Eat Them All: Book 2- Chapter 41 (Patreon)

++Humans forget things, elves deliberately erase them, but vampires…vampires are far too megalomaniacal and ambitious to ever allow a thing as precious as knowledge to fizzle out.++

Book 2: Chapter 41

Oleri kept her head down, her feet ahead, her temper cool. She did all of these things, but only with a great exertion of will. The torments she experienced seemed to be without end, and, as usual, most of them came from her own kind. 

It had gotten out, somehow, that she had been personally present at Norvhan when it slipped from elven control, and none of the other Circumscribers were letting her forget it. 

She wasn’t the Warden’s daughter any more, she was barely even an officer in the army. Oleri had seen humans shooting scornful looks her way, and she had weathered them. To take the humiliation in silence was as great a dignity as she still had the freedom to seize for herself. 

All she could hope to do now was erase her mistakes. Fight well and bravely in the assault and distinguish herself enough to silence the dissenters. 

And she could do it, too. Oleri was not a prodigy, she was too old to harbor that delusion, but she was a skilled and powerful Warrior. Of the ten other Circumscribers with her now, only one was greater than her and only one more her equal. If she matched their fury in combat, she would do well. And if she doubled it, if she tripled it—if she hurled herself at the enemy like a woman possessed…An above-average fighter could perform extraordinary feats, provided they didn’t care about the consequences of their doing so. 

It wouldn’t be enough to simply kill more enemies, or go where the fighting was thickest, though. Oleri had to do something nobody else did. Her distinction had to be one of quality rather than quantity, to make her stand in a separate category than everyone else. 

They were three weeks from Norvhan, and she took only one of the twenty days remaining to realise what she would have to do. 

Oleri would kill Reginald Smith.

***

The Irazhtan might just kill Reggie.Butt at the very least that wasn’t looking to be an imminent thing. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve just continued fighting, right? Used that telekinetic trick, except this time just lift Reggie twenty feet up and smash him down until his solids turned into liquids. 

He didn’t. He wasn’t looking too friendly, but if anything that just made Reggie trust him more. Well, not trust him. Feel less inclined to start screaming and lunge at him.

Another reassuring fact was that the Irazhtan still hadn’t seen Reggie’s transformation, though he somehow doubted it would help much, all things considered. It had been less-than-guaranteed odds back when his enemy was a walking corpse.

Which he still was, but like…a better preserved one. Whatever.

“I intend to leave soon,” the Irazhtan told them all. “With one exception.” He pointed at Anne. “I would like to take this creature with me.”

Anne was still very visibly blood-deprived and looked like she was fighting to stay awake, but, to Reggie’s surprise, she managed to pick up what had just been said and retaliate with a glare. 

“Listen here you old fuck,” she growled before taking a step forwards and immediately collapsing onto her face. He thought she’d lost consciousness, for a second, before she slowly forced herself back up again. It really was surprising, she was probably weaker right now than Reggie had been before his death. Weaker by far. 

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she concluded.

The vampires just ignored her entirely, with Krieg replying as if Anne had said nothing.

“Why should we give you her? She’s a useful servant, valuable.”

It was like she was nothing more than a negotiating chip. Some commodity to be traded or bluffed with, assessed for value and then handed away if that value could be met. Reggie felt distinctly sick, all of a sudden. And more than a little pissed off. 

“I may have use of her,” the Irazhtan replied. “And I am entirely certain you will have use of me. You have seen what I can do. You know that I am powerful enough to claim more than a Barony. I could be a Vampire Lord, if I so wished.”

He had them there. 

Truth be told, Reggie had to admit the Irazhtan was being weirdly nice about all this. As he’d said, he had the power of a Vampire Lord or Lady, easily. If he wanted to actually exert that power, he didn’t need to just do it through offering a service. Reggie doubted that he and Krieg would’ve won if all Reggie’s forces from back in Norvhan had rushed in to help. Not easily, at least.

But then, vampires weren’t nice, either. There had to be some reason he was being so generous as to negotiate, Reggie just knew it. What exactly was he gaining from this that he wouldn’t have enjoyed through brute force and a contest of power alone? Reggie had to think about it fast, because the time to commit to a decision was rapidly approaching.

His life really was complicated these days.

“You want to sire Anne,” Reggie found himself saying.

The Irazhtan stared at him just for a moment. Half a moment, really, the barest fraction of a fraction of a second, maybe the time needed for two brain cells to rub against one another. Reggie noticed it, though, and it was all the confirmation he needed. “That’s why you’re negotiating, you want to avoid any kind of fighting that might get her killed.”

Reggie had to admit there wasn’t anything concrete inspiring his deduction, here. It was more a product of intuition than reasoning. His intuition was pretty good though, in general. One’s tended to be when everyone wanted to burn you at the stake. 

