Rebirth of the Seer

by Peter W. Dawes

  “I’ve had enough of him. Sedate him and prepare him for travel. I’ll call in the others to take down these bodies and notify the families.”

  “With pleasure.” I faintly heard the sound of someone crouching beside me and hissed when the prick of a needle pierced my neck. Julian chuckled. “Now, little vampire, don’t hiss at me.” A cool sensation surrounded the point where the prick originated. I envisioned a syringe being emptied into me. “You ran from me, but I finally won our cat and mouse game.”

  A distant part of me almost congratulated him for getting the euphemism correct this time. That same part murmured the words on repeat. “Please, search for Monica,” I said. “Do not leave her here.” The last few words were slurred, produced with a great degree of difficulty. I felt the black of more than merely my shut eyes surrounding me, invisible hands reaching to pull me into an obsidian abyss. My tentative hold on consciousness faltered. Slumber came, whether I cared for it or not.

  “Very good,” was the last thing I heard Julian say, “Go to sleep. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

  ***

  The first thing I became aware of – as consciousness encroached upon me like an unwelcome visitor – was the slight jostle of the world around me in a strange, rhythmic fashion. Intermittent bumps interrupted a smooth trip forward and the more lucid I became, the more my bearings settled through the haze of grogginess. I knew I was lying on my back, and that the clacking sound I heard in the background bore a familiar cadence. It took me a matter of moments to realize I was on a train, undoubtedly headed for my place of reckoning.

  My hands were bound and my face devoid of glasses which ensured my journey would be spent sightless. With a sigh, I listened for any sign of company. A single pulse beat far off to my right side. “Have I been left alone, or is that a guard I detect?” I asked, not able to summon the energy for a telepathic prowl.

  “Good morning, little vampire,” came the answer from the mouth of Julian.

  I sighed. “Evening more like it, I assume.” My mind swam, attempting to measure the passage of time while unable to find a place to plant its bearings. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Over twenty-four hours. And morning was correct.” I could hear the smugness in his voice. “We still have a long way to go. Settle in and get some sleep.”

  A sigh drifted past my lips again. The details of the last few days were piecing themselves back together in my mind. I swallowed hard, my stomach sinking at the thought of what might have happened to Monica. The scent of blood still lingered potently in the air around me, but had dried enough to keep its siren taunt a low hum. I silently wondered if my watcher had gone on to the ether and I was soon to follow. “No rest for the wicked,” I said after a brief pause. “Care to pass the time with a chat?”

  At first, Julian failed to respond. I shrugged, assuming this to mean I would be left in silence as well. A few minutes passed and then I heard a shuffle accompanied by him clearing his throat. After another few seconds, he finally spoke. “My orders were to keep an eye on you. Not entertain you.”

  I scoffed. “Even you have to be bored by now.”

  “I pass the time.” I visualized the shrug which punctuated the comment.

  “I am surprised to even still be alive. I thought your orders were to kill me.”

  “The orders were changed by the High Council. They wanted you brought in.”

  “To Seattle, if I am recalling correctly.” I flexed my wrists and shimmied. “These are hardly comfortable accommodations, though. Whose bloody idea was it to transport me via train?”

  “Less questions on a train about an unconscious vampire.” A smirk lay in his words. “I would think you’d like the gesture after what happened in Philadelphia.”

  “I am touched. You remembered our first date.”

  Julian grumbled and failed to respond. I sighed again. “Apparently when the Order instructs the lot of you, they remove your sense of humor”

  Another low murmur preceded his reply. “I didn’t find what you did to those men in Chicago amusing.”

  “And you truly believe I was the one who did it?”

  No response.

  I shook my head. “Julian, you have faced me and even when I had the chance to kill you, I did not. I threw you around a trifle, but considering you were going to behead me, I thought it only turnabout.”

  “It wasn’t convenient.”

  “Leaving you as a potential threat, who could have uncovered our location and slaughtered us at any moment, was not convenient? I spent four years as an assassin. Do you think I simply let my targets slip away?” I noted to myself that Anthony had been an anomaly.

  Julian scoffed. “You see? You just admitted you kill off your threats.”

  “Yes, when I was murdering without impunity. If that was my current modus operandi, you would have been a crime scene left for the police department. Does it say anything that you were not?”

  When he did not acknowledge the point, I continued, “Whether or not you choose to believe me, I am not the same being Sabrina turned. In fact, I am not even the same man you sought to assassinate both at the hospital and the train station. These days have changed me to the point that I hardly recognize myself, which is both amazing and confusing all at once.”

  “You are deceiving yourself.”

  “I disbelieve myself. But she was right.” I huffed, a bittersweet smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “She has been right all along.” Indulging a deep, steading breath, I felt another pang of melancholy threaten to pull me under. The uncertainty left me hanging in limbo, though, unable to determine what to hope for or how much to resign myself. “Did you look for her? Or am I expecting too much for you to have not assumed I hid her body somewhere?”

