Blood of Eden
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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Warmth slowly oozes into me. My whole body tingles with energy, life, which I haven't felt for so long in that empty, shadowed, cold darkness. I am so exhausted/. My eyes, though shut, even burn through and beneath my eyelids, which almost seem red because of a dim light from somewhere in the room. Red. Coursing blood within my veins. Energy strengthening so slowly, strength, even more slowly, building up.
My whole chest seems to be weighed down from the pressure around me, and it seems my lungs might collapse. My stomach is searing with pain from lying on my back for a very, very long time, never having moved. My head is spinning…Then I notice a faint noise. Beeping. Steady. It matches my heart rate, I can feel it.
My right arm twitches in a small muscle spasm. Sharp pain, like a needle, pokes into it at the crook of the elbow. There's something stiff stuck to my wrist, weirdly even in my flesh. Hard…needle. I feel the hard metal, see the plastic tube in my mind, only an essence of it, though.
Then I begin to smell. Dry air with no humidity whatsoever. It's sort of cold, not too cold, but not warm enough.
The beeping gets louder and clearer as my eyes flutter weakly, me trying to open them. For a moment, a slit of blinding light fills my blurred vision. I shut my eyes tighter as they being to water and as I turn my head. My eyes are stinging roughly now.
Where am I?
Hospital? I jerk awake and gasp, startled, jumping, my memories returning in a murderous manner of flood, even some of my visions during my sleep, especially the ones of Leviath…Octavius.
Octavius? Leviath? "Majesty? What the hell?" I croak, my voice breaking a lot. My throat screams for water. I'm so thirsty. Hungry…There's no food in my stomach. I feel empty, as if I've not eaten for a long time, that I've been hooked up to these IV's I see hanging upside-down for the clear liquid in them to travel down the tubes into me. "Maybe just a dream," I suggest aloud, to myself. But I still remember Octavius's face turning into the face of the other vampire dude, Leviath , when he was turning into darkness, the shadows.
I jerk my head up, looking expectantly to the corner of the room where he'd disappeared. How could he change faces?
Shapeshifters, something tells me from my subconsciuosness. I shake my head in disbelief. No. That's stupid and impossible. Not even practical. But still, Octavius? Leviath? One guy? A new…I guess, King?
Wait…Livier. Mr. and Mrs. Kilbourne's story. Related. Please be dreaming only. Stop this. It's nonsense—
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Why the hell am I in a hospital? Did something really bad happen to me? What happened?
My mind is quite hazy. If I have the answers, I’ll not know for probably quite a while until my mind sorts itself back out into consciousness.
Suddenly sadness wells into me. Octavius’s betrayal. His lies, I remember that; I remember all his lies. A tear trickles down from my eye. It’s warm but its trace of moisture quickly turns cold.
A sharp sting in my head turns everything back to darkness again.
Later, perhaps minutes, maybe hours, probably even days, I wake again. Again, my memories have fled. I try to move and find myself strapped to a hospital bed, IVs stuck in my arm. Squirming seems to almost tighten the straps.
I stop trying to move and stare directly up at the bright overhead light. “What is this place?” I ask. My accent is strange to me, yet so familiar. It’s Romanian again.
A faint mental image flows across my mind of doctors and patients in other areas of this premises. I spit disgustedly, “Hospital, yes, I see them.” The images leave as if I just dismissed them. Actually, they seemed to have come at my command, the question.
I look down at the tight straps and snicker distastefully. “Release me.” A deep, dark pair of words spoken in such a manner that a shadowed power is given to them. I felt it the moment I set my mind of wanting free, pulling at me, tugging from inside of me, like some sort of magnetism.
My stomach plummets and a wave of dizziness overcomes me for a short instant. But then it’s gone and I look down again. I am free, no longer bound. Pathetic.
I find myself quite weak when I sit up and get out of the bed. The floor is very, very cold, like ice without moisture.
I turn, stepping slowly, silently with my pale bare feet, and go to the closed metal door. It’s gray. A shiny, rounded metal knob-handle. I see a faint small black label on the other side of the door in my head. White engraved numbers, and word: Room 317.
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That’s all I see. I let it go and reach for the cold metal. But I feel someone on the other side of the door. Male…They’re gone now. I turn the knob and step out into the hall. Very few people. I don’t pay attention at all to them or the doors or white, marble tile floor, or the chairs near the walls. Nothing but the lights. That’s all I see, all I can look at. I stare up at the bright lights above me, down the hallway. Everything else is so dark. I am uninterested. Electricity. The energetic pulse within the walls beneath my feet, refreshingly cold as the last steps I’ve taken, and my light hospital gown; loose, stiff material.
