When I’m done, you must finish the job by impelling the hidden wooden stake through her heart. Lamia lives on if you don’t,” said Morgan.
Yew nodded. He saw a glint in Morgan’s eye as if he were the master trickster. He had been a parasite dependent on Lamia’s slayings to sustain him. A worm on a worm. And now the worm was going to kill the host.
“Now, we sit and wait,” said Morgan.
It seemed as soft ethereal chants of distant angels whispering, filling the air. Morgan sat on one of the throne room’s pinkish-tint marble benches oblivious to the warm music. His head resting on his clenched fists. His forearms forming a pyramidic power-stance propped on his knees. Hunching over, his dark hair framed his foggy eyes. Glaring from underneath his brow, he appeared in a scowling trance. He was impatiently waiting.
Morgan was constantly waiting, even hoping for a confrontation with his nemesis, his female counterpart. It had been a long time. Closing his eyes he thought of Lamia’s chilling beauty, her movements graceful, her speech impeccable, her voice seductively throaty. In spite of all her natural beauty and gifts, she was a dark, sinister, vengeful trickster. Her only purpose: to destroy. Her victims were always pure, unsuspecting, and shining. Unblemished lambs harvested before fulfillment’s crest and tragically sacrificed.
Morgan reflected. How did he feel about her victims? He was always stunned by their previous brilliance and lost luster. It seemed barbarous. Why always the brightest, the most elite? Morgan grimaced as he thought he too lived off the murdered, taking a portion as trophy and another to sustain and protect his life. He looked at his hands. They appeared leathered, worn by time. How many dead had his hands held? How many had to die before Lamia’s vicious dance was done? Paradoxically, he too, depended on future deaths to maintain his existence. He felt trapped living off Lamia’s negative energy. He evolved into a negative creature, also.
Lamia entered true form as a two-faced black widow. Devourer extraordinaire. Morgan’s incestuous mother.
“Both of you stay lying down as planned. Quiet, or we are all dead,” whispered Morgan.
Morgan dragged each supposed dead body, sliding them across the slick marble floor and into the throne room.
“Lamia! Mother, I brought you warm blood to quench your thirst.”
“No blood satisfies,” she shouted from the throne, “but I am weak. Bring them to me.”
“I suppose you haven’t the energy to drain them,” Morgan said with contempt.
“Bring them here and hold them up to me. I’ll manage.”
Lamia was not afraid Morgan would harm her. He needed her like an addict his drug or like an antidote for poison. He was the little black spider who had secretly grown as rabid as she.
Close enough now to strike her, Morgan dropped his pretend victims and drew his ax-like sword. He flicked slicing the blade easily through Lamia’s thin pretty neck in one stroke. He picked up her chattering head by her black hair.
“Tonight I dine on your brain. I’ll live for over 100 years on that tiny morsel. And then I shall die but I’ll not be a bloodsucker vampire like you. I’m no longer your slave, human tick.”
Morgan strode out of the room with the bloody head. Zingara and Yew sprang to life. Zin searched to retrieve the stake and mallet previously concealed in a compartment under the throne by Morgan. It was empty.
“The stake and mallet aren’t here. He lied. We’ve been suckered,” cried Zingara.
Yew rolled Lamia’s body off the throne with his boot. Yew smashed the wooden leg off the chair with an angular boot thrust. He jabbed the improvised stake into the decapitated corpse’s heart with all his body weight. The bloody stake protruding from Lamia’s evil heart gave a final quiver.
“What a grizzly sight,” said Zingara, “I hope I live to forget it. But it seems appropriate for the she-monster.”
“Hey! Speaking of monsters, where’s your “beauty queen” sister,” asked Yew.
“Very funny. Probably back down stairs. C’mon!”