by Aiden James
As they flew at me one after another, I whirled around with the coin in front of me, ignoring the bombardment of Christ’s suffering and hoping the coin’s talisman qualities against Dracul’s powers would prevail against his offspring. It took a moment to confirm it helped at all, especially when one male vampire delivered a blow that sent me flying back twenty feet. But as I quickly got back to my feet and resumed my ballerina act, the attacks lessened until finally they stopped altogether. I watched in amazement as the entire brood retreated to the shadows, leaving behind several dark lumps on the floor that I soon understood were once their brothers or sisters that had succumbed to the coin’s mysterious power.
“Would you like to go next?” I said to Dracul, swiftly approaching the stage when I saw he had not yet murdered Roderick. “You might look better with a little more red, don’t you think?”
“Don’t come any closer, Judas! STOP or I WILL butcher him!”
He was desperate. Everything from the wild look in his eyes to the tentative hold he had on his dagger, that was ready to filet Roderick’s flesh, said so.
“Okay…I’ll stay right where I am.” I lowered my voice, relying on the de-escalation training I had gone through with Cedric Tomlinson several years ago. It was a fairly new thing with the CIA at the time, and I prayed it proved helpful now. “You know…we can make the same deal I offered when you had the upper hand, when the coin was still loyal to you.”
“What pitiful deal is that?!” he hissed.
“I’ll reveal the home of the crystals, which can give you what you crave most, Vlad,” I said, remaining calm in my delivery. “You will no longer be restricted to the night, and can finally mingle with civilization in daylight.”
For a moment, he appeared to seriously consider my offer. Maybe if Roderick hadn’t awakened and appeared as startled as he did, this story would’ve taken a different turn, one that engendered a compromise acceptable to all involved. But the look of horror on my druid friend’s face when he saw his anus was less than six inches away from a gleaming spike of gold seemed to resuscitate the evil that would always be a permanent aspect of Vlad Tepes.
“I don’t need your useless charity any more than I need your accursed coin!” He crowed, holding Roderick with one hand while raising him slightly. The impaling was about to commence.
“NO! Please, don’t do it, Vlad!” I pleaded, unable to control the panic in my voice. “Let me take his place—I beg you!”
“Say goodbye to Roderick, Judas, or Emmanuel, William, or whoever else you pretend to be!”
I rushed the stage, but I couldn’t get there quickly enough. Just before he dropped Roderick on top of the spike prepared for him, Roderick screamed for Dracul to remove the taped gag from his mouth. To my surprise, he relented.
“Oh? So the whimpering Brit wants to give us his last words, eh?” He removed the tape and Roderick spit out the gag. “Speak to us in the eloquence you once reserved for me in Madrid, old friend. Do you recall how it was? Hmmmm?”
Roderick said nothing, merely glaring at Dracul while his body shook with as much rage as the vampire had expressed earlier.
“Cat got your tongue?” taunted Dracul. “Ahhh…that’s too bad. Well, since we don’t allow eulogies here in my house of pain, I’ll tell you what I can offer. I would very much like to set the record straight about what a coward you’ve always been. Eh? You do recall how your friend Emmanuel here saved you twice, and if I had known he would show up again in the same lifetime, I would have refused his offer to exchange his life for yours and executed you on the spot. I’m fairly certain you lack the ability to come back from death like your friend…no? The look in your eyes tells me this is correct.”
“Vlad, you don’t need to do this!“
“Oh, but on the contrary, Judas, I believe I do need to do this! It is absolutely necessary to set the record straight, since you two imbeciles have roamed the world scot-free, as they say, for the past four centuries, while I’ve been forced to watch and wait from afar.” He held up a hand in warning when I crept up the steps leading to the stage. “The Americans might see you as some kind of hero, Roderick, with all you supposedly did to help build that corrupt nation from the start. But after you’re dead, I will personally deliver excerpts from the diaries I kept during your two imprisonments in 1515 to 1518, and 1556 to 1569…. I see you don’t want me to share the things I made you do, deeds I bet not even Judas knows about.”
