Death After Death-Chapter 219: Spilling His Guts

Simon spent the rest of that night telling her everything she wanted to know. On some topics, he was happy to be as forthcoming as he could be. That was especially true when it came to proclaiming his innocence regarding the worst things she accused him of. On others, though, she had to drag the words out of him one painful sentence at a time. It was those Freya delighted the most in.

He learned some things, too, in the course of their discussion. He learned that it was not his spell that had caused her vampirism but a bite she’d gotten later that day when she was saying goodbye to her boyfriend Kel, and he gotten free again.

She’d recovered from that one, too, thanks to the lingering effects of his healing magic, but the hunger started almost immediately after that. Within two weeks, she could no longer tolerate the light, and within three, she was murdering strangers just to keep the terrible hunger that was growing inside of her in check.

She hadn’t known what was going on then, of course, but as she made her way east, she heard stories of similar creatures and followed them to try to learn what it was she’d become. That was almost enough to make him feel sorry for her. At least, until she started to enjoy the killing.

“I came all the way to this blasted castle, though, and no one was even here!” she growled when she got to that part.

She’d journeyed hundreds of miles over unfamiliar areas where she didn’t even speak the language, and she’d arrived at the source of the rumors only to find the castle abandoned at the previous owners long dead. She couldn’t even read the writing in the basement that was supposed to tell the story.

“I had Hidaran read it and explain it to me once, but it just seems to be another version of the blasted story that lured me here,” she sighed.

Simon had never heard this story nor found it in the Unspoken’s forbidden library. If the original really had been written down there, he would have loved to read it, but the way that Freya told it, it sounded like a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, there was a powerful witch, and her husband was dying of a wasting disease beyond the power of herbs or even spells to cure. So, she sought more power and used forbidden blood magic to save his life at the cost of six others. That only worked for a time, though, and after a week of howling in pain at the light of day and crying out at night in hunger, he finally escaped his bonds and feasted on her flesh. Apparently, he went on to rule the region for decades after that but was slain by heroes long before Freya turned into a monster.

It would have been an amusing tale if not for the fact that he was in almost the same situation now. He hadn’t killed anyone or brought anyone back to life with forbidden magic. However, after his experiments with goblins, perhaps using a magic circle to heal someone wasn’t the best idea when the environment was saturated with death.

It was very easy for Simon to believe his magic had set the conditions for this to happen exactly as she’d described them. The ground around that barn had been littered with the corpses of zombies that had been attacked by his incessant hammering, and magical contagion was definitely a thing.

She wouldn’t hear any of that, though. She had no interest in any explanation except for the one where he admitted to doing all of this on purpose.

That deluded certainty carried over into every aspect of this awful conversation. Simon found all of that easier to believe than she found any part of his story about how it was they knew each other. She scoffed or mocked him every time he brought it up.

“You mean to tell me that you and I were once married? In another life,” she laughed. “Preposterous! As if I would ever sleep with a bridge troll like you.”

Simon had long moved past insults affecting him. In some lives, he was handsome, and in others, he was not. It just depends on what torments he put himself through. Freya’s words stung, though, even though he knew this wasn’t the woman he loved.

“You have forbidden me to lie,” Simon insisted. “Why do you believe the other things I say but doubt this?”

“What is you think you’ve said that I believe?” she countered. “I believe you’ve ruined my wonderful little life for however long it takes me to undo all of this damage. I believe that you’ve killed my men, and I believe you are in possession of terrible magics, but that is all. Everything else you say is only to amuse me.”

“Then why not kill me and be done with it?” Simon snapped.

“Kill you?” she laughed. “Even if you did not seem to believe you would come back to life in a fresh, new body, I would never dream of killing the man who has done this to me. You will suffer for as long as my rage remains, and I assure you that’s longer than this castle will stand. How long did you say you were turned to stone again?”

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“I don’t know, perhaps a century or a little less?” he admitted.

“Well, then I hope for your sake you aren’t telling the truth because I intend to keep you imprisoned much longer than that,” she said with a cruel laugh.

Simon’s heart sank. Not at the idea of being imprisoned again. He could make his peace with that in time. It was the idea of becoming another monster that upset him. He still lived with the memories of a zombie’s eternal hunger. He didn’t need anything else to add to his nightmares.

There was nothing he could do to stop it, though. He couldn’t even stop telling this Freya every gory detail about all the other Freyas he’d known. “You should understand, then,” she said with a smile when he finished the story about how he murdered the man who killed her. “You got your revenge, and now I’m getting mine.”

