Pure Healing (12 page)

The Consul appeared permanently changed after his trip to see the Vampire Queen.
Rain’s collapse, like a paper doll folding over Xandros’ considerably healthier looking form, brought Valerius’ focus back to the Healer.
Without a word, he reached her in two long strides, gathered her up in his arms and took her from the clinic, not once looking back.
When he reached the inner chamber of their Enclosure, he locked the double-doors and laid her carefully on the bed. With some frantic rips and tears, he doffed his clothes and joined her under the coverlets, bringing her pale, fragile body into his naked heat.
He rolled onto his back and draped her on top of him, holding her head against his throat, urging her lips to his vein.
“Sweetheart,” he entreated huskily, desperately, “time to feed.”
He began to panic when she held still for long moments, and he could barely feel her breath against his skin. Just when he tensed to leave the bed and find his dagger to cut open a vein to feed her himself, she stirred ever so slightly against him, her lips moving before the soft words reached him.
“Let me rest a while,” she murmured groggily, “I am well. Though the General sustained many wounds, the poison was yet freshly in his system. It was not so difficult to neutralize and take out.”
She pressed closer to him and inhaled deeply his scent at his throat and sighed as if it comforted her. “I just need a little nap. I’ll be hungry when I wake up.” He could feel her smile against his skin. “I promise to indulge myself fully with you then.”
Reassured for the time being, Valerius held her close while she slept and felt himself drift into dreamless slumber as her even breathing allayed his fears.
*** *** *** ***
The vampire gazed into the crackling fire and popped a piece of French chocolate truffle between its full red lips, colored by the aged red wine in the glass beside its chessboard.
On one side, the diamond white pieces sparkled brilliantly in the firelight. On the other side, black obsidian pieces reflected a red glow within them, like red flags in the eyes of an enraged bull.
But there was something peculiar about this particular chessboard: the white side had no pawns in the front line. Instead, those eight positions were taken by two more knights, three more bishops and three empty seats. And in the position of the king, there was a pawn in its place. The white side had no king.
The black side, however, was assembled in the traditional array. It seemed like a spectacularly illmatched display. Surely the white had too much advantage.
But then the vampire smiled a knowing smile. Pawns had their uses. And when they reached the last line of the other side, they could become as powerful as queens.
And besides, a knight and a bishop had already been sidelined, and two more white knights had fallen. The vampire carefully took those pieces off the board and arranged them perfectly on the edge of the table between the white and black sides. It surveyed its handiwork with satisfaction.
It was indeed an ill-matched set. The advantage was entirely with the black.
Echoes of pain reached the vampire from a distance, and it perked its ears to listen. The sounds of torment resonated in undulating waves off the underground walls.
Hmm
, it purred with a devious smile, the new addition to its company of pawns must be enjoying his induction. Becoming a vampire assassin was a messy business, and not particularly pleasant for the inductee. The vampire almost rubbed its hands together with glee.
A new toy to play with! And such a large and handsome piece.
There was so much to look forward to, its delighted laughter drowned out the distant shouts of pain. *** *** *** ***
Valerius’ body erupted in flames as Rain took his vein while he still slept. Unconsciously, he raised his hips and arched his back to offer more of himself, his arms tightening around the Healer.
Not wanting to disturb his much needed rest, Rain kept him in slumber by triggering calming energy throughout his system with selective insertions of strands of
zhen
into his pores. She lay on his chest and fed languorously from his throat, still half asleep herself.
Although Valerius did not awaken, the intense, painful need within his body ignited by her feeding blossomed darkly into haunting dreams of the past…
Sometime before 200 B.C. City of Rome.
The stately Roman manor that rose in the heart of Rome, amidst a circular border of olive trees with stone paved roads that led to a grand fountain outside its entrance, boasted serenity, charm and elegance.
But the depravities that carried on within put the trials of Tartarus to shame.
Valerius’ days and nights folded into each other with predictable monotony that blurred the passage of time.
Wake up. Eat. Get cleaned.
