by J. C. Diem
Our small group of vampires was all that stood between the imp army and an unsuspecting humanity. I couldn’t help but have serious doubts about our chances of saving them, or ourselves.
Chapter Two
“During my captivity,” Luc began and slanted a glance at me when I frowned at the painful reminder of his incarceration, “I noticed the diminishing numbers of female courtiers and grew suspicious.” He’d been held captive by the Comtesse, the most powerful of the nine Councillors who ruled the Court in France. The Court was made up of at least several hundred European vampires. The courtiers came and went on various errands for the Court so it was hard to tell exactly how many there were. I’d come to the conclusion that all were attractive, vain and a complete waste of space. I’d only had a few dealings with them but they’d left a memorable impression on me.
At first, I believed I’d been fated to kill most of the courtiers. Apparently that was now limited to only the vamps that had been possessed by their shadows. A tiny part of me was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to wipe the entire Court off the face of the earth. Unless the First gets to them, I reminded myself. Then they’ll all become damned or will be turned into imps and then I’ll get to kill them. The thought cheered me up a little.
The Comtesse was one vampire I was itching to put an end to. She was Luc’s maker and a truly unpleasant monster. I’d only realized the praying mantis was Luc’s true master after she’d ordered him to chop off my head. I still hadn’t understood completely until his sword had separated my head from my shoulders. The truth had sunken in pretty quickly when it became apparent that he was unable to refuse her order.
I didn’t want to rehash the horror of waking up to find myself reduced to being a head in a box again so skipped ahead to the main point; the Comtesse had broken our laws. One of the rules enforced by the Council was that the lords and ladies could only have one servant each. It helped to control our undead population as well as aiding us in keeping a low profile. Of course, there was a clause to the rule. All nine Councillors, being so much more important than the rest of us lowly minions, could have up to twenty servants each.
Luc and the others were fairly certain that the Comtesse had created over a thousand servants. This included lords, ladies, guards and the various other lackeys who helped run both her white marble mansion in the UK and the French mansion. She’d managed to keep this fact a secret for so long because she was ancient, evil and fiendishly clever.
I was almost impressed by how the praying mantis had pulled this off. She forced lords and ladies, who she herself had turned, to pretend to be the masters of new vamps she had also turned. Being beneath her control, they were unable to blow the whistle on her. So, while every vamp that had been turned by her knew the truth, they couldn’t come out and admit it.
I didn’t want to kill the Comtesse just because she’d breeched the rules so badly. I wanted to end her lengthy unlife because she had been tormenting Luc for seven centuries. I’d rescued him from her clutches a couple of nights ago but he wouldn’t be truly free of the hag until her head was separated from her body. I was a firm believer in an eye for an eye. Unluckily for her, I’d gained the ability to reattach any body parts that I misplaced. It was just another one of the mysterious talents that alienated me from the rest of vampirekind. Unlike me, once the Comtesse lost her head, she would become a stain on the ground and her reign of terror would finally be over. My lips curved upwards slightly at the thought.
“I began keeping watch for any unusual activity,” Luc continued his explanation. “I noticed a white van appearing every few nights. Each time it showed up, one less courtier was seen the next night.”
“You think we should wait for the van to show up and then follow it?” Igor guessed.
Luc nodded. “Exactly.”
“How long has it been since you last saw the van?” Gregor queried.
“The last time was three nights ago. It is due to arrive again tonight or tomorrow night,” Luc replied.
Luc, Gregor and Igor immediately launched into a detailed plan of how we could best track the van without being noticed by the guards patrolling the mansion. My eyes glazed over pretty quickly from boredom. I was more of a doer than a planner. Lengthy discussions like this tended to make me sleepy. Meeting Geordie’s gaze, I saw he was equally disinterested in the conversation. His lips quirked when I rolled my eyes then we were both laughing silently.
