Chapter 9: Weltbild und Realpolitik

July, 1988

My father had not returned from Fernando and Hilde's yet when I got home that night looking a little shell shocked. I went to my room to get clothes and then got in the shower. I was halfway through the shower when I realized I forgot to bring a knife into the bathroom with me. Considering what I had just been talking to, that was a little scary and my heart started to race. Washing off the soap quickly, I left the shower on and got out, wrapping a towel around me for a dash to my room for a weapon. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you!

I was barely to the bathroom door when it crashed open and something ugly burst through waving a massive axe right at my face. I ducked and jabbed it in the face as its body came down with its axe-swing with all of my suddenly superhuman strength behind the punch. I heard a crunch and the monster was suddenly underfoot as I tried to make my way to my room. I was almost to my door when I saw another ugly out of the corner of my eye. I sprinted into my room and whipped two of my dueling knives out of my practice bag and set my stance, praying to a God I don't really fully believe in that I wouldn't slip in the water that was dripping off of my wet body.

Seeing I was now armed made the two creatures in the hall pause long enough that I was able to get a good look at them before they charged me. They were tall, taller than daddy, with leathery looking skin, huge, bulging muscles, and matted brown hair. Their large mouths were crammed full of pointed teeth and their beady little eyes looked hungry to me. There were two of them and they both wore what looked like very dirty fur with blood spattered down the front. Both of them held clubs with sharp teeth bored into the length. I really could not see how I was going to live through this when I heard a voice I had just met yell out my name.

"Alexandra!" Herr Lars Something Something Magnus bellowed. At his voice, both monsters looked at each other. The bigger of the two nodded and the smaller one backed out of the room and looked down the hall toward the front door of the apartment. "Ogres! Alexandra! If you are alive and able, please invite me in! You cannot take these creatures alone! I cannot help you unless you invite me into your home! Alexandra!"

The ogre in front of me grinned viciously and shocked the hell out of me by saying, "Vampires! You can't live with them and you can't eat them. Invite him in and you will join his little harem soon enough. All those bloodsuckers are alike! Now come to Goresmaak. He will eat you right, tiny as you are."

As soon as he took a step forward I sprung at him, dodging his club and jumping to plant my right hand knife in his eye socket. I heard it pop and fluid spattered all over me as I pulled back. I vaguely heard it bellow as I cautiously edged out of my room and looked toward the front door. I saw the smaller ogre (though small ogre is somewhat of an oxymoron) standing before the open door taunting the vampire.

"Goresmaak will eat her quickly and then we will smash you," it promised, drooling. "Mashhard is dead, girl kill him, so Goresmaak boss male now. He take pack axe and split you in two, send you with slave to Berlin to tell Lord Vampire to keep out of Gorthog's territory business. Bloodsuckers want to play in Alps, bloodsuckers pay Gorthog slaves. Gorthog give Goresmaak and Ogres-"

What Gorthog would give the ogres we would never know because I snuck up behind the beast and rammed my knife into the base of his brain, severing his spine. The creature crumpled at my feet as Lars stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I bent and wiped my gory knife on the fur of the ogre's back, keeping my eyes on the vampire at all times.

He inhaled deeply, grimacing at the smell of the carcass, and said, "Well, it appears you can handle yourself," Lars said in a toneless voice, his face expressionless as well. "I take it there were only three?"

I stood and glared at him suspiciously. "As if you didn't know."

His eyebrows rose at that and he smiled. "My dear Alexandra, if these creatures were mine, I would have had them invite me in as soon as they broke in so that I could have a taste. Blood of people as powerful as you could be would sate me for days. I certainly would not have let you get out of the shower and into your room to get armed. These cretins work for the local Goblin Lord, Gorthog Mashbar. As you could hear this lackwit saying, Gorthog will undoubtedly think I had something to do with his Ogre mercenaries' failure since he knows I am in the area and his people will be able to smell me days after I have left. I do suggest that you and your father find somewhere else to live for a while, though, because he will send other, smarter minions to find out what went wrong and they won't all look like these idiots."

The vampire turned sharply and tilted his head, as if listening. I edged closer to the open front door, but not close enough for him to grab me without me being able to stab him. I couldn't hear anything but he turned back to me with an anxious expression on his handsome face.

"I think your father is home," he said hurriedly, eyes darting around the gore-splattered room and down to the dead ogre at my feet. "Invite me in! Hurry up! I need to get these filthy animals' carcasses out of here before your father sees them!"

