by Jade Alters
A puff of air hits us all in the face at once. Every one of us clams up as Helena’s flame flickers its wild tails around. It casts a seventh, taller, lankier shadow amongst our group now. A clammy, gray-skinned shape appears before us, as if by teleportation, faster even than I’ve seen Vampires move. I can’t be sure if it’s a trick of the light, or if it really looks like that. But I’m no novice in tricks of light.
This thing, this Fiend, has a two-foot height advantage over Rock, the tallest of us. Its arms hang at double the length of my own. Its nails crick out from its long fingers as jagged chitin daggers. Its feet are much the same, easily big enough to encompass my entire skull. Its colorless lips are indistinguishable from the rest of its long face until they part to show not just one set of pronounced fangs, but an entire mouthful. The Fiend’s long, thin tongue flicks out below its faint bump of a nose with two slits for nostrils. Its eyes are much the same, like two horizontal, black slices in its fleshy skull. If it even has eyeballs or if the entire slit is its eye, I have no idea. It hangs with its thin-but-muscular arms at its sides mere inches from Hoster.
“Can… can it see us?” he murmurs, quiet-but-audible.
“It shouldn’t…” I answer him, just as quiet, “But it looks like it might be able to hear us.” The thing’s slitted face turns to me the longer I talk.
“Maybe smells us, too,” Rock adds. He dares point a finger within inches of the thing’s tiny nose, at the undulating, thin nostrils.
“Fast then. Like we practiced,” I murmur. Helena puts her flame forward, both hands ready to enhance it at a second’s notice. If this thing would even give us that long. Hoster slides a quiet step backward, entirely silent to us. The Fiend, however, cocks the side of its head towards him. Its bare, gray foot slides across the dank floor. Shallow breaths inflate the thin skin over its gut between the jutting halves of its rib cage.
Hoster decides, without prompting, to try and possess the Fiend from right where he is. I put a hand on both his shoulders to hold his body upright while he leaves it behind. None of us can be sure exactly what happens in the Blue Plane, in the seconds that pass in heavy silence. Trusting in Hoster, Fey Deller moves forward, past me, to play her part. She crouches to lay her palms gently on the stone. Any second, the Fiend’s right hand should rise over its head. Hoster’s signal that the beast is under his control. The tips of Fey Deller’s vines poke through cracks in the ground, ready to ensnare it right away. The only breath in the wet sewer corridor is that of the Fiend’s as its long-fingered hand rises. We all freeze. It climbs higher by the second while Fey Deller’s vines inch up towards the Fiend’s ankles. A violent tremor ensnares Hoster’s body, shaking my hands.
“Are you alright?” I whisper as low as I can in his ear. He only continues to gyrate. The vibration calls the Fiend’s thin, dark eyes right back to him. It takes all Hoster has to parse his lips and speak.
“I’m… not… controlling it,” he manages. Muscles coil tightly in the Fiend’s raised arm.
“Get it!” I whisper to Fey Deller. Her hands thrust down into the stone. Thorny vines jump up in an oppositely powerful reaction. They coil tightly around the Fiend’s legs, right up to its waist. The screech that escapes it turns blood to ice. It’s long arm whooshes past me faster than I can see. Its long nail engraves a bloody line across my collarbone as Rock yanks me backward. The Fiend topples, tearing at the viney straitjacket Fey Deller has snared it in.
I leap up from the ground, pulling Hoster with me in one arm and conjuring a handheld portal in the other. The Fiend flaps and flails around on the ground, tearing at Fey Deller’s vines faster than she can hope to grow them.
“Hoster!” I cry as the thing fights its way dangerously close to freedom. Even as Fey Deller’s thorns slice into it, it struggles and bucks.
“I can’t!” Hoster shouts back, “I can’t control it… it’s mind… it doesn’t…”
“Explain it later!” Rock bellows. He moves each of us aside with a stern shove to take the front beside Fey Deller. I watch his skin change shade and textures in the light of Helena’s fire. The thick hide of a rhinoceros covers him as his nose grows to a long spike. The Fiend rips free. Rock braces for impact, blocking the hallway with the girth of his growing shoulders. The weight of the decision hinges on me, interim Captain of the ASTF.
