Deadly Lovers (The Prussia Series)

by Karisha Prescott

  He had had a chance to leave. He could have left me alone. If he had just left the castle, he wouldn’t be crumpled where he now sat in the dirt, straw, and his own blood. But he chose to stay. And after what he chose to do after he stayed, I had decided I was going to make it right.

  I didn’t care how much pain it caused me. I pulled my knee forward with all the force I had in my entire body and let it impact the Duke in the face. The lights in the room became so bright I couldn’t see for a second. The pain was blinding but I still smiled. I gritted my teeth and smiled. I had broken my leg. I knew it, I felt it. Whatever fractures I had before had broken when I kneed the Duke in the face. But watching my knee connect with his mouth, watching his front teeth break off into his mouth and the back of his head rebound off the brick wall, made it worth it.

  I stepped back and tried to keep my weight on my other leg as I watched the Duke lean forward, hands on the floor, and spit out several of his teeth along with a mouthful of blood. I secretly wished it had been his fangs but it hadn’t been. My mouth twisted up in disgust as the Duke spat out mouthful after mouthful of blood and cursed me between breaths.

  I was losing that feeling, the feeling of power. I liked that feeling but it was slipping away with every curse he tossed at me, with every low guttural growl that slipped from between his lips as he crouched on the floor. I wasn’t anywhere close to done and we weren’t any where close to being even. I hopped on one leg over to the table that had tools spread out on it. It just so happened I was fully equipped to make sure justice was served.

  I picked up a pair of surgical looking pliers and hopped back over to the Duke, still spitting blood in splatters all around him. It looked as though I had killed somebody. Still, he bled. I knelt down next to the Duke and he recoiled, his arm swiped out at me and hit my face, scratching the side of my face in the process. I fell over into the brick wall but recovered quickly.

  The Duke sat back, his legs forward to keep distance from me, one of his hands up in front of him, and one behind him to keep him up. His hollow eye sockets looked for me, unable to see but clearly listening for my movements. Nothing was going to keep me from getting my justice. It was my job, after all, according to Queen Victoria. And not only was my leg starting to feel better but I was starting to enjoy the job of doling out my brand of court fairness.

  I recovered quickly from his strike and lunged over the Duke, a leg on either side of him. The Duke looked up at me without any eyes, only blood streaking down his cheeks, face and neck, and his mouth open with a terrified hiss. I smiled as the Duke gave me the opportunity I was looking for. I shoved the pliers, open, into the Duke’s mouth. I had hoped for his fangs but would settle on his tongue.

  I caught the Duke’s tongue between the grips of the steel pliers and locked them down, pulling forward and feeling the give and take of the Duke’s tongue stretch at my hands. The shrieks of horror and pain were ear splitting. The Duke tried to scurry backwards, away from me, but I had him by the tongue and as soon as he pulled at all against the pliers his scurry halted. I gave a tug and listened to the gargling of blood in the Duke’s mouth and the sound of pain drowning in his throat.

  “Get. Up. Slowly,” I said, a whisper so crisp it would have given me goose bumps if I wasn’t coated in layer after layer of dry and drying blood.

  The Duke used his hands to carefully push off from the dirt floor and stand up. I held the grip of the pliers with both hands, not wanting to lose my grip, and pulled the Duke by the mouth back to the metal chair he had once been restrained in.

  “Sit,” I said, as I squeezed the pliers tighter and a deep, gargle of a moan attempted to escape from the Duke’s throat, blood splattered out of his mouth as air fought to escape with each moan and cough.

  The Duke sat with a shrill scream of pain as I dropped the pliers and let his tongue hold the full weight of the pliers. I quickly grabbed the ropes that were scattered about on the floor. Clearly they had not been tight enough. As the Duke struggled to figure out how to unlock the clamp the pliers had on his tongue without being able to see how the lock on the pliers worked, I tied the ropes around his feet to the legs of the chair. I smiled with appreciation at the metal rings on the chair that would prevent the ropes from simply slipping off the legs of the chair. I tied the ropes as tight as I could, no intention of ever untying them. By the time the Duke had gotten the pliers off of his tongue, I had already slipped the last piece of rope around his torso and tied him to the back of the chair. I pulled as hard as I could and smiled each time he groaned in pain.

  “You can’t do this,” he said, “I’m of another court,”

  “No,” I said, securing the last knot in the rope and coming around to view my handiwork, “You’re in my court,” I said, smiling.

  “Don’t you mean Queen Victoria’s?” asked the Duke, cautiously, his tongue a mangled mess and his pronunciation skewed.

  “I get the feeling…” I said, as I turned to view the tools spread out on the table and let my hand roll over the smooth silver finish of the knife handles laid out carefully, “…that it’s more of a family responsibility,” I said, looking back at him with a smile on my face.

  “Just kill me,” groaned the Duke as I picked up a sharp cleaver, heavy in my hand but the weight exciting me, “That’s what you’re going to do anyway. Just do it. Just kill me,”

  I put the tip of my finger on the sharp blade of the knife and flicked it, feeling the razor sharp edge and being satisfied that it would be a good first choice, a first try.

