Fan Fiction ❯ The Vampire Hunter II: Bloodlines ❯ Chapter 14

Chapter XIV

"Wakey, wakey," Cynthia sing-songed, as she sprayed some liquid onto Gabrielle's face that would counteract the knockout potion.

Gabrielle's eyelids fluttered open, and she was immediately awake this time. She was on her feet in an instant, but there were heavy manacles attached to her wrists and ankles, which kept her from going very far. She started to try to pull her arms out of the cuffs, but she stopped when she felt razor sharp spikes attempting to cut through her hands.

"Ah ah ah. We'll have none of that now. I just want to talk," Cynthia told her.

Gabrielle looked down and saw that the shackles had little teeth angled against her wrists, which would shred her hands if she tried to slide them out. And the metal of the cuffs was far too thick for her to even bend, let alone break. She caught a whiff of salt and realized the links of chain had probably come from an ocean liner's anchor. She looked up at Cynthia and steeled her expression.

"Let me go," Gabrielle ordered.

"Only if you agree to leave the humans alone. Let them fight their own battles."

"You almost sound like you're trying to protect them, so why can't I do the same?"

"I want to protect my food source, that's all. You want to turn them into our equals, or worse, our conquerors. What you plan to do is make them capable of destroying us completely. I can't let you do that."

"They don't even know we exist, just the younger ones," Gabrielle protested.

"Clark knows. In fact, she has the locations of every lair you've visited for the past two weeks. Now, I wonder," Cynthia ripped the locket from Gabrielle's neck and dangled it in front of her face, "how she managed to do that?"

Gabrielle stared at the silver pendant in shock, as she remembered Clark's words: "It will keep me close to you, even if you can't see me."

Gabrielle shook her head. She wasn't angry, though she was a little hurt at the lack of trust, even if she'd been the one who had been dishonest about where she was going in the first place.

"She's just trying to protect her kind," Gabrielle finally said.

"Even from you."

"Yes, even from me."

"But will you protect your kind? Even from her?" Cynthia asked.

Gabrielle just stared at her sister. Even the thought of harming Clark made her heart hurt.

"That's what I thought," Cynthia said, when there was no answer. "So, I take it you're still refusing to leave the humans to their own devices?"

"They need guidance. If we do nothing, they could destroy themselves and there would go your precious food source."

"It's your food source, too, sister. And if we intervene, they could end up destroying us. But regardless, I had a feeling you would say no, so I've prepared a little rite of passage for you. I wanted to be fair and give you a chance to prove yourself as our rightful leader instead of just executing you and taking your place. I don't know how much you remember of the old texts written about our father, but the books about his challenges through the twelve gates of the Underworld were very entertaining. So, I've recreated them for you, since you seem so eager to take our father's place as supreme deity of the humans."

Cynthia pressed a button on the wall directly across from where Gabrielle was chained. Gabrielle heard the sound of grinding stone as the wall rose into the ceiling and revealed a short passageway into another room. Gabrielle could see another door on the far wall of the next room, and a clock inset next to the door showed a countdown had just started marking off the seconds and minutes to the end of the hour.

"At five minutes before the hour is up, that door will open, and you will have until five minutes past the hour to go through before it will close again, never to reopen. There are twelve gates, marking the twelve hours of the night, each with a challenge that must be faced and defeated within that hour. If you make it through all of the challenges, you'll be free to go. And even though this ritual is supposed to take place at night and end with the rising sun, that wouldn't exactly work for you, so we're starting now in order to make sure you can leave in the evening. If you make it that far."

"No. I'm not playing some game for your entertainment," Gabrielle declared.

"Oh, this is no game. It's quite likely you'll die by the third challenge. However, I do have some incentive for you to enter anyway. You see, the Hunter is already in there and waiting for your help. And if you don't get to her soon, she's going to die," Cynthia explained.

"What did you do to her?" Gabrielle asked angrily.

"Only what you wish you could do to her," Cynthia smiled, and Gabrielle caught the scent of blood as Cynthia licked her lips.

As Gabrielle was digesting this new information, Cynthia turned and walked towards the only other exit from the room.

Once Cynthia was through the passage, Gabrielle heard grinding stone again and realized the exit was being blocked. She might be able to break through the stone, but she had no doubt that Cynthia was telling her the truth about Clark, at least the part about her already being in the Amduat, as Gabrielle remembered it being called. Whether Clark was injured or not, if the challenges posed a threat to Gabrielle, then they definitely did to Clark.

Of course, she had to find a way to get out of the manacles first.