I follow the lights, looking up all the while, never looking away. Blankness from myself, faint feelings of any person I might pass who are in the rooms of the doors I pass. Some doors are open and some are closed.
His lies. All he ever did was lie. Everything was because of him. Nothing was real. I do not really feel the energy, it’s his lies again, always will be.
I realize I am mumbling aloud, though almost completely inaudibly. I stop as a hand touches my shoulder from behind. I see a nametag in my head.
“No need, Rebecca,” I whisper, still looking up. “Mrs. Whitman, I do not run…”
She stops, hesitating and slightly shocked that I know her name, but she tries to shove the surprise aside, and she turns me to face her. I still look up, not at her, at the lights. She tries to get me to look at her, gently coaxing me, “Look at me, miss.” My eyes flicker down to hers for a lingering moment, but wavering as I stand, I look back up from her brown eyes. “How’d you get out of your room? How are you feeling?”
I jump slightly, startled for no reason. My eyes pull from the light and I focus on her face. She is an older lady, perhaps forty years old, with blond hair, brown eyes, sad face, and worry in her heart. Some relief also dwells there.
My voice is raspy and haunted. When I speak, she grows uneasy, uneasy as anyone else ever having known me does. “No prison may hold me. No chains, no locks. Only his lies can bind me, as they always have and always will…However long near-dead I’ve been, I’ve not had even a moment of peace, for seeing his lies. My sleep is not sleep. So how do you think I’m feeling?”
“Come on…What’s your name?”
“Marian Draculess Ivan. How long have I been out? What exactly happened to me?” My voice is now breaking up through my sad hopelessness as she leads me the long way back to room three-seventeen.
She stops to look at me, starting to answer, but my nose begins to bleed and my vision goes red for a blurry moment. I wipe my eyes and pull back my hand. Blood? Crying blood?! My strength fails and I fall upon my knees, enveloped by the spinning room.
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“Ah, I see you are awake at last, dear child,” a deeper male’s voice says. It’s him.
“Damn it, leave me alone,” I gasp as the poor woman tries to help me stand. She practically has to drag me to room three-seventeen. “Get out of my mind Leviath!”
Instantly, upon the name spoken from my lips, a stranger in a chair opposite my room’s door jerks his head up, staring at me with hatred and surprise and disgust. His eyes are hypnotic and he wears lots of black. He is very young, about my mom’s age, Jeana’s age, and he is bald, but also quite thin and seemingly hungry. His slight snarl reveals the tips of two blade-like incisors. I gasp, almost screaming, yet unable to.
Rage settles over me, but before I can try to attack him, I again black out, though only for a moment. I open my eyes to see he’s gone as I am being carried into my room by about three people, two doctors and the nurse. I begin to cry as they place me back upon my bed. Maybe that was just in my head, too. Maybe there’d been no vampire there.
One of the male doctors, a young man, looked inquiringly at the older doctor, “Straps?”
“No. She’s awake now. That was for her safety during her seizures.”
The older man turns to me when I grab his wrist, I am breathing hard and my eyes are wide. The nurse is wiping, or should I say, trying to wipe, the blood from my face. I gasp, “How long—how long have I been here?” My words are not in English, though.
Damn it!!!
He smiles down at me, not understanding a word I say, and there is a sort of pitying look in his eyes.
I speak again, this time definitely in English. “How long have I been here?”
But he starts speaking before I’m halfway through. “We’ll call your family right away. Do you wish to see them?”
I go blank, releasing his wrist. “My family?” Suddenly my eyes cloud over with anger. He sees it well. “Why should I want to see them? Call them if you want! I don’t care! But do I wish to see them? No, but they can see me, though. I want to see how much they’ve changed toward me, if any. I want to hear what they have to say.”
As he leaves, the younger doctor turns to me. I see a flash in my mind the moment his blue eyes meet mine. Calmness comes into me from him. Worry, sure. But also calmness, and I feel another worry from him, of his own, for someone close to him. Something stops my breathing and I am driven to say to him, my voice strangely different than a moment ago, “Irene Dorothy Triany will die in three days’ time upon the stroke of three at noon. Alice Triany will die in an accident. Her first born cannot be saved. The unborn will die with her mother.”
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I gasp in air, blink, trying to breathe. I am shaking, trembling. I slowly manage to look up at him, my weakness great. The color has drained from his face. Shock. Dismay. Unable to react in any way except taking a couple steps back.
A mental image of darkness returns. There are chains upon my wrists in the cold. I am shivering. “Marie…” His voice is helpless, crying. He feels me faintly awake now.
“No!” I scream, shoving my hands to my eyes as I bolt upright to cover them, to try to not see it anymore. It’s only a lie. “Stop it,” I cry. “No more…Stop…”
Blood of Eden Chapters
