She jumped up from the bed and grabbed him by the collar of his crisp, white- button down shirt, not knowing that her touch would send a surge of pure voltage through his body. He shouted in pain, through gritted teeth as the electricity jolted through him. Regina stepped back, in shock and immediate apologizing for what she had just done to the guy that saved her life. He was pissed now.
“Sit down, now” he ordered her, eyebrows arched in anger and eyes glowing red. Both of his fangs were drawn out, and she gulped, knowing she was going to die for sure this time.
“That’s why they are after you! My intuition served me right!” he hissed, “You still don’t know who you are do you?” His eyes squinted at her, still red from his temperamental, but expected reaction.
“Look, I’m just a girl from Texas who came here to escape the bullshit, but apparently I’ve only attracted more bullshit! First, the weird sightings when I got here, and then dreams of you or someone who really looked like you haunting me right out of my sleep, then I get kidnapped by some ancient fucks from the crypt? Again, who the hell are you? Why do you insist on hiding shit from me?” she lashed out.
“I know who you are. Please settle down and hear me out, and don’t overexert yourself or you won’t heal any faster. It’s not a coincidence that you came here. I searched extensively for you in the afterlife,” His anger had subsided.
Regina scoffed at the latter remark and blinked at him three times out of loss of patience.
“I need to go back to work! What’s this afterlife anyway?”
“These memories will not transfer to you overnight. You will need to undergo deep meditation and hypnosis if you wish to find out the truth. Until then, if you choose to live in oblivion, you will render me no other option than to wipe out your memory,”
“That seems extreme, why would you do something like that to me?”
“Because it will suppress your metaphysical powers you were endowed with. That wave of electricity you sent through me, that was dormant up until you got here. The vortexes of energy here are why you have had your visions. The lingering energy of deceased vampiric souls have awakened your power. And unfortunately, you have gotten the other coven’s attention. If I cloud your memory, it also places a damper on your abilities. Either way, I’d be protecting you. You decide,”
“Why me? Why did you choose to save me besides what you’ve mentioned? Because it doesn’t seem like something so worthy to risk your own life for.” she asked the dhampir. He took her small hand gently in his large and bony, ice cold hand.
“Don’t ever say you’re not worthy of anything. Never say that again. This sounds vapid, but you resemble my wife so much. She passed away over more than a century ago. She died a violent death. But don’t think immediately that you take her place by any means,” he said, ending his explanation so rudely.
“Well, that isn’t my intention, so don’t flatter yourself. What exactly did your wife look like?”
Enttu looked to one side, and his eyes gleamed nostalgically, as he swallowed a lump of survivor’s guilt.
“She was sun-kissed as a human. Amber, luminous eyes that were the only form of sunlight I could tolerate. Long black hair, lips always red like ripened berries. You could almost say she was slightly akin to the Duchess Meghan Markle. You kind of fall into that category yourself,” he said, making Regina unsure if that was a backhanded compliment or not.
“She sounded lovely,” she commented dryly.
“You’re welcome to clean off, be careful to not get too much moisture around your injuries. You were badly wounded from when I had to pull you out of the car. I will run the bath for you, and give you a robe,” he said, changing the subject.
He helped her, insistently clutching her by her waist and holding her firmly beside him everywhere they walked. She was led into a room with lavender colored wallpaper, and a beautiful, Renaissance-age bathtub made of white and gold porcelain. She stood patiently and watched him while he turned the hot and cold faucets on. The delicious aquatic sound of the cleansing deluge filled the tub. The vampire tossed in a hand full of powdered soap that mixed with the flowing waters, and then he gave her a black satin robe to change into, with a bath towel. She was in that long white, archaic looking gown, that stuck to her right side and the side of her thigh. He had gone away and left her to be and undress. In his mind, he had wished he stayed, and imagined her stripping sensually. His attraction to her was apparent beyond his diaphanous veil of poorly-feigned callousness.
