Insidious Winds

by Rain Oxford

  One of the doors was wide open, but it was too dark to see into. “What happened?”

  “You chose to sacrifice yourself over your loved ones. You have proven yourself worthy of protecting the final key. It will be a great burden, but you will succeed as long as you remain the man you are now.”

  “What about Astrid?”

  “As I promised, she will live.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Still in Dothra. You are free to go and get her.” He gestured to the open door.

  “That’s to Dothra? Why is it open where anyone can come and go?”

  “It was not I who opened it.”

  “Langril. Where is he now?” Was he really dead? It didn’t seem possible.

  “He was attacked and overwhelmed. It appears he was trying to save both Heather Anne and the vampire, but his plans were overheard. I will close the door behind you.”

  Was he really trying to save Astrid? No, probably not. “Can you tell me how to find her once I get there?”

  “I cannot,” he answered dismissively, holding his hand out flat. A small disk, about an inch in diameter and a quarter inch thick, appeared above his hand. He motioned to the disk and it floated towards me, stopping a foot away from my chest.

  I sighed. “I don’t want this.”

  “And that is why you are the only one who can keep it safe now.”

  I reached out with my right hand and froze; my instincts were telling me that was wrong. Instead, I held out my left hand and the disk floated to my palm. I grunted, but managed to contain an outright shout of pain as the disk suddenly turned almost red hot. I dropped the damn thing. It fell halfway to the floor, halted in midair, and vanished.

  I studied my hand. There was not much pain left, but a circle the same size as the disk had been burned into my palm. There were intricate designs and symbols in the circle, just like those from the drawing on Heather’s note I found after her death. As I watched, the burned lines faded to a shade paler than the rest of my skin.

  When I looked up, Janus was gone.

  I didn’t feel suddenly more powerful, but at least I didn’t feel dead. I cleared my mind, certain this was going to hurt, and stepped through the doorway.

  * * *

  No matter how badly my lungs were burning, my instincts would not let me inhale. I was colder than I had ever been, which made sense, because I was under water. I sat up, though the task was made difficult by the rushing water. I was in some kind of concrete tunnel with the tower smack dab in the middle of it. The top of the tower was higher than the ceiling of the tunnel.

  I got to my feet, shivering violently, and tried to squeeze the water out of my clothes. Either side of the tunnel led to darkness, but my instincts were pushing me to go downstream. With no better options, I followed the tunnel and came out into a dark street. Not all of the water ran off into the drain holes, as they were obviously poorly designed.

  There were buildings just like the shops on Earth, but they were all run down and creepy. None of them had any windows, paint, or items on display. In fact, they looked like they were trying to go unnoticed. Old-fashioned, down-facing streetlights provided some lighting, but half of them were out and the other half were dim or blinking. People here obviously didn’t like light.

  I turned and stepped back to see over the water tunnel. Built almost hanging over the street was a massive castle, easily three times the size of Quintessence. The tower, which grew out of the tunnel, was pressed against another, wider tower in a very sloppy manner.

  Was Krechea in there, or had he already escaped to Earth?

  I heard a scream and ducked into the tunnel. I wasn’t particularly worried, since the rushing water was loud, until I sensed the presence of those approaching. Vampires. Not just any vampires, either; these were the most powerful vampires I had ever crossed paths with.

  Five vampires passed, two of which were dragging a screaming, thrashing woman. The vampires were wearing long, black leather coats and sporting many large, flashy rings on their hands and chains around their bodies. Hell, they looked like a cross between a vampire and a pirate.

  One of them stopped, turned, and looked right at me with glowing red eyes. I reacted impulsively by reaching out with my magic to take his mind.

  Nothing happened.

  Not a damn thing; my magic was completely and entirely unresponsive, which had only ever happened when Gale was using the amulet against me. I started reaching for my gun the instant I realized I was in trouble. Unfortunately, the vampire was faster. He slammed me into the wall and leaned forward to rip out my throat. I head-butted him, which was apparently not something he was familiar with.

  He jumped back and screamed something in a foreign language while alternately checking his fingers for blood and looking at me like I was utterly insane. The other four vampires stopped playing around, but by then, I had my gun. I shot one of them in the heart and the bastard burst into ash. I stared at my gun in shock, as did the remaining four vampires.

  Okay, so silver works on pure vampires.

  Before I could pull the trigger again, the first vampire smacked the gun from my hand and grabbed my wrist. Without thought, I reached into my pocket with my free hand, pulled out the first thing I touched, and stabbed it into his eye. I grimaced as he screamed. “Sorry, but I need that back.”

  I pulled the penlight back out, wiped it off on my shirt, put it in my pocket, and went for my gun. One of the remaining vampires beat me to it, aimed it at me, and pulled the trigger. I laughed. Of all the times to run out of bullets…

  The vampire tossed my gun aside, but I dived for it and snapped it up out of the water easily. Before I could straighten, the vampire shoved me against the wall of the tunnel. I kicked him in the side of the knee and slammed the butt of the gun into his nose. With one hand, I released the empty clip. With the other hand, I pulled a new clip from my pocket and snapped it into the gun. When I shot him in the chest, he burst into ash.

