by Milo Spires
Angus said he wasn’t concerned because he was going to leave his nastiest warriors armed with machine guns at the top of the ambush room for them, just incase they weren’t found in time.
Also because Hoidrious never told Angus about Rex disappearing on the day of the attack, he had the problem of dealing with the messenger from the fictitious Irish Cluckunic coven.
So that night Hoidrious gave orders to Loicheonk and Marchilla to cancel him, but in a permanent way so he wouldn’t tell Angus either. He was killed.
The reason he had to cancel the plan was he doubted the coven would be receptive of negative news aimed against their leader, with Rex was unable to defend himself due to his absence.
That night had proven it because the whole coven was sent into some desperately macabre and twisted paranormal shock, as the mental pain of it all had begun to register in their minds. Hoidrious had felt strange himself as he saw them wandering the corridors listlessly. None of them spoke to one another either; the whole place seemed like a cloister for un-dead religions. It was clear to look at their faces, that they were all mourning their fallen leader.
Hoidrious also felt strongly that had he called them all to a meeting and then spoken badly about Rex, they would have reacted accordingly.
Since his public whipping, their level of respect towards him as their number two had fallen considerably, and for this to be restored he knew he needed time. He felt if he had mentioned anything bad about Rex in the negative, they would probably have become violent with him, and maybe even to the point of torture too.
Over the next few days even though Hoidrious had managed to delay any further attacks against Angus, who by then had sadly been told of the plan’s cancellation, and Rex’s disappearance, they still demanded in his absence the war with Angus continue. They demanded retribution for the age-old rule being broken.
Lack of news about Mietioc’s success coupled with Rex’s disappearance, had caused disturbed, false, and almost demonic rumors of Angus’ involvement. And they were spreading exponentially. With their urgent need for revenge, they even told other covens without Hoidrious’ permission, and phone calls from their leaders were flooding in offering their battle services too. It was strange because they never once blamed the church even though they knew Rex went to see a priest and not Angus when he disappeared.
Also Angus had phoned the next day after the full moon and was furious with Hoidrious.
He had said the infected humans had been within his coven walls all the time, but they hadn’t been found before they had turned into werewolves. That night hundreds of his coven members had been savagely torn to pieces. He decried how his intent to help Hoidrious had obviously backfired upon him, and the plan to overthrow Rex had somehow again turned full circle.
In his violent rant on the phone, and just before slamming down the receiver, he had threatened should the war continue and more warriors arrive to attack them, he would make it publicly known who had arranged the whole thing.
Hoidrious was at his wits’ end and knew as a result he would be found guilty of treason by his own coven. They would be undeniably furious with him, and the punishment would be death. Probably in the deeply traditional way too, his being hung, then drawn, and afterwards violently quartered.
Hoidrious couldn’t believe the situation he was in and how irrational Angus was behaving. After all he had been assiduous to detail when they had deliberated over the plan to overthrow Rex. How could Angus not have realized as with everything in life, there is always a chance things could go terribly wrong?
Angus had also told him he wanted nothing more to do with him at that point, and that Hoidrious shouldn’t contact him anymore. Hoidrious had detected a true depth to his voice, one that suggested he indubitably meant what he’d said.
Now to ensure his own coven members wouldn’t be able to demand retribution for the missing Elite warriors, Hoidrious had no choice but to distract their thoughts by ordering a massive vampire hunt for Rex.
Hoidrious was also very much aware if word ever came back they knew where Rex was, he would have to try his hardest to delay their rescue of him without suspicion being drawn he was doing so. This would have to include a plan for his own escape, which he had yet to come up with.
The plan would undoubtedly involve him moving to the other side of the world, a place of distant, barely-retained memories, mostly forgotten due to the fact he hadn’t been back there since Christ’s crucifixion.
Then when he arrived there he would have to spend an eternity watching over his shoulder, scanning every shadow, every clump of grass, every bush, and every tree line with the deepest levels of paranoia. He also felt sure in his mind the day would come when he felt complacent that he was safe from Rex and they would never find him. Only he felt sure that it would be this day they bloody appeared.
Then with screaming curses and flailing arms they would fly him back to the stinking cells for gruesome tortures, and as an added retaliation for his evildoings, they might even cut his arms and legs off and leave him rotting in the corner as a ghoul.
An eternity as a hapless ghoul with no arms and legs to even move, he felt sure this might actually be even worse than hell itself.
