Mortality Bites Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Vance, Ramy

  Jean lifted his arms in exasperation. “See? Messing with us.”

  The general shook her head. “You judge too quickly. Yes, she is not telling us what we seek to know, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth in her obfuscation. It is legend that those who seek the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan must have a legitimate claim to an item that resides within its divine halls. A legitimate claim,” General Shouf repeated, slowly emphasizing each word. “Only then will the location be revealed, and even then, only to the bearer of said claim.”

  The aigamuchab walked over to the other side of the table and motioned for Jean to stand up. “Do you mind?”

  “Certainly, ma’am,” Jean said, standing.

  General Shouf sat down and slowly removed her boots as she continued shattering words at us. “The things those halls hold are so magnificent that even the gods could not contain their power. The only way to hold the power in was by giving them an outlet to seep out into this world. A one-way conduit, constantly releasing the pressure of the powder keg held within.”

  The aigamuchab lifted her feet onto the table so that the soles of her feet faced me. Her heels stirred as two eyes opened and stared directly at me.

  Or rather, in me.

  ↔

  “That is hella creepy,” I said.

  Jean nodded in agreement. “I’ll never get used to it.”

  General Shouf ignored us both as the eyes continued looking at me, narrowing in deep contemplation as she scoured every inch of me in one of the most violating experiences I’ve ever had.

  I wasn’t just being closely looked at—I was being examined while power exuded out of those horrible eyes. I could feel that they weren’t looking through me, but in me, and to have such a foreign presence exploring my insides was horrible.

  “Will you … will you stop it, please?” I said, starting to lose control over myself. I hadn’t wanted to give them the satisfaction of showing discomfort or pain, but this was getting to be too much. “Please,” I repeated, unable to hide the panic in my voice.

  She ignored me, her horrific eyes continuing to scan me.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” I yelled.

  Still nothing.

  I tried to stand up, but Jean quickly got behind me and forced me back into my seat with two strong hands. I struggled against them, but couldn’t move. He was strong. Very strong.

  “Let me go,” I growled.

  Still the eyes performed their violation. And just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, the eyelids closed and Shouf took her feet off the table.

  “I see now,” she said. “Your soul. That is your claim.”

  With that she stood up and walked out of the room, leaving her shoes behind. “Jean-Luc—if you will,” she said from the hall.

  Jean let go of my shoulders and started for the door. He paused at the threshold and turned to me.

  I didn’t look up at him, still reeling from those horrible eyes and what they’d done to me. I wanted to run, to scream, but I knew there was nothing I could do but sit there and breathe.

  I took several deep breaths before I heard Jean leave the room and close the door behind him.

  A Million Screens and Eyeless Creeps

  I had just enough time to center myself again before the door flew open and a red-faced Jean stomped in. Whatever discussion had happened outside, it hadn’t pleased him. Nor had it taken long. He threw me a set of keys and made a hurry up gesture.

  As I freed myself from my shackles, he gestured for me to follow. I thought about resisting, being difficult, refusing to leave, putting the cuffs back on—you know, just to show him who was boss. But the thought that I was actually being set free compelled me to cooperate. If I was really lucky, Deirdre, Egya and I would be back at our hotel before dawn.

  But luck hadn’t been with me on this trip.

  As I followed Jean through the base, passing by theater rooms with dozens of eggheads writing on clear boards, computers beeping and booping and radars pinging, I realized that getting out of this place was the last thing on their minds.

  We entered a room with dozens of screens showing different parts of the base. On them, I saw the full extent of this base and the preparations they were undertaking. It wasn’t just equipment being stockpiled, but equipment being unpacked for use. As in, use right now. The way the soldiers were gearing up, they were preparing for deployment to only the GoneGods knew where.

  But it was New Year’s. If anything, the base should have been operating with a skeleton crew while the majority of the troops went off to party. Especially given the time of year and that there wasn’t any major fighting going on anywhere that required such force. If there was, the news would have been all over it and the world would be at DEFCON 1 or 5—whatever passed as the highest state of alert.

  I also noted several digital clocks on the wall with the names of locations printed over them: Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Melbourne … Montreal. These clocks weren’t of the time-telling variety, though; they were used to monitor any major magical activities, and from the progression of time, very little magic was being used in those areas. But these clocks weren’t limited to major cities. Other, smaller towns and hamlets were being monitored, too. Scotland’s Inverness, Egypt’s Fayoum, Canada’s Cardiff, New Zealand’s Hobbit Town, Cotswold, Strun, Paradise Lot and dozens of other places I’d never heard of.

  None of them were counting down to New Year’s (which was only an hour away), but rather, didn’t seem to tell time at all. There was a master clock that hung above the screens which was counting the exact years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds since the gods left. None of the other clocks were in sync with the master clock because the other clocks were measuring magic use. Every time magic was used in one of those locations, the clock would speed up just a bit, providing an accurate measurement of how much magic was used and where.

  Also, the location choices of these clocks were immediately apparent: they were all places that had a reasonably high Other presence. With the exception of Paradise Lot, an unofficial Other sanctuary, none of the clocks had sped up too much, being out of sync with the master clock by a few weeks at most. And even in Paradise Lot, it seemed the use of magic was very limited, with only a year of additional time spent.

