by HDA Roberts
Vampires didn’t have Magic, they couldn’t!
The... I suppose you'd have to call it an affliction, which gave Vampires their powers could not work on a Magician. A Magician's Well, the source of our power, killed the thing before it could make any changes to our physiology.
And yet, there he was, a Vampire-Magician hybrid; an impossibility.
Curiosity overpowered my good sense (and manners) and I cast Mage Sight, mostly on reflex. I just had to know how that was possible.
That was a mistake.
A big one.
One look at him, and I soon had to make a real effort not to throw up my expensive dinner.
Mage Sight was a very versatile Spell. It let you see energy, get an idea of the depth of a Magician’s Well and let you see their Affinities.
It also let you see their Aura. I couldn’t give you the details, but the Aura was essentially a complex energy field created by the interaction of mind, Soul and Well. You might call it a way of glimpsing what made up a man.
And if that man was a murderer, if he’d taken an innocent life... you could see that, too. That act stained the Soul, and that, in turn, showed up in the Aura.
This Vampire, this thing... his Aura was all stain.
He was like a walking love-letter to atrocity. I couldn’t even conceive of the rivers of blood that he must have shed to end up with an Aura like that. The only way I can describe it is as a white tablecloth had been covered with wine, left to dry, and then repeatedly stained over and over; each successive spread of liquid building on the one beneath into a tableau of red shade.
That was bad enough, but that was now far from my only problem. Seeing this man-shaped horror woke me up to just what sort of company I’d been keeping and I found myself breathing hard at the things I saw.
The stains around me weren’t as bad as those I’d seen on the newcomer, but it was still far too prevalent for my comfort. The Elders, especially, had enough blemishes in their Aura to mark each of them out as mass-murderers. The only small comfort (if you could call it that) was that their stains were old and faded. The newcomer’s were not. Not only were they fresh, some weren’t even hours old.
I wasn’t sure what to do. The days of Vampires feeding and killing indiscriminately were supposed to be over. There were rules, laws. Hell, Vampires and their donors had to register in the European Union (and just about everywhere else) to make sure that there wasn't any abuse. The Houses were supposed to be reformed, civilised.
The only thing I could think of was to go for help, but that plan was quickly scuppered as Crystal squealed and threw herself at the new arrival. She hugged him tightly, but briefly, before turning to drag him towards me, babbling away in French. He laughed, smiling indulgently at the woman I loved as she held a hand only recently soaked in innocent blood.
I felt my heart sink into my boots as she opened her mouth to say what I desperately hoped she wouldn’t...
"Mathew Graves, I'd like you to meet Vallan Myrddin, Father of my Blood, Lord of Aurelia, Father of the Druidan."
Yes, that’s what I’d thought.
And crap...
Chapter 2
Vallan was of middling height, with flat, open features, thin lips and black, greasy hair slicked back against his head. He smelled faintly of rot and blood, mostly overpowered by expensive cologne, but the odours were still there if you knew what you were sniffing for (unfortunately, I did).
He offered his hand and smiled, it was a kind expression, something you’d see on a favourite uncle or grandfather. I reached forward, trying to put up a good front, but something of my thoughts must have shown on my face because that gentle, open smile morphed before my eyes into the most evil-looking smirk I'd ever seen in my life.
"Foolish boy, you shouldn't nose into things that don't concern you," he said, his voice cold and low. Crystal looked startled by the sudden change in atmosphere and took a step back.
"What are you?" I managed, retracting my hand. I was still staggered by the sheer depth of suffering that clung to the monster's Aura, but I had enough wit not to leave any body parts within grabbing distance if the civility was gone.
"You couldn’t conceive of what I am, child," Vallan replied, that awful grin widening even further.
For a second, I didn’t know how to react. There were any number of things I could have done in a situation like that, including simply ignoring the whole thing and carrying on with the evening.
But I didn’t think I’d be able to live with that, not after what I’d seen.
Damn it.
"I'm going to have to ask you to come with me, Mister Myrddin," I said slowly. "You will have to answer for what you've done."
"And what have I done? Can you prove anything? Mage Sight isn't evidence, you know."
The fact that he’d sensed my Spell, and was able to recognise it, was not good news; it showed that he was both skilled and knowledgeable. Those traits coupled with a high-end Sorcerer’s power and an Elder Vampire’s body made him a very dangerous man.
But not dangerous enough to stop me doing what had to be done.
"You will submit yourself to a Telepathic inquiry," I replied. “That will establish the extent of your crimes.”
"Oh, there’s no need for that, I assure you. If you want to know what I’ve been up to, I am more than happy to oblige you. Please, take a good long look."
I felt power dart from his mind and into to mine like a bolt of electricity, carrying his Telepathic probe straight into my psyche with terrible force and speed. By the time I’d thought to slam something akin to a mental door in his face, he was already past it, and well into my mind.
I was such an idiot. Rule one when around Vampires: always have a Mental Shield in place. Every Vampire was a Telepath, and they only got stronger with age. Not only was Vallan ancient (Vampire Elder), but, as a Magician, he’d be able to make the very most of his innate Telepathic abilities.
