echoing past, his one guide to an ever-expanding future ... and still they were red! He saw it even now in the eye of memory: how it had been in another time, another world. And how it was yet to be in this one:
Giorga, that cruel old bastard! Bah! For his death had been too easy ... Flopping about in his own blood, awash in a crimson flood that pulsed from his gaping throat and punctured gut. Air whistling in and out of his sliced windpipe, forming bright red bubbles into a livid froth that stained his beard and speckled his madly puffing face. But the spurting of his life-blood and all his jerking and twitching quickly slowing down as life ebbed. Much too quickly!
And Giorga's son, Lexandru: who had raped Radu's sister, sharing Magda's body - even when life had fled it - with his brother Ion and the Ferenczys. He too had died far too quickly, with a bolt from Radu's crossbow buried in his black heart and Radu's name spraying in red from his disbelieving lips.
And Ion, last and most loathsome of a brutish line:
Ion, with one bolt through his right arm, and another in his shoulder pinning him to a tree. But Radu had promised himself that this time the payment would be cruel as the crime - even so cruel, just so cruel! Magda had been raped, deflowered even unto death, her innocence crushed and ravaged from her as if torn out. So be it...
Ion, hanging there helpless from a crossbow bolt, while Radu's taloned hands caressed him in his body's most delicate parts. Then ... a// of Radu's rage and Wamphyri passion flowing in a single moment into his arms and hands!
In that same moment Ion Zirescu had lost everything, even the lower pipes of his body: dislocated, wrenched out of place, and left dangling like lumpy red rags! Not surprisingly, he had lost consciousness, too, and would have gone on losing enough blood that he. would never wake up -except Radu would not let it go to waste, not all of it. And while there was yet a pulse in his victim's jugular, he had buried a wolfs fangs in it to draw of the remainder of Ion's life.
Ah, how he had slaked his awful thirst, giving nothing of himself but draining all from the other, even to the dregs ...
Blood! It was what Radu had needed, what his parasite vampire leech needed. It was the nectar of life -
- It had been the life, and would be again, when he was up, up, up from his gluey grave! No, not a grave but a refuge, a sanctuary. From men, and from ancient enemies who were other than men, and from time itself. But especially a sanctuary from that Greatest of all Destroyers, which had finally determined his fate. Black it had been, and Black its name. Black as the swarming rats that brought it out of the east ...
As for men: they'd been naive as children when first Radu and the others out of Starside came among them. Their sciences were young, their superstitions many, and their blood sweet as any to be found on Sunside in that far vampire world of Radu's youth. Even so, their weapons had been deadly, and their courage unbelievable. In the first hundred, two hundred years, the vampire and werewolf had flourished; aeries and lairs had been erected or excavated in the mountains, and men had shunned the wooded foothills of the Carpati Meridional! and lands around.
In the beginning, ranging far and wide, Radu and his various packs had ravaged among the colonial setlements north of the Danube - even to the point of harassing a Roman garrison's three cohorts, which were permanently stationed there to man forts strung out between the river and foothills, protection for the trade and supply routes. A fairly easy target, the garrison was residual of a much earlier XIHth Legion; its soldiers had mainly setled the land around; they were as much 'locals' as the Dacians themselves.
But despite that they were only three cohorts of the original legion, the title 'the 13th' stuck, and the troubles Radu brought them quickly earned them a prefix: the 'Unlucky' 13th. From which time forward that number had been known as a symbol of il-fortune among the Romans and others, and eventualy the entire world, even as it had been in Sunside/Starside.
Night-skirmishing with legionnaires along the river and in the Dacian hamlets: