The Vampre's Salvation

by Martha Woods

  My eyes widened, but I took a deep breath to try and pass it off as just me trying to calm myself down. “You know what I… it’s fine, I know you were just trying to do your job. That’s what we’ve all been trying to do lately, I can’t blame you.”

  “Well, that’s… that’s very big of you,” He said, letting his arms fall back to his sides. “I feel bad though, I’m supposed to be your superior and… I feel like I let you down. What kind of boss does that?”

  Before he could even blink I flicked the blade out of the sheath on my waist, catching it in my hand and driving it up underneath his ribs, twisting it in place and grabbing the back of his neck, pulling him deeper into it. “Not my boss,” I growled, “Not the Rick that I know.”

  “Amy?” The real Rick yelled from behind his doppelganger, “What the fuck is this?”

  “This,” I said, turning Alvin around to face him, Rick’s face turning white as a sheet when he stared into a face no different than his. “Is magic.”

  “What… what is he?”

  “I can explain all of that later, but right now...” I tugged the knife to the side, Alvin groaning in pain. “I need to go save a friend.”

  Even though he was in excruciating pain, Alvin still managed to laugh, “You really are stupid, you think that there’s any chance that this is going to work?”

  “I think that the only thing keeping you alive is the fact that I haven’t dragged the knife two inches to the left, which would sever a very major artery in your heart and result in you bleeding out in seconds.” I pulled his head up to look into my eyes, letting him see the loathing that I had for him close up. “I think that you’re a coward who’s going to hope for whatever way out you can get, no matter how bad the odds are that you’ll actually get it. So, you’re going to shut up, you’re going to walk, or I’m going to make this very painful for you, got it?”

  He growled at me, grip tightening around my hand, but he started moving with me nonetheless, winding our way through the hallways before coming to the outside once more. The crowd erupted in cheers, parting like the red sea as I dragged him through, an ocean of sneers and hating eyes glaring down at him while he tried to make himself as small as he possibly could.

  A snap of my fingers and the cage dropped its glamour, standing large and proud in the middle of the gathered crowd. The sight of the metal and the engravings decorating every inch drove Alvin into such a state of fear I could feel his mind itself screaming out, the disguise he had been wearing dropping in an instant while he tried to worm his way out of my grip. True to my word I twisted the knife, his every protesting movement stopping in an instant as every nerve in his body lit up in pain, only coming to when I tossed him into the cage like the piece of garbage that he was and slammed the door behind him.

  “Please!” He said hands around the bars and face pressed through as much as he could get it. “Not like this! If you’re going to kill me kill me but don’t do it like this!”

  I stared at him coldly, feeling Tariq and Damon approaching me. “You butchered so many beautiful young women, led your brainwashed minions in a mission to wipe all of us out. You drove us to the brink of war just so that you could gain just a little more power.” I screamed in anger, slamming my boot against his fingers. “If I could you would have so much worse!”

  Damon held me back, pulling me away from the bars and placing his lips against my temple, whispering calming words against my skin and moving me further back towards the crowd. “Come on Amy, it’s alright. Let’s let Tariq do his work.”

  “If you do this you’re no better than I was!” Even without looking into his mind I could tell that Alvin thought he was using his trump card, even more so when he said, “You’re a cop, aren’t you? Is this what a cop should be doing?”

  I had to admit, he had a point. Not on being as bad as him, I hadn’t tried to commit genocide as far as I knew, I was undeniably better than him, but being a cop… I’d thought long and hard about how I could reconcile what I was doing with who I was if I could really claim that I was working for a greater good when I could sacrifice someone so easily like this. But then I thought about how no jury in the world would ever convict him, how he had tried to make the man that I loved butcher me like a hunk of meat, how many brothers and sisters he had taken away in his hate filled quest for little reason other than his own enjoyment. He had tried to kill not just me, but everyone else here, I think that he deserved to be tried on their merits, not anyone else’s.

  “I am a cop, you’re right there,” I said, “But right now I’m suspended.”

  “No!” He howled, slamming backwards against the bars of the cage when Tariq held his palm up, flames passing from his fingertips and wrapping around the bars of the cage, heating them until they were red hot and the engravings glowed gold.

  “By request of the ancient powers, by the demand of all that is righteous, we call upon the enlightened to grant us an exchange.” Tariq held his hands out, the flames only growing higher and hotter, Alvin bouncing off the walls of the cage in his ill-fated attempts to escape. Rick approached my side, his gun safely in its holster and in no danger of being dropped to the ground, his hands shaking as a result of what he was witness to.

  “Amy… what is this? What the hell is going on here?” He turned to me, only just resisting the urge to physically grab me and demand answers. “What are they doing to him?”

  I sighed, unsure of how much I should say but knowing that he wouldn’t accept anything less than the truth. At least if I told him everything there was a chance that he would support the plan, or at the very least not stand in opposition to it. If he did, however, I was going to have to get… creative. I don’t want to have to erase someone’s memory again, but if I have to I will. I’m not giving Vincent’s life away for this man, no way, I would rather give myself up than do that.

