A Shade of Vampire 65: A Plague of Deceit

by Bella Forrest

  “Leave her be,” Hunter told him. “She needs some peace and quiet for now.”

  “No, I need to know what happened here. I did this, didn’t I?” I asked.

  Hunter stared at me for a while, then gave me a weak nod. “Yes. You started glowing, but this time it was different. You released a flash of light, for lack of a better word. It burned the Perfects to a crisp. They won’t be coming back from this one.”

  I took a moment to process the information. There were gaps that needed filling, because I couldn’t remember any of this, and it had to make sense.

  “Where were you?” I asked him.

  “On the ground. Varga, Kallisto, and Cassiel ducked, too. It’s how we survived,” Hunter replied, a muscle ticking nervously in his jaw.

  Varga groaned. “I still don’t get why Cassiel ran off. We did the job. It’s over. The comms blockers are down, and we’ll be able to resume contact with our teams and Calliope. Maybe even some of the dome prisoners, since there were some Telluris connections made, in case there were no comms devices left. We were out of the woods here!”

  “Maybe he was afraid,” Kallisto murmured.

  “Of what, me?” I asked, feeling terribly guilty. I should’ve been breathing a sigh of relief, given that I’d somehow managed to kill a bunch of Perfects, permanently, but something didn’t quite click for me.

  Varga shrugged. “Well, he’s known you for what, a couple of hours? And you literally wasted over two dozen Perfects. In hindsight, if I were him, I’d be wary, too. Not me, personally, though. I’ve known you since I was a toddler, after all. You don’t scare me so easily,” he replied with a half-smile.

  He was trying to reassure me, in his way. But it didn’t have the intended effect.

  “So, you’re telling me that I practically obliterated more than two dozen Perfects when I blacked out and went into… Word-mode?” I croaked, my throat suddenly dry.

  “Pretty much,” Hunter breathed. “You were like a nuclear reactor that simply went off. The first pulse was devastating. It instantly fried the Perfects, from a height of about ten inches, more or less. It missed us by millimeters.”

  Varga pointed at the base of a still-standing burnt corpse. “Their feet and ankles are intact. Gah, this is so creepy.”

  “Won’t they regenerate?” I asked.

  Hunter shook his head. “The pulse obliterated them, it destroyed their nervous system in one powerful hit—infinitely more intense than a normal fire. That’s what stopped a Perfect body from fully burning, to begin with. There’s nothing left of it to regenerate now. Just useless feet and ankles.”

  “What about the Draenir boys? Where are they?” I asked.

  They all went silent for a few seconds, their eyes wide as they stared at me. That gnawing sensation in my stomach came back with a vengeance. None of this was right.

  “They died fighting the Perfects, before you blacked out,” Hunter blurted.

  Varga and Kallisto looked at each other, then at me, and nodded.

  “We told them to stay back,” I said, feeling sorry for such a loss. The Draenir were already on the verge of extinction, and had been so since Ta’Zan’s plague. The last thing they needed was to die while helping us defeat him. It just didn’t seem fair.

  “The fight got hot, fast,” Hunter replied. “They didn’t last for too long when the Perfects spotted them in the trees. We tried to get to them, but we were taking hits of our own. We did our best. And so did you, Kale. That’s all you need to know.”

  A minute passed in the heaviest silence, as I observed my own reaction to this turn of events. Something still didn’t fit, like a piece of a different puzzle trying to jam itself into this one. My instincts kept tugging at my conscience, as if they knew something I didn’t.

  “I permanently killed Perfects. That’s new,” I managed.

  “Not sure it’s an avenue we want to go down, in the future,” Varga said. “You weren’t in control of it. And, frankly, I wouldn’t want to be around a weapon that cannot be controlled.”

  I nodded slowly. “No, I agree. It’s just weird. And I can’t talk about my connection to the Word, otherwise I’d be able to tell you exactly what’s going on inside me. My swamp witch oath is quite strict on the matter. But, if it makes anyone feel any better, most of the time, even I don’t know what is happening to me.”

