There was no better time to try something than when death is imminent, so I turned away from the vampires who waded toward me with purpose, and imagined my mind as a corridor. I saw one door rimmed with light. There. That was the last of my will; my strength. My abilities, all bottled up in a final, secret place where only the desperate and wounded can go. Fortunately, I was both, and I drew close to the door, prying it open in a mind gone foggy with oncoming doom.
In the real world, the cliff reached back to me. I managed to grab onto it, just in time for the water to fall away in a thunderous crash, and with it, the swimming vampires. I lay gasping on the ground as distant shrieks of agony reached my ears.
“Sweetest sound I’ve ever heard,” I groaned, spitting water and fighting the urge to do something drastic, like die.
Tess helped me to stand. “Come on,” she murmured. “Sunrise can’t be far away.”
34
We’d made it. We were on the right side of the gorge, safe on solid land. I felt like hammered dogshit, but we didn’t have time to coddle my weakness. Pain was temporary, always, and we had more pressing concerns. We needed to get to the red-circled area before the bad guys did, and the sun would be up soon enough. We could relax when the vampires had to go to ground. We couldn’t rest much, but we could at least sit down and breathe. I could push myself a little farther, as long as I knew there was an end in sight. The light at the end of the tunnel always makes for easier steps.
The rainforest on this side of the gorge wasn’t substantially different from the rainforest on the other. I didn’t expect it to be, and I couldn’t see much of it anyway. Not in the dark. It got easier to see everything as the sky lightened ever so slowly over our heads, but there wasn’t much new to see. The flowers, vines, and trees were the same. The brightly plumed birds were the same, flying over our heads, looking for their breakfasts. The monkeys might have been a little friendlier, but that could have been the early hour. Everything was still beautiful, but some of my appreciation for it was starting to dim.
As we walked, my body got stronger. Maybe I just got used to the ache. I didn’t know. I hadn’t done too much physically when you got right down to it. I was tired, but I could go longer without sleep than I had. I was getting better at separating the toll from overstretching my powers and overdoing it with my body. I could walk with confidence now, where I had been kind of slumping along before. I didn’t need to fight myself to stay upright. As long as no one asked me to use my powers, I should be okay.
My head still throbbed, but I could live with that.
“So.” Tess tugged at her backpack straps. “Swimming across the void. That was something for the record books, huh?” She glanced back at me and tossed me a wan smile.
“You can say that again.” Lila gave a little laugh. “That’s why I went first. I figured if I gave myself time to think about it, I’d never do it.”
“Really?” Zarya spoke up now. “I was sitting here thinking you must be the most fearless person on earth. In reality, you were afraid of chickening out?” She gave a little laugh. “Goes to show what I know.”
“You bet.” Lila beamed at her. “There’s no shame in it either. I’ve always felt it’s perfectly okay to be afraid of something, you know? As long as you do the thing anyway. The only shame is in letting your fear stop you. Courage just means doing something in spite of your fears. It’s not bravery if you’re not afraid.”
“I guess.” Kamila rubbed at her face. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. Even when I got attacked, even when I became a Ferin, I wasn’t that scared. I don’t feel brave or more powerful for having gotten through something I was afraid of. I just feel hollowed out.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Kamila.” I cleared my throat. Even speaking made my headache worse, but I had to get the words out. “I needed to get us off that cliff, and it was the only way to do it.”
Kamila stopped in the middle of the trail. She turned around and hugged me. When she placed a kiss in the middle of my forehead, a little bit of the pain in my head receded. “It’s okay. You had to shock me out of what I was doing. I never would have gone for it any other way. Don’t make a habit of it, but I completely understand why you felt you had to do it.”
I was lighter after that. Vindication was a great salve for my mind.
We stopped for a rest under a giant tree. Lila told us it was a samaúma tree, a kind of kapok, and the fiber coming out of the seed pods could be used like cotton. I wasn’t exactly a fiber arts kind of guy, but the sheer size of the tree astounded me. The trunk was three meters around at the very least. It was so tall the roots had to buttress it. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live here, day in and day out, and see something so ancient and so huge looming over me.
We got up after a snack and some water. Those packs we’d picked up in Belém had really worked out, and our belongings were as dry as the day we’d bought them, even though we’d gone swimming across a river. It amazed me how as a species, we could design materials that could keep our gear dry even in circumstances like that, but we couldn’t get rid of a parasitic species like the vampires.
We kept going. I didn’t see a lot of signs that any humans had been in the area recently. On the other side, we’d seen the occasional piece of debris and that one possible cocaine field. Here seemed pristine and untouched. I knew there had to be some indigenous groups somewhere around here, but I didn’t see any trace of them. That was probably okay. We had enough complications without trying to explain away our presence to a bunch of people whose language we couldn’t speak.
After a little while, we got to an area where the ground cover wasn’t quite so thick. We were deep in the area circled in red on the map by now, and the hair on the back of my arms started to stand up. There could be any number of explanations for the difference. The ground could have something in it, like toxic waste, that made it difficult for plants to grow. I didn’t see any sign vehicles could get in here, though, and most companies didn’t dump toxic waste by hand.
