The King's Concubine

Chapter 13

Hanzori saw them coming, and no doubt the man that walked slightly behind the couple saw him as well, though he was within the cover of trees grown hundreds of years with leaves and overgrowth, his dark fur blending with the night that had fallen. Hanzori was hardly surprised Serena walked beside Orphen, Lena had said it would happen.

“She will come back,” Lena had smiled. “I knew that before I threw that dagger. I’m only willing to sacrifice so much.”

“You wanted war,” the village’s elder had said to the visionary. “Has this all been a part of your twisted plan?”

“Yes,” she hissed out happily and glanced up at the sky. “I have two days, or my plan will fail.”

That was when the screaming started. As suddenly as she had been standing there, speaking with the creatures of the River Forest Village she was on her knees screaming up at the sky. There was no bewilderment in her eyes, no surprise, just an overwhelming pain clawing through her body. If Hanzori had not known better he would have thought she had been expecting it.

The blast the omitted from her, swift and sharp, shook River Forest, causing a break in a water way that had begun to flood the village. The damage was nothing too detrimental; enough to cause damage to homes.

“Come down, young wolf, I see you perfectly.” It was the tall man in the back who called to him, his voice a whisper traveling to the wolf’s ears perfectly. Hanzori resigned himself to jumping within the flooded pathways of River Forest. He looked up at the approaching trespassers that he had been anticipating and slanted his eyes forward; focusing on the young lithe body of the beautiful blonde he was in love with. He had only attacked the girl he loved with the promise from Lena that Serena would be revived. Lena had planned it all to the very last moment.

“Welcome back, your majesty,” the wolf snarled out at the Elf King who stood beside the woman he loved, but his anger dissimilated upon focusing more closely on his one true love. Her blank expression, her empty face, still… She was revived, her body was healed, Lena had promised him not just the wound would heal but the entire desecration of her perfect body that Orphen had caused, including virginity in tact.

“Serena!” Hanzori cried, bounding for the lanky beauty, kicking up sprays of water as he dashed toward her. He stopped himself just short of the drawn sword from Orphen’s sheath, the silver blade against the dark skin, and fur, of the wolfman before him. Hanzori narrowed his eyes, caring not about the sword and only for Serena. “You bastard, what have you done to her?” he screamed out, looking to her, the girl who stared at him and showed… nothing. No emotion, no facial features at all, though her hands were wringing together in a nervous way.

“I brought her back to life,” Orphen said triumphantly, as if he was the one who used an ounce of magic in her return. “Would you have preferred her to stay dead? Well, I assume you would have, since you were the first to go after her!”

“Lena promised…” But, Hanzori was not some foolish man who would just go shooting his mouth because he was distraught. He knew better than to reveal anything that Lena had promised.

“This is why I never put much trust in visionaries,” the tall man behind them said, showing a casual disinterest in the scene before him. “Even they can see things wrong at times.”

“Lena is never wrong,” Hanzori growled. He crouched back onto his haunches, ready to pounce and away from the blade that had threatened his neck. Orphen seemed to sense no danger from the wolf and pulled his sword slowly away, but though he was estimating no evil calculations from the wolf he was not underestimating him either, the sword stayed out, gripped at his side. He had seen the attack River Forest had launched on them originally, he was not about to let them go so far as to have that drop once again.

“Serena is not what you had expected, is she not?” the arrogant king who stood too close to her continued. “So, she must have been wrong.”

“She could have misinterpreted in her correlation,” Hanzori spoke quietly. “She often will lead us to believe one thing…”

“So now you admit your mistress is a liar.” A flash of fang from the high king’s mouth showed Hanzori how the king felt about this whole debacle. “Take us to her, no more insinuations or lies; we want to speak with the lady herself.”

“You can not.” On this Hanzori would stand firm. He offered no explanations. No one was to see the visionary; that had been her direct orders, even while she writhed in pain on the ground as many of her followers tried to carry her to her bed, to make her comfortable in what could be her last days.

“We already know of her plight,” the high king said sharply, taking over where Serena and Orphen seemed to be at a loss for words. Orphen’s hand, the one free of his sword, had never left Serena’s hand. He was visibly distracted by her and the high king had no time for doomed romances. Tragic love affairs went out a century ago. Living was a much better way to go.

