The Dhampir Dimension

by Viktoria Alukard

  That was probably the most irritating part about her job before; constantly listening to people tell her that she seemed too pretty or too dainty to be an electrician. She had hoped that in Europe, people had a little bit more of an open mind and versatile culture than the borderline toxic environment she was in before. It wasn’t only the job that was toxic, it was the people, the personal situations, her divorce, the ultimate end of her career.

  She was given the boot from military service due to such a deep depression that almost drove her to suicide, endued from her emotionally abusive marriage to her despicable, concentric ex-husband. He had almost left her broke had it not been for her hiring a lawyer and had attempted to kill her by “accidentally” shoving her into an oncoming car. Luckily, a passersby who saw the incident grabbed her out of the path of danger.

  He had urged her to file a police report on her ex-husband, and she did, though the other one was able to be bailed out of jail by his parents. Thanks to her lawyer, there was a restraining order set into place after the incident and ultimately, this led to her ex-husband forfeiting half of his savings he tried to disclose from her. She was then able to finance her getting the hell out of San Diego for good.

  While things mostly did work out in her favor, her ex had managed to tarnish Regina’s reputation with nothing but slander, but so much of it that some of her former “friends,” more like “frenemies,” now looked at her differently. Good riddance. She hoped that they and the entire coast of California would eventually sink into the Pacific Ocean.

  Without further ado, she called the phone number on her application before getting too carried away in deep thinking of her troubles. When the familiar beep of a number that had been disconnected was what greeted her on the other end of the line, she grumbled internally.

  “Oh, for fucks sake, these people need to get on it!” she proclaimed to the empty air.

  Around ten, she went up to the mysterious portrait room to retrieve the keys of the car she would be borrowing, as she needed to do some shopping for career clothes, her first job where she could no longer rely on the routine of donning her former military uniform. The room wasn’t as overwhelming with otherworldly energy as it had been the night before, instead it looked majestic this morning with the sunlight, the rare sunlight, pouring in through the arched crystal windows.

  She stopped to observe all the paintings this time, to see if she recognized any of them from her dream. But was it a dream or another strange astral projection? All the paintings were of some aristocratic looking figures with no names written on or around the paintings. There was one painting of a man with long black hair, another of a blonde woman with green eyes and wavy hair, another of a blue woman with stars behind her, another of a woman with a cat ear headdress, and the last painting of a black-haired woman, much like the one she had seen in dream.

  She neared the painting of the blue woman with molten silver stars blended into the painting, touching the glossiness of the artwork. She realized that she could push the painting upwards, as a set of small sliding rails held the painting in place from the back. There was a hollow box of a space where there was a wooden safe without a lock on it. She opened it, and inside was a black clicker key with the familiar white and blue BMW symbol in the center lock button, and a gold key hanging from a black leather string wrapped around a palm-sized crystal crescent.

  “These must be the keys to the house,” she thought out loud. It was time to head out into town to clear her mind for once, while doing some shopping for herself and maybe even another trip to the spa. She made her way out of the portrait room and back down to her bedroom without any troubles or supernatural disturbances, with much relief, and keys in hand.

  After preparing her purse, she walked out of the house, locking the front doors and walked to the garage adjacent to the house, about to unveil the car she would be driving. Indeed, it was not too shabby of a ride. As she was told before, it was a black BMW M3 sports sedan, but it was a more recent model. She unlocked the car and stepped inside the ride. The interior was of red leather that still smelt new. The engine was a pushbutton start and the car had wireless audio connection, with a heads-up display, high end luxury that she certainly did enjoy. She started the car, and the famous BMW chime came on twice before the settings stabilized. It was almost like driving a mini spaceship. She noticed a clicker in the cupholder, and in the backseat there was the shotgun Magnus had mentioned before.

  Carefully, she put the car in drive and let off the gas, letting the car coast forward, steadily, until the entire body of the car was out of the garage. She hit the clicker button, so the garage doors closed behind her. Out into town she was and spent until 3 in the afternoon doing her shopping and her personal affairs.

  She arrived back to an empty mansion, with bags upon bags of merchandise in the trunk of the car, and carried them all back in one trip, offloading them onto the bottom of the right staircase. For most of the afternoon until 7 PM, she napped comfortably, and woke up well rested, to go prepare herself a snack and later, a bath.

  During her lavish, long bath that she liked to treat herself with, her phone sitting on a towel on the floor beside the tub began to vibrate, with a No Caller ID on the screen. Reluctantly, she dried the hand she answered with before picking up the call to find out who it was. She answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Good evening is this Petty Officer First Class Brighton?”

  Regina scoffed at this title, as she was no longer in the service; she slightly cringed.

  “Well, I’m a civilian now, no one calls me by that title anymore.”

  “I am sorry ma’am, I am only going by what you put into your application two months ago. I take it you no longer work for the U.S. military?”

  “Correct sir” she answered back to the soft and low male voice with a local accent.

  “Okay Miss Brighton, you are welcome to do a tour of your new employment sight tomorrow, but it will have to be at nighttime,”

  That wasn’t suspicious at all.