Roderick shook his head vehemently, and when fresh tears formed in his eyes, I realized this was not just an idle accusation. Something did happen…something terrible enough to shame him to the point he had never shared any of this with me. In fairness, back in those terrible days we were held in separate cells roughly two hundred feet apart during the first incarceration. And for the second one, I didn’t make it back to Spain after the Inquisition had me drawn and quartered, until 1574. By then, Roderick had already arrived in what would later become New York.
Roderick opened his mouth to say something, but only a whisper came out.
“What? You want me to come closer, so you can utter your last words to me in private?” Dracul laughed, and as he did, the crimson blood vessels expanded further. “All right, tell me what you want to say. When you finish, I will bathe myself in your blood!”
Roderick nodded subtly, as if resigned to his fate. Dracul pulled him close, and as Roderick opened his mouth, the deadliest vampire I’ve ever known prepared to receive the blood rush soon to follow Roderick’s impalement. But as soon as he brought his ear close to my buddy’s mouth, Roderick let out the primal shriek first heard in Bolivia last November.
Startled, Dracul let go of Roderick, and I cringed in horror when he fell upon the razor-sharp golden spike. I looked away, unable to bear watching Roderick’s body writhe as the spike worked its way up his ass and ripped through his intestines and abdominal organs. I wasn’t prepared for the thud of his body landing on the stage, but my heart filled with incredible joy to realize he had survived nearly intact. His only injury was a pierced left buttock. At least that’s how things appeared from where I presently stood, near Dracul’s throne.
He squirmed between the stakes to escape Dracul, who had ripped one of the iron stakes up from the stage floor and tried to stab Roderick with it. Of course, I was already on the way to help Roderick fend him off.
Meanwhile, the reverberations from Roderick’s yell gained strength, bouncing loudly from wall to wall. The dark glassed cathedral windows began to crack, and to Vlad’s unexpected horror, the windows shattered. Rays of sunlight poured into the castle, as the sun had risen just above the eastern horizon.
Vampires ignited all around us, including Dracul. Only a few youngsters made it to the deeper shadows in the far corner of the cathedral, beneath an awning that prevented the sun’s rays from reaching them. The rest of the vamps exploded into fiery cinders drifting in the air around us.
“God damn you, Judas and YOU, fucking druid!” Dracul shrieked. The flames had been contained to his legs and arms, but now spread up his torso, chest and back. He howled in agony, and it appeared he had one last, disparaging remark to say. But the flames ignited his face, until all at once his head exploded.
I sheltered Roderick from the spray of gore, until Dracul’s headless body fell over as a burning heap among the spikes. I stood cautiously and sought to help Roderick stand, as well.
“How bad are you hurt?” I asked him, while the remaining glass shards from the windows and what must have been UV filtering skylights fell around us. “Can you stand and move with my help?”
“I think so,” he said, hoarsely. “Thank God you found your coin. Otherwise….”
“I couldn’t have done it without your help, as you know.” I said, helping him to his feet. His clothes were missing, other than ripped trousers lying nearby. I gathered them for him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The stench of burning flesh hastened our departure, and once he was dressed in his
ragged pants, we made our way to the cathedral’s exit. Roderick draped his left arm around my shoulder until he got his legs back. The healing had already started, but it would be mid-afternoon before he started to feel like himself again. At least he could travel. Whatever energy flow he had set in motion was now working through the main structure of the castle, and tremors shook the floor below our feet.
“Good idea,” he agreed. “We need to find the ladies and your boy.”
“I know. Any ideas on where to look?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “But if they’re in the castle, we won’t have long to find them. In fact, we need to leave now!” He left my side, limping at a near sprint until he reached the corridor, now bathed in daylight. “Come on, Judas, we need to get to the front of the castle before things change!”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” I ran after him.
“We need to hurry.”
“Yes, you said that.”
