Wilhelmina A Novella (14 page)

‘Yvette!’

Her attention was stolen as a brunette beauty ghosted into the room with haste. Carmilla glowered and hissed.

‘Drop the human now, we have to leave this place!’ Carmilla growled.

‘But I want her!’ Yvette shouted.

I might have been growing light headed but I was aware enough to feel fear in the very core of my being.

‘I want her soul; I crave it so badly it burns!’

‘Come, now!’ Carmilla screeched.

‘Just let me drain her, it will take but minutes!’ She whined and begged, but Carmilla snatched her wrist and pulled. Yvette dropped me out of shock and I gasped for air. I thought my lungs would burst from how desperately I heaved, but I was alive and still conscious.

I had to find Charles.

I wasted no time, sprinting from my knees to my feet andrushing down the halls toward the sounds of thunderclaps and lightning cracks. Something rock hard flew through the glass windows of the hall from the garden, but I didn’t bother stopping to see what it was. I had tunnel vision and needed to stay focused on my task: finding Charles.

I ran out into the garden where I chaos incarnate rampaged, just as Yvette had promised me.

Dark creatures leapt incredible bounds and ripped through their enemies, all pale and ashen with the battle cries of wild cats in the night. There were so many of these ravenous monsters gnashing and clashing that it was hard to pick out familiar faces from the invaders. It looked as though the governess’ guests were at war with an enemy clan of some sort. I had never seen so many demons in one place.

My arm was snatched and I was being dragged back into the mansion, a death trap. I screamed.

‘Wilhelmina, it’s me!’ Thomasine shouted. ‘Come on, we don’t have much time!’

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, nearly stumbling in my bewilderment.

‘Hell’s come, that’s what!’ Thomasine said as she pulled me through the narrow corridor into the kitchen. ‘I don’t know where the governess is, but it’s not safe for us to wait around and find out.’

‘Where’s Charles?’ I asked.

She swung me into the kitchen and closed the door behind us.

‘Never mind that demon, we have to run!’

‘I’m not leaving without him!’ I said, stubbornly.

Thomasine turned furiously, eyeing me with such incredulous scorn, but whatever rant she had prepared was interrupted by loud screeches, more cracks, and thuds in the halls. The fight had moved into the mansion.

‘Wilhelmina, this is a fight between demons and demons, evil clashing against itself! If you stay here, you will die,’ Thomasine whispered. She gripped my hands and leaned in close. ‘Please, Wilhelmina,
please
come with me.’

‘Running won’t help,’ I said.

I knew from firsthand experience, I’d run away from this place twice. These nightspawn seemed to enjoy the hunt, and would even made a game of it. There were only two ways that anyone could leave this place; to turn away from the light of day and become a part of the darkness of the night - or death.

‘I can’t go with you.’

Thomasine’s pleading expression collapsed under the heart-wrenching burdens of disappointment and sorrow. She pulled me to a cabinet and guided me as I stepped inside.

‘Stay in here until you can’t hear anything anymore,’ Thomasine said. ‘I’m running, I can’t stay here with the hope that I
might
survive.'

She held my hand tightly as tears striped her lovely dark cheeks. Then she was gone. The cabinet door was closed and I was alone with only a few ventilation slits to see through.

The oven fire weakly lit the kitchen in a dim glow, enough to see. But vision wasn’t what scared me; sound was the sense that haunted me as I heard everything drawing closer, growing louder, and it was only going to get worse.

I heard footsteps echoing through the corridor beyond the door, much like the shuffling I heard after Charles left me in the room. My heart froze; had Yvette come back for me? Had she been following me from the very beginning?

The door of the kitchen burst open and I fought the urge to scream. I saw not Yvette, but a small slave child instead. It was Henrietta. I was about to thrust open the cabinet door when a lone pale figure entered the kitchen.

