Page 53 of Nexus

Ruen moved as fluidly as the liquid that oozed from his pores. His tattered rags fluttered wildly and his straggly hair blew back from his hideous face from his sheer speed. Pouncing on the lead guard, his teeth latched onto the hapless creature’s shoulder, since he didn’t have a neck. Even with my damaged ears, I heard the gross sucking noises the vampire made as he fed.

In seconds, the guard had been drained of his blood and his life. He didn’t have two neat puncture wounds in his skin. Instead, his flesh had been ripped open and a ragged hole gaped widely through his armor. Both the corpse and its attacker were covered in blood.

Ruen leaped through the air and landed on his next foe’s back, taking him to the ground. Shaking off the stunning effect of his scream, I lumbered forward as the other guards rallied. Plucking rocks from my ear, I tossed them at our enemies before they could stab the leech in the back.

The two guards who’d been knocked out woke up as I killed two more of their companions. Ruen and I finished them off in short order. He’d drained three of them to death. I could hear blood sloshing around in his now distended stomach.

“I’ve never fed on so much blood before,” Ruen said, now seemingly like his old self, except for his appearance. His hollow cheeks had filled out and he wasn’t gaunt anymore.

“Are you okay? Are you going to puke?” I asked warily when he put a hand on his gut.

His response was to belch long and loudly. Droplets of blood were expelled from his mouth in a fine mist. They hung in the air for a couple of moments before falling to the ground. My eyesight was so acute that I could make out each individual droplet.

“I feel much better now,” he said, grinning disturbingly.

“We need to get out of here before more guards come along,” I said. There was no way we could hide what we’d done. We just had to hope no one in the underworld would figure out we were responsible for their deaths.

Tilting my head to the side, I banged on my skull until the rocks fell out.

Ruen gaped at me in astonishment. “I’ve heard the term you’ve got rocks in your head, but I didn’t know it was based on ogres.”

“I don’t have rocks in my head,” I said with a scowl as I began trotting along the path. He had to run to keep up with me, since he was so much shorter than I was now. I told him about accidentally pushing the rocks into my ear when he’d screamed like a banshee. “What the hell was that, by the way?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never been able to do that before. Perhaps this is what vampires are like in the underworld.”

“No offense, but you’re as creepy as hell in this realm,” I told him.

“At least I didn’t gain five hundred pounds,” he muttered.

“I heard that!”

“Your hearing is much better in this dimension,” he said uneasily.

“All of my senses are sharper,” I divulged. Then my stomach growled so loudly that it echoed up and down the rocky crevice.

“We need to find a way out of this passage,” Ruen said, looking around in search of an escape route. “There could be more guards ahead.”

My stomach growled again and hunger began to gnaw at me. “I think I’m going to need to find something to eat soon,” I warned him.

“You could have eaten one of the guards,” he pointed out.

That thought had my upper lip lifting in disgust. “I’m not that hungry.”

He shrugged and kept on running. Neither of us grew tired as we ran for a good mile or so before the crevice began to widen. We reached the end of the rocky passageway and found ourselves in a valley. A ring of tall mountains encircled us, with only one trail over to the right. It led towards the smallest peak.

“It looks like we’ll have to go that way,” Ruen figured. “I can see smoke rising from just beyond the shortest mountain. Someone must be living nearby.”

“We’ll have to try to sneak around them,” I figured, doing my best to ignore the hunger that was growing by the second.

He gave me a skeptical look, eyeing my new height and girth. “I don’t think that’s going to be possible. I think we’ll have to kill our way through every being who impedes us until we find what we came here for.” His creepily empty eyes shone with fervor at the thought of killing and feeding on our potential foes.

“We’re only supposed to defend ourselves from anyone who attacks us,” I reminded him as we took off again.

“You saw how the guards reacted when they saw us,” he said in self-defense. “We had no choice but to kill them.”

“At least there were no survivors to tattle on us,” I muttered, then continued down the path that would lead us to the smoke in the distance.

Chapter Forty