Another cut-scene from The Curse of the Unholy Grail. Nikki’s mentor, the Bishop, has kept his connection to the vampire Aline secret. Nikki knows only the wake of carnage attributed to Aline to help the villain acquire the Grail. But it was no ‘chance encounter’ for the Bishop to bring these two women together. Can Nikki ever trust him again?
Initially, I sought a scene to introduce our intrepid FBI agent, Nikki, to Aline in some pulse-pounding way, a scene of detonation, reducing the mentor/mentee trust to splinters and ashes from which Nikki had to crawl out.
Anyway, as with Bishop Pays a Call to David, here you get a taste of (for 😉 my writing.
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Spoiler-ish things ahead …
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As if hearing a sound, the Bishop cocked his head and slowed his pace. A moment later, eyes closed, he panned his head seemingly homing in on a signal.
“Aline is coming. Two minutes away, if she keeps this pace.”
“She has to die, Isidro” Nikki said, her expression pinched with the impatience of re-explaining a fact to the stubborn. She looked away from him; what was the use of an unyielding glare if he wasn’t seeing it.
“Ms. Lange, I am adamant you not try. Let me handle this.”
“Granted, she has inside information, trouble is we can’t trust it. At best, it’s a time-wasting snipe-hunt, at worst a trap.” She stilled herself, extending her senses to try to get a fix on the approaching vampire.
Read more: The Bishop Leaves Nikki Betrayed“No, Ms. Lange, we’ll not be misdirected. I cannot tell you how I know until you and she have done a Pont d’Âme …”
“No way! No way, Isidro. Not a drop of her blood touches mine, not a thought in her head enters mine. After what she did to that family? She’s fucking psychotic,” Nikki said, giving up on trying to locate Aline. Instead, Nikki rested her hand on the Bishop’s shoulder, taking a deep breath, and trying to ensure her next words sounded dispassionate. “After the bloody massacre at Main’s house? She has to die. You have to see that.”
No doubt, the Bishop would counter with something like ‘Oh, vampire morals are not human morals: Stopping the Apocalypse justifies misdeeds.’ or perhaps ‘Oh, mortals do not cease to exist when they die, so what is death, really?’ Something irrelevant. She’d already prepared a zinger — biblical, yet Shakespearean, and so Bishop-kryptonite: ‘Even the devil can cite scripture, Isidro.’
“Be that as it may,” he said. “You have little choice; she is stronger than any vampire you’ve faced, … and I will not help you kill her.” Not a rationalization, just … an ultimatum, which he let hang there a moment so sink in.
She gnawed the inside of her lips and swallowed expletives as they rose. With a sigh, she started to speak, but stopped short seeing alarm on Isidro’s face. His eyes widened and he snapped his gaze down the tunnel.
“Others are coming. They speed to catch up to her. We have to retreat, hide until…” He spun to stare down the way they’d come. “Oh, no. They’d been masking their auras, on the hunt.”
“What?”
“We are surrounded. I feel they have not yet spotted me, and likely not you,” he said, turning to face her. “Though it is inevitable.”
“How many?”
“Too many. Our only hope is if I reach Aline to hurry her to you.”
“Isidro, we can’t trust…”
“You must trust her. It is imperative you do.”
Nikki didn’t want to waste time debating; they needed some way out to keep from getting flanked and trapped. She scanned the full circle around them, despite knowing the futility of it, looking for another passage away or even for something to hide behind. Nothing. No way out, no way to hide. And she knew her rising pulse and nervous skin would only draw attention faster.
“I am truly sorry, Ms. Lange. Success requires deception.”
Without warning, his embrace locked around her chest, pinning her arms at her side, his head craned hers painfully aside, then she felt the widening mouth of her mentor slide down her neck. Before she could even utter a cry, his fangs had pierced her, imbuing narcotic tranquility the deeper they sank.
“Isidro, no! What are you doing? St… stop! St…” Her throat had gone slack, her tongue and lips numb. With his bite’s venom, he was paralyzing her. She gulped in air, trying in vain to fill lungs to yell, to demand, to plead, but her voice was gone, replaced by the puffing of a leaky bellows.
