With a swipe of his hand, the wiry kidnapper sent Jen bloodied and sprawling. Darnell had to dive to the side to avoid her stumbling form. He landed not far from Ramona.
“Get the mortal,” he growled to her. “We’ll take care of this prick.” With no more pause than that, he was throwing himself again at their enemy, and unlike with Jen, the kidnapper was no match for Darnell’s speed and power. Darnell drove him backward and onto the ground.
Ramona shook her head trying to clear her mind. She ignored the last burning of whatever it was that had sprayed from the eye. She climbed to her feet and rushed over to Zhavon.
Zhavon? This can’t be her.
Ramona couldn’t bring herself to believe that it was.
No….
But one of the creature’s eyes opened, and it stared into Ramona’s face. The mouth opened, but only garbled sound came out. Ramona looked away. She had to force herself to turn back—and wished she hadn’t. She saw the forked tongue, both tips fused to the roof of the mouth. Ramona looked again at the creature’s eye—at Zhavon’s eye—and her disgust melted away to pity.
“I’ll help you…” Ramona paused, choked on the name, “Zhavon.”
Zhavon nodded, then her eye closed. Her jaw and head hung limp.
Ramona turned at the sound of screams. Darnell was rolling into a crouch. He had dodged another spray from the eye, but Jen hadn’t been so lucky. The shoulder and sleeve of her sweatshirt smoked and sizzled, as did the skin beneath.
Ramona turned hurriedly back to Zhavon, sliced the rope around her ankles with one deft flick of a claw. The girl’s arms were a different story. There was no rope to slit or untie, only skin and stone—the skin was fused to the stalagmite behind Zhavon. And the stone would take far too long to chip away.
The melee, meanwhile, had become something of a standoff. Darnell and Jen, favoring her burnt shoulder, warily circled their prey and watched especially closely the strange eye. The kidnapper, for his part, was backing slowly toward a wall trying to prevent either of his attackers getting behind him. Having gauged his opponents, he paid closer attention to Darnell.
Ramona dithered for only a moment. She hated to inflict more suffering on the girl, but more than anything else she wanted to get poor Zhavon away from that place of torture. Ramona grasped the mortal’s arm and pulled. Skin ripped away from stone, and a piercing scream filled the cavern and echoed deafeningly.
But it was not Zhavon who screamed.
The gangly kidnapper stood ramrod straight. His head jerked up. He glared beyond his immediate attackers, whom he no longer seemed to notice.
“Do not touch my masterpiece!” he bellowed, and suddenly he seemed taller than before, less emaciated. The eye shed an ominous, pale light across the chamber.
Ramona lifted Zhavon in her arms, but then froze as the eye’s gaze fell upon them. That stare locked Ramona in place as the cold hatred of countless years sapped the passion from her bones. How insignificant this one mortal seemed now, how petty the urges that drove Ramona. Who was she to interfere with this monumental work of art?
Ramona’s own desires washed away under the weight of ages. She dropped to bent knee and laid the mortal on the ground.
Darnell and Jen didn’t understand Ramona’s actions, but they saw their enemy’s distraction and pounced.
Leave him alone, Ramona thought, suddenly perplexed. Why are they bothering him?
The eye flashed a brilliant blast of golden light, and the scene unraveled before Ramona as if in slow motion. Jen leapt at the kidnapper’s side, but from the cave floor, a stalagmite erupted where before none had been. It shot upward and caught Jen in mid-air. Its jagged point ripped into her belly, knocking her upright. It tore through her body, crushing bones, splitting skin as it forced its way through her chest cavity. Emerging through her arched back and then completely piercing her neck, the stalagmite finally halted.
Jen’s head, a bloody heap of bone and blonde hair, fell to the cave floor.
Darnell attacked at the same time that Jen did but, to Ramona, he too appeared as if he moved in slow motion in the flashing golden light.
The Toreador caught Darnell.
The force of Darnell’s lunge should’ve at least knocked his target back a few steps, but the kidnapper clamped a hand on each of Darnell’s shoulders and caught him without so much as flinching.
