Zara's Curse (Empire of Fangs) (8 page)

10.

Something was calling her.
 
Pulling at her like an undertow.
 
She felt herself drifting through the apartment.
 
Floating.
 
The room was full of moonlight that draped a silvery gleam over all the furniture.
 
The windows had been left open, letting a warm breeze through, making the curtains flow like living things.
 
She could hear heartbeats that thundered like war drums, beating away in the other apartments and even out on the streets and farther.
 
It was symphonic.
 
The sweet metronomic music of blood.

She felt hungry.
 
More hungry than she had ever been.
 
A thick fog seemed to fill her head.
 
She was being consumed by this primal hunger.
 
She felt loosely in control.
 
She was lunging headlong into the night.
 
She felt inhuman.
 
She felt powerful.

11.

When Zara awoke she felt different.
 
She was no longer hung over, and felt pretty good, except for her neck, which still throbbed a little.
 
The strange dream—or nightmare—seemed to linger as she lay in bed.
 
She couldn’t remember the details of it, except for an image of a man, sitting in a chair and casually drinking wine.
 
There was a battlefield too…wasn’t there?
 
With thousands of spikes forming a forest all around him, and a red sky overhead…and…there was….was…then she’d lost it.
 
The vague images vanished like a specter.
 

She looked at the clock and saw it was a little past 6 p.m.
 
She had slept the day away.
 
She got up and went to the bathroom to see why her neck was bothering her.
 
When she looked in the mirror, she saw two tiny dots. She gasped and looked away.
 
There was no way
, she thought.
 
This was some kind of gag.
 
She looked again. They were still there.
  

Aside from her neck she felt fine.
 
Better than fine.
 
Invigorated.
 
But her mind was spinning.
 
She was undergoing something new and terrifying.
 
She felt it deep inside of her and she was pretty sure it wasn’t covered in the
Our Bodies Ourselves
book she had gotten from her Aunt Maggie some birthdays ago.
 
While she gingerly touched the markings on her neck, fighting off her growing panic, she suddenly noticed that her own thoughts were accompanied by other voices.

They were fleeting voices that whispered to her in some strange language.
 
Sometimes many voices speaking in unison to form a sort of chant.
 
When she tried to focus on the words
 
they vanished, leaving her only with her confused thoughts.
 
Am I going crazy?
She wondered.
 

She went out to the living room and pulled open the curtains.
 
The sun had just gone down, but was still casting a dark red light over the metropolitan skyline of Denver.
 
Standing there, her skin seemed to itch.
 
She closed the curtains and sat on the couch.
 
She checked her phone.
 
Eight messages from Twig.
 
She didn’t feel like a lecture, so she just deleted them all
.
 
Wasn’t that what mom did whenever she woke up from a night of self-inflicted embarrassment?
 
Pretend it didn’t happen?

Her paper was due the next day and she decided it might make her feel more normal if she did a normal thing like homework.
 

She went over to the small kitchen table where her laptop was still open, her history book beside it.
 
The voices had all gone silent, except her own, which was busy laying out possible scenarios involving spider or snakebites.
 
She typed a few lines to set the stage for the essay, and then began to leaf through the pages of her book for useful dates and names.
 
She was making some progress when something caught her eye in the book—a painting of a man—and the room seemed to suddenly become airless.
 

In the painting, a man clad in ornate armor was impaling a semi-nude woman with a long spear through the chest.
 
The woman was dressed in peasant rags, and appeared to be begging for her life to be spared.
 
But clearly mercy was not being granted to her.
 
In the background a gruesome battlefield smoldered under a blood red sun, and countless bodies were skewered on pikes, left to bake and rot as a warning.
 
The man with the spear was grinning with utter satisfaction.
 
In his other hand he held a long flowing war banner that blew in the wind.
 
The words on the banner looked similar to those that were etched on the plaque on Micah’s front door.
 
She studied his chiseled face and blonde hair. There was no mistake.
 
It was a leer she couldn’t forget.
 
It was Drake.
 

Zara closed her laptop.
 
“Shit,” she said.
 
She got up and made sure the front doors were locked, then texted Twig.

Can you come by in the morning?
 
I really need your help.

It only took him a minute to respond.

I know.
 
