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Chapter Eighteen
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“ Did you really think that it was going to be that easy?”
It is cold and painful. I am cuffed against a wall between two large chains, each pulling my arms away from my body – it causes my shoulders to throb immensely. I do not know where I am. My shirt has for some reason been removed. What is happening? It is dark – so dark. I can smell blood, old blood mixing with new. What is this place? It is so dark – so lonely. Blood; I am wounded. I feel warm blood pouring down my front. It sends a shiver down my spine. The chains rattle against each other when I try to move. They are mocking me. It is so dreadfully cold.
I suddenly hear movement – someone else is here.
“Well, did you?”
That voice – a woman. I know that voice.
“Who’s there?” I try to ask, but my dry throat causes it to come out only as a cough.
I try to clear my throat and repeat the question, but it is as hoarsely asked as before. I need something to drink.
“What now, Theodore? Having trouble to speak, such witty person as yourself? How shameful.”
I do not answer. I cannot. It is too painful. Where am I?
I hear something splashing. Out of nowhere, a spray of water bursts over my sore body, washing my wounds clean. I cry out it in shock. The water is freezing.
“Drink,” the female orders.
I would refuse, if I did not know that it is my only choice if I wish to speak to her. I frantically lick my wet lips; they are soaking in water. The rest of the water is already pouring down my body only to be absorbed by my pants. They do not only absorb the water, but also the cold that comes with it. I wince anxiously as the freezing water makes it way down my naked upper body.
“Can you speak?” the female demands.
Coughing lightly, I feel my dry throat grow a bit less aching.
“Y-yes,” I stutter with my jaws trembling by the cold, “yes, I c-can.”
She emerges from the darkness gradually, letting me to first see her long silver hair and then the cold silver eyes that follow. A wicked grin decorates her lips. She gleams of insanity.
“Good,” she beams, “then we can begin.”
With a snap of her fingers, the darkness escapes into the obscure corners of whatever chamber we are occupying. Torches on the walls burst into flames, only to illuminate bizarre tools of torture. I know now where we are – the Asylaum. I would recognise its walls no matter where I saw them. This chamber however, is unknown to me, and by the looks of it, I think that I can figure out why. My attention is drawn to another being chained to the wall opposite to mine. It is growling furiously and trying to tear the chains down, and the entire wall with them. It fails miserably. These chains were made to hold vampires; they are not ordinary chains.
Taking a closer look on my cellmate I notice that he has claws and that blood is dripping from his cheeks. He is one of them – a blood-weeper. My jail keeper walks in my line of sight, blocking my view of him. She grins manically.
“I believe that you’ve met Jackston,” she chortles.
It is Jackston, and she has hung him up on the wall like trophy. I almost pity him hanging there, despite everything he has done to Mina. A puddle of blood is drying up beneath him; more blood drips down from his cheeks even as I look at him. He has been strapped up to bleed to death – and he is not far from doing so. I swallow deeply a few times, making sure that my keeper can hear me this time. I then glare loathingly at her.
“Bitch,” I sneer.
A moment later I feel my cheek burn and my neck ache terribly. She is standing next to me panting, greatly upset with a raised open fist. Her face is coloured red in ferocity. The mark of her hand is slowly fading away on my reddened cheek. It is too bad that she could not show that strength when we were hunting down that Elder, or even as she pretended to be wounded outside the Council Chamber.
“How dare you?” she cries. “I am Ariane Tash of the Sisterhood, and I take insults from no vampire!”
I muster my strength and pull a faint smirk.
“And yet you just did.”
My neck feels as if it is being torn away from my body when she slaps me on the other cheek. I suppose I needed them to match.
“Silence!” she roars.
The ice queen has got quite the temper. I would have found this rather amusing had I not been strapped down in a torture chamber, bleeding and freezing to death. I decide to obey her word – it would be unwise to do otherwise. I nod seriously to show her that I will follow her advice, or order – whichever way she puts it.
“Good vampire,” she says condescendingly.
I do not move as much as a muscle at her remark, though I truly wish to. Her dimples twitch slightly at my attempt to keep quiet.
“Yes,” she smirks, “good, pesky vampire, thinking that you could simply shoot me as you pleased.”
I admit my curiosity over this – I distinctly remember putting a bullet between this woman’s eyes, and yet she is not only alive and talking, but she has cuffed me to a wall. That is impressive – even by my standards.
“You still haven’t understood, have you Theodore?” she scorns. “There never was a shot fired in the Asylaum, not a single one.”
Of course there was. I saw it, I felt it; I did it. I shot her. I watched her fall dead to the ground before the Council Chamber. I dropped the gun next to her body – I am sure.
