by HDA Roberts
Vallan laughed again, his voice gurgling from the blood in his throat, "Oh Crystal, you picked a good one, my sweetheart. He's almost as vicious as me. Same instincts!"
My fury pulsed, my Shadows expanded, and he screamed again before laughing hysterically.
"Just proving my point, Shadow! It's true what they say; girls just go looking for their fathers!"
I opened my mouth, likely to swear at him, but he raised his hand, and a blast of light banished my Shadows, letting him drop to the floor.
He leapt up in a violent burst of movement, closing the distance between us in less than the blink of an eye. His limbs were covered in red-tinged energy, and he struck with enough brute strength to dent the side of a battleship. The hit took away a third of my shield layers, but I retaliated before he could strike again. A shimmering plane of Will snapped into existence and darted at Vallan. He dodged, but my attack still carved off an arm, with enough leftover force to send him through a wall (on which had been mounted a piece of art that had likely cost more than my education. I rather regretted that, but needs must).
He rebounded instantly, but at least he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked almost feral, now, his expression twisted into hissing ugliness. His fangs had lengthened into something better described as tusks, while the nails on his remaining hand had become curved and wicked claws, more at home on some pre-historic lizard. His missing limb started to re-grow before my eyes, the power of his Magician's Well merging and building on the natural powers of a Vampire Elder to make the process go much faster than it had any right to. Already three inches of upper arm were back, and it wasn't slowing.
"Stop!" Crystal screamed, finally loud enough get my attention. "You have to stop!"
I didn’t disagree with her, but it wasn’t like I could stop fighting while the rabid predator was preparing to bite off my face. Vallan got his shields back up, and they were better constructed this time, stronger and more efficient. I demolished them almost as easily, but the extra effort required let him get close enough to take another swipe at me. My shields lost another few layers, and my return attack missed completely as he spun out of the way.
I winced as yet another piece of art-clad wall was destroyed by my stray attack. What few guests were left flung themselves into cover (including Crystal, which showed what she thought of my aim).
Damn, but Vallan was fast! I’d known intellectually that Vampires got stronger and faster as they aged, but this was just ridiculous. He was far stronger and faster than even a thousand year old Vampire should have been, and that was saying something. I needed to put him down quickly, before he pulled out a trick I wasn’t ready for, or he simply ran off. At the speed he could move, I wouldn’t be able to catch him.
So, I checked to make sure that the innocent (well, less evil) Vampires were out of the way, and then I cut loose with a wave of Shadows. My first attempt missed, merely catching and smashing some furniture, but my second surrounded Vallan and gathered him up in a sphere of darkness which then compressed down on him like a barbed fist.
What I did to him was not pretty, but at least it was over quickly, which is more than most of his victims could claim.
The tiny space inside the sphere came alive with coils of razor-sharp Shadow that ripped and tore into him, stabbing and gouging deep into his flesh. He screamed as he thrashed and struggled, trying desperately to escape. He threw his Magic at my Shadows, but I poured my own into reinforcing them, and he got nowhere.
Seconds later, what was left of him, amounting to little more than half a torso, fell to the carpet, chunks of flesh, bone and blood-soaked furniture falling around him like some grizzly rain, turning the carpet black.
Let's see him regenerate that.
I let him scream for a few seconds before approaching him, rage in my eyes and some morally-questionable Spells at the ready in my mind. He looked at me, and then he started laughing again!
That was really starting to piss me off.
Dark blood oozed from his mouth (I really had made a mess of him) and yet more was sprayed and spread with each hacking chuckle.
"You Archons don't screw around, do you?" he gurgled, but then his eyes locked onto mine.
"Well, neither do I," he rasped.
I had to hand it to the ancient monster, there was just no quit in him. He was lying there with no arms and not very much below the sternum, and yet he still wasn‘t willing to call it a day. In fact, he was casting a Spell.
Not, in itself too much of a problem, except for the particular kind of Magic he was using.
It wasn’t a surprise. I’d known there was Black Magic in him somewhere.
It was barely a flicker, just enough to keep his body from flying apart in the face of pure wrongness. But it was still sufficient for any number of terrible things. Thankfully he didn’t try any of them on me, or we would have had the mother of all messes to deal with. Nor did he try anything on himself, likely because there wasn’t enough of the stuff to make a difference, nor enough of him to really work with.
No, being clever, the bastard did something I wouldn’t have expected.
He opened a Portal.
Well, technically, a Gateway. Portals let you connect one part of your dimension with another. Gateways opened holes in reality to other places entirely.
As you might guess, Black Magic didn't really open Gateways to nice places.
All I could see was darkness, broken up by the occasional streak of purple lightning, but what I felt left me open-mouthed with shock and terror. I’d never, in a million years, have imagined that the man would have been this stupid!
When I'd started using Portals on a regular basis, Hopkins and Kron had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure that I could identify which dimensions were not to be accessed for any reason. That had not been a pleasant week. Even under controlled conditions, the energies of those places were awful things to expose yourself to. It wasn’t that getting into these planes was easy, but my sisters assumed that I'd screw up and manage it somehow, which was a bit on the mean side, but not an opinion I could really blame them for.
