So together in the darkness we wait.
Chapter Eight
Hours, days, centuries may have passed. I honestly have no idea. My world has been reduced to Bartholomew’s touch and voice and little else matters. He stands and pulls me to my feet as nine black robed figures slowly file into the room chanting in a low tone as they do so.
They surround us in a perfect circle and even through my calm detachment, I can feel dark magic beginning to rise all around us. It feels like a graveyard chill in my very bones.
It smells like scorched metal and rotted meat.
Despite the calm detachment I feel the sly voice note each Dark Adept in turn, so that he can recognize them later. The sensation is disturbing but it fades as he touches my face softly.
“Come to me Andrea Doyle, seek you now my dark embrace and lie with me to arise from that bed forever changed and forever bound to me as thy creator and sire.” He says in a formal tone.
Dark magic is pulsing all around the room building to some kind of frantic crescendo, the chanting becomes louder and more insistent as the coven calls upon the forces of darkness and tries to bend those forces to its will.
I hesitate slightly, the sly voice is screaming now and pounding its fists on the walls of my mind in a desperate last try for my attention.
It hurts.
“Come to me now Andrea Doyle, step into my arms and lie with me now to arise from our bed forever changed and bound to me as thy creator and sire.” He repeats in a more forceful tone than before.
Dark magic is filling the room so violently that the walls themselves creak and groan in protest at having to contain it. Frost is climbing slowly up the walls as the chanting intensifies.
I close my eyes and step into his embrace.
His fangs find the sweetest spot imaginable on my neck.
That is the last thing I remember from my human life.
Chapter Nine
I die in his dark embrace as he drains all of my blood from my orgasmicly twitching body. Then he tears his own left wrist open and forces the bleeding wound into my mouth.
His blood flows into me as he begins to chant in a language far older and harsher than English, his chant blends into the chanting of the Dark Adepts and the magic fills the room to the very shattering point.
There is a scream lodged in my throat like a piece of meat, I try to draw breathe past it, but I cannot.
For the simple reason that I am no longer breathing.
My heart lies still, not beating in my cold chest.
A new energy flows through me, changing me with each passing instant. The blood of the Master vampire burns like a wild fire through me leaving me altered in its relentless path.
With this new energy animating my body, a sensation is slowly building to a razor sharp pain.
Thirst.
That single word is not enough to contain the urgency of the need to drink that consumed me.
It is akin to holding ones hand in a white hot fire and saying ouch.
Ouch is the same sort of understatement.
The thirst wracked my new body with pain that could only know one relief.
I needed to feed, to drink.
Hector turned on his heel and punched the remaining street thug in the face and then kneed him in the groin as the larger man collapsed.
Then he dragged the semi-conscious man over to me and dumped him at my feet with a sick grin.
There was blood all over his face.
I couldn’t stop myself.
A low rumble of laughter went around the room as they watched me feed on the stunned thug. Bartholomew held up a pale hand and the laughter ceased immediately.
The blood both slakes and somehow elevates the dire thirst consuming me, every sickening sip of sweet nectar leaving me desperate for the next.
No thoughts of right or wrong no grief at my human life passing or the life of the man I was trying to drain. Just raw unadulterated need. It was the sum and total of my existence. A fever was burning through my body, mind and soul and it narrowed my focus to one thing and one thing only.
The need to feed.
Rough hands pull me away from him and haul me to my feet to stand before Bartholomew. I struggled against them but they hold me fast.
One of them is the vampire that I woke up to licking the blood off of my face and the other is a male vampire I do not know.
They hold me easily and I can feel that they are using the barest fraction of their strength to do so.
It should scare me, I suppose, more than it does that already I can tell from their scent that they are both the Master vampire’s progeny.
“Enough for now, little friend. Take her to the lower level and make her secure against the dawn. We still have much to do. You give me such hope that which we have long sought and such cost seems almost in our grasp now. Guard her with your very lives, if anything should interrupt what we are attempting I will be most, displeased.” Bartholomew barks and they all scramble to obey.
His voice encourages blind and instantaneous obedience with the undertone of the worst of consequences if that obedience is not forthcoming.
I am lost in a fog of new overwhelming sensations as they drag me from the room. All of my senses are flooded with input as they struggle to deal with the heightened senses the vampiric energies flowing through me have granted. Imagine going through life with all those senses muffled only to have what was muffling them suddenly torn off.
They drag me down a long flight of stairs and fling me into a small windowless cell. I land hard and roll to the back wall ending up face up against it. I hear the sound of them locking the door and moving away.
I am alone.
Alone with the taste of a dying man’s blood in my mouth, lying in the darkness without even the beat of my own heart to comfort me.
I try to breathe and give it up after a few panicked attempts, I simply cannot and after a while my mind accepts this fact and moves on.
