This is only one kind of a scenario for being the lifemate of a vampire and there are probably plot holes but oh well… Nonetheless, I have no idea where these violent thoughts came from. I honestly blame reading too much murder mysteries. Enjoy, and try not to flame yeah?
"Carpathian Language." (Translation)
Warnings: Extreme violence, suicidal thoughts
Disclaimer: The Dark/Carpathian Series belongs to Christine Feehan…
Words: 2,773
…Dark Sin…
"Age teaches us that monsters don't live under our beds.
Experience teaches us that monsters live in our souls…"
- Adapted by Me
Sinning is a form of art, and Jack was a master practitioner.
The seven bodies, men and women, hung above the wide expense of the warehouse, sluggish red seeping into the dull, cracked grey floors, a web of intricate veins pooling and twisting. The metallic scent of blood was heavy in the air, a forbidden temptation floating out into the night sky. Paris was alive outside, it with brilliant lights and gushing with life. She remembered when it was nothing, remembered when it was falling into ruin, when the streets were filled with depravity and rotting flesh.
She sat backwards on a chair, leaning forward onto the rusted back of it, pulling a cigarette to her mouth and dragging in a long, deep gust of poison. She held it, and then released it from between red painted lips, the greyish cloud swept away as wind teasingly blew in through the broken windows.
She had been waiting for an hour now, but she was patient, they would come, they always did, she was just always gone. Not this time though.
She was tired.
Two thousand years of this life was enough to drag one down into the welcoming arms of darkness but despite everything she had ever done, Jack did not have the strength to take her own life. She burned with such fever during her years, now she lay in the ashes of sins long forgotten.
Carpathian. That was what she had been born, a beautiful baby girl with huge, innocent azure eyes and wild, bouncing black curls. A child of an ancient race of warriors, of near immortals, children of Mother Earth, and gifted with powers that no ordinary being could perceive.
Light. That was what she had once been. Purity, virtue, the utopia of good. Never had she transgressed, never had she disobeyed, never had she questioned. Her parents said and it was done. Her Prince asked and it was answered. Her friends wished and it was given.
Lifemate. That was what she should have been. Carpathian males lost their ability to see colour or feel emotion after two hundred years of life, falling deeper and deeper into abyss with very kill they made, ever dispatch of evil. She should have been the other half of a male, his light, his soul, his salvation.
Killer. What she is.
Jack was conceived of war, and she would have it no other way. Her blood sang for combat, her bones ached for battle, her mind turned towards death and her heart beat for the power. If she had been born male, there was no doubt in her mind that she would have given up her soul, become the thing her people hunted, the undead, vampire.
She probably would have liked it to. Heck, she was almost like them. It was not as if she could become any more twisted than she was. Perhaps she should have attempted draining one of these sods alive, drinking every drop in them, such as it was when a Carpathian turned vampire. A female Carpathian had never done it, and she wondered what the consequences would be. She had stopped living when she had started dealing in death, her soul mattered little now.
It wasn't as if these people hadn't deserved what came their way. They were the evil her people turned a blind eye to.
It was appropriate, she, the worst of her kind, would be the one to deal justice. Jack tapped off the ashes on the tip of her cigarette, raising a hand to run it through her hair, no longer startled when her fingers did not continue sliding through the silken strands for as long as it used to. Jack used to wear her dark black-blue hair as her people did, long to her hips, usually in a braid. But a month ago she had taken a blunt scissor to it, brutally chopping it off so it sat in jagged ends around her shoulders. And then she had bleached it, a light blonde, and then dyed the very tips blood red.
Jack lifted her head, deep blue eyes scanning her surroundings even as she stretched her mind out further, brushing against the walls of the warehouse before silently slipping further.
Two Carpathian hunters stood outside of the rolling metal door of the warehouse, directly opposite her and on the other side of the seven corpses.
She waited.
The metal door rolled up, rusted steel squeaking in protest. Her eyes, brilliant in the night, took in the two hunters almost reverently. It had been long since she had seen her kind. They were twins, and old, so very old. They were tall and broad shouldered, built with thick ropes of muscle beneath silken black shirts and the dark hair of their kind worn long, pulled back at the nape of their necks with leather chords. Vessels of raw violence deceptively wrapped in the illusion of handsome perfection. Their eyes were as hers, midnight blue, the older markings of a Carpathian. They watched her and she watched back.
