by K. A. Poe
There were now only three men left, including the one who had falsely told Hannah that his name was John. The three split up and each went to a different target. John had chosen me.
I tried to shove my apprehender away as easily as we had the ones before but he did not budge. He swung his right fist in a wide arc and I barely moved from the blow in time to not get struck. As he staggered from his own momentum I kicked him hard in the ribs and heard a sickening crunch. To my astonishment he turned towards me as if it were only a scratch, despite the red blood dying the side of his robe. These three were far stronger than the previous ones and I had vastly underestimated them.
With some sort of fanatical zeal he came at me with a flurry of attacks, jabbing and kicking as I struggled to block each blow. Unfortunately my best efforts were not good enough as he eventually landed a punch into my left brow, instantly engulfing my eye in blood.
He leapt to my left side where I could barely see thanks to the veil of blood now covering my eye. Before I could turn and anticipate his next move he was on top of me, forcing me down onto the cold black stone. I tried to thrust my arms up and push him off but he grabbed them and forced them under his knees, pinning my upper body down and leaving his arms free. With terror I realized what he was doing. With all his strength and weight he pressed down on my head with both hands, turning my gash towards the waters. As the blood dripped I saw it glitter and disappear in the crystal waters. Struggling against hope I shouted out for Salem as I looked around for either him or Hannah.
From my viewpoint I could see Hannah, fairing barely better than myself, hopping back across some of the stepping stones as her assailant jumped and kicked at her. I saw no blood from her yet though, and as far as I knew the water only reacted to it. I prayed I was right, for her sake.
My attacker dominated the rest of my view through my remaining good eye. If Salem was okay, I couldn’t see him. As a last desperate attempt to rid the hands on my head and face I bit at his flesh, tearing large gashes with my fangs. For a moment I had hoped it would be enough but instead it seemed to strengthen his intent. He pressed harder and I could hold no more, then instantly his weight was gone from me, tumbling over my head and out of view. All I could see now was Salem, still intact other than some rips in his shirt.
For a moment I was relieved and thankful, but then came a loud roar. This time it was not a waterfall. I turned to see John emerging from the waters, his right hand shriveling into a tangle of black. He came at Salem and I both, entirely disregarding the blackness that would soon consume him creeping up his limb. I went in to counter attack when all of a sudden Salem and I were both pulled back. Turned to defend myself against what had undoubtedly been the woman in the tattered dress I was surprised to see Hannah’s face. She must have slain her opponent.
“Don’t risk it, just wait,” she said.
“What?! Don’t risk what?”
“There,” she said, pointing at the withering arm. “He can’t fight that. Just keep your distance until it finishes him off. No need to risk ourselves.”
“And when did you become the voice of reason, little sister?” Salem smirked.
“Fight smarter not harder, I always say.”
This was easier done than said. John ran at us with speed befitting a vampire. We managed to dodge him and he slammed into the altar, the small white mask surrounding his eyes and covering his nose fell from his face. What I saw then was horrifying. Whatever ‘magic’ this water contained was definitely not meant to extend life forever.
His face was more twisted than wrinkled, dark creases and lines ran across his forehead so deep that they appeared to be carved there. The soft under the eyes was drooped and had turned a sickening color of dark, wet purple. I wondered how the woman had not succumbed to this same aging. For the briefest of moments I pitied him, but then came another attack.
Using the altar as leverage he pushed off with one foot and leapt onto Hannah. She hit the ground hard and I could see her golden locks becoming black with blood. Her eyes were closed and she went limp.
“Hannah!” Salem shouted and dashed towards the man who was now more than half withered.
The darkness had reached his right hip and leg and Salem knocked him off balance with ease. John tumbled close to the water, and unable to stand, started crawling his way towards us again. Salem gave him one final hard kick to the side of his head and he ceased to move.
As Salem went and kneeled beside his sister, the woman moved to what was left of her lead follower and spoke for the first time since the fighting had begun.
“Vilas,” the woman said as she shook her head. For a moment I noted sincere sadness as she stroked what was left of his face with her forefinger. Then what seemed like amusement.
Smiling, she lunged at me, slamming my body into the sacrificial stone. I gasped as the blade of her weapon met the skin of my abdomen. “You will pay for this with more than just death!”
I flinched as she began to drag the blade across my stomach, but something caused her to stop. I heard the knife fall to the black stone below and I was shocked to see a steel bolt sticking through the hand that had held it.
“Bull’s-eye,” a voice said and my eyes widened in horror as I tore my attention away from her hand to see the speaker.
“P-Paul?” I stuttered as Salem pulled the woman away from me and held her from behind. There was no mistaking it, standing at the top of the stairs, crossbow in hand and a large flashlight sitting on the ground beside him, stood my father.
“Sorry I showed up a little late,” Paul apologized then let another bolt shoot from his loaded crossbow. I screamed as it soared, knowing that he would finally be able to kill Salem who was defenselessly holding the woman still. The bolt flew through the air as if in slow-motion and struck its intended target.
Salem let the woman fall, the second bolt buried into her heart. Just as easily as one of her minions, the water devoured her, leaving nothing but a shriveled and blackened husk.
