Tryal's Curse 4.2

~2057 words

Evian was fully expecting to collide with someone as soon as the door shut behind him. The Hawkstead Inn was forever close to bursting with people, even during work hours. The last time he had been here a vampire had decided to chuck the contents of his suitcase at him. Evian had nursed an unsightly bruise for days after that, and had explained it at the Office as a ‘clumsy accident on his part’. He smiled slightly at the memory—Evian Threshold was hardly, if ever, clumsy. 

But tonight, Evian was not met with drunken staggers. He did not happen to fall face-first into the middle of a brawl, nor did he have his ears serenaded by the dulcet tones of people cheering people on over something he did not understand.

No—tonight was highly unconventional in this respect:

Evian Threshold was met with surprise.

Inside the Inn, it was mostly dark and mostly quiet. 

Evian shifted slightly on his feet; there were only a couple of people standing beneath the archway that led into the main room, talking amongst themselves in low voices. One of them wore a fine, blood-red cloak; it burned Evian’s eyes just to look at it.

The men continued their conversation steadily, not breaking eye contact with one another, as if they were in a battle not just of wits, but of gazes. They remained unperturbed even as Warren pushed past them; they simply stepped out of the archway and into the hall. Warren turned his head towards Evian and silently raised a hand in his direction. Wait, his glare said. Evian scowled at him.

Warren delivered a prize frown back. Then he turned on his heel and disappeared into the dark of the main room.

Evian leaned against one of the oak-panelled walls, trying to organise his thoughts from the medley they had fallen into. But it was useless—his thoughts were circuitous, always ending with his worries about Edith, or wondering how on earth he was going to get the Orb back. Because he had to get it back; it was unthinkable that he not try, even. Evian shifted uneasily, wiping his hands on his pyjama pants. He could not specify the moment he had realised that the Orb was this important, or even why it was all that important. He just knew, that was all.

He diverted his gaze—and his thoughts—to the men standing beneath the archway. They were speaking quickly, their mouths forming strange words—a language, Evian thought, from the old Vampire legions. Róndian, perhaps, or Paerish, or some other obscure tongue the likes of which flooded the historical texts in all the schools these days. He attempted to listen in on the men’s conversation. The men, he gathered, must be vampires—their words curled around their tongues too easily, like music, while the language of men was coarse and hard. At best, the language of men could be smoothed with sandpaper, but even then the bumps in the tongue would forever remain.

Besides that, both men also had rather pointy, furry ears—and fangs. Either those were extremely realistic costumes, Evian thought drolly, or they were vampires.

He was inclined to think it was the latter.

Evian’s stamped his foot on the ground impatiently and crossed his arms over his chest. He wanted dearly to follow Warren, but he had a feeling that stepping into the tavern was not the wisest choice. He would attract too much attention, in his current state. But—Evian looked at the door again through which they had entered—he felt much too … exposed here. What if someone happened to enter the Inn—a messenger? The Crew—Luin himself? Evian couldn’t stand the thought.

And what about Edith? What if Luin decided that instead of searching for Evian, it would be more appropriate to kidnap his wife?

The hallway was lit dimly with lyte-fixtures—it would be madness to have torches in a building made largely of wood—and the harsh shadows sweeping across the room looked even more menacing in the low light. Evian fiddled with his fingers, drumming them against his leg. Once more he cast a wary glance at the vampires. What was taking Warren so long? Before his common sense could chastise him, Evian walked through the archway.

This time, unfortunately, the vampires noticed, especially because Evian attempted to shield his head with his hands as he passed by. It could also be because he reeked badly of sweat and gutter water, but in order to preserve Evian’s dignity, it is best not to comment.

Perhaps it would be necessary to state that Evian also found the vicelike grip on his arm rather frightening. His instincts told him to run, but logic told him that he couldn’t—not unless he particularly wanted the vampire to tear his arm off.

The vampire in question leered at him. ‘We were talking,’ he said, the sentence sounding oh-so-very-odd on his tongue, as if it had cost him some effort to construct it. His ‘r’s rolled into forever; his ‘t’s sounded like ‘d’s. Evian would have laughed at the vampire, were he not afraid to.

Instead, he gulped. The vampire’s fangs looked even larger up close, and his eyes were yellow, and his gaze was piercing, and—ow— ow! Evian’s arm burned where he touched it. He looked up at the vampire, focussing on his nose instead of his eyes, and said,

‘My sincerest apologies. I didn’t know how to get past without offending you—if I may pass?’

He cringed inwardly at his forced politeness, but exhaled with relief when the vampire’s hold on his arm loosened. Evian moved a step forward—almost immediately, the vampire’s burning hand was once more pressing into his flesh.

‘You are Evian Threshold?’ he asked, stooping slightly until his eyes were level with Evian’s own. His pupils dilated; the yellow in the vampire’s eyes flashed, and Evian felt a faint pinprick of pain at his temples. ‘Leoth! By the arms—restrain him!’

Everything escalated from there.

Evian didn’t know when—how—where—all he knew was pain, bright, flashing, an endless stream of pain hurtling through every cell in his body. He was on fire—the fire gave way to sudden chill—then, fire again, burning, massive; his bones were pillars. He could feel the floodgates of his mind giving way: memories broke free of him like water horses, rearing, neighing, until every feeling and thought he had ever experienced was not his own. The vampire held Evian by the throat; his companion grabbed Evian’s arms as he thrashed and flailed. A sharp, piercing scream was emitting from his mouth—but it was a scream Evian would never know or remember. He was far too trapped in himself to register anything—the crunch of wood, the cries of the vampires, their hisses … it was all beyond him.

Evian was floating. He was flying. He was tumbling through the severest kind of agony that was.

Re-living his worst memories had not been on Evian’s to-do list that day.

One second he was being tossed around in a sack, twelve years old again, hitting his head on the wooden walls of a luggage compartment. He was frightened; he was scared; he was bleeding. He called out for his mother and sisters. But nobody came—until a sudden burst of light washed over him and once more, he flew.

He tasted antiseptic. He tasted blood and brine. A pirate ship. Fog. So much fog. Evian mind-flapped in it, wishing it would all go away. He was fifteen years old, swabbing decks. Fifteen years old, being cuffed on the ear for something he didn’t do. Fifteen years old and starving thin. Evian had forgotten what the S.S Rebble had done to him, forgotten what it felt like to have every inch of your body blackened and covered with bruises. He had forgotten—and as the yellow-eyed vampire pressed deeper into his mind, he remembered. The pain of his thoughts, of the vampire’s presence in his mind, the tangle of arms and limbs that were his and someone else’s and fighting and screaming—all ebbed away.

Evian felt, suddenly, like he was caught within a dream…. To the vampires, of course, Evian’s dreamscape did not matter; they merely snatched fragments of Evian’s past as he tumbled through it again. One of the vampires held Evian’s arms behind his back—the other searched his mind for all the information he needed. He flicked his wrist as though sorting through stacks of paper, yellow eyes gleaming. It was lucky that the Inn was mostly empty. As it was, it was nothing out of the ordinary for men to be brawling in a pub—even if the brawling was not in a physical sense.

A young servant girl eyed the trio by the archway and wondered where her master had gone, before scurrying away to find him. Meanwhile, the vampire continued rifling through Evian’s mind.

Inside himself, Evian screamed.

When he was twelve years old, he had been smuggled to a different country and sold as a slave. When he was thirteen, he ran away, and found a job on a pirate ship. When he was fourteen, he had nearly died and been used as a shield in a mutiny. He still had a scar running along his back, a thin, spiraling thing that had been too shallow to cut him through, but was the result of an amateur being handed a rapier. When he was fifteen, the ship had been set on fire. On fire—on fi—i—i—re. He remembered the cries of the sailors, the crude swears, the yells as insanity throttled the crew’s last bit of good sense and cast it aside like a dead snake.

The ground underneath Evian broke open. He was drowning—drowning slowly—then faster, as the vampire flipped through his memories. These memories of pain were unneeded—they caused him as much misery as they did Evian. The vampire’s eyes narrowed, his jaw tensed, the vein in his temple throbbed and his ears flicked back and forth in irritation. Evian Threshold’s eyes were wide as he peered into them, wide and black and overwhelming like the vast expanse of sea that dominated his mind.

The vampire shared Evian’s thoughts—and at that moment a terrible fear gripped both of them, as they discovered that Evian was unconscious in his memory of fire and pirate ships.

And it was a fact that unconscious peoples could not swim. A bubble grew inside Evian’s chest, a bubble that was cold and filled with vacuum. The black expanse grew until it was as thick as oil.

Then—it cleared.

A tight knot formed in Evian’s mind, a knot of safety and stability; a firm hand gripped his own. He was pulled—up, up, up—onto a life raft. The vampire only caught the barest glance at a face—the same face Evian saw as he drifted into consciousness, and into unconsciousness again.

A girl with copper and yellow hair. Brown eyes. A scarf plastered to her forehead.

The vampire smiled. He stilled the image in Evian’s mind.

Then he let him go. 

When Evian came to, the first thing he noticed was splintered wood in his hair. He looked up—he was slumped on the ground. He didn’t remember how he had ended up there, so he rubbed his head. A red … something … fluttered into his vision. Wincing, he reached up and plucked at it, his arms feeling like they were made of broken bits of brick tied together. As he dangled the red something in front of his eyes, he realised what it was.

A strip torn off a fine, blood-red cloak. Evian sat up quickly, turning his head to the door just as it snapped shut, but not before he caught a crimson glimmer swishing off into the night. A thought formed in Evian’s mind; it carried wild urgency, dancing in bold letters across his mind. It was a thought that belonged not to him, but to a yellow-eyed someone—it echoed in Evian’s head, over and over again, in a foreign accent that rolled over ‘r’s and pronounced ‘t’s like ‘d’s:

Come to the House on the Hill when need may be. Ask for Aidan.

We will be waiting for you.

Then, the presence vanished, almost as though it had been whisked away. Like a bat, Evian thought, being carted away by the wind’s wings.