“Thanks, I guess,”
“You American girls, not fond of complements?”
She chose not to answer and followed him quietly, hoping to god that he would shut the fuck up and be a little bit more professional. They proceeded into another lobby, this one looked like a chess room, with a black and white checkered floor and a red carpet, a mural of a castle in the middle of the wall ahead of them. They walked on the red carpet to a grey stone platform in front of the painting, and before she could stabilize, the platform gently dropped down a level, almost causing Regina to fall, but the guy with her caught her by the arm. She was getting more annoyed by the minute. Who did this guy think he was?
Once they reached a lower level, there were no doors, just three steps down into the maze of a power plant, whose light emitted from green LED floorboards, and there were six bedroom-sized generators parallel from each other, three per side. The overhead was nothing but aluminum silver piping, and small bridge walkways that seemed to lead to the uptakes of the generators. It was indeed as if hell froze over in here. Regina had never seen any power plant or generators that looked like these. Other than the floorboard lighting, the power plant was dimly lit. her tour guide, the probable office creep, led her up a ladder next to the second giant, conch-shaped generator. It was a big black humming snail, with windows near its slip rings to view any arcing and sparking.
Regina painfully hit her knee on the second rung of the ladder, the pain quivering through her shin to her toe. She muffled a curse, biting her lip as she let the pain subside on its own, before limping the rest of the way up. At the top, there was a smaller boxed enclosure in the nook of an open clearance, with two blacked out windows with wipers in the front. There was a door next to the windows and she followed inside. There was a switchboard that took up space on three walls except for the windows and the door. Here inside, were two black stools, a latrine in the right corner, and some technical manuals on shelving under the windows. This room too was also dimly lit except for the same green LEDs as outside.
“This is the control room, this is where you will be tomorrow,” said office creep.
The room should have had someone working the shift, but they were nowhere in sight.
“Shouldn’t there be somebody in here?” Regina asked, concerned as to why someone would abandon running generators.
“Yes, they are either smoking in the uptakes or asleep somewhere. You will know if there is ever a problem with these generators. All we do here is watch the kilowatt load, keep an eye on the voltage and amperage, balance the load. The hardest thing you probably will do is parallel in, remove loads, bump test, kill a switchboard or sections of the switchboards. They are in the lower level and it’s not hard if you aren’t illiterate. And you don’t seem like you’re illiterate,”
Again, with the unwanted creepy, backhanded compliments. Regina squinted her eyes and pursed her lips, looking at him sideways.
“Easy for you Miss America, right? Beauty queens that can still make a motor run,” he laughed almost sarcastically either at or with her. She rolled her eyes far into the back of her head, letting out an audible scoff. He handed her a set of technical books, blueprints, and a map of the building and the engine rooms.
“You will begin a night shift here, hope you don’t mind. See, your name is already on the board for 11 to 5 in the morning. This place will earn you good money, pretty girls like you get all the raises,”
Oh no, another ignorant, probably resentful, sexist douchebag. But Regina didn’t have the reaction he would have wanted.
“I’m glad to inspire you someday,” she sneered right back at him, almost pompously. Her claws were coming out, maybe because she was getting hungry. They didn’t stay in the room for longer than five minutes, when he led her back out of the engine room, back to the lobby, and all the way to the car, the air even more bitter now, it felt like no more than 45 degrees.
“Oh, by the way, you stand the shift by yourself, unless you want someone to keep you company,”
Regina looked at him through lowered eyebrows,
“No, I’m pretty sure I can fare well on my own,”
“Pretty, for sure,”
She sighed, now the warmth of anger tingling behind her ears, and crossed her arms.
“How far are we from my house?”
“I hope I didn’t anger you, you shouldn’t doubt that you’re a very beautiful woman. You should own that!”
She was thinking of something to come up with to tell him off and make him knock it off with the uncalled-for attention, but his phone rang, and he was one of those who texted and drove.
“Un-be-fucking-lievable,” Regina muttered under her breath.
The driver-creep had answered his phone in Romanian.
