Death After Death-Chapter 223: Only a Distraction

Simon lurked and waited as the minutes passed, resisting the urge to kill and devour more men just because he could. Instead, he only eliminated one more man, and that was only because he’d been walking too close to the alarm bell for Simon’s liking. Then, after he’d hidden the body, he broke the man’s spear in half to create an appropriate wooden stake with the haft and positioned himself on the tower nearest the stables that gave him the best view of the girl’s retreat.

They did not run, just as they’d promised him, which must have been hard, given what an awful place Castle Gravenstone was. They went down the long hill slowly, making good time. It was only when the horizon started to glow blue that the alarm went up from an unexpected quarter when they were almost out of sight that Simon finally had to act.

Simon turned to the shouting and noted it was coming from a guard who had just come up from the basement. “The bloodsucker’s escaped!” he shouted.

Simon sighed. He’d been so sure that no one would check on him that he hadn’t tidied things up more. If they’d just dumped the corpse of the first guard into the cell and shut it tightly, it might not have been noticed until Freya visited him tomorrow. Still, he forgave himself. It was all he could do not to devour the girls in that moment. He’d hardly been in the right state of mind for thinking ahead.

Word spread quickly, and Simon was sure it would attract Freya’s notice soon. That left him with a hard choice. Should he kill himself now or try to buy them more time. He looked to the sky, even though his every impulse said that he should not, and noted that they had less than a half hour until the sun finally rose. They might only have twenty minutes, but that was still enough time for Freya to soar through the sky and rip those girls’ heads off.

So, Simon decided to sew a bit more chaos. He walked around the battlement like any other guard, appearing to search for the escapee, but each time he passed a building with a thatched roof or, in the stable’s case, an exposed haystack, he whispered the word of lesser lesser fire.

Each spell, as weak as it was, was a real exertion. When he’d been alive, he barely felt a lesser word, but as he was right now, a lesser lesser word felt almost as hard on his body as a greater word usually did. He thought that he might be able to cast a lesser word while his body was saturated in power. A true word of power might even be an option, but it would take all he had to do it. Greater words were definitely off the table.

For now, he didn’t do either. He just lit fires and watched the light blossom ever faster as the castle came alive in the worst way possible. When every building on this side of the compound was on fire, he decided that was enough. He looked to the horizon where he’d last seen the girls one last time. He couldn’t see them now. He could only see the sunlight building there.

The light of false dawn terrified him. It made him want to flee, and even though he knew that the light would be strong enough to take him in seconds or minutes, he decided that wasn’t enough. So, with his eyes on the horizon, he raised his stake with both hands to end his cursed life.

Simon had felt the thing pierce his skin and brush against the bone, but fractions of seconds before it penetrated his heart and reduced him to dust, Freya arrived. She ripped it out of his hand, and with a single gesture, she tossed him off the catwalk, and sent him tumbling twenty feet to the cobblestone courtyard below.

Before he’d even risen, she was already there again, kicking him hard enough to break ribs without every blow while he tried in vain to defend himself. “What is your problem!” she raged. “I give you a lovely feast, and you thank me by letting them escape? I build a lovely home, and you try to burn it down? Unforgivable! I was in the midst of a perfectly nice orgy, and then you do this to me? I will make you rue this day for the rest of eternity!”

Simon lashed out at her with his fists, trying to carve out some breathing room, but it was hopeless. She was a blur, and the only reason he wasn’t dead already was because he wouldn’t stop healing. It was only after she collapsed his eye socket for the second time that he realized she was practically naked and dressed only in the most indecent of robes.

Once upon a time, he would have given anything to see Freya like this again. Now, it only made him sick. She’s not your Freya, his brain reminded him for the thousandth time. This time, though, he agreed totally. He’d kill her if he could, but he was entirely outmatched.

When she was done kicking the shit out of him because it was almost sunrise, she personally dragged him down into his crypt and left him there bleeding. Simon spent the day lying there in torpor. Occasionally, thoughts about what she might do to punish him bubbled to the surface, but he dismissed them as much as he was able.

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She’ll do what she’s going to do, he told himself. She needs to make me suffer, and I need to escape, one way or another.

