Dimitri's Point of View in Frostbite (Vampire Academy) (Book 2)

Part 4

I glanced around the classroom, mainly at the girls. They looked as if they were about to fall out of their chairs they were so awed by the young guardians looks. Each of them were swooning with wide adoring eyes. I felt a pang of jealousy inside my chest. Hoping that Rose didn't share the same expression. And from this angle I couldn't tell if she did or not. Which made that jealous feeling tighten.

It was Janine's turn next. By the posture of Rose's back I could tell that she despised hearing a word from her mother. And as she launched into her story Rose's posture grew darker and darker.

Janine talked about how her charge, Lord Szelsky, and his wife had attended a ball put on by another prominent royal family. Several Strigoi had been lying in wait. Janine had discovered one, promptly staked it, and then alerted the other guardians present. With their help, she hunted down the other Strigoi lurking around and performed most of the killings.

"It wasn't easy." She explained, she had a briskness to the way she spoke, making her statement far from sounding like bragging. "There were three others on the premises. At the time, that was considered an unusually large number to be working together. That's not necessarily true now, considering the Badica massacre." I could see a few people flinch at the casual way she spoke about the attack. She wasn't there, so there was no reason for her not to. She hadn't seen the things I saw at that house. But when your charge lives outside of the wards then I guess that "massacre" was a normal every day thing. She continued. "We had to dispatch the remaining Strigoi as quickly and quietly as possible, so as not to alert the others. Now, if you have the element of surprise, the best way to take Strigoi is to come around from behind, break their necks, and then stake them. Breaking their necks won't kill them, of course, but it stuns them and allows you to do the staking before they can make any noise. The most difficult part is actually sneaking up on them, because their hearing is so acute. Since I'm smaller and lighter than most guardians, I can move fairly quietly. So I ended up performing two of the three kills myself."

Everyone's face shone with wonder, as if they couldn't believe that a guardian was capable of killing that many Strigoi in one night. I was kind of awed myself, never before had I heard of so many killings in one night.

She continued with the story. When she and the other guardians had killed the remaining Strigoi, they'd discovered two Moroi had been taken from the party. Such an act wasn't uncommon for Strigoi. Sometimes they wanted to save the Moroi for a later "snack"; sometimes lower-ranking Strigoi were dispatched by more powerful ones to bring back pray. Regardless, two Moroi were gone from the ball, and their guardian had been injured.

"Naturally, we couldn't leave those Moroi in Stirgoi clutches." She said. "We tracked the Strigoi to their hideout and found several of them living together. I'm sure you can recognize how rare that is."

And it was. Strigoi had evil and selfish nature, which made them turn against each other vary easily. Organizing for attacks--when they had an immediate and bloody goal in mind--was the best they could do. But living together? It was almost impossible to imagine.

"We managed to free the two captive Moroi, only to discover that others were being held prisoner. we couldn't send the ones we'd rescued back by themselves, though, so the guardians who were with me escorted them out and left it to me to get the others."

She went on telling how she got captured but managed to escape and rescue the prisoners. In doing so, she performed what had to be the hat trick of the century, killing Strigoi in all three ways: staking, decapitation, and setting them on fire."

"I had just staked a Strigoi when tow more attacked." She explained. "I didn't have time to pull the stake out when the others jumped me. Fortunately, there was an open fireplace nearby, and I pushed one of the Strigoi into it. The last one chased me outside, into an old shed. There was an axe inside and I used that to cut off her head. I then took a can of gasoline and returned to the house. The one I'd thrown into the fireplace hadn't completely burned, but once I doused him in gasoline, he went up pretty quickly."