die, put this horror behind us, here and now. I can feel her love flowing into me.
“At least we’re dying together,” she whispers. “I just wish it went fast.”
It’s incredible, how my stony heart reacts to this woman each and every single time, melting at the sight of her, the smell of her, her words and her love. I don’t mind dying. But even though this angel of a woman has healed me of my ugliness, I’ve been a monster for so long that there’s no chance I’m going to heaven with her. So, in death, Juliet and I have no chance of being together.
No, I can’t let this happen. I can’t allow these bastards to take her life, and sure as hell not in the cruel manner Victoria will have them strip it away from her. What happened to Lazarus—who is still not quite dead—is nothing compared to what she has in store for Juliet.
More and more vampires jump on me, and I already sweat trying to keep them off of Juliet. I end up wrapped like a cocoon around her, but I won’t be able to hold out for long.
“Just a little bit more,” Victoria says with evil satisfaction. “Let me tell you what will happen to her when you’re dead, Radek,” she says as the vampires beat, bite and claw at me like crazed orangutans, winning the fight. I keep scanning the town for a place to teleport, but there’s nothing. “I’ll have them fuck her and bite her at the same time. She will die in excruciating pain, and all because you loved her.”
The bestiality in her words and her insatiable desire to watch it happen hurt so bad that I feel them in my gut. The pure, loving woman who healed me, being terminated like a—No, not while I still draw breath. I will fight for her to the last drop of blood. I’ve won wars for wicked kings, I must be able to save my only love.
Before I decide on a move, I do something I haven’t done since the initiation six hundred years ago—I pray. I pray to God, not for myself, since I deserve the vilest things of this world done onto me, but for the woman I love.
My eyes snap open, and an idea comes to me—I cannot teleport to another part of the castle or the town, but I can teleport weapons over to me.
All it takes is an instant to channel my third eye into a funnel, and send two battle axes hurtling through one of the mirrors right into my hands. My arms snap up to catch them. The vampires stop and stare for a few moments, not sure what just happened, how come weapons just formed in my hands.
With a grin, my hands wrap tightly around the axes’ handles, my knuckles showing. They look at the axes as I’m still on my knees, bent over my Juliet who’s crouched at my chest like a child. They look once again at each other, and then they attack.
I leap to my feet, trying to ignore the woe in my heart as Juliet grabs my leg and holds tightly, whimpering, pressing her fragile, warm body to my shin like a terrified dog. The woe adds fuel to my rage. I raise the battle-axes and swing them at the incoming vampires, right into the base of their necks. Heads fly off from the first blow, because I hurtle the axes at them with strength and skill.
My dexterity is still there, as if the last time I’ve done this was yesterday. I move so fast they can barely see the blows coming, and when I need to swing the axes more times at som
e thicker-necked monsters, I do it as quickly as a machine gun, chopping off their heads.
Juliet screams and claws into my leg as dark blood spurts from the vampires onto her face and all over her body. In a small break between incoming batches of vampires I get a good look at her—dressed as a vampiress herself, the black lace dress barely covering her, more blood on her legs and face and caking in her hair. The mask has ripped off of her face. Mask... I turn my head towards an entire hoard of incoming vampires.
I won’t be able to keep fighting forever. I must have killed dozens, but Victoria has come prepared with an entire army. They’ll keep pouring from my brother’s side of the tunnels until I’m dead and stomped on, and Juliet.... No!
My eyes fix on Victoria’s face. She’s staring at me with perverted lust—it’s the first time she sees me fight, and she’s obviously enjoying it. It probably makes her horny, too, watching me hurtling axes full force into the vampires in a show of violence and power.
But, like this, I’ll never win. The vampires will eventually overcome me, considering that my powers are limited because of Dracula’s ward spell. But they are all still afraid of the midnight monster.
As they run in from the tunnel, not having quite reached Victoria, she begins walking towards me as if hypnotized. There’s lust swimming in her eyes, and something tells me she’s willing to trade something for one last round of sex, probably on a pile of dead bodies. But then I take my hand behind my head, touching the knot that keeps the piece of the cape covering my face. Victoria stops in her tracks, and so do the attacking vampires, most of them throwing themselves to the side, covering their heads.
Victoria is the only one to remain standing, not sure what’s happening or what to do. I make sure Juliet is behind me. The pain of seeing her crouched and hiding, shivering, covered in blood, motivates me to finish in pain all those who caused her this. I pull slightly at one end of the knot like one would slowly push one piece of a domino, and the mask falls off. I can only hope the curse still works, even though the monster is gone.