A Darkness Below: Chapter 10
Once again, I have ended up a bit behind of posting a chapter every Tuesday, but I'm here now! Here's the next chapter of my story. Enjoy! As always, upvotes are most welcome, as well as any comments or critiques!
If you're just coming to A Darkness Below, you can check out the previous chapters here:
Maggie leaned back in her chair and reached up to rub at her eyes. The morning had started early, as usual, with a run around the courtyard and her own exercise regimen, but now she’d spent four hours sitting at a desk, poring over report after report. Thankfully, this was the last week she’d have to deal with this hell, and she’d be back out in the field in only a few more days. She was so excited and relieved that she could barely stand it. If she could be any more anxious, she was sure she’d jump out of her skin.
On the bright side, though what brightness this brought to anyone but her was a fair question, she’d compiled a few more reports that matched her own. Across all of southern Ireland, hunters had received the same threats of a massed attack on Cahir over the last month and a half. There was no way this was just coincidence, not in her mind, and if she had to kick down McKenna’s door to get someone to pay attention to her, then by God she would. She’d even taken the time to type up a report that quoted and referenced all of the field reports that made reference to it, so she wasn’t going to go there empty-handed.
She stretched her arms up above her head, letting her back pop in a few places before slumping back into her chair with a satisfied sigh. Glancing at her watch, she let out a quiet groan; feeding time already. Nudging her chair back from her desk, she stood to her feet and turned to head down the hallway to the infirmary. She quietly thanked God that this was going to be the last time she’d have to go down there to deal with that thing in the basement. No level of familiarity was going to keep her skin from crawling whenever she was in his presence, and she was glad to be rid of this burden.
Still, it hadn’t been all bad. As she headed down the hallway, she thought back to their previous conversation. In fact, she felt a little guilty about the way she’d handled their last encounter. Sure, he was a bloodsucking monster, but he’d only ever been polite when they’d talked. A little snarky, maybe, but compared to her conduct and given how they kept him, she couldn’t say she was all that surprised. Besides, were he not an undead nightmare, he might actually be considered handsome. She chided herself for that last thought. I need to get laid, she thought. As unladylike as that sounded, she had needs, too.
She ducked through the double doors into the infirmary ward, walking past the short row of beds to a small office on the far side. They normally kept the spare blood in the same room as the narcotics and various medical supplies, and it was kept locked, but her father had given her a key for the lock. She wasn’t about to go on a morphine bender, so there wasn’t any harm in it. She fished the key out of her pocket and slid it into the lock, unlocking the door and stepping inside to find a spare bottle.
Much to her dismay, there was no blood on hand. The fresh supply must have expired on Monday, which she recalled hearing about between one of the typists and her crush, a medic that worked under the head nurse they had here at the castle.
“That’s just fucking grand,” she muttered, before she snagged a couple of pieces of tubing, a syringe, and an empty glass bottle. She unbuttoned her tunic and slid it off, rolling the sleeve of her blouse up and tying one length of tubing up around her bicep. As she clenched and unclenched her fist to build up pressure, she attached the hypodermic needle to the other piece of tubing, setting the open side in the glass bottle. Once she could see a good artery to dig into, which wasn’t hard given how pale she was, she nudged the edge of the needle into her arm at as close to a parallel angle as she could.
It stung slightly, but after a second, blood began flowing up the tube and into the glass bottle. Thankfully it wasn’t a particularly big container, only 250 milliliters, so she wouldn’t have to leave the infirmary feeling all too woozy. She was also thankful she’d paid attention in her field medical classes about how to run an IV and properly insert a needle. She reached up and untied the tubing from around her arm, increasing the flow. Before long, the bottle was topped off, and she pressed her thumb down against the insertion point as she slid the needle out of her arm. She shook the last bit of blood free from the tube into the bottle before she capped it and took the used materials to the wash basin. Snatching a piece of paper from the desk beside the supply closet, she scrawled a note to the medic to sanitize the needle and tubing and thanked them in advance.
Bottle in hand, she taped a piece of gauze to her arm to staunch the trickle of blood still leaving her arm and rolled her sleeve back down. Sliding her tunic back on and buttoning it up, she left the infirmary at a crisp pace and made her way to the door that lead down to the dungeon.
“He’d better be real damn grateful,” she said to herself, snickering a little. Even the task she was about to have to do couldn’t hold her down; this was the last week she had to spend cooped up in this damn castle. Brisk, even steps carried her down the hallways of the castle to the one stairwell leading down to the dungeon. Her exhilaration at finally being done with this drudge work even managed to stave off the unease she seemed to experience every time she came down here. With a bounce in her step, she made her way down the corridor to the last cell door, unlocking it and stepping inside.
“You are alarmingly cheerful today,” Jasen said, cocking his head to the side and lifting a brow. She flashed him a winning smile as she slid down into the chair across from him, tossing the glass bottle at him. As before, shadowy tendrils rose from the floor and uncapped the bottle, turning the contents up into his waiting mouth. She watched him as he drank, not saying a word as he savored the fresh taste of blood for the first time in over a decade. Once he was finished, he licked his lips and replaced the top on the bottle, depositing it down by the leg of her chair. “That wasn’t just warmed up; that was practically fresh. What’s the occasion?”