  “Nighttime? How do I even get there with all of the dense fog?”

  “Give us your address and we will come to provide you transportation,”

  Regina hesitated.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” she asked dumbly, realizing what she had just said only after she said it.

  “Because Regina, I am your boss,”

  She swallowed her pride and her words. They exchanged information and agreed on a pick-up time of 8 PM the next evening. Through the power and grace of the universe, she had hoped she did not already fuck this new opportunity up.

  The next morning, she went to a new breakfast spot by herself, for a brunch of bloody Mary’s and birds nest style eggs with sriracha. Nothing too important had happened the night before so nothing really clouded her mind today, except for the near fatal mistake of her poor choice of words. Still, if her boss was truly offended and found her tasteless, why would he have wasted his time negotiating transportation? Her worries subsided, the rush of caffeine bringing life back into her veins. From the far corner in the back of the café, she was watching the news on a mounted television, and the headline caught her about-to-be-wavering attention. The headline was displayed as yellow English subtitles. The subject made her raise a brow.

  “Three shot dead in car chase near Meytros Estates, 28th May 2018”

  CH. 4

  FALLING INTO PIECES INTO PLACE

  “God damn it!” hissed Enttu, as he held the body in his arms, of a recently deceased woman with bite marks on her neck. Her excess blood decorated her sleep shirt and sweatpants. Her apartment, now a crime scene, reeked of her decomposing body.

  “She didn’t make, it, and even transforming her now would be putting her through a tormenting lifestyle, she’s been dead for over 24 hours” he said to Vittorio Celentano, who was with him at the crime scene, “we could have pr
evented this if we hadn’t been fucking off with Malakae and his puppy back in Dubai!”

  “Shhh, don’t be so hard on yourself, Stefan. You’ve had that habit for centuries now,” said Vittorio, who picked his teeth.

  A coffee-sipping Marc Mocanu went into the room with a newspaper, handing it to Enttu. He snagged it out of his hands, and a look of shear anger begat his face as he read the headline. His eyes fixed his gaze upon a confused Marc.

  “The incident made local news? It won’t be long until Narciso knows we’re onto him.”

  He turned to Vittorio, giving him instructions for a plan to both cover everyone’s tracks and not allow any more leakage of this crime to reach the media.

  “Roxana Banu, Age 23. Height, 1.6 meters, weight 52 kilograms, death by puncture wound to the jugular, weapon used in attack, ice pick,”

  Vittorio looked his friend with raised brows, knowing that a tamper of evidence was what it would take so word wouldn’t get out onto the streets. It was a huge risk that they regularly took, because tampering with evidence was a solid felony. Death by stab wound was reasonable than having to explain a death by vampire bite. They did everything very methodically, eventually making the death of the woman seemed like she was attacked, still viciously, but what would have seemed like a “normal”, mundane murder.

  The young-looking dhampir who had lived well up into the year of 2018, well from his birth year of 1865, helped his partners tamper the evidence in a way that it looked like a natural occurrence. As Marc went to the kitchen of the apartment to look for an ice pick, which nearly every household in the region needed for windshields on cars icing over, Enttu paused his thinking for a moment, his ears twitching, seeming as if he heard a strange noise coming from the kitchen area.

  “Wait, did you two hear that?”

  Vittorio turned back to face him and muttered something to him in Romanian that he made out clearly as a “no.” Before Vittorio was able to ask “why, did you,” the dhampir sped past him in a blur, from the hallway where the dead woman lay, past the kitchen table in less than half a second. His vampiric speed didn’t ever betray him. He had his glowing blue Selenite dagger withdrawn and the thing he had heard had leaped out so fast and was about to make a meal out of the detectives. Fortunately, he had reacted fast enough to push Marc out of the way to safety.

  A re-animated, humanoid creature that reeked of rotting flesh, and had pieces of skin falling off the bone and organs coming out through orifices tried to bite the dhampir. It missed him, and when Enttu went to punch the thing in the face, he shaved off the entire skin from its right side of the face with his fist, revealing a maggot infested mouth cavity. The smell coming from its mouth was sickening, as it stuck out its black tongue through the hole in the cheek before snapping its teeth.

  For being a sack of necrotic flesh, it sure was strong, and put up a bit of resistance when the dhampir tried to stab it the first time. It threw him towards the wall, and Enttu crashed right through it, causing a large man-sized hole in the drywall. He got up with his vampirism enabling his rage, his eyes glowed red and his fangs were fully withdrawn, the instinct for combat triggered. The creature was lunging toward for Vittorio, before Enttu dash-jumped onto the creature’s back, and drove his blue dagger right through the top of its skull, impaling it all the way through its jaw. The zombie humanoid collapsed, spraying out a black liquid from the wound after Enttu removed his dagger. He hopped off the zombie and cleaned off his dagger with his cape.

  “What the fuck is that thing?” Vittorio exclaimed, kneeling in a corner beside the female victim.

  The dhampir’s fangs were still threateningly withdrawn, and adrenaline fueled the rage in his voice.

