Death Beckons (Mortis Vampire Series, #1)

by J. C. Diem

  Luc handed over a credit card to the guy behind the counter and nabbed us two seats on the flight to France. The card surprised me even after having seen him hotwire the truck. He was very progressive for someone who had died not long after the dark ages had happened. If I were to live for seven hundred years, what would I see? A list flew through my head; hover cars, teleportation instead of airplanes, telepathy instead of telephones, instant meals in pill form. Again, my imagination stumped me. I need to read more sci-fi books. Then again, why bother to read them when I could potentially live to see mankind’s most farfetched ideas come to life?

  Leaving the desk with our tickets in hand, Luc’s coat caught momentarily and flashed open. A young woman passing by saw the sword. Her mouth opened to scream and she made the mistake of glancing up at Luc’s face. He bamboozled her with his vampire magic and leaned down as he passed. “You didn’t see anything troubling,” he whispered silkily into her ear.

  “No,” she agreed in a wooden voice, “I saw nothing at all.” She continued on without raising the alarm.

  “Neat,” I murmured, impressed again by how good my new and only friend was at being a vampire. Maybe I’d be that smooth one day. Don’t kid yourself, my subconscious scoffed. It clearly knew me better than I did.

  It was my turn to use my strange powers of allure at the x-ray machines. I might not be smooth like Luc but I was able to capture the eye of the guard easily enough. While I had the unfortunate sap under my spell, Luc went into action. He quickly removed his coat and hid the blade in the folds before placing it on the conveyor belt. I took my time, earning grumbles from the people in line behind me. It was hard to keep my eyes on the guard’s and to strip off my shoes at the same time but I managed it without falling over.

  Luc made it through the metal detector and retrieved his coat and sword without drawing attention. I released the guard’s gaze with relief and put my shoes, cross and the prophet’s journal in a plastic tray. It took practice to bamboozle people for more than a few seconds at a time.

  “Finally!” An elderly man in the line behind me muttered in a foreign language I couldn’t place. I rolled my eyes but refrained from saying anything childish in return.

  Hurrying through the metal detector, I rescued my belongings and quickly reshod myself. My cross received a grimace from Luc as I stuffed it back into my pants and out of sight.

  We made the flight just as they were giving the final boarding call. Again we were separated during the trip. Luc took the window seat this time. I’d have liked to have seen him try to explain away the sword if he’d been in my seat. Was it even possible to hypnotise a bunch of people at once?

  This time I was trapped in between two people in the middle section of the plane. On my right was a woman about my age. She gave me a quick smile then pulled a book from her handbag. On my left was a teenage boy. His look was surly and lingered on my chest. My cool stare had him flushing and turning away, pretending he hadn’t been caught staring at my boobs.

  A few minutes after the plane took off, I gingerly opened the journal and began reading through it again. I caught the woman to my right staring in open mouthed fascination at one of the illustrated pages. It was a picture of me slaying a bunch of grovelling vampires. Luckily, the Mortis in the pictures really did look nothing like me. Angling the book away from my fellow passenger and into the light more, I noticed something I’d missed last night. The shadows cringing on the ground in the pictures looked different from their masters. So it wasn’t just my imagination. The Prophet saw it, too. But what did it mean? I had no answer for that one and the prophet had relapsed back into his coma so I could hardly go back and ask him.

  Again, our flight was over six hours long but there were no delays this time and we landed well before dawn. I waited for Luc to reach my row before squeezing into the line behind him. He kept his hand on the pommel of the sword to stop it catching on the seats or from banging into anyone’s legs.

  We made it through customs with practiced ease and stood indecisively off to the side out of the flow of foot traffic.

  “I guess the guards aren’t waiting for us this time,” I said after a couple of minutes of waiting.

  “It would appear not,” was Luc’s disturbed answer. He might be fairly progressive for the anciently undead but he didn’t seem to have a mobile phone. He motioned me to follow and headed for a bank of pay phones. Dialling a number, his expression turned dark when the phone rang out.

