by Phil Maxey
“What are you doing?” said Alyssa, her words pulling me from the daze I was in. My hand was hovering over the dark red ripples. I promptly pulled it back.
She walked closer to me. “Everything you see here is some dark shit. Don’t even think of taking a drink. Got it?”
I nodded, not understanding what just happened, but admiring her restraint.
Another warded door appeared to be our only other way out. She looked back at the scene of gore behind us. “Must be some kind of storeroom for their messed up plans. From here on, we might have to get our hands dirty, try not to get in the way.”
“I can handle myself.”
She looked at the dagger on my belt. “Just remember the sharp end goes forward.”
I rolled my eyes, as she listened to the blood-stained door, then turned the handle and pushed it open.
Another bad smelling corridor ending in another door, which we ran to and she opened it immediately. This time it was a parking lot, which after the previous large space was something of a relief. What was odd though, were all the cars were black.
“Who’s f—”
An elevator door opened to our left and voices emerged from it, followed by a smartly dressed man and woman. Both human by their scent. We ducked back in, Alyssa closing the door.
“Can you see them?” she said looking at the paint chipped wood.
At first I couldn’t but then faint human like images appeared, and were moving laterally. “I think so…”
“Good, you’re tracking their heat signatures.”
Once we heard engines start up and their vehicles move away, she pulled the door open and we moved quickly outside. She pointed at a box on the ceiling.
“Security cameras. Stay right behind me.”
“How do you know where they are pointing?”
“I can see the infrared it puts out, you can’t?”
I squinted but it just looked like a black box camera. “No.”
She shook her head. “Just stay close.”
We jogged to the elevator walking past the stairwell, impatiently waited for the door to open then moved inside. I went to question why go to all this bother just to take the elevator, when she jumped up pushing the emergency trapdoor open and grabbed hold of the frame in one movement, then pulled herself up. I did the same but just as I let the trap door close the lift started to ascend.
“Hell…” I said, watching the concrete and steel supports slide by. Alyssa was a picture of calm. “You done this before?” I said.
She looked at me with a smile.
“What floor we want?”
She looked up. “All the way to the top but we’ll take this as far as we can.”
“Why the top?”
“You can’t feel it?”
Apart from vertigo, I could feel a tingling across my body, which caused me to shiver. “Yeah what is that?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out.”
The metal floor below us stopped suddenly and we could hear feet packing inside the elevator. Without warning Alyssa leaped off, grabbing hold of a ladder which I hadn’t even noticed. I and the elevator stated to descend. She waved as I stood, and metal rungs sped past.
A number of expletives left my lips as I tried to copy her same maneuver, jumping free of the rapidly descending elevator and hitting the ladder a little too hard. My hand slipped off the first rung and I fell a good ten feet before I grabbed another in a panic. I dangled, looking down at the elevator disappearing below.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and started to climb upwards. I quickly caught up to a smiling vamp. “Maybe some warning next time.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
She turned and started to climb upwards as I smiled myself. It wasn’t long before we had climbed the further fifteen floors, to the topmost exit. Like a cat she swung from the ladder and balanced on the two inches of ledge, then pulled the steel doors to the topmost floor open.
Darkness resided inside and a chill breeze swept past both of us. She stepped forward tentatively. “There’s a whole lot of bad on this floor, be ready for anything.”
“What happened to just checking this place out?”
She walked forward into the gloom. “Too late to go back now.”
I jumped from the ladder to the floor, and instinctively pulled the dagger free from its sheath. I noticed it wasn’t glowing like her usual weapon but I was happy to have it, for the air was thick with hate and despair. Like when you awaken from a dream with a feeling something awful had happened, but you can’t remember what. My mind went back to the first night I slept in the bunker and the zombie girl nightmare.
Revenge emanated from the woman in front of me. I needed to make sure it didn’t get us both killed.
We walked along a corridor of bare walls, with only a dim bulb providing any light. At the end was a set of closed double doors.
Now the vamp’s blade was out, and it was beginning to shine. We crept forward, waiting for something to announce itself, when it did. Giggling came from behind us, which unfortunately I recognized. We both whipped around to something awkwardly moving in the shadows.
I knew the stench from the professor’s kitchen. Maybe all evil paranormals smelled the same, or maybe the scary thing from my nightmare was only fifteen feet away, staggering towards us.
“I… I’ve seen that thing before!”
“What? Where?”
“In the bunker. It talked shit about the professor. I thought it was a dream.”
Her head flicked back to the creature that was now emerging from the shadows. Alyssa’s blade was beaming, lighting us and everything else, but the light failed when nearing the thing that walked towards us, as if shadows clung to it. Suddenly its form changed, shrinking somewhat, reforming into a more complete physique. The ragged clothes healed until standing in front of us was a woman, around the same age as us. She was even attractive, which was the most unnerving thing of all.
She smiled but her eyes looked beyond us. We both whirled around for an attack that was about to come from the double doors, which were now completely open. Frome stood between them.
