Debra Phoenix flashed a sheepish smile as she sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t have anyone to talk to or be with, so I usually get ready for bed as soon as I get home from work.”
And the guilt trip begins, Jerusa thought.
“Why don’t you get a hobby? Sewing club. Bowling. Anything is better than just hanging around the house all night. You need to get out and make some friends.”
Debra pursed her lips as though Jerusa’s advice was sour to the taste. “I’m too old to make friends. Besides, no one wants to hang around an old, crazy woman like me. I could get some cats, though. That would be nice. There’s a lot more room now that you’ve left me.”
Jerusa suppressed a deep sigh. It was an act, all of it. The frazzled expressions, the lonely spinster routine, even the weight loss was just a conscious act to seem more lost without Jerusa around to take care of her.
“Mom, you can’t be like this,” Jerusa said as soft as she could. “I’m not moving back in.” Her mother’s eyes became slits. “I’m just saying, you need to take care of yourself. You spent your whole life taking care of me, but I’m okay now. I can take care of myself.”
“I did just take care of you.” That spiteful edge started to creep into her mother’s voice. “For eighteen years I gave you everything I had. Sacrificed everything. My marriage. My life.”
“Don’t put that on me. I understand what you gave up for me and I’m thankful, but you can’t expect me to shut down my life and lock myself away with you here.”
“No, but you don’t have to abandon me, either.”
Jerusa covered her eyes with her hands. “I’m not abandoning you.”
Her mother pushed away from the table and went to the sink to finish hand-washing some pots. “What do you want to talk to me about?”
Her wall was up. Anything short of Jerusa begging to move back in would not be welcomed.
Jerusa swallowed hard.
“I’m going away for a while.”
The words fell like a hammer’s blow. Debra stood motionless for a moment, as though she couldn’t quite process what she had heard. Jerusa considered repeating herself, but before she could, her mother slammed the pot on the counter with a thunderous clang.
“Not abandoning me, huh? What a nice little liar you’ve become.”
“Don’t be that way.”
She turned around. “Is it that boy?”
“Thad?”
Her mother nodded. “Yeah, him. You’ve been different ever since you met him.”
“Don’t bring him into this.”
“Are you running away with him?”
“We’re not running away.”
Her mother pointed an accusatory finger at her. “You are running off with him. What? Are you getting married or something?”
Jerusa’s cheeks blushed hot. “No, we’re not getting married.”
Alicia and Foster appeared in the room, one on either side of Debra. Alicia crossed her arms and rolled her eyes as she always did. Foster, who in life, had only heard the stories Jerusa had told him, seemed aghast by the actual woman of the tales.
“So, where are you going?”
Jerusa hesitated, considering whether she should lie or not. Her mother was on the verge of a full tilt tantrum. Jerusa wanted to tell her the truth, all of it, but Shufah was right. Her mother would never be able to process the whole story. Either she’d think it was some cruel jape or she’d go mad with the knowledge that the world wasn’t flat.
“I’m going to Rome,” Jerusa said, just above a whisper. She closed her eyes and awaited the explosion.
But it didn’t come.
She opened her eyes. Across the room Debra Phoenix stood as stiff as a tree, her face a twisted scowl of rage. “Get out,” she said and Jerusa nearly flinched at the venom in her voice.
“Mom,” she implored.
“Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that again. Go on. Leave. Run off with your boyfriend and leave me here to die.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
Her mother’s lips pulled back from her teeth like a snarling dog. “You’re sick. Have you looked in the mirror? You look terrible, all pale. You’ve not been taking your rejection medicine. Don’t deny it. I’ve checked on it. And now you want to run off to Rome. What for? To die? Well, I won’t let you. I’ll have you committed if I have to.”
She turned side to side, mumbling and raving to herself. Jerusa rushed to her side, a little too quickly judging from Debra’s panicked expression. She looked into Jerusa’s face and gasped. It was then that Jerusa noticed the tiny wet trickles tickling her cheeks.
Jerusa wiped her face and looked down upon the blood-tears glistening on her fingertips before they reabsorbed into her skin. She hadn’t realized that she had been crying. She looked into her mother’s frightened face, searching for a way to explain this away.
Debra’s eyes fluttered down to Jerusa’s mouth, to her fangs. Her ragged breath seized in her chest. She reached behind her, grabbing a steak knife from the sink full of dirty dishes and held it high in front of her face with both hands.
“Who are you? What’s going on? What have you done to my daughter?” Her hands trembled almost as much as her voice.
“Mom, it’s me. Calm down. I can explain this, but not until you relax.”
Jerusa took a slow step forward. Her mother slashed at her with the knife. Jerusa avoided the knife with ease, but her speed only rattled her mother more. The front door opened and then closed. Jerusa glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see Taos and Shufah coming to her aid.
But the two forms darkening the doorway were not her friends. Jerusa had seen these men earlier in the day, in the security monitors at home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Silvanus sat inside the lion’s den. The three female vampires—sometimes called the Erinyes, sometimes the Furies—had led him down into the deepest part of the cavern where the piercing rays of the sun could not find them. The lions had let them pass without so much as a sideways glance, as though the four of them were part of the pride.
