by J. C. Diem
Gregor and Igor stepped back, eyeing me warily. “I have the blood of three different vampires in me now. I guess that’s made me stronger,” I said in answer to his first question while wiping thick blood from my chin. My fangs had retracted and my lip had healed like magic. “The holy marks only work if I will them to,” I said in answer to the second query. Turning to Gregor, I pinned him with my stare. A lot had changed since we’d last met and I was no longer the naïve baby vampire he’d known. “Where is Luc?”
Exchanging glances with Igor, Gregor knew he’d have to come clean but he still didn’t want to answer me. Now that he’d seen my strength, maybe he was reluctant to stir my wrath again. I’ll show him what wrath is if he doesn’t answer me within the next five seconds.
It was Igor who had the balls to tell me what I didn’t want to hear. “The Comtesse has him.” He met my stare directly and without flinching away from my instant anger.
“Why haven’t you rescued him?”
“Because he is surrounded by several hundred guards, not to mention the members of the Court,” Gregor said dryly.
Rubbing my face with both hands, I took hold of my anger and boxed it back up. “I’m going to take a shower,” I told all three of them. “When I’m done, you can talk me through what’s been happening while I was gone.”
“Would you like me to scrub your back for you, chérie?” Geordie asked slyly. Igor reached out and slapped him up the back of the head.
“No thanks, but you could find me a change of clothes. This suit seems to have a few holes in it.” I fingered the slashes and rolled my eyes.
Relieved that my anger had abated, Geordie scampered up the stairs ahead of me, rubbing the back of his head at the same time. “You are not much smaller than me. I can loan you some of my clothes.”
“Ok, but I’m not wearing one of your bras,” I said inanely. A high pitched giggle floated out from the room my young looking friend had disappeared into.
Stepping inside the room I’d stayed in the last time I’d been here, I stashed my backpack on the bed. I then waited for Geordie to appear with a change of clothes before entering the bathroom. I’d woken up in bed with him lying beside me once. I didn’t want to step out of the shower and find him holding my towel for me.
“Thanks, Geordie.” He didn’t seem to be inclined to leave on his own so I pointed to the door. “Out.”
Hanging his head, he sent me a doleful glance over his shoulder. I wasn’t falling for his tricks and kept a stern look on my face until he was gone. When his footsteps thumped on the stairs, I locked the door then allowed a small grin to appear. Christ, I think I actually missed him. My friends had always been few and far between since I’d been turned into the undead. You didn’t have any friends when you were alive either, I reminded myself. The three guys downstairs were about the closest thing to friends I’d had in years.
It was heartening to see that at a few other vampires had yet to be called to the First. Maybe we would find more of our kin that hadn’t been possessed yet and talk them into joining our cause. I hoped so, because otherwise the army I’d been promised would consist of just the four of us. It looks like Kokoro was right after all, I won’t have to do this alone. The knowledge was profoundly comforting.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I felt much better after my first shower in over a week. Geordie’s clothes were a couple of inches too long in the legs and sleeves but the jeans and cream jumper were clean. Best of all, they didn’t have any holes in them. Yet, my negative subconscious put in. At the rate you’ve been going through your clothes lately, these won’t last very long.
Hearing voices in the dining room, I joined my comrades. Gregor looked curiously at the backpack that I placed on the seat beside me. The hilts of my swords stood out plainly but we had other matters to discuss and he put aside his questions for now.
“Ok, fill me in on what happened after I was beheaded and cut into eleven pieces,” I said.
Smoothing his mane of dark blonde hair back nervously, Gregor glanced at Igor and received a nod of support. Stoical as ever, the Russian pulled a machete from his belt and checked the edge. Unhappy with what he found, he fished a sharpening stone from a pocket and went to work.
“After you were…dismembered,” Gregor began as delicately as possible, “and your body didn’t break down as expected, the Comtesse ordered the courtiers to disperse. We had no choice but to leave or risk death at the hands of her guards.”
“The bitch did not want anyone to know what happened to your remains,” Igor said in his thick, almost unintelligible accent. He drew the edge of his machete against the sharpening stone once more then deemed it to be done. The stone disappeared back into his pocket and the weapon slid back into his belt.
“We caught one of the guards who was in the throne room that night and tortured him for information,” Geordie said gleefully.
“He was one of the few guards who hadn’t been turned by the Comtesse,” Gregor explained. “We were extraordinarily lucky since ninety per cent of the guards belong to her.”
“You mean she’s their true master?” It didn’t seem possible that the praying mantis had gotten away with such a blatant breach of the rules she herself enforced. Councillors were only supposed to have up to twenty servants each. This meant she had potentially hundreds of vamps at her disposal.
“We strongly suspect that she is,” Igor confirmed.
“Our captive informed us that five guards were ordered to inter your body in a place that only they and the Comtesse knew about,” Gregor said. “When Lucentio heard what the Comtesse had planned for you, he went a little insane.”
“How can you go ‘a little insane’?” I asked, disturbed and strangely touched that Luc seemed to care about me even though he’d chopped my head off.