Then he squeezed. He pulled Darnell’s shoulders each to the side, and as Ramona looked on in rapt horror, their enemy pulled Darnell’s shoulders a foot broader. The flesh, the bone, stretched out beneath the kidnapper’s hands.
Darnell howled as he fell to his knees. His arms hung useless at his sides. The shoulder joints and muscles were hopelessly misaligned. And then the monster with the eye reached for Darnell’s face.
“Come on!”
Ramona jumped at the sound of Tanner next to her. The shock jarred her back to the moment, pried her loose from the grip of the eye.
“Let’s get out of here!” he urged in a harsh whisper.
There was something strange about him, but amidst the confusion, the thought didn’t fully form in Ramona’s mind.
“Grab her and come on!” He gestured toward Zhavon, then turned to leave, just like he had earlier that night.
Zhavon. Blood. Jen. Could it really have been the same night?
Tanner had led her into the trees just after sunset. Now it was nearly dawn. And, again, he’d ordered her to follow and then turned to leave. Ramona looked back to where the monster was pressing his fingers into Darnell’s brow. The bones gave way like clay at the hands of a sculptor. Darnell shrieked as the openings of his eyes grew smaller and smaller.
“Damn you, whelp. He’ll have to fend for himself!”
Ramona looked again to Tanner. The last time he had assumed she would follow. In all his confidence he’d just kept walking. This time, he’d stopped to make sure. This time, his voice was imploring her. Staring into his eyes, Ramona knew what was different.
Fear.
His face was awash in it. He was facing something he’d rather flee from than fight.
I made you what you are.
Yet he didn’t know what to do. He was afraid.
The realization struck terror into Ramona.
I am your sire, he’d said. I made you what you are.
She’d thought he would be the one to reveal secret knowledge to her, to show her the meaning of this new existence. But he didn’t understand what was happening here. He was running away. Afraid.
Ramona lifted Zhavon once more and began to run after Tanner. Seeing her follow, he took off in earnest. Darnell’s screams echoed throughout the cave. They chased Ramona down the tunnel. She ran faster and faster, but she couldn’t outrun them.
And then she was out of the cave, in the meadow. Darnell’s screams still echoed in her ears.
Tanner didn’t slow down, but Ramona, even bearing the load of the inert Zhavon, almost caught up to him. The sky was growing light to the east. Seeing that reminded Ramona not so much of the pain she’d suffered just one sunrise ago, but instead of how Jen had worried about where they would stay—Jen, whose head lay on the cave floor at the feet of a monster. Ramona missed a step, stumbled, almost fell with Zhavon to the ground.
How much worse off is Darnell? Ramona wondered. I should go back and save him, she thought. But how?
She shook her head. It doesn’t matter. I should… be there with him… die with him.
But there, ahead of her in the meadow, was her sire, the one who’d created her as a vampire. He seemed so much more cunning than she was. He could sneak up on her with no problem and then disappear without a trace. And he was running away.
That should tell you something, girl, she thought.
They crossed the meadow and began up the hill. Tanner had pulled away when Ramona had stumbled, but she’d almost caught up with him again. He ran without pause toward the ridge. Not a leaf or twig moved with his passing. The crunch of Ramona’s every
footstep seemed to announce her presence to the early morning. She began to chastise herself: I’m being as loud as… then stopped.
Jen.
Tanner stopped halfway up the western face of the hill. “This’ll do,” he said. “Sun’s probably already burnin’ on the other side of the ridge. We’ll go to ground here.”
Go to ground. Of course. There was no time to find shelter. But Ramona stared at the limp figure in her arms. “I can’t just leave her,” she said plaintively.
Tanner looked directly at Ramona for the first time since they’d gotten out of the cave. His expression was blank. He said nothing.
“I can’t leave her!” Ramona shouted at him. Her eyes were blurring with tears of blood.
“Do what you must,” he said evenly.
“Fuck you!”
Tanner watched her impassively.
