by J. C. Diem
Shaken by the display, at least I now had an answer to what had happened to the other imp silhouettes. I couldn’t say I was sorry to see them go but I was highly disturbed that I had a group of assassin shadows to battle now.
“Ok, you got rid of the competition, what now?” I asked them. “Are you going to flip a coin to see who gets me?”
Shuffling its feet silently, the first shadow scratched its head while the second one cut suspicious glares at the other three. It was the third shadow that reached a decision. Balling up a fist, it punched the second shadow in the face. Three of my shadows instantly became a furious clawing, biting whirlwind. No other human or vampire would have been able to hear them cursing each other in our father’s alien language. I wished I couldn’t hear them myself. I was amazed that beings that had come from me knew such foul language.
Stepping back further to keep out of their way, I watched in fascination as two of the shadows ganged up on a third. One grabbed it around the waist as the other bent and somehow managed to tear it free from me just like it had with the imp. Wailing in either pain or terror, the shadow immediately lost its shape and began to dissipate. Unlike the imp, this one took longer to fade.
Wisely, shadow number four had scurried off to one side to avoid getting caught up in the fray. The other two silhouettes circled each other, looking for an opening. Knowing my time was running out before I had to face the First, I took matters into my own hands and reached for the closest of my dark clones. It began to shriek as my holy marks settled on either side of its head. Expecting some degree of pain as a consequence of unleashing the dark power, I winced when the shadow became a wispy, insubstantial ghost before disappearing completely. As far as I could tell, killing it in this manner had had no effect on me. The last time I’d unleashed the holy marks on a shadow, the diseased alien blood had oozed out of the vampire host. A dry husk had been all that remained.
Now I was left with only two contenders for my body. The boldest, shadow number one, sized me up. We both ignored the last silhouette. It was busy cringing beneath the desk and didn’t appear to be much of a threat. Moving suddenly, my opponent leaped at me. We fought silently, punching, clawing and slapping at each other.
Clamping its hands on my head, my enemy tried to unleash its shadow version of the holy marks. Pretending to be mortally wounded, I fell to the floor and writhed around with my hands covering my face. It might as well have tried to beat me to death with a feather duster for all the effect it had had.
“Finally, triumph is mine!” the shadow trumpeted inside my head.
“Guess again, stupid,” I said and grabbed the shadow by the feet. With an audible ripping sound that only I and my two remaining shadows would have been able to hear, I stood and tore the thing free from me. Hanging upside down by the ankles, the shadow screamed as it became thinner and thinner before finally melting away.
Turning, I spied shadow number four still huddled beneath the desk, trying to pretend it wasn’t there. “How about you?” I said to it. “Aren’t you going to try to possess me, too?”
“Um, I hadn’t planned on it,” it replied inside my head. “Honestly, I just want to go back to being a normal shadow again. I hate having to anticipate your every move all the time.” It was hard to tell since I couldn’t read its inky expression but it sounded like it was nearly in tears.
“That would be a pain in the butt,” I agreed. “So, what now?”
Slinking out from beneath the desk, my shadow slumped against it. “I dunno. The other three were the brains. I’m just the original.”
Great. My real shadow is dumber than my fake ones. “Pretty soon I’m going to go into the First’s lair,” I reminded it. “We’re going to fight and he’s probably going to win.” We were both glum at the thought. Once I was dead, my clone would cease to exist as well.
“I don’t want to turn into one of those flesh eating monsters,” it replied plaintively. “They smell horrible, they eat with their mouths open and they have no sense of humour.”
“You can smell?” I admit I was surprised by the revelation.
“I can smell, taste and feel anything you do.”
I mulled this over then came to a horrible realization. “So, when Luc and I are…”
Before I could even finish, my shadow was nodding. “Oh yeah. I felt evvvverything. All four of us did, heh heh. That Lord Lucentio is pretty good in the sack.”
It had been mortifying to discover our friends overheard us each time we got physical with each other. This was somehow so much worse. I almost felt like an unknowing star of a porno film. I’d better not tell Luc about this. Then I remembered that he’d been the sexual entertainer of the Court for hundreds of years. The idea of being spied on by my four shadows probably wouldn’t bother him at all.
With far more important things to worry about, I turned my attention back to the present. A plan had just come to me and I smiled. “I have a proposal for you,” I said to my black clone.
“I’m listening,” it replied. After I outlined what was on my mind, the thing gave a laugh that sounded eerie inside my head. At least it spoke English and not an alien language. “It’s a deal! I just hope this works so neither of us ends up dead.” On that note, my shadow and I were in perfect accord.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Heading upstairs, my poor shadow tried its hardest to copy my every move until I took pity on it. “Don’t worry about copying me. No one else can see that you’re…alive.” I wasn’t sure ‘alive’ was the correct word but I didn’t want to offend my new ally.
“Thank G-G-G-G.” I sensed its grimace even if I couldn’t make out its features properly. “I keep forgetting about that.”
“Me, too.” It seemed the silhouettes had more in common with their fleshy counterparts than I’d ever imagined. Neither of us could say the lord’s name out loud.
