Indigo Vamporium (18 page)

Scratch that; it floods me with inconceivable dread.

My heart hammers, having congestive tantrums as if it recalls what he perpetrated when I was lost in netherworlds from the only drink he left to parch my thirst. Laced with opiates which blocked out logic, it flushed me into hellacious hallucinations.

“What did you do to me?” I say, immediately softening my tone with the amplified resonance of the acoustic crypt.

Tapping his head with a long pale finger, his nails painted black, he winks, “You were inhibited up here.” Tap tap forehead. “All I did was untether your indoctrinated boundaries.”

“What was that flower?' I probe, daring to question him.

“The black bat blossom.” Turning back to his compulsive scribbling, he moves as if in a trance, mumbling oaths in a meditative baritone. “... Also the secret of the secrets of all the spirits may be opened before me, gently obeying me and my commandments, through the holy Akibeel and Jeqon...”

I do not know this Ross. He's a stranger to me.

An intelligent stranger.

Scrawling chalk squiggles across the walls, he chants, “Kasdeja, Penemue, Remiel, appear before me in a mild manner and form, and do what I desire. Gadreel, Armers, Melkejal, you will also defeat my enemies. Grant me Clavicula Salomonis to open all that is locked, free my bounty, heap the treasure of treasures on my spirit, raise me up and blind my nemesis, bind the evil, conquer all fear, release the love that is mine so I may embrace it in everlasting fortitude.”

Turning to face me, he whispers, “I conjure you spirits by the power of Akae, Arsayalalyur, grant to these to obey my will and my commandments, to do my will and pleasure, fulfill. Behold by these signs and names, the secret of all secrets who ruleth all, gently answer.”

Hissing in a deep groan, he points to the pentacles one by one, mumbling, “...conjure... Hel... wonderful... Kasbeel....” mumble moan.

In disbelief I watch while the air warps, shimmering in a hazy mirage, materializing an enormous man with eyes so blistering red they glow like forges, over seven feet tall, built like a tank, his perfect skin and evil black hair send terror searing through the night, through me, the sound of sky ripping apart in volts of anger and preternatural power shaking through the bones of the building, causing debris to rattle to the cold concrete floor.

The sky is sharing my seizure of terror.

“Quid tibi vis in?” rumbles across the small chamber from his thunderous baritone.

Ross puffs out his chest, his eyes gleaming with smug import, “I command thee to speak to your commander in his native tongue.”

I swear the magic manifestation looks like he's about to laugh while I'm cowered in a corner ready to pee my pants.

“What can I do for you?” he booms, forcing me to block my ears for fear he'll shatter my eardrums.

“Noctiluca I brought a virgin, to sanctify the rite, grant me her lifelong servitude,” says Ross, pointing at me.

No! Absolutely, categorically, you must be out of your demented mind!

The apparition bows his head, “Shortly.” And poof, like a genie he vanishes without granting three wishes.

“I command you to return!” shouts Ross, losing his pompous composure.

*

Venix:

I sense him immediately, pivoting fast to face the demon Zarak.

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

He scowls at me, “I just found the missing girl. Some twerp has her in an unused silo just beyond Paarl. The moron has found himself the grimoires of the first holders of the Urim and Thummin, and the fool thinks he is playing dice with the outcast from heaven. Instead I pitched up out of curiosity when I heard words no mortal should utter without deep and never ending recourse. I wish to feed him a bounty of regret.”

Holding my hand up to pause him, I yell for my charge, “Seithe!” I give him no time, pulling him with haste to our meeting. When he is thrust over the threshold I release the bind, freeing him.

“Back off! I'm not your pet!”

“Shut up Seithe, this is important,” I snap, pointing at Zarak. “Tell him what you just told me.”

“I found your girlfriend. Her moron abductor thought he could summon angels and demons to stroke his ego for him, and I poked my head in just to jerk his chain. He offered her to me as his virgin. He wants me to force her into a life of servitude to him. And you folks think I have ego issues? We haven't got anything on human arrogance. We don't come anywhere close to the depths your dabbling conceit sink to.”

“You found Taz? Take me there! Now!”

“Not so fast, Seithe,” I shake my head. “It would be better for an anonymous tip to be delivered to the police, and let them catch that little weasel red handed!”

