The massive limestone blocks, which had lined the inner stairwell of the Ice Sanctuary for centuries, now lay in a ruptured pile, blocking their descent. Freezing air and icy scree rushed in, filling every void in the massive stones.
Shufah rushed past Taos and placed her hands upon the stones as though she intended to push them out of the way. The falling scree covered her feet to the ankles. “Suhail,” she spat. “Thad, can you clear us a path?”
Thad approached the stone. He closed his eyes and extended his hands. His body trembled as though he held a great weight in his arms. They all watched the stones in expectation, but the only movement came from the pea gravel and crushed stone used to fill the void between walls. Thad fell against the tumbled blocks.
“I can’t,” he said, panting heavily. “I’m sorry. We’re too far from actual earth for me to take hold.”
Taos started forward in a huff, but Celeste snagged him by the arm. She had stayed his advance, but she couldn’t stop the instant rage that all too often controlled him.
“What do you mean you can’t move them? It’s stone and dirt. Isn’t that your forté? Aren’t you a ground mover?”
Thad’s eyes blazed. He stood straight, his chest puffed in defiance. “Listen up, you giant Nordic moron. If I could move them, I would. But they aren’t connected to the actual ground, which is at least three hundred feet away.”
The fire in Taos’s hand blazed brighter. “Then stop being a pathetic little fledgling and do something useful for once. Reach out, get a hold of the earth that’s three hundred feet away and make us some sort of tunnel. You’ve done it before.”
“It’s too far away to control. Even if I could get the ground to move, there’s a good chance I’d either bury us, or rip a massive crack in the ground and flood this area with sunlight. I don’t think either option is all that great, so get off my back about it.”
“Enough,” Celeste shouted. “Thad, I know you’re angry because Taos bit you. And Taos, I know Thad somehow threatens your fragile male ego, but I’m getting real sick of all the fighting. So cut it out before I reach into both of your minds and scramble your brains.”
Tiny smiles flickered on the faces of the other women. Taos and Thad looked about like chastised children, but said no more.
“There are other ways to reach the labyrinths below,” Shufah said. “We’ll just have to take a different path.”
“If Suhail blocked this path,” Tisiphone said, “it stands to reason that he blocked the others as well. With his new abilities, he could leap from one to the other in a matter of moments.”
Taos pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the tumbled stone. “To knock those over, I’d say leaping isn’t the only new ability he’s acquired.”
“We can argue later about which new powers Suhail does or doesn’t have. Right now, we need to figure out a path of escape that Suhail doesn’t know about.”
Thad’s eyes lit up. “Do you know about the secret passage in Sebastian’s room?”
Shufah’s eyes narrowed. “No. Only the High Council and a few choice Hunters were allowed near the Watchtower.”
“Then Suhail probably doesn’t know, either.”
“Just get on with it,” Taos said with a measure of controlled impatience. “Don’t keep your secret too long. We’re running out of time.”
As if to emphasize Taos’s point, a colossal sonic blast filled the Great House, a sound that could shake the very foundations of the Earth and rent to pieces the very fabric of existence.
The vampires clutched the sides of their heads—even Alecto and Tisiphone—trying their best to blot out the auditory attack. They tumbled to their knees, slid down the stairs, piling up against the fallen stone.
Taos’s fire extinguished, leaving them in total darkness as the god-roar caused the scree to vomit from the holes in the wall, nearly burying them.
The banshee’s cry went on a few seconds longer, but suddenly, it cut off in a choked, garbled cry of anguish. The silence that followed seemed heavy, yet hollow. Celeste realized only now just how all-consuming the pain the noise had caused had been. Had the sound gone on much longer, it would’ve killed them all.
The vampires stood up, freeing themselves from the pile of stone with relative ease, and Taos reignited his fire. Several new cracks had formed in the walls in the upper part of the staircase.
No one questioned where that sound had come from, nor what had cut it short. It had come from the grand hall. And to reach the wing where the Watchtower once resided, they were going to have to travel up the main stairs, and across the balcony.