  I aimed the gun at the one who had attacked me first and he… vanished, as did the other two vampires. That was one more thing Earth vampires couldn’t do. The woman they left behind curled up on the ground.

  I glanced around before putting my gun away and approaching her. Just because she was their captive didn’t mean she wasn’t very dangerous. “Are you okay?” I asked her. When she didn’t answer, I reached down and gently touched her shoulder.

  When she jerked her head up, I jumped back. Her eyelids were sewn shut and her eyes were caved inward as if her eyeballs had been removed. There was also a very gory, open sore on her forehead. She started babbling something, but I couldn’t tell if she wasn’t making sense because of fear or if she was just speaking another language.

  My instincts fired up so hard that I took several steps away from her before I could stop myself. In two seconds, the shadows reared up like a wave in the ocean and engulfed her before forming into a man. He was tall, thin, and set off every alarm in my head. He grinned cruelly and tilted his head.

  “Sren, come look what I found,” he said, his voice chilling and playful at the same time. More shadows converged and formed a woman. She, too, was creepy as hell, with black hair, black eyes, and very pale skin.

  “A human!” she said excitedly. “Can we keep him? I always wanted a human.”

  The man chuckled. “No, you have not. Look closer; he has magic.”

  “Ooh, do you think he can learn tricks? Like he can go get us food and send messages? Do you think he knows any words?” She glanced down at my body. “Is that a normal size for a human?”

  “Slow down, Sren, we have to take him to the Master before we can play with him. You know humans cannot be loose in the wild.”

  “You realize I can understand every word you’re saying, right?” I asked.

  They both froze. “Did it just try to speak?” Sren asked.

  The man shrugged. “He is not from here; we cannot expect him to speak our language.”

  I sighed
and pulled my gun out. “Let’s try this again. Take… me… to… Astrid…” I said slowly, emphatically.

  They both looked from me to my gun. The man then made a waving motion with his hand and my gun vanished. “Is he asking for food?” Sren asked.

  “How should I know? The Master will decide if he eats or not.”

  Anger overcame any fear inside me when the man reached out for my hand. I was here to save Astrid, not play games with the local demons or be talked about as if I were a stray dog. Anger probably overcame reason, too. “Stop,” I growled.

  He did.

  So, silver works on vampires, but mind control doesn’t. Mind control works on wizards, but guns don’t. Yay.

  Unfortunately, although mind control did work on Dothra wizards, I wasn’t powerful enough to hold on for more than a few seconds. When his mind snapped out of it, the backlash was the equivalent of an instant migraine.

  “What did he do?” Sren asked him.

  Instead of answering her, he reached for me again. By then, I had a theory. I allowed anger and hate to fill me again and my power came with it. I reached out as if to push the man away and focused my anger on him. The same red lightning I had used before struck him in the chest and he burst into… well, shadow. I hadn’t killed him, but he didn’t swarm me. The woman looked shocked for a second before she also became a shadow again.

  I finally understood everything Langril told me and why he always made me mad during our lessons; magic in Dothra is entirely based on emotion. There were no elementals on Dothra. Here, fear made my magic weak and anger made it strong. I wonder what love does.

  Certain that someone else would come along and try to enslave or eat me, I took off towards the light. It seemed like at least the wizards favored the darkness. The streets all looked like the one I had seen in my vision of Astrid, which didn’t mean she was actually anywhere close. I tried the door of every store I came across to find one that was abandoned. Oddly enough, none of them were open to the public at the moment. Maybe it was nighttime.

  Did a world of darkness have a commonly recognized “nighttime?”

  I finally found an unlocked door and went inside, where there were stacks of unmarked boxes everywhere. The investigator in me wanted to snoop. Instead, I focused on Astrid’s mind and tried to find it with my magic.

  Nothing. I couldn’t sense her at all. I also couldn’t stick around the store all day. I needed to find someone who knew something. Hell, I needed someone who understood me. How could I understand those two shadow wizards and they couldn’t understand me? Damned backwards world.

  I started to leave, but my instincts were warning me against it. Thus, I decided to snoop. I opened one of the boxes. Water? It contained nothing but bottles of water. I opened the box next to it and found some form of ERMs.

  I didn’t know if they were rations for the common people, emergency relief, or poison meant to fool someone’s enemy. The other boxes contained more of the same. After a few minutes, I heard the sound of someone talking, so I ducked behind an old filing cabinet. The door opened the second I was out of sight and two men came in. I peeked out of my hiding space just enough to see the men start loading the boxes onto a flat cart.

  “Why do we have to feed the vermin?” one man asked.

  “The vampires are even greater pests, and they feed off the vermin.”

  “If we just kill the vermin---”

  “Then the vampires will feed off us.”

  “But this only kills the vampires,” the man whined.

  Fucking wizards. They’re all the same; kill the vampires by poisoning their food supply without the humans even knowing they were poisoned. That was probably how Astrid was poisoned. Would Astrid go back to the same food source after that? I wanted to think she wasn’t that stupid, but I had no idea how desperate she was.