Gabrielle used the edge of one of her cuffs and dug into the wall. The stone quickly gave way to metal, and Gabrielle realized the chains were embedded in a wall of steel.

She shook her head. Yanking the chains out of the wall hadn't really been her plan anyway. She needed to get the cuffs off, but they were way too thick for her to damage enough to be able to get her hands out. And they were more than skintight. Gabrielle guessed Cynthia had probably modeled the shackles on her own wrists and ankles, since they were twins, which was why they were such a perfect fit. The one-inch spikes surrounding the inner edge of the manacles would cause so much damage to her hands and feet that it would take her hours to repair the extremities if she tried to pull her hands out.

She glanced at the clock in the other room. She still had plenty of time, hardly five minutes had gone by, but Gabrielle knew time would get short soon enough. She just had to think.

Cynthia apparently believed Gabrielle could get out of the restraints somehow, while still maintaining enough functionality in her limbs to face the challenges ahead. Gabrielle checked the cuffs and the chains for defects, and then she checked the wall again. She found nothing. The seam of the manacles had been welded shut, so there was no locking mechanism for Gabrielle to figure out or try to destroy. Either Cynthia had shielded Gabrielle's wrists and ankles from being burned, or she'd healed Gabrielle of her wounds while she was still drugged.

In fact, Gabrielle felt her face, and found that all the burns from the sun were gone, as well as the blindness she'd suffered.

Gabrielle thought about that for a moment. Cynthia didn't seem like she cared whether Gabrielle was in pain or not, so why would she have healed her? To make sure she was in good condition for her upcoming challenges? Or was it subtler than that, trying to make her overlook something?

Gabrielle remembered a story she'd heard once about a traffic jam at a major tunnel. A truck hadn't had the right clearance and had gotten stuck in the entrance of the tunnel. It had sat there for hours, while engineers tried to figure out how to dislodge the vehicle and get traffic moving again. Then, a little girl in one of the waiting cars had asked why they didn't just let the air out of the tires.

Gabrielle looked at her wrists and then down at her feet. Cynthia hadn't really said when the challenges would begin, but this was supposed to be a test of her right to rule the Vampire Order, according to Cynthia. Such a test would most likely involve intelligence, strength, courage, and the ability to find solutions to problems that didn't appear to have any.

She couldn't exactly let the air out of her arms and legs, but she wasn't confined to the same rules that humans were. There had been several times in her life when Gabrielle had lost a limb. There were two solutions. Grow a new one, or keep the old one held in place until it reattached itself. If the cut was clean, the second option was usually the best because it presented the least amount of surface area to heal. The mangled mess her hands would be in if she dragged them through the spikes would take a lot more time and energy because there would be more cells to repair.

Gabrielle looked at her left arm. That was all fine in theory, but she'd never actually tried to rip off one of her hands before. The idea wasn't very appealing.

She went back to looking for another way to break her bonds. Maybe there was a trick to it, like a secret button or a hidden switch. Cynthia seemed like the kind of person who would enjoy that sort of thing; making someone do something horrible that they didn't really need to do if they were smart enough to find the real solution.

Gabrielle put her acute vision to work and scanned everything she could, even the walls that were out of her reach, in case there was a button she could throw a stone at to release the shackles, even though she knew they were welded together. It didn't matter. She just had to find something. Anything.

There was nothing.

Gabrielle checked the clock in the other room. She only had forty-five minutes left and she would need that time to heal, if she was really going to do this.

Gabrielle closed her eyes. This was going to hurt. A lot.

She decided quick was better than slow, and she yanked hard, moving her arm horizontally to use the bottom edge of the metal cuff as a knife. She felt her skin tear, and the muscles and tendons ripped, as her bones broke, shearing off her left hand at the wrist. Her arm came free, and her hand fell to the floor with nothing to hold it in the cuff.

Gabrielle screamed. There was no point in keeping it in, and the sounds reverberated off the stone walls and echoed back to her, a sound unlike anything she'd ever heard before, and it wouldn't stop. The pain was excruciating, and she fell to the floor and held her arm to her stomach, attempting to bury her wrist and ease the pain, as she rocked.

The pain refused to let up, and Gabrielle realized she needed to reattach her hand if she wanted to make it feel better. With blood tears streaming from her eyes, she blindly reached with her right hand over the dirt floor and brought her severed hand in front of her. She gripped it tightly and then pushed her bloodied stump into the torn and dirtied end of her detached hand.

