A Shade of Vampire 65: A Plague of Deceit

by Bella Forrest

  I wasn’t really comfortable with staying back for this. I would’ve wanted to go with Elonora and her team, but we needed one of us to stay back and keep the Draenir on our side. Additionally, we needed a command center, a spot to go back to.

  Reclaiming Strava for the Draenir and saving the entire friggin’ universe wasn’t going to be as easy as one, two, three. We had a strategy, and a number of stages to go through. Taking down a creature like Ta’Zan, who’d already acquired so much power and influence, was quite a feat.

  And we all had our parts to play. Mine was rather simple. I didn’t want to use the wards on both Rakkhan and Bogdana. Not yet. I figured I could do things the old-fashioned way. I would speak to the elder Draenir first and try to get a feel of what he’d done. Understanding how he’d managed to round up the young ones and bring them to Merinos before the plague got to them was a good indicator of whether he knew about it in advance or not.

  Then, the wards had an extremely old fae to mind-bend for a hidden truth. What Bogdana wasn’t telling us could very well be just an embarrassing detail. But it could also be a potential ace up our collective sleeve, provided we played our cards right.

  Elonora

  Our teams said goodbye to Rose and the others in the camp, then traveled ten miles west of Merinos to our prearranged meeting spot—a large, pale blue rock with a jagged tip that reached for the sky, breaching the thick jungle foliage. We’d seen it on our maps, and we’d agreed that it would become our return point.

  Once our crews were done with the missions, we were due to come back here, then travel together back to the camp—wherever that was. We were aware of the possibility that the camp’s location would have to change in case of Perfect discovery, and we had the tracking spell paraphernalia needed to find them. We couldn’t risk using a swamp witch cloaking spell anymore—we’d learned that from day one, when Ta’Zan’s people found and destroyed our shuttles on Noagh.

  Having a separate meeting spot prior to returning to the camp was one of the safest ways for us to get back together and avoid putting the Draenir in danger, in any of our worst-case scenarios. The blue rock could be spotted from the air, too—merely a peak poking out of the woods, whose cover allowed us to gather without any Perfects spotting us from above.

  “Okay, so, everyone’s clear on what we have to do, right?” Ben asked, checking each of us out from our heads to our toes, like a good leader, making sure we weren’t missing anything. After everything that had happened, and after all our trials and tribulations on Strava, I had to admit, Rose and Ben were like parent figures to us, and I felt a tiny bit better knowing that we had them with us.

  I gave him a confident nod. “Yeah. Kick some ass, take some names, ruin a comms network, blow up some ships.”

  “Gather some rebels, find a bunch of poisonous snakes,” Zeriel added with a smirk.

  “Ransack the Draenir bunkers… Hey, sounds like we don’t have that much on our plate!” Serena said.

  Heron chuckled. “Wait till we have to carry the stuff back to this meeting point, then the camp. We’ve got the heavy load.”

  “Consider yourselves lucky,” Lumi said, then pointed a thumb at me and my crew. “These guys are going straight into enemy territory to piss them off.”

  We all chuckled, but from the auras I could see, we were nervous and afraid. Nevertheless, courage was never the absence of fear, but rather our ability to get past that fear and still get the job done. We had our families and friends to save, not to mention the rest of the world. The responsibility weighed heavily on my shoulders, but with people like Ben around, I didn’t have to carry it around on my own.

  “We’ll meet back here as soon as we’re done. We’ll wait for all of us to come back,” Ben said. “But don’t take too long. If we’re not all back together in three days, those of us who do return will have to carry on. The mission can’t stop.”

  Once again, we were all in agreement.

  With a final bid of good luck, we split up and went our separate ways. To better avoid detection, we took different routes into the Perfect-populated parts of Strava. Ours was the farthest north, as we had to surround the entire cluster of diamond colosseum archipelagos to disable every single comms tower that Ta’Zan had erected to scramble our communications, both on the surface and with Calliope.

  Raphael led our team, guiding Kailani as she zapped us from one island to another. It took less of a toll on her with fewer numbers, allowing us to cover larger distances in a shorter amount of time without exhausting our beloved witch.

