by J. C. Diem
“Over two thousand years ago, when I was first afflicted with this gift, I kept a journal of my visions.” It took an effort for him to get the words out. He was almost completely drained of vitality. I couldn’t seem to last more than a couple of days without feeding let alone two hundred years. His willpower must be incredible.
“You are the only one who can read it but I fear the consequences if my servants were to view the pages.” He reached out a palsied hand and put it on my knee. My skin crawled but I was too polite to leap of the bed with a cry of revulsion. “You must find the journal on the mountain top and read it,” he continued. “It will tell you what you must do.” He patted my knee and even through the fabric his hand felt dry and papery.
Leaning down, I whispered as quietly as possible. “Shouldn’t you be ordering your guards to, uh, rend me in twain?”
His lips moved in a parody of a smile. “Read the journal. My men will not harm you.” His eyes closed and he subsided back into his coma. Since he hadn’t melted down into a watery stain, I believed he was still unalive. Just how long he could subsist on sheer force of will was a question for another day.
Silence descended then stretched out painfully. Danton broke it first. “What did the Prophet say?” After guarding the cinnamon stick for a couple of millennia, his curiosity about what he’d had to say must have been enormous. He was all but wringing his hands with the need to know.
Sliding off the bed, I dusted off my clothes. Vacuuming and changing the linens didn’t seem to be high on the list of housekeeping chores. Even Luc shifted impatiently when I didn’t answer straight away. I was gathering my thoughts, wondering how much to tell them. But the prophet really hadn’t had all that much to say. “He said Lord Lucentio and I have to climb to the top of the mountain.” Luc gave a brief start at my proper use of his name and title. Hey, I knew when to use discretion. I just ignored the warning signs my brain gave me most of the time. “Apparently, he left something for us up there.” I wasn’t about to tell them the whole story. Not without talking it over with the vampire cop first.
Puzzling over the news, the monk made a decision. “Then you must act quickly before Vincent discovers your plan and sends his servants after you.” Turning to one of the guards, he barked a command in Romanian. I heard it as ‘show them how to reach the surface, quickly’.
At the guard’s curt gesture, Luc and I followed him through a smaller door and down a long, skinny tunnel. Turning off into a doorway, our guide ducked inside what turned out to be a storeroom. Luc ducked in after him. Being shorter, I simply walked inside. Old crates and broken furniture had been stacked in haphazard piles. The guard moved a broken, seven-foot tall wardrobe aside to reveal yet another door. Unlocking it, he waved Luc inside.
A ladder leading up toward the surface far above awaited us. When the guard closed the door behind me, the shaft became completely lightless. Luc started climbing and I was a few rungs behind him. My night vision kicked in but there was nothing to see but ladder and roughly hewn rock. It took us fifteen minutes to climb to the top. As a human, it would have taken a lot longer and I had my doubts I’d have made it. As a vampire, I climbed out into the night air without even breathing hard. Or at all for that matter.
Closing the lid that had cleverly been hidden by bushes, Luc scanned the area to get his bearings. We were three quarters of the way up the mountain and the top still towered over us. Spying a dirt track that would take us up to the summit, he took the lead.
“What did the Prophet say to you?” he asked after we’d been walking for several minutes.
“He asked if I had the holy marks then said I had to climb the mountain to get a journal he wrote a couple of thousand years ago.”
“You could truly understand his ravings?” He slanted me a doubtful look over his shoulder.
“My ears heard gibberish but my brain made sense of it,” I said with a shrug.
Retreating back into silence, Luc pushed his way through foliage that was making a strong attempt to overgrow the path. Branches slapped at me, hitting me in the chest, face and arms. Growing tired of being attacked by plants in Luc’s wake, I dropped back a few feet. After a few seconds I became aware that we were being followed.
“Um, Luc, I think we’re being follo-” was as far as I got before someone jumped on my back. At the high pitched giggle, I knew it was the filthy boy with the cavorting shadow. Thrashing around in a circle, I tried to pry him off but he clung to me like a super strong monkey.
