*
“How does this even make sense?” Siobhan eventually shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth so Jack could hear her.
“He had very rustic tastes!” Jack called back, standing on top of a rock and shading his eyes as he looked around, though there was no sun to speak of yet. “Besides, he’s supposed to be hard to find!”
“This is bullshit!” she hollered back, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
“We’re vampires!” he reminded her, hopping down from the rock, briefly obscured by the dust cloud that rose around him with his landing. “We’re old and fussy and good at bullshit!”
Siobhan coughed against one hand to ineffectually muffle a snort of laughter.
Keeping each other company did at least make the task a bit more bearable on the whole, and they continued shouting back and forth to each other as they searched for the elusive entrance.
They should have kept in mind, perhaps, that shouting back and forth in the middle of nowhere was not the most inconspicuous way of going about things. And they might have considered that perhaps the visitor of the day before had realized they were not regular humans when they had failed to panic at the sight of him, and that perhaps he might have followed them to see what they were doing.
Alas, they had been lulled by the lie of a day that seemed calm, and they were not prepared.
When Barton started barking, pacing back and forth just a few feet away from Siobhan, neither she nor Jack were expecting it. Siobhan shrieked in surprise and smacked her head against the crevice she was peering into, and she heard Jack yelp a few dozen yards away. Something plummeted from the sky and landed with an impact that rattled the ground, dust and stone vibrating across the ground like a cell phone on a coffee table.
There was something strangely robotic about the angels. Siobhan had noticed it before, but it was only then that the words really clicked into place. They were too symmetrical. Too perfect. Even the Vampire Lords had their imperfections; they had once been human. But the angels looked as if they had been made from a mold, repeated over and over so that each one looked as perfect as the last.
Even the wings were too perfect. Each feather was uniform, and the exact same shade as every feather surrounding it. Even standing within a stone’s throw of one, he looked unnatural, as if he had to be fake, no matter how logic told her he was right there and he was real. It was like they had all been created by someone who had a vague idea of how humans were shaped but had never seen one in person.
There was something fundamentally unsettling about looking at an angel, and that was when they weren’t even doing anything. As if a Roman statue had come to life.
And then he spoke, in a voice like falling rocks and crashing tides. “Will you fight back?” he wondered. “If you stand still, I will end you quickly. Should you fight back, then I may lose my temper, and the results would be most unpleasant, even for the brief amount of time you had to experience them.”
Angels were very arrogant, apparently. He looked entirely relaxed as he said it, his four wings lax behind him, as if even facing a pair of vampires didn’t even give him pause.
Then again, maybe he really had no cause to worry. From what she had heard so far, for all Siobhan knew, he really could just slaughter them both as easily as breathing.
“We know what you are doing,” the angel continued, his voice level and uninflected. It sounded as if he was reading a weather report. Not even a particularly interesting weather report. “We have been keeping track of you, and we can’t let you finish.”
Even without any sort of emotion, the melodrama was still pretty impressive.
Slowly, Siobhan looked in Jack’s direction to see him eying the archangel thoughtfully. “If we give you the key to the next Vampire Lord, can we get a head start?” he asked, his words layered with deference. He reached into his pocket and drew out a key, holding it up.
The angel sighed slowly, and then nodded his head once. “Very well. I don’t imagine you’ll get particularly far.”
Jack cocked his arm back and pitched the key into the distance like a fastball. The angel vanished, reappearing where it landed and bending to scoop it up, only to stumble forward a step as Jack tackled him from behind. Siobhan sprinted to his side a moment later, and under both of their weight, they got the angel down onto his knees.
At a gesture from Jack, they both turned and bolted, running in opposite directions. If he had a real plan, Siobhan didn’t know what it was or how he planned on actually doing anything about an archangel, but she was willing to follow his lead for the time being. That was better than her own idea of running away and hoping he didn’t follow. That one had already failed them once.
The archangel vanished, reappearing in front of Siobhan with an impact that shattered the stone outcrop he landed on. Siobhan ground to a halt, ducked under a wing that was aimed at her face as it opened, and bolted back in the direction she had come. Before it could follow her, Jack whipped a rock at the angel’s head. It was harmless, but it got the archangel’s attention focused solely on Jack for a moment.
They played keep-away like that for as long as they could, the archangel’s attention slingshotting between the both of them. On one occasion, he almost caught a handful of Siobhan’s hair, and on another, he very nearly managed to take Jack’s arm off at the elbow.
Watching his patience wind down, it was quickly becoming apparent that they were only going to have so much time before he snapped and simply leveled the entire area.
Jack picked up a flat rock and used it as a shovel to fling a piece of poop from one of the dingoes at the archangel. Of the rather limited amount of insult the archangel had likely had to put up with, having literal dog shit thrown at him was likely not one of those insults.
Jack bolted like a jackrabbit, right down the nearest tunnel.