“Good to see you again young Sebastian. Welcome to Octavian. I see you have brought your bodyguard.”
“You’re the one that put Fortacan in the hospital,” shouted Alyssa, her fangs now clearly showing.
He smiled. “I thought I had ended him. He’s a tough old bird isn’t he?”
She surged forward, covering the fifteen or so feet to the Frenchman in a blink of an eye, her blade ready to mess up that suit of his, when instead he swiftly moved to the side, grabbed her arm and flung her into the room behind him. He grinned at me, taking a step back and slammed the doors closed. I went to run forward, when a vice like grip grabbed me by my shoulder and flung me in the opposite direction. I sailed through the air, only slowing on smashing through a flimsy partition, then stopping completely on hitting filing cabinets in an office.
I shook the dizziness from my mind and looked up. The woman, dressed in an ornate dress of some kind sauntered towards me, then stopped just shy of the new door I had created. She was bathed in shadow but I could swear her eyes glowed.
I looked around for my blade, but it was lost somewhere along the corridor. Worse was I could hear Alyssa fighting in the room behind the double doors. I stood, trying not to make it too obvious that I was looking for some kind of weapon to fight back with, when a cold grip grabbed my throat and lifted me clear of the floor, then slammed me against the wall.
Despite her beauty her breath was foul, and her eyes were definitely emanating light. I swiped my clenched fist across her face, but instead of connecting it just kept on going, as if she was made of dust.
She smiled. “Can you hear the sound of your girlfriend dying?”
She was right. I could hear Alyssa struggling. I struck out again, both fists trying to get any purchase on the thing that had me pinned.
The witch l
ooked back to the corridor. “Ah… I believe she is almost dead, if I hear the sound of her heart correctly.” She looked back to me and smiled.
I had come into the professor’s and Alyssa’s life, and now both were on the verge of death because of me, because I had never lived the life I was fated to. Emotion and a well of energy filled me and I grabbed the witch’s head. Her face full of shock and horror. A new light had now flooded the small office, one that was flowing from me. As my anger took illuminated form, the witch screamed in agony and fell backwards, her form dissolving back to the hideous thing I had seen in the bunker.
I turned and in an instant I charged along the corridor, smashing through the double doors, and then continued into the side of the demon Frome, his shock at seeing me being too late to react. He had been strangling the life from Alyssa and she rolled off a table onto the floor coughing.
Alive.
I got back to my feet trying to understand what had just happened. The surge of power I felt with the witch was dissipating. Frome was on the ground, trying to recover with a hand on his side. I moved to Alyssa and helped her up. I then realized an alarm was filling the air, and I could hear the sound of distant footsteps. “We’re leaving,” I said to the vamp.
“You have no idea what you are, do you?” said the demon on the floor. “So much power… and when we destroy the seal…”
I walked with an injured Alyssa to what was left of the double doors and turned around. “We’ll be back for that.”
“Wait,” said Alyssa then bent down and grabbed her own blade from the floor. We walked into the corridor and I did the same. I wondered where the witch had gotten too, but I was more concerned with the sound of the heartbeats growing closer. Alyssa pulled me forward and we arrived at the elevator shaft entrance then stepped off the ledge.
One second… two… four… our speed accelerated to a point I wasn’t sure we would survive until we crashed onto the top of the elevator, which was moving downwards. Alyssa threw the trapdoor open and slipped down with me following, then hit the emergency stop. The doors flew open to an innocuous empty office, with glass walls and a waiting area. I noticed the sign for the stairwell but the vamp had other ideas and was sprinting towards the far side of the room. I ran behind, but then realized what her plan was.
“We’re still thirteen floors—”
The sound of shattering glass filled the air as she crashed through the huge window and into the night. I skidded to a stop, teetering on the edge of the frame and watched her land and roll in one movement on a nearby roof.
“Shit…”
I jogged back ten steps. “I can do this… I can do this.” Then ran forward, leaping best I could and landed next to her but without the elegant roll and careered into a cell phone tower, buckling it as if it was made of wood.
She helped me to my feet. “We need to go.”
As she ran to the fire escape, I looked back up at the monolithic black slab of a building and was sure I could see a sparking light on the topmost floor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I need a hamburger,” said Alyssa as we hurried along the sidewalk.
“What?” I said.
“They help me think. With lots of mustard.”
“Okay… Sure, let’s get a hamburger…” My thoughts were a tangle of doubt and confusion. Maybe processed meat in a bread bun would help sort that out. “Just when I think it couldn’t get any stranger.”
“What?”
“Nothing…”
She looked away. “You saved me… thank you.”
I forced a smile. I had saved her and defeated the witch, without knowing how. We crossed a road and entered a modestly lit cafe. She exchanged a nod with the owner, a portly man wearing a white apron and he started to tell the few customers they were closing. I followed the vamp to the back, a more private hidden section of padded chairs and black and white photos of boxers and others I didn’t recognize, and we sat.
“Maybe we should go back to the bunker?”
“We’re safe here.”