  So where the hell were these troops going?

  ↔

  Despite the room being filled with screens and computers and other pieces of equipment that would be any gadget-addicted geek’s wet dream, there was no one else here.

  Well, no one if you didn’t include Jean, General Shouf and me. Seeing the aigamuchab again made my heart cringe. “You’re not going to sole gaze me again,” I said, pointing at her feet.

  She didn’t react. Neither did Jean.

  “You know, sole. As in the sole of your foot, but it sounds like ‘soul,’ as in life force, spirit—”

  “We get it,” Jean said.

  “Chi,” I muttered.

  “Ha-ha,” Jean said, pulling out a chair for me to sit.

  I sat. Huffily, I might add.

  “Ms. Darling,” the aigamuchab crackled, “I believe we have gotten off to a poor start. I want to offer you my humblest apologizes for my little intrusion earlier.”

  “Intrusion? An interesting word for what you did to me. I’d go more for mental rape.” And I meant that word in all the ugliness it implied. I’d never felt more violated or powerless before—and if the GoneGods willed it, I would never feel that way again.

  Jean cringed at the word.

  General Shouf only nodded. “You are not the first to put it that way and I am sure you will not be the last. If it makes you feel better, know that I burned almost two weeks of time to examine you.”

  “Given a convicted rapist gets ten years plus … no, no it doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “I understand,” General Shouf said. “But do allow me to put into context why I went to such extreme lengths to extract the information that you were so unwilli
ng to provide.”

  Before I could think of a snarky reply, she pushed a button and the disconnected base security monitors unified into one large, theater screen that showed a video of the night the gods left.

  What I saw were the typical scenes that had been played a million times on the news and in documentaries about the GrandExodus: the sky turning blood red as angels fell like comets, volcanos erupting with dragons, frog creatures and mermaids and kelpie swirling at the shores, dwarves pouring out of the gold mines of Papua New Guinea.

  I yawned at the miraculous scene of the divine being poured onto Earth. “Yeah, seen it all before. Your point?”

  General Shouf didn’t shift, instead waiting patiently as the screens displayed the first weeks of the Others’ arrival. Attacks, fights, anger, protesting. The world in chaos. Again, all familiar stuff.

  Until it wasn’t. The screens shifted to a zoomed-out display of what must have been a hundred battleships all focusing their cannon fire in the sky. Their bombardment was accompanied by several fighter jets and Apache Warbirds also concentrating their fire … on what?

  Despite the size of the screen, I had to stand up to get a closer look before I understood what they were firing at. In the center of that concentrated arsenal was a single angel darting around the screen like a hummingbird moving from flower to flower.

  Except those puffs of smoke weren’t flowers. They were bombs exploding midair as they tried to kill a lone angel. At one point the angel dove into the water, his body crashing through a hull and sinking a battleship. He emerged from the water, grabbing an Apache Warbird and removing its propellers as if plucking petals from a blossom.

  “When was this?” I asked, still staring at the screen.

  “November 20th,” General Shouf said.

  Three days after I’d lost my soul.

  On screen, the battle went on for a long while, the angel dismantling this Armageddon piece by piece, all the while taking heavy fire himself. I could see that he was being hurt. I could also see him aging as he burned time, using his magic to put up one hell of a fight.

  The screen went blank. “That was the archangel Gabriel,” General Shouf’s voice crackled, “and he took down four more battleships before we finally managed to stop him.”

  “You mean kill him,” I said, turning to look at the faceless aigamuchab.

  The general shrugged. “In the end we lost nearly a billion dollars of equipment in just one battle. A battle, might I add, that we nearly lost.”

  “Interesting that you put the loss in terms of dollars and not bodies,” I said.

  General Shouf shrugged, but I could see from how Jean looked away that he was clearly pissed off about that, too. As a soldier, he thought in terms of people, his brothers and sisters in arms, and not dollars. Clearly, that was something he and his eyeless general didn’t agree on.

  “Dollars—bodies,” the general continued. “The point is, one Other did all that. Granted, the archangel Gabriel was a particularly powerful Other, but still.”

  "He wanted to die,” Jean murmured. “Being Christian, he wanted to commit suicide. He picked a fight with us in the hope that we would end him. He could have flown away—he could have done so many other things besides fight to the end.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Jean shrugged. It was clear neither of them knew.

  The general stood up, clicking twice to orientate herself in the room, and walked over to me. “Humans do not have magic to defend themselves. You, more than most, must understand that. After all, you once had access to unlimited power, and now …”

  She let her words trail off. She was right, of course. As a vampire, I was impossibly strong, fast and had heightened senses that were an asset in just about any situation. And those were just some of my natural abilities. But now that I was human … well, my fragility was made abundantly clear as I tried to move about, my muscles sore from fighting the nio and shisa guardians, my body aching from all the times they hit me or threw me against a wall.

  They hurt me in ways that wouldn’t have even registered as a vampire. And the memory of what my strength was before only accentuated my weaknesses now.