Get dragged to the “entertainment” chamber. Fight the guards with fist, feet, nails, teeth, and any movable object that could be used as a weapon.
Get beaten and subdued. Get restrained to whatever instrument of torture that was the special of the day.
Get raped for the next few hours by the patrician and his wife, their friends, random strangers who paid to be entertained, even the guards if their masters felt particularly generous.
Get dragged back to his isolated cell. Wait for the pain to become somewhat manageable.
Eat. Sleep.
And start all over again.
One month crawled into a year. One year stretched into several.
Valerius became intimately familiar with every kind of debasement, every sort of pain. As his body grew into manhood, so did his masters’ fascination with it. They were endlessly inventive with their games. And if Valerius became more difficult to subdue with his increasing size, muscle and life-and-death fighting techniques, his masters happily accommodated these changes with cruel creativity.
Body parts, poles, sword hits, even broken shards of pottery – Valerius had been brutalized with more objects than he could count.
He learned to disengage his mind from his body early on. Learned to distance the pain and the unholy acts of violence. He only focused on getting stronger, fighting tougher and plotting his escape.
One day when Valerius was in his twenty-fifth year, there was some commotion in the slaves’ compound towards the back of the manor. Two female bodies were dragged across the canopied garden walkways linking the slaves’ quarters to the main residence. They were obviously dead, for the grayness to their skin and the fact that they made no sound as the guards dragged them over rocks, steps and debris.
Valerius watched the guards’ progression through the masters’ bedroom window with stoic eyes. He was too concerned with his own upcoming struggle to have any curiosity about the female victims.
Today the masters decided to change their routine. Instead of shackling their favorite toy in the
entertainment center below stairs, they had him brought to their own chambers for a group orgy. They were having guests after all, and Valerius was the main attraction. But to make sure they had nothing to fear from their feral, troublesome slave, they doubled the guards and kept the stud in tight chains that wound from his neck to his wrists to his ankles.
Valerius kept his gaze on the back gardens and stared sightlessly while two of the guests came forth to admire and grope his body. In his head he calculated the probability of success if he tried to fight off the six guards, four guests and his patrician masters. He also weighed the consequences in the event of failure, which was by far the most likely outcome.
Not that he cared.
A surreptitious sweep of his surroundings told Valerius that two of the guards were new and young, bulky but bumbling. Their weapons weren’t even strapped properly, and by some miracle, they were the two that held Valerius’ chains. The guests would offer no resistance, for they appeared to be inbred patricians from the noblest Roman families; none of them had an ounce of muscle or nerve. His masters had been imbibing heavily before his arrival, for their breaths reeked and their movements were clumsy. And because it was the master’s bedroom, he had easy access to the grounds outside.
Valerius almost smiled. His chances of success had increased considerably.
As he planned his maneuvers, a knock came on the chamber door.
“I ordered not to be disturbed!” the master thundered from the bed.
“My lord, what do you want us to do with the females?” came a muffled reply from the hall.
“Just get rid of them over the cliff by the river out back,” the mistress responded, then groused to herself, “such tiresome creatures.”
There was an obedient response from outside and the sounds of departing feet with dragging bodies.
“I hope they were worth your pleasure,” the mistress shot a venomous look toward her husband, as if she were jealous. “It’s not fair you had fun without me.”
“Didn’t you enjoy watching, my love?” the master responded with a sly leer, “and didn’t I let you keep the trophies?”
The mistress fingered a simple gold chain around her neck with a small pendant in the shape of a bird, carved out of some sort of stone. Around her wrist sparkled a bracelet made out of beads, circling around a bird that matched the one on the necklace.
Valerius’ gaze suddenly sharpened, and when he realized what he was looking at, the ground beneath him seemed to shift.
The trophies the master alluded to were as familiar to Valerius as the back of his hands. For he’d made the simple jewelry for his mother and sister with those very hands when he’d been a boy. They were parting gifts to the two women in his life before he and his father left for the arenas after a brief visit home. It was the last time he’d seen them.
Unbridled rage and grief flooded Valerius in tidal waves, infusing him with a superhuman strength and clarity.
