The Savage Vampire (The Perpetual Creatures Saga Book 5)

by Gabriel Beyers

  The noise of the helicopter faded, leaving only the startled whispers of the forest. The holes in the canopy had closed like a healing wound, and the darkness below was haunting.

  They fell into a nervous silence. Thad suddenly felt vulnerable. Were there eyes upon him? Had the Watchtower augurs warned the Hunters of their approach? Had the Hunters heard the helicopter? Listened while he and Taos argued?

  The men looked to Celeste. Carter, the human, had given them pretty good intel, but he didn’t know exactly where the Hunters were lurking. He didn’t think they’d be much over ten miles from the village of Ha. As an augur and former member of the Crimson Storm, Celeste’s specialty had been tracking down “unworthy” vampires and infected humans. It was time to step back into the old business.

  Celeste closed her eyes, turning in a slow, tight circle. Taos watched her with awestruck admiration—a look that seemed so foreign on the giant’s face. Thad, however, couldn’t keep his eyes off of the deep, inky shadows.

  “I can’t touch the Watchtower augurs,” Celeste whispered. “They’re cloaking themselves.”

  No surprise there, Thad thought. He wished she’d hurry. The Hunters were probably fortifying their positions while they stood exposed.

  Celeste turned with a sudden start, her eyes springing open. Thad and Taos spun toward her gaze, stances low, their muscles as tight as bear traps primed to snap.

  Nothing emerged from the darkness before them.

  “There are two Hunters,” Celeste whispered.

  “Where?” Taos asked. “I don’t see anyone.”

  Celeste’s eyes were distant… dreamy. “To the north. One is a pyro. The other is a TK. They are hiding beneath the tree.”

  Taos looked at Thad, his eyes questioning. Thad had no answer. Millions of trees surrounded them. Which tree did she mean? And though the canopy was dense, and no doubt blocked a good deal of sunlight during the day, why would the Hunters just hang out with the Watchtower beneath some tree?

  Celeste shook herself, then turned toward them, her eyes once again vibrant. “I know where they are. Follow me.”

  They moved through the forest, single file, and with barely a sound. Life, small and great, buzzed all about them, avoiding them as they passed, but making no real effort to hide, almost as if they were familiar with the comings and goings of vampires.

  They had gone only eight miles when, off in the distance, visible even in the murky darkness, the tree came into view.

  Later, Thad would discover the strange tree looming before him was called a Peepal tree. A tree of great religious importance in this area. One which stood for healing and enlightenment.

  This Peepal tree, however, seemed the antithesis of those concepts.

  This tree was much larger than the smattering of other Peepals in the area. Also, it had been grotesquely twisted by some unimaginable force, and had been dead for a long, long time. The crown rose high, its bare, skeletal branches creating a hole in the canopy, as if the branches of the other living trees were afraid to venture any closer.

  A small patch of starry sky looked down on them, expectantly awaiting the battle to come.

  The dead branches fanned upward, then outward at a sharp angle, almost as if something large, heavy, and flat had been set upon its crown. The trunk was thick, straight, but the bark had either been stripped off, or had rotted away, lending it the look of a femur of a dead titan.

  The roots vomited across the ground, the tentacles of a nightmare octopus, and converged in a tangled knot at the base of the trunk. The strangest feature of all was the way the base of the tree hovered five feet above the ground, supported by the upturned roots, as though the tree had tried to stand up and flee whatever calamity had killed it.

  Though the tree looked like it had been dead for more than a hundred years, a thin layer of desiccated heart-shaped leaves covered the ground. All except for a small patch at the base where two serpentine roots parted to make an inverted V. There, the leaves vanished into a tiny black circle that wasn’t a shadow.

  The inverted V was small, only three feet at its widest. Had the canopy been sealed, blotting out the starlight, and had the dead leaves been carried away by the wind, the small hole beneath the Peepal tree would’ve been indistinguishable from the other shadows.

