Moving toward it, I could feel the energy bubbling inside me. My will was stronger than ever, and, when I got closer to the crystal… it reacted. A thin sheet of frost formed on its surface, prompting Zeriel to suck in a breath and straighten his back.
“Oh…” he murmured, eyes wide as he stared at the frozen patch, which was only about ten centimeters in length and width, uneven and shallow.
“This might work,” I said, almost feeling Seeley’s persistent stare.
I desperately needed Zeriel to know that I was here. I’d seen him fading away over the past couple of days. There were dark rings under his eyes, and he’d lost some weight, too. All this was taking its toll on him, and I wanted him to have at least an ounce of my hope and ambition. He didn’t know the things I knew, though he was likely aware that my soul was still around. He’d been talking to my body, but even that had become rare. More often than not, he’d just watch me, silently, probably not knowing what to say, maybe thinking I couldn’t hear him, anyway.
So, I wanted him to hear me.
The frost was only a first step, and I was already feeling tired, but I knew that, if I managed to do this, I could go even further.
“I can do it,” I whispered, mostly to myself, and pressed my ethereal finger on the frosted glass. I gasped, realizing that, despite my semi-transparent form, I could feel the chill traveling through my arm. Even more importantly, I’d left a print, a warm print in the frost.
“By the stars…” Zeriel mumbled, shaking like a leaf.
The last thing I wanted was to scare the daylights out of him, so, before he might think of backing away and getting the heck out of dodge because it was obviously haunted, I pushed myself further.
I wrote something, praying to every single entity out there to let my message be seen. It worked. I managed to leave three very important words for him on that frosted crystal. He stilled and leaned closer to get a better look.
“Z, I’m here,” he read out loud. “Holy…”
He looked around a couple of times, probably making sure that no one could see him as he exhaled and simply teared up. I would’ve given anything to be able to hold him, but, unfortunately, that wasn’t an option right now. But I could improve my communication skills and talk to him, bring him back to his old self, the one who would do anything to keep me safe and happy.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Seeley snapped, sliding off the crystal casing. He glowered at me, arms crossed, but I could tell that he was also stunned. “How in the world did you just do that?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not done yet,” I said with a giggle.
“Vesta, don’t do something you might regret later,” Seeley replied.
“Like what, tell Zeriel about you people being here, for example? You’re damn right I’m going to tell him.”
“You really aren’t helping the situation.”
“Then stop me,” I said, and when he didn’t respond, I understood that he couldn’t. Maybe there was some rule in place to prevent him from interfering with my actions—though that could potentially open quite the can of worms if the spirit was even more potent than me.
However, that wasn’t my problem yet. My bumbling fiancé took precedence. His breath was ragged and too rapid to be healthy, and I worried he might start hyperventilating soon. So, I wrote another message in the frosted glass. It came easier this time around. Practice makes perfect.
“Calm down,” he read, and chuckled softly. Several deep breaths later, he looked at my body and smiled. “Thanks, baby. You’re haunting me, yet you’re the one telling me to calm down.”
I could do more, I thought, concentrating on my body. There was still a connection to my flesh; I felt it… I just needed to tap into it, somehow. The Hermessi might’ve kicked me out, but the life-chain was still on. “The chain,” I murmured and glanced down. Last time I’d touched it, it had burned—the black part, anyway. I’d yet to try the glowing links, the healthy ones.
Once again praying to the universe, I gripped the first link. A rush of warmth engulfed me, as if the sun itself was shining down upon me. In that instant, my body’s eyes popped open. They shone brilliantly orange, but they were open. Zeriel let out a short shriek and quickly covered his mouth. Only Arwen and Mona were in the sanctuary now, on the far end, looking after another fae, but I was glad he didn’t call them over. I worried I wouldn’t be able to concentrate like this with more people watching.
“Vesta… Did you just do this? Are you... Are you awake?” Zeriel asked.
