A man approached, and Victoria also became afraid when she saw his face. Everything about him was wrong—his smell, his appearance. He was something that she had never heard of or encountered. His bright golden eyes contrasting with his tan skin. Inside of his mouth, vampire fangs were sharp and ready to shred. And on top of his head were two ram-like horns. He smelled like a vampire and a wizard. Victoria had never before seen a creation consisting of both.
"Hello, princess," he said in a deep voice. "My name is Nicolae Blake." Victoria gulped and began to shake in fear under his gaze. "Though I suppose you already know that since their has been quite the number of stories about me in the news. Not to mention that your parents and I go way back." When Victoria still didn't say anything, he just smiled at her. "I've been waiting for this for a long time. Both fate and justice have been demanding that we meet for a long, long time."
"What do you want with me?" She finally spoke up. She had intended for it to come out strong, but what she heard was the voice of a scared little girl. She was helpless.
"I just told you," he cried as if she were a simpleton. "I've brought you here for the justice that is owed to me. I guess it's not only that, though. I intend to disrupt those little monarchs on their golden thrones and bring about a new order for this world."
"And in what way have I possibly wronged you?" Victoria shuddered. All the while, Ceto was watching their conversation go down.
"Well, you were born. My good friends Vlad and Alina had the audacity to start their own family even though they killed mine." Victoria's confusion must have been written on her face because Nicolae continued. "Confused?" he asked. "Let me tell you a little story. The wizard group known as the Tenebris, after centuries of being allowed to do as they please are suddenly deemed to be too evil for this world. They are then disbanded, hunted down, and killed along with their children who inherited their gifts."
Victoria rolled her eyes. "I already know this story."
"You know a side of this story," Nicolae snarled. "Not the whole story."
"A young woman in Piatra by the name of Perdita Blake thinks the killing of these people is wrong," he continues. "So, she hides them. At this time, the main leaders in this fight were Cenric Remington, Vladimir Speranta, and Artur Dalca. They find out what she's doing and go to arrest her. In the chaos of everything, she is killed along with the unborn child in her belly." Nicolae was quiet for a moment, rage alight in his eyes. "The justice I seek is hers. Vlad was among the people who took everything from me, so now, I'm taking everything from him. However, in order to get the job done, I needed some friends in high places. Therefore, we decided on a reshuffling of the seats in Regula Palace and new order of power for the kingdoms. As you can see, I'm quite the genius." Victoria just stared at him. "What? Not even the slightest bit of sympathy for a man who's lost his family?"
Victoria couldn't help it. Lately it felt like there was a beast inside of her that was becoming bolder and more vicious by the second. She scoffed at him. "You ask me to feel sorry for you? No. You are a man who has suffered more than anyone should, and yet you gladly cause the suffering of others, of innocents, in the name of justice."
"Is it yourself you refer to as one of these innocents?" he asked her. He still wore that smile on his face like a suit of armor. "Or perhaps her?" He pointed over to where Ceto hung onto each and every single one of their words. "Would you consider yourself innocent, my dear queen?" he called over to her. Her silence was answer enough. "And we both know that you're not as innocent as you appear to be. Little girls in glass castles shouldn't throw stones, now should they? Lest they realize that their kingdom is just as fragile and liable to fall as everyone else's."
"Now what are you talking about?"
"So, the monster plays coy." He clicked his tongue at her. "I must say, I don't blame you for hiding it. You act like you're so special for being a cripple, but they would have hunted you down like a dog if the news ever got out. Just like me. To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised you don't hunt small children in the streets. Your ancestors certainly did." Victoria stopped cold at his words. What on Terrarum was he talking about? Nicolae noticed her silent questioning and his smile grew ever wider. "Unless, of course, you didn't know either."
"Victoria, what's he talking about?" Ceto was looking at her expectantly, but she was just as confused as the queen.
"I have no idea."
