She hissed through her fangs, angered at a flailing Marc who fought for his life.
Regina showed up right behind Vittorio, panting, with a gun in her hand. The cathedral reeked of blood, which really worked up her hunger. The state of emergency was quickly perceived from the stance of attack of a bloodied Enttu and Vittorio looking ahead. She immediately noticed the skinny little blonde bitch from the theatre holding Marc hostage in the air. With gravel in her voice, she went flying towards the girl, ready to greet her with mortal violence.
The blonde female dodged Regina’s gunshots as she opened fire on her, and reappeared behind her, snickering in mockery.
“And who the fuck are you supposed to be? Some cheap copy of his former whore?” she cackled, “I wouldn’t move, or he dies,”
“Take off your mask, you ugly bitch,” Regina replied.
“Ha! Says the cheap copy!”
The two female vampires engaged in a cat and mouse hunt throughout the second level of the cathedral, as crowds of the roisterous undead partygoers poured in to watch the melee. It was a dance of illumination by lightning bolts crashing with black energy. Marc was dropped next to the rear balcony, and he landed comatose onto his side, bones and skin crashing onto a marble floor. Enttu tackled Narciso to the ground, and Vittorio held a gun the Dragul clan leader’s head.
“What kind of fucking operation are you running here, DRACULA!” the dhampir scolded him.
Narciso sneered in resignation as a dagger was pressed into his throat.
“You know, Enttu, or Alucard, whichever you prefer, I wish we could have had a more peaceful family reunion. Why must you always have to be so violent?”
“You betrayed the truce between the covens. And now you are trying to resurrect a demon, for what reason? For your own hedonistic pursuits, instead of worrying about the innocents you’ve harmed?”
“I don’t see why you desire so much for vengeance. After all, we are family, whether you want to accept it or not, we the Tepes clan, we’re all damned for eternity. What say that you put down your weapons and join forced with me, maybe we can start a revolution. You know that humans don’t love us, they don’t want us to belong,”
“You are gravely mistaken, Narciso. We share a name, but we will never be family. And if you think I will allow you to keep hurting humanity, you are wrong. You have no idea what you are invoking when you meddle with the Lower Astral planes. You’re being used by Basilisk!”
Narciso shoved Vittorio’s weapon out of the way, and he tossed the dhampir off him, the other one breaking his crash with the momentum of his hovering. The vampire hovered to his level.
“Ha! Leave it to a stupid little half-breed to sympathize with humans. Dare I say, that you surpass the stupidity of your father, Nicolae. I don’t know why your father ever thought mingling with humans was some sort of epiphany. You dhampir folk are some self-righteous idiots. You’ve killed humans as well, Enttu. Was it not you who mindlessly slayed all those Nazi soldiers before they received a proper trial at Nuremberg? Was it not you who murdered and mutilated the bodies of all of the drug and human traffickers at the start of the 21st century?”
“Narciso, repeat that last sentence very slowly. I have never killed innocents like you have,”
“Get off your high horse and stop denying that you are a damned creature of the night. Peace with humans is never going to happen, and unless we help to reduce the population on Earth by feeding them to keep the Lower Planes at bay, Earth will be destroyed again,”
“You believe everything Basilisk tells you?”
“Listen Enttu, you are damned no matter who’s side you take. And you will die a damned man, rebuked by both covens, hated by your own daughter!”
The dhampir rose to his feet and slowly walked towards Narciso, knife in hand.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“Best of luck on your great misfortune!” Narciso dismissed himself.
He then jumped inside the portal, and it shrunk down to the size of a pinhead before the dhampir was able to seize him.
“Fuck!” he shouted out loud, almost in defeat.
Up above, Regina was soon becoming exhausted from the standoff, but still had one last trick up her sleeve that no one expected. From the time she had gotten to her first command, up until the time she left the ship, she always carried a small flashlight with her that her chief had given her upon arrival. It just happened to be a UV lamp, and she just so happened to keep in the pocket of her duster. She took it out and turned in on to its full luminosity, which spanned a sizeable range for being so small, and the blonde female retreated, hissing in pain from the burning lamp. Regina chased her down the second level, near the platform where Marc was left to wallow in agony, and all the vampire crowd scattered so they wouldn’t be hit with the light.
