The Dhampir Dimension

by Viktoria Alukard

  He stood in silence to absorb the fleeting incident and pondered heavily on the animosity of the young woman towards him, his gut highly suspicious of the Dragul involvement. From out of the inside sleeve of his duster, he pulled out his phone, which remained surprisingly intact from the collapsing rubble, and dialed Vittorio. The other one answered immediately.

  “Enttu, ce faci? Are you still in downtown building?” a worried Vittorio said on the other end, nervously blowing puffs of menthol smoke.

  “Nu. The citadel ‘suflat in sus’ and I barely made it out,”

  “What?! But you are okay though, or else you would not be calling me, correct?”

  “Absolut. How is Regina, is she with you?”

  “Ah my boy, you ask for your ‘amant’ before you ask for me. Priorities eh?”

  “Vittorio, nu ma joc. I could not find Marc before the building exploded. I did encounter a female vampire though. That singer from the Odeon Theatre. I believe she is responsible for Marc’s disappearance and that she’s connected to the Dragul! She placed the bombs in the citadel. She regards me as a nemesis. She tried to attack me. She went inside of the Magalesti Cathedral, and I am across the street from it,” the dhampir stated, with a stern tone that highlighted the heaviness of the situation.

  He heard a car door slam shut, followed by the clicking of seatbelts.

  “Regina is here, she had to use the ladies room. Do you wish to speak with her?”

  “Please,” urged the dhampir. The soothing voice of Regina melted away the discontent boiling in his veins.

  “Regina….I’m glad you’re safe. I was beginning to worry heavily for you,”

  “Hello Enttu, I am fine. Where are you right now?”

  “Tell Vittorio to head to the Magalesti cathedral, or monument, whatever this shit hole is now. I have a lead on several suspects, that may not just be responsible for whatever we saw in the building, but the power plant incident, and the string of murders that have been happening lately,”

  “And possibly disappeared Marc and killed Radu and Cassandra?” Regina inquired.

  Enttu remained silent on the other end, squinting his eyes at the stained-glass windows of the church that suddenly flashed an intermittent purple light. The screaming of a tortured soul came in one ear and out the other, sending a chill down his spine. He hung up the phone, and leaped into the air, performing a dazzling backflip where the soles of his shoes pointed toward the sky, and the rain-infused winds lifted his long hair. An archangel flew through the stormy night, and he landed inside of the spire, before he snuck inside the church through a broken glass window on the south end, opposite the spire. Carefully, he tiptoed across the line of the stuccoed, steepled roof, quiet so no one inside would hear the dawning intruder.

  Once he had entered the perimeter of the parish, the memories of him taking revenge by brutally slaying the façade priest Jedediah Magalesti came rushing to him. It was dark in the room he snuck into, except for the outside lights of traffic and lamp posts strung together by wires and transformers. Rain bounced off the leaves of nearby tree branches that waved in the stormy winds, and gave off the earthy scent of cool, wet soil.

  Apprehensively, Enttu scanned the room for any signs of human or demonic life of creatures lingering from the Lower Astral Planes. He pulled out his cobalt glass dagger gifted to him by Selene, and noticed that it glowed a bright blue, as it did every time evil forces were lurking. Steadily, he went, feeling carcasses of cicadas and roaches crunching underneath his boots. It smelt dank in here, of rotting wood, and the air was stagnant with abandonment and dead souls. He used the light of his dagger to navigate the dark, and swatted away a web with a giant, glossy black widow that fell to the ground heavily. He crushed the arachnid and cringed when he felt the sole of his boot sink into its belly and pop it, like an engorged tick. He heard goo explode and drain out of the body onto the wooden planks that made the floor. It was a sound he could not unhear.

  The blonde vampire continued and paused to listen at what sounded like the drums and pulsating bass of industrial techno music. He carried his blue dagger in one hand, and his Colt 1911 in the other. There were more entities in this building, and they weren’t good. There was a stairway that led down where the music grew louder. He walked down the dark staircase and put his dagger back into his cape, so he wouldn’t draw attention to himself. When he reached the bottom, there was a long hallway illuminated by dark red lights, and sylphs scantily clad in black lace and vinyl gyrated against each other in a trance, to the beat of the music.

