by Jeff Gunhus
Pahvi looked up from his spot on the ground. By his expression, I could tell he had followed our conversation in the other room. He eyed the dagger in my hand and then looked away. It was a nuanced motion but I caught something in it that I’d never seen in Pahvi before. He was scared.
“Will you take me to meet Shakra, the Lord of the Vampires?” I asked him directly.
He looked up and nodded toward my blade. “And bring you to her with that weapon in your hand? I think not.”
I held up the dagger. “So you know what this is?” I asked. “The blade once wielded by Gregor the Vampire Slayer, the same blade that killed St. Denis.”
“And it will be the blade that kills me before I deliver you to my Lord,” Pahvi said. “And then your precious Eva will die. Or did you forget about her?”
I nodded. “I haven’t forgotten. But I’ve already mourned her. There are greater things at issue now. She would be the first to say it.” I twirled the dagger in my hands. “Do you know how it’s supposed to work?” I asked. “The dagger, I mean? Gregor told me, but it seemed a little far-fetched.”
I saw it again, a quick tremble of terror across Pahvi’s face. His voice was flat as he spoke. “I know how it works.”
“So, it’s true then,” I said in mock wonder. “One small scratch with this blade and you will experience all those deaths.”
“Yes, and then my soul will be trapped in limbo for eternity. Conscious of the eternal pain, but unable to ever escape,” Pahvi said. “And yet, even so, I will not do what you say.”
I tried to look compassionate. “That sounds terrible, Pahvi. And you’re a very old vampire. I imagine your suffering would be…unimagineable.” I crouched down, the dagger resting across my knees. “I’m going to give you to the count of three to agree to escort me to your Lord. After that, so help me, I’m going to stick you with this blade and put you through the most miserable death a vampire has ever experienced. One…”
“I won’t do it,” Pahvi said, eyeing the dagger.
“…two…”
“Go to hell, Jack Templar,” he spat.
“You first,” I replied. “THREE!”
I lunged forward. Pahvi twisted hard to get away from the dagger. The radiator ripped out from the wall, but it was too late.
I stuck him in the shoulder, the blade going only a few inches into his arm. But that was all I needed.
I stepped back as Pahvi strained against the chains, clawing at his shoulder, his eyes wild with panic. He curled up on himself like a beaten dog.
And then nothing happened.
Slowly, he looked up at me, panic dissolving into a grin. The vampire’s cocky attitude came roaring back. I looked down at the dagger, horrified.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It’s a fake,” Pahvi gloated. He pushed back his shirt to expose his shoulder. The spot I’d stabbed him had already resealed and was healing itself as I watched. “You’ve been taken for a fool.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would Gregor send me all the way up…” my voice trailed off and Pahvi caught it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Just figure something out?”
“When I opened the rooster on top of the spire, a voice came out. More of a cry really,” I said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I could have sworn it sounded like Gregor.”
Pahvi laughed, a low hollow chuckle. “It was a cisternix, a receptacle where you can store off painful memories or emotions. You put them somewhere they won’t ever be found or disturbed. If they stay locked up after your death, it can keep your soul from finding peace. If I’m not mistaken, your friend Gregor used you to release his memory from the cisternix.” He nodded toward my dagger. “And he threw a cheap dagger into the deal for you.”
I let the dagger fall from my hand to the wood floor, and it hit with a hollow thud. I knew my expression gave away my disappointment and my frustration. For once, I didn’t care.
“I wouldn’t get cocky. I can still kill you, you know,” I said.
“I suppose you could,” Pahvi replied. “It’s just not the same, now is it?”
I heard the others in the room next door arguing about something. I turned back to Pahvi. “If I untie you and release you from your bond as my prisoner, will you promise to take me to your master?”
Pahvi studied me closely. “Just you?”
“Just me,” I replied. “I’m no threat. I just want to talk to her. Make a bargain.”
Pahvi laughed. “You have guts, I’ll give you that much.” His eyes narrowed. “I can’t guarantee your safety. In fact, there’s a good chance she’ll kill you on sight.”
