A Shade of Vampire 73: A Search for Death

by Forrest, Bella

  “Until now, we only had theories as to how the primordial fluids work. We understood that the pink waters reacted to us, and in several instances responded to our needs. However, we had zero certainty that we could simply think about our desired destination, and then poof! We’re there. However, looking back now, it does make sense. Thinking of Hellym, without even realizing it, got us to Hellym. Thinking of Death… well, it brought us here. So, now, we know for a fact that the pink waters are timeless wormholes whose destinations we can actually control.”

  Nethissis smirked. “You could’ve taken it all at face value and tried your luck either way. In hindsight, it’s better that you didn’t. At least we’re all together now, and in the right place.”

  We were still at a stage where we had more questions than answers. However, our resolve remained indubitable, unshakeable. In fact, we were more determined than ever to see this to the very end, while I kept most of my Word-related concerns to myself. There was no point in troubling them with this—not until I figured out a few things, first.

  “So, she lives up there?” Riza asked, nodding at the waterfall building.

  From where we stood, even with the trees surrounding us, we could still see it rising in the distance between branches and gaps in the foliage. “That’s the general consensus,” Taeral replied.

  Varga came up to me, wearing a sheepish smile. “Lumi, I have a favor to ask,” he said. “You’re the most powerful here, in terms of energy. Can I syphon some off you? My legs are jelly, and I think we need all the strength we can get for what comes next.”

  “Of course, young prince. Take as much as you need,” I replied.

  Invisible tendrils penetrated my head. I could feel them reaching deep inside my mind, suckling raw energy. Fortunately for him, I was full of it. I motioned at the others in Varga’s team. “The rest of you need to have at least one of the healing potions you brought with you. I assume Acantha and Nethissis prepared some of the blue bottles, not just the Druid concoctions, right?” I asked, and the swamp witches nodded. “Good. Use those. They’re our proprietary blend. They don’t just repair damaged tissues, they also replenish energy levels.”

  “Oh, natural tonics?” Herakles grinned.

  “Pretty much.”

  We spent the better part of the next hour recovering and exchanging impressions of all the recent developments. Varga’s crew needed the break, while I hoped the Reapers wouldn’t come back anytime soon.

  “Are you sure Death is up there?” Varga asked Taeral, who shrugged in return.

  “We’ve had no confirmation, but the constant tingling in my spine kind of says yes,” he replied. “Plus, the closer we are to that place, the more spirits I can see,” he added, looking around. “There are hundreds of them—some are watching us, but most are just wandering aimlessly, translucent and confused.”

  “And the Reapers? Wrik, Baethal, and the other one, what’s his face?” Fallon asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Gone, for now,” I said.

  “But you think there will be more of them, the closer we get to that building,” Herakles replied.

  “Yes. And I believe we must be ready for whatever they might throw at us.” I sighed.

  Raphael grinned, putting an arm around Herakles’s shoulders and pulling him into a brotherly headlock. “But we’ve got you back in the mix, you sourpuss. I’m no longer scared. We can take ’em.”

  “You’re no longer scared,” Herakles repeated after him. “Were you scared before?”

  Raphael thought about it for a moment. He shook his head and chuckled. “No. I was just trying to make you feel better.”

  “Aw… the Stravian brothers from another mother, back together again,” Varga quipped.

  We laughed, but it sounded weak and faded. Our nerves were strained, our instincts on fire… but we laughed because we needed the momentary release. What came next would either save us or kill us, and we had no way of knowing whether the odds were in our favor or not.

  Looking at Acantha and Nethissis, I felt a familiar ache in my heart. I’d experienced this before, back in the diamond dome, shortly before our escape from Ta’Zan’s grip—Kailani had succumbed to the Word, glowing like a limp lightbulb. At the time, I wasn’t sure she’d make it, and it had nearly killed me on the inside. I’d sworn to myself that I would never put myself through such an emotional rollercoaster again.

