I didn't realize just how dark this was going to get until I wrote this chapter. Warning! Some character torture ahead. Note the rating change.
Chapter 4
Somewhere Cold
March 1943
Nikola had given up on ever waking up warm again so long as he was stuck in this godforsaken hell hole of a country. He'd spent fifteen minutes staring blearily at his feet before he realized that the reason they weren't touching the floor was because he was suspended.
There was a dull ache in his shoulders but the rest of him was numb. And wet. And cold.
Deliberately wet and cold. And he had been robbed of yet another coat. He wondered if Kohrber had seen fit to burn it.
He was fairly certain he was back in Korhber's clutches.
Why else would he be strung up like a slab of meat in a cold locker.
Perhaps they thought that keeping him frozen would weaken him. He hated to admit that they might be right.
He couldn't even consider vamping if he wanted to.
He hadn't been awake long before the sealed metal at the end of the empty room opened with a hiss. Without preamble a young soldier entered his prison, lifted the muzzle of a Luger toward him and depressed the trigger.
Nikola felt the impact of the bullet somewhere on his chest, but there was no pain. Breathing became a challenge after a moment and when he was forced to cough there was the brief warmth of his blood on his lips before that too froze.
The boy with the tan, Hitler Youth uniform and just a hint of remaining humanity in his eyes, backed out of the room, apparently pleased with the result of his experiment.
The Serbian coughed again, then drew a shallow breath and started shouting. He spat out with every curse he knew from English to Serbian to Russian. He tried to force his legs to move, hearing frozen ice crystals creak and shatter, ice dust bursting from the creases in his clothing. He had managed to bend both knees and started moving his hips when his shouting brought the youth back.
The door opened and he stood staring at the vampire. He said nothing for a long time, and Nikola was obliged to do the same. Waiting in the torturous nothingness for something to happen.
Then the door closed.
"No. NO NO NO!" He screamed, then jerked hard at his arms and hands. He forced his head back groaning at the pain that he could now feel from the bullet lodged in his side. His hands were bound in chains, they were blue and unmoving no matter how many times he told them to work.
He needed warmth. He needed something, anything to get the blood moving again. There were no lights in his prison but for the sunlight streaming through a solitary window. The door might have some kind of electricity running to it and unless it was twenty below in all of Germany, he assumed he had to have been in a freezer. Freezers didn't run on friction.
There had to be a current somewhere.
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
Present Day
"I was left there, in that hole for days, Helen." His eyes refused to focus on any one spot. His voice was angry and bitter and haunted. Her face was mere feet from his but there had been times when she had needed to move her head closer to understand his words.
"Someone would come in, either to splash buckets of ice cold tepid water over me…for fear that I had begun to thaw." His teeth came together, clenching so hard that he was forced to stop speaking. He quickly washed down a gulp of wine, emptying the tiny airplane bottle in one go. "Or to shoot me…" He finished, his head nodding in affirmation as if she might not have believed the words the first time.
"I was their experiment. Something they were keeping, literally, on ice, until they could find a way to use me."
There was a silence again. They sat together on the floor of Helen's private jet, the cabin lights out, their faces only visible thanks to the glow from the small kitchen behind them. Helen was grateful for the darkness. It hid what Nikola's revelation was doing to her.
Somewhere in Germany
March 1943
He had counted in the interim. 77 long, suffering hours had passed with only the visit of a dull faced youth and the occasional splash of freezing water to break the monotony. They had added several new holes to his anatomy, most of them still bearing the lead that made them. It was the same thing as using a slab of beef for target practice. The frozen flesh slowed the path of the bullet dramatically.
On the eve of the 78th hour he was inundated by a crew of seven soldiers dressed in the darkest, blackest uniforms he had ever seen. They entered his prison in a rush, one of them literally slipping on the slick of blood that had collected and frozen beneath the vampire. The chains were loosened and gloved hands pulled him down, bearing him from the room. He went from shadow into glaring and painful light.
He had managed to close his eyes and was bracing himself for the hurt that would come from warming again. He could hear the crackle of a fire as he was carried from room to room, the sound turning into a roar that got louder and louder. The soldiers hadn't stopped to put him down, nor did they seem interested in chatting, or demanding questions of him.
He had just heard a familiar and hated voice shouting, "Nien, Nien." Like a child watching its mother throw away a favorite toy. Then a wave of heat, followed by pain, like nothing he had ever known.
Something in him came to a boil, and there were explosions all around him. He had never pondered how he would die, or that there were so many excruciating and terrifying ways for it to happen.
He didn't have to open his eyes again to know that he was surrounded by flames that were being fed fuel the longer he stayed there, and he was the fuel. There was steam as well, mixing with the smell of burning flesh.
His fingers twitched and curled against his palms. He could feel them for a split second before the numbing cold turned into numbing heat. He tried to curl into a ball but hadn't the room for it and his feet burned. His clothes smoldering as the heat melted the ice, turned the water into steam, and set fire to the drying fibers.
Smoke filled his lungs, cruelly taunting his attempts to breathe.
He couldn't hear his own screams at first. There were too many other sensations bombarding his body for something so inconsequential to register.
The fire burned, the torture continued and still his metabolism wouldn't surrender, his DNA healing the damage even as it was being inflicted.
For the first time in 80-some years Nikola regretted being a vampire, and begged his father's deity for death.
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
Present Day
She held him, as tightly as she could. She had never known the man to cry in his life. Not once. She understood now why that was. Why he could go for years, watching relationships pass on, fighting for lost causes, losing everything that amounted to his life's work and keep going. Why he hadn't wept when James passed.
Her face was a wreck of tears, running makeup, running nose. She had been crying his tears long before his voice even cracked. Until he stopped speaking both of them had been in that hell. She had watched, sick with rage, as SS men shoved something they didn't understand into a furnace and tried to burn it to death.
Something that was living and breathing, that had been born a human boy, lived a human life until a fateful day in a science lab. With these new images were old ones. Stories told by survivors of the camps, chicken scratches in German that depicted inhuman acts done against the helpless, claiming it was in the name of science with a detached air. There had been others that had been burned, while still alive. She had been there to hear the stories told by the men who put their friends, siblings, even their own children into the flames.
But death had eventually claimed them. Death had been the final reprieve from the pain. Nikola hadn't been given even that mercy.
She stroked his head, unable to stop the tears, unable to erase the images. Horrified that he had been hiding it from her all that time. That he had chosen to do so instead of bringing her into his confidence.
He was trembling against her, clinging to the arm that supported his chest. The plane was quiet but she still couldn't hear any noise coming from him.
"I'm so sorry, Nikola." She said. "I am so sorry."
Dachau Prison Camp, Munich Germany
March 1943
When they found they couldn't wipe him from the earth with ice and fire they took him to another cell. This one was by far nicer. He was dumped on a cot and watched with pained satisfaction as the guards who had been tasked with escorting him there walked away with looks of disgust, wiping at the bits of burned skin and cloth that had stuck to their hands and clothing.
He couldn't really move. Every shift meant pain, the opening of freshly healed burns, some of him still smoldering even though the fires had been put out an hour before. He managed to prop himself up on the bed, breathing slowly through the process to keep the grunts to a minimum.
He had no hair left. He was sure of that. It would likely grow back but for the moment he was bald. Like Johnny, he thought wryly. Perhaps he should show up on Helen's doorstep this way. She would fall for him in moments.
He toyed with the idea, following the course of his thoughts into a place far more pleasing and painless. Slipping into that place between wakefulness and sleep, dozing with his eyes open. Ready for the next hell, but clinging softly to the brief heaven in between.