They would all see for themselves soon enough.
Shufah took the lead as they backtracked up the stairs. Taos quenched his fire, as to not draw any unwanted attention. The darkness was unnerving, and Celeste felt as though they had been swallowed by some gargantuan beast, who was savoring them in its cheek, preparing to mash them to paste with its towering teeth.
Taos reached out and took her hand, returning to her a measure of courage. Though they had the ability to achieve incredible speeds, the vampires made their way back to the surface one painstakingly slow step at a time.
As they drew near to the doorway leading back to the grand hall, a faint, ghostly light filtered in from under the threshold. The stinging in their eyes and prickling of their flesh said it was daylight, but thankfully, not direct enough to start cellular breakdown.
The sonic quake had opened up holes in the Great House. They could only hope most of the roof remained intact.
The repetitive thrum of massive propellers chopping the air drew ever closer, now settling somewhere over the sweeping entrance to the Ice Sanctuary. The humans in the helicopter had surely felt the quake from the sonic blast, even from their lofty position. Perhaps they were merely getting a closer look at the damage to the once magnificent building.
Celeste very much doubted this. There was a sense of purpose behind this intrusion. But right now, humans were the least of their concerns.
Shufah opened the door, shielding her eyes from the painful light. The shadowy horde of wraiths was nowhere to be seen. A thin, jagged rift had opened in the ceiling just above the grand stairs, spilling deadly sunlight down the treads and across the steel plate securing the main entrance. The light reflected off the marble floor, sending muted beams made visible by the floating dust bouncing around the room.
The indirect sunlight gnawed at their exposed flesh and stabbed at their eyes, but it posed no immediate danger. The golden blast cascading down the stairs would hurt, especially young Thad, but with their speed and agility, they were more than able to storm through and reach the darkness of the upper rooms with a bare minimum of damage.
There was only one problem. Suhail stood at the top of the stairs, bathed in sunlight like a conquering king, as he devoured the limp, yet still alive, Divine Vampire named Augustus.
Augustus’s head lulled side to side as a string of slobber dangled from the corner of his mouth. A weak moan escaped him, not from his mouth, but from the jagged hole in the side of his chest where his right arm and shoulder had once been.
The barb of the umbilical cord was buried deep in Augustus’s solar plexus. Suhail didn’t use the cord to inject savage blood as the umbilicus had done when killing a Divine. It served only to hold Augustus, or perhaps, to anesthetize him.
The ever-shifting storm of skin color and texture churned all the more violently as Suhail feasted. His mouth spread back impossibly wide, showcasing all of his teeth. His jaw seemed to unhinge, yet remain just as powerful, as he tore another large mound of flesh from Augustus’s side.
This wasn’t just a savage eating flesh to replace lost tissue. Suhail wasn’t just devouring Augustus. Celeste sensed he was absorbing him. In a matter of minutes, there would be nothing left of the once handsome Divine.
“We’re trapped,” Thad said, turning away from the grim spectacle at the top of the stairs. The helicopter descended, shaking the house, and
he had to yell to be heard. “What do we do now?” More a statement of desperation than a question.
There were other paths to the labyrinth other than the collapsed stairwell and the secret path from the Watchtower that they could explore. Though Celeste believed Suhail probably had blocked the other known routes, she couldn’t say for sure.
Not that it really mattered. Even if one were open to them, Suhail would be finished with Augustus soon. He could easily find them in the caves below. Their only hope was to get far enough away, fast enough that Suhail wouldn’t know exactly where to leap to.
Shufah pushed them toward another doorway on the opposite side of the grand hall, perhaps thinking it was better to try to escape and fail than to stand still and admit defeat.
“Wait,” Celeste said, placing a distracted hand on Shufah’s arm. That all too common nagging sensation in the back of her mind told her they needed to stand still. “Do you hear something? Just outside the front door?”