Nicolae burst out in laughter, but there was no joy or hilarity there. It quickly turned into anger. "That seer lied to me! He knew his duty and he still lied to me!"
"What's happening?" Ceto cried. Victoria just shook her head. This man was scary at the best of times. When he was this angry, he was impossibly terrifying.
"I must say, it was a good show. Even I was convinced you were as incompetent as you pretend to be. It took me quite a while to discover that your not who you even seem to think you are. It wasn't until that bomb went off and you were acting like a crazed lunatic that I figured out how potent your bloodline truly is." He walked away from her until he leaned against the opposite wall. "You're as much of a monster as the rest of us are. People like you, like your brother, all deserve to die."
Victoria lunged forward against her chains as if there indeed was another monster within.
"Whoa, there she is!" Nicolae cried with more cackling laughter. Victoria's nails had elongated into black claws and she bared long fangs at him as her pupils grew into two black pits inside her skull. Victoria let loose an unholy roar that seemed to shake the very tunnels around them. For the first time in her lifetime, Victoria saw genuine fear in the eyes of someone who looked at her. Ceto pressed herself as far away from her as she could get. It was as though she were afraid that those silver chains wouldn't hold for very long.
Realizing her rage, that loss of control, Victoria slumped back down into the chains that bound her. "I am not strong," she said rather warily. In the corner, Ceto seemed rather unconvinced. Nicolae just scoffed. "It's the truth!" she exclaimed. "I am no more valuable than a human."
"Is it really so much easier to convince yourself of this? Does it ease some of the pain?"
Victoria simply glared a him.
"You seem to know an awful lot about me. What is it that you could possibly gain from all of this?"
"What would you say if I were to tell you that I was there the night your brother died? What if I told you that I played a bigger part in his death than the world knows?"
She again bared her teeth at him but kept her composure. "I'd say you are a liar. A liar who enjoys nothing more than to thrive in the calamity of his own creation." Nicolae only began to laugh again. Victoria's anger melted into a sorrow she'd been holding onto for too long. "What could you possibly have to gain from murdering an innocent child! He'd done nothing to you! Nothing!"
"I don't know what to say about you, Victoria Speranta. One minute I am convinced that you might actually be quite powerful. The next, you can't even blow the dust off of a couple nearby shelves. I can't decide whether you are very incompetent or very clever."
Victoria just stood there, staring at the madness of this man. Was this too a lie? What was real about him was impossible to tell. He just appeared to be one trick after the next. No wonder her parents hated him.
"Like I said before, I killed him because that dumb seer lied to me."
"How is that supposed to make sense to me?"
He thought for a moment before a large smile spread across his face. "I suppose its not." He clicked his tongue at her. "Well, don't look so defeated. The fun hasn't even started yet."
"The…fun?"
"The others said I should wait on the psychological stuff. That I should start with the physical torture first. But, you know, much like your betrothed, I believe psychological torture has always been my favorite."
Victoria's eyes trailed after him as he made his way over to a metal table. He unrolled a canvas case, much like an artist would with their paintbrushes. However, instead
of paintbrushes, his roll was filled with knives. Some were serrated, some long and deadly looking. She also eyed a few scalpels of varying sizes. She suddenly felt her stomach drop as she realized what he meant by fun.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Edge of Nowhere
During the entire time, Nicolae Blake didn't ask Victoria a single question. He just smiled as he dug the blades into her skin; laughed as her screams broke through the silence of the Underground. As time went on, she realized there wasn't anything about her kingdom he wished to know. He just wanted to watch her suffer. It was his own way of punishing the king and queen of Sangera.
All the while, Ceto cried in the corner of the room begging him to torture her instead. Victoria was surprised by this. She never figured her for the self-sacrificing type. He simply told her that she would get her turn, too.
When he was finished, he left Victoria there, lying in a pool of her own blood and tears. Her immortal body refused to heal. Before he added another slice to her body, he would dip his blade into a purplish-black liquid that smelled of rotting flesh. Every sense within her screamed to get as far away from it as possible. Victoria had no idea what it was. Just that it caused excruciating pain.