  “Tell me,” I asked, curiously, “How do I kill a vampire?”

  “What?” asked the Duke.

  I’m guessing his eyebrows would have been drawn together more tightly if he had eyeballs still.

  “You know how to kill a vampire,” said the Duke.

  His voice sounded frustrated but the fact that his tongue had been so mangled by the pliers meant his words came out sounding…well, funny. His tongue had begun to swell from the trauma. I started to wonder if I would still be able to question him if his tongue got too big to answer.

  “You’re referring to Jasper,” I nodded, though I knew he couldn’t see me, “Yes, well. Jasper was an accident. A convenient accident and not one I feel especially bad about but still an accident,” I said, waiving the cleaver around as if giving a speech. Looking back into the hollowed out cavities of his eyes, it dawned on me that the performance was lost on him.

  The Duke didn’t respond. He just sat there, looking towards my direction but never at me.

  “Spit it out,” I said, “Otherwise, you have no use for that tongue and you’ll spit that out,”

  “The heart,” offered the Duke quickly, “it’s the fastest way,”

  “And…what if I want a slow way?” I asked.

  I thought he was going to answer me but he paused. His mouth hung open for a minute.

  “Go to hell,” he growled at me through gritted teeth, blood spilling out of his mouth where his missing teeth left gaps in his sparkling white row of teeth with blood foaming at every curve and corner of his mouth.

  “I would, certainly,” I said, placing the sharp tip of the cleaver at the curve of the Duke’s neck, “If I weren’t immortal,” I said with my sweetest smile and happiest voice as I began slow slices into the muscles that held his neck attached to his shoulders.

  The Duke tried his best, for several strokes of the blade, not to cry out. But by the fifth slice, as the blade began small shaving cuts into the collar bone, the pleading and begging began to bubble up from his lips in sweet succession. As his cries turned into gentle murmurs, a gurgle of blood dripping in a small trickle from the corner of his mouth, I headed back to the table to test out something new. I wanted him lively and active. I wanted to talk him through his pain and hear every ounce of it.

  I selected a curved blade next. It reminded me of a small wheat sickle, just small enough for my dainty hand and just big enough for a grown vampire. I let a gentle hand trace
the outside of where the Duke’s eyes had once been.

  “I never noticed what color your eyes…were,” I said, enjoying that I could still find humor in the situation, “What were they?”

  The Duke sobbed, no tears but plenty of despair. I laid a hand on his forehead and let my thumb gently stroke his eyebrow, comforting him. The Duke shook his head back and forth violently. He didn’t like it. And it made me laugh.

  “You laugh now but when Josephine gets you…” the Duke’s voice trailed off and I could hear the faintest traces of a laugh, deep in his chest yet not reaching his lips, “When she finds you…that’s what I’ve been thinking about. What will sweet little Josephine do to you, do you think?”

  My hands balled into fists as I listened. I felt a chill across the back of my neck with every hint of laughter. Somehow he was still enjoying this. My hands were covered in his blood, his eyes were smashed somewhere in the dirt into tiny mushy pieces, and he still laughed at me.

  His laugh was too much. I came around to the front of him and slashed at him with all of my strength, my arm swinging so fast and wild that I thought my shoulder might dislocate. The hand sickle was small but sharp. It sliced through the layers of the Duke’s blood soaked suit and on the third pass, hit flesh. His jaw clenched tightly, his arms tensed, his hands balled into fists ready to fight, and his face turned up. His entire body fought to pull away from the slicing of the sickle into his skin.

  My eyes were wide with anticipation as I watched the sickle just barely breach through the skin of his stomach. I didn’t know how it compared to what he had done to me but I had to believe that he still deserved it. As the blood began to pour in a sheet down the front of his pants, innards still tucked inside his abdomen, I stopped swinging the sickle and leaned down to take a closer look.

  His moaning had already begun to quiet. The Duke tried very hard not to voice his pain. He must have realized I enjoyed it. But I wasn’t done with him. And I still wanted to hear his screams. I looked at the gashes across his stomach and could see the glisten of what looked like sausage.

  I set a finger against the gash and poked, just a little. Instantly the Duke burst to life with horrified screams as I had never heard come from his lips. The corners of my lips turned up slightly as I looked up at his howling face.

  But his howls stopped as soon as I had stopped poking. So, I poked again…and again…until finally, his skin gave way and I watched in horror as his internal organs bulged forward, threatening to hit me in the face. I retreated quickly, thinking they would spill into his lap and bounce right into my face but they didn’t. They were caught among themselves, still held somewhat firmly by the Duke’s skin. I looked at the Duke’s face. He had broken out into a sweat, his mouth gaping open with his missing teeth on full display. Still, I saw no fangs but the pain was there. No screams came out of his mouth as he gasped up at the ceiling in petrified terror.

  Perhaps he had reached his limit. Or I had gone too far. I leaned back down towards his abdomen and hooked my index finger around the sausage like organ, what I knew to be his intestines though I didn’t know if they were small or large, and gave a little tug. The Duke screamed what I imagined would be comparable to a final cry of death.