---------
(Back in the cells with the story of Hoidrious’ deceit firmly in your minds)
Mietioc was furious.
He suddenly spun around and began swinging his swords violently through the air. Hoidrious ordered him to stand down but his breath was wasted, as he demanded retribution for the Elite warriors death.
The goons dived forwards and clashed their weapons against his. Their swords produced massive sparks flying everywhere as the archaic steel collided.
Mietioc‘s arms were massive from the years he had been training hand-to-hand combat. His skills from countless battles were also unbelievable. The goons who hadn’t seen combat in over fifteen hundred years, although slightly rusty, they were fully enjoying the experience.
Chapter 39 - The Beach
(5am outside the traps room, in deep wintry conditions. Devil’s Dyke, Brighton.)
After Kaine had burst out of the exit; for a moment he had been taken back by just how bad the weather was. Then with Jenny in his arms he had leapt up into the sky and roared straight up vertically through the rain and sleet at just over 140 mph.
Across into the darkness and beyond there was nothing between himself and the open sea.
He was heading for the piteously dark grey clouds, all the time with his deep and stretched facial expressions and as hard as he could, he was beating his massive wings that spanned three meters either side of himself.
In the deep wintry months owing to the close proximity of Kaine’s home to the sea, the weather was unpredictable at the best of times, and this morning it was bordering on the insanely terrible.
Even though the weather was different to where Captain Ognian had died, that was on the other side of the hill outside Kaine’s garage entrance. A place deeply nestled and protected from the coastal weather some hundreds of feet below the huge expanse of the South Downs.
As he was sky-rocketing up towards the Heavens suddenly from beneath him in the darkness, faintly through the extreme sound of the harsh wind, he heard the hallowed screams of the vampires as they piled out of the exit after him.
Jenny was laid out in his arms, and his intentions were to see if he could out run them, to gain enough height that as he got into the clouds, hopefully he would be lost from sight in the zero visibility conditions up there.
If he could then perfect maybe he could loose them before they caught up with him, but if he couldn’t outrun them, he had a second plan.
When he reached the cover of the hideously dark clouds and was out of sight from them for just the miniscule of time, he would spin around and dive-bomb them.
OK he had Jenny in his arms and she might wake up, which would undeniably cause major problems with his agility if she did, but until that moment he hoped he coul
d kill enough of them to make things fairer.
So far if his calculations were right, there was at least sixty to seventy vampires airborne in his wake. This figure, although it had reduced since his last estimation in the garage by a significant amount, it allowed for the vampires who were still searching his home for Regina and Becky. He presumed they would be because over the past couple of days the women had been out walking the dogs at varying times, so Longinus from his hiding place must have seen them too.
Now though as he struggled to keep the rain out of his eyes he had another major problem, he had no weapons. So to start his crazy dive-bombing stunt he would be one armed and hurtling towards them at deathly speeds, where for the fear of being surrounded by them, he would have no possibility to slow down either. So the combined speeds of his attackers and himself travelling towards each other would be over 300 mph. As he passed the first vampire he would have to steal a sword and he highly doubted it would be possible considering the velocity he would be travelling at. He felt the force alone of the snatch if he managed to pull it off would almost certainly leave his only shoulder available, considering the other was busy holding Jenny, severely dislocated and unusable.
Wiping more rain from his face, he cursed inwardly for not having taken a sword from the dead vampires in the traps room. The ones who had a first-degree example of just how a bear feels when it gets caught in those horrid Alaskan traps of his.
Still in his defense he knew why he hadn’t taken a sword. The door leading into their home was about to cave in and Jenny was in her vegetative state. The sight of her had really impacted on his brain. It had been sheer luck they had managed to escape when they did. Kaine felt sure if they had caught him in the room, they would have overpowered him and then succeeded in their mission by killing them both.
With the dark ominous looking clouds almost upon him, Kaine prepared himself should he have no choice left but attack. So far it sounded like the vampires below were catching him up and maybe he wouldn’t even reach the clouds before they caught him.
His plan if he was able to steal a sword on his first attempt would then take him on a mad man dive, plummeting towards the ground and flying in between the vampires, vehemently slicing at them until there was no time left before hitting the ground. At the last second when death was looming and seemed highly imminent, he would arch his back and suffer the most extreme G force’s as his wings almost snapped from the pressure. Then with the massive vibrations roaring through him, he would sweep across the surface of the ground, and hoping he didn’t crash into anything like a huge tree, he would race back up into the sky and head into more dark clouds to repeat the process.
