Forever Young

by Daniel Pierce

  “Let’s head out,” Tess said. Maybe she was reading my mind, or maybe she was just smart. I didn’t push back on her suggestion either way, and we turned on our heels and followed the incline up and toward the surface.

  Every muscle in my body tensed. We hadn’t met up with any vampires since we’d gone into the tunnels, except the one sentry Tess and I dispatched.

  It didn’t seem right.

  A place this big, with that many comparatively fresh corpses, had to house a huge population of the monsters, but they weren’t anywhere to be found. Where were they hiding? My mouth went dry as I tried to pick up any scents on the dank air, but all I could pick up was the lingering stench of death. With vamps, it was always about death.

  When we got closer to the abandoned shaft, we had our first encounter. I saw them as voids against the warmer walls, three vampires in a lazy arc, their awareness turned away from our approach. I wasn’t sure how Tess knew, but her spike was in her hand in a silver flash.

  I turned the first one into a walking torch without warning. A small part of me considered the fight unfair, but I would lose that memory soon enough, and good riddance. I didn’t need to show compassion for these monsters that killed vulnerable people and tossed their bodies into a pit. I increased the intensity of the flames, so he couldn’t scream and only acknowledged my satisfaction when he crumbled into ash.

  Tess had her hands full with Jeff and one other vampire I didn’t recognize. Jeff might have sounded like an imp when I’d heard him speak earlier, but as a fighter, he was anything but tame. I couldn’t let Tess fight two on one, so I aimed a small, scorching ball of white fire at the head of the fanger I didn’t know. It took the creature’s head off like cauterizing a wound, killing it and rendering it into ash in seconds.

  That gave Tess the opportunity she needed to sink her spike into Jeff’s heart. He looked down, laughed like a wild dog, and crumbled to ash without fanfare.

  Tess scattered the ashes with her boot and looked up at me. “Maybe we should hurry this along?”

  “You’re singing my song.” I grabbed her hand and sprinted toward the exit.

  35

  Our way to the surface was far from clear. We found two sentries, both male, near the room where I’d found the corpse of the young farm worker. One was difficult to kill with fire, but he succumbed to the silver spike right away. The other evaporated in a puff of smoke almost as soon as I turned the flame onto him.

  “Different resistances,” I said as we scattered the ashes.

  “I don’t know why, but the silver always comes through in the end. Then again, the ones who are flammable go up like a torch,” Tess said with a shrug

  We found a knot of vampires halfway up the road, their pose one of cheerful exhaustion from a night’s hunt. I didn’t think they were sentries. One of them still had dried blood trickling from the corner of her mouth; a gobbet of human flesh clung to her hair like a ghastly trophy. I put her to the flame without hesitation, and Tess waded in with her spike. My pulse throbbed in my ears, and my lungs sang with the thrill of killing them. At that moment, my ability went from duty to pleasure.

  I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, killing vampires couldn’t exactly be a negative. On the other hand, I was enjoying combat for the sake of combat, and that hadn’t ever been me. I would worry about that later because now, in the heat of fighting, I had more immediate problems on my mind.

  “This guy’s the Legion Flame!” shrieked a vampire from the group. He tried to dart around us to alert other fangers, but that didn’t work for me. I seared the air between us with an arrow of flame, catching him directly in the back. He staggered forward and fell to the ground, collapsing into a pile of ash.

  I got cocky. Maybe it was the vampire’s words that did it. I had no idea what a Legion Flame was supposed to be, but I figured there was no better time than now to try it. I let loose with all of my anger, rage, and hatred for these creatures.

  Three of them went up in columns of fire. Even Tess looked a little shocked by the heat and savagery of the act.

  In the second of quiet, we ran, racing for the exit as fast as possible in the tunnels. I could see the cool November sunlight peeking through at the entrance, and I knew we were safe. I let my vision go back to normal once we crossed into the surface world, and I turned to look at Tess, grateful for her presence, her humanity.

  She looked at me, and for the first time in days, she laughed. “If you could see yourself.”

