by Dave Ferraro
“No. They were out camping for a week and just got back to find things the way they are last night. But we did encounter a man at the lighthouse who saw the men disappear. He couldn’t hear us or see us, but he was pretty spooked and afraid of whatever happened here.”
“It seems to have led the men out of town first,” Shanna explained, “then some of the women went to search for them and disappeared too.”
“And that’s when the rest of the town decided to leave. But whatever caused these disappearances are related to that singing. And it wasn’t too keen on the lighthouse either, because the beacon was damaged pretty extensively.”
“The lighthouse?” Saul seemed surprised. “Whatever would anyone have against the lighthouse?”
“Maybe this thing mistook the light for a cry for help?” Jordan suggested.
“Or it didn’t like the bright light,” Krystal threw in.
“Perhaps it just didn’t want any ships setting down in the area,” Jade reasoned. “It probably wouldn’t care if ships hit the rocks or whatever, but more witnesses may have presented a problem.”
“Whatever the reason,” Hunter said, “without any sufficient proof either way, this isn’t helping. We’ll have to discover the creature first, I’m sure, to understand its intentions.”
“Oh!” Shanna straightened up. “We also called Valor with a working phone. She couldn’t hear us, because of the frequency thing, I guess, but she said that she was sending help our way.”
Hunter nodded. “Maybe we can arrange for something to let them know the situation.”
“Alright,” Brett sat up. “Are we done here then?”
Natalia sat forward. “Hunter, do you have any texts here? I believe a little research would prove useful. Blindly looking for the source of what occurred here could be tedious, not to mention dangerous. Perhaps some sense of direction would remedy the situation that much faster. ”
“Actually, we do have some texts available,” Hunter replied. “Do you think it would be spreading us too thin, should we split our efforts between fixing the frequency problem, hunting for the source of the song, distracting the girls, and researching on what occurred here?”
“We’re all professionals here,” Amelia said. “Over the past month, we’ve instigated missions involving only two or three others. I don’t see why this situation should play out any different.” She looked around for any hint of protest and continued when she saw none. “Now, let’s split up into teams and get mobile. Todd obviously needs to work on fixing the machine that will remedy this mess. Jade?”
“Be happy to help,” Jade said with a salute. “But don’t think I’m going to be cooped up in here when we find out what’s going down outside.”
“I’ll distract the girls,” Brett volunteered. “I’m kind of a lady’s man, you know.”
“And I’ll keep a watch on him,” Rachel added, not bothering to hide her contempt. “Plus, the girls know me and will be wondering where Shanna and I went off to.”
Amelia nodded. “Good. Saul, you can go with them. Hunter and Krystal, we’ll keep you out of the hunt for whatever’s behind the evacuation, so you two are on research mode. I’m sure Hunter will be invaluable for pointing us in the right direction when it comes to texts. Anyone else up for helping out there?”
“I’ll do it,” Jordan spoke up. “I really don’t mind.”
“Cameron? It would probably be best if you helped them too, rested up a bit more.”
“No thanks,” Cameron shook his head. “Now that I’m coming out of this fog, I need to get out of here, move around. I feel like I’ve been cooped up for days. Probably because I have.”
Hunter looked away, and Shanna thought she noticed Amelia smile at that.
“Alright,” Amelia stood up again. “The rest of us will be part of the hunting party then. Let’s all reconvene here by sundown.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Rachel agreed, jumping up herself.
“So, can I talk to you before you join your group?” Hunter asked Shanna as she moved to prepare for the task at hand.
“Sure,” Shanna agreed. “Everyone’s going to be looking for weapons before we head out and I’ve already got mine.” She patted the sheath on her belt, where her cross dagger was housed. “Where to?”
“The next floor up, where we’ll be doing our research.”
“Okay.”
Hunter smiled and gestured for her to follow.
On her way out of the room, Shanna gave Cameron a squeeze on the shoulder and told him she’d be right back. He nodded as she disappeared from view.
She followed Hunter up the staircase and into a room with a few desks and a small table, and walls lined with bookshelves that stretched to the ceiling. The books rather overflowed from the shelves and could be seen in piles on the floor and stacked under the table in heaps. It was out of one of these piles that Hunter poked and prodded, searching for something.
“So, what do you scholars do for The Agency exactly?” she asked, opening a thick book on top of a stack beside her. She paged through until she found an illustration of a demon fitting half a man into his mouth. She grimaced and closed it.
“Well, The Agency is actually a part of Visum et Repertum, or ‘the scholars,’ as you put it. So, it’s quite the other way around. We research monsters, old texts, prophecies. We analyze things. Many of us live in Lime Bay with you already. We’re kind of a back-up team to help with the translations of things you come across, the best ways to battle threats. And we’re also charged with directing you, balancing our resources. So on, so forth. Ah. Here we are.” He flipped through a thick black leather-bound book, its pages yellowed with age. The air in the room was thick with the smell of old books, like the library she’d visited with her mother as a child.
He set the book down on a desk before Shanna and pointed to a line of text. “She will be one of the seeds gathered from afar to become the tree that the darkness can not topple,” he read aloud. “Its bark will be as iron, it will shed but a few leaves and none will be able to penetrate its hide, its roots, its will. She will rise from the ashes to fight anew. And she will reach her roots deep into the soil and uncover there what they have been searching for all along.”