When she tried to pry off the gown from her sides, she bit her lip in overwhelming pain as she forcefully unstuck the cloth from dried up cuts and scrapes on her ribs. There was a deep incision on the side of her thigh. She also noticed a gauze bandaged over the side of her bare stomach, and felt the tender flesh on her neck where her jugular was. The breaking moonlight shining through a textured glass window washed over her naked body. Her physique was fit and athletic, but she still looked strong, and had remarkable posture.
Her hair finally reached her shoulders and felt like it had become oily and tangled in those three days.
“He must think I look like a hot mess,” she thought out loud.
She perked up when the frigid air touched her bare nipples, and developed goosebumps while she waited for the tub to finish filling up. After forever, the tub was ready, and she dipped a foot in to feel the temperature, and the water was to her liking. She then slid all the way in till only hear head was above the water, and she carefully covered her breasts with her forearms. The water stung her healing wounds as it made contact. She hissed through her teeth, letting the pain course through and linger, until it finally dissipated away enough to where it was tolerable, and she let every muscle release its. Her eyes closed in relaxation as she leaned back into the bubbles and let the calm wash over her. Oddly enough, though she was in an unexpected situation, where life had stuck its fangs in her path, she felt an unusual sense of safety among the somber vicinity of the vampire.
Enttu awaited her in his study room, where he was lost in the myriad of pages of The Necronomicon, a subject that piqued his interests and academic practice of the occult and dark arts. His metaphysical abilities were rusty after he awoke from his slumber in 1980. The disruption of energies brought on by deliberate human to human bloodshed, nuclear wars, and terrorism made it harder for him to re-learn in peace. His own psychological strife was yet another barrier. His phone rung, and it was Vittorio. Whatever the call was about had to be urgent, since this night was their collective day off.
“Tepes, its Celentano. We want you to come see something. How is your new girlfriend?” his gruff, brawny voice said through the line.
“She isn’t a girlfriend, she’s just someone whose life I saved,” the dhampir replied with a rude inflection in his voice.
“I will give it a week before that tone changes with you. Vampires are possessive. Anyway, Marc and I are here at the Magalesti cemetery. It’s been chaotically vandalized,”
That name still provoked deep feelings of vitriol in the gut of the dhampir.
“I’m sure you can give me a brief description. What is going on?”
“About two rows on the east side of the cemetery looked like they have been excavated. Broken and open coffins are strewn all over the place. The epitaphs are destroyed as well, and there are footprints all coming together in one direction. Marc and I have been here for over an hour investigating the scene,”
Enttu’s hair raised in response his sudden adrenaline spike,
“That is preposterous. Give me an ETA of 20 minutes, I will be there soon,” he replied back to Vittorio, then hanging up.
He sat in a blue velvet chair in his study that contained a library of ancient texts and scrolls, with glass doors that let in the nocturnal light from outside. The room was made of precut cinderblock and a polished granite floor. The walls were lined with darkened oak accents, two more blue velvet
seats, shelves upon shelves of books, a rug from Persia, and candelabras that provided lighting, except for his electric desk lamp. There were also portraits of his wife and daughter in various poses and locations. Out from under the drawer in his desk, he slid it just far enough to grab his motorcycle keys and a pack of cigarettes. He grabbed his leather jacket from the coat hook, as well as a bandana that he used as a hair tie to keep his locks from blinding him on the road.
Before leaving off, he was slightly nonplussed at the thought of having to leave Regina by herself. He went to check on her, hiding his deep concern under a face of resting apathy. The girl was startled out of her tranquility when she heard the door handles jiggle, and the door creak open. The brooding, languid presence of the vampire blended seamlessly into the corners of the Victorian bath chamber. He swallowed desire, upon sight of the glistening skin of her bare amber shoulders, and her covering her breasts right away.
“You caught me off guard,” Regina stammered nervously, with a piece of black hair over her eye.
