by JN Moon
He nodded. Even though he was nephilim, and even though a blinding divine light—apparently the Seraphim—had succeeded in wiping out the demons and wraiths, I still didn’t prescribe to his Old Testament beliefs.
He continued, laughing, “And don’t think I fancy you because I’m sharing your bed. I just can’t go back to my flat again.”
“No worries, of course you can’t. That would be macabre. It’s like the old times when you first stayed with me.”
“C’mon, let’s sleep. I’m bushed.”
Sleep came fast and deep for both of us. We slept for two days solid.
When we woke, we went to see Acacius and find out what was happening with these kids. I also wanted to catch up with Nathaniel, and I guessed he had returned quickly to his hedonistic lifestyle. He may be good and bad, very bad really, but he was a part of me and I wanted, craved companionship of immortals like myself.
Walking through the city, obviously I have no fear of humans, but you can feel alienated when everyone around you is so weak and so mortal. So fragile...
After we had walked about a mile, he spoke first. “They killed their mothers, drank their blood to survive.” He shivered at the thought.
“I thought the purebred nephilim killed the parents!” I shrieked.
Marcus replied, “I guess instinct drove them to it. I hope. God knows. What a situation.”
I really wanted to ask him about Damien, but I knew I shouldn’t, not now at least. Rachel and I had split up due to my irrational emotions and stupid inconsistent behaviour, but I never stopped loving her. Marcus knew about him. Being able to read minds was every nephilim’s forte. And to prove it he spoke in a matter of fact tone, “Give it time, Anthony. Don’t worry about that now. I’m not going to speak of Damien, but he isn’t all he appears. Don’t worry, he’s not dangerous. He just not quite what he seems.”
“Thanks, now I’m more interested and worried!”
“Don’t be. Rachel fought and killed a demon, and Lucius was powerful. She’s stronger now and probably hasn’t found herself yet. When you, as you know, go through an immense change, you need time to adjust. And usually when you’ve done that you go back to the ones you know, like us. Our friendship is a comfort.”
“I see. Good to know.”
My phone buzzed in my coat. It was Nicolas, I didn’t even know how he’d got my number, but I knew before I answered it trouble had arrived.
His voice was frantic. “Orion has escaped us! He sneaked out of his room and we have no idea where he is. One of us has to stay here, that’ll be me, to watch over the others. Can you help?”
“You know I will. Where did he live? He may have gone back home.”
“In the centre somewhere. Hang on.” I could hear Nicolas talking to Damien.
“It’s Nicolas. Orion has gone. They want me to find him,” I told Marcus though he no doubt knew being telepathic.
“Anthony, we think it was around Abbey Green. You’ll help?”
“Of course. I’ll keep you posted. Where are the others? Out searching?”
“They’ve just left now!”
“Nicolas,” I spoke quickly.
“Yes?”
“Don’t lose any more...” I hung up.
“He’s probably gone to his home just off the centre of the city.”
“Abbey Green? I heard. Come on, let’s find him. He’s probably scared.”
“To be honest it’s not him I’m worried about!” So, turning on our heels, we headed back into the city.
Abbey Green is hidden away in a quiet, cobbled square with a huge sycamore tree in the centre which reigns down over like a huge natural umbrella. This is one of the oldest parts of the city and you often find supernatural creatures living in the oldest places, clinging onto their past as some semblance of security throughout the centuries. No doubt his mother had lived nearby until the boy had, through his instincts, bled her dry. A macabre start in life for them all, draining their mothers and something which I didn’t want to think about.
“I can feel he’s been close by,” Marcus whispered and stopped abruptly.
“Orion,” I called softly. “Orion, its Anthony. Are you alright?”
Marcus raised his eyebrows, questioning my calling the child, but there was no point in trying to sneak up on him. He no doubt knew we were here before we sensed him.
We heard his laughter and followed it to a little street alongside the square, and there he was, talking to a group of vampires dressed in Victorian finery and wearing masks. Something about them made me feel queasy, and the way they were laughing and petting him, and his innocent sounding giggling seemed to astonish and delight them. They were clearly fascinated with him. We stepped up a pace. “Orion! We were worried. Are you alright?”
He turned to look at us, his cherub mouth dropped, and he took a step back, closer to the group of decadent strangers.
“You are not his parents!” one of them stated, looking at us sternly. He was taller than the others and wearing a top hat and tails, immaculately dressed, but the masks seemed as odd as the clothing. Their whole demeanour had changed. They’d been laughing, smiling and now their faces resembled stone, hard and rigid.
“Who are you?” Marcus asked puzzled. They were not only dressed in antique clothing, something about them, they seemed from a bygone era.
“No friend of yours!” A woman dressed in black silk and lace, so delicate that her bustle dress shifted as she moved, shimmering under the antiquated street lights.
A roar of thunder bellowed fast and pitch blackness fell and seconds later the light came back. And they were gone, with Orion.
My eyes flickered as I adjusted to the shock wave, and at first neither of us spoke.
“I cannot sense him.” Marcus’s first words full of panic. “What’s that noise?”