I held up the keys to the padlocks on his chains. “Do we have a deal or not?”
Pahvi stared me down, and I met his cold eyes. I felt them burrow into me. A shiver passed through my body, and I ignored it. This was my only chance to getting to Eva any time soon. I couldn’t blow it. Finally, Pahvi pulled his wrists apart and broke the chains holding him. I realized that his oath to be my prisoner had been the only thing keeping him from fleeing.
“On your honor as a Romani, you’ll deliver me to her alive,” I said.
“You and your oaths. Yes, we have a deal.” I stepped forward, still leery of the vampire but ready to take this risk. I unlocked the broken chains and he shook them onto the floor, stretching to his full height.
“Right, that’s better,” he said. In a flash, he grabbed my arms, swung me around, and sent me crashing through the window so hard that I flew out of the building and into the night.
I fell through the air, a flailing mass of arms, legs and shattered glass. At least we were only on the second story, and I hit a patch of garden next to the hotel. Still, I hit the ground hard, and a stab of pain radiated out from my hip. I barely had time to look up before I saw the dark shape of Pahvi jumping out of the window after me. He landed gracefully as if he had stepped off a curb instead of jumping down twenty feet. He walked up to me as I scrambled to my feet.
“I thought we had a deal?” I exclaimed.
“We do,” he said. He swung with his left fist and I dodged it easily. But it was just a feint and his right cross caught me on the jaw. “I said I would bring you to her alive.” I fended off a barrage of punches only to have Pahvi’s knee hammer me in my stomach. It knocked out my breath and left me gasping for air. “I never promised you wouldn’t have a few bumps and bruises.”
He smacked me across the head, and it felt like a bag of cement hit me. The world turned sideways, and I fell to the grass, ending up on my back looking up into the night sky. I blinked hard as raindrops hit my face. Pahvi’s face entered my field of vision. “That was for trying to kill me with Gregor’s dagger,” he said.
“But it was a fake,” I said.
“But you didn’t know that,” he snarled. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
He walked away, leaving me to pull myself up from the ground. A wry smile involuntarily came to my face. Pahvi was wrong. I had, in fact, known the dagger was a fake. The one I’d stuck Pahvi with was just a normal blade from the Academy. I patted the spot on my leg where I had the Revealer with the real dagger strapped under my clothes. The ruse had worked. I had discovered that Gregor’s blade struck fear into even an ancient vampire like Pahvi, learned Eva was still alive, and secured a promise to be hand-delivered to the Lord of Vampires herself, armed with a powerful weapon to defeat her.
As I stood up, Pahvi turned and marched back to me. For a second I feared he somehow had guessed my plan. Maybe even read my thoughts. He pointed an angry finger at me. “I pledged to take you to my master, but know this, monster hunter. If you hurt her in any way, then the death by Gregor’s blade will sound like a carnival ride compared to what I will do to you. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Pahvi turned and walked into the night. I looked back up at the window he’d thrown me from, half-expecting to see Will or T-Rex there.
But it was empty. Even though I knew it was supposed to be empty and that the other guys were supposed to be busy getting ready to follow me, I couldn’t help a chill passing through my body. I felt totally alone.
As I ran after Pahvi to catch up, I hoped the other guys been able to adapt the plan to my erratic exit through the window. If not, I was about to meet the Lord of the Vampires all by myself. Even though I had the dagger Veritas on my side, I felt a rising dread at what I was about to face.
Chapter Twenty-One
We didn’t stay above ground for long. After crossing the Pont-Neuf Bridge back over the Seine, Pahvi cut through an alley and then through a rusted gate that opened into an old stone courtyard. The building around it was in disrepair with a sagging roof and crumbling bricks. Weeds grew high from the joints between the flagstones. In the middle was a stone well.
As Pahvi walked to the well, I spotted movement in several places in the shadows around us. Six different vampires stepped forward, wrapped in black cloaks and blending into the night. Pahvi waved them back with a quick gesture, and they fell back into their sentinel positions. Pahvi jumped up onto the edge of the well and turned to me.