“You can't just leave her there!” he demands.

Ignoring him, I look to Zarak, “What did you say... do?”

“I spoke Latin to him to make it feel more authentic, and he commanded I speak to him in his mother tongue. When he ordered me to give him what he demanded, I just said 'shortly' and popped right in here to alert you.”

Seithe tilts his head, examining Zarak, “Why did he summon you? How did he get your name?”

“He didn't. It was all just smoke and mirrors on my end, I heard him speaking names of brothers long gone, and I went to investigate. He got me, luckily for you.” Zarak glowers at us, “That little wretch, I feel like taking him to the underworld to teach him a damn good lesson. He's picked up some fake copy of Solomon's Keys and thinks they're real!”

“How do you know they are fake?” I interrogate, needing to make sure.

“The moron calls him Jesus of Nazareth. When we both know full well it was truthfully Immanuel the Nazarine, because he was of the elite order the Nazarites. Only an idiot would pick up a translated book and swallow everything in it as gospel truth without researching the subject they're swearing allegiance to. He never called himself Jesus, that was a Roman coup cast in stone by a couple of pagan kings like Constantine, who only swore allegiance to cover his bases when on his death bed. Even he didn't believe the lies he'd poked into that book. That little shit thinks he has Solomon's Key, I'll show him Solomon's Key, and it'll hurt more than he can stomach, and teach him a mountain of humility and respect for arcane subjects he's throughly ignorant about, but thinks he can wield for his pathetic ego and selfish will. What part of free will do these thicktards not understand?”

“Take me back with you!” interrupts Seithe, cutting short Zarak's sanctimonious tirade.

He's right though, he was Immanuel, never the corrupt Roman name bestowed on him, and he really was of the elite order of the Nazarite.

Zarak's eyes flare blue, “And how are you going to explain that to your girlfriend?”

“I don't care! Let's go punch his head in and rescue my girl!”

“You don't just run about the countryside punching heads in, Seithe. You aren't a savage. Where on earth does this unrequited anger in you stem from?” I say to him.

Zarak bellows his belly laugh, “Anger? Ha! You and your brothers were no different. How short is your memory, Venix?”

“Excuse me but we're burning time here! Tasmin needs us!” yells Seithe, urgency blasting off him.

Zarak holds up his hand, “I'll send the idiot on a wild goose chase, hang ten young vampling. I'll be back with news shortly.”

The enormous seven foot two demon vanishes, leaving Seithe wound tighter than a blood knot.

“No! Why does no one ever listen to me?”

Smiling at him, I offer hope, “Hold your horses. You are spontaneous and headstrong, Zarak has way more experience than both of us combined. He won't let anything happen, just wait the ten minutes he needs to set his plan into fruition.”

Traipsing to him, offering Seithe a goblet of sustenance, I pat his shoulder, “We'll get your girl back today, you have my oath.”

*

Zarak:

Appearing back in the den of inequity, my veins constrict at the hasty escape. The thicktard isn't so thick after all. How did he know we were onto him?

What do I tell Seithe?

Looking at the empty silo, I can still smell her tears, taste her fear, a piece of her innocence left behind to stain the walls with her psychic trauma.

Chapter 24

Tasmin:

The world is hot and wet, like a womb of pleasure, just right, subliminally perfect.... tropical comfort.

Is it wrong that I like it? Probably. I've never thought about it before now. I've never tried it. Not that I'd admit that to anyone. I'm positive I'm dead, if I'm totally honest. I can't move. I tell my arms to shift because they feel stiff, and they simply ache when I try.

I attempted shuffling my legs, and nothing happened. I tried opening my eyes, listening, and both senses are on strike. The world is black, mute... but my skin feels something, and what it feels is warm …  wet.

It's cozy, and... ssssexy... and very,
very
, wrong.

But I like it.

I like being dead. It's ... sssseductive.

Ssssurprisingly pleasurable, turning the amplifier on my heart up to full volume, racing the pace of my pulse to cardiac arrest, stealing thought and breath, replacing it with a glowing corona of bliss, teasing, tensing... euphoric sssscintilation.

I'm in paradise where feathers trace my nerves in lazy circles, churning sensation to cryogenic fire, freeing my mind to soar so high only Jupiter's red aurora borealis can lick it.

Breathing.