  “It’s imperative that we take the towers down in a specific order,” Raphael said, just as we reappeared beneath a giant palm tree. Five hundred yards out to the west was our target, a small island with a patch of trees in the middle.

  He checked the map tablet, using his thumb and index to zoom in on it. He’d marked our first target with a red circle on the screen. It was smack in the middle of that patch across the turquoise waters. The moon glowed proudly above, its bluish light dressing everything in a delicate shimmer. The ocean twinkled, its low waves lapping at the shore, as if inviting us to swim for hours on end.

  I would’ve loved nothing more, but we had a job to do. I used my True Sight to identify the specific palm tree that we needed to get to. It was the tallest in its patch, stretching about fifty feet in the air. Its long, feather-shaped leaves fanned out, and a series of glowing blue cables hugged its slender trunk in an irregular spiral.

  “That would be our first item on the list,” I murmured, pointing at the tree.

  Raphael followed my gaze, then used a pair of binoculars that Dmitri had given him. He gave me a nod and a grin. “You do realize you’re superior to me with this True Sight of yours, right?”

  “Guess you’re not that Perfect after all,” I replied, jokingly.

  “I don’t know. He seems pretty Perfect from where I’m standing,” Kallisto muttered from behind, shamelessly checking him out. She’d been relatively quiet since we’d discovered the Draenir tribe, but she was definitely happy to be with us. Eagerness defined her aura, and the grin stretching her lips told me she had developed a tiny bit of a crush on Raphael, who was clearly flattered.

  He chuckled, then gave her a playful wink. “See? There’s a lady who appreciates the good things in life,” he said, pointing at Kallisto, then narrowed his eyes at me. “Unlike you, Lenny.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” I asked, slightly confused.

  “I don’t know, Lenny. Most people would love a Perfect’s attention,” he replied. “But you’re hung up on icicle-man, over there. It’s a little bit sad.”

  I stilled, wondering if Nevis had heard anything. I looked around and found him with Kailani and Hunter by the water, quietly waiting for the rest of us to join them. The Draenir boys reached them first, followed by Kallisto.

  “I’ve had enough of the Perfects’ attention to last me a lifetime, thank you very much!” I quipped.

  Raphael laughed, then we both dashed across the sand. The night sky was clear and loaded with billions of twinkling stars. Sonic booms thundered in the distance, but not close enough to be cause for concern. This was a late hour for the Perfects—most of them slept during the night. As soon as we all gathered on the shore, I scanned the neighboring island again, following signs of movement, while Kailani passed a dose of invisibility paste around for each of us to consume.

  “There’s not enough of it to cover all the tower operations and sneak into the colosseum, so I suggest we don’t use it unless we really need it,” she whispered.

  I took the small serving from her. It was stored in a tiny, flat glass case, which I slipped into a back pocket. “The invisibility paste is limited. And we can’t overdo it with the pulverizer pellets,” I grumbled. “Why the hell do we even carry this stuff around if we’re not going to use it?”

  “We use it if we absolutely must. I thought you liked challenges, Elonora,” Nevis replied, wearing a faint smile.

  �
��This isn’t a challenge. This is just cruel,” I said.

  “We’ve managed more in circumstances that were much worse,” Nevis said.

  “Ice-man’s got a point,” Raphael chimed in. “Besides, you have me.”

  “How does that help?” I asked dryly.

  Raphael feigned taking offense, placing a hand on his chest. He would’ve totally gotten away with clutching his pearls, if he had some handy. I stifled a giggle, and shifted my focus back to the neighboring island.

  “Twenty Perfects stationed around the tower,” I said. “Five more on the east side, resting in a diamond, igloo-type settlement.”

  “It’s an uninhabited island. The sleepers are technical support. The twenty are the guards. We need to take the latter down first,” Raphael replied.

  “What about the other five? They’d be able to fix the tower if we wreck it, right?” Hunter asked.

