“Any chance he’s taking care of the Watchtower for us?” Thad asked.
“They’re not here.” This turned all eyes upon him, and for the first time, Taos didn’t enjoy being the center of attention. “The High Council shipped them out. No one seems to know where to. Oh, and apparently, they slaughtered the rest of the Stewards too.”
A chilling silence fell across the room.
The Stewards of Life were an exclusive group. It took more than a pair of fangs and a couple of millennia wandering the earth to join. You had to prove your worth, whatever that meant.
For all of their tyrannical faults, the one thing you could say for the Stewards was that they stuck together. Once you were in, you were in. Betrayal was not tolerated.
For Othella, Cot, and Mathias to kill, not just a few Stewards but all of them, meant they felt confident their alliance with the Necromancer was going to pay off.
Though Celeste and Thad seemed shocked by this revelation—as Taos had been—Shufah’s face remained as unreadable as a stone.
“Taos. Thad,” she said, her eyes turning back to Conrad. “Go find the Furies. There’s nothing for us here, and we need to go. It’s too dangerous to linger much longer.”
“I’ll go with you,” Celeste said, falling behind Taos. “I can help you find them.”
“No,” Shufah said. “Stay here with me. I want to ask Conrad some questions. You can tell me whether or not he’s telling the truth.”
Celeste objected, but Taos took her hand and kissed it. “We’ll be all right. Won’t be gone too long, I promise.” He grabbed Thad by the shoulder and gave him a playful tug. “Come on, fledgling. If we run into more savages, I can use you as a decoy while I make my escape.”
Thad actually laughed. “I think I know where they might be.”
Taos followed Thad up several flights of stairs, down a few corridors, and through one giant, scorched hole in the wall. The last time Taos had been here, the Great House had been immaculately clean, and decadently furnished. Now, all was in ruin. He didn’t recognize much. But true to his word, Thad led them straight to the Furies.
The three women stood before what looked like a smashed trophy display. The glass doors were shattered, and the wooden frame was burnt to blackened cinders.
The Furies held hands, and Taos had the strangest notion that they were mourning not the destruction of the case, but what it had once housed. Whatever that had been, it was now gone. Turned to ash by the battle with the savages that had waged before their little company had arrived.
Thad approached them with slow, deliberate steps. Taos made to follow, but the boy signaled for him to stay put. Normally, Taos wouldn’t obey the commands of a fledgling, but the Furies were emitting an especially powerful aura of danger right now.
The boy stopped a few feet away from the women. He extended his hands, as if to comfort them, thought better of it, and returned them to his side. “I’m so sorry. I really am. But we can’t stay here. We have to keep moving.”
The Furies stood motionless, not even breathing, as if, for them, the world outside their strange tri-parted consciousness had vanished. Taos sensed the heat of their anger—or was it pain—emanating across the room. A dagger of fear pierced Taos’s stomach. Not just for Thad, who had taken a foolish risk drawing so close to the women, but for every blood drinker who remained under the roof of the Ice Sanctuary.
Taos took a step forward intending to snatch Thad around the waist and fleeing the room. But before his next step could fall, a tremor shook the house, followed moments later by a gut-wrenching scream that boiled up from the great hall below.
Chapter Nine
An alarming sense of time slipping away settled in the back of Shufah’s mind. Her brother was coming. She saw the truth written on Conrad’s smarmy face. But how long before he and his horde came smashing through the doors, she couldn’t say.
The daylight would force Suhail to travel concealed, or perhaps underground. Surely, that would buy them some time to escape.
“Has my brother assimilated the Watchtower?”
Conrad’s eyes rolled across his surroundings. “I already told you, no. The High Council carried them away. They were gone when he arrived. He hoped you’d know where they’ve been hidden away.”
Shufah glanced at Celeste, who nodded that this was the truth. “Do you know why Suhail wants the Watchtower?”
Conrad flinched a bit at the mention of her brother’s name. “To add their sight to his own. To seek out and find his lost children. To spy on the hidden thoughts of his enemies.”
She glanced once more to Celeste. The beautiful augur held her hand parallel with the floor, slightly jostling it side to side. The corners of her mouth turned down, and she gave a small shrug.