It was possible this had been the site of some ancient battle, and the victors had sown the ground with salt. They’d done that in Carthage, hadn’t they? But the ground cover wasn’t nonexistent. There was just less of it. Maybe there was another explanation.
I literally tripped over our first clue. In my defense, I was exhausted, and my headache was bad enough I could barely see straight. While the ground cover wasn’t as extensive as it could have been, it did exist, and it had covered the carved stone over which I tripped.
I caught myself before I fell onto my face, and I turned to see what had tripped me up. My boot had dragged over some of the moss, which made the carving visible. I couldn’t read the glyphs, but I didn’t have to.
“What do you think this is?” I asked the women.
They stopped and rushed over to examine what I’d found.
“I don’t know for sure, but it looks ancient.” Tess ran her finger along the grooves. Then she frowned. “Something’s not right, though. This moss isn’t the same as the other stuff that grows around here.”
Zarya knit her brows together and took a few steps. “No. No, it isn’t. It’s not even a tropical kind of moss.” She crouched down and ran her fingers over it. “It’s chia.”
“What, like the awful planters they sell on late night television?” I wrinkled my nose. I’d seen an awful lot of those commercials in the months surrounding my divorce.
“Exactly like that.” She looked up at me. “You can eat it, you know?” She stood up and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Someone planted this. It didn’t just grow here because it felt like it.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. It was possible we’d stepped into someone’s chia farm. “There are all kinds of illegal farming operations in the protected parts of the rainforest,” I said slowly. “But this doesn’t feel like that sort of thing.”
“No.” Kamila had wandered over to a little pile of rocks. “This is supposed
to be an ancient structure, right? But then why the crucifix? There weren’t churches this far into the interior, and if anyone had sent missionaries in, they’d have built things out of wood. Not stone. Too difficult to get things in and out.” She pushed some of the rocks aside, onto the chia, and pulled out the stone crucifix. “Made in Italy? Really?” She tossed the crucifix to the side. “It’s even written in English.”
“Sloppy.” Lila scoffed. “If you’re going to make a scam site, at least make an effort to get the details right.” She scratched at her chin. “Who would set up a fake ancient ruin, though? And who would go to such great lengths and get it wrong? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The vampires might.” I rubbed at my temples, trying to get my headache to go away. My whole skull seemed to vibrate every time I spoke. Something about this whole scene felt wrong, like something bad must have happened, but I couldn’t figure out what. “Someone’s been here recently. The chia grows fast. That’s why they put it in those ridiculous planters and sell them to people. It’s a recent scam. If they’d done something and tried to cover it up, they might do something like this.”
“We should see if we can’t figure out what it is.” Tess’s mouth flattened out grimly. “I don’t like this. That map led us almost directly here. It might be a setup.”
“Could be.” My insides squirmed. Her point wasn’t lost on me, but I didn’t want to admit she was right. This might well be a setup. The vampires had left us a map that sent us here, and someone had set up this elaborate ruse. I didn’t want to think they’d have sacrificed so many of their own to get us here, but they’d shown us time and time again they wouldn’t hesitate.
We explored the whole site, but we couldn’t find any signs of violence. We didn’t find signs of anything at all, really, other than a couple of fire pits, cold and disused. Kamila managed to find some more. Zarya found some post holes, and Lila found a couple of small metal screws. That was it.
There were no bodies. There was no blood. There were no signs of violence at all, other than the pile of rocks pretending to be a ruined chapel. If someone wanted us to think this had been the site of a big fight, they should have done a better job of setting it up. Of course, the fact that they hadn’t made me even more sure the vampires had been involved somehow.
The screws proved the site had been used recently—a lot more recently than the carvings would suggest. The whole scene screamed creepy to me, and I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to be.
“Freeze!”
We all turned around. A man was walking out of what looked like another samaúma tree. When I looked harder, I could see he’d made some kind of bunker and carefully hidden it in the buttress roots. It was clever.
The man was average height. He had light skin, and he looked to be in his early twenties. His clothes were nondescript and kind of dirty, and he held a shotgun aimed right at Kamila.
We all froze. A shotgun blast might not kill Kamila, but it was a chance we would not take.
35
I studied the stranger’s face while I tried to figure out how to respond. The guy would absolutely use the gun in his hands; of that I had no doubt. His dark eyes told me he would do whatever it took. At the same time, he didn’t strike me as bad. Rather, he looked determined. And I noticed the glint of silver at his wrists and at his throat.
“Tell me who you are and why you’re here.” His English was accented, his words firm. “Now.”
I took a deep breath. I’d gotten used to not trusting strangers over the past few months. Hell, after everything that happened with Linda, I guessed I’d gotten used to not trusting strangers long before I ran into Chilperic. I was going to have to learn to trust this one, though. “My name is Jason, and I fight vampires. This is my family. Tess, Kamila, Zarya, and Lila. They fight with me. We came here because we got word that vampires wanted to find something here. They wanted to find it pretty badly, so we figured we’d better get to it before they did.”