  “I… lost someone close to me recently, they almost died but were placed in what’s basically purgatory.” I held up a hand at his dropped jaw. “Yeah, I know, that’s going to require a much longer conversation. The point is… the only way that we can get him back is if someone else is forced to go there in his stead, and given that I don’t want anyone innocent to be put in that position…”

  Now he really did speak up, looking in shock between me and Tariq. “You’re talking about human sacrifice Amy! This is the kind of satanic shit that I’ve only ever seen in bad movies, and if you don’t want to call it that then there is a much more mundane word for it; vigilantism!” Rick shook his head, half a movement away from pulling his gun out before I stopped him. “Let me go, Amy, this is a crime and I will not allow myself to be party to it.”

  “If you try and stop this they will kill you Rick, and I don’t think I would be able to stop them.” I squeezed his arm, trying to pull it away from the gun. “Please Rick, just… think about this.”

  “What is there to think about?” He asked, “The culprit of the murders is in that cage, we can take him down right now and arrest him, isn’t that what you want?”

  “How do you think that’s going to happen, Rick? Who in their right mind would look at what we have and give a conviction? We found him using magic? They would let him free in ten minutes and be asking for your job in five, there is no outcome in which he makes it through the court system.”

  He was about to argue more, but I cut him off once again, “And even if he did, what then? Where do you think you could put him that would keep him secure? He can blow walls apart with a flick of his wrist, he was mind-controlling people to murder the people they were closest to, he has a legion of followers so deeply entrenched in every part of our lives that it would be impossible to keep him locked down.”

  “Followers?” Rick asked, narrowing his eyes. “Like who? How do you know this?”

  I was silent for a moment, wanting to give him time to prepare for what I was going to tell him next. “Vivienne was one of them, she wanted to get close to me as a way to ensure that I could be sacri
ficed like the other girls. It was almost a success,” I said, lifting my shirt to show him the scars. “That’s where I got these.”

  “I don’t believe this…” He covered his mouth, finally realizing just how over his head everything about this case was. “Did you kill her? When you found out who she was and what she was doing, did you kill her?”

  “No.” I reached for his shoulder, waiting for him to look at me. “Rick, hey, look at me. I did not kill her. It was either him or… some failsafe that she’d placed herself under. I don’t know I wasn’t able to work that out.”

  He stepped away from me, dragging his hands down his face and trying to make sense of all of what I was telling him. From the groans that I could hear muffled through his hands, it wasn’t very successful. “This is… this is wrong Amy; can’t you see that?”

  “I can,” I said, nodding my agreement. “It goes against everything that I believe in, everything that I’ve trained and worked for my entire life. But it’s the only thing that we can do here that will actually solve anything. One monster dies, good people get to live, it really comes down to that.”

  “And you’re comfortable making that choice? You’ll be able to sleep at night knowing this is what you were willing to do?”

  “No, I won’t.” I walked up to him, snatching his hand away from his face and tossing it down to his side. “Do you think I like having to do this? You think I’d rather he dies here than waste away in a prison cell thinking about the lives that he’d ruined? I’m going to be thinking about this night years from now Rick, don’t you dare think otherwise!”

  Rick stepped back, obviously not having expected an outburst like the one he had gotten. At least that meant that I was starting to get through to him, but I was still insulted that he even suspected that I thought that way. “Well… what then? After all of this, what do we say? We can’t just leave a cold case, and those men that have already been arrested will need something to exonerate them.”

  “We’re forensics Rick, we can think of something.” I shook my head sadly. “I don’t like having to use my talents for something like this but… what other choice do we have?”

  “None at all,” He said, turning to look back at the cage. “None at all it seems.”

  Alvin was shaking faintly still; his eyes had rolled back into his head and his jaw hanging open as his soul was taken away from him piece by piece. The others couldn’t see that happening, all they could see was him slowly losing his mind and his consciousness, which was very good luck for them. They didn’t have to hear the way his mind was slowly losing all lucidity and was shutting down, every second screaming out for help that he knew was never going to come.

  I’d said before that I wanted him to rot in a prison cell for the rest of his life, I’d consider that to be a good punishment, but looking at this… a lifetime of imprisonment would likely have been a blessing compared to this. This was seventeen kinds of horrible that were going to take the strongest of liquors and the most hedonistic of indulgences to even begin to forget, and I have a large suspicion that I was not going to be successful for years to come.

  But then in the midst of all of that, all the pain and all the screaming, I felt him. I felt Vincent rising to the surface, so fast and so desperately that he was quickly eclipsing everything around him, the more Alvin faded away the more he began to push through back into our world.

  Tariq clenched his fists, stepping back and slamming them down into the ground, flames erupting in front of the cage and seeming to roar forever, the air around us heating up until it was almost unbearable. Through the haze I could see Tariq clenching his teeth in pain, muscles straining from the effort he was under until finally, he let go, the flames subsiding and extinguishing almost instantly, leaving behind a figure who was too busy hacking and wheezing that we almost didn’t realize who it was.