Half true, half lie.
“What else does he want the Watchtower to show him?” Shufah shot forward with blinding speed, snatched Conrad by the chin, and forced him to meet her gaze. “Tell me all, or Celeste will know.”
Conrad didn’t pull away. His strength was no match for Shufah’s. Instead, his mouth twisted into a shame-filled smirk. “He seeks whom you seek. You are twins, after all. Is it so strange that your destinies race for the same prize?”
“The High Council?” The question fell from Shufah’s lips in hushed horror. Sudden understanding slapped her in the face, and that terrible countdown in her mind spiraled out of control. “You know why the High Council executed the rest of the Stewards, don’t you?”
“Rumors.” His eyes faltered. “Just rumors.”
“Tell me! Tell me now, or I’ll remove your jaw from your face.”
Conrad opened his mouth. The large, echoing room of the great hall fell silent in yearning anticipation. The breath caught in Shufah’s lungs, and her heart rate slowed as if her body was instinctually trying to blot out any sound that might compete with Conrad’s answer.
Shufah already knew the answer. Othella had ordered the deaths of her fellow Stewards because she would soon usurp a Divine form. A prize too tantalizing to share. Cot and Mathias would be wise to watch their backs.
What she really wanted to know was, had Conrad shared this secret with Suhail? A freezing cloud of dread overshadowed her heart.
Before Conrad could begin his confession, a dark hand appeared on his left shoulder, gripping so hard that his clavicle snapped like a dry twig. A pale hand, the color of spoiled milk—except for the red tendrils of Conrad’s blood—exploded through his chest, expelling ribs, splinters of breastplate, and Conrad’s pulverized heart.
Conrad uttered a shriek of pain, not so much from his mouth as from the hole in his chest. His guttural bellowing echoed from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, continuing in a circuit that seemed to increase in amplitude rather than diminish.
His eyes rolled back to the whites, but quickly turned the color of rotting blood. His mouth hung slack. His lips withered like fermenting fruit. Yet, strangely, Conrad didn’t seem even the least bit surprised by the hand piercing his chest. In fact, he looked relieved.
Shufah, however, couldn’t remember a more jarring sight in all her five thousand years, and not because of Conrad’s violent death.
Shufah and Celeste had Conrad captive on the upper terrace with his back almost pinned to the wall. There were no doorways behind Conrad for the owner of the bi-colored hands to slip through. Shufah thought, for just a passing moment, that Silvanus had materialized behind Conrad, executing him as he had Kole once upon a time.
But that was all wrong. The being behind Conrad was far smaller and well concealed behind the larger vampire. The only thing visible were the different colored hands.
The part that jarred her, made her feel as though the fabric of her sanity had come unraveled, came when the skin tones, and even the contours, of hidden villain’s hands changed places.
The exchange didn’t happen in an instant, like a magician’s illusion, but with a soft, slow liquidity that reminded Shufah strangely of a lava lamp. The
tarnished brown of the left hand—so much like her own hand, she noticed—seemed to fall back from fingertips to wrist as a flood of pallid white washed in to seamlessly fill the void. The right hand received a similar, yet opposite, transformation. The brown flesh rushed in, pushing the white flesh out. And though the brown and white never ceased to touch, they never commingled. It was a marriage of convenience, not one of love, Shufah mused later on.
The now brown hand protruding from Conrad’s chest retreated with a sickening slurp, making a little suction pop at the end when it pulled free. The hole in Conrad’s chest closed as his internal organs collapsed into the void, and the blackish blood coagulated into a vile scab.
A thundering crash erupted to Shufah’s right, and she and Celeste jumped in fright. Taos, Thad, and the Furies spilled onto the balcony from the stairwell with such speed that they nearly collided with Conrad.
The now fully savage Conrad tracked the new arrivals with his blood-clotted eyes, snarling and snapping his venomous teeth, yet he made no move to attack. The left hand remained on the savage’s shoulder like a foul demon, and an icy strip of goosebumps cascaded down Shufah’s spine.