The coven of vampires stopped, turning their attention to the front of the house, focusing their hearing past the roar of the helicopter, penetrating wood paneling, plaster, insulation and stone.
Just outside the Great House were voices. Human voices. And the high-pitched electric ticking of a charging detonator.
“Get down,” Celeste screamed, but the others were already in motion, fleeing with vampiric speed away from the door.
A deafening concussive blast fired inward, displacing the thick steel safety door, sending it skipping like a flat stone on a still lake. It sheered the grand staircase in half and embedded itself deep into the back wall.
A blanket of golden sunlight spilled into the grand hall, temporarily choked by competing clouds of smoke, ash and dust.
A team of fifteen fully armored humans rushed through the newly gaping hole.
Chapter Eleven
Shufah pulled the others away from the door just in time to avoid both the flying steel door and the deadly sunlight.
The vampires retreated as far back into the shadows as possible, out of the reach of direct light, but not far enough to escape the pain of the reflected UV radiation.
The humans rushed through the dust in three lines of five, stopping only a moment to glance up at Suhail, who still stood atop the now destroyed stairs.
Suhail glared at the intruders through one bloody eye and one black doll’s eye, but continued to glut himself on Augustus with greedy, ravenous bites.
The humans crossed the room in a slow but determined pace, stopping twenty feet from the vampires. They were all dressed in black military-grade tactical armor, complete with helmets and reflective face shields connected to an SCBA unit, but lacked any identifiable markings or standards. They each wore a semi-automatic rifle slung across their back, but all fifteen had both empty hands open and extended before them.
The middle human in the first line of five stepped forward. “We’re here to help,” he said, his voice barely audible over the roar of the helicopter. “There isn’t much time, so if you want to live, trust us now.”
Shufah glanced at Celeste, who nodded. “Our trust, you have.”
The leader of the humans held up his right hand, the first two fingers extended, and spun them in a tight, clockwise circle. Without hesitation, the second row of five shot to the left, while the third row darted to the right. They moved in a quick, tight formation around the first row of humans and approached the vampires without fear.
Three of the approaching ten drew their weapons and aimed them up at Suhail. Shufah wanted to laugh at such a pointless gesture, but when her eyes fell once more upon her brother, the laugh died within her. All that remained of poor Augustus was his left arm and left leg connected by a flank of mangled flesh.
The other seven each produced a small plastic tube, no larger than a road flare, from the small of their backs. They cracked the tubes over their knees, almost in unison, and removed what looked like a tube of reflective glass.
They tossed the broken plastic husks to the side and unfurled the tubes, which turned out to be reflective cloths that expanded to the size of a small tent. Without a word, the humans tossed the cloths over top of the vampires.
While the outside of the cloth was reflective, the inside was densely black. It was comfortable and airy, but somehow weighted around the outer edges, for it dropped to the floor, sealing out the invading sunlight, leaving the vampires in a blessed cocoon of darkness.
“We’re going to surround you now,” the lead man said. “We’ll lead you to the helicopter. Try to hold the blankets in place. He’s almost finished eating, so we’re gonna hafta make a run for it.”
The vampires could easily maneuver their way to the helicopter and back to this exact spot three times with nothing more than their sense of smell before the humans could make it out the front door. But the humans had the helicopter, so Shufah kept this bit of trivia to herself.
The vampires bunched together, with Taos in the center, and the other six encircling him. The humans formed a triangle around them, and the entire group pushed toward the throbbing heart of the helicopter.
They zigzagged their way around fallen debris, and out through the ruined front door. The reflective blankets performed perfectly, without even a glimmer of sunlight finding its way inside the black cocoons.
That was until they came out from under the vestibule and the helicopter descended upon them like a hunting eagle. The freezing air lashed at them, doing its best to snatch the reflective cloths away.
Shufah caught the front of her covering, but a blast of burning light ricocheted up from the blinding snow, gnawing at her face and gouging her eyes. She pressed her back against Taos, both to help keep her cloth in place, but also his.