Reassured that no one would notice its weird antics, my silhouette stood up and allowed me to pull it along. Not only was it not particularly intelligent, it was also lazy. If it had been a real person, we’d probably have been the best of friends.
Knocking on the stairwell door, I heard muffled exclamations of fright from the other side. Unlike the soldiers, I didn’t make a lot of noise when I walked. The door cracked open and one of the guards eyed me carefully. I tapped my watch to indicate we were running out of time and he hurriedly pulled the door open.
Not wanting to scare anyone into putting a bullet in my back and ruin my leather suit, I walked at an almost normal pace towards the exit. “Where are you going?” one of the guards called, jogging to catch up.
“I left some gear in the police headquarters that I’ll need for the cavern of doom,” I said.
“Did she just say ‘cavern of doom’?” the first guard said out of the side of his mouth in Russian.
“She did and I don’t like the sound of it.” If they’d seen the actual footage of the cave, they would have liked it even less. I thought it was an apt description.
Emerging onto a street I didn’t recognize from my earlier reconnaissance of the town, I raised an eyebrow at the two soldiers. “How far away are we from the police HQ?”
“It’s four blocks away,” one of the men answered. That confirmed what the final remaining imp had told me after my head finished regenerating and I’d woken up in the cell.
I could have sprinted there and back quickly enough but didn’t want to risk having my head riddled with bullets again. Reattaching something that had been cut off was easy enough. Repairing one hole in my head took a few seconds but regenerating my entire head had apparently been a bit trickier. Since we didn’t have much time to waste I would have to play it safe. “Let’s go,” I said to them both and they broke into a jog.
“Where are the rest of your shadows?” one of them panted after we’d jogged for half a block.
“They had some other place they had to be,” was my vague reply.
“Are they coming back?” the other soldie
r asked anxiously.
“I bloody well hope not,” I muttered. I was down to having a single shadow again and it was my fond hope that I wouldn’t collect any more of them. Try to avoid ingesting the blood of vampires or imps from now on, my subconscious suggested wryly.
Both men were breathing harder than normal by the time we reached the squat white police building. I wasn’t breathing at all, of course. They escorted me inside and I made my way up to the second floor to retrieve my backpack.
“I’m going to change my clothes,” I told the pair as I motioned them out of the room. “If either of you open this door, I’ll rip your face off,” I warned them as I closed the door.
“I wouldn’t mind if she ripped my pants off,” one of the soldiers whispered. The other one sniggered.
Changing rapidly, I wormed my way into the red suit for the first time. Just like the black ones, I almost had to be a contortionist to do the laces up at the back. “Let me,” my shadow said and brushed my hands away. It was creepy that my shade was corporeal enough to be able to do up my laces. It pulled them tight enough that it would have cut off my circulation if I’d had any. Not very bright and lazy it might be, but the silhouette was efficient. I only had two more items to add to the suit but I’d wait until we were in position near the cavern before I donned them.
Opening the door, I ignored the dazed expressions on the soldier’s wide eyed faces at the sight of me dressed in neck to toe red leather. Moving over to a window, I checked my reflection. The thick band of metal across my chest and back were contoured to my shape and didn’t stand out as much as I’d thought they would. Skin tight, the suit fit me perfectly and was almost as comfortable as being naked. Considering just how closely it fit, I might as well have been.
With my escorts following close behind me, most likely staring at my butt, I jogged back to the squat grey building where I’d been incarcerated beneath the ground. One of my guides led the way back to the war room where the leaders of the two armies were working out their strategy.
Striding down the hallway, I ignored the heads that turned and mouths that dropped open. There was an instant and deafening silence at my arrival when I stepped into the war room. Colonel Sanderson’s eyes popped open as wide as they could and my shadow giggled. I had to bite down on my bottom lip so I wouldn’t do the same. Men were such visual creatures that they could be rendered brain dead at the sight of a woman’s contours. Mind you, my brain went a bit numb whenever I saw Luc without his clothes so I couldn’t really criticize them.
“Good timing,” the American said when he finally managed to tear his eyes away from my new outfit. “We’ll be leaving in five minutes.” Realizing something was different about me, he frowned. “You seem to have lost some of the shadows that have been trailing behind you. What happened to them?”
I decided to go with the truth this time. “They had a fight to the death over which one was going to possess my meat sack. That one was the victor.” I hiked a thumb over my shoulder.
“Meat sack?” someone muttered.
“My body,” I elaborated, inwardly wincing at using my late imp shadow’s terminology.
Eying my only remaining shadow, Sanderson hesitated before asking his next question. “Has it tried to possess you yet?”
I shook my head. “No. We’ve come to an understanding. It doesn’t want to be turned into an imp and neither do I.”
Everyone in the room was struggling with the idea that my shadow was sentient. They couldn’t see it hugging itself and looking around uneasily. All they saw was a normal shadow doing normal things.
Checking his watch, the Colonel circled a hand in the air. “It’s time for us to move.”
Sanderson and his men knew what I was but I doubted they had thought through the logistics of how to transport me once the sun came up. It seemed prudent to raise the issue. “I’ll need to ride in an enclosed vehicle without any windows in the back. I’ll also need something to cover me with. A blanket will do,” I instructed the Colonel. I’d left the long black coat Luc had stolen for me hanging over the back of a chair. Sighs of disappointment swept the room when I donned it.
