Blood Vengeance [COMPLETED]

Chapter Twenty-Eight - Ash

Arthur kept his hands to himself for the rest of the evening, and Selene watched as he gesticulated and laughed with the hand that had so recently been on her. She flinched as he touched a woman's arm with those same fingers.

Selene found she couldn't look away from him, despite the fact that the Vampire on her right kept trying to engage her in conversation.

"Jonathan Masters said he had you first." The Vampire was drunk, having swallowed so much of the poisoned champagne that Selene was amazed he was still alive. He kept pawing at her, trying to touch her, but he was so inebriated that he kept missing, his hands hitting the table with a bang.

"That's not true," said Selene, trying to move her chair away from him.

"He said you have a lovely naked body." The Vampire slurped the dregs of his champagne and called over a servant to top up his glass.

"He never saw me naked."

"Well, I guess it doesn't matter either way, because we'll all see you naked tonight." He leant back and guffawed loudly, his fat belly shaking.

But just then one of the women at the far end of the room began to scream. It was a scream that meant the same thing to everyone: death.

It curdled the blood, and Selene's heart stuttered. She felt as guilty as if she personally had poisoned the woman who screamed.

The woman had stood up, and was clutching at her heart; her mouth wide open and her scream became a wail that filled the hall. Others moved around her, trying to work out what was wrong. And then the shouting began.

"Dying! She's dying!"

Arthur stood up, pushing his chair out with a squeal on the tiles like an animal.

"Don't go." Selene grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and tugged on it.

"Something's wrong. Don't you see?" he said, pulling the fabric from her grasp, every muscle in his body tight, like a tiger about to pounce.

But before he had time to move, the disorder started in earnest. The woman's body began to change colour, her skin blackening, and all the while she continued to scream, staring at her hands as they began to disintegrate. And then she was nothing but dust.

The Vampires began to scatter, crying for help, trying to escape the contamination; but it was too late. The screams rose up from all corners of the room. The sound was deafening, and Selene covered her ears with her hands.

The Vampires in their death throes were reaching out to one another, grabbing at the human servants who flitted about the room, running now for their lives. Their movements were unbalanced, frantic; their fear apparent in each judder of their dying bodies.

The drunken man to Selene's right passed out on the table, gurgled and disappeared in a puff of ash, leaving only his rumpled clothes in his seat, probably too drunk to even feel the pain.

Arthur stood watching the massacre that was taking place in his home; his face pale, his features stricken with a horror that Selene couldn't bare to watch.

"Arthur," screamed the woman nearest him, before her voice took on a deathly wail, and she too began to blacken and die. Her hands gripped his jacket, stretched out for his hands, and he stood, appalled, as the hands he held disintegrated in his palms.

Selene pushed her chair out from the table, desperate to get out, to move away. The death of hundreds of Vampires, the noise of their panic and pain, was horrendous. But as she moved Arthur grabbed her and pulled her round to look at him.