  I grimaced. “I’ve got to say, you’re not exactly looking ready for a night on the town.” Her beautiful features were streaked with soot, ash, and blood.

  She waved a hand. “I’ve got baby wipes stashed in my saddle bag. And they just cleaned the showers at the campsite. Come on. Let’s get this vampire funk off us.”

  She’d stashed her motorcycle next to mine, proving I was no expert at hiding things. We rode back awash in our own thoughts, the air cool and fresh around us. Kamila greeted us with a scowl, though there was concern underneath her outward anger. She had coffee ready, the mugs steaming invitingly.

  “Well,” she said, passing out mugs, “I should be pissed, and I am. I thought we’d convinced you to listen and not put yourself at risk. But you survived, so I don’t suppose there’s much reason to lecture you.”

  “Probably not.” Tess stepped into the van to grab shower supplies. “If you’ll let us go get washed up, I promise we’ll tell you everything.” She fixed me with a baleful glare. “And you will tell us everything.”

  I had no problem agreeing to that. Tess and I headed over to the marginally less vile shower house and got as clean as we could in a communal shower that was a glorified mold farm. We walked back to the campsite, where Kamila had built a fire to keep us all warm, but even Daisy seemed mad at me. She blocked me from the fire and turned her back on me. I supposed I’d earned it.

  I hadn’t had much choice, but still.

  Kamila set breakfast down on the picnic table. “Spill,” she ordered. “Now.”

  I nodded. “I overheard some vamps talking even before I went inside. It seems the vampires here in Twin Falls aren’t here full time. Their leader, who they call Dread Blood, has called them here.”

  Kamila widened her eyes. “Their leader’s a Dread Blood?”

  “I guess. I don’t know what that means. Wasn’t that a TV show?”

  “I don’t know. No TV, no cable, remember?” She made a face at me.

  Tess cleared her throat and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “A Dread Blood is a big deal. It’s lucky for us we didn’t meet up with him last night. If we had, we wouldn’t have survived. Vampires come from demons. A Dread Blood is a vampire who was created directly by a demon, not by another vampire. They’re immensely powerful, more than you can understand.”

  “Do the demons… like them?” I scratched my head, trying to wrap my head around the idea. “I mean we come from vampires, but they hate us. Are vampires like Ferin to demons?”

  Kamila blinked at me for a second. Then she turned to Tess. “Did he get hit in the head while you were down there?”

  “Once or twice.” Tess grinned briefly. “Demons don’t like anyone, Jason. They’re demons. They’re creatures of hate and spite. It’s what they do. If you think we can call on demons to make common cause against the vampires, go drink some bourbon until you’ve erased that thought from your memory.”

  “Will do.” I hadn’t been thinking of making a truce with demons, but I wouldn’t have discounted it if I thought it would work. “Anyway, this Dread Blood guy has a history of calling them together for petty bullshit. The vamps don’t think this is a Great War, but they answered his call just the same.”

  “Good to know.” Kamila hummed. “What about the mine itself? Is this their main lair?”

  Tess shook her head. “It’s just a safehouse. That said, it’s a safehouse that can hold a lot of people. I do mean a lot. And they’re feeding on migran
t workers and tossing them into an abandoned shaft when they’re done. So that’s a thing.”

  “Gross.” Kamila shuddered. “What an awful thing to do. I suppose I shouldn’t put it past them, though.”

  I swallowed. “One of them, on our way out, called me something. He said I was something called the Legion Flame. Do you know what that is?”

  Tess looked away. “It’s some weird vampiric thing. Believe it or not, they don’t keep me up to date on all their idiocy. I think the situation we’re dealing with here is dire. If the leader of the vampires is a Dread Blood, we may not be able to win this fight.”

  Kamila narrowed her eyes at Tess. “You don’t think? Do you want to just roll over and die? Let’s be real here. I’m not a big fan of starting fights we can’t win, but we’ve also seen some wild stuff since we started on this ride. A year ago, I’d have agreed with you. Right now, I don’t think winning is guaranteed, but I think it’s a real possibility.