Luc was fighting his own battle with three other vampires. Clearly, he had some kind of martial arts training. He punched and kicked the vampires away like they were extras in a low budget movie. Every time one went down, someone else from the growing crowd would jump to the attack.
Meanwhile, I was still thrashing around with the filthy vampire on my back. He snapped at my face with his fangs, just missing my eyes every time I turned my head to get a look at him. My jumper began to ride up until the cross at my back became exposed. At the burst of heat against my skin, I figured it had finally made contact with the boy.
Shrieking, he leaped off me and danced around in a distressed circle. Shirtless, he wore only stained, torn pants. Prancing around like that, he reminded me of the little tan dog that had almost become my snack about a thousand lifetimes ago. Except the dog hadn’t been wreathed in bright blue flames. A clear imprint of the cross stood out bright red against the stark whiteness of his stomach. Blue flames had sprouted from the imprint and were quickly growing in size and ferocity.
Dropping to the ground, the vamp rolled around in the dirt, trying to put out the fire that was now spreading to his chest and arms. Apart from that first flash of heat, the flames hadn’t even touched me. My shirt wasn’t even singed, I discovered when checked that I still had my weapon.
I wasn’t the only one to watch as the pretty blue flames bathed the kid. He had an audience of many. He burned a lot faster than Silvius had. Maybe because the fire covered his whole body and not just his hands. He also wasn’t vomiting black blood. Was that because I hadn’t stabbed him through the heart with the holy symbol? In seconds, his unsettling screams ceased and he began to melt. Luc stood with one hand clamped around a vampire’s throat and the other poised to punch. All around us, the creatures stared in horror at their fallen comrade. No one seemed to realize that I had set the kid on fire. Time to show them what I can do and watch them tremble in fear!
Pulling the cross free from my waistband, I brandished it. The enemy flinched back in unison, gaping at me in disbelief. Even Luc shied away from the holy object in my hand. “That’s what you get,” I shrieked in triumph. “Maybe you’ll think twice before attacking Mort-,” my words were cut off when an object came whistling through the air and punched through my chest.
A rusty, pitted sword came to a quivering to a stop. It had sliced right through my dead, shrivelled heart. A foot or so of blade stood out from my body. Looking down the hilt-less weapon numbly, my legs gave way and I was suddenly sitting on the ground. Luc howled in fury and began tossing vampires around like a wolf savaging a bunch of kittens.
This is it. I’m about to die. Again. Staring down at the sword, I waited for my flesh to dissolve but nothing happened. It didn’t even hurt all that much. Eventually, I figured out that I wasn’t going to die again so clambered back to my feet. The sword must have missed my dead, shrivelled heart after all.
A thin, scrawny female vampire leaped at me with a witchlike screech. Sidestepping the attack, I grabbed hold of her arm and twirled in a quick circle. With a sickening crack, she went sailing out into the trees, leaving most of her arm behind. White bone gleamed at me through the coarse sleeve of her dress. Dead blood dripped from the stump. My lips wrinkled back from my teeth in disgust at the sight and smell. God, that’s rank!
The male vampire who’d wanted to have a taste of me landed in a crouch a couple of feet away. Snarling and squinting horribly, he began to circle around me in a bent over hunch.
He held a knife in one warty hand down low, ready to spill my guts out onto my shoes. Since I liked my guts right where they were, I lunged forward and speared him through the chest with the exposed bone of the torn off arm. “Suck that, creep!” I crowed and dusted my hands off when he fell on his back, twitching. Picking up the cross, I turned and the foot of sword still sticking out of me clanged loudly against a tree. It vibrated inside my chest unpleasantly for several seconds.
Luc was surrounded by vampires, almost lost from my sight. All held rusty, broken weapons and would be only too happy to insert them into my protector. With a pitiful war cry, I brandished the cross and sprinted forward. No one paid me any attention until I set the first few vampires on fire. Then they were screaming and milling to get away from me. I couldn’t remember ever being this unpopular before. Not even during the mid-year sale in my previous job when the prices somehow got all mixed up and I lost about two thousand bucks worth of sales. My assistant had been responsible but I was the one who got the boot. That was the one and only time I’d ever tried being a supervisor. I’d lasted three whole months before being canned.