Ramona lowered Zhavon to the ground, stroked her hair. “I can’t just…” Zhavon’s face was as badly deformed as the rest of her body, maybe worse. One eye was simply gone, hidden beneath stretched flesh and bone perhaps. The nose was flattened, smashed to the side, probably no longer functional for breathing, judging by the gentle, constant panting from what remained of Zhavon’s mouth. Her beautiful lips were flattened, stretched, and her head was at a sharp angle, held there by the fleshy cheek that Ramona had seen fused to the girl’s shoulder.
“I can’t just…”
Ramona smelled blood. It was all over her, she saw. Zhavon’s arms, where they’d been torn away from the stone, were bleeding and had been the whole time Ramona was carrying her.
“Do what you must,” Tanner said solemnly, and then he sank into the ground.
Ramona stared after him. She was unsure if he merely sank beneath the topsoil, or if his body actually became a part of the earth. She was unsure which would be the case with her own body when she joined him in just a few moments. She had no longer than that to decide. The last few minutes of daybreak, when the sun finally rose above the horizon, always seemed to go so quickly. Already, her skin grew warm to the touch, as if she had a fever. But only living flesh could be fevered.
Zhavon’s twisted body lay at Ramona’s feet. The mortal girl had been transformed into a monster as surely as Ramona had been. Except while Ramona could hunt, could find sustenance and survive, Zhavon could not go on like she was.
Ramona stroked the girl’s smooth, chocolate skin—almost the only recognizable feature, except for the single eye that opened to stare at Ramona now. Zhavon couldn’t speak. Even if her tongue weren’t melted to the roof of her mouth, she lacked the strength.
Probably she wouldn’t survive through the day, Ramona tried to tell herself. And if Zhavon did, no surgeon could correct the damage done to her.
I’d be doing her a mercy, Ramona thought. I can’t just leave her.
The sun was rising. There was so little time.
Ramona looked into the human eye in the midst of that monstrosity of warped flesh. She wanted to say something, to comfort Zhavon, but there were no words. Tenderly, Ramona kissed what should have been a perfect, teenaged cheek. She looked one last time on Zhavon in her nakedness, and tried to see in the obscene mound the girl she had known.
Then Ramona reached down to the exposed heart, placed her hand on the beating organ. Despite the unimaginable trauma done to the body, the heart still beat, still forced Zhavon’s lifeblood through that form.
As the sun began to singe her back, Ramona drank deeply. The blood was sweet, but bitterness consumed her soul. Ramona drank until the mortal fire was quenched, and then she sank into the earth.
part three:
ash
Friday, 23 July 1999, 9:09 PM
Upstate New York
As the tide of consciousness began to tug gently but unmistakably at Ramona, she found herself sorely tempted to ignore it, to burrow more deeply into the subterranean calm she had discovered. No single reason for her reticence asserted itself; the feeling was broad and many-layered like a patchwork quilt. She saw herself nestled among the sheets and blankets on her bed, not wanting to crawl out and pack herself off to school, where nearly anything could happen. That hesitation, however, was rooted not in contentment with the present so much as dread of the future.
Slowly she grew more aware of her surroundings. She was not the young girl she had been. School was not the problem. There were no sheets, no blankets. The peace that enveloped her was that of the earth itself—soil, stone, roots, crawly creatures. She was with them; she was of them.
Is this what it’s like at the very end? Ramona wondered. Could death—real death—be more peaceful?
She stretched out her awakening consciousness to that which surrounded her. She entwined herself among the massive sprawl of roots that anchored and nourished a great oak. She traced the roundabout twists of a groundhog’s tunnels.
Maybe I’ll just stay.
It would be so easy, an end to the pain.
But even as the contentment took hold, something else stirred within her—hunger. It had a firm grip on her heart, a stranglehold on her soul. For it was not her body that hungered, but the ravenous Beast within her that howled for release. Thoughts of rest, of peace, served only to heighten the fury of its ravings.
You gave in to the Beast.
Already, it had driven her for two years, just as it drove her from rest now. She had felt the hunger, many times, but she had never realized the force behind it. She had never before known how close to the surface the Beast lay.
