by Aiden James
It doesn’t happen often, but in the midst of my moments of deepest despair, miracles sometimes emerge. I didn’t expect one to take place this time, and had already prepared myself for a forlorn existence until the end of the ages. But, a minor miracle did happen, in the form of sudden inspiration. I clung to a glimmer of hope.
“I have a stash of these crystals that could last you and the rest of your vampires for several centuries!” I announced, though believing I was too late to save Beatrice. I would honor her memory and live out my days as determined by God. “But harm a single hair on her head and you will never know about it!”
There, I said my peace. Time to begin grieving over the loss of the only woman I’ve thoroughly loved. I couldn’t bear to watch her die and closed my eyes, until a powerful grip pulled me up into the air. I faced Beatrice once more.
“I will hear your tale of these other crystals, William Barrow, and we shall adjourn to my throne room within the hour,” advised Dracul, somehow balancing his hold on my shirt with the torch that came close enough to my face to singe my whiskers. “But, make no mistake. If I find you are lying, and there is no such place, you will wish I had simply drained your wife as I intended just now. Am I clear?”
“Yes,” I replied, confidently. In truth, I had not lied to him. There was a treasure trove of such life-enhancing crystals. Only trouble was, he would need an industrial digging device and Iran’s blessing to get to it.
The crystals were buried in the Alborz Mountains, and far, far away from Dracul’s castle in Montenegro.
If only it was far enough.
Chapter Fourteen
The air was colder than expected. Then again, everything else seemed different from Roderick’s and my previous visit to Dracul’s throne room. Only the pewless sanctuary and the same towering stained glass windows in dark hues along either side of the immense hall seemed unchanged.
The stage surrounding the ostentatious throne chair was filled with spikes. Most were of the traditional wooden or iron variety that Vlad had favored during his storied mortal lifetime. All but five, and these appeared to be made of solid gold.
“It appears you and I have been added to the previously privileged few,” quipped Roderick.
He and I were flanked by a dozen menacing vampire youths dressed in full black attire. Alistair and Amy walked ahead of us, looking anxiously back at Roderick and me, as if begging for some sort of miracle to come forth from the pair of ancient immortals who had rescued them before. A trio of gunmen escorted them, carrying assault rifles trained on their heads. As for Beatrice, Dracul had yet to release his deadly grip on her neck. He carried her like a chicken about to be strangled for supper, and he marched with regal resolve into the immense room. I died moment by moment; terrified his careless approach might break her tender neck at any instant.
He climbed the steps and approached his throne with continued resolute strides. It heightened my worry that he might’ve changed his mind about my proposition, and decided instead to impale Beatrice on the closest spike.
“And, perhaps I will, Judas,” he said, without turning around to face me. He seemed to be looking for the perfect size to use for just such a purpose among the shaved wooden poles near his throne. “Should we conduct our conversation with your clandestine thoughts and my broadcasting your foolishness for everyone gathered here?”
Roderick shot me an imploring look to be prudent with my silent musings. I shook my head in response. I had little chance of avoiding Dracul’s probing tentacles.
“So, tell me exactly where these crystals are?” Vlad demanded, taking his seat on the throne after throwing my wife down in front of it. He held her fast beneath his booted heel. “Tell me, or I’ll slit open your wife’s carotid artery to where it will pour out her life force in under a minute.”
“You’ve already said that you’re planning to do it anyway,” I said, scarcely able to remain calm. Beatrice had landed with a crunching thud, but had the presence of mind to cast me a look that said she was okay. Had this event taken place as recently as two months ago, several bones would have surely snapped from her osteopenia still present until she regressed to her early forties, physically. “Beatrice and my son, as well as his fiancée, Amy, need to be completely removed from harm’s way. Otherwise, there is no deal.”
“How dare you defy me!” he roared, rising from his throne in anger. I thought for sure he would crush Beatrice’s head with the heel of his boot. Instead, he moved to the row of spikes nearest the edge of the stage. “Time for some fun. How about a demonstration of seriousness? I believe I’ve got just the thing to inspire your memory of what I’m like!”