  “Something is wrong,” he said after hanging up. “No one is answering the phone.”

  “I thought the Comtesse didn’t like phones.” I almost called her the praying mantis again but you never knew who was watching or listening so quenched the urge. Great, now I’m becoming paranoid. Hadn’t I heard somewhere that you weren’t paranoid if people really were watching you?

  “While the Comtesse does not approve, she understands that it is a useful tool. A telephone was installed several decades ago and someone always monitors it.”

  “So, it’s a bad sign that no one is monitoring it right now, huh?” My question was obvious and didn’t require an answer. Our eyes met and we came to the same conclusion. The impostor me must have made a trip to the Court and not just for a friendly cup of tea. I wasn’t entirely unhappy at the thought of hordes of vampires being slaughtered like cattle. Practically speaking, it just meant less vamps for me to take down later on.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked. As I’d suspected, he already had a plan in mind.

  “I must see if there are any survivors.” I’d almost forgotten for a moment there that Lord Lucentio was the vampire equivalent of a cop. Of course he’d need to investigate what had happened. It was his duty and obligation. Now, if I could just wait somewhere safe while he went about his investigating, I’d be much happier.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? What if the impersonator is still there?”

  “Then,” he said after a short pause, “you shall battle as the Prophet predicted.”

  “Great,” I muttered without enthusiasm as he headed for the rental car desk. I might be the favourite for the battle ahead but that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it. I especially wasn’t looking forward to what the journal said would happen after I slaughtered my way through the bulk of vampires in the world.

  “We should feed and find a place to hide during daylight hours,” Luc decided.

  “Good idea.” Any plan that would prolong the moment I had to face my nemesis had to be a good one.

  “I’ll meet you at the rental car desk in twenty minutes,” he said, already turning away to find his victim.

  Scanning the airport, I was frozen with indecision. I only had a short time to find a meal and I had no idea where to start. Then I spotted a likely victim and knew how a lion felt when picking a vulnerable calf out of a herd of water buffalo. A cleaner was heading for a maintenance closet after a hard night of work to stash his tools away. Pushing a plastic trolley full of cleaning products, his attention was on the floor and his steps were weary. A peek at his face indicated he was half asleep.

  Glancing around casually to make sure I was unobserved, I closed in on the target. He had the trolley most of the way into the closet when I pounced. Pushing him inside, I pulled the door shut after me.

  “What’s going on?” he asked in French. It was completely lightless inside the small room.

  “Sorry,” I said as he fumbled for the light switch, “I thought this was the bathroom.” I had no idea if he could understand me or not but it didn’t matter once the light bloomed. As soon as it came on, my eyes caught his and he was lost.

  My nose was clogged with the overpowering smells of cleaning products but that didn’t deter me from biting into his neck. The taste of blood drowned out the scent of harsh bleach and lemon cleanser. The cleaner sank to the floor wearing a happy smile when I was done with him.

  Opening the door cautiously, I made sure the coast was clear before switching off th
e light and pulling the door closed. My watch said I still had ten minutes left as I sauntered towards the rental car desk. My self-satisfied smile turned into a scowl when I found Luc already leaning against the counter, waiting for me.

  “That must have been a quick snack,” he said with a gleam in his dark eyes.

  “I’ve always been partial to fast food,” I said with a casual shrug.

  Leaning over, he brushed his thumb over my bottom lip then brought it to his mouth and delicately licked it clean. “You missed a bit,” he said with a smile.

  Mesmerized by his charm like a defenceless human, it took the pointed throat clearing of the rental car woman to snap me out of it. Luc smirked then turned to take the keys.

  “Where are we going?” I asked when we were nosing out of the airport grounds.

  “To a safe house.”

  “Are you sure it’s still safe?” My query was dubious considering the lack of response he’d had from the mansion.

