The rainforest was full of spots like this, a nexus of raw beauty that would clear whatever dark memory haunted your mind at the moment. Sure, there were pockets of poverty that would do the same thing, just the opposite way. Every place in every corner of the world had places like that. Maine had areas so poor, people lived out of their cars or out of storage units. In Mine, there was frostbite. Here, there was the favela. Both were functions of a cruel world that killed the innocent every day.
I floated on my back in the fresh, warm water for a little while. I didn’t know if the water had been warm when I got into it or not, and I didn’t care. I took the moment to quiet my mind and grow distant from the screams of our last battle, letting the water wash away my sins with each calming second.
Something rustled in the brush, startling me into sitting up. I treaded water, scanning the undergrowth to see what was going on. I could certainly defend myself against a big cat, but I didn’t want to hurt an endangered animal on top of everything else. I’d come to respect the predators. They were . . . essential, unlike the vampires, and I found their presence less dangerous and more reassuring that the world, despite our war, would have balance.
What emerged from the bushes wasn’t a cat. It was Zarya. She moved through the small clear space around the pool with all the grace of a nymph and sat down on a nearby rock.
“You doing okay?” Her voice was soft.
“I’m good. Floating, actually. Maybe a little lost in thought.”
“You’re feeling guilty about bringing that cliff down in Uruará because you don’t want to kill innocents.” She didn’t ask. She didn’t need to.
“Not guilty. Just remembering the battle,” I said. “It’s not a casual thing for me.”
“No, it isn’t.” She let her feet dangle into the water. “It’s not something to do lightly. I was there. I know you were very careful about how you brought that cliff down. And I know you didn’t have a choice.” She sighed and removed her T-shirt. “You know, I once flooded an entire city to get away from some vampires.”
I almost forgot to keep treading water. “You did?”
“Yes. It was in 1763, I think. I had been abducted by a handful of vampires, along with some other women. They didn’t seem to realize I was Ferin. I was able to free us, but the only way to do it was to flood the city. I did what I could to mitigate the damage, but, well, what can you do? There’s only so much you can do to stop however many tons of water from damaging a city, and the burden always falls hardest on poor people.” She looked away for a second, and then she finished stripping down. “I understand what you’re feeling, Jason.”
She slid into the water, barely making a ripple as she entered the pool. She swam up to me and kissed me, and I kissed her back.
Zarya wasn’t the kind of woman who liked to be rushed. I kissed her slowly, devouring her mouth like I might savor a meal under the stars. She wrapped herself around me, molding her body to mine and letting the energy flow between us.
We’d already formed a bond between us when she first took me on as a student, back after we rescued her in Belize. That bond was only strengthened when she and I built that bridge together, her energy flowing into me as I constructed the impossible. Now the bond surged to life again. I could almost feel her need as if it were my own, a uniquely odd sensation that only amplified my desire for her.
When I could resist no longer, I brought a hand up to caress her bare breasts. The water made them slippery and slick, and the sensation made her laugh quietly. “That feels good,” she murmured. “Keep doing it.”
I was more than happy to oblige. The way it felt through our bond was like sunshine on a cloudy day. I hardened as I caressed her body, and she gasped in delight as the dual sensation reached her. It was like a feedback loop. It could probably go on forever if we dared let it.
She reached out for me, and I felt her touch from both sides, a sensation like no other. I’d been treading water before, but now I firmed the water into a thick gel, holding us upright in the pool. I wasn’t sure how far we were going to go or what we were going to need, but I wanted to be ready.
She climbed into my lap as I slid into her, all the way until our bodies were pressed together like we were trying to fuse. I groaned, not bothering to hide my appreciation. This felt too good for silence. I wanted Zarya to know how incredible this was, but of course, she knew already. She could feel the echo through our bond, her head back in a laugh of unbridled joy.
I rubbed my thumb against her clit as she worked, for the first time understanding just how electric each brush of my thumb could be. It was an education and a hands-on lesson all in one, so I took an active role in every nuance of movement, watching her pleasure—and mine—unfold like origami made from our writhing shapes.
When she came, when we came, it was like nothing I’d ever imagined. Her orgasm bubbled up from inside like a geyser of lava, spreading out to her extremities as she clenched around my cock. Mine started as a primal heat pooling low in my belly, punching its way out of me and leaving me breathless. I had to shout, my cries mingling with hers and echoing off the water.
We stayed like that for a while, joined in ways no one else could possibly understand. I wondered if we could stay like this until sunrise. Then I pulled gently out of her, giving her a little kiss.
She smiled up at me, her eyes soft. “Come on,” she said and stroked my cheek. “We’ve got a war to fight.”
38
The camp had one elder who considered himself a scholar. His name was Dênis, and he’d been a monk before his unfortunate encounter with a vampire required him to leave his community. In spite of everything he’d seen and done over the past four centuries or so, he still tried to live according to the Franciscan rules of his time.
I mostly admired him for it.
