by Nick Stead
There seemed to be little left of Lady Sarah by then, the jelly-like substance of her eyes washed away with her skin and much of her muscles, her form skeletal and in danger of dissolving into nothingness at any moment. And still she didn’t wake up. Whatever David had done to her, she’d been rendered utterly helpless and left completely at his mercy. I supposed if she was trapped in so deep a sleep she might at least have been spared the pain of her flesh melting away, though that would be no consolation if I couldn’t find a way to repair the damage for her.
She weighed next to nothing when I lifted her and ran to the left, towards the doorway into the next section of the dungeon. The shower of holy water didn’t quite reach as far as the doorway and I was able to set her down in relative safety without having to go through to whatever dangers lay in the next passage. My wounds inflicted by the steam were already weeping, but I needed a quicker flow of blood to pass through the vampire’s mouth if I was going to stand any chance of saving her. So I drove a claw into my own wrist and severed the major veins and arteries there, then held my arm over her bare fangs and let the blood spill between them, praying it would be enough.
A red stream burbled from the gash in my wrist, running across my skin and dripping down into the cavern of Lady Sarah’s mouth. I wasn’t sure there was enough left of her for it to do any good, much of her throat melted away like the rest of her which surely made swallowing impossible, even if she regained consciousness. Gently I cradled her gore adorned skull in my good arm so gravity would at least send the blood in the right direction. I didn’t know how far gone she was beneath the dress but I hoped the material might have offered some protection for her vital organs. Or maybe it had made things worse with the way it clung to her wetly. There was a worrying lack of shape beneath its sodden material – where before she was definitely female underneath, there was a distinct lack of that feminine body shape now. But her chest hadn’t just flattened into something more unisex: her entire torso seemed to have sunken inwards. Did she need a stomach to make feeding possible? Or did the blood just have to reach her heart somehow? If she even had a heart left to receive the stolen life force. I couldn’t even begin to guess how vampire physiology worked or whether it was possible for her to come back from this.
The minutes trickled by and my heart rhythm grew irregular with the greater effort to pump the blood around my body the more it lost through the open wound, but still there was no change in the stricken vampire. Her body didn’t appear to be healing, nor were there any signs she’d regained consciousness. Then again, with so little flesh left on her bones I wondered if I’d even know if she did wake up – she might not be able to move if there wasn’t enough in the way of skeletal muscles to make it possible. And she had no eyes to open or vocal cords to so much as groan with. I didn’t even have the usual tell-tale signs of life like a heartbeat or breathing to rely on, since vampires didn’t always have either of those things, even when conscious. She might as well be a corpse in her current state.
I thought about calling for Zee but if he was in some kind of danger himself, he probably couldn’t help anyway. So I continued to drain my life into what was left of Lady Sarah, hoping her vampiric healing would suddenly kick in once enough blood entered her system. There was only so much I could give her before I’d be forced to heal though. Light headedness was already beginning to settle over me, my limbs tingling with the sensation of being starved of blood and my vision going blurred once again. I was becoming all too familiar with the symptoms of blood loss by then and I knew I would have to stop the flow soon.
Bitterness took hold as I was forced to accept that, despite making a sacrifice just as David had wanted, I’d still been too late to save not just Lady Sarah, but Amy as well. My body was leaving me no choice but to abort my futile attempts to bring the vampire back, and I let the transformation take hold, focussing on healing the damage without losing my current hybrid form. There was nothing more I could do.
Chapter Fifteen – Shadow Guide
Rage bubbled up to the surface again as I healed, keeping the grief at bay for the time being. I think a part of me was also in denial, unable to feel that sense of loss because I couldn’t fully accept that the vampire I’d known as ally and travelling companion, teacher and someone I one day hoped to call friend, was truly gone. I also refused to believe that did really mean Amy’s life was also forfeit, even though I knew my failure to save Selina’s sister meant our bargain was over. Maybe she’d still risk everything to save my sister but if she was anything like Lady Sarah had been, then I doubted she would do that for an ordinary human with no supernatural gifts. Lady Sarah had always been so very practical when it came to our survival and she would have argued that the life of a mortal was not worth risking our own eternal existence, especially when all mortals are doomed to one day die anyway. It was entirely possible Selina would be of the same mindset. And yet, even knowing that in my head, in my heart I couldn’t accept it. Until I saw my sister’s body lying completely lifeless, I would cling to what little hope there was left.
I turned my attention to my other vampire friend who’d also sounded to be in trouble from the other side of the wall. There was nothing to hear other than my own heart still pounding with all the strain it had been put under, my cells still undergoing the regeneration process and replicating to replace the tissue that had been lost to the steam, and the fall of the holy water from behind me. The silence suddenly seemed ominous and I had to wonder if I was going to be too late to help Zee as well.
