Another thought came to her, infiltrating her mind with such subtlety that it was as if the moonlight had delivered it itself. The question came softly enough, but once formed, it stopped her dead in her tracks like a punch to the face. It was a question for which she had no answer.
Danielle said Jerusa was drawn to blood drinkers gathered together in large numbers. The crowd sizes had been dwindling with her attacks, but she was more apt to attack a gathering of ten rather than five. And soon five would be considered a large gathering.
Shufah believed her. Danielle had no reason to lie. But why, if Jerusa’s pattern held true, had she not attacked the High Council?
Did they know about Jerusa? Had they already distanced themselves for protection? Possible, but unlikely.
Othella, Cot, and Mathias would guard over the Necromancer like greedy demons over the last soul. None of the three would trust to have that wizard out of his or her sight. And if they were together, they probably had at least one fledgling each, now well on their way to the Stone Cloak, close at hand. Then there was the Dwarf who was slippery as an eel and knew the endgame they were reaching for. No way they’d allow him out of their sights.
That was seven blood drinkers, minimum. More if they had Hunters escorting them, or had opted for more than one fledgling a piece.
So, how had they escaped Jerusa’s notice?
And a far more disturbing question: What would be the outcome when she did notice them? Would Sebastian and the Necromancer be quick enough to reverse Jerusa’s condition? Would Silvanus and Danielle be able to fight her off?
Shufah clutched her arms around her chest, the air felt suddenly too cold. She went back to the cabin to awaken the Monster before something more terrifying came calling.
Chapter Fifteen
Silvanus lay on his back, the heat of the white sand wicking up into his weary muscles. Jerusa sat at the edge of the sandbar, legs outstretched in the lapping waves, blank eyes fixed on the horizon.
In this moment of rare calm, he could almost forget the nightmare of their situation.
His eyes begged to close, but now wasn’t the time for sleep. If Jerusa leapt, he’d have to leap right behind her. The longer they were apart, the more difficult it would be to pick up her trail again.
It had been no easy trick grabbing her back at the Ice Sanctuary. The savage wraiths, split into two factions, had been warring not only with the Suhail/umbilicus creature but also with Jerusa herself.
A vital clue to this mystery danced at the edge of his mind, like a name held hostage on the tip of your tongue. Though his mind was too weary to hold a thought for very long, he pondered the sequence of events, turning each over like pages in a book.
During the battle, he and Augustus had teleported to the balcony. Silvanus to grab Jerusa. Augustus only to distract Suhail. In hindsight, they should’ve both grabbed Jerusa.
Suhail was fast. Faster than a savage. Faster than a Divine. Faster than even the umbilicus. As soon as they materialized on the balcony—Silvanus behind Jerusa, Augustus between Suhail and the savage guarding the human—Suhail fired his umbilical cord, catching Augustus square in the chest.
Now that Silvanus had a moment to collect his thoughts, the last drops of battle adrenaline washed away, his memory of the horror returned with intense clarity.
Suhail hadn’t fired his cord after Augustus appeared. He had fired just before. The deadly barb had already been well on its way, as if Suhail had expected their arrival. No. Not expected. Predicted.
The sting of guilt and loss burned behind Silvanus’s eyes. He clenched them tight as if this could somehow smother the pain, but there was no reprieve. Augustus’s fear-stricken face floated before him in the darkness, begging for help and cursing him for causing this death.
Silvanus wrenched his eyes open. “How did you do it? How did you merge with the umbilicus?”
A sudden fear struck him that his questions would draw Suhail here. But the only answer came from the restless sea that only shushed him for disturbing their endless dance.
Silvanus loved this sandbar; though, he couldn’t say exactly why. That was why he had leapt Jerusa back here. She had been born Divine here. In a way, it was her home.
Silvanus’s mind drifted back to their escape. Those shadowy devils had swarmed around him, obscuring his view as they fed on his life force. Thankfully, he had leapt within reach of Jerusa. Still, dragging her out of the Ice Sanctuary felt like tearing the moon out of the sky.
