by M C Ashley
“My name is Zoë Slinden, youngest heir to the Slinden holds, and proud ruler of Vice City in our hallowed father’s name! May he reign eternally over the bent world!”
“Forever and ever!” the crowd chanted.
Zoë flashed a wide smile at the crowd, baring her fangs. “One hundred years ago, humanity learned about us for the first time! One hundred years ago, we killed our enemies for daring to violate the natural order of the world! For vampire and human to walk side by side, caring for the needs of the other! Through the wisdom of our hallowed father we have overcome those who spread ignorance of our true selves from you, our brothers and sisters! I was once like you, but through our hallowed father’s wisdom he sought to bridge the gap between human and vampire! Now we stand united so we can never again return to the world where we could not reach our full potential!
“This is Vice City, renamed from Corpus Christi, a failed religious attempt to enforce the rule of the resurrected enemy on us all! Now we have banned His images from the land! We have slaughtered His followers, both Christened and mundane alike to come to this place of understanding! Of equality! May they never rise again! May the hallowed father crush them into the dust!”
I looked up to the sky. “Now would be a good time for a lightning bolt,” I muttered, as Zea elbowed me.
“The Feast must start here,” Zoë continued, “because without the site of the end of the Gray Forum, it loses all meaning! We must kill humans to appease the ones who came before to save us from segregation! Without the source flow for the energy we would simply kill for the sake of killing! No, ours is a higher calling! With the energy channeled from all the Feasts in the Sanguine Collective, we raise this city up to the masters, to those who gave us the opportunity to overcome our enemies!”
I turned to Zea. “You failed to mention that,” I said.
“Hey, this is my first Feast too,” she said. “She could be lying. Perhaps she just likes talking.”
“Still, though. That’s all the motivation I need. I like to talk too.”
Smirking, I cracked my neck and stared straight at Zoë.
“Ageg!” I shouted.
The bow appeared and I fired an arrow right into her microphone. It fell to the ground, squealing the speakers loudly and effectively silencing everything. I powered up, removing my hood and held my hat in my hand, while Zea moved in formation with me. Jumping up, we ran up to the platform. Zea shouted something I couldn’t hear to blast Zoë with a wave of fire. Zoë lashed out with her talons to attack us. I ducked down, rolling toward the microphone. I placed my hat on my head.
“Hello,” I said, grabbing the microphone and speaking into it. “Sorry, but tonight’s program will be cancelled in favor of previously cancelled material: A Gray Forum reunion tour!”
I bent down to avoid getting slashed. I brought out my gun and fired at Zoë, hitting her arm. She shrieked in pain. Cole rushed to her side, most likely too stunned by our sudden appearance to move before his beloved boss had been hit with a case of the 9x19mm.
“Now I know most of you have never seen invocation before,” I announced to the crowd, “so tonight you’re in for a real treat, because we’re broadcasting live so that everyone can know that you’ve been lied to by your vampiric ‘friends’ over here.”
“Shut up!” Zoë roared, sprinting past Zea to reach me.
I threw the microphone in her face, causing her to stumble, and consequently the microphone bounced back into my hands.
“Huh,” I said. “Just as planned.” I pointed out to the crowd. “People of the world, I am Blake Azarel, last Sentinel of the Gray Forum and I am here to save you! Some applause would be appreciated!”
They stared at me, unable to decide what to do. Some in the back started to run away, most likely afraid of Collective reprisal.
“Huh,” I remarked. “Tough crowd.”
“Less talking, more backing me up!” Zea roared.
“Oh yeah,” I said, turning around. “The reason we’re here. People, you have been lied to for a hundred years. We were never your enemies.” I crafted an orb of light with my hand and flung it at Cole before he could hit Zea from behind. “We were there to protect you from scum like this. We failed you, but I say no more! No more failures! We will gain your trust! We will make this world move ever upward!”
