Demon’s Cry Rubies

Prologue: Fire and Ash

I think I’m trying\ to save the world \ for you…

Though only mid-day, the skies now hung low and foreboding, dark as weathered steel. Thunder blurted and snarled amongst the condensing miasma, and twice she thought she spotted the hoary Tempest-Stallions of the mythical gods, raging across the backlit canopy of the clouds, the wheel’s of his chariot rolling out an unsteady cadence on the cobblestones of the sky. Then began the rain. The rain was without beginning, nor end, an impatient drumming of fingers on the grass and decaying mould. The rain drove relentlessly against the long-faded and weather-beaten ebon shutters of the begrimed tenant house, causing them to flap like restless crows rousted from their brooding reveries upon twisted and forsaken boughs of trees. The building itself groaned in voiced disapproval. Inside the building, florescent lighting flared sporadically, as if they were colossal lightening bugs, held by a potent adhesive to the vaulted, and peeling, ceiling.

An infant wailed within the dim lighting of the diminutive apartment, waving minute fists about in the air, its small face growing quite crimson with the effort of expelling of its oxygen from its lungs in a beseeching cry. “In a moment, love, a moment,” called Lúthien, running a petite hand, suddenly gone quite pale, down the length of an upset chair’s leg. The chair was old and tired, its pallid mahogany paint peeling and flaking off to settle in the sands of time well trod by hurrying feet. Deep grooves had been worn into the crossbar, where weary feet and moved fore and aft over it in times of mirth and the pure concentration of narration of a tale. There came a tremendous crack, and the chair leg hung loosely in Lúthien’s right hand. Lúthien settled upon the floor, crossing her right leg over her left in such a manner that her right foot nestled against the calf of her left leg, and vise versa, a meditative yoga position to mentally prepare her for the task at hand.

From within the folds of her black and faded leather pant’s backmost pocket, Lúthien withdrew a penknife, whose battered and scarred outside casing betrayed many years of service. With the deftness of an old pro, Lúthien thumbed the catch until the desired glint of silver was revealed. She was never aware that the silver blade’s flawless tip was now tinted crimson, and that a bead of blood formed and swelled upon her thumb, mirroring many faceted crimson reflections of the small apartment. Lúthien began to shave the chair leg with deft, sure strokes, until all rough or uneven surfaces of the wood had been smoothed, and the splinters nothing more than a memory. With that accomplished, she began to carve the wood with brusque, downward strokes, periodically rotating the leg until the wood tapered into a perfectly symmetrical point. Again the infant wailed. “A moment, sweets. Just one moment.” Lúthien’s mind began to wander, shying away from the task at hand, and instead began to wander down the corridors of her mind, seeking a door in which contented memories lurked.

Again the little infant sounded, wailing out her displeasure so long and loud and forcefully that the lonesome and irritable old man the next door over took up his broom and began to drum its handle stick against the wall. The intensity of the thumps startled the infant into sullen grunts and whimpers, and it gazed round with wide eyes. Lúthien was oblivious as milk from her breast began to seep through the thin material of her tee shirt. “Devin, can’t you….?”

Devin. Devin was gone. She must accept that……

“Lúthien! Do pay attention!” Devin snapped crossly, as his blade nearly took her in the vulnerable section where her collarbone and spinal cord. Lúthien lithely danced away from the upswing of his blade, and flippantly set him on his toes with the point of her own sword. The tempered blades of the Slayer and her Guardian seemed to the unkeen eye to be two languid hoary serpents, elongated necks wrapped in an ardently lethal embrace as they partook of the fallow gold bars of life that flowed from the heavens. However, now and again the serpents would part, silver tongues a fathomless clamor of foreign dreams. Then, rearing back tapered hoary heads, they struck ceaselessly at each other, railing at the other with steel and iron ensorcelled dreams held fast in quicksilver maws, before once again locking in that restless stillness, as Slayer and Guardian set their blades to chasing each other about the summer skies.