A buzzing sound, like a huge wasp persisted around us. Tilting our heads back, we saw a flock of drones hoovering over and around us.
“What the fuck is that? Where did all those come from? Why are they bothering us?” But I had no time to continue as red lasers flashed onto us and instinctively we both fled, back into the square and though a tunnelled walkway alongside a shop. We didn’t speak with words but expressions, our eyes, and mouths wide with horror and confusion.
It made no difference; the drones simply tracked us, and were now firing at us. Without needing to say anything else, we flew out of there as fast as our preternatural legs would go. At the exit, Marcus grabbed me, his huge wings opening up and swooped us so high and so fast that I instinctively closed my eyes. My head was spinning. Luckily, we didn’t fly into any other immortals. After about ten minutes, we lost them and found ourselves on the outskirts of the city and rushed to get into Rachel’s home. But it was different.
The beautiful old front door had been replaced with some kind of metallic atrocity and the whole street contained high security and cameras. It was like something from a nightmare.
Without words, we turned on our heels and fled, not wanting to attract the drones, and headed further off out of the city until we came to a derelict building. Though it was not entirely abandoned as I sensed others around, a scattering of both mortals and immortals were hidden there-about.
“What the shit just happened?” Marcus spluttered. Even for us, we were both out of breath.
“I have no clue. What the Hell was all that?” I sat down on the floor to cool down and get my breath back.
“Where did those drones come from, and Rachel’s house!”
“As much as it makes me feel sick saying this, and even saying it makes me feel like I’m jinxing something, have we fallen into another time loop? Is that what that roar of thunder and blackness was? At least we both have experience and should be able to get our way home, as long as we don’t end up dead first!”
“I don’t know, Anthony; this is nothing like the time loop we were in! This is our world with drones. And the houses—that security, bars on windows. Something�
��s definitely screwed up here. We need to find the others. We’ll have to edge around the city, stick to the tree lines and plan it out. Why were they firing at us? And who the fuck are they?”
The building we took shelter in was an old Victorian industrial structure. It hadn’t been used for decades and I was keen to speak with the others hidden thereabouts to find out what was happening. It was nearly midnight and I had recovered after that bizarre and terrifying incident, although I was acutely aware that I was hungry. As we crept around, we both jumped suddenly when we heard sirens going off around the city. What now? It was like being in a dystopian parallel reality.
Marcus looked at me. I saw blue lights flashing outside, but to my relief they kept on going past the window. I sensed tension in that place from others hiding there and through the thick dust and rubble of the decay, I went in search of answers.
I didn’t have to look far as the other immortals there were seeking us out. They looked ragged, not like the foul beasts that turned me, but from their clothing and appearance it was obvious that they lived rough permanently.
“Who are you?” a voice barked at me.
I could see a vampire partially hidden in the shadows. I had so many questions, but better to answer his first. Marcus answered, “I’m Marcus, and this is Anthony. You’re vampires, like us?”
The vampire looked apprehensive and his group of four stood with their backs to the entrance of the room as if ready to flee at any second. Grime so thick it looked like a coating of brown skin mixed with rust red on the archaic machinery that lay to waste, and a fierce wind blew through the vandalised windows.
Trying to muster his authority and courage, the young male vampire stepped forward a little into the light, “Where are you from? You’re not like us. We haven’t seen you before. Why is that?”
“We haven’t been here before,” I answered honestly.
“Are they hunting you? If you’ve been seen, they won’t stop until they’ve captured you.”
“No, we just arrived here. We’re looking for some old friends. Nathaniel, Damien, and Nicolas. Do you know of them? Two of them at least are vampires. Damien is a hybrid.”
At that last word, the young vampire’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. He looked at me with hostility. “You’re looking for a hybrid? Are you fucking mad? You are friends with them?”
I knew there was something wrong here—terribly wrong. There is bigotry in the supernatural world, but generally not this fierce.
“Damien is half vampire, half demon,” Marcus answered calmly.
The vampire nodded and looked somewhat calmer. “I see, I thought you meant...the blood angels. Where have you come from and how do you both look so clean? How do you exist?”
By this point I could detect no threat from him, I looked to Marcus who nodded slightly in agreement. We would need help in this Hellhole and that meant trusting someone. We had to start somewhere.
“Before we tell you, can we go somewhere else? It doesn’t feel safe here, even for a vampire.” But as I finished speaking, I heard a screech so loud we had to cover our ears. He didn’t speak, just signalled his head in the direction of the door to follow him.
They led us to a damp basement and two of them pushed shut a heavy wooden door, and we all waited in silence for ages.
Whispering he spoke, “That was close.” A tiny candle barely lit up the room, which like upstairs was full of ancient looking machinery and rubbish. And dust. But it smelt worse than it looked. I couldn’t discern much more of its surroundings, and then I told them what had happened.
“We were following a child in the city, and found him speaking to some vampires, they were dressed in Victorian costume and wearing masks. Then a flash of lightening, a roar of thunder and the next they had vanished and were chased by drones! Drones, where did they come from?”
He frowned, looked at the others who shrugged, then asked me, “What do you mean? Where do you come from? We’ve had drones for nearly a decade now? I don’t understand you?”
