Zarya smirked. “Tell me about it. I spent 200 years alone on an island off the coast of Belize. I made sure going into town was such a hassle, I wouldn’t want to do it more than every few years.”
Adão laughed. “I can understand that. I’m not quite old enough to say the same, but maybe someday. Please, have a seat. You look exhausted. Have something to eat, rest up a little. If you’d like, I can escort you to the new camp. It’s a little way away, but I can almost promise you won’t have to reroute any waterfalls.”
I laughed weakly and sat down on the column I’d tripped over before. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so happy to sit down. Lila brought me some rations, and I choked some of them down. I couldn’t eat much, and I felt kind of bad about it, but my body was as tired as my mind.
I dozed off for a little while. It was probably rude of me, but I didn’t care. When I woke, I felt far better. We Ferin healed faster than humans did, and I’d had the pleasure of experiencing that healing factor more than once. I wouldn’t say I was at a hundred percent, but I felt able to function again.
“Adão says it’s time to get going if we want to make camp by nightfall.” Tess glanced over at our host. “Do you trust him?”
I considered her question. Even with enhanced hearing, Adão wouldn’t be able to hear us. “Unsure. It feels weird to trust anyone at this point. But I do want to hear what he has to say.”
Tess nodded, and we rejoined the others. I was glad I wasn’t the only one having a little trouble with the whole trust thing. It would probably take time before any of us would fully be able to relax around other people again, but we had to be willing to try.
We left the old site behind and trudged through the rainforest again. This time, we had a guide who knew where he was going. It made all the difference. For one thing, he knew there was a path through the brush. It wasn’t easily seen, but it existed. The path helped us to move faster, and moving faster meant we felt like we were making real progress.
The second big difference was the river. Kamila blanched when she saw it, but Adão just chuckled. “No worries, my friend. No one will pick this thing up and carry it around.” He led us to what looked like a giant log.
Plenty of things in the Amazon looked like massive logs but weren’t. I held my breath and waited for a caiman to bite Adão’s leg off, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he rolled the log over to reveal a carved-out canoe. “We hid it well,” he explained. “We didn’t want it to be a giveaway, you know? But it’s big enough to get us where we need to go. I’ll steer, since I know where we’re going. The rest of you can take an oar and pile on in.”
I hesitated, but I got into the dugout. What choice did I have? If things got dicey, I could always manipulate the water. I took a seat at the back of the canoe. We made sure Lila got the seat in the middle, where she was most protected.
Then we pushed off. If Adão noticed we were moving faster than normal, he didn’t say anything. I noticed Zarya giving us a little push as well. I had no interest whatsoever in being out here on the water when the vampires woke up. I might not know where we were going, but it had to be better than being out here in the middle of the water like a sitting duck.
We floated downstream for about an hour before Adão steered us into a little inlet barely visible from the water or from the other side of the water. It was prime caiman territory, and I eyed every bump or apparent piece of driftwood we passed with suspicion, but none of them moved. After a few minutes, we pulled up onto a rocky shoreline.
A dark-skinned woman with her hair in long braids approached us. “Welcome home,” she said, a little smile on her face.
36
I got the feeling the people in the camp would have been suspicious of us, but Adão’s word meant they welcomed us with open arms. Camp leaders shook our hands, showed us where to set up our tents, gave us a quick tour, and explained the rules. And with a population of 200 hiding out here in the rainforest like this, they had to have rules.
The camp adhered to the leave no trace principle as much as they could. This wasn’t just because they were environmentalists, although it would be hard to live in a place with so much natural beauty and not care about spoiling it. When hiding from monsters who were able to pick up scents from half a mile away, it made sense to hide as many signs of your passing as you could. Over the first days of our stay, we learned how to live in a Ferin community.
A regular human who walked into the camp would have thought we were living as roughly as people could. There weren’t many visible amenities. We didn’t have a bath or a shower. We had a waterfall. We had to bury or burn all of our trash. We had no entertainment beyond what we ourselves could provide.