I hear it tight to my ear, a pumping heart held in life's breath caught to my eardrum like a seashell, resonating dull thuds... comforting.

Floating... on a sigh suspended over windswept skin.

“Tell me you love me.”

I wrestle with fatigue, against a spellbinding plague which possesses my tongue and forces me to speak words because I was ordered to. I sound drunk when I tell Death in a chaffing whisper, “I... love you.”

Who is
you
?

Why would Death care. How did you dominate my body to speak words out of my mouth I did not think, I did not will, I do not feel, like your marionette with broken strings, a puppet pulled over your violating hand like a corpse possessed.

Dread inflames my paranoia. Everything is wrong, inciting me to struggle, something dry instantly popped under my tongue, a strong hand clamping my mouth shut in a finger muzzle.

“Scream and I'll make you so high they'll never rescue your sanity.”

Closing my eyes to the smudging sight, the parasite's fingers bite so hard into my cheeks it juices tears out of my eyes.

A hot tongue slips up to run a wet ring under my eyelashes, painting shame into my skin. Pestilence slips his tongue between my lips, contaminating my conscience, raping my soul.

Defeat is bitter comfort when suspended in desolation.

*

Seithe:

It hovers suspended, like fine talcum powder on a pampered Renaissance king. It hazes the vista and the soul with mortician's alabaster. It is without a doubt dominating the world in obscure tension, fatiguing vision and stretching nerves so tight they warble in dull thuds like barrels bobbing downstream.

It's heavy, preternatural, deliberate, diabolical.

A Venetian masquerade summoned by the hunter who wallows in his psychosis with my Tasmin.

Yes, mine.

Call for me Taz. Sing my little bird, wherever your cage is hidden, just chirp to the world, even if it's in the dark...  I can find you instantly. But without your voice uttering my name, I'm lost in the drifting fog coating the landscape the way dementia clouds the mind.

It bleaches the beauty from the world, leaving behind coffins of despair where once majesty cradled us in a hand of breathtaking rapture.

It's menacing, embedding damp cyanide into the weave of my clothes, slicking laudanum through my hair, sticking my eyelashes together like a cheap prostitute who wears sin as a mask, varnishing over the loathing which scalds the heart.

I can feel it. Sense it. It pulls my vipers off my palate so they press uncomfortably into my lip.

Closing my eyes to the etherscape of endless fog, I listen to the faint pulse I tasted, hearing it trickle and drip, running in panic....

My eyes flick open as realization plants a voodoo pin in my retina. Your pulse chases up flights of stairs. Labored,
excited
... not from fear, but pleasure.

The betrayal singes my eyes with burning anger and I stare at the pillow being held over our faces, suffocating us, making us blind, covering scents and sounds, stripping us of every fragile thread, severing my heart from yours.

How can he pull this hood over our heads? He is a mortal. There must be a way to force this choking gaseous infusion into receding, or lifting, or just blowing away.

It's scratching over my skin like cankers of poison, eating into me and annihilating my coherence, muddling logic, muting courage like a slowly administered toxin.

It's a sedative! The wily traitor has confounded us with an airborne soporific.

How? How did he know what we are?

Turdface. The dude sent to score with my sister.

We were set up! It was a test! And I'm the idiot who walked into the snare with both feet.

Wafting my hand through the atomizing tranquilizer, I hold my breath because it is making us docile. It's makes us his fool, his victim, his amusement.

This is a game to him. A trifling game he is currently victorious in. His ego is licking across my girlfriend's skin while I catatonically sit here in smoggy delirium.

The thought is like a stun grenade going off internally, one second paralyzed, the next...

“Arelstin!” I bellow, unleashing revenge. “Arelstin!”

If you wanted a vampyre vendetta, you certainly found the right V for the vocation. She's my IV, not yours. She's sedated with ecstasy, in more ways than one.

I suppose he thinks that's funny?

Wait... how the hell could I even know that?

“Because you have white hair, you are fast rising to the yoke of responsibility. You are half angel with the power of a fully fledged to wield, that's how you know. You must have fed from her, now you know what she feels, thinks, experiences. And you are correct, I don't know how he could pull so much fog off the sea, or drop it this thickly over the entire peninsula, but he has. As it's sea air, for us it has a certain sedating aspect to its chemical composition.”