‘There you are...’ The man's wicked grin widened with excitement as Henrietta backed away into a corner. He drifted around the large table until he stood just outside of the cabinet. ‘Come over here. I won’t bite, I promise.’

Henrietta made a dash for the kitchen door again, but he was far too quick. He gripped her neck and flung her across the table so quickly that the small, frail girl skidded across the wood like a stone along water’s surface. She hit the opposite brick wall so harshly that I could hear her bones
crack
. Though she was out of my limited range of visibility, I knew that she would be dead. The strength of these monsters was not found in mercy.

That was enough to force me out of my hiding place.

‘No, stop!’ I shouted as I burst out of the cabinet and looked around. I saw no man where he should have been, only an empty kitchen and a limp girl lying on the floor near the oven. I saw a fan of blood along the wall and the floor, splattered from her ruptured form when that inhuman strength threw her across the room. Now her lifeless face rested motionlessly on the stone floor, her battered and broken body bleeding out from her open wounds.

I couldn’t stifle my tears, and I cried over the innocent child’s death. I sobbed out loud. Though I covered my mouth with my hands, my cries could be heard throughout the large kitchen.

Soon there was laughter above my sobs. I looked around, anxiously trying to see where the murderer was, but I couldn’t see anyone in the room with me.

His pale face, like a beautiful porcelain mask hiding the monstrous fiend beneath, appeared out of the shadows as he slowly emerged from his hiding place and entered the light.

‘Luckily I got to you before one of the others could,’ he grinned that wicked smile again. ‘Otherwise I might not have been able to bring you back to Rosa in one piece. You do look appealing.’

‘You monster!’ I picked up a knife from the counter and charged in a blind rage, blade in fist and ready to strike. The creature didn’t flinch at my attack, he stood his ground and watched me with some morbid intrigue. I thrust the blade and pierced the delicate fabric of his dark shirt, pushing deep into his stomach. But when I retracted the blade, it hadn’t even stabbed through him. Instead, it was bent and curved.

He snatched my wrist so fast that I dropped the knife, and he held the back of my neck in his sturdy grip.

‘Rosa might decide to keep you after all. You are definitely a fighter: she needs those.’ His cold, chilling breath snaked into my ear and down my spine. ‘Or she may simply make you desert. You certainly smell sweet enough.’

He laughed as he took a deep sniff of my hair. I fought him as he began dragging me off into the corridor, but his strength was too much for me to resist.

I was on my knees in the garden of the dark mansion, bathed in moonlight next to the rest of the inhabitants of the governess’ home. The slaves, and even Rhoda, we were all equal in the eyes of the menacing madmen and shadows surrounding us.

A large pile of pale white limbs, hollow inside like a statue, was being built by the second as the white demons gathered up the pieces of their foes. I wondered if the governess was somewhere in that pile.

One by one we were dragged off of our knees and taken to the ashy brown mistress of blood that I'd known over the last few years as Rosa, one of the governess’ regular guests. It turned out Rosa was responsible for the attack on the mansion and had her own agenda in mind with the governess and her coven.

Her wild-looking lackeys brought the slaves up to her to examine. That is, the few slaves who made it to her before the untamed hyenas ripped them to shreds and fed on their blood, or stopped to fight among themselves. She would make a quick nod, and that would seal their fate. A nod to her left meant that they were to be changed into one of them, another soldier to build her army of darkness. A nod to her right meant that they were to become supper.

I saw that strange man from earlier staring at me, the one with dark hair and that curious expression on his brow as he cocked his head to the side to study me. Charles, he said his name was. But he wasn’t
my
Charles, who I was still searching for in the crowd.

I was gripped by my hair and pulled up to my feet by one of the many soulless drones under Rosa’s spell, and forced to stand before her.

‘You.’ Interest sparked behind her calculating garnet eyes. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here. Weren’t you supposed to be sold to Charles and turned?’

‘Tonight was the night that he was going to change me,’ I said flatly, rage beginning to boil once more. ‘You interrupted that.’