He raised his hands above his head and clapped them twice. At first, only the fluttering sound of vampires disappearing from our presence could be heard. Then the sound of a young man screaming in terror reverberated throughout the cathedral.
“No, no…please no!” the man begged, in English, as a pair of female vampires dragged him through the air to the stage. A tinge of Brooklyn in the accent, this likely was a kid who had been on some sort of holiday excursion to Europe. Perhaps it was a trip given as a graduation present to travel across the entire continent while enjoying the ultimate freedom of youth. And yet, sadly in the end, he fell prey to Dracul’s henchmen on the lookout for fresh, young, and especially, naïve meat. “I’ll do anything for you! Please don’t kill me!”
The kid’s pleas were cut off sharply by Dracul reaching inside his cloak and pulling out what looked like a steel hunting trap. He shoved it into the boy’s mouth and secured it over his lips. Twin rivers of blood flowed down the sides of his jaw, and I believe all of us held captive cringed at the muffled shrieks, while tears poured down the poor lad’s cheeks.
It could’ve been anyone’s kid, including mine. Alistair no longer looked any older than twenty-one, and in no way could I bear to watch his demise. I turned away as Dracul lifted his terrified victim off the ground.
“I hate it when my dinner won’t keep quiet!”
Dracul followed his twisted attempt at humor with a hearty laugh, and his brood of dark disciples in attendance chuckled along with him, like a modern congregation enjoying a good joke from their pastor. His victim squirmed, desperately trying to escape, but his hands and feet were bound. It was hopelessness that soon became a gruesome spectacle.
When he grew tired of the young man’s pitiful behavior, he brought him over to the closest wooden stake to his intended audience—namely the four of us on the floor—and shoved the body on top of it, piercing the shrieking kid’s blue jeans as the sharpened pole traveled up his intestines. However, due to the fiend’s anxiousness to impress his message upon me, Dracul was careless and the spike’s bloodied end soon protruded just beneath his victim’s sternum.
“Ah, hell,” he said, wearing an irritated grimace, as if he had just missed a putt that cost him a birdie. “Well, if at first you don’t succeed….” He ripped the body off the spike and raised it high above his head. Keep in mind, the young man was still very much alive and enduring a level of agony very few can truly appreciate. “Try, try again!”
Certainly, those of you still with me can unfortunately picture what happened next. Thankfully, Dracul’s anger and incredible strength ended his victim’s life quickly, as the second impalement went perfectly, terminating with the spike ripping through his head and sending a shower of blood and gore in every direction. I expected the cruelest human being I had ever encountered, until Viktor Kaslow came along, to writhe in ecstasy while bathing in the life force that has aided his unholy reign on earth for more than half a millennium. But he didn’t.
“That, Judas, was just an appetizer,” he said, motioning for the pair of his protégées to take the corpse off the skewer and the stage. They gladly obliged, and seemed barely able to control the urge to consume the violated corpse before exiting the cathedral. “But, I must admit to a growing hunger for something new. Hmmm? …I believe I’m in the mood for something swe
et and sassy next!”
Of course, like a fool, I thought he meant Beatrice, since she was getting younger by the day. Despite her duress over the past twenty-four hours, her overall regression continued and had taken her into her late thirties, physically. I figured it would take a few days before the rejuvenating effect of the Tree of Life crystals would begin to wane.
But Alistair knew what Dracul intended. He reached protectively for Amy, until a pair of male vampires threw him aside effortlessly when Dracul nodded in her direction.
“Pops, tell him where the crystals are!” pleaded Alistair.
“I can’t, Ali,” I told him, eyeing him sternly. “There’s far too much at stake for everyone.”