Placing what was left of Lady Sarah back down on the stone floor, I rose and stalked through the doorway to find myself back in another passage. There was a staircase to the left of me which had to lead down to the exit on the left hand side of the chamber where Zee had been, and I rushed down, wondering if there would be another pool of gore waiting for me at the bottom. I replayed the moment in my head where I’d heard him cry out as I ran. It hadn’t so much been a cry of pain as a noise like he’d been taken by surprise, unless that was just whatever hope I had left distorting my memory. Surely if more holy water had fallen on the other side of the chamber I’d have heard him screaming in agony before his unnatural existence was brought to an end though. So maybe he’d encountered something else but then, if he wasn’t unconscious or worse, why couldn’t I hear any sounds of him fighting or anything?
“Zee?” I roared, deciding to risk calling out for him.
No reply was forthcoming.
I emerged back in the left side of the chamber to find: nothing. No apparent danger that might explain the vampire’s absence, no grisly corpse ruined by holy water or otherwise and no sign of where my friend might have gone. I couldn’t believe he would have just left me without good reason after everything we’d been through since we’d first met at the start of the dungeon, so I had to assume he’d gone on ahead. But what was it that had caused him to cry out?
Cursing the overpowering stench that made my sense of smell almost useless, I ran back up to the passage leading on to the next section of dungeon, shouting his name as I went. I strained the only two senses I could rely on for any clue as to what was happening, but I was given no clue to forewarn me as to what might be waiting up ahead. I didn’t think Zee would have gone too far on without me so I kept calling him, my rage building as I went. Running around blindly was getting really frustrating and I’d had enough of David and his sick game. My bloodlust returned with a vengeance and all I really wanted was to rip into the humans responsible for all the death and suffering in that place. I began to hope Zee’s cry had been caused by an enemy taking him by surprise because I really wanted another fight then. Though the longer I called to him with no reply, the more my hopes of finding him alive waned.
The passage seemed to meander on far longer than any other I’d been in, curving round in a clockwise direction until finally I reached a dead end. That only frustrated me more. No doubt there was another hidden door the vampire had gone through for reaso
ns I could only begin to guess at, but I didn’t have the patience to search for it. It didn’t matter that I’d already tried and failed to break through the thick stone walls in other areas with brute strength – anger drove me to attack the stone with claws and fists, gouging several claw marks into it but no more successful than before in dealing any real damage.
I sank into a crouch, panting from my efforts. My anger receded somewhat and despair began to creep in, when suddenly I heard the sound of another stone panel grinding into action, closely followed by a welcome voice at long last.
“Nick?”
“Zee! Where the fuck have you been?” I growled. “What happened to don’t go too far in case it’s a trap?”
He appeared from further down the corridor, sword drawn and eyes wary, but otherwise appearing to be okay.
“I’m sorry, my friend. While you were making your way to Lady Sarah, a beast appeared on my side of the chamber. You sounded to have enough to cope with as it was so I chased it through to this passageway, trying to keep it from running back and into the side you were on. It got away from me but the good news is I found a hidden passage that leads to your sister and the witch, so you can take Lady Sarah to her sister as promised and save your own. Where is she?”
“She’s dead,” I answered, all anger and relief at his reappearance draining from my voice. Just saying those two words drove all questions I might otherwise have had about the beast and the passage from my mind.
“No,” he said in disbelief.
“Her body was drenched in holy water but even when it had eaten through her skin and down to the bone, she still wouldn’t wake. I got to her as quickly as I could but it was too late…”
“Did you try giving her your blood?”
“For fuck’s sake, just ’cause I heal quicker than a human doesn’t make me a walking blood bank for you guys,” I growled. “But yes, I tried feeding her from my wrist. It didn’t make any difference.”
“Show me.”
“What’s the point, we’ll only be wasting more time. I need to get back to Amy; I’ve been away from her for too long as it is. I have to see if there’s some other way to save her, or if this really is going to be goodbye then I at least want to be there by her side.”
“It’s possible you might have missed something. We will go empty handed to the witch if you wish and you can say your goodbyes to your sister, but if there’s even the slightest chance Lady Sarah can still be brought back do you not want to try that first? I would go and look at the body alone if you’re that desperate to get back to Amy, but I don’t have the blood to heal her if I do find anything left to heal. Vampires can’t feed on other vampires. It has to be blood from a living body or the recently deceased.”
“Okay, but let’s be quick.”
I wasn’t convinced Zee would think of anything more to try than I’d done already but I supposed if there was even the slightest chance I had missed something it made sense for another vampire with centuries of experience to check. The undead pirate had been around long enough to know all the limits and abilities of his curse, and I admitted to myself it was possible he might find new hope where I’d thought there was none. And at least if going back to the corpse I’d left in the chamber only confirmed that she was indeed dead, I could be certain of it, instead of having to live with ‘what if’ for the rest of my life. So I led the way back to where I’d left her.
The grisly scene was no less horrific when my eyes settled on it a second time and beside me, Zee cursed in shock. My brief description of what had happened clearly hadn’t done her death justice. The gore covered bones looked no different to before, no miraculous healing happening after I’d gone to look for Zee, and nothing had moved; her bloody remains lay in the same position I’d placed them in after carrying her out of the holy water. The downpour had stopped while I’d been out in the passage, but otherwise nothing had changed.
