Vampire Innocent (Book 9): An Introduction To Paranormal Diplomacy

by Cox, Matthew S.

  A weak grunt in the otherwise silent distance makes me picture a little kid trying to lift a heavy object. She sounds out of it… unsurprising if she’s been without food for a few days. I speed up, slaloming the otherworldly trees, which get larger and thicker the farther I go. Not a great sign. Probably means the kid’s at the center of the woods, in the oldest part.

  The emptiness is kinda surprising me. Other than the shadows, Mardle and I appear to be the only living—okay, can’t really say ‘living’ literally—things here other than plants. Not running into tons of dark dryads or other monsters defending their territory should be a relief, but it makes me suspect I’m in for a nasty surprise.

  Finally, I catch sight of something moving.

  Maybe a quarter mile ahead, a small figure writhes, seemingly stuck to the side of an absolutely massive tree. Amid all the grey and dark green, two little dots of neon pink stand out: kid sneakers. The scent of candy-like blood is stronger here. I could zoom in my eyesight the way Glim showed me, but no point when it’s easier to simply fly-sprint straight to her.

  I slam on the proverbial brakes within six feet of the huge tree, hovering. It’s fatter at the top and base like an apple core, the roots on the ground and branches overhead curving away from the gargantuan trunk in such a way as to create the illusion of a giant torus-ring of open space around the ‘heart’ tree, the trunk of which is easily forty feet in diameter.

  A little girl hangs semi-crucified by thorny vines on the side facing me. She’s maybe seven or eight, dressed in a raspberry-colored winter coat, teal tights, and bright pink sneakers. The girl’s head lolls forward, a dense wall of brown hair concealing her face. Her coat sleeves have been peeled open from the wrist end, exposing her skinny arms almost to the elbows. Thorny black roots wrap around each arm, burrowing into her, visible like swollen veins under her skin. Similar roots have punctured her coat and pierced into her legs, all coated in a slow seep of blood.

  “Mamaí,” whispers the child, barely conscious.

  She struggles to lift her head. Two thin black roots spread up from her neck into her cheeks, separating into numerous thinner strands crisscrossing her face in narrow venous lines and making her cry bloody tears. Something thin moves under the skin of her throat.

  Seeing this poor child rips my heart straight out of my chest and stomps on it. I’m too horrified and shocked to do anything but stare at her.

  “Cabhair liom…” She struggles halfheartedly at the roots holding her to the tree. “Tá mé ag iarraidh a dhul abhaile.”

  “I’m sorry… I can’t understand you.”

  The girl cringes, no doubt in a great amount of pain. “Help me… I want to go home.”

  I zip closer, studying the vines holding her up. Looks like most of her weight is on the roots going down the neck of her coat, probably burrowing into her shoulders and back. Unimaginable… she’s hanging on the thorny strands burrowed inside her.

  “Oh… my.” I cover my mouth. Nothing, no gory sight I’ve ever seen since becoming aware of supernatural crap, has prepared me for witnessing roots moving under a kid’s skin. Despite being a vampire, the scent and sight of her blood nauseates me. “You’re gonna be okay. My name’s Sarah. Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “Addy Parker,” whispers the girl. “I’m scared. It hurts everywhere.”

  “Ye better hurry,” whispers Mardle, behind me. “The dark ones are makin’ ’er into one o’ dem. Poor wee lass will be all made o’ wood in’ another day ahr two.”

  I sprout claws.

  The poor kid doesn’t even flinch at the sight.

  In her position, my thoughts would be ‘go ahead and just kill me.’ Somehow, this kid doesn’t have a fatalistic glint in her eye. She’s not hoping I end her suffering; she’s merely not afraid of me. I reach up and place my claws under one of the thorn vines burrowing into her right forearm. Since my attempt to cut the last batch of magical roots didn’t go so well, it’s best to make a small test slice first rather than slashing the load-bearing ones and having the rest tear loose from her.

  Here goes…

  I rip my hand forward, having a surprisingly easy time severing the horrible thorny tendril. A spray of black fluid gushes from the strand still attached to the tree. Addy gasps in pain, as though I slashed her actual flesh. Before I can even process her reaction, the air fills with shrieks and screams of rage.