“Why don’t you two children go upstairs and get cleaned up?” Igor said with a dark frown. Luc shook his head wearily at our antics and Gregor hid a smile of what I took to be fond amusement. Compared to them, we were toddlers. Especially me. My irises had already disappeared and my pupils had become enlarged thanks to being cut into eleven pieces and then buried in consecrated dirt in a cemetery. I’d gone through some pretty radical changes during that short and unpleasant period. So, while I might look ancient in the eye department, I was still fairly new.
Seizing the excuse to flee, I bolted off the couch and raced Geordie to the set of stairs in the hallway. The kid beat me but only because he cheated. Tripping over the foot he stuck out, I sprawled on my face at the base of the stairs. Planting a foot on my back, he leaped over my prone body then raced to the top and down the hall with me right on his heels. I could have beaten him by using my unnatural speed but that would have been unfair.
As I’d suspected, there was only one shower in the house so I was forced to wait for my turn. “You could always join me, chérie,” Geordie said and batted long, girly eyelashes at me.
“No thanks, I’ll wait,” I replied grumpily. The clumps of ooze in my hair and clinging to my suit didn’t smell very nice and I desperately wanted to clean up.
While Geordie showered, I prowled through the upper floor. Apart from the bathroom, there were three smaller bedrooms and one larger one. Placing my backpack on the bed of the master bedroom, I claimed it before anyone else could. Luc and I would be sharing a bed so it made sense for us to have the bigger room.
It was late autumn in Europe and it was a lot colder than I was used to. I’d lived in Australia my whole life and it had a very warm climate in Queensland most of the time. Thankfully, a small pile of wood was waiting to be lit in the fireplace. Matches were on the mantle so I struck one then used a heavy iron poker to coax the pitiful flames to life. I couldn’t blow on it since I no longer had the ability to draw a breath let alone to force any air out of my lungs.
Geordie took his sweet time showering but finally emerged in a cloud of steam. I was waiting for him by the time the door opened. I hastily shifted my eyes away as he flashed his thin body at me in the pretence of adjusting his towel.
He opened his mouth to make some kind of inappropriate comment then cowered away when I lifted my hand to palm his face away. “There is no need to threaten me, Natalie,” Geordie said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I will go, for now.” With a soulful look over his shoulder, he disappeared into one of the smaller bedrooms.
Like all sensible vampires, Geordie was afraid of the holy marks on my palms. The marks were twin indentations that I’d received from holding onto a cross too tightly. The outline had become embedded in my palms on both occasions. They were deadly weapons that could kill the undead but only if I willed them to.
Being able to withstand holy objects and holy water were two of my many talents. Fire also reportedly had no effect on me. I hadn’t tested that theory yet and had no desire to do so. The flames might not kill me but it would probably hurt like hell anyway.
Some of the usual methods that killed our kind that I had unwillingly tested were; being beheaded, staked through the heart and being left out in the sun. The last one had been the worst by far. Only the sun really had the power to hurt me. Even then, I’d managed to regenerate after being boiled down to a skeleton from the waist down after only a few hours. I doubted I’d ever forget the excruciating pain of that particular episode.
Now that the bathroom was fre
e, I took a few items from my backpack then locked myself inside the small room. Along with a fresh black leather suit to change into, I also carried one of the samurai swords I’d been given during my trip to Japan. Geordie might be annoying at times but he was correct when he said the imps could sneak up on us without my knowledge. My new policy was to keep a weapon close at all times.
My hair was covered in shampoo when stealthy noises alerted me that someone was at the door. I was out of the shower and had the sword poised to strike by the time it opened.
Chapter Three
Luc arched an eyebrow when he was confronted with the sword then eyed my dripping nakedness with a slow smile.
“Oh, it’s just you,” I said ungraciously and put the sword on the sink again. I’d locked the door but Luc had many talents of his own. I’d seen him hotwire a decrepit old truck once so I was unsurprised that picking locks was another of his skills.
“That’s the welcome I was hoping for,” he replied wryly. “May I join you?”
