3
The water was ice cold, but at least it was clean. As she plunged under the water and emerged again, Ruth did everything she could to stop herself from screaming. A good ‘Fuck!’ would really help with the temperature right now.
The sewers underneath the Red Keep had become a temporary home to her in the past few weeks. She was rather lucky to have found an open entrance when she escaped her captor, Igo Kasper. If she hadn’t found an entrance to the sewers, she would have died by now.
From what little she’d seen of the Keep, the place was a sprawling labyrinth, an endless cathedral city built with distinct red blocks. Her time on the surface had been brief. From what she understood, the Keep existed on a plane of magic. From overheard conversations it was clear the only way in and out was through portals. The doorways only opened four times a year and were under constant surveillance. Igo had dragged her through one of these portals at the last minute. As soon as they emerged on the other side, the sight of crimson daylight surprised her. Igo's men stripped and shackled her in an instant.
“What’s the matter dear?!” Igo said, as he sneered. “Don’t worry about the sun! It’s only artificial, it can’t burn!”
She hated how she felt then. Tied in thick black chains, stripped of her clothing, stripped of her dignity. She thought his eyes searching over her body was the worst part, but then he touched her—groping her breasts, cupping between her legs. His ugly black tongue slipped over his lips, and he’d moved forward to kiss her.
Ruth had her own fun, kissing him back and lulling him into a false sense of security. With her teeth clamped onto his lips, she yanked her head back. His skin ripped, blood poured, and he scrambled back like a piss soaked schoolboy while screaming. Ruth could only smirk as he howled. He seemed to have got the message.
“Fuck you!” Igo roared while holding his face. “You're lucky that I can heal you fucking bitch!” He thrust a bloody hand at his men. “Take this whore to the cells and chain her to a table! I’ll fuck her cunt later and then I’ll slit her fucking throat!”
The guards dragged her off, not taking any care to be gentle. Once at the cells, she was almost certain she was dead. They strapped her to a wooden table in a bare cell. A narrow window overhead gave a brief glimpse of the artificial sunset. The room was cold, ice cold—but she seemed to tolerate cold better now she was a vampire. Igo Kasper returned several hours later, and he’d made the mistake of leaving his guards. He slid into the cell with a slimy grin on his face.
“Oh you’re mine girl,” he’d said. “I'll take all of you, and then I’ll kill you too. Or should I make you a slave by Intention? You’d like that wouldn’t you? Be my sex slave for all time. Think of it as payback for our little misunderstanding earlier.”
He tried to take control of her mind, but failed. His anger rose at realizing he couldn’t control Ruth with his Intention. Whatever the reason, her mind was too strong for him. His anger rose even further when she realized she could break her chains. It was as if a surge of strength burst through her body. The world brightened, the metal folded around her limbs like butter. She brought her leg up and caught him square in the crotch while he stood masturbating with his pants on the ground. He’d doubled over in pain, she swung her knee into his face and sent him flying back against the wall.
Her new found strength surprised even her, but she knew there was no time to react on it. She grabbed the keys off his belt and fled the cell. Since then she had been down here in the sewers, hiding, learning, trying to plot an escape.
Ruth climbed from the round pool of ice cool water, and stood in the dim room, shivering as the chill worked its way through her bones. The room she was in was large, filled with many identical pools like this one. They weren’t technically for bathing, but she didn’t give a fuck. She’d been running around a sewer for weeks. A wash was long overdue.
She’d got the keys for the water processing plant from a guard she had pick pocketed back in the sewer tunnels. There were regular patrols of guards through the sewers at the moment, it seemed they were looking for someone, a ‘dangerous’ and escaped prisoner. From the conversations she’d overheard, she knew it wasn’t her. They were looking for a man. There hadn't been a single whisper about Ruth. Either Kasper didn’t care, or he was too embarrassed to report her missing.
She sat on the edge of the round pool in the wide dark room, listening to the silence and waiting while her body air dried. A towel would have been mighty handy right about now, but she’d quickly learned that being a runaway in a sewer wasn’t exactly a life of luxury. She grew impatient of waiting after a few minutes and decided half-dry would have to do.
Her clothes lay on the side, damp and cold after a quick hand scrub. Water dripped as she wrung the cloth in her hands. She pulled the damp scraps on and looked down in disappointment. After escaping she found quick solace in the sewers and was lucky enough to find a pile of discarded rags. One rag became an impromptu loin cloth, and the other covered her breasts. In between that there was a lot of bare flesh. The girl looking back at her in the dim water looked ridiculous.