“Die, vile creature,” I screamed and pressed the cross against the vulpine female vampire’s head. Instead of catching fire like I expected her to, her head imploded instead. Drenched in black blood and soupy brains, I stumbled backwards and felt the sword punch into a body. Turning my head, I took in the vampire I’d unwittingly spitted. Slumping forward, he dropped the small axe he’d been about to split my skull open with.
“Look out!” Luc cried in warning. I clumsily turned in time to spit a second vampire on the front of my sword. Both were about my height and the pitted metal had found their hearts just fine. They twitched and danced like puppets on strings before becoming dead weight.
With two downed vampires hanging off me like a pair of gigantic Christmas decorations, I was over encumbered and clumsy. Clumsier than usual anyway. Looking around wildly, I searched for more creatures to kill but the area was now empty. Luc was surrounded by the quickly forming moist patches of our dead kin. He’d apparently torn them to pieces with his bare hands. He was even more covered in the black gore of the fallen than I was.
“A little help?” I said and gestured at the corpses slumped on both ends of the sword.
With a grimace of distaste, Luc stepped forward and peeled first one then the other off. He tossed their limp corpses aside like garbage. Hitting the ground, they immediately began the process of dissolving. “Can you do something about this?” I pointed at the sword lodged in my chest. He braced a hand on my shoulder and pulled the metal out in one smooth move.
My knees wobbled at the lancing pain but I didn’t go down. It had hurt way more on the way out than it had on the way in. Peeking inside the ragged slit in my clothes, I saw that I’d been right the first time. The blade had gone directly through my heart. “Huh. Look at that,” I said in wonder. “Shouldn’t I be dead?”
Luc gave me a disturbed glance but had no answer to explain the mystery of why I was still unalive. He sorted through the puddles until he found a sword that was rusted but still intact. “Keep your cross handy,” he advised then took off up the path at a run. I noticed that he still hadn’t answered my question. Since I was an unliving legend, he probably didn’t know why I hadn’t died. Maybe the prophet hadn’t covered this in his sometimes legible ramblings.
Holding my hands up to shield my face, I let the branches slap away at me and tried to keep up with my ooze drenched companion. I wasn’t about to let myself fall behind again. The vamps might get their courage up enough to regroup and make another attempt to attack us.
Wind howled across the top of the mountain, whipping my hair across my face, when we finally emerged from the trail into a clearing. I’d expected a hoard of crazed vampire minions to be waiting for us but the area was deserted. Across the clearing was a spire of rock that I estimated to be seventy feet or so high. A jagged opening didn’t look inviting but it was our fate to enter it.
We approached the cave cautiously. Luc held his sword confidently and I clutched my cross nervously. Anything could be inside that hole; bears, wolves, Sasquatch. I wasn’t schooled up on what kind of wild animals were native to Romania and that was probably a good thing. My imagination could only stretch so far. Besides, weren’t we far more dangerous than any animal could be? Well, Luc was. I’d been more of a liability than of much help during the fracas on the way up the mountain.
Moonlight filtered inside the cave, leaving a silvery imperfect circle of light on the dirt floor. In the centre of the ten foot wide space was a roughly hewn bench seat that had been carved out of rock. A bum shaped groove had been worn in the centre of the seat. A cave wasn’t the kind of place I’d feel the need to visit regularly but maybe that was just me. For all I knew, cave squatting was a favoured vampire past-time.
Circling the seat, I squinted at gibberish that had been carved into the back. Translating the message into English, I hunkered down and examined the dirt.
“What does it say?” Luc asked.
“It says ‘Dig’.” The message, inscribed over two millennia ago, wasn’t exactly profound but at least it was to the point. The last thing we needed was to waste time puzzling over a cryptic message.