The man curled his lip. He had dark circles under his eyes, and it looked like he could use a good night’s sleep. “You’ve got to be making that up. I don’t suppose you feel like proving any of that, do you?”
“Are you going to shoot me if I put my hands down to get something?” I raised my eyebrow.
“We’ll see.”
I reached into my pocket. After a second of digging, during which no one from my family made a sound, I found the key. “Are you familiar with a place called Uruará?”
He looked up at me sharply. “That place is like a nexus for the vampires. The favela there is, anyway.”
“It was.” I tossed him the key. He caught it one-handed, never lowering the shotgun. “We might have wrecked their safehouse.”
He scoffed. “You? I know I’m not exactly a prize, but you look like a million miles of bad road, my friend. You can’t possibly think I’ll believe you wrecked anything.”
I probably did look like shit, but I didn’t care what he believed. I just wanted to lie down and go to bed. “Believe it, don’t believe it, just give me the key back. I’m tired, and I want to get to bed, man.” I risked a glance back at the others. “Look, we’ve made it to the objective. I can’t think what the fangs want with this guy, but so far, I think it’s a bust. We need to get back to Belém and regroup.”
“Prove you’re on our side.” The stranger shook his weapon. “Prove you can fight the vampires, or do anything but stand there for that matter.”
I groaned. “Seriously? Right now?”
Tess snarled at him. “Buddy, you have no idea what he’s had to put himself through today.”
The stranger cocked his shotgun. “I’d stay where I was if I were you.”
I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t know or care who this guy was. He was threatening one of my women, part of my family. I was pretty sure he was Ferin, so I shouldn’t kill him, but I wasn’t going to let that stand.
My head still throbbed with pain. I was ready to throw up already, but clearly I had to do something to show this guy I was who I said I was. I reached for my power, down raw, sore passages that made me want to scream.
I knew what I wanted to do almost before I had to do it. It didn’t take much power at all. The ground here was pretty much saturated already. All I had to do was pull in a little bit more water from the ground around us. I didn’t have to create it at all. A tiny bit of effort was all it took to keep the composition of the soil where I wanted it, down to the depth I needed, and I had quicksand.
Six feet of it, cubed, all around the stranger.
He gave a shout right before he sank underneath the surface, chia and all. I let him stay there for a moment while Tess fished out his shotgun. Just as I’d suspected, it was loaded with silver slugs.
Zarya buoyed him out with a gesture. The stranger lay on the ground, gasping for air and staring at the green canopy above. “I guess you’re the real deal,” he said when he got his breath back.
Zarya helped him clean himself off. Kamila dried him. Tess and Lila helped to prop me up. For my part, I tried to keep my stomach from rebelling.
“He is,” Zarya told him with a cool look. “And last night, he lifted a waterfall to turn it into a bridge. He’s in no condition to do what you asked of him.”
The man hung his head. “I apologize for hurting you,” he said to me. “I’m sure you can understand, though. We can’t be too careful, especially in times like this. My name is Adão. You were right. We did go to some effort to make this place look like some kind of old mission or temple. Whichever, we weren’t feeling picky.”
“So which is it?” Kamila turned to him.
“It was a camp.” Adão ran his hand through his dirty brown hair. “Can I see your map please?”
I showed it to him. We didn’t need it anymore, and it had led us more or less right to him.
He blanched and swayed a little on his feet. “This is . . . well, I’m glad we had early warning. That’s all.” He recovered and looke
d back up at us. “Where did you find this?”
“In a vampire lair in Belize.” I looked away. “I was worried it was a setup. The vampire in question all but handed it to me.”
He frowned. “This site never belonged to the vampires. It was a camp, like a refugee camp. It was a home for Ferin who escaped vampire-controlled areas. We were hiding and building our forces, training and getting ready for the war.”
Tess picked her head up. “You know about the war?”
Adão snorted. “Lady, everyone knows about the war. Maybe some people up your way have stopped believing, but not down here. We heard from one of the bad guys that the war was heating up, though, and we saw evidence to that effect. The bastards were working together instead of against each other. That kind of thing.”
I nodded. “We’ve seen the same thing. It’s why we came down here, actually. We thought we’d fought off our biggest threat, but then we came under attack again. That took us to Belize and now to Brazil. The vampires seemed to be looking for something specific in Brazil, but as far as we know, what they were looking for turned out to be in this place.”
He twisted his mouth, grim anticipation on his face. “I’m sure they are looking for us. Fortunately, we got word they’d found out about this place before they ever got here. We moved camp. My job was to wait here in case someone else needed us.” He sat down. “It’s been a pretty dull couple of months, I don’t mind telling you.”
I looked around. “I can only imagine. Do you at least have something to do out here?”
“I can count the monkeys. That’s about it, friend. But it could be worse. At least the fangs haven’t found this place yet. I’m not exactly the biggest people person out there, so I can’t say I mind too much, but it does get boring. And I do mean boring.”
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 19