  “That thing is a true abomination. It looks like the result of trying to transform a human after decomposition sets in, creating what is essentially a zombie. It’s an insufferable existence and even more depraved for whoever is spawning these creatures. I don’t put it past the Dragul stooping this low to gain ranks. We will have to make this seem like it never happened,”

  “You couldn’t possibly put a family through suffering, they will wonder what happened to their daughter,” Vittorio tried to convince him. Marc was shaken up, and his legs were trembling as he managed to get by Vittorio’s side. As usual, Enttu didn’t listen, and he closed his eyes, putting up his fingers in the shape of air pistols with each hand beside his face.

  “Noapte Eterna nu exista niciodata!”

  A black mist filled the place, and thick dark green moss started to appear on the walls, and the bodies of both the woman and the zombie started to dissolve into the floorboards, into one giant black puddle of liquid. The human detectives were disgusted, not at their undead partner, but at the chemical transubstantiation of the matter.

  “I forgot you could do that,” said a fascinated and equally horrified Marc.

  The dhampir lost color to his face, not that he had much to begin with and slumped down to the floor on his knees. It was unexpected, as he was the strongest of the three. He almost fainted as weakness painfully racked his body. His head bowed down on his knees and his hair covered his face.

  “Tepes, hey are you alright?” a concerned Vittorio rushed over to the dhampir, who’s energy almost completely drained after performing his ruin spell.

  He was still conscious but felt as if he had been hit by a train. That had happened to him once, and he survived to tell.

  “I will need to feed soon, that happens after post mortem spells. Let’s get out of here,”

  Vittorio and Marc helped the dhampir out of the crime scene, and they stepped out into a night of the full moon. They half-carried their tall and thin, but strong and heavy partner in between them. After they all safely inside of an older black sedan, Vittorio drove them back to their citadel, an undisclosed location near the Transylvanian Alps. The road was dark and abandoned, except for the light of the moon. Enttu fell asleep from exhaustion in the backseat, while his etheric body slipped out and sat on top of the moving car, enjoying the view of the stars above. He also had seen the brief flash of the mysterious young woman he had bumped into while perusing downtown Bucharest. Her face was small and round, and her lips were glossed red. So strong was her impression onto him that he could smell her perfume and taste her blood underneath the skin of her neck. She seemed so near, and he moaned some languid sounding name in his sleep, while his fangs stuck out of his mouth. She was in the car in the oncoming lane, and Vittorio had sped by her and the driver of some exotic sports car.

  “Oh hey, Radu!” Marc exclaimed, carefreely at the car that zipped on by them. The car had honked twice briefly and then both vehicles continued their separate ways.

  8:15 PM, Outskirts of Bucharest

  Regina sat quietly inside the passenger of a Lamborghini that sped down the road doing at least 20 over the speed limit, not that they mattered here. She was in her favorite black Avenged Sevenfold hoodie, black jeans, and high-heeled combat boots. Her driver had waved at some old sedan that passed them by and honked twice at them. She thought nothing of it really.

  “That was my brother, haha!” said the driver, who for some odd reason, was wearing sunglasses even in the nocturnal hours.

  She had so much anxiety pent up in the pit of her stomach, it was hard for her to strike up a conversation, and she budged a silent, sweet smile. It didn’t take much longer to get to their destination after driving about 4 miles up into the mountains. The car pulled off into an exit on the freeway into a one lane road. The was path only visible by an occasional mile marker. After what seemed like forever, the car drove up a path on a hill to a building that was shaped like a three-tiered stone pyramid, with the top steeple shaved off. The moonlight bounced off the opaque grey outside. There was a parking lot with three cars randomly dispersed throughout the spaces, and the driver pulled into the last, furthest space.

  “We’re here,” the driver sa
id.

  Regina raised a brow as she looked around everywhere, the cosmic theater above her, shields of mountain range encasing the building, and of course, the weird architecture of the building itself. As they walked toward it, and got closer, she noticed a black shiny strip of windows that she couldn’t look inside of, lining the top edge of the second tier. There was a downwards flight of stairs leading to a ravine where the entrance was, and both sides of the stairway were fenced in. Regina walked beside the man with her hands in her hoodie pockets, fighting the urge not to light up a cigarette from her pack she kept stashed. The air was so cold, she could see her breath, and it didn’t help that the weirdo next to her was uncomfortably aloof. Also, there was no sign of vegetation anywhere in sight!

  Once they were both inside, they were in a blue-lit lobby with white wrap-around, minimalistic seating lining the entire inner perimeter of the wall. The guy walked towards some hidden, pull-out shelves. She noticed that the blue light came from the floor, and the walls were made of dark slate stone. Very eccentric and none of it went well together.

  The driver tossed a black coverall jumpsuit made of twill at Regina, and she caught it with one hand.

  “Put that on over your clothes, it gets cold where you work,”

  She did as told without really any complaint and slipped her legs into the small black jumpsuit that fit her form like a catsuit.

  “That looks good on you,” the guy complemented her. She curled her lip in a slight disgusted reaction of the unwanted attention.