“Halo?”
Another male voice could be heard on the other end. They were speaking for a while, and too tired to start a battle, Regina took a car nap, pulling the hood of her jacket over her eyes, holding her black coveralls, and tech manuals on her lap. After a seemingly good while, she woke up when she felt the car stop, and recognized the surroundings and fog of the Meytros Estates.
“Wake up sleeping beauty,” said the annoying driver, gently tapping her. She jumped up, looked at him with visible irritation on her expression, and grabbed her belongings. Before she stepped out, he handed her a black crystal key card with a three-dimensional silver pyramid superimposed on the card.
“Use it for the gate and for the building. Leave it in your car, the driving map is with the building map. Ciao Bella!” said the driver, waiting for Regina to enter the gate of her residence, before he peeled away slowly.
The thick, ominous fog was no joke at this time of night. Only the street lamps and some light peeking through the thick crystal windows from the Alucard room lit the way. The fog was so dense, it was even a struggle to breathe without inhaling its extra-cold humidity.
Back in the mansion, she set her work-related belongings on the dining table, ready to treat herself to a glass of wine. She grabbed a corkscrew and went for the red wine, pulling the cork out, and pouring the rich, red liquid that smelt of grapes and berries into a crystal and gold fluke that prismed in the light. A sharp note of the piano across the living room startled her, as the musical instrument began to play by itself. She almost died of a heart attack, before recalling that Ophelia had let her know that it is pre-programmed to play by itself for a whole hour before midnight.
A dazzling tune of multiple key strokes permeated the silent ambient, hitting highs and lows simultaneously, the rich notes perfectly accompanying her wine. It took her little to notice that it was the “Alucard” melody.
No one was around, and after a few sips, and a little bit of tension slipping away from the wine, Regina began to hum the melody, before she wondered how her own voice would sound like, and she did love to sing when no one was watching.
In perfect harmony, she sang in unison with the next coming bar, matching voice to tempo symbiotically. She vocalized the lyrics with a sweet, angelic voice, the wasted talent of someone who should have been in an opera.
“Aaaluucarrd, Aluuucarrd, come be wiiith meee, A-lluucard, Alucard, Selene Divine, Be with me to the end of tiiiime,”
Her voice echoed beautifully, and she was getting carried away, not noticing the flickering lights around her, but she did notice when the fluke of wine in her hands suddenly exploded into tiny shards that went all over the wooden floor. She gasped at what had just happened. Did her singing just make her shatter glass? What on Earth had just happened and what was going on? She eventually cleaned up the mess after gathering her nerves and decided to go meditate before going to sleep.
MIDNIGHT, DOWNTOWN BUCHAREST, 30 MAY 2018.
Far away in the heart of the city, where the nightlife never seemed to shut down, his cape flew straight with the wind, and though he was freezing to death, h
e ignored it for the most part. He stared down fifty stories below onto the street, where the cars looked like ants from this height, listening for any cries of help or desperation. The air was more silent up here, and the voices of the crowd below couldn’t pollute his thoughts this high up. Enttu had nothing better to do than to guard Bucharest at night, with no demands from anyone, and without pay. He had recovered from his post mortem spell, and Vittorio and Marc had decided to call it a night. He wanted to practice some music with them, but they were drained, and exasperated from an exorbitant amount of work.
Though someone as brooding as Enttu didn’t need any pay, he had been recruited long ago circa 2007 by the Bucharest Police after he had saved a big strew of trafficking victims from unscrupulous human dealers. He became a cop and that is how he had met Vittorio Celentano, and then almost eight years later, he met Marc Mocanu. He was a rogue and a hero in the duality if one being, a prince turned into a 21st century vigilante. Earthly possessions didn’t matter much to him as much as finding out the whereabouts of the two people he had ever loved the most, his wife Nayeru, his daughter Vanya.
