Death After Death-Chapter 220: Locked Away

Simon was there for nearly a week before his captor showed herself. By the time he next saw Freya, he was completely overwhelmed with the thirst, but at least for now, he did his best to ignore it completely.

The only thing he couldn’t ignore was his new fangs. He was unable to stop toying with them with his tongue. He couldn’t help it. They felt so strange and foreign in his mouth.

Despite the fact that his cell was pitch black, he could keep track of time fairly easily by the feeling of dread that forced him into a dreamless torpor each time the sun rose. It was terrifying. It wasn’t so much sleep as it was lapsing into a coma and praying that he never woke up again.

Unfortunately, each night he was disappointed, and each time he was disappointed he carved another mark into the wall so that he would remember how many days he’d been down here.

She thinks this is as bad as being a statue? He thought defiantly as he sifted a handful of coarse sand through his fingertips.

Here, he could still move and breathe. Even better, he still had a goal, and that was to die. A statue couldn’t do any of those things. It could only endure forever.

Such thoughts assured him that he hadn’t completely lost his mind nor that it seemed likely that it would in the near future. Simon noticed when they repaired the door to his cell and replaced the broken door held shut by rubble with a stout oaken slab that was barred from the outside. This one had a window at the top. It was barred, so escape was impossible, but sometimes people looked in on him after that. They never spoke to him, though; they simply held up a torch and looked at him for a bit before leaving him in the dark.

That was enough to make him resent sparing the staff of this place. None of the faces he saw were proper guards. He’d killed all of those, but only a few days later, Freya already had people back to work. Maybe if I’d slaughtered everyone, they’d have been more wary, he sighed.

Once, he woke up to find a rat in his cell. He felt his mouth water at the idea of draining its meager life force. That was a feeling he knew well in the form of the word of transfer, though. So, he resisted it and, capturing the thing, tossed it from his cell uninjured. He didn’t know if the thing had been tossed in as dinner or if it had crept in on its own.

I will not give in, he promised himself. I will wait for the hunger to take me.

It was only when it was gone that he realized he could have tried a tiny blood sacrifice to power a word of force. He didn’t need much. He just needed one strong shard of wood and he could end this.

He tried that with the next rat, but with his monstrous hands he couldn’t make the words of power fine enough with the rat’s blood on his cell wall. He thought about trying again, but it was hard enough not to eat the one he’d tried to use for his spell, so he resisted, promising himself that he’d find an opening.

That was easy to say, but it became harder to believe with every day that passed. Simon’s heart no longer beat. It had been replaced with a black hole and every day, it grew larger and deeper, demanding to be filled.

When Freya finally made an appearance, she didn’t bother to open the door. She just flowed around it as a fine mist before she reconstituted before him. She must have feasted quite a bit in the last week because she was as young and beautiful as he’d ever seen her in that moment. He, on the other hand, was decrepit and dying.

Simon was dead already, of course. He couldn’t die again. At least, he couldn’t without a stake to his heart, but he felt like he was just the same.

He no longer had the strength to try to kill himself. He’d attempted that a dozen times before he’d given up. Now, those deaths, combined with the thirst, made him so weak that he could scarcely do more than sit up when she arrived.

“Not so mighty now, are you?” she laughed. “It’s only been a week, and my home is all but back to normal. You, on the other hand, have transformed from witch hunter to wretched.”

“Normal, huh?” Simon spat. “You were able to replace your lovers so quickly, after all. Good for you.”

That drew a harsh look from her, but she didn’t take the bait. In his weakened state, he was pretty sure she could kill him with a hard enough beating, even if he couldn’t do it himself. She seemed to have similar thoughts, though, because she just smiled coldly, showing off her fangs, and said. “No, your suffering has only just begun. I just came down here to disabuse you of a few… misconceptions that you seem to have about your current state before I leave you to rot.”

“No, thanks,” Simon said as he laid down and rolled over to huddle against the wall. “I’m good. Dust to dust and all that.”

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“According to the stories, vampires can live for decades or even centuries without a drop of blood; that’s your first mistake,” she said cruelly, ignoring him. “I wouldn’t know because I’m well-fed every night, but I think going at least a year between devouring someone probably wouldn’t kill me. It would just make me miserable.”

Simon was afraid of that, too, but he said nothing. A decade or a century, though, didn’t really matter. If she just buried him alive, eventually he would die, and eventually, he’d make his way back to his cabin, where he would make sure all of this never happened.