“How the hell did you find us! Are you here to kill us?” Hannah asked as she turned her attention to Paul, ready to attack.
“Why would I bother savin’ you if I planned to just kill you after?”
“Maybe you just wanted to save us for yourself!”
Before giving Paul a chance to respond, I spoke up. “Then why are you here?” I asked. It was difficult to look at him, knowing that the last time I had seen him he was trying to kill Salem. “How did you know we’d be here?”
“And how did your big ass fit through that hole?” Hannah added and Paul glared at her angrily.
“I found your journal, and I guessed you might come here,” he explained. “Look, Alex…I have had a lot of time to think about what happened, and I wanted to apologize…”
“This isn’t the time for mushy scenes, we have to figure out how this fountain works,” Hannah said firmly.
“Right…” my father mumbled and slowly crossed the stones to the small island. Once safely beside the altar he offered over the leather bound book.
I took it with a poor attempt at a grateful smile and looked through it for any signs of where we should look. My wound completely healed up – another thing I was going to miss soon – and I glanced up from the book to look around the cave. The images that Ezra had drawn depicted a spring sketched on the old paper; my mouth fell agape and I nearly dropped the journal as I remembered Ezra’s mentioning of the fountain being a spring.
“The fountain isn’t a fountain at all. The spring at the end of the cave back there…past the bodies…that is the ‘fountain’!” I exclaimed excitedly.
I lifted John’s torch from the white altar’s sconce and we all made our way back across the stepping-stones. After waiting on Paul to catch up several times we finally made it to the back where the waters trickled out of the earth from the large horizontal crack. The stench of the corpses stunk fiercely this far back and without thinking I tossed the torch onto the pile which ignited far quicker t
han I had imagined.
I was thankful my lungs did not function as they did when I had been mortal. The black smoke was thick, and with little place to go it filled the cavern with a thick haze. The sound of Paul coughing caught my attention.
“Maybe you should go ahead and head out,” I said. He didn’t have the luxury of being unaffected by the smoke like the three of us.
“No, I’m fine,” he replied.
I was unconvinced, but he was even more stubborn than I was. My eyes were now focused solely on Salem. This was the moment he was waiting for. The waters flowing below us would be all it would take to give him the life he had always wanted. The one that had been taken from him, as he put it. Now that we were here, I had to seriously question if this was what I truly wanted – after all of the trouble we went through to get here, I felt I had no other choice.
“So this is going to make you all human again, right?” Paul asked.
I nodded slowly in response. “That’s what the journal says.”
“I only wish we would’ve know about this before…before your mother…”
“You had the book before Alex; did you even read it?” Hannah butted in.
“No,” he said with a frown. “After my dad gave it to me, I set it aside and ignored it. I just figured he’d taught me everything he knew, so what use was some diary? I never was much of a reader, anyway.”
“Grandpa never mentioned anything about the fountain?” I asked.
“Well, no one in the family would have ever needed it as far as I can tell,” Paul said and cautiously stumbled toward me. “I really am sorry, Alex. I wasn’t right in the head, you got to understand that.”
“I know, dad. I’d probably have done the same thing if it had been Salem in place of…mom.”
“Enough sob stories, guys,” Hannah muttered. “Just get on with it and drink or whatever. I’ve had about enough of this cave for a lifetime.
Salem knelt at the edge of the water and ran his hand through the liquid. His eyes stared longingly at the rushing water and I knew at once that this was what I had to do. As I was watching him, my naturally graceful stepping failed me and I slid on the slick limestone grabbing Hannah’s arm to catch myself.
“I’m sorry, Hannah,” I mumbled as I straightened myself out. “What’s wrong?”
The look on her face was a mixture of grief, horror and confusion. I knew at once what had happened – she had seen something during the momentary touch shared between us.
“What did you see?!” I demanded, knowing it had to have been something bad.
She didn’t respond, instead she grabbed Salem by the shoulder and tugged him away from the water. Another identical look played across her face. She looked troubled as she stepped away. “You can’t…you can’t become human.”
Salem’s eye narrowed. “Are you doing this just because you do not want us to be human again?”
“That isn’t why!” she cried, “I don’t usually see visions, I place visions in other people’s minds, but…just, trust me. You can NOT do this!”
“Give me one good reason, Hannah,” I said angrily. “Tell me what you saw.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“If there was a real reason not to you’d tell us. Salem, do it.”
“No!” Hannah shouted, and Salem dropped the knife he had just summoned and it splattered into the spring, “I will tell you, just…come with me first, okay?”
“Come with you where?” I asked.
“Just back down the steps, in the room down there…away from all this smoke and death.”
“But the fountain is right here.”
“Honestly, I think any of the water in here will do. Just trust me.”
22. FUTURE
The four of us sat on the cave floor near the waterfall. Salem and I impatiently waited for Hannah to explain to us why she so desperately didn’t want us to partake in the gift the fountain would bestow upon us. Paul got up and began pacing around, rubbing his forehead anxiously.
