Bloodborn Read Free

then jerked him away from it and threw him into the table, upsetting it and knocking the hourglass to the floor. His fingers remained in the door.
    He shrieked on the floor, staring at the crimson stumps of his digitless hand. She grabbed his shirt front and hauled him up, his feet dangling above the ground. He continued to scream.
    ‘Shut up!’ Ulrika cried. ‘Stop that noise!’
    He would not.
    She snapped her head forward and tore out his throat with her fangs.
    He was silent at last.
    Ulrika was on all fours, puking up black gobbets of heart meat, when Countess Gabriella opened the door a while later. She shook her head and sighed as she surveyed the carnage. Young Johannes’s disparate parts were strewn across the tower room’s stone floor like grisly islands in a red sea.
    ‘This will not do,’ she said. ‘This will not do at all.’
    Ulrika glared up at Countess Gabriella, opening her mouth to curse her, but another convulsion rocked her and she spewed a stream of undigested organ bits onto the flagstones. She had never felt so sick in her life – or her death. She was full, her belly bloated like an overfull wineskin, and was woozy and nauseated as if with hangover, one worse than she had ever had after drinking kvas with her father’s troopers.
    Worse was the sickness of her soul. She was horrified by what she had done – disgusted by her savagery. In life she had never shied from bloodshed, but neither had she killed an innocent. She had never torn apart a defenceless boy with her bare hands. She buried her face in her arms, sobbing though no tears would come.
    Gabriella called down the tower stairs for servants to come and clean up the mess, then raised her floor-length skirts and stepped fastidiously through the maze of Johannes’s limbs to sit again at the chair by the smashed table. She picked up the cracked hourglass from the ruins. The lower chamber was less than a quarter full of sand.
    ‘I apologise, Ulrika,’ she said. ‘I have tested you too severely. I have forgotten how hard it is at first.’
    Ulrika pounded the flagstones with her fists, splashing herself with gore. ‘Why did you not just kill me?’ she screamed. ‘I don’t want this! I’ve become an animal!’
    ‘It won’t always be like this, child,’ said Gabriella. ‘Restraint will come. You must have patience.’
    ‘I don’t want restraint! I want to die!’
    Gabriella looked at her levelly for a moment, then stood and crossed to the window. She opened the shutters, being careful to avoid the knife-edge of morning light that stabbed in and highlighted the table, and the red flecks of blood that dotted its legs.
    She turned to Ulrika, gesturing with her hand like a butler inviting a visitor into a great house. ‘You may walk in the sun any time you like, beloved.’
    Ulrika looked with desperate longing at the rosy dawn that glowed above the distant snow-capped hills. All she had to do was leap – a jump to the window and a jump to oblivion as the sun tore the flesh from her bones and ripped her soul from the cage of dark magic that held it there. Nothing but an empty, blackened skeleton would hit the rocks at the base of the castle wall if she leapt. She tried to force her limbs to move, to give up their selfish desire for existence and finish the job Krieger had started.
    She crouched there, trembling with tension for a full minute, but she couldn’t do it. She was weak. Her will to live was stronger than her loathing for what she had become.
    She lowered her head to the bloody flagstones and shut her eyes. ‘Close it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see it.’
    After the servants had carried away Johannes’s remains, mopped up the blood and taken the rug for cleaning, Ulrika retired to her bed for the rest of the day. She lay awake for a long time, finding it hard to summon the trance-state that vampires call sleep. Her thoughts would not settle. She remained disgusted with herself, even more so now that she had