I hated myself at that moment. Surely, he had no idea this was killing me. But my gut told me two things, and the first was to avoid picturing Iran’s Garden of Eden in my mind at all costs. The second was to trust Dracul not to seriously harm Amy. The demon had tortured me several times during the sixteenth century, and although I lost my life twice in the most excruciating executions concocted at the time, I had revealed nothing to him. The only concession I had made was to offer my life for Roderick. But no sworn secrets escaped my lips. Had that happened, Roderick would have been summarily executed. The same deal could happen now, as my secret was our only bargaining chip.
Amy shrieked in terrible fear as two more vampires dragged her kicking and screaming to where Dracul waited. He took her trembling body in his arms and turned her toward the three of us. I could feel his mind’s slimy probes searching for an access point inside my head, and I worried about what he might discover inside Alistair’s head. Critical to keep him out this time, there was far too much at stake for us all. I dared not make things worse by being an easy mark.
Dracul pulled back Amy’s head to fully expose her neck.
“How will Alistair survive without his bride to be?”
“Probably not at all,” I said, calmly as possible, and determined not to fall for any of his trickery or sidetrack dribble. “I would imagine, he might make it an hour or two before you’re ready for a midnight snack!”
“Perhaps the question is better posed to Alistair,” he said, coolly. He yanked on Amy’s hair, garnering a yelp from her as he pulled her head back further. “Is this how you want your beloved to remember your chivalry?”
“Pops, please…owww!”
I slugged him in the gut, hard enough to bring him to his knees. His eyes had already welled with tears, and now they flowed freely down his cheeks. No doubt, he felt completely betrayed. But if he had looked over at Roderick, he might’ve seen confirmation in the druid’s stoic expression that I had a valid reason for my unexpected attack upon him.
Since the conversation had started about the life-giving crystals, I had fought to keep my thoughts in check, focusing as I had earlier that day on everything from Snow White to Dudley Do-Right. No way in hell could we afford for Dracul to pick up on our Iran excursion, since our last flimsy negotiating piece would be gone forever.
So many factors were involved to make this work. It was no different than a row of dominoes falling into place. Just one mishap and we’d be screwed, undeniably and completely. It meant the only other two living human beings present would have to remain mum about Petr Stanislovsky’s operation in the Alborz mountains a few years back.
Amy seemed far too frightened to think clearly, although her mind was among the sharpest I had ever known. Yet, because of the near-rape she had endured at the hands of Viktor Kaslow’s staff, she had never broached the subject since then—at least not in my presence. And because she had reached the fullness of her crystal-inspired youth two years ago, I was betting all of these factors would keep her knowledge out of the forefront of her mind.
That left Alistair. It killed me to sucker punch my son in the gut. His heartbroken look was not unlike my Lord’s saddened expression two thousand years earlier, when I handed Him over to Caiaphas. But Alistair was about to crack at any moment, and it would only take a few seconds of him lamenting about my refusal to divulge the home of the Tree of Life for Dracul to pick up the general location. Excruciating torture would take care of the finer details he still needed.
“Fine parenting skills, Judas. It must be the Emmanuel still in you. I must say, it harkens to my own father.”
“I could never be anywhere as worthless as the piece of shit Vlad the Second was,” I retorted, drawing a deeper look of hatred from him. “The apple certainly doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
In an instant, he flew to where I stood, Amy’s limp body still in his grasp.
“Perhaps we should let The Almighty decide who’s crime is worse!” he sneered in my face. The hundreds of small spider veins in his face from the spell that fused his head back onto his spine five hundred years ago seemed alive, pulsing as he shook from intense rage. “How I would love to skin you alive once more, you cowardly curr!”
His grip tightened around Amy’s head, as if he intended to crush her skull or snap it cleanly from her neck. The mention of Dracul’s father seemed to especially upset him.
“Perhaps you’ll get that pleasure again, at some point,” I replied, smugly, while glancing beyond him at Beatrice, who had managed to sit up in front of Dracul’s throne. She seemed to be recovering—a very good development for my plan to work. “But, you really should try to manage your anger issues, Vlad. If you harm Amy, you’ll end up angering Alistair and then you’ll have to kill him. That in turn would devastate my wife, and…well you know how this thing could spiral out of control. After you’ve killed those I cherish most, you’ll be relegated to permanent darkness, since you could never torture the location of the crystal treasure trove from me—ever!”