  “They’re hiding beneath the tree,” Thad whispered, repeating Celeste’s prediction. “What do we do now?” Though he had been in more than a few battles since becoming a vampire, he still didn’t consider himself a fighter. “How do we even know they’re in there?”

  The other two vampires turned to look at him, Taos with disdain, Celeste with an incredulous smirk.

  Thad gave an apologetic shrug.

  “They’re in there, all right,” Celeste said, turning her face back to the tree. “All of them.”

  Taos kindled a tiny flame in his right palm, and Celeste quickly knocked his hand down, extinguishing the fire.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice was somehow both a whisper and a shout at the same time.

  Taos looked around as if the answer should be obvious. “I’m going to set the tree on fire. Flush them out of the hole.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” Celeste warned. “Set the tree on fire and the Hunters will know we’re out here. We’ll lose the element of surprise. We should go in there after them.”

  “I think that’s a bad idea,” Taos snapped back. “We have no idea what’s beneath that tree. The Hunters will have the upper hand. Besides, have you seen the size of that hole? Sure, you and the bearded beanpole can go sliding right in, but there’s no way I’m getting through without making an awful racket.”

  “What if Thad and I go in? Flush them out to you? You pick them off as they come out. We give them a double surprise.”

  Taos shook his head. “Don’t like that at all. We’re not dealing with some soft coven of fledglings. These are Hunters. And Hunters don’t run. You know that better than anyone. They’ll stand their ground, and you’ll have to go toe to toe with them. Without me. Your best weapon.”

  Thad laughed, a little too loudly, drawing matching looks of annoyance from his two companions. He hadn’t meant to laugh. It just fell out. Taos had said, “They’ll stand their ground.” Ground. It was so simple, he felt stupid for not thinking of it right away. That’s why he laughed.

  “Something strike you funny, fledgling? It sure is cute the way you move dirt and pebbles with your mind, but I’m the only one that can kill the Hunters without them turning savage.” Taos glanced over at Celeste, perhaps expecting her to agree with his braggadocios self-assessment, even though she almost always played the anchor that kept him grounded.

  Celeste didn’t answer him. Instead, she looked at Thad with a little knowing smile perched upon her face.

  “What?” Taos asked, frustrated by this silent exchange from which he had been excluded. “You know I don’t like inside jokes.”

  “Think about it,” Celeste said. “You said it yourself. Thad moves dirt and rocks. The Hunters and Watchtower are under the ground. We don’t need to go searching around in dark caves. Thad is going to bring them up for a brief chat.”

  Taos started to argue, could find no flaw in their plan, then slowly closed his mouth. A miracle in and of itself. “Yeah, well, it was my idea,” he said at last. “Don’t you forget it.”

  They formed a wide triangle around the tree with Thad standing in front of the inverted V.

  “I’ll hold the Hunters,” Thad said. “Keep them from rushing us. Taos, you need to take care of them before they dowse me with fire or crush me with a boulder from the sky.”

  “Don’t worry,” Celeste said. “I’ll dazzle them.”

  “What if the Watchtower dazzles you first?”

  Celeste raised an eyebrow but offered no other answer.

  Taos extended his left arm in front of him and drew back with his right. A flaming bow and arrow exploded into existence. “If the Watchtower are that stupid, there’ll be a few le
ss augurs in the world.”

  Thad really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. “Okay, then. Here we go.”

  He closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed, yet his heart rate shifted into overdrive. He extended his arms wide, palms down, fingers spread. On the surface, he looked like a man in deep meditation. But deep down, where others could not see (not even the augurs of the Watchtower), Thad no longer inhabited his body.

  It was a strange sensation. Not one he could easily explain. In the beginning, his gift seemed something akin to magnetism. He was the magnet, and substrates around him were like metal filings. But his powers had grown, matured, maybe even evolved.

  The blood ring had done it. No question. He had been born of the blood—the blood of Heidi of the High Council—thanks to Sebastian. That alone had made him a powerful fledgling. But the infusion he received in the blood ring made Heidi’s contribution crude by comparison.

