Shadow Phantoms

by H. P. Mallory

  Laucian pulled a face. “I would like to hope so, but have you considered why it has taken them so long to attack? It has been ten years since the fall of the Underworld.”

  I sagged. “So they can build their numbers.”

  “That is what I fear. Picking off vampires here and there over the last decade to join the swelling ranks of their army.” He sighed. “In which case, I have to thank you for making that more difficult for them. You have made the majority of vampires inaccessible out here, upon the ocean. And because you all live together, in distaste I might add,” he paused as I rolled my eyes. “I assume someone would notice if your vampires started to disappear.”

  “It is not as if we take register every evening,” I admitted with a shrug. “But people would soon notice if their favorite sex buddy went missing.”

  Laucian gave a thin smile. “What a convenient way of keeping tabs on everyone under your protection.”

  “What about your people?” I asked.

  “I have already lost someone,” Laucian replied, picking up the photo of Luc and looking at it with what amounted to detached fondness. I was not certain if the expression upon his face was true or for my benefit. He looked up at me then. “If the Vryloka are building their way up through the ranks, it is likely I will be next.”

  “You?” I asked.

  He nodded. “They will come for me before you.”

  “If we are guessing their tactics correctly and if any of this is actually real.” I sighed. More ‘ifs’ than I liked to see in a sentence. “Can we be sure they are targeting people of importance?”

  “Not sure,” Laucian admitted. “But do you not find it odd that Luc and this other vampire were not turned into Vryloka themselves? I believe the Vryloka wanted us to find the bodies.”

  “Why?”

  “As a warning of sorts.”

  “A warning of what?”

  “That such vampires are not the ones they are after. They have bigger plans.”

  I nodded, grimly. “Thank you for coming here, Laucian, I appreciate it.” He had not had to warn me, but we were both the last of our kind—master vampires—and he had felt it his duty. Though we might have always had our differences, I could rely on Laucian to do his duty.

  He accepted my gratitude graciously. “I hope, now that you are aware of the threat, you will take the correct course of action.”

  I pricked up my ears at that. “The correct course of action?”

  “Well, yes,” Laucian shrugged as if such a correct course were obvious. “You have three ship-loads of useless vampires…”

  “I would be very careful how you use words like ‘useless’,” I fired the words back at him, my anger giving them heat.

  “What word would you use then?” asked Laucian with a casual shrug that did not befit him. Nothing Laucian did was casual. “Unless you plan to seduce the Vryloka and screw them to death, then what good are these vampires of yours?”

  “Firstly, they are not ‘mine’.” I pointed out. “They belong to themselves. I just gave them a home where they could do as they pleased. Secondly; at least they live in the real world. At least they are protected. Such is more than the disciples of Laucian can say.”

  “My people know how to conduct themselves in a fight.”

  “Dueling pistols at dawn?” I suggested with a well-timed yawn. “If the Vryloka have been preparing for ten years, they have also been learning about how the world has changed since they were last here. You have not done so for centuries.”

  “If this,” Laucian indicated all around him with a gesture of repugnance, “represents the ‘modern world’, then I think I have done right to shield my people from it. Your vampires could learn much from mine. That is what I have come here to tell you—that you and I should work together.”

  “Work together?”

  He leaned across the table urgently. “We should not wait for them, Sinjin. We should go after them ourselves. We can track them down and we can kill them.”

  Although I was still angry at his characterization of my ‘useless’ vampires, the idea of hunting down the Vryloka made my blood stir in my veins. It had been so long since I had found myself in gainful employ. I could practically hear the sounds of battle. It would be like the old days, when I hunted my prey, when I killed without conscience, when each day seemed like its own little adventure. Those days were long gone now and I would not want to go back to the time when I killed indiscriminately—I had changed too much for that. But the Vryloka were killers, themselves. Thus, taking them out would not be murder, but public service. If someone did not do it, then who knew what they might do? Visons of glorious campaigns marched before my eyes; of victory, of blood, of death.