The human triangle immediately collapsed around them, blocking any further attack from the violent wind. Shufah felt the heat of their bodies through the blankets, and the song of their rushing blood drowned out even the roar of the helicopter. She pressed the tip of her tongue against her right fang and the brilliant but, somehow, pleasant pain brought clarity to her thoughts.
“Hey, giant blond guy,” the lead human shouted over the propeller’s roar. “You better squat down unless you want a haircut.” Taos did as instructed—with none of his usual sour sarcasms—and then they were under the propeller.
The humans in the front parted, allowing the vampires access to the cab of the helicopter. They couldn’t climb inside without allowing the sun to seep beneath the blankets, so Shufah took a deep breath, preparing for the pain, and jumped inside. The sunlight rushed in, biting at her exposed skin, but then, she was inside and spinning away to allow room for her friends to enter.
In a matter of seconds, all seven vampires huddled together at the rear of the cab. The fifteen humans took an eternity, by comparison, to board. Time seemed to slip like blood from a gaping wound, and all Shufah could see in her mind’s eyes was Suhail, now finished with Augustus, teleporting into the cab of the helicopter.
Finally, when all the humans were inside, the door slid shut with a pop and the helicopter tilted hard to the side.
They rose quickly into the air, and the increased g-force pooled the blood in the back of Shufah’s head, giving her a moment’s reprieve from the pain of her sunburns. The nose of the helicopter spun toward the south—a fact she could detect even buried beneath the blackout cloth—as they continued to gather elevation. When the pilot achieved his chosen trajectory, the helicopter motors came to full power, the nose dipped, and they blasted away from the Ice Sanctuary at an impressive velocity.
“The cabin is secure,” the lead human said, addressing the vampires. “You’re free to remove the blackout blankets, if you’d like.”
They peeled back the reflective shrouds and dropped them to the cabin floor. The humans stripped off their tactical gear, stowing it and taking their places in seats near the cockpit.
They had blackened the round windows spanning both sides of the helicopter. Though she was no exp
ert, Shufah thought she recognized this helicopter as an Mi-8 HIP. Old, but relatively well-kept. Did that make these humans Russian military? She didn’t find that likely.
A third of the crew were women, all of them (men and women) were of varied races and ages, and none of them seemed the least bit interested in the vampires.
Shufah found that strangely refreshing. She had never encountered a human that didn’t look at her with at least some measure of curiosity, whether that be awe over her beauty or lust for her power. Even Foster had watched her with fawning, childlike wonderment.
These humans, however, seemed far more interested in what they were watching on their computer monitors than the immortal blood drinkers they were transporting.
The only human that paid them any notice at all was a tall black man with a handsome face, square jaw, and highly intelligent eyes.
“Sorry for the intrusion,” he said. It was the team leader. “We rarely get involved with vampire affairs. But these are strange days, and we thought you could use the help.”
“Thank you,” Shufah said.
He shrugged as if to say, hardly worth mentioning. He turned toward an athletically built woman with brown skin, short dark hair and the piercing eyes of a warrior. “Are we clear?”
She looked up from her monitor. “Out of visible range. Even if he can teleport this far, I don’t think he can get a solid lock on us.”
A nervous rock fell into Shufah’s stomach and she thought, if you knew my brother, you wouldn’t give him that kind of leeway.
“Good.” The team leader cupped his hand over the black band covering his voice box. “Ground team?” He waited a moment, received an answer in his earpiece, and then continued. “Bury the house.” He nodded as another answer came and then dropped his hand.
A moment later, three enormous explosions erupted, thundering toward them from the direction of the Ice Sanctuary.
The vampires turned their heads toward the sound, but the humans remained trained on their tasks. Another sound drifted to their vampiric ears over the expanding distance, a noise that chilled Shufah’s blood and sent shivers up her legs.
The Savage Vampire (The Perpetual Creatures Saga Book 5) Page 12
