The Last Hunt

by T. L. Cerepaka

  “How did that feel?” said the Newborn. “Did it hurt even more?”

  I smiled. “Is this the best you’ve got? A few paper cuts? I see why Hisara likes Lucius better than you. You’re pretty pathetic.”

  The Newborn’s eyes widened in anger. He raised his knife above his head and said, “That’s it. I’m going to skip torturing you and just go straight to cutting off body parts, starting with your eyes, which I don’t think you’ll be needing any longer.”

  Damn it. I should have kept my mouth shut. Then again, my old man always did say that my mouth would be the end of me one of these days. Guess he was right about one thing, at least.

  The Newborn brought the knife down on me. At the same time, I closed my eyes instinctively and expected to feel the knife pierce my eyelids and tear out my eyes.

  Instead, I heard the Newborn cry out in surprise. Opening my eyes, I saw the Newborn’s knife just a few inches from my face, close enough that my eyes nearly went cross-eyed trying to focus on it. As for the Newborn himself, he was looking not at his knife, but at the large hand which had closed around his wrist, stopping his knife from stabbing my eye out.

  Confused, I looked over to see who had caught the knife. Lucius stood there, his expression as cold as always, his hand firmly gripped on the Newborn’s wrist.

  “Lucius?” said the Newborn in surprise and annoyance. “What are you doing here? And why did you stop me from killing the Hunter?”

  “I’m here to relieve you of your duties,” said Lucius in a soft voice.

  “What?” said the Newborn, nearly shouting. “Oh, I see. You want to kill the Hunter so you can get more praise and attention from Lady Hisara. I’ve let you walk over me enough times already, Lucius, so I’m not going to let you—”

  What happened next happened too fast for me to follow. One second, the Newborn was ranting and raving at Lucius; the next, the now-headless Newborn lay on the floor at my feet, the expression on his face still stuck in anger and hate. The knife lay on the floor next to the increasingly large pool of black blood leaking out of what was left of his neck.

  Panting hard, I looked at Lucius. Lucius held a strange black blade in his hand, which was now dripping the Newborn’s blood onto the floor.

  “When I said I’m here to relieve you of your duties, Newborn, I meant permanently,” said Lucius.

  He then looked at me. I renewed my struggle against my bonds, because I figured that Lucius was going to kill me next and I wanted to see if I could somehow summon a burst of strength to help me free myself. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t budge the ropes whatsoever and my magic was still negated as always.

  I looked up at Lucius, who raised his blade above his head. I didn’t know what it would feel like to have my head cleaved in two with a shadow sword, but I hoped it would be an instant death. I prayed a brief prayer to God to keep my wife and daughter safe.

  Lucius brought the sword down, but not on my head. Instead, his shadow blade cut neatly through the ropes around my body. Then he stepped back and said, “Stand up. We have work to do.”

  Briefly surprised by this sudden turn of events, I nonetheless tossed the ropes off me and jumped out of the chair. I summoned a ball of light in my hand, but before I could throw it at Lucius, the tip of his shadow blade touched my neck and I froze.

  “Don’t,” said Lucius in a low tone. “I’m not your enemy this time and I don’t want to fight you. We’re on the same side.”

  I laughed. “Oh, really? Is that why you betrayed me to Lady Hisara? Because that’s what friends do, am I right?”

  “I never said we were friends,” said Lucius. “Besides, if I wanted you dead, I would have let the Newborn continue to have his way with you. Newborns usually don’t know how to moderate their blood lust, so he likely would have killed you at some point.”

  “How do I know you don’t just want to kill me yourself?” I said.

  “You would already be dead if that was the case,” said Lucius. “I know you humans have a hard time thinking beyond your emotions, but ask yourself why I would kill the Newborn and free you if I wasn’t trying to help you. Or are you just going to let your own hatred against ‘vamps’ blind your reasoning skills?”

  I hated to admit it, but Lucius had a point. I didn’t know the full extent of his power, but Lucius was certainly in a better position to kill me than I was to kill him. If he had wanted me dead, he could have killed me while I was tied to that chair and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing I could have done about it.

