by Izzy Shows
It isn’t the prettiest of deaths, a sword not quite severing your head from your body. Certainly, it looked better to be speared through the gut or chest, but it did the job admirably.
She gasped, blood bubbling up her throat and spilling out of her mouth, her eyes locked on mine for a moment before I yanked the sword out and took her life with it. She fell off me, head knocking against the ground.
I stood up and watched her body return to the clay mound it had been when we’d first walked into the room.
Good. Now that that was over, I could assist the others with their own fights.
I turned to them, saw that Aisling had dispatched the Bastian ganger and moved to assist him with her own. I frowned, telling myself it wasn’t a mark against me that Bastian’s ganger had been easier for her to dispatch than Nuala’s had been for me. Nuala was a Fae, and stronger than a newborn vampire. It made sense.
Still, it wounded my pride just a little.
I also didn’t think it was a good idea for her to immediately switch back to her own ganger, I would personally have voted for continuing to focus on the other’s until yours was the only one left. But then again, my own was probably harder to take down than hers was.
Because I’m the strongest. In case you forgot.
Nuala had been doing a good job, not necessarily better than the one I had been doing, but at least she wasn’t dead and now there would be two of us to take it down.
I joined her, and we began to attack like a pair of wolves. Every time my ganger turned towards one of us the other would swoop in and slice him, turning his attention towards them so that the other could attack again. It wasn’t terribly difficult now that we had an actual tactic and it wasn’t just one of us trying to take down a Fallen Angel.
It’s not an easy thing to do, OK.
Aisling and Bastian joined us a few moments later, after my ganger was already weakened to the point of taking a knee every other time one of us swooped in to attack. Told you hers would be easier to take down than mine was.
I really didn’t want to have to take myself on ever again.
He stood still for a moment, and for some reason so did we, and looked around at the four of us, taking in the combatants that were left and the likelihood that he wasn’t going to survive. Or at least, that’s what I assumed. I have no idea what goes on in a ganger’s head, except that Nuala’s had been about as stupid as she was.
So maybe he was a good tactician then.
He charged me immediately after, and I realised that he’d been distracting us with the sudden stillness, we’d all been trying to figure out what he was doing and ended up wasting our own time in the process.
I had just enough time to bring my blade up when he was just a pace or so from me, impaling him through the heart. I lifted him slightly up off the ground, allowing gravity to pull him farther down the blade instead of having to do the work for me. It had the bonus of not allowing him to yank off it before it did fatal damage.
I felt his life source pulsing out of him, into the blade and therefore into me, and I smirked.
“I did promise you that you would pay,” I murmured, patting him on the cheek before I threw him down and dissipated the blade.
He returned to clay shortly afterwards.
I took in a few deep breaths, shaking my head, as I stared down at the mound.
I was vaguely aware of the clicking sound that signaled the exit door unlocking itself. We had succeeded here and could move on to the final room now.
Only that room was going to kick Nuala’s arse, and she had already used quite a bit of her own energy. I was nervous now that she wouldn’t be up to the task, but I didn’t have any options left to me.
I looked up at her from beneath hooded eyes, panting.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I need a minute.” She sat down on the floor, hard, and let her own blades dissipate in a flurry of snowflakes. She drew in several breaths, hanging her head as she regained some of the lost energy.
“I thought you said. That this was. Going to be a sensory. Deprivation room.” Aisling panted beside me, not waiting to catch her breath before she reprimanded me for my bad information.
Because this failure of a room was on me this time, not Bastian. To his credit, he had not fucked up the room. I had. I had led us into a room we had not been prepared for—although how do you prepare for a doppelgänger fight? —and wasted a lot of precious energy in the ensuing battle.
I shrugged my shoulders idly. “I thought that’s what it was going to be.” I shook my head. “Believe me, this is not something I would have wanted to go through, and it’s not something I would have blindly thrown you into.”
Nuala nodded her head in agreement from her seat on the floor.
That was a surprise. She’d berated me for the steel door when we’d first entered, another thing I hadn’t known about and certainly something that hadn’t done any damage at all. Not like this had. This had kicked our arses quite nicely. By all accounts, she should be screaming at me right now.
I didn’t have the energy to question her, though.
“Come on. We need to get moving again,” I said, reaching out a hand to Nuala to help her back to her feet. She eyed me cautiously for a moment before she grasped my forearm, standing as I pulled her up. “I know everyone’s tired, I know no one wanted to deal with something like this, and I’m sorry. But we’re almost there.”
“Almost there meaning we have a hell of a room to get through still,” Nuala said, sounding like a petulant child.
“Hey, it’s going to be a cake walk after this, right?” I grinned, trying to take some of the sting out of the last encounter. I didn’t have anything truly uplifting to say, nothing that would really help anyone to feel better.
All I could do was give them a joke to laugh at so that they wouldn’t give up.
It worked. They all had a good chuckle and we started for the exit.
“Nuala, can you draw on our strength at all?” I asked as we walked. “Would it help?”
She frowned. “I don’t think so. I’ve never blocked a nightmare before, but it’s worth a try.”
I nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
1924, The Compound...still
It took no time at all for us to reach the next door. No one spoke, yet again. Only this time the reason was obvious—we were all trying to conserve as much energy as possible to get through the next room. Everyone would be pooling strength into Nuala, and she would get us safely through the room. If everything went to plan, this should be the easiest room of all. Then again, the first room should have been the easiest room, it was supposed to have just been a bit of chatter back and forth. Nothing obnoxiously difficult like it had been.
We reached the door and Nuala stepped forward without prompting, though her hand hovered above the door knob for several moments. I watched her shake, waited for her to stop, then stepped up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder blade.
“You can do this,” I said, voice pitched low and lips very close to her ear. She shivered, exactly as intended, and turned the doorknob.
The room looked identical to the one we had just been in. It was large and empty, marble floors and dark walls. No windows, of course, it being inside of a compound and all. There was nothing inside, though I hadn’t really anticipated anything waiting there for us. It would have been nice if it was a simple nightmarish creature but that wasn’t the case, it was just…an empty room.
I looked at Nuala, then at the rest of them and nodded.
Each of them lifted a hand to place on her back as I had, and in unison we began to chant.
I felt the strength, the power flowing from me to Nuala, watched the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. A soft gasp escaped her, the slight murmur of pleasure, and she stepped forward as if pushed into the room. I watched her gait with a lazy smirk curled across my lips, the slight sway of her hips.
Power is
pleasure.
She turned back to us, her eyes still slightly glazed, and nodded.
Well, I guess that was all the confirmation we were going to get. There was only so much she could do, and it wasn’t as if anyone had done something like this before. No way to know if it was going to work or not until the nightmare hit.
We followed her into the room without any more hesitation, though we walked slowly. She waited for us to reach her before proceeding at the pace we had set. No one was in the mood to go charge ahead and get caught off guard again. We’d been through enough fuck-ups to risk something going wrong in this room.
We crossed the halfway point and relaxed a bit, I felt the tension ease out of my shoulders and watched as Bastian rolled his to release any excess. Aisling’s step became a bit perkier again. Nuala kept her focus though, I was impressed to see that, she wasn’t going to drop her attention just because we were almost to the door.
Shrieks penetrated the chamber as bat like creatures descended from above, screaming down at us and flapping about the head.
Pure reflex, I ducked down and covered my head, as if all I was being attacked by was a flock of birds that would disperse on their own.
They wouldn’t.
“Relax, if they do get to us, they won’t be able to transfer the Nightmare,” Nuala said, firm and confident.
I hoped she was right.
“So, this isn’t the Nightmare, then?” Bastian tried for a joke, his anxious laughter betraying how he truly felt.
“What, afraid of a few bats?” Aisling asked, laughing wildly at the notion as she swatted away a few of them, before crying out. “Ah!” She gasped, withdrawing her hand from the air she’d been swatting at and cradling it in her hand.
“What happened?” I asked, sharp.
“It, I don’t know, it bit or scratched me. It hurt.” She frowned. “More than it should have.”
I stared at her for a hard moment, my mouth mimicking her own frown. A simple scratch wouldn’t have hurt her…
Bastian screamed.
I whirled around, gaping at Bastian. The bat like creature—it was way too fat to be a bat—had secured its position on his head and was threading its needle like claws into his brain.
“The fuck!” I shouted, leaping forward and conjuring my blade yet again, lifting my arm to swipe above his head. The being jerked him to the side, hissing at me as it dodged the blow. I heard Aisling scream behind me, and Nuala shortly thereafter.
It hadn’t worked, I realised. Nuala had not been able to combat the Nightmare, these creatures were here to transmit it, and they were doing a very good job of getting it into their minds. I had to think fast, or else I would fall under soon. There was a creature circling overhead, alternating between hissing and shrieking at me to let me know that I was next.
It was the last one, there had only been four, one for each of us. The rest looked content to stay with their own victims and not help this one catch me. In fact, if I had to take a guess, they looked a little smug that they had all reached their targets and this one was yet unsuccessful.
If I could kill this one, I could kill the others, and we’d be able to get out of the room without any more interruptions.
This was supposed to be a damn game.
I conjured the dark ball of malevolent energy into my free hand, raised my sword arm up into a defensive position.
The creature swooped towards me, I fired a bolt of energy at it and darted to the side. I threw out another bolt of energy as I turned back, a blind shot.
And then the darkness claimed me.
Modern Day, Blair’s House
I stared at mal, waiting for him to continue, but he was gazing off toward the fire that had slowly begun to die. I should probably stand up and tend to it, but I’d been so caught up in the story that I hadn’t given it a single thought.
He had leaned forward over his knees, was playing with the ring on his finger.
“And?” I prompted. I hadn’t wanted to speak up, to break the silence, in case it stopped him from telling the story. But I was dying to know what happened next.
“Rocks fall, everyone died,” he said, still not looking at me and he sounded rather far away. He wasn’t fully aware of the room he was in, I was sure. He was inside the memory now, just automatically responding to the auditory prompt.
“Clearly not, you’re here.” I said, reaching across the coffee table to nudge his leg. “What happened next?”