A long time ago, not long after he had heartlessly but justifiably murdered Jedediah Magalesti for his atrocities against his own people and the war against vampires, he had found the ashen remains of his wife who was burnt alive by her own father, Magalesti himself. He gave her a proper burial, through the last tears he would ever cry in an aeon. Vanya was still nowhere to be found, and he had searched every corner of the world for his little princess. The darkness this burden in his heart was always carried with him. It had ever slightly embittered him and made him callous towards anyone whom he could read the guilt of murder off their minds, and he became somewhat of a holy killer through the passing decades. Unbeknownst to the police department, he also took justice into his own hands on one too many occasions, and he had done some very grizzly things to pedophiles and human traffickers after they were convicted. He truly believed in eye for eye, even if he did permanently tarnish his own karma in the long run.
Perhaps it was a good tradeoff for the overall wellbeing for humanity, though it stood true, that good couldn’t exist in the universe without the bad. It took becoming the darkness to kill the darkness. It took bloodshed to stop further bloodshed. There was no peace without war. There was no enforcement of the laws without having to break a few to bring about a harmonious, functioning society. Enttu was the kind of individual whose philosophy was that he’d rather sacrifice one to save the rest. Bucharest alone was mostly safe, except for petty theft and the non-murderous felonies, but for the city to get to where it was, it didn’t come without death of those who had to pay and answer up for their innocent victims.
Human trafficking had stopped existing recently since 2008, when he had caught the kingpin that was trafficking young girls and babies for organ tradeoff and more lascivious business. He had killed that man and his henchmen by quartering all of them down the middle in a clean cut, and then mentally ripping the kingpin apart limb by limb. But out of such a gruesome kill-off, 346 women, girls, and babies were saved.
Furthermore, they had been given access to medical treatments, and safely returned to their families or placed in development shelters. He never kept direct contact with the victims he saved, but he knew some of them had grown up to be honest political figures, highly paid lawyers, doctors, police men and women, and artists of all sorts.
He floated up into the air, giving one last observation of the city, before he shot up into the air like a bullet that headed towards the mountain region. The cold mist of the night slapped his cheeks and caught in his lashes, and his platinum long hair whooshed behind him like the tail of a comet. For the thrill of the moment, there was a bridge over the Danube that he neared, and he aligned himself level with speeding cars, lingering long enough beside them before drivers noticed a black floating figure next to their window. As they were about to look, he sped away.
To take a break from his self-sport, he stopped and rested on top of a wall around a mansion in his former city, that he had only been coming back to for about a week now. The Meytros Estates remained heavily wooded, with oaks and wispy willows, that blocked out plenty of sun and moonlight. The invisible, metaphysical barrier that once kept unauthorized humans and non-Selenians from entering the city of Lower Meytros had long ago been destroyed during the ambush of 1894. This claimed the lives of almost all the humans, vampires, and dhampirs in his coven. Now, it was the refurbished Meytros Estates, and he patrolled here too on occasion. The heavy fog here was the result of the cold humidity, and the spirits of vampires that only he could see from time to time. They liked to hang out in the Alucard room of the Marlboro Mansion, where he found himself that night.
The balcony doors flew open gently, and out she came, a breathtakingly, painfully beautiful girl that his heart could not avoid. She was small-framed but looked strong. Her black hair came to just past her shoulders and her large brown eyes languidly stared up to the moon as if wanting to ask it something, through demure lips that were candy apple red. He could see her figure through her nightgown. This stirred a feeling of butterflies in his stomach that he couldn’t help, making him short of breath whenever he saw her. He could not shake off the nostalgia she provoked in him. Inconspicuously, he took out his phone and snapped another picture of her to keep, unaware that the camera noise alerted her. Soon, he realized that she was staring directly at him, cocking her head to one side as she adjusted her vision.
“Fuck!”
Enttu disappeared quickly out of her line of sight, still able to see her from behind his supposed coffin he had purposely lay there to fake his own death. He loved to look at this young woman from afar and being drawn back to his former neighborhood after she began appearing to him in vivid, lucid dreams and involuntary out of body experiences. He hadn’t thought to ask Selene who she may be, because for sure the goddess would tease and scorn him for getting distracted from his missions. From afar he could hear the girl singing angelically, with his acute hearing ability he was able to make out the words,
“Alucard, Alucard…. Dracula spelt backwards, Alucard.”
