Blood of the Gods (The Vampire from Hell Part 5) (2 page)

Dead Girl (Rayea’s Journal)

***

“
We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
”
~ Jim Morrison

***

Told by Rayea and from her previous online journal (originally published in the chapter named ‘Dead Girl’ in
A Vampire on Vacation (The Vampire from Hell Part 3
).

***

“She has to wake up.  Rayea.  Rayea.  RAYEA!”

I opened one eye and felt the soft surface of my down comforter beneath me.  My phone was vibrating in my back pocket.  I fumbled for it and pulled it from my jeans.  Holding it up, I saw a photo of Ashton as the vampire character, Ron Maxwell, sneering at me.  A call from Lynn.

Someone slapped my iPhone from my hand and it bounced across the bed.

“That thing has been ringing nonstop.  Who is Lynn for god’s sake?”

Death’s voice was frantic.  He was obviously frustrated with me for sleeping most of the day.  I assumed it was close to nightfall because the sunlight coming in from the white sheer curtains in my bedroom had been replaced by the warm golden glow of streetlamps.

“You may want to be nice to her if you want her help with this situation, Demetri.”

“Situation?” I mumbled, attempting to push myself into the pillows lining the headboard of my bed.

Michael
stood on one side of the bed while Death, or Demetri, as was his formal name, glared at me from the other side.

“What situation?”

Both of them pointed to a curly red-haired woman who had collapsed in one of the Queen Anne wingback chairs I had moved from the living room.  Her long hair covered her face and her stomach was completely soaked in blood.  [This would be me,
Grace
.]

“She looks like she’s dead.  This isn’t my department, guys.  I think it’s yours,” I replied, pointing my iPhone at Death.  Twenty-two missed calls from Lynn.  Shit.  I had missed our lunch.  “I’ve got to get going,” I said, bouncing off the bed.  “Have either of you guys heard from Blick?”

As Michael and Death knelt down, examining the dead girl, they both paused and glanced at each other.  Death returned to holding the girl’s hand, whispering to her.  Michael slowly stood up and faced me.  “Why, what have you heard?”

“I haven’t heard anything.  I dreamed he was sick.  That’s all.  Is he okay?”

“Ohhhh, the Ra blood.  I told you it would be intense.  I’m sure Blick is fine.  I need to be getting back anyway.  I’ll tell him to text you.  Okay?”  Michael blew me a kiss accentuating his new smug vampire demeanor.  Excuse me, angelic vampire.  He then nudged Death’s shoulder.  “Can you walk me out, man?”

I probably should have been more nervous than I was when I saw both angels acting weird, especially with Michael asking Death to walk him out.  But it didn’t dawn on me at the time as to what it really meant.  I assumed having a girl dying in my bedroom was reason enough for their odd behavior.  Was she dead?

Carefully I approached the girl and smoothed her hair away from her face.  She had beautiful, long lashes, high cheek bones, lush lips, and very pale skin probably because she had lost a great deal of blood.  I felt her wrist for a pulse.  It was very weak.  Not a good sign.

I managed to unbutton her flannel shirt as far as her bra line and spread open her shirt.  When I sliced away the soaked bandages with my long nails, I discovered she had probably 10 or 15 knife wounds.  A few were very deep.

I sighed.  “Who did this to you?”

“I think she did it to get back at her boyfriend.”  Death pulled up the straight back chair that had been at my writing desk in front of the window.  Crossing his long legs and peering down at her wounds, he added, “Her thoughts are confusing, but that’s about all I can get.  ‘Nathan will pay for this.’  That’s what she keeps saying.”

“What do you propose we do?” I asked glancing at him.  He had removed his light gray leather jacket and tossed it on the bed.  One side of his dark T-shirt was drenched with blood.

“We have to save her.  It’s my ass if we don’t.”

A frown crossed my face, and I was sure Death noticed it.  “What are you talking about?  May I remind you?  You are the Angel of Death, not the Angel of Life.”