She laughs at me. It could be my expression, or she could be reading me. I do not care.
“You see, Theodore, everything that you think have occurred since you returned to the Asylaum after you having been the mouse to the two cats I sent after you, has been a lie,” she says. “As soon as you came back, I locked you in here, with the sweet little fantasy of having shot me. You looked so utterly pleased with that grin on your lips when you shot me in your puny vampiric mind.”
Impossible – I saw it with my own two eyes.
“By the way, Theodore, speaking of my two cats; whatever did happen to the two Lords I sent after you?” she grins.
I grit my teeth and lower my head in shame, apparently causing her delight.
“You didn’t kill them, did you?” she asks with an implying tone. “That would mean that you’d break that precious Guidance that you vampires hold so high, and you would never do that, would you, Theodore?”
I refuse to answer her question. It is none of her business what I have and have not done. She chuckles in delight.
“Ah, vampiric pride – how you do adore your dear Brethren,” she says.
Suddenly she comes to a halt; pauses in mid-sentence before turning around to glare viciously at me.
“Disgusting!” she roars.
Taken by surprise by her sudden outburst, I flinch and cause the chains to rattle once more, only to remind me of my poor state. Looking at Jackston, I see that my state is paradise compared to his; he is dropping in and out of consciousness with his head hanging lifeless on his shoulders. Had it not been attached to his neck, it would have fallen off in lack of willingness to keep it – you poor soul, Jackston.
Ariane is now marching restlessly back and forth in the chamber, glaring at both me and Jackston.
“Parasites, that’s what you are! Filth! Unworthy of life,” she growls, “feasting off the one race that deserves to live – disgusting!”
I am surprised how her opinions are so far from her sisters’; they have not shown any aversion during my brief visits at the monastery. Ariane suddenly swings around and glares manically at me. For each step she takes at me, I can feel her powers grow more and more intense.
“My sisters,” she begins through gritted teeth, “are even worse than you scum. Not only have they allowed you to live, but they have also—”
She stops in mid-sentence, as if realising something as she speaks.
“No,” she then continues, “not them – her. Though they have had the horrible taste of letting you live, it is she has influenced them to do so, and to think that I allowed myself to be influenced for so long. For millenniums, you vampires have plagued this world, drinking the blood of the true Guardians, just to keep your foul beings alive. It ends tonight!”
I have a hunch about who she is blaming for all this. It is the very same hunch I had when I knew that Sarthimia was not telling me everything the other night when she spoke of the Ancients.
Knowing what Ariane’s intentions are, I can obviously not let her pull her plan through, but at the moment I am not in a state where I can do anything about it, and with Jackston being as weak as he is, I expect no aid from him either. I am stuck, and there is nothing I can do about it. Sarthimia, I need your help.
“Don’t you ever speak that name again!” Ariane cries.
I did not – I thought it. She must be the most powerful Reader I have ever met, being able to read me without even focusing. Even when Jackston was at his peak, he had to focus on his victim to able to read it.
“Don’t compare me with your puny vampiric terms,” she snorts. “I’m beyond them. My powers are beyond your comprehension, Theodore.”
Her last remark puts a smirk on her lips, though she has not forgotten about her speech. She begins quietly, almost in a whisper.
“She created you,” she says, “she made you. Just after Celeste was slew, she made you.”
I gather that Celeste is the name of the first sister in Sarthimias story, the one that went bonkers and rampaged on the humans. I have this thought on purpose; I wish to distract her so that I may find a way out of these cuffs. She does not even react. She is too busy wallowing in loathe to notice my thoughts.
“She figured that five was not enough to guard the Guardians. So she made another one, with the blood from her very veins,” Ariane continues. “Without consulting the Sisterhood, she presented our ancient blood to a human, deemed worthy only by herself. As a result of her blasphemy, the human turned into something other than human, and yet not like us – filth. The creature was dependant on the blood of its former kin to keep itself alive. The Sisterhood was outraged when we learned of Sarthimia’s doing, but of course; she persuaded us into believing that it was for the greater good.”
I smile faintly by Ariane’s words. It sounds like something Sarthimia would do – convince others into her own convictions.
“It took us only weeks to realise what grave mistake we had made, agreeing with her decision. The creature shared its blood recklessly among its former kin, and had soon created a band of its own kin to wreak havoc among the Guardians we had sworn to protect,” she goes on. “Though the creatures possessed only remnants of our powers, it was enough to slay hundreds of hundreds before they could be stopped. The Sisterhood demanded instant execution for each and every one of them – Sarthimia refused. We allowed ourselves into persuasion once more; Sarthimia suggested rules, laws for the creatures to obey. It disgusted me that she even considered redemption for them, but my vote was not enough to stop it from happening. Along with the most powerful creatures, including the first made by Sarthimia, the Sisterhood agreed upon laws, forbidding the creatures to slay humans unless completely necessary.”