  Hunter put his arm around me as I got up. I leaned into him for support, thankful to feel his muscular frame against my body. There was a strange sense of comfort from him, as if, no matter what happened and no matter what came next, I could rely on Hunter to make everything a little bit better.

  For someone like me, that was worth everything.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the doubt that one of them wasn’t telling me everything, if not all of them.

  Hunter

  I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.

  The look in her eyes, the moment she’d realized what she’d done, was painful enough. This wasn’t the time, nor the place, for Kailani to know the truth about how uncontrollable her connection to the Word seemed to be.

  At the same time, I was in awe of her. The amount of power needed to permanently kill creatures that had been designed to regenerate from pretty much anything had to be something out of this world. In fact, if I stopped to think about it properly, that obliterating flash of light was as hot and as intense as the fire coming from a jet or fuel engine. It burned with enough force and at such a high speed, that it didn’t give the Perfects’ nervous system enough time to stop the blaze from consuming the entire body.

  Varga was right, though. While Kailani’s burst of power seemed extraordinary and was ridiculously effective, it couldn’t be easily reproduced, nor could it be controlled. The blackout was clearly connected to me this time, much like the last. Whenever I was injured and close to dying, Kailani seemed to lose it, and that worried me.

  We were in love with each other.

  But I didn’t want to be the source of her unwillingly destructive behavior. I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe we were better off apart, at least for the time being. At least while this Strava issue continued to unravel. Still, my heart completely rejected the premise. We’d only just gotten closer, after years of tiptoeing around each other.

  “I’m worried about Cassiel vanishing like that,” Kailani said, drawing me back to reality.

  “We’ll need to get out of here, ASAP,” Varga replied. “If he skedaddled like that, maybe he sensed that more Perfects were coming our way, and he didn’t want to risk exposure.”

  “We need to get back to the edge of the woods in any case,” I muttered. “Elonora, Nevis, and Raphael should be back soon.”

  A string of explosions echoed in the distance. From what I could tell, they were pretty far away and not the sonic booms of Perfects darting through the sky at their annoyingly high speeds. Varga looked to his left, toward the colosseum, using his True Sight to scan the area. The corner of his mouth twitched.

  “It’s the colosseum. They did it. They blew Ta’Zan’s flight plans up,” he said. “I can see the fires from here. They tore a hole through the place, on the inside.”

  “Then they must be headed back now,” Kailani replied.

  She picked up her weapon and darted through the jungle. Kallisto, Varga, and I followed, as we headed back to the edge, to our meeting spot. Despite the loss of life and Cassiel’s sudden disappearance, we’d accomplished our mission. The comms blockers were fully disabled, which meant that, any second now, we’d be able to use our earpieces and Telluris soul links to communicate with each other.

  It didn’t take long for Elonora, Nevis, and Raphael to show up where we’d first split up. They revealed themselves about twenty yards away, most likely so as not to stir us into a defensive stance. We were already on edge enough as it was.

  I was surprised to see five Faulties with them, too. One had turquoise fur covering his neck and most of his upper body, some visible through his t
unic. The others had reptilian features, with round yellow eyes and a variety of colored scales on their limbs and napes. They blinked rapidly, as they tried to understand who we were, and what we were doing here.

  “Well done!” Varga congratulated Elonora, then took her in his arms and held her tight for a few moments, while Nevis stood next to her, unable to hide his proud smile.

  “I can’t believe we made it back!” Elonora chuckled, then turned to also face the Faulties, whom she introduced to the rest of the crew. “These are the engineers in charge of Ta’Zan’s flight plans. Well, five out of six, anyway. Meet Marku, Elias, Chancy, Kerron, and Luden.”

  We shook hands and introduced ourselves, while Raphael measured us from head to toe, then narrowed his eyes.

  “Where’s Cassiel? Where are the Draenir boys?” he asked.

  The question felt like a punch in the gut, but I quickly took control of the dialogue.

  “Cassiel vanished after we disabled the tower,” I said. “None of us saw him go. We were… busy.”