It wasn't long after Nicolae left that Victoria heard Ceto in her cell on the other side of the room. Her siren voice carried across the bleakness of that dungeon. It was quite possibly the most beautiful sound Victoria had ever heard. Prettier than any song and more peaceful than any sound. As soon as she began to sing, the pain was gone. There was no more Underground or cell. Only herself floating peacefully on a boat in the ocean under a sky full of stars.
For a minute, Victoria thought that she might have been dead. It was only when she could still hear the queen's singing that she realized it was all an illusion. An illusion that once brought sailors to a watery grave was now what gave Victoria a little bit of peace through all of the pain.
Victoria recognized the illusion from many childhood memories. She was on the Inlustrus Ocean: a sea made of starlight. Its waters stretch from the eastern coasts of Sangera and Piatra and as far as the western coasts of Parvolus, Frumos, and Adraxia. When Victoria was younger, she and her family would take trips to see it. Flora and fauna of bio luminescence would stretch as far as the eye could see. It was as if she could hold the very stars within her own hands.
"This is who we are," her father would tell she, Antonius, and Albert. "We are starlight." He always used to look out at those shimmering waters with peace. "There will be people who will try to tell you different. They'll try to convince that you're not worthy of this world. When that happens, I want you to remember this moment and what I have said to you. Remember that we are not monsters. We are starlight. Creatures crafted from the darkness between the stars."
But the torment continued. And, with each slice of Nicolae's knives, Victoria didn't feel like starlight. She felt like nothing.
She had begun marking the time by gouging scratches into the floor with a rock. The scratches signified each time Nicolae came in to take another piece of her soul away. She tallied them up. Twenty-three. Twenty-three times, Nicolae had come in here with his knives and his poison and scratched at her as if she were his masterpiece. When he would be done, she did not know, but she had become ready for it all to be over. Eager, even.
She and Ceto had nothing better to do than sleep and talk to each other while they waited for whatever horrors it was that Nicolae was preparing for them. Through their conversations, the two learned that there was more to them than what they had originally thought. One evening, Victoria asked her the question that she had been wondering for a while.
"How come you're not married, Ceto?"
The sound of Ceto swaying her tail in the water momentarily paused. "I was, once."
Victoria looked up at her "Really?"
Ceto nodded. "The Ceto's are a line of powerful women, but they did not rule over Mancator. It was the Sirena family that ruled, and I just happened to marry into it."
"Arranged?"
"Of course. What other kinds of marriages actually happen these days?" She sighed. "But as the years went by, I fell deeply in love with Kamalani, and he with me." She heard the queen sniff and knew that she had begun to cry. "And then he died. He was killed in his youth like so many monarchs are and I was left alone with a court who only saw me as their late king's consort. It took a while to get them all to trust me, and even still there are some who don't. That's why I keep his name. For that reason and because I still love him so much."
Victoria was surprised. For some reason, she always assumed that Ceto hadn't married because she was a heartless fiend, not a heartbroken widow. "So, you and Kai… you two never…"
"I know the Nokken leader cares for me. I just don't know if I could ever bring myself to love someone else the way I loved my husband. It would feel like a dishonor." She shook his head. "I can't ever replace him."
"I don't think your husband would want you to be unhappy, but I suppose that's up to you." Victoria looked over at the siren who did indeed have tears running down her cheeks. "I'm very sorry for your loss."
Ceto sniffed and replied, "And I'm sorry for yours. I don't think I ever realized how bad relations were between Frumos and Sangera since they killed your brother. Even still, Mancator didn't do anything about it. I should have cut ties with Cenric after he allowed such a tragic thing to happen."
"Thank you. I think we're both learning more about the worlds over which we rule down here than we would have been able to on the surface."
Ceto nodded and gave her a sympathetic smile.