Luc dropped to his knees beside me and pushed the heavy stone seat away with one hand. My nails were much stronger now thanks to my transformation to the undead and they cut through the soil easily. Luc dug with stolid determination beside me. His fingers were the first to encounter the wooden box.
Digging it out, he held it up. It was the size of a large envelope and was about two inches thick. The workmanship was pretty good considering nails and glue hadn’t been invented when it had been created. It seemed that the whole thing had been carved out of a single piece of wood. Luc lifted the lid off and we peered in awe at the book inside. The box had been constructed well and no dirt had found its way inside.
Not much larger than a standard paperback novel, the journal was quite thin, we saw when Luc lifted it out briefly. It had been bound in the brown skin of an animal but I didn’t know what type. The workmanship wasn’t professional but it did the job of protecting the book well enough. “We will need to get to a place of safety before you try to read this,” Luc decided.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” I agreed. My curiosity would have to wait. I doubted Vincent would be amenable to us staying beneath the mountain for another night and dawn was on its way.
“Our vehicle will most likely have been rendered useless by now,” Luc mused as he ducked out of the cave.
“What are we going to do?” I hoped he had a contingency plan because, as usual, I had nothing. Back in my old life I’d sold clothes for a living. This situation was so far from my old life and world that I might as well have been in another universe.
“We’re going to run and hope we find somewhere safe before daylight strikes.”
“That’s a really shitty plan,” I muttered to Luc’s back as he darted off into the trees.
We avoided taking the trail this time. Vincent’s minions would be waiting for us, what was left of them. Instead, we careened down the mountainside in the opposite direction from the castle. Luc gracefully leaped over obstacles with ease. I careened into them, fell over them and crawled under them about as gracefully as a cow with three broken legs. Panic drove me and made me into a klutz. Or so I told myself. The real reason was that I was moving too fast to control myself properly.
Fleeing became easier when the ground levelled out. We made better time and put as much distance between ourselves and the mountain as we could. After hours of nonstop running, Luc began angling toward a much smaller hill and I followed him without question. The earth was warming and exhaustion was once again setting in. They were both signs that my lights were about to go out.
Luc ran straight toward the hillside, twisting at the last moment to burst shoulder first through some rotted boards. He slammed into a metal door and rust flaked o
ff it in clouds. Screeching in protest, the door was ripped clean off its hinges, revealing an old mine tunnel.
Stumbling in after Luc, I spied a dark side tunnel with rusty rail tracks leading downwards and made for it. I was five steps into the shaft when I lost consciousness.
·~·
Chapter Seventeen
Snuggling into my cold, dirt mattress, I kept my eyes determinedly shut. Not even fully awake yet, I knew something was wrong. Cold, dirt mattress just didn’t sound right. Neither did the shuffling sound of multiple feet that surrounded me. Here we go again, I thought in resignation and opened my eyes to see what misery the night had in store for me this time.
Vincent, I was unsurprised to see, squatted like an enormous vulture several feet away. He’d changed into a dead black cloak with a deep hood that hid his face so well he almost didn’t seem to have one. Like a turtle coming out of its shell, his pale face emerged from the shadows and he smiled nastily when he saw I was awake. His resemblance to my late maker was uncanny. All that was missing was the network of wrinkles. I followed his pointed look to see we were surrounded by vamps. Some of the lackeys held flaming torches. Considering how well we burned, I thought that was a bad idea.
I noticed almost immediately that Luc was being held captive. Two of the half-naked minions held swords to my companion’s throat. Another held one ready to skewer through his heart. The odds were definitely not in our favour. Luc’s stony expression reflected his agreement with my silent assessment of our situation.
“Have I mentioned just how badly death sucks?” I asked the room in general. I didn’t expect an answer and wasn’t disappointed when I didn’t get one.
“Get up,” Vincent commanded and rose to his feet. The black cloak didn’t suit him, not with his height and pallor. He looked like an overdressed skeleton that someone had brought out early for Halloween.