  “With what?! And the Draenir?” Raphael retorted, clearly annoyed.

  Kailani sighed. “Cassiel ran into trouble at the comms blocker. Too many Perfects for one of him. We went in to help, but… Hunter says we lost the Draenir in the fight.”

  “What do you mean by that? Weren’t you there?” Elonora replied, slightly confused.

  “I blacked out again,” Kailani murmured. Nevis and Elonora stilled. They knew exactly what that meant. “I don’t remember.”

  “Wait, what? How did—” Raphael tried to probe for more answers, but I cut him off.

  “Point is, I got injured in the same fight that killed the Draenir. There were over two dozen Perfects there. We were overwhelmed; we didn’t expect so many of them,” I said. “Kale saw me on the ground, and she lost it. She went into Word-mode and released a blast that killed all the Perfects. We ducked just in time, too.”

  “Otherwise we would’ve been toast,” Varga muttered, and I shot him a reprimanding scowl. Kailani wasn’t comfortable with what had happened, and she didn’t even know about the Draenir’s true end. Varga didn’t have bad intentions, but his foot-in-mouth syndrome was as annoying as Jovi’s or Dmitri’s. “But we’re not,” he added with a grin, reacting to me. “We’re A-Okay!”

  “I’ll explain things later,” Elonora whispered to Raphael, then shifted her focus back to Kailani and me. “At least we finished the mission,” she said, giving us both a soft smile. “Let’s hope the others did, too.”

  “What about Cassiel?” Raphael asked. “I am really not comfortable with him being out there, knowing what he knows about us.”

  “It’s not like we can do anything at this point,” Elonora replied. “He’s virtually untraceable for us. We should focus on what we have to do next. We have to get back to our meeting point by the blue rock and wait for the others.”

  We paired up again and followed Raphael as he led the way back down the hill and through the southern jungle, headed for the beach. From there on, hopefully, our journey was going to be as smooth as the one here. Kallisto and Varga stayed right behind Raphael, with the Faulties right behind them. Kailani and I were at the end of the group, along with Nevis and Elonora.

  A few minutes went by in silence, as we delved deeper into the trees, the shade swallowing us and allowing Elonora and Varga to take their hoods off again. It was pretty hot at this hour, and, as vampires, there was only so much their bodies could take before plunging them into a state of discomfort.

  “We met Isda in there,” Elonora said.

  “Ah, she’s okay!” Varga exclaimed. “So good to hear. How did she seem?”

  “A little sad since we took her boyfriend away,” Raphael cut in, nodding at Marku behind them, “but other than that, still on our side.”

  “I gave her an earpiece for Grandma and Grandpa,” Elonora replied. “We’ll be hearing from them soon enough.”

  “Wait, you’re Isda’s boyfriend?” Varga gasped, looking over his shoulder at a slightly embarrassed Marku, who gave him a nod in return. “That’s pretty cool. I’m out here because of her, you know,” he added, then switched to Raphael. “When will comms be back on, now that the blockers are down?”

  Raphael shrugged. “Not much longer. I think it’ll take a while for the blocking waves to die down. It’s not a part of magi-tech I know very well, but I think everything will be back in working order by sundown at the latest.”

  “We did our part,” Elonora said. “There isn’t much else we can do right now, other than go back and meet up with the others. We need to plan the next stage of our mission.”

  We were all in agreement here.

  A couple of islands later, after Elonora told us exactly how their mission inside the colosseum unfolded, I took Elonora aside for a private conversation. When Kailani saw me leave her side, she gave me a questioning look.

  I smiled in return. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kailani didn’t say anything, but kept walking instead. Elonora and I stayed behind, putting about twenty yards between us and the others.

  “We need to talk,” I whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyebrows arched in wonder.

  “The Draenir didn’t die fighting the Perfects,” I said, keeping my voice down.

