6. Raphael
SIX
RAPHAEL
A thick red haze clouds my vision and blocks out the world. There’s nothing now except for truly being alone.
Alena will grow old and die, and I won’t be able to save her.
She’s been tainted forever.
They’ve done it.
The Order.
I know it was them. I know because of what they did to Isaac.
A foul, disgusting smell oozed from her wound, and I still smell it in my nose.
It’s keeping our bond from fully forming. I can feel it in the very marrow of my soul. It’s a festering rot that tries to break our connection.
Tries to break fate .
And it will probably succeed…
I ran from her, but I had to.
If I had stayed, it would have been my ruin.
She doesn’t deserve my pain added on top of hers.
She doesn’t deserve the rage.
Or the insurmountable sorrow.
The fucking Order. Full of their god’s love and his hatred of vampires.
They’ve committed countless atrocities over the last two millennia. Their barbaric nature far surpassing ours.
What they’ve done to Alena is unthinkable. Poisoning her to spite love.
Such vile cruelty goes above and beyond anything we’ve seen before.
I should have realized the smell was like Isaac’s. The human hunter who tried to save Chloe.
He fed on blood, too.
Chloe’s blood.
It was supposed to give him protection from us.
We beat him, we maimed him, and yet he healed.
They used Chloe’s blood as a weapon.
And the same has been done to Alena. They’ve used someone’s blood to weaponize her against me.
My body is in motion.
I know not what it does as I silently wage war across my own mind. My beast stripped me of the power I had over him the moment I smelled the vile odor seeping from her wound.
I try pushing through the red veil of rage, but only fragments of bloody scenes pierce my brain.
I’ve hurt humans. I’ve mangled them.
And I’ve taken their lives.
But it’s not enough to sate my wrath.
I want to destroy the whole fucking world.
Words or emotions, I can’t tell which, are pushed at me sporadically.
Telling me to calm. To cage the raging monster.
But there’s nothing I can do to stop him.
The memory of Alena’s face flashes over and over again. The look of disgust and hurt. She loathes my existence…
And why wouldn’t she?
But I miss and crave her even now.
Crave to touch her. To feel her silken skin against mine.
I’ve never seen true beauty like hers before. Flawless in both its perfections and imperfections.
That little scar on her lip… the way it curved just a fraction… Even now I can remember the way it transfixed me.
But I’ve hurt her.
I hurt her with my words and disgusted her.
Disgusted her with my cowardice.
What if I can’t get her to see me as her soul’s other half? Will she disappear from my life?
I’ve seen the insanity that happens when a soulmarked is torn from one of my kind.
Ambrose.
He knows the pain of loss. The pain of having everything pulled from his grasp.
Will I become like him?
Just a shadow of my former being? Eventually put down because I can no longer control the beast that threatens to never release me from his clutches?
I want to blame my beast for all of this.
But I’m the one that’s truly to blame for this chaos.
If I controlled myself… If I kept the cage locked on my emotions…
But the pain and fear of losing her before I could truly call her mine was too much to bear.
Will I be doomed to fucking repeat the memory of her being in my arms for eternity?
Only to push her away…
Am I already falling into the endless void of insanity?
Another push on my consciousness tries to break through the darkness swirling through my very being. Another push of someone trying to end this vicious cycle of hell I’m trapped in.
Just as a hot splash of blood fills my mouth, Asher finally breaks through my madness.
The red fades to the sides of my vision.
A human man’s head is in my hands, and I want to smash the skull open on the pavement like a pumpkin.
“She won’t be fucking tainted forever, you stupid fucking twat! She’s not fucking dead!” Asher’s voice screams next to my ear.
My beast’s control weakens as that realization punches us both in the gut.
Asher’s right.
The human body, while fragile, can eventually filter out impurities in the blood. Fuck, we could give her dialysis from other humans, if we must.
“Silence your demon, Raph,” Asher urges. “Your future with Alena is not far off. You just need to quit being such an asshole.”
My brain is a fucking mess.
