As we walked deeper into the cave, it started to look less like a tunnel and more like a stone hallway. The floor became firmer and clearer, while the walls became more defined, looking more like actual stone walls than the natural walls of a cave. The ceiling, too, smoothed out, with interesting hexagonal patterns that probably meant something to whoever had built this place, but to me just looked like meaninglessly patterns.
“What does all of this stuff mean?” I said, looking at Lucius as we walked. “Dad didn’t mention any of this when he told us about this cave.”
“He might not remember any of it,” said Lucius. “Or maybe he didn’t see it. After all, Richard doesn’t have night vision like us and there aren’t any lights in here.”
“But it’s still weird,” I said. “It looks like this wasn’t just a natural cave, but something built by people.”
“Perhaps it was built by the ancient Native Americans who once lived here,” said Lucius. “Or perhaps by the people who preceded the Native Americans. Either way, this is a mystery I have little interest in solving. I care more about finding Blake at the moment.”
I understood, but at the same time, my curiosity was piqued and I couldn’t stand wondering about whoever had built this obviously complex tunnel network. Furthermore, I wondered why no one, aside from Dad, had yet to discover it. After all, it was right next to a fully-populated town and wouldn’t be very difficult to reach with the right climbing gear and equipment. True, Oro was not a very big town, nor was it particularly famous, but it still seemed strange to me that this cave had remained undisturbed for so long. Maybe there were still rumors about evil spirits haunting this cave, which kept the locals and anyone else away.
More importantly, however, the clawed footprints which we had been following since entering the cave had vanished. This was due to the fact that the floor had become solid stone, which meant that it was impossible to leave footprints on it, though there were clusters of dirt here and there that seemed to indicate where something had cast off dirt from its body, but there wasn’t enough to give us a very clear idea of the path that the creatures took on their way inside.
It was also very quiet. Every now and then we’d come across a small mouse, which would squeak and hide inside a hole in the floor very quickly, but other than that, the tunnel was very quiet. I wondered if it had been this quiet when Dad came here twenty-five years ago. Given how it had been full of vampires who tried to kill him, I doubted it, but I kept my guard up anyway, because just because I couldn’t see anyone in here didn’t mean that we were alone.
A loud moaning sound came from somewhere up ahead. Lucius and I came to a stop, listening closely to the moaning, which was magnified in the small space of the cave, making it sound much louder than it actually was.
“What is it?” I whispered. “It sounds human.”
“Not sure,” Lucius whispered back, “but we should not rush into danger. It might be a trap laid by Blake or one of his allies. Even if it’s not, it would be unwise of us to rush forward, because we have no idea who is moaning.”
Just as Lucius said that, the moaning turned into a scream.
“Help!” a voice shouted somewhere up ahead. “Someone, help! I need—”
His voice was cut off by another scream and then we heard footsteps rushing toward us. Lucius and I took battle stances, ready to defend ourselves from whatever was coming toward us, but as it would soon turn out, this was entirely unnecessary, because the figure who stepped into our vision from a side tunnel was in no shape to fight at all.
He looked to be an old man, probably in his early sixties based on the grayness of his hair. He wore torn and ragged sorcerer’s robes, which might have been blue at one point, but had since faded to an ugly gray. He had a full-sized beard that went down to his chest and his arms and legs were fairly spindly, making him look almost spider-like in his movements.
When he looked at us, there was a deep fear in the man’s eyes, but somehow I could tell he wasn’t afraid of us. He was afraid of something else, something behind him, and the worst part was that I had no idea what it could be.
“Who are you?” I said, looking at the old man in surprise. “Can you tell us your name?”
The old man blinked several times and then reached out toward us. “Go. Leave. This place … this place is hell on Earth.”
With that, the old man suddenly fell face first onto the stone floor, where he lay as still as a stone.
I knew it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do, but I rushed toward the unconscious man anyway without even waiting for Lucius. Kneeling beside the man, I flipped him over onto his back and said, “Hey, old man, can you hear me? Old guy? Hello?”
But he didn’t answer. I thought he might be dead at first, but when I touched his wrist and felt his pulse, I realized that he had just fallen unconscious. That amazed me, because his old age combined with that fall made it a miracle that he had survived at all. I wondered how long he had spent down here and whether he knew anything about Blake.
Lucius appeared over me and said, “Is he still alive?”
“Yes, I can feel his pulse,” I said. I looked up at Lucius. “But he’s obviously injured and very weak. We need to save him.”
“You do that,” said Lucius. He looked in the direction from which the old man had come from. “I’m going to go ahead and scout. Whatever frightened this old man is probably not far behind and I want to make sure it doesn’t sneak up on us while we’re distracted.”
I was about to tell Lucius that he was just putting his own life into danger for no reason, but Lucius disappeared down the corridor before I could say a thing. Typical Lucius. Running straight into danger without a care in the world. And I loved him for it.
But at the moment, I needed to focus on helping this guy. I was no nurse, but I’d gotten better and better at using healing magic over the last couple of months thanks to Dad’s training. He’d even taught me how to use magic to sense where an injury was, so I activated the spell and ran a hand up and down the old man’s body, searching for the largest source of his pain and hoping to find it quickly.