“Whether you know of her plight or not, I have been instructed to not let you pass,” Hanzori said firmly. He pulled his own sword from his sheath and raised it threateningly.

“You raise your sword to me?” the vampire laughed. He stepped forward until the tip of the blade touched the vampire king’s chest, drawing a drop of blood that ran down the blade to the hilt. “I hate to sound cliché, but do you know who I am?”

“I was only told to be wary of you,” Hanzori said, but now his voice faltered, his hands shook just a hair more. Something in the man’s commanding tone told Hanzori he should have been backing up, running away from this intimidating man. Hanzori had never been smart enough to follow his animalistic instincts, instead he listened to what the visionary taught him and only remembered and thought of her words. “Stand your ground.”

“This is why I despise tiny villages in the depths of nowhere,” the vampire smirked. “They teach the children nothing; they know nothing of the world around them. You are told to bow down to a mere visionary when do you even know that Orphen is your king, and that even higher above him there is a vampire king that rules this entire continent?”

“You can not be Nicholas, High King of this realm, you can not,” Hanzori insisted, though his heart told him it was true.

“Oh, why can I not be?” Nicholas crossed his arms against his chest, moving just a step back so the blade was not still digging into a spot on his chest, a sore spot that had already vanished in the course of the conversation.

“Lena said that Nicholas was nothing to worry over,” Hanzori said strongly. “She said that Nicholas was… well… not disturbing.”

“And?” the high king seemed bored.

“You are disturbing.” Hanzori said it on a whisper, a tilted voice that barely breathed from his lips. His mind was distracted, his eyes focused on the vampire king. He was losing all sense of concentration. He did not feel the trickle of blood that was running across his fingers, against the back of his palm. He did not know enough to be more than just a little frightened of the demon before him.

“Then you will let us through?” Nicholas, high king of the known worlds, said calmly.

“No.” Hanzori still stood his ground, readying his sword for a fight.

“Pity, I thought perhaps the people of this village could be saved,” Nicholas smiled harshly, showing the protruding fangs that grew with every word. “Apparently, they can not.”

Hanzori dropped the sword. From where Orphen stood there was no reasoning to it. The wolf-man had been standing threateningly one second, the next the sword fell from his hands into the waters of River Forest. Hanzori pulled his hand up, staring at it as if he expected the skin to be pulling away. He screamed in pain, staring at his hand, covered in blood that was not his own. What Orphen and Serena both did not understand was that vampire blood could also be used as a poison, and Nicholas was making sure that the young wolf-man, that had one loved Serena with every ounce of his soul, and whom she had loved once too, was going to die, either slowly from poison, or quickly by Nicholas’s feasting fangs.

“You two go on ahead,” Nicholas said calmly, removing a black glove from his elongated fingers. “I will be there shortly.”

Serena’s head turned to Hanzori as Orphen tried to usher her ahead. Her emotion may have been remiss from her beautiful face, but even Orphen recognized the slow regret in the set of her shoulders.

“Do not cry for him,” Orphen whispered into her ear, urging her further forward. “He did not cry for you.”

Serena relinquished her dwelling emotion and turned away from the man she once loved, blocking out the sounds of his screams beginning to echo. The poison would move slowly through his bloodstream, but like Lena in her agonizing painful death, it would be slow.

When Orphen and Serena were far enough away Nicholas gazed down at the wolf-man who had fallen to his knees in a rush of his own self-pity and pain. Nicholas smiled, fangs fully extended, and reached down to Hanzori’s neck, grasping it in pale, deft fingers. “I will make this quick for you,” Nicholas told him in the deep seducing voice of his bloodline. “Only because you are ignorant. I can tell you now the rest of your village will suffer far more than you are suffering.”

Near Serena’s feet, so very far away, blood trickled through River Forest. She glanced it with dull eyes and was relieved of her new disposition of hiding all emotions. She did not want Orphen to see the horror on her face as she knew, somewhere in the background, Hanzori was dying by the High King and she had simply walked away, allowing it to happen.