By her side, Vittorio with his machine gun, and Enttu with fire in his palms appeared, as a trio against a sinewy undead mob. The blonde female hissed and crouched to her knees in pain, as she seared under the violet light that grilled her skin from white alabaster to bubbling pustules bursting with pinkish plasma and pus. The mask was beginning to stick to the second-degree burns forming on her face from her melting skin, and the side of her lips burned off, fully exposing her fangs and gums. The disconcerted mob of the vampire audience fast approached them, but Regina waved the light towards them to keep them back. In the split second she removed the light away from the girl, she removed her mask, threw it over the balcony, and rose to her feet, her eyes glowing red with teeming desire for carnage.
Immediately, Enttu felt the synchronizing psychic pull from his solar plexus and third eye chakras as he finally saw her face underneath the mask. He stepped forward, squinting, trying to get a better look and deciphering whether his eyes deceived him or not. She bore an uncanny resemblance to him, only with features more feminine and petite, even in the same way her eyebrows arched down.
“It can’t be,” he muttered loudly enough for his friends to hear him.
A woman with long red wavy hair appeared right behind the girl to scold her.
“Aurelia, what are you doing? Drink his blood and kill them all!” the red-head ordered the blonde female.
Aurelia. Vanya Aurelia Tepes.
“What have they done to my daughter?!” Enttu hissed, through protruding fangs and electric blue eyes.
He lunged forward to unleash his fury upon the vampire crowd, and his group followed him forward. Vittorio opened fire on the party goers, and they scattered like roaches to the first level. The redheaded woman tried to impale the dhampir with a poker, but he grabbed her by her neck, and he bashed her face into the concrete of the wall, rendering her unconscious. He then ran back to recover Marc, but by then he vanished again, only to reappear in the air when waving fabric caught his attention out of his peripheral. Enttu stared in defeat at the tragedy unfolding before him, as Vanya sunk her fangs into Marc’s neck and bled him dry of his remaining blood. She stared back with pure evil lurking in her pupils, taking delight in the bewildered reactions of her biological dhampir father. When she was done, she smiled through dirty, blood-covered fangs, and some of it dribbled down her chin in viscid strands. As if this wasn’t enough, she still pried Marc’s head apart from his shoulders, and his throat split open as if it was ripping along a seam of tissue and muscle.
His body dropped down to the main floor of the cathedral and the last dregs of blood spilt out of the hole where his neck would be. Vanya Aurelia dangled Marc’s severed head by his hair from her hand, and she tossed it at Enttu as if it was a football. His eyes twitched in disbelief, unable to fathom that his own flesh and blood, that was long lost and even thought dead, could have transformed into someone so baneful. This young girl that was the product of his and Nayeru’s love, that they had both nurtured and raised, had become something so detestable, it made Enttu’s blood boil over.
> She vanished into nothingness as her father unleashed an inferno of fire towards her, fueled by newfound hatred and reopened emotional wounds. Was this possibly some sort of mind control? Had Narciso used Vanya to lure Enttu in, to kill him off once and for all? Vampires and dhampirs were mortal enemies, and Vanya had become exactly that, when she was taken by Narciso and molded to his liking to treat human life like a sport. Down below, the vampires were closing in on Regina and Vittorio, and he came to their aide, jumping in between them, and launching throwing knives from inside his coat, that drove cleanly through necks and causing a few vampires to drop dead. This gave Vittorio time to reload, and Enttu went to steal the rifles off two of the fallen enemies, and he tossed one to Regina, who caught it gracefully between her delicate whitened palms. She smiled bleakly at him with gratitude.
“You’ve fired a rifle before?”
“I’m ex-military,” she protested offensively.
His ears twitched as they picked up distant, approaching footsteps, and the flutter of what sounded like giant, flapping wings. He stood up and motioned for his team to step back to the next threat. Shadows heavily contoured the hollow underneath his exquisitely sculpted cheekbones, enhancing his exotic yet deathly beauty. The insides of the cathedral were eerily silent, a calm before a storm, and the lighting here was of an electric, dim yellow from the aged overhead lighting, which made the place look run down.