“He turned into a raving lunatic,” Geordie said baldly and cringed away from Igor’s flat stare. “She should be told the truth,” he whined. “She is Mortis.” A grimy finger in desperate need of a wash pointed at me from across the table. “If anyone can break him free, she can.”
Heaving a sigh that would have taken a lot of practice to accomplish, Igor capitulated. “Our prisoner told us that Lucentio started carving his way through the guards in an attempt to reach your remains.”
“Then the Comtesse ordered him to be still,” Gregor took up the tale. “He obeyed her instantly, which told us that she is most likely his true master.” A frown darkened his brow for a moment before he continued. “He could only stand there and watch as you were gathered up and carried away.”
“How did you find out where I was buried?” Despite how disturbing it was to hear myself being spoken about like I was an inanimate object, I was caught up in the story. I had been inanimate, after all, but not for long.
“The guards who carried you away haven’t been seen since,” Geordie said in a low voice that would have been suitable for a spooky story told around a campfire in the middle of a haunted forest. “At first we thought the Comtesse must have ordered their deaths.”
“Then Igor found a note in his pocket one night,” Gregor said over top of his fingers he’d turned into a mini tent. “On the note was the name of the cemetery you’d been buried in as well as a rough map of where your remains were placed.”
“Do you still have the note?” I was totally captivated by the story now.
Igor reached for his back pocket and brought out a stained, crumpled piece of paper. Opening it, I saw the name of the cemetery I’d been interred in at the top. Beneath it was a body shaped drawing with circles where my bits and pieces had been buried.
“It isn’t well known that Luc and I are acquaintances,” Igor said with a degree of dignity that I hadn’t seen in him before. “We do not run in the same circles.” Dressed in his worn farm clothing with un-brushed, unruly black hair, he was a far cry from the Court dandies. He was made to be a servant and would remain so until his maker was dead and he was freed from his servitude. I
couldn’t imagine Igor as a lord and almost smiled at the idea. Then a strange thought hit me and I did smile.
“What is so amusing, chérie?” Geordie asked, puzzled that I could find any humour in this situation.
“My maker was Silvius and he’s dead.”
“Yes?” Gregor said after a pause.
“Does that now make me a Lady?”
Geordie snorted a laugh as the other pair exchanged glances. “It does,” Igor decided.
“Lady Nat,” Geordie chortled then pouted when Igor kicked his shin. He opened his mouth to voice his next thought and manfully held it in.
He was going to call me ladybug, I thought. I’d mistakenly been called a gnat by several European vampires by now. “Yeah, it is pretty funny,” I said almost wistfully. It was absurd to think that I could be a lady. “So,” I returned to the topic at hand, “the mysterious note turned up in Igor’s pocket. When did that happen?”
“About two weeks after you disappeared,” Gregor said briskly. “We waited for another week, planning how we were going to break you out then headed for the cemetery.” I appreciated their sentiment but I’d already been long gone by then.
“We killed the two guards that were on patrol,” Igor explained. Hah! They were guarding empty graves, the idiots! After the two I’d killed had disappeared, they’d simply replaced them instead of checking whether I was still there or not. Maybe this wasn’t the first time their people had run away. I’d only spent a short time at the Court and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
“Then we followed the map to where your head had been buried,” Gregor took up the story.
“The map gave us landmarks so we’d know where to dig,” Geordie broke in. I glanced at the map and saw a crude drawing of an angel standing near where my head had been buried.
Gregor gave the younger vampire a frown for interrupting him. “When we dug down to your head, the box was already empty.”
“It was also full of hallowed dirt,” Igor said dryly and shook his hand in remembered pain. Whatever wounds he’d sustained had healed months ago but the memory obviously still lingered.
“I’d like to meet whichever of the guards planned this,” I murmured. “He must be on our side.”
“Why do you think that, chérie?” Geordie asked.
“Whoever it was, they knew that holy stuff doesn’t affect me so burying me in hallowed dirt would be a waste of time. In fact, it ended up helping me.”
“How did the dirt help you?” Gregor asked, confused.
Light dawned in Igor’s eyes. “No one rescued you at all. Somehow, you managed to free yourself!”
Geordie went into a French tirade of disbelief and Gregor gaped at me. The knowing look didn’t fade from Igor’s expression and he nodded in satisfaction when I didn’t disagree with his guess.
“Thanks to the dirt and a bobby pin I held onto after killing the fake Mortis, I managed to spring one of my hands free.” At my explanation, I received two stares of bewilderment and one thick eyebrow raised in interest.
“Natalie has attained powers no other vampire has ever possessed before,” Igor told the other two. I hid a smirk at his choice of words. ‘Possessed’ was highly accurate. “She was able to gain control of her dismembered body parts and draw her pieces back together.”
“How can you know this, Igor?” Geordie asked in tones of awe.
“I saw a small tunnel beside the box where her head had been buried that didn’t make sense until now. We were the first to dig down to the box since it had been buried but the lock had been broken and she was missing.” Igor was in full Sherlock Holmes mode now. “It looked to me like something had burrowed its way to the box underground but I had no explanation for what that creature might have been.”