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “I believe you. I don’t like you, but I believe you.”

  The tip of Lucius’s sword left my neck and Lucius said, “That’s all I needed to hear. You are much smarter than you appear.”

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically as I lowered my light ball to my side. “So why did you betray Lady Hisara? Do you really like me that much?”

  Lucius’s shadow sword dissipated back into darkness as he said, “Not particularly. You see, I was never actually loyal to Lady Hisara in the first place.”

  I eyed Lucius skeptically. “What do you mean?”

  Lucius folded his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not working by myself. I’m here on orders from the Order of Vampires to take down Lady Hisara.”

  I frowned. “Order of Vampires? Never heard of them.”

  “They’re the Vampire Council’s espionage division,” said Lucius. “We do a variety of jobs for the Vampire Council, but we specialize in neutralizing threats to the Council’s authority and to the vampire community in general, such as Lady Hisara.”

  “You mean you consider Lady Hisara a threat to the vampire community?” I said. “Wasn’t she just going on about how she was going to usher in a new era of freedom for vamps or whatever?”

  Lucius shook his head. “Lady Hisara is an egomaniac and narcissist of the highest order. She doesn’t care one wit about vampires. She simply wants to increase and consolidate her own power over the others. If she gets the Vampire Sword, she will use it to overthrow the Vampire Council and rule over all vampires with an iron fist.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised to hear that,” I said. “She struck me as being a few lights short of a full string of Christmas lights.”

  “She’s much worse than that,” said Lucius. “Lady Hisara has been on the Council’s radar for a long time due to her interest in the Vampire Sword, but it was only within the last few months that I was given orders to infiltrate her group and take it down from within. I’ve been pretending to be her loyalest supporter for several months now, though I’ve used my position to take down her other supporters by framing them for betrayal and planting seeds of doubt regarding their loyalty to Hisara in her mind.”

  “So you’re a spy. Like a CIA agent, but for vampires.”

  “Much more efficient than the CIA, but yes, that’s technically what I am. It’s why I ‘betrayed’ you, because I didn’t want her to think we were on the same side. She’s gotten increasingly more paranoid the closer she’s gotten to the Vampire Sword and the last thing I needed was for her to start suspecting me of being less than loyal to the cause. She has a tendency to kill anyone who she even suspects of being a traitor.”

  Rubbing my wrists, I nodded. “Yeah, I get it now. So why did you come back now?”

  “Because the ritual is nearly complete,” Lucius replied. “And I’m going to need help to stop it and kill Lady Hisara. I sneaked away while Lady Hisara was ordering her Newborns to finish it in order to get your help.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, not bothering to hide the skepticism in my voice. “You’re not just going to betray me again to Lady Hisara, are you?”

  “Of course not,” said Lucius. “There’s no point. I just need you to do what you do best: Kill vampires.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t believe that a vampire spy who has openly admitted to manipulating people for his own gain isn’t going to stab me in the back as soon as I turn around,” I said. “Maybe I�
�ll just go and kill Lady Hisara myself, and then you afterward.”

  “That would be quite foolish,” said Lucius. “Kill me and you will have the entire Order of Vampires on you. And trust me, as a Pure, none of my fellow Order agents are as merciful as I am.”

  “So you really are a Pure, then?” I said. “That wasn’t a lie you made up back there to get me to trust you?”

  “Correct,” said Lucius. “Lady Hisara doesn’t like Pures very much. She’s told me more than once that she intends to kill all of us once she gets the Vampire Sword, except for me, of course, because I’m one of the ‘good’ ones. Presumably, you can see why I don’t feel guilty about betraying her.

  “That’s still not good enough for me,” I said. “I know from experience that vampires are not to be trusted. And Pures are still vamps. I’ll need more than just your word before I trust you.”

  Lucius nodded. “Then let me give you something you can trust.”

  Lucius waved his hand at the ceiling. A shadow portal appeared in the ceiling and a second later, Domination fell through the hole. I caught Domination by the handle before it hit the floor and looked it over in amazement.