The Erinyes started a small fire with dried brush and a few chips of coal. The fire flashed to life from nowhere. At least one of the three possessed the gift of fire. Silvanus suspected it was the woman with the olive skin and white hair. She regarded him with a look of curiosity, as one who has found something in the open that was previously thought lost.
The black vampire and the red-headed vampire sat on either side of her, their legs crossed, close enough that their knees touched the one beside them. Flickering shadows waged a silent and bloody war upon their faces. The three sat motionless, awaiting him to speak.
“Can you help me?”
“What manner of help do you seek?” the red-headed vampire asked. So far she was the only one of the three to speak.
“I seek knowledge.”
“What would you like to know?”
“What am I?”
The red-head and the black vampire looked toward the olive-skinned vampire, though their eyes remained closed. They were communicating, but Silvanus couldn’t hear their thoughts.
“You are a Divine Vampire,” the red-head said. “One Who Has Regained the Sun. Not a drinker of blood, as we are, but a drinker of life just the same. Shufah should have told you this.”
“She did. But how did I become this? Why am I different from you? I gave a dying girl my blood to save her. I had hoped she would be like me, but—”
“She became a blood drinker?”
“Yes. I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry. The secrets of how a blood drinker becomes divine is lost or maybe just hidden.”
“Hidden by whom?”
“The other Divines.”
Silvanus’s spirit leapt within him. “So there are others? I’m not alone?”
“There are others. Or there were others. We haven’t come across a Divine in centuries.”
“How do I find the others?”
“We don’t know.”
Silvanus stared down into the tiny flames. “There must be a way.”
“When the savage wars threatened extinction for mortal and immortal alike, the Divines appeared like moonlight through the clouds. We don’t know where they came from or where they vanished to.”
Silvanus sat in silence for a long time. Why had Shufah sent him to find these women if they didn’t have any of the answers he needed. Maybe he was asking the wrong questions.
“Who are you?”
“We are the Furies. Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?”
Silvanus sighed. This was going nowhere. “Who were you before Shufah named you the Furies?”
“We no longer remember our true names. A torment we suppose you understand. But Shufah, our friend, named us after the Erinyes on the day she saved us from the wrath of the Stewards.” She gestured toward the black vampire. “This is Megaera.” Then to the olive-skinned vampire. “This is Alecto. And I am Tisiphone. What name do you take?”
“I am called Silvanus.”
“Welcome Silvanus the Divine,” Tisiphone said. “We hope we are well met. We are honored to be in the presence of one such as you.”
He felt humbled and unworthy of their awe. “Why do you alone speak while the others remain silent?” he asked Tisiphone, but he couldn’t help but glance at Alecto. Her eyes were so expressive and he once again felt as though he were in the presence of one, instead of three. “And why do you alone open your eyes, Alecto?”
“I speak for us because I am the only one that can,” Tisiphone said. Silvanus furrowed his brow and she smiled as though she could see his confusion. “The Stewards have many cruel punishments in their arsenal. They took my eyes and my ears, but left my tongue so that they could hear my cries.” She opened her eyelids revealing empty voids beyond. She pulled her thick red hair back from the side of her face showing him the puckered scars where the Stewards had dug out her ears.
Silvanus wanted to turn away from the horror, but he kept his eyes fastened on her.
“The Stewards stole Megaera’s eyes and tongue, leaving her with ears to hear the screams of those she loves,” Tisiphone said in a flat tone.
“And from you, Alecto, they took your ears and your tongue?” Silvanus asked.
The olive-skinned beauty nodded.
“But if you have no eyes or ears, how is it that you seem to see and hear me, Tisiphone?”
“Because I can,” she answered. “Megaera is our ears. Alecto is our eyes. And I am our tongue. We long ago ceased to be three. Now, we are only one.”
“Is that why you feed from one another?”
Tisiphone and Megaera both made startled faces, but Alecto smiled. “You Divines hide rather well,” Tisiphone said. “No wonder you are impossible to find. Yes, that is why we feed from each other, daily, in fact. We share one blood, one mind, one purpose. Alone, we would be doomed, easy prey for the Stewards and their little army of Hunters.”
“Why did the Stewards do this to you? What could you have done to deserve such torment?”
Tisiphone turned her face toward Alecto, silently asking permission to speak. Alecto fastened her unblinking eyes on Silvanus for a long moment. He could feel the weight of her scrutiny, the power of her mistrust. She gave a subtle nod of consent, then looked into the tiny fire as though through its flames she could see the distant past.
Tisiphone turned back to Silvanus. “There have been many wars between blood drinking vampires and flesh eating savages throughout the ages. Many have been recorded by humans as plagues or pandemics. The worst of these battles hit in the early 1300s. The humans called it the Black Death. We called it the Great Savage War.”
“Shufah told me of this,” Silvanus said.
“At that time, there was no rule over the vampire nation, not like today. The eldest of the blood drinkers had formed the Stewards of Life centuries before, but had yet to establish any true authority. Many careless vampires fed without killing, leaving their victims infected. There were many things that a human could die from in those days, but the onslaught of Bubonic Plague created countless weak fledglings that were born of the bite.”
