A Shade of Vampire 65: A Plague of Deceit

by Bella Forrest

  “Any of my people in there?” he asked, his brow furrowed and his voice low.

  I nodded. “I count… twenty, but there could be more. It’s quite a big crowd in there, you know,” I replied. “Just like we suspected. About six hundred, more or less.”

  “That’s a lot of people to break out,” Raphael muttered, raising an eyebrow.

  “We’ll have to be smart about it,” I said, grinning.

  “Geniuses, in fact,” Raphael retorted.

  I gave him a wink. “I trust you’ll come up with a brilliant plan.”

  The temperature dropped again. I’d yet to address this dynamic between Nevis and me, so Raphael still came in like a third wheel. Nevis clearly didn’t like it when Raphael and I got along, and he certainly didn’t enjoy the winks and smiles—though they were all harmless. I’d already made it clear to the Perfect that nothing was going to happen between us. I’d just failed to mention that to Nevis, too.

  “Do you see their shuttles?” Nevis asked, changing the subject.

  “Right, first things first. We’re not breaking anyone out today,” Raphael grumbled.

  Shifting my focus back to the colosseum, I zoomed in on the research labs on the west side of the structure. There were four spacecrafts already built, but their lower sides were still open, a multitude of wires and circuits spilling out. That entire hall was empty—probably because it was still early morning. I assumed that the Faulty engineers came in later. I took as many details in as I could, knowing that my True Sight might not serve me as well while I was inside the colosseum. The way the diamond walls were cut had an effect on it, somehow—from what I remembered of my first colosseum visit near Noagh.

  “This is the ideal moment to strike,” I said. “There’s no one in there, and they’ve got four ships waiting for us to tear down.”

  Raphael grinned. “In the western sector, right?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Do you see a computer in that hall, too?” he asked.

  I took my time, checking every visible inch of that place, until I spotted the culprit, a computer system that covered the better part of a wall with what looked like processing units, several glass keyboards, and dozens of screens.

  I nodded again.

  “Good,” Raphael said. “That’s where we’re going. Time to get down, now.”

  We jumped from the tree and landed on a thin layer of fallen leaves. Behind us, about fifty yards away, Perfects were patrolling. In front of us, there were more, dispersed in groups of four across the five-hundred-yard stretch of jungle.

  We darted through the woods, zigzagging toward the colosseum to avoid running into Perfects. I had my True Sight on at all times, steering Raphael either left or right in order to get to the colosseum without any direct contact with the Perfects.

  Some of them heard a branch or two break under our boots, but they couldn’t see us. Others caught a faint scent, and they tried looking for us, but we were moving too fast and were invisible. They didn’t stand a chance.

  By the time we reached one of the service doors of the colosseum’s western section, the jungle rattled with frustrated Perfects, who were relentless in chasing us down. Raphael sprinkled some more of his black mineral dust by the doorway, just to be sure.

  “I can’t go nuts on this stuff,” he whispered. “It’s still a pain to procure.”

  “Okay, what now?” I asked.

  “Follow me,” he replied, then pushed open the narrow diamond door and went inside.

  We followed as he led us into the ground floor of the colosseum. The view before us was beyond stunning. The diamond structure looked incredible from the outside already, but it was downright sublime from the inside. The sunlight was fractured, casting an ethereal glow with multicolored flickers that scattered everywhere. It was a visual spectacle.

  “Whoa,” I breathed, noticing something different in my True Sight.

  I stopped for a second, looking through one of the walls. I could see everything clearly. Then, a thought crossed my mind, as I removed my red garnet lens. Just as I’d expected, my True Sight was glitchy again.

  “What is it?” Nevis whispered, while Raphael nervously crossed his arms to express his impatience.

  “I think the red lens is helping my True Sight inside this place,” I murmured, then put the lens back on and tried looking through the wall again. It worked! “From the outside looking in, I had no trouble. From the inside looking out, or anywhere for that matter, not so much.”