I heard Seeley scoff, but ignored him altogether. I was too busy here. Zeriel needed to ask me one question at a time; otherwise, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to answer coherently. Surprisingly, I did feel a tiny bit of my body, distantly. A slow heartbeat echoed in the back of my mind.
“Oh, crap. I can’t pummel you with questions,” Zeriel realized. “Okay… Okay, how do we do this? Man, I’m so… I can’t explain how happy I am.” He laughed lightly, running a hand through his blond hair. “I didn’t think I’d get to talk to you… sort of. Okay, pull yourself together, Zeriel. Come on. You can do this.” He closed his eyes for a moment, humming as he sought to concentrate and give me something I could work with, now that I’d made it clear that I was still here. “Got it! I got it! Baby, can you blink?”
Could I? Well, I could certainly try—and I did, once. He gasped.
“Wow… this is real. Good. Good! Vesta, baby, blink once for yes and twice for no. Can you do that for me?”
I blinked once, and he giggled like the happiest little boy, rubbing his face and taking deep, measured breaths. “Are you alive? I mean, your body is alive, but your spirit is out… and I’m a little confused, so let’s just do this as a test question. Are you alive?”
Again, I blinked once.
“Are you in any kind of pain?” he asked, and I blinked twice, making him smile. “Good… Good, at least there’s that. Do you know what’s happening to you?”
One blink was enough for this. But I felt like it wasn’t enough. The yes-no bit was fantastic; however, I wanted to do more, to tell him more. Inching closer to my crystal casing, I willed more frost into stretching on top of the first layer, which had already begun to melt.
“Here goes,” I whispered, and wrote another message.
Zeriel frowned as he read it. “Reapers + Fae…” He didn’t immediately get it, but I was patient. He looked around, his gaze darting from one crystal casing to another. “You mean there are Reapers here?”
I made myself blink once. The answer made him break into a cold sweat. I could see the tiny drops of sweat blooming on his temples.
“There are Reapers here… for the fae, you mean?” he replied. Yet another blink in return. “Oh… That’s not good. They’re… They’re here to reap you all, aren’t they?”
The answer was yes, and it tore me apart on the inside to see him descend into a state of panic. It didn’t last long, fortunately. His love for me was too strong to let him lose his grip.
“I admit. You scare me a little,” Seeley muttered behind me, and I shushed him, as Zeriel seemed to be formulating another question.
“Do you know when they’ll take you? The Reapers, I mean,” he asked, and I blinked twice. “Okay. Do you know what they’re waiting for?”
That was an easy one. I managed to write another message in the frost.
5,000,000.
As soon as he saw the number, he knew. He’d had an inkling before, much like everybody else in GASP, but, this time, he’d learned it from me. Zeriel understood that, as soon as the number of affected fae reached five million, it would kill us first, before anyone else, leaving our bodies for the Hermessi to do with as they pleased.
“So, our suspicions, our theories… they were all right.” He sighed. “Once the Hermessi hit five million fae, your souls will be permanently separated from your bodies and… and you’ll die, while they’ll use said bodies to… to finish the ritual. It’s all true. For a while,
I didn’t want to believe it, but… dammit, Vesta, I’m not letting you die.”
I blinked once. “I don’t expect you to,” I whispered.
“Reapers are waiting for you to die,” Zeriel said. “But you’re not going anywhere without me, you hear me? I love you, Vesta, and I am going to be here, fighting until my dying breath, to keep you.”
Seeley cleared his throat. “I have to say, he’s taking this a lot better than most people would.”
“Most people? I take it you’ve seen stuff like this before?” I asked.
“Yes and no. I’ve come across a couple of hauntings. Most souls weaken if they’re out for too long without moving on,” he explained. “But there are some… powerful, determined people who even in death seem to defy all reason. Their spirits grow stronger and angrier—that being the downside to a mighty soul, I guess. And you, my dear Vesta, you would make quite the poltergeist, if left to your own devices.”
“I’m inclined to take that as a compliment.”
He smiled. “It was meant as one.”