Devin advanced upon her, swinging his blade in a manner meant to drive Lúthien back and mind her footwork. Instead of parrying, she cast her blade downwards, severing the head of a wild columbine, and sending to spin indolently in the atmosphere between them before coming to rest at Devin’s feet. “For you!” She said, laughing as freely as a nymph. Devin’s head plunged slightly and his eyes widened, taken aback. The corners of his lips tugged upward, then won their battle as a smile settled in place of his disapproving scowl, albeit with some obvious reluctance. “Concentrate, or I’ll be forced to double your training regiment for three weeks.” Lúthien, despite her best efforts, could not suppress her laughter this time. For when she did attempt to stifle her giggles, a most unflattering and sporadic snorting and grunting came out in its place. Exasperated, Devin placed folded fists on his hips and stared at her with an expression of exasperated affection. “What, may I ask, is so funny?” He demanded. “Your cross words don’t go with your pretty face,” she said. “ ‘Pretty face’ “, Devin repeated, his eyebrows threatening to disappear entirely into the crimson crows-nest that was his hair.

“Yes,” Lúthien answered, wondering if she had at last overstepped her bounds with her Guardian. So saying, she held her sword upright, as though to parry not another blade, but her Guardian’s next words. She swung her blade upwards, and caught Devin full across the chest, shredding the thin material of his “Wife-Beater” shirt. Even as she watched, a slender beading of blood promptly traced the shallow wound. She suddenly had a foolish, arbitrary, impulse to cross over to him and lick the wound clean. Either that, or kiss him. She had not yet decided which. She wrinkled her nose, and gave her head a shake, rather like a horse beset by flies. What’s the matter with you? She demanded of herself. Stop it. Suddenly, as swift as the wildest quicksilver, Devin ensnared her hand, and exerted enough force so that the sword clattered from her hand and onto the warm jade of the grass. He soon released her wrist in favor of her waist, which he seizes, and drew her close, and forcefully brought his lips to hers. For an instant, she thought about making a sound of protest within her throat thought of drawing away. But only for an instant. Time and space whirled round and lost meaning.

This, too, however, lasted only an instant. Devin wrenched away suddenly. “This isn’t right,” he said, words coming thick and harsh and rushed. “You’re the Slayer, and I’m your Guardian. You have a sacred duty to mankind.” It was what he had told her since she that fateful day when he had escorted her from her parent’s guardianship. She was, quite frankly, tired of hearing it. “How can it be wrong?” She challenged. “When it feels like this?” “But your destiny,” protested Devin. “You,” Lúthien interrupted, “are my destiny.” So it was that neither voiced protest as they retired to their single, shared bedroom.

Lúthien surfaced from her reverie, and beheld a blonde, tow-headed little boy with sleep-bleary eyes cradling her daughter, cooing nonsense to her, whispering to her, placing clumsy kisses onto her cheeks and tiny, waving fists. She had long stopped wailing, and was gazing up with wide ocean-hued eyes at her brother, with an expression of rapt adoration upon her face, his proffered index finger held fast in her minute fists. Lúthien smiled wearily, and began a series of mad-cap leaps and feints and jabs, her shadow leaping from wall to wall, as if it had suddenly found a will of its own.

So it was that days turned to weeks, weeks transcended into months, months, in turn, into years. Lúthien and Devin reared two children, a son, whom they named Eclipse, due to the darkened depths and intensity of his ebon hued eyes, and a daughter, named Fëanor. Often, Devin would hold their son aloft, so that their son may better peer into his sister’s crib. “What do you think?” Devin would tease. “Doesn’t she look like a wood nymph? Maybe our real baby was switched with an Elf!” “Don’t say that,” Lúthien would scold, mock-slapping at him. “She’s your baby sister.” Eclipse wrinkled his nose. “I think she looks like screaming raw meat, most of the time.” At this, Devin would toss back his head and roar out laughter. Even Lúthien was hard pressed to suppress a grin. “Well, you have little room to talk. You looked much the same when you were her age.”

