The Dark Messenger (28 page)

In response to Captain Ognian fronting up to
him with his swords out, Vius returned him a withering stare.

‘Why would you challenge me Ognian, after all
the years we have been fighting side by side?’

‘Because it is clear that
just to keep up with the coven’s tradition of hand-to-hand combat,
you would knowingly send us in there to our deaths, than to avoid
bringing embarrassment on yourself in the future if stories were
told. We are losing with swords, and after the first wave of
warriors died we should have changed tactics and swarmed the garage
with machine guns. Only,
like a
fool,
you keep sending more of our
brothers to their deaths and those who refuse you kill them
too.’

‘Fine. You want to use machine guns…’ Vius
grunted.

Turning around he ordered a warrior who was
standing next to him, a vampire named Ziuf to grab a machine gun.
He told him to go to the entrance and blast the mad fucker
inside.

‘One is not enough! Swarm the place!’ Ognian
demanded.

Two more grenades then bowled out as they
were talking and killed three more warriors in a garish white
flash. Afterwards the ones who got hit and didn’t die were
staggering around screaming as the tried to pull out pieces of
molten hot silver from their flesh.

Vius ignored Ognian’s request to send more
warriors and stood back to watch, hoping the one warrior now armed
with a machine gun would have more success.

Ziuf crept up to the entrance furtively but
as he reached the doorway he looked down at his weapon in
disgust--it was empty. Reaching behind himself and contradicting
his clandestine approach, he slammed a new magazine into the gun.
The noise it made as the steel casing slid inside the weapon was a
horrifyingly loud, ear piecing metal-against-metal crunch.

Ognian cursed as he realized the sound would
have been heard inside the garage too.

Holding the powerful weapon at waist height,
Ziuf leapt into the entrance and pulled back the trigger on his
machine gun.

Even though he could see two female vampires
and two dogs covered in blood and within easy range, he centered
his efforts for retribution of his fallen comrades, by trying to
hit the beastly male vampire first.

The vampire must have heard him though.

Strange,
he thought as he watched him
dive for cover behind two dead bodies. Using them as shields, he
made it impossible for him to shoot him without brazenly stepping
inside, which he wasn’t prepared to do.

Furious, he turned to give the women a blast
instead, but then the vampire that was hiding suddenly came back
into view for the miniscule of time. As he appeared, he flung a
sword at him and then disappeared again behind the dead bodies.

Ducking fast to avoid the lethal weapon, Ziuf
lost control of the machine gun. Uncontrolled, the ammo sprayed
upwards. The bullets bounced off the ceiling and ricocheted
everywhere.

Realizing his magazine was all but empty, he
dashed behind the doorframe for cover and began fumbling in his
pocket for another magazine whilst negative telepathic messages
from Vius were screaming round inside his brain. Then just as he
slammed the new magazine in, ignoring Vius as his utmost concern
was self-preservation at this point, suddenly there was a thud
behind him and he knew what it was too.

Swallowing as he turned to verify it, Ziuf
never got to see the grenade explode, because everything went
black.

And then he was dead.

Seeing his warrior get blown apart from the
explosion of another grenade, Ognian reacted. He charged, swinging
both of his swords wildly, their blades seeking Vius’ face.

Vius jumped backwards, laughing. ‘You have to
use two swords?’

Throwing the shorter one down so that it
buried itself deep into the soil, Ognian began to circle him with
just the one sword as he prepared to attack.

Vius grinned as he drew out both of his
swords and lunged for him.

Ognian twisted his sword so that the widest
part of his blade hit first. Vius’ left sword twanged out of tune
as it flew out of his grip. Then it vanished into the dark field
behind him.

‘Can’t have you cheating, can we?’ Ognian
sneered.

‘Fine, then I’m going to kill you with just
one sword!’ Vius screamed as he lunged forwards and swung for
him.

Ognian slipped in the mud, narrowly missing a
devastatingly deep throat slash as he brought his own blade up to
bear, blocking the attack.

The swords produced sparks similar to
extremely expensive fireworks as they violently clashed together,
exploding into a glorious array of colors.

For a moment between strikes, the ground all
around the two warriors was lit up. Shadows were casting in all
directions; the leaves on the bushes in the distance became just
dark silhouettes whilst others, closer, leapt out at the assembled
watchers, brightly lit in different shades of emerald green.

Both warriors had several deep slashes across
them, but only Ognian was suffering. With blood pouring out of a
wound across his back, the giant realized he was not winning this
one.

As a group of gathering clouds ambled past
the moon, sending the land into complete darkness, there was the
whoosh of a vicious swipe, and Ognian screamed.

As the clouds passed and the eerie
luminescent glow was restored to the wintry hillsides, Ognian saw
that his left forearm was now lying on the ground in front of him,
still twitching.

Vius looked the giant in the eye and smiled
before saying, ‘I seem to be winning here, my friend.’

Looking down at his stump as it sprayed blood
out of his severed sleeve, Ognian growled, ‘That it may be true,
but now I’m going to fucking kill you.’

Suddenly there was a huge explosion from the
garage. A massively bright, super-garish flash tore out of it, as
if a star had just exploded into a supernova. As the force shook
the ground violently all around them, it was clear the explosion
was easily fifty times bigger than the grenades had been. It was
like an earthquake, reaching an unbelievable 9 on the Richter
scale.

The trees all around them shook from the
tremendous power. Their leafless branches thrashed backwards and
forwards like they were whips in the hands of demon chariot riders
trying to make their soulless horses gallop faster through the
night.

The bushes that had been gently rustling
missed the middle stage of flapping, as they were suddenly immersed
in a frantic dance. It was as if they were in the height of a rush
on some crazy dance floor.