Ramona, as well, rose closer to the surface—the surface of the life-sustaining earth. Darkness and contentment receded into distant memory. The sensation of air upon her face entered her consciousness only slowly. She stretched her fingers, her toes, forcing motion into muscle and sinew that should long ago have rotted to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
Night sounds filtered through her waning lethargy. Crickets and tree frogs reminded her that she was far from the familiar asphalt jungle in which the mortals encased themselves. The sounds reminded her, warned her.
“If you’re good and ready…?”
The voice, so near, shocked Ramona fully to her senses. In less than a second, she was on her feet, crouched, ready to receive attack.
Not thirty feet away squatted Tanner, arms folded, a scowl visible on that of his face not hidden by his hair or sunglasses.
His presence brought back the most recent memories to Ramona. They swept over her like a wall of flame driven by a cruel wind. Jen was gone. The same might be true of Darnell. And Zhavon…
Zhavon!
Her name was a desperate wail. It bore witness to the Beast within Ramona. She slumped to the ground remembering her crime of the night before—how she had fed directly from the girl’s beating heart until it had surrendered the last of its lifeblood. Zhavon’s lifeblood.
Ramona, sitting cross-legged, head in her hands, expected tears of blood—Zhavon’s blood—to overwhelm her. She waited for the tears, but they did not come. There was only a great emptiness. And across the emptiness echoed the howls of the Beast.
“Never,” Tanner admonished her, “come from the ground without knowing who—or what—is there.”
Ramona ignored him. He was clearly annoyed, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t pull herself from the morass of guilt surrounding Zhavon’s death. Only recently had Ramona begun to comprehend the nature of the bond between herself and the girl—how being near the mortal kept Ramona in touch with that fading portion of humanity within herself. Except now Zhavon was gone. Dead at Ramona’s own hand. She thought for a moment that she heard the baying of the Beast all around her, but it was merely the breeze playing among the leaves of the trees.
Tanner didn’t move. He stared unblinking at her.
Ramona glared back at him. None of this made any sense to her. For two years she had known nothing but fear and hunger. Now before her was a person who could explain it, but he seemed more interested in ordering her around.
Well, Mr. Lincoln done freed the slaves, she thought.
Tanner had stolen her old life. He hadn’t asked her if she’d wanted this existence of night and blood.
“I must go,” he said at last. “I was waiting for you.”
“You want me to thank you?” Ramona asked, but her defiance was undercut by the renewal of fear. He was going to leave again. Since she’d found out about him, that had been the way of things. He would appear briefly, and then he was gone—outside Ramona’s window, at the garage, in the woods in Hayesburg. The only difference here was that for the first time he’d bothered to tell her before he disappeared.
“I got questions,” Ramona said.
“All in good time.” He didn’t move. He was too calm. It was like he wasn’t alive.
“I don’t know about you,” Ramona snapped, “but I ain’t havin’ a good time.”
Still expressionless, Tanner stared at her. “I have to get others.”
Others.
Ramona wasn’t sure what he meant. Others, like Zhavon, to feed the ravenous Beast? Or by others did he mean Darnell and Jen, who needed rescuing? Although Jen, Ramona reminded herself, was beyond rescue.
“We have to get Darnell,” Ramona told Tanner.
He shook his head. “I’ll get others first.”
His face gave away nothing, but Ramona remembered the look of fear she’d seen in him last night. She didn’t want to go back into that cave either, but she couldn’t just leave Darnell.
“Darnell isn’t dead…might not be dead,” she insisted.
“Better for him if he is,” said Tanner matter-of-factly.
Ramona wanted to argue the point but, thinking how that madman with the eye had deformed Zhavon, realized that Tanner was probably right.
“But we have to find out,” she said.
Surprisingly, Tanner nodded his assent. “Yes. I will bring others, and then we’ll destroy that creature.”
Ramona watched him closely. His scowl was not so deep now that she wasn’t arguing with him. From what he said, he held out less hope than she did that Darnell had survived this long. Tanner’s interest was vengeance. She wasn’t surprised. Men were like that. Tanner felt his pride had been wounded somehow, and he was going to go back and kick that creature’s ass.
Clan Novel Gangrel: Book 3 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 12