  I had to still the battle cry in my throat.

  But of course, not all of that death would be theirs. Was this what it meant to be a leader? Was this how poor Jolie had felt all the time? There was nothing I wanted more than to get out there and put my life on the line to take down an evil enemy. But Laucian was not talking about me, he was talking about my people, my vampires. Few of them had the fighting experience I had. How many would be turned to soulless Vryloka before the war finished? And that was another subject of note: our dead would increase their numbers. My job, whether I liked it or not, was to keep my vampires safe. And I had done that already by putting them on these ships. Laucian did not care about my people, he just wanted the Vryloka dead. A decade ago perhaps I would have been on his side, but now I had new responsibilities.

  Still, perhaps I would have talked myself around to his way of thinking, if his attitude had not continued to rub me the wrong way.

  “It is time for your vampires to re-enter the world,” Laucian continued. “And they will need a bit of training if they are to be of any use to us at all.”

  Perhaps if he had made the offer a few minutes earlier, I might have said yes. But I was hardly going to listen to him pour scorn on the Vampire Coalition and then roll over. ‘Much to learn from me and mine’ he had said. How dare he? I had saved the vampire world from itself, and all I got was condescension from a walking antique.

  “My vampires will need training to re-enter the world?” I demanded, glaring at him. “You came here on a clipper ship! Is that what you plan to teach my vampires? How to sail?” I folded my arms. “We are not going anywhere. My job now is to keep my people safe and there is nowhere safer than here. If you and yours would like to join us, then you are welcome.” I paused. “But you will have to trade in your glum demeanor. No one wants to spend any time with a bore.”

  He returned my glare. “I would no sooner live upon this… this floating sex party than stake my own heart.”

  “Well, there you have it, then. And I apologize that your delicate sensibilities have been thus offended.”

  “We have to work together, Sinjin, for all our sakes.”

  I laughed, grimly. “You and I are not natural allies, Laucian. I find your version of vampirism ridiculous, and you find mine degenerate. How do we work together?”

  “Well,” Laucian began, diplomatic but with a definite edge, “I was hoping that, in the circumstances, you might recognize the superiority of my ‘version’ of vampirism. My people are ready to fight. Only by taking vampires back to the clean, pure version of what they once were can we hope to have any chance against this enemy.”

  “In other words; abandon everything we have learnt in the past two hundred years.” I shook my head, laughing again at the arrogance of the man. He was almost as bad as me. “And with it, everything we learnt as part of the Underworld.”

  “Quite so.”

  I frowned at him. “How many vampires do you count among your followers Laucian? Ten? Twenty?”

  “I have fewer than you do, yes.”

  I shook my head. “The Underworld taught us to live together, to work together and to fight together. If you think there is not a lesson there that might help us against the Vryloka, you are even more deluded than I thought you wer
e and, believe me, that is saying something.”

  “Sinclair,” he started. If he was using my surname, he meant business.

  “No,” I interrupted. “You want to work together now, when you are in danger, but the rest of the time you are quite content to be aloof and look down your nose at us. If you ask me for protection, I shall happily grant it. But I will not be lectured by someone determined to drag our species back to the dark ages.” I frowned at him a bit more. “I quite enjoy my iPad, not to mention the number of skins I have accumulated in Fortnite, and I am becoming quite fond of that Mrs. Maisel show.”

  “Bloody hell.” Laucian’s face had become set. “Well then, it seems as if you are right. If you cannot see the value in what I am offering, if you cannot see that I would be the right leader against the Vryloka, then we should go our separate ways. We clearly cannot work together.”

  I smiled, showing my fangs. “You never wanted to work together, Laucian. You wanted to take all I have achieved, and then re-shape it to suit yourself. I never factored into your plans.”