  “Not really, no. They’re more on the maintenance side, and they wouldn’t even know what happened until we take the central tower down. By then, it’ll be too late,” Raphael explained. “They’ll have to report back to Ta’Zan, get some engineers out there with them, and redo the entire structure. That’ll take weeks to put back together. The comms blockers have a complicated circuit system. Difficult to put together and activate, stupidly easy to destroy.”

  “Hence the twenty Perfects guarding it,” Nevis muttered.

  “Exactly,” Raphael replied.

  I checked the Perfects’ positions once more. Based on the patterns we’d observed so far, the ones with guard duty were not the brightest or the strongest of their kind—those were the ones that Ta’Zan sent out to war, or to hunt us. I felt Nevis’s icy blue eyes on me. Turning my head to look at him, my heart skipped a beat. He’d been watching me, brooding and quiet, his aura a jumble of unreadable emotions once more.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  I sighed. “I’m thinking that Ta’Zan wouldn’t have his mightiest guarding these towers. He’d have them out in the field, hunting us, since we nabbed Raphael. Word of Abaddon’s and the others’ demise will reach him soon enough, if it hasn’t already.”

  “So, the twenty out there might not be as dangerous as Araquiel, Oriphiel, and so on?” Hunter said, raising an eyebrow.

  I nodded slowly. Raphael grinned. “She does have a point,” he said. “Guarding the towers isn’t exactly a prime spot in our Perfect hierarchy. It’s for the brawny, at best. Mostly, it’s for the more… mediocre specimens. Ta’Zan is quite selective regarding who does what around here, and he doesn’t want his best to wither away while watching over a bunch of cables.”

  “Okay, Raphael goes out first and takes out as many of them as he can, while we zap over and kill the others,” I said. “We’ll save some pulverizer pellets this way.”

  Nevis nodded, then handed Raphael his soul-eater blade. “You’ll need this to move fast. I bet ripping their heads off is a tad more time-consuming.”

  “Thanks. I’d do a lot better with two of these, though,” Raphael replied.

  I chuckled, then gave him mine, too.

  Kailani put her hands out for us to take hold so we could zap off the island.

  Raphael gave us a brief nod, then turned his back on us. Two splendid, enormous white wings shot out from beneath his shoulder blades—the slits were so fine, they were practically unnoticeable. His wings spanned about fifteen feet each. Enormous, with pure white feathers, each the size of my forearm. My breath was taken away.

  He shot out with a single flap, darting over the water, quiet and incredibly fast. He flew so low that he almost touched it. He glided toward the island while we linked hands with Kailani, and everything went black for a split second.

  When we reappeared beneath the comms tower, Raphael was already slicing Perfects’ heads off with impressive speed and precision. He moved like lightning, swinging his blades left and right.

  We took our weapons out and flipped the side switch to fire pulverizer pellets, instead of penetrating bullets. This was our first trial with such firing power, and we had to keep a low profile, so we stuck to using the pulverizer pellets for this first stage of our mission.

  I took aim and took down a male. He instantly turned into a puff of ashes, bringing the others to a grinding halt. The horrified looks on their faces told me everything we needed to know: they hadn’t seen such permanent destruction coming.

  Nevis, Kailani, Hunter, and Kallisto fired their weapons next, one pellet each, smacking four Perfects right in the chest. The force of the impact barely nudged them, but the ensuing bright blue dust immediately obliterated them. They didn’t even get a chance to react before they were reduced to clouds of ash.

  Three more Perfects remained, frozen right beneath the comms tower, and we closed in on them, our weapons pointed straight at them.

  “Keep quiet and let us give you a temporary death, instead,” I said, my voice low and ice cold. “You so much as try to alert the others, and you’ll end up like your friends here. Nothing, ever again.”

  The hostiles glowered at me, but they didn’t strike me as reckless or stupid—stupidity would’ve been difficult to accomplish, given their genetic cocktail and Ta’Zan’s training. They’d learned to assess a situation before jumping in, and they’d already seen what our weapons could do.

  One of them exhaled, then bared his fangs at Raphael. “What are you waiting for, traitor?”

  Raphael withdrew his wings, then bolted toward them with one soul-eater blade out and up at shoulder level. He shot past them at lightspeed. We all heard the sword slice through flesh and bone, before all three heads rolled, followed by the thump of their bodies.