Shanna looked from Hunter to the book and back again. “Very pretty. But what does it mean?”
Hunter looked her in the eyes with a grin that threatened to overcome his face. “You hunters are the seeds, you’ve come to form the tree that can not be penetrated. You are our salvation, humanity’s salvation. The darkness - the monsters - have no chance against your combined forces! And you...”
“Wait. We’re seeds?”
“Yes. You will be cared for, trained, nurtured...and you will be unstoppable as a force!” Hunter forced himself to calm down before he pulled another book from a nearby pile. “This particular prophecy is from the eighteenth century. There was an important figure from that time period. Her name was Diana…”
Shanna stopped breathing for a moment as her thoughts leapt to Damien, whispering that name to her at a tavern upon their first meeting, then to a painting with her exact likeness displayed at The Crimson Rope’s mansion in New York City. And then there were the flashes that invaded her dreams and waking hours for a short period of time when she’d first moved to Lime Bay, but had since ceased. The flashes hadn’t been of her own life, but of this woman’s…this Diana’s. Somehow, there was a connection between the two of them. She wasn’t sure what that connection consisted of…but it was still frightening nonetheless, having this connection to a woman she’d never met, who hadn’t been alive for centuries…
Hunter paused and looked up at her. “Are you alright? You’ve blanched.”
“Blanched?” Shanna shook her head, to clear it of her suddenly crowded thoughts as much as to dissuade Hunter from worrying over her. “No, I’m fine. Please go on. You say Diana was an important figure?”
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Hunter nodded. “Mmmm. Very. She was a high profile vampire, named after the virgin goddess of the hunt. She supposedly died as a virgin when she was changed.”
Shanna closed her eyes and did her best to stifle a moan. A vampire. Of course. She had been afraid that her roots were tied to darkness. That’s why there was so much interest wrapped around this Diana figure at The Crimson Rope, La Faer Noir, from Damien, Scarlet Fever and Lupe… Of course Diana had been one of them. An important figurehead to them, from their past, suddenly materializing in front of them. It must have seemed like fate. Was that…Was that all Damien saw in her? Shanna shook her head. Of all the things she should have been thinking then, she was wondering over Damien’s intentions. What was her problem? Things were beginning to make a bit more sense…why the mora creatures had tried to win Shanna over to the dark side to win favor with La Faer Noir…why her presence had been tolerated at all. It was because of this…uncanny resemblance. If that was all it was… But if it was in fact just a resemblance, then was someone messing with her mind, making her see these visions…to confuse her? To test her? To stir and birth yearnings within her that she did not really feel? Or did she genuinely have a connection with Diana? It was too much.
“And records would indicate that she was a real force to be reckoned with,” Hunter prattled on, completely unaware of the storm brewing within her mind. “She was the consort of Vlad, the...well, have you heard of the Impaler?”
Shanna shrugged, only half-listening at this point. “Sounds familiar.”
“Bram Stoker created Dracula based on him. You’ve surely heard of Dracula?”
“Of course.” Perking up a bit, Shanna inched closer to Hunter. As much as she didn’t want to know the things that Hunter was telling her, these were things that she needed to know. People may try to manipulate her…may already be manipulating her, based on this person torn from the pages of history. Diana….Virgin Goddess of the…the Hunt. It seemed appropriate somehow. An unbridled, perverse, beautiful creature with the arrogance to name herself such.
“Not exactly the same thing he was made out to be in the Stoker novel, but nonetheless, he was pure evil. He taught his queen everything he knew. But she was destroyed in the end during a raid. She sacrificed herself as a decoy so the Impaler could escape, vowing to return one day.” He hesitated. “I’ve read the Iron Will prophecy, as it’s come to be known, hundreds of times before I really focused on the one line of the ‘she’ it mentions, almost as an offhand remark. It makes a point to mention her and I wanted to know why. It appears that she shows up in a few other prophecies. She’s an important figure, always referred to as ‘she.’ It was a huge gift this prophet was relaying if anyone paid attention to the vague pronoun he used to describe what I presume is the same figure.”
Shanna looked back down at the prophecy and pointed as she read “She will rise from the ashes to fight anew.”
“Precisely,” Hunter confirmed. “Ashes is the key word. I thought at first that it was merely a reference to the phoenix, coming out of the ashes. A rebirth. But then I made a connection to vampires. Vampires, when they die, what happens to them?”
“They turn to dust,” Shanna answered.
“Ash,” Hunter corrected. “They turn to ash. No bone, no flesh, no nails or hair, just ash.”
Shanna paced for a moment, trying to figure out what he was articulating. “So, you’re saying that this girl is a vampire...come back to life?”
“Reincarnated. A reincarnated vampire. She died the first time, turning to ash as she was staked. Now, she has come back as a hunter.” He paused and turned the page, opening the book he was holding so that Shanna could see the illustration on it.
She drew in a sharp breath, despite the fact that she’d been expecting it. It was exactly her likeness. Not one detail was out of place. It was her.