  And yet, less than a month after we’d defeated Ta’Zan, I’d taken on five new apprentices. Not one, not two, but five. Now, I worried they were unprepared for all of this. The Word had funny ways about it—its unpredictability had had its charm over the years, but things were way past serious now. Before, I’d thought the Hermessi would never be able to bypass the Word’s magic.

  Clearly, that was no longer the case. It meant that my students and I were no longer as safe as I’d thought, in the event of a completed ritual, and the Word’s peculiar behavior wasn’t reassuring in any way. We’ll just have to keep going and see what happens.

  Easier said than done.

  Varga

  I didn’t let Eva out of my sight. She’d scared me back inside the light bubble. Just as the spell had finally broken through the atmosphere, she’d seemed dangerously close to passing out. Fortunately—so to speak—the bubble snapping had kicked in enough adrenaline to keep her awake. I owed Herakles one hell of a hug for his inspiration to grab Eva as soon as Riza had caught him. I’d doubted I’d be able to do much for her, given my own position, hurtling toward the ground.

  The blue bottle had helped her recover, while Lumi’s energy filled me up to the brim. In fact, I felt all powered up and ready to take on a hundred Hermessi right now. However, that wasn’t the mission. After we communicated our position to GASP and heard Phoenix shouting about Amelia and her crew already being on Mortis without knowing it—a conversation that had included a remarkable quantity of expletives—we were ready to move.

  “Harper isn’t home yet, is she?” Eva asked. She was quite fond of Harper, as Serena’s sister, and she’d mentioned her concerns about the vampire-sentry before. I shook my head.

  “No. But Herbert will hold up his end of the deal, no doubt about it. Ibrahim still has control over him, remember?”

  She sighed deeply. “I guess. I’ll just breathe easier once she’s back in her body. It’s got to be weird.”

  “Guys…” Taeral muttered, frowning as he looked around. “I think we might not be alone here for much longer.”

  “What, the spirits are disappearing again?” Amelia replied and shot to her feet from the rock on which she’d settled to rest for a while.

  Taeral nodded. “Yeah. Reapers are coming. Let’s link hands. I can zap us closer to the building.”

  We made sure we were all connected. I held Eva’s hand in mine, my fingers gripping firmly, as if I feared that, if I let go, she’d slip away like an early morning dream. We vanished, reappearing moments later in another part of the woods.

  The waterfalls gushed not far from where we were, the streams’ rumble much louder than before. Above, hidden in the bamboo-like trees, strange birds shrieked and squawked, like homegrown alarm systems signaling our presence. We were the trespassers here, and I had a feeling someone or something didn’t want us around.

  The flat-topped mountain towered over us. I had to lean my head back so I could take it all in, the building, a palace of sorts, rising on top of it like a silent, elegant giant. Lights flickered inside, and a chill squirmed its way through me like a quiet warning, telling me to get back… to stay away.

  “I think we can keep walking from here,” Taeral said, his gaze wandering around us. “I can see the spirits now. Oddly enough, more of them than before.”

  “More than the place we just left? That’s odd indeed—oh, whoa, wait.” Raphael paused, his eyes bulging. “I can see them too.”

  “What? How can—” Amelia didn’t finish her reply, just sucked in a breath.

  It turned out Taeral wasn’t t
he only one who could see spirits, even though he was the only one touching the scythe. We could all see them. Hundreds—male, female, young and old, from a plethora of species… translucent apparitions that stepped forward from the surrounding woods. Some, I recognized as creatures of the In-Between. Others were fae and perhaps visitors from the Supernatural Dimension, like witches and jinn. But there were numerous specimens I didn’t know of, in various sizes and with striking physical features.

  “I don’t think this is normal,” Lumi murmured, cautiously moving back into our group. Instinctively, we followed her lead and clustered together, forming a tight center around which the ghosts began to gather. “We’re not supposed to see them.”

  “Also, why do they look so… murderous?” Fallon mumbled, drawing his sword.

  The screech of the blade sent shivers down my spine, but I feared it wouldn’t do any good against spirits. “Fallon, buddy… I doubt you’ll be able to hit anything with that sword,” I said. “They’re dead, remember?”

