Not much to say except, here's the next chapter.
Enjoy
Awake & Dead
Chap 4: Sunrise
Stavios felt the marionette's spell slacken then die away completely. He dropped heavily to the ground and winced loudly as his shoulder was crushed under the weight of his body. Blood pooled out of his wounds and seeped into the dirt, creating a sweet smelling mud beneath him.
The sight of his blood sinking into the ground was painful, but the scent of it was pure agony. His thirst was beyond measure.
The eternity he had passed while confined in a stone coffin, unable to drink had made him strong. Just how powerful he did not know, but it was long enough a time for him to be a match or more to the son of Sparda-or so he hoped.
But while his strength had grown, his new power did not come without a price and although he had seemed and felt normal when he had first awoken, he was now beginning to succumb to the weariness and pain brought by the absence of blood.
Every ounce of the crimson liquid that left his body intensified his thirst and caused his body to become all the more drawn and skeletal.
He silently wondered how the little Dary girl would react to his present appearance and almost laughed at the thought of her shrieking and running away…Though at this time he might not have given her that option.
All the more he thought on it, the more the clown's mention of his stupidity in not claiming the life of the child plagued him. He had thought it mercy. His personal rule of not taking the life of an innocent child-no matter how talkative and irksome they might be-was something Stavios had always tried not to break-no matter his hunger.
He had managed in the past. Yet in the past he had never been this desperate for any sustenance. If Dary were to come back right now, Stavios knew that the scent of her sweet, pure blood would consume him and he would not think twice before taking her life.
He prayed she would listen to his warnings and stay away. He tried to push her out of his mind and forget how close he had been to drinking from her before. He tried to suppress the part of him that wanted her to return to him-the part that would use his last remaining strength to summon her back. He tried to convince himself that he didn't want the little girl, but his raging thirst and weakening state won the inner debate.
He wanted her. And he needed her soon.
The room was just ahead, the door closed, the space behind it quiet. It could have been that Trish was sleeping peacefully behind the door. Nothing about the closed room seemed menacing and any other day, Dante would not have thought twice about opening it.
But this wasn't any other day and Dante knew better than to trust his hope and imagination. He wasn't going to fool himself into thinking that what he'd seen hadn't been real-He couldn't now. The smell of blood was too strong and fresh-It was too real to be just in his head.
As he slowly glided his feet towards the door, he felt himself stumbling on objects that did not even clutter the empty carpet. He moved with as much grace as a drunk man and the closer he got, the more his head swooned as the scent from the bedroom intensified.
When he had finally made it halfway, he suddenly fell; his legs giving out on him. He didn't make a move to stand and he began to wonder why he was even heading for the door when he was sure, as he told himself, that Trish was dead inside. Why did he have to see it with his own eyes-in reality-if he was so certain?
Gradually he bent over and crawled the remaining distance to the door. He didn't look at the room ahead the whole time and when he finally reached the edge, he felt one hand squish into the edge of soggy carpet below the door.
His face blanched and he stood in a flash, out of shock. He rubbed his fingers together before his eyes, shuddering as the thickening red liquid smoothed along his long digits. He gasped and his body began shuddering uncontrollably. His legs went weak once again and they sagged as he grabbed the door handle. He forced himself to hang onto the smooth knob and he listened, waited with closed eyes and he suddenly heard a soft groan. His eyes shot open.
"TRISH!!"
Dante turned the handle and burst through the door, the familiar sensation of his feet sinking into the blood soaked carpet; blood all over the walls; dead body on the bed, long blond hair tangled and crusted with the crimson liquid; sheets torn; objects smashed. It was the vision come to life. Trish was very much dead and the moan Dante had heard had just been in his imagination.
The devil hunter choked and slumped in the doorway, feeling nauseated from the squish of the carpet and the cooling blood soaking into his pants. His head fell against the doorframe and he stared blindly at the scene before him, his arms dangling at his sides. He couldn't look at the bed. He couldn't see Trish lying there-lifeless. He wanted to get out of there as fast as he could but his body wasn't listening to his commands.
He closed his eyes tight and opened them slowly, hoping that what he'd seen would disappear and everything would be back to normal. But even before he opened them, he knew it was a pointless action. The lingering smell of blood gave it away and suddenly Dante's thoughts raged on the vampire in the cemetery. The dark-haired man had known something. He hadn't told him much, but Dante could tell now that he'd been hiding something and he planned on finding out just what exactly it was.
Getting to his feet was easy now that he had a purpose to move-other than to just get away from the carnage of the room. He stood tall in the doorway and surveyed the room with a focused gaze. He wanted to know what demon had destroyed the room and slashed at Trish's body mercilessly.
By the look of things, it could have been any mindless minion to the darkness, but Dante was pretty certain that it could only be one type-The Marionettes. He knew because everything that had happened that night was connected somehow. It all went back to the clown at the circus, the one whose face was a grinning skull and whose attire looked like it had been taken from a decaying corpse.
Jester. Yes. It all had something to do with that mad entertainer whose true form only Dante seemed able to see. But why? Why was it that Dante could see right through the mask? Not just because he was a devil hunter or even half demon himself. There was something so familiar and terrifying about Jester that Dante was certain that the circus was not the first time and place he'd ever seen him. Jester was something from long ago, but just when, Dante didn't know. All he knew was that Jester had made him see the Marionettes and the Fetishes when he stood in the arena and he had nearly caused him to kill a few harmless clowns.
