by Lumi Laura
CHAPTER 46 Battle of Peleș Castle
Alex found the police already there along with Father Zosimos. She wondered where Stefan was, and thought that he'd probably turned chicken, but then saw him drive up in his minivan. Radu Cuza, the man she bit after she'd killed the rapist, was with him as well as his two companions the night he shot her with the sawed off shotgun. Alex realized what a chance she was taking by including these morons.
Jaklin and Mikhail came running through the gates from where they'd been inside the Monastery. Mary trailed sheepishly behind.
"I want to stay here," she said slowly. "I'm sorry, but I don't want to commit or even witness anymore violence. This seems like home. I feel like a little girl again."
"Oh Missy, you should have seen her. Father Zosimos gave her a cross," said Mikhail.
"She stood before the altar staring up at Christ on the cross," said Jaklin. "She couldn't quit crying."
"Don't feel bad," Alex told her. "You've done more than your share of good for this world. It's time the rest of us shouldered that responsibility."
Mary returned to the Monastery without looking back.
Alex took a deep breath and turned to the officials clustered about her. She would have to clue them in. "We know that a band of feral vampires are in the Castle and that they plan to turn as many dignitaries as they can. Exactly where they will have congregated, I don't know. We'll have to search the place."
"I know where," said Father Zosimos. "The Castle was built over a pagan temple with a little-used underground chamber chiseled out of stone. It has two access portals, one from inside and the other outside. If Alu is really doing this, he'll stage his raid from there."
Alex turned to the police chief. "Once we get to the portal, you and your men start the evacuation of the dignitaries and staff, then enter the underground chamber from the inside portal. Father Zosimos will take us in from the outside."
With that, they all piled into vans and SUVs and were off to Peleș. Father Zosimos had performed religious functions frequently at Peleș, and he was able to get them on the grounds without a ruckus. Jaklin with her position with the Bulgarian Consulate vouched for the others. Of course, the police were the police. Alu would obviously want to provide the freedom for his ferals to roam the area without worrying about sunlight, but they had to work fast. Shadowrise was minutes, if not seconds, away.
Once inside they exited the van, and the first thing Alex did was bite a servant girl and then the young man caretaking the grounds who tried to pull Alex off her.
"What the hell?" said Jaklin.
"For some reason my body's storing blood," Alex said. "I want to bite every one I see."
Mikhail scoffed. "All this oath stuff about not scarfing without permission, and you're feasting on anyone with a heartbeat."
"I know," Alex said. "Can't stop."
"A likely story," he said.
"I bit Stefan," Alex added.
Jaklin nodded. "Okay, we get it."
Alex said nothing more of the continuing flashes of her psychic ravishing. Off in the distance, she observed royalty entering up a flight of steps and through the front door. She and her friends had to enter from the back and go underground. They come to negotiate the important issues of the day and celebrate civilization, she thought. We come to kill.
Father Zosimos took them around back to the storage facility, which, he said, had fallen into disrepair and was no longer used, except as a short-term cache for grounds-keeping equipment. The little stone structure was locked tight, but he found a crowbar, with which he pried loose the latches, and since the door itself was locked with a deadbolt, he had to pry it open also. Inside, Alex saw lawnmowers, rakes, shovels, shears, all rusted and in varying states of disrepair.
Father Zosimos walked straight to a trap door in the floor of the shack, which he raised to reveal a stone staircase descending into the mountain. A soft glow emanated from within. He removed his cross from a pocket of his robe and holding it before him started down the steps. Alex followed with Jaklin and Mikhail descending after her. Stefan and his bounty hunters trailed behind. Father Zosimos stepped from the bottom of the stairs out into a spacious enclosure with a low stone ceiling and stopped. Alex touched the cold, sweaty walls with her fingertips and stopped behind him.
The chamber had been excavated from the mountain with pillars of the original stone left standing to support the ceiling, or floor actually, of a room in the Peleș Castle complex. They looked like a forest of stone spires, but what took Alex's breath and frightened her no end was the hoard of ferals milling about. She and her cohorts had not yet been seen by those congregated for what reminded Alex of bal de liceu, a high school prom, something Alex never attended.