At the same time, even the human sympathizers living in camp were extraordinary individuals. We could bury our trash twenty feet deep without any effort at all because earth Ferin could open up a midden with a wave of their hands and cover it up again with a thought. Burning it wasn’t a problem either, not with fire Ferin around. Fresh water was easy to come by. We got food from scouts who traded with natives or went on trips into the villages and towns to get it.
After a few days of stability, Kamila sent word to Ali. Daisy showed up with the next delivery of food. She was delighted to be with us again. I was nervous about having her in a camp that was so clearly meant for people preparing for war, but it wasn’t right to separate her from Kamila for such a long time, and judging by Daisy’s tail, the reunion was long-awaited. She spent the first hour drooling on Kamila’s lap while having her ears rubbed. I made a note that if reincarnation was real, I was coming back as a dog, and preferably one who lived with Kamila.
Most of the people in camp were from South America, although that hardly narrowed things down. We had plenty of Brazilians, but people had come here from all over the continent. There were Ferin from all over the world. Vampires didn’t discriminate when they attacked people, so it only made sense that the occasional tourist, businessman, or even former colonist would show up as a Ferin now and again.
I found an earth Ferin named Cezar who was willing to help me train with my earth abilities. I had come a long way with them on my own, but I hadn’t gotten to a point where I trusted them yet. I wanted to get to a point where I wasn’t constantly on guard about causing earthquakes and the odd volcanic fissure.
Cezar was a mellow kind of guy, about two centuries old, give or take. He’d originally come from Recife, and his skin was as dark as night. He’d learned English for trade purposes in his youth, so we were able to communicate well. He took me out into the forest where I couldn’t hurt anyone to show me some of the things I could do with my gift.
“It’s nice to be able to sit there and turn the world into your own personal place of comfort, isn’t it? But you’ll need more than a soft loam couch in the days ahead.” Cezar melted into the ground and popped up several feet away. “Do you see? It’s not just about moving the earth. It’s about being part of the earth, accepting that the earth is part of you.”
It sounded dangerously close to crunchy earth-mother quotes, but I could see the proof of it right in front of me. So I tried it myself.
It took me several tries to get it right. Cezar had been doing this for centuries, and I’d been doing it for weeks. I wasn’t going to just understand everything right away, especially since I couldn’t quite foresee Cezar helping me to understand quite the same way Kamila and Zarya had. Our relationship remained fully clothed and free of lewd behavior, unlike what I enjoyed with my women. Still, we worked well together, and I came to appreciate his subtle teaching method.
I understood the limitations, and intellectually, I could accept them. I was still frustrated, but that just made me work harder. I fought hard, and by the end of the first week, I was able to move through the earth almost as well as Cezar. And since earth was not my only ability, I could come up fighting.
Cezar wasn’t the world’s harshest taskmaster. He was willing and happy to teach me ev
erything I needed to know, but he also didn’t want me to burn out. “It’s important work for us to do,” he told me, “but we’re no good to anyone if we’ve collapsed.” We climbed a tree and sat in its branches for a while, enjoying the view. “You know, the vampires have been here as long as I can remember. They were always here, but they weren’t here like this. They were around, but there weren’t so many of them. They would attack if they found us, and vice versa, but they didn’t go out of their way to hunt us. And there might have been two or three in a city, not three hundred or more.”
I nodded. “It seems bizarre to me that any place can sustain so many of them.”
“They can’t. It just isn’t possible.” Cezar waved his hand. “We realized they were getting out of hand maybe ten years ago when they made their alliance with the drug dealers. That was when we realized this was beyond anything we’d seen before. We reached out to a few Ferin around the world, and we knew their supreme whatever had decided now was the time for their great war.”
