by D. N. Hoxa
RECLAIMED
Morta Fox #2
D.N. HOXA
Copyright © 2016 by D.N. Hoxa
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
If you're going through hell, keep going.
-Winston Churchill
I
There were three memories I chose to hold onto as tightly as I could when the cold hit. One was of my sisters, looking at me, smiling when they thought we were finally escaping from home. Two: when my Doyen asked me to kill him, and I made my place in the immortal world. And three…Morta Fox.
She looked like the Angel of Death when she fell down the ROB building that night. I had seen things before, many things. But nothing was quite as fascinating as seeing her fall. Her arms were wide, her eyes closed, as if she was expecting the world to fall at her, not the other way around. But what left me stunned in place was her beating heart.
A heart that continued to beat after she fell.
Her wide, endless eyes, and her beautiful heart-shaped face, and those red, red lips…it was getting so hard to hold onto her, especially during the cold. Sometimes, I longed to call her name. If there was one word I could say, that would be it. Morta…it echoed in my mind.
But this fucking place held me captive. I heard nothing. I spoke nothing. Everything I saw had a red hue to it. Guess that’s why they called it the Red Dimension. The anger that burned in me against the cold painted everything in red. And it never fucking stopped.
Angry, angry, nearly mad, yet not quite. The feeling never left me. I was so tired that I wanted to let go so badly, but I couldn’t. Every second of existing in that timeless place was the same.
I’d known I’d end up in there the second I realized I’d fallen for her. I’d never kill her. It was stupid of me to make that promise, knowing what would happen. Yet somehow, in those moments, having her with me seemed much more important than ending up in the Red Dimension.
I remembered the way she’d looked at me when Mohg’s trident began to transport me.
Helpless. She was as helpless as she’d been when all she wanted from the world was for it to end her. It ripped my chest apart and drove me even angrier. I’d promised her that I would go back for her, no matter what.
That was more than seven years ago.
All I wanted was to feel a little hope that she at least was alright. But no. I could feel nothing but anger.
The trick was, I’d found, to focus on someone for as long as you could. It never lasted more than two minutes before I got so angry with that person without reason and wanted to rip them apart. But two minutes were more than enough.
In there—or out—there were hundreds of vampires around me. Lifeless creatures that couldn’t hear or speak, just like me. Some sat like I did, experiencing the pain without movement, while others crawled and kicked and tried to shout, and tried with all their strength to pull out their hair, because the pain was unbearable.
I’d tried to scream, and I’d tried to hurt myself in the past. That was until I realized that I was only amplifying my own pain. If you pulled out chunks of your own hair, it just grew right back, and it hurt like hell while it did. If you scratched yourself with your fingernails, when the wounds closed, the pain doubled.
I moved only once a month when the people I stared at became too familiar. Movement, no matter how small, caused pain. That is why I only moved my eyes, and nothing else.
I craved blood like never before. I’d gone seven years without it. The creatures in the Red Dimension had none. I’d tried to suck on them in the beginning, and some had tried to suck my blood. It was no use. Still, the craving was a monster inside my chest. It was difficult to control my mind and think about those three things I’d chosen, when the smell of blood sometimes lingered in the air like it was right there within my reach, and I couldn’t take it.
The scenery never changed. Above us, there was a dark, starless and moonless sky. Under us, the ground was set with ash and small, black stones. There was no ending and no beginning. Just people that were once vampires. The sight alone drowned you in despair so deep, you had no place for any other emotion. Except for anger. Anger was always there. During the cold and during the flames.
It was a state of being, the cold I was in. Nothing changed in the air around me. Only my body did. For an hour, more or less, I felt like I was covered in ice. It was so cold that my bones broke from it. It was agony when that happened.
And then, there was the fire. When that happened, invisible flames licked every inch of me. My flesh burned, and I could smell it. When my bones broke during the cold, they healed during the fire, but my flesh got grilled. Flames burned my insides as well. I felt them in my throat and in my stomach and at the tips of my toes, inside my skin. I was thankful that for me, each condition lasted for an hour. I’d seen others burn for days.
Neither the cold nor the flames ever stopped. When the cold was over, the transition to flames lasted half a second. Same for when the fire died, too, and cold took its place. It was a never-ending torture of mind and body, and from the looks of it, I was beginning to believe that I was stuck in there forever.
“I am a liar,” I thought to myself. I lied to her. I told her I would go back for her. I promised her that I would see her again.
I needed to say it. To shout it to the world, to tell everyone that I was a filthy liar, but I couldn’t speak. So I said it with my eyes, the only parts of me I dared to move, in Morse.
I am a liar.