  “First thing we need to do is go back to that safehouse, though. Now, during the day. It’s full of this Dread Blood’s allies, and we definitely won’t stand a chance of winning if we can’t get rid of it.”

  I sat up straighter. “In broad daylight?”

  “Hell yeah, in broad daylight. Vampires are useless in daylight. On a sunny day like today, the sun will do more than half of the work for us. We get in there, set some explosives, and get out.” Kamila shot me a wicked grin that made me regret we weren’t alone.

  “Just like that.” Tess snorted. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “I never said anything about it being easy, sugar.” Kamila winked. “I just said what we needed to do. We just need to get our hands on something that will go boom.”

  Getting our hands on explosives wasn’t hard. Mining in the modern era involved plenty of big booms. All we had to do was sneak into a mining site, take what we needed, and get out. It wasn’t quite as easy as all that, but we did what we had to do, and we did it fast. I seemed to have a knack for felonies. Add that to my list of newfound skills

  We headed back to the safehouse. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, and Kamila was riding with me. We’d left Daisy in the van because it was safest for her, and dogs are naturally inclined to rip the hell out of anything remotely like a vamp.

  I worried about retaliation, but for now, they didn’t seem to know where we were camped. And if we took out enough vamps at the safehouse, the probability of retaliation went down by an order of magnitude. We would kill until there were none left to kill It was brutal but effective

  The mine wasn’t completely silent. Deep in the bowels of the tunnels, no sunlight could reach the vampires, and they were able to function almost as well as they could at night. They seemed a little sluggish, but that could have been wishful thinking on my part. We didn’t encounter a lot of resistance because there were only three of us and our noise profile was small. Small forces were better. Quiet was much better.

  Maybe I’d been right the whole time.

  We did have to fight twice, and our fire powers had just become exponentially more dangerous. We couldn’t afford to blow ourselves up, but we weren’t willing to let ourselves get killed either. Fortunately, we didn’t set anything off as we fought our way back to the surface, although it was a near thing. Fire and explosives are not friends, much like Ferin and fangers.

  At Kamila’s suggestion, we took a prisoner. Tess and I dragged him toward the mine entrance, and he struggled like a son of a bitch until I clubbed him in the skull hard enough that he began to drool. I almost felt sorry for him. Not quite, but almost. He began sweating blood as we got closer to the door, and then Kamila held up her hand.

  “You see how it is, buddy. I can either let these two lovely people have their way with you, or you can look at the sun one last time, but either way, your ass is, as they say, grass. Now, where’s the Dread Blood?”

  The vampire snapped at her, fangs bared, and I sent a little lick of flame into his forehead. He howled. “You want to try that again?” I asked.

  He sagged. “I can’t tell you. He’ll kill me.”

  Tess leaned down and spoke into the vampire’s ear. “I’m not sure you understand this situation.”

  “Flames or sunshine, pal. Come on.” Kamila pretended to look at a watch she didn’t have. “I ain’t got all day, now.”

  The vampire glared at her, eyes red. “There’s an old church downtown, abandoned. The base is there.”

  Kamila threw the door open. “Let ‘er rip.”

  We shoved the howling vampire out into the bright, clear sunshine. His screams were cut off immediately as every part of him turned to ash. For a second, he stood there like a column of charcoal, carved into a statue of a man in raw agony. It was...beautiful.

  Then Kamila hurled a fireball into the mine. We dove out of the way, and the blast of air and gasses coming out of the mine blew a column of undead residue out into the wind, dissolving around us in a disgusting cloud.

  We didn’t wait long. Forty or more vampires poured out of the mine in a hissing, spitting wall of anger. All of them seemed to have been mangled in some way, unable to heal due to the sun striking them in perfect agony as they ascended to the surface.

  “They all started out human, just like us,” Tess said in a quiet voice. “They still have that human instinct to run when something’s burning or something blows up. They never paused to think. They just ran.”

  “I’m surprised they had that much humanity left,” I said as the last of them collapsed into a heap of ash.