He factored he would need to doing it about fifty times to achieve his target of over forty kills. Only he did wonder if it would be possible due to the G’s he would have be pulling. Could his body handle it even once, and if so, would his body be able to handle a whole load more of them without him passing out?
Now looking up, he realized that within seconds he would be into them.
Adjusting his grip on Jenny to be sure he was ready, he noticed her body sliding around on his arm. Looking down briefly he was horrified to see that her stomach was absolutely covered in blood.
As he started screaming at her to wake up, and hoping to see her eyes opening again, suddenly his vision was obscured by the thick dark clouds, he was now flying into. He wanted to stop for her sake and to hover, but he knew she needed more than that, by the amount of blood he saw she needed urgent medical attention. Anyway if he did stop, the vampires would catch up with them and then they would both be dead.
With the visibility now absolutely zero and abandoning his dive-bombing plan, he slid his other arm underneath her and kept flying up as fast as he could. He had to make it out of the rain cloud he was obviously going through. If he could then his new plan was to see where Brighton was and then dive back into the dark clouds and fly in that direction, popping his head up momentarily to check his bearings. He had to get her back to Brighton general hospital fast.
Then suddenly he recalled Regina telling him that after he had rescued Jenny, and as she was leaving the hospital, the unforeseen had happened. The helicopters had crashed into the hospital and blew up. The flames from both explosions had roared up vehemently and hugged the contours of the building. She said minutes later the buildings were engulfed in a huge fireball.
With that thought in mind, he reasoned that the place would be closed then, maybe even permanently too.
Scanning his mind for another hospital, he cursed because the closest he knew of was twenty miles away in Crawley. Then as he registered the memory of just how much blood was over her stomach before they had gone into the clouds, the harrowing thought that maybe she wouldn’t make it that far, suddenly encroached on his brain.
Then as he passed through the top of the clouds and his vision started coming back to him, he realized the sky was vibrantly roaring in Heavenly colors. There were streaks of gold, blues, greens and reds, all merging into one another and creating the most stunning visual effects.
Looking down into his arms sadness then swept through him as he realized she couldn’t be saved. She had parted from this world, the sweet innocent child, his friend for such a short time--was in fact dead.
How though, she was fine when he left her in the room, and he was only gone a minute. He thought.
Then as he examined the wound and saw it was from a sword, all doubt escaped his mind and the answer hit him like a freight train in the head. The vampire stuck in the bear trap closest to her, he must have driven his sword into her side as he was trying to close the door.
At that moment her death rocked him. He craned his neck back forgetting the immediate dangers ensuing and roared.
It was a loud, piercing roar from the core of his being. The level of it had he been inside a glass greenhouse somewhere would have almost certainly resulted in every pane exploding into a myriad of pieces. It was beyond all fathomable levels of primal, it was beyond even that, it was pure bone chilling and unbelievable.
Then as he looked below and saw the evil vampires hurtling out of the dark clouds, rage swept through him and not by the gallon, but rivers of the stuff. His whole body began to shake as it washed through him.
Then as his muscles tensed and he arched his body into a dive position, suddenly he realized that something was wrong.
He was shocked to find he was unable to descend. Something he had never experienced before was happening to him; he was strangely frozen in mid air and could go nowhere.
Looking up he noticed something that took his breath away. Above him in the brilliantly bright Turneresque sky, there were thousands upon thousands of angels racing down towards him.
Then as he looked down at the vampires, he noticed the same fate was upon them too. They were suspended and screaming up at him.
‘Hello Kaine,’ he heard a familiar voice say.
Turning his head in the direction of where the voice came from, he could see the angel Abdiel was hovering a few meters away.
‘We are here for Jenny and our heavenly father awaits her arrival. He is very happy she is coming home,’ the angel said.
As Kaine cleared his throat, he then replied, ‘Did you know she would die?’
‘I did say before to both you that soon she would be reunited with our heavenly father. Her spirit is at peace now and she thanks you, Kaine. She says you must never blame yourself for this and to give her love to Becky, for whom she will be waiting.’
‘You knew she would die…’ Kaine said, as he also thought, if you did, then why did you offer me the job as your Truth Messenger, knowing I wouldn’t accept it and that she would die in the traps room?
‘Sadly that is true, but in the future remember this: you will only be fully at peace when you accept Heaven’s offer, and only then. Now you have much anger inside, and you must deal with it in your own way.’
Kaine felt confused. Why did he have to talk
in riddles?