Marcus interjected, “This must be a time loop or something, we live in Bath. But it seems not in the same time...or something.” He joined this vampire in frowning too.
“A time loop? No, this isn’t a time loop, this is the twenty-first century, pure and simple.” Closing his eyes for a second, the vampire continued, “There was a tale, more of a legend, that said the first of them was stolen from time and taken back to the year of eighteen-hundred and something.”
“Who, who was taken?” I asked. As soon as the words left my mouth I could feel Marcus’s stare boring into me. “Orion? Those masked vampires? No, that’s inconceivable. I’ve heard some stuff, seen more than I’ve wanted but no...” I shook my head in disbelief.
Marcus wasn’t always known for his patience. Or his sense. Rather than continue with the story of the fact that we may have witnessed the incident that caused this shift, he asked, “These blood angels, have you ever seen one?”
“Most of us haven’t. Few have and lived to tell. They’re ruthless. They like nothing more than to feed on other immortals, our blood being more potent. They don’t look like us, they’re bigger. Their hands are like claws, their wings and skin are dark and touched red from all the blood they gorge on. No one, not even us, goes out after the alarms. And like you, they have wings, we do not.”
“That was a curfew?”
“How the hell don’t you know this? Who are you?”
My mind was spinning with all this new information and this horrible situation. Bloody hell Acacius and Damien, they had one thing to do.
My words tumbled out fast. “I think we’ve come from another time or dimension. We know of these blood angels, but where we are from they’re only children and there are only three. In our world, there are no drones that shoot at you, no curfew, and our kind, we live well.”
“I want to visit your world.” The vampire’s face lit up as if we could offer him paradise.
“How do you hunt, if you are hunted?” I asked.
“Not easily. Most of us have survived on the outskirts of cities, going out before the curfew and we have to hunt in packs. We used technology at first. That worked and it was safe, but those bastards, both government and blood angels, managed to decipher that and track us. So now we have to hunt as our ancestors, except they weren’t hunted by something far worse.”
“So how do the mortals cope?”
“They have personal drones, in and outside their homes. Drones fitted with guns, tranquilizers. Cameras monitor everywhere. Everything is on lock down at eleven anyway, unless you have a permit. That requires either signing one at your own risk, but they don’t usually allow that because the blood angels might turn you into one of their own. They increased their numbers before the curfews came. Or you need extra security, and even if you buy it, it has to be from those crazy or desperate enough to provide you with it.”
“Oh God!” I sat back in the filth to try to comprehend the disaster. Marcus was quicker...
“Orion! Those masked vampires snatched him... That must have been why they were dressed like that. They were from an earlier century! A time loop. I think we know how this happened.”
As I heard the words and pieced it together, tension gripped my body. “And that place, I was only thinking earlier on how it is the oldest section of the city, and how many paranormals dwell there,” I groaned.
We looked at each other, and I spoke. “If we could get back to that place—it may have to be the same time, hell the same date—in theory we could skip into that loop and stop all this. Are we on drugs or something?” I had to laugh, to release the fear and the intensity of our situation.
“God, I wish we were. Drugs would be easy compared. That is the best plan we have. What was the date it happened? 30th April 2016? What is it now?
The other vampire spoke. “18th February; thereabouts.”
“What year?”
“2016, so you’ve only time travelled back two months the
n!” he sniggered.
“Two months. I don’t want to wait for two months living like this. Can you help us find our friends and tell us of, of this place?”
“What is this old building?” He grinned. I couldn’t blame him, it was incredible but I wasn’t about to live in the gutter, hunted by man and immortals.
“Nathaniel, nope never heard of him. Nor Nicolas. There are very few of us here. We’ll help you, if you help us.
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Kyle; this is Nikki, Anne, and Trish. We live like rats. Once, I’m told, we lived like kings.
“Kyle, I can’t promise you’ll live like a king, but if you help us, you will be, by default, helping yourselves. We have to try and find our friends, but maybe they’re not here... God, I hate these time loop things.”
Marcus took me aside. “It’s confusing, but if they’ve taken Orion back in time, these blood angels are no doubt his descendants. We probably won’t find the others. They may not even exist in this reality. But that place where we saw the masked vampires, that must be where the time loop or whatever it is, is? I think first we need to know more about this time; we can’t navigate through a terrain we don’t know.”
That was the best start. And trusting Kyle and his friends was a good choice; they knew their time and could show us.
“We’d like to be included in your conversations, if we’re to help each other!” Kyle added.
“We know where in the city Orion was taken, and we know who by, although we know nothing about them. He was snatched by masked vampires dressed in ninetieth century clothing- just like your legends told. Once they grabbed him, a crash of thunder blasted and everything went pitch black. Then we arrived here. That must be a time loop, of sorts.”
Kyle spoke slowly, his eyes darting around the room, “So, you’re saying, I think, that you two come from a parallel reality? In your reality, Orion, and the others like him are children. In our time”, he gestured to his friends, “Our time now, this is the result of those masked vampires stealing Orion and taking him back in time. Because of that, because of what they have done, he has bred and we have this plague of his kind in our reality?”