“The occasion is I’m finally done with this bloody detail, and I’m going back into the field this Saturday,” she beamed. “That, and they were out of blood stores at the medic station, so I had to draw my own.”
“If I’d known that, I would have taken the time to savor it a bit longer,” he said, flashing a lopsided grin at her. She rolled her eyes and crossed one leg over the other. “So that means I’m going to be bereft of company again.”
“Sadly, you’ll be doomed to spend the rest of eternity chained down here in this miserable little cell,” she replied, voice taking on a lilting quality as she poked fun at his fate. He simply shrugged his shoulders.
“Better than being off murdering people for the fun of it, I suppose,” he retorted plainly. She took a good, long look at him without saying anything else for a moment. Life had almost returned entirely to him thanks to the transfusions she’d been providing him, and, while she still didn’t understand her father’s reasoning in feeding him this much this often, especially at how emaciated he’d appeared before, she had to admit he looked good. Even bedraggled and ragged like he was, he was a handsome thing, and it would have been all too easy for her to fall victim to something like that had circumstances been different. Thankfully, she reminded herself, they weren’t, and she was in control here.
“You said that sword you had was Japanese,” she started, changing subjects to something that wasn’t so heavy and depressing. “That means you’ve been to the Far East?”
“Not just to Japan. I roamed across China, India, and Asia Minor as well,” he said, looking up at her with gleaming red eyes. “I’ve been across the world. I suppose the only place I haven’t yet had the pleasure of visiting is this New World everyone talks about.”
“Boy-o, it hasn’t been a New World for more than two hundred years,” she said, laughing a little bit. “Besides, it’s not much to see. More of the same, just a lot more space I gather. Then again, I haven’t been to the ends of the earth like you have.” The inflection in that last part was meant as a jab, but it was good-natured; she wouldn’t have been smiling otherwise. Jasen tilted his head to the side, curious to see her in such a good mood, especially given where she was.
“Well well, aren’t you walking on clouds,” he quipped. “Seeing as this is your last day down here, I’m not going to hold you up. You can leave me down here whenever you’d like, and thank you for the generous donation of your own blood. That was the first decent meal I’ve had in years.” A chuckle left his lips and he leaned back against the wall, resting his head against the cool stone. She didn’t get up though. Instead, she remained seated, one leg crossed over the other, regarding him for a moment. The wheels were turning behind those green eyes of her, and, now that she was in such a fantastic mood, her curiosity began to win over her disdain for the creature before her.
“You’re obviously not a nip, so you weren’t born in Japan,” she started, which made him open his eyes and look at her. “Your accent is…something I can’t place, but it’s definitely not that far east. Where are you from, originally? Who were you before...this?”
A long silence followed her question, and he looked past her, his eyes unfocusing. She lifted a brow, waiting for his answer, but he remained silent for what seemed like an eternity. Just as she was beginning to think he was doing it on purpose, he finally spoke up.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly, looking back to her.
“What do you mean you don’t know,” she asked, staring at him dumbly. The notion that someone didn’t know who they were was preposterous.
“I mean I don’t know. My earliest memory that I can clearly recall was one night in the desert, feasting on some poor nomad who happened to cross paths with the wrong monster. Before that, there’s nothing. I see fragments, sometimes; every so often I’ll remember a feeling or see some kind of image, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not connected to anything. All I have are fragments from whoever I was before.” He furrowed his brows a little, ruminating on that fact.
His answer had caught her off-guard. She’d expected something grand, that he was a duke or some sort of ancient king from a long-forgotten realm that was only described in mythology. She hadn’t expected this answer. She wasn’t prepared to regard him with some measure of pity and compassion like she was now, despite her growing sympathy for his plight. Her brows knit together, and she turned away from him, looking at the wall instead. She couldn’t imagine forgetting all of her life; she didn’t dare think of a world in which she didn’t have a father or mother. Not having a family would have been crushing for her, and living with it for eternity was an unbearable thought to her. Likely, it was unbearable to him as well, and she genuinely felt sorry for him.
“That must be hard to live with,” she finally said, quietly. He nodded absently, but said nothing. For a long time, the silence hung in the air like a threatening rain cloud, but not a drop fell.
“Harder than you can imagine,” he finally said, “but you learn to accept it and move on. The name you and your father know, the same one whispered into children’s ears for centuries as a warning against disobeying their parents, was given to me by the people I terrorized. It’s a title, not really a name.”
She shifted a little bit in her chair, turning to look back at him. He’d turned his gaze down to the floor, thinking about what he’d just said. The silence clung to the air, heavy like the fog that would no doubt roll in tomorrow morning, and it suddenly felt very small and cramped in the cell for Maggie. A faint smile rose to her lips, and she leaned down to catch his eyes.
“You can’t be all bad, I guess,” she offered. He looked up at her, tilting his head. She shrugged her shoulders and stood from the chair. “I’m going to head back upstairs and finish the last few reports I have to do. I likely won’t ever come back down here, so I guess this is it. Goodbye, Jasen.”
“Goodbye, Maggie,” he said, nodding his head to her. “It was a pleasure talking to you.”
She turned on her heel and headed to the cell door, unlocking it and stepping out before she locked it back behind her. As she headed back down the corridor to the stairwell, a thought occurred to her. Much as she was loathe to admit it, the pleasure hadn’t been all his this time around.
great post
Yikes, Chapter 10. I have some catch up to do.