DISCLAIMER: Blade: The Series and its characters are the property of Spike TV, New Line Cinema and Marvel Comics . No infringement intended.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Waiting for the Ash
By ralst
The blood pooled at Krista's feet. The boy had died quietly, gratefully even, but she was sure his gratitude would soon dissolve into fury when he awoke to find himself a plaything for a reject of the House of Chthon. Caged and baited, he would be just another in a long line of victims, all created to feed her desires and pervert the life she once knew.
Scarred by one of Marcus' experiments, the hunger eat away at her soul, hour after hour, day after day, until the only thing she could do was kill. Her undoing had finally become his, as her fangs tore through his throat and left him a pile of ash on the floor. Her brother's death had finally been avenged, even though she could no longer remember his name, or what it was to be human.
"Krista?"
The voice of the dead. The one link Krista still had to her life before Marcus' experiments. The woman she killed. The woman who refused to stay dead.
"Chase?"
Chase knelt beside the body and trailed a finger through the cooling blood. With slow deliberation she brought the finger to her lips and tasted the latest result of Krista's madness.
"It tastes like chicken."
Krista's eyes blazed with feverish delirium and the joke left her puzzled. The need to feed had returned and the curve of Chase's neck beckoned. The vampire's blood would be a heady brew, she knew that, but seeing the defeat and welcome in Chase's eyes would be the real intoxicant. Their rivalry once again ending in blood and pain.
"Wait."
It was the smile on Chase's face, more than the quietly spoken command, that made Krista pause. Evil and innocence was combined in one single expression and called to the dark heart that now inhabited the brunette's chest. The tiniest glimpse of a companion in her loneliness.
"I want your pain."
"I know." Chase raked her eyes over what remained of Krista's face; scars bit into her flesh and obliterated the beautiful woman Chase remembered. A face to scare small children, one of her contacts had told her, but he'd been wrong. Krista's visage could scare even the most heroic of men. "And I want yours."
Blood coated Krista's feet as she walked through what remained of her last sacrifice. The smell tickled at her senses but was subsumed beneath the prospect of a fresh kill. It would be beautiful. Chase's skin beneath her lips, the sharp moment of penetration, followed by the inevitable struggle for life and freedom. It was that last part she enjoyed the most. That desperate scramble to avoid her touch, slowly fading as the life drained from their body into hers. The thick, rich taste of blood providing her with that final high.
"Krista?"
"You're going to die." The tortured skin, that was all that was left of Krista's mouth, contorted in what would once have been called a smile. "Again."
"We all die." Chase circled around the corpse at their feet, keeping the soiled remains between them the entire time. "Some of us more often than others."
Krista lunged. Her fingers digging into the soft flesh at the top of Chase's arms and pulling the blonde impossibly close. The resistance that she craved strangely absent as the older vampire relaxed into her embrace, the curve of her neck bared, as if in invitation.
As Krista's fangs sank into the pale flesh a burning excitement consumed her body and rivalled even the most intense of orgasms. The pleasure was overwhelming. Chase's blood was infused with the lives of thousands and as it gushed and smeared across Krista's mouth she felt, for the first time since Marcus, completely satiated.
Krista's grip loosened and Chase fell from her arms.
The stench of blood was overpowering but instead of wallowing in its glory, as she always did, Krista felt sick.
"You used to know better," Chase murmured.
Krista looked at the blonde; her face and upper chest were coated in blackness, as the blood congealed against her skin, the wound at her neck already beginning to heal. The speed of Chase' recovery made Krista doubt her own senses. The world of hunger and pain she had inhabited over the last year was beginning to recede and with it a thousand points of agony invaded her mind.
Chase slowly began to rise. "I'm not to be trusted."
A scream tore from Krista's lips and she collapsed to the floor.
The smile that consumed Chase's face had lost all of its innocence. She swayed, slightly, the blood loss eating away at her equilibrium and, at the same time, inspiring a sense of admiration for the woman at her feet. Marcus might have bastardised Krista's body and soul but he had also unleashed her killer instincts and, for that, she was grateful.
Two men entered the room, their silence eerie in its subservience, as they gently began to dispose of the dead boy, taking due care to severe his head before he could reawaken into his new life. Next, they came for Krista, her limp body reverently carried between them, with Chase following patiently in their wake. As the door began to close the sound of a match striking echoed through the room, only to be engulfed moments later by the sound of flames fighting to consume and destroy the evidence of Krista's carnage.
Outside an ambulance stood waiting and the two silent men carefully laid Krista onto one of the gurneys within, a third figure, dressed in unseemly white, then began to insert IV tubes in her arms and legs, the thick, black liquid Chase had prepared soon eating its way into Krista's bloodstream. The antidote would either kill or cure but, either way, it was better than the cesspool Krista had called a life for the past year.
As the ambulance began to move Chase perched, precariously, on the edge of the gurney, looking down into Krista's ruined face. Gently, with a fondness alien to her nature, she traced a finger along the side of Krista's cheek. It was almost as if a Halloween mask had been welded to Krista's face, her natural beauty obscured, in favour of someone else's nightmare. The sheer beauty of the wreckage made Chase want to weep in joy.
"Chase?"
"Welcome to the world of the dead," Chase murmured, her fingers continuing their idle caress.
Krista didn't feel dead but she did feel as if she was being slowly murdered. Pain tore at every part of her body but, for some reason she couldn't fathom, her screams failed to be released.
"Chase?"
"Shhhhh." Chase ordered, her tone light, and almost playful. "I'm waiting to see if you dissolve into ash."
As the ambulance tore through the night Krista could only pray for oblivion.
The End