The vision had been so real. So much so that it wasn't new to him. It was more like a forgotten memory being brought back to light. He'd seen it all before; the vacant eyes of the demon puppets; their cold laughter; the heat of the Fetishes' flaming breath. It was all old news that seems to trace back further than Mallet Island when he had encountered all those demons.
Dante growled and shook his head. He couldn't reason anymore. He needed to get out of DMC and go someplace to clear his mind. Hopefully then he'd be able to think straight. It wasn't like he could act now anyway, at least not in terms of searching for the vampire. Being day, it was pointless to seek a demon that wouldn't be awake for another eight hours or so.
Leaving the room for a moment, Dante went to an upstairs closet and took out a clean sheet and a towel and brought it back to the room. He walked uncaringly through the blood now to the bed and immediately wiped Trish's face clean, seeing that it hadn't been damaged and if he ignored her body and the rest of the room, it was as if she was just sleeping peacefully.
"I'll get them back, Trish," he said quietly so he wouldn't hear his voice break with sadness. "I'll fix this. Somehow I'll find a way."
He sighed loudly and stepped back, flinging out the clean sheet so that it floated down slowly over Trish, covering her completely. He didn't want to leave her exposed while he was gone.
Dante turned away and never looked back or around him while he left the room , shutting the door quietly behind him. He made his way downstairs and pulled Alastor off the wall. He knew he wouldn't be back to DMC for a while and he wanted his sword with him so he could go after Stavios as soon as the sun set.
The dark-haired vampire remained motionless, slowly hissing in air and lacking the energy or the will to move, regardless of the menace of the rising sun. He felt it better to shrivel and burn to brittle ash, than face what was to come. At least he told himself as much, though not very convincingly.
He looked up at the sky and immediately felt the scorching brightness of the coming morning. He closed his eyes at once and lifted himself slowly to his hands and knees, his limbs quivering with the action. He put no weight on his right shoulder and already that arm was burning painfully from the sunlight.
Stavios crawled a few feet, sensing, rather than seeing a mausoleum dead ahead where he could take shelter before his body succumbed to the spell of sleep. His pace slackened with every movement and at the steps of the stone crypt, his head dropped to the ground and his body followed suit. He couldn't go on and what was the point anyway? By the time night fell, Jester would already have gotten to the devil hunter and everything Stavios had aimed to stop by his earlier confrontation with Dante would have begun by then.
Lost in his defeat, the dark-haired man stopped listening to the sounds of the outside world. He retreated into his mind and did not hear the hurried steps of a child making their way towards him. He only felt the slight vibration in the ground, but that, he ignored.
He became angry at the thought of his loss. He was enraged by the idea that he'd been damned and would fail in stopping the rise of the Dark One all because of a shiny trinket on a chain. He couldn't let his last moments be like this. He couldn't go out now, having spent an eternity sleeping and getting stronger without putting up a fight. He simply couldn't.
"STAAAVEY."
The annoying sing-song of Dary's voice was enough to snap him back to reality and Stavios opened his eyes, see the young girl bent beside him, her head tilted to the side, observing him.
"Watcha doing?" she asked sweetly.
"Dying," Stavios said frankly, "And did I not tell you to stay away?"
"Yup," Dary nodded. The smell of her blood rose above all other scents and Stavios breathed it in, pushing himself up slowly so he was just above her eye level.
He frowned. "Then why are you here? You said you would not come back. You lied to me."
"Yeah. But you told be to come."
The vampire froze. "I did?"
"Uh huh. You told me to come back. I was sleeping and then I heard you and you told me to come back. So I did." Dary's eyes widened in excitement, "Are you going to play with me this time? Is that why you told me to come? I wanna play hide and seek cuz it's more fun than tag and there's lotsa good places here to hide. So do I count first or do you want me to hide?"
Stavios's frown deepened dramatically before rising into a tortured smile. "No," he looked at Dary straight on, ignoring the burning in his eyes, "No. You will not be hiding. You've already lost."
"But we haven' started playing," Dary stared at him, confused, and suddenly let out a small gasp, finally registering his appearance. "What happened to you? Are you sick? Do you need a doctor? My uncle's a doctor a-"
"I don't need a doctor Dary." He took her chin with his thin fingers. "I just need you. Only you…And your blood."
The darkness of his eyes vanished and he bowed his head to her neck, biting down quickly before she could make a sound or protest. She did not fight him and went completely limp in his arms as he drank. It was not long before he'd taken her life, but there was no time for thought or remorse. He lifted the girl's lifeless body and carried her weightless form to the mausoleum with him.
Out of the sun he felt better but he needed rest desperately. Scattering the remains of a coffin on the floor, he placed Dary's body inside and slid the lid into the place, then made room for himself in another, larger stone box. He was in a deep sleep even before the cover put him in darkness.
When the sun rose, it would be the devil hunter's turn to die.
That's it for now. Remember to review and thanks to all who've bothered to do so. Really appreciate the feedback.