“The Guidance,” I say, surprised of its origin.
She laughs at my observation. Once more I have brought her delight.
“No, but your ignorance is amusing, Theodore,” she chortles. “It was we who set the fundamental laws, but it was your kind that set the laws of how to treat other creatures of your kind. Such as what would be the fate of a vampire was he to create another one without the consent of a more powerful vampire, or what would happen if he slew another vampire. They simply longed for excuses to kill each other, now that they were not allowed to kill humans for fun.”
“So you’re saying that the Sisterhood is not only the creators of vampirism, but also the Guidance which we live by?” I ask, sounding not nearly as surprised as I am.
I am far too exhausted to show any signs of surprise or any emotions at all, in fact. What has she done to me? The wounds should have healed by now – a lot sooner than now, even.
She nods, washed over by despise of our kind.
“We made a mistake and tried to justify it by making another one. We should simply have killed you then, when your numbers were small and your damage was minuscule,” she drifts off.
I gasp. A sudden pain spreads in my abdomen. The pain is far more intense now than before, and though the pool of blood beneath me is not even half the size of Jackston’s, I know that time is running out. I grit my teeth and try to get a hold of myself.
“Which is something you intend on changing now, by killing us?” I pant.
She grins wickedly at my remark, her eyes gleam of joy, like a child’s, finally getting the one thing she has craved during her lifetime.
“I do.”
The pain causes me to squeeze my eyes into a pained expression. I gasp and try to cover my wounds with my hands. I cannot – they are still cuffed to the wall. I notice that the concrete in the chains’ attachments budge slightly when I swiftly pull my arms in front if me, as if hinting that they might give in was I to pull harder and faster. This surprises me – they appear to be of such sturdy material that not even a vampire could tear loose, which I suspect is their purpose to begin with. What is this place? Who built it?
“I should’ve done this millenniums ago, but I haven’t really gotten around to it until now,” Ariane informs.
“Why not?” I manage to ask as the pain moves up my body, robbing me of my breath.
My question removes her pleased grin, and replaces it with a grim expression. Her cold eyes are drowning in despise.
“Because a small part of me still had hope that my sisters were right, that you disgusting beings would turn out to be useful,” she snarls. “You didn’t. So tonight you die.”
“All of us?” I ask intriguingly, wondering how she could ever pull of such feat in one night.
By now, I regretfully have no doubt that she is indeed capable of performing the task, I am merely curious as to whether she could truly do it in one night. There are more vampires in the world than in the Asylaum, and only here we have several hundred inhabitants. I know that she could slay them all tonight, but to hunt down every vampire spread in the world in one night – I doubt it.
“As many as possible,” she sneers. “The rest has it coming another day, but I promise – I will not keep them waiting. Not even the ones who have shunned your paltry society.”
She stares dreamingly at a strange piece of machinery with her eyes gleaming.
“I will extinct your kind, Theodore,” she says distantly, “I will tear its roots out, starting with the centre of the plague – your Asylaum. Then, the few branches that remain after I have cut this epidemic tree down, I will burn. And all that this world will remember you by, are the pillars of smoke that your burning corpse made.”
Charming, that is one description expressed somewhat too vividly.
I then think of something, something that I have not even considered before – something that makes my heart skip a beat. I worry that I have made a decision that has taken the life of the one being left in this world that truly matters to me.
“Your sisters,” I begin with an anxious voice, “are they aware of your actions?”
My mind rushes by me at ten times the normal speed. They cannot be. I cannot have misjudged Sarthimia to such an extent. I cannot – I will not. I never put my trust in anyone unworthy of it – ever. And yet I find myself second guessing myself. If I am wrong, if I have made a mistake – I have guaranteed Mina a gruesome death.
“They are,” Ariane smiles, aware of my concerns.
She pauses dramatically, while my heart becomes a black pit of self-loathing and sending me into grief beyond comprehension of any man. Forgive me, Mina, for I have inadvertently killed you. I no longer doubt that you have died, probably minutes after I left the monastery. Damn you Sarthimia – damn you for making me trust you.
Ariane chuckles at my grief. I swear that I will kill her before this night is over – may it even cost my life, which it is likely to do anyway, so I have little to lose, I figure.
I growl furiously at her.
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Chapters
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
11 | 12| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | Epilogue