There came a knock at the door. “Who is it?” called Devin, the laughter still in his voice. There came a pause. “Rupert West.” Lúthien and Devin exchanged frowns. Neither was familiar with that name. Still, Devin crossed over to the door, unlocked it, and flung it wide. “Who is dat?” Inquired Eclipse, eyes bright with inductiveness. “Shh. We’ll have to see, won’t we?” Lúthien whispered. “But who IS dat?” demanded Eclipse. “Lúthien Di Diablo?” inquired a worn-out looking man in a drab gray suit. “Lúthien Brookwalter,” she corrected, using her married name. “I am Rupert West, your new Guardian. The Slayer is dead. You have been Called.” Stunned silence filled the minute complex. “I….I am her Guardian. She has no need of another,” Rupert West turned eyes as gray as steel and equally cold upon him. “Devin Brookwalter, my associates shall escort you back to the Guardian Council, where you will be required to stand trail for your….offense.”

“Offense?” Repeated Lúthien. “What is this offense that you speak of? Is loving your wife, having a family, an offense?” She demanded. West found he could not comfortably meet her eyes. “Yes,” he answered stiffly, opting to answer his loafers rather than the enraged Slayer. So saying, he mentioned for the two men at the threshold to flank Devin. One man seizes Devin’s shoulder and spins him round, and the other deprived his arms of his daughter, placing her, wailing, back into her crib, before he secured his wrists with handcuffs, not seeming to have trace of regret when Devin flinched as the catch pinched the flesh of his wrist. Eclipse leaned forward, eyes brimming, whimpering. “What’s happening, Mama? Where’s daddy going?” “Shhhh,” Lúthien whispered into his fair locks, rocking him back and forth. “What if he refuses to go?” Lúthien spoke up, suddenly brazen. West’s associates moved closer, their body language giving forth subtle threats. “He can not refuse,” West said, with a note of dangerous finality.

“You’re not really going to leave us, are you?” Asked Lúthien though she knew the answer before it passed his lips. Devin gazed up at her, eyes flat and distant, as though his soul was momentarily absent. “I have no choice. But I will come back for you, I swear it.” Lúthien had a passing, inane, impulse to stand up and go to him, to embrace him for what was likely to be the very last time she would ever do so. But that was just a passing thought. They both knew, gazing solely at each other, that if she did make such rash a move, she would never let go. And she must remain strong. For their children’s sake. Devin turned his gaze to that of Eclipse, and knelt as far as his captors would permit, to better look him in the eye. “Daddy has to go away for a bit. Be a good boy and look after your mother, and our little nymph.” Eclipse’s chin quivered, but he returned his father’s solemn look and said, “Yes, daddy.” And then he was gone…

Lúthien crossed over to her children. She knelt until she was at eye-level with Eclipse, and then uncorked the bottle of Holy Water she had been loosely gripping in her left hand. Then, she dipped a pallid fingertip into the chill liquid, and traced the pattern of a cross upon their foreheads. “Be strong, my darlings. I pray that this will be enough to protect you,” she whispered. That was when the screaming commenced. Lúthien did not gaze about in an obtuse manner. She could quite effortlessly pin-point the source of the agonized sounds. They came from just beyond her door. She crossed over to the door, unlatched it, and swung it wide. A body came with it. No-no a body, she corrected herself. Life had not yet left this one. She was a child-barely out of the pre-pubescent years, still dressed in a simple white nightgown, now stained crimson with her own blood. She was secured to the doorframe by iron railroad spikes. That had been the true source of the dull thumps heard towards dusk. Blood ebbed from her palms, where two iron spikes had been driven through the flat of them. Two more pegged a few inches of the flesh of her legs to the door, and final one ran her through her stomach. The telltale marks of vampire bites ran the length of her neck, wrists, and even one on her thigh. Blood trailed indolently down the length of the doorframe, to pool on te dirt-begrimed floor, and began to stealthy creep over the threshold.