  He no longer felt a magnetic connection with the surrounding earth. He was the earth. As if, somehow, his consciousness had transformed into the whole sprawling wilderness. His entire being seeped into the ground, permeating it, infiltrating it, until the soil and his soul were one.

  Thad pushed deeper, past the hidden roots of the Peepal tree, down, down, into the arterial caverns branching this way and that.

  A dangerous intoxication threatened to overtake him. There was an inexplicable metaphysical euphoria that came with leaving one’s body to drift into another plane of existence. It begged for him to leave his physical self behind for good. To marry himself to the living, breathing spirit of the Earth itself.

  Thad forced himself to focus. To narrow his reach to just the caverns.

  Where are you? I know you’re here somewhere.

  And then he felt them. Four of them. He couldn’t tell if they were tall or short. Men or women. Vampires or wood sprites. All he could tell was that they were there. Flesh and blood intruders in a temple of dirt and stone.

  Thad shook the ground, willing it to break apart like flour in a sifter. The network of caves imploded with a dull whumf! Long, twisting ditches formed on the surface, yet the Peepal tree remained as steadfast as ever.

  The ground between and slightly behind Taos and Celeste became as turbulent as water. They backed toward the tree, more to reposition themselves than out of shock.

  Thad willed the four below ground to rise, and they shot up through the liquified substrates like rockets through the stratosphere. As the four exploded through the surface, choking and gasping for air, Thad commanded the ground to solidify, encasing them up to the shoulders.

  With more than a bit of difficulty, Thad pulled back from the grasping hand of the earth—an uncomfortable but not painful sensation—until he at last felt his consciousness drop back into his body like a rock into a puddle. Then he fell backward as though drunk.

  His arms and legs were full of lead, and a stinging headache settled behind his closed eyes. The dull warble in his ears slowly devolved into shouting. Taos’s voice, yet he couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

  Thad forced open his eyes and stumbled to his feet. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Then his eyes fell upon the four vampires trapped in the hardened earth.

  All four were women, each with a similar, if not identical shade of dark hair. Each had pale skin, light eyes (some blue, some green) and none appeared to be wearing the Hunter’s trademark leather duster.

  Celeste chanced a glance over to Thad, but quickly returned it to their captives. “Are you all right? That was a little scary. I felt you drift away. I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”

  “Me either.” Thad stood straight and took a deep breath. He felt better, but not quite his old self again. He looked from one woman to the next. “Can you sense which are augurs and which aren’t?”

  “Normally, yes,” Celeste said. “But the Watchtower augurs are blinding me.”

  “Don’t you understand that we’ve come to set you free,” Taos shouted at the women. He still held his fiery bow and arrow; though, now, his arms shook from the strain. “Tell us who the Hunters are, and I’ll kill them.”

  The four women remained silent.

  “They won’t talk,” Celeste said. “They know we won’t risk killing the augurs. And the Hunters won’t attack because it’ll give away their identity. We’re at a standoff.”

  The Watchtower augurs hadn’t predicted their arrival, or if they had, they hadn’t warned the Hunters. If they had, the Hunters would’ve set a trap. But the Hunters had, no doubt, forced the augurs into this pre-planned shell game, just in case this scenario should unfold.

  “Don’t worry,” Thad said. “I’ve got this. Just keep that fire ready, Taos. Celeste, watch them.”

  Thad held his hand up and slowly squeezed it into a fist. Immediately, the four women grunted in pain.

  “It’s going to get a lot worse,” Thad said. “Either tell us which two are the Hunters, or I slowly crush you until your heads pop like pimples. Better hurry, though. I’m not known for my patience.”

  The women writhed as their ribs cracked like dry twigs. Blood tears spilled down their cheeks. Even so, they refused to talk.

  Thad sighed. “I guess I’ll have to add some incentive. Have you ladies ever heard of the iron maiden?”

  The women gasped almost at once as Thad willed thin, sharp spikes to emerge within the constricting cocoons of soil. It was harsh, violent and grotesque, but pain is a great motivator. A lesson he had learned repeatedly within the walls of the Ice Sanctuary.