They bounced around for a bit, Jerusa trying to leap away, Silvanus holding on to her with the last bits of his dwindling strength. He couldn’t say where all they leapt, for the wraiths traveled with them, cocooning them inside a tumor of living shadows.
One place had been hot and arid, devoid of all sound. Another, the sound of rain blasting through treetops filled his ears. Once he had heard voices, caught the jumbled static of human thought, but whether the mortals had seen him and Jerusa entwined in their shadowy embrace, he couldn’t say.
It didn’t really matter. At this point, secrecy was a distant concern.
Somewhere amid their struggle for control, as he and Jerusa teleported from one random location to another, a third player entered the game.
Silvanus felt the newcomer’s presence, more than he heard it. Someone was following them. Leaping when they leapt. His concentration flickered, allowing Jerusa to slip her right hand from his grasp, and she clutched his throat with deadly precision.
Her fingers wrapped around his windpipe, sending a red ripple of pain rolling through him. She seemed to understand that though her wraiths could weaken him, they couldn’t kill him. But maybe she could finish the job with her bare hands. Silvanus didn’t know if Jerusa possessed the strength to tear his throat out, but he didn’t wait to find out.
With his left hand now free from holding her right, he hammered down hard on the side of her face. He had heard the human platitude, “This hurts me more than it hurts you” many times since awakening, and though he had long understood the meaning behind the saying, this was the first time he actually felt the sting that bred the phrase.
Striking Jerusa was like tearing chunks from his own soul. Every punch echoed within him, like thunder chasing lightning. But the creature strangling him was not Jerusa. He had to remind himself of this one key truth. And if he ever hoped to have the real Jerusa back, he needed to regain control.
After the fifth blow, Jerusa released her grip. Silvanus caught her hand, this time intertwining his fingers into hers. Her grip clamped down and the tiny bones in his hands threatened to explode. But at least he could get enough air to make sounds again.
“Danielle,” he called out, the name burning his throat as it passed. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” she called back. Her voice seemed somehow muffled by the storm of wraiths. “I can’t get to you.” And then, in a moment of frustration. “Stop leaping, for pity’s sake. It’s really annoying.”
“Never mind me,” Silvanus shouted. “The blood drinkers need you. Suhail has them trapped at the Ice Sanctuary. But be careful. Suhail has—”
Silvanus couldn’t recall how he had meant to finish that statement. It didn’t matter. Danielle vanished without asking why the vampires needed her help.
Had he just sent her to her doom? He hoped not. But he didn’t have time to dwell on that now.
Jerusa continued simultaneously trying to kill Silvanus and break free from his grasp. The savage wraiths grew more agitated (a feat he didn’t think possible), pulling more and more of his life force away and feeding it to Jerusa. Her strength waxed as his waned, and soon, the balance would tip.
As they continued to bounce around to random locations, Silvanus realized Jerusa was the one doing most of the leaping. He had leapt them from the Ice Sanctuary, but after that, Jerusa’s clouded, confused mind had done the rest.
As if to prove this point, they suddenly appeared high in the sky where the air was cold and thin. They immediatel
y fell, like twin stones, for at least a minute before Jerusa leapt again, this time beneath the ice of some frozen lake.
Being beneath the water was not a danger to either of them, but something about it had caused a tremor in Silvanus’s mind, snapping him from the lethargic stupor the savage wraiths had been drawing him into.
He released her wrists and gripped her tightly around the waist. If she slipped away from him now, he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to follow her. Silvanus wasn’t sure why, but he thought of the sandbar. Somehow, there they would be safe, if only for a short while.
Silvanus leapt, and they dropped a few feet to the white sand. The sky above had been dark and speckled with stars. Jerusa slipped from his tired grasp but didn’t leap again. Instead, she drifted around the micro-island as if some part of her recognized the place. She even knelt and pulled a tiny sliver of obsidian glass from the sand, gawking at it with blank confusion.
The savage wraiths mirrored Jerusa’s sudden passivity, and dispersed in the wind, nothing more than smoke and dust.
