The boy scowled at me. He gave me no answer, but I could smell the hostility wafting off of him in waves.
“How amusing.” I moved my head, flinging it backwards and dropping the glamour from concealing my true self. I sighed with a little relief at taking off the costume, as it were. I ran my hand over the resplendent goat horns that curled away from my head and stomped a furry hoofed foot.
“How about now, child?” My voice had changed as well; it resonated deep and gruff with dominance. That guttural sound always brought humans to a quivering mass of fear.
The boy trembled and paled as I placed my goat-like face inches away from his own, but his angry stare continued. I smelled him. The delicious aroma wet my mouth.
Ivan’s foot pumped impatiently. The filthy thing would just have to find some endurance.
“Well, Ivan, I do say, this one seems like an ornery little beastie! I wonder…” Tapping a finger over my lips, I pondered whether or not the boy could be one of ours. Then I grabbed my favourite serrated knife from the desk and cut the sack off him.
I ripped open the shirt, exposing the boy’s neck and back. A small whitish scar at the base of his neck and a swirling freckle pattern indicated the boy had been harvested.
“Ah, see, as I suspected. Marked! The boy is ours, Ivan. Ours to do with as we need! Perhaps he is worth more to me than the rest of his family. But of course, this human form will not suffice. You are too weak to do the things I will need you to do for me,” I mused, glancing back at Ivan and the jar full of parasites on the desk.
I cocked an eyebrow and tilted my head to the side as an idea formed. “I know just how to make up for that small fault of yours, boy.”
Dragging him to the desk, I grabbed the jar filled with the engorged bugs. Once I screwed open the lid, parasites scurried and clamoured over top of each other in a pathetic attempt to crawl up the sides and escape.
I reached in and pulled out a particularly fat and juicy minion. I gripped the parasite at the base of its head, and as I squeezed, the bug’s long spindly legs danced in the air as if it were trying to still crawl up the glass tube.
I removed the boy’s gag.
“You freak! Let me go!”
I liked the way he displayed his terror though anger. Rage fed the shadows of darkness; it deepened them, made them richer, more sinister and twisted.
“Now, child, do you think you could escape if I did let you go? Do you think you’d get past me and the Vampyre? Would you like to show your family how stupidly brave you think you are?” My lips curled.
“Yes,” he spat out towards me, saliva flying and emphasizing his conviction.
I grabbed his crotch and squeezed hard. The boy whined a pathetic little noise.
“Then you have more balls than most. I will use you.” I released the parasite onto the youth’s cheek.
The bug sat there for just a moment, two front legs bobbing up and down. Gradually, it crawled down the side of his face and sat in the little indent between the collarbone and the neck. It opened its mouth, exposing rows of sharp teeth. Pinpricks of blood welled up on the skin from each of its steps, a tiny trail of red destruction, and then it bit into the boy’s neck and stuck its entire head into the wound.
He screamed in agony.
Metal spines dug and tore at the wound, ripping up the skin. Clearly the pain had been too intense, as the boy went limp, falling face-first onto the concrete floor.
The boy’s family continued their mewling. Ivan remained in the chair where he’d sat motionless throughout the entire episode.
The Vampyre pod started. Long, wet, sinewy blood-red tendrils spewed out of the boy’s neck. Ropes of tissue that seemed like muscle without skin stretched thin to form thick, taut cords. They flailed for a second, wrapping around the youth’s body. Within minutes, the human body had disappeared, covered up in several thick layers of glistening sticky dermis. Tendrils erupted from both the top and bottom of what would have been the head and feet. The smaller ligaments anchored the pod onto the floor and attached to the ceiling. The structure pulled itself vertical. The pod pulsated, slowly, like a heart—beating—secreting blood, which dripped onto the floor and defied gravity by pooling on the ceiling.
The young teenage girl screamed behind her gag throughout the entire process.