  A dozen or more lumps swell outward from the trunk of the giant tree, growing rapidly into creatures closely resembling slender human women, or rather, nude wooden statues brought to life. Their ‘skin’ is the same shade of grey as the rest of the trees, similar to sun-bleached driftwood. Where a normal person would have hair, they sprout moss. A collection of brambles sits atop their heads, part way between hair and elaborate crowns, some having branchy ‘horns’ as wide as their arm span. While their faces appear mostly human, dark wooden lips peel back to expose thin, pointed piranha teeth dripping with black fluid similar to the ichor seeping from the vine I severed.

  More emerge from trees surrounding the ‘mother’ trunk.

  There is no possible way I’m going to be able to delicately get this child down in a hurry without causing serious internal damage. Ripping her off the tree is going to kill her, and I really don’t want to turn a little kid into a vampire.

  At the emergence of the dark dryads, Addy tries to scream in terror, but she’s so weak she makes a noise more like a tire losing air.

  Frustrated, horrified, and angry, I swipe my claws at the nearest wooden face, walloping it hard enough to send the bitch flying head over ass and leaving a couple of hatchet gouges on her cheek.

  Ow.

  I think my hand broke.

  A dryad above me, her legs still embedded in the mother tree, grabs in my direction despite being like ten feet away. Her fingers lance outward, elongating and braiding together into a whipping thorny vine. I dive out of the way, totally cheating with vampiric reflexes. Her attack passes over me and whips another dryad in the chest. Serves her right for sneaking up behind me. Vine strikes oaken boob with a crack as loud as Jacob’s little handgun, but doesn’t appear to inflict any damage.

  A flash of yellow light detonates a short distance to my right, but there’s no time to look as three more dryads dive at me, jumping off the mother tree into free fall. I dodge by flying. Three heavy thuds strike the ground behind me—but a vine-whip gets me around the leg, yanking me to a halt.

  Another whip nails me in the side, but I avoid the one trying to wrap around my neck. Growling, I do a kick flip, yanking on my trapped leg hard enough to drag the dryad on the other end of the vine into a stumbling charge—and stomp-kick her in the face with my other foot. She flies back into the other two, knocking them to the ground in a pile of crackling kindling.

  Motion behind me.

  I spin, raking my claws down the chest of a dryad. The attack is modestly more effective than I expected using claws on solid wood could possibly be. Quarter-inch-deep gouges leak black sap. She grabs the wound, branchy fingers clattering, and shrieks in agony.

  Whistling in the air warns me of an incoming vine. I duck, spinning into a slash across the abdomen of the dryad trying to blindside me. These bitches are damn tough, but not particularly fast. I go full on Neo mode, bending under some whipping vines, jumping over others, and squeezing in a claw slash or kick whenever possible while fighting ‘slow-motion’ enemies.

  Against two or three of these things, I wouldn’t be terribly worried. Sure, it would take me forever to kill one—like cutting down a tree using a pocket knife—but my speed is sufficient to stay well away from their reach.

  However, I have a problem.

  Fifty or sixty problems to be exact. With so many dryads coming after me, it’s impossible to dodge everything. See, there’s a key concept to avoiding being smacked in the face, and it’s having somewhere clear to go. Far more often than I’d like, every inch of usable space in my vicinity is full of ouch, and the harder
I push to get closer to the little girl on the tree, the more punishment I receive.

  These bitches are pushing me back, swarming me like I tried to go shopping on Black Friday during the height of Beanie Babies. Every time I try to get around them or fly over them, a vine—or fifteen—grabs me by some random body part and pulls me down. In not even two full minutes, I look like I got into a fight with a weed-whacker and lost. My clothes aren’t exactly shredded as bad as a vampire-on-vampire fight, but I’m a bloody mess.

  Every so often, I catch a glimpse of Addy in the distance, helpless, in agony, and trying to call out for help. Seeing her ignites a spike of rage, and my next kick splits a dryad’s head in half. Her body stops all motion in an instant, becoming dead wood. The others don’t seem particularly upset by this, or even notice. Could be, I merely knocked her out. Considering how difficult it is for the dark ones to reproduce, they ought to be furious with me if I really killed one.