Wait, is she singing Alucard’s Threnody? How does she know that? Only Selenians and Celentano’s know that! Wait, she couldn’t possibly be…. a descendant? Is that why I am drawn to her so much?
The blonde haired dhampir was shrewd and loved to push the envelope when it came to certain aspects of life, namely romance and interests of the heart. He stayed in the grassy meadow around the tomb to watch this young lady. He waited silently until she went to bed, and broodingly conspired to never get enough of her. He had to have her, even if he just had her with his own thoughts. The bloodlust and love he felt for her was insatiable, and it made his heartbeat audible in his brain, and made his mouth dryer than an arid desert.
He floated up inconspicuously, where the girl had been looking out the balcony, and he noticed the doors were left wide open. Conveniently concerned for the girl’s security, he entered quickly, and concealed himself, behind a hidden wall on the left corridor that led to a chamber behind a set of paintings he had himself created when he was a young lad, when his father Nicolae was still alive. Nicolae pressed for his firstborn son Enttu to pursue his metaphysical, musical, and scientific education, that was offered in Meytros when persecuted science professors from around the world were offered a safe place to teach, practice, and live, in exchange for sharing their knowledge to the Selenian coven. Count Nicolae was one of the few who made it to the afterlife realm and whom had contacted his son only once after his death, and after the birth of Enttu’s dhampir child he had with his human wife, following in his father’s footsteps. Time to the life of any vampire was almost nonlinear and the stages of infancy to adulthood were ephemeral in comparison to the lifetime of any human; vampiric longevity was almost flawlessly eternal.
Time flew from when he’d sprung forward from the universe, through his mot
her’s womb, and into the plane of the Earth, to welcome arms of the Selenians whose hearts were overjoyed by the royal birth. A tireless midwife had given the crying, small and fragile white-skinned baby boy to his mother Dayanara so she could place him on her swollen, ripe breast for him to have his first welcome-to-earth meal. His tiny head was covered in curls the color of the sun, and his eyes were large, blue oceans of the most iridescent, glistening sapphires. The little baby was surprisingly warm, and Count Nicolae who knelt by his wife, took the babe and swaddled him in a blue cashmere wrap. He cradled his newborn son tenderly, gently running a finger on the child’s hair. The child possessed the luminosity of the moon in his skin, and the divinity of the holiest angels emanated from his tiny, brand new soul, though demure, this child’s shrewdness could already be perceived well into the future, as if the tenacity could also be felt coming from a past life.
“Enttu Stefan von Tepes, because Enttu means ‘to be in divinity’ with our goddess Selene, our vampiric goddess Sekhmet, and with the Upper Astral Planes,” Nicolae told the child, as he still knelt beside his wife who was depleted of energy and eluding sleep.
Dayanara, a French aristocrat who had once been a human before surrendering her mortality to her husband, became a mother at the age of 20. Her hair reached past the length of her diminutive waist, in silver, loose curls that glittered in every angle the light reflected off her hair. Her skin was the color of white, blooming rose petals, and she had two azure jewels for eyes, which truly emphasized her doll-like features. Fast forward to then, Enttu was about 15 years of age, with the same raging hormones of teenage boys but at a much more accelerated rate. His emotions and behavior seemed to be everywhere while he would often go nowhere. He was able to channel this unstable energy through martial arts and very excruciatingly long meditation sessions. Still, as vampires and dhampirs alike are no strangers to tragedy, seemingly happening to them so frequently, he lost his father in battle, the first time the Dragul wanted something legitimate to start an armament. He mourned his father’s death silently, almost falling for the wrong young woman amidst his grief, having experienced his first ever consummation with this girl, named Silvana, who turned out to be nothing more than a very entitled, bratty heiress of her father’s jewel business. He made this girl forget him under a spell he evoked upon her to juggle her memory.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 9