I hated screaming. The shrill noise punctured my ears to the point where it felt like knives piercing my head. I glided over to the human girl and delivered a vicious and loud slap across the face. My thick yellow nails tore her cheek open.
“Silence!”
Ivan sat completely still in his wooden chair, exposed with ribs protruding. He gave no outward appearance of noticing the events that surrounded him. Ivan’s stillness belied a state of catatonia. His glassy eyes stared like the dead, focused just above and beyond the warm humans in the room, at nothing.
Certainly, he would have eaten all three of the remaining captives if given the opportunity.
I walked over to him, took the rope, and bound him to the chair. The captives watched every action, their gaze indicating their current level of terror.
As I took my knife, Ivan stiffened, almost imperceptibly, bracing himself against my next action. This would be the last time I would be able to do live surgery on a Vampyre…for now. I took delight in other creatures’ expressions of agony. The experience of torture, pain, and humiliation that ran across the ghoul’s face as I sawed into him fed my curiosity. I’d have to find another reason to take up the knife and carve another living thing open, soon.
I chose a new spot on the greying Vampyre’s abdomen and slowly inserted the serrated blade all the way up to the hilt, then sliced. Ivan clutched the arm of the chair and grimaced through the pain. The wound would heal, thanks to the demon healing, but it would leave a scar. I enlarged the wound to the size large enough to accommodate my fist.
One would have expected lots of blood as I pulled the knife out. Alas, only a small trickle oozed—another sign of Ivan’s starvation. Aside from the fact that withholding food made Ivan more compliant, with less blood, the surgery would be less slippery and easier to get a handle on the internal parasites.
I placed the bloody knife on the desk. Bits of Vampyre flesh stuck in the serrated blade.
I squished my callused fist inside the cold abdomen and felt around. It took me a few minutes, but I trapped the last minion between my pinched fingers. It tried to dig further into the body and away from me. The bug didn’t come willingly. I dragged the little beastie out from Ivan’s midsection, writhing and scraping and clawing.
Ivan jumped a little when I wrenched it free.
As soon as my hand exited the Vampyre’s belly, he heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed in the chair. The wound disappeared slowly as the serrated flesh melded back together.
I dropped the last of Ivan’s minions into the glass jar, and it joined its other brethren. I spun the metal lid and screwed it on tight, saving the parasites for future use.
“Now that it’s done, Ivan, you are free. You have done everything I have asked. You may have him,” I said, pointing to the captive father. Ivan flew with such a speed that I almost didn’t see him launch himself forward, grab the meat sack of a human, and whisk him away into the darkest corner of the basement.
The father screamed a few times, but Ivan clearly did something to mitigate the noise—knowing how I hated it so. Instead, the sound of a crack and then slurping noises filled the cool underground air. Ivan would have snapped the upper neck bones, resulting in his prey’s paralysis, but it would keep the victim alive and conscious.
The Vampyre pod pulsated in time to Ivan’s sucking.
I refocused my attention to the remaining two humans, who were trembling and terrified. Their fear saturated the air with the most delicious aroma.
“I have lost one of my parasites, but I have gained a new Vampyre,” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the red beating sack of meat that had been the male teenage. “Which means th
at you really have become useless to me, except for one thing.”
I raised my hand with the knife and slashed Susan’s neck clean through the jugular. I caught her quick, pulling her head back and let the blood run freely into the metal trough that Ivan had been so good to bring for me.
The girl sobbed violently, her eyes tightly shut.
It took longer than I had patience for, but eventually the blood flow ebbed to a quiet trickle. I let Susan drop to the floor.
“Now see, everyone except you have become very useful tonight.” I grabbed the girl’s head and pulled it towards myself. “That was your brother?” I pointed to the pulsating meat. “Am I right in saying that your brother is the one who so valiantly wanted to fight his way out of this?”
The girl nodded and then mumbled something through her gag.
“My apologies. So rude of me.” I took out the cloth that had been jammed into her mouth and throat. She coughed a few times and then spoke.
“Bradley,” she cried and nodded. “My brother Bradley.”