My eyes closed, prompting Zeriel to place his palms on the crystal casing. “Vesta, are you okay?” He was understandably worried, while Seeley chuckled.
“What’s so funny? I can’t do that again, for some reason,” I grumbled, feeling strained and stretched beyond my comfortable limits.
“You’re tired, Vesta. Operating your body from the outside is a tough gig. Yeah, you did it on your first try, and, again, kudos to you. But still, it takes its toll. You need to rest a little if you want to do it again,” Seeley said.
It made sense. It explained the growing exhaustion expanding through me and making me feel like I was being wrung like a wet cloth. I managed to draw a small heart in what was left of the frost on my crystal casing—my last attempt to tell Zeriel that I was still here.
I heard his sigh of relief, but my vision began to blur.
“You’re blacking out,” Seeley said. I couldn’t see him anymore, as darkness crept up on me, hugging me like a giant teddy bear, warm and fluffy and soft. “You’ll be okay. Just go with it.”
I’d succeeded in communicating with Zeriel, so at least it hadn’t all been in vain. I wasn’t sure how long it would be until I’d be conscious again, but I could only hope that I’d helped give Zeriel some peace of mind. At the same time, I also knew that what I’d just told Zeriel would break Derek’s and Sofia’s hearts.
Because what was happening to me was also happening to their son, Ben; their granddaughter, Grace; their great-granddaughters, Caia and Vita… and to Lucas and Kailyn, among many others whom they were deeply fond of. They would soon learn that Reapers were present in the sanctuaries, calmly waiting to take us all away once the five million mark was hit.
Eva
It took less than two hours to prepare for the journey to Mortis, much to my dismay. I’d hoped we’d be too busy to sit down and “get to know each other,” like Kailani had suggested. My joy at seeing Nethissis again had quickly shifted into discomfort, once I’d seen how she practically ate Varga up with her eyes. Nethissis and I had more or less grown up together, but we’d never been too close.
There had always been a certain level of competition between the Lamias, especially with the rise of Azazel. Our species had already been shunned by the Druids, whom we needed in order to continue our lineage. Once their numbers began to dwindle, most of them becoming Destroyers against their will, the Lamias were left with a reproductive problem. Therefore, whenever a Druid did come along—before Azazel’s reign took a turn for the worse, and he started killing the remaining Druids left and right—the Lamias wound up arguing and fighting over who would get to be with the Druid.
After my (ugh…) father was destroyed, there was hope again for a relationship between the Druids and the Lamias, thanks to Draven’s, Serena’s, and the rest of GASP’s efforts to establish some form of cooperation between our species. We were no longer “personae non gratae” among the Druids, but it would be a long time before there would be enough of them for all the Lamias to simply say, “We no longer need to argue about this.”
Granted, in this case, the wedge between Nethissis and me wasn’t a Druid, but a vampire-sentry. Clearly, the competitiveness deeply embedded in us did not care much for species. Lamias were especially aggressive and eager for a mate during their peak fertility season, which varied from one gal to the next. It usually hit in the spring, but not always. I was inclined to believe that Nethissis was, in fact, in a more fertile period, where all males, regardless of species, seemed appetizing to her. It irked the crap out of me, because I didn’t want her anywhere near Varga.
He and I… We had something going on, and I wanted to see where it would lead us. I’d yet to even kiss the guy, and Nethissis was coming in, all hot and curvaceous and determined, making my self-confidence take quite the nosedive—to my utter shock. I’d never felt like this before, and it worried me. I didn’t want to lose Varga before I could even be with him. We were already in a gigantic mess with the Hermessi; I really didn’t need one of my Lamias popping in and making it worse.
The one thing that gave me comfort was the fact that Varga seemed relatively immune to Nethissis’s charms. But I also knew Lamias could be elegantly persistent, weaseling their way into one’s heart, eventually.
