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Chapter 16
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Chapter 16 I was beginning to get feeling back in my toes and fingers, the fire of healing fading to be replaced by the burning of hunger once again in the limbs that were healed, both fires equally unbearable. I could smell that wonderful smell again. The scent of blood, now that I knew what it was, both repulsed and intrigued me. Different people smelled different ways. Like different entrees at a great feast. Each person had a bouquet all their own. The person dragging me had a bitter scent, but it wasn’t unpleasant. They dropped me against some hard surface. I thought it might have been a wagon wheel, it had spindles beneath my back, but it was cold and felt like metal. Someone grabbed my broken leg and jerked it straight with a sickening snap. What would have been a scream came out as a loud hiss through my sundered throat. The ankle was quickly clamped to the side of whatever I had been dropped on. I began to squirm, thrashing as much as I could with my unresponsive limbs. Pain roared like wild fire through my ravaged body. The three fires nearly consumed my sanity. The rib bones that had broken through my chest when I hit the ground were bending themselves like snakes, seeking their broken halves. My neck had nearly been cut in two. Mischi’s sword had stuck in the bone of my vertebrae, it was too dull to cut through bone, but all the tiny minutiae in between had been severed and crushed to destruction. Veins and vessels and muscle had given way under his sword, and now they burned with the fires of hell to knit themselves back together. My other leg was jerked straight, followed by each arm. The hands that griped me were strong, and weathered, aged with time. Beyond that and the strong scent of their bitter blood I had no idea who had me now. My mind shrieked at my body, willing it to move. I could hear whispering in my brain, murmurs of want and desire. The bitter smell filled my nose and made that burning center that was my core plead for a taste, the bitterness was becoming more welcoming, like cinnamon or cloves, bitter and yet flavorful. A soft gurgle sounded from my opened throat. Whatever I was chained to began to move, I was being dragged. I could no longer hear the sounds of battle, the ring of steel on steel and the cries of the dying faded into the night sound of owls and crickets. More smells began to fill my nose. I wasn’t sure if the smells were coming from real items or if they were the ethereal smells of people. I could smell cheese and meat, burlap and leather. The smell of animals invaded my senses, and somehow even that made my mouth water, their blood scented with earth and hay. I heard the groan of metal and wood as my platform was raised and loaded. I wasn’t sure the purpose of whoever had me. If they had meant to kill me then surely Michi would have done the job when he was attempting to cut my head off. I heard whispers, just outside my range of hearing. I assumed that I had been strapped to a board or wheel of some kind and then loaded into the back of a wagon. My destination and what was to become of me unknown. I mourned the last night’s events. I was damned. I had lost my love, my family, and my life in one fell swoop. I was a danger to my people, to all people. A sob left my throat as a gurgle as the wounds slid shut. My mind wandered to the terrified face of my father, his acceptance, his reaching for me. I was forgiven for things I did not wish to do. The look on Mischi’s face spoke of no such forgiveness. He would hate me for the rest of his days. I knew this and I deserved it. My heart screamed in agony as I lived the pain I knew he must feel. I had taken the life of his love. Part of me knew that in that moment I had lost my own love. Setrel baffled me now. Was he vampire as I was or something different? When he was outside the Lord’s hall earlier this night, it was like a transformation took place. His limp was gone, his rage like nothing I had ever seen. Being in this place full of monsters had tainted him somehow. From the moment I had had that vision it was like a demon had been unleashed in his soul. The look on his face when he ripped his father’s head from his shoulders chilled me even now. There was so much death, so much evil in this place. It seeped into the pours of the people. Had I truly damned myself so long ago in that far away churchyard? Perhaps the curse was Setrel’s to bear and I had merely gotten in the way. Now I longed for death. I was evil, alone and tainted. The hunger burned in my heart and demanded blood. As my body mended it burned through the blood I had already consumed, the reconstruction process slowed as it ran out of the fuel it needed to change my broken body into a new, fresh killing machine. Tears of blood pooled in my eyes and traveled in crimson rivers down my cheeks. This was hell and I had no hope of salvation. As my throat sealed it’s wounds shut the whimpers of my sobbing escaped my throat. My words weren’t sensible, I didn’t even know if anyone could hear them. I cried out in vain for my father, for my mother, for Setrel. No one came. There in the darkness under a tarp in the back of a wagon, I prayed for death to take me. It wasn’t long before I fell asleep mid sob. It was the same time that the sun breached the horizon. I knew the instant the sun sank behind the western mountains. My eyes opened, still buried beneath the rough canvas that had helped to hide me from the sun. My body burned with hunger, I felt like I was in the middle of a bonfire. My body wanted to twist in on itself. The broken bones no longer protruded through the skin of my chest. Sounds of movement and voice