Before anyone knew what had happened, he leaned forward on one knee, yanked on the chains that held him with such force, the ends escaped the two guards’ grasps. Winding the sections near him around his wrists, he swung the free ends like whips across the guards and guests who were closest, striking them unerringly on soft, exposed flesh and vulnerable eyes, nose and groins.
By the time two guards and two guests had been beaten down, Valerius was already ramming his shoulder into one of the new guards, pushing him hard into the wall and knocking his head back against it. He then deftly unsheathed the dagger and short sword and wielded them with deadly accuracy with the chains wound loosely across his shoulder, chest and around one arm, out of his way.
The shouts from his masters, grunts of pain from the guards and squeals of distress from the guests faded like background noise as Valerius honed in on his next targets with lethal precision and skill.
Four more bodies crumpled to the ground as he cut a path to the bedroom window. But he was in no hurry to make his escape.
No, he was going to kill each and every one of them, and he’d leave the masters for dessert.
The rest of the guards on retainer in the manor had gotten wind of the massacre and arrived just outside the chamber door. At the first pound, Valerius squeezed the life out of guard whose neck was in a chokehold between his bicep and forearm while taking the guard’s long staff and inserting it into the hollow handles of the door, keeping the reinforcements at bay.
Within minutes, all six guards and four guests littered the floor in pools of blood and tangles of limbs. Valerius wiped his bloodied lip on his forearm and regarded the quarries left for last.
The master and mistress clung to one another on their bed, looking almost mad with fright. By now their screams and crying had faded into whimpers, like two cornered animals awaiting slaughter.
Valerius advanced slowly and purposely upon them, a spatha at the ready. Wordlessly, he dragged his tormenters to the floor and urged them to their knees. As he poised to strike with sword raised, he was oblivious to their groveling and blubbering. The accumulated pain and grief for his family rose within him, blotting out all else. Death was too good for these two demons from hell. And their death would not give him any comfort, any absolution.
But death would have to do.
As Valerius’ blade met its targets, dealing the killing blow, the chamber door burst open and guards and Roman soldiers flooded the room. Valerius neither struggled nor spoke when they dragged him away. He would be executed for his deeds, he knew. A slave doing mortal harm to his masters was a capital crime. It mattered not all the cruelties they’d inflicted upon him.
A slave had no rights, after all. Not even to his own humanity…
Three days later, Valerius considered his short and violent existence as he breathed shallowly upon the crucifix he’d been hammered to the night of his revenge.
Three days and nights he’d rotted up here beneath the blistering sun and the chilling night winds. Strangers had pelted him with stones for amusement. Vultures had picked at his wounds and sun-burnt skin. He felt his strength ebb out of his body, felt the last breaths of life deserting him.
Any moment now, he would finally be able to rest. But he would have no peace, for his deepest regret was failing to protect his family.
With a soft breath, his eyes eased shut and his world went black even as he felt the first drops of soothing rain.
Sometime later, when he stopped before the River Styxx that carried the dead across the underworld, a glowing mass of energy floated towards him and blocked out the darkness.
“Before you go, warrior, consider this choice: what would you do if you had a second life? What one regret would you abolish?” a haunting female voice penetrated his consciousness.
Valerius automatically replied, “I would protect the ones I love. I would protect the weak who cannot protect themselves.”
“Then rise again, my Pure One,” the voice grew stronger and the light grew brighter until Valerius was blinded by the glare.
“Rise again, Protector.”

When Valerius awoke the next day, he found Rain already gone, not only from their bed, but also from the Shield. She and Ayelet had started off early to the clinic as a peculiarly high incidence of patients complaining of symptoms that sounded like anemia had called to book appointments the day before.

Ayelet wanted to have a look for herself and assess the situation for signs of vampire tampering. Usually, when vampires took blood, they also took souls, for blood alone was not enough to sustain them. But the Dozen feared that something sinister was in the air, something that changed vampire biology, and by extension, the fragile Balance that had been maintained since the last Great War forever.