I only managed to run my hand up and down his body a couple of times, however, before I jerked my hand away. It was strange, but it felt like I had just touched a hot stove top and burned my fingers. I tried the spell again, only to get the same result, but this time I was sure I felt something different. It was like there was some kind of force inside the old man’s body keeping my magic from working on him, which was strange, because I’d never run into something like this, nor had Dad ever mentioned something like this to me. Or maybe I was doing the spell wrong? I was still in the Beginner class, after all, and healing spells were tricky to do right, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I was just messing up the spell.
Yet I didn’t think so. I was doing everything right, just as Dad showed me in our training sessions. The problem, then, was with the old man’s body. Some magical force was preventing me from using my spells on him, but that did nothing to explain how that worked or if it was possible to circumvent, because this old man clearly needed medical attention and I shuddered to think of what might happen to him if he didn’t get healed soon.
Then, almost abruptly, the old man’s eyes opened. He stared straight up at me, his brown eyes wide with fear.
“What?” said the old man, his voice dangerously weak. “Where am I? Have I died? Is this heaven?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, old man, but you’re still alive.”
The old man closed his eyes, but he was not unconscious. “Hell, then. I’m still in hell. My time still hasn’t come yet.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Who are you? And what are you doing in this place? Are you by yourself or do you have friends?”
The old man’s eyes opened again, but this time they looked less fearful and more resigned. “I had friends. But then Hell ate them all, one by one, until I was left on my own. You need to get out of here yourself if you want
to avoid suffering the same fate as my friends.”
“But this isn’t hell,” I said. “Hell is where unsaved souls go when they die. Neither of us are dead, so—”
“It’s what I call this place,” said the old man. “And it’s what you will be calling this place if you stay here for much longer.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that. The old man seemed sane enough, but it was possible that his time down here had warped his mind. Still, he was obviously injured and needed help, so I couldn’t just abandon him here.
“Well, you can call this place whatever you like,” I said. I reached out toward him. “But those injuries you’ve sustained don’t look good, so if you’ll let me touch you, then I—”
A hand came out of nowhere and wrapped around my wrist. I looked up and saw Lucius kneeling near me, his hand wrapped tightly around my wrist.
“Don’t touch him,” said Lucius. “He might be a threat.”
“A threat?” I said. I looked down at the old man. “He’s not a threat to anyone. Just look at him. He’s old and frail and clearly injured.”
The old man stared at Lucius with wide eyes. “A vampire? Young lady, what are you doing traveling with a vampire, of all things? Do you want to get yourself killed?”
“He’s a Pure,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed, “and even if he wasn’t, I’m still perfectly safe, because I’m a half-vampire, which means that—”
“A half-vampire?” the old man repeated. “Impossible. Those are just a legend.”
“Sorry, but I’m not ‘just a legend,’” I said, pulling my wrist out of Lucius’ grasp and folding my arms in front of my chest. “I’m every bit as real as you are, however much you don’t want to accept it.”
“A vampire and a half-vampire,” the old man muttered, seemingly not hearing my response. “This really is Hell.”
“Did he just call this place hell?” said Lucius, furrowing his brow.
“He did,” I said, looking up at Lucius again, “but it doesn’t matter. How did your scouting go? Did you find anything up ahead that might be a threat?”
Lucius shook his head. “No. I didn’t find anything particularly dangerous. Just more tunnels that twist and turn well into the earth. I’m not sure what attacked the old man, which is one of the reasons I said he might be a threat. Perhaps he’s just pretending to be injured and unable to defend himself in order to make us lower our guard.”
“This is no act,” said the old man. He struggled to sit up, but failed and laid back down on the floor. “I’ve been down here for ages, with precious little food or water. I’m in no position to harm anyone. I couldn’t even harm a Powerless human in my current state.”
“Then what was chasing you?” said Lucius. “Why were you screaming earlier?”
The old man closed his eyes, like he was trying to avoid looking at something. “I don’t want to talk about it. It would be best for all of us if we just left this place and never came back. Otherwise, you’ll end up just like my friends: dead.”
“Well, we have a reason for being here,” I said. “We can’t just turn around and leave, at least not until we get what we’re looking for.”
“No one ever gets what they want in Hell,” said the old man. “You only get what you deserve … if you’re lucky.”
The old man’s ominous words made me shiver slightly, but I said, “Well, can you at least tell us who you are and what you’re doing down here in the first place? Maybe we can help you somehow.”
In truth, I was more interested in finding out more about ‘Hell,’ as he called this place, than anything. I wanted to help the guy, of course, but I was more curious about how this man got here and what had killed all his friends. He might even know a thing or two about the Vampire Flame and where it was. I also wanted to know why my magic apparently didn’t work on him.