Now, several hours later, it seemed but the phantoms of a nightmare.
Silvanus stood to his feet, wavering a bit as if the ground had quaked. He had been more drained when the original ten Divines had imprisoned him, but not by much. Some of his life force would regenerate on its own, but he was probably going to have to swim out and hope he could get a hold of some large aquatic life to feed from.
Jerusa’s auburn hair danced across her back in the wind. Why was she still here? Did the sandbar really hold the magic key to calming her, or was she simply waiting while her wraiths searched for more blood drinkers?
“Jerusa?” His voice came out dry and raspy. “Do you remember this place? Do you remember me?”
She glanced over her shoulder as if just now realizing she wasn’t alone. The blood glow of savage eyes had vanished with the wraiths, leaving twin emeralds glittering in the sunlight. But the eyes watching him were void of thought and emotion. She turned back to watch the sea.
Silvanus had been running on borrowed hope ever since the day that Jerusa had awakened, but that blank look hollowed him out. Even if he could somehow banish the wraiths, exorcise them by the sheer strength of his love, her mind would still be a blank canvas. That was the curse of a Divine Vampire. She was lost to him, now and forever.
A small, stubborn section of his heart refused to accept this, though. There had to be a way to restore her. If only he had more time.
This thought brought a laugh rolling from a dark pit nestled deep within his gut. More time. What a cosmic slap in the face. They were both immortal beings, granted perpetual life and endless time for which to solve this enigma. But Suhail had fixed his murderous eyes upon them. No matter what they did, what precautions they took, eventually, he would find them.
The weight of their situation fell upon him, and there, on the sandbar, with the sun in his face, Silvanus collapsed into unconsciousness.
A subtle change filled the air, snapping Silvanus from an empty sleep. The sun had risen thirty degrees, and he knew, without looking, that they had a visitor.
Danielle made a slow, wide berth around him, her eyes fixed on Jerusa as she did so.
“She’s gone docile,” he said, feeling the weariness of his soul echoed in his voice. “For now, at least.”
“That seems strange.” Danielle’s body was tense, as though she suspected an attack.
“Even we Divines need to rest from time to time.”
“Not that one.” Danielle’s face cinched tight. She heaved a deep sigh, reluctantly looking to Silvanus. “Augustus is dead, isn’t he?”
Silvanus wanted to look away, but he owed her a straight answer. “Yes. He sacrificed his life to save Jerusa from Suhail. I was worried he might’ve got you, too.”
Danielle collapsed beside him on the sand. “They were gone by the time I got to the Ice Sanctuary. The whole place was gone. Blown up by some group of humans calling themselves The Round Table, or Lamorak, or something like that.”
Silvanus’s limbs went cold despite the tropic furnace blazing around him. “The blood drinkers?”
Danielle wiped at the twin streams of tears cascading down her cheeks. “Fine. For now. The humans got them out. Extracted them on a helicopter, then sent the whole fortress tumbling down into the caverns below.”
She sat quietly for a moment. Silvanus wanted to bring her comfort, but knew there were no words that could soothe her pain.
“I felt him go, you know,” she said. Her voice was hushed, almost a whisper. “Felt his life force shrink and blink out. Not like when the others were still alive, but I still felt it.”
Silvanus nodded. “Yeah. I did, too.”
“I didn’t want to believe it was true. I told myself that it was you that had died. That your blood witch had finally undone you. Then I arrived at that massive crater full of fire and smoke. I heard his banshee cry rise from somewhere beyond.”
“Except it wasn’t Augustus, was it?”
“No, not Augustus. The cry was his. I’ve heard it many times in battle. But it had changed, somehow. Become… diseased. I saw him in the distance, but he didn’t see me. Suhail, the savage. Suhail, the umbilicus. His attention was on the mortal woman he had with him, and the savage that kept hold of her. Thankfully, they leapt away. I don’t know where.”
“Suhail won’t stay gone long. He’ll come for the three of us, soon enough. To assimilate our powers into his own, just like he did with Augustus. Once we’re gone, he’ll be unstoppable.”