My eyes must have narrowed because he was practically dancing in the doorway with anxiety. "Fine! Come in!" I said with exasperation. Then I raised my knives, feeling more than a little ridiculous trying to appear threatening in my bath towel, and said, "If you are playing with me, I know about a hundred ways to kill a person and my dad knows about a thousand."

Lars smiled and raised his hands as he walked into the apartment. "Only two of them will kill me and I won't help you out on your Vampire-slaying career by telling you which two."

He walked into the bathroom and quickly came back out, easily dragging the corpse of the largest ogre. He stopped outside my door and released the ogre's arm, going into my room and returning with the other ogre thrown over his shoulder. Stooping, he grabbed the first ogre's arm again and walked back toward the front door. By now I could hear my dad speaking to one of the neighbors from the first floor in the stairwell.

"Hurry up!" I whispered, dancing anxiously not unlike the vampire was doing a few minutes earlier. "That is my dad and he will want to kill you if he sees this mess! As it is he will probably want to kill me!"

The vampire grunted, pulling and carrying the two largest ogres out of the apartment and up to the next floor's landing. He quietly came back down for the other, slinging the filthy creature over his shoulder. On his way back out of the apartment, he bent over and kissed me on the cheek, smiling and quipping as he danced out of reach of my knives, "You look absolutely glorious in that towel, my dear." And he was gone, the three ogres with him. As I stood, blushing, in the doorway I began wondering how he was going to get out of the building with three huge bodies without being seen. Never you mind, Alexandra, Lars' voice said in my mind. But it would help the both of us if the front door was closed and you were dressed when your father came home. I could hear the chuckle at the end of that sentence and his voice was gone from my mind.

Hearing boots on the steps, I closed the door and ran into the bathroom. I jumped into the shower and quickly scrubbed the greenish black slime off of my body and shut the shower off. I patted my body as dry as I could get it as I heard the front door open and my father scream, "Alexandra! Where are you? Alexandra!" Not wanting to be barged in upon whilst naked, I threw my shirt and underwear on before trying to get my sweats on and was glad because I only had one leg on when the bathroom door burst open and my dad rushed through, gun drawn.

"Alexa!" he yelled, sweeping me up in his arms, his eyes watering. "What the hell happened?"

I squirmed out of his arms and pulled up my pants before looking up at him with narrowed eyes. "What, exactly, did Fernando and Hilde say?" I countered warily and wearily, my body crashing from the adrenaline rush.

He stiffened, flicking the safety on his gun and sliding the weapon in the front of his pants. "They told me a lot of things which made me want to call the mental health people on them. Then I yelled some very rude things at them and stormed out," he said woodenly, looking at the large puddle of goo on the bathroom floor with a raised brow. "Do I owe them an apology?"

I sighed and held my arms up to him. "Carry me into the living room so I can slip some shoes on and I will explain," I said, thinking real hard, then shook my head and added, "Some."

My father saw the puddle in my room and his arms around me got tighter and the worried look on his face was the worst I had seen since the day he rescued me from the German and American cops when I was five. This was not going to be a good talk. Not by any stretch of the imagination would this be a good talk.

Daddy set me down in a chair in the dining room and went to get me some shoes. He came back and placed them at my feet very carefully before straightening and walking to the far side of the table and sitting down, facing me. He watched silently while I slipped my sneakers on and laced them up. When my head came up, he put his hands on the table and laced the fingers together, his eyes as blank as I have ever seen them. I had a feeling I was seeing Sean McKiernan, superspy, for the first time in my life. There was nobody home in those eyes that I could talk to. They were like emotional black holes waiting for me to spill it so that they could suck it all in.

I suppressed a shiver and sighed instead. But before I could say anything, he said, "They were telling the truth, weren't they," in a frigid voice, as devoid of feeling as his eyes and face.

My eyes darted over to the puddle of greenish black slime and nodded. "I think they were ogres, daddy," I replied in a soft voice, probably the closest I have ever come to using a "little girl voice" on my father.

His expression did not change, however. "Where are the bodies? You don't get that much fluid out of a body without killing them and there are smear marks from the bathroom to the front door." I had not planned on telling him about Lars (don't ask why, I don't know) and I think I must have looked like I was going to lie because he added, "The truth, young lady! The whole truth and nothing but, am I understood?"

I growled with irritation at being treated like a suspect. "There was a vampire, all right! He talked to me after practice and when I was attacked by the ogres after I got in the shower he tried to get me to let him in to help me," I told him with a glare. "When I was done, he heard you talking to the neighbors and I let him in to get rid of the bodies."