  Elonora stilled. “What? What happened? Oh…” she breathed, instantly making the connection to what we’d told her before. “Oh, no… Kale…”

  I nodded. “She lost it, Lenny. I got hurt, and… it triggered something in her. She blew up in that weird, blinding light. When the blaze was released, we barely ducked in time. The Draenir were up in the trees, shooting as many Perfects as they could. They didn’t make it down in time. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Oh, man,” Elonora groaned, shaking her head in dismay. “She doesn’t know. You didn’t tell her… Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want her to flip out. Not here, not now. And, frankly, I didn’t have the courage to tell her,” I replied. “Call me a sissy, if you will. I think I’ve earned it.”

  “Nah, Hunter. You’re a white wolf with a big-ass heart,” Elonora said, smiling. But her good humor faded quickly. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled, staring at Kailani. She gave me the occasional over-the-shoulder look, as if making sure I was still here. Every time, I smiled at her, hoping to soothe her unsettled heart. She was still troubled by her blackout episode, but there wasn’t much I could do, other than give her emotional support.

  “We have to tell her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “As soon as we get back to base,” Elonora said. “We have to tell her, Hunter. And then, we need to talk to Lumi about it. I don’t give a damn about the swamp witch oath or whatever. These are special circumstances. There has to be some loophole, some way for Lumi to help Kale control this thing. Otherwise, she could easily become a liability to our mission, to us. And I can’t have that.”

  “Me neither, Lenny. We’re on the same page here.”

  “Then help me persuade Lumi when we get back. She has to understand what happened. She must have a clue as to what she can do to help Kale. I love this girl to bits, and I hate seeing her like this,” Elonora replied.

  I breathed out. “Me too, Lenny.”

  Kailani’s greatest advantage was that she had people like us around her. Given our current circumstances and the troubles that lay ahead, we needed our witch more than ever against Ta’Zan.

  Most importantly, I needed the love of my life to stay with me, to live a long and healthy life. So I could give myself to her, like she gave herself to me. This thing between us had been sparking for years, now.

  And I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose my Kale, my feisty little witch, to the Word.

  Draven

  We came back to the blue stone with not one, but two all-terrain wheeled containers filled with supplies. We kept the foods and medicine in one, and the weapons and other chemicals in
the other. The trip was relatively smooth, with the exception of a few wandering Perfects. Lumi took the lead on most of the attacks, casting crippling spells that made them drop to the ground like flies, for us to behead. We set the bodies on fire with burning oil, each time. That way, it took longer for them to regenerate, while we covered our tracks and got as far away from those hotspots as possible.

  It was late afternoon when we reached the blue rock. We were the first ones there.

  The ensuing hour felt like the longest ever, as we patiently waited for the others. For a second there, I worried something must’ve happened, but when I saw Raphael, Elonora, and Nevis leading their group back to our meeting spot, I breathed my first sigh of relief.

  “Those aren’t Draenir,” Serena murmured, narrowing her eyes as she tried to differentiate between the members of Elonora’s crew, who were still about a hundred yards away when we first spotted them.

  “Where are our people?” Wanna asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “They’re… They’re not with them. Those are Faulties. Five of them, to be precise,” Serena replied.

  My instincts told me that something had gone wrong. When Elonora finally reached us, Wanna’s worst fear came true. Her four fellow tribe members had died during the last comms blocker disabling mission, but Elonora was quite vague in her account, barring the promise that we’d talk more about it once we got back to base.

  Deep down, judging by the glances exchanged between her, Hunter, Kallisto, and Varga, I knew there was more to the story than what they’d said. Nevertheless, their tasks had all been successfully accomplished. We offered our condolences to Wanna and her people, but I had to admit, they seemed to be taking it pretty well.

  As the sun came down, and the sky took on a purple hue, we gathered for a meal, while we waited for Ben’s team to return. They seemed to be taking longer than expected, but, then again, their mission was a bit more complex, since it involved talking to rogue Faulties.

  “I’m sorry for Airis, Stephon, Klavis, and Kemp,” Hunter said to Wanna, as he sat with his legs crossed and his back against the base of the blue rock.