The Savage Vampire (The Perpetual Creatures Saga Book 5)

by Gabriel Beyers

  “We could’ve turned the tide, back then,” Danielle continued. “Could’ve crushed the High Council. Could’ve stopped the Light Bearers. Could’ve ended the Zealots. We could’ve done anything, but we did nothing.”

  Silvanus didn’t think they were cursed, but he didn’t interrupt her. She was grieving for Augustus, and, to a lesser extent, the other Divine Vampires. This wound needed to be cleaned, otherwise, it’d never heal right.

  “We ten, of all creatures on Earth, had the time, ability, and wisdom to hold back the darkness. But we didn’t. Instead, we scattered to the wind, withdrawing from even each other, thinking that, somehow, someway, we could just whittle away eternity hiding out amongst the mortals, as if we were on some vacation that’d never end.”

  Silvanus shook his head as if shooing away her proclamation. “To be honest, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me. If all of this ended tomorrow, and I had Jerusa back the way she once was, I’d want nothing more than to take one of those long ‘vacations’, hiding out, pretending to be human. As powerful as we are, it is not for us to shape the nature of the world. Hold back the darkness? Yes, that I will agree with. But you and the others did that. Reluctantly, perhaps, but you still answered the call.”

  Danielle actually smiled at that, a tiny laugh falling from her lips. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that being said, all of my previous confessions are not why I think we ten are being punished.”

  “What other heinous crime could you have possibly committed?” Silvanus immediately regretted the question, for he saw the answer in her eyes.

  “You,” she said. “You are our crime. You came seeking us, alone, lost, searching for a family.”

  “Danielle, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” she spat back at him. “Don’t tell the truth. We knew you were there, looking for us, but we hid from you. Then when you found us, we not only shunned you as some foul betrayer of our laws, but we also took you prisoner. We tried to murder you.”

  “But you didn’t murder me. I’ve told you before, all is forgiven.”

  “Forgiven by you, maybe. But not by the Greater Power. You’re only alive because we lacked the knowledge of how to kill you. Had we known the secret of savage blood, we would’ve taken that dark path, and you wouldn’t be sitting here forgiving me.”

  She barked a wry little laugh and ran her fingers through her short hair.

  “The fact that we didn’t achieve our aim cannot change the intent of our hearts. We are murderers. Murderers of our own kind. And not because you fed from Jerusa or allowed her to feed from you. Oh, no. We tried to murder you because you were not one of the TEN.”

  She shouted the last word.

  “Your appearance threatened our self-deceit. Would force us to return from our little mortal vacations. And there was none of us, me included, that could bear to return to the reality of our responsibilities. That is why we are being punished, one by one, until only I remain. And my punishment lingers just a hand’s breadth away.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” Silvanus said. He turned to his knees, drawing closer to her, but she retracted. He wanted to brush away her confessions as one does a swarm of gnats, but they would not go.

  Danielle shook her head vigorously, holding out her hand to stop his advance. “No. Listen to me and believe what I say. I cannot escape the punishment to come. I know that I, too, will die before this is all over.” She shushed him when he tried to argue. “I’m dead already. But hear this. I would make it right. I will not let the light of the Divine Vampires be extinguished. Whether by my life or my death, I WILL help you restore your love.”

  Jerusa Phoenix, still as stoic as a gargoyle, staring past the ever-rolling sea, shed a single, unseen tear.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sebastian had lost all concept of time.

  Not as the humans lose time, mind you. He could still feel the crushing gravity of the sun as it passed over the yacht (and the wonderful reprieve of nightfall) even locked inside his steel prison.

  Oh, he supposed that if he were so inclined to count backward, sunsets to sunrises, he’d be able to track the calendar just fine. But what do days, weeks, months, and even years matter to one such as he?

  That’s not what he meant about lost time.

  The combination of his metal confines along with the never-ceasing trek across the briny deep had stifled his telepathy as a dam does a river. Take away one or the other, and he might touch the mind of one of the stray augurs floating about. Maybe.