  He pushed through the crowd of cold and warm bodies grinding against and past him, most of them not noticing his presence. It was a crowd of Dragul vampire sires and humans they fed from or were about to transform. A male with slicked black hair about as tall as he pushed him up against the wall and tried to cop a feel on Enttu, strong hands on his hip bones, and pinning him by the wrist, and lips of the other brushing against his neck. In defense, he immediately hit the other vampire right in the junk with his knee and violently shoved him into the sea of undead, spitting in his face.

  “You’re not my type,” said the dhampir, who kept moving on through the club. This was an uncommon occurrence that happened only once or twice when males tried to make a verbal pass at him due to his initially delicate appearance. He was anything but however, and the women in his life were aware of it, especially during the episodes of rough sex with him.

  An alluring woman in a red corset and a piece of fabric for a miniskirt approached him and offered him a glass full of blood. Though she was captivating, with ample breasts that he was tempted to squeeze, he did not trust her nor her intentions. She took a sip of blood from the cup to assure him she wasn’t trying to poison him, and then handed him the cup back. He hesitated, but he knew that to go deeper, he had to blend in. Cautiously, he let the delicious metallic tinged, salty fluid run down his throat and entered his bloodstream. He took a few more drinks, until an image of an innocent schoolgirl getting her throat slit from ear to ear appeared to him, and he stopped drinking. They were all drinking the blood of the innocents, people that had disappeared, people that him and his detectives were never able to find.

  He licked his fangs and inconspicuously handed the glass back to the woman, kissing her and letting her taste the remains of blood in his mouth. He pulled her up against him by her waist, and leaned her over to kiss her more passionately, feeling sharp fangs along the tip of his tongue. As suspected, she was also a vampire. Without caring much for the rest of the crowd, who were a promiscuous, bloodthirsty bunch, he unzipped her corset halfway and uncovered her large, plump breasts with nipples begging to be sucked. He licked away at her large, fleshy nipples until the woman whimpered and orgasmed from just this action alone, begging him for more.

  “You want more? Come with me, and I will give you ecstasy between your legs,” he teasingly lied in a soft, hot whisper in her ear.

  Desperately, the excited and exposed woman followed the dhampir through the crowd, his cold hand around hers and guiding her through the sea of people. There was an open door in the end of the hall, and he opened it, where he could finally be alone with her. He pinned her against the wall, and she thought he was going to fuck her right there, right now, when he nibbled her ear. The harshness in his voice awoke her from her sexual fantasy of him plunging himself between her spread legs around his waist.

  “Do you know anything about the innocents that died for the blood you gave me?!”

  “Wh…..what are you talking about?” the frightened female vampire said, as the dhampir’s hand clenched tighter around her jaw.

  “Better yet, what could a bunch of humans possibly be doing at a vampire gathering?” Enttu asked the female, as he now held his dagger to her neck. He was ready to kill her for the sacrilege she had made him commit. He never drank blood of innocents unless they wanted transformation, at least in the physical plane.r />
  “I don’t know who you are talking about, I’m only a coven member!”

  “Coven? What coven?”

  “The Dra….”

  “The Dragul?” he finished her sentence. The woman was visibly frightened but also didn’t fight, as she sensed that he would possibly spare her life.

  “Narciso Tepes, where is he?” the dhampir demanded louder, pressing the tip of the blade into the flesh of her neck, letting out a single ribbon of blood from the wound.

  “The catacombs!” the desperate woman screamed, so he could ease up the blade digging into her.

  Wow, so much hassle for such simple questions. He put his blade back into his cape and retreated from her. Just when she had been so grateful that he spared her life, he sent a ball of flames hurling towards her that engulfed her alive, and continued to the catacombs, as best as he could recall the path. Her shrills of excruciation echoed through the walls like the wail of a banshee in the ocean.

