Forever Young - Book 2

by Daniel Pierce

  The hotel amenities weren’t stellar, but they did exist. I could shower and change my clothes, getting the dried blood and the stink of fish off me. I wasn’t sure how Tess got some of our cash exchanged without raising a whole heap of questions, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. All I was sure of was that she did, and the American dollar punched well above its weight. We had two days to get to our rally point, which meant more healing, hydration, and a small set of needs that Tess and Kamila were handling. My cuts healed, though the lingering ache told me that my wounds would have been fatal to a human. I dismissed that thought despite the seed of alarm, deciding that death was going to be my constant companion from this point forth, and the only way to win was to be the aggressor.

  We had two days to get from Puerto Padre to our departure location, and the road was straight and clear. Tess found us a car, a sweet old ’58 Packard held together with wire and prayer. The tires were bald, and the engine coughed like a chain smoker, but it turned over on the first try as we swung out onto the road, windows down and eyes alert for fangers. We headed south toward the old city of Santiago de Cuba, resplendent in the colonial glory of an earlier time.

  In my head, Cuba was this giant, mysterious wilderness completely unknowable to anyone American. There would be soldiers on every corner, checkpoints everywhere, and secret police waiting to drag us away any time. Reality couldn’t have been more different. Sure, there was reason to be cautious, and we didn’t have to look far to see the effects of American sanctions. At the same time, Cuba proved to be a place of rare beauty. I didn’t have to spend much time with the sun on my face and the windows rolled down to find I liked it here.

  We rolled into Santiago de Cuba and found lodging. Under other circumstances, we would probably have had to stay in campgrounds or parking lots, but it would have attracted attention here. We decided to blend in with the other Canadian tourists, seeking relief from the harsh winters and exploring the city on foot, our faces turned to the buildings like proper travelers who found themselves somewhere different from home.

  It set my mind at ease to be in a building, in a room we could easily defend. The memory of the fight in the forest of Bermuda wouldn’t leave me alone, and I knew that planning and awareness would save us when defenses could not.

  We walked. We ate. We drank Cuban coffee, which was indistinguishable from jet fuel with caffeine, but sweeter, and began to sweat in the brilliant sun as the drink set our blood to buzzing.

  “Is it just me, or could I lift a house right now?” I asked Tess and Kamila.

  They both laughed as they felt the effects of the coffee too.

  Kamila pointed to a bar. “Rum. Then we walk some more. No sense missing out while we wait.” Cutting through the Bermuda Triangle must have obfuscated our trail enough to get us some time.

  We were set to leave Santiago de Cuba on the evening of our second day there. Tess and I decided to go out into the older part of town, the part with all the sun-drenched Baroque architecture, and stock up on some supplies for the next part of our trip. We stopped in a little coffee shop to get our caffeine fix, and Tess explained the arrangements she’d made for our car.

  “We’ll leave the keys in the car. I’ve already sold it to a guy who lives here. He’s got a buyer for it on the other side of the island. It’s a done deal.” She winked at me. “Don’t worry. You’ll catch on to this stuff soon enough.”

  “Maybe. Something tells me this stuff was part of your world even before you changed.” I gave her an appraising look. “I think you were a pirate. Or worse.” I smirked at her, and I was gratified to see her blush.

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “Maybe it was. It was a long time ago, and obviously, I don’t need to do that kind of stuff anymore. It wasn’t as glamorous as Hollywood makes it out to be. That’s for sure.”

  “Nothing is.” I raised my coffee in a salute.

  “Ain’t that the truth.” She joined me in a toast.

  A local man came and sat down at our table. He was probably about my actual age, in his late forties, with iron gray hair and a thick mustache. His skin was a dark brown, and his eyes small and wary.

  He looked at the two of us, shoulders tense. “You are Tess and Jason, yes?”

  I nodded, gathering my power to me. I didn’t know who this guy was. He looked perfectly normal and human, but looks could be deceiving. “Who wants to know?”

  He shot me a thin little smile. “Don’t worry about my name. I understand you’re looking for someone by the name of Mort?”

  Tess straightened up and focused on the stranger right away. “Have you seen him?” She was ordinarily so calm and cool, playing everything so close to the vest, but when it came to Mort, her poker face went right out the window.

  The stranger shook his head. “No. I was asked to carry this message. I was simply asked to let you know that Mort is alive. That is all.” He pulled a half-sized bottle of rum from his bag, placed it on the table, and left the coffee shop.

  Tess and I exchanged glances. The whole thing smelled of bullshit, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Tess looked too happy. Her eyes shone, and she all but vibrated with excitement. “Can you believe it?”

  I picked up the bottle of rum. On the bottom, scrawled in Mort’s typical awful handwriting, were the words proof of life. The paper seemed perfectly clean, with no blood or other bodily fluids, and his hand hadn’t been shaking when he wrote it. “It looks authentic.” I passed her the note.

  She held it reverently, like I’d given her one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “It’s his writing. I’d know it anywhere.” She put it into her pocket. “Come on. This is a game changer. We need to go share the good news with Kamila.”