“Forget it!” I bark. It’s not worth any one of our lives. “We’re dead in the water if this thing has full control! Rock, fall back!” He takes a step back, his horn turned out to threaten the confused Fiend. The thing swings wildly at the darkness, still unable to tell exactly where we are.
“Lemme through!” Helena shouts. She squeezes between Rock and the wall just enough to poke an arm out at the Fiend. From it, she spews an expanding cloud of napalm. That it doesn’t have to see. It backs up the second it feels the immense heat. This gives Rock enough space to shift back. He and Fey Deller fall behind Helena as she unleashes a searing hell from both palms.
Then I feel that same, sharp breeze. A displacement of air from something moving too fast to see. My eyes shoot up the very same second the Fiend drops from the ceiling.
“Shit!” Rock screams the thought we all share as we hit the floor. My arm flinches up as a pointless, feeble protective instinct. I’ve seen what the Fiend does to flesh. That arm might never be recovered when the beast is done with me. It does, however, put the glassy ball of light I conjured into my view. In the clutch of my hands sits something like a tiny Universe. The portal! Right! I fling it up just as the gray arm reaches for me.
I lay in darkness for about three seconds before a hand grabs my shoulder. Fey Deller and Hoster pull me up on my feet. My eyes open to a Fiend-free hallway. The portal is gone, too. Only six mortified Academy students remain.
“Where did you send it?” Hoster pants. When feeling returns to my shoulders, I shrug.
“I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking when I threw it, so… let’s get the hell out of here,” I shudder.
“Aye aye, Captain,” Rock agrees shamelessly.
We head back for the ladder to the manhole in the same formation we came. We hardly breathe. I curse every pounding heartbeat that threatens to give us away by sound long after we trek back past Murphy and the other detectives. It takes until my back hits my bed back at the Academy to breathe out some of the dread.
An Overdue Verdict
Darius,
The Broken Academy, Holding Block
He stands outside my cell for three long minutes, silent. Well, it might be a long time to him. To me, it’s another infinitesimal blip in an endless sea of shadows and torchlight. Even his interview visits have become part of the eternal monotony. Even Serge and Emery’s drop-ins. Everything. It’s all one long half-awake blur of reality and dream. Finally, Magister Reynold raps his little iron skeleton key across the bars of my cell. I look up at him from instinct, not interest.
“What? No Christmas already? No ho ho ho, or the elves must miss you?” the Magister asks. He even sounds a little disappointed. Hearing some of my best lines from his lips forces a little smile onto my face. I’m not even sure why I care anymore. Maybe some small shred of my spirit really is indomitable, like I’ve heard them say. But, at this point, I’m just going through the motions. My life ended with two fangs in the side of my neck, but I was fortunate enough to go on living. But these past two years? I could barely call it surviving. “Lord, Darius, you don’t remember what today is?”
“Hm?” I answer at last. Something about the genuine pity in his voice awakens a new kind of awareness in me. For the first time in a few weeks, I feel something, even if it’s just curiosity. Magister Reynold pushes the door of my cell inwards. He crosses the stony floor of my tiny home and bends down to unchain my wrist bindings from the anchor on the floor.
“Darius. Your hearing is today,” Reynold tells me.
“Hearing?” I wheeze. I’ve spoken so little lately that the words struggle to find a hold on their way up my throat. It’
s too dry, too weak.
“You don’t remember what I told you during my last visit?” Reynold asks. My dead-eye stare should be answer enough. He shakes his head and plucks something from his pocket. A sealed vial of dark crimson fluid. It hardly matters that it’s sealed.
My sense of smell pierces the glass right through, I’m so starved for that sweet ruby need. He twists off the top of the vial and hands it to me. “Have a drink. Maybe it will refresh… something.” I raise both of my bound hands as one, touching the shaky vial to my lips. The swirl of chilly iron down my throat is the sweetest sensation ever to sicken me. Blood. Just enough to oil my joints, and shake off some of the fog.
“The hearing…” I start to remember, “Because the Kyrie is out of the picture?”