Dênis wasn’t able to keep much of his library with him now that we were on the run, but his mind was like a hard drive of the most elegant design. He’d retained almost everything from before he’d been forced to flee, and he’d managed to scan a lot of it anyway. “Most of it is stored digitally now,” he told me. “Sympathizers still living out in the world have put it in the cloud, whatever that means.” He chuckled. “Ali will explain it. I’m an old man. I can’t be expected to know these things, but I understand that my mind is like their cloud, so to say, but powered by this.” He tapped his head, smiling.
Kamila and Zarya were thrilled to have someone to talk about ancient legends and lore with. I had some interest in the subject, but they had centuries of prior study. I didn’t have time to play catch-up, and I had a specific area of focus right now anyway.
My women sat with him and shared the books they’d looted from the vampires. All three of them pored over them with unalloyed delight. Tess, Lila, and I all spent those hours training instead. We trusted Zarya and Kamila to find the relevant details in the sea of weird info the vampires stored. Dênis was still an unknown quantity, but we trusted Zarya and Kamila.
Once we’d proven ourselves to the locals, we were sent out on patrols. These were medium to long range outings away from camp, sweeping the area to make sure our location was still safe. Any vampires we found were put down swiftly. Patrols were partly a training exercise, and I could see why they were such a smart idea. Everyone from the camp would have to be able to work well with everyone else in a crisis. No one could plan in advance to get paired up with someone whose language they already knew or someone whose powers they knew how to work with already.
I loved going on patrol. I wasn’t a big fan of sitting around in one place for so long, and hiding out in the rainforest made me feel like I was letting the vampires get away with something. Patrolling let me get my aggression out, roast a few vampires, and feel less like a sitting duck.
Sometimes, our patrols didn’t net anything. Sometimes, we wound up fighting a whole clutch of them. One night, I was lucky enough to be on a patrol with Cezar and a Ferin without combat-related abilities when we c
ame across a fresh horror.
A blood farm.
I’d never heard of such a thing. If they existed in North America, no one had mentioned them to me. Cezar explained it to me simply.
“It’s exactly what it says on the box, my friend. They keep a population of humans here to feed from. Sometimes they breed them. Sometimes they don’t. They don’t usually kill them on the farms, unless they’ve gotten too weak or unless the vampire loses control of himself. It’s not unusual.” He shrugged. “It’s not like anyone’s going to stop them.”
“Maybe not before.” I flexed my fingers. “How many vampires do we usually find in a place like this?”
“Usually eight or so, and oddly used to working with each other.”
The other Ferin, Gabriel, tilted his head. “What do you have in mind?”
Cezar straightened up. “Surely, you’re not thinking we can just go in there and free those people?”
“Actually, I am.” I forced a grin. “We all know what it’s like to feel the fear from one of those monsters feeding on you. We all lived through it once. Imagine your whole existence being distilled down to that moment, day in and day out. Besides, we can totally take on ten at once. No problem.”
Cezar’s eyes widened. “You’re not just talking out your ass, are you?” Then he laughed. “Let’s do it.”
The blood farm looked like any other isolated, remote illegal farm, just without much in the way of visible agriculture. We made entry during the day because we were sensible people, and we entered the main farmhouse.
It was empty. Of course it was. The vampires weren’t stupid for the most part. They’d have their livestock in their lair with them. With a sigh, I found the trap door and threw it open.
The vampires lived in the damp, windowless basement. It was a smart move on their part because the sunlight couldn’t reach them down there. It only took half a second for me to see just how evil these monsters were.
The vampires chained their livestock to their beds. The humans slept on the floor with chains on their necks and hands. The vampires slept in beds, stacked up like cordwood. These poor humans were chained to corpses in the dark all day long, until they had to listen to the corpses coming to life again.
I didn’t get much of a chance to think about it beyond the obvious. As soon as that first flash of dimly filtered and watered-down sunlight landed in the basement, the vampires woke. They couldn’t come up into the main house, but they would remember our faces and our scents. We had to kill them, or they would kill us later.
Besides, we weren’t about to let them live while there were humans living in the basement as prisoners.
I jumped in first. We had two problems down there. The first was the low light level. I could handle it by switching to thermal vision. It wouldn’t let me see details, especially not on the vampires, but it would let me avoid hitting the human hostages. The others would have to work to avoid mistakes. They would manage. I knew they would, but it wouldn’t necessarily be easy.
The other problem was the hostages themselves. Gabriel was armed with a gun and silver bullets. So was Cezar. My best weapon was the fireball. We didn’t want to hurt the twenty or so humans, all in various states of ill health. The vampires didn’t care.
We would do what we had to do, though, and deal with the consequences later. I charged in at the nearest vampire and burned him from the inside out. Gabriel took out two and Cezar one. That took care of four right there. The humans screamed as I got another two, filling the cavernous basement with a sickening stench. It smelled putrid, but it didn’t risk hitting a civilian in the crossfire.
Gabriel took claws to the arm, but he didn’t do more than wince as he shot the offending vampire in the face. He got another one in the heart without missing a beat. Cezar took out two more, and that was all. We’d slaughtered the sluggish undead in a matter of seconds. Cezar shook his head, amazed.