“Guys, lock and load,” Enttu commanded in his signature diplomatic tone he took when he delegated tasks. He defined a benevolent, but hard-charging leader most of the time, but his emotional distress could be heard from the gravel in his throat.
The trio formed a circle, and racked their weapons, holding the butt stocks of the weapons pressed against their collar, with fingers on triggers, aimed towards the empty space, in anticipation.
“On my count…….”
A moment of silence. It was so still, they all heard each other’s hearts beating. The electrical power cut out abruptly, leaving them perplexed in the befallen dark.
“FIRE!”
In the blink of an eye, the darkness was illuminated by the peppering of bullets fired into the bodies of men and women who launched themselves towards the group from all directions. The trio moved the muzzles of their rifles in a horizontal direction, to ensure that all the enemy ground was covered. When the ambush of vampires saw a flash of yellow flying sparks of the bullets in the air, it was already too late for them. Most of them were weaker than a dhampir, and fell dead upon gunshots, bodies stacked on top of bodies.
Regina felt a wave of increasing stress transforming into fields of current in her wrists, as they vibrated back and forth from the bullets leaving the weapon she was firing. The loud boom as they left the chamber was deafening and permeated the air with the smoke of spent ammunition. Enttu crouched down next to her to reload a clip into his rifle. He bent one knee and with the butt stock placed against his collarbone, continued to fire at the crowd of the undead roisterers, who had widely dispersed and were retreating towards the side flanks of stairs that led to the mezzanine turned night club. Something seemed shady about the sudden fall back.
They were left standing, confounded, and let down their guns at ease. Gun smoke filled the air, and gold casings of spent bullets decorated the ground along with droplets of blood that repainted the walls. Vittorio wiped away sweat with his palm, and he exchanged glances with the dhampir and his newly sired vampiress, as they questioned the sudden drawback.
Silently, Regina let her rifle fall to her side, and she stared straight ahead in tunnel vision, and walked forward, leaving Enttu and Vittorio behind her in silent consternation. The altar then lit up with a sudden onslaught of lightning bolts, and the ground beneath their feet trembled with rolling thunder, as Regina beat down on the formidable nemesis they hadn’t seen. The constant strobing effect of the electricity outlined the deformity of a shiny, black and rapid-moving muck that stunk of sewage and putrefaction. It towered as high as the mezzanine level where some remaining vampires were merely looking down at the group in trouble. The dhampir ran towards the monster and proceeded to empty all his rounds into the belly of the beast, only for the spent ammunition to be absorbed into its folds that flowed like pahoehoe. The current that Regina was sending into the monster illuminated all its insides and seemed to stun it for a short while. This thing could not be killed by their weapons. It was a creature of the Lower Astral Plane and had to be rid of by metaphysical means.
“Get back!” Enttu ordered her and motioned her to fall back, before he performed his spell of immolation.
He took on a visible blue glow around him, as he levitated up to face level with the beast who slid toward him and spawned small black bats to attack him. They were hacked and slashed away with his crystal dagger and burst into cherry red explosions of blood. Their tiny, halved cadavers made a dull thump when they hit the ground. He cast a circle above his head with his indexes, before chanting in English,
“Sekhmet! Sekhmet! Lend me your inferno! So, Mote It Be!”
From the circle he had cast above, a thick grey cloud appeared above him, and fluid-moving blue flames channeled into his arms and hands, into balls of energy. The creature was about to engulf him in a mouth full of jagged, razor-sharp and stained teeth. He sent the blue ball of energy into its gaping mouth, and it stopped in its tracks, forcefully swallowing the searing hot flames that burned on the way down its esophagus as if a coal was swallowed. It seemed to shrink in size, as it let out screeches of agony that sounded like nails on chalkboard. The dhampir stayed floating in the air right in front of it, the cape of his trench coat gracefully waving in ripples, and his boots dangling from below. Even in darkness, his tall, thin silhouette, accessorized by his billowing flaxen locks, preserved his gothic elegance.