The second time she drank his blood, it was to the very brink of death. She said something cruel then. He could tell from her expression, but he was too enervated to hear what the words were. He still knew what was coming next, and when she ripped open her own wrist with her teeth, she drizzled her poisonous black blood across his face.

Still, he refused to open his mouth to drink it. He didn’t have to. He couldn’t hear her dread commands or focus on her eyes. Instead, he simply lay there on the stone floor of the tower and waited to die. He knew Freya wouldn’t let that happen, of course, and instead of letting it all go back, she picked him up by the breastplate, kissing him hard with her cold, dead tongue and forcing as much of that awful blood into his mouth as she could.

Her evil smile was the very last memory that he had before his body started to burn with a terrible pain. Every last one of his blood vessels started to burn as his heart continued to slow down. It was a nightmare, but the paralysis that came with it made it impossible to do anything.

Simon was surrounded by darkness until his heart slowly came to a stop, one slow beat at a time. At the end, it seemed like those beats were hours apart. Then, there was only burning. Somewhere far above him, he could feel the warmth of the sun. He even feared it despite the fact that he wanted to die, which was a singularly strange sensation.

When he woke next, he didn’t know if hours or days had passed, but he was alone in a locked room somewhere beneath the castle. He was sure he’d seen it before in his search, but his mind was too jumbled to remember the layout very clearly.

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All he knew was that he was naked in the dark and as weak as he might have been if he’d spent days in bed with a fever. He was also still in pain, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in some of his other lives, and he tuned it out as the background hum it was.

It took him a few minutes to figure out that he was able to see without any light whatsoever. The world was reduced to a flat gray place, but he could see quite clearly, and he could see that there was no way out. Though he’d wrecked the place, there were stones stacked on the other side of the door, and it resisted his every effort to knock it down.

“That’s okay,” Simon told himself. “I don’t need to escape. Dying here is fine.”

He reached up to his neck and grasped the pendant tightly. There was just long enough of a delay for him to wonder why it wasn’t working before it detonated. It was less like the grenade it was supposed to be, and more like a small fire cracker. It hurt like hell, and it mangled his throat, but a few seconds later he was good as new.

Normally that would have been a handy trick, but today that was exactly the opposite of what he wanted. “Maybe things like this don’t work with vampire blood,” he rasped as he recovered.

He took a deep breath and centered himself. Then he whispered, “Gervuul Meiren,” willing himself to blow apart into a thousand flaming chunks of dead flesh.

But nothing happened. It was strange and disturbing. There wasn’t even the taste of sulfur or the feeling of essence moving through his body. It was like nothing happened.

Simon tried again, but the result was the same. He tried a regular word of fire after that, with the same effect. It wasn’t until he tried lesser fire that he felt even the hint of something stirring inside of him, and it was only when he finally tried lesser lesser fire that he was able to make a single spark appear in his cupped hands for a few seconds before it faded.

That tiny spell left him feeling weakened, and he sat back down to contemplate his situation.

“Well, that’s fucked,” he said aloud as he considered the new problem. “When Helades explained that years of my life fueled magic, I never took it quite so literally.”

He’d only just started to consider this problem, but he was almost certain that the reason he couldn’t cast spells was because he had no life energy to fuel them. He was no longer alive after all.

He could move and speak. It was also clear that the vampires he’d fought had some magic in their nature, but wherever that was in him, it was inaccessible to his spells as he’d cast them, which was more than frustrating.

Simon considered that after he’d fed on someone, he might get enough energy back to cast a spell or two. It was a grisly thought and the very last thing he wanted, but he wasn’t sure what else he could do. He should be able to stake his own heart. He was pretty sure there was no rule against that.

It was only after he’d decided on that course of action, though, that he realized why he was in such an empty, boring room. If she’d given him a coffin, he could have smashed it and found a piece big enough to end him.

“Well, weak as I am, is it possible to die other ways?” he wondered aloud.

Simon had no idea, but he decided it was worth a try. He forced himself to his feet, then staggering over to the wall, he smashed his head against the rough stone wall as hard as he could. It was painful, but he managed to do it twice. Then, he heard something crack and fell to the ground. His head was in agony, and he was no longer able to feel his legs. A few minutes later, he was mostly fine again. He just needed a minute to catch his breath before he could stand again.