“Please forgive me. I must head out. I will return before midnight. I will leave everything locked so that you can be safe. I have to go,” he explained briefly, standing in the corner in black streetwear. He left Regina as soon as he came to her, and she was flabbergasted at the thought of him leaving her locked in his residence.
“What the hell, am I being held prisoner here or something?” she protested to the air.
Swiftly, he made his way out of her line of sight, and headed out, past the vast marble and velvet hallway of his fort of a residence, shaded behind acres of oak trees, rose shrubs, and coved meadows of moonlit lavender. He hopped on to his BMW motorbike and started it. The loud rumbling exhaust blew away leaves that collected on the garden court behind his house in the forest. There was a fountain with a perched gargoyle in the middle of the limestone court. He peeled out and went speeding onto a trail in the woods that eventually became the main stretch of freeway along the Meytros Estates. Along the way, he passed a nearby tourist village with a popular tavern, with rows of cars parked on the side of the road adjacent to it.
The yellow street lights and pine trees of the rest of the folkloric Meytros Estates were just up ahead on the road, with the nearby mountains in the background. Around 8:23 PM, he arrived at the Magalesti cemetery to meet his companions who were waiting beside their motorcycles, smoking under the moon. He parked next to them and stepped off, joining them and lit up a menthol.
“What the hell’s going on here,” Enttu said first thing to his fellow detectives.
“Come see this,” Vittorio motioned with his hand. The three men walked together toward desecrated graves, among rows and rows of draping wispy willows. Dried leaves crunched under their boots, and the dead spirits in the wind howled around them. Marc seemed a bit nervous, puffing his shiny cheeks in and out rapidly. Enttu remained calm, as he was rather fond of cemeteries and for the most part, found comfort among the dead and romanticized death itself, since he was growing fatigued of his longevity.
He was rather perturbed at the scene of the strewn dirt and destroyed lawns around the graves. Open coffins were randomly strewn about the ground, with crawling worms and centipedes. When he neared them, the unmistakable rank smell of necrosis and disease became more powerful, but there were indeed no bodies in any of the coffins. At least twenty of the graves were vandalized. When the dhampir approached the furthest grave where the last willow was still flowing before it became open ground, he noticed the tracks Vittorio mentioned to him before.
They were facing randomly at first, and then they all came together, in various foot sizes and imprints. What really caught his attention was a large inverted pentagram carved into the grass with either a metal rod or a spear. He knelt to study the pentagram, which looked like a ritualistic commencement for a type of sinister sacrament. The moonlight shone upon a viscous black fluid that stained the lower quarter of the pentagram. Enttu placed one finger in the liquid to see what it was, and unafraid as he was immune to human disease. Not to mention, he was technically dead himself. The liquid dripped slowly off the tip of his index, a little bit less thick than tar, but the same black color. He brought it dangerously close to his nose to sniff the substance and made a face of disgust, short of vomiting.
Marc stayed behind near the vandalized graves, growing increasingly nervous by the minute as he thought he heard voices, but tried to convince himself that it was just his mind paying tricks on him. Vittorio was walking to where his undead comrade was psychically deciphering the riddle of the scene.
“Anything you can make of it?” the man asked, kneeling next to the dhampir.
“This is blood of the dead. And I mean, they were already dead before the sacrament. But their blood did get used in this. That still doesn’t explain the tracks or whom they came from. My educated guess is that the phenomenon we had encountered at the crime scene at the apartment of Roxana can possibly be occurring at random now, as much as I hate leaving randomness as an open explanation,”
Marc froze in fear when he saw something dash out of his peripheral past a tree, and then heard a scratching sound pick away at the bark.
“Hey guys, I thought I saw something, can you guys please come back?”
Enttu stood up and looked back at Marc.
“You better catch up, Marc!”
Marc carefully trudged his way towards the two men ahead, taking about ten steps, before Enttu barked an order that caught him by surprise,
“GET DOWN!”