So it wasn’t such a surprise when he saw the Irazhtan angered in that way only a man who’d been seen through could be. It gave Reggie just enough time to consider whether he should have kept his giant, gaping asshole of a mouth closed before the vampire was talking.

“Quick-witted,” the Irazhtan growled. 

“Fuck you,” Anne cut in, still, amazingly, awake. Mostly. “You’re not turning me into one of you freaks.”

It took a lot of balls and not a lot of brains to say that sort of thing in her present company, Reggie had to admit. 

“Silence,” the Irazhtan replied. With a single gesture of his, Anne started clawing at her throat, eyes bulging as sickly choking noises escaped her.

“Stop that,” Reggie spat. “You’re killing her.”

So much for hiding that he gave a shit. But the Irazhtan seemed more irritated with him than eager to pick up the hint. 

“I am not. Do you have any idea how many humans I’ve killed over my centuries? If I wanted her dead she would be dead. This will just restrict her oxygen supply enough that she does not have the necessary surplus to spend on talking.”

Reggie had no reason to doubt the vampire, there certainly were easier ways for him to kill little old Anne, but there was something instinctively sickening about the sight all the same. It took a good few minutes of distracted listening to her retches and chokes before Reggie was finally confident she’d not just keel over and die. 

It was, he realised, probably intentional on the part of the Irazhtan. Krieg was certainly angry about it, and for a second Reggie thought it was finally some chivalrous streak making itself known in the Varenthor.

“How dare you man-handle another vampire’s property like that,” he snarled.

Ah, right. Asshole.

“It will soon be my property, in any case,” the Irazhtan shrugged. “One way or another. You are rapidly exhausting my patience, spawn of Guerra. I do not wish to kill you out of respect for your sire, do not mistake that for any sort of advantage on your own part.”

Krieg was beyond reason though. It seemed this latest slight had been one too many, Reggie could see the familiar build-up of rage and violence as they pulsed through his body and sent it quivering. 

So how did he avert this? 

“You’re a scholar, right?” Reggie asked abruptly, taking a deft and, he hoped, subtle step to put himself between the two other vampires before anybody could do anything that would get Reginald Smith killed for real. 

Things started out promising enough, Krieg paused and the Irazhtan nodded.

“A greater scholar than any human has the potential to become,” he confirmed. “I have been learning for over two centuries of dedicated study, and began that period with the knowledge of an alchemist already gained from my human life.”

“Cool. Well Krieg here has a bunch of old books I’ve been translating for him, written and collected by Guerra in a bunch of different languages. I can read one and sort of another, but that’s all.”

“What are the other languages?” the Irazhtan asked, curiosity apparently piqued.

“I don’t know,” said Reggie. “I don’t read them.”

The vampire looked somewhat irritated, then turned to Krieg. “You will show me to these tomes?”

“Will I let you steal the knowledge of my sire, you mean?” Krieg spat. 

The Irazhtan stared at him evenly. “I could take it,” he pointed out. “Instead I am offering to share the contents with you. I do not need to do that, and I am being more than fair.”

Reggie was just as surprised as he was relieved to see Krieg’s anger diffuse and his body seem to deflate. 

“You can translate all of them?” he asked after a moment. 

“I do not know, I haven’t seen them yet,” the Irazhtan replied. “But I can tell you that I speak a dozen elven languages, and fifteen that were known to humanity before the arrival of the System.”

It seemed promising enough to Reggie, and with that the situation had calmed. This was very good for Anne, who was finally allowed to talk again.

“I’m going to fucking kill you! I’ll kill all of you! I’ll follow you into that stupid fucking estate and explode, you’ll be cleaning bits of me out of you for months, you hear me? As soon as my legs start working again I’ll—” they left her there until she had the chance to calm down and regain use of her legs, heading up to the estate. Krieg was tense as they walked. Reggie had to admit, he felt nervous himself. There was so much knowledge stored there, what if the Irazhtan just fucking burned it all?

So much easier to destroy things than create them.

Except me, I’m a lot more durable than books. And I’ll live forever if I play my cards right.

Reggie had always sought out knowledge in a sort of casual regard, more for the convenience of what it could bring him, but just then he resolved to do so a lot more actively. 

That was a concern for later, though. Right now he was accompanying a vampire ten times more powerful than him to a treasure-trove of information he’d never seen matched before. Reggie barely kept the wince off his face as they headed into the estate and finally reached the room he’d been translating from. 

At a glance, the Irazhtan seemed…unimpressed. Even now that his face had regrown most of its muscle, he wasn’t very expressive. 

“This is the collection?”

An awkward pause, which became a lot less awkward and a lot more tense when Krieg answered with a growl.

“Yes.”

“It is glorious,” the Irazhtan said. Without another word he started for the books and gestured at the air, drawing one of the tomes up to hover before him. Reggie realised only when the first page turned that he was reading it. 

That was promising, at least. He hadn’t started burning everything right off the bat.