Ω
Time went on and Victoria soon lost track of whether it was daytime or night. She supposed it didn't really matter anyways, since she seemed doomed to die down there. She was slowly losing faith that there would ever come a time when she would see the night sky again.
Then, one tally, there it was. As if it had been hiding away, waiting for this moment.
Hope.
Victoria heard the squeaking of the door that led to their cells and braced herself for another round of torment. However, it was not Nicolae's demonic horns and viscous smile that she was met with, but rather the solemn face of a disheveled looking witch. She wore all black and was adorned with silver jewelry shaped like the moon and the stars. A celestial witch.
"Nicolae sends his apologies that he could not be here for your meeting," she said. Those icy blue eyes didn't leave her for a second. "But he gives you a gift."
She held out a gold chalice with a dark red liquid inside. Victoria weakly held out her hands to receive the cup of blood, but the witch just threw it at her.
Victoria threw up in revulsion.
The blood inside of the cup was not mortal, but vampire, and she was covered in it. It seeped into her clothes and hair, and she threw up again as the scent wafted through the room. Victoria heard Ceto let out a whimper as she also realized what it was.
"Drink up," the witch smirked at her. It had been so long since Victoria had fed that she hadn't been able to differentiate the vampire blood from that of an animal.
Suddenly the cup caught Victoria's attention as she recognized the marking on the side. It was a noble family crest. It was an "S" in a shield with a crown atop it. On either side of the "S" there were three tulips. It was the Speranta family crest.
"What is this?" Victoria cried with all of the strength she could muster.
The witch just laughed as she left keeping her cold eyes on Victoria the entire time. That is until she bumped into the door of her cell, which had all kinds of sharp and jagged points. On one of these sharp points she cut herself rather deeply.
Victoria's head suddenly snapped up with newfound strength as the smell of her mortal witch blood became her every thought. She was too hungry to have any control over herself. It was like before, back at the Viata Castle library. She had to have it. Faster than the witch could react, Victoria had forced herself to as far as her chains would allow and
snatched her with black claws. Victoria grabbed her neck with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. Before she even had a chance to scream, her fangs were in the witch's neck and Victoria drank more greedily than she ever had before. Ceto looked on with horror as she drank and drank, but she didn't care. She drained that witch for everything she had, down to the very last drop.
Draining that witch of her blood was like quenching a thirst Victoria had felt her whole life. When she finally released her, Victoria felt that ravenous hunger finally subsiding. Her strength had come back ten-fold. It was hardly even a challenge when she ripped herself free from those chains of silver. It was nothing at all as she tore off Ceto's cell door and ripped through her own shackles.
"Why are you saving me?" she asked as Victoria helped her out of that tank and she took on the form of a mortal. She was careful not to break the queen's too dry skin.
"Do you not think you are worth being saved?"
She shook her head. "I just didn't think you would save anyone but yourself.
The two were about halfway through the door, when Victoria felt her stomach flip. She shuddered as a wave of pain, nausea, and fatigue washed through her.
"Are you alright?" Ceto asked. Victoria looked at her worried eyes and nodded. A lie.
"I'm okay. We need to keep going."
Through their aches and pains, they quietly crept through the hallways. Every once in a while, Ceto would glance at Victoria with wide, careful eyes, as if she would turn on her.
"Are you sure you want to save me?" She asked her. "You've never liked me."
"True," Victoria replied. "But I've also never known you."
"Please, don't eat me."
Victoria looked over at her. "I'm not going to eat you. But, if we're going to make it out of here, we'll both have to kill more people."
She took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay."
Suddenly, another person was in front of them, eyes wide in surprise at the sight of Victoria drenched in his friend's blood. His shock gave Victoria enough time to grab him and rip his throat open with her claws. She couldn't help it. The blood of witches and wizards was too intoxicating to pass up. Victoria hunched over the body on the floor and began to drink. A cough behind her interrupted her feeding.
The Hunger of Wolves Page 11