“That would mean then, this was your mommy and daddy?”
The girl nodded again.
“Y-Yes…”
“That is simply wondrous. You have shared your family with me, so I shall share mine with you.”
I went over to the desk and pulled out a long quill. I bent over and dipped it into the trough, then, with quick actions, began sketching out boxes with lines across the wall. I took my time, drawing with the blood, until the exact numbers of required lineage trees lined the concrete wall.
I heard shuffling, turned away from my penning, and inspected my bound and bagged guest. She wrestled with her binds, her eyes tightly closed.
“Hmph.” I waited quietly for her to stop. To her surprise, when she opened her eyes, I glared menacingly, inches away from her face—almost nose to nose.
“Well, there you are. I can’t show you my family if you’re not watching.” I patted her on the head like a puppy.
Dipping my quill in the pool of blood, I returned to my diagram on the wall.
“You see, it started with Astrid, many, many years ago. Astrid gave birth to my first son Charles.” I wrote their names in blood on the wall, in the two top boxes on the far left of the drawing, and worked my way down. “Charles, my firstborn, was special. He too, like me, could teleport—although we call it slipping.
“Imagine a human who could do such things! Well, I suppose entirely human isn’t correct. I needed to create a hybrid. You see, I need very specific participants in order to hold a very special ceremony—a ritual that would bring the dark lord here to your world.”
The girl continued to struggle, tears streaming endlessly down her round pink cheeks. The scent of her fear wafted through the air, something akin to incense, and added to the electric energy from the dissection of the Vampyre.
“Charles and I got along very well. But after a time, his attention turned towards the ladies, and one in particular caught his eye. He married a cute little French girl, Geneviève. They gave birth to several children, three daughters. Sadly, none of them retained the gift I had bestowed upon Charles. But, being the gracious son, he gave me one of his daughters.
“Of course, Geneviève expressed her unhappiness about that. Charles had to make her understand. Poor Geneviève, she didn’t survive that lesson, but my granddaughter, Celeste, was a lovely child! Once she matured, she and I had our own child together. I hoped mightily that this child would display demonic talents. And alas she did, but she could not slip.
“But even better—she turned out to be a witch! And once a witch is in the family, all succeeding daughters will pass that lineage along.
“And so I could leave that family and simply breed the daughters and wait until the witch of the sixth generation arrived.” I wrote in all the names of the daughters, one name in each box. “You see, the sixth in the family line would be born soulless, as they always are. That gives them unending powers but requires that they consume souls for every spell.” I jotted down a name in the last box of the lineage. “Now we have our blonde-haired girl, Jenae, our soulless witch. She will be the Soul Door to pull him into our world.”
I turned to glance at the girl, who had listened to every single word I had said but furrowed her brow and looked totally confused.
“Now you see, there are many other boxes, but a vast majority of my children failed to show affinity towards us. This has been my biggest disappointment. But for those children who developed darker sympathies, being half human would never suffice. I had to find a way to release the dormant demons within them. They needed to be awakened! My D’Alae and his venom helped, but we needed something even more.
“It took me a long time to develop these wonderful little silver minions who would do exactly that, awaken the darkness within them, and which, right now, your brother is experiencing firsthand! You see, you too, child, are one of mine, you and your brother. And as such, you belong to me, and I shall do with you as I need to, in order to bring him here. Your brother, he was marked. He showed the balefire, but you, child”—I ripped away the burlap sack and inspected her neck—“you, sadly, have remained human.”
“And so, where your brother will serve me for quite some time in his new form, you who has no affinity, you shall have another purpose. You will have the honour of showing me when to complete the ritual so that I can bring him here.”
And with that, I slayed the girl, let her blood spill into the trough. After I collected as much as I could, I took my enchanted walking stick and began to recite the words and make the symbols, then drew them in the air with her blood.
The blood pulsated, hanging and floating before me. The pulsations of the blood, remembering the beating of the heart, made the symbols come to life.