  There was dark, spiral stairway made of cold and dusty limestone that remained intact from the last time he had trespassed this parish in the 19th century. The only illumination was offered from a single, burning white wicker candle at the top of the stairs that swirled down into an infinite spiral. He traveled down swiftly, but quietly so his presence wouldn’t be noticed by the other vampires, whom he heard rushing to the scene of the burning harlot. She must have been but a pile of ash by the time they reached her.

  It was mostly dark and coldly arid on the way down, and he came across the same hall where a long time ago, he had come too late to save a young nun named Monika from being murdered by a clergyman. An inner feeling within him told him to enter the hall instead of continuing down the spiral. His breaths were shallow, and breezes from an unknown direction rustled his hair and made his cape wave slightly. He couldn’t help but to feel that someone was watching him in the dark.

  Up ahead not too far away, the light of a door-less threshold illuminated the cobblestone floor with purple flashing light and long, distorted shadows that deformed in the refraction. On his left, before reaching the threshold, he realized the old bloodstain of the parishioner he murdered in revenge for Monika’s death lingering on the side of the brick wall. Some dark green moss formations had developed on it over time. When he got to the threshold, he noticed he could not see much past the pillars between the pews and the centerline red carpet that led from the altar to the outside doors.

  He had to be very careful and couldn’t just thrust himself into another battle, given that he was trespassing into a makeshift citadel for the Dragul Vampire Coven. They greatly outnumbered him. No soul had noticed the dhampir peering from behind a pillar, at the sacrament or, rather more, sacrilege, occurring at the altar. Several people in a circle, three males and two women in black robes, were muttering an incantation over a black swirling hole in the ground of the carpet that seemed to be pulsing the louder they chanted.

  In the center of the entranced chanters, there was the opera singer holding a small cage in the crook of her arms, with an entrapped black cat inside. It was hissing and clawing at the cage wildly, as if it knew that its time on earth was soon about to come to an end. She opened the cage, and forcefully grabbed the arching cat by its body with a single, very strong hand that gripped its entire, velvety black body. It scratched and clawed into the side of her arm, leaving three deep red and long lines on her skin that would heal themselves as soon as they were inflicted. Predictably, she dropped the feline inside of the hole in the ground, and consequently, the animal vaporized into the hole, which acted and resembled something like a portal used for time travel. One of the three males broke from the circle to give something to her as a reward for her living sacrifice to whatever entity was on the other side of the portal. He unrobed himself, revealing his smooth alabaster complexion contrasted by his petrol black hair and jade eyes. Narciso handed her a large onyx crystal that was cut and polished into a conical, multi-faceted diamond shape.

  “Now, for the human sacrifice to forge our instruments to arise the Demon King. Bring the cretin forward!” Narciso ordered the three males.

  As much as it sickened him for his suspicions to materialize before him, Enttu at least now knew that his theory was now a confirmed truth; Narciso was behind it all. The three robes males brought forth a human figure wrapped in brown potato cloth, with a black linen capelet duct taped over the head. The smell of familiar blood quickly swirled up to his nostrils, and he sniffed twice to confirm that it had been who he suspected. Just at the same time, Narciso tore the head cover off the victim to unveil a disheveled, beaten and bruised Marc, held by his arms by two of the guards. He kicked, screamed, and cried, trying to resist them from shoving him into the gaping portal.

  Narciso urged the other beings in the ritual to continue in their incantation, which provoked a green mist to spring forth from the black portal, and he gently nudged the girl to Marc’s direction, as she held the crystal to her chest. She was complicit to his every command, like his own personal marionette. With enough force to almost rip out his arm, she grabbed a petrified Marc, and held out his wrist over the portal, and she stabbed his veins, tracing the crystal along his forearm to make a deep laceration. He screamed in the severity of the pain, that felt like his arm was on fire, and he stared horrified, as syrupy crimson strings of blood fell from his wounds into the portal. The green mist turned into black upon receiving Marc’s blood, and it rose higher up, about six feet into the air. The blackened mist wrapped around Marc’s bleeding arm and forcefully dragged him down to the ground. He struggled with it, while the blonde girl with the mask then proceeded to cut his other arm, now infected by the darkness. The black crystal began to glow an ominous red, slickened with the red liquid.