  I was surprised when he replied with a cocky smile. “You will live to regret this conversation, Sinclair.” He picked up his glass to drain the last of the virgin blood he had brought. For a few moments he toyed with the empty glass as if deciding whether to say something more.

  Finally he spoke. “Sinjin, we all know what happened with you and the elemental. Not the specifics, but enough to know you are still grieving your loss.” He looked up at me then and I attempted to school my expression best I could. “Be honest with yourself; is this decision the same one you would have made if you were not still bemoaning her loss? Is this Vampire Coalition the same one you would have created if your mind had not always been split between here and Kinloch Kirk?”

  Perhaps it was a fair question, but the fury still burned inside me and I clenched my fists, trying to control it. “My fleet is safe and secure. You may have a moat about your castle, but I have an ocean about mine. There are thousands of us here. Let the damned Vryloka come. Much good may it do them.”

  “I hope you are correct.”

  He stood, retrieving his cape and whirling it elegantly back about his broad shoulders. “One day Sinjin, you and I are going to fight. I hope when that day comes, it is shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face.”

  I hoped for the same. For all his affectations, Laucian was a fierce fighter and a dangerous man. Again, I found my mind drifting to James Bond; someone who could fit in at an exclusive dinner party and knew which fork to use and what wine complimented the fish, but also knew how to throw a punch. Bond was a suave thug, a streetfighter who had been cleaned up a bit. You might not know it to look at him, but Laucian was the same; the elegant, traditionalist was veneered over the monster that raged beneath, and you would not want to be there when that monster was released. Perhaps such was true of all vampires to some degree, it was certainly how I felt from time to time.

  Although his visit had left me irritated and more inclined to throw him off the ship than see him off it, I did my duties as a host and escorted Laucian back to his old-fashioned, ludicrous and yet, somehow, cool clipper. We shook hands and parted as equals, if not friends. I watched as the little ship sailed away, gathering speed as the sails filled. It was a sight from another age, and some days I would rather have been living in that one than this.

  Walking back to my state room, I ran through the conversation in my mind. Without Laucian there to press his points home, much of the reality of it, which had seemed so vivid at the time, began to slip.

  The Vryloka? They were a legend. And what proof did he have, really? Five dead bodies with red circles on them? That was not much as far as proof went. And Laucian was talking about practically an army of these creatures? Even if we were to say, for the sake of argument, that those deaths had been the work of a Vryloka, then it seemed more like the work of one or two, not a whole army of them. And one or two Vryloka I could handle.

  By the time I returned to my room, I had more or less decided I had allowed myself to get sucked into Laucian’s story because, frankly, I had been bored recently. I had put Denise ashore at the last port, despite her protestations, and had not yet located another Bryn substitute to start training.

  I yearned for a quest; something to do, something to fight for, or just something to fight. I missed the days when there always seemed to be some direction to my existence, some challenge. That was why I had believed him. Because the Vryloka would certainly have been a challenge. They would have been a way to pass this infinite boredom.

  But, no. No, it was all simply too ridiculous to countenance. It was typical of someone like Laucian, living in the past, that he would reinvent an enemy from millennia ago. A good enough vampire in his way—brave and strong, certainly—but not to be relied upon when it came to the here and now. Perhaps, like me, he was bored and looking for something to do. It was a common problem in vampires of a certain age.

  You think it can be hard to fill an afternoon, try filling eternity.

  But even as I dismissed the whole thing as nothing to worry about, my eye caught the five pictures that Laucian had left upon my table. On the one hand, they underscored my point about how out of touch he was; who the hell carried physical pictures anymore? He could have emailed them to me, if he had an email address and a bloody computer or smart phone. But, on the other hand, they also tweaked the straining nerve of uncertainty that his visit had stretched. Each of the victims were notable people within their communities. Could that be a coincidence?

  And then I thought of Emma.