The dreary basement swirled away as a large landscape appeared before me, and within the picture, my dark demonic children stood at the ready. The moon hung full in the sky, and the trees stood barren. A gentle layer of snow covered the ground. It was the winter equinox.
The girl’s blood reacted as it should have. Her blood showed me that his time was near.
I was so close to accomplishing my goal.
Tattoo
DATI
I sat on the settee in Marta’s office, my head throbbing and still oozing blood, watching Alyx’s new cocoon. It had been hours since the white Succubus threads pulled him up towards the ceiling. The white pod glowed faintly.
Once again, the burden of guilt was heavier than I could possibly bear for what I had let happen to Alyx. Marta had been right—I utterly failed to protect him from my world. I had failed Marta as well. How could I possibly apologize to Alyx?
My head hurt from the bashing I’d received via Alicia’s minions, but I was wounded more than just physically as I stared helplessly at the cocoon. It made sounds, like the last pod, but this one was reminiscent of paper being crumpled.
The air in front of me shimmered softly, like heat rising off of scalding pavement. A hand reached out from the center of the disturbance. The appendage was clothed in robes from a time long forgotten.
I backed up as the Kasadya pulled himself through the tear in the air, but he was not alone. Attached to him were Hemming, Jenae, Caleb, and Riken, all of whom were a little ashen.
“A little warning on how that was gonna feel would have been nice,” Jenae spat out as she grabbed the wall for support.
Riken dropped to all fours and immediately threw up a small pile of dead bugs.
Great, another mess to clean up.
“It’s been a long and strange night, Dati,” Hemming said in response to my surprised face and the gastro contents.
“This is not—was not—what should have happened! If it was going to happen, it should occur much later. The timing is wrong,” the Kasadya yammered, spewing his unusual speech while pointing at the Succubus pod.
“What the Hell is that?” Hemming blurted out.
“Alyx,” I said, deflated.
/> “I have not seen this either. But now that I have, it explains,” he said, shaking his head. “This makes all the timelines more perilous. This is one step closer to the end of the world.”
Everyone ignored the blithering from the Kasadya.
“But that’s another pod.”
“I’ve had some fun of my own here,” I said, then as quickly as I could, I relayed the events from the moment Alyx broke free of the D’Alae crystalline pod to the encasement in an incubi shell. “Oh, and the best part, Master is Alyx’s father,” I added, almost forgetting.
Hemming and Jenae were gobsmacked. The Kasadya, who ignored me completely, watched and inspected the pod as threads of various thicknesses continued to spin and weave upon itself.
“I’ll explain more later. But right now, we’re stuck in Alyx’s mother’s new-age shop until the pod hatches. Except there’s a little bit of a problem with that because Marta has involved the police, and I guarantee they’ll be showing up here again soon. We probably have a day, maybe two before they return. He won’t be done.” I pointed to Alyx.
“That is not as much a problem as you think, D’Alae. There are other issues you have not considered,” the Kasadya replied, not taking his attention off of the silky cocoon.
“The ambiguity, god, how I love the ambiguity—do you ever not talk in circles?” Hemming asked suspiciously.
The Watcher demon broke his gaze away from the cocoon and stared at Hemming.
“I see us travelling to the Elementalist—within a few short hours. If we are to be free of your Master’s plan and have the parasites that dwell within us removed, we must leave today. And I have a way.” The Kasadya grabbed the chair that sat in front of Marta’s desk and wheeled it over in front of the ever-spinning threads.
He stood on the chair gracefully and leaned forward, getting close to Alyx—too close. I stood up, ready to pounce, to ensure that he did not touch the pod or interrupt the morphing process. I wasn’t as worried that Alyx wouldn’t make it through the process—he had already successfully endured the first—but this was also new territory, something I had never seen, and I had no idea what would become of a merging of three different demon bloodlines within one body. What would that do to anyone—or anything?
Daimonion (The Apocalypse Book 1) Page 21