I can feel the weight of the rising sun in the back of all these new sensations. A constant ticking clock in the back of my mind. A heaviness slowly moves through my limbs pinning them to the ground, a haze surrounds my thoughts and gradually stills them. All slows and dims until I am just scarcely able to form a coherent thought.
The last one being a simple one.
I am no longer human.
Chapter Ten
When I come back to my senses I can feel that the sun has left the world and that darkness has fallen. My heightened senses seem more normal to me now and I am less overwhelmed by them.
The stench of dark magic, that unique stink of scorched metal and rotten meat lingers in the cell they are keeping me in. The Dark Adepts have been busy chanting spells over me as I slept. I have no idea what they are attempting to do to me, no idea what crazed agenda they are following or why they chose me for it.
I can feel the Master vampire somewhere in the building above me, we are connected somehow. He is in my head, I can feel him sitting in the darkness brooding, I can feel the thin shiver of hope he is nursing about me but I cannot tell just what it is that he is hoping for.
Only that it concerns me somehow.
I can feel the thirst building in me and it fills me with sick shame. The fact that my human existence is over forever has begun to sink in, I will never again walk in daylight. I will never again be able to stand with my fellow supplicants and sing hymns praising the Light. I am, unfit for such things now.
My heart may no longer beat, but it is broken by the knowledge.
I would weep if I could, but vampires don’t cry.
“Good evening little Adept, how are we this fine and lovely night?” Hector asks me in a mocking tone as he unlocks my cell door.
A surge of rage flashes through me and I decide to kill the monster standing there mocking me. I feel new strength and speed within me and I know that I can do it before he can use his magic to stop me.
I will tear his damned throat out.
<
br /> I think about moving and in an instant I am standing in front of him with my new fangs bared.
He smiles at me.
My hand flashes out towards his head to pull him to me so I can rip him to pieces.
That same hand falls limply to my side.
“One of the many sweet little nothings that my Master whispered in your ear while he turned you was the compulsion to do those who serve him no harm. You have no choice but obey your sire so I am safe enough from you.” His grin makes me want to scream in frustration.
His grin vanishes and all of a sudden he is solemn and all business. A barely detectable nimbus of dark magic begins to slowly form around him and I feel that nimbus brush lightly against me.
His eyes meet mine and I can feel him searching for answers to questions I fail to understand. The stare goes on for a long time until he looks abruptly away.
“You have no idea, little Adept what our hopes for you are, I realize that. But, you are the best candidate by leaps and bounds for that which we are attempting. If we succeed the world will never be the same again.” He says and my new senses can hear fear and excitement in his voice.
“And if we fail?” I find myself asking.
This earns me another long searching stare that goes on painfully long. He once again looks away before he answers.
“Better to not dwell on that possibility my little friend. Come let us go attend to my Master and see what we shall see. Follow me.” He calls over his shoulder as he moves away.
Lacking a better idea, I find myself following him.
I close my eyes and I can sense all of the other vampires in the immediate area, there are nine of them all of them sired by Bartholomew. I am by far the youngest, the rest range from a century to three centuries old.
All of them are hungry.
The thirst is rising for us all.
As I walk down the long hallway behind the Dark Adept I vow then and there to take the vows of a starvling. I am repulsed by what I have become and do not wish to exist in this horrible state. I will turn myself into The Order and help them in any way I can, until I starve myself to death.
Well, another death. This one final.
The need for blood burns in me and I struggle to control it, it doesn’t help that I can sense the other vampires in the building feeding and slaking that awful need.
Humans are dying all around me.
If nothing else I can turn in this nest to The Order and they will send Guns to wipe it out. They will end every vampire that killed a human right up the sick daisy chain to the Master vampire himself.
At least I can make what happened to me count for something.
I follow my tormentor down the hallway and up a few flights of stairs as we go vampires and Dark Adepts fall in alongside of us until we are a sick twisted parade of sorts.
The Master vampire awaits us.
He stares at me as we come into the room and I can feel the weight of his power settle upon me. He is centuries old, my life to him is a blink of an eye. The life of the poor woman he fed off of, now lies dead on the floor next to him likely means even less to him.
There is a lot of power seething in the room, the Dark Adepts have started a low chant that sends shudders up my spine. It builds quickly to a crescendo and then abruptly stops.
Leaving silence.
“Good evening, my newest progeny. Welcome to your new existence. You will come to appreciate just what a marvelous gift I have given you. I hope that we have centuries to become acquainted but there is one bit of business to get to before all that.”
I spit on the floor and give him the finger.
Screw him, I didn’t ask for this ‘gift’ I was kidnapped, tortured and worse, then turned against my will. Maybe if I piss him off enough he will grant me a quick death and my soul or what is left of it can be freed to find whatever peace it can.
He laughs, the low grating chuckle echoing in the room and begins to clap slowly.