"You're late." She told them, her voice husky from disuse. No matter her race, Jack had not spoken in a long time, had not fed either as the telltale red sheen to her eyes said. It would not matter either way after tonight. "I sent out the invitation an hour ago."
The pair looked at the seven bodies, all swaying slightly in the night breeze, hung from thick roped nooses as if sentenced to death by kings of old, their toes making the barest of ripples in the pools of blood beneath them.
"Forgive us." The one on the left murmured, inclining his head towards her. His voice was like that of all Carpathians, an invitation, and allurement, a spellcaster's greatest weapon, weaving a spell over the listener. She almost willingly gave control over to it, but her fire honed instincts roared in protest and easily brushed away the enthrallment. "You should have just called."
"Where's the fun in that?" She asked, tossing her cigarette to the side and rising from the rusted metal chair. She was tall and curvy, a man's fantasy, each secret covered in leather, a tight black pants that rode low on her hips and a long sleeved red vest done up with three silver buckles in front, short enough to expose her midriff. Her feet were covered in black boots, leather too, five inch pencil heels and zipped up to beneath her knees. A black choker set around her neck, dangling a gleaming ruby the size of a dove's egg in the hollow of her collarbone.
"Why?" Brother two asked, jerking his head to the bodies.
Jack moved forward, her steps a whisper of air as she came to the first corpse. She reached out a hand, nails painted black, and pushed it. It swayed, the beams above creaking. The cause of death had not been visible but when she had touched him, his flesh had bended unnaturally, his body wobbly, his insides turned to goo with only his skeleton left to keep his shape, skin sagging on bone. "Meet Pride. He was a lawyer, he wore he's pristine suits and shiny shoes every morning, kissed his wife goodbye and went to work. At night he would come to the slums and get drunk in a bar, boasting about all he has done. One night he boasted about the beauty of his wife and twelve year old daughter, and when a group of men did not believe him his Pride demanded he prove them. He led them home. They raped his wife, took turns with her all while she cried and screamed for him while he sat giggling and drinking, cheering them on. They killed her, and then the proceeded to drag his daughter from her room by her hair. They used her for a month and every day after work he'd visit and use her too, proud of his daughter. She died, internal bleeding."
The Carpathian hunters were very still, stepping into the room, a heavy aura sweeping into the room of barely contained rage. Outside an ominous rumble sounded, the previously clear skies covered in heavy thunderclouds. She took in the look of fury on their faces with a half-smile before moving onto the second. She absently twisted her hand and a knife fell into it, as long as from her wrist to the tip of her little finger, and a hilt made of black obsidian. She stabbed it into the man's thigh, tearing easily through the shredded cargo material.
"This was a soldier, he served his country well, too well. He wanted war, he liked war." She paused, tilting her head in a bird-like gesture and stabbed the man's cold flesh again. The hunters winced but neither interrupted. "Much like me I suppose." Blue eyes went higher, taking in the expression of absolute terror forever frozen on the handsome features, floppy brown hair laced with dried blood falling forward. Stab wounds covered every inch of him, he looked like a demented sponge, oozing blackened crimson. "He started an underground fight club, urging people to fight, fights that ended only when one opponent was killed. But it was never enough, and then he got the idea to use children. So he kidnapped children from parks, off the streets, from their very homes, and he stripped them naked, covered them in black paint, put knives in their hands and threw them in a ring. He told them to kill each other, or he'd kill their parents and siblings and then them. People would place bets, buy children, just like fighting cocks in a pit. He was Wrath and I was his dispatcher."
Jack banished the knife, stepping around the swinging corpse to another. This one was of a woman, heavy and thick, layers of fat protruding disgustingly from her once pastel blue blouse. "This is Sloth. Amanda Everest never cleaned up after herself, her apartment was filthy, breeding sickness and death. There were rats in her apartment and Amanda did not like rats. She heard that cats are good pets because they keep away rats and ate any that were near, so she went to the local pet store and bought twenty of them. They were beautiful kittens you must understand." She met the Carpathian's gaze, seeing their comprehension as they took in the numerous scratches over the woman's body, some deep enough to drag forth bubbling blood, some just shallow enough to burn. "She locked them in her apartment without food, thinking the rats would be their food, and filthy water in a bowl. She went for holiday. When she came back, the kittens were ripped to pieces, some died from starvation, some dehydration, some were killed by the giant rodents in the apartment. And rats had fed on their bodies." Her eyes went low and the pool of blood rippled and then a squeak sounded, a rat the size of a house cat appearing, brown fur torn in places, blood covering it, eyes sickly and teeth yellow. It lunged and bit the woman's toe off before sinking back into the blood as if it had never been.
