03 - The Power of Words
A/N: There is a quick reference glossary to refer back to while reading this chapter at the bottom of the screen.
Now, on with the show!
Chapter Three
The Power of Words
Pandemonium.
House walked into the front lobby of the hospital, the same lobby he entered to get to work every day, with Thirteen and Wilson behind him, supporting Kutner and Foreman, respectively. The place was milling with cops and crime scene investigators, and countless other losers in uniform checking out what had happened at the local teaching hospital when some nuts shot the place up for some random reason that the head diagnostician wouldn't have given a damn about if he didn't have a gargantuan hunch that the hospital shooting had everything to do with his patients, Thirteen, and Sasha.
"Where's Sasha?" House demanded as soon as he saw Cuddy.
"Where's... what the hell happened to these two? They look like they lost a fight with a... a... a doberman or a rottweiler or-"
"My twin brother," Thirteen replied sarcastically, and deposited Foreman on a comfy, electric purple chintz armchair. "He doesn't go for people breaking into our house. He needs his privacy. He's got some problems. Don't we all?" The dark edge to Dr. Hadley's voice made the Dean of Medicine give her a second look. She grinned, and it seemed as if she had more teeth, and bigger teeth, than she ought to have. And for the first time in almost twenty years, she was starving. Ignoring the building hunger, compartmentalizing it so that it was manageable, Thirteen absently patted the dark-skinned doctor's shoulder and then scanned the lobby. "Sasha's not here. I can't smell her, sense her, hear her. Nothing. I can't find her."
"Why didn't I know you had super vampire senses?" House demanded. Cuddy blinked. Remy noticed Kutner and Foreman eyeing her with sudden suspicion. Her boss only looked irritated. He went on, "That kind of trick could probably come in handy in medicine, you know."
"You obviously weren't paying attention to what I was doing just before we left my house," she replied, and just the thought gave her the sensory memory of metallic, copper-sweet blood on the back of her tongue, with a citrus-bitter aftertaste. Her brother's blood. The first taste of Family blood in almost two decades. All she'd needed was a couple drops- she'd gotten a lot more than that- and her powers, weakened by malnutrition until they were almost non-existent, had flared up to life again. Not enough to fix them completely, just enough that she could sense things most people could sense. Everything was 20 times sharper than before, but if she'd had more blood, she could've been back to 100 percent.
She gently pressed the tip of her tongue to the tips of select, incredibly senstive teeth, and found her eyeteeth and incisors much sharper than she remembered from earlier that morning. Thanks a lot, Radu.
"Obviously I wasn't paying attention to your life story," House snarked back, ignoring the curious look from his boss, Dean of Medicine. "I assumed you were doing what you said you were doing- putting your evil twin back in his cage down in the basement."
"He's not my evil twin, and I had to sedate him first. He was understandably irritated that there were humans on the grounds of our estate. The Rampling Estate of New Jersey is, after all, our family's ancestral home in this country. And the process of subduing a vampire of Radu's strength was strenuous enough that it reawakened my sleeping abilities."
"And why were your abilities 'sleeping,' Dr. Thirteen?" Her boss asked almost acidly.
"I'm suffering from malnutrition," she said brightly, as if commenting about a toddler's birthday party instead of being starved for human blood. "It interferes with many of my genetic talents."
"What does that mean?" Cuddy asked.
"Who cares!" House snarled. "I get it. I understand. Now where the hell is Sasha?! She went in after the shooters, and now she's missing. Where is she?"
"She's around here somewhere," Remy replied, shivering and rubbing her arms against the sudden chill. Another side-effect of tasting the sweet crimson of undeath and getting her powers back, was a sudden, drastic decrease in her body's core temperature. Unless she fed normally, or unless she went back to abstaining and returned to a mostly bloodless diet, the temp change would be permanent. Curse of the undead- the chills.
"I don't see her anywhere," House snapped.
"Why do you care so much?" Foreman demanded as a nurse came up to him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a wet cloth. She began cleaning the ragged but shallow wound in his neck.
Remy could tell by the way he winced and jerked away from the nurse's touch that the wound still hurt, which also told her Radu was deliberately being cruel, trying to torment the doctor. Vampire saliva had a conscious numbing agent in it. He ought to have used it, and hadn't. She shuddered, this time not from the cold. Why was her twin such a sadistic freak? How could he be such a monster to everyone else, and so gentle and protective towards their family and Remy herself?