Lúthien tore her eyes away from the carnage with no little difficulty. And there, standing upon her threshold, was the one responsible for the atrocity. “Slayer.” “Vampire. Well, now that we know each other,” she began. But her heart simply was not in it. Not with the lifeforce of a raven-haired innocence ebbing away upon her door. “Come and play,” taunted the vampire. “No.” No?” “No,” Lúthien repeated, slowly working loose the stake she carried in her back pocket. The vampire gave a smirk and arched a brow. Damn you, she thought to herself. Why do you always have to find that so attractive? “As you wish,” the vampire replied, and so saying, brought the limp wrist of the youth up to his lips, and if to kiss it. However, those pallid lips parted, and his fangs slid forth. He sank aforementioned fangs into the girl’s wrist with excruciating slowness, his eyes never leaving Lúthien.

Lúthien snarled, rage intensifying. She wrenched the stake free, and lifted it high, intending to hurl it across the threshold, and into the vile creature’s heart. She was never aware that Eclipse had crept ever closer, until he was at the threshold…and over. Eclipse soon found himself the broacher of the invisible sanctuary. The vampire never seemed to move so Lúthien was somewhat taken aback to see her son cradled in his arms. She could only stare, in mute, transfixed, horror, as he creature inclined his head and once again parted his lips, and sank his fangs into the soft, vulnerable, nape of Eclipse. Lúthien gives tongue to a scream; a sound to chill the marrow, for it is the sound of a broken soul echoing back like ripples in a pond from the ninth circle of Hell. That cry is taken up by Eclipse’s cry of “Mama! Mama!” And Fëanor’s wail from inside. Three voices, one broken heart. Lúthien, rather like a tranquilized she-wolf awakening to find her cubs gone, sprang forward, heedless and enraged, as she passed their invisible barrier of safety.

“So you join the fray!” Crowed the vampire. “You at last become the Slayer!” He danced away from her ill-timed and inept lunge, leering at her, his fangs dripping the blood of her son. Fëanor’s wail intensified from within. “Your child’s blood is sweet,” the vampire mused to himself, again sidestepping the Slayer’s grief and rage-stricken lunge. Eclipse had long given up screaming, and now hung limp in his tormentor’s embrace. His eyes were excruciatingly dimming, and to observe it, was like being seated in front of a car as it spluttered and faltered, periodically shutting off completely at inexplicable intervals, watching the faltering afterglow of its dimming headlights, until there was no longer a flicker of life remaining. “Intoxicating, the were excruciatingly dimming, and to observe it, was like being seated in front of a car as it spluttered and faltered, periodically shutting off completely at inexplicable intervals, watching the faltering afterglow of its dimming headlights. death of a child,” the vampire commented. “His last moments were most sweet. Most sweet indeed.” With the scream of a tormented soul with nothing further to loose, Lúthien leapt at the foul creature, wrapped her arms round the startled being as though gathering him to her like she once had the child in his arms.

The vampire dropped Eclipse in favor of Lúthien, returning the embrace, and inclining his head towards her nape. As the last remainder of her strength ebbed with the last flicker of her life, she brought the stake she still held upwards, and plunged it deep into the back of the vampire. So it was that Lúthien forfeited her life for her child, and her flaccid form came to rest upon the very vampire whose un-life she had claimed.

Hours later, as the sky just began to blush, Eclipse rose and looked round. There was a twinge of pain upon his forehead, and he absently reached up to discover the source of the pain, only to discover blackened flesh in the shape of a cross burned into his flesh. As the sun slunk sullenly across the threshold, it discovered the body of the vampire and his mother. They began to burn. As the crimson and gold flames began to dance hesitantly at the threshold, Eclipse darted into the apartment, shying away from the window. He crept to the crib, and found his sister grazing up at him with solemn eyes. He gathered her to him, inhaled the scent of innocence. “It’s okay. I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you…ever.” Fëanor giggled and blew a spit bubble, as if understanding his words. Then she smiled wide, and spoke a word of her own; her first. “Vampire.”