Ognian and Vius stopped crashing their
archaic swords at one another, and for a brief moment spun round to
look. This immediate urgency forced a temporary truce as they
indulged like gentlemen before a duel, in a transient abeyance.

Crouching and taking in the almost-historic
moment, they couldn’t believe the power of the blast. Those
assembled, who survived, compared it to when the atom bomb had
exploded for the first time. At least ten more warriors died,
whilst others were picked up like pieces of paper and thrown
violently, spinning through the air, straight out into the field
and beyond.

Coming from the entrance was a huge channel
of dark toxic fumes already beginning to plume up high into the
moonlit sky above them, as it took the shape of a gigantic
mushroom.

Ognian, mesmerized by what he was seeing,
didn’t hear Vius creeping up behind him until it was too late. Vius
spun round in a whirlwind death strike, keeping the blade at
forehead height, and chopped his head off in one clean swipe.

As it hit the grassy bank, it suddenly rolled
backwards and with a frozen look of horror across the face, it
disappeared into the bushes below.

Vius cursed inwardly because he knew he had
to find the head.

Looking back briefly he could see that all
the vampires that had been blown into the field by the explosion,
were now back up by the garage entrance. Realizing he hadn’t much
time left to find the head, he knew he had to double his efforts.
He wondered if maybe it had actually gone right through the bush
and out into the field on the other side.

The reason he had to find the head was to
restore the troop’s belief in him as their leader. It was a
vampire’s way of proving he was triumphant and victorious in
battle. The head had to be cut off his opponent and then it had to
be held high for all to see. If this wasn’t done, then the hostile
situation would not be appeased or placated. Vius knew that the
only way this mission would stay under his command, and his
warriors returned to his direction, was to show the head to
them.

Instead of crawling back out and then leaping
over the bush, he decided to crawl forwards into the field. Seconds
later, he regretted that decision and knew that the whole of the
next day he would too.

‘Aaargh fuck!’ he screamed as he crawled
backwards out of the bush. He was furious that he still hadn’t
found the head, but even more furious now because two stingy nettle
stems had stung him across the face and neck.

Fucking bush,
he thought. He could feel his face beginning to
throb from the poisoned barbs that had just infected his skin.
Refusing to rub it for fear of spreading the poison and therefore
causing so much more pain later, he tried to ignore it as he got
down to his knees again, concentrating on looking for the head
instead. Only once did he slide his fingers gently across the
surface of his skin--and cursed because there were already little
bumps coming up everywhere.

Then suddenly a flashback crossed his mind—an
unwanted and deeply embarrassing one.

It was when he was fighting another vampire
from a different coven some hundreds of years before, and they were
trying to kill one another. They had been battling and clashing
their swords at the top of a hill, but then found themselves
somehow hurtling down the steep escarpment and bashing their heads,
somersaulting, and spinning violently as they crashed into various
pain-inflicting objects. At the bottom, after finally bouncing off
a tree stump, they became airborne.

For the miniscule of a moment, time froze.
Then with an extremely hard thump it restarted again, as they
landed in the middle of a dark-green patch of stingy nettles. They
had leapt back up and fought for a time, but then unavoidably, the
irritating and extremely heinous itching began. Together, as if
mutually agreeing to a transient abeyance, they dropped their
swords and ripped off their chest armor. Then they began scratching
everywhere, like monkeys in the jungle.

He hadn’t known at that time that, by
scratching, he was actually aggravating the poison and only helping
to impregnate it even deeper into his flesh. The hours that passed
afterwards were so unbelievably painful that even though he was an
elite warrior, his threshold had been breached. Because of his
anxious state of mind and with his sanity tested, whilst no one was
looking, he dropped to the floor and tears ran down his cheeks.

Finally as Vius was almost giving in suddenly
he walked into Ognian’s head. Smiling to himself, he grabbed it and
laughed at the expression on its face.

With Ognian’s hair clamped between his
fingers and using his wings for a split second, he flew over the
evil possessed bush and landed back on the hillside twenty feet
from the entrance. He grinned around at his warrior’s disgruntled
looks and felt great relief; for a moment back there he had doubted
finding it, but now he had they would listen to him again as their
leader for sure.

Vius reached up high and held Ognians
terrified look of shock and horror for them all to see.

Out of respect when they saw, they dropped to
one knee and held their heads low as they stared at the ground
beneath them.

‘Apology accepted,’ he said, appreciating
that their loyalty had returned and that he was again their leader.
‘Now, we have three and a half hours till the sun comes up.’

Looking at the entrance to the garage, the
smoke still trickling out of it, he said, ‘They must be in there
hiding and hoping that we think they blew themselves up. I highly
doubt that a warrior with his immense skills would have just
committed suicide and taken his family with him. No, they are in
there somewhere, laughing at us.’

The very idea turned his face black with
fury. He spun back to his warriors. ‘Get in there and dig through
the mess! Find them! I want their heads for this!’ he screamed.

Then turning around, he sat down on the grass
and began to sharpen his blade. His thoughts wandered to a place
where Captain Ognian was still alive, and he immediately regretted
taking his life. As his thoughts then reflected on Voitek too, his
mind began to link other things of the past. He wondered if
everything that the coven had been involved in recently was, in
some twisted disturbed way, somehow strangely connected.

After Regina and Becky had dragged the
prisoner upstairs by his feet, they let go of him as Regina went to
get some nylon zip ties from the drawer. She wasn’t concerned that
he might try to escape, even though his injuries from downstairs
were almost fully healed. The reason being is that he had new
injuries, caused by her dragging him backwards up two flights of
stairs.