I looked around. “In a diner?” I then noticed the patterns on the walls were something more. Magical wards.
“Yup.”
Once the man turned the open sign over, he made his way to us and looked at Alyssa. “The usual?” He briefly looked at me. “For both of you?”
“Sal, Seb, Seb, Sal.” She nodded. “Yeah, thanks.”
I forced a smile at Sal, who frowned.
“I’ll bring you drinks as well. Any injuries?”
“Nah.” Some lacerations on her cheek and red marks on her neck were fading. My body was still complaining from the beating I took the day before.
“What was that woman? She wasn’t a demon,” I said.
The question seemed to dislodge something in her my mind. “You said saw her in the bunker?”
“I thought it was a dream. What is she?”
“We call them Drudes… basically what you think of as a witch… The bunker is warded, there shouldn’t have been any way she could have gotten in, even in your dream. But they are known to be powerful practitioners of the void” She shook her head again. “Things are changing. Evil’s becoming more…”
“Organzied?”
“I was going to say confident, but yeah. These things we’re up against… I’ve not come up against them before, they are from folktales… Fortacan has told me stories, but I didn’t really believe any of them were real until now… Drudes are serious shit. Would explain what we saw in the building’s basement…”
Sal appeared with two tall glasses of crimson liquid, which I presumed weren’t strawberry flavored milkshake.
I sat back in the cubicle as he placed them on the table.
“Burgers coming up in ten.”
She nodded, and he moved back into a kitchen area.
“Three months ago I was driving my Lamborghini around southern France. The only decision I had to make was what’s the most fun way to spend money. And now I’m a demon, from a family of ancient knights… and my grandfather’s watch, or what was inside it somehow stops the end of the world, which I then lost… to evil demons…” I let out a breath. “It’s kind of a lot to take in.”
Her expression slightly softened. “Look. I know your world must be spinning right now. But you need to get your melon on straight.” I guessed she meant head. “You’re in the battle now.”
Sal appeared with two of the best looking and smelling hamburgers I’d seen since my change. “It’s got the usual herbs as well,” he said.
Her expression was not one of joy though. She looked up at the older man. “I’m going to need to talk to Salazar.”
He put the plates down a little heavy. I grabbed the few layers of bread, and bit into the rarest of rare burgers, with a myriad of spices that set my demon taste buds into overdrive… all of which was almost enough for me to lose track of the conversation going on in front of me. I looked at Alyssa, catching enough words to force a question to my lips. “There are a gang of vampires?”
*****
I opened my eyes to Fortacan looking back at me. “You were shouting in you sleep,” said the old man, his face free of tubes, but still containing a bandage around his head.
I pushed myself up in my seat. I was in his hospital room. “I didn’t know I fell asleep. How do you feel?”
He smiled. “Happy to be conscious.” His expression then became one of a teacher about to scorn his student. “Your watch was the seal?”
I looked down, then reached into my pocket and pulled out a handful of parts and dropped them on a nearby trolley. “No… but something inside it was.”
The old man let out a deep breath. “I can understand why you felt the need not to tell us. Have you always known what it was?”
I shook my head. “Had no idea until the first night, when I was attacked. The watch, or the thing inside it, killed a whole bunch of the damned, set them alight. I would have told you, I just needed more time…”
“Something, we are now in short supply of. You know about Halloween?”
I nodded. “There’s something else…” I told him of the night’s events, leaving out the part where I zapped the witch. I hated another lie by omission, but I needed to understand what it meant first. The beeping from his heart monitor got annoying to both of us, so he asked me to turn it off.
“It would appear the enemy are a number of steps ahead of us. I think it is time we found allies in our cause,” he said.
“That’s what Alyssa said. She’s gone to meet some vamp called Sa—”
“Salazar!”
The professor looked past me, his eyes growing wide. “Yes?” I said. The door to my right opened just as I sensed the extra multiple heartbeats of those standing outside.
Alyssa stepped into the room, joy on her face. “You’re awake!”
“Why is he here!” said Fortacan, his bandaged hand pointing at the corridor.
I turned around fully in my chair to see three new men, wearing mostly black leather jackets, arms and neck covered in tattoos. One of them, the tallest and oldest, with long dark hair sneered at the two equally large guys who had been standing guard. He then looked at me, his eyes full of disdain. I turned away.
Nice to meet you too, buddy.
I could smell the newcomers were vamps.
“How do you feel?” said Alyssa, standing at the end of Fortacan’s bed.
“Never mind that. Why is that piece of swine feces here?”
Salazar stood in the doorway. “You’ve seen better days… old man,” he growled.
Fortacan looked back to Alyssa for answers, and she to me. “I told him what happened,” I said.
“We need help!” she said.
“You can’t trust him!”
“Why? Because he’s like me? A vamp?”
Fortacan sighed and briefly looked away. “You know that’s not the reason. Fletcher has said she will help. I see two of her people outside.”
“The only reason she’s helping is because she thinks she can get Seb his company back! She’s thinking of her ten percent! You know how her team operate!”