Automatically, he did as told, and barely dodged an ambush attack from behind, by a leaping creature that was now standing in front of him, a beast of six arms or legs that ended in scythes, a human body and overgrown human head, with scraps of flesh, and a scorpion tail. It towered over ten feet tall. A foul-smelling, clear glossy slime coated the outer tissue of whatever this chimera monstrosity was. It growled as it moved towards Marc, still ducking on the grass. Fortunately, the dhampir then appeared between him and the scorpion-human beast, with a cobalt glass dagger in his hands.
The beast plummeted one of its scythe-legs where the dhampir stood but was too slow for his bullet-like speed. Enttu slashed away the first two legs with a sword in his other hand as he strafed way too close past the mouth of the beast, kicking up dust. He barely avoided its tongue that contained another smaller mouth with rows of black spikes for teeth, a mouth within a mouth. He had turned back for a moment to motion Marc to get up and run away as fast as he could, and it was just enough distraction time for the creature to wrap its long, vine-like tongue-mouth around the dhampir’s ankle and dragged him toward the beast.
He attempted to stab the tongue with the blue dagger to no avail, because the flesh was of a slimy, leathery texture. It flung him straight up into the air as if he was a rag doll, and then slammed him down hard on the ground, creating a dent in the earth where he came crashing down.
Enttu was enraged by now, activating the vampirism and bloodlust pumping viciously through his veins, when the creature tried to drag him back again. It was only met with his powerful resistance now, with him not budging as the tongue retracted with a harder pull. It was a game of live or die tug-of-war. Vittorio came into the standoff, firing two revolvers into the creature’s face. Even at this, it wouldn’t release the dhampir, until he clawed his way through the leathery flesh with his nails that extended during vampirism, and then, he was finally able to rip the tongue apart to shreds like a pulled pork roast. He shouted out loud with sheer rage in his growl, like the warrior he once was. His combat abilities never abandoned him.
He smiled devilishly in celebration of his short-lived victory, the tongue of the beast ripped to shreds and releasing its grip. Vittorio, who stood next to him was suddenly whipped away by the scorpion tail into the air, and the creature then drove its hind scythe-leg right through the flesh and bone of Enttu’s left calf, forcing him to let out a guttural scream
of severe, throbbing pain. The bony and ivory scythe was penetrated through his leg, pinning him to the ground. Ribbons of liquid scarlet started oozing out of the wound. He had three other free limbs though and did everything he could to fight the beast off.
The creature launched its stinger in his direction, but the dhampir was swift enough to catch the stinger in both of his hands, before it stung him right between the eyes. More than ever, with strength supercharged by his boiling bloodlust, he held the vibrating stinger in place with all the power in his trembling biceps. The creature tried to break free and finish its kill.
Vittorio rose back up and witnessed the deathly altercation that was happening before him, and he grabbed his weapons from the ground, running in the monster’s direction. He began emptying his magazines into the leg that pinned his friend to the ground. After two entire clips emptied, the deafening gunshot smoke filled the air, and the scythe-leg then cracked into pieces. Enttu regained mobile control of both his legs, although he had a piece of bone impaling him all the way through. The scorpion tail was about to hit Vittorio again, but he was able to strafe away this time, and went to assist his vampire friend unpin himself.
The creature lost its balance, and leverage. Tepes was now glowing blue with his tenebrous sanguinary aura, and in one jerking motion, he ripped the stinger from the tail of the monster. It spewed a black liquid everywhere, and some of it landed on his face, as it flailed wildly about. The creature danced around, going berserk in all directions.
The dhampir was able to place mind over matter and savagely rip the scythe out of his calf. A crimson river poured rapidly out of the wound and soaked the black fabric of his slacks. He floated up into the air, blue dagger in hand, and dripped blood tracks on the grass. He drove the dagger straight into the heart of the scorpion chimera, avoiding it’s snapping teeth from its mutilated mouth, and it gave its last pterodactyl-like shrieks of death as Enttu delivered the death blow. He somersaulted backwards into the sky, as the thing exploded its necrotic guts all over the graveyard.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 14