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A smile slowly spreads across his lips. “Hmmm. Well, you certainly seem like you believe in your sister. It’s funny, Kaleid, after she left, I never heard you mention her name. Like Solon, she was as dead to you as she was to me. And yet…here she is.”
Skarde fixes his gaze on his daughter now and her eyes go wide, her body starting to tremble. Her fear is so visceral that I feel it inside me, how badly she wants to turn and run and never return.
But she can’t. She stays in place as Skarde calmly walks toward her.
Walks behind her.
Her eyes widen further, so much shining white against the pale blue, darting from side to side, but she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t move as her father stands right behind her, looking every inch the killer.
“You know I’m pretty good at reading my own kind,” Skarde says, his voice turning into a purr. “I can read emotions like I’m reading thoughts. Your emotions are all over the place, daughter.” He closes his eyes, breathing in deep through his nose. “So much adrenaline and fear.”
He opens his eyes and he’s looking straight at me now as he places his hands on either side of Natalia’s head. “I understand, of course. How intimidating I must be. Still, I can’t help but think that your feelings are betraying why you’re really here. How afraid you are that you’ll be…caught.”
Skarde brings his fingers over her eyes. “Perhaps if I take a closer look.” He smiles at me over Natalia’s shoulder and says, “Don’t be alarmed if my appearance changes, Lenore. I’ll always be whoever you want me to be.”
Then he snarls, showing fangs, his handsome face fading away into a gray one so gaunt that it’s like there’s only a strip of flesh between him and his skull. His eyes are round balls in the deep sockets, his teeth without lips or gums, just a monstrous row of fangs that belong on a shark.
Kaleid screams, trying to make a move for Skarde but he can’t, he’s frozen in place, his arm outstretched trying desperately to reach for her.
And now I see why.
Skarde presses his long, boney fingers into Natalia’s eye sockets until her eyeballs fall out like red grapes, hanging by a thread of muscle. She’s screaming in horror, I’m screaming, Kaleid is screaming, and yet none of it is stopping him as he drives his fingers deeper down, down, down until he’s reaching into the depths of her skull.
And being a vampire, she doesn’t die easily.
She’s still screaming, writhing in agony, the endless shrieks filling my brain until I know I’ll never sleep again without hearing them.
And Skarde keeps going, until his fingers have busted through all the bone and he’s able to grip with his hands in the middle of her face, reminding me of someone trying to eat a lobster tail, having to break apart the shell first before they get to the meat.
He smiles at me, a warning, and then he starts to pull her face apart.
Natalia screams and screams until her face is ripped down the middle, her skull coming apart, her nose, her mouth, her chin, all splitting in two.
Then the screaming stops but her father doesn’t.
He keeps pulling her apart, until guts and muscle and veins and bone are being stretched like taffy, until her entire body is completely torn into two pieces and then discarded into two sickening lumps on the floor.
He looks to me, then Kaleid. “Now you know what I do when I find loved ones aren’t being truthful. Are you sure you standby all the statements you’ve made earlier, Kaleid?”
Kaleid’s face is paler than I’ve ever seen, his eyes brimming with tears, body shaking slightly from the onslaught of horror. “I’m sure,” he manages to say, his words coming through in a whisper.
Skarde observes him for a moment, then, when finally satisfied, he looks back to me and his face morphs into the handsome one he had before, all sparkling blue eyes and a great jawline. “And you, Lenore. Well, there’s no hiding your intentions. You want me dead. I don’t blame you. Seeing what you saw doesn’t help, does it? They say there are only three ways to kill a vampire, but did you know that I can do whatever I want to them and it still counts? Call it a benefit of being born from the Dark One. But it doesn’t really matter, not in the end. No one said my bride would be a willing one. All they said is that she’d be a vampire with the power of a witch and with black magic flowing through her veins. They never said you’d love me. They never said you’d bend. But oh, my bride, I have ways of making you bend.”