  “Here is your sword back,” said Lucius. “Your silver sword, the one weapon you own that could kill me.”

  I looked up at Lucius again suspiciously. “No strings attached? You didn’t enchant Domination with your vampire magic to make it blow up in my face if I tried to stab you with it, did you?”

  “Of course not,” said Lucius. “Your sword is exactly the same as it was when you dropped it earlier. I’m giving it back to you because I want you to use it to kill Lady Hisara and her minions, even though I know you could easily use it to kill me instead. Given that, I’m interested in seeing if you still think I can’t be trusted.”

  Damn it, Lucius had a point. Most vampires in his situation would never have willingly given me my sword back or asked me to use it against their own people. And as far as I can tell, he was telling the truth about not enchanting it. I didn’t sense any vampire magic on it and it didn’t feel more fragile or weaker than it normally did.

  Besides, I had to look at the situation realistically here. Without Lucius, I would be up against a Vampire Lord and her Horde alone. I knew where the graveyard was, but this was not the kind of situation where I could afford to mess up. If I had Lucius’s help, then my chances of stopping Hisara increased considerably. I still didn’t trust him entirely, but I realized that Lucius wasn’t the main threat here. Hisara was.

  “All right. I believe you,” I said. “We can work together for now to beat Hisara and stop her from killing everyone in this town.”

  Lucius smiled in satisfaction. “I knew you would see the light eventually. Come with me. We have no time to lose.”

  ***

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The graveyard was packed full of vampires tonight. According to Lucius, there was only about a dozen vampires overall, but it sure seemed like more to me. Crouching low behind a particularly ancient gravestone, I peered over the top of the tombstone at the various vampires which were patrolling the graveyard. They didn’t have weapons, but with their fangs and their claws, they didn’t need them. Their red eyes darted back and forth in their heads, forcing me to lower my head behind the tombstone and keep my breathing as quiet as I could so they wouldn’t hear me.

  Not that I expected them to hear me, however. Prior to leaving the mansion, I had cast an invisibility spell on myself which would make me unseen to the vamps. I’d also a cast a spell to hide my scent, which was the primary way that vamps would sense me. In ordinary circumstances, that would have been more than enough to allow me pick up my sword and go around killing random vamps.

  But Lucius and I had made a plan together and we were going to follow through with it. I hated the idea of having any sort of ‘plan,’ but Lucius had convinced me that we needed to be careful about how we attacked Lady Hisara. Hisara may have been an insane Vampire Lord with delusions of grandeur, but that didn’t mean she was stupid or weak or that her minions were either of those things as well.

  The plan went like this: Lucius would return to Lady Hisara and make up whatever excuses for his absence that Lady Hisara would buy (Lucius had assured me that this was the easy part, because Lady Hisara liked him a lot and so didn’t question his disappearances or absences very much). While Lucius kept an eye on Lady Hisara, it was my job to go around the graveyard disrupting the ritual lines which would allow Lady Hisara to access the Vampire Sword. Then I would make my way back to the center of the graveyard, where Hisara and Lucius was, and Lucius and I would kill Hisara and any minions of her who got in the way as well.

  It was a pretty simple plan altogether, but I had a hard time understanding the ‘destroy the ritual lines’ part. Lucius had explained the ritual to me in this way:

  According to Lucius, the ritual to open the portal to the Vampire Sword required large concentric circles drawn within the graveyard, connecting tombstone to tombstone with red paint. The ritual needed seven concentric circles of increasing size in order to work properly, which was the main reason Lady Hisara had chosen the Paths Graveyard as the spot for the ritual, because it was the only graveyard she had been able to find that fit that criteria. Lucius had explained that the ritual relied upon taking the ‘death energy’ from the long-buried dead to work, but I didn’t really understand the concept that well.