  I nodded, not that the blind aigamuchab saw that.

  “I know that you are no fool. No vampire as old as you could be,” Shouf said. Then she took on a casual tone, as if we were at some cocktail party. “Did you know that less than two percent of all vampires are alive today? That is a fact most are unaware of, vampires included.”

  I shook my head; I hadn’t known any vampires in my earlier years. My own sire had disappeared before we got a chance to “get to know each other”—whatever that would have entailed. When I started to meet other vamps, well, that was a statistic they never shared. No surprise there—vampires aren’t really the numbers or the sharing type.

  “Indeed. One of the questions on the registry is, ‘How many vampires have you sired?’ Based on the answers and allowing for error, lies, exaggerations and vampires who have yet to register”—she pointed at me—“our calculations put survival rates at under two percent. Correlate that with legend, lore, record-keeping and so on, and we further estimate that the average vampire survives less than ten years. There are several reasons for this: underestimating their own strength, failing to properly time sunrises, gorging on heavily fortified locals. Again, the list goes on, but all those reason can be boiled down to one overarching theme: stupidity.”

  General Shouf put a hand on my shoulder. I pulled away, swatting her claw-like hand like I was avoiding a scorpion. Again, she shrugged. “Stupidity,” she repeated. “When you have almost unlimited power you tend to think nothing can kill you, so you get stupid. But you never got stupid, did you? Three hundred years and not only are you still alive, but there is virtually no record of you or your escapades. You must be a very clever, careful girl.”

  “Not that clever,” I said, “given where I am now.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was a case of bad luck. We weren’t looking for you—we were monitoring Kenji’s activities, gathering intel on all this.” She clicked another button and the scene of the soldiers preparing outside returned.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was meaning to ask you about that. I mean, that’s a lot of kids who aren’t getting time off on New Year’s. Overtime alone must be killing your budget.”

  If General Shouf caught my facetiousness, she made no indication of it. She simply nodded. “Indeed, but they knew what they signed up for, and evil takes no holidays.”

  I groaned. “Clichés aside, can you get to the point? I know that you’re trying to recruit me, otherwise you wouldn’t have uncuffed me and been so apologetic—by the way, apology still not accepted—or brought me to your little fishbowl. So I know you want me to work for you, and I’m guessing it has to do with the map only I can see. But knowing all that, I still don’t know why.”

  The aigamuchab smiled. “Like I said: clever girl.”

  Carrots, Sticks & the Realization

  That Museums Aren’t Just for Tourists

  “We’re under attack,” General Shouf said.

  “As in, now?” I asked with a huge dollop of sarcasm.

  “Not at this moment, Ms. Darling, but soon,” the general said gravely. I really had to stop using sarcasm with Others.

  General Shouf pushed a button, bringing into focus a camera that showed a scene somewhere off the shore of the base. She clicked another two buttons and the camera zoomed in without image quality loss. Another click and the camera turned to night vision, showing something—or rather, somethings—skidding along the surface of the water.

  “Are those … mermaids?” I asked.

  “Mermaids and mermen—meres,” Jean said, putting his feet up on the table. “We detected their advancement off the shore of Taiwan about twelve hours ago. At their current speed, they should be here by morning.”

  “Here? As in here, here?” I said.

  “Yep,” Jean said.

&nb
sp; “You don’t seem too disturbed by the prospect of being attacked by a—a … what do you call a bunch of meres? A school?”

  Jean chuckled at this. “We’ll be ready.”

  “Indeed,” shattered General Shouf. “There is no error in the timing of their attack. They were hoping that we would be celebrating the human new year. Given the past attacks—”

  “Sorry, did you say past attacks? As in plural?”

  “They’ve been attacking human military facilities with increasing regularity for the last six months,” Jean said.

  “No way,” I said reverting to my 70’s vernacular as I registered my own surprise. “There was nothing on the news and—”

  “Ma’am, we’re the military, not public schooling. The media knows what we tell them and we don’t tell them much. Besides, up until now all attacks have been against military facilities. The Others are organizing themselves and, as I mentioned earlier, they have yet to mess with any civilian areas. We believe that they’re probing us, searching for weaknesses.”

  “Probing? Really? They’re mythical creatures, not aliens. They don’t ‘probe.’ When they fight, they fight for glory or honor or whatever meres hold dear. They look for victory or a glorious death worthy of being recorded in the annals of legend. They’re not really the let’s-find-the-humans’-weaknesses type.”

  “Indeed,” agreed General Shouf.

  Jean nodded. “You’re right, of course, but those were mythical, divine, gonna-live-forever Others. These guys are different, more organized than we thought. More vicious and—”

  “They have a leader,” I said, the implications hitting me for the first time. The reason why there was never an Other uprising or heavy attacks was because they were always disconnected. Different pantheons didn’t play well with other Others, often holding grudges thousands of years old.

  But if someone could unite them … well, then it would be a different ball game all together. A raging minotaur could cause a lot of damage, but one was still manageable. A stampede of minotaurs all stomping their way toward a common goal, now that was a different story.