That thought gave me pause. “Listen, how much of this does Kamila know? Because I’m not putting her in danger, she doesn’t know about.”
“I think she knows pretty much all of it.” She sighed and looked away. “She used to be close with Margaret, and she has her own sources of information too. She just never liked the whole pack mentality thing. She felt we were safer on our own. I guess we were both wrong.”
I nodded. “And you’re positive it’s not just a fluke, that I’m this Lifebringer or whatever.”
Tess’s eyes shone with tears, and she bit her lip. “I’m as sure as I can be. The other stuff, the lore stuff, I’m a little less confident about. It’s not my area of expertise, you know? I go where they point, and I do what I’m told. But when it comes to who and what you are, Jason, I’m as sure about that as I am about my own name.” She took a deep breath. “It’s what Margaret told me while she was dying. Her final words, in fact. She told me you were the Lifebringer, and you must be protected until you came into your own.”
I drained the rest of my drink in one gulp. I could barely understand the words coming from Tess’s mouth. How could I? I’d never been anyone special. Even among the Ferin, I’d been the lowest on the pole. Now she wanted me to believe Margaret’s last thoughts had been of me? Had been to order her to protect me? “How awful for you,” I said when I could find my voice. “I’m so sorry, Tess.”
“I’ve been proud to do it.” She smiled at me, but a few tears streamed from her eyes. “It’s what I was born for. I understand that now. Besides, you’re kind of cute.” She looked out over the waves. “I feel much lighter now with all that off my chest.”
I was willing to bet she did. I didn’t share her sudden levity, but I was glad she had it. Maybe someday, I could pay her back.
Epilogue
Tess and Kamila spoke quietly when we got back to camp. They spoke in private, but from what I could see, Tess apologized, and they reached an accord. They exchanged hugs, and we all agreed to leave the next morning, our collective axes buried in the beaches of San Diego. Kamila had gotten the tan she wanted, admitting there was only so much beach a girl could take each century. “I warmed up, looked at some cute young men, and now I’m ready to get back to kicking ass. I don’t know about the rest of you, but these vampires are a pain in my ass, and I’d like to see them gone. How about you?”
I met her eyes and held them. “Kamila, I need to know you’re okay with everything. It’s going to get a lot rougher from here on out. I need to know you understand the risks. Can you accept it? The risks?”
Kamila tossed her hair over her shoulder. “You know what? When you first showed up on my doorstep, I’d have said no. I’d have told you to fuck off. But seeing the things I’ve seen, doing the things I’ve done with you? Nah, I’m good. I’m in for the long haul, Jason. The war isn’t going to leave any of us behind. None of us asked for it, but we’re all going to be the ones caught up in it. It’s best if we all fight as hard as we can as long as we can.” Her smile faltered a bit. “Maybe we’ll all die, and maybe we’ll win. Either way, we’re taking a bunch of them down with us.”
We headed east because it was the only option. We’d come from the north, and the Pacific Ocean was west, and my water powers hadn’t advanced far enough yet to carry us out to Hawaii. Yet.
We didn’t have a destination in mind. We planned to have me work my water powers for a while until they too became second nature. I expected it to progress like my fire powers. I’d screw up here and there, but I’d get the hang of things, thanks to passion and natural talent. I was wrong. Quite wrong, in fact.
We stopped in the Sawtooth Mountain Wilderness, or at least in the area of I-8 that ran near it. I didn’t know anything about it save the fact it was desert, the sky was blue, and the sun was punishing. It was a desert, through and through. “There now,” Kamila told me. “Find us some water.”
“Cute.” I held up a plastic jug of spring water, one of the many we’d brought with us for this trip. “Here you go.”
She gave me a pissy look and pulled out a bandana. “Just for that, we’re going to do this the hard way.” She blindfolded me and led me out into the desert. The ground crunched under my feet, and a hot wind blew.
“Now use your water ability to find your way back to the van, smartass. Don’t touch that blindfold for ten minutes. I will know if you cheat.” She patted my ass and walked away, boots noisy in the sand.
I waited ten minutes in the sun’s furnace. I knew I couldn’t die of thirst, but I was already drying up. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten snarky, given how the air around me seemed to rise a degree a minute.
When I took off the blindfold, I had no idea where I was. Everything looked the same, except the mountains in the distance and some scrubby plants to my left. Water and plants went together, so I lurched toward them without thinking.
Don’t be an idiot. You’re supposed to be finding your way back to the van, which is only ten minutes away. See if you can find the van. Feel the water in those jugs, not what makes sense because you read it in an encyclopedia in second grade. I steeled myself against the burning heat and reminded myself the heat couldn’t hurt me either. Then I asked myself where I felt the water.
The only problem was, I couldn’t feel any water at all.
I took a guess and set off toward the right since the mountain hadn’t been there when I’d been at the van, and neither had the brush. Of course, if I were trying to train someone to navigate by sensing water, I’d move the van. That probably said something nasty about me, but we weren’t here to be nice. We were here to fight a war, and I was at the center of it. I needed to toughen up.
I tried not to think of the sun as my enemy. Instead, I tried to think of it as an ally protecting me from vampires.
I walked for half an hour before feeling...concerned. Yes, Kamila and Tess had assigned themselves the task of protecting me and making sure I got trained, but I knew I was a challenge to them. What if they’d decided to ditch me out here in the desert? What if vultures came down to peck at my eyes for the next thousand years while I wandered lost out here forever? What if Tess and Kamila had been attacked? My thoughts raced, and after another half hour, I found myself in a low-key panic.
