The Phantom Oracle (Vampire Innocent Book 5)

by Matthew S. Cox

  He nods.

  Glim leans slightly toward the door and a whooshing rush wells up around us. For an instant, my stomach leaps up into the back of my mouth from the floor falling out from under me. Walls of shadow rise up on all sides and collapse over us, changing reality into this black-and-white, twisted version of the world. We lurch toward the narrow gap between the doors, which widens like a giant pair of ancient castle gates pulling apart. Shelves blur by in a torrent of shadows. Glim pulls me along, bobbing and weaving side to side with the weightless agility of disembodied eyeballs flying around. It occurs to me that I can’t feel my body at all, and trying to move my arms or legs doesn’t do anything. When I try to look over at Glim, my view rotates, but the only thing I see is a mass of darkness with a vaguely head-shaped part at the leading end. Oh, this is trippy.

  Do people even say ‘trippy’ anymore?

  Yay me for having a father stuck in the Eighties.

  Glim’s shadow form swerves to the left, pulling me along into a silent vortex of books and infinite darkness—sort of like being a librarian. I try to ask him how we’re supposed to push the hidden button to open the secret passageway, but my voice ignores me. He doesn’t slow down, flying straight into the bookshelf at the end.

  A sensation akin to jumping naked into a bathtub full of tepid peanut butter accompanies us passing through the solid barrier into a nightmare version of the spiral stairs. On this side of reality, the metal railing appears to be covered in glowing blue marks, rune writing. Going down is way faster in this form. In mere seconds, we’re at the bottom and cruising along the underground passageway. It’s pretty hard to get lost in a corridor that has only one door.

  We round the only corner and stop short at the sight waiting for us: the door is glowing bright blue. Circles appear, drawn in thin white lines, rising up from the door’s surface and expanding out a few inches until they fade away. Each ring is lined with indecipherable writing in no script I’ve ever seen before.

  But damn, it’s kinda pretty and mesmerizing.

  Glim dips low, dragging me along. What had been an inch-high gap at the bottom grows cavernous. We slide under a ceiling of roaring blue fire. I can’t help but cringe away from it, feeling like a hunk of meat teased by a char broiler. The instant we’re past the painful light, I stop short. A blurry, shadow-filled hallway in front of me appears to stretch off away from me along with a sensation similar to being drawn backward at high speed. The next thing I know, I lurch forward as if I’ve been fired out of a slingshot and land face down on solid stone.

  “Ow,” I mutter.

  Everything is spinning so damn much, I can’t even push myself up. I roll on my side, holding my gut and throwing up like I’ve never puked in my life. Only… I’m not actually throwing up. There’s nothing in me to come out, which makes the convulsions way more painful.

  Hands grasp me under the arms and gently lift me upright, holding on until the retching stops.

  “Are you all right?” whispers Glim.

  I cling to him, shivering. “No. What the hell happened to me?”

  “The energy in this place interferes with my crossing. It is mild, but it has affected you more because you are neither acclimated to, nor supposed to experience that world.”

  “Right.” I swallow hard, then lift my face away from his coat.

  Sure enough, we’re inside. The hallway looks like we’ve gone back in time to a medieval English castle. It runs on for at least a hundred yards with multiple branching passages on both sides, archways, and doors everywhere. Several suits of medieval plate armor stand on pedestals among tapestries showing a bunch of dudes wearing funny costumes. The outfits sorta have an Egyptian feel to them, but the men are almost whiter than I am. They’ve even got some swords hanging on pegs and some other weird symbols I don’t understand.

  Odder still, a heavy metallic quality in the air tastes like I’m sucking on a penny.

  “I’m going to assume you don’t know where specifically she is,” says Glim.

  “Nope.”

  “Keep holding my hand then in case we need to make a quick exit.”

  I nod. “No arguments here.”

  My confidence has taken a slight hit. It’s easy enough to laugh off the idea that magic exists when someone’s merely talking about it—even if that someone is a ghost—but I can’t explain the funny feeling tingling over my skin, or the glowing door with arcane circles dancing around it.