Much to his liking, the beast began to dissolve away into a slow-forming black puddle of decay. It had almost consumed the creature entirely, only its head remaining, when without expectation, the beast bubbled up from the ground, and stretched itself back up, past the mezzanine of nosy vampires, and began to violently slam against the marble railing. Some of the vampires had stepped back, but two of them were knocked over the edge, and fell into the black muck that made the body. Horrifically, they began to smoke as if they had jumped into a vat of sulfuric acid and howled in excruciation as they were slowly absorbed into the creature. Vittorio called for Enttu to retreat and come back down, but he was too stricken with aversion to not look away.
“Hey! Come on, it’s not going to work, we need to make a run for it!” his friend yelled below him.
He looked down and was about to tell him to go ahead and go without him, when a discordant blast that caused black slime to spray everywhere from the impact startled the wits out of him. His supernatural hearing helped him react faster than the next oncoming rocket he heard fire off, and he scooped Vittorio out of death’s way, both narrowly being missed by whomever had fired off an RPG. Regina had seen it, and she flew up into the air when she felt the heat of the missile.
The grenade blew up the entire first three rows of pews, and set ablaze the forward left corridor, and shattered glass-stain windows, and a piece of the wall, leaving it exposed to the outside rainfall. They ran, both half-carrying Vittorio out with them, who ran slower than they did, due to his human state. They barely made it past the threshold just in time before another grenade was launched at them. It missed them terribly, and hit the upper portion of the entrance dome, blowing out all the glass artwork and destroying the Baroque frescos in instant immolation. The grenade blew a hole in the dome, letting rain fall through the hole, and the piece of the building had landed at the corner of the street block, almost hitting a passing car.
Vittorio started the car he left parked across the street, and Enttu sat shotgun, while Regina sat on top of the car, underneath the frigid rain. The legion of roisterous vampires, the ones who remained, poured o
ut of the building like roaches. Vittorio’s undead friend instructed him to floor it, and the car peeled out aggressively, with the Regina squatted on top of the sunroof, with a rifle aimed towards the cathedral. Vittorio rolled down his window to maintain communications. The rain still fell heavily, and in no time, thick wet strands stuck to the back of her neck, and danced off the tip of her nose, adding discomfort to her sudden craving for blood again. She bit her lower lip gently, and suckled on the teasing dreg of salty, iron-rich blood. The taste would hold her off for a short while.
Inside the car, Vittorio had turned on the Bluetooth radio, and played classic rock loudly, “Wild Side” by Motley Crue. Courteous enough, Enttu tossed Regina a blood pack to feed from, and she tore the top lip of the plastic package open, and let the cold metallic fluid revitalize her dry mouth and pruning internal organs. She was delicate to let most of the blood fall into her mouth from the opened slit and wiped off the excess mess the corner of her mouth with the back of her palm. Vittorio almost wanted to gag at the sight and smell of his companions refueling with the organic red bodily fluid. The car stunk of iron, copper, and the sickly sweet after-odor that stung his throat.
The Subaru WRX had been on the empty freeway for a good ten minutes or so, without disturbance, when a black SUV that looked out of place approached from the oncoming lane. Regina looked over her shoulder, and noticed the shady vehicle, that seemed to be slowing down when they were about to cross. The rear tinted windows of the SUV were slightly cracked ajar, to allow for air to circulate. She got a closer look by mentally switching on her auric vision at will and saw inside the outlines of whom seemed to look a lot like the mayor of the city sitting in the back, downing a shot of clear brown liquor.
He was sitting next to some individuals with a bluish-green body scanning, indicating they were most likely cold blooded. When she focused more, she could see that they mayor was sitting between none other than two Dragul vampires, and the car was loaded with an arsenal. The sun roof of the SUV, a black Tahoe, opened, and an older vampire male wearing a brown flapper jacket, popped right up, with an RPG in hand, aimed towards the WRX. Enttu had seen them clearly, just as well, and he acted.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 39