He sprang up from the chair and started pacing in front of us.  He seemed more agitated and frustrated than I had ever seen him.  “She has a mark.  She’s important to one of the houses.  J told me if I found a girl like this anywhere on Earth that I had to protect her.  She’s not a soul that is to go over.  And now I may be too late. I’m screwed.”

“Show me,” I said.

Slowly he pulled up the left flannel sleeve of her shirt.  Beneath the fabric, right below the bend of her arm, she had a tattoo.  A detailed symbol of a lion fighting a snake in black and red ink with blue and silver shadings.  It was exquisite.  It reminded me of paintings I’d seen in my art books.

“The mark of the dragon,” I whispered.

“What?” Death asked.  “What do you mean?  Have you seen this before, Rayea?”

“Something I dreamed about,” I mumbled, not wanting to divulge to Death the insanity of my blood-induced dream.  “What is her name?” I asked, trying to think coherently.

“Grace.”

Immediately, the girl sat upright, shouting at us.  Her eyes blazed and her lion tattoo began to glow.  Her entire body was scalding-hot to the touch.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the tattoo actually moving along her arm as the lion whirled a few times around.  She wasn’t a normal human, I thought to myself.  It’s not possible.  If J wants her saved, she has to be saved, I decided.

“Go get me a knife from the kitchen,” I said to Death.

He looked at me, then at Grace.  “Rayea, do you know what you’re doing?  Why can’t you use your fangs?”

“Go get me a knife,” I repeated.  When Death left the bedroom, I spoke to Grace.  Actually I put her in a light trance, so that she would obey my commands and calm down.  She was in too much pain and I knew she needed a few moments of relief.  “You’re going to be okay.  I know we haven’t met, and I’m sorry for that, but you will be okay.  I won’t hurt you.”

She blinked her vivid green eyes at me a few times.  “The bar.  I saw you in the bar.”  Her voice was a hoarse whisper.

I ran to the bathroom and got her some water.

Her body temperature cooled somewhat as she drank the liquid and I dabbed her forehead with a damp towel.  “He wanted to sell me off.”

I placed my hand on her right temple, hoping to access her memory.  Maybe she could tell me what bar she meant, so I could get a location.  Who wanted to sell her off?  It sounded like she thought she had seen me before.  Then the memory surfaced.  She had watched me the night before drinking in Max’s bar, the Golden Skull.  She had harmed herself because she’d rather die than exist with a boyfriend she despised.  His name was Nathan and she loathed him.  He wanted to sell her off to a woman he had met on the internet.

“The new Medusa,” Grace breathed, lightly laughing afterwards before she grimaced in pain and coughed.

I wiped a few spurts of blood from her lips.  No one but Stephanie would use the new Medusa as her new super freak name.  Now I knew I had to do something.  If my plan didn’t work, I’d be in even more trouble, not really with the Council, but with J.  That thought seriously frightened me.  He could burn my brain into a clump of ashes with a snap of his fingers.  If this girl was important to him, I had to do something.  And if Stephanie was on the loose, I couldn’t begin to think what that meant.  Lynn.  Ashton.  I had to know they were okay.

“Grace, can you hear me?”

She nodded.

“How long have you had this tattoo?  Is it recent?”  I pressed my index finger into her left arm to show here where I meant.

“After that night.  The first time.  Nathan.  He sliced me up.”

I put my hand against her face again, reading her thoughts.  Her boyfriend wanted to be a vampire.  In a bloodletting ritual, he had harmed her and somehow she had survived the first set of injuries.  He wanted her to be a vampire too, but Grace’s change had gone wrong.

“Fire,” Grace whispered.  “Fire shoots from my hands now.”

Good god.  I had to think about this.  If she was something like me, able to send flames from her hands, she would be even more dangerous if I turned her into a vampire.  I didn’t know how to turn her however, so we did have a situation.  I gritted my teeth.  Then my mother’s words came to me.  “Protect your friends.  Keep them safe.”  Ra’s words overlapped my mother’s as they walked through my mind.  “You will not always be a fledgling vampire.  Knowing who is of a pure heart and soul will guide you.  You will defeat all evil.  It’s who you are.  The mark of the dragon will guide you.”  I could recall everything from the dream, meeting Ra, meeting my mother, their conversations, the blood tea, and the supposed blood god racing around in my veins.  Despite it all being a dream, I knew those events were real.  It had actually happened as far as I was concerned.