I was still hurting from the move I’d made from one part of nowhere to another. I’d walked fifteen steps, and I’d crawled for another thirty-four seconds until I’d collapsed from the flames. I liked the cold better, but during it, movement wasn’t possible.
Sometime later, I managed to sit. The smell of my burning flesh made the craving worse.
I am a liar, I said again with my blinking eyes. I would’ve given all that was left of me to be able to speak out. Unfortunately, there was no one that cared to take anything of me and give me something in return. Whoever was in charge of the Red Dimension—if someone was—you could say that they took pleasure in our pain. And if this was only a portion of the real hell…I didn’t dare think that far.
Faceless heads passed in front of my eyes, and none came too close to me, for which I tried to feel thankful. That was a second before someone fell on top of me and knocked me to the side.
My arm and my hip broke. My mouth opened, and my lungs longed to scream. The same dead silence suffocated me. The body that had crashed onto me m
oved, but I couldn’t. Everything hurt. I hated that whoever it was, he was going to beat me so hard that when flames came and my body healed itself, the pain would drive me insane.
The body fell to the side, and a burnt face appeared right in front of mine, lying on ash and stone. Everything on his face was burnt. The only white thing among the churned flesh was his wide blue eyes. They disappeared and appeared every few seconds.
I tried to move my foot to kick him away from me. I would tear him apart limb by limb when flames came back. I begged for them to do so sooner.
I closed my eyes to gather strength to face the pain, when he kicked me in the groin. My eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. I looked at his, and told him about the thousand ways I’d hurt him when flames caught hold of me, when…he blinked.
He blinked fast, and blinked slow, and blinked fast and then stopped…
He said R.
I pushed my head back as far as I could to make sure what I was seeing was real. This burning vampire had blinked the letter R in Morse. I watched him closely when he blinked again. Fast, then slow. A.
Again, he blinked and gave me Y.
Ray.
His face was black. No hair, no nothing. Just eyes. I couldn’t identify him, but I had an idea. And when he gave me the letter D, and then O and Y, I needed no further confirmation.
The man in front of my face was Ray Bardos, the vampire who turned me, and the one everyone thought I killed a century later. He was my Doyen.
***
It took a hell of a long time for the cold to leave me and the flames to heal me. I writhed in pain as my bones attached and my flesh burned. I was so angry at Ray that I kicked him as hard as I could twice before I was so tired, I fell on the ground next to him.
He kept blinking, trying to tell me something, but I was in so much pain that I couldn’t concentrate enough to understand. I had no idea how he knew to communicate with me in Morse. He must’ve seen me call myself a liar.
His burnt hand grabbed my burnt arm and tried to squeeze, as if to demand my attention. I looked up at his wide eyes, and he immediately started to blink.
One, two… O, and a U and then T.
Out.
I raised my brows in question. I must’ve read him wrong.
He blinked the same letters again. I shook my head to tell him that there was no way out. But he nodded. I blinked no. He blinked yes, right before he blinked the word escape.
Despite knowing about the chances of ever getting out of that place, a tiny ray of hope bloomed in my chest. Could it be possible that he knew of a way out of the Red Dimension?
He made an effort to sit up. It took him minutes to do it, and it took me even longer. Our burnt faces were in front of each other’s now.
I asked him how. He blinked: three.
I shook my head thinking he didn’t understand my question, so I asked again, and again his reply was the same. Three.
I asked what. He pointed first at himself, and then, barely, at me.
Vampires. He meant three vampires.
I raised two fingers, because obviously there were only two of us that could communicate. But I didn’t care. We would do it, no matter how long it took. We would do everything necessary no matter how small a chance we had. And maybe it was stupid, but I needed to hold onto something so desperately that I believed immediately.
He put his hand above my fingers and blinked three again. I blinked, of us? And he nodded.
How? I asked again.
He started to blink the letters so fast that I almost lost them:
One face.
One heart.
One mind.
He lost me completely.
I got so angry that I couldn’t speak and have him tell me exactly what he meant. I grabbed his shoulders with my burning, smoking hands and tried to shake him. I barely moved him.
Specific, I blinked. He only shook his head. The next second, he squeezed his eyes tightly and opened his mouth as if he wanted to scream. I let go of him and watched the smoke dissolve on his skin while it regenerated.
I watched his mouth take shape, and his dark hair grow on his head. I knew how bad it felt. I knew how much pain he was in, yet I only felt angry that he was wasting so much precious time that could have been passed in conversation. I watched him transform into the vampire I knew for a single, fleeting second, and then I watched him freeze in place as cold took him.
After that, he only blinked one word.
Out.