Cezar looked out over the forest. He was quiet for a long second, and then he continued. “I don’t want to say we weren’t paying attention or we didn’t take it seriously. The thing is, every once in a while, some fang decides it’s time for the Great War. They start ranting and raving, and the next thing you know, the vampires go hunting. I don’t know if it’s like that up your way, but you can reliably depend on South American vampires to start joining forces to hunt Ferin every fifty years or so. This time, I thought it was the same thing, until it wasn’t.
“A cruise ship captain brought word it had spread up in North America too. A safehouse up in the northern United States had been destroyed, with only three survivors.”
“It’s true.” My mouth went dry as I spoke. “I was one of them. Tess was, too.” I could still see Margaret’s body burning if I allowed myself to.
“Ah. I am sorry, my friend. You must have lost many of your friends that day. “He bowed his head. “The vampires are saying a Lifebringer has emerged in the North, and they need him to complete whatever bizarre thing they have to do to complete their ritual.”
“That’s what they say.” I made a face. “I’m not exactly sure what they think this guy’s going to do for them. I have yet to meet a Ferin who doesn’t want to destroy each and every vampire, but hey, I guess anything could happen.”
Cezar laughed. “Right? They’re pretty sneaky, those vampires. But anyway, we’re not going down without a fight. We’ve been training ever since. We move camps from time to time, just to avoid drawing attention to one location. We made a mistake with the other place. They found out where we were, and we got out just in time.”
I nodded. “It’s true.” I swallowed. “Have you heard of Patagonia?”
He frowned at me. “The province in Chile?” Then he laughed. “Sure, the vampires claim some kind of ancient ancestral homeland called Patagonia, but I think someone made that up. For one thing, they want it to be in Brazil, when it clearly isn’t. If we had a Patagonia, we would know about it.” Then he narrowed his eyes, deep in thought. “I suppose it could be a code word, though.”
I cursed. “I hadn’t even considered that. What could it be code for, though? I can’t think of anything. I honestly don’t know.” I rubbed my temples. “What about The Day of Culling?”
“Now that, I’ve heard. It’s all these wretched leeches want to talk about. Usually right before they take a shot of silver to the eye.” Cezar laughed. “It’s all, Oh, you’ll be the first one destroyed on The Day of Culling. Lord Malfas will render the marrow from your bones like soup. And so on and so forth until you bury them alive just to shut them up.” He snickered. “Well, maybe not alive. You know what I mean.”
I did know what he meant. I smirked, although the thought of eternity underground made my blood run cold. We did what we had to do, though. “Wait. Can we put them into stone and leave them there?”
“Let me put it to you this way. I’d avoid delving too deep inside Pico da Bandeira if I were you. It’s efficient, since they can’t break out, but they’re still alive, and they’re hungry.” He patted my shoulder. “Come on. They’re training down at the clearing. Let’s see how they’re doing.”
In the clearing, Tess was facing off against a giant of a Ferin whose name I didn’t know. This guy was the size of a truck. His muscles had muscles, and he was circling her like she was dinner. Then he pounced.
Tess barely seemed to move. Even I could barely follow her movements, and I was used to seeing her fight. I saw a pale blur, and then Mr. Beefy wound up on his back with Tess’s wooden knife at his throat. Apparently, they were using wooden knives for practice.
The man, his face sheepish, tapped out. “I don’t suppose you’re single?” he asked with a sigh. “I’ve never been so happy to get my ass kicked.”
“I’m afraid I’m very much not single,” she told him with a grin. “But I’ll tell you what. I can show you how to do what I just did.” She looked over at me and caught my eye. She gave me a wink and then moved on, selecting another guy from the crowd of spectators and drawing him in.
“You’re a lucky man, Jason.” Cezar patted my back again. “Come on. Let’s go play vampire for some of the Ferin with combat-oriented powers.”
Since I couldn’t be hurt by fire, water, or earth magic, I was the perfect choice to play the antagonist in training. People could unleash against me, and it wouldn’t hurt. It helped me, too, although maybe not in the same way people thought.
