Death After Death-Chapter 221: Madness

It had been a long time since Simon had been truly stunned by anything, but the terrible trap that the vampiress had put him in had been completely unexpected. “I-I’m not going to hurt you girls,” he reassured himself as he sat down against the door, as far from them as possible. “I’m so sorry that I got you involved in this.”

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“What happened?” the younger one whined. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty. “You said you were going to slay this witch! You promised us!”

“And I very nearly did,” Simon nodded tiredly, trying to ignore his rising guilt along with the frantic way that the hearts of both women were beating in their chests. That was even worse than smelling them. The sound of warm blood flowing through their bodies made his stomach growl as his body slowly came back to life and prepared to feed.

“This wouldn’t have happened!” the girl screeched. “It would never have happened if—”

“That’s enough, Emma,” the older girl chastised her sister. She might have been twenty-five, but it was hard to say. Simon felt so old these days that even forty-year-olds looked young to him. “He did what he could. What happened to Papa and Mama wasn’t his fault.”

“What happened to them?” Simon asked. “Freya… the vampiress, she killed them?”

“In front of us,” the older sister nodded. “She ripped the farm apart looking for something called a portal, but she couldn’t find it.”

Simon sighed at that. She’d listened to Simon as she’d forced him to tell her everything, but apparently, she didn’t understand. While he didn’t know exactly where the portal to the next level was, he was pretty sure it was on the farm that belonged to these two girls or in the castle, depending on what exactly this level wanted him to do. No matter where it was, though, it wouldn’t appear without him.

He sighed. The mere fact that Freya had picked out this farm because of that fact made this a lot more his fault than it had been a moment ago. He had no idea what the right answer was now, but he knew he didn’t have long to decide. He couldn’t look at either of the girls without getting hungrier, but looking away from them didn’t help much either. He was fairly sure that this was more than he could tolerate for very long.

Today, he could handle it, and maybe tomorrow he could too, but if he had to wake up day after day to the sound of beating hearts and the sight of beautiful girls with throbbing carotid arteries, he knew he was going to snap. Even if he didn’t, in a few days, they'd die of dehydration. He doubted Freya would make it that easy, though.

She’ll draw this out, he told himself. She’ll let them waste away for a month as they starve to death in front of me. The more they suffer, the more I suffer, and that’s what she wants.

He needed to make a decision and then act fast. Unfortunately, the older sister was faster than his sluggish brain and made up her mind before he’d even figured out what all his options were. “I want you to do it,” she said calmly. “I want you to kill me. It’s the only way to save Emma.”

“No! Ara, you can’t!” the other girl cried out.

Simon only sat there quietly, his face in his hands as he tried to block out both of their tearful voices. Their suffering only made his thirst burn brighter inside of him.

They continued like that for several minutes before Simon wiped the drool from his mouth and said, “I meant what I said before. Both of you are getting out of here.”

“How?” Ara asked. “If you could have escaped so easily, wouldn’t you have done so already?”

Simon nodded ruefully, but before he could agree with her point, Emma said, “Why can’t you just use your magic? Like you did to heal Papa?”

“Because I…” Simon trailed off as his world spun on those implications.

For a moment, his mind had tried to tell him that the only way they could all escape was if he drank their blood and then used it to fuel his magic. In theory, that might work, but that was just the thirst talking. In reality, there was an imminent, more practical solution: he could just teach them how to cast a couple spells necessary to break free from this dungeon.

While he hated the idea that he’d be shortening their lives if he did this, it was the only way to save them. He thought about it for several seconds, though, before he spoke again. He had to because every other path led right back to drinking his fill, and honestly, once he started to devour the blood of either girl, he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to stop.

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“Because I can’t…” he continued cautiously. “But you can. You both can, I think.”

“We can what?” Ara asked. “Use magic? Doesn’t that damn your soul as badly as being a vampire?”

“Magic does nothing to harm your soul. It, but it burns your life away one spell at a time,” he explained. “It's dangerous stuff, and I’ve never taught anyone before for that reason, but it might be your only way to get out of here.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to to save Emma,” Ara said with conviction. Emma agreed, too, but Simon was a little more concerned about her temperament.

He gave it a few minutes thought and then began his explanation. He told the girls how imagination, more than anything else, was what channeled the energy that they summoned. “To speak a word of power correctly is to summon its energy, but without a tight grip, it could go wild.” As he told them that, he recalled his early experiences with the greater word of fire. It was not the most forgiving teacher, and he’d burned out his throat more than once by failing to harness it properly.

