Scarlet Dawn (13 page)

“YOU
FUCKS! YOU SICK FUCKS! LEAVE HIM ALONE, OR I SWEAR I’LL RIP EVERY ONE OF YOUR—AHHHH!” The cold that had begun to seep into Zane’s core was flooded by scorching pain. Fighting against the leather bind that held his head, he pushed to see the source.

Then suddenly wished he hadn’t.

The dagger was nearly buried to the hilt; the few inches still protruding allowing him to see the rusted and serpentine metal that had been embedded in his belly.

“Silence that wretch,” the chief’s voice rose over the celebratory jeers of the taroe tribe. “I’ll tolerate no more of his flapping tongue!”

“Shall I carve it from his head?”

Zane wretched and whimpered as the dagger was yanked from his guts and a length of intestine followed.

Raith’s cries were stifled then, the chief letting out a grunt as he fought to maintain control of the therion.

“No,” the chief’s voice oozed with malicious intent, “he’ll suffer far more if we allow him to keep his voice. Here, use these.”

Zane whimpered as he felt the warmth of his insides begin to worm down his hip. “What… what do you want from us? Wh-what—”

A pair of hands seized his face and forced his lips open as another taroe leaned in and pushed two fleshy lengths into his mouth. The taste of therion blood—
Raith’s
blood!—rolled over his tongue before it seeped down his throat. His vampire body ignored the bitter taste of the source and excitedly compelled Zane to seek out more, but his awareness of who the blood belonged to made him wretch. As his bound body quaked with spasms of nausea, he felt a pair of hardened points rake against his lips.

Claws…

His eyes widened and a muffled cry squeezed around the two fingers that had been cut from Raith’s hand.

“I think the filthy blood-sucker
likes
it!”

“Disgusting creatures!”

“One of you help me,” the chief called out. “This wretched dog won’t keep his eyes open!”

As a few of Zane’s captors stepped away from the blood-covered stone slab he’d been secured to, Raith’s cries started up again.

“Open the vampire up! Prepare him for what’s coming,” the chief ordered, still grunting over his unseen work with Raith. “You there! Free the therion of his thieving heart!”

The dagger once again found its way into the depths of Zane’s stomach, and the taroe wielding it began the long and purposeful process of sawing from the far side of his right hip to the left. When the process was finished, the blade was removed and embedded in his thigh to free the wielder’s hands so that he could begin shoveling the bulk of Zane’s insides onto his lap.

As Zane was brought to a new threshold of pain that he’d never thought possible, his mind began to warp the scene around him until all he could hear was Raith’s cries of agony.

They were just as much his own now.

Zane coughed and gagged on his friend’s severed fingers, struggling to keep the self-lubricating hunks of meat from sliding down his throat.

He wanted to curse.

He wanted to yell.

He wanted to say whatever it would take to get the taroe to release Raith.

It was his fault! His greed that had brought them there and his carelessness that had gotten them caught!

He’d brought ruin and death to one of the people he cared about most…

“Yes,” the chief’s voice rumbled over him and he shifted his gaze to take in the taroe’s leering face, “you’ve brought ruin and death to one that you love.” He paused long enough to nod to the taroe who’d just finished with Zane’s insides, who wiped his hands on his chest before yanking the dagger from Zane’s thigh and stepping around the stone slab to join the chief by Zane’s head. “And that is only the beginning…”

The rusted,
blood-stained dagger fell out of focus as its tip neared Zane’s right eye, and he hissed and fought to turn his head away from the encroaching weapon.

“HOLD HIM! KEEP HIS EYES OPEN!”

“Don’t think that I won’t free you of your eyelids to force you to watch, vampire!”

More and more taroe hands gripped his head and pried his eyes open, and the dull, crusted metal began the slow and calculated path in carving his eye from his skull. With the right half of his vision rapidly falling into a dull, dark crimson, Zane’s left eye—darting about in a chaotic panic—caught sight of a familiar brown eye, blood-soaked and dangling by its optic nerve from the delicately pinched fingers of a nearing taroe, as it was offered to the chief.

“The therion’s eye, sire!”

“Excellent! Now to deliver it to its new owner!”

Whimpering around his agony and confusion, Zane felt a flood of cold air fill the vacant cavity as his mutilated right eye was tugged free of his body. Stepping aside, the taroe who had robbed him of one eye made room for the other as Raith’s stolen organ was fed into the vacant orifice.