“Do I need to get you a rope, or can you make the climb?” he asked.
“I can climb,” I said purely from ego since I couldn’t see inside the well yet.
Pahvi grinned, knowing foolishness when he saw it. “As you wish,” he said. Then he jumped into the well and disappeared.
I peered over the edge of the well. It was old and built of limestone brick, so the edges were rough enough to give a climber at least small footholds. But in the rain and the dark it looked like a really bad idea.
A rope hung on a nearby wall out of the rain. I swallowed my pride and walked over to grab it. As I reached for it, a hand darted out of the shadows, clawing the air next to my face. A vampire leaned forward, hissing between its teeth, the foul stench of stale blood filling the air.
I took the rope and, after testing its strength, tied it off and dropped one end down the well shaft. Even though the rope was at least fifty feet long, I didn’t hear a splash at the end. I wrapped the rope once around my leg and lowered myself in.
I slid quickly down. The well smelled like freshly dug earth full of moss, insects and who knew what else. An enormous spider crawled across my face, and I flailed around on the rope until I could swat it away. I laughed at myself. Even though I was following a vampire into the underground lair of one of the most dangerous Creach monsters in the world, a plain spider made my skin crawl.
About halfway down, I saw a glowing light come from one side of the well. As I got closer, I saw an open thick wood door with heavy metal bands across it. It opened to a passageway where Pahvi stood with a torch in his hands. I swung my legs over and climbed into the tunnel.
“I thought you guys could see in the dark,” I said.
“Can you?” he asked.
“No, but I didn’t take you for the considerate type,” I replied.
Pahvi shrugged. “We are not animals crawling around in the dark. The flame is a comfort for us.”
“Really?” I goaded. “In my experience with vampires and fire, the vampires didn’t look very comfortable.”
“If the stories are to be believed, your own family has not fared well with fire, have they?” He was referring to my ancestor, Jaques de Molay, the last Grandmaster of the Knights Templar who was burned alive at the stake as a heretic. “From what I understand, my master was there to mark the occasion. Perhaps she can describe his screams to you.”
Pahvi turned and walked down the tunnel. As I followed, I felt a new appreciation for the power I was about to face. Jacques de Molay seemed like a storybook character to me, the hero of a seven-hundred-year-old story. The idea that I was about to meet someone who had actually been present at his death put my short fourteen years of life into perspective. Even with Gregor’s dagger, I would need to be careful. Especially since my goal wasn’t to kill the vampire lord but to save Eva and capture the first Jerusalem Stone. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to make a choice between the two.
The farther we walked through the tunnel system, the more ancient it appeared. Chisel marks from crude tools scraping through the dense limestone covered the walls. The wood support beams were dry and cracked with age, bulging out in some places in ways that didn’t inspire confidence. Soon, we started to pass openings for smaller offshoots, some angling upward and others down. Eventually, we took one of these. Pahvi was far enough ahead of me that he didn’t notice when I pulled a small canister of Xavier’s glowing spray paint and shot a small dot on the wall where we’d made the turn.
The narrow offshoot brought us to a new level of the tunnel system. From here, I saw even more branches shooting off in different directions. Most of these were level, but some were steep declines leading to even deeper levels.
“How many levels are there?” I called to Pahvi.
He answered without turning. “Fifteen that we know of,” he said. “There are things living in the deep dark that even we don’t want to disturb.”
Fifteen levels. And I thought the Cave of Trials had been complicated. Discretely, I sprayed a bit of Xavier’s paint in the direction we traveled, hoping he wouldn’t turn around to notice because his vampiric eyes would likely pick up even the smallest glow. As we marched along, the scenery began to change.
The decorative skulls came first. Only a few to start with, usually impaled on a post with the spike exiting one of the eye sockets. I wondered if these were unfortunate cave explorers who had happened down the wrong tunnel by chance. Farther still, the tunnels began to look more like the catacombs where we’d first gone underground with Pahvi. Piles of bones replaced the single skulls, but instead of neatly organized rows, these lay in heaps along both sides of the tunnel walls. Little avalanches of bones blocked our path in places. We had to step crunching over them.