Still, he’d already decided that he wasn’t going to give them the greater word. Even normal words would do enough damage to them. They would practice with lesser words, then escape with regular words, and somewhere in the chaos, Simon would die. It was the perfect plan.

At first, the only good all of his explanations did was to give the girls hope and keep his hunger at bay. While he was focusing on teaching them, he couldn’t very well focus on ignoring their heartbeats, and that noise taunted him relentlessly.

Fortunately, by the time he was done with the theory behind all of this, just before sunrise, teaching them had opened his eyes on a couple of issues. He’d had whole lifetimes to think about some aspects of magic, but he'd never actually tried to teach anyone before, and the results were illuminating. Mostly, it was how fast they were able to learn the basics. That left him questioning a lot of his assumptions.

Speaking a couple words perfectly wasn’t so hard, and though they both complained about the pain and the taste of sulfur after a few attempts, they cast their first spell with less effort than he did, and after a few tries of “Aufvarum Barom,” there were two tiny specks of light floating there in the absolute darkness of their cell. Ara’s was an ivory mote not much bigger than a firefly, and Emma’s was a diffuse cloud of glowing blue glitter not much bigger than his fist. Neither of them put out as much light as a torch, but it was a start. It was undeniable proof that magic could be taught to someone who couldn’t see the auras.

The Unspoken were right, he realized as he watched those motes drift throughout the room. At least a little. If this knowledge got out in a major way, it would sweep through the world like wildfire. That was a dumb realization, though, he decided after a moment. It already is sweeping through the world, just not this small part of the world.

Simon didn’t try to explain any of that to the girls. He merely congratulated them and told them, “It's an excellent first step.” He promised to teach both of them more in the morning, but in return, he extracted a promise from each of them that neither would try to use any magic while he slumbered. “Tomorrow, you will learn the word of force and perhaps one or two more but do not practice without me. Not only could you alert the guards, but you could do serious damage to yourselves.”

The last part was mostly a lie. As near as Simon could tell, screwing up a spell was a little hard on the throat, and he was pretty sure the energy involved went to waste, but that was about it. Still, they didn’t know that, and while he wouldn’t mind if they tried to kill him in his sleep, he’d rather help them escape first.

Torpor took him a few minutes later. He had no choice in the matter. He could feel the sun rising, and that terrible light was enough to make his half-starved form curl up into a ball like a beaten dog. He would have done anything to escape it, and every time he went through this, he wondered how that third vampire had managed to put up any fight at all while there was light in the sky.

The following night, their situation was unchanged, yet he still didn’t start immediately. He couldn’t, not when he knew that Freya would have to come and see if he’d given in yet. Sure enough, less than an hour into the evening, that mist reentered their cell, and she materialized.

“Both of them are still breathing?” she taunted. “I have to say, I’m a little impressed. You have more willpower than I gave you credit for, wizard.”

Simon wasn’t sure if that last word was a not-so-subtle hint that she knew what he was doing, but it didn’t matter. It was their only option. He didn’t try to sleuth that out; he just pretended that it was all he could do to resist killing those girls and stuck to short answers with the occasional hiss or long look at Emma or Ara.

Freya was amused by that, but when it became apparent that he was not, in fact, going to give in, she left. “Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow,” she said before she drifted away through the cracks in the door.

After she was gone, they got to work immediately. This was the night he wanted to escape before either girl was too weakened by hunger or thirst, but if they weren’t ready yet, then it would have to be tomorrow instead.

“Either just before dawn tonight or just after sunset tomorrow,” he explained. “We either get you out then, or we die trying.”

Simon gave them both a crash course on lesser force and fire after that. Force was for breaking their manacles and the door, while fire was for any guards they happened to encounter between here and the gate.

Both of them learned those words as quickly as the light, but he was a little concerned with how sloppy the lines in the sand were when they used force. Using small amounts of force effectively meant using it in very small lines, thinner than a sword blade. Both girls seemed more comfortable wielding sledgehammers instead, which was inefficient. Sledgehammers would need greater force, and they might well break their wrists in the process.

Still, as dawn approached, he directed them on what to do to break free. They needed to move, now while he could still resist devouring them. His crash course would have to be enough.