Since vampires had pretty much no body heat, we usually took boiling hot showers. In a house this small, the hot water system would empty out quickly. “Ok, but no hanky-panky,” I warned him and stepped back into the shower. “I’m not having sex with you in a house this small.”
“Why on earth not?” Luc asked as he stripped off and stepped in after me. A light dusting of dark hair covered his torso but did nothing to hide his leanly muscled form. Now it was my turn to eye him appreciatively.
“Because the others will hear us.” Duh. As if I could get in the mood knowing they’re listening to us getting all hot and heavy. I’d never been into voyeurism and the thought of having an audience for our bedroom antics did nothing for me.
“I can hear you right now,” Geordie said from across the hall, proving my point for me. He didn’t even raise his voice and I still heard him clearly.
Luc’s now soapy hands circled me from behind and cupped my breasts. “Then we will have to be very, very quiet,” he murmured into my ear.
I didn’t want him to stop what he was doing but I had a bad habit of moaning loudly whenever Luc put his hands on me. Bracing myself against the wall, I clamped my lips shut as one of his hands slid down over my stomach and invaded my lower regions.
Luckily, I didn’t have to breathe anymore so I was able to contain most of my involuntary noises as his fingers slid, stroked and explored. Then his chest was pressing up against my back and something much larger than his fingers was inside me. With both hands gripping my hips, he slid in and out of me with the speed and strength I’d come to appreciate and crave.
When I came, I bit right through my lips, shredding them both. They healed so fast I barely registered the pain at all. “J-J-Jeepers,” I said quietly as my body shuddered then went limp. I sometimes forgot I could no longer say Jesus, God or Christ and ended up embarrassing myself by stuttering. “Do you think they heard?” I whispered and was horrified when three answers came from various parts of the house.
“Oh, yes,” came from Gregor, with a touch of amusement.
Igor was more matter-of-fact. “Of course we heard you.”
“How many times did you come, chérie?” Geordie asked. His cheeky question didn’t go unpunished. I heard the sound of rapid footsteps on the stairs then a hand connecting with the back of the kid’s head. “Ow! I was just curious,” he whined.
“Your curiosity will get you killed one day, Geordie,” Igor told his apprentice grimly and clumped back downstairs.
Mortified that everyone in the house knew what we’d been up to, I turned to Luc and found him placidly soaping his chest. “Sex is an essential part of our lives, Natalie,” he explained. “With hearing such as ours, it is impossible to be discreet when we find our pleasure.”
“Great. That’s just great.” I was near sobs of humiliation but refused to give into them. Crying was fairly pointless when you couldn’t produce any actual tears.
“One day, we will have a house of our own and only I will hear you scream with pleasure,” Luc said.
Shocked, my hands stopped massaging conditioner into my hair. “Are you asking me to move in with you?” I’d had boyfriends before but the relationships had never lasted long enough to actually shack up with any of them. “This seems a bit sudden.”
I was on the verge of panic even though I loved the guy. Oh my God…I love him! It was the first time I’d admitted the depth of my feelings for Luc to myself. I knew he loved me because I’d been inside his memories. I was the only woman he’d ever loved and I had no idea why. Apart from being Mortis, destroyer of the damned, I was pretty ordinary for a vampire.
“Relax, Ladybug,” he said dryly and I wrinkled my nose at the new nickname. My maker, Silvius, had been a lord. Due to our laws, since he was dead that technically made me a lady. Most Europeans I’d met thought I was named after an insect when I introduced myself as Nat. Hence, Geordie thought it was hilarious to call me Ladybug. Unfortunately, the nickname was sticking. “We have a lot of work to do before we will have the chance to choose a home.”
Luc’s point calmed me down before I could become hysterical. He was right, we had to track down the First and fight our way through his hordes before we could start picking out curtains. How we were going to accomplish this without dying was a minor detail we hadn’t quite worked out yet.