“The interplanetary travel spell we’re using this time is a bit of a gamble,” Acantha said, breaking my train of thought. We were on our way up to the platform on top of Luceria, where Phoenix and Ibrahim would meet us once they had the coordinates. “Since we don’t have anything from our destination, Nethi and I will have to steer it ourselves.”
“Hence the need for coordinates and these big-ass serium batteries,” Herakles grunted, his upper body bent forward under the weight of six large glass cylinders filled with serium crystals and sealed at both ends with meranium caps.
Fallon was carrying six of his own, and Varga four more. Nethi nodded. “Exactly. We’ll need all the power we can get for this.”
We’d spent the better part of an hour loading our backpacks with spell paraphernalia, pulverizer pellets, and healing potions, cleaning our weapons, and sharpening our blades—while Nethissis and Acantha did most of the socializing. The crew knew, by now, that both swamp witches were young and ambitious, and that they were, all in all, reliable field partners. The Word was constantly giving them new magic, though only a fraction of what Kailani had learned in her first three months after ascending.
They also learned that Nethissis loved the succubi’s spiced rose water, and that Acantha wasn’t too fond of her feline form—according to her, the lioness instincts were too aggressive, for which reason she often stayed in her humanoid form, fearing a certain lack of control. She’d assured Herakles, in particular, that she would never harm us and him, but that she preferred to rely on swamp witch magic.
Riza didn’t seem too happy with Acantha’s unabashed curiosity about Herakles, but she kept a straight face and smiled as often as she could. I didn’t even bother being polite, knowing that Nethissis needed to see me, clearly, to understand that she was treading some dangerous waters.
Riza had yet to make a move on Herakles, and the Faulty, despite being unable to take his eyes off her, couldn’t bring himself to take the first step, either. I’d decided that if they didn’t get past this first stage soon, I’d help them. All it would take was a little magical kick in the hind for one of them to do it, preferably before Acantha sensed their hesitation. While said hesitation had been adorable in the beginning, it was becoming a problem. After all, we were females and they were males. The chemistry was undeniable, and other females could easily swoop in and fight for the males’ attention. It had been the way of the world since Calliope and all the other planets had first been formed. It wasn’t going to change.
“Will it be enough, though?” Varga asked.
Ahead, marble stairs reached all the way up to the top. Luceria was somewhat deserted these days, with only a minimal number of
staff on duty. The rest had been advised to stay home and safe, given the Hermessi cults’ outreach and ability to permeate any layer of Eritopian society. I didn’t mind it. The less crowded, the better.
“Worst-case scenario, we’ll need to draw vital energy from you,” Nethi replied, smiling at him. “Surely, you won’t mind pitching in…”
Varga thought about it for a moment. “It’s okay. I’ll help however I can. Frankly, I think Fallon and I have a larger amount of energy to offer, given our hybrid biology.”
“Good. It’s nice to see such dedication. It’s rare,” Nethissis said.
“I can pitch in, too,” Herakles interjected, drawing a brief scowl from Riza. But it did make Acantha grin.
“Excellent. The more the better,” the Bajang swamp witch replied.
I slowed down slightly, just enough to catch Varga’s attention. The rest of the group kept moving, including Nethissis. I was nervous, but I felt the need to tell Varga a few things before this trip. It could very well be our last, if we weren’t careful, and I didn’t want us to go in without opening up a bit.
“What is it?” he asked, putting the serium batteries down for a bit and shaking his wrists to remove some of the strain from carrying them.
“There’s something you should know, if you haven’t noticed it already,” I said, my voice low. He frowned. “Nethissis. She’s… She’s a great girl, don’t get me wrong. A talented Lamia. I mean, her snake form is gargantuan; she could kill a full-grown daemon through constriction. And she’s got some nifty Druid magic under her belt, on top of the Word. But, Varga, she’s obviously got a soft spot for you, and—”
“You want me to be careful,” he replied, a faint smile revealing his white teeth. Nearby candlelight from a wall sconce glinted against his fangs.
“Pretty much. She’s… She can be very intense.”
A Shade of Vampire 73: A Search for Death Page 12