  Just as Marc was about to be pulled into the mysterious abyss, at once, Enttu sprang from behind the corner of the pillar and he came hacking away at the mist, slicing through it cleanly with his trusty weapon. Marc was freed but too weakened from loss of blood to move, and he was slowly starting to go into shock. The girl was grabbed by her neck and thrown against the wall of the second level above the alter, causing a huge dent that caused some limestone to crack off. She peeled off the wall and landed on her palms, then jumping down and lunged at the dhampir with her claws extended out to attack him, but he simply dashed out of her way. When she reached for a gun secured in the side of her black leather holster, Enttu met her cheek with the steel toe of his combat boot, and he knocked out a bloodied fang from her mouth. She went flying back again, landing on top of the sacramental podium, and cursed out loud in rage.

  The black-haired vampire sneered at the blonde male, with a fang-bearing grin, and the black light of the portal contouring him severely. Enttu squinted at Narciso fiercely, ready to release the desire for vengeance in his blood. His heart pounded loudly, and his breaths were sharp and trembling from the flow of adrenaline in his veins. The vampire before him did nothing but stand arrogantly, lighting a cigarette. With a knife-hand motion, he ordered the cloaked men and women to attack the dhampir and do his dirty work for him. He moved too fast for the vampires in a black blur, and lunged towards, Narciso, grasping him by his throat and sinking his long black nails into his veins, but he mockingly cackled through the searing pain.

  “Stupid half-breed!” Narciso spat in his face. He produced a wooden stake and drove it right through Enttu’s left side of his chest, too quickly for the dhampir to catch on to his next move, and as he doubled over in cascading waves of pain, Narciso kicked him up in the air. He landed in the middle of the cathedral, onto the red carpet that soon wet with his spilling blood from his sucking chest wound. He was so disoriented from the loss of blood, that he barely saw the four vampires that came to finish him off through blurred vision. Much to Narciso’s dismay, he had missed the dhampir’s heart by a millimeter, and the other rose to his feet and disappeared.

  All four of the vampires came charging at lig
ht speed but were soon greeted with a dagger hacks and slashes, and the sole of combat boots. The first pair of a man and woman were killed immediately. Being full-blooded vampires, they had more disadvantage in battle, as they were weaker. One by one, their throats were slit and one of the men was cleanly sliced in half, lengthwise, and his spine was ripped out and thrown aggressively on the ground. Blood sprayed the carpet and the wooden polished floor, leaving shiny, crimson pools that smelt of copper.

  Enttu relished in victory, licking the blood from his fist, watching the mutilated and spineless bodies twitching on the ground. The crazy bastard pulled the bloody stake out of his chest to use as another weapon for the next enemies. The second pair of a man and woman seized the dhampir by his arms and slammed him down hard to the floor and pinned him by his arms. The woman managed to bite him and take some blood from his wrist, and he growled in pain as her fangs sank into his carpal tendons. He was able to sit up to have enough leverage to stake her through her eye. She sprayed his shirt, and screamed through her fangs, before he sent her flying across the other side of the cathedral, where she impaled herself on a metal cross of a statue of Jesus, covering the sculpture in dripping blood.

  The other man who still had him by one arm yanked his head back in a whiplash, by pulling his platinum hair hard enough to almost rip it out. His fangs just barely pierced the flesh of his throat, when three consecutive booms of gunshots permeated the scene, and penetrated the body of the vampire from the back. The undead creature collapsed on top of Enttu, but he immediately rolled the robed man on his back, relieved when he saw Vittorio standing mightily in front of him, with a silver revolver in each gloved hand. All four of the vampires were now dead, except for Narciso and the girl.

  “She’s got Marc!” Vittorio yelled, pointing toward the air, where the girl hovered, while grasping Marc from behind, with the crystal pressed to his throat.