As we walked, I felt the air change. Up to this point, the air had been dank and stifling, getting worse the lower we climbed. Now I felt a soft breeze on my face, not exactly fresh air, but better than that dead air behind us.
Then a new light glowed ahead of Pahvi. Soon it grew stronger, and I heard a low chanting. Many voices in unison, backed by a deep drum keeping a slow, resonant beat. Pahvi waited for me to catch up to him. “We made it just in time,” he said. His mocking tone filled me with dread. “See for yourself,” he offered, stepping aside.
I stepped into an enormous cavern of natural rock, several times the size of the feast room where the vampires had attacked the tourists. Torches and bonfires lit the entire area, highlighting a forest of stalagmites near the edges of the room and stalactites covering the smoky ceiling. It felt like being caught in the middle of closing jaws. Rectangular holes carved into the solid rock honeycombed the cavern walls The holes were stacked in columns, each big enough for a grown man. It struck me that they were the size of coffins, perfect resting places for vampires.
But no vampires rested that night. They covered the floor of this massive cave, all standing and facing the far side of the cavern from where I stood, swaying in time with the chant and drum beat.
There had to be hundreds of them. Some dressed in modern clothes. Others dressed in older styles. Military uniforms from World War Two, ragged three-piece suits from the turn-of-the century, even court frocks from centuries ago. They all blended together in dark, drab color from stains of mud and blood, looking more like rags than clothes now.
These were vampires as I knew them. After meeting Pahvi, I thought maybe the vampires in Paris were a different breed, but now I knew it was Pahvi who was different. These were not the glittering charismatic creatures from the movies, but dirty, underground scavengers who wasted away their immortality crawling through the dark places of the world, most of them driven half-crazy by the burden of so many years of murder and despicable living. None of them turned to look at me. They gave their rapturous attention to what was happening at the far end of
the cave.
I looked up to see a natural platform that served as a stage for this macabre vampire concert. On it, a chorus of vampires in black robes stood in rows in a bizarre rendition of a church choir. The figure in the center of the stage was the center of attention.
A woman dressed in a stylized suit of golden body armor stood behind a fire. Instead of the smooth surface of regular armor, hers looked like a muscular body, the metal shaped into the contours of her body. The effect sharpened how terrifying she looked. Spikes extended from the armor’s joints at the elbows and knees. But her helmet was most shocking. It was a horrifying mask of a vampire locked in a scream, mouth open, teeth far out in front of its lips, face twisted in a mix of anger and pain. It was all too clear who I was looking at.
This was Shakra, the Lord of the Vampires.
Nothing prepared me for what I saw next. Shakra lifted a flaming torch from the blazing bonfire in front of her and held it over her head. She stepped aside and revealed a person tied to a stake in the middle of the stage, surrounded by wood for a fire. The crowd of vampires erupted in wild, chaotic cheers. The person at the stake looked up. Before I saw her face I had a terrible feeling what I was about to see.
Eva!
I was about to shout when a firm hand covered my mouth. Pahvi shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. This group can be hard to control.”
“Eva of the Black Watch,” Shakra intoned from the stage. The vampire mob fell back into their ritualistic chanting, softer now in deference to their master. “Mans de Mort. You have been given the chance at eternal life, and yet you have refused.”
Eva spat on the ground at Shakra’s feet, and a shocked reaction rippled through the crowd. Calls came from different corners of the cave.
“Burn her!”
“Give her the fire!”
“Finish her!”
Shakra raised one hand, and the crowd settled back in the chant.
“It is against our ways to force the eternal gift onto a monster hunter,” Shakra said, speaking to Eva, but her voice carried easily through the cavern. “Sometimes that yields unfavorable results. But if you choose willingly…” Shakra reached out and cradled Eva’s face in her free hand, the torch still in the other. “So much we could do together.” The flaming torch drifted closer and closer to the woodpile. “So much pain you could avoid.”