“There’s a good deal more than that out of the picture,” Reynold sighs. He reaches down under my arm to help me to my feet. I stumble sideways into the wall before he steadies me. Other than walking to the toilet on the other side of my cell, I haven’t seen much sense in standing up. The feeling I get when Reynold walks me through the open door to my cage is akin to the one you get when you step off a treadmill after a long run. I feel like I should take off, or strangle him with my chains before he can throw me back inside and say it was all some sick joke to break me. But I know that if I did either of those things, a swift trick would be the end of it. “You may not believe me when I say this, Darius, but… I hope they release you.”
“You’re right,” I scoff to myself, hollow. I let him support me for the first few steps down the dark dungeon hallway. “I don’t believe you.” We pass the gaoler, and the silent prisoners of a plethora of other cells, on our way to the stairs.
It takes a long time for a Vampire to miss the sun. About two years, I guess. My cold heart skips a beat when I see the first ray of it cut down the middle of the climbing stairs. I quicken my pace to chase it before it can slip away like it always does in my waking dreams. Reynold holds onto me lightly, only applying pressure when I nearly stumble several times. He lets me shoulder open the door at the top myself, drowning my eyes with unfathomable light.
I gasp for air and avert my eyes. I let them open, just a slit, every few seconds, to see if my body is ready yet. Every time, I’m disappointed. The world outside is just too bright for me right now. My only choice is to squint, with my eyelids hardly cracked. Through them, I see the D-Wing Broken Academy courtyard. I see shadows floating this way and that, heedless to my appearance. These vague phantoms attend whatever schedule they have for months, an entirely unremarkable day. To me, it’s a miracle. So many people in one place, unbound, wandering about. Then two of them come in close to me. I shrink back, only to be stopped by the Magister’s wide arms around my shoulders. He forces me to face them.
“Darius,” I recognize the voice long before her face comes into focus. It’s my only two visitors, finally come to meet me outside my cell. Emery. And the other one must be…
“Hang in there, buddy. It’s almost over,” Serge assures me. The only one quicker to doubt that than me is the chunky old Magister behind me.
“We make no assurances,” Reynold corrects him, “The Council will decide the outcome of his hearing.” Something falls out of Serge between a grunt and growl.
“Come on now, Serge…” I try to muster up some of my old bravado. My lips form the smirk of habit once again. Is it really so ingrained in me? “I’m the one… who should be feral by now.” I look in the direction of his voice, but his face remains a blur of tan features.
Then I feel something warm between my fingers. Something soft. I almost hum out loud with how the sensation seeps into me, returning forgotten inches of my body back to life. I trace Emery from her hands up her arms, over the curve of her chest, to her face. It’s a haze, like her brother’s. I fight with the sun to open my eyes a little wider. It’s the first time I’ve seen her - really seen her, not just by torchlight - in two years. Emery seems somehow to have gotten younger in that time. Stress lines still wrinkle certain corners of the outside of her face, but her eyes have lost more than half their sharpness. She’s as perceptive as ever, without any conspiring or scheming. It’s an honest face I never thought I’d see again, almost like the one I knew when we were younger. I can’t imagine how mine’s changed, despite my eternal age. The last part of her that comes into focus are those two golden nugget eyes. Like two glorious glimmers of hope after the last, defeated swing of a pickaxe. I hardly remembered what hope looked like until I saw it again in those eyes. After all this time.
“Alright, don’t get me in trouble now,” Magister Reynold scolds her weakly. He pulls me an inch back from her by my shoulders. Emery’s warm fingers slide out from between mine. “I have a hearing to get him to.” Reynold heaves me between Serge and Emery, down the hall to another staircase. I take comfort in the footsteps of the two behind us.
Reynold leads me higher still, to the Administrative Wing above the Academy grounds. For all the time I spent here when Lucidous still held an office, the place is entirely alien to me now. The vague familiarity that coats my brain is more haunting than anything, like the ghost of another life. Reynold leads me down the central walk between the offices. He nods to the man acting as secretary in place of the old Fey one at the desk. The new secretary lets us through the wall of glass doors to a chamber just dark enough to prickle my nerves. To make my body anticipate the cage. The cold, dark stone of my prison cell. My home.