"Damn ruth." She said to herself. "You look like some crazy sewer slut."
She took off back into the main sewer lines, using her speed to air dry her body and clothes as fast as possible. The large round tunnels would have been pitch black to human eyes, but with her heightened vampire senses, seeing through the dark was easy. Her ears had adapted too, and she could pick up echoes of conversations in the tunnels from a few miles away.
Ruth hadn’t missed the irony of her situation, being in a sewer with heightened senses wasn’t exactly the best place to be. It’s not even that there was that much waste. The large round tunnels had narrow walkways on either side, and a wide and shallow trench of watered down blood trickled down the middle. The place still stunk, and the constant miasma of death hung permanently in the air. It didn't matter how much time passed, that stench didn't seem to fade.
The distant jeers of a loutish patrol group echoed down the sewer tunnel a few minutes later. Ruth homed in on the direction, and burst toward it in a frenzy of speed. Sewer patrol proved boring, and the guards down here had a tendency to gossip on their routes. Ruth learned fast that sticking close to the guards was valuable. One of these days she might overhear something that could help her to escape.
Her bare feet slapped against the stone with each quick step, quieting as she got closer. Ten minutes later, she had covered a distance which would have taken her an hour back when she was human.
This section of the tunnels opened into an underground viaduct. At the top of the large room, near its curved roof, there was a grid of hanging walkways, suspended in darkness. Ruth was on these walkways now, watching from the shadows, listening to the group of guards below her.
“Business as usual,” said a man with a graveled voice. “We need to find this fucking dog. Vangzali’s already pissed enough we’ve not got him yet.”
“She shouldn’t have let him escape in the first place,” a red haired guard said with a daring smile.
“We all agree on that one, but you be the one to fucking say it to her.”
“No thanks.” Red hair laughed. “I ain’t fucking bad-mouthing Vangzali's to her face. That bitch terrifies me.”
“She terrifies everyone in the Keep apart from the High Vistor. How do you think she got so high in rank?”
“There’s a meeting happening near here soon.” A thin limbed guard with blond hair said. “Vangzali is in it. It’s a big one. About destroying the families… that Draco guy. All the big stuff. The stuff they like to keep secret! They’re using the room under 3-G. We could use the grate underneath it and—”
“No,” Gravel voice said. “I'm not risking crucifixion just to eavesdrop some fucking meeting. That shit has nothing to do with us. We’re here to find this dog. Now go!”
The guards parted from the room, having agreed to meet back there within the hour. Ruth stayed in the walkways for a good ten minutes, making sure that no one was coming back. Satisfied she’d waited long enough, she dropped from the high ceiling, landing silently on the floor with her hands and feet.
Draco, Vangzali, 3-G…
Draco? She wondered if that referred to Ansel Draco, the vampire she’d met through her sister, Kat.
Ruth didn’t know much about him. Edmund, the vampire who turned her, had been hunting Draco—but they seemed to form an alliance at the end. Whatever that other stuff meant, Ruth got the impression that it would be worth her while checking it out too.
The large room had four doors, one on each wall, and each had markings painted on the side. She approached the door which led to section 3-G. A small thud came from the center of the room behind her and she turned on her heels to face it.
“You're thinking of checking out that meeting too then?” The stranger said.
Ruth clenched her fists, and her heart thundered in her chest. The crouched stranger stood from the floor slowly, lifting his head to look at Ruth with a smile. He wore the red jacket and trousers of the guards in the Keep, but his hair was long, blond and plaited in dreads. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. It was hard to tell from the low light and the distance, but he looked well built. The fabric stretched over his body, looking a few sizes too small—he'd clearly stolen the uniform.
“And who are you?” She asked.
“I’m the ‘dog’ the guards want.” The stranger stepped forward and smiled. There was still a good distance between them, and if she had to fight, Ruth was ready. She stared into his eyes, two circles of brilliant yellow, with a narrow black slit down the middle. They reminded her of an animal somehow.
“You’re not a vampire,” she said. “Just what in the hell are you?”
“An escaped prisoner, just like you.” The man took another step forward, but Ruth didn’t react. “My name is Logan Nash. You?”
“Call me cynical, Logan Nash. My mother always told me not to talk to strange men in sewers.”