Playing the vampire role let me get into the monsters’ heads without having to talk to them or spend much time with them. If I could figure out how they thought and how they approached a fight, I could better direct our fights with them. And if I could better direct our fights with the vampires, we had a better shot of winning this war.
Granted, we’d done pretty well so far. We’d gone into fights with some terrible odds, like twenty-five to one, and we’d come out on top. There was always room for improvement, though. There was no part of me that thought we’d cut through all of them so easily.
We’d found a good place to land for now. I liked having a place to stay with my fellow Ferin, and it felt amazing to not have to hide who and what we were anymore. Granted, we were hiding in the depths of the rainforest, but we were all together. It was enough for me, at least for now.
37
My days settled into a fairly predictable routine of training myself, training others, patrols, and socializing with other Ferin. I picked up a little bit of Portuguese and Spanish, rolling the unfamiliar syllables on my tongue like a new flavor. All of the routine and all the predictability made my skin crawl. In my old life, predictability had been welcome and safe. Here and now, predictability would get us killed. Eventually.
At the same time, routine was a normal, human behavior. Humans liked to do the same thing every day. We functioned better when we knew what to expect. For better or for worse, we just did. And collectively, we needed training.
Even my family needed training. Sure, Zarya and Kamila had been doing this for centuries, but they still benefitted from working with others who’d also been working with fire or water for a long time and had been doing things differently. It was incredible to sit back and watch as the people who’d taught me took something they’d already mastered to new heights. I considered myself lucky to see it.
We all taught, too. I taught all the fire users how to make the flame discs I’d used on the train from Santarém, for example. Some of them didn’t have the strength to use them yet or to control them. Most of them figured it out quickly once I demonstrated it.
“The vampires have some degree of control,” I explained while Lila translated for those who didn’t speak enough English to follow. “They can get away with a certain amount of public attacks, but they can’t quite get away with tearing through civilians like paper yet. It’s obviously not because they care about humans, but humans can and will shake off their influence if their lives are threatened.
Even under mind control.”
A man in the back, his head shaved with a big ugly scar down the middle, made a face. “They’ve got mind control. Some of them. They can make whole crowds behave.”
I grinned. Now that I’d already been through it and lived to tell the tale, it was almost fun. Almost. “They tried that on the train. And it was working. I was desperate. I figured if the people were scared enough, they might shake the mind control. If it didn’t work, we were already screwed, and trying wouldn’t hurt anything. And if we pulled it off, we’d manage to screw the vampires up enough that we’d have a chance of getting away.”
Tess picked up my narrative. “We’ve all spent a long time trying to avoid civilian contact, thinking it kept us and them safer. In some contexts, that works. In others, the opposite turns out to be true. I’m not saying we should use human beings as shields. That’s creepy. What I am saying is that we should be willing and able to get out into towns and cities and do what we need to do. There are advantages to being in a crowd of people. For example, every time we brushed up against someone, we spread our scent onto them. That made it harder for the vampires to track us.”
A few people nodded slowly. “I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Cezar said after a moment. “But you’re right. That does make a lot of sense. It’s a good tactic to use if we’re ever caught out there.”
“Is that why you crushed the favela in Uruará?” someone else asked.
I nodded. “That was the last thing I wanted to do, honestly. I tried to limit the damage to just the vampire-held house, but I’m sure I wasn’t a hundred percent on target. I couldn’t find any other way to get us out of there. We were completely surrounded, and the people were being controlled. It was a shitty choice, but it was the only choice.”
I didn’t run, but I did shuffle off as memories of the favela intruded on my mood. I walked over to a quiet little waterfall not too far from where my family and I had set up our tents. It was set off from the main camp, so most of the other residents didn’t use it. I was almost guaranteed my privacy there. I headed to the little pool at the foot of the waterfall, stripped off my clothes, and jumped in.
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 20