I muttered something to myself and threw the microphone at Zoë again, who caught it in her hand. She laughed, seemingly disappointed at my repeated tactics. I smirked as it blew up in her face when the darkness invocation I’d secretly placed on it activated.
Rushing forward I used the brief respite to draw Ageg and fired into her other arm, hitting her beneath her elbow. The purifying arrow stuck in her skin for a moment, but she wrenched it out and smacked me in the head with it.
Ouch, I thought. That’s new.
Dodging another blow, I ended up back-to-back with Zea, who was breathing a little heavier than me.
“We’re still not rested,” she said.
“No,” I said. “But we can do this. Oh look, another microphone.”
“Don’t you dare leave me like that again.”
“It was for a good cause. We need a fanbase before we can start going on convention tours. Otherwise it’s just sad, pathetic self-promotion.”
“That arrow hit you harder than I thought, because I understood nothing that you just said. Although I am surprisingly getting accustomed to ignorance around you.”
I laughed. Zoë approached us, her wounds healing. The prisoners in the cages cried out to us to look out, but we stayed in place, ready to adjust our plans accordingly.
“How were you not detected?” Zoë asked. “Cinderella would’ve told me the moment you used invocation to get here!” She stared down at my left hand, seeing the ring as if for the first time. “What is that? What were you hiding from me?”
I paused. Had she not seen the ring on my finger while interrogating me? Had it somehow hidden itself from her presence and made me not think to look for it either before she had left the room? If that was true, then I really had no desire to use it again.
“I’m just full of tricks,” I said, looking for Cinderella, who had disappeared.
Zoë raced forward with blazing speed. I barely summoned Ageg in time to block her attack. But bows are notoriously lacking in the same amount of stopping power that a sword has, invoked from light or not. Zoë pushed against me. Zea engaged Cole in a shootout, with him using an AK-47 and her with small fire blasts. I braced myself as Zoë pushed me backward, gritting my teeth. Sometimes I wished I wasn’t too much of an iconoclast to carry a sword like Mom and Dad had always told me to.
I stepped over a loose board on the stage and stumbled, which Zoë used to slash my right hand with her claws. I grunted, and whirled around to avoid her next attack, kicking her in the back of the knee. I cringed. If she were human that should’ve at least torn her ACL, but since she had mystical vampire regeneration as a racial trait, she merely restored the damage and gained a bonus to attack.
To put that in non-D&D language, she healed and retaliated with a kick to the back of my knee. I fell to the ground. This wasn’t good. My body was taking too many hits. I focused to the best of my ability to craft a shield of darkness around me, hoping to gain enough time to heal my wound.
Zoë slashed through my makeshift shield, right as the charred remains of enforcer Cole sailed past me and into Zoë. The impact ripped her dress and caught it on fire. I stared with my jaw agape as Zea rushed to my side and prepared a healing invocation. It mostly restored my ligaments. I let her carry me upward, careful not to strain the newly-formed ligaments, knowing the longer I let the invocation work, the longer it would last.
We looked over to where Zoë had fallen, a slight trail of flame surrounding her. Most of her body was burnt from the blast, and her clothing was almost burned off, but (thankfully to my conscience and sanity) I couldn’t see anything worth mentioning. I prepared to send a blast of light her way,
but she quickly grabbed Cole’s enforcer armor and hastily put it on herself. The blast of light simply bounced off of the armor.
“Oh, frak me,” I said.
Zea pulled me away as Zoë leapt at us.
“You have cost us everything!” Zoë roared. “No. The day is not yet over. We can still salvage this. We have the prisoners. We can still continue the Feast!”
She laughed madly, having located Cinderella, who was cowering behind one of the cages.
“Cinderella, dear, it’s time to start the fire,” Zoë said.
I reached out, but my hand went limp. No, it was too early to get tired. I didn’t care how many bruises I got, or how much my body was battered: I was going to save these people. Why was my body resisting me?
Cinderella approached the center of the stage quietly, the cages lying in a pseudo-pentagram, ready to be enveloped by her flames. She raised her hands, tears in her eyes as she started to speak.