  I had not seen my niece, Emma Balfour, since her mother had disappeared. Since then, she had been looked after by Bryn, as her father (a man from whom I had expected better) had gone off the deep end following his wife’s disappearance. With my tempest pouring her version of events into young Emma’s ears, the child no doubt viewed me with near total hatred. As everyone else did…

  Though I tried to stop it, my mind began to stray back to those happy days in Kinloch Kirk. I had never really thought I would be much of a family man. I had never expected to have the chance to find out. But with Emma and Rowan so close, I had been given the chance to be an active uncle as well as a father.

  Uncle Sinjin. Who would have guessed how much I would enjoy being Uncle Sinjin, or could have predicted how much I would miss hearing that name? I remembered birthdays together, tiny arms thrown round my neck to hug me in thanks for the expensive toy (and always the best out of all the presents) I had bought.

  I remembered reading The Gruffalo to them both, until I could recite the wretched book from memory. I remembered playing hide and seek with them in the copse that surrounded Mathilda’s old house. Did they still play there?

  Probably not. They were both a bit old for hide and seek now.

  That was the worst of it. I had missed so much—so many memories I could never get back.

  But, though I knew none of them would accept my help, if there was anything I could do to help them without their knowledge, I would do it. And if Emma was genuinely in danger and in need of protection, I would provide it. I loved that child as if she were my own and I would fight to the death anyone who intended to harm a hair on her lovely head.

  I might never hear the words again, but I could still be Uncle Sinjin from a distance.

  EIGHT

  EMMA

  “B’caw! Cutting it close! B’caw!”

  Patricia popped out of her clock. Today, her giant clock hung along the wall of a second-floor staircase.

  “Not today, Patricia!” I ran down the stairs, past the cuckoo.

  True, I was still the last one out of the dorm, but by a much smaller margin. Patricia squawked the quarter hour six minutes ago. I didn’t have Jupiter’s vial anymore, but if I hurried, I had just enough time to arrive on time and magic-free.

  The last thing I needed was a note from the principal sent to my dad. Not that he would show up to lecture me or anything. I could
n’t remember the last time I’d seen him. Instead, he’d send a formal letter on formal paper, bemoaning my bad attitude and spelling out for me the bleak future I could look forward to if I didn’t excel in my studies.

  Well, fuck you, dad.

  I reached the waiting area outside my lecture hall with two minutes to spare.

  There was a puddle near the closest bench. Water dripped from a hole in the vaulted ceiling. I sidestepped the slick spot, nearly bumping into the unattended mop bucket. Looking down, I noticed one of my shoes was untied. Most everyone was already seated in class, but I had some time to spare. I knelt to one knee, tied my right shoe and tucked the laces.

  I stood up at the same time that I stepped forward and slammed into the side of a large, solid body. My books crashed to the floor. The worksheets I’d stuck between the pages went flying off in different directions. Amid the scattered debris, I looked up and locked eyes with the handsome man from the principal’s office. I remembered he had a strange name before I remembered precisely what it was.

  Stone!

  He looked down, startled, his thick brows furrowed a bit on his gorgeous face. There was an effortless charm to the way he carried himself. With his flowing golden brown hair and strong, chiseled face, Stone had the sort of timeless beauty that normally only exists in a Rembrandt painting.

  He wore a tweed jacket over a blue cashmere sweater.

  The sight of Stone’s vivid blue eyes took my breath away. I had to remind myself to inhale, hoping he read the expression on my face as surprise and not the admiration it was.

  Then, feeling embarrassment claiming my cheeks, I looked straight down and started to drop to my knee, hoping to gather my books into a pile on the ground, but Stone stopped me with a strong hand on my arm.

  “No, Emma,” he said, kindness in his sunny blue gaze. “Please, allow me.”

  I was surprised he remembered my name and watched as he knelt on the ground and gathered my books. So many different shades of light touched his hair. It looked incredibly soft from above. The drape of his shoulder-length waves cast a shadow over his face, bringing out the strong line of his chin.