  We all breathed a sigh of relief, as a thin layer of gray ash settled over the white sand.

  “How many did we use?” Raphael asked.

  He’d been too busy cutting off heads to count the pulverizer pellets we’d used.

  “Five,” I said. “We’ve got thirty-five left.”

  Each team was assigned forty pulverizer pellets. We needed to make an action plan for the other comms towers. If there were twenty Perfects per tower, plus other tech support aides, then we definitely had to think of more effective and equally quick ways of killing them, without wasting all our ammunition.

  “We still have the bullets. Those, in fact, we have plenty of,” Kailani replied.

  “We’ll work out an attack plan, going forward,” I said. “Consider this our trial session. We’ll get smarter. We’ll have to save some pulverizer pellets for the colosseum and the trip back to camp.”

  “You were ridiculously effective,” Hunter said to Raphael, who’d already begun dripping some kind of oil from a bottle he’d tied to his belt.

  “Lenny was right. These guys aren’t top brass. They’d be deemed insufficient if they were to go into a training hall with me, or Douma, for that matter,” Raphael replied.

  He doused the fifteen Perfects’ bodies with oil, then snapped his fingers to produce a spark and set them on fire. We all stared at him for a while, in awe of what he was capable of. I hadn’t seen his fire ability before, but I had to give it to him—snapping your fingers and starting a fire was definitely a skill I would’ve loved to have.

  Unlike the fae, Raphael and other Perfects like him didn’t need an existing fire source for their abilities. He was able to create his own flames, easily. He noticed us gawking at him, and laughed lightly.

  “What’s everyone so shocked about?” he asked, though slightly rhetorical.

  “Hey, man, it’s not every day that we get to see Ta’Zan’s greatest warrior in action,” I replied. “But thank you for helping us do this. It would be a lot harder without you.”

  “You mean impossible,” Raphael retorted.

  I shrugged. “Meh. Let’s not go that far.”

  “Okay, what next?” Kailani whispered. “We’re still in the middle of enemy territory, here.”

  “And we’ll continue in the same fashion until we get
back to the blue rock,” Raphael said, then pointed at the comms tower. “I’ll disable this now, while you kiddos keep a lookout. There are five Perfects on the east side. We don’t want them alerted.”

  “Won’t the smoke do that?” Nevis asked, his brow furrowed.

  “Not necessarily. Perfects often set fires to warm up at night. It can get pretty chilly toward the morning,” Raphael said.

  He turned to take on the comms tower next. The tree was enormous from up close, at least twelve feet in diameter and slimming as it reached for the sky. The glowing blue cables ran in uneven swirls, spiraling up the hard trunk, interconnected by thousands of tiny circuit systems and metallic wires. White-and-red lights flickered here and there, all the way to the top.

  “Why does he use trees for this?” I murmured, looking up.

  “The serium is amplified by the tree sap,” Raphael explained. “The circuits are fitted with long extraction needles that go deep into the trunk. It’s what helps the comms tower block all communications, including the magical types. It’s the ‘magi’ part of ‘magi-tech,’ if you will.”

  “So, the serium powers most of the device, but the tree sap amplifies it,” I concluded.

  Raphael nodded. “Exactly. The sap gives it the coverage it needs to block all or specific wavelengths. I’ll destroy every single circuit node. Once all the red-and-white lights are out, the tower will be disabled.”

  “What about the serium cables?” Kallisto asked, sheathing her sword.

  “We’ll cut those too, but last,” Raphael replied. “If I take them down first, it might set off an alarm trigger. I’m pretty sure there was one in the blueprints that Ta’Zan approved for this project.”

  “And if—” I wanted to ask something else about the so-called triggers, when the sound of rustling leaves startled us all.

  We turned around in a flash and pointed our weapons at the dark greenery before us. My heart got stuck in my throat, as I used my True Sight to see deeper into the patch of palm trees and tall, rich ferns. A single figure was moving toward us… and I knew who it was. I just couldn’t believe it until he stepped into the dim moonlight that pierced the overhead palm leaves.