  The strong augurs, like those of the Watchtower, he could touch with nothing more than an open cell door and a few minutes of concentration. But that would never happen.

  Othella had been around the block a few billion times. He sometimes forgot just how cunning she was. She had taken great pains to isolate him. But why?

  “To keep me from disclosing their location, that’s why,” he answered himself, then laughed at the absurdity of his own voice.

  Not that that information would do a heap of good traveling as they were. He could give another augur—that demure yet saucy Celeste, perhaps—a telepathic beacon to home in on, but unless she was near a Divine Vampire (or by some miracle was cruising close by on a boat of her own), the High Council and their prisoners would be long gone by the time she got here.

  Sebastian didn’t believe in miracles, and he suspected that the Divine Vampires had their hands full right about now… assuming any of them were still alive.

  A stitch of panic filled his tiny, black heart. Jerusa Phoenix was a Divine now. A strangely powerful one, no doubt. But not yet ready to take on Suhail. Not yet the Queen of Life he had seen in his visions.

  Did the girl still live? He had no way of knowing, and that was the worst sting of his isolation. Not knowing.

  Just because he had envisioned Jerusa rising in victory over her enemies didn’t mean it would come to pass. The future was as restless as the ocean upon which this yacht traveled.

  He pulled his mind away from this line of thought, though he knew it would circle back around, eventually.

  As it always did, his mind then turned to Victor the Monster. Had that broken mind understood what he had been trying to tell him? Had he found Shufah and her coven yet? And as long as he was indulging this spiral of thoughts, would they—if they still lived, that is—have the strength to fulfill his request.

  “Kill the Watchtower,” he whispered to the empty blackness. “Do not spare them. Do not reunite them.”

  He threw his stunted arm over his mismatched eyes as though this could sweep away the phantoms his idle brain conjured on the blank canvass of darkness.

  He knew the hearts of Shufah and her coven. Killers, all of them… when they needed to be. But assassins? Murderers? He had his doubts.

  This tragic play spilled out before him, neither for the first time, nor the last. It wasn’t a vision. Nothing more than the musings of a highly creative mind, and endless hours of boredom.

  Shufah and her coven would spare the Watchtower. Promise protection, and eventual freedom, in exchanged for one little favor: find the Dwarf.

  Not that Sebastian had any misplaced notions that it was he they really desired. They craved the Necromancer. Sebastian was just a means to an end.

  Their little plan would go something like this: Gather the Watchtower. Find the Dwarf. Make a brave storming of the yacht, hopefully with the aid of a Divine or two. Bring the Necromancer back to the gathering of vampires and wait for Jerusa to be drawn to them.

  “You fools,” he shouted. “Have you learned nothing from me? Kindness is a weakness. And weakness invites attack.”

  The plan would work; oh yes, it would. Jerusa would most definitely be drawn to so many blood drinkers, half or more of them powerful augurs.

  But she wouldn’t be the only one.

  There was a reason the High Council had divided the Watchtower into three smaller groups and spread them out across the globe.

  Othella didn’t want the W
atchtower interfering—whether accidentally or on purpose—with their plans to steal Divine bodies.

  Two augurs side by side are far stronger than two separated by a distance. One augur is a magnet to another augur. Two augurs make a more powerful magnet. Place the Watchtower back together and you have a superconducting electromagnet.

  The High Council knew well that Suhail had been collecting augurs for his savage army. That was the reason for separating the augurs. But the rules of the game had changed. Suhail was so much more than a savage now.

  Even if Othella, Mathias, and Cot possessed Divine forms, it would most likely be a brief stay. Suhail was on the hunt, and he’d gotten a taste for Divine flesh.

  Of course, this was all mere speculation. He didn’t really know anything. He was trapped in this lightless cell, torn away from other minds, where he could gain no additional information, and was powerless to manipulate the circumstances, as he waited for the outcome of an unknowable future.