  “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  “Indeed.”

  Coralie walks out into view a ways down the hall, and waves at us in a beckoning manner. Her eyes are wide and she appears to be trembling.

  “There she is. Can you see her?”

  “Yes.” Glim nods. “You are right. She looks terrified.”

  “Let’s hurry up then before someone notices we’re here.” I jog toward her. “Do you think they live here?”

  Glim glances around at the décor. “I wouldn’t think so. This place has the look of a lodge. I’d guess they use it for meetings or rituals.”

  “That’s good.” I stop in front of Coralie. “Is there anyone else here?”

  “No one alive.” She bounces with excitement and nearly attempts to hug me, but catches herself, remembering she’s not solid.

  “Cool. Perfect. Umm, this place is a damn maze. Where are you?”

  Coralie points at a set of wooden double doors behind her. “This way.”

  While she ignores them, I have to open them. Fortunately, these aren’t locked. I step into a long, curving hallway with dark walls, burgundy carpeting, and a serious amount of medieval weapons on the walls. Every like twenty feet, a big alcove on the outside of the curve holds a leering gargoyle statue as big as a man. They’re all the same: muscular male figures with eagle heads, angel-wings, and clawed hands. I’m sure they’re meant to be menacing, but having them perched on pedestals like cats makes them look a little silly. People only adopt that posture for one reason… and they don’t do it terribly often since the invention of the flush toilet.

  My inner ten-year-old snickers at the row of pooping gargoyles.

  Coralie breezes down the hallway, but stops short without warning, pointing at the wall. “Sarah. You should take that.”

  When I catch up to her, I realize she’s gesturing at a shield.

  “Are you serious?”

  She nods. “Yes. But you won’t have to carry it for long.”

  “Okay… whatever.” I reach up and grab the giant thing from the wall, staggering under its weight. “Oof.” Once I think about wanting to be stronger, the shield goes from as burdensome as a car door to a hunk of plastic. “Okay. Got it.”

  With the exuberance of a kid racing to the living room on Christmas morning, Coralie zooms off down the hall. She leads us through a series of turns—crap this place is big—to another passage that ends with a pair of ornate metal double doors that look fairly tough. Etched symbols cover most of the flat spaces in neat vertical rows, though I can’t begin to read it.

  “I can’t go past here.” Coralie turns to face us. “This is the vault. Turn left at the first room, follow the hallway around, and you’ll find me in there. Mine is the only body in the place, so you shouldn’t have any confusion.”

  Glim nods and examines the doors. “We’ll need to jump past it.”

  “Is King Kong going to gut punch me again?” I shiver, nearly ready to say screw it.

  “For such a brief hop, I doubt it.”

  I heft the shield. “What about this thing? This isn’t going to fit under the door.”

  He laughs. “Neither should your body. Be glad I am a Shadow and not a Sybarite.”

  “Do I even want to know why?”

  “Some of them can turn their bodies into fog… but only their bodies. No clothes or objects.”

  I smirk. “I’ve already put in my twenty-four hours of compulsory public nudity when I escaped the morgue. Not really in any hurry to do that agai
n.”

  Glim smiles. A brief flash of shadow surrounds us along with a stomach-twisting moment of vertigo. I’m vaguely aware of something whooshing past us at high speed, and we’re standing in another hallway of plain concrete walls.

  “Oof.” I press a hand to my stomach. “I’m okay. Just did a little flip.”

  “The Old Guard can transubstantiate into mist as well, but as I understand it, it takes them a long time to reach that level of power. Perhaps the Sybarites who are wonton libertines manage it more easily since it takes less energy for them when they leave all their possessions behind. I can’t say I’ve ever cared to study it.”

  As soon as the cramp in my gut fades, I look up. A short distance in front of us, the corridor connects to a room filled with an assortment of giant trunks, cabinets, and shelves holding all sorts of things: books, globes, bottles, staves, and bundles of fabric that could be rolled up tapestries or enormous scrolls. The air in here is so dry and dusty I’m tempted to lick the floor to improve the flavor in my mouth.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I can’t tell if it’s due to nerves at breaking the rules, a genuine feeling that something is now watching me, or some unexplainable magical energy.