And how can you justify calling your only blood relation a freak?
Oh, she replied caustically, heard that, did you? You tried to eat my coworkers. I have the right to call you a freak for that.
"I'm going to look for her," House snapped, breaking Dr. Hadley's reverie, and began stumping towards the elevators when Remy suddenly cried, "I got it! Eustacia's room! She ought to be in Eustacia's room. If she'd defeated every enemy in the hospital, she'd go back to guarding our sister."
House was already in the elevator, and the doors were sliding shut.
Cold.
Everything icy cold. It ate at Sasha's gray flesh, nipped at her face, nibbled at her fingertips, gnawed at her bones, and did everything in its power to devour her alive. So cold was she, that she could barely trudge down the hall, leaning heavily against the wall in case she should collapse into a heap of bloodless, exhausted vampire.
Strange... the walls had been so cold before when she'd prowled the halls searching for the gunmen attacking the hospital. Now the tiles felt almost hot against the skin of her palms. Her stomach was cramping violently, red hot pain stabbing into her belly, and her teeth and jaw ached. Her lip bled where her fangs cut into the soft flesh.
In the back of her mind, she realized that the heat of the tiles meant her body temperature was desperately low. The pain was a sharp reminder that she was starving, and injured. Sasha shuddered, though she couldn't discern the actual movement because of how wracked she was with the violent cold chewing at every nerve ending. She was too close, she realized. Too close to turning. She was almost a lilim now, not quite a revenant but too close to the building agony of thirst to be safe around anyone for long unless she found a living, human anchor. An old soul, her auramdas. She whimpered as sharp pain lanced her temples. Her skin itched, and she noticed it had begun peeling, as if from sunburn.
She didn't have a lot of time to make it back to Eustacia's room, didn't have a lot of time to get blood from Rena or someone else who knew her Family.
In her mind, she saw piercing, cobalt eyes, cold with intellect and blazing with something she'd never seen in a human before. She wanted to find them, those eyes. She could scarcely remember where she had seen those beautiful eyes, but it didn't matter. She would find them, and when she found them, the thirst would be gone.
The thirst, the cold, the pain- it would all disappear, as soon as she found those eyes.
Dr. Hadley caught up with House in Eustacia's room. He was clutching his cane and staring at the clock on the wall, hunched up almost defensively in a hard-backed, crappy chair beside the unconscious Eustacia's hospital bed. In two other beds in the high-profile, luxury hospital room were the women known as Lucinda and Marishka Rampling, Dr. Hadley's foster mother and sister.
Lucinda slept, the golden glow of the almost-sunset dusting her cheeks.
Marishka watched the clock, her amber eyes zeroing in on the ticking hands. She nibbled on her bottom lip, ignoring the itch of lengthening teeth.
"She's not here," House snapped the moment Remy walked in the door. She knew who he meant- Sasha.
The woman ignored him, only looked at her sister, Marishka, sitting up in her hospital bed, continuously brushing back the wavy, golden locks hanging in front of her eyes. Mari had the worst case of bed hair Thirteen had ever seen. Short and slender to the point of being petite, the young woman was swamped in the hospital gown she wore. She looked like a child playing dress up. It almost made Remy want to smile. But she was busy observing. Her sister's gaze wasn't fixed on the clock, as Remy had firstly assumed. The golden gaze flicked between the clock and the turn at the end of the hall, off to the left.
Sasha was on her way.
Heat.
Not just warmth, golden and syrup sweet against her skin. Not just heat, like a roaring fire. This was sun-blazing wildfire, raging hellish inferno, melting the ice in her veins. She could feel warmth coming back to the tip of her nose, to her fingertips, to her toes. All because she was crawling closer and closer to those beautiful, sea blue eyes. They called to her, beckoned like a fire in the night. They promised safety, warmth, peace. Everything she needed right now.
But she wasn't quite sure she could make it.
She was still bleeding from the gunshot wounds in her right thigh, knee, shoulder, and side. She'd been sneak attacked with silver buckshot in the back, barely able to duck out of the way in time to keep the deadly pellets from getting her in the head when her attacker had been betrayed by the harsh, earthquake sound of a chambering round in his shotgun. She'd also taken a chip of silver in the chest from a hollow-point round that had shattered on the wall, and the silver piece burned as it sank acid-like through the layers of flesh on its wormy way to her heart. She needed to get that piece of silver out before it found its way to an artery. If it was in her heart, that was okay. Something that small, there would be no lasting damage once she found it. But if it got to an artery, it would make its way to her brain, and she'd be dead in seconds, especially in her weakened, almost revenant condition.