Anyway, because of that, it didn’t take me long to recognise that Vallan’s Portal led to one of the very, very worst places I’d known about. This was a dimension where even the Devil didn’t go because it was too risky; that should give you some hint of the titanic cock-up I was dealing with.
I threw a frantic Dispel, but somehow the Portal just ate it up... and then expanded.
And then it kept expanding.
It had been open for barely a handful of seconds, and it was already three feet across and seven tall, eating into the carpet, which was now smouldering.
It wasn’t long after that when I felt... things on the other side of the Portal perk up and pay attention. I immediately pulled away from what I’d sensed, out of simple self-preservation. Kron had warned me about these things, and I was as scared as I’d ever been in my life. I hadn’t actually felt them when I’d been exposed me to their Realm’s energy, and I was glad of that. I could have gone my whole life without ever feeling something like it.
Even from that brief contact, I’d discovered that the Entities had colossal minds, unbelievably ancient, completely malevolent and almost infinitely hungry. They hated and desired everything we were in equal measure and would do anything to have us, to consume us.
No wonder Vallan had been able to conjure a path to their home so quickly... he was just like them.
And they’d sensed our intrusion.
Vallan may as well have rung a damned interdimensional dinner bell. The Entities were already coming right at us, just a few for the moment, but I could sense more of them, just tiny blips of intent, but getting bigger.
Closer.
"Turn it off!" I snapped at Vallan.
He just smiled, "Did you think that you were the first Magician to corner me? You're not. And if you thought the things I did were bad, just you wait and see what my friends do. You'll scream, and
scream, and you'll never be allowed to die!"
He was supremely confident that he knew exactly what he was doing, which reassured me for a brief moment. At least we weren’t talking about losing the city...
But then he choked, and his eyes flickered with confusion, then shock.
I felt his control slip, and the Portal expanded another foot. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out, and his eyes went wide with terror before his back arched with sudden agony.
This wasn't good. Dimensional Gates could go very wrong if they weren’t very carefully managed and cast with iron control. From what I could tell, not only was Vallan not managing it properly, but he’d also messed up the cast. He’d constructed the Gate so that the power came from his Life Force instead of his Well. That had to be agonising, which in turn was badly detrimental to his ability to control his Spell.
Worse, as an Immortal, Vallan’s Life Force was a vast resource, which meant that the out of control Portal wouldn’t shut down on its own... certainly not before those things got to it.
Speaking of which, the Entities were now much closer. We didn't have a lot of time. I threw my power onto the Portal and forced it to start closing; it got smaller, but it wasn't anywhere near fast enough.
And then Vallan snapped. I saw it happen. I imagine that the combination of unspeakable agony, Magical feedback and the contamination that came from being linked to a dimension full of apocalyptic horrors all combined to break what little sanity he had.
He started laughing again, but this time it was different, tinged with pain and existential horror. The kind of laugh you’d hear at the end of the world, when all of reality has started crashing down.
"If they get here, you die too!" I barked at him, trying to snap him out of it. He could still stop it.
"Do I? Are you sure?" his voice was high and... ecstatic? That was just disturbing.
My heart skipped a beat as I felt the Entities' minds reaching for the Portal. If they got control of it...
I had to stop him. I’m sure he merely intended to let something reach through the Portal and eat me, but it didn’t take a genius to see that he was losing control of his mind, and with it, his Spell. I could feel the strands of Magic connecting him to the Portal’s Matrix start to fray and buckle. Worse, I could feel the Entities’ minds start to ooze past him and into the Spell’s framework.
If it were any other sort of Spell, one cast with regular Magic, I could have broken it, drained it or simply Dispelled it, but this one was different, not entirely here or there, an amalgam of both, fuelled by an immortal life and started with Black Magic.
In a moment of terrible clarity, I understood that as long as he was alive, that Portal would remain open, and that in a very short while, seconds, one of those things was going to get close enough to seize control of the Spell entirely. Then the Gateway would expand beyond all reason until one of them could come through and put an end to us all.
I didn’t know what to do.
So I dithered.
And Vallan's lost control.
One of the creatures simply swatted his mind aside, casually obliterating it in the process, and seized the Spell.
My head suddenly felt like it was two sizes too small for my brain as the Entity’s presence expanded into our world. It wasn’t close enough to power the thing yet, but that wasn’t going to stop it from exerting its will. Using Magic I’d never even heard of, the Entity yanked on the strands connecting Vallan’s life to the Portal and massively expanded them, all but pouring the wretched Vampire’s life into the construct.
The Portal expanded to six feet wide and twice that tall. A particularly large flash of lightning lit up the empty space, and revealed creatures that would give me nightmares for the rest of my life.
The closest of the things coming for us was miles away, and yet I could see it clearly, it was that huge. It was a great mass of gently waving tentacles, black against its black realm, titanic in every sense of the word and powerful beyond belief.