We stepped into the corridor. The entire structure suddenly began to shake, and deep fissures formed in the walls and ceiling. Huge pieces of granite and marble from the castle’s grand façade fell toward us as the ceiling crumbled.
“Run!”
Chapter Seventeen
Racing to beat the collapse of the colossal fortress quickly became a stressful affair. The fact neither of us had any clue as to where my family had been taken made it especially so.
“How do we get out of this frigging place?”
I posed the question to no one in particular, since it seemed likely Roderick didn’t know. At least the anxious look on his face indicated as much. Limping as fast as he could, he had chastised me twice already for slowing down to make sure he kept up.
“Let The Almighty determine if my time amongst the living should continue, or if this is where the game finally ends for me,” he said, in irritation, and seemingly poised to succumb to exhaustion at any moment. “If it is meant to be today, know that I will always cherish our long journey together, my brother.”
He laughed weakly, and dark blood had seeped in between his teeth from lacerations to his internal organs. If he could rest, he would recover…I was certain of it. But behind us, the castle’s deeper halls had moments ago collapsed into the sea. The rocky shore was also no longer visible, and sunlight danced on the surface of the deep blue water. If the same thing was happening to the rocky bluffs in front of the dark fortress, then worse trouble loomed ahead.
We had to get out of and off of whatever this thing was. For the first time, I wondered if Dracul had managed to create an illusion so real I never considered it could be otherwise.
“Yes, I’m curious about the same thing,” said Roderick, wearing a wan look of admiration for the wiles of our enemy, one that I prayed had been truly vanquished. “That’s why I’m suggesting you leave me here. This place will disappear very soon, maybe in a matter of ten to fifteen minutes. Save me, and you run the risk of not having enough time to locate Beatrice, Alistair, and Amy.”
“But what if they’re not here?” I wasn’t sure I believed any differently than him. Hell, they could’ve been anywhere at that point. I had no ‘feel’, one way or another, and my biggest fear was they were already dead. “What if he had them taken someplace far away, in case we managed to escape? It seems logical he’d put them far enough to where we couldn’t reach them in time to prevent their execution. Right?”
“All the more reason for you to get going,” he said, lying down on the floor that had begun to vibrate. In a minute the tremors we had eluded would find us. Dracul’s implements of torture had robbed Roderick of his stamina. “Goodbye, dear friend….”
“Roderick? …Roderick?! Damn it, man…wake up!”
But he wasn’t asleep. At least not in the clinical sense. His body was dying and his mind was shutting down. I could scarcely believe this was happening!
“Don’t you dare leave me!” I shouted at him.
Tremors in the floor grew worse and the familiar fissures spread rapidly through the granite walls surrounding us. The ceiling had already collapsed prior to our arrival in this section of the castle, and the fact we could still be crushed or swallowed up in whatever chasm waited below us heightened my anxiety. Forced to make a decision right then, I prayed it was the correct one.
Hoping I wouldn’t need my coin’s apparent power over any other vampires we might encounter, I shoved it into a pocket. Then I hoisted my buddy, who had become a dead weight, and threw him over my shoulder. He might be dying, and could become a stiffening corpse by the time we exited the castle, but for better or for worse he was coming along.
Running was no longer possible. I moved as quickly as I could, zigzagging to avoid new fissures extending to the floor from the walls, along with sudden granite and marble shards popping up around me. Hard to keep my balance. I thought of nothing else but reaching the large hall just inside the castle’s entrance. Since we crashed our motorcycles there, I hoped at least my bike remained drivable. Otherwise, it would take forever to reach Budva, where my instincts told me I’d find my family, either alive or dead.
Certainly, as I’m sure some would suggest, the risk existed they could be somewhere inside the castle. Perhaps dispatched to another dungeon like the one they were relegated to when we stumbled onto them. It was a valid possibility. However, glimpsing foam from sea water crashing beneath the holes in the latest corridor’s floor made finding them anywhere beneath us highly unlikely. Ditto for the chances of finding them stranded in the upstairs quarters presently disintegrating above us.