Saaaaaashaaaaaaa...
She heard the voice in her mind, and more heat flowed back into her limbs as she forcibly pulled herself forward, her still icy body dragging on the hot tile floor like so much meat. It was a calling, a summoning from far off and yet close by, tasting of the electric blue vanilla sweetness of the subconscious. Her own bloodloss was distorting her senses. How much of her blood was on this floor? Sprinkled scarlet rain drops? Anorexically thin, crimson rivulets? Gushing, burgundy rivers like spilled wine? She was bleeding out from a nick in her femoral artery. Surely there were rivers of crimson blood upon the floor.
Suddenly, she choked on something thick, slimy, and cold in her throat, sludging into her mouth like toxic waste. Hacking and coughing, she spat out a giant glob of coagulated blood. That piece of silver was burning its way into her lungs. Already, things were beginning to swim across her eyes.
She took a gasping, shuddering breath, and another. Her eyes burned as the tiled-glare from the overhead lights intensified to the point of lancing agony. She squeezed her eyes shut as she struggled onward.
Auramdas...
Sasha managed to force the word into her mind, sounding almost plaintive, desperate, though she didn't know why. Such an old, old word. Positively ancient. Still capable of stirring the deepest feelings in any vampire. Still capable of urging a dying bloodsucker onward in the hopes of finding that person so she could be anchored to this world, unable to slip away into death because of a few gunshot wounds and some poisonous silver rounds. That was the power of that word, the idea behind it, the power of the connection it gave birth to. The word gave her strength, because the connection behind it was drawing her onward towards her sister's room.
Why am I thinking about crap like soulmates at a time like this? Sasha asked herself disjointedly, almost angrily, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the slick floor. I haven't even met any new vampires and there sure as hell aren't any in the hospital that aren't related to me and damn! That hurts, she thought as a hunger pain slashed through her belly. Her fangs sank into her lip.
She heard the sound of voices, and opened her eyes.
House slowly rose to his feet, agonizing white pain shooting up his thight and down to his knee. He gripped his cane tightly in his right hand. Clenching his teeth in a grimace, he stumped towards the door to the patients' room. He could feel her, a calling, a summoning... She was so close to that bend in the wall of the corridor, so close to turning round that corner. But there was such pain in her. He could feel it, practically taste it.
"House!"
He turned his head slowly to see Cuddy, trailed by Cameron and Wilson, striding toward him. The Dean of Medicine's face blanched when she caught sight of her employee, but she and her two other doctors approached the wild-eyed diagnostician.
"What?" He demanded, jerking his head to look in the other direction. He tensed, scanning the hallway for any sign of Sasha. He could feel her approaching, slowly, like the tide. Why? How could he feel her very presence, like the light of the sun on his skin? Unless he was hallucinating... Was this just some delusion, sucking at his mind as he staggered through the hospital? Or was it the power of his own deductive reasoning?
"House, what is going on?" Cuddy demanded, staring at him intently.
"Ask Thirteen."
"I'm asking you!"
He ignored her, his eyes boring holes in the wall as he continued to study the hallway. He knew she was coming. Where was she? Why was the pain lancing through his leg sharpening, burning, blazing? What was going on here?
Sasha, where are you?
If he didn't find her soon, if she didn't come to him soon, she would die. There was too much pain for her not to die. Her body would shut down, her brain would destroy itself, even if there was nothing physically wrong with her. He didn't know how he knew it, but she would die without medical attention.
Auramdas...
The word whispered through his mind. It shivered across his flesh, breathed against the inside of his skull. It seared his veins, burned at the tip of each nerve ending. What did that word mean? He knew he'd heard it somewhere, read it somewhere, something, but it stirred something like sweet pain in his chest and agonizing fire in his leg.
And he saw it. The sign he'd been waiting for. An ivory pale, blood speckled hand falling to the cool tile floor just beyond the left turn of the hallway. That hand, and the wrist attached to it, lay limp upon the floor.
He lurched forward, yelling, "Sasha!"
Strength.