I’ll be there.

12.

Her father had gotten up to make breakfast.
 
Zara was still hunched over her laptop.
 
Although she had stayed up all through the night and early morning searching the internet for more about the painting, she had found very little.
 
The painter was an unknown person of possible Italian origin, and the painting had not been given a title until the 1800s, when it had begun to be referred to by museum curators and in historical art circles as:
The Dragon’s Touch
.
 
The subject of the painting—the grinning sadist—was rumored to be an unknown nobleman of possible Germanic origin, who, judging by the Ottoman dress of those lying dead in the background of the painting, was a supporter of the Hungarian king at the time during the Ottoman war.
 

Zara read the Wikipedia page over and over.
  
The painting was created during an era that was chock-full of cruelty and horror.
 
The page was rich with misery.
 
It was the time of Vlad the Impaler, one of the great pioneers in atrocity.
 

Her father was happy to see her so hard at work.
 
He was wearing his other work uniform: the khaki pants and the blue, collared shirt he sold mattresses in. He placed a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of her, which she took no notice of.

“Long night or early morning?” he asked.

“I just got up,” she lied.
 
She didn’t want to worry him.
 

“You should eat, you look a bit run down.
 
Everything okay?”

She smiled and closed the laptop, “Everything’s just dandy,” she took a nibble of bacon to appease his fatherly concern.
 
It didn’t seem to taste like anything to her but she feigned delight so he wouldn’t guilt her with the starving kids in China speech.

Her dad ate his food while standing up, threw the dish in the sink, and sighed.
 
“I’m off.
 
Have a good day at school my darling daughter.” He walked over and kissed the top of her head.
 

“I will.
 
Sell some beds.” She waved absently as he left the apartment.

She printed a copy of the painting and put it in her book bag.
 
Sunlight was coming in strong now through the curtains and she got out her blue neon-framed sunglasses from her room and put them on.
 
Her eyes were sore from staring at the computer all morning, and the daylight wasn’t helping.
 
She sat on the couch and waited, watching the door.
 

Twig had barely knocked once before she had leapt to door and opened it.
 
He looked worn out as well, even though his aviators and mustache hid his face well.
 
She grabbed him and hugged him and he hugged her back.
 
She began to cry.

“What’s…going on with me…everything is so…” she said.

He pushed her back and took off his sunglasses, and looked her over,
 

“What?” She wailed.

“You’re becoming one of them,” he said calmly.

“Oh God,” she moaned.
 
She now went over to her couch and sat down. “Don’t even say a vampire.
 
This isn’t even funny.”

“Okay then: demonic creature of the night.
 
Draculady.
 
Hellspawn.
 
Do any of those work for you?”

She put her hands over her face.
 
She stopped crying.
 
“No.
 
They don’t.
 
I don’t believe in that stuff.
 
This isn’t happening.”
 
She sounded more like she was convincing herself.

Twig sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder.
 
She looked at him and noticed a long cut along his arm that had been stitched up with what looked like dental floss and was red with inflammation.

“It is what it is,” Twig said.
 
“You know that I’m a born skeptic.
 
But I have seen it.
 
I know what they are and whatever you want to call it doesn’t really matter.
 
All you need to know is it’s not something you want to be.”

“How long have you known about them?”

Twig turned his arm and inspected the damage.
 
“I’ve known ever since my father told me.”
 
He produced a pack of American Spirits from one of his pockets, and slid out a smoke and lit up.
 

“But your father is…insane.
 
He was put in Whispering Pines,” Zara said, staring at the floor.

Twig leaned back on the couch, lit his cigarette, took a long drag, and blew a plume of smoke in the air.
 
Usually, she would of spazzed on him for smoking in her place, but given the circumstances she didn’t much find it a priority.
 

“My father…was one of the leading Hematologists in the country,” Twig said after a few more drags.
 
“Blood doctor.
 
He was published in medical journals all over the world.
 
They even considered him for a Nobel Prize at one point.
 
Anyway, one day he had been sent a blood sample from some museum in New York.
 
A sealed vial unearthed in Romania.
 
He found things he shouldn’t have found in that sample.
 
When he began to talk about blood that exploded in sunlight, that had seemingly magical properties, he was shunned by the scientific community and fired from his job.
 