  “And the red garnet fixes that,” Nevis said.

  I gave him a brief nod, before Raphael cleared his throat to remind us we still had work to do. We followed him deeper into the colosseum.

  The Perfects wore white silken tunics, much like the ones we’d seen on Araquiel and his crew. The soldiers had metallic plates and cuffs completing their outfits, along with bejeweled arm bands that seemed to note their ranks within the Perfect army. From what I could tell, the hierarchies had clearly evolved since the beginning. There were more of them now. Order, roles, and responsibilities were a requirement in any society.

  The Faulties wore pale yellow silken tunics. They were sullen, and they kept their eyes on the floor as they went about their business for the day—cleaning the diamond surfaces, including the walls and floors, delivering food and various supplies to different rooms in the colosseum, and serving the Perfects as demanded of them.

  No one knew we were there, and that allowed me to breathe a little easier. This invisibility spell was our one advantage, and I prayed to the entire universe for Ta’Zan to never discover our secret. My nerves were stretched well beyond their limits, but it wasn’t going to get any easier, going forward.

  On the contrary.

  We stayed close to Raphael as we crossed one of the main hallways, dodging and swerving random groups of Perfects or Faulties. He took us deeper into the western section, through a number of corridors, until we reached the flight hall, which was visible through a set of huge, clear double doors. The diamond walls distorted everything else, but my True Sight showed me everything.

  There wasn’t anyone in there. Just four starships, a giant computer, and a lot of machines, strategically placed around the hall.

  Raphael went to the side of the double doors, pointing at a computerized access panel. Ta’Zan had learned to secure his most valuable areas, most likely after the prisoners’ attempt to escape. He’d finally realized that guards weren’t enough to keep anyone in or out of a room.

  “They’ve upped their game,” he mumbled.

  “Access ports,” I replied. “There’s probably a code. Otherwise we can’t get in.”

  “I don’t suppose you know it,” Nevis said to Raphael, who stifled a chuckle.

  “This is after my time, I’m afraid. But, then again, there’s always option B,” he muttered, then prepared to punch the panel.

  “Wait!” I hissed.

  He froze, staring at me with sheer befuddlement. “What?”

  “Hold on,” I said, then pushed him aside. “Let’s wait and not cause a ruckus. It’s morning. One of the Faulties responsible for this hall is bound to come in and open the doors. I could try to disable the panel, but that would take too long.”

  “How would you even do that? You don’t know magi-tech,” Raphael said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know the magi part, but I understand enough about the tech part to know that there are wires in there, which I could cut to disable the door system. We could try to pry them open then.”

  Raphael groaned. “I’d rather wait for one of the Faulties. Or all of them, preferably. We’ll have to take them out anyway. It’ll buy us more time if Ta’Zan has to start over from absolute scratch, including other Perfects to try and understand how space travel works.”

  “We’re not killing anyone!” I whispered. “We can take them with us, whether they want to come or not!”

  “Good grief, you’re making this more complicated than it should be. We’re
at war here, Lenny. There’s no time to spare everyone we come across.”

  “We must make time,” Nevis interjected. “If we’re to get anyone on our side, we should at least try.”

  Raphael thought about it for a moment, then crossed his arms and leaned his back against the diamond wall, standing right next to the control panel.

  “Fine,” he grumbled.

  It didn’t take long for the first Faulty to show up, though. About ten minutes after we settled by the double doors, one of the engineers reached the hallway, carrying a computerized glass tablet. The Perfects that passed him by threw him narrow-eyed sneers, and some cracked a few jokes about his turquoise fur, but the Faulty didn’t seem to care. He was too busy reading something on his tablet.

  We held our collective breath when the Faulty stopped by the access panel and punched in a six-digit code. The doors slid to the sides, and he went in. We swiftly followed, finally gaining access to the hall.

  As soon as the doors closed behind us, we spread throughout the hall. Nevis stayed by the doors, his weapon locked and loaded. I shadowed the Faulty for a while as he began his inspection of the four ships. Raphael went straight to the computer—from what I could see, he had all the knowledge he needed to sabotage the system from the inside.

