Chapter 13
Perpetual Peace
When Anton saw movement in the direct center of his sight it poked his drifting consciousness back into awareness. The shrubbery rustled, and he saw the great boulder, the one that seemed to be embedded in the ground, start to move, start to rise up and permit an opening. Five dark-cloaked vampires emerged, one by one, into the daylight. Their skin was thoroughly protected from the light by their heavy cloaks, in which they moved with a lumbering gait.
At seeing this sight, Anton completely dispensed with caution and decided to confront them, all five of them, single-handedly. He was hoping that he could somehow force his way past them, enter the cave, and free his sister. His plan for how to accomplish this wasn’t well drawn out or carefully articulated, but, without further consideration, he leapt right into the situation, climbing down the tree and plummeting to the ground.
He descended to the ground without grace or stealth and all five of the vampires turned to look at the loud noise behind them. Anton drew his long bow and pointed it at Asha.
“I’ve come to free my sister, Constanta. Let me in there and let me free her and no one gets hurt,” Anton demanded while a taught bow pointed its arrow point at Asha.
The five vampires looked at him with some disbelief, not quite sure whether to take him seriously. Not seeing any action on their part, Anton launched his first arrow in the direction of Asha.
Asha’s reflexes sprung into action, and she batted the arrow away in a swift sweep of her hand, sending it spinning away from her onto the ground. Before Anton had even the chance to reach for another arrow, she lunged directly at him, grabbing him by the neck and pushing him against a tree.
Anton’s feet dangled above the ground, and the whole of his body weight was hanging by his neck, which was wrapped in an iron grip that barely permitted him room to breath.
“You don’t shoot at me,” Asha snarled at Anton while he hung there in her hands, “I could have you executed even for just attempting to kill a vampire. That’s the way it is from now on. You want to join your sister? Just try to kill me. Just take out your knife and try to stab me. Come now? Your hands are free. It’s there around your belt. Just try it.” As she squeezed a little bit harder on Anton’s neck, she repeated, “Just try it.”
Anton was, once again, saved at the threshold of death by fortune. A whistle in the distance made Asha stop and turn her head. Two carriages waited for her and the other four vampires. The carriages were barely discernible in the distance, and her actions were undoubtedly all but invisible to the human occupants of these carriages, but she nonetheless, decided to toss Anton aside instead of killing or enslaving him. With her one hand, she hurled Anton through the air such that he painfully crashed onto the forest floor.
Asha and the other vampires walked away in the direction of the carriages.
Anton picked himself up off the ground and began to walk. He was finally willing to give up on waiting and take the sleep that he needed. He walked in the direction of Vallaya, towards Andrei’s, where Vasile was undoubtedly resting. But Anton didn’t stop at Andrei’s. He continued walking in the direction of his home, passing by the church and steadily approaching the farmhouse, visible on the horizon in the distance.
As he approached, he saw his father repairing the window and shutters, pounding away at it with a hammer and swearing to himself. When his father saw his son in the distance, he gave him a cold look and didn’t take a step towards him.
He shouted in Anton’s direction, “Well, look who’s come back. You ready to admit you were wrong?” When Anton didn’t say anything, Josif grunted and turned back to his work, paying Anton no further attention.
Viorica was inside preparing food. When she heard Anton enter and turned around to see him, a smile passed across her face. But immediately after she wrapped Anton in her arms in a stifling embrace the tears rolled down her face. “Oh Anton, it’s so horrible! They took Constanta! They took her right out of our bed while we slept,” she wailed.
“I know,” Anton told her.
“You know?” she asked, raising her tear-soaked eyes to look up at her son.
“I saw her being taken away, in the forest last night,” Anton admitted, “I saw them carrying her.”
“Well, why didn’t you stop them?” she asked.
“I tried,” he told her quietly, “I tried as best as I could, with all my strength, and more. You almost lost me to them too. They almost killed me. But they failed, and I failed too. I just wasn’t good enough. I should’ve never gone to work for Vasile. I was wrong. If I was here I could’ve protected her.”
“I should thank God that I haven’t lost you too,” she said, crossing herself and lowering her eyes. Then she asked, without much interest in hearing an answer, “What will they do to her?”
Anton traversed the room to the bed where he and his sister had slept, to the spot from which she’d been taken the night before, and he sat down on her side of the bed, touching the tussled sheets she’d only just recently used.
“I don’t want to know. All I know is that she’s dead by now,” Anton said, before he sank down into the bed and cried.