Realm of the Rogues

Chapter LXXXIV

"Slayer!!" I yell, making him stop dead in his tracks and turn around slowly, at first looking bewildered, but then quickly forcing that superior and scary look over his face. My sudden yell also makes the other vampires down the hall turn their heads towards me, allowing Alasdair, Farlan and Isobel to quickly make an end to them. Slayer is now surrounded by us. 

As we all creep up slowly on him, I notice his schooled expression beginning to fail, as he realizes how outnumbered he is.

"What, you can't even take me on yourself? Do you really need help from your little girlfriend and buddies?" he mocks me, trying to get me to lose my temper and mess up. But I don't need to lose my temper to know that I could easily take him on one-on-one right now. 

"Oh no, I don't need any help," I answer with confidence. The others get my memo and halt, as I continue to approach. In one last futile attempt to intimidate me, Slayer puffs up to his full size and creeps towards me as well. I won't let him scare me anymore. This time, I am going to kill him and make sure he stays dead.

I lunge towards him at the same moment he lunges towards me. We clash in a fury of punches. As he is larger than me, he lands more punches to my face. I won't win by might alone, I have to find some kind of advantage. I notice him cupping his hand, ready to grab my neck and strangle me, so I put up my hand quickly in front of my throat. I manage to grab his arm as it reaches mine, and then twist it around, making him turn his body, to avoid snapping his arm again.

As I'm doing so, I see my chance to bite down hard into his neck, ripping out a huge chunk of meat, and making blood burst out from his jugular. This won't be enough to kill him - a vampire could survive for days before dying of lack of blood since we don't really need that much oxygen anyway. It is enough, however, to hurt like hell, causing Slayer to let go of me to feel his injury.

I shove my leg in between his, then hook it around the front of his leg and pull it out from under him, while using my arms to shove him to the floor. He doesn't have time to brace with his hands, making him fall chin-first onto the floor. Blood flies out of his mouth, and next to the floor lies a chunk of meat, that I realize must be his tongue. 

As he's paralyzed in pain for a second, I take the opportunity to jump with both feet as hard as I can onto his neck. It crunches underneath my feet, as multiple vertebrae are crushed to pieces. For good measure, I jump on the back of his skull as well. That doesn't seem to have healed entirely after the impact with the stone floor in the cell. Where a normal skull probably would have remained intact, a cracked skull doesn't. It crumbles beneath me, and even I feel sick at the feeling.

I step off his shattered head slowly before kneeling down beside it. One of his once so haunting eyes lies in solitude a few centimetres away from its socket. It's almost hard to feel satisfaction with this kill when all I feel is disgust with the state of his body. I hope this image won't haunt me more than the memories of his actions.

I stand up, breathing heavily and look around at the others with a strange, heavy feeling. Their expressions vary between disgust and a sad kind of relief. I hope it's not disgust with me, but I wouldn't blame them. This was a show of my most nasty of sides, which I hope will never see the light of day again.

"Let's find Harris," I mumble, as I walk past the others. They join me silently. Weirdly enough, the few vampires we meet quickly surrender without a fight. They must feel Slayer's death, and without their leader, why would they fight?

We ask a few of them after Harris, and they all point in the same direction. We move down the dark corridor in silence, listening for anyone moving around. It doesn't take us long before we find Harris and another vampire talking in hushed voices in a corner. He looks a bit older than I remember, but that was to be expected - he was only sixteen when he asked me to turn him, so just as I have grown up, so has he. He's still skinny though and with a more innocent look on his face than any of us.