Before I’d left the small island where our Japanese kin lived, Kokoro had foretold that I would have an army to help me battle the First and his minions. So far, my army consisted of five people, including me. Since we were all vampires, we were susceptible to becoming possessed by our shadows. I’d been watching all of our shadows carefully and none seemed to be sentient yet. This meant that none of us were in danger of being taken over any time soon. But once we were in close proximity to the First, he could call our inner imps out of us in mere seconds. We would be helpless to resist him and that made us fairly useless as an army.
As if reading my mind, Luc took me by the shoulders. “We will find a way, Natalie.” His smile was reassuring even if it wasn’t particularly believable. I knew full well that Luc didn’t think we would win. That realization had only just hit me before we’d entered the safe house and I was still shaken by it. If he didn’t believe in me then how could I possibly believe in myself? Are you thinking of running away again, my subconscious asked me curiously. No, this time I would see things through to the end. If I was fated to battle the First then I had to at least try to believe I might have a chance of winning. Besides, the last time I’d tried to run, I’d ended up as Alexander the London sewer vamp’s science experiment.
It was getting late, or early depending on whether you were a night or day person. For us night people, it was late and dawn was just around the corner. Before retiring to our hideously decorated room, I cleaned the imp ooze from my leather suit. Entering the bedroom, I spread the suit over the single armchair near the fire to dry.
Unfortunately, the overstuffed purple armchair was the most tasteful thing in the room. The walls were hot pink and the carpet was snot green. A comforter that matched the wallpaper exactly covered the queen sized bed. I was glad to see a number of blankets beneath the comforter since I had stripped down to a borrowed t-shirt, undies and nothing else.
Gregor had volunteered to take the first watch during daylight hours. Once Igor and Luc died for the day, they wouldn’t wake again until the sun set. Since I could wake up whenever I wanted to, so if Gregor needed to sleep, I could take over from him.
A quick check of the windows reassured me that they were boarded over but I made sure the curtain would keep out any stray bars of light. Already in bed, Luc gave me a suggestive smile then shrugged philosophically when I shook my head. He’d have to catch me by surprise again if he wanted to engage in a bout of mattress wrestling.
Climbing in beside Luc, I felt the life slip out of him as the sun appeared. The first rays always came with a suffocating sense of heat for me. It was gone quickly enough and the
sense of heat faded.
Gregor moved around downstairs, checking the doors and windows. The imps might be alive again now but they still shunned the sun. It was doubtful they’d make a daylight attack but not impossible. If they were covered from head to toe, they could still move around during the day. I’d survived an ambush they’d launched while the sun had still been up. If I’d been a normal vampire that couldn’t rise until nightfall, I’d have been reduced to a sticky smear on the ground. Since I was far from a normal vampire, nothing they could do would kill me. They didn’t know that and would probably continue to try to ambush us.
For a while, I studied Luc’s face. Even in death, he had underwear model good looks. What does he see in me? I’d seen his memories of the woman who had pretended to be his maker when I’d accidentally bitten him. Monique had been tall and beautiful with long black hair and an excellent rack. I was nothing compared to her in the looks department.
Then there was the Comtesse. She was tiny with voluptuous hips and white-blonde hair. I had nicknamed her the praying mantis due to her widely set, soulless eyes and general unpleasantness. The first time we’d met, she had ordered me to strip naked for her amusement. The two hundred or so courtiers who had been in attendance at the time had watched and laughed at me. There were many reasons to kill the ancient hag but that one remained at the top of the list.
I’d had the partial revenge of relieving her of one of her hands the night I’d broken Luc free. It wasn’t nearly enough punishment, not for the centuries of torment she’d put him through. Hacking her into a million tiny little pieces still wouldn’t be revenge enough but it sure would be enjoyable.
While Luc lay insensate, I watched over him and listened to Gregor pacing the floor downstairs. Maybe Luc wasn’t the only one having doubts about the likelihood of our success. They were both a lot older and a lot smarter than me. They would have examined every angle of the plan they’d concocted and were still willing to go ahead with it despite their misgivings. That just proved to me that all men were crazy.