It was only one of about a dozen more just like it, all coming towards me.
The air sizzled under the growing power of the aperture. A table caught fire as it was split in half by the expanding disk, the floor turned molten in a little dip as the stone under the carpet flowed through the Gateway.
I didn't have much time left to do something.
I tried desperately to find the connection between Vallan and the gate, but it simply wasn't something I could see, the connection remained inside him, part of him, living as he did. That mad, evil, horrible monster was fuelling a way to destroy the whole world and everything in it, and there wasn’t even enough left of his mind to stop it, now. All he could do was sit there, his eyes dead, his flesh collapsing in on itself as the Entity used him up to rip that Gateway wider and wider.
I looked towards Vallan, his empty eyes still locked onto me.
I couldn't think of anything I could do. Even if I had the time to invade his mind, he'd already lost control of the Portal. He was just the battery now.
Time seemed to slow as I finally realised what I had to do.
There was a way to stop it, and I only had a very short window of opportunity. As soon as the Entities got close enough, they wouldn't need him anymore. They already controlled it, and in a few more seconds, they'd be able to power it as well.
There was no other way...
I prayed to God that he forgive me for what I was about to do.
I firmly believed that Magic should not be used to take a life. I believed that with all the fibre of my being. I’d never imagined that there would come a time when I would have to kill.
But in the end, the choice was simple. Do nothing and feel really good about my personal ethics while the world was consumed by unearthly horrors... or do the job I was born to do.
Preserve our world.
I made my choice... and I took Vallan's head with a single swipe of sharpened Shadow.
Chapter 3
"Oh, thank God," Hopkins said, flopping back on the bed next to me.
"What's that now?" I asked.
"Don't scare me like that, you idiot! You stagger in here, all covered on blood and messed up, saying you killed someone, and then it turns out it was just a Rabid Vampire who was trying to get us all eaten? What are you trying to do to me?! I thought you'd been out on a killing spree or something!"
"But... I murdered someone!" I said, really feeling a bit put out.
She sighed and took my now healed hand. I'd been fixing myself up as I'd been talking and I’d managed to repair everything except for the left eye, which I was going to have to rebuild from scratch. I shuddered as I remembered what had happened to it.
"Do you understand the difference between a Rabid and a Civilised Vampire?" Hopkins asked me, now apparently exasperated with me for some reason.
"Not as such, but I can probably guess.”
"I'll bet, but take me through what you're thinking, just for giggles," she said dryly.
I sighed.
"Well, if I had to guess, I'd say that Civilised Vampires are like Crystal. They feed from donors, they don't kill people; they fit into society."
"Good. And Rabids?" she prodded.
"They... they're like Vallan. They kill."
"They do, but not just that, Matty. Rabids are the ones that will always kill; the ones that are true predators, the ones that can't be anything except predators. They aren't animals, don't make that mistake, they can control themselves to an extent, but they will always, always go back to blood and murder."
"How the hell are there still things like that wandering around the world, anyway?"
"Because the ones that survive are very clever. The dumb ones get weeded out by their own kind pretty quickly, so that they don't bring the world down on them. The smart ones can last more or less indefinitely, and they know to keep away from Magicians because we can detect them. You’d never even have met Vallan if your Crystal wasn’t so sneaky. And
, so you know, there is only one way to deal with them. Believe me, we've tried everything; every conceivable method to stop them hurting people. It doesn't work."
I moved to rub my eyes before remembering their state and letting my hands drop again.
"But what I did-"
"Was exactly what I would have done. What any of us would have done. Hell, any Magician worth their hood would have done the same damned thing. Some creatures can be changed, can be redeemed, but some can not. Rabid Vampires fall into the latter category. And that doesn't even cover the Portal to a dimension full of God-like monsters."
I didn't know what to say, or what to think. I'd murdered someone, snuffed out a life like it was a guttering candle flame. But I honestly didn't know what else I could have done. I knew that it was the only thing that I could do at the time and yet... I should have found another way. I shouldn't have had to kill...
"Wait," Hopkins said, dragging me away from my brooding thoughts. "If it went down like you said, then what the hell happened to the rest of you? You looked like you'd been dragged backwards through a wood-chipper."
At that, I sagged.
"That was my fault...” I began with a deep sigh.
Vallan's head hit the ground with a wet thump and the Portal closed with a heavy snap, sealing those monsters away once again. That had been a close-run thing. Another few seconds... well, best not to dwell.
Black blood shot up through the stump of Vallan's neck like a geyser, and then the body joined the head on the floor. He decomposed right before my eyes, centuries of long life catching up with him as the animating power of his Pseudo-Well left his rancid meat. He was reduced to dust in seconds.
The room was deathly silent as I turned around.
It was a mess. Furniture had been overturned or destroyed, the walls had been punctured and the fixtures were ruined. I felt rather bad; it had been a beautiful space.
Crystal slowly came out from behind cover and then just stood there, her eyes darting from me to the pile of dust that had been Vallan. She started crying, and the enormity of what I'd done slammed down on me like a hammer.
