“You weren’t lying. You’ve suffered so much. I understand why you’ve done the things you have,”
A human glimmer danced in his gorgeous, wide almond eyes, greyish blue when they weren’t electric or glowing red from his condition. There was so much pain threatening to spill out in them. He understood that she finally understood and opened his lips to speak and elucidate. A thunderous boom from the uptakes rattled the entire power plant, and the floor beneath them shifted, causing them to stumble. The glow of engulfing flames was seen spreading throughout all the expansion of the upper level from the corner of the ladder leading up there, and soon, they realized, that it was a bomb that went off.
“RUN!” Enttu yelled with gravel in his voice, as he dragged Regina along by her wrist. He was significantly weakened but still was gratefully endowed with such a speed in his feet that allowed them both to dash through flying debris and shrapnel.
The power plant rattled even more when steel beams came crashing down, and Regina was almost taken out by one of them. It was without question that the elevator would soon be blown to bits and getting inside it meant a fiery box of death for them. He scooped the newly made vampiress in his arms, and levitated up the stairs, as flames chased behind them. The fire seared the tips of his ears and reached the tips of his hair, frazzling some of it into split ends. By the time they made it into the ravine, half of his hair was burnt, and it looked as if it had undergone some chemical damage. He perched over her, as a second explosion came, and soon engulfed the entire power plant. A cloud of billowing smoke, fire, and metal fragments came looming above them, and he made his body flat on top of hers to protect her, and he covered them both with his cape. His chest digging down into her bosom made it nearly impossible to breathe and stifled her momentarily. His lips crashed down on hers again for a split second, and she wished that he could take her right here on the asphalt.
When the fire storm disappeared seconds later, he helped her back on her feet, and they ran into the parking lot where there were two getaway cars that had belonged to Radu and Cassandra. Rain hadn’t ceased, and still fell heavily, with the large droplets dancing off their cheekbones. The sky was a lightening gray of the coming dawn.
“Oh fuck, we have another problem,” Enttu said solemnly, pointing beyond the horizon in the east. Here, beyond the Transylvanian Alps, contrastingly bright red rays of sunlight hung just below the top of the black ridge along the skyline.
“Get in the car!” Regina yelled at him, from the driver’s seat of a black CLA 250 Mercedes-Benz.
He was surprised at how the hell she even broke in the car, much less, started the damn thing, with no key. Apparently, while he looked toward the rising, solar death star, she tore the door off its hinges, and hot-wired the car. He slid into the passenger’s side, and she peeled out, about to race the daylight. She sped onto the freeway and frantically accelerated back towards Bucharest, while the rays began to pour out behind the mountains. A single, amber ray touched the center console, where Enttu rested his arm, and his hand was exposed. The skin hissed and smoked under the sunlight, and he withdrew it back in pain, stifling a curse word under his bitten lip.
Regina turned sharply into the forest off the freeway after she passed the tavern, and narrowly avoided a car accident with an oncoming silver Fiat who blared its horn at them. The trees provided adequate protection from the morning light and she kept on, retracing the path that led to his domicile that would be coming up soon after the lavender meadows. She looked behind her to make sure daylight didn’t chase them into the woods.
“Stop the car,” Enttu commanded, when he saw a hovering pyramid above his house before she did. It darkened the sky all around the fields and caused strong drafts that blew the flowers horizontally to one side.
Regina opened the car door, and then they stepped out together, trying to make sense of whatever was above his home. It was all black and revolved slowly on a central vertical axis. The energy from the pyramid turned the stratus black and blocked out the coming daylight, a saving grace for them both. At least it was, until a blinding red light from it sliced into the sky, and it began to approach the location they stood at. It made a low pulsing sound of a lower frequency, and caused the grass, tree branches, and flowers to violently gust. She looked at the dhampir, whose hair was flying wildly in the gust, like golden white thread. He grabbed her, motioning her to run in the opposite direction.