  I chugged the rest of my coffee and pocketed the rum. We ran back to our little hotel as fast as we could, not at all concerned about attracting attention from the police or from vampiric spies. Tess would have run right over either one of them anyway. It was better not to hold her back, and the streets went past in a blur of angled buildings and sun.

  Kamila was skeptical about the information until she saw the note. I kind of wondered how three little words could cause so much fuss, but Mort was well-loved, and I wasn’t going to sit there and discount that. “I’m still kind of worried, though. What if he’s being held captive? He’s alive, and it doesn’t look like that piece of paper is all that old, but what if they’ve got him walled up somewhere and he needs rescuing?”

  Tess bit her lip. “We’d have no way of knowing,” she said finally. “I agree with you a hundred percent. But I just don’t see what we can do about it right now.”

  “Probably not much,” Kamila said with a wry grimace. “For now, it’s enough to know he’s alive. The priority has to be training. There’s no way to find him without more clues, and we just don’t have those.” She bowed her head for a moment. “Besides, if he were being held captive by the vampires, they wouldn’t have sent some human to tell us he was still alive.”

  I didn’t voice my other concern. If he was sending us proof of life, it raised the possibility that he was in league with the enemy, or simply hiding.

  We kept our appointment with the next smuggler, who brought us to the Dominican Republic on a ship carrying a full load of raw sugar. I had no idea Cuba shipped sugar there, but I wasn’t going to complain. It was better than fish, the ride was smooth, and I began to adjust to the idea that moving between the shadows was a real way to assure some degree of safety. Smugglers loved money. We had it. I began to trust that dynamic, and my conversion to Ferin took another step forward as I left my human expectations behind.

  We came ashore in Puerto Plata and joined a tour group making its way down to Santo Domingo. A few of the tourists, who were mostly people over the age of seventy, looked a little askance at Daisy, but she won them over in minutes with her cheerful demeanor and gentle demands for pets. Taking the bus meant taking the long way, but it was a beautiful trip, and we got out to stretch our legs more than a few ti
mes. There was security in numbers, even if I had a lingering feeling that our simple presence meant we were putting the kind old folks at risk.

  It also meant we didn’t have to try to blend in with the locals, which would have put my atrocious Spanish on display.

  Kamila admitted she had planned for this. “I know it’s a complex way of travel, and it’s a pain,” she explained when the tour group stopped for lunch near a beach. “It’s more than a matter of traveling documentation and trying to move around overseas with the dog. Our enemy is strong, and they have resources at their disposal we can only imagine. We need to take extraordinary steps to be able to counter them. The more complicated our path…”

  “The harder it will be for them to follow.” I nodded. “It makes sense. It boggles the mind, but it does make sense. I’m starting to get a little crazy from all the travel, but it makes sense.”

  Kamila laughed at me. “I don’t think the travel is a problem for you, sugar. You say it is, but you’re thriving on the open road. This whole nomadic lifestyle thing is what you were made for. I think you could probably live without the war and the need to keep everything a secret, but you’re interested in the people, and you want to get to know them. That’s what’s really making you crazy, isn’t it?”

  I chuckled. “You’re not wrong. Part of this feels right, like I was born to it.”

  We hopped on board a freighter carrying rum from Santo Domingo to Belize City, the sweet scents of caramel and sugar thick in my heightened Ferin senses. Rum smelled good; far better than a hold full of salted mackerel. It was a much longer trip, and I wasn’t convinced the captain or crew knew we were there. We hid in one of the holds and didn’t come out unless we were sure the coast was clear. Even then, we only did that to let Daisy relieve herself, which was easily cleaned up with the occasional splash of water. The stealth of it all became a challenge, not the least of which was fighting simple boredom. The ocean is vast and beautiful. The darkened hold of a ship is not.

  We didn’t want to bring any light because we didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence. We couldn’t talk because, again, we didn’t want to let on that we were there. The ship groaned and creaked the entire way, and the bottles of liquor rattled in their crates. There was nothing to do but sit alone with our own thoughts, senses overloaded as Daisy slept on my leg, dreaming the secret dreams that only dogs know.

  The boat wound up making port earlier than she expected. I didn’t push much, but expecting three immortals to sit alone in silence with nothing to distract them was a bit optimistic on the part of the universe. Speeding things up was for Daisy’s benefit, not mine.

  At least that’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

  16

  Belize City was the biggest city in the country, mixing old-world charm with modern convenience and the colorful beauty of the Caribbean. It was a loud city too, or at least it was loud near the docks. We disembarked under cover of darkness and counted on the general confusion and activity of the port to help us make our escape. We were right.

  Belize City had the advantage of being a true melting pot, so we were just three more—make that four—faces in the crowd, capable of moving outside the tourist areas without fear of being unique.

  We hit the ground running. Being cooped up in that aquatic prison had been more than I could bear, and we had things to do. We had goals, despite the distant hum of fear permeating our every move. It was a question of will. Between us, we had enough. When I dug deep, we would have more than we needed to move with confidence. I did not want the vamps to see us, but when they came—and they would—I welcomed the fight.

  We knew Zarya lived on a private island off the coast, ominously named Deadman’s Caye.