She moved to the next corpse, her hands hanging at her sides and looking at the man wrapped in thick, heavy chains, only his head left untouched. Her head turned and eyes fell on brother two. "Care to take a guess?"
He exhaled the word. "Greed."
Jack nodded. "Diamonds, gold, money, women, cars, drugs, power. He wanted more and more and more. He took what he wanted, he did not ask, violence was his answer. He hoarded what he had, become cunning, lied and tricked." She said little about the man wrapped in pure golden chains that had been heated and burned into his very flesh.
"Gluttony." Brother one said before she could, his face blank, looking at her and not at the obese man whose dead weight caused the beam above to bow slightly. "He ate and ate and ate. He took from the poor and cared not for their lives."
She had more to say but she did not bother, he had summed it up, she went to the next carcass, waiting but neither spoke. "Lust is usually considered only sexual desire, I suppose that is why I hunted down this particular man, but lust is much like greed, wanting and wanting and always wanting." The man's features were disfigured beyond recognition, whatever physical attractiveness he may have had destroyed completely and utterly. "He lusted after men and women alike. He would slip drugs into their drinks, he would hit them unconscious, he would bind them, and he would take them with extreme prejudice. And then he would beat them an inch of their life and not kill them, not because he did not have the heart, but because it pleased him, aroused him even, to know they would remember him, feel him and live in constant fear of him and hatred of themselves for something they could not control."
Jack moved around the last body. The woman was thin, a too long neck and point features. She was dressed like a suburban house wife. She sighed. "I suppose of all the sins, this is the one I am most guilty of." She stood in silence for a moment, her back to the brothers before bowing her head. "She desired her neighbor's food, she wished for her sister's talents, she wanted her cousin's beauty, she lusted for her husband's friend, she craved her friend's son more than her own, she sought riches not hers." A smooth hand rose, delicate fingers stroking the pale flesh of the woman's cold cheek. "I think this world is cruel to us, but we are foolish enough to deceive ourselves into believing it isn't. We aren't expecting the pain it throws at us and that makes it hurt all the more." There was a hole in the woman's chest, her heart laying beneath her feet, almost as if when Jack had taken this woman's life it had been as if she was disposing of a vampire.
Of herself.
"Envy." Lucian and Gabriel Daratrazanoff said together. The Carpathian woman, for she was Carpathian and there was no way she was not, spun to look at them, Envy behind her. "Juta susu sisar." (Come home sister) Gabriel offered softly, watching her with kind eyes Jack knew she did not deserve. The language of their people was beautiful, a musical murmur of love and acceptance that she did not acknowledge for her heart bled for it.
"I came here to find justice, ekä, I have no home." (brother) She told him simply. "I am Jack, but once I was Adrestia Solvana, the daughter of Marcus and Carina Solvana, named after the Greek Goddess of Balance, the handmaiden of Nemesis, bringer of Revolt. I have failed my lifemate. Remove me from this world."
Lucian stirred, his mind blocking away his lifemate utterly and completely, feeling his twin do the same. "Your lifemate?"
Her chin went up, eyes flashing. "His name was Ruslan Malinov, the eldest of the Malinov brothers, and he is undead. Had I been capable, I would have followed him into the darkness and stood proudly by his side."
"Yet it is not innocents that hang behind you." Gabriel pointed out, his shock and horror well hidden. Ruslan Malinov was one of the greatest enemies of the Carpathian people. He had been destroyed, a month ago, by his childhood friend Zacarias De La Cruz, a victory to their people, but she was already doomed.
"We are defined by or defeats more so than by our victories." Jack smiled and it was emotionless and sharp. "I curse the day Ruslan Malinov was born, and I curse the universe that made me his other half. Relieve me of this world Daratrazaoff, grant me the peace I could not have. Kill me."
The Dark Twins stepped out of the burning warehouse, both of them reaching across space to two ancients. One was the Prince of the people, Mikhail Dubrinsky, and the other was Zacarias De La Cruz. They shared the happenings of the evening and then broke the connection, entombing the knowledge deep in their souls where their lifemates did not go, granting them their wish not to touch such darkness. The four would carry the end of Adrestia Solvana into their dawn, and they would do it with honor.