Even as he contemplated all of that, his captor kept gloating. “You also seem to think that you can control the thirst, but after a few days, it will control you. You’ll be begging to feast on rats and worms in less than a week, and after that, it will only get worse for you. Once you start begging to be fed, I plan to brick up your little room and check on you every few years. Perhaps I will show you off once a decade on the anniversary of my ascension. Maybe we will make it a public holiday, and we can take you to the top of Gravenstone’s tallest tower so you can watch all the surrounding villages burn you in effigy. We’ll call it Traitor’s Day.”

She went on like that for some time, but Simon ignored her. As long as he wasn’t looking at her, she couldn’t compel him to do anything, it would seem. After a few more minutes of explaining how awful she was going to make his life, Freya eventually left him in the dark. It was only then that he smiled. She truly seemed to have no idea that he’d already spent lifetimes, on and off, wrestling with the very addiction that consumed her.

This was as bad as it had ever been, of course, even as he lay dying in Ionar, but he could cope. At least, he thought he could. As the weeks passed, one scratched-out day at a time, he could feel the urges growing ever stronger. Every few days, rats would reappear in his room. Though Simon never saw his jailers add them, he was sure that was what they were doing. It was a petty torment, but each time, it was harder to throw them away.

After Simon had been in that living hell for a month, Freya upped the ante. First, she did so by leaving her bloody victims just outside his door where he could smell them. Then, after that, by leaving bowls of blood on the ground just outside of his door, where he could see them if he looked out of his tiny window.

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Those sights doubled his hunger and made it burn out of all control, but he still took the opportunity to try to call the mirror in that dark reflection. Unfortunately, no matter how he tried to invoke it, it wouldn’t come.

At first, Simon thought that was because he couldn’t use his magic anymore, but after a couple of hours of trying, he decided the problem was deeper than that. “Right,” he reminded himself. “Vampires don’t have reflections.”

That, at least, was enough to make him laugh, which did him a world of good. He chuckled about that for days on and off, which made all of his other sufferings a little better. It was a stupid reason for one of his powers not to work, but he could hardly deny it. The mirror had once told him that it had trouble finding him on some levels unless it was called, and without a reflection, Simon was almost certainly invisible.

Simon suffered in silence, even when Freya started bringing her victims to his door and devouring them in front of him. Sometimes, she even offered to let him have a taste, and though every fiber of his being wanted to leap up and do just that, he refused to let it. Instead, he sat there, doing his best to meditate her and her bloody feast right out of existence.

That annoyed her more than anything else he’d done to date, and two days later, they started installing manacles on the walls of his cell. At first, he thought that they might be for him so that she could torture him more. Up until now, she’d refrained from physical torture, preferring to let her psychological torments slowly do the damage instead. Still, it was only when they’d installed a second set that he ruled that out and grew curious.

What is she up to, he wondered.

Simon didn’t have to wait long to find out. Two days later, on day eighty-nine of his imprisonment, his door was unlocked, and two women were brought inside by guards with torches. They said nothing to him as they bound both of the young women to the wall with both their wrists above their heads.

Freya was there too, but Simon ignored her as he studied the women. There was a sense of familiarity to both of the women, and it was only after studying them that his eyes widened in alarm, and he realized it was the daughters of the farmer he’d saved the first night.

“Ah, so you did figure out my game,” Freya smiled as she noted the look of recognition in his eyes. “I’d wondered if you’d be so far gone that I’d have to explain all of this to you.”

Both of the other women squirmed silently, but they didn’t dare scream. Not in the presence of this monster. They only cowered, so it was Simon who spoke next as the guards locked the bindings and retreated silently.

“You really are a monster,” Simon grunted as he got to his feet for the first time in weeks. “Throwing away these girls' lives as pawns just to make me suffer.”

He’d grown steadily weaker for the first week. After that, he’d flat-lined at the pathetic state he was in now. He was skin and bones, but he was skin and bones that would not die.

“I’m not throwing them away,” Freya smiled wickedly, showing off her fangs. “That will be your job. Even though I have to chain them to the wall so they don’t find a way to end your miserable existence by day, they are my guests, and they will stay here until you make a decision.”

“I’ve already made my decision,” Simon said, ignoring the way that the smell of living humans made his mouth water. “I’m not eating them or anyone else. I’d rather die.”

“I admire your optimism,” Freya said, “But even if you manage such a reckless feat, you will only kill them both. I will let one free when you drain the other one dry, if you can restrain yourself from just devouring both. If you will not do that, then they’ll stay here until they starve, and the blood of both girls will be on your hands.”

Simon’s shock at her wicked plan must have shown on his face, because Freya laughed then. It was a terrible sound. She took the last lantern with her as she left the room and started down the hallway, leaving the three of them locked inside that room together in the dark. Her voice carried a long way down here, and her terrible mirth echoed down the hallway long after she was gone.