“Let’s go!” he yelled, taking her by her hand to run with him, as the pyramid homed in on them.
Too soon, a blinding, humming tractor beam froze them into place. The light a blinding red laser that painted everything around them a bloody, hellish color. Neither his nor her vampiric strength could break them free. Regina attempted to reach out to the dhampir, but could not move for the life of her, and he could see the desperation in her eyes. She trembled place, growling to break free as the red light grew intolerably brighter, and radiate immense heat. The brightness provoked a severe migraine in her, and she let out an inhuman screech, until she finally did break free from the auroral arrest, toward her lover. A choir of deep voices and apocalyptic trumpets blared loud enough to cause their ears to bleed. They fell to their knees, holding each other, and then the red light and swirling dust began to settle. When everything cleared, they found themselves surrounded by a circle of black obsidian obelisks, and sitting in an arid plain of red, compacted dirt, and a glittering bloody night sky above.
CH. 12
DIMENSION OF NIGHTMARES
Beyond the solid veil of the spiky obelisks that formed around them, the woman and the vampire looked at their surroundings, they saw a blood red desert, with a black and blood red firmament dancing above. When they stood up, they walked wobbly, both feeling as if their legs were made of jelly. The gravity here felt stronger and more oppressive as if it weighed them down. The weather here was arid and the dry air had a tolerable, faint smell of burning plastic to it. Ahead in the distance, black mountain peaks easily five times higher than Mt. Everest lined the horizon. Permanent night dwelled here, except for the two deep red orbs on the right side of the apocalyptic firmament that hung lowly over the horizon and tainted the nearby skies a dull sanguine.
“What is this place? We were just in Bucharest!” Regina exclaimed.
Enttu stood, expression serious, and his eyes slanted, as he immediately took into recognition that he’d been here before, a very long time ago, when he was still a little boy. This place wasn’t a friendly one, and just even the air here presented itself to him in its familiar hostility toward any living thing. He’d been having nightmares of visiting this place each time before something catastrophic was to happen in the present.
“Welcome to the Lower Astral Planes,” he said.
The hair on the nape of Regina’s slender neck raised and her amber eyes widened with fear. Her red, glossy lips parted in apprehension. That name is one she’d read about before and learnt of when she had a pining to learn about astral projection, and she picked up the works of Ophiel, and several other subject matter experts. This place didn’t seem in any way pleasant, and it was hot, despite the dark red light that was the only available brightness.
Some inscriptions embossed onto the obelisks that she hadn’t seen before began to glow a fiery orange, and she approached one of them out of curiosity to read it. The monument was over thirty feet tall, and was a polished, lustrous black that reflected glossy red light. She was in shock to come to find out that the letters were Arabic, and better yet, that the words were in plain English.
“Too good to be true,” she said.
“The inscriptions will appear to you in your first language. I came to discover that when I used to come hide out here, before I realized this wasn’t a good place to be. This place preys on vulnerable souls and on children. Please be careful,” warned Enttu, hovering behind her.
She touched the obelisk and it felt cool and smoot
h underneath her palms. When she did, a smaller inscription glowed, and then in clear, austere letters, it read “BUCHAREST, ROMANIA.”
“Wait, why does it say that?”
“I don’t know, but the one next to me says San Diego, California. And the one next to it says New York, New York. Milan, Italy,” the dhampir’s voice echoed distantly. His back was facing her, as he floated as a slender figure with a sweeping black cloak made of velvet.
The ground under her feet rattled, and then the obelisk in front of her that read “Bucharest” began to sink into the earth. The dry, cracked red dirt engulfed the monument as it slowly penetrated the crust of the surface. Her feet shifted to prevent her from falling, and the dhampir came to pull her out of the way, his soft breath in her hair. He put one arm over her chest and he pressed himself onto her back. She liked it when he did this, it made her feel vulnerable and like a stick of butter melting in his hands, but she also felt comfortably secure.
“I have never seen those obelisks do that before,” he said in her ear.