  His tiny, twisted body burned as if with fever. His muscles were stiff to the point of being petrified, and overshadowing all his hurt, misery, and loneliness came the thirst firing through him like rivers of magma, bringing his entire existence into a chorus of excruciating agitation. Not pain, exactly. More like a deep itch nestled below his skin that he couldn’t scratch, no matter how hard he tried. And oh, how he tried. It was eyes and tongue, dried to the point of being gritty. It was the hollow drumming of his own pulse echoing between his ears. The creak of his bones with every subtle movement. The way his skin pulled tight yet felt as brittle as old paper at the same time. The stench of his own putrefying blood stagnating in the airless room.

  Othella, Cot, and Mathias may starve every other vampire aboard this yacht to induce the stone cloak, but Sebastian was exempt from that fate. The fledglings had never tasted blood—except that which transformed them from human to vampire—so, theoretically, they would eventually “hatch” from the stone as Divine Vampires.

  The only thing the stone cloak held for Sebastian was a slow and agonizing death. But not yet. Right now, they needed him.

  The swapping of souls was no simple task. No magician’s illusion. It was a fearfully dangerous rite. If not done properly, the invading soul could miss its window and be lost to the void forever. Also, the evicted soul needed to be compliant in the matter. An unwilling soul was much more difficult to force out.

  That was Sebastian’s part to play in this paltry affair. The fledglings, starved and consumed by the agony of the cloak, might leave that torment willingly. Then again, maybe not.

  Sebastian was to draw out the fledglings while the Necromancer replaced them with the High Council. He didn’t know if the Necromancer meant to insert the displaced fledglings’ souls into the ancient yet empty husks of the High Council or not. He supposed it didn’t really matter.

  What did matter was that Othella, or one of the others, would soon bring him a human to feed upon. They needed him not only alive but also well-nourished to complete his task.

  Sebastian licked his lips with a sandpaper tongue at the thought of hot, living blood. His fangs ached to pierce flesh. But the game was still afoot, and restraint was the next card to be played.

  No matter which of the High Council members brought the human victim, Sebastian had to convince them to leave the rotting corpse as they had before. It was a foul business, one likely to cause him a great deal of pain, but he had to make them believe they were punishing him.

  This all continued for a good deal longer. Long enough that he doubted his own wisdom. What if the High Council didn’t need him after all? What if the Necromancer had already done his magic, and now, Othella, Mathias, and Cot were Divine Vampires?

  He banished the thought, but only after a tremor born of terror and not chills overtook him.

  The yacht still swayed upon the sea, only stopping for fuel and provisions for the infected human slaves. Had the deal been done, they would just sink the ship, and leave him at the bottom of the ocean until he was nothing more than a chunk of obsidian glass.

  Sebastian laughed despite the tears trickling from the corners of his eyes. He deserved no less. Had he not once condemned Silvanus to the same fate, although not purposely? He didn’t believe in miracles, but he did believe in malicious poetic justice.

  Several nights later, just when Sebastian considered gnawing off his own tongue (just to spice things up), they finally came.

  It was late, just a few hours from dawn, when the biometric locks on his cell began whirring somewhere within the thick steel door. There came the sound of a spring uncoiling, giving it a sickly resonance. Perhaps the sea air had seeped in around the edges, bringing the tiniest bit of corrosion. The electronic circuits clicked and whined like insects mating in the dark, and then the solid cylinders receded back into the jamb and the seal of the door broke with an audible hiss.

  Sebastian sprung to a sitting position, scooting backward to the far wall. He stared at the thin, almost spectral, light outlining the door, both mesmerized and terrified.

  He bit down on his tongue hard enough to pierce straight through with his left fang. The pain was exquisite, but that, along with the taste of his own blood, recalibrated his shell-shocked brain better than a cold shower and a long vacation.

  Sebastian swallowed the mouthful of blood, shuddering like a wet dog, and climbed to his feet before the steel door floated open on its now creaking hinges.