filled my ears, and scents assaulted my nose. It was like being chained to the wall at a fine banquet all the wonderful smells of fine food and you could not taste. I could feel my body trying to consume it’s self, the hunger in my veins consuming my flesh and withering it. The speed that the fire ripped through my body was beyond any pain anyone could ever feel. Through a throat still half open I screamed. The sound echoed louder than I would have thought possible, and silence fell beyond my canvas prison. The sound of my own voice startled me, and I sobbed. Footsteps approached and the canvas was ripped from my face. I screamed again, the dim firelight burned like a thousand suns. It was brighter than anything I’d ever seen, and what was more, without the canvas covering my face, the smells of the people assaulted me even harder. I let my hair hang over my face, and instantly regretted looking down. The feeling that my body was eating it’self was no lie. In the process of healing it had burned more blood than I had consumed. I looked starved like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. I was a skeleton with skin stretched over bone. My breasts hung like limp sacks of wasted flesh. My legs turned at impossible angles and my ribs stood at attention, each one accounted for. Tears coursed down my cheeks and little drips of red like paint stained my skin, and then absorbed. My mind was in danger of cracking, I was too absorbed with the light, the pain, the vision of myself in my deathlike state to notice when they pulled me from the back of the wagon and stood me up before the entire caravan. I had the strength but not the will to raise my head. I had become some kind of grotesque side show attraction. I had been beautiful, I had been a princess in my own right, and now… I screamed my terror to the moon. That bright full moon had watched in silence as I had died at the hands of a monster. That hateful ball of light that had watched me kill in a stupor of hunger and said nothing. I thrashed at my bindings, hearing the frightened murmurs and whispers that echoed my own terror, I could not free myself. My starved frantic mind remembered a passage from my youth. Something a priest had spoken over the funeral rites of a that had died of starvation. My lips moved and began to speak and silence fell. “O God, thou art my God. Early will I seek thee: my soul THIRSTETH for thee….” My voice growled out of my ruined throat, angry boot steps approached, but I continued. “My flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is…” The slap that echoed across my face silenced the prayer and nearly snapped my neck. I fell silent and by sheer will forced my eyes to focus on the man who had struck me. Mischi glared at me in livid silence. The purple hue of skin was unhealthy as if all his blood had reached the surface and longed to come out. Oh, how I longed for it to come out. An inhuman snarl left my lips and I continued the passage as I stared him down. I moved to the part of the passage about vengeance. “But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall by the sword…” Mischi swore and struck me again, he skinned his knuckles on my cheek bone. My own flesh came away and left the bone exposed. It healed nearly as quickly as it happened, aided by the blood from Mischi’s knuckles. The hunger burned ever brighter as it tasted a sip of sweet nectar. I fell silent, brooding on the small knowledge I had just learned. Mischi glared at me for a few more seconds and then he turned to, what I assumed were, his people. As he spoke of the evils this abomination, I can only assume he meant me, I turned my head and brushed my cheek against my shoulder. It no longer stung from his blow but I saw what I wanted to see, no blood stained my shoulder. I smiled softly as I turned my face to the ground, I had felt no bone against my withered flesh. The hunger snarled through me like demon wolves racing a forest path. I wasn’t dead yet. I glanced up at Mischi as he stalked between me and his caravan. He was preaching speaking of how I would be an example, how he would show everyone man woman and the evil that existed. I idly noted that even my hair had withered, it looked like old lace brittle and frail has if it might break off and fall away. I blew a breath to knock it from my face, my wrists twisting in their bonds, the bones grinding together painfully. The chains around my wrist pinched my paper thin skin and tore at it. My mind was hazy with hunger, but I was not going to die this way. My thoughts ran red with the blood I longed to spill. Setrel’s face loomed in my mind and I could not suppress the cat like growl that boiled in my ruined throat. The red haze cleared and I caught Mischi’s glare. I knew what I would do. I parted my cracked brittle lips and croaked, “Let he who…” I gasped, “who is without” I forced air into my lungs. “Sin,” I hissed, hiding my grin behind the fall of my hair as he blustered forward already pulling back his fist as I finished the passage. “Cast the first stone.” His fist flew and instead of cringing from it as he had expected me to I leaned into the blow, his fist grazed past my cheek again and landed a blow in the steel contraption that held me. I turned my head and bared my fangs and sank them deep into his throbbing forearm. I inhaled his blood, like sweet ambrosia I feasted upon it taking his strength and for a moment he filled my brain. His thoughts, his feelings, his memories warred with my own until I wasn’t sure if I was Mischi or Liliana. I felt rage at all vampires, at the bloodsucking demon that had stolen my beloved wife, within hours after I had felt her touch and tasted her flesh. When her dew still anointed my length, and her breath was