It was hard to concentrate, but some of her body's instinctual healing abilities began the process for her. Gabrielle could feel the cells knitting themselves together again, as they filtered out the dirt particles, forming a brown crust around the rim of her wrist. With the pain lessening, Gabrielle was able to concentrate on the natural process and sped it up considerably.

Healing Clark had taken a lot longer because the human's healing process was naturally very slow. But Gabrielle was able to completely heal her injured flesh in only a few minutes, since the repairs covered a relatively small area.

It was only Gabrielle's pure determination that allowed her to go through the whole process again with her right hand. This time though, she extended a razor sharp claw and sliced through her right wrist in a lightning quick move. The pain from the much cleaner cut was a little easier to take, but Gabrielle still screamed, and it took several minutes before she could focus enough to begin healing the damage.

Once she was pain free, she looked at her feet and took a deep breath. She didn't have time to stall, so she quickly slid her right leg over and extended a claw again. But she barely managed to slice through the flesh and bone of her ankle before curling into the fetal position, as she tried to cope with the incredible pain.

The one thought that finally made her move again was the knowledge that Clark needed her. Gabrielle was sure that Cynthia had harmed Clark and Gabrielle had to get to the human or she would die.

Gabrielle held onto the image and used it as incentive to sit up. She picked up her detached foot and positioned it at the end of her leg in order to begin repairing the severed limb. As soon as her foot was mostly reattached, she performed the same surgery on her other leg. Her throat was hoarse from yelling so much, and when she was finally finished reattaching both her feet, she spent a few seconds repairing her esophagus as well.

Gabrielle rested for a little while, as she tried to let go of the ghosts of pain she still felt around her wrists and ankles. But after only a few minutes, she stood up and looked over the mess of blood she'd left on the shackles and floor, not to mention herself.

There was nothing she could do about her clothing, but she had no intention of leaving so much of her blood behind for someone else to ingest. So, she walked to a nearby torch and removed it from its sconce. A few passes over the blood-covered areas and there was nothing left but an ashy residue. She replaced the torch in its holder and walked into the new room, pushing the entire experience to the back of her mind in order to focus on the coming challenges.

The clock said she still had ten minutes left before the hour was up, and she decided to inspect the room to pass the time. The walls were covered in hieroglyphics, and Gabrielle recognized the words. The wall with the door that led back the way she'd come had the text from the Book of Caverns, which wasn't very detailed. However, the two walls to Gabrielle's left and right had the writings from the Book of Amduat and the Book of Gates, which were both very thorough in their accounts of Re's journey through the Underworld.

Gabrielle read through them, but they didn't make very much sense to her. For one thing, they couldn't seem to agree on what took place during each of the twelve hours of the night. And for another, most of the so-called challenges seemed rather benign, like when Re parceled out land for the dead to plant crops or when he provided clothing for the dead.

She turned away from the writings and faced the door. Though it was supposed to be on a timer, Gabrielle wondered if she could get through it early and maybe reach Clark sooner than Cynthia had intended.

She drew back her arm and punched her fist into the stone door. It went in all the way up to her biceps, and she carefully removed her arm from the hole she'd made. Unfortunately, the stone went too deep for her to seriously consider trying to dig through it.

Gabrielle checked the clock and watched as the numbers flipped over to show exactly five minutes were left. She felt a tremor and then heard the sound of stone rubbing against stone as the incredibly long slab of rock lifted to expose a dark passageway.

Movement out of the corner of her eye alerted her to danger, and she light-walked out of the way of the snapping jaws of an oversized crocodile. There were two more that came after her, but Gabrielle easily smashed in the skull of one of them, slammed another against a wall so hard that the croc left a dent, and killed the third with a few slashes of her extended fingernails.

It took her less than thirty seconds, and she allowed herself a few minutes to check the hidden door they'd entered through. Another heavy stone slab had blocked the entrance, but Gabrielle hadn't really thought she'd be able to get out that easily anyway. And even if she could, she needed to get to Clark. She wouldn't leave her behind no matter what.

Gabrielle took one last look around the room. The three crocodiles had probably been Cynthia's interpretation of the three guardian serpents Re was supposed to have fought in the first hour in order to gain entrance to the Underworld in the version offered by the Book of Caverns. Which meant that all of the challenges at each of the other eleven "Gates" would most likely be based on these texts.

Gabrielle looked at the clock. She only had a few minutes left to get through the passage and see what her next challenge was. With all the possibilities given for each of the books and the many ways they could have been interpreted, Gabrielle had no idea what to expect. She just knew she probably wouldn't like it.

Gabrielle turned around and entered the dark tunnel.