  I keep pushing, trying to fight my way past the wooden army, but soon find myself using all my time to break thorn vines off my arms, legs, and chest. The damn dryads are trying to mummify me in roots. Fighting does not seem to be too effective, so I try luring them away from the tree, shredding the grabbing thorns off my body and flying around in a circle. Roots and branches burst up from the ground, more—or maybe the same—dryads keep erupting up in front of me, shrieking and grabbing for my face. I’m really damn glad to be a vampire, and not only for the speed and toughness. They’d totally have killed a normal human me in seconds. No, mostly, I’m glad for being exposed to the knowledge and sights undeath has hit me with already. Otherwise, these wicked, twisted perversions of women with their needle fish teeth and hollow black eyes would have put me straight into a mental hospital.

  Especially the way they keep springing up out of the ground in front of me no matter where I go.

  It’s like being in a video game running on a crappy computer where it can’t render all of the environment at once, and I’m only seeing a little bit of the impenetrable wall around the mother tree at a time. No matter how fast I fly, there’s more damn dryads always in the way.

  Another vine grabs my ankle, not quite yanking me to an immediate stop, though I am towing 300 pounds of wooden bitch—and I think my ankle is dislocated. They pile on, dragging me to the ground. Thousands of tiny thorns dig into my skin. Vines squeeze my legs together and immobilize my arms. A few even go around my neck.

  Gah!

  Ignoring the sensation of thorns tearing my skin, I wrench myself around hard enough to snap some vines and get my right arm loose. The dryads are too slow to react to my accelerated speed, giving me the chance to slice my way free and fly backward. They don’t pop up to intercept me if I fly away from the big tree—but I can’t leave Addy there.

  It would be kinder of me to shoot her in the head.

  Mardle appears in a flicker of golden light between me and the dryads. “Go! Back ta the gateway! Der be too many!” He faces the oncoming dryads and releases a magical blast of intense light.

  “Ack!” I yell, recoiling as if someone stuffed a police-issue Maglite in my face and turned it on.

  The dryads flinch, trying to shield their faces behind their branchy fingers. Most of them petrify, going from pale grey to chalk white and shifting into unmoving wooden statues. I’m about to yell at him for not using this magic earlier, but the effect is extremely short-lived. Their coloration begins returning in mere seconds.

  Mardle yells, “Go! I’ve got an idea!”

  “I can’t leave her!” I shout, and start to charge at the dryads again.

  He whirls at me, and snaps his fingers.

  The mass of dark dryads in front of me instantly becomes the six-tree ring. Grr. I catch myself with flight in mid leap before going through the portal… until Mardle crashes into me from behind and pushes us both into the glowing mist.

  We land in a heap, once again in the normal forest.

  Without the threat of an attacking army of vile, twisted forest spirits, I don’t bother moving, remaining sprawled on my chest, stuck between wanting to cry as if Addy is already dead and throwing a temper tantrum out of frustration. My usual reaction to failure is to go home and sulk for a while, but my failure has never meant the death of a child before.

  Hundreds of tiny thorn wounds close one by one.

  Feels like acupuncture.

  Except for the dislocated ankle, which hurts a bit more for about five minutes.

  “We should ask de aid o’ de dryads,” says Mardle.

  “What?” I push myself up to kneel. “They just tried to kill me.”

  He again snaps his fingers at me; my ripped and bloody clothes become pristine. “Na them dryads. Da oother ones.”

  I really want a machine gun so I can go back in there and play Tom Clancy’s ‘Splinter’ Cell. A big enough gun ought to make those dark dryads into toothpicks. Of course, knowing my luck, I’d hit the girl. Ooh, wait. Flamethrower! Hang on. My outfit’s not ruined.

  “Hey. You fixed my clothes.”

  “A dank ya’ would be nice.”

  “Can you get those vines out of her?”

  Mardle taps his foot, giving me a stern look.

  Sigh. Stubborn. “Thank you for fixing my clothes.”

  He grins. “Ye welcome. An’ I tried. Dahn’t work.”