  “It does kill the vermin,” the second man said. “It merely takes longer. Eventually, the poison will cause their organs to decompose. It starts with nasty, open sores all over their skin.”

  I knew without a doubt that the vampires here were more powerful than those on Earth, since they were the originals, but they didn’t deserve to die like that. The humans (or weak Dothra wizards) didn’t deserve to die, either.

  I wanted my gun.

  I let anger well up inside me again and shape my magic into fire, which I let out into the boxes. Heat filled the room before the boxes actually started smoking. At this point, the two wizards freaked and ran away without even trying to put out the fire.

  At least I wasn’t cold anymore.

  When the heat of the flame melted the plastic of the water bottles, the water spilled out and tried to extinguish the fire. I made my way over to the door, only to hesitate. At the rate it was going out, there would be a lot of salvageable food. Pressing my back against the door in case the fire got out of control, I remembered every argument with Regina. My ex-wife was a selfish, egotistical, gold-digger and no one could piss me off faster. For the sake of the people who this poison was intended for, that was a damn good thing.

  Unfortunately, recalling the last time she emptied my personal bank account after our divorce was too infuriating; fire engulfed the entire mass of boxes, spread to the ceiling, and filled the room with black smoke. I had just turned to grab the door handle when part of the ceiling collapsed in front of me, blocking the door. Since it opened inward, I was trapped.

  I opened my mouth to cuss, only to fill my lungs with smoke. No damned windows when I need one! Maybe there’s a back door. I could have made it through the door eventually, but I doubted I had that much time.

  I had just started towards the back of the shop to try to find a back door when the front door burst open. It was actually broken off its hinges. Someone entered wearing black clothes, goggles, and a face mask. He grabbed my arm to pull me towards the door. I followed him out to the street and into the building across from the burning one. Someone shut the door behind me and the man who helped me pushed me onto a bed of blankets.

  I struggled to breathe through my burning lungs, but I was otherwise unhurt. When someone tried to hand me a bottle of water, I pushed it away. “It’s clean!” she said, taking her mask and goggles off. She drank from it herself before passing it to me.

  It tasted clean and the water felt cold in my dry throat. “Who are you?” I asked, picking up a blanket to dry my hair with. I was still wet and getting pretty cold again.

  There were five of them, who all started taking off their masks and goggles. I gaped. The youngest was only about ten years old, while the oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. And every one of them had glowing red eyes, indicating that they were vampires.

  “He speaks English, so he’s human,” the oldest one said in English. He and the youngest vampire were boys, while the middle three were girls. The really odd part was that I didn’t sense that they were vampires.

  “We should kill him,” the younger boy said. They certainly sounded like vampires.

  “He burned down the CT supply; he’s on our side,” the oldest girl said. She was the one who offered me water. I just hoped she wasn’t about to ask for blood in return.

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  “I’m Lyda,” the oldest girl answered. “We were each lost here over the last five years.”

  “From the vampire world? How?”

  “There was a tower on our world. We were told it was a portal to other worlds. We didn’t believe it and tried to destroy it. Nothing happened to the tower, but we started getting attacked by demons that demanded sacrifices. All of us were sacrificed to the demons.”

  “How do you know English?”

  “When I first arrived, I met a very beautiful demon who said I would be saved if I survived long enough. We’ve all been waiting for the savior. The demon said he would be a human and that English was the human language, so we learned from the humans that were sacrificed.”

  I scoffed. “There are hundreds of human languages.
Sacrificed…? You mean dead?”

  “How else would we be here?”

  I studied my palm and ran my fingers over the mark. “If you’re already dead, how can you be saved?”

  Lyda shrugged. “Every day is miserable and harder than the last. What else can we do but to keep fighting and hope there’s an end coming?”

  I stood. Even though my key was for another world, I assumed that it would let me back into Earth, since there was no key for Earth. “I will help you get out of here, but I need to find someone first. Her name is Astrid. She’s a vampire, but not like you guys; she’s from Earth. Her mother was a vampire from your world, though. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  They shook their heads. “Only the dead have names here. We can be controlled by our names.”

  I had forgotten all about that; Krechea’s name was a huge secret, which made sense because everyone was calling him “the Master.” In fact… “If I had the name of someone, how would I use it?”

  Lyda frowned. “That depends on who you are, who they are, and what you would be trying to do with their name. Only wizards can use a name.”

  “I am a wizard.”

  She narrowed her red eyes in suspicion. “I thought you were human.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I am from Earth, yes, but we have wizards on Earth, just like we have shifters, fae, and vampires.” Plus, the rare dragon, phoenix, gargoyle, griffin, and a shitload of other mythical beings I didn’t even want to contemplate.

  “I told you we should have killed him,” the younger boy said, sneering at me.

  I ignored him. “Wizards are different on Earth. We’re… basically human with magic. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Lyda looked unsure, but she turned to the older boy. “He doesn’t act like a wizard and he did burn the poison.”

  “Yes, but… a good wizard? I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”

  I scoffed, because before I started at Quintessence, I would have said the same thing about vampires. “Astrid, the vampire who I’m here to save, is my childhood friend, and I love her.”