Seven : Beloved and Taken

 § Beloved and Taken §

 

I was awakened harshly by Adelheid, shaken by her, accompanied by shrill whisperings.

 

            “What…?” I began groggily.

            “Get up, Eileen,” she hissed. “Now! Hurry up, we have to get outta here!”

            I sat up, startled and suddenly alert.

 

            “What’s going on?” I asked, glancing around the room.

 

            “We’re gonna be late for first period!”

 

            “You little…You scared the s**t out of me, making me think we were being attacked or something!” I hissed vehemently.

 

            “Well, at least that got you up,” she answered simply. “Go get dressed and whatever. Class starts in ten, so we don’t have time for breakfast.”

 

            I brushed my teeth and hair, hauled on dark jeans and a black scoop-neck sweater, and shoved my wool-socked feet into winter boots. Throwing on a heavy winter jacket on top, and grabbing my purse and gloves, I headed outside to meet Adelheid waiting by the first set of stairs nearest our dorms.

 

            When we arrived at the building that ROV was held in for twelfth-graders, it was half-full. When I noted the fact, Adelheid muttered something considerable peculiar.

 

            “Look at it as half empty"that’s what it is, after all.”

 

            I ignored her pessimism and passed it off as her worry for Khaled.

 

            Today’s topic, from the sound of the introduction of the day’s lesson plan, was going to be quite interesting. We were going to learn about history of the vampire monarchy.

 

            From what I knew so far without education from the academy, there were mini civil wars going on between vampire groups"although whether they could be called “civil wars” when vampires didn’t have their own state was debatable"and it essentially broke down into organized rebel groups against royalists"although that could be arguable as well, since their “monarch” was basically their leader, as they’d yet to gain their own state. Although, Romania (the new capital of which was declared to be Transylvania by the vampire army occupying it, instead of Bucharest) could be considered as some "mostly them" to be their own nation-state.

 

            I thought it unlike any pre-revolution in human history.

 

            Currently, vampires were under a constitutional monarchy rule, where the current king had defeated the villainous last generation of the Draculian lineage royal family. The strange part was that the present king had been an advisor to King Dracula Jr.-to-the ten-thousandth-whatever-eth. But when there’d been a real rebellion, possibly termed “revolution,” again by mostly them, the vampire “people” had voted for the current king"then an advisor of some sort to the ruthless king to be the new leader. Also, they’d cut off the old king’s head, as well as his two self-indulgent wives’ and thirteen children.

 

            So…it wasn’t all that different from our own history. My bad.

 

            “By the end of the week, you’ll have memorized all the names of their current royal family, as well as the more important vampires of the Draculian lineage such as Dracula himself, his immediate children, and the last generation of his lineage,” Ms. Ardent, the ROV teacher informed us. “Unless you plan to"I don’t know, fail.”

 

            Some kid in the back raised his hand, and the teacher bid him speak.

 

            “Are we gonna learn about the Eminescu sisters?” he inquired.

 

            “That’s irrelevant to the topic of discussion, Angelo,” she said. “This is vampire history, not psychoanalysis.”

 

            Some students laughed; others actually moaned as if their hopes had been let down.

 

            “Does anyone know the name of the current governmental system of vampires? Let’s see…”

 

            She was searching the class to pick on someone, avoiding the people with raised hands.

 

            “Eileen?”

 

            Great; maybe I should’ve put up my hand so she wouldn’t pick me.

 

            “Um…constitutional monarchy?”

 

            “Right; and which nation-state is being ruled by the constitutional monarch? Eve?”

 

            “Romania.”

 

            “Good. What’s the name of the ruling monarch?”

 

            “King D****e-sucker,” someone slightly to my left muttered under his breath.

 

            Ms. Ardent actually laughed a little before disguising it as a mini cough attack, which was followed by poorly disguised laugh-cough sessions of students.

 

            “King Liam of"”

 

            To the astonishment of the whole class, the window behind her shattered into a million pieces of dangerous shards of glass. Behind her now stood a black-and-red-clad vampire, followed by another leaning almost gracefully into the room through the broken glass. The teacher crumpled to the floor like a puppet with cut strings. Appearing behind her were more vampires leading yet more of them into our haven, now stepping over the unconscious teacher and proceeding to reach the student body.

 

            Adelheid was the first student in the whole classroom to react. She got up out of her desk, grabbed my arm violently, and led me away to the exit, at which point the others had just had the sense knocked into them and were scrambling out of their seats. The first scream came from a boy whose wailing voice I couldn’t recognize.

 

            “We’re locked in,” Adelheid said, panic creeping into her voice.

 

            My shoulder was aching from her grip on my right arm, but I felt her panic surge through my own body as if she was transferring some of her fear into me, as well I had my own fear to deal with. As I was trying to process the fear of both of us at the same time, she jerked my arm yet again, opened a door, and shoved me inside. The next moment, I heard her shriek"felt the fear she was experiencing in my bones.

 

            What had just happened? Where was I? More importantly, where was Adelheid? Had one of them captured her? Why had she shoved me into this space, and not gotten in with me herself? How come I couldn’t see anything"where was a light switch? And back to the first question: Where was I?

 

            When I scrambled around my surroundings to get a clue about my hiding space, I bumped into the corner of something hard. When bloodcurdling screams erupted inside the class, I almost dropped to my knees in alarm. Hence I discovered that the floor of the space was about two meters square at most, and not carpeted.

 

            I’m inside the teacher’s filing closet, where students say teachers hide the things they can’t keep in their filing cabinets, I realized.

 

            The volume of the screaming had decreased a great deal, and I was afraid of the implications. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to breathe or live. Or die.

 

            The unwelcome visitors were speaking a foreign language, so I was lost on what they were planning out. I swiped out my cell phone from my jeans pocket and dialed 9-1-1, then the principal’s extension line. It was continuously ringing, and finally…the automated answering machine picked up.

 

            I breathed a sigh of frustration and tried his wife’s extension number; same results.

 

            Then I turned on the voice recorder on the phone and began to record the vampires’ conversation snippets. When I realized I’d forgotten to turn the phone on silent, I panicked, imagining a scenario where Mr. or Mrs. Winters called back, my lyrical ring tone rang out, and vampires opened the undetectable door with their super strength. And I dropped the phone.

 

            When I quickly retrieved it from the floor, I could see more things than those my phone’s LED lights were illuminating. A crack in the door had exposed my surroundings.

 

            A rogue vampire of the Vladimir Clan grinned down at me, exposing his fangs.