Of Light and Darkness (6 page)

“Thank you for coming, Father.” Aiden lowered his head and stepped aside, allowing his father’s astral body to enter the cottage. He watched Danek’s eyes shift around the room. Aiden guessed the small home seemed extremely modest in comparison to the lavish lifestyle of living in the palace.

“Where is your mother? Is she all right?”

A new knot tied in Aiden’s throat. He longed for his family to be whole again one day, but he knew that was unlikely. “Everyone is sleeping.”

“Why have you called on me, then?”

Aiden frowned. No matter what, this could not sound like some trivial schoolyard crush. That
wasn’t
what this was. “I need to speak with the lord, Vladislov, right way. It is…regarding something very important.”

Danek raised an eyebrow. “Something bothers you?”

Aiden’s hands trembled slightly, and he shoved them deep within his pockets. Even as a spirit, his father was intimidating. “Since I was very young, you taught me never to trust the followers of the dark—”

“Yes, Aiden, though you and your mother went against my word,” Danek interjected.

Aiden stopped pacing, looked his at his father directly. “No, Mother never went against you. Not for a moment! But if you were to banish me, of course she was going to follow. I am her child!”

Danek’s stern features tensed. “And I am her
husband
. Aiden, she went against me by befriending one of our
natural enemies
. Both of you did. You must make your point quickly. I have to get back.”

Aiden looked at the floor, choosing his next words carefully. “I understand now,” he said quietly. There was a moment of absolute silence between them. Aiden had to glance up to see if his father was even still there. “Valek Ruzik has what I want. He has committed a serious crime against the Regime.” Aiden continued to struggle to articulate. “What I mean to say is…I am finally ready to accept Vladislov’s offer.”

“Good,” Danek replied shortly, folding his ghostly arms behind him. “But Aiden, we already have a plan for the Vampire….”

***

Valek caught Charlotte and lifted her into his arms with ease. He began walking again and gazed down at the frail girl he carried her through the night. Her face seemed as peaceful as it had the night he first found her. It really hadn’t changed all that much, he decided. She was still the sweet, confused little Lottie who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. He hadn’t taken the chance to
really
look at her lately. She had grown into such a beautiful young woman, and he realized just how proud he had become of her.

As he continued through the quiet town square, Valek listened to her thoughts. He had never paid this much attention to her mind and found himself completely entertained by the mental war raging inside her, even as she slept.

But then, and not to his surprise, an overwhelming feeling of sadness came over him. This was his Charlotte–
his
Lottie. She was his
child
. But now, that which had been so peaceful for years was about to grow to a great complexity. This battle was not yet over. He could feel it.

Valek barely noticed the creatures gawking at him from inside the opened taverns, nosily wondering what he had done to poor, lifeless Charlotte in his arms. If it hadn’t been for their annoyingly curious thoughts aimed directly at him, he probably wouldn’t have been aware of them at all. They stared with their multi-specied eyes, and whispered things to one another, though with his keenness, they might as well have been screaming. They elbowed each other in the ribs, pointing their extended claws.

A Witch with an edgy, white, bowl cut, chic against her angular face, nudged Evangeline, who looked up from a conversation she’d been having with a tall, male Elf.

“Valek!” She shrieked and ran to the center of the square. Several gasps fluttered from the crowd.

Valek stopped walking, glancing around defensively at the ogling eyes.

“Valek! What did you
do
to her?” Evangeline asked, exasperated, and staring wild-eyed.

Valek saw she had somehow managed to gussy up more than she already had been that evening. Her chestnut hair swirled in loose curls around her pale rounded shoulders. Dark, emerald eyes glimmered under a bed of curled lashes. But all of that didn’t appeal to him so much this time around. It seemed oddly sort of fake, like there was a hag cowering just underneath the layers of sparkling gossamer and ribbon.

He sneered. “
I
did nothing.”

“Then, what happened to her?”

“Nothing. She’s just exhausted.” He looked down at Charlotte again.

“Why are you crying then?” She reached up to the streaks of blood falling from his eyes.

He was quick to pull away, agitated. Had he really been crying? “I do not know. I hadn’t realized it.” He glared back once more at the watchful eyes staring at them around the village square, noticing how eerily still everything had become. “I believe I am just tired as well. Won’t you excuse me?”

“Can I walk you home?” Evangeline asked.

Valek shot a malevolent glower at the macho Elf still standing in the shadows of the tavern. Evangeline apparently did not waste any time finding another toy to play with.

“I believe your new
friend
would not feel right by that,” Valek seethed through gritted fangs. “You may hurt his feelings.”

Evangeline’s face burned with a chagrin Valek found neither appetizing, nor appealing.

“So, I think I’ll make it home myself. Thanks.” The urge to kill her was more out of fury rather than thirst, but he kept walking, leaving Evangeline alone in the center of the road.