It was that stoic attitude that let him endure what happened the next day when he woke to find himself in chains with little more than a shrug. He couldn’t sit up, but he could see that there were several people already hard at work bringing bricks into the room. Between that and the sound of cement, he figured she was going to go full… well, full whatever that revenge story he’d had to read in English class a million years ago about the dude that bricks up his enemy in the wall of his wine cellar.

“Comfortable?” she asked sarcastically when Freya finally showed up. “You’d better get cozy because I’m not reopening this thing for decades.”

Simon didn’t answer. He continued to stare at the ceiling and wait for whatever was going to happen.

“I know you think you’re some big hero,” she told him. “You saved me, and now you saved those girls, but you know what I’m going to do? Tonight, I’m going to go find them, and make sure they think they got away. I’m going to let them live nice, happy lives. Hopefully, they’ll have nice big families, too, because one day, when you’ve completely lost your mind, I’m going to dig you out of this hole and let you spend the whole night devouring their grandchildren. Won’t that be fun?”

“I would never,” Simon spat, hoping it was true.

“We’ll see,” she smiled wickedly. “Decades of starvation and isolation can take a terrible toll…” Simon knew that to be true, but he vowed to ignore it anyway.

“No?” Freya pretend to pout. “No last words?”

“Rot. In. Hell.” Simon said coolly. He didn’t do it because he thought she needed to hear it, though. He only spoke because he was certain she’d drag out the moment until she got some sort of reaction out of him.

He was right, too. As soon as he finally gave in to her needling, she smiled and slammed the lid on him, letting him breathe a sigh of relief.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, “We need to hammer this thing shut… Where are the… Oh, right here…”

Simon screamed when the first blade plunged through the lid and his chest, but only from the first one. All in all, she pierced his body in half a dozen different places, but none of the others got as much as a whimper out of him.

“Sorry,” she taunted. “We didn’t have any nails long enough, so I thought I’d use the blades of my men you murdered. Have fun with that!”

Freya didn’t speak again after that, though Simon could feel her presence lingering. She might want him to think that she was gone, but she was still watching him suffer as he heard the bricks and mortar still piling up around him.

The workman chatted some, but between his occasional grunts of pain and the supervision by their particularly scary boss, it was a quiet affair that was dominated by row after row of masonry going up around him. That wasn’t good, but truthfully, if he’d just been lying here, it would have been bearable. It was the sword in his fucking liver that made this truly awful, but for the moment, he did his best to ignore it, as well as the cold and the pain that radiated off of it. If there was anything to be done about it, that would have to be after they’d finished entombing him.

Simon suffered for the rest of the night and most of the one that followed. It was only after the last of the bricks had been piled on, and they started work on bricking up the door, that he even tried to move. The first thing he tried to do was to see if he could work any of the wood slats free, to see if he might be able to break a wooden stake off of this and end himself.

That proved impossible, which was a shame because Simon would have loved nothing more than to open this tomb in fifty years, only to find out that he’d long since turned to dust. Still, death was by far the preferred outcome, so he kept trying, and it was only after several days that he resigned himself to his prison and set about trying to make it more comfortable.

One of the blades was short enough that he was able to push it back out of the coffin lid into whatever cavity lay beyond it. Three more, he was able to yank his limb through the blade and then allow it to heal up behind it.

Only the two in his chest were intractable. They stubbornly refused to budge, and he no longer had enough strength to cast a word of force necessary to sheer either of them off. It was an awful predicament, but eventually, he made it better by doing the opposite of what he’d done with most of the rest of the blades. This time, instead of trying to shift far enough to cut his way out, he shifted his spine toward the blade embedded near his heart, severing the spinal cord and any sensation below his chest.

That was enough to finally rest a little easier. Spending eternity with a sword in his chest wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time, but it beat being a pincushion. Now, he could focus on it. He could endure it.

Will she really wait decades for her revenge on those girls, Simon wondered as his mind started to come to grips with the terrible situation he was in. What if this is all just another twisted game, and she wakes me up in a week or a month.

Then you count yourself lucky as hell and impale yourself on the nearest fence post, he told himself.

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He could worry about all of that later. For now, he had to worry about keeping his sanity in all the years that lay between here and there. It was a long, terrible road made worse by the blade that jabbed into his spine, but he’d endured it before, and he would do so again if he had to.