Then the voice inside my head said one simple phrase: “The angel drank your blood.  Why can’t this girl drink yours?”

Maybe that could work unless I still had some of the poison in my system.

“Can I show you something, Grace?  We aren’t so different after all.  Watch.”

Her body stiffened when she saw a small ball of fire I summoned to rise from my fingertips.

“Oh my god,” she whispered.

I straightened one of my hands out and waved the other hand over the flames.  Quickly they extinguished.  A few streams of smoke floated upwards.

“Do you understand?  I’m like you, and we’re on the same side.  It’ll be okay.”

She chewed on her lips, nodding her head against her will.

“There is one other thing,” I said as I raised my left sleeve of my shirt.

Her eyes widened as she observed a tattoo of a dragon on my upper arm.  It hadn’t been there before Michael had laid me in my bed to sleep off the power of Ra’s blood.  But after my dream with meeting
my mother
and
Ra
, I had awakened up with a stinging sensation radiating from my arm like a burn.  It was a tattoo similar to Grace’s.  That couldn’t be by coincidence.  Mine was an illustration of a dragon fighting a snake in black and blue ink with red and gold shadings.  Anyone could tell it was created by the same artist, same shadings and similar colorings.  It looked like it had been lifted from the walls of a pyramid.  It had to be the mark of a house.  Maybe it was the House of the Dragon.  Ra’s story about the two sisters, Maia, the good daughter and
Mehen
, the evil flashed before me.  But what did Grace’s lion tattoo mean?  What house did it represent?  I didn’t have time to process all of it.  Whether or not we had been marked by the gods, I had a responsibility to try to save her.  Or maybe I was rather bleary still from my blood dream and I was envisioning nonsense.  It didn’t matter.  I wasn’t letting this girl die, not in my house anyway.

“Grace, I want you to trust me, okay?  I can help you, but I know you fear vampires.”

She stiffened again in the chair, pushing backwards into the fabric and winced in pain.

“It’s okay.  It’s okay,” I said, taking her hands in mine.  “I won’t hurt you, but we need to heal you.  You must want to live though.  I can’t make you want this.  Live for revenge if that is enough.  You can seek vengeance on Nathan, your asshole boyfriend.”

Rigid with fear, she managed to nod at me.  She bared her teeth at me when another seizure of pain hit her.  No fangs.  Maybe she wasn’t like me after all.

I glanced around and saw Death standing in the doorway.  “Do you think it’ll work?”

“I have no idea,” I stated flatly.  “But I have to try.”

Slowly Grace dropped my hands and extended her arm towards Death.  “Demetri,” she whispered.

He rushed over to her in the chair and took her hand in his.  “I’ll do whatever I can.  If you don’t survive, I’ll come for you.  Do you understand me?  I’ll find you no matter what.”

Seeing him respond to her request and verbally vomit a slew of promises he may not be able to keep, a slight smile played across my face.  My eyebrows raised in amazement as my eyes widened.  I exhaled slowly.  My ex-boyfriend was finally in love.  It was a glorious sight.  As my face shifted into a wide grin, Death bumped me with his hip.

“Shut up,” he mouthed with his lips.

I continued to smile like an idiot at him.  We’ll save her.  Don’t worry.  I let my thoughts pass quietly to him, not knowing if he could hear me telepathically.

“Do whatever you can please,” he replied.  “I’m not giving this one up without a fight.”

Death’s words resonated with me.  How many guys did I have to let get away before I figured out what I was running from when it came to love.  What was I so scared of?  Getting hurt?  Deciding to leave the topic to discuss another day, I returned to my task before me.  Before I could back out on my decision, I yanked the knife from the floor and sliced my right wrist open.  As I let the blood from my right wrist fall onto Grace’s stomach, she screamed in pain.  The blood sizzled as it rolled over her flesh.