  I cautiously advance down the plain hallway. “Wow, I thought that turning into fog thing was a made up story. What about wolves and ravens?”

  Glim shakes his head. “Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “So,” I whisper, still creeping forward. “How’s that fog different from what you can do?”

  “They aren’t jumping into the spirit world. They’re stuck drifting around only as fast as the wind pushes them.”

  “Oh that sucks. Guess it’s really for quick escaaaaaaa—”

  I’m flying across the room before I realize something smashed into me from the left with a loud bang of stone-on-wood. My body slams into the concrete wall on the right side of the room, then slides a few feet down until my sneakers touch the floor. It takes me a second to realize I’m peering over the shredded remains of that shield at one of those gargoyles.

  Only… it’s no longer squatting. The damn thing’s alive.

  And that shield is the only reason my head is still attached.

  “Fuck!” I shout.

  The bird-headed pale grey statue pivots and swipes its claws at Glim, who disappears into a puff of black smoke. Three stone claws as long as steak knives pull at the dispersing mist. The gargoyle shifts its head toward me. Blue light wells up within its eyes. I raise what’s left of the shield to guard my face an instant before a strange buzzing crackle goes off. Something hits the shield with the force of a mild punch, and a corresponding bang comes from the right.

  I glance over at a patch of blue fire burning on one of the shelves.

  “Oh, of course it throws tiny fireballs from its eyes.”

  Azure beams like lasers shoot from its eyes, converging a short distance in front of its beak. Another little comet of blue flames forms and flies at me, but slows to an almost-creep once my reflexes slow down the world. It’s almost trivial to swat it aside with the shield. This evidently annoys the creature as it comes storming at me, raising claws.

  Glim grabs a giant quarterstaff thing covered in decorative feathers, beads, and other dangling junk. He rushes the gargoyle from behind, swinging to take its head off. The stick breaks on contact, though the hit does make the creature stumble. Glim eyes the broken staff with a contemptuous ‘cheap piece of shit’ smirk.

  The fireballs are slow enough to my accelerated reflexes that I can dodge them with ease, so I toss the broken shield aside and run to the right, putting some distance between me and razor sharp stone claws. Coralie is probably losing her mind on the other side of the door at all the noise we’re making in here. I wonder if she even knows about the—of course she does. She told me to take the shield.

  Geez. It would’ve been real nice of her to warn me.

  The gargoyle whirls on Glim with surprising speed for a solid stone statue. Again, it shreds a dissipating cloud of black smoke when he poofs at the last second. I have no damn idea what we’re supposed to do to a creature like this. Our claws aren’t going to scratch it. Weapon. Need a weapon… I start looking around at all the junk in here—taking note of three corridors leading out, one in each direction. Hmm. Maybe running is the best idea?

  When the thing charges at me again, I race around the room in a wide circle.

  “Hah! You might be strong and tough, but I’m still faster than you!”

  It shoots another fireball at me.

  “Cheater!”

  I stay ahead of the first one, and stop short, letting the second fireball go past me in front. The gargoyle shrieks like an eagle someone kicked in the balls. Glim reappears in an inky cloud above and behind it, falling into a drop-kick that knocks the six-foot bird man flat on its front with a resounding thud.

  “Okay… if there’s anyone in here, they definitely heard that.” I eye the left offshoot. “If there’s anyone on the fourth floor of the school, they heard that. Shit, my parents probably heard that back in Cottage Lake.”

  Glim laughs.

  A metallic gleam catches my eye from one of the shelves. I zip over and grab a broadsword from under a giant cloth scroll. But… it doesn’t have the heft of a real weapon. More like a cheap ceremonial blade. It’s not even sharp.

  The gargoyle pushes itself up to kneel.

  “Bleh. It’s a prop.” I toss it back on the shelf. “We’re not going to be able to get her out of here with this thing in our way, are we?”

