We still need man-things!

Chapter Thirty Three

"Come on, come on, use all of your strength!" The guards commanded. "One, two, three..."

By using all of their power and risking their own lives too, the villagers were able to get the heavy pickup truck on its side and then push it back to an upright position. The left rear door came open after this, and a couple of bathfuls of water flowed out together with motionless sisters in completely wet winter suits.

"Now, get them to warm up immediately!"

In a minute, the daughters were carried each by two men to the same shack as Vasile. Exposure to cold had made their bodies solid like ice and their faces like marble, where a lot of black lines like fine cracks were running on their snow-white skin. They weren't dead yet, but every second counted, and transporting them back into the castle was just out of the question.

"Over here, put them in the kitchen, and close the door." A young woman living in that house was speaking.

"Elena, are you crazy?" His father started to protest after seeing this. "You are not taking these monsters into my home!"

"They aren't monsters!" Elena protested. "Yes, they love blood and death, but still, they have helped us so much by hunting down stray lycans that kill our livestock! In every summer!"

Villagers had very different views on the Dimitrescu family; some of them wanted them dead, while others had a good relationship with them. Elena had once worked as a maid in a castle and escaped from there after getting tired of giving away her blood for pennies and seeing a man being executed. Like her parents, she hated Alcina's family, but witnessing Lady's daughters almost die after they were exposed to icy water was something that she still didn't wish for.

In the kitchen, which was dirty and very small compared to the castle's, she took off their wet winter suits and added a lot of firewood to the oven to make her shack hot like a sauna. Without a bath, like in the Hall of Ablution, that was all she could do to avoid their petrified bodies crumbling to dust.

*

Lady Dimitrescu arrived a few minutes later, and the guards spoke very briefly about what they knew about the incident. They showed her the house where her daughters were taken and gave her hope that Elena is able to keep them alive until Mother Miranda arrives.

"It was Linda, wasn't it?" Alcina sobbed.

"Almost certainly." Grigori nodded. "I heard an explosion, so I doubt it was just a crash."

"I knew it! I knew she did it! Start the hunt immediately! I will devour this girl alive! I will kill her!"

She was so enraged that she was barely able to hold herself back from tearing those innocent men to pieces. But yet she understood finally that these poor peasants still have a good heart despite all of that forceful blood-snatching and arrogance from House Dimitrescu to them over the last six decades.

In the meantime, Elena dried the daughters and placed them on mattresses to avoid them having contact with the unheated floor. Their bodies had started to warm up a bit, but they were still cold and pale. The black lines in their faces were still there and didn't go away even when warm water bottles were placed against their cheeks.

"How are they?" Alcina sobbed after having entered the house.

"Barely alive." Elena sighed and removed these bottles. "I did everything I could to save them."

"Oh, my little beauties..."

She cried and cuddled them for hours. Elena understood that she could do nothing anymore and left for the living room to take care of the injured Vasile, who was still waiting for Miranda. The man's condition was far better; the wound in his abdomen turned out to be shallow, and his broken hand wasn't something that could endanger his life when aid doesn't come quickly. He was rather worried about his possible punishment and how his wife and son could keep their farm running if he was taken to the castle to be drained.

"If she rips off my head for this, then I'm ready." He spoke to Elena. "But my son and other family members should not be responsible for slow rescue from me or everything else. You won't imagine how much I regret that I agreed to take these three on a ride."

"She won't punish you for this." Elena sobbed. "You did everything right; they are lords; they wanted your service, and you offered this. How can you be responsible?"

"I should have informed Alcina; they are still childlike despite being older than me. Why is Mother Miranda taking so long?"

Mother Miranda and Rednic arrived at the house by late evening. They couldn't come earlier because they had been visiting Moreau's reservoir for some reason and got their car broken while there. Because of the distance and geography, neither of them didn't hear the explosion and had no phone with them to receive the distress calls from desperate villagers. When guards finally found them and reported about the event, even Miranda was shocked that something like that could happen to her own children and promised to do everything to find the perpetrators by the next day. For her, it was a miracle how Alcina's daughters are even alive, as the temperature of the icy water was well below 10 degrees Celsius, which she believed to be the threshold between their lives and deaths. With aid from another truck driver, she organized the transport of the victims to her lab in a short time and asked Lady Dimitrescu to come along with her.

Vasile's fractured hand and his stomach wound were fixed by Moreau the same night, but the possibility of saving Alcina's daughters promised to be much more difficult and was full of uncertainties.

Mother Miranda used some kind of healing salve to cover their bodies entirely with a thick layer of that substance and then placed the girls into a large hyperbaric chamber she had in her secret underground laboratory. She hoped that adding more oxygen and special nutrients to their skin would launch the regeneration process that seemed to be stopped.

Initially, the girls started breathing deeper, but they didn't jump back into consciousness like they were predicted.

"We have to hope, Alcina." She solaced her after having done everything possible to make them recover. "I do everything to find out why it happened and what this little bitch is up to. I truly do."

But Alcina did nothing but cry. That was the most painful day of her life. The chance of losing all three children, even when they were not biological, was something that she couldn't imagine, even in her worst dreams.

She remained in the laboratory for the entire night without wanting to leave. Through the small circular window in that chamber, she kept an eye on the sleeping beauties and thought about taking her own life if she truly happened to lose them.

I've got a tool for it, hidden in the tower in my castle, she thought. Without daughters, nothing will keep my life worth living. I just go in there. And push its poisoned blade deep into my heart.