fresh on my cheek. I felt his pure terror as I fed, rather than tempering my hunger it increased it. I longed to curl myself around him and feed until I absorbed him into myself. The terrified screams of the caravan barely reached my ears over the high tempo staccato of his failing heart, as the blood coursed through me, I felt myself swelling and my wrists pulled at the chains that bound me. With an inhuman shriek of twisting metal my arms came around the slumping body of Mischi. His warriors moved in to save their leader but the twisted wreckage of their metal wheel was wrapped around the two of us like a cocoon. It was like it had been before, my eyes were blind to the moment. I was somewhere in the past, in a past that was not my own, reliving the memories of another person as if I had lived them myself. I remember the pain of an arm I never broke. I felt the odd sensation of a male erection. I felt the rage of paying a handsome price for a well bred bride, and then having her stolen from me on my wedding night by a demon. A demon so beautiful I was angry that she was not mine. I was both disgusted and repulsed by the sensations that traveled through me. His greed and his hate and his inhumanity, it turned my stomach and made me want to vomit up the life I had just stolen. This was a true monster. This vile twisted thing that looked like a man was more of a villain than I could ever be. Through his own eyes I saw him kill, for no reason greater than jealousy. I threw him from me as far as I could with in the shell of steel that kept his men at bay. I screamed as fire burned through me. His blood coursed through my withered muscles and damaged flesh. The life I stole from his blood knit me back together in a firestorm of pain and agony. The memories flashed through my brain in pure horror. This was a man who accused many of being a vampire, knowing they were not. Placing false accusations so that he could take what was not his. I screamed in pure terror as I relived the of a young girl, her father’s blood still fresh on my hands. I had accused him of being a vampire and cut off his head and ordered my caravan to destroy his home and family for harboring him. He had not been a vampire. But his was beautiful, and she would not give me the time of day. As my stomach churned as Mischi’s glee washed over me. He had secretly relished in her screams, the sight of the bloody hand prints over her face. His words echoed through my lips, the sounds of spears on steel died away, Mischi’s voice echoing in the night made everyone back away in shock and terror. “That’s right, taste the blood of your father on your lips.” His words and his grunting, wheezing breath hissed from between my lips, my hips thrusting against his now lifeless corpse, as I repeated what he had said and done. “You shouldn’t have turned me away, you bitch. How does it feel to know I’ll win anyway?” I barked out a laugh in Mischi’s rasping snarling hate filled voice, my own mind numb with terror and screaming. I trailed my tongue over his cooling cheek placing a kiss on his open sightless eye, in echo of his actions in murder. “I told you what would happen.” Each word was punctuated with a thrust, in the back of my mind I could hear the girls sobs, slowly the turned to gasping, choking, as his hands circled her neck. I shuddered violently willing this torture to end. My own hands circled the neck of his corpse, squeezing with a force that he never possessed in life, I snapped the head from his shoulders and cast it away from me. The memories began to fade and my eyes were again my own. I gagged, but the blood I had consumed was already far from my stomach flowing into my limbs and giving them life and strength undying. The memory of death fresh in my mind, I heard another laughter not my own. Echoing in the back of my mind as the girls death rattle had. A snarl curled my lip as the fading memory turned it’s head and smiled over it’s shoulder at another man. This man watched, his manhood in his hand as I ravaged the girl and choked the life from her. Even though she was dead beneath me, as I moved he came forward. The fading memory spared me from what I knew would come next. He was coming for his turn. I blinked violently, fighting the dry heaves that shook my frame. I pried my wrists and ankles from the metal shell. The men stood outside, I could see them through the spindles, they looked from one to the next, uncertain if Mischi had some how defeated me within our tiny steel cage. My eyes focused, there to my right was the same vile man from the vision. He was aroused by the memory, the voice, the words. He alone in this crowd knew where they came from and what they meant. I snarled and it turned to a steady growl as I threw myself against the steel, ripping through it in one violent motion. I pounced upon the sick twisted soul with my fangs withdrawn. I had been learning quickly. If I tasted him, I would taste his memories and I already knew enough of his memory to know that he needed to die. I shoved my long taloned fingers deep through his breast plate and gripped his lung, pulling it forward. Like a blood eagle, when it was free of the muscles of his chest, the lung began to inflate like a balloon, larger and larger until it burst, spraying blood over him, me, and the stunned few that stayed to watch. I snarled and dropped the gasping man to the ground. Echoing memories of wrongs done fed my fury as I hunted the members of Mischi’s caravan. In the darkness, on that night, I became a demon. I feasted on their blood. The , the innocent, I let them run. My stalking sense of death claimed those of evil heart and cruel intent.  Easily distracted by shiney objects |
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