Taos slid in next to Celeste. The Furies fanned out behind the group in anticipation of battle. Thad approached Shufah, standing to her right and slightly behind.
“What do we do?” Thad asked.
Shufah shushed him. She wasn’t exactly sure why. The static tension felt precariously unstable, as if the slightest jolt or noise might cause this situation to explode. This was inevitable, but the fear welling up inside her wanted to draw out this peace-before-the-storm moment as long as possible.
She could only hope that Silvanus was still inside the Ice Sanctuary, and that he had heard Conrad’s screams.
A tiny whimper, like the mewling of a sick animal, drifted from behind Conrad. The blood drinkers collectively sniffed the air as a subtle, yet familiar, scent wafted to them. The stench of Conrad’s blood had almost masked it. Along with the fresh scent, came an unmistakable arrhythmic, yet clearly human, heartbeat thrumming like a broken metronome.
The hand on Conrad’s left shoulder disappeared, reappearing on his right arm. Conrad took three shuffling steps to the left. At the same moment, a frail woman, twisted with pain and agony, fell to the right, landing with a yelp.
Though all the vampires recognized the human woman—whose death from a drug overdose had been postponed by the derelict ghost trapped within her—none of them could pull their eyes away from the thing who seemed to be Suhail, yet wasn’t.
Shufah’s mouth gaped open. Questions danced upon her listless and dry tongue, yet she found herself powerless to speak. The thing standing before her, his mouth curled in a dangerous smile, was no doubt her twin brother. Yet, somehow, he was also the last of the umbilicus.
Separate, yet fused, at the same time.
Suhail’s dark flesh danced, or perhaps warred, with the infected white flesh of the umbilicus, not only on his hands but on his face and exposed neck. Even his eyes changed from a blood-clouded savage’s to the black, shark-like orbs of the umbilicus—yet not always both eyes at the same time. But when the thick forest of black hair gave way to patches of bald white wastelands and back again, Shufah thought she might faint.
What stood before them was an unstable entity, a deadly flux of powerful elements, every bit as devastating as a nuclear bomb.
The savage Conrad shambled over to the woman and hoisted her roughly to her feet. She let out a squeal of pain, or maybe surprise, that snapped Shufah out of her gawking trance.
The woman held out her hands, reaching toward the blood drinkers with a look of pleading despair etching her emaciated face. She tried to speak, but all that would usher forth from her cracked lips were groans and nonsensical mumblings.
“Alicia?” Celeste asked, her voice as dry as the woman’s lips.
Conrad pushed the woman away from the vampires until her back was against the wall. He stepped in front of her, faced the blood drinkers and snarled, warning them to stay away from his prisoner.
Another wave of dizziness threatened to pull Shufah to the floor. Nothing made sense. Was this some kind of vivid nightmare? She’d give almost anything for that to be true.
“Suhail?” she asked, finally finding her voice.
“Sister,” he replied, but the voice issuing from his mouth was not one but two. Somehow, she heard Suhail’s voice as it had been as a vampire and the garbled wheeze of the umbilicus’s voice at the same time. Hearing the dual voices in perfect synchronicity made the room spin all the more fiercely.
Shufah wanted to ask how such an impossible union had been achieved, but for her brother, bitterness and madness had taken the place of truth long ago. Then, in a flash almost too fast for even her powerful eyes to detect, a red mark flickered on the left side of his face.
Uriah, Shufah thought. What have you done, you demon?
A wave of desperation washed over her, and her knees threatened to buckle. Even if they escaped the Ice Sanctuary, even if they somehow found the Watchtower and destroyed every last augur, even if every savage hidden in the underground pockets around the world suddenly exploded by spontaneous combustion, they still had no hope of winning this fight. Suhail’s powers were now limitless. His weaknesses…
“Where is the Watchtower,” Suhail asked. He took a slow, single step forward.
“We don’t know,” Shufah answered, her voice only a raspy whisper.
“Don’t lie to me, sister.” His voice remained calm, yet she felt the dangerous edge beneath. He stepped forward again, a single step, and though Shufah wanted to retreat, she found her feet fixed to the floor.