But there were vampires.
Huddled in the darkness ahead, I braced for Roderick and me to be pounced on the instant we entered the hall they guarded. It appeared to be the destination I sought…but what to do? Well, truly there was no choice. If we waited for a miracle, within the next minute or two Roderick and I would be dropped into the churning Adriatic. There was no other choice.
Mustering a primal yell from deep within my soul, I ran with Roderick on my back, which amounted to a quick, awkward approach on stumbling footsteps. But the increased speed proved fortuitous when the floor behind us began to crumble and fall into the water.
Logically, I thought it would be the last lucky break for us. It should’ve been. But having watched the rest of the castle vanish into the sea seemed to sap these young vampires of their courage, and definitely any sense of meaningful servitude to their deceased master. The vamps hovered around us, but never attacked. And, by the time we made it back to my Suzuki, all but one had withdrawn. The one named Markita glowered at us from striking distance, as I laid Roderick down on the cool floor near where I ditched the bike.
I expected her to say or do something. However, when the onslaught of destruction caught up to this final area of Dracul’s wretched home, she and the others disappeared. Sunlight followed the dissolution of the tall ceilings. I heard several shrieks and caught a glimpse of a female younger than Markita erupt into a ball of flames. As before, in the cathedral, within seconds all that remained of this forlorn soul was a stream of ashes floating to the floor.
“Rod?…Roderick, can you hear me?” I shook him to the point of abuse. When he didn’t respond, I hurried over to the Suzuki. A busted fender and broken headlight were the most obvious damage to the motorcycle. I quickly checked all the vitals for it, and when satisfied it still ran well enough I tried to rouse Roderick again. “Come on, man, we’ve only got a minute to get out of here!”
I couldn’t carry him and drive the bike, and there wasn’t anything handy to secure him to the passenger seat. He would have to hold on to me. He made a slight noise in response. Without any time or choices left, I told him to hang on to my waist, hoping he could hear me. It would be a cruel twist if I got him this far, and he still died.
The walls fell in on themselves and the immense gate crashed through the disintegrating floor. There didn’t seem to be a way to get around the part that stuck out ahead of us. But then I noticed a small o
pening nearly five feet in width and almost as high. The floor was an imperfect zigzag to reach it.
“I…I will try,” he whispered, when I set him on the bike.
“Try nothing…just make damned sure you do!” I told him, sternly. The floor behind us began to give way, and as the bike’s engine returned to life, I sped out of there, leaning toward the front wheel to help us climb above the collapse. “Hang on, Rod!”
The gap was smaller than anticipated. I didn’t have enough warning to adjust the bike, and the zigzagged portion of the floor we followed began to buckle. I opened the throttle and ducked down, worried sick Roderick would be decapitated as we passed through.
We made it. Rather than look to see how close it had been, I sped onward. Elation filled my heart as Roderick’s listlessness gave way to a powerful grip around my midsection.
“Next time, I’m driving!” he shouted as we raced down the one lane highway toward the beach. “Better hope the road holds up!”
He reached over my shoulder to point to an area a hundred feet ahead of us. I damned near slammed the brakes. There was nothing but blue water in front of us.
“Don’t stop, Judas! The road isn’t disappearing!…It’s forming!”
Immediately, images from the past two nights came to mind, and I recalled how the road appeared just ahead of the speeding Jaguars. But that was when Dracul was alive and well, and wanted us to join him for our dreaded face-to-face meetings. Now he was dead.
“Someone else is behind this,” said Roderick, in answer to my latest silent musing. “Someone I should’ve sensed before, and to whom Dracul was a mere pawn.”
“What? How in the hell is any of this even possible?!”
“I don’t know,” he murmured, to where I barely heard him. “But his life force hasn’t completely left the earth plane. You know what it’s like when any immortal older than three centuries leaves us…we all sense it. Without fail it works that way.”