“Oh you are a lively one, little friend. I like a little spunk but if our acquaintance should by chance survive this evening, I will of course take the time to teach you a lesson or two about the required respect a fledgling shows for her creator. Hector, shall we begin?”
“As you wish Master.” Hector bows very low before his Master and pulls out a single black candle that he holds out towards me.
“Call thy magic to you Andrea Doyle, light the candle.” He intones formally with odd echoing tones to his voice.
“No.” I tell him stubbornly holding my hands to my side in clenched fists.
“Oh, little friend, such willfulness. I will enjoy the process of breaking you in. But for now we will dispense with this nonsense, as your maker I order you to obey my servant in this and all things.” Bartholomew tells me in an almost bored tone.
His words hit me like a fist and I double over in pain, his words resonate in me shaking me to my core and the plain truth is that I have no choice, but to obey him.
I reach for my magic and it eludes me, I try harder and it’s like it lies just a fraction of an inch out of my reach, no matter how hard I strain for it.
“Try harder bitch!” Hector shouts in my ear.
Magic has always come easy to me, even before formal training I was doing things instinctively. This is the least of all spells and should come with no effort. I smash my will against the barrier between me and my powers and feel it give just a little. I push my will, every damned iota of it and pour it into the spell that once I had to scarcely whisper, but now I scream into the room and for one brief instant the candle sputters weakly to life.
Only to go out almost at once.
Then I remember something from my early training that truth be told I found boring at the time. It was told to me during a class on the history of The Order and the struggle they waged against the vampires. It was about one of the few advantages humans had over the blood suckers.
Vampires can’t wield magic.
Chapter Eleven
There is naught but silence in the room for a long moment, the smell of the smoke from the briefly lit candle hanging like an accusation of failure.
The Master vampire stands and throws his head back and howls in rage and frustration.
It is a sound indescribably horrible.
It drives every being in the room to their knees with their hands clasped over their ears.
Hector struggles to his feet first and stands shakily before his Master. There is blood trickling from his nose and one ear as he stands there.
“Master….please. This is the closest that we have ever come in all our time of striving and I sense that even if she is not the answer she may contain it within her. She lit the candle my Master, however so briefly, she lit the candle.” There is a pleading groveling note in his voice that sickens me.
Nobody else has risen from the floor yet, what I just tried has exhausted me and I lie there stunned. Just another bitter pill to try to swallow, my human life is over and now I just lost my last connection to The Light that I have tried my level best to serve most of my life.
Bartholomew’s rage and frustration is a palatable force in the room, but slowly by painful degrees, I feel him struggle to return to calmness. He starts by sitting back down in his chair.
“Oh, little friend. You had our hopes so very high. Still, as my loyal servant has pointed out, you are the closest we have ever come. For far longer than you have been alive we have been trying to create a vampire that can wield magic. Once we do the balance will be tipped in favor of our kind and we will rule this world as is our right. I truly thought that you might just be the one, but while you may be an interesting failure, you are a failure nonetheless.” His tone holds notes of emotions that I have no name for.
Gradually all of the vampires and Dark Adepts in the room struggle back to their feet. They all turn as one and stare at me as I do the same.
“Master, I would serve you poorly if I did not give you my best council and advice. Le
t us keep her for a time and experiment with ways to reach our goal. Worst case scenario is she doesn’t survive what we try.” Hector says shakily.
The Master vampire sighs deeply and leans back into the chair closing his eyes. Through our odd connection I feel his disappointment and almost feel bad for being the cause of it. His glamor doesn’t consume me the way it did when I was human but he is still my maker and I am learning what that counts for. I catch bits and fragments of his thoughts and I get the sense that this little hobby has sustained him through centuries of immortality.
The Asian vampire, who just hours ago had lain on top of me licking blood from the ruins of my face, has drawn a silver tipped wooden stake from the folds of her robe and is giving me a mocking grin.
A mocking grin that I want to put my fist through.
My sly inner voice demands that I kill every single thing human or otherwise in this damn room. The sad reality is that I find myself agreeing with it.
With her.
The voice is accumulating personality traits, this should scare me more but I have a lot to be of afraid of just now and this ranks low on the scale. She, the voice has always been with me but now she is beginning to feel separate from me with her own thoughts and feelings.
Well, not really feelings, just one feeling really.
She is pissed off royal.
Finally something that we can agree on.
Bartholomew makes eye contact with me and with that single gesture, drives me to my knees so hard I feel my kneecaps crack.
“My loyal servant has argued for your life little failure, and against my better judgment, I am going to indulge him on this matter. I have slain all of the other failures out of hand, but we will try a little different approach this time. You will spend your next few nights with us in your cell as our guest while he and his merry little band attempt, well, whatever they are going to attempt I suppose. My advice to you is cooperate with them and try to be what we so desperately need you to be. I began you, and believe me little failure, I will end you.” His tone is bored, empty and harsh.
Dark Molly Book One Page 3