She could feel it in the thundering of his heart against the wall of his chest, the chest that cushioned her head as he held her in his arms. She could feel strength in the way the muscles of his arms and shoulders tightened with the strain of holding her aloft. She could feel it in the steady, throbbing pulse of blood through his body. She could taste it on the skin of his neck as her lips brushed against it. She couldn't help herself- she could barely breathe, much less move her head away.
"Sasha, stay with me." His voice was deep and gentle, but urgent. She'd do anything for that voice, even kill. She'd stay with him. Of course she would. Always. Forever. Of course.... "Sasha!"
She looked up into eyes like a blue sea softened and glamourized by pearl grey mists. Those eyes... she'd found them.
She tried to smile, the right corner of her mouth curling a little.
Auramdas? His voice in her mind, his thoughts breathing the word inside her brain, making her shiver. Her eyes locked on his, and this time it was she who breathed softly, gently into the warmth of his so-human mind, Auramdas.
The diagnostician stared at her, unable to look away from that pale face flecked with bits of dried, maroon blood. There was a smudge of brown where he'd seen that dimple in her right cheek. He could see the tell-tale teeth in her mouth now, teeth that were much more pronounced than any of the times she'd flashed him that feral grin. Again, he heard her whisper, the word resounding in his head, filled with certainty, Auramdas.
He didn’t know what the word meant, but hearing it eased the burning in his muscles, the shooting pain in his thigh. It softed the hard ache beginning in his back. House had no idea the little bodyguard was so damn heavy!
I heard that, she mumbled in his head.
"Yeah, well, you could stand to lose a few pounds," he replied as he made it back into the recently vacated room. Wilson took Sasha from the limping doctor, who added, "Next time, do what I say. Try not to die."
"Everybody's a critic," she murmured, struggling to draw breath. And in his mind, she whispered one more time, Auramdas.
Auramdas? What does that even mean?
She smiled, both corners of her mouth quirking.
Soulmate.
Here ends Chapter Three of Suck.
So, here's chapter three. First violence, now romance. I love those romance novels about soulmates, like Christine Feehan's Dark Series and LJ Smith's Nightworld books. So, anyway, I had created this vampire universe for another fic (anime) but I liked the history, language, and culture I had created, so I figured I could do a non-anime fic in that same vampire-world.
Which means, among other things, that Cameron is hiding a secret and NO it is NOT that she's a vampire. Cameron is NOT a vampire.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed. Chapter four won't come for a while cuz I'm going out of town.
I just discovered this amazing trick of using these long lines across the page instead of the centered periods I'd been using so I'm going to be remodeling most of my stories in the next few weeks, just an FYI.
Reviews?
Quick reference glossary to refer back to while reading this chapter:
auramdas- the Sanguinyte word for "soulmate." Unlike in human culture, vampires need their soulmates in order to survive. A soulmate anchors a vampire to sanity and the living world, helping prevent them from degenerating into other subspecies of vampire such as lilim, nosferatu, fiend, or revenant. Once soulmates discover each other, a psychic connection begins to form between them, even if it unconsciously. A vampire can be soulmate to any other preternatural species, including humans. If one's soulmate is killed, a vampire will go mad with grief.
lamia- a vampire that is born, not made. This type of vampire ages, though much more slowly than a human would. It can take up to 200 years for a lamia to reach full maturity. Somewhat like puberty in humans, the speed at which a vampire "grows up" is different for each bloodsucker. Lamia carry a genetic allergy to lemons.
lilim- an emaciated corpse-like state where the vampire is feral, starving for blood and in agonizing pain. The madness brought on by this state is reversible. A lilim is controllable only by its master, its auramdas, or someone strongly bonded to them, such as a sibling, child, or parent. The curses of vampirism are much stronger in the lilim- they blister in the sun, they ache with cold, and all sensations (like pain and hunger) are magnified a thousand times.
revenant- a state much like the lilim, but the madness cannot be reversed. A revenant must be slain, or it will either starve to death due to capture and confinement or slaughter countless humans until it dies. They are strongly affected by the curses of vampirism- they catch fire in the weakest sunlight, they are mad with hunger, their flesh blisters and melts when in contact with silver and certain sacred types of woods, and garlic repels them. It should be noted that ONLY revenants are affected by garlic.
Sanguinyte- the Vampiric language (a/n- I came up with it on my own. it's copyrighted by me as of 2002).
GLOSSARY