The fire in his eyes brightened. Certainly, he considered ending my William Barrow lifetime right then. In the very least, I expected him to deliver a death sentence to one of us. My racing heart felt as if it would burst through my ribcage while awaiting the verdict.
“Very well. I’ll send them off,” he said, finally. “However, Roderick will remain here, in bonds. If you disappoint me in any way, I will skewer him to where his balls come up through his throat. Do not misunderstand my intention to go through completely the next time.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“Yes.”
Relieved my family was spared for now, only time would tell if we truly survived Dracul’s designs. Much was riding on what the vampire and I discussed next, as well as the trustworthiness of his word.
Chapter Fifteen
Saying goodbye to my loved ones was hard…far more difficult than I had anticipated.
I expected Alistair to react angrily in regard to my unannounced attack, and I wanted desperately to tell him why it happened. But the effort to keep the Looney Tunes chorus line going in my head made it near impossible to give him so much as a subtle clue. Still, the loving bond we had spent the past thirty years forging overrode the most recent unpleasantness.
“Be careful, Pops,” he whispered, as I hugged him tightly. We stood just inside the cathedral’s entrance. “Don’t do anything stupid!”
“Oh? As if being here isn’t foolish enough?”
I thought he might laugh, as he often did in response to my caustic sense of humor. He wept instead.
“There, there, son, we will be together again,” I assured him, holding him tighter. “Take care of Amy and your mom.”
He cried harder, and I reluctantly pulled away when my family’s human escorts tapped on our shoulders.
“Just give me a moment with my girls, please,” I beseeched Arso, who regarded me with much more contempt than earlier. Being bested as badly as Roderick and I had done to him and his buddies apparently sat quite poorly. “I’ll be quick.”
He begrudgingly relented, and most likely stepped aside only because he could tell I was set to bowl him over. Landing hard on his ass would surely mean more teasing by his thug cohorts and possibly something far worse at the hands of hi
s undead companions.
I stepped up to Amy, who resisted my gesture to embrace her. An understandable response considering I had assaulted her beau, and had done little to dispel the fact I very nearly let her meet a horrific demise at the fangs of our vampire host.
“One day, when this is completely over, you and I will need to have a chat about the illusory events that infiltrate our lives far more frequently than realized,” I told her, drawing a quizzical look. “There is much to me that you scarcely understand. But, what I want you to know, my dear, is this: You are the best thing that’s ever happened to my boy. If I should perish, Amy, I will do so knowing Ali’s in very good hands.”
She nodded thoughtfully, and offered a wan smile before looking away. As expected, when another henchmen tugged on her arm she offered little resistance.
“Wait! Wait!” I implored the one named Gajo, who grabbed Beatrice to move her out of the grand hall. “Let me speak to my wife one last time!”
At first he ignored me, yanking her through the immense granite doorway separating the hall from the darkened corridor beyond the threshold. But then he turned back, squinting his gray eyes while listening to an inaudible voice that took me a moment to realize came from a tiny amplifier in his left ear. Beatrice ran to me, throwing her arms around my shoulders.
“Oh William! Please be careful, my love.” Her voice cracked and I thought she would cry, too. It took every ounce of fortitude to keep from weeping myself. “I can’t, I won’t lose you again!”
“You won’t lose me, ever!” I promised, gently kissing her neck before pulling her gaze to meet mine. “I am yours forever, Beatrice.”
I held her as tightly as I could, knowing either Dracul’s thugs or a sullen member of his vampire brood would soon loosen my grip. When we were pulled away from each other, we were sobbing, and I could almost hear Beatrice’s heart crumble into irretrievable pieces. My heart began to disintegrate, as well. I couldn’t help thinking I’d never see her again. For that matter, watching all three disappear into the corridor’s thick darkness bore such finality I almost ran out to stop them. Almost, that is, until Dracul’s voice rumbled from his garish throne of skulls.