The old man rubbed his forehead, a tired look on his face. “Very well. My name is Shawn Anderson and, as you have probably guessed by now, I’m a sorcerer. More specifically, I work—or worked, I should say, since I’m retired—for the Sorcerer Parliament as one of their many secretaries who write down the minutes of their meetings and make sure that all sorcerers are aware of every new law they pass. I worked at that job for thirty years before retiring five years ago, with a nice pension so I could support myself in my old age.”
“How did a secretary end up down here?” I said. “This doesn’t seem like a place where a secretary would go.”
“It’s not a place any human should be,” said Shawn. He grimaced, like something hurt, and then continued. “When I retired, I started traveling the country, because I’d never traveled that much when I was younger, and when I did, it was usually on official Parliament business, so I rarely got a proper vacation. I’m originally from the state of Washington and have visited over half of the states in the Union in the past five years or so.”
“I guess that’s how you came to Texas?” I said. “Just another state on your list to check off?”
Shawn nodded. “In a way, yes. I always wanted to visit Texas, not just because I was determined to visit every state in the Union, but also because I have family out here. My older brother lives in Oro and I never got to see him very much due to my work. When my older brother’s seventieth birthday came around, this was the perfect moment to visit him, so I packed my bags and headed down to Texas.”
“Did you manage to see your brother?” I said.
Shawn nodded again. “Yes. I went to his house, where I would stay for the two weeks I planned to spend in Texas. But, as you can obviously see, I didn’t.”
“What happened?” I said. “What brought you down here?”
“What brought us down here,” said Shawn. He suddenly started pointing in random directions. “Me and him and him and her. The four of us.”
Lucius and I looked at where he pointed, but we didn’t see anyone other than ourselves standing around him.
“Er, what?” I said, looking at Shawn again.
Shawn blinked several times. “Sorry. I forgot that all my friends are dead.”
“Your friends,” Lucius repeated. “Who were they?”
“Janet, who is—was—my wife, Robert, my best friend, and Daniel, my other friend,” said Shawn. “They all traveled with me to Oro, because it had been a long time since we’d all been together like that and we all wanted to see my older brother again, who we all knew. But when we arrived in Oro, we heard rumors from the townsfolk that there were creatures seen wandering around the outskirts of the town, attacking people at night and vanishing in the morning before anyone could see them, which had been happening for six years prior to us arriving there.”
“Creatures,” I repeated. “What kind of creatures, exactly?”
“Vampires,” said Shawn. Then he shuddered. “At least, that’s what we thought at first, because the descriptions the people gave us sounded similar to them. We hoped to locate the Horde’s nest so we could report it to the Vampire Hunters Guild and let them deal with it. One night we tracked one of the creatures back to a cave in the hills, which we assumed was the entrance to its nest.”
“Why did you go inside?” I said. “If you thought it was a vampire nest, wouldn’t it have made sense to go back to town and report it to the Guild, like you said?”
“That was the original plan,” said Shawn. “But then some of those creatures attacked us. They cut off all avenues of escape, so we were forced to enter the cavern, despite knowing that we were heading into danger. But we had no choice, because the creatures were too numerous and powerful for us to kill on our own.”
“How did you escape them?” I said.
“We didn’t.”
“But you’re here,” I said. “And still alive.”
“What I mean by that is that we didn’t evade the creatures through any cunning of our own,” said Shawn. “They chased us deep into the network of tunnels underneath the mountain, but at some point stopped chasing us. We actually thought
we had outrun them at some point, but looking back, I realize that the creatures just abandoned us.”
“Like they were afraid of getting lost in here themselves?”
Shawn smiled grimly. “Like it was all part of their plan, as if they had been intentionally herding us deep into the heart of Hell. I believe that because when my friends and I tried to retrace our steps, we found it impossible, partly because of the darkness, partly because we’d lost our sense of direction. We’d taken so many twists and turns in the darkness that we couldn’t see where we were going. And then it happened.”
“What happened?” I said.
Shawn looked at me with an unnerving stare. “You did. You killed my friends. And now I’m going to kill you.”
Shawn’s eyes turned an unnatural white. His hands moved with lightning speed and wrapped around my windpipe and constricted. As a half-vampire, I didn’t need air to breathe, but getting choked was still not my idea of fun. I grabbed Shawn’s hands and tried my hardest to pry them off my neck, but his grip was as solid as steel.
“You killed my friends,” said Shawn, whose voice was becoming increasingly raspy and inhuman with each passing second. “You killed my friends, you killed my friends, you killed my friends!”
I wanted to tell Shawn that I didn’t kill his friends, that I had no idea who killed his friends, but his tight grip on my neck made that impossible. All I could do was desperately try to communicate to him, through my eyes, that he was making a big mistake, but I wasn’t certain that Shawn was with us anymore. That magical aura I felt earlier—the one I had felt when trying to heal him—was stronger than ever, but it felt evil and unnatural, like something that should not be.
Lucius grabbed Shawn suddenly and threw him off me. Shawn slammed into the wall opposite us hard enough to leave visible cracks in it and landed on the floor, where he lay either stunned or unconscious. It was hard to tell.
The Vampire Flame (Vampire Sorceress Book 3) Page 5