Tisiphone paused a moment, lost in her thoughts.
“It didn’t take much to tip the scales,” she continued. “Imagine hundreds of fledglings, born of the bite, weak, confused, starving. Make no mistake, humans are not helpless, especially in large numbers.”
“The humans tried to kill the fledglings and the fledglings turned savage.”
A somber and pained look passed over the three women’s faces. “By the time we realized what was happening and gathered our numbers for battle,” Tisiphone said, “it was too late. One savage can create hundreds more within a week.”
“I thought that a savage devoured the brain of its victim. Those without brains didn’t change, did they?”
“No, you’re right. The younger savages were mindless animals, devouring like a swarm of locust. But the older savages, the ones that were well-fed, became smart. Just as a savage will devour an arm to replace one that they have lost, they will devour a brain in order to replace the brain cells damaged during death.
“Those savages, that had regained a measure of conscious thought, began to form strategies. They no longer killed their victims but merely bit them and moved on to the next village. We lost many of the ancient vampires during those times. Many were turned.”
Tisiphone stopped. She, along with Alecto and Megaera, seemed to be on the verge of tears. Silvanus wondered how long it had been since they had spoken to someone outside their tiny circle. Had they ever shared this story with another? He didn’t believe so and he understood why not. The savage, Kole, had been an abomination to behold. To have the countryside overridden with savages would be hell on earth. Who would want to remember such a time?
“Is that when the Divine Vampires appeared?”
“No. First, the Stewards elected the High Council, the oldest and most powerful vampires that had survived the battles. The High Council began scouring the vampire ranks, pulling out any that showed a talent useful for war. The mind-movers and the fire-makers were the most common enlisted. The augurs—the seers—were collected as well. This was the beginning of the Hunters and of the Watchtower.”
Silvanus wanted to ask about the Watchtower, but he didn’t want to disrupt their tale.
“At the time it was a great honor to be chosen as a Hunter, to take on the savage horde face to face and drive them into extinction.”
“But the Hunters were not successful.”
“No. Though they were ideal warriors to dispatch the savages, the horde was too great, growing every day. Thousands died at the hands of the Hunters. And many more, left without shelter, were destroyed by the sun. Yet, our losses were greater than theirs. The savages could replenish their numbers much faster than we could.
“The vampire ranks, which had started in the hundred-thousands, were whittled down to mere hundreds. But the human loss was far worse. Millions were dead or turned savage. The war stretched across Europe and Asia. There seemed to be no hope for any of us, human or vampire. But then, from nowhere, the Divines appeared. And I mean that literally.
“We were seeking refuge from the sun in an underground fortress when ten individuals appeared in our midst—exactly as you did during our battle. That’s how we knew you were Divine.”
Silvanus looked away from their faces, fidgeting in place. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. To be divine is to be a god. I am no god.”
“It is simply a title of respect, which is why the Stewards refuse to use it.”
Alecto smiled at him. Her warm eyes beckoned to him like a song. He wished that she could speak, that he could hear her voice. A flash of rage burned in his bones at the injuries delivered to these three. He swore a silent oath that he would repay their wounds on those that delivered them. Alecto tilted her head, questioning, with her eyes, t
he look upon his face.
He buried his anger and stilled his face. “The Stewards have no love for my kind then?”
“In the beginning they did. They hailed Those That Have Regained the Sun as heroes.”
“What changed?”
“We never saw any Divines other than those ten. If more exist, they didn’t join the fight. But those ten were all that were needed. Their powers were extraordinary, as I’m sure you understand. Their strength and speed were unmatched, not to mention their ability to skip from place to place. Some could conjure great storms of fire or lightning, some could command the waters. Others could ride the wind or cause the earth to quake. The bite of the savage didn’t cause them to turn. Is it any wonder why we called them Divine?”
Silvanus nodded, but he still didn’t like the title.
“They made short work of the savages,” Tisiphone continued. “The war ended faster than it had begun. It was then, with the savages no longer a threat that the Stewards’ true fear came to light.”
“What do they fear?”
“The same that all those in power fear. To lose that which they have, to become subjugated, obsolete. It was clear that the blood drinkers and the Divine were in some way related. The Stewards sought the secrets of the Divines’ power.”
“Did they obtain these secrets?”
The faces of all three women became grave all at once. “We don’t know,” Tisiphone said. “If they found what they were looking for, then the truth didn’t please them. The High Council devised plans to capture the Divines.”
Silvanus sat up straight. “How is that possible? To capture us, I mean? We can vanish, at will, like a ghost. How can you capture a ghost?”
Alecto’s eyes lit up. She seemed to have caught something, but it was hidden to Silvanus. He couldn’t read the minds of vampires as he could humans. The three turned toward each other, silently sharing that which Alecto had detected.
“There are ways to detain the Divine,” Tisiphone said. “If we three were to take hold of you and you tried to vanish, we would travel with you wherever you went. But let a large group take hold of you, say twenty or thirty, it seems to be too much for the Divine to move and they become locked in place. We are surprised that you do not know this.”
Perpetual Creatures, Volumes 1-3: A Vampire and Ghost Thriller Series Page 33
