The Vampire's Rival

The past is the last place we look for lessons

I woke up from the Venom stupor, struggling to breathe. I was buried underneath a large heavy mass. I reached for the surface, desperately clawing at the mass above me. When I was finally free, I couldn't get enough of the fresh air, gasping for what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes. I could feel it. My eyes. I could feel the blue bleed away from my left eye, leaving it green. I was at the brink of starvation. I needed to feed! I fell to my knees on the mountain of corpses that I'd been buried under. Dead dogs, dead vampires, dead zombies, and dead humans filled the street.

"Ruqwik?"

I followed the whisper of my name to Cruto. He was barely alive, but that was enough. Given blood, he would heal.

His eyes were filled with fear as they studied me.

"Cruto! Thank God you're alive!" I said, stumbling off the mountain of death and over to him. I reached out a hand to help him up.

He shuffled away from me as fast as he could. "Don't! Don't touch me!"

I looked at him in surprise. I had my hair covering my right blue eye. Even at the edge of bloodlust, there was no way he could see it. No way he could tell I was a Venom hybrid. No reason for him to fear me.

Yet, he still looked at me with unbridled terror in his eyes.

"What did you do? What... what are you? What kind of monster...? What did you do, Ruqwik?" he kept muttering over and over again looking around us at the corpses littering the street. "You killed them! You killed them all!"

I looked around and finally noticed that most of the corpses had their brains leaking from their ears. I had never seen anything like it before. The Venom in my blood thrummed in satisfaction, even as it had settled down in that placid lake. I grimaced. To save me, the Venom had done the impossible. It had simultaneously, telepathically crashed into every mind around me and ignored every restriction I put in place for myself when I visited a mindscape, thus turning every mind into mash, killing them all.

I wasn't supposed to be able to reach into more than one mind at once!

Did every Master really get this much stronger after turning a Fledgling? This was getting unreasonable.

Dangerous!

I turned back to Cruto. He was the only one who'd survived the onslaught, but blood poured from his ears, eyes, nose, and the corner of his mouth. If the Venom had stayed in control any longer, Paluri's last surviving Fledgling would have been just another drop in the ocean of corpses around me. I was genuinely surprised he'd survived the onslaught. It made me wonder what his vampiric ability was and if it had anything to do with telepathy as well.

"We need to get back to the Barn," I insisted, trying to focus on what I could control and ignoring that which I couldn't change. "We need to tell them that we succeeded. That the dogs are dead."

"I'm not going anywhere with you!" Cruto spat.

I was getting tired of this. Tired of what he was trying to imply. Sure, there was some collateral damage, but I had just saved him!

Saved us all!

I was not a monster!

"Cruto, get up!" I said, but this time, I pushed into his mind and made him obey. I watched his face contort even further, but he did as he was told.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The sudden flare of Venom slipped off me, back into the placid lake, and I felt a little more in control. I opened my eyes again and looked at Cruto. I should have apologised then, but I was still irritated by his ungrateful attitude. His erroneous insinuations.