And I feel like a fucking hormonal teen when I think about that future ahead of me.
Rage, lust, and love all surge through my psyche.
But Alena’s safety is far more important than me raging around a city like an asshole who doesn’t get what he wants immediately.
Looking up at the overcast sky, I frown. “How long have I been out?”
“Twenty minutes or so,” Asher says, and motions to the building that’s directly in front of us.
“Ah,” I say, and the hatred in my soul intensifies.
There, standing before me in all its disgusting fucking glory, is a church of the Order.
Centering my mind, I stare at the building.
For what they’ve done, they deserve a reminder of who they’re fucking with.
Calming the fury that threatens to overwhelm me again, I look to Asher and focus on our own connection.
The blood link between Sire and Childe.
It’s still there, strong as ever.
The soul bond with Alena, though, is thin and fragile. And the faint echoes of pain and anguish I feel coming through it are all my fault.
If only I could strengthen the bond with my love alone.
I love her. I’ve always loved her.
Yet the word love seems pale and unworthy of what I truly feel. What I feel is so much more. Something my brain can’t find a word for…
Trying to push the emotion across our bond, I hit the block again. Something is keeping me separated from her.
And someone must pay for this cruelty.
Why not the fuckers who did it?
“They need to fear us again,” I say to Asher, and nod toward the church. “I want to see the dread and realization that they’re going to die on their faces.”
Asher frowns in thought. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done something like that.”
“It’s time to remind them who we are,” I growl viciously. “No better time than during the day when they think us vulnerable.”
Examining the massive iron doors at the entrance of the church, I’m reminded of the castles that existed during my youth.
“How long has it been since you stormed a castle?” I ask.
Turning to face me, Asher gives me a toothy grin. “Centuries.”
Racing as fast as my feet will carry me across the asphalt, I lower my shoulder and slam into the left door of the church.
Asher is not far behind, slamming through the right side.
The iron doors we burst through aren’t as weak as I originally thought. No, they’re quite dense and meaty.
It makes little difference, though, as I watch mine fly into the room and shatter a couple rows of wooden pews.
The door Asher hit flies even farther into the room and hits a praying parishioner.
“Fucking showoff,” I grunt at him.
All the commotion we just created is bound to get the attention of everyone inside the building.
I smell something so fucking familiar in the air, though.
I smell Mother here.
Or at least something very similar to her.
Asher freezes. He must smell her, too.
“It’s Chloe…” I say.
“No, she’s not here.” Asher’s nostrils flair as he takes a deep breath. “It’s not new blood.”
“What, in the good Lord above, are you doing?” screeches some old cunt of a nun.
“It’s time to sup, you fucking hag,” I smirk at her. “But I doubt you’ll be filling enough.”
All the pain, anguish, and misery of discovering my soulmarked is tainted plays like a symphony of wretchedness in my brain.
Red begins to cloud my vision.
The berserker wants to be free again. He wants to blindly destroy everything in his path.
But I can’t allow it.
Not this time.
I want to be present. I want to see all the pain and misery I’m about to cause fill their eyes.
Racing forward, I focus on my purpose. Punishing them for what they did to my beloved.
The nun tries to push her cross against my cheek as I grab her.
Laughing at her, because that stupid shit doesn’t work on us, I bend her neck to the side and rip my fangs into her jugular.
Thin, coppery blood floods into my mouth. She’s on blood thinners, from the taste of it. Most likely for her bad heart.
This one will only be a snack.
Asher laughs loudly. “Now that you’ve found your Marked, you won’t be ghouling one of these bitches into a stripper, right?”
I shake my head at Asher while I drink. Wishing I could shake off that particular memory.
Asher darts past me while saying, “Eat. I need to figure out what’s going on here.”
It’s been too long since we’ve been at war with the Order. It’s time to remind them just what they should be afraid of.
The nun quickly runs out of fight as I gulp down her blood. And when I hear her old heart giving up its final beats, I pull away.
She won’t get to escape life that easily.
Biting my wrist, I shove it against her mouth and let my blood flow into her slack mouth.