A sharp wind suddenly whipped over the stage. The cameras on the cage doors began to glow with a bright green light. The wind seemed to make the green glow brighter, and eventually the light cracked like a firework. Cascades of fragmented green energy flew in every direction, except into the cages themselves. The cage doors popped off of the cages, and flew in a controlled manner out into the crowd. I watched in amazement as the cage doors targeted groups of enforcers, and smashed them into the ground. The doors didn’t stop pummeling the remaining human enforcers until every last one of them were dead. Then the doors collapsed on the ground, and the green particles faded away. The forceful gale also ceased.
“Did you do this?” Zea asked in amazement, her mouth agape.
I shook my head, wondering what in the world was going on.
A huge explosion resonated in the air. Zea and I looked over to where Zoë’s mansion should have been. The bridge disintegrated in a blast of blue light. Debris crashed into the water below. I felt the remnants of the vampiric enforcers die in the inferno before any of them could escape.
A breeze flashed right past me, and settled beside Zoë. It stroked her hair for a moment and then flung it in her face.
“No way,” I said, realizing who our savior was.
There he was, wearing one of the garish “wizard cloaks” from before. He’d been there the whole time, right under our noses.
Clooney Dressler stood in front of the now homeless leader of Vice City and smirked. A slight breeze whipped behind his hair.
“Who are you?” Zoë asked, incredulous. “What have you done?”
“My name is Clooney,” he said. “I’m on loan to my friends here. I just blew up your home.”
“But the circle!” Zea shouted out. “It could only be activated by a—”
“Oh, I may have forgotten to mention this,” Clooney said, smirking victoriously as he stared Zoë down, “but I’m a Psionic.”
Chapter 22
Zoë stared at Clooney, malice dominating her mind. But she did nothing to stop him and he remained still. I felt like attacking to end the awkward silence, but I knew that every second I didn’t fight was another second to gather more energy to fight later. Zea, sensing my thoughts, nodded, and waited to strike when the time was right.
“They’re all dead,” Zoë said. “All of my enforcers. Cole. Impossible.”
“And you mourn for them?” Clooney asked. “They were monsters—predators designed only for the murder of innocents. For too long their actions were unchecked. For too long innocents died to fuel their bloodlust. How pathetic.”
“Mourn for them? Why would I care about them like that? They were mine! MINE! I owned them! I own this city! How dare you disrupt the grand work I have been entrusted with here! The Feast is ruined!”
“All in all, I would consider that a success.”
I smiled. Zoë grimaced.
“No,” Zoë said, trembling as she stared blankly into the projector screen. “Father please forgive me. I am not a failure. It’s not my fault.”
“It kinda is,” I said, drawing her attention.
“You! This is all your fault! I ruled peacefully here until you emboldened these people to revolt against me! You are a poison that must be vomited out!”
“Eww. It’s been a while since I’ve drawn that reaction from a woman.”
“But that isn’t your concern,” Clooney said. “We may have been brought here by the actions of Blake, but you must now face the convictions held within our hearts that compelled us to listen to him in the first place! You have ruled this city with an iron fist for years, but you have never been able to destroy resistance! We have come here today as an almighty symbol of the judgment facing your kind! Prepare to die, Zoë Slinden!”
Dang, I thought. He’s good.
Zoë growled and lunged at him, but to our mutual surprise, Clooney ran away from her and hid behind me. I stood there, stunned and completely at a loss for words.
“What the hell was all that?” I asked.
“I may have potentially used up most of my energy to blow up the mansion and free the sacrifices,” Clooney said, sheepishly.
“Figures,” I said, dodging a blow from Zoë’s talons. “Although I have to admit it was a heckuva entrance.”
Clooney smirked.
Zoë raced to our position, raising her talons at me. However, a beam of ice struck her and knocked her off balance. I looked for the source and found Zea breathing heavily, gathering energy for her next attack.