“He already is,” Danielle said. She smiled, but it couldn’t mask her despair. “The blood drinkers have a plan. I have my doubts.”
“What’s their plan?”
Danielle explained about the divided Watchtower, and the plan to reunite the augurs so that their combined psychic eye could search out the Dwarf and the human wizard called the Necromancer. She told him of how they hoped to draw Jerusa to them with such a large assembly of vampires. Then once all the stars had aligned, the Necromancer would reverse his spell, returning Alicia back to Jerusa.
“That plan is madness,” Silvanus said, mostly to himself. “It’ll never work.”
“Like I said, I have my doubts.”
“The first part, I can go along with. The Watchtower should be able to find Sebastian. And where he is, the Necromancer is. But Jerusa won’t be taken so easily.”
They turned their eyes upon her, suspicious that she might eavesdrop, but her face remained void, her empty eyes fixed upon the sea.
“But if they move to attack her,” Silvanus continued, “which is how the savage wraiths will see it, they’ll strike back. The wraiths will kill the Necromancer and turn the rest into savages before they even get started.”
“You’re probably right. We’ll need to distract her. Give them time to do whatever it is they are going to do.”
Silvanus spun in the sand to better see Danielle’s face. “Distract her how?”
She shrugged. “You tell me. She’s your love, not mine.” The words came out harshly.
Silvanus placed his hand upon her shoulder. “I’m sorry about Augustus.”
“He was my friend. Even from the beginning, whenever that was. Seems so long ago, it’s hard to remember now. With the others, well, we were friendly, but not exactly friends. Augustus and I had a certain bond.” She picked up a handful of sand and scattered it out before her. “After the others started dying, we became more than friends. Not lovers, exactly, but fear breeds a thirsty yearning.” She glanced at Silvanus from the corner of her eye.
He had guessed at the relationship budding between Augustus and Danielle. They hadn’t been open with him about it, but they didn’t hide it either. Now she was alone. Just like he was.
Not long after he had first awakened, when he had learned that there were others like him, he’d held such hope of belonging. The ten had turned their backs upon him, confined him, tried to execute him, for making Jerusa a blood drinker
. Oh, he knew loneliness very well.
After all of this time, and all they had gone through, even though Danielle was the last of the ten, she didn’t fully embrace him into her coven. There was a distance between them that could never be crossed. And the hope of starting his own Divine coven with Jerusa died a little more every day.
Loneliness was the cruelest of all pains. A person could withstand almost any other hurt as long as there was someone else there to help them endure it. Loneliness itself was a vampire, feeding upon the will to live. But Divine Vampires were creatures born from solitude. It was their birthright.
Silvanus turned his thoughts back on the problems at hand.
The vampires had a decent plan, but not a great one. Danielle was right. If they were to survive, he’d have to distract Jerusa long enough to allow the Necromancer to do his work. But there was only one distraction he could think of, and the cure was more deadly than the sickness.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Danielle said. The sharpness and desperation in her voice caused his heart to skip a beat. “Are we being punished?”
Silvanus sat dumbstruck for a moment. Her intense eyes turned on him, pleading for him to answer, and though he opened his mouth, not a word came out. “A punishment?” he asked, finally unloosing his tongue. “I’m not… I don’t know what you mean.”
“After the last savage war, when the blood drinkers’ treachery had been revealed, the ten of us vanished into nothing. There was no way that the ‘Stewards of Life,’” (She actually made air quotes, which Silvanus found endearing.) “could have overtaken us. Or so we believed then. But we left. Left the bad ones to control the good ones. They mutilated the three women that warned us, and we did nothing.” The self-contempt in her voice was jarring.
Silvanus thought of the Furies and smiled. On the night of their first meeting, when they had mistaken him for a human, after he had offered his own blood as a token of their friendship, he had vowed that he would repay those responsible for their torment. It had never occurred to him, until just now, that the guilty party just might be the Divine Vampires themselves.
The Savage Vampire (The Perpetual Creatures Saga Book 5) Page 17