  I pressed the weapon’s nozzle against the Faulty’s nape, just as he stopped in front of the fourth ship. He stilled, his aura bursting yellow with fear.

  “Don’t move or speak unless I tell you to,” I said firmly. “If you so much as think of going against me, I will not hesitate to kill you.”

  “What… What do you want?” he croaked.

  “Your cooperation. If you help us, you live. Am I making myself clear?” I asked.

  He nodded once. “Please don’t hurt me. I will help if you need me to. You’re one of the outsiders, right?”

  “Yes. You’ve got my grandparents in that diamond dome, and I’m here to make sure you don’t take or kill more of our people,” I replied.

  Raphael cursed under his breath. “There’s a lock on the blueprints,” he said. “I need it.”

  “Four, five, seven, seven, four, two,” the Faulty replied.

  Raphael typed the code and gained access to all the files he needed. “Good Faulty. I’m wiping everything, but first, I need to see who was assigned to this program,” he muttered, reading through the documents.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Nevis stood quietly by the doors, his ice-blue eyes fixed on me. I knew I’d felt shivers down my back… for good reason, too. Whenever he looked at me, my whole being sensed it. We stared at each other for a while, until the Faulty engineer broke me out of my thoughts.

  “Why can’t I see you?” he asked, looking at his blurry reflection on the side of the fourth starship.

  “I’m invisible,” I replied. “It’s how we made it all the way in here, undetected.”

  “What technology is that?” the Faulty gasped.

  “It’s magic, my furry friend!” Raphael quipped, his eyes on the computer screens. “Oh… This isn’t good…” he added, frowning.

  “What? What is it?” I asked, alarm bells ringing in the back of my head.

  “We won’t be able to buy too much time,” Raphael replied. “Even if we take the engineers away. There’s one we can’t touch.”

  “Amal,” the Faulty chimed in. “Yes. You can kill me and my other four colleagues, but Amal… She cannot be touched. She oversees the project and inspects our progress every day at noon. She’s always accompanied by Perfects when she visits.”

  “We don’t want to kill you,” I murmured in the Faulty’s ear, then looked at Raphael. “Wipe it all. Every single file and string of data. Then, we’ll destroy the ships and take the engineers with us,” I added, and shifted my focus back to the Faulty. “Please tell me the other four will be here before Amal. The universe owes us this much.”

  He nodded. “They’re due in any minute, now.”

  “Good. You’re coming with us,” I replied.

  He seemed to process the decision for a few moments, while Raphael proceeded to delete everything about the starships—blueprints, measurements and calculations, physics and chemical formulas, projections and stellar data, anything that the Faulties had worked on in order to assemble four smaller versions of our starships.

  “There’s a switch on the right side of the door, beneath the access panel,” the Faulty said. “Flip it upward. It will obscure the view inside the hall for those on the outside. We use it all the time when we’re in here. No one will suspect anything, and no unauthorized personnel will be allowed to enter.”

  “That’s nifty,” Nevis said, then flipped the switch as instructed.

  The diamond walls darkened, completely obscuring the view. We all heard a second lock get activated on the doors.

  “It’s a security measure for the engineers, specifically,” the Faulty replied. “We use it when we have top-secret work to carry out. Father was very clear. He doesn’t want anyone to see what we’re doing in here. Personally, I agree, but not for his sake. Our knowledge of these starships is probably the only thing stopping the Perfects, and even Father, from killing us.”

  “Listen, if you help us, I promise you that no one will try to kill you or ruin your lives, ever again,” I said to him.

  And I meant it.

  Ta’Zan’s charade had gone on for far too long. It was time to take it down, diamond brick by diamond brick.

  Kailani

  So far, so good, on our end.

  I kept myself on alert, though. The area was teeming with Perfects, and we ran the risk of discovery at all times. Varga scanned the colosseum again—obsessively looking for his sister. Now that he’d found her, he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight. Ever.