  Thad knew he should be ashamed of himself, but he wasn’t. Did this make him just as bad as the Stewards or the Hunters? To be honest, he didn’t care. They didn’t have time to play games.

  The woman furthest from Thad cursed and spat out blood. Her eyes lit with hatred, and not a second later, a wave of fire shot toward Thad.

  Thad threw up his hands and a wall of dirt blocked most of the fire. The burns from the little that got through would heal within the hour.

  Taos released his fiery arrow, and it caught the distracted pyro in the throat. She burst into flames and quickly broke apart into smoldering embers. Her screams echoed through the forest for longer than seemed possible.

  The two women to the right looked at each other with a mixture of anguish and panic. A silent agreement passed between them, then they turned their gaze upon the odd woman to the left.

  Celeste gasped as the Watchtower augurs sent her the telekinetic affirmation. She pointed at the odd woman. “It’s her. She’s the Hunter.”

  Thad didn’t really need telepathy to know that. He had seen the way the two had looked at the one. Taos drew back on his fiery bow and another burning arrow appeared.

  Suddenly, the three of them were blown backward by an invisible force. Taos smashed into a thick tree trunk and it snuffed out his flaming bow and arrow. Celeste went sprawling across the forest floor, coming to rest forty feet away. Thad tumbled through the air but conjured another pillar of soft dirt to catch him before he traveled too far.

  The telekinetic struggled against her earthy confines, which had loosened when Thad was knocked backward. The Watchtower augurs were wriggling out of the dirt, as well. In another moment, they’d all three be free, and then it’d be game over.

  “No,” Thad said. It was all he had to say. The soil surrounding the three vampires knew exactly what he wanted.

  The loosening dirt around the two augurs solidified around their legs, as hard as stone. The dirt around the Hunter twisted and contracted, wringing her like an old rag. Bones crushed, flesh split, and blood sprayed everywhere.

  The augurs screamed in horror.

  Taos dowsed the dead and now bloating vampire with fire before she could explode with savage spores.

  The augurs screamed again.

  Celeste approached the Watchtower. “You can die like the Hunters, or you can come with us.”

  The augurs looked at each other, then to Celeste. “You leave us little choice
,” the one with blue eyes said.

  “True,” Celeste agreed.

  “When do we leave?” the augur with green eyes asked.

  “Just as soon as the helicopter arrives,” Taos said.

  The blue-eyed augur laughed. “There’s nowhere to land. How are we supposed to board a helicopter?”

  Thad smiled back at her. “Have you ever been fishing?”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Blackhawk landed on the outskirts of Illizi, just on the edge of a small plateau. It was hot. Even with the sun over three hours set, the ground emanated heat like a kiln.

  “They won’t be hard to find,” Rian said to Shufah. “Head east from here. Down the mountainside. There, you’ll find the cave with the all-too-official-looking barricades.”

  They stood on the far side of the plateau, away from the helicopter. The engines were winding down but were still annoyingly loud.

  Victor looked south to where the city of Illizi twinkled in the darkness like a tiny galaxy all to itself. Shufah watched him from the side of her eye, but there wasn’t much she could do if he slaked his thirst for blood and murder on the poor sleeping inhabitants.

  “Thank you. We shouldn’t be long. If we are, it went badly for us.”

  “We’ll wait as long as we have to,” Rian said. “There’s no way to refuel up here, so we’re shutting off the engines. We must refuel on our way to Howland Island.”

  Shufah nodded, but this information barely registered. Her mind was busy racing through all the scenarios that could transpire once they entered the cave. What would happen if they made it back to the helicopter was merely a distant hope in the back of her mind.

  “Come on, Victor. It’s time to go.”

  Victor moved to Shufah’s side, then bounded down the steep slope without a word. The Monster was surprisingly agile for something so massive. Shufah made to follow him, but Rian stopped her.

  “I know you’re on a mission to save the world. Believe me, I understand, but can I make a request?”