  Julian paused. I motioned to sit up, which caused my guardian a great degree of alarm. I heard the air displace around him in a sudden rush, equating the sound with Julian coming to a hurried stand. I raised a hand to stop him. He pulled his sword from its sheath anyway. “Please,” I said, rising and turning to face in his direction. The shift in weight, mixed with the texture of surface on which I sat, revealed we were in a cargo car. I felt the distinct slits associated with crates. “I am not going to do anything to you. I merely wished to sit.”

  “You have silver shackles and wards around you,” Julian said, although I could not tell if he was informing me or setting his own mind at ease. The sword slid back into its sheath. “Before you try to escape.”

  “Point duly noted. I did sense more than the normal amount resistance to entering your thoughts.” I lifted a brow without opening my eyes. “My watcher?”

  Julian sighed. “I looked around, but couldn’t find her. Or any sign of her.”

  “Damn it.” The news impacted me with a violent surge of emotion. Maintaining my composure became a struggle – I wished to rage and scream and destroy everything keeping me from running back to Chicago. Bloody shackles. Bloody magic. I felt tears rise behind my shut lids and gritted my teeth against their desire to escape. “Julian, if you have ears to hear, you must listen to me. The man who took Monica has something grave planned. All I know is that it affects your Council and, somehow, the entirety of your Order. I did not have the chance to map out his full intentions.”

  What had been delivered with impassioned urgency was met with disdainful laughter. “You’re spinning tales to save your own neck.”

  “You… nearsighted nitwit.” I laughed, incredulous. “You mock me to your own destruction, much the same as the Order shuns me to their detriment. I am not requesting your mercy. I am stating to you the truth of my purpose as the Fates have deigned it to be. They staked a claim on my soul and speak to me through visions, yet you daft creatures only see me as a liar – at the very moment I am anything but.”

  “Now I know you think I’m stupid. The Fates have given you visions?”

  “Somehow, I have become the unfortunate anomaly in the cosmos. It is not a position I wante
d, by any means.” My lips curled downward in a frown. “As a human, I only wished to be a good doctor. As a vampire, I wanted the next kill. I did not ask to be thrown from either camp, and the sole happiness I have been afforded through all of this has been my watcher. I sit here with callings and visions and a bloody chess match hanging over my head when I never wished any of this.”

  Indulging a deep breath, I continued. “I am not your demon, Julian. Nor am I a hero. But the part of me that is still partly human is the part speaking when I say, search my heart. Tell me then, seer, what you find. If you sense even an iota of good, then promise me you shall take my warning seriously. If I am to be dead by their hands, at the very least, save them from their demise.”

  I felt the weight of Julian’s stare, and even a tickle in my mind as I felt him prodding around, this time without any walls to protect even my deepest, darkest secrets. Whatever surrounded me had dampened my ability to stop him and even then, as he retreated, I heard a snort of disgust precede him sitting down again. “I’m not that easily fooled,” he said. “Whatever you have in there now, I saw what was in there before.”

  My frown deepened. “On both occasions, you have seen the truth of me.”

  “And I don’t believe that much can change so fast.”

  “Peter has lived on, despite what you think is possible. I cast him into his prison and forced him to behold the things that I did, but none of that killed his spirit. Not even when he was subdued.”

  Julian scoffed again. “You speak of yourself like two separate beings.”

  “I have no better way of explaining it.”

  “You really are crazy, then.” I heard a huff and a creak. The diminished volume of his voice led me to believe he had turned his back on me. “Or a con artist. And I’m not going to believe the lies of either. You see judgment waiting for you and want to be freed.”

  “I would not shirk my judgment. Peter only wishes your kind be protected if–”

  “Lie back down and be quiet. Before I drive your own sword through your heart and claim you were attacking me.”

  The jab cut deeper than I expected. I did as he asked, shifting on the crates and lying back atop one, my bound hands resting on my stomach with the shackles impossible weights. I could not deny the very loud voice which said, ‘Reasoning with madness, seer? Better you save your breath and damn them to their fate. ’ The next breath I inhaled was shaky, a mirror to my resolve.

  I found myself getting lost in a thought. “You said you yet have my sword?”

  “I have it, yes. You won’t ever hold it again.”

  “I did not fancy I would.” Both sides of my psyche – saint and devil – spoke in unison, for two entirely different reasons. “Keep it by your side. It might be your salvation. A human swordsmith crafted it at the directive of the Fates. Maybe you were meant to be its champion.”

  Julian said nothing in response. No derisive snicker or angered growl passed through his lips and neither did any hope anything I said might have come home to roost. “I shall not burden you any longer,” I said, and for the next day, I did precisely that. A string of guards waited at Seattle to take me into custody and a short ride in a van brought me to my final destination. During the moments I was not consumed with sadness and worry, I traveled two divergent paths of thought becoming more and more urgent as time went by.

  The Fates had weighed me and found me wanting – they had brought me there to die. What truly happened to me would be destiny’s hand to play.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  For the next two weeks, pain became an intimate friend.