  He inclined his head. “Yes. People I trust have already taken up residence in the house.” So, he’d had time to find a meal and to make another call before I’d met him back at the rental car desk. Centuries of practice must make perfect. I didn’t bother to ask who we would be meeting at the safe house. If Luc trusted them then I’d just have to trust them, too. He’d managed to keep me unalive this long, hadn’t he? My insidious subconscious tried to bring up the fact that Luc would also be the one to end my life but I ignored it. There was no use dwelling on something that I couldn’t change. My demise had been prophesized and that was the end of it. Really? You’re just going to give up without a fight? The thought was too loud to ignore successfully this time.

  We drove through dark countryside in the general direction of the Court mansion but pulled up several kilometres short. The narrow road we turned onto took us to a small country town. As we drove through it, I wondered how many of these unsuspecting townsfolk had served as vampire chow over the past few centuries.

  Our safe house turned out to be a rustic old farmhouse. Two levels high, it was made of a combination of brick and wood. Smoke flowed from its four chimneys, a sure sign it was a vampire abode. It could be the middle of summer and the fires would probably still be lit.

  Luc pulled into a four car garage with a dirt floor that had only one other car in it. The vehicle was black and strangely familiar. I saw why when a door leading to the house opened. Igor, who had chauffeured us from the airport to the mansion and back, nodded curtly at me. He and Luc immediately began exchanging quiet conversation. I followed behind them as they entered the house.

  I heard every word of their conversation and translated it without hassle. Apparently, my impersonator had burst into the Court mansion two nights ago. She had cut a swathe through several guards before being surrounded. The Comtesse and other Councillors had been whisked away by more guards who had apparently been prepared for a quick escape.

  Maybe the impostor wasn’t as skilled as I’d thought if she’d already been captured. Igor shattered my illusions by going on to say that she had then struck down twenty guards. Naturally, the rest had fled before she could skewer them with her weapon of choice, a spear. She had disappeared into the night and no one had any idea where she’d gone.

  “Does she bear the signs?” Luc asked quietly. Igor paused with his hand on a door leading deeper into the farmhouse. His answer was a shrug. He replied that he had been outside the whole time. He’d heard this second or third hand from survivors.

  “But,” he said, “I heard from a reliable source that she does have some strange marks on her hands.”

  Sharing a disturbed look, Luc and I followed him through the door.

  ·~·

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was late and the men decided to postpone any further conversation until we rose for the night. “The bedrooms are upstairs,” Igor said in English with the thickest accent I’d ever heard. It would have been easier to translate his words from Russian, or whatever nationality he was, in my head.

  Luc nodded, he’d been there before. The directions were for me. I smiled my thanks and trailed up a staircase after my companion. The room I chose was small with only a double bed that was piled high with blankets. After a quick shower in the tiny bathroom down the hall, I stripped down to my t-shirt and climbed between the sheets. Exhaustion pulled me down into oblivion.

  Opening my eyes just after the sun went down, I started back when I saw a familiar face a few inches away from mine. It wasn’t a face I expected or particularly wanted to see first thing after waking up. My only consolation was that he lay on top of the blankets rather than beneath them.

  “Hello, chérie,” Geordie murmured. His hand was under the blankets and on my butt He squeezed to test the muscle tone. “Would you care to share your flesh hunger with me?” At his sly smile, I planted a hand on his face and shoved with all my might.

  Cartwheeling through the air, he hit the wall and slid to his face on the floor. “I’ll take that as a no,” he mumbled into the carpet. Sitting up, I pulled the sheet up to my chin, amazed at my own strength. I was ready to launch him through the air again if he came near me.

  Luc burst through the door, sword in hand. He took in the situation and rolled his eyes when he spotted Geordie climbing to his feet. With a fatalistic shrug, the boy ambled out, straightening his clothes with quiet dignity. “Perhaps some other time,” he said with a grin. A faint impression of his body had been stamped into the wall. If he’d been human, he’d have been a mess of broken bones and internal injuries.