I let my mind wander, pulling back the natural limits, but all I got was nothing. I wanted to scream, and since there wasn’t anyone around to hear me, I did exactly that. This was stupid. The water had been a fluke. I had to get back to the van and tell them Chilperic had been wrong. I was no Lifebringer. I burned things, and that was all.
Behind me, a cactus flew into the air, rocketed into the sky by a jet of water that broke apart in the sky like a rainbow flume. They could probably see that column of water in San Diego.
Oh, shit. Well, on the plus side, I’d found the water. But sending a geyser of water up for all the world to see wasn’t the best way to avoid attention, and it seemed like a waste of good water.
Tess appeared moments later, out of breath from running. “What the hell did you do?”
I grimaced. Shame had once again entered my vocabulary. “Panicked?”
She took my hand. “Did you think about the aquifer here before you blew it up?” We took off at a run, Tess leading the way.
“I couldn’t find the aquifer!” I chugged along beside her, but inside, I shrank down from sheer embarrassment. “Shit. I didn’t think about an aquifer. I was more or less looking for a spring.”
Kamila had the van running by the time we got there. I didn’t even get a chance to buckle my seatbelt before we were moving again.
“I don’t think I’m meant for this,” I told them after about an hour on the road in silence. “Seriously, that was just the most futile thing ever. I think I might have just screwed up the water table in Southern California for the next six generations.”
Kamila sighed. “Probably not, Jason. I mean maybe. Water’s a fragile thing around here, but nature has ways of fixing herself. The thin
g is, well, none of us really knows how the water ability works. You and I are fire Ferin. Tess’s ability isn’t elemental, I don’t think. We’re all kind of winging this. Maybe putting you into a high-stress situation isn’t the best solution. Maybe we need to start smaller.”
Tess turned around to give me a weak smile. “If Mort were here, he would know what to do. As it is, we’ll just have to figure it out.”
I bit my tongue against a snappy comeback about Mort. Mort had only been moderately helpful with my fire ability, after all. Not that I wanted to think about being passionate with Mort. I slid down in my seat and tried to think about something else, anything but my spectacular failure in the desert today.
We grabbed dinner in Yuma, Arizona and ate at a picnic area, the desert spreading around us as armor against our uncertainty.
“Jason. It’s okay,” Tess said. “I know it’s frustrating, but it’s only natural.” I hadn’t realized I was outwardly angry. “You wouldn’t have these abilities if you weren’t destined to have them and to become good at them. Remember how frustrated you were when you first got the fire ability? You’ve become possibly the strongest fire user around in only a couple of months. Don’t think that’s normal. It’s not. You got training, and that’s what made all the difference for you.”
I took a deep breath to calm myself. “I definitely wouldn’t be any good at all without Kamila’s help. And I wouldn’t be much good in a fight without yours. But getting training for a water ability is going to be a bit of a challenge, won’t it? All the Ferin we knew are dead. There’s no one to train me.”
Kamila licked her lips and tossed Daisy a fry. “I might know someone. A few someones, actually.”
Both Tess and I turned to look at her. “You were going to share this when?” Tess leaned forward.
“Half past never until I knew we needed them,” she retorted. “It’s a clan of water-working Ferin holed up in New York City. I’m a redneck fire Ferin who lived very happily on my own in Virginia until this friggin’ war jolted me out of my home. Why would I want to go talking to those people? What in the hell would we have to talk about? ‘Well, howdy, Alexander, I hate vampires. How about you?’ That about sums it up, don’t you think?” Kamila snorted and wrinkled her nose. “Bunch of stuck up, high-rise living bastards that they are anyway.”
“Oh good,” I muttered. “They sound delightful. I guess if they won’t train me, we can just burn their high-rises down.”
Tess tugged on my arm. “Won’t they just activate the sprinkler systems?”
“Not if Kamila and I melt them.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t want to fight other Ferin. I really don’t. If nothing else, we should probably warn them about the war. If they don’t want to train me because they don’t like the company I keep, so be it. We’ll figure something else out. Right now, it seems like the only way.”
“It does,” Kamila agreed. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I just want to go on the record saying Daisy, and I don’t like it.”
Daisy barked twice and wagged her tail.
“Traitor,” Kamila said.
It lightened the mood considerably, and we turned the van east-northeast to bring us toward the City That Never Sleeps.
I’d never had the slightest urge to go to New York, not even as a little kid. Now that I knew about vampires and Ferin, I wanted to go even less. The city was terrifying, and anything could happen there. A vampire could attack in the middle of Times Square, and no one would notice. Hell, people would film it.
Still, it was the only way to get me the training I so desperately needed. The war was on us now, and there was no time to lose—or waste. I wanted to kill every vampire on the Earth. It might sound a little genocidal, and maybe it was a little genocidal, but the vampires were born from demons. They existed only to sow hatred, discord, and misery wherever they went.
I wouldn’t mind preventing more Ferin from being created, either. A life lived outside of society, unable to interact for fear of being found out, was no way to exist. If it had been chosen, it would have been fine, but it could only be bestowed through an act of violence and hate. Ferin existed because someone screwed up murdering us, and we remembered that every day of our lives.
I put my hands on the steering wheel, smiling tightly at my partners, my women. My fighters. “New York?”
“New York,” they agreed in unison.
I turned the key, looking out over the desert. “Lotta fangs between here and there.”
Tess put her hand on my heart, smiling. “Lots of fire in here, too.”
“Good enough,” I said, and together, we drove toward the sun.
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About the Author
Daniel Pierce lives in Wyoming with his wife Marissa and their two dogs. After fourteen years as an engineer, Daniel decided it was finally time to write and release his first novel.
As a lifelong fan of scifi and fantasy, he wants nothing more than to share his passion.
He invites readers to email him at [email protected]
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