#vampire barb

Eddie wakes up.

That in itself is a surprise because the last thing he remembers is being vigorously chewed up by a swarm of demon bats. And maybe Dustin was there.

He hopes not. Would kind of defeat the whole heroic sacrifice thing.

(Jesus, he hopes Dustin is okay. He hopes they’re all not dead.)

Also surprising: He’s not in any pain. 

He could almost believe the whole ‘eaten alive’ thing was a dream or a hallucination or something, except his clothes are definitely torn up and soaked with blood. Like, an insane amount of blood. His blood. 

Some of it has dried now, stiff and dark. Like it’s been there for a while.

So… that’s pretty weird.

Disappointing but not surprising: He’s still in the goddamn Upside Down. The murky, dark sky stretches above him, shifting with its eerie glow and occasionally spitting out red lightning.

“It’s about time you woke up,” says someone next to him.

Eddie is so startled he actually jumps to his feet. Which is way easier than it should have been given all the blood that is no longer in his body, but he ignores that for now. 

A woman stands a few feet away and she is… beautiful, but really freaky looking.

Her own tattered clothes are covered with deep stains and splotches of blood or Upside Down muck or both. It’s in her hair too, which is even longer than Eddie’s, although the tangled curls haloing her face and spilling over her shoulders are muck-free enough that he can see the color: bright red.

Honestly too bright. Too, like, alive compared to everything else down here.

Her face is round and grayish-pale and marked with black lines like forks of lightning that he abruptly realizes are veins. They’re visible up and down her bare arms too, and across her stomach where her morbidly stained shirt is torn.

And her eyes... they're entirely solid black. The whole eye, not just the middle part.

She looks ethereal, and deadly. Like an angel from hell.

Like if a balrog was a person.

Like artwork that crawled off of a really awesome album cover to wreak destruction in the real world.

She also looks kind of familiar... 

Eddie asks, “Who the hell are you?” Which is a very reasonable question, and more polite than what he really wants to ask which is: What the hell are you??

She rolls her freaky eyes before taking a moment to examine the nails on her right hand—which Eddie notices aren’t so much nails as they are claws extending monstrously from her fingertips (long, razor sharp, definitely bloodstained).

“I serve the one you call Vecna,” she intones dramatically. Then she rolls her eyes again and scoffs, “And now you do too, which means I’m stuck with you.”

Well, that is an utterly terrifying thing to say. She just seems kind of annoyed, though. And bored.

“What do you mean ‘now I do too’?” Eddie demands, hears his voice crack with his rising panic. 

She just turns impatiently and stalks away, her wild hair briefly swooping around her like it’s caught in a wind that isn’t there, and says, “Let’s go.”

Go with her. 

Eddie yelps out loud in surprise. The command isn’t something he hears, either out loud or in his own mind, it’s like he just… knows it, somehow. And then his feet are moving, trailing after the cranky monster woman against his will.

Not in the direction of his trailer, or the Creel house. Somewhere else.