Even though his words were not remotely sexually provoking, she could feel the frequency of his faint voice in her legs. She distracted herself and kept her eyes focused on the sinking monument until it was finally underneath the earth. The most astounding thing was the dirt where it had once been lay completely smooth, flat, and unruined, as it nothing had been there at all. They both unwisely proceeded to the smoothened patch of red dirt, both wondering where the hell that obelisk went to. Naturally, as he would act so jumpy, Enttu grabbed Regina by the wrist to pry her away from here. He sensed the negative vortex of energy before she did and sure enough, the beam of black and purple light came shooting forth from the earth in place of the monument. It pierced all the way up to the sky.
“Keep moving,” he said, dragging her away from it. She was so absent-mindedly curious more than the frightened state he expected from her. They soon came upon a forest of thorny vines, blackened Joshua trees, and overgrown Venus fly traps.
It was supposed to be some dystopian oasis, and there was a nauseating green vapor that lingered above the grass. When he squinted his eyes, Enttu noticed the slim shape of another being standing underneath a Joshua tree past the sashaying Venus fly traps. He withdrew his katana that he was pleasantly surprised he still had with him and hacked and slashed his way through the botanical path. The botany was carnivorous, and snapped in his face, trying to take a chomp out of him and Regina. She punched one of the plants and it slumped back, remaining stunned from the hit. This reminded her of being on a virtual set of Super Mario, and she was fighting real-life Piranha Plants. They reached the end of the path, toward the brooding figure in the mist, underneath the tree branches. Enttu kept the edge of his blade in front of him, wielding his weapon toward the silhouette, and his aura was glowing blue.
“Step out!” he ordered the thing.
And it did exactly that, causing the dhampir to go from aggressive to a becoming a weeping mess, heart broken into fragments of deconstructed emotions. A man stepped forth, inches away from him, maybe an inch or two below his stature. He looked no more than 35, and save for the light brown, cascading hair, and the greyish-violet eyes, he was the spitting image of Enttu. He possessed the same tall, slender frame, the delicate but still masculine features, the angular jawline, and the befallen almond eyes full of burden. Even the ears of the man were pointed, which gave away that he too was likely another vampire.
The blonde vampire stepped forth and embraced this man tightly and sobbed into the side of his shoulder.
“Nicolae! Why are you here, father?”
Regina then understood the physical and emotional correlation between the two men, and she was moved to silent tears of empathy. Her lover was reunited with his father centuries after his murder.
“Enttu, you’ve grown so much since the last time I saw you. I’m proud of you son. Very proud of you. The Alucardian blood in you beats strong. I know you’re going to be alive for the next several thousand years. It was always in your fate to become a vampire elder,”
“How is that possible? I’m not even a thoroughbred. I’m a dhampir. And some Selenians, the Dragul, every other Tepes has said and done what they could to remind me. It’s part of the reason I refused the crown. I just wanted to be happy with my wife……You never met her. Nor our daughter. It’s painful to talk about what happened to our entire coven,”
“Your fate wasn’t ever theirs to decide, son. You are the King of the Undead, and you are the one who will remain alive to balance good and evil. I know everything about your life, as I have guarded you forever since after I died. You should stop pretending that you’ll ever attain the normalcy of humans. You never were fully a human. Your darkness is something you’ll have to come to terms with about yourself. No amount of repent or guilt will change the past, Enttu. You’re still a young vampire. Don’t make the same mistake I have and try to reconcile or justify who we are to others. We are damned. You were born damned. But that doesn’t mean the darkness can’t do you any good. And you, young lady, if you didn’t believe in reincarnation, well, you’re about to,” Nicolae said, pointing his finger at Regina.
“Am I supposed to be someone’s reincarnation?” she asked Nicolae, but he pretended not to hear her.