  A breeze blew in to wash away the ashes. “You’d be surprised when those little things come out,” Kamila told me. “Come on. We deal with the Dread Blood, and we do it tonight.”

  36

  We found the abandoned church by late afternoon, just as the sun began its last slide over the horizon in a sky that the color of molten hone. The church was plain; even standard if you knew the layout of Catholic churches built in the twentieth century. I knew the layout without seeing the interior. There would be an altar at the front. There would be another, secondary altar toward the right, dedicated to the Virgin. The floors would be linoleum, with the same pink fake-stone hue.

  The pews were long gone, as was anything of value. The walls were covered in graffiti, most of which could be kindly described as blasphemous. Someone had taken a sharpie and drawn a mustache on the statue of the Virgin. I felt a twinge for things that were lost, and then, I felt a new rush of anger.

  A statue of Saint Agatha, to whom the church had once been dedicated, had not fared quite so well. She’d been decapitated, and someone had drawn male genitalia onto her robe.

  I passed over a burned spot on the linoleum floor and made a face. “Linoleum smells awful when it goes up.” I could smell the fire as if it had been yesterday. I could see it, too, and everything happening around it. “Squatters, hiding out here for the winter. The fire didn’t get out of hand, but they had nothing else to keep them warm. Would have made me puke.”

  Kamila side-eyed me. “When did you start being able to see old fires?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even try, really. Maybe when all of this is over, I can start a new career as an arson investigator?” I stood up. “There’s probably a crypt underneath the altar.” Modern churches didn’t use the crypt to store dead people anymore, but churches were still often built with a special room under the altar to store valuables.

  “Let’s go, then.” Tess headed for the stairs. “We’re not going to be able to lure them out this time. If we try to torch the place in broad daylight, they’ll know it was us.”

  “Yeah, probably.” I sighed and followed her toward the stairs in the sacristy.

  We had to take two flights of stairs to get to the crypt. It struck me as odd, but my working knowledge of Catholic churches in Idaho was thin at best. There might be something of merit, an artwork or relic that called back to the heady days of the medieval era. It might need darkness, or dry air,
or any other number of possible requirements, but none of them mattered except whether or not it helped us kills vamps.

  We found a sentry posted at the doorway, here below the surface where no sunlight reached. He’d been a priest at one point, or at least, he wore a priest’s vestments. Tess didn’t hesitate. She stabbed him with her spike and stepped over him, even as his body was still turning to ash. His transformation was so fast, any scream he had died in the grit of his dissolving throat.

  We edged into the crypt, and it became obvious that someone had done a lot of work down here since the crypt was a glorified vault. A narrow corridor had been widened. I could see the difference in the ceiling vault. Someone had put in dim lights, which surprised me. Vampires didn’t need light, which meant there were humans—or an expectation of humans—here in the darkened recesses of the vault.

  The lair looked like a long medieval hall, lined with heavy wooden doors. At the end of the hall was a massive, Gothic-looking chair, big enough to be called a throne. I recognized the man sitting on the throne as soon as I laid eyes on him. Ginger hair, bad 1980s clothes, and hateful eyes. He was just as ugly as the first time I’d seen him.

  If the snarl of loathing on his face was anything to go by, he recognized me too.

  I saw red. Everything, my whole vision, was a sea of blood and rage. “You.” My voice was a rasp. It sounded alien in my ears.

  Then the little bastard laughed. He laughed, so hard he doubled over and almost fell off his ornate, ostentatious throne. “Really? Piss Man?” He covered his mouth with his hand. I could almost feel his rage and hate coming off him in waves, but he kept laughing. “This is just too precious. I never thought I’d create a Ferin. I’ve always been very clean that way. But out of all the cattle I’ve drained, the one who would be tainted would be the one I caught with his dick out, taking a piss?”

  I snarled, wordless in my fury. How dare he laugh? He’d taken everything from me. He’d taken my identity, my home, my very life. And he thought it was funny. I let loose with my flame, setting that ginger hair of his alight.