“I guess the larger tunnel I made so I could drag my head away must have collapsed,” I said dryly.
Geordie made a gagging sound when it finally dawned on him what we were talking about. “You mean your hand dug its way through the ground all by itself?”
“I know,” I commiserated with his sick look. “It grossed me out at first, too.” I wasn’t about to admit that I’d shrieked like a scared little girl when my hands had at last broken into the box where my head was installed and I’d gotten a look at them. If I’d ever come close to losing my mind, it had been in that moment.
“To cut a long story short, I broke all of my body parts free and gathered them together. Then my body magically reassembled itself like it was a really big jigsaw puzzle.” Geordie made a gagging sound again but was unable to vomit up his last meal. Our bodies didn’t work the same way as they had when they’d still been human.
“What happened to you then?” Gregor asked. He was hiding how badly he was rattled by my story but not very well. “You’ve been missing for almost five months.”
How time flies when you’ve travelled halfway across the world to learn how to fight. “I went to visit the Japanese vampires,” I said airily.
Igor was speechless for a second. “Didn’t they try to kill you on sight?”
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “But I eventually managed to talk them around.”
Excitement sparkled in Geordie’s mostly dark eyes. “What happened?”
“It might gross you out,” I warned him.
He waved off my warning. “Nothing could be as bad as what happened to you in the cemetery.”
He might rethink that assumption once I fill him in on the details. “Ok, you asked for it.” I summed up my arrival on the island and the reception I’d received. “Then they cut off my head and threw me into the pit of death,” I finished up.
“What happened next?” Gregor asked. He wasn’t the only one sitting on the edge of his seat.
“How deep was the pit?” Geordie queried, bouncing up and down on his chair.
“Did you manage to climb out?” Igor demanded.
“The pit was about eighty feet deep and the sides were too smooth to climb,” I said in response to both questions. “My only chance of survival was to go down.”
“Back into the earth,” Gregor mused thoughtfully.
“It took me hours to smash through the rock and dig a tunnel.”
“But you made it out before the sun rose,” Geordie was almost pleading with me and was crestfallen when I shook my head.
“You mean you were still in the pit when dawn arrived?” Igor said.
“Half in,” I corrected him.
Gregor looked ill, as if he had some idea of the hell I had gone through. Unless he’d experienced the excruciating pain for himself, he couldn’t really have a clue. “What happened when the sun filled the pit, Natalie?”
“I began to melt,” I said simply. Igor reached over and patted Geordie on the shoulder when he sank his face into his hands. Gregor’s expression was partly horrified and partly pitying. “Everything from the waist down boiled away until there were just bones left,” I said glumly in remembered agony. Geordie gave a small moan and began sobbing tearlessly.
“But you were able to regenerate,” Igor said as he continued to console his young helper.
“Yeah,” I agreed. If I hadn’t, my pants would be a lot looser right now. “But I wouldn’t want to go through that agony again.” I shuddered and waited for Geordie to regain control before continuing on with my tale. I told them about meeting the emperor and convincing him to allow me to learn their way of fighting. Then I told them about the bargain I’d made that had resulted in cleansing the Japanese vampire nation of their damned.
“How many?” Gregor asked sharply. “How many possessed were there out of five hundred vampires?”
“Three hundred.” He wasn’t happy with my answer and closed his eyes.
“Over half,” Igor said in tones of alarm.
Geordie was clueless at the implications. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means that the same fate most likely awaits the European vampire nation,” Gregor answered him grimly.
“It gets worse,” I warned them. “The First is making his move for world domination.”
“What do you mean?” Igor asked. “The First is just a myth.”
“He’s real, Igor. The thing that infected him and turned him into a vampire was a very powerful alien. Our dear old Dad made a deal to give the human ‘everlasting life’. What he neglected to mention was that his diseased blood would one day turn the vampire into a replica of himself. He also didn’t bother to mention that all vampires would be turned into things that look like imps from hell.”
“And this process begins with our shadows possessing us?” Gregor asked doubtfully. On some level he believed something weird was going on with his kin. The reception they’d given me proved that. But he wasn’t positive that I wasn’t just a raving madwoman.
It was time for show and tell.
Standing, I moved to the wall so my shadows stook out sharply. Gregor was the first to see it. He blanched and clutched the table. Igor saw it next and shoved his chair back, standing and moving into a fighting stance. Geordie stared at my shadow, squinted, then his eyes went wide. “Why do you have three shadows, Natalie?” His voice was high and almost girly.
“Because she has been infected with the blood of three different vampires,” Gregor deduced correctly.
“The Japanese vamps also have a prophet. She foresaw our Father’s plan tens of thousands of years ago and carved it into the rock beneath the mountain. He gave his blood to a human, turning him into the first vampire. The human didn’t know that the alien’s plan was for his blood to slowly change his shadow into a sentient being. Eventually, the shadow gained possession of the First. Over time, he changed even further. As far as I can tell, he’s a replica of our Father and is now a creature of flesh and blood again.”
“How do you know this?” Igor asked gruffly, pulling his chair back in to the table.