  “Someone should neuter that kid,” I said as he disappeared from the room.

  “Geordie is over two hundred years old,” Luc told me. “He has not been a child in a very long time.”

  As far as I was concerned, he’d always be a kid to me. Now Luc, he was definitely a man. There was nothing boyish about him. I drank in his leanly muscled form as he stalked out the door. I wondered if I would be able to jump his bones a few more times before he killed me.

  Dressing, I left the bedroom to seek the others out. I passed a couple more bedrooms before finding the stairs. At the bottom, I followed voices into a dining room. It was spacious with heavy oak furniture on display. A worn rug in patterns of red and royal blue covered the floor beneath the large dining table. There were enough seats for a dozen people but only Igor, Geordie and Luc currently sat around it. They were deep in discussion about our situation.

  While the menfolk spoke boring strategy, I toured through the house. Floral wallpaper in shades of light yellow and peach predominated. It was very girly and didn’t match the picture of a vampire safe house that I’d conjured up. I’d been expecting a dank cave somewhere deep underground with heavy metal doors for fortification. The only indication anyone allergic to sunlight lived here was the shutters on all of the windows. Heavy curtains, also in floral patterns, could be drawn across the shutters. No stray rays of sunlight were going to penetrate this house. It was weird how hyper alert I was about windows and curtains now.

  Vampires didn’t eat yet the kitchen was fully stocked with modern appliances. The fridge and shelves were empty so the appliances were just for show. I didn’t find any doors to a hidden cellar or hear the cries of kidnapped humans who would provide us with meals.

  Searching the bedrooms, I found a clean white t-shirt and red jumper that were several sizes too big for me. My own jeans and underwear would have to do for now. Borrowing a large brown leather handbag that had been left behind by someone with horrible taste, I stuffed my old clothes inside. Backtracking to my bedroom, I fished the journal out from beneath the mattress and hid it beneath the clothing.

  I ambled back into the dining room just as the men were pushing their chairs back. A course of action must have been agreed upon. I didn’t bother to ask where we were going. I was just supposed to be Luc’s servant, after all. My plan was to follow along meekly and to keep my mouth shut until I had to step up and duke it out with the imposter. />
  Leaving the rental car behind, we climbed into Igor’s black car. Geordie was silent beside me in the back, prudently leaving any wisecracks unspoken. After a few minutes of quiet, I realized everyone in the car was frightened. Especially me.

  All three men, and I hesitated to put Geordie in that category despite his longevity, had brought weapons along. Igor had a nasty looking curved dagger about the length of his forearm. Geordie had a meat cleaver clutched in his slightly trembling hand. Luc had his trusty sword. As far as two people in the car knew, I was weapon-less. I was banking on the cross stuffed down the back of my pants and the imprints on my hands being a surprise to any enemies we encountered. The longer I managed to hide them, the longer I would remain insignificant.

  When we arrived at the mansion, no lights shone through the lower, unshuttered windows and I didn’t think that was because the drapes were drawn. I couldn’t hear any sounds of voices or movement. The place was empty of the living dead.

  We searched the ground floor first, staying in pairs. Igor grabbed hold of Geordie before he could trail after me and dragged the grumbling boy off to the east wing. In room after room, all Luc and I found were a few stains on the ground and discarded clothing that had once been our kin. Furniture was broken or knocked over and the floor was scuffed from the battle.

  Meeting Igor and Geordie back at the stairs, we headed up to the second floor. I half expected a tumbleweed to roll across the ballroom floor when I saw the desolate starkness. Damp patches and empty clothing, the remains of fallen vampire guards, marked the polished wooden floor. I tried to avoid them but it was impossible, there were too many. My sneakers started making sucking noises from the goo sticking to their bottoms. Geordie walked on his toes and made disgusted faces at the sounds his cheap tennis shoes made.