“Darius Jecks,” the sound of the Dragonlord’s voice calls me back from the brink of madness.
My eyes open to find I’m not in my cell at all. The light on me is dim, sure, but it’s not the horrendous orange flicker of torchlight. This room shimmers a dull blue. I find the source of it in a glowing, circular panel under my feet. Dragonlord Thise sits alongside Magister Reynold, Sorceress Lily, and Chief Shifter Botan at a high-topped stone table that encircles the round edge of the room. I didn’t even notice the good Magister let me go. Nor did I notice Serge and Emery stop just outside the glass door of the Councilchamber. They wait for me impatiently outside.
“Darius,” Thise calls to me again. She must have noticed my dull eyes wandering. I force myself to look up at her. “Do you know why you’re here?” Goddamn, what a loaded question to start with. It all depends on what she means by here. Why am I out of my cell? Why am I still at the Academy? Why am I still living in the body of a twenty-two-year-old when I’m more than twice that age? Why was I even born in the first place? “Why we brought you in for a hearing after two years?” At least she has the decency to narrow it down for me a tad.
“Because… you have some use for me,” I say outright. For once, I don’t mean it as a jab, but the candid truth. Thise nods in an oddly off-color sort of respect.
“We may… but its all contingent on the way you answer a certain question,” she answers.
“The same questions Magister Reynold has been asking me since you locked me away?” I dare to ask. The sound of his full name from my lips twists his face up in a way that looks sad, even to me. What kind of sad life does that fat bastard live, that he cares so much about me? What do any of them care?
“Not quite,” Thise tells me. Lily and Botan twiddle their folded fingers or chew their lips, Reynold looks like he can hardly face me, but Thise is the image of patience. I get the feeling that even my old tactics of aggression first wouldn’t do a thing against her, not that I have the passion for it anyway. “First, we need to confirm that you fully comprehend the circumstances that bring us here. Magister Reynold reports that you’re not always entirely lucid during his visits.” At this, the Dragonlord sits back for Sorceress Lily to take the forefront. My eyes float idly over to her as she clears her throat.
“You’re aware of the Kyrie’s last known movements, correct?” Lily asks. I scrunch up my face to think on it. I know Reynold told me a month or so ago, or maybe it was a few months… God, now that I’m trying, I’ve got no idea what I remember and what I made up.
>
“They… unleashed some kind of monster from the Realms of Power?” I string together from fragments I can dig up. Lily nods, though the sunken lines of her face tell me there’s more to the story.
“Not just some kind of monster. Fiends. From the Vampiric Realm of Power, specifically. Are you familiar with the legends?” Chief Botan jumps in. It takes a chunk of energy just to rotate my head over to him, let alone think along the way.
“The spooky bedtime story version, sure. Some old Vampires like to tell new ones stories about the Fiends as a warning about what we’ll become if we overfeed,” I recall. It was Lucidous who first spun the tale for me. Hell, there was a time when some might have called me a Fiend. Lily, Botan, Thise, and Reynold share a few quizzical glances and nods before they all turn back to me.
“The real version of the Fiends’ story is much more graphic and horrifying. They’re like Vampires, with ten times the appetite and none of the communication skills,” Reynold explains. “A sizeable handful of them escaped from the Kyrie Stronghold a few months ago. They’ve already been responsible for fifty documented deaths across California and other states, spreading from there. The Norman media is just starting to pick up on a connection… what’s worse is those few who survive are reborn, much as you were, as a Vampire. Only, Lucidous took a huge chunk of the Vampire staff and student population when he left, and the Kyrie has all but vanished. There are too many of them for us to shepherd.”
“You’re not…” I choke on the sick laughter that swings from my Adam's apple. “You’re not thinking of promoting me from prisoner to professor?” Again, the Council shares an uneasy glance. This time I join in.
“It’s not something we’re considering at this time, no,” Thise assures me. “But… you can imagine we don’t have nearly as many resources to manage certain things in-house anymore. One of those things is the maintenance of prisoners.”