  What I did understand, however, was that if even one line was smudged, then the entire ritual wouldn’t work. This was part of why this ritual had never been completed before: It was easy to accidentally smudge or even outright destroy a line, which would require redrawing the entire circle in order to reestablish the link between the tombstones. That was also why Lady Hisara had her minions stalking the graveyard. It was to ensure that each line was complete and that none of the lines had been smudged, damaged, or destroyed in some way.

  Of course, what Hisara didn’t plan for was me and Lucius teaming up to ruin her little ritual. I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I thought about how simple it was to disrupt this ritual. Just smudge a few painted lines in the dirt and voila, ritual broken. Vampire Lords were usually of higher intelligence and cunning than your average vamp, but I guess Lady Hisara must have missed out on that part when she became one. Or maybe she was so caught up in dreams of ruling the world that she didn’t think it was even possible for anyone to stop her.

  I slowly but surely lowered the tip of my sword onto my next line. Then I carefully dragged the tip of my sword through the dirt. It was a subtle effort, really, but Lucius had told me to keep it subtle so that none of Hisara’s minions would notice. The last thing we needed was for Hisara’s minions to realize that someone was disturbing the ritual and sound the alarm, which would likely make Hisara retreat. He said this was our best chance at stopping Hisara once and for all and he didn’t want her to slip away and try again somewhere else.

  I stood up to go down to the next circle, but then paused and crouched again when I heard voices coming down the path. Leaning against the back of the tombstone as closely as I could, I listened to the voices as they drew nearer. They sounded like Newborn vamps, based on their raspy, high-pitched tones. I probably didn’t need to hide from them, but just because they couldn’t see me didn’t mean that they couldn’t see my efforts to disrupt the ritual.

  “… Lady Hisara told me that the trap is set,” said one of the Newborns. “He’ll never see it coming.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said the other Newborn, whose voice sounded slightly feminine, in contrast to the masculinity of the other’s voice. “But that Lucius is very smart and clever. Perhaps he’s already anticipated the trap and has figured out a way to counter it.”

  I froze. What were they talking about Lucius and traps for? I listened harder than ever, because I didn’t want to miss even one word of this conversation.

  “You always worry about everything,” the male Newborn said. “Lady Hisara is smarter tha
n anyone. Any trap she sets is practically destined to succeed.”

  “I suppose,” said the female Newborn doubtfully. “I shouldn’t doubt Lady Hisara like that.”

  “You definitely shouldn’t,” said the male Newborn. “If Lady Hisara was nearby, she might have overheard us, and then what do you think she would have done? It’s best to keep these doubts to yourself. She doesn’t tolerate doubt.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the female Newborn. “Still, that Lucius is strong. Even if the trap goes well, that doesn’t mean he won’t survive it somehow.”

  “Lady Hisara is a Vampire Lord,” said the male Newborn. “Lucius is merely a Pure. In a straight fight, Lady Hisara would beat him easily. So even if the trap fails, Lady Hisara will be fine. Remember, she has bodyguards as well, so she doesn’t have to fight alone.”

  “Right,” said the female Newborn. “Sorry for doubting Lady Hisara. I’ve just been so anxious ever since the Hunter appeared that I can’t stop worrying about what might happen if something else went wrong.”

  “The Hunter was subdued and imprisoned beneath the mansion,” the male Newborn pointed out. “And right now, he’s probably being chopped up into pieces by our fellow Newborn. A similar fate awaits Lucius regardless of how he handles the trap.”

  “All right,” said the female Newborn, though there was still doubt in her voice. “If you say so.”

  “I do,” said the male Newborn. “Anyway, let’s finish our route and then return to Lady Hisara at the center of the graveyard. I want to be there personally to see Lucius get what he deserves for being a spy and a traitor.”

  The male Newborn started chuckling darkly when he said that. The female Newborn didn’t make any noises, but in my mind, I could see her (though I didn’t know how she looked) smiling at her companion’s chuckles and thinking that maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

  That was when I jumped out from behind my tombstone and beheaded both of them before they even realized what happened. They didn’t even see my sword coming. One moment, they were walking along the path. The next, their headless corpses lay on the ground, leaking the distinctive black blood of the vampires that was already starting to congeal and stink.