  “Of course. Once we find her, it’s easy to leave.” Glim jumps on the gargoyle’s back, knocking it flat again.

  “Okay. Let’s grab her and get the hell out of here.” I run across the room, jump the gargoyle’s legs, and haul ass for the hallway that would’ve been a left turn from the way we entered.

  The gargoyle rolls onto its side and swats Glim with a wing, launching him into a tall shelf. He smashes into it, creating an explosion of dust and flying splinters. Grr. It lumbers back to its feet and turns toward him. He looks down at a large piece of broken wood sticking out of his chest that evidently impaled him from behind. That looks super painful. And it’s my fault.

  I skid to a stop, and by total chance, wind up eye-to-top with a giant metal candlestick. It’s solid bronze or brass or something. Perfect. Even with my strength turned up to eleven, it’s got obvious heft. I grab it like a baseball bat and dash back across the room, leaping into the air and bringing the metal club down on top of the gargoyle’s head.

  A dull clonk accompanies the candlestick bending. The gargoyle’s head shatters into several large hunks of stone. The body ceases moving like living tissue, statue-rigid in an instant. It falls over sideways with another floor-shaking thud.

  “Take that, bird brain.”

  “That was even more painful than this board.” Glim sits up, stands, and walks over before turning his back. “Would you mind?”

  I grab the piece of shelf sticking out of him and pull. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. Worst thing is having to get a new coat, but it’s fine. We have an entire room full of brooding black trench coats back at the conclave.”

  “Hah.”

  Faint scraping draws my attention to stone chips vibrating on the floor. They gradually slide toward the gargoyle body.

  “Shit. It’s putting itself back together.” I whack it in the head again to break more of the neck stump.

  Glim flashes a toothy smile. “It appears you only, umm, knocked it out.”

  I use the candlestick to swat a softball-sized piece of its head across the room. “Hopefully that’ll buy us a few more seconds. Wow, talk about a splitting headache.”

  “You are your father’s child.”

  “Sorry, the puns are contagious.” I jog to the corridor, spend a few seconds trying to straighten out the candlestick, and stand it back where I found it. “Maybe they won’t notice.�
�

  Glim scratches his chest where the wood had poked out. “Worst part about wood injuries is they itch so damn much.”

  “Is that where the stake thing came from?”

  “Maybe. Could be an allergy… most likely it’s my body purging dust particles or tiny splinters.”

  The corridor only goes about twenty feet before it bends to the right and leads to an octagonal room with tall cabinets, most of which have fancy inlay patterns. This stash makes me wonder who raided the bedrooms of a dozen princesses… and at least one princess is wedged between two cabinets on the left side. Or at least, a former princess.

  Surprisingly, for a woman who’s been dead for almost two centuries, Coralie’s body doesn’t look that bad.

  Her dress has rotted more than a little, but it’s clearly the same outfit she’s wearing as a ghost. Something weird and magical has to be going on here to preserve the body, since she doesn’t look too decayed or dried out. Her skin’s intact and white as paper, her waist-long hair light brown and reasonably healthy in appearance. A slight hint of withering at the mouth is the most obvious sign that she’s dead, along with her sunken cheeks. She looks like a mannequin tilted to the left, her head against a cabinet and arms at her sides. The contrast between her perfect hair and slightly-not-right face makes her look more like an ancient doll than a corpse that’s been sitting around since 1849.

  I creep over to her and reach a tentative hand out, tracing my fingertips over her sleeve. Dry fabric at the verge of disintegrating crinkles at my touch, the arm under it as rigid as wood. Thankfully, the body doesn’t give off much of any detectable smell beyond a faint floral perfume—which is pretty damn weird.

  “Wow… you’ve aged rather well.”

  Glim walks up behind me. “They’ve turned her into a mummy of sorts. Preservation techniques I do not understand have been used on this body.”

  “Thank you Captain Obvious.” I chuckle.

  “I mean remarkable preservation. She’s barely decomposed at all.”

  “But she’s clearly dead.” I fidget. “Ugh. Is this what I look like when I’m sleeping? No wonder I freaked Sophia out.”