“Good… Good! Now… the heart! Bring me the therion’s heart! And get the relic in place,” the chief leaned in towards Zane’s left side—the only side that still offered the suffering vampire any sight—and wet his lips, “You’ll be pleased to know that you’ll be leaving here with what you came to steal. I truly hate to part with it—we all do, actually—but the punishment you’ve earned demands that you be burdened with what you sought so greatly to wrong us for. May its weight add all the more to your already sizable burden,
Maledictus
!”

Zane groaned as the chief yanked Raith’s fingers from his mouth, freeing him of its effects.

“Wh-what… why are you—”

“Don’t you dare ask us ‘why’,
Maledictus
!”

Zane tried to blink—tried to focus beyond his agony to understand the word—but the stolen eye that now occupied his face made the act excruciating. “
Wh-who is… M-Male…”

“
Maledictus
,” the chief repeated for him, his voice suddenly gentle, “It is what you’ll be known as from henceforth. Now, prepare yourself, this next part
will
hurt…”

~Three Days Later~

Zane was only distantly aware of the injuries he was sustaining as his body crashed down the side of the mountain. The sound of his bones breaking with each impact against the jagged rocks that stood between him and the base of the mountain were no more relevant than that of the branches he snapped along the fall.

All of it meant nothing.

He wasn’t afraid of death; something deep within him—whether it was the wretched relic that had been crammed beneath his ribcage or the severed heart of his butchered friend that now beat beside his own—knew full-well that he wouldn’t die that easily.

No.

If he’d learned anything from that weekend, it was that death was not as easily achieved as one might imagine.
Especially
when the combined magic of hundreds of malicious magic-wielding chanters refused to let it!

No…

They hadn’t thrown him from that mountain to kill him.

They’d simply freed something infinitely worse than death into the world!

Nicc’oule couldn’t see past the burning haze of her tear filled eyes. She hadn’t been able to stop crying since the moment she’d seen Raith captured. That wretched thing
had
been cursed; it
had
been evil. Wherever it had come from—whatever its purposes—it had poisoned her entire tribe and turned them into ravenous lunatics.

It had driven them to use the one spell their people had sworn
never
to unleash.

A spell that
should have never been allowed to be brought into existence.

A spell every bit as horrible as the relic that had driven it into being.

A spell called
Maledictus…

She’d wanted only to free her people of the thing that she saw as a cancer to the goodness of her people, and her efforts had gotten the man she loved killed.

And now his friend—this vampire; this… Zane—was forced to carry the literal weight of his death beside his heart; was forced to see the world through the shared gaze of a beloved friend.

This Zane would have to carry their failure through every terrible act that the enchanted ink they’d laced beneath his flesh condemned him to commit.

And when word got out to the mythos Council that a taroe tribe had committed this unspeakable act on one of their own, there would be hell to pay.

Still unable to see past the burning haze of her tear filled eyes, she blindly navigated the chasm to her and Raith’s secret cave; a cave that she’d never again get to share with him.

Soon enough her village would be wiped out—made an example of by the non-human government who had made it clear to their people long ago that the
Maledictus
curse was
never
to be anything but a rumor. And while there seemed to be a poetic justice in letting Raith’s people see an end to her life for getting him mixed up in her tribe’s troubles, she couldn’t bring herself to stand upon the ground as one of the monsters that her people had allowed themselves to become…

Zane groaned, struggling to get his thoughts to function in a way he could decipher. Though he wasn’t sure how he knew or how he’d come to be there, he was certain that he was in his bed. The familiarity and serenity of the home he’d built with Celine was unmistakable…

But something about it felt hollow and incomplete.

Forcing his body to move, he sat up—hearing his bones and joints moan and crack and protest every inch of the way—and scanned the empty bedroom for any sign of Celine. Seeing that he was, in fact, alone in the room, he forced himself to his feet and stumbled his way to the bathroom, feeling, for the first time in a long time, as though he was hung over.

The dull hum of fluorescence set a skeptical calm in his mind as he started towards the toilet, eager to empty his strained bladder. Passing by the mirror, however, a new priority presented itself.

Tattoos!

Dozens of them!

The suddenly familiar tribal designs snaked all over his arms and shoulders, littering his chest and starting up his neck!