“You are Diana.”
Chapter Sixteen
“But I’m not her,” Shanna argued, unable to take her eyes off of the portrait. The woman had her nose, her chin, her smile. Her eyes...were like looking back into her own. She could be staring into a mirror for all of the similarities she found there. But it was a painting. There was some margin for error, she reasoned. There had to be. “There has to be some sort of mistake. I’m Shanna Hunt. An ordinary girl from the Midwest.”
“Oh, but I think not,” Hunter said, closing the book, ending the spell that had held Shanna in its thrall. “You are Diana reincarnated. That is the only explanation. But...in theory, when people are reincarnated, they have no knowledge of their previous lives, so why would it be any different in your case? In fact, you probably aren’t that same person at all, but you might carry the same energy that gave her life.”
Shanna sat down on a nearby desk and put a hand to her head, feeling more weary than she had in days. Diana. The name drifted through her mind. The portrait flowed over her eyes, blinding her to all else. And then it hit her again…
Shanna looked to her left and was startled to find herself in the past. Just like back in New York, where the visions had first besieged her.
She was crouched in dirt and filth. She was in a fireplace, behind the grate, where soot and ash were staining her gown. But she found that she didn’t care about this. What she cared about was that she stay hidden.
I’ve seen this before…
A hand grasped hers in the dark and she looked over and could see a flicker of her brother’s face in the shadows, from the moonlight cast down upon them from above.
She was different this time, Shanna realized. Diana wasn’t as crafty as she’d been when she’d pushed a woman out of a window. Wasn’t as cocky. She was human, she mused. This was Diana before she had become a vampire. And her name...wasn’t Diana. It was Emma. She hadn’t become Diana until she was changed. At that moment she was Emma, living at a school of others like herself...psychics. Other young people with the power of the third eye. Telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, psychic flashes. Her brother was a channeler. He could perform automated writing. Beings used him to write or draw things through the pen and paper he held. The Children of Athena. That’s what they were called. Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war. She sprung out from Zeus’ forehead - the third eye. Emma loved Greek mythology. She knew many of the stories by heart.
The hand in her palm was shaking, bringing Emma out of her thoughts. Her brother was terribly frightened. And she realized that she should be too. But she wasn’t. She knew what was coming. She knew it would be horrible, yet...she welcomed it. She welcomed death and the dark embrace that would taint her, twist her soul towards an inclination for evil. The power she felt from this life left her breathless. It would be delicious.
Her brother let out a small whimper and Emma suddenly shook herself. She couldn’t let this happen. Her feelings....thoughts...she didn’t know what to call the psychic impressions she had...they had never been wrong before, but she’d never had any control in the past. There had never been a situation that she could alter as a primary figure. Her feelings of foreboding were always of people around her, never herself. Until now. The feelings began to advance upon her again and she got a rush from what she felt...pain, warmth, pleasure. But no pictures. Her visions were not laid out for her so plainly. She could only feel what was to become. And she did not wish it to be, for she felt her brother’s cold body in her arms....and her own indifference toward it.
A creak. Someone was out in the parlor now. In the shadows. Emma squinted into the darkness. She thought she could make out a figure moving beyond the closest chair.
Her brother was breathing too loudly. He had to relax or he would give them away. He had to relax now.
“I know you are here, Girl,” a voice called out from the darkness.
She heard the words plainly, even though she knew they were being spoken in a foreign tongue. Another gift of hers. Her m
ost useful gift.
Emma swallowed hard and shifted in the ashes, trying to get a better look through the grate.
“I smell your fear,” the voice added. “I smell your power. Pray tell, Girl, where did you ever happen upon such power? If you tell me now, I will let you live.”
A lie. He never intended to let her live. Emma knew it for a fact as plainly as if he’d just said so himself. All she felt from him was death. Could she elude such a fate? Could she escape or was she already damned?
The figure sat down in the chair facing the fireplace. He folded his hands over his chest, as if meditating. He seemed to be staring right at them.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Shanna stood on shaky legs and shook her head. The vision was quickly fading and she was feeling more like herself already. It was like it came over her whenever she thought about Diana too hard. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t had a vision since New York. She merely hadn’t thought about it since then, at least not seriously. She would have to avoid doing so in the future.
“Are you alright?” Hunter asked her, looking up from his book.
“Hmmm? Oh, yeah. I don’t...what does this reincarnation stuff all mean?”
Hunter sighed. “It just means that the prophecy is true. The group of hunters you are a part of is destined for greatness and will triumph over the dark. There’s nothing bad in the prophecies about you. It’s just where you came from, another life you led.”
Shanna looked up at him with a frown. “What do the other prophecies say about me?”
“Maybe...maybe you should just forget that I’ve told you anything.”
“Forget it? Forget it? Are you serious? You just told me I was the protégée of the Impaler, for Christ’s sake!”
Hunter bit his lip. “Yes...well...I promise you I will share anything I come across about you, but I have nothing else here. This is just a small portion of the books we have in our possession.”
“God,” Shanna muttered. “Of all things.”
Hunter put a hand on her shoulder, not knowing what else to do. “I...I could be wrong.”