  “We have a cartoonish name, and that’s it? Long way to go for a hunch,” I said.

  “It’s not a hunch,” Kamila answered, but I could see the tension around her eyes. She knew I was right, and she cut her eyes when I let my gaze linger. For all that Kamila knew her, and apparently knew her well, she didn’t know her well enough to have visited the island. All we could do was walk around, listening and asking discreet questions while on high alert.

  “Do you see the issue here?” I asked Kamila.

  “Well, maybe.” She stopped, turning to look up at me. “You don’t understand—”

  “Stop right there. I understand perfectly. You’re holding information in order to maintain mission control because you don’t trust me. That’s fine. But know this, Kamila. Just because we’re fucking and we have a connection? It doesn’t mean I trust your decisions either. Is that clear? Does that seem unfair to you?”

  She bit off a comment then nodded.

  “Good. Because one day, you’re going to conclude that a solo Ferin is a dead Ferin, and I won’t be there to help you,” I told her. To her credit, she looked more thoughtful than angry, and Tess merely nodded, taking my hand as we started moving again.

  We scoured the waterfront in a lazy kind of pattern, moving from bar to café to gathering place, watching and listening to whatever we could catch from the throng of people. There were wildly different kinds of bars—some for men in work boots, others for boat people with money and foreign credit cards, their sunglasses costing as much as a month’s pay for the local dockworkers. The waterfront had a busy air that allowed us to vanish in plain sight. It was, for us, perfect.

  As we did, the water called to me. I could feel it in my veins. The sea had all but destroyed this city more than once. It would do so again if the circumstances were right. It would only take the slightest nudge to send the sea back over its wall and into the streets, a liquid curtain that would flow inland until the mountains pushed back, and I could feel every minute of that violent history echoing in my mind. I turned away from the sea, smoothing the area of waves my emotions brought to life. Kamila gave me a knowing look, and Tess watched the wavelets vanish before our steps began again. I needed training, not spy craft. I needed a mentor.

  I saw an old man with limpid eyes holding court in an ancient bar, his gnarled hands wrapped around a beer that was warming under his grip. We sidled up to him as his guests wandered away, and I proved yet again that a smile and a cold beer make for an excellent introduction. After a moment of pleasantries, we got down to business.

  He knew the place we sought.

  “Ah, yes. I remember Deadman’s Caye. There was a beautiful woman who lived out there in my time. She had such a way about her.” His eyes grew misty, and then he shook his head. “But all of that was decades ago. You don’t want to hear tales of a woman old enough to be your great-grandmama. You want to hear how to get to the island.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kamila’s voice sounded a little strained to me. I didn’t know if it was with laughter at the idea of Zarya being old enough to be our great-grandmother, or with irritation at having to deal with the bartender’s rambling stories.

  “You want to get yourself a boat,” he said. “And then you want to take the boat and go east-southeast for about an hour. Mind you, you’ll want to take a chart with you. Deadman’s Caye isn’t on any chart you’ll ever see, but the reefs are. So are the sandbars. You’ll want to steer clear of both if you want to be able to get off the island when you’ve had your fill of exploring. My advice to you would be to get off the island well before the sun goes down, but if you can’t do that, get back to the beach and make camp there until the sun is well up. Don’t go into the jungle after dark, do you understand?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is there something wrong in there, sir?”

  He laughed. “There are plenty of things wrong in that jungle, boy. I was a teacher, and this land was one of my favorite topics. There are snakes, for example, you wouldn’t want to be cozying up to. But there have been stories about that island for centuries. You don’t think they call it Deadman’s Caye because of its welcoming atmosphere, do you?” He passed me a shot of rum—unasked for—and laughed. “I don’t know so much about all that. I’m a man of sc
ience, not superstitions. Give me rum instead of ghosts and ghouls. But if people have been telling stories about the place for hundreds of years, there’s probably something going on that I don’t want to go messing around with. It doesn’t have to be supernatural. It might be critters or swamp gas. But we don’t need to go messing with either of those things. Dead is dead. So just you make sure you’re back on that boat or beach by sundown.”

  We thanked him, I drank rum with him, and then we left.

  “I don’t see why I didn’t get rum too,” Tess complained.

  Kamila waved her hand. “A lot of folks in Belize are deeply conservative. They wouldn’t give women alcohol.”

  “It’s because of your attitude. I’m sorry, but you’re not very friendly,” I told Tess.

  She punched me in the arm, affecting a sulk.

  “Next time, I’ll share, but you should really work on your face,” I said.

  She punched me again, and I laughed.

  We rented a boat from a business that hired sailboats out to tourists. I was a little bit nervous about it because I’d never done much sailing. They gave us a good first-timer’s lecture and some life jackets, which we all pretended to take seriously, our eyes wide and heads turning to and fro. Our body language screamed rubes, just as we wanted.

  As soon as we got far enough away from the shore, Kamila stopped pretending to be a novice. She took the sails and re-arranged them to her liking, moving with practiced and efficient motions.

  “You’ve done this before,” I surmised.

  Tess reached down and scratched Daisy’s short muzzle. “With Captain Logan,” she suggested.