seymoure

21.

Maria found herself standing in a chrome- colored corridor. She was angry that they had all been taken in by evil one.

He stood across from her, leaning against the wall.

“You are magnificent!” He observed.

“I no longer have any powers,” She told him, “I am no threat to you.”

“You would be a threat to me as long as you lived,” He admitted, “You are the truest form of hero. You are the same kind of purity of purpose as was I in the long dead past.”

There was great sadness in his voice, memories fairly jumped from his eyes, and Maria was moved in a way that she had not been in their former encounter.

“I wish you to know what I have become and why. I will tell you what I will do, and why I want to save you from the slaughter that must come,” He said with conviction.

“My family is out there, I would be with them,” Maria said in no uncertain terms.

“Family,” The word burned his tongue and lips as he uttered it, “Family is what this is all about.”

“I know your story,” She began to tell him.

“From Keaton’s damn chronicles,” He interrupted, “He had no right to tell my story.”

A bell rang behind them and then a doorway opened. A dark visaged but pale man came in. Maria thought he might not have touched the ground as he moved, but she couldn’t be sure.

“My lord,” The newcomer hissed, “the taking of Moscow had begun.

“Show me,” Shastan told him. Then another passage opened and the three of them walked into a room with a huge video screen on the wall.

What it pictured was hideous. People in a darkened city were being attacked by monsters. The populace was being torn apart by a horde of vampires. There was no one fighting back, no sign of police or military intervening.

Panic was the overpowering emotion.

Maria couldn’t look at anymore. This was horrific and without precedent. There were hundreds dying before her eyes. It was heart-breaking.

“Destroying their leadership structure, voiding their police and militia, is the true beginning of the end,” The pale skinned thing growled.

Shastan looked at Maria and said, “I do not destroy the world alone this time. I have assistants around the globe.”

Maria snarled at her captor, “Even a Psi in our camp.”

“More than that,” He smirked, “There are more among yours that work for me.”

Her mind raced to think who might also be a spy among their forces.

The grim pale man left the room and closed the door behind him.

“He thinks I am giving him the ruins of the world as a payment for his and his graveyard army in their assistance during the siege. Little does he know, that is only part of the truth. When he gets the world, there will be nothing alive left on it for them to feast on. They will soon be gone,” He told her in conspirator’s terms.

“And,” He moved directly into a close position, next to her face, “If you are a good girl, I will let you watch the last of the vampires die before I kill your family.”

He began to laugh in the way old movie serial villains laughed. It had more that a hint of madness in it.

Maria could think of nothing but her family. But, she could hear nothing but Shastan’s maniacal laugh.

How could she ever have felt sorry for him?