He jerked his gaze to my hand on his leg and I withdrew it immediately; he followed it back to me then lifted his eyes up to meet mine. He looked so different from how I had ever seen him before: lost and disoriented. He’d always been so self-assured, so confident, so aware of where he was in the world and how to manipulate those around him, and now he didn’t seem to know where he was.
Had he been in the Nightmare?
Oh God, what had his Nightmare been? I was dying to know.
He stared at me, but he didn’t see me for a while before he shut his eyes, a shudder passed through him, and he looked at me again. Really looked at me this time.
He swallowed. “What?”
“I uh, I asked what happened next?” I was still staring at him, bewildered by the vulnerability I had just witnessed, but was gone now. It was as if it had never happened, and I almost thought that I had imagined it. But I hadn’t, I knew that I hadn’t, and I held that conviction close to me. Maybe someday I’d talk to him about it, but I was afraid to bring it up now. I didn’t want to trigger any bad memories, or push him away when I felt that he was close to telling me more about him. I had to know more.
“Oh, well, obviously, we went under the effects of the Nightmare creatures. Not for very long, I don’t think, but it’s impossible to really judge the amount of time that passed while we were under. No one was awake to judge it for us, since I couldn’t kill the monsters. We only had our bodies to judge by, and there wasn’t any hair or nail growth, no lines on the skin, nothing of that sort that would indicate prolonged exposure. That, and the fact that we were still alive. The Nightmare creatures wouldn’t have killed us, but they certainly would have kept us down while someone found us and dragged us off to some dungeon. So, since we woke up in the same room, it stands to reason that we were down for a maximum of an hour or so.” He delivered the report so straight faced that I was astonished.
“Oh, come on! That’s not what I wanted to know, that’s not even close,” I said. I wasn’t snapping, per se, but I could hear my own agitation. I should probably be more sympathetic, but that had never been my forte.
“What did you want to know?” he asked, tilting his head to the side and lifting his eyebrows at me.
“I want to know what the Nightmares were. What did they see?” I didn’t ask for his, not yet. Too close to home, I’d ask afterwards. I knew I could get him to tell me.
“That’s rather personal, Blair. I can’t believe you’d ask for something like that.” He leaned back into the couch again, smirking.
“Pfft. It wasn’t personal when you invaded my dreams, when you undressed me while I slept?” I fired back, arching my own eyebrows at him, jaw set.
That had been a while ago, and long since apologised for, but I still liked to give him grief for it whenever the opportunity presented itself.
“Oh, not that again,” he groaned. “When are you going to let that go?”
“I don’t know, maybe after you tell me about the Nightmares?” I asked, grinning at him. I had used that line so many times already.
“Yeah, yeah, until the next thing you want comes up.”
“We’ll see. You have to admit, that was very rude and invasive, I’m certainly entitled to more than just one guilt trip.”
He glared at me, though I knew he didn’t mean anything by it. Mal liked to make you think he was worse than he really was, all part of the typical demon persona. Except for that weird part where Mal wasn’t a demon, he was Fallen, which meant that he was a progenitor of the de
mons. It was all a little too confusing for me to follow. I didn’t want to make Mal explain it again, which was why I hadn’t brought it up since he’d initially explained it to me. Certainly, I wasn’t going to ask him about it right now, when he was on the verge of telling the juicy bits of the story to me.
This was what I liked. The action was all well and good, and it was certainly riveting, but it was the details about him that I wanted to know about. Mal would rather talk about anything under the sun except himself, so it was a rarity to get any information about him.
“Fine, fine.” He gave up, throwing his hands up. “I’ll tell you. We all talked about it after everything was over, so I’ll tell it to you like they told it to me. Bastian’s was the simplest, so I suppose we’ll start there.”
Bastian's Dream
It was the night of the grand ball; the first one Bastian had ever been to. He had flown across Europe to the Carpathian Mountains—he’d found it hilarious that the Vampires were holding their ball here. He hadn’t had the guts to ask if this was the true birthplace of Vampire or if it was just the ironic factor they’d been going for.
Regardless, here he was, dressed up in a tux and all the trimmings. Everyone here was gorgeous, at least the ones in the room were. He’d heard rumors of the older vampires, the ones that had been around for so long they didn’t even know what humanity was like anymore. Allegedly they didn’t look like humans at all anymore, corrupted by their power.
Of course, that’s not how the vampires referred to the Change. But then again, the first time he’d heard about it hadn’t been from a fellow vampire.
“Hello.” A charming voice greeted him from behind.
Bastion turned around, his heart caught in his throat when he took in the sight of the vampire speaking to him. She was beyond perfection in his eyes, porcelain skin and hazel eyes, black hair curling about her bare shoulders in expertly shaped ringlets. Her gown could not possibly be made of any fabric he’d ever seen before, it shimmered…no that wasn’t quite right. Flowed, perhaps, was the word. The deep sanguine color and the flow of the gown reminded him of blood, he assumed it was an intentional allusion. The color of the gown contrasted with her pale skin, and a ruby necklace nestled in the hollow of her neck.