  “They’re in the western section,” he muttered from the sturdy branch he’d climbed on for a better view. “They just made it inside the ship hall. I count four vessels, our three agents, and one Faulty,” he added, then chuckled softly. “My sister is relentless. She’s got a gun on the guy.”

  “How in the world can you see her, if she’s invisible?” Kallisto replied.

  Varga turned his head, for us to notice the red lens he’d put over his right eye. Hunter gave him a devilish grin.

  “Man, I love Lumi even more now,” he said.

  “Good to see there’s at least one of us who’s not entirely creeped out by that woman,” Varga muttered, making me laugh.

  “What’s your beef with Lumi?” I asked.

  Varga shrugged. “No beef whatsoever. But I may never be comfortable around her, no matter what she says or does.”

  “Why not?” Hunter replied.

  “I don’t know, man. There’s something about her. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s been alive for over ten thousand years. Or the way she managed to survive millennia while locked up in a Nerakian basement, her soul gradually eaten by daemons and Maras, only to bounce back and friggin’ restore swamp witch magic to the point where she even took an apprentice,” he added, pointing at me. “Or perhaps it’s the eyes. They’re so… weird. Don’t get me wrong, I value her existence. But still, creepy.”

  I shook my head, amused by Varga’s statement. “You clearly don’t know her as well as I do. She may come across as heartless and cold, but she isn’t. The time she spent in Nerakian captivity marked her, that’s all.”

  “Okay, I still don’t know how you can see Elonora all the way from here, with her invisibility spell on,” Kallisto moaned, scratching the scales on the back of her neck.

  “The red garnet allows us to see anyone using the invisibility spell,” I explained to her. “We were sent plenty of them in the care package from Calliope. It’s a little glitch in the swamp witch magic, I suppose. There’s something in the red garnet’s mineral composition that just bypasses the invisibility spell altogether. We’ve tried with all the known versions of the spell—the old, the Nerakian, and this upgraded batch from Lumi.”

  Kallisto pau
sed, then stared at Varga for a while. “Magic is incredible,” she whispered. “I only know of the alchemy from magi-tech, and it’s nowhere near as complex as what you people have shown me so far.”

  “And yet, there’s something in it that managed to bypass our cloaking spell,” I muttered.

  Hunter sighed. “Not to mention the interplanetary spell. They must’ve figured out a way to intercept it, if we didn’t get Draven’s message.”

  “Uh… guys? We’ve got trouble,” Varga cut in, looking in the opposite direction.

  I immediately shot to my feet, because I already knew what he was talking about.

  “Cassiel?” Hunter replied, standing up.

  Varga nodded, his eyes glimmering gold as he looked deep into the woods, all the way to the last comms tower. “He took down the guards, and he’s halfway through cutting the circuits. But he’s got company now.”

  “Dammit. How many?” I asked.

  “Two dozen, more or less,” Varga said.

  Hunter, Kallisto, and I looked at each other. We’d all reached the same conclusion.

  “He won’t be able to kill them all without drawing more attention to himself,” I concluded. “We have to help him.”

  The four Draenir boys—Airis, Stephon, Klavis, and Kemp—gathered around us, clutching their weapons. I gave them an apologetic look.

  “Don’t get too close,” I said to them. “You don’t have our physical advantages.”

  “It’s fine,” Stephon replied. “We can shoot these from up to fifty feet.”

  “Good, then take to the trees around the tower,” Hunter instructed them.

  They didn’t wait around to be told twice and dashed through the woods. Varga, Kallisto, Hunter, and I followed, jumping over roots and jagged rocks as we made our way toward the last comms tower. Despite Raphael’s initial reservations, Cassiel had been incredibly helpful. In hindsight, maybe one of us should’ve gone with him, but we’d also pledged to not break our groups up too much. We’d already let Elonora, Nevis, and Raphael go on their own.