Enttu and Regina followed behind Nicolae, through the shrubs of roses behind the rows of Joshua trees, and then there appeared the old castle they once all resided in. They traversed a bridge over a watery moat, and then entered the courtyard, still perfectly pristine, and unmarred, save for the overshadowing, permanent darkness. Come to think of it, this was the dhampir’s residence in modern times, and Regina took note of the gargoyles and lavender, and cherry sakuras. This time, they went down into the basement through a staircase that began normally, but then winded upside down.
There was a painting of the woman in her visions of blood memories that resembled Regina, and she had broken free from the other two vampire males momentarily to observe it. She touched the painting, and when Enttu turned back to call her attention to not touch anything, she was gone. Vanished into thin air! Him and Nicolae ran towards the painting of Nayeru, when she was still in the initial stages of pregnancy, sitting in front of a pond surrounded by roses.
The Two Baby Boys
Lips were perfectly painted red, and her hair, long, black and wavy cascaded into a nocturnal halo. Her skin was a pale golden shimmer, and her eyes were glowing amber. She was still relatively slender, save for the five-month baby bump protruding from her belly, that pushed out the fabric of the cornflower-blue lace, and empire waist dress that adorned her. Regina felt so at peace, and the energy in the house was tranquil, and silent. She glowed despite her vampiric condition of several years now. The unborn baby boy danced in her womb with glee.
Outside, there stood her husband or lover, the same familiar vampire she’d come to love and treasure, for it had been him who had saved her from a lifetime of abuse and he sired her after she almost died from the birth of their firstborn daughter. Radiant under the moonlight, very light blonde hair gently cascading past his shoulders, Enttu stood to soak in the light, and when he turned to acknowledge her presence, he smiled warmly. He was so handsome when he did smile, and it was rare that he ever did anymore, after his unhealed wounds of time. They kissed each other passionately, prolongedly, with a brewing love that was tinged with recollections of past lives, an ancient love full of wisdom and grace that extended beyond the physical and emotional. Their love was pure, and conquered over cosmic longevity, despite the stereotype that vampires couldn’t be capable of love because they were portrayed as blood-sucking monsters.
“Te iubesc pentru totdeauna,” he whispered in her ear in Romanian, which she was able to easily understand as “I love you, forever.”
“Tu esti totul pentru mine,” she replied to him in his native tongue.
Their eyes closed, and in the passing of time that nei
ther one of them felt, clothing fell to the ground, and their bodies became one on a slab of cement amidst a meadow of roses. Her eyes were still closed, as her body squeezed around his erection buried in the confines of her womb. She moaned into his neck the harder he plunged into her.
“Oh Alucard, Alucard,” she moaned sweetly.
Her eyes opened, and she saw the black-haired vampire rhythmically climbing her body and bucking his hips against hers, eyes electric blue from sexual crescendo.
“Ah, Elvira!” he exclaimed, spilling his raw emotion and climax in her.
They tangled in each other in post-coital sweetness and drank the life out of one another. Regina closed her eyes again, arching her body up to Alucard’s, and he felt so real, skin smooth and cold under her palms. When she reopened them, she was back in the arms of Enttu, who knew right away what it was that she saw. They were back in the davenport facing the garden of roses and the pond.
“Nayeru, you have now seen our ancestors. They became us, and when we died, I stayed as I am. You became Regina, the woman I am holding now,”
She was stirring in her mind, trying to make sense of everything. Her hands touched the still ripe, pregnant belly cocooning a little boy within. The dhampir’s eyes were saddened, bearing the weight of grief that transmuted to her. A stake suddenly protruded through his heart, and he was drenched in a red liquid blanket of his own blood. Her blood-curdling screams that ensued didn’t stop her own body from being set on fire, consuming and killing both her and the baby. Her spirit slipped out from the flaming carcass, and she found herself staring at the corpses of the dhampir and her look-alike with longer hair, the woman that Enttu had loved in a past life, named Nayeru. This was his wife he pined over in depressing nostalgia over for ages. Here they both lay, slain together, in a way, it was poetic justice for them to die together.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 31