“Why do you need these things?” a high ranking Russian asked. Unlike Sanderson, he couldn’t seem to raise his eyes above my legs even after the cloak covered them.
“Because I’m highly allergic to sunlight,” I reminded them. A few of the men chuckled. I didn’t join them because I wasn’t trying to be funny. Being boiled down to a skeleton wasn’t much fun.
A suitable vehicle was located to transport me to the First’s lair. I watched the armoured truck pull up out front of the building and gave the driver a nod of approval. Sanderson appeared and climbed into the back of the truck with me, clutching a small bundle. I wasn’t sure if he was riding with me as a gesture of good faith on his part or if he simply didn’t trust me to be alone with any of his men.
Five more men joined us then the truck went into motion. My shadow shifted sideways with a small huff of annoyance when one of the soldiers sat on its face. It sat by my side, close enough that we brushed up against each other when the truck took off. It was disconcerting to know that only I could see, touch and hear it. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I was going crazy. I’m pretty sure you passed that milestone a few months ago, my subconscious broke to me ungently.
“Here,” the Colonel handed me a musty old blanket with several holes in it. “This is the best I could come up with on short notice.
Judging the state of it, I nodded my thanks. “It will do.” I poked a finger through one of the holes but it didn’t look like it would tear easily.
“You’ll look just like Vincent when you put that on,” my clone sniggered. I pictured the tall, thin, bald, crazy Romanian vampire and shuddered. He’d had a penchant for wearing long, dark hooded robes and then posing theatrically like a terrible actor in a C grade movie.
You were sentient even back then, I asked it mentally.
“Sort of,” it replied uneasily as if it was afraid I’d react badly to the news. “Right from the first night you woke up as Mortis, I’ve been…aware on some level. Over the last couple of weeks, all four of us woke up fully. We were biding our time, waiting for the right moment to try to take you over. Well, the others were anyway. I was just going along and pretending to be one of them.”
I had the feeling my original shadow had felt like an outcast amongst the others. Sadly, I knew exactly how it felt. I mulled this knowledge over silently, quietly freaked out that my original shadow had been alive to some extent this whole time and I hadn’t even known. This meant that I’d been doomed to become one of the damned from the instant I’d become a vampire. They’d been disturbingly clever to hide their sentience from me for so long.
By some weird twist of fate, my shadow didn’t particularly want to possess me. If it had and I’d won a battle for supremacy, would I have ended up completely shadowless? What would have happened if I’d been forced to wrench my original shadow free?
Casting a sidelong look at it, I studied it without its knowledge. Glumly staring at the Colonel, my clone didn’t seem to be harbouring any thoughts of mutiny. In the back of my mind I wondered if it was just putting on a clever act while secretly planning on turning me into a puppet.
I’d find out soon enough when we reached the First’s lair and we put my plan into action. Once that happened, our survival would be in my shadow’s hands.
Chapter Thirty
After the estimated two hour journey, our truck came to a stop along with the rest of the convoy of army vehicles. If the First had any sentries posted near his lair, our plan would be sunk. I was pretty sure he would be too arrogant to bother with lookouts. He thought he was secure in his underground haven and that humans wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out his location. If he’d left his cavern of doom at all in the last century, he would have seen just what kind of weapons and technology our food had invented lately. Maybe then he wouldn’t have been qu
ite so complacent.
Colonel Sanderson gathered his troops together with a few hand gestures. They automatically separated into five groups. Four of the groups were smallish, with about a hundred men each. The fifth group was much larger with over two thousand American and Russian soldiers.
It had apparently been decided that a small group of highly trained soldiers would be more effective than sending in thousands of ill-trained men. Although the cavern was large, the imps would be contained and would have nowhere to run or hide. More troops would be arriving soon just in case our mission went sour. If it did, then they would bomb the mountain and cut down anything that emerged from the ruins. Considering how many humans were reportedly missing, the powers that be had decided to give us a shot at getting them out before resorting to such extreme measures.
Sanderson addressed his men quietly and they strained to hear him. “You have all been briefed on your tasks and are aware of the risks involved.” Heads nodded and lumps in throats were swallowed. The sour stink of fear permeated the entire gathering. “We will give Natalie a five minute head start and she will create a diversion.” He turned to me for confirmation.
“I’ll stall the First for as long as I can to give you time to rescue the humans.” I almost said ‘food’ again but caught myself this time. The men were already nervous enough without me adding to their terror.
“Teams one and two,” the Colonel pointed to two of the groups. “Your job is to break the prisoners free. Do so as silently as possible. If you are detected, set off a flare and we will immediately launch our attack.” Turning to the second two groups, he addressed them next. “Teams three and four, on my signal, you will unleash your weapons on these monsters.” Each one carried a rocket launcher on their backs. They were already loaded and ready to go. Judging by the way they were sweating and shifting uncomfortably, the launchers were heavy.
“Sir, yes, sir!” the American soldiers all responded. I sensed they wanted to roar their response but we were too close to the cavern to make that much noise.