If she could change into vampire-form, she’d stand a chance to fight free, to counter the venom taking hold. But the numb, buttery slide of paralysis and bliss made the change loose and unsteady, like scrabbling up a pile of pebbles. Claws emerged, but only halfway. Raking them over his forearms, she drew bloody slashes, which merely healed before she could claw again. Her claws had gone human again, and she had to struggle to reassert them.
Blood pumped out of her, of its own accord, driven by a heart given over to nourishing the Bishop. The room seemed to pitch and tilt, as if she tumbled in the zero-g hold of the Bishop’s embrace. She arced her head and smashed it backward into his, succeeding only in dragging teeth further into her neck. She lifted a bent leg and kicked backward toward his knee with a grunt of force. Only she missed as he side-stepped away. His grip tightened around her, stopping her lungs from replacing the breath her attack had spent.
Why had he betrayed her? Why had he given himself over to the Unholy Grail? They can’t stop it if she dies. And with this bite, she felt herself dying. Dizzy fury made her curl her legs up again for another kick, but Isidro knelt and she found herself just sitting on bent legs.
More peace and detachment poured in, even as more blood and strength siphoned out. She heard a woman moan softly, a sound muffled in the roar of a waterfall in her ears. It seemed impossible it was her voice. But the grip tightened with the noise. Shivering in cold, she knew emptiness. Claws and fangs long gone, strength taken, all she had left was a dimming, unfocused gaze, and the fear of death and the regret of failure, and a mouth silently hinging a few degrees, like a trout on the boards of a dock.
As he laid her on the ground, a last question went unanswered before losing consciousness: What made him kill her? Because you know for every sin, someone has a sermon at the ready to excuse it.
Then blackness took her.
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Nikki did awaken, though. Surprising, that she did. The feeling of other vampires close-by gave some shot of adrenaline, perhaps. Still cold and numb and helpless, still on the brink of death … yet he hadn’t stolen her youth and vitality — what a vampire actually feeds on — he’d merely stolen blood. Why? But that answer came soon enough; kneeling over her, the figure of Aline came into focus. Isidro had made her a sacrificial offering and laid her at Aline’s feet. She poised over Nikki then hooked steely fingers behind her shoulders.
“Tsk-tsk. Isidro has left his playthings on the floor.”
She hoisted Nikki to standing, and again Nikki felt the tilt of her head exposing the wounds on her neck, and again Nikki felt a vampire’s mouth slide its way down, and again she felt her heart obediently pulse blood into that mouth.
No, no, there’s nothing left to give.
Other vampires came into the tunnel, surrounding the two women. Nikki heard applause. She felt them more than saw them, lacking the strength, or more truthfully, the will to see them gloat.
“Are you going to share, Aline?”
“Pas du tout, silly boy,” Aline said, lips coated in Nikki’s blood, smile darkened by it. “Find your own wayward morsel; this one’s coming home to entertain me tonight.”
Aline tossed Nikki over her shoulder, like a hunter with a deer, and strode down the tunnel. Then, once more, blackness took Nikki.
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Not so bad a scene, really. So why cut it?
Well, 1) it feels out-of-character for Isidro, I think he’d spare the three seconds or so to explain “I have a crazy plan, but trust me”, yet the scene would lose all its punch if he did; 2) there’s no returning from the damage done, I can’t picture Nikki ever saying “yeah, nearly killing me was a great idea; I totally forgive you, Isidro”; 3) we have to explain how Aline brings Nikki ‘home’ without the villains Grévan and Cord finding out and vassal-izing her (or punishing Aline for letting the FBI agent ‘escape’); 4) I’d already cut the scene with the murdered family — and the character who was actually responsible — so I lost most of the prejudice Nikki carried into this scene.
But most importantly, 5) one needs to be careful rendering one’s heroine helpless too many times. Arguably, knocking her out with a 105℉ fever during her human-to-dhampir transition, that’s okay. A late-game boss-battle/sacrifice scene, that’s okay number two. But a third time, here, feels cliché … if not smarmy.
Anyway, cut though it is, it gives you a (hopefully pleasant) sense of how I write an action scene, establish stakes, incorporate emotion, balance show and tell, or other writerly-virtues you might look for in a Fantasy novel. Lemme know in the comments what you think.
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