Chapter 156 More

Chapter 156 More
Khan touched his chest again.

Vikram was watching him from across the tent with a wide smile, "My first hybrid."

Khan looked at the bodies on the floor around him, all of them in the positions they had fallen in, and the food on the table between them going cold.

He looked back at Vikram.

"What do you mean," he mouthed, "first hybrid?"

Vikram leaned back in his chair at the head of the table and looked pleased with the question.

"The wine," he nodded towards it. "Do you remember the toast?"

Khan thought about the red wine in the cup. The toast to Silena. All of them drinking at once.

"It was laced with my blood," Vikram continued, picking up a piece of fruit from the board in front of him and turning it in his fingers. "Vampire blood, diluted enough to be palatable, but concentrated enough to matter." He looked at the fruit. "When a werewolf dies after being fed vampire blood, the transition depends entirely on the individual. Those who are strong enough, who carry enough of the right kind of life force, wake up." He set the fruit down. "Those who do not simply stay where they are."

Vikram looked at the bodies on the floor and shrugged. "Most did not."

Khan sat with this information and let it sink in.

He wanted to be furious. He could feel the fury without any difficulty. His Raja had laced their toast without telling any of them, had killed them all without warning, had sat through the feast with smiles and his cheerful manner knowing exactly what was coming at the end of it. He wanted to let the fury out into the room and say everything it had to say.

Instead, he took Vikram's outstretched hand when the man approached and let himself be pulled to standing, and he said, very calmly, "A warning would have been good."

Vikram let out genuine laughter.

"I should've warned you? Where would the fun have been in that?" He released Khan's hand and moved back toward the table. "Besides, I needed something to do. My bride ran away and left me in a very sour mood. But I must say, the look on your faces helped." He sat back down and poured more wine into his cup, looking at it for a moment before setting it aside. "Speaking of which." He looked up at Khan with eyes that were light and conversational and also, underneath both of those things, very predatory. "You wouldn't happen to know where my darling Silena went, would you?"

Khan looked at him steadily.

"No," Khan held his gaze, unflinching.

Vikram held his gaze for a moment and then nodded once, accepting it, and looked back at the food on the table.

Khan did not look away from him immediately. He stood in the ruined feast with the bodies of his people on the floor and looked at the man sitting at the head of the table eating fruit and thought about the question he had just answered.

He did not know where Silena was. That was true. He knew she had left, knew he had heard her footsteps in the dark and made the decision not to stop her, but where she had gone after that was something he genuinely did not know.

He hoped it was far, far away from this madman and all the madness.

Vikram was quiet for a moment, and in the quiet he seemed to be somewhere else, his eyes on the table but they were not quite seeing. Like his thoughts were far away.

Khan watched him.

He had learned to watch Vikram in the weeks since the man had arrived in Maddox's body. Had learned the difference between the expressions he put on for rooms and the ones that arrived when he thought no one was paying attention. Right now, in the quiet between the conversation, something was moving behind those unnatural eyes and it was not the confidence that lived there in public.

It was something closer to concern.

It lasted only a moment and then it was gone, and Vikram reached for more food.

Khan did not ask about it.

He was still thinking about how he was alive right now.

What happened to a vampire, he wondered, who had started their existence as a werewolf? What did the combination produce in terms of what could kill it and what could not? And Vikram, who was wearing a borrowed body to begin with, what would happen to him if that body was killed? Did the soul find another vessel or did it go back to wherever it had been? And what happened to the real Maddox’s soul?

He did not ask that either. 

A sound came from the floor.

He looked toward it.

Arjun. One of the commanders who had been at the end of the table furthest from the entrance, a compact and serious man who had always listened more than he spoke in every meeting Khan had attended with him. He was moving, and suddenly he sat up.

He looked at his hands and around the tent. He looked at the bodies around him and he looked at Khan, and Khan crossed to him and crouched beside him without speaking first, giving him the seconds he needed.

Vikram slowly rose from the table, a slow smile spreading across his face, "Wonderful..."

Then, from the other side of the tent, Rudra woke.

Rudra was louder about it. He came up fast and scrambled backward until he hit the tent wall and sat there with both hands out in front of him and his eyes going around the room at a speed that suggested his brain was trying to identify threats faster than it could process what it was seeing.

"Ruko," (Stop,) Khan said, looking at Rudra. "Ruko. Saans lo." (Stop. Breathe.)

Rudra looked at him.