Her skepticism pulled a throaty laugh from his chest. The casual warmth and timbre of his voice put her at ease a little. “Suit yourself Cynical. Should I call you cynical Cynthia, maybe? Maybe Synth… that would be a nice nickname.”
“Call me whatever the fuck you want. I won’t be around to hear it.” Ruth turned from the room, deciding that the man was harmless enough. She wanted to eavesdrop on this meeting and didn’t want to waste anymore time talking to this bonehead.
“Let me come with you,” Logan followed Ruth out of the sewer, walking a dozen paces behind her in the wide and shallow water trench.
“You’re not a vampire, I doubt you can keep up with me.”
A pocket of air clapped in the space on her right, followed by a horizontal sheet of blood red water. The sheet extended down the middle of the sewer ten yards in front of her, then it crashed to the floor again, the water gushing as it settled itself. There, stood with his arms crossed in the space before her, was Logan.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said while flashing an infuriatingly mischievous smile. She imagined he'd practiced that smile in the mirror for hours. It was a smile that hypnotized girls with low self-confidence, to Ruth it read: ‘I get what I want, because I’m good at manipulating people.’
“Just what the fuck are you?” She said, standing there with her mouth hanging open.
“Someone who has been following you for the last few days. I wanted to figure out if you we’re an enemy or not.”
“Days?!” Ruth said. No way that was possible. She had become a ninja of silence while down here. If someone followed her, she would have noticed it.
“Of course. From that abandoned maintenance room you’ve been using as a base, all the way to those fresh water pools you were bathing in earlier.”
Ruth’s face filled with red, this bastard had watched her bathe!?
“Well now I trust you even less. Watching a woman bathing doesn’t exactly lead me to believe you’re someone I can trust.”
“I wasn’t spying on you.” Logan said with a roll of his eyes. “I looked away when you were naked. Mostly.”
Mostly? Son of a bitch.
“Why are you following me then?”
“I told you, to see if I can trust you. I’m a prisoner here, just like you. Together, we might be able to get out of here.”
“There’s no way out of the Red Keep.” Ruth laughed. “Apart from the portals…” Portals that had 24 hour surveillance.
“Who brought you here?”
“A warden. Igo Kasper.”
Logan nodded. “Jago Vangzali brought me here. Have you heard of her?”
Ruth shook her head and took a step forward. “Only what I heard from those guards just now. Should I?”
“Vangzali is one of the worst fucking vampires in this place. She makes the High Vistor look like a kitten. She brought me to the Red Keep as a slave after betraying me back in the real world. I escaped her clutches a month ago, and I’ve been down here ever since then. Now I’m trying to get back to her.”
“Why?”
“You’re right that the only way out of the Keep is with the portals. Mostly. As it stands, a few senior vampires have personal keys that can get them in and out at any time. Vangzali has one, I know that for sure. She keeps it in a locket around her neck.”
“So we go to this meeting, kill her and use the locket to escape?”
Another hearty laugh came from Logan. “Fuck no, that would be instant death. If you understand one thing about Vangzali, understand this: she’s the most dangerous motherfucker I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, stealing her locket will take planning and stealth.”
“And what does this have to do with me?”
“You want to get out as well don’t you? I figure we can work together on this.”
“And why should I trust you?”
“I’ve been watching you all this time lady. If I wanted to kill you, I could have. The fact of the matter is, I noticed something peculiar about you the other day… and I think we can use it to get Vangzali’s locket.”
“You noticed something about me? What do you mean by that?”
“I’ll explain later. The important thing now is that we get to this meeting on time. Any stray tidbits we can get out of Vangzali’s mouth will help us. You coming?”
Ruth stared into his curious yellow eyes as she considered her options. Trust was the one thing she was running low on right now, and teaming up with Logan called for every spare ounce. She realized she didn't have that many options, pushed her fears to the back of her mind and nodded. “Fine. But if you try anything funny, I swear I’ll drop you faster than a cannon ball.”
Logan held up his hands. “Hey, I’ve seen that tight body of yours. It’s clear you’ve got the muscle to defend yourself.”
“You ever been hit by a girl?”
“Many times.” Logan smiled. “What’s your name anyway Synth?”
“Ruth.” She said after a moment’s apprehension.
Another megawatt smile. Logan stepped forward and held out his hand. She grabbed it, feeling a rush of warmth up and down her body. “Welcome to the team Ruth, now let’s go crash this meeting.”