Suhail lifted his left hand and pointed—with a finger that started off as white but melted to brown—at Celeste. “She knows where the Watchtower is. The Dwarf sent her a vision.”
The remaining color drained from Celeste’s already pale face. “I saw… something. But it made no sense.” Her head rattled side to side in denial, even as Taos shoved her behind him.
“Come to me, augur,” Suhail admonished. “Join with me. Yield your mind to me, and I’ll spare those you love.”
Shufah held her hand out to Celeste, stopping her just in case she did something stupid, like believe Suhail. “We have unfinished business, brother. Let my coven go and face me in battle.”
A wry little smile curled on Suhail’s face, and the upper lip melted white while the lower remained brown. Without a flinch of warning, the sharp barbed cord of the umbilicus exploded from his navel, shredding his shirt and sending a tuft of cloth floating in the air.
The deadly cord, a conglomeration of sinuous muscle and black veins, shot toward Shufah with such speed and murderous precision, that she had no hope of evading the strike.
In the fraction of a second, before the barb struck Shufah, Silvanus appeared in front of her.
Silvanus caught the cord with both hands just behind the barb, and the force of the impact drove him into Shufah. The two of them slid several feet across the slick marble floor before Silvanus found a foothold.
This time, Shufah’s knees did buckle, and she dropped into a puddle upon the floor. She looked up at Silvanus, a mix of awe and gratitude washing through her like fresh blood.
Suhail tried to retract his umbilical cord, yanking Silvanus forward, almost to where he had started, but he dug his feet in and threw his weight backward, holding onto the cord like a man engaged in a tug-o-war.
“Hello, father,” Suhail said, but the umbilicus dominated the timbre of his dual voice this time. “We’ve been looking for you. You were supposed to be the last of the Divine to die, but you killed the other, and there is no more time to spare for games. I need to add your power to our own.”
The cord began retracting again, and this time, Silvanus seemed powerless to stop it. He should have let go of the cord, but instead, he closed his eyes, and tightened his grip.
The frigid air filling the large, open room suddenly raised
fifty degrees, as though some unseen colossal being had cupped his hands over the Ice Sanctuary and sent a blast of fiery breath down upon them.
Silvanus’s hands burst into flames, the licking tendrils quickly changing from red to white to blue. He dug his fingers into the vile, pulsing cord, willing the hellfire to penetrate and devour.
Suhail writhed and grunted while the umbilicus side of him shrieked. He stepped backward, yanking at the cord with his multi-colored hands, but he couldn’t free himself.
The umbilical cord sizzled, filling the air with a terrible stench. The barb burst into flame like a torch, imploded to a gnarly black knot, then broke free with a loud pop.
The sizzling cord retracted into Suhail’s stomach, but not completely. He stood, holding the blackened end in his hands.
Silvanus chucked the crispy remnants of the barb across the marble floor and it shattered into a pile of glowing coals. “You’re the only one dying today.”
Shufah found her feet, but her knees were still weak, and she faltered backward. Thad caught her and they continued backward in tandem until they reached Alecto. Tisiphone and Megaera rushed to them, quickly joined by Taos and Celeste.
It should’ve been a moment of triumph. The death of not only Suhail but also the last umbilicus. But, something was wrong. Something in the very air seemed to scream for them to flee while they still had a chance. Yet, they stood huddled together, fixed in place by morbid fascination.
Suhail held up the burnt and ruined end of his umbilical cord. The last time Silvanus had separated the barb of the other umbilicus in the same manner, the foul creature had fallen into a pile of broken embers quickly after.
But the rules had changed.
Shufah’s eyes bulged, and the group made a collective gasp as the end of Suhail’s cord swelled as if it were going to rupture. At first, she thought—she suspected the others did, too—that Suhail, in the throes of death, would soon explode, filling the room with savage spores.
The bloated end of Suhail’s cord turned black and hard, like magma exposed to the cooling air. It pulsated and fluttered, each time, condensing into a more defined shape. Shufah knew what was happening, but when the throbbing mess at the end of the cord regenerated once again into the deadly barb, all hope withered within her.
The Savage Vampire (The Perpetual Creatures Saga Book 5) Page 10