  Every part of his body rocked the chair with muscles straining against the restraints, a bucket of blood exploding from the cavity of his abdomen in a rush down his lap and onto the floor, all over my feet. His face went completely pale and contorted, his scream sinking into my bones and shocking me into awe at the raw emotion in it. And I felt accomplished even as I stood with my hands slapped around my ears to protect them from the horror of his scream.

  “Mercy,” he whispered, repeated, over and over, “Mercy…mercy…mercy, I beg you…mercy,”

  The Duke’s face stayed strained upwards toward the ceiling. I looked at the damage I had done, the justice I had served, and felt that I had accomplished something. But in my heart, I felt a small hole, black and cold for what I had done. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that had done it, which part had been the cause, but I knew it had cost me something. I looked at the Duke’s entrails leading out of his stomach and onto the dirt floor, straw sticking to the slimy, slick organ, and my eyes followed it all the way to my hand that was still slapped around my ears. I gasped as I realized that my index finger had remained hooked around his intestines even as I had put my hands up to protect my ears from his earth shattering screams.

  “For the love of God,” I heard someone mutter in disbelief.

  I looked up to see John Campbell at the door of the dungeon looking at the Duke, strapped to the metal chair, eyes gouged out, shoulders carved down to the bone and disemboweled. It didn’t dawn on me the depth of what I had been capable of until John Campbell was shoved aside and Sebastian stepped into the light, his face falling on my handiwork first and his eyes following the Duke’s intestine to my index finger. As soon as his eyes found me, standing covered in layer after layer of blood and finger wrapped around the entrails of the Duke, I uncoiled my finger from the Duke’s intestine and took a step back, hands behind my back.

  The Duke made a murmur of a cry at having his intestines dropped on the floor. He was barely conscious. And as I stood there in the silence of the moment, the only voice was the slow and steady murmur of the Duke asking for mercy. It dawned on me that he hadn’t been begging me for mercy. His face turned up, eyes vacant from his bloodied skull, he was praying. He was praying for mercy.

  “Prussia…” said Sebastian as he took a step forward and hesitated, his hands outstretched and then pulled back. He looked so confused. He took a step towards the Duke and hesitated again, turning back towards me, “Are you…okay?”

  Sebastian gazed at me for a long moment, taking in the scene, the blood, the damage. I wanted to think he was asking if I had been hurt and some part of that question, I’m sure that’s what he was asking. But it wasn’t just one question. He wasn’t just asking if I had been hurt. I stood before him, clearly having disemboweled a high ranking politician of the court after being left alone for what I started to think might have only been twenty minutes, though it had felt like a lifetime. He was asking if I was okay, if I was mentally alright, if it was really me standing in front of him.

  I could feel the blood still trickling from the wounds in my arms. I could feel the muscles with every twitch of the injury to my shoulder, skin, and chunks of tissue missing. Blood streamed in sheets down my back and my chest. Every inch of my body had a shock wave of pain shooting in every direction. But all my attention had me focused on those eyes, looking at me in a type of horror that made me sick to my stomach. Sebastian’s eyes didn’t see his beautiful new wife. Those eyes were looking at a monster. And I knew as soon as I thought it that I had made him feel this same way on more than one occasion and instantly regretted having looked at him with that same look in the past.

  “When you said you didn’t want to leave her alone with him for too long…I thought you were worried about her, not…about what she was going to do,” I could hear John Campbell whisper, his eyes flitting in disbelief between the Duke and I.

  I stood, embarrassed, as if I stood in judgment. My feet shifted back and forth as I waited for them to say something, to do something.

  “Wait, what?” I asked, anger shooting from toes to fingertips as I had time to process John Campbell’s whisper, “You were worried about leaving me alone with him and you still just left me alone with him?” I asked.

  I watched as John’s eyebrows went up, his face went completely pale and his mouth clamped shut. He might have regretted the words but he couldn’t take them back. Sebastian held up his hands, his mouth falling open without an answer to fall out, grasping for words and gapping at the air.

  “Water,” snapped Sebastian at John Campbell.

  “Huh?” said John, looking dazed and confused at Sebastian, as though he had never heard the word before in his life, “Get a doctor?”

  “No, get the biggest pitc
her of water you can find from the kitchen. Go. Now. Hurry!” snapped Sebastian.

  “No, I want to hear more about this,” I said, pointing a blood soaked finger at John Campbell.

  I stood there a moment, my eyebrows knitted together in anger and my teeth gritted, ready for a fight. But John didn’t wait. He took one look at me, one look at Sebastian and walked out, his footsteps sprinting down the passageway towards the castle.

  That power I had felt before as I had been taking pieces of the Duke at my leisure, for my pleasure, dissipated in that moment. Watching John race down the passageway after I had told him not to leave, it was a reminder that I wasn’t the one in power in this room anymore. I was just…just Prussia. Not a vampire, not quite human, not strong or fast but able to suffer for eternity given the opportunity.

  “Prussia, what happened here?” asked Sebastian, his arms out in front of him now and taking slow steps towards me as if I were a rabid animal lose from the cage and he was going to catch me, “What did you do?”