I should have known better. Damn it, I did know better, but I’d been foolish, made complacent by nine months with Crystal. It didn’t help that I’d assumed nobody at that party would be stupid enough to attack an Archon.
Wow, did that cost me...
I pulled my few, hastily assembled, defences back to protect my body’s core functions, but quickly discovered that he wasn’t out to do something as mundane as stop my heart or paralyse my diaphragm. He was smarter than that. He knew where my defences would go first, and so he did something I hadn’t expected; he went after my memories.
This was the nightmare; a powerful Telepath in past my mental defences, where he could wreak havoc and tear me apart from the inside-out. I was nearly frantic as I re-established my inadequate barriers in front of my memories, only to be surprised once again when he didn’t try to take, or even damage, anything.
Instead, he expanded his probe, and poured his own memories into my mind, like opening a mental floodgate. It was a simple, but very clever, attack, almost overwhelming in its intensity, like a great living river of experience and emotion that filled my mind and tried to drown me in sheer, unbridled horror.
I’d seen some nasty things in my life, some truly awful things, but what Vallan poured into me...
There was only the barest hint of order to it; an only somewhat chronological stream of vile acts and unspeakable, revolting images that would have rendered even the most hardened of Torquemada’s Inquisitors down into a weeping puddle. My mind was suddenly saturated by memories of torture, murder and cruelty, the kind of evil and depravity that could shatter a mind unprepared for it. It very nearly left me catatonic from the terrible shock of it all, which was likely what Vallan was going for.
It was only sheer stubbornness that saved me in that moment. I clawed and fought against that stream of memory, refusing to drown in it, keeping my own thoughts at the forefront of my mind as I pushed against the attack.
I managed to cobble together just enough wherewithal to throw up a Will Shield around my all too vulne
rable body, knowing that Vallan’s mental attack was only meant as a distraction, to weaken and divert me from his real assault.
I was just in time to stop the creature from tearing out my throat. He bounced off my shield, and that seemed to throw him off his stride for a second, but then he doubled down on his mental invasion and I was suddenly in real trouble.
What was already a sea of memory deepened into an ocean, and it was all I could do not to be swept away inside my own mind. When I still didn’t go down, he stopped holding back anything at all, and the entirety of his poisonous memory was dumped into my own.
I imagine that he had some pleasant memories, but damned if I noticed any of them.
All I got was the stuff with blood in it.
If nothing else, at least I got a good understanding of the man.
He was far more ancient than I’d thought; well over a thousand years old. He’d once been a classically trained Sorcerer with an Affinity for Telepathy and an impressive talent for Will Magic. His early memories were a bit thin on the ground, but what little there was involved constant, terrible fear; fear of death, of capture, enslavement. I think I saw his sisters die; his mother too. Even he wasn’t sure after so long.
But he remembered becoming obsessed with cheating death, and he remembered the long, terrible road that started him down. I saw decades of experiments, most were failures and none free of suffering, but eventually he came up with a solution; brilliant in its way. A single Spell—one that would turn him into a Vampire and put him beyond the reach of the Reaper’s scythe once and for all.
Vallan cast that Spell just after his one hundred and fifteenth birthday. It was built around some sort of ritual that cost seventeen of his closest followers, and twice that many Vampires, their lives.
I didn’t really get a good impression of the Spell he’d used (he probably didn’t want anyone knowing too much about that), but I understood enough about the impossibility of it to recognise the presence of Black Magic. That was just about the only power versatile enough to do what he’d wanted, which was to change the essential nature of a living being. There couldn’t have been much of it, or I’d have smelt it on him, but then it didn’t take much.
Even before that transformation, Vallan hadn’t been a good man, but after...
I wouldn’t even want to start describing the degenerate depths to which he sank over the following centuries. From what he showed me, he’d spent that time engaging and indulging in every depravity and atrocity that a bored and increasingly ancient mind could conjure. He made sure that I experienced as many of those memories as he could cram into me, each act played before my mind's eye with the clarity born of a Vampire’s near-perfect recall.
I’d thought it was bad before, when I just got to see hundreds of men, women and even children die screaming, but now it was hundreds more... and then thousands. Whole families, then whole villages, it devolved into a great blur of blood, pain, violation and murder. I experienced horrific experiments, mental torture, terrible blood-soaked games of cruelty... I’m not sure that there even are words for some of the things he’d done.
Underlying it all were his emotions, a sickening, awful amalgamation of pleasure, pride and delight. He was exposing me to any sane man’s hell, and all the while he was floating gently in his own personal heaven.
A human mind, even a Magician’s mind wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the influx of that much information. Thankfully, an Archon’s was built around a larger capacity, or my brain would have started oozing out of my ears within the first few seconds. Even so, I felt my mind begin to fragment under the strain of Vallan’s attack.
It felt as if my very soul was being poisoned by his evil, like I was being tainted by it, stained simply for having seen it. That was, of course, exactly what he wanted. The attack was designed to shock me, horrify and traumatise my psyche until I broke down and lost the ability to defend myself.