  The prison I had been thrown inside was a fortress unparalleled. My shackles from the train were removed, but new ones took their place which kept me confined to the extent of the four walls surrounding me. Each time my skin touched metal, my flesh would burn. Whenever I came too close to the edges of my cell, I felt sluggish, nearly blacking out once while trying to test my mettle and see how long I could endure. My blood-drenched clothing still hung on my frame like dirty rags, their former smell rapidly replaced by the stench of use which had attached itself along the trip. The moment the door swung shut, the silence which followed was maddening. Without even a shaded window, I had only periods of sleep to denote the close of one day and the beginning of the next.

  At the very least, the darkness afforded me the chance to open my eyes.

  I spent long hours lying on the ground, having not been given as much as a bed. My mind waxed philosophical while my body began to feel the strain of days without feeding. Memories of how I had calmed my spirit the last time I failed to eat led me toward thinking of my parents again, and once more their faith became a topic of interest. I recalled their concern I be squared away with the Almighty so we could all meet in the afterlife. It was a matter I never took seriously with all the wisdom of a thirteen year old. Now, it weighed heavy in my thoughts.

  My quest for redemption had fallen woefully short. Three more souls were dead and another lost, possibly killed as well for all I knew. The magical wards fencing me in also prevented me from trying to see how far my link with Monica might stretch, if there was still a chance she had not been murdered already. This great mission I had been set upon would crumble to pieces once my execution took place and I would finally face the recompense I had waiting for me. I had nothing to offer the powers-that-be but good intention and attempts rent asunder.

  The notion turned even more sobering as another day passed without so much as a whisper from my captors. My hands quaked with withdrawal, teeth aching for purchase on anything with a pulse. What had started as a philosophical exercise became much more incensed. The old Flynn whispered at me, carrying reminders of our days when we dared God to cast us to hell so we might rule over the Devil himself. I screamed at the bolted door and curled in the middle of the floor when my ranting garnered no response. The frightening truth had been laid out before my eyes. They intended to starve me.

  Before I knew it, even the fears I held for humanity slipped into an abyss. During my first days in the cell, I thought to call out to whoever might be hearing my repeated warnings that they were all in danger. As I realized a fate even worse than death had been decided for me, however, my voice was stilled, my thoughts darker than when I had entered. My one beacon of hope was probably gone by now. Why should I not curse the rest of the world with my dying breaths?

  “No, you must not say that,” I said hours later while pacing the floors. My fangs remained exposed, something I had not been able to remedy since rising. Thoughts on the hereafter now bounced back and forth between rage and the animalistic need for an answer to my thirst, with brief moments of clarity interspersed amongst the two. A period of lucidity brought about by biting my own wrist was slipping away rapidly. I clutched onto it, not knowing when the next would come. “Damn you, creature. You can make them listen. Someone in this lot must be capable of reason.”

  “I think you give them too much credit, Flynn. This group has never been known for its progressive thinking.”

  The sudden voice gave me a start. I spun around, looking for its source while seeing no one in the cell but me. My brow furrowed, eyes darting wildly from one wall to the next. “Who goes there?” I asked. The door was yet bolted shut, its appearance betraying the silver I knew at least adorned its exterior. I drifted as close to it as I dared. “Speak your name or leave me alone.”

  He laughed. “You know my name, dark one,” he said, his voice laden with amusement. “It hasn’t yet been a week since we last spoke.”

  My throat dried, stomach sinking. “Ian.” I spoke the name in a hush, working through my addled mind that he was real and not some manifestation of my decent into madness. A wave of anger assailed me like a bolt of lightning. I charged for the door, but recoiled with a hiss when touching it singed my hand. “You son of a bitch.” I stepped backward again. “How dare you come to me like this?! If I could reach you, I would rip you into pieces for what you have done.”
/>   “What I’ve done? I seem to recall warning you against this.”

  “You warned me of nothing.” I scowled. My shaky hands rubbed together. “You threatened us and stole my watcher when I would not play along with your dance.”

  I heard the faint sound of tsking. “You’re looking at this all wrong. Once again. Remember? I told you things were about to get much worse for you and your fetching witch threw me away from her before we could talk like civilized monsters. Now I come to you as a savior and you still attack me with threats.”

  “You are no savior. You are my enemy, and when we face each other again, I shall put you through the same torture you inflicted on me.”

  “I inflicted on you? Let’s examine this for a moment, shall we?” His voice changed in location. I pictured him pacing from the door to further down the wall. “My second impaled you with a sword, true. And yet, we ensured you would live through that. I believe your former allies even made mention of this when they questioned your loyalties.”

  “The innocent men you slaughtered.”

  “Nobody is innocent. Not the least of which includes your captors. Look at this cage.” I glanced around at his direction. “Silver. Incantations. Isolation. They have you handicapped and have been squeezing the life out of you for six days. Have you figured out what they’re doing to you yet?”

  I frowned. “They are starving me.”

  “Precisely. You know that precious lucidity you cling to right now? Within two days, it will have vanished. You will be twisting and screaming and scratching at the walls, ready to consume anything that crosses your path. You will be so driven from yourself, you won’t even know your own name. You’re too young to weather it any other way.”