  The second that I did though, I ran forwards, wrapping my arms around Vincent’s neck and pulling him in as closely as I could. “Vincent! Oh my god is it really you?”

  “I… I think it is,” He let out a small laugh of disbelief, “I think that I’m really back. How did you do it?”

  I looked over his shoulder, gazing into the blank eyes of Alvin Quick, whatever consciousness had been in his body before long gone, leaving behind just an empty shell. “That doesn’t matter right now,” I said, “We can talk about that once you’re all healed up ok?”

  Vincent nodded, letting his head fall back against my shoulder. “You’re hiding something but… ok. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”

  I lifted him to his feet, Damon jogging in to take his other side while we led him out. “This is odd,” Vincent said, looking over at Damon. “I thought for sure that you’d take the first opportunity to drop me.”

  “Yeah well, the night’s still young.” Damon allowed himself a small smile, patting Vincent’s shoulder before facing forward. “Welcome back Vincent.”

  Aside from those that had been most personally affected, most of the others were already leaving, wounds needing to be tended to and family members to be held, but Rick stood steady at the entrance to the cage, looking down at Alvin’s empty body.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it? People who commit the most heinous of acts so often look the smallest once punishment is done.” He held his hand up before I could say anything, a bitter smile coming to his face as he said, “Don’t worry about this Amy, I’ll make sure that everything is taken care of. You should take the rest of the week as well, actually get some recovery time in.”

  “So…” I said cautiously, “Are we square? Or…”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “We’re square. See you at work.”

  As I was walking away I couldn’t help but think that this was far from the last time we were going to talk about this, but right now I couldn’t bring myself to care too much. I had Vincent back by my side, Damon still there as well, those young women had been avenged and the alliance was safe for the time being.

  For now, I was going to count this as a win, and nothing was going to take that away from me.

  Chapter 9

  The week off went by fast, most of it spent sleeping like I’d never slept before. The rest of it was spent trying to get Damon and Vincent to be able to spend more than two hours in the same room without looking like they wanted to kill each other. It took me a while to figure out, but their mutual dislike wasn’t just over me, or even over the difference in species, some people just… genuinely do not get along with one another.

  Of course, since all of our time together was spent on either sleeping or making them tolerable to each other, that left no time for… other adventures. Which meant that I was almost going mad having not gotten any from either of them and to make things worse today was the day that I was supposed to be going back to work. This was going to be an interesting day, to say the least, but not everything can be sunshine and rainbows. The world had been saved if that meant that I was a little touch starved for a week or so I guess that’s a small price to pay. An irritating one, but a small one nonetheless.

  “Sooner or later you two are going to be able to hold a proper conversation,” I said to Damon, fixing my hair and straightening my tie in the mirror. “I’m not the only one who’s capable of learning to communicate after all.”

  “No,” He replied, flipping through his book. “But there’s a lot of deep seated issues that we both have to work through before we can hope to get to that point.”

  “Like what?”

  “That I don’t like him,” He laughed to himself, “But we’re building that wall brick by brick.”

  “Don’t you mean tearing it down?” I asked, pressing my lips to his forehead.

  “Sure, yeah that’s what I meant. You almost ready to head to work?”

  “Yeah,” I groaned, “I want to stay here with you but… gotta get back into it sooner or, later right? It’s not like regular crime just stopped on my behalf.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.” He
stood from his chair, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and pressing his lips to mine. “Be careful alright? I know there’s no point telling you not to jump right into everything but… just promise me to be careful?”

  “I always try to be.” I squeezed my arms around him, taking a moment to enjoy the warmth of him being here with me. “Alright, gotta go. We’ll have dinner tonight, might be a good chance to find something in common between you two.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” He said, “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try.”

  He watched me every step of the way out the door, a smile stretching across his face and love in his eyes. “See you later Damon.”

  “Yeah, see you later Amy.”

  I shut the door behind me, walking down the hallway and passing by Damon’s apartment door, where I could tell was trying and failing to sleep through the day. “See you later Vincent.”

  “I hope you really don’t insist on making us have dinner together,” He replied in my mind, “You know we can’t stand each other.”

  “Well that’s just something we’ll have to work on,” I said, “And it would mean a lot to me, so please at least give it a chance?”

  Even though I couldn’t hear it in my mind, I just knew that he was sighing. “Fine. But I get to pick the wine that we drink tonight.”

  I smiled to myself. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  * * *

  It was strange stepping through the doors and seeing a new receptionist, but at least I could be somewhat confident that this one wasn’t a rogue witch desperate to try and kill me like the last one was. I wasn’t exactly keen on being a suspect in another receptionist death, that just wasn’t a good image.

  “Hello, you must be Amy,” She greeted, a practiced smile on her face. “I was told that you would be coming in this morning.”