Valek found himself stalking instead of gliding, like he normally did, back to his home at the far end of the street. It had been a long time since he had gone a full night without blood, though he believed nothing serious would happen to him. Veins throbbing under his icy skin pained him to no end. The anger that pulsed inside him didn’t help the situation either.

All of the lights were still on inside. The door left wide open after he ran out after Charlotte. He made his way back inside and slammed the door shut, barely touching it. He trudged up the stairs. All of the lanterns lining the wall on the way to the second story flickered out, bulbs bursting into thousands of tiny shards he crushed under the soles of his shoes.

Charlotte hung limp in his arms, her still face twitching every so often with a new thought. The floorboards, which normally creaked when Charlotte treaded on them, were silent under Valek’s feet as he made his way into her bedroom. Again, he noted how quiet and still the house felt without her. Charlotte’s bedcovers were still turned down from when she had woken up earlier that evening. He recalled their argument, instantly regretting having it.

He lay her down and removed her shoes. Charlotte was still adorned in her soaking, black dress, her hair clinging in thick pieces to her sleeping face. A nearly invisible shiver made her lower lip tremble, and he knew he had to remove the garment before she caught her death. A discomfort quickly flared up under his skin and if he were alive, he imagined it would have been several shades of chagrin turning him red. He sighed as he bent over her, gingerly fumbling with the pearl-face buttons beginning just below her collarbone, until he was able to slide it completely off her in one fluid motion. Quickly, he pulled the blanket around her, his gaze fixated on the dusty floorboards instead of on her.

He gazed at her again. She finally seemed peaceful; though he knew a million things haunted her behind those pretty eyelids.

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched sleep calm her features. Touching her soft curls, twirling them around his fingers, he listened contently to her complicated dreams, not surprised at all that they revolved around him. It shouldn’t have, but it made him smile. He glanced over at the alarm clock on her bedside table to see it was almost four a.m.

The muscles in his arms felt weak as the
thirst
started to flare in his throat again. Valek watched Charlotte’s chest expand and contract as she breathed. He leaned down and buried his nose in her hair, breathing in her rosy perfume, listening to the warm vibration of her pulse. It created a sharp, stabbing pain in his gums, his mouth drying up like he had swallowed a bale of cotton.

Lottie, my love, there is more than just the one reason why we could never be together
. The angel and Satan’s plaything—together forever, he scoffed.

Though, he did love being so close to something so vulnerable, so real, and so alive, he decided that was what he loved most about her. It was a constant reminder of what he used to be—what had been taken away from him.

He inhaled her scent once more and an unrelenting burning shot up the back of his esophagus again, worse this time. He darted away from her, clinging to the furthest wall. Ruby veins glowed at him under the ivory current of her flesh. He shut his eyes tight against the sight of it. His gums throbbed harder, beckoning him to feed and he covered his mouth firmly with the back his hand, feeling his eyes begin to water.

Slowly, he walked to the door, turning one last time to look at his “Little Lottie,” knowing things were going to change between them forever. The door clicked shut.

He plummeted down the stairs and into the library, now made eerily dismal because of the dying fire. On his armchair sat a white, folded note. He opened it cautiously, already knowing who it was from. Evangeline’s face was creased from the horizontal fold. Her gray-scale eyes in the picture opened with a sad gaze toward him.

“Sorry,” the note sounded in an airy, musical voice, double-toned by a chord lower and sadder, before it vanished in a cloud of purple and gold.

“It is too late for sorry,” Valek muttered and collapsed into his chair. He put his head in one clawed hand and sighed. His lips throbbed with the thirst, and he knew death was imminent in just a few moments. He didn’t even have enough energy to make it back upstairs to his bedroom and close the curtains.

He sat there, analyzing the situation before him. His Lottie, his doll he had treasured and polished for years, the one he saw as eternally innocent, forever a little girl, had finally grown up.

The day he neglected to anticipate had finally come. In the back of his mind, he’d known it was coming. She was womanly. The little girl he’d watched change before his unchanging eyes, year after year after year, had made a change he hadn’t anticipated. Maybe he hadn’t
wanted
to anticipate it, because he didn’t want to believe she would ever change that way—that she would ever grow up. He mulled this over until the feeling of perishing was finally too overwhelming to ignore any longer.

First, breathing became more difficult as he choked and fixated on the oxygen. He fought with it until he felt his brittle ribs give to the pressure. He moaned softly, careful not to wake Charlotte, as his vision started to haze and then blacken. Soft flesh hardened around his drying bones. A louder cry ripped from him as his spine arched backward, pushing against the death that clung to him as he, himself, had been death clinging to life hundreds of times before.

The room grew entirely too cold and he clutched the sides of the chair, tearing holes in the upholstery with his mangled claws as he heaved. He fought for every last moment, tearing into his consciousness for one single shred of life. But the darkness finally enveloped the vision of the room before him as one final image shimmered before his blazing eyes. Charlotte.