Like Alice following a rabbit, the outraged archangel followed Jack down into the tunnel, Siobhan following as quickly as she could. She probably wouldn’t be able to do much if Jack got cornered, but she would try, at least.
The thing about angels, regardless of how many wings they had, was that they moved a lot. With each step the archangel took after Jack in the confined tunnel, the walls narrowed, until all four of his wings were pinned against the walls of the tunnel, like a frog tacked to a tray in a middle school science class.
His own looming fate was not appreciably more pleasant than the frog’s.
The archangel tried to beat his wings, only to come to an abrupt halt when he realized he was stuck, feathers being torn loose as the rocks of the narrow cavern ripped at them. He squirmed, less like a being from Heaven then and more like a trapped child.
Jack advanced slowly from in front of him while Siobhan paced closer from behind, one step at a time. “Do you think any angels have learned what it feels like to be ripped apart, like they do with vampires?” she wondered, her voice low but her tone deceptively casual.
Jack made a show of thinking it over as the archangel’s struggle increased. “Probably not,” he decided eventually. “I’ve never heard about it before. And we were awfully lenient with that angel in Japan.”
“I know, right?” Siobhan pouted. “Just a quick snap and it was done, if you ignore that business of ripping one of her wings off.”
The archangel stilled, his struggling ceasing. Instead, he tried reasoning with them. Just going by the look on Jack’s face, Siobhan was willing to bet that none of the angels had lowered themselves to that tactic before.
“If you let me go --”
Jack recovered from his surprise quickly, one hand lashing out to clamp around the angel’s neck, effectively silencing him. “What can you actually promise? You can’t say other angels will leave us alone. You can’t say that attacks will stop. If you want to buy your safety with blatant lies, then you’ve got this coming.”
His grip tightened for a moment, before he released the angel’s neck, instead shifting to look over the archangel’s
shoulder at Siobhan. “Hold him still?” he requested, his tone mild.
Siobhan leaned forward, slipping her arms around the archangel’s middle as Jack grabbed an arm and began to pull, eventually planting a foot on the angel’s chest to give himself better leverage.
When the archangel screamed, it was like an avalanche in slow motion, or boulders falling into the sea. The noise carried on for so long that Siobhan’s head was buzzing afterwards.
By the time they were done, little more than meat remained, as they had rent the angel to pieces. Unsure what they were supposed to do with the pieces afterwards, they simply threw them to the dingoes to fight over once they returned to the surface.
They looked around at the shattered rocks. Two of the piles led down into cave systems, similar to the one they had just come out of. Which meant there were only two options for where the next Vampire Lord could be.
Siobhan closed her eyes, turned in a circle, and pointed. When she opened her eyes again, she was jabbing her finger toward the opening that was farther away. “Let’s check that one first,” she decided.
Too frazzled to argue with the arbitrary choice, Jack fell into step beside her and dropped down after her into the opening.
The cave was unexpectedly beautiful after the first few feet, as it broadened out until there was enough room for them to walk side-by-side with space to spare. The walls and ceilings were coated in small crystals, no bigger than grains of sand, so it looked as if the entire cave system had been coated in diamond dust.
They didn’t find the Lord’s chamber, but the cave was pretty enough that they couldn’t feel exasperated by it.
When they returned to the opening, Barton curled up just outside it, Jack poked his head out first, only to drop back down into the cave. He gave Barton’s collar a tug until the dog reluctantly began to crawl in, and he caught Barton as he dropped through the opening.
“Can you get the tarp out?” he asked, setting Barton down again. “The sun’s coming up.”
Siobhan sighed and pulled the still wrapped tarp out of her bag. “I guess if we’re going to spend fourteen hours stuck in a cave, at least it’s not a bad cave.” She handed the tarp over so Jack could unwrap it and cover the opening.
*
Siobhan took the first nap, curled up on the ground with her head resting on Barton’s shoulder. He breathed evenly beneath her, save for the occasional grumble as Jack talked to him. It was surprisingly easy to sleep there, even when Jack pulled out his phone to get some light.
She could still dream as a vampire, she had discovered pretty quickly after being turned. She wasn’t sure why that had surprised her at first. Probably for the same reason she had been surprised at all of the other ways she was still so similar to a regular human.
Dreams were more vivid, though. Things smelled sharper, looked brighter, sounded harsher, and felt firmer.
She dreamed of a car ride, where the car cruised along like it was gliding on ice. Everything outside the windows blazed past in streamers of light, indistinguishable and soothing in their blurred edges. When she opened the window, the wind rushing past smelled fresh and new like a breeze off a mountain.
She wasn’t sure what the car was leaving behind or where it was going, but she couldn’t wait to get there.
When she woke up, she had to just stare at the ceiling of the cave, glittering in the low light. Even after everything that had happened that evening, her mood was high.
Eventually, she moved over to let Jack take her place, using Barton as a pillow. The dog grumbled and squirmed on the ground, but he settled quickly and dozed off again. Soon enough, Jack was asleep on top of him.