The vampires were dressed in the richest of garments and seemed entranced. All the men were in white shirts, black ties, black pants, and red cummerbunds. All striking and uncommonly handsome. The women were in white full-length gowns, black sashes but cloaked in dark red, and irresistibly beautiful. These were not like the ferals Alex had witnessed in the Ichor Dome. Quick and arrhythmic, but somehow still beautiful in motion, they were perhaps a hundred in number and gathered about something, someone in their center.
As Father Zosimos and the others stepped forward, the ferals turned in unison, as if telepathically connected, to see who had entered. These were vampire royalty, pure and virginal, a glorious gaggle of immortals. Somehow Alu had used that box from the Garden of Eden inside vampire psychic space to transform them from ferals into an exalted form of vampire worthy of mixing with the royalty of Europe.
Alex stepped around Father Zosimos, who had frozen in his tracks. She regretted what she was about to do. They were so regal, so androgynously beautiful. She remembered that Catalin had told her everyone in the Divine World was bisexual and wondered if these were angels. Had Alu trapped a band of wild angels, who had descended, as had Velinar, and turned them?
She wished she'd joined Alu and become one of this prized group of royal vampires. She wondered if the world would be better off in the hands of these immortal beings? They seemed so pure, such innocents. She felt that not only was she susceptible to evil, but that now she had become pure evil. Evil itself. Was it still too late to stop the killing? Did she have the courage? She felt so far from home and out of her depth.
The hoard of vampires parted, and Alex saw Alu standing at the foot of the stairs leading up into the Castle. They had caught them just in time. He looked princely himself in a white cape and black pants and shirt. He was magnificent.
Father Zosimos stepped forward thrusting his cross before him to no avail, for these vampires were beyond all that. Somehow they were cured of Christ's stigmata.
Alex heard pounding on the door at the top of the stairs above the angel vampires, and everyone turned to see what was happening. In what seemed to Alex an explosion, the doorframe splintered, and the door fell onto the stairs. The police burst through.
Out of nowhere, Stefan's shotgun fired and a vampire dropped. Jaklin darted around Alex, and started hacking mercilessly, severing limbs until she could get a clear swing for a decapitation. Alex, having no stomach for it, dropped her walking stick and walked among them. A couple of vampires dragged her away from Mikhail. As one vampire bit into her neck, then another, she couldn't resist. They only drew a little blood then released her, wandered away a few steps, and quite suddenly went into convulsions and their clothing burst into flames exposing the scintillation of their skin like sparklers at a celebration.
Mikhail came to her rescue, beating off two more ferals, but Alex had gone into an altered state. She watched Jaklin fighting, and it seemed that time had slowed for her. She'd become an unstoppable fabled creature, folkloric. Her motion seemed a choreography of archetypal gestures seen in mythical time. Jaklin was the Millennial Woman.
Alex realized it was to be another slaughter. Since Alu's vampires had no weapons, it would be like killing children in a schoolyard. But then she saw Alu throw
open a door to another chamber and usher those around him into it. One of them was Cosmina. The sign on the door said "Pivniţă de Vinuri," Wine Cellar. Alex negotiated the mayhem as more ferals poured through the door, realizing she had to enter too, but alone. Anyone who entered with her would also perish. She needed to solicit just one more donation, a topping of the tank, Mikhail would have said. Father Zosimos, the perfect donor, was up against the stone wall panting, perhaps gathering his strength before reentering the fight, his blood churning within his veins and arteries. She went to him, fangs exposed telegraphing her intent.
"No, Alex!" he shouted. "Not me!" He swooned.
"You've owed me a long time," she said and bit into him with a vengeance. Like a spider, she coiled her arms and legs about him, shoved her face into his flesh, the flow close to the surface and immediate. She took two long drafts of holy blood before releasing him. "Debt paid in full," she said, smacking her lips and stepped away. It was faith she gained from him, his blood, faith in what she was about to do and the conviction to do it. Yet, she knew it was evil, that someone or something was set to enjoy the atrocity she was to commit. She had become Evil's scullion.
Alex reached the door, knowing that if the others entered with her — Jaklin and Mikhail, Stefan and his band of bounty hunters, police, Father Zosimos — they'd all die.