  “Where can I get a flamethrower?”

  “Why’d ya wanna do a damn fool thing like that?”

  I point at the creepy tree circle. “Dryads are made of wood. Do the math.”

  “No.” He holds his hands up, shaking his head. “Ya burn ’em, and they’ll kill the child fer sure. Wi’out all me leprechaun friends, der ain’t a way ta get her back but them wantin’ us to.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  He taps his fingertips together, flashing a cheesy smile. “Never been tha’ close. ’Ad ta see it meself fahr I knew. Trus’ me. De light dryads be tha only way we kin’ ’elp tha wee lass wi’out da rest o’ de leprechauns. Thar be a delicate balance ’ere among different creatures.”

  “Right…” I stand.

  “It’s koind o’ loike yer family gatherin’s ’round the ’olidays. One wee error an’ all unholy heck breaks loose.”

  I blink. “You know my Uncle Hank?”

  “Na. Most ’umans er like dat. Follow. Time be shart.”

  I can’t help myself but snicker.

  “Oy, ye makin’ fun o’ me height again?” Mardle holds up his shillelagh in bonking position.

  “No… sounded like you said ‘shart.’”

  “Ay did say shart.” He narrows one eye, widening the other. “Why’s et funneh?”

  “It’s not.” Cough. Snicker. “I just got hit in the head a bunch of times.”

  Bonk. “One mahr. Now c’mon.”

  Grumbling, I rub my forehead and trudge after him.

  33

  A Bargain Slightly Awkward

  Mardle hops on my back so we can fly.

  The little guy might be magically fast, but he’s only a bit quicker than an ordinary human running. Judging from the noises coming out of him, he’s rather enjoying flying, even if he does have to keep one hand on his hat and point the way using the shillelagh. Great. Between him and Sophia, I’ve got a new job: promoted from katana scabbard to hoverbike. Our trip across the forest doesn’t take too long, maybe eight minutes, before we find a small clearing containing a ring of wildflowers. I wouldn’t have even noticed them if not for a subtle cloud of magical glow inside the circle.

  “Is that a faerie circle?”

  “Na. Too big. G’won in.”

  I shrug one shoulder and fly straight into the glowing patch. Fortunately, the ‘light dryads’ don’t live in a world of perpetual sun. The forest on the other side of the portal is more or less identical to the natural one, except for having more green moss. I don’t pick up the scent of any humans, only an overabundance of wet earth, plant matter, and various flowers on bushes everyw
here.

  Whispery conversation emanates from the trees a fair way off on my left. Might as well check it out. We fly for a minute or two before I spot a bunch of women ahead, sitting around a grove of lush trees and soaking up moonlight. Pretty sure they aren’t human. My first clue is their emerald green skin. Second clue is their glowing green eyes. White hair isn’t definitive proof of inhumanity since I’ve seen plenty of normal girls who like to dye their hair snowy blonde—case in point: Mandy Carlin. Also odd is how they all appear to be the same age—mid-twenties. No kids, no elders, not even a single soccer mom. Oh, they’re also all naked.

  Gonna go out on a limb here and assume they’re vegans, too.

  I mean, can’t get much closer to nature than being half tree, right? Or wait, would eating a veggie burger be like cannibalism to them? Never mind. No time to ponder such a pointless question.

  The dryads all look toward me at the same time, going wide-eyed and cringing in a spot-on impression of Sophia accidentally watching a horror movie too intense for her. Meaning, she’s watching a scary movie not starring Muppets.

  Crap. I bet they can sense me being undead.

  “I just want to talk! You have my word I will not harm anyone.”

  The dryads start running off in random directions.

  Mardle shouts in a foreign language. Not sure if it’s Irish or Leprechaunish. I’m also not sure if Leprechaunish is a word.

  A few dryads stop running, hesitating to watch me suspiciously. With my most innocent smile, I approach and land at a distance close enough to talk without being so close they’ll fear me as a threat.

  “Please, I’ve come here to ask for your help. A little girl’s life is at stake.”

  They mostly make sad faces at me.

  “It is too late,” says one. “We cannot restore you to life.”