It wasn’t a bad plan, really. It might even have worked... if I wasn’t one of the top ten Telepaths in the world.
I won’t say it wasn’t ugly, it was. I had to force down my revulsion; normalise my emotional state. I had to allow all that horror to become statistics, numbers; boring. In effect, I had to make myself ‘alright’ with it to allow myself to move past it. It was a painful move, but it was the only one that I had against such an overwhelming emotional attack.
I knew that state couldn’t last long; my mind would reject it eventually, so I worked fast.
I started with my own memories, walling them up so Vallan couldn’t get at them. Then I started gathering my resources, solidifying my mental structure, moving my defences around the points where his probes had connected to my mind.
Then I started to push him back.
I couldn’t do anything about the memories already in my head, not yet, but I could stop any more coming in. I leveraged my mind against his and the flow slowed to a trickle, and then a halt. I pushed his probe out, the attachment points tearing at me as they were shoved outwards, further and further away from my core.
Of course, he felt me fighting him, and he fought back harder, throwing more memories and dark emotions down that link. He chewed at my growing mental defences like a madman, almost desperately, now that he felt me gaining ground.
My nose bled under the strain, and still he pushed harder. He tried to circumvent me and shut me down, but the momentum was building against him. He put even more power into the attack, right up to his limit, but it wasn’t enough.
He slammed into the growing bulwark of my mental defence, and got no further. My barriers expanded, building on one another, pushing him back further and further, until he was far enough from the core of my mind for my real defences to snap into their proper place.
I almost cried with relief as the familiar bulk of my mountain appeared, surrounded by its impenetrable maze and deep, encircling chasms. My iron-clad defences, which not even one of my fellow Archons could penetrate quickly.
At some point, I’d closed my eyes, and didn’t even notice until it was time to open them again. The animal was snarling at me, his face contorted in concentration as he fought his losing battle, making no progress at all now, but giving it his all, anyway.
He hadn’t realised he’d lost; he didn’t even know I was functional again. That gave me a little time. I could have attacked him, ended it right then and there, but I couldn’t bear to wait even a second before walling up as many of those intrusive memories as I could. I didn’t have time to do more than mute them a little, but it was enough to keep me from screaming, at least.
They could stay locked down like that until I was in a position to deal with them properly, but I fully intended to expel them. I couldn’t bear to keep those memories; just that brief exposure to so much human suffering had broken my heart and tainted my view of the world around me.
It was one thing to know that there were wicked men who were willing to harm others for their own profit or amusement, but it was quite another to see those crimes with your own eyes, to hear the screams of the victims and taste their blood on your tongue as if you’d been the perpetrator.
I felt as if the world grew a little darker in that moment and I resented the hell out of that son of a bitch for doing that to me; the attempted murder was almost incidental, quite frankly.
Strangely though, in a twisted way, I was also just that little bit happy.
Because now, I got to make him pay for it.
All of it.
A twitch of my finger and a wave of living Shadow surged from under every nearby table before slamming into Vallan with crushing force, flinging him up and over the crowd to smash into the far wall, shattering an antique mirror.
His dropped to the floor, bleeding and injured; his Telepathic assault cut off immediately.
A thought, and my Combat Shields flickered into existence, replacing my simple Will Shield with dozens of overlapping defensive layers that would keep me safe from physical and Magical attack
alike, all powered by regenerating constructs that would repair any damage almost as soon it happened. My Shadows coiled around me, tense and ready, reflecting of my own anger and hatred.
Vallan slowly got to his feet, his tongue darting out to lick up a trickle of black blood that oozed by his lips. The snarl was gone, replaced by the familiar smirk, a sight that immediately started my blood boiling.
God, how I hated that man...
And then he started laughing. The bastard actually laughed at me!
"Now what, Shadowborn?" he sneered. "I can do this all night, and we both know you're not going to kill me. Crystal told me all about you, Lord Shadow."
I didn't know what to say. Nothing I came up with sounded anything other than hollow to my mind. What could one say to something like him? What rational argument could I make to something as sadistic as Vallan? I may as well try to sell veganism to Hannibal Lecter.
“What, nothing? No words of wisdom, pronouncements about my nature?” he continued.
He conjured a simple shield, a glittering dome of Will. I felt him gather energy; some kinetics, nothing impressive.
He obviously expected me to talk to him, to give him an opening, but I was well past that now. I wanted him down and bleeding. If I’m honest, I wanted him dead. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done to push that instinct down, to keep from simply tearing him to pieces.
I flicked out a quick Dispel that shattered his shields, quickly followed by a tendril of Shadow. The lance of hardened darkness speared through his abdomen, lifting him up and pinning him to the wall. The hit dragged a scream out of him, which he quickly cut off before gritting his teeth against the pain.
Dimly, I was aware of Crystal screaming at me to stop, to calm down. Other Vampires were yelling, too, but most of them were keeping their distance (which was sensible of them, I was in no mood). I knew that I should probably have done or said something to calm them down, but I didn’t dare take my attention from Vallan. If I screwed up, and he escaped, goodness only knew how many would die before someone caught up with him.