"Kya hua?" (What happened?) His voice came out rough and strange, like something that had not been used in a while and was readjusting.

Khan looked between the two of them and thought about how to say what needed to be said in a language that had no existing framework for it among his people, because his people did not have vampires in their history, not like this, not as something you became rather than something you encountered.

"Humein maara gaya," (We were killed,) he said. "Aur phir hum wapas aaye." (And then we came back.) He looked at Arjun and then at Rudra. "Hum ab woh nahi hain jo pehle the." (We are not what we were before.)

Arjun took it in without saying anything. Then his eyes shifted past Khan to Vikram, who was watching them with wide eyes and a smile.

He didn't say a word.

He didn't need to.

The look he gave Vikram said everything he had decided was better left unsaid.

Rudra had no such restraint. He glared at Vikram and Khan was physically stopping him from attacking an amused Vikram.

Vikram looked back at both of them equally.

"Unhone humein bataya bhi nahi," (He didn't even warn us,) Rudra gritted out, baring his teeth. "Yeh kya tarika hai? Apne hi logon ko maar dena?" (What kind of approach is this? Killing his own people?)

"Mujhe pata hai," (I know,) Khan said quietly.

"Aur baaki?" Arjun asked, looking at the bodies on the floor. (And the others?)

"Woh nahi uthe." (They did not wake.) Khan said it plainly, because there was no other way to say it.

Both men went quiet.

Hours passed.

The candles burned lower and the food on the table had since long gone cold as nobody else woke up, and gradually the fact of it settled into the tent as a conclusion rather than a possibility. Three out of five. Khan, Arjun, Rudra. The others lay where they had fallen and did not move.

The hunger arrived for all three of them around the same time.

Khan noticed it first in himself because he had been monitoring his own body since waking, trying to understand what it was doing and what it needed. He felt the hunger and it was not the hunger of a man who had missed a meal. It was something that started in his throat and radiated outward, it made the air in the tent smell different and worse, and also somehow more present, it made him extremely aware of everything in a way he had not been aware of them a moment before.

He looked at Vikram.

Vikram looked back at him and let his gaze shift to Arjun and Rudra who were both sitting very still, though he could see the tremors from Rudra's clenched fists and the veins of Arjun's neck. He nodded once and rose from the table.

He stepped to the tent entrance and said something outside it, and two men came in escorting two other people—a man and a woman, they were part of the human cooks who were brought to prepare the feast, both of them looking at the tent's interior with wide and terrified eyes as they saw the bodies on the floor, they had been hoping very hard that they were not going to end up in the same tent as those bodies. The two men that escorted them in turned and left the tent.

Vikram produced a knife and walked towards them.

He drew the blade across the cheek of the man, a shallow cut, enough for blood to well up and run, she hissed and flinched. But the blood, its smell hit the tent like a change in weather.

He used the blade across the woman's shoulder.

"There," he spoke pleasantly, and stepped back.

Arjun and Rudra moved at the same time toward the same person, toward the chef whose shoulder was bleeding, and there was a brief and undignified collision between them before they each latched onto a shoulder.

Khan stood where he was.

He was not going to do this. He looked at the chef standing a few feet from him, at the blood on the man's cheek, and he told himself he was not going to do this, that he was Khan, that he had been Khan through a prison and a camp and a war and death itself apparently, and he was not going to let his body make this decision for him.

Yet, his body moved.

It moved before the decision was made, and he found himself across the distance, his tongue licking the blood of the man's cheek and groaning when a new one quickly welled. He bit into the man's shoulder and the hunger subsided completely, almost.

He fed.

From the head of the table, Vikram laughed. It filled the tent and went out beyond it into the camp, and nobody outside came to investigate because nobody outside was going to investigate the Raja laughing.

"Good," Vikram said, watching the three of them with satisfaction. "Good." He looked around the tent, at the bodies on the floor and the humans whose lives were completely being drained out of them. Rudra and Arjun had the woman on the floor, Rudra was behind her as she was cradled in his arms, his mouth sucking greedily on her neck while her legs were around Arjun as he feasted on the spot above her breast.

Khan also had the man on the floor, but he had his body covering the top half of the man, so no one could see as he feasted on him, just like a predator with his prey.

Vikram sipped wine as he watched them, the next thought arrived behind his eyes and he spoke it into the room as though it were a simple logistical matter.

"I need more," he ordered. "More wolves to turn. More people who can survive the transition." He looked at the tent entrance. "I want an army."