When Blood Runs Cold - Chapter 276

A long silence draws between us as Fangorn deliberates the matter, obviously deep in thought. Occasionally his eyes will flicker from blankly staring at the wall to the skinny looking girl who rocks herself on the bench, her state obviously deteriorating by the minute. Then his expression becomes pained and he looks away, fiddling with the daggers at his belt the way he always does when there is something on his mind. I don’t think I have ever seen Fangorn give so much thought to something in my life.

Given what I have already told him about my own predicament, and the fate of the girl, I am a smidgen surprised that he has not made up his mind yet. Part of the reason I had brought Fangorn here was because he is vastly more sympathetic in his nature than me, or any other vampire for that matter. To me, bringing him here to turn her was the obvious choice- not only because he has a strong vampire blood in his system also.

But it seems I was a little hasty on my judgement.

Rubbing his face with two bear-like hands, he gives an audible groan. Thankfully, this is all but drowned out by the barrier of shielding darkness that pulses around us.

“Lilyana is going to kill me,” he grumbles, combing one hand through the dark locks of spiky hair. But despite his clear reservations on the matter, he manages a grin.

“Does this mean you will do it?”

Screwing up his face somewhat, Fangorn rolls his eyes, obviously realising by now that I had set him up to do this in the first place. But in fairness, he doesn’t seem to mind too much.

“Yes,” Fangorn sighs, rolling up his sleeves and wiping back the dark strands of his neatly combed hair. He gives me a strangled look. “Here is to hoping she will survive.”

A grim smile from both of us. Dismissing that bubble of darkness around us now, I glance over to where the girl continues to chant, her voice faded now to a low, raspy whisper. It sounds as though she is having trouble breathing. Biting the inside of my cheek, I pace forward slowly as not to startle the girl who continues to rock herself in front of us.

“Hey,” I say, tapping her arm lightly, drawing her attention back to reality. Startling a little, she looks up fearfully to the towering giant of a man next to me, her eyes locking on to his pushed back horns and scheming red eyes as though he were the devil himself. Perhaps it is that my eyes are amber that gives me a softer appearance, or the curl of my own horns that give me a less sharp appearance, or something else entirely, but whatever it is, she sure doesn’t like the look of Fangorn. Winding her hands together as she scoots to the other side of the bench, she glances between us both warily. She seems almost repelled by Fangorn- her body arching away from him like magnets of the same side, quivering.

Fangorn however, who is rather used to such spiteful looks considering he has spent a far few hundred years as an outcast in the end, looks as careless as ever.

“Who is he?” she mutters fearfully, continuing to look between me, and then Fangorn, and then back to me again, still chanting under her breath with each second that passes. Pressing my lips tightly together, I add in the way a mother might consul a child:

“He is here to help.”

She doesn’t look convinced. Prodding Fangorn’s arm with her finger, she gives him a strangled look, before adding another prod against his skin, her nails digging into his flesh. A soft grunt of discomfort echoes from Fangorn’s throat, causing the girl to sharply pull away, as though she has been stung. She doesn’t try to prod him again after that.

“He looks like he wants to kill me,” she mutters, turning from Fangorn now to give me a pouty look, as if to say: please don’t put him near me. Reading this look, Fangorn rolls his eyes, sliding into the seat next to her. Running his hand over the back of his neck, he breathes out an exasperated sigh.

But just as I am about to intervene with her uncooperative attitude, Fangorn mutters impatiently:

“Look little miss, there is no easy way to do this, but I am here to save your life, okay?” he says firmly, placing a bulky hand on her shoulder, causing a shuddering whimper to slip from her throat. “I am here to help, you have to trust me.”

“Please,” I ask quietly to the girl, a rare display of formalities. “Trust him.”

Pressing her hands together, the girl crawls in on herself, sucking in her cheeks and her stomach in a desperate attempt to make herself smaller. Like prey becoming smaller in the face of its predator, she two becomes this: prey for the vampire. Eyes glazing over as her chant dies down in the room around us, she stills to a sudden halt.

“You are going to turn me.”

That voice. That tone. So familiar it sounds that one might presume it is a perfect parody of another. I have heard those words before, the fearful tremble to each word as though each one might be their very last.

Serena. She was just like that. Only her line was on a much thinner tether.

I suck in a sharp breath, the room around us suddenly turning excruciatingly cold. A blackness descends over my vision, tingles of power cascading through my body like fish down a fast flowing river. For a moment, and only a moment, it becomes uncontrollable. Then, with a short breath out, I dispel that wretched feeling that has taken hold of me, clearing my mind of any lingering thoughts of distress. To be complacent with ones emotions is to condemn oneself to death.

“My Lord?” Fangorn prompts slowly, pressing a hand against my shoulder as though to check I am still alive. Finger clenching, I frown, attempting to dispel those words from my mind, but uttered now, they remain permanently attached- an icy frost against my conscience.

Drawing up a hand, I stem the rest of his thoughts.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle. Not like I have seen the changing of individuals a hundred times before,” I say, half jesting with him as though that would somehow lighten the mood. But Fangorn, as perceptive as he is, remains thoroughly unconvinced. Regrettably he is one of the few people who has been around me long enough to know when I am lying.

It is unusual for me to be so disturbed by such normalities as this. After all, most vampire turning in the Kingdom have to first be presented to the king to witness the ceremony and ensure the rite had been taken place properly (to avoid the creation of halflings, of course.) After my parents died, it was my job to oversee every one of these when the rite eventually came round- of which there were a few hundred a year. As such I am greatly accustomed to seeing such brutality, to hearing the screams and the cries and the despair ringing through the air like a thick fog.

But this, this is something more. Ever since turning Serena, watching her bleed out and die in front of me… nothing has quite been the same since.

It would seem I cannot quite get to grips with her former mortality, and that despite her newfound vampiric immortality and the peace between our kinds, there is a part of my mind that still fears over her demise, that after all these years of waiting, she will slip through my grasp once again, like sand through my fingers.

It is a grim thought, and I find that with a shake of my head, I no longer wish to linger on it.

“Just do it, Fangorn,” I mutter to the impatiently awaiting vampire with a dismissive flick of my hand, wondering whenever did I become so pitifully weak to it all. But of course, I know that already.

“As you wish, My Lord,” comes Fangorn’s slightly exasperated reply as he steadies the girl with his hands, giving her a couple of reassuring wordless noises. Her only response consists of a few whimpers, strained against the swell of tears that clogs her throat with grief.

She doesn’t think she will survive this. Hopefully I can prove her wrong.

“This might hurt a little, sweetheart, but I promise once its over everything will be much better,” Fangorn assures, his voice calmer now. But from the corner of my vision, I can see how hard his fingers are clamping against the surface of her skin- so hard that his knuckles almost turn white.

I turn from the scene.

“The pain is temporary,” I assure the girl without looking back, glaring at the hazy shadow of my winged reflection up against the pristine marble of the prison wall. Inwardly, I grimace.

“It will be over soon.”