“It isn’t all clear, but you have to believe me…please,” Hannah begged, looking at us with pleading eyes.
“We will,” Salem vowed and reached out to comfort her.
“No! Don’t touch me!” she wailed and scooted further away. “I don’t want to see anything else!”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “We will refrain from touching, if it helps you.”
“Thanks…” Hannah mumbled. “If you do this…you will be putting yourselves and the rest of the world at risk.”
“The world…how?”
“A child…” she shook her head, “I saw a boy. He looked so much like you, Salem…but he wasn’t you. No. There was something wrong…”
I grew worried. Was this our child she spoke of? What was wrong with him? How were we going to risk people’s lives by having a kid? Salem remained calm and composed, at least on the outside – I am sure his mind was flooded with the same curious, haunting possibilities.
“Tell me every little detail you can remember, Hannah. Don’t fight it. I know that it is scary, but we need to know.”
“The boy is yours…I have no doubt. But…” she grimaced at the memory. “His eyes, so red, so menacing.”
I gasped. “That can’t be,” I argued. “We wouldn’t let that happen!”
She shook her head again. “You cannot stop it, Alex. If you become mortal again, and you have this child, he will become a vampire. He will become evil. The things he will do…are worse than anything I have ever done. You will be the parents of the evilest, cruelest, sickest, vampire imaginable. If he is not stopped, the entire world will bleed.”
I almost wanted to laugh. This was ludicrous!
“The future is changeable,” I said harshly. “Just because you see that now, doesn’t mean it will happen like that. You and Salem have both told me how visions are just a possible future.”
“No,” she said flatly. “I have never been more certain in my life. You can argue against it all you want, Alex, but it will happen! You will regret it if you don’t take my warning.”
“Since when do you even care about the rest of the world, anyway?” I asked. “You have spent years killing countless people, and now all of a sudden you see one little glimpse of a possible future and you care? I don’t believe it for a second, what are you playing at?”
“Please, Alex! I know how this sounds, but I really think you are making a mistake! Just live like you have been – immortality isn’t as bad as Salem thinks it is.”
“Ah, so there it is. You just don’t want us to be mortal. Well, if I weren’t I would have to witness all of my friends and relatives dying, Hannah. That’s not something I could sacrifice for immortality,” I said with a subtle frown.
“This has nothing to do with me! And besides, you would be doing the same if you let this happen.”
“Not necessarily,” I objected. “Things can be changed, Hannah. You don’t know for certain that the future will unfold the way you think it will.”
“I’m not standing idly by while you risk yourselves and everyone else.”
“Just what do you plan to do about it, then?” I scoffed. “There’s nothing you can do to stop us, and you know it.”
Her lips moved to speak but no words came out. She slumped over in defeat and averted her eyes from the rest of us. I felt mild remorse but I wasn’t going to let this prevent Salem from living out his dream of becoming a mortal again. We had come all of this way, and I was going to make the trip worthwhile.
“Salem, are you ready?” I asked and tried to ignore the uncertain expression on his face.
“What if Hannah is right, Alex?”
“You are going to give up that easily? After all we have been through to get here? Is this not what you want?”
“It is, of course, but not at the risk of hurting so many other people.”
“What if we just don’t have a child?!” I growled. “Would that fix the issue?”
&nb
sp; “You can try to avoid it, but it will happen,” Hannah insisted.
I was at a loss for what to do or say.
“Take this from a man who has lost his love, and nearly lost his child on far too many occasions – take the chance. It will only come to you once. You can both live as vampires and watch the rest of us rot and die, or you can ignore Hannah and truly live,” Paul said. “No one, not even Hannah, knows if this ‘vision’ is true. Imagine what you would be losing out on if you didn’t take the chance.”
“He is right,” Salem said, approached me and took my hands in his. “My powers were not always accurate when I first began experiencing them; perhaps Hannah is having mixed visions of the future. They are only a possibility, which does not mean what she sees will indeed happen. And if by some horrible chance it does begin to happen, we will do all that is in our power to stop it.”
I smiled meekly. “It’s settled, then?”
“Yes,” he whispered and released my hands. I watched his eyes turn purple – for what I presumed to be the final time – and a dagger appeared in the palm of his hand. “We will be together forever, Alexis, however long that might last.”
“Roughly sixty or seventy more years,” Hannah mumbled. “How can you even consider giving up eternity?”
“There are far more important things than living forever, Hannah,” he replied. “Perhaps you ought to consider that for yourself.”
She didn’t respond after that. I watched, mesmerized, as she rose from the cave floor and began making her exit. No one attempted to stop her, although I constantly desired to say something – anything – to get her to stay.
“Should I go, too?” Paul asked.
“Only if you want to,” I answered.
He shrugged and backed away some, sulking in the shadows.
With one sudden movement Salem embraced me and pressed his lips hard against mine. I was so caught up in the moment that I scarcely noticed one of his hands fall away from my hip as he removed one of my arms from his neck and extended my palm out toward him. The sting of the dagger’s blade came to me almost at once and I broke away from the kiss. He tightly grasped my wounded hand with his, and I noticed with a wince that he, too, was bleeding.