“You couldn’t have talked to her for another few minutes,” Zea said. “You couldn’t have let us gather more energy before we exhausted more. I don’t know about you, but the rest of us, no matter how powerful we are, can’t fight this long without getting tired in our current condition.”
Zoë snarled at us. I surveyed our surroundings, making sure her enforcers had really been wiped out.
Zea was right. As powerful as we were naturally, we weren’t perpetual motion machines in the truest sense of the term. I had been forced to rely on collecting all the energy I could from my surroundings for three days once to save my life, but it had taken me two weeks of recovery to deal with it all. Zea and I could gather all the energy we needed to fight, but our bodies were still all too human. We got tired, we needed to take some time to rest, and we were simply not meant to last that long. If we kept using the Christening without stopping, we could end up burning ourselves out, and in the worst case cause our own deaths.
I hadn’t foreseen my death, but there was nothing that said it couldn’t be a second before we died. I wasn’t going out like that. I had no plan to die now. Not anymore.
I shook my fist, ready to strike back, but Zoë swerved to my left, intent on killing Zea. I watched her arm transform itself into a pure ebony blade. Zea brought out her spatha and met the blade. Zoë’s swing had too much power and it overwhelmed her, causing Zea to fall to the ground, the spatha flying out of her hands.
Reaching for my gun, I watched Zoë swing at Zea. But to our surprise, the blade landed in the middle of the stage, two inches away from Zea’s face. Zoë stared at the spot of impact, too stunned to speak. Right then, a rock zipped past my face and slammed into Zoë’s head.
Zoë was knocked back, glancing at the rock, and then turned to locate her assailant. I turned my head to follow her gaze, finding Nathan standing defiantly by himself, as the crowd slowly backed away from him to avoid Zoë’s future wrath.
Zea whirled around and picked up her spatha, ready to counterattack. I inched a little closer to Nathan, knowing exactly what was about to happen. I never let Zoë out of my sight.
Nathan walked up the stage and held out his arms. “You really are a pretentious idiot,” he said, grinning. “You have no idea what we’re capable of. I am the master of the mind!”
What is it about me that brings out the inner ham of other people? I asked myself. I am a positively bad influence.
He was no such thing. He’d barely been able to influence her vision to the point where she had missed
Zea. Still, I had to admire the kid’s audacity.
“You little worm!” Zoë roared. “How many of you are there left in this world? How dare you crawl out from the dirt to ruin my city! I will kill you!”
“Yeah, well you have cooties,” Nathan said, sticking his tongue out at her.
Zoë lunged forward and brought her arm blade down to Nathan, but I managed to push him out of the way in time.
“Nice moxie, kid,” I said once we were safe, “but leave the heavy work to us.”
“But, Blake, you still haven’t heard the good news about—”
“Later, I promise. Just get to safety.”
Nathan grunted and ran down the stairs to the ground. I returned to the platform, as Clooney and Zea held Zoë off from running after Nathan. Clooney had a new slash wound on his stomach. He was bleeding profusely.
“Clooney!” I yelled. “Watch after him! No hostages for her! Charge up and wait to strike!”
“Understood,” he said, leaving to follow Nathan, as they mixed with the crowd.
I fired a round at Zoë, hitting Cole’s armor. I swore inwardly. How was she able to beat us so easily? We had to do something quick to gain an advantage. I had withheld using any invocations to store them for later, but I knew if I didn’t start we’d be finished.
And that’s when I had an idea.
“Zee, I have a bad plan,” I said, swerving to my left.
“Then don’t say it!” Zea shouted.
“But it’s a bad good plan.”
“Well I suppose it’s better than nothing.”
“Bind her.”
Zoë froze in place, shocked by what I’d suggested, giving Zea enough time to knock her down to the ground. Zea rolled backwards to her feet, grappled with the vampire, and pushed her off with an invisible shield. Zoë was knocked back several feet, landing on her back.