Gabriel grinned. “Who would have thought we could move so quickly, hmm? I guess you’re lucky to have around?”
Maybe I was, and maybe I wasn’t. My arrival hadn’t been all that lucky for the people at Owl’s Nest or the folks in Twin Falls. Still, I could be proud of what we’d just accomplished. We had one loose end left to tie up, and it wasn’t one I was used to dealing with.
“I don’t suppose any of the vampires left a key behind?” I looked over at the terrified humans.
They were a mess. All of them were so pale or ashen they had to be sick. None of them had clothes. All of them were covered in bite marks, some of which had gotten infected. One of them had drawn flies. He looked like he might not make it long in this world.
At least he would make it as a free man.
I couldn’t do much without a key. I didn’t have clothes to offer them, but I directed Gabriel to start tearing up the bedclothes to make loincloths or wraps for them. In the meantime, I cut through the chains holding them to the beds with a small, shaped disc of spinning fire. It could do more than just destroy, after all. It could liberate.
I asked Cezar to explain to them that we would get them to a road, but we couldn’t go into a village. They couldn’t tell anyone about us either. I’m not sure they accepted that, but I was also pretty sure the idea of a tall, pasty American spinning fire discs from his fingers was pretty low on the believability index. I wasn’t too worried about it.
We had to carry a couple of the victims, and moving them along was slow going, but we couldn’t do any less. It would have been cruel to free them from their chains and then leave them to die in that hovel. We didn’t make it directly to a road, but we found a small village of indigenous people who were willing to help these people out. I couldn’t understand what was being said, but Gabriel understood their language, and he said the villagers would nurse them back to health. They had methods of their own for keeping the undead at bay and would keep them safe until they could be returned to their communities.
We thanked them, and we headed back to ours. We didn’t have the resources to bring them back with us, especially not over such a long distance. I was a little nervous about leaving them with people we didn’t know, but I knew I had to give up control here and let someone else step in. I’d done all I could. It was time to let someone else help.
It took us nearly a day of hiking to get back to the camp, in which we continued to find and kill vampires, but only in two and threes, and then, a short distance from camp, a single ragged fanger with wild eyes and skin that looked like he’d been roasted alive. He huddled in the remains of a smuggler’s shack, surrounded by shards of wood and sawdust.
“Illegal logging. Huge money if they can get away with it,” Gabriel said.
“What happened to him?” Cezar asked. “I’ve never seen a vampire in that condition. Not one that—what’s that?”
The shack was covered by the canopy, so it was already gloomy, but there was a haze of darkness that made it hard to see inside the open doorway. The door was torn off, tossed to the ground a few feet in front of the shack, like the vampire had been in a hurry to get inside. I didn’t blame him. The sun wouldn’t just kill him. It would make him howl before he died.
“Eight thousand, two hundred and ninety-six,” came the rasping voice from inside the shack.
“What—what’s that?” Cezar asked, but I knew. I felt my power singing, pulling me forward toward the cloud of artificial darkness over the ruined building.
“Go on,” I told the fanger.
“You are him,” the vampire said.
“I am.” I stood a few feet away. The vampire uncoiled to meet me, standing in the doorway, squinting as his skin began to sizzle.
“My master has come. He sends a message.” The vampire lost a tooth as he spoke. It gleamed on top of a leaf. The point was sharp, like a needle.
“What the fuck is eight thousand— ” Cezar said, but I waved him to be quiet.
“It’s how many vampires we’ve killed since I became the Lifebringer,” I said. There was no doub
t now. I knew so many things, including The Day of Culling and its actual purpose.
“Yes, and now my master has come to collect. There are too few of us left to control the herd, so your time has come, Ferin. Lifebringer,” he spat.
“The Day of Culling is only for one?” I asked, but I knew the answer.
The vampire waved, dismissing every other possibility. “One that matters.”
I nodded, then turned to Cezar and Gabriel. “Back to camp.”
Gabriel bristled. “No way, you can’t—”
I touched his shoulder, and he felt the power in me as it unfolded for the final time. “Do as I say. Tell the women, and then others.”
“You don’t have to die, Jason,” Gabriel said, his face a mask of concern.
“Who said anything about dying?” I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder, then reached out and pulled the vampire into the weak sun. As his skin began to char, I leaned close. “Which way?”
Before he turned to ash, the vampire smiled. “East. He waits for you.” Then he collapsed to ash, and it was only the Ferin standing there on the cusp of the last fight we would ever know.
At least, it was for me.
39
The path was easy to see. Everywhere Malfas had been, the ground was sick. Plants were yellowed, dead, or weeping blood red sap unlike anything ever intended for the natural world. It was his calling card, and he wanted me to find him.
I obliged.
With the sun setting, I found him, standing on the rotting remains of a capybara, the ribs sticking out like daggers.
“Lifebringer.” It was a curse and a greeting all in one.
Forever Young - Book 3 Page 21