Chapter Six

Bedrich, Danek, Kazimir and…Vladislov

Sitting alone in his office chamber, Vladislov watched the world teem outside his window. A phenomenal October sun painted its jack-o-lantern color across the morning sky. The moon had begun to disappear, fading against the periwinkle clouds behind the mountains of the West.
His
side of the world was now waking up to greet the day as Western civilization tucked itself in for another dark night. Mortal children stretched in their beds, yawning up at the brightened sky as their mothers rushed them out into their mundane lives. School. Work. Mortals wasted this earth. They took up space better used by the Occult—those with what he considered to have
divine
blood. But as everything
ordinary
was, they were temporary. Dust in the wind. They’d be gone soon. He cracked a smile that stretched the cavernous lines in his face.

Ever since the advent of life on Earth, there had always been deviations from what mortal society considered normal. Otherworldly creatures with the divine spark of magic—things only spoken about in fairy tales and legends among humans, were the things Vladislov considered
normal
, and fought to conceal behind walls. But with a powerful civilization comes a powerful government to keep order, and Vladislov resided at the very top.

Wind whistled through hollows in the alleyways of his city, while unseen spirits descended into the white light of the sun now raying off car windshields. People rushed off in their lives, completely unaware of the more powerful forces existing in the simplest forms around them, all of it going unnoticed. It existed in the wind malevolently blowing their hats into the path of an oncoming vehicle. It existed inside the perilous mind of an envious ex-lover. And it existed in an unassuming building standing very regally near the center of Prague, in Old Town, where Vladislov sat.

The Regime Headquarters did not exist in some grand Occult city at the top of the world, as even
he
used to fantasize as an Elven child. The oligarchy of the master Wizards ruled from a small country in the heart of Eastern Europe in a capital city, infested with mortals, hiding in plain sight—as magic always tended to do.

Vladislov and his advisors lived and worked in the center of Prague, completely unbeknownst to mortal society. It was the most enchanted, modern metropolis in the world and the only Occult city the Regime could not hide. Human population flocked to the city mainly for its beauty. The history etched in the brick and mortar of Prague Castle, the old gates and bridges, kept mortals coming, fantasizing about the things they didn’t know actually existed. People could not deny the energy one found when walking about the glistening streets. It was powerful enough to fuel both the magical and the mortal realms, and so the Regime made the choice to have their order exist secretly amongst the common people of Europe. Because, after all, Vladislov couldn’t blame the lesser species for being so attracted to his divine race.

To the outsider, the building’s façade might have looked like some sort of embassy, with darkened, common bricks and long mirrored windows—all things completely spellbound, of course. If human blood ever tried to enter the palace doors, a simple touch of the handle would erase all short-term memory. Vladislov chuckled darkly. The grand doors always seemed locked, but could be opened with a rune most common Elves would not be familiar with. The Regime remained protected and coveted, even from its own kind, as any other government building was. Its one spire, atop the tarnished dome that shone turquoise in the sun, protruded high over the other surrounding rooftops. The building, for the most part, seemed completely common, except for the fact that once inside, its depth seemed to go on indefinitely.

Kazimir, the lowest of the oligarchy, and a master of the Fifth Realm and psychic arts, could make human beings see and believe whatever he wanted them to. His name meant “the great destroyer” and in many ways, Vladislov was lucky to have his younger brother in his good graces. Kazimir was once responsible for destroying whole villages in Asia, making it look like the responsibility of human military.

Bedrich was the high priest of the oligarchy. He was closest with air, and a master of everything theological. He was the brain, and had been since he was just a young Elf. His massive cranium he hid under hooded robes reflected that.

Then, there was Danek Price. His family had immigrated to the golden city from an Occult town in Ireland when Vladislov called upon him. A master of the earthly realms, he was best at cunning strategy. Danek was strong and quiet, just as he had taught his son, Aiden, to be.

Vladislov, the leader of the oligarchy, was a master of every element, something only few could dream of achieving. He could cause and control tsunamis, tornados, flash floods, brush fires. Anything to bend others to adhere to his will. He indulged himself with the finest of all things and held no compassion for the creatures he considered to be beneath him. Foremost on his list, were Vampires—specifically one: Valek Ruzik. The upstart who’d dared break into his rooms uttering demands that were not his to make.

Late one particularly dark winter night when the moon was new and the sky was at its blackest, Vladislov sat alone, once again, in his chamber. The bedroom was completely draped in red velvet from the curtains, to the bedclothes, to the upholstery used to make the chair he sat in.

The year was 1989, the year Czechoslovakia would divide into two nations. The human condition about the country was in turmoil, with the raging end of oppression and communism.