The vampire pirate sank to his knees beside what little was left of Lady Sarah, his hand shaking when he stretched it out to her bloody bones. I guessed he’d never seen such devastation caused to one of his kind before. If he’d had any hope of finding some way to save her that I hadn’t known about, it had just been washed away much like Lady Sarah’s flesh – I could see it in his face. But still he gently lifted the edge of her dress to peer down at her chest underneath. There was nothing sexual about it – I doubted there was any of her breasts left for us to leer at, even if we’d wanted to – he merely wanted to examine the extent of the damage beneath the material and check whether her heart was still intact.
“Her heart is still there,” he said, though his voice held no fresh hope.
I knelt down to see for myself, amazed to find it had miraculously survived in the ruins of her chest cavity. The holy water had done some damage, the outer tissue of the organ beginning to liquidise along with the rest of her guts, but it hadn’t been completely destroyed by the acid effect of the liquid.
“I admit, I didn’t check that before. But is it enough? Can she come back from this?”
Zee shook his head. “I don’t know. Her brain needs to have survived as well but the only way for us to check that is to crack her skull open, which I would rather not risk doing. Any more damage to her skeleton and it looks like she might just disintegrate. Seeing her like this, I would say it’s doubtful there’s enough left for your blood to revive. The water could easily have seeped in through her eye sockets or her nasal cavity, or even her ear canals. I hate to say it, but I think you already did everything you could.”
“Then what was the point in coming back?” I snarled, rising back up.
“I know you said the water burnt her right down to the bone, but I had hoped to find more than just a bloody skeleton,” he confessed. “I thought there would be more flesh on the bones and that perhaps I could find something that was preventing your blood from healing her, or what it was that was keeping her from waking. But now, much as it pains me to say it, I think you were right all along: she really is gone.”
I knew he’d meant well but I was angry he’d wasted valuable minutes that could have been spent with Amy, just as I’d first thought when he’d said he’d wanted to see the body for himself. But there was no sense in letting the rage take over when there was nothing other than the vampire to direct it at, so I forced it back down to simmer in its dark pit until I could make use of it.
I turned my glare on Lady Sarah’s remains while I wrestled the anger back down, the irrational thought that it was somehow her fault she’d died slithering into my mind. If she’d just had the strength to fight whatever the Slayers had done to her and broken the enchantment or whatever it was that kept her from regaining consciousness, she could have run from the shower of holy water and saved herself. I knew as soon as I thought it that I was being unfair, but my anger blamed her all the same.
“It’s back,” Zee hissed.
“What?” I growled, turning to see he’d also got back to his feet and was looking through the doorway at something in the passageway beyond, sword drawn.
“The same beast as before.”
Red eyes met mine, glowing from within a black canine face seemingly made of the very darkness itself. Huge paws stood firm on the stone ahead, a muscular form with a physical weight to it blocking our path, very much there despite its ethereal nature. I knew all too well the power in those shadowy limbs and jaws, remembering the last time I’d faced a beast just like it out on the moors, outside Selina’s cottage. Without a scent to determine if it was in fact the same beast, I couldn’t be sure it was Selina’s barghest companion, but I suspected it might be.
“Wait,” I said, aware Zee was readying to charge at the dog. “It could be the witch’s familiar. Did it attack you before?”
“No,” he admitted. “I attacked first, wanting to keep it out of the chamber so it couldn’t cause you problems.”
The dog made no move to attack. It simply stood and waited, and I got the impression it wanted
us to follow it. When Leon had first named it as a barghest after I’d described it to him in his mansion, he’d talked about how witches could bind the beasts to their will which made me think the dog wouldn’t have randomly appeared to us. Either Selina had sent it, or maybe she was in real trouble and it had come to fetch us to help its mistress. And after she’d talked about how the one thing she could try to save Amy would be at great risk, I had a feeling the barghest suddenly manifesting for us couldn’t be a good thing.
“If it meant us harm, I think it would have attacked by now. What happened when you chased it before?”
“It ran through the section of the wall where the hidden passageway turned out to be. I lost it after that, even though I went on a little way to make sure it wasn’t going to come back and cause trouble, getting close enough to the doorway at the end of the passage to pick up the scent of the witch and a human girl who could only be your sister. Then I came back to find you before we ended up being separated, and to show you the way I’d found so you could get back to Selina and Amy as quickly as possible.”
“Then I’m guessing this is the barghest bound to Selina. I think it was leading you down there, back to its mistress, but when you didn’t take me straight to the passageway it showed you, I’m guessing it came back to try and get us to follow it a second time. We should go to them. There’s nothing more that can be done here and I just want to see my sister again now.”
The vampire kept his sword drawn, but he at least nodded his agreement. “I can’t say I trust these shadow creatures, but you’re right, we should go to them. Once we’ve done what we can for Amy, we may well need the witch’s help to escape this accursed place.”
“Yeah, with any luck she’ll accept that we did all we could for Lady Sarah and focus her wrath purely on the Slayers,” I said, trying not to think about the fact I might be going back to Amy only to say my last goodbyes.