Siobhan pulled her phone out to play solitaire. It was a decent way to pass a couple hours, and the light from her phone bounced off the crystals so that the cave shimmered like she was inside a snow globe.
Now and then, she looked over to Barton and spoke to him, just nonsense murmured in that low, rolling tone that got his tail swaying across the rocks. Things like, “What about you? Are you enjoying your vacation?” or “You don’t care about any of this. You’re just happy as long as someone pets you. Lucky bastard.”
Jack twitched in his sleep now and then. Siobhan wondered if he still dreamed of war and of being rescued, if his subconscious was still circling that point of his life, or if he had moved past that and into better experiences. He seemed pretty relaxed in his sleep, so Siobhan hoped that he had.
By the time he woke up, they still had hours to go. They paced in circles until Jack decided he needed to teach Siobhan how to do the Charleston, and from there, it wasn’t especially surprising when they wound up in a tangled heap on the ground, their legs entwined and their arms around each other as they kissed with exploratory laziness.
It was a good way to pass the time.
*
There was only one crevice left to check. Squirming through the entrance, Siobhan found it anticlimactically drab in comparison to the cave system where they had spent the night. It was still impressive, certainly, as Siobhan could see even from the opening that it broadened out into a maze of stalagmites and stalactites, with something dripping in the distance. But it lacked the awe-inspiring beauty of the cave system.
“Bit of a letdown,” Siobhan observed, looking over her shoulder, where Jack was still peering into the crevice from the outside.
“Maybe the crystal cave is a decoy,” Jack suggested as he shimmied his way through the opening. Immediately, he was shoved out of the way as Barton wiggled his way through with a grumble and popped out of the entrance into the cave proper, sniffing tentatively at the unexpectedly steep downward slope.
“We ready to go?” Siobhan asked, and Jack nodded his head once.
“As ready as we’re going to get.”
Siobhan pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight, glad that she could still do that, even if the majority of the phone’s features were useless. Sniffing cautiously at the stale, dusty air, Barton prowled forward to begin leading them downward.
“What’s this one’s name, anyway?” Siobhan asked eventually, leaning back as she carefully picked her way down the slope. Barton waited impatiently at the bottom, evidently not caring that neither of his companions had gigantic paws to climb with.
“We’re going to wake up Allambee,” Jack replied, and the answer was followed by the sound of sliding gravel as he accidentally slid a couple feet down the slope. He grumbled incoherently as he slapped both palms against either side of the walls to stop himself before he crashed into Siobhan’s back.
“Assuming we don’t die before we get there,” she drawled blandly, glancing over her shoulder at him.
“That would be a bit of a letdown,” he replied, parroting her earlier words back at her. Siobhan didn’t need to look back at him to know he was smirking.
Nonchalantly, she lifted her free hand to flip him off, only to immediately need to latch onto the wall with it as her feet nearly slid out from under her on a damp patch of ground. Karma, apparently, was swift to enact justice and didn’t appreciate crass hand gestures. Unfortunate, but good to know, nonetheless.
It was with a sigh of relief that they joined Barton at the bottom of the slope. The dog yawned widely and stretched out, his front paws reaching forward until his toes spread out. While Siobhan knew that dogs couldn’t actually be sarcastic, she still sort of felt like he was trying to be.
He straightened out again and resumed trotting forward, his nose low to the ground and his ears swiveling every which way. Siobhan wasn’t sure how long they walked, weaving around stalagmites and ducking under stalactites. Now and then, they passed entryways into branching paths, and though Barton ignored them to keep following his chosen path, Siobhan and Jack paused to peer through them regardless, though none of them held the same beauty as the crystal caves.
Barton didn’t follow a straight path, though. It wound and twisted, leading them through branching paths until they came to another slope. Though it
was not quite as steep as the initial slope, it circled like a snake, twirling around a central column, and with each step farther down, it became more and more apparent that the column was not a natural structure, and that the winding path was too smooth to have formed on its own. Perhaps the beginning of the path was natural, but someone had extended it deep beneath the ground.
When at last they got to the bottom of the path, they found themselves in a rounded chamber with at least an inch of standing water on the ground. The walls curved into a circle, and the ceiling above them was a remarkably smooth dome, save for the hole where the column and the path rose up toward the surface. There was no furniture, but Siobhan had come to not expect any. There was, however, a man propped up against one curved wall.
His skin was very nearly the color of a penny, albeit less metallic, and his hair was a tattered mess of black sticking out in every direction around his face and coated in stone dust. He had broad, square features and thick eyebrows, and he could have been anywhere from twenty-five years old to fifty; Siobhan couldn’t tell. By that point, she was fairly sure that ‘ageless’ was just a trait of the Vampire Lords, as eerie and unnerving as it was.
The Vampire's Bond Trilogy: The Complete Vampire Romance Series Page 11