He reflected by the warm candlelight, the law that had been passed several decades before, written by himself and his younger brother, and revised by Bedrich and Danek. Vladislov read the decision they made together. Bedrich had tried to persuade Vladislov not to pass the one law, which would lock every Occult creature inside their secret cities forever, making it unlawful for them to cross over the borders into mortal society. But Bedrich’s attempt had been feckless, and Vladislov made it so—doing this without anticipating the repercussion that would advance on
this
night.

He was about to turn in for the evening, leaning over to blow out his candle, when a black shadow crashed through the frosty windowpane. Shards of glass whizzed through the air to the floor around Vladislov. Chilled winter air from the night steeped the deep, red bedroom, causing the candles to flicker out on their own.

Cold wind blew Vladislov’s long, silver, wiry hair about his face as he squinted through the darkness for the intruder. Something inhumanly fast whizzed past him. He shot up from his chair. This wasn’t any kind of mortal thief.

“Who intrudes? I demand to know!” he bellowed.

The shadow leapt to the other side of the room. Vladislov spun to look behind him, trying to catch the thing, but he had no such luck, the creature was fast. It moved again, making one of his towering bookshelves crash to the floor. Vladislov could hear guards stirring downstairs from the ruckus.

“You will be punished dearly for this, whoever you are!” Vladislov spoke again, his tone significantly meeker. “My guards are coming with their Lycans. You will be torn to shreds!”

The being slowly crept up behind the Wizard and let out a cold breath that slipped like a chill of death the back of Vladislov’s neck.

“I know what you plan to do. Do not sign that document, sir, or you will surely live to regret it,” the phantom hissed.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I am the thing which will watch you from the shadows until the day you die,” the creature whispered. “The thing that will haunt you as you dream. The only thing…you will
never
defeat.”

Vladislov, who had stealthily moved his bony hand to his desk, grasped a letter opener. He whipped his arm around and slashed the mysterious man’s throat open, blood spewing as the figure recoiled back into the darkness. But when he looked to see the body, nothing was there. The wizard let out a soft sound of terror as he suddenly felt someone standing behind him. The creature’s claws slashed at Vladislov’s hand, slicing it off at the bone, knocking the bloody letter opener to the ground.

Vladislov let out a loud cry of pain as he clutched his spewing arm. He fell to the floor and crawled like an insect from a falcon.

The obscure creature brought one claw down to wrap around Vladislov’s neck and sent him hurling into the wall. His back crunched with the impact.

The shadow slowly made its way to stand before him. The moonlight shimmered off the creature’s threatening fanged grin.

“Vampire!” He gasped.

The Vampire let out a low chuckle. “The only thing you will never defeat,” the Vampire repeated, just as the chamber door flew open. Guards rushed in, their footsteps booming on the floorboards.

“There!” Vladislov gestured with one spindly finger at the Vampire.

Just as the guards and their wolves lunged, he leapt back through the open window into the dark night. There was no evidence left of the fiasco, other than the destroyed chamber and the ‘
Law One
’ soaked in his red wine.

***

Eighteen years later, the Regime’s hatred for the blood-sucking creatures continued to consume its four leaders. Vladislov thought of ways to make sure it would never happen again. He would sit up, sleepless night after sleepless night, devising ways to make life more difficult for
the only thing he would never win against
and every night, he came up with the same solution: rid the Earth of Vampires completely. Form a mass genocide, and the world would no longer have to fear the blood demons.

“Sir?” A young Elf that worked in the building as a page interrupted Vladislov’s reverie. “Excuse me, sir, but the Vampires from the Northern most Slovakian occult city have arrived, sir.”

Vladislov nodded and waved him away.

Kazimir soon took the boy’s place in the room as he walked over to his elder brother and put one hand on his pointed shoulder.

“Tomorrow is the day, Vlad,” he said warmly. “This is only the first of many Occult districts to be cleared. Soon, the entire world will not have to worry about these savages appearing by their bedsides anymore.”

Vladislov slowly got up from the leather armchair with a tired smile.

“Yes, Kazimir. Soon human children will forget every vampiric fairy tale ever told. It will be as though they’ve never existed, and we can all rest easier.”

“Can you believe one of them actually asked me what she was being tried for?” Kazimir laughed, lines forming around his dark, shining eyes. He looked almost identical to his brother, though a bit more youthful.

“How did you respond?” Vladislov only slightly shared in his brother’s amusement.

“I told her they were all guilty on the count of ruthless murder. How could we let creatures such as these exist after killing thousands of people, and endangering our secret?” Kazimir beamed. “The little demon looked at me like I had three eyes.” His laugh was thunderous again. “You should have seen the way she clawed at those bars, as though she were strong enough to rip through platinum.”

“Let us see how strong they are when they are forced to meet eyes with sunrise,” Vladislov seethed, and started out of the large room.

“Good day, brother.” Kazimir eyed him as Vladislov nodded and disappeared behind the door without another word.