  But he’d been accurate in his assessment. The spirits seemed angry, their expressions mangled by a fury that didn’t belong there. Those with fangs and claws to bare showed them off, hissing and growling as they approached us.

  My heart began a thunderous race, beating frantically as I realized that these spirits were about to become aggressive. But it also begged a question I hoped I wouldn’t get the answer to: “Can they hurt us?”

  “I don’t think I want to find out,” Herakles whispered. He and I were definitely on the same page.

  “Be ready,” Lumi advised us.

  Nethissis and Acantha were not fully recovered yet, and Lumi motioned for them to stay in the middle of our group. They weren’t too pleased with her request, but, based on their long sighs, they didn’t have much of a choice. Eva and I moved outward, swords drawn and ready. Raphael, Herakles, and Riza were on the other side of our cluster. Fallon, Taeral, Eira, Amelia, and Lumi completed the circle.

  “We could teleport out of here,” Taeral suggested.

  “Surely. But don’t you want to find out what they can do?” Eira asked him. “If ghosts cannot be seen, and yet they’re visible, doesn’t this prove there’s a strange phenomenon manifesting here?”

  “By the same logic, if ghosts can’t normally touch us… these ones might be able to,” Raphael replied, his tone pitchier than usual.

  One of the spirits came forward—a large daemon with a long black mane and golden rings jingling around his thick neck. He first reached Raphael, who dry-swallowed, his claws extending as he assumed a defensive pose. “I guess I’m about to test your theory, Eira. Though, let it be known, for the record, that I am not okay with this.”

  The daemon spirit sneered at him, breathing heavily. We were ready to touch one another and link with Taeral at a moment’s notice, but Eira was right. If the ghosts had this ability here, we needed to know.

  “Are you going to keep sizing me up or are you going to attack?” Raphael asked the increasingly angry daemon.

  “I’m just sorry I can’t eat you,” the daemon replied and lunged at Raphael. The Perfect slashed at him with his claws, but they went through, as if he were fighting a body of water. The daemon, on the other hand, was able to draw blood from Raphael, cutting across his torso.

  Lumi’s arm shot out, intense blue light bursting from the palm of her hand. It was bright and powerful enough to temporarily blind the aggressive spirit, but the other ghosts came charging at us, snarling and roaring. Horror paralyzed me, as we all understood that reaching that waterfall building would not be as easy as we’d thought.

  “Link hands!” Taeral shouted.

  We did. I found Eva’s hand, and Fallon caught mine. As the army of spirits jumped at us from all directions—poof! We were gone. I relished the temporary sense of weightlessness, before we reappeared on top of a cliff. The palace was about fifty miles away now, and the woods were silent.

  I let a sigh tumble out of me, without letting go of Eva’s hand.

  A stream flowed to our left, snaking toward the edge of the cliff. It went down in a thin curtain of clear water, and I could hear the river below swelling. The wind rushed past us, rattling the trees and making them whisper. Lanterns lit precise paths through the forest—and they all seemed to be leading in the same direction: the palace we couldn’t so easily reach ourselves.

  “Well, that was weird,” Raphael grumbled. Nethissis pulled a piece of white fabric from her backpack and handed it to him.

  “Put pressure on that cut while you heal,” she said.

  Lucky for him, his Perfect biology seemed to work fast. A minute later, the cut across his chest was no longer bleeding.

  “How is this possible?” Fallon asked, understandably befuddled. “How in the world is any of this possible?!”

  He was met with awkward silence, as none of us were able to immediately formulate a reasonable explanation. All we could do was stare out at the sea of green stretching between the cliff and the palace, while the flickering lights kept teasing us from inside.

  Taeral pressed a hand against his chest. “It’s almost calling to me. It’s so difficult to explain.”

  “It’s calling to you, but the ghosts surrounding it are trying to kill you… kill us,” Acantha replied. She looked at Lumi. “What do you think?”

  Lumi exhaled sharply, equally perplexed. “I… I have no idea.”