  He squinted at the bright block of light now flooding his tiny cell, refusing to lift his hands to shade his eyes. Two figures stood silhouetted by the light, looking disturbingly like the visions he’d had of Jerusa’s savage wraiths.

  Sebastian could tell from the tall, thin shape of the one to the left that it was Cot. Maybe miracles did exist.

  Othella was wickedly shrewd and untrusting, to the point of making it seem like an artistic talent, and would most likely have seen through his ruse. She wouldn’t have understood why Sebastian wanted to be left alone with a decaying corpse, but she would’ve smelled something afoul (no pun intended) and confined him to the darkness, alone, once again.

  Cot, however, was a moron. Powerful, yes. Dangerous, yes. But still a moron. Not the slow minded kind of moron. He actually had a quick wit about him. How else would he have ascended to one of the five members of the High Council? He just didn’t have much distance to this thinking. Easily goaded, and always ready to rush into a fight.

  Sebastian stifled the pleased smile shaping his mouth. The trick was angering Cot just enough to cloud his judgment, but not so much that he twisted the Dwarf’s head off and kicked it into the sea.

  The other (on Sebastian’s right, Cot’s left) was no doubt a mortal. From the fearful thrumming of his heart to the tidal rush of his blood, to the smell of the fear-laden sweat pouring down his face, he was human through and through.

  The thirst coiled in Sebastian’s guts, drawing into a tight knot that threatened to double him over. He remained standing but allowed Cot to see the discomfort on his face.

  “Where have you been, servant?” Sebastian asked in a mockingly gruff tone. “I rang for my dinner days ago. I should have you whipped.” He looked away as if bored and motioned for Cot to leave. “You may go. Leave the human. I’ll ring when I wish for you to remove him.”

  Cot thrust the man to the floor, causing him to yelp in pain or fear. Probably both. Cot rushed inside but stopped at the center of the cell. The blast of fresh air following him was so sweet, Sebastian couldn’t help but inhale lustily. “Do not call me servant, dwarf,” Cot shouted, “unless you’d rather spend your remaining time with no arms or legs.”

  Sebastian feigned surprise. “Oh, Cot, it’s you. My apologies. I’ve been in the dark so long, my eyes must have been a bit cloudy.”

  “I can remove them for you, if you like.”

  Sebastian crossed his stunted arms over his barrel chest. They didn’t quite reach, and it looked more like he was trying to hold his own hand, but the message sti
ll translated. “How droll. Did you just stop by to threaten me with violence? We used to be such good friends. Come, tell me of the world. How are those new fledglings? Have they put on their cloaks, yet?”

  Cot’s long arms could reach him even from his spot at the center of the cell, and the backhand he delivered sent Sebastian cartwheeling into the corner to his left. He ended his brief journey upside down, his ears ringing like church bells, and his jaw feeling an inch out of place.

  Sebastian stood up, dusted himself off (even though there was no dust to be found in this cell), and snapped his jaw back into place with an audible crunch. His eyes were unfocused and Cot mistook this for a rattled brain. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

  With the door wide open, the wind of thoughts wafted in, and he found them so much more refreshing than the actual sea air. Almost as intoxicating as blood. It was a drink to the thirsty. Food to the famished. Healing to the sick.

  It was wonderful, brief as it was.

  Sebastian sensed the minds of the humans aboard, especially the dark, throbbing, purple mind of the Necromancer, but he couldn’t discern their thoughts.

  Whispers in a storm.

  The fledglings, encased in their own steel cells, were invisible to him as well, though his highly tuned instinct told him something regarding those poor souls had changed. Had he not seen the slightest twinge flash in Cot’s eyes when he had mentioned the fledglings?

  The minds of the High Council, however, burned like blood-red suns in the blackness of space. And there were others, too. Distant in flux, but there, nonetheless.

  Though it pained him to do so, Sebastian withdrew his psychic web. He wanted to call out to the far-flung minds, to make contact if they were perceptive enough, but he couldn’t risk it. Not yet. Cot wouldn’t continue mistaking Sebastian’s condition for much longer.