He became obsessed, started spending all his time working on some kind of cure for what he thought was a virus.
 
But that wasn’t what made him go mad.
 
They did something to him, those things…something to keep him quiet.
 
They twisted his mind in the same way your new boyfriend has twisted yours.
 
Eventually, they threw him in the crazy house.
 
He refused to see me every time I visited.”

Zara took a deep breath and let the story set in.
 
“You never talk about your dad.
 
That’s horrible.
 
But why didn’t you warn me about all this?” This was the first she had heard anything about Twig’s father.

He got up and walked over to the window and peered out.
 
“Because I needed to get into that house.
 
I needed to know where they kept him.”

“Kept who?”

“Him.
 
Their father.
 
Damon Caspari.”

“But why?” Zara asked.

“To destroy him,” Twig answered evenly.

“You want to kill him?
 
Jesus!
 
Do you realize how insane you sound?”

“Funny,” Twig said with a cynical chuckle, “I said the same thing to my own father before they hauled him away.”

 
“And this Damon person.
 
Micah’s father…what’s his story?”

“In my father’s notes, he says that Damon Caspari was an orphan born in fifteenth century Hungary.
 
He joined the military as a young man and from his exceptional ruthlessness on the battlefield quickly rose to power.
 
During this rise, he served under one Vlad of Wallachia, aka Vlad the Impaler.”

Zara reeled. “Oh god.
 
I’ve been reading about him.”

“Yeah,” Twig said with a sigh.
 
“So anyway.
 
During the war, the two men became friends and came to respect each other.
 
It was then that my father thought that Vlad let Damon drink from his famous grail.
 
A golden cup he used to leave unguarded in the center of the city to tempt any criminal stupid enough to touch it.
 
And they became the first of their kind.”

“Let me guess, the Holy Grail?”
 
Zara said sarcastically. The whole thing was too much to handle.

“Not quite.
 
A different cup.
 
Previously owned by a man known as Lazarus of Bethany.
 
You know, the guy from the bible who rose from the dead?”

“Now you’re just messing with me,” Zara said, holding her head in her hands.

Twig continued undeterred by Zara’s disbelief.
 
“And in time, with his newfound titles and lands, all Damon needed to complete his life was a family, and so he chose one.
 
He chose a wife, a peasant girl named Vivian Zokos, who was pregnant with child.
 
A boy who would be named Micah.
 
The unborn child’s father was put on a pike like a kabob when he tried to protest.
 
You see, Damon Caspari is every bit as vicious as his old friend Vlad.”

Zara got up and peered out the window now, feeling quite uneasy.

“Vivian is his mother.”

“Yes,” Twig said.

And Micah chose me,” she said flatly.

“He did.
 
But we can stop it.
 
My father speculated that if you could take out Damon, the blood bond would break.”

“Speculated,” Zara said sadly.
 
“And even if it was all true:
take out
a warlord vampire?
 
Just like that huh?”

“Yeah, well, there is something else in his notes.
 
Something he was working on.
 
A weapon against those with infected blood.
 
Something called
Liquida Solis
.
 
Liquid sunlight.
 
One shot of it…and poof.”
 

“So…we somehow get this liquid stuff into Damon and I go back to normal, angels sing, and everyone rides off into the sunset?
 
That’s our plan?”

“Well, you were never really normal,” he said, sitting back next to her.
 
“But yes.
 
I think it will undo this…curse or whatever it is.”

“You think,” Zara whispered.
 
“You also think there is a secret military base under the airport run by the Freemasons.”

“That’s a fact.
 
I had a friend who worked there.
 
Said they had all kinds of secret tunnels under—”

Zara cut him off.
 
“Alright, alright.
 
Can we just maybe save that discussion for another time and get back to my dilemma? I mean…how do you know it will work? ”

Twig shrugged.
 
“It’s a theory.
 
Mostly I’m just going on what I found in my father’s notes, and the movie
The Lost Boys
.”

 
“Great.
 
That’s very reassuring.
 
My future hangs on some mad ramblings left in a notebook and a 80’s cult classic.”
 
Zara was starting to look back at her worry over her late history class essay with fond memories.
 
How small our problems become in the shadow of real dread.