She won’t die, not right away.
She won’t become a vampire, either.
She’ll be a ghoul.
A joke from the gods, I think. We can only turn women who are soulmarked into vampires.
Any other woman simply becomes a lizard-brained zombie.
If she was male, I could quite easily turn her into a vampire.
Yet another doomed to suffer the fate we all share. The waiting to find the other part of his soul.
But I won’t doom another to suffer the way I have for all these years.
Throwing her body away from me, I hear a brittle bone crunch as she lands somewhere off to my side.
“Time to feast!” I shout.
Moving from room to room, I search out each heartbeat.
Draining as I go.
Any man I come across, I give them the gift of death.
The women are another story.
I ghoul them. I destroy the very body that should bring life into this world.
They hurt ours, so I’ll destroy their futures in return.
“Fuck!” I bellow at the ceiling of the church.
My cock throbs now.
Hard and filled with blood.
Charging through the rooms gives me an outlet to vent all my anger…
But it also causes my denied lust to return in full fucking force.
I ache for Alena. Ache to feel her lush body against me again. I don’t give a fuck how bad her blood smells. I need her legs wrapped around my hips.
I need my weight crashing into her, hard and deep.
“Raphael!” Asher shouts.
He’s somewhere below me, but not far.
Weaving my way through the halls, I find a staircase leading to a basement.
I follow the trail of bodies. Priests, nuns, and a hunter.
A hunter was here?
What the fuck?
The smell of Mother grows stronger, and I get the feeling that whatever is down here is not supposed to be seen by our eyes.
Asher stands just outside a room with its door ajar. A priest lies dead at his feet.
The priest wasn’t drained. His neck was twisted all the way around.
“What the fuck is going on, Ash?” I ask warily.
Something about that room makes the blood in my veins ice over.
“I don’t know,” Ashers says in frustration.
“Is that an altar?” I ask and start to walk into the room.
Latching onto my shoulder, Asher points to the giant circle painted on the floor.
Freezing mid-step, I don’t let my foot touch the room’s floor. Pulling my leg back across the threshold, I stare at what I’m seeing in disbelief.
That circle…
“No,” I mutter to myself. “That’s not possible.”
“You know what that looks like,” Asher spits out in disgust.
A witch’s work.
I can’t peel my eyes away from the circle. “Ash, that should not be here.”
Witches were exterminated during the Witch Wars.
For the good of all.
They’re the very embodiment of evil. The worst horror one could imagine.
Fuck, they’re so corrupted and twisted, they make the modern concept of Satan look like a fucking choir boy.
Asher pulls a cellphone from his pocket and starts taking multiple pics of the room.
“Get as many as you can of that altar.” I nod my head towards the table pushed against the wall. “That’s not something I’ve ever seen before.”
Asher takes a few more pictures then says, “We need to move.”
I nod. “It wasn’t enough time, but you’re right.”
There’s so much blood in my stomach, I’m fucking bloated.
Asher tucks his phone back into his pocket and we both start up the stairs.
“How many humans did you get?” I ask out of curiosity.
“Seven dead or ghouled.” Asher grins at me. “And I left them a nice gift.”
Moving quickly through the church, we stop short of the bright sunlight streaming through the open doorway.
“Shit,” I say. “We overran the clock.”
Asher winces. “Chloe’s pissed.”
“How do you know?”
He points to his chest. “You’ll feel it, too, when you become one.”
My heart sinks to the floor suddenly and all the blood in my stomach sours.
There’s a terror… A deep-seated terror that overwhelms my entire being for the briefest of moments.
Completely consuming me before exploding into a fiery blast of anger.
Anger that I’ve been so fucking stupid.
If I had paid any attention to my own soul bond, I would have realized sooner that my soulmarked is currently panicked and scared out of her mind.
Looking at Asher, I shout, “We need to go now! Something is wrong with Alena!”
Fuck the sun.
Grabbing my arm, Asher ushers me toward the parking lot in search of a car to steal.