  “Whatever this is, we obviously need to get past it,” Eva said firmly. “I did not come all the way here to have the door slammed in my face.”

  Once again, I found myself speechless before this creature. Even with all the potentially deadly dollops of weird that Mortis was chucking at us, she was still determined to move forward, to find Death, and to get her to help.

  In that instant, before I could even open my mouth and say anything worth hearing, a little voice in my head made it clear that, should we survive this whole Hermessi debacle somehow, I would definitely have to make this relationship of ours a priority—I had real feelings for this girl, unlike the different trysts from my past. And my heart, ever the troublemaker, seemed to agree, jumping like a maniac despite the troubles lurking around us.

  Taeral

  I ran a hand through my hair, my gaze wandering to one of the lantern paths that led to the waterfall palace. The pull was real; I could feel it. The farther I got from that place, the harder I longed to be closer to it.

  The team kept bouncing theories and ideas off one another, but I only half listened. Whispers trickled out from the woods, telling me to get closer. To jump off this cliff and make my way up one of the lantern paths and knock on Death’s door, for she may welcome me with arms wide open. My stomach was in knots, and it hurt to even think about what I would do once I found Death. It was as if my body was registering something that my mind, bent by these whispers, couldn’t—if Death herself were to welcome me, it could very well mean the end of the road for me.

  “You can hear something, right?” Eira asked me, standing by my side. She’d been quiet for the past couple of minutes, but I’d sensed her presence, like a sunbeam keeping me warm, when all I got from that waterfall palace were jolts of ice right through my heart.

  “Yeah, but it’s hard to find the right words to describe it,” I said slowly.

  “Is it saying something to you? Or is it just this weird pull?”

  “I think both. I can’t make out the words, but I understand them anyway,” I explained. “It’s telling me to come closer.”

  “But the ghosts and the Reapers are telling us to stay away,” she said, wearing a bitter smile. “This is quite the existential conundrum, isn’t it? Go in and die. Stay back and live. But, if we don’t go in, we die anyway, because the Hermessi will kill us all.”

  “Not you, though.” I chuckled, reminding her of what she really was.

  She gave me a pained look. “I don’t care about what happens to me. I wouldn’t want to live in a world that hasn’t got any of you people in it.�
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  “I’ll be honest, it’s good to have us all back together,” Raphael said, drawing my focus away from the waterfall palace. “Yeah, we’re in quite a pinch, but at least we have more hands on deck.”

  “That being said, we need an entry strategy,” Lumi replied. “We’re not dealing with just Reapers anymore. It seems like, the closer we get to that building, the more aggressive the defenses become.”

  “Perfectly illustrated by killer ghosts, which is a term I never thought I’d have to say out loud, beyond the realm of comic books,” Amelia said.

  “Let’s think about it this way,” Riza chimed in. “As you advanced toward the palace, without even knowing it was there, for that matter, the Reapers started to appear, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And they warned you. First just this Baethal fella, then the three of them. They were even close to attacking you, when Lumi’s Word outburst scared them off. And we can all agree that there’s a risk of them coming back to warn us some more, right?”

  “Yes,” Lumi agreed.

  “Now, as soon as we reached the base of that mountain, the ghosts—in larger numbers than before—became aggressive, and could even hurt us… which is unnatural, while Taeral’s instincts here keep screaming for him to go back there, because that place is calling to him,” Riza continued, making me nod again. “Okay. So, we’d be dealing with aggressive Reapers and killer ghosts. I think we can focus on distracting them all while, say, Taeral and Lumi make it inside that place. We’ll keep the hostile elements busy while you two find Death.”

  “We split up, then,” Herakles grumbled, not liking the idea.

  I, on the other hand, saw the sense in Riza’s proposal. “Lumi, Eira, and I can go there. I’m not letting Eira out of my sight,” I said, drawing a surprised look from the Hermessi daughter. “She could also act as a sort of Hermessi representative, and she could state before Death herself that there are plenty of elementals who don’t want the ritual to go through.”