II
Days passed before Ray Bardos burned in flames again. I had never been longer than a day or two in one condition, but with him, it was almost a week of non-stop cold. I changed in front of his eyes, from burnt to frozen, over and over again, and I watched him, my eyes never moving from his face.
He only ever blinked that single word: out. It was like his brain was stuck in those three letters and knew of nothing else.
With every second that passed I got angrier and angrier at him. On the third day, when flames caught me, I hit him so hard I heard his collarbone break. I regretted it immediately. What if he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to tell me how to escape? He might not really know how, but that wasn’t something I was willing to risk. Because finally, after years and years of anger and soullessness and flames and cold, I finally believed that maybe I was going to see her again. Her face stayed in front of my eyes through every second, hot and cold.
There were so many things I wanted to tell her of the life I led. Three centuries worth of stories, and I would leave nothing out. Not one single thing, good or bad—or worse—that I’d done. I wanted nothing more than for her to know who I really was. I did some terrible things in my time, sure, but I regretted nothing because all of the things I did led me to that building on that night—to her.
Specifics, I kept blinking to Ray while he finally burned. He wouldn’t look at me until the collarbone I’d broken healed completely. And when he finally did get through it, as much as one could possibly get, he slapped me.
I wish I could say he slapped the hell out of me, but when my burning eyes opened again, hell was still there.
Rage consumed almost all of my thoughts. But after I’d broken his collarbone, I’d tried to train myself to keep focus on the only thing that was important. Getting out. That was the only way I was ever going to see Morta again, and that was the only thing that mattered anymore. So I fisted my hands and kept myself from moving and fighting back, and I swallowed hard. I could take a slap like a man. Yes, I was mad with rage, but fighting back wasn’t going to win me any time. So I only blinked specifics again and waited.
One face, one heart, one mind, he blinked back. I tried to shake my head, but it was too much effort and pain. So I blinked no instead. I needed him to be more specific.
Go north, he blinked. Wait for full moon, and I thought, who the hell knows in this place when the next full moon is? Give one face, one heart, one mind.
There were a thousand questions I thought to ask. When he said face and heart and mind, did he mean literally? Who the hell was the third of us, or did we have to find him?
But just as I was about to start blinking, I stopped. There were those questions and many more, but I didn’t really care. No matter what the answer was, I would still trade my face, my heart and my mind for the smallest chance to see her again. So I didn’t waste time asking about myself, because I was going to do it. The decision was made the second he blinked the word out.
Third person, I blinked to him. And he blinked yes.
I understood he meant he already had him, whoever he was, so I asked where, and he started to drag himself to his knees. He was taking me to him.
Hope grew inside me again, together with the anger that came the moment my foot fell on the ashen ground and held half my weight. God, how I longed to scream.
For a while, we crawled and fell and stopped to take breaks. We got knocked down by mad people who were burning around us, and we even knocked dow
n whoever fell in our way. It hurt so badly. My brain boiled with anger.
Ice came quickly this time, or so it seemed to me. It froze me completely while I was on my knees. I cursed whoever was there to curse, and begged with my mind for Ray to turn his head and look at me, see that I wasn’t following him.
He didn’t. He fell on his stomach, but he didn’t turn to look back at me while I watched him, aching everywhere, hating everything, wanting to tear myself apart, because I just didn’t want to take it anymore. It was too much. I’d had enough. I didn’t care what happened. I just wanted to be done with everything.
But that was the thing about the Red Dimension. Even when you were ready to quit and let go, it didn’t let you. I felt like it was laughing in my face as I watched Ray crawling away from me, never looking back. Who knew how long the ice was going to hold me there, on my knees, crying, shouting inside my head while he walked and crawled and found whoever it was he was looking for?
And when Ray finally realized I wasn’t there, he wasn’t going to turn back for me. No, he was never that kind of a man. He would simply find someone else, and then what? I would get stuck in there forever.
Never before had I tried to move while frozen. Surely something would break even if I moved a little finger. But right then, I didn’t care as I watched Ray’s back. I pushed my hands away from my body, and I heard them crack as my bones broke. I hit the ground hard.
***
Hours later, Ray Bardos disappeared from my sight. I kept my eyes on him for as long as I could, but eventually, bodies swam in front of me and behind him, and I lost him. With him, I also lost hope.
Eventually ice turned to fire, and my body started to heal. God, how it hurt! I felt like I had broken every bone in my body. I fell to the ground on my stomach and decided to stay there. What else was I going to do?
Others kicked me as they went, and some even fell on my back, but I didn’t bother to get up. It wasn’t worth it, and besides, the healing had taken everything away from me. Not that I had much to begin with. But I stayed put. I didn’t move. Not when the cold came back, and then the flames later, and the cold again.