‘Oh well,’ Rosa said, looking me from the ground up. I waited to see if I was to become one of the damned, or another body to add to the feat for later.

‘Where is Charles?’ I asked her.

‘The one that was going to change you?’ She asked, and I confirmed. She tossed a glance over to the gruesome pile of hands, arms, legs, torsos and heads drenched in dark demon blood behind her. My stomach sunk and tears stung my eyes so quickly that they fell almost instantaneously.

‘There was a deep bond between you two, I can see that. That is a shame, because I was going to keep you. But now that I know how much he meant to you, and how much hatred you must feel toward me for killing him, I’m afraid that you are too great a risk.’

With one solid nod to her right, I was dragged off and thrown into the crowd of slaves that were just as frightened as I was, next to the pile of demon pieces. Rosa’s watch dogs circled us like legged vultures, ensuring that none of us escaped. I chose to fall to my knees and crawl to the pile.

I began digging and tossing aside body parts, and they crackled and rolled like chalky boulders. Charles couldn't really be here, he just couldn’t be. I found pieces of most of the familiar faces I knew from the governess’ gatherings. I even choked back bile as I found Yvette’s head in the pile, eyes wide open with the shock of her death.

I dug, and dug, and my hopes were rising as I found no trace of Charles.

Until I did. I saw beautiful, tousled, dirty blonde hair beneath a twitching arm, and I pulled with all of my strength. But still, my strength just wasn’t enough to pull him from out of the rubble.

I pulled and pulled, but he, along with the bodies piled on top of his, were too heavy to be moved by my weak hands. By then, I had gathered an audience of observers as the slaves stared at me, confused.

‘Please, somebody help me,’ I begged.

They stood right where they were, silent. Their faces, both snow pale and dark chocolate alike, were blank and empty of anything but fear as I pulled to remove Charles from this pile. He didn’t belong here with the others, it wasn’t how a man of his infinitely kind stature should die.

‘Please,’ I sobbed again.

Finally, a young man knelt down beside me and took a hold of Charles’ exposed arm, pulling at his wrist as I pulled at his elbow. Then another man pulled, and even a young woman wrapped her fingers around his jaw and pulled.

When Charles was free, they all let go and backed away as fast as they could. I clutched his coat and held his cold stiff body to my own as I sat there. I was horrified when I opened my eyes.

All that was left of Charles was his chest, an arm, and his head wrapped in his coat. But still I would not let go.

Charles was dead.

There was commotion among that group of slaves around me; we, who were chosen to die. They were done sorting out who was going to live and who was to be eaten, and apparently Rosa believed in wasting no time when it came to satiating the thirst of her loyal soldiers. There were twenty at least, including Rosa, who were closing in on us from all sides.

I refused to let go of Charles. If I was going to die, I was going to do it with him in my arms. That was how I was going to die, and that was final. If Charles was not with me in the end, then I wasn’t dead, simple as that.

I wrapped my arms tighter around his fragment of a body, burrowing them beneath his coat until I felt something. It was soft and smooth, and cool against my fingers as it partially hung out of his inside pocket. I fished the mystery item from its home and clutched it in my petrified fingers.

It was my red ribbon. He’d kept it after all of these years, and now, as I saw the bright red eyes in the darkness around us close in, he was with me after all.

The first scream was followed by many, and my ribbon wasn’t as bright as it was once blood smothered the faces around me.

8. Fire

Turmoil was the very air I breathed. Disorder and confusion were night and day, and the moon watched over the governess’ unholy garden with nothing but apathy. Concrete claws sent bits and pieces of flesh and blood soaring through the darkness, glimmering with lunar brilliance like thousands of ruby stars around my head.

People screamed as they were ripped to pieces. More screams were heard beyond the veil of cries as Rosa's chosen few writhed in pain on the opposite side of the pile of bodies, changing into something cold and inhuman.