Vampire Mist: Ballad of the B-Team, Book One

by Adam Thomas

  “We already knew they could do magic,” Shonasir said. “Remember the blood boiling.”

  “I was still holding out hope that that was a bluff,” Sorvek said.

  “No such luck. Someone’s coming,” Wiggins said, and he vanished from sight.

  The parlor led deeper into the lair by way of four separate passages, three of which an elven thrall now filled. Each had long, lank hair that hung limply as they hunched their shoulders and looked upon the party with lifeless eyes. Shonasir’s heart went out to them – they were not vampires, which meant releasing them from this mockery of life would allow them to return to Karanathan. Shonasir vowed to themselves to send them there, whatever else lay in store for them in Apranashar’s lair.

  The elf tore their eyes away from the pitiful thralls as a voice echoed up the passage towards the parlor’s fourth final doorway. “You have returned and a day early. I am impressed. What have you brought me?”

  Apranashar strode into the parlor and stopped at Rosamund’s prone body upon the sled. “Ah, my confidence in you was not misplaced. And I see your numbers have grown by one.” Their eyes fell upon Syne, and the vampire showed their fangs. “Have you brought this one as a further offering?”

  Syne shrank to the back of the group. Nearby, the invisible Wiggins held his breath.

  Sorvek said, “He was instrumental in Rosamund’s capture. He came along because he hoped to share in the reward.”

  “The reward?” Apranashar echoed, their voice full of mockery. “The reward is not having your blood vaporize within your veins. I thought I had made myself clear. Now, where is the orulanon karest?”

  Emric stepped forward, his hands firmly gripping his lute. He felt the force of the vampire’s personality boring into him. The bard made his mind go blank and resolved to say only truthful things. “Her house burned down. The rubble would have taken weeks to sift through.”

  Apranashar cocked their head towards Emric. “I smell her stink on you. You have been under her spell. Why should I believe anything you say?”

  “We’re sorry. We don’t have it. We thought bringing Rosamund would be enough.”

  “You thought?” Apranashar repeated, and now their voice moved from mockery to disdain. “I did not contract with you to think. I hired you to act.”

  “Conscripted us, more like,” Rhys said.

  “And here I thought this was a friendly call. Is there a reason you have your blade drawn in my home?”

  The vampire’s head snapped from Emric to Rhys. Rhys felt his mind tearing in two directions, as the presence in the sword held him fast and the vampire tried to take hold.

  “That sword is impressive,” Apranashar said. “I’d like you to give it to me.”

  Yes, yes, give the steel to the vampire. Sheathe it in their flesh, and I will be free.

  Sweat broke out on Rhys’s forehead, and a pain gripped his chest, a heavy pressure that began shooting down his left arm. The arm moved an inch towards the vampire. Rhys’s mind was a storm of the voice and the vampire’s charm and then, suddenly…

  Music.

  Emric had begun playing a countercharm on his lute, a quiet but persistent pattern of picked notes running up and down the fretboard. Apranashar looked down at the dwarf, but before they could say anything, another voice spoke, silky and triumphant.

  “My sire, I gave you a chance to negotiate.” Rosamund sat up and blasted Apranashar with the full force of her magic. The elder vampire staggered back against the wall.

  Before Apranashar could recover from their shock, Tyrevane was lodged in their chest. Rhys yanked out the blade and drove it in again.

  Something is wrong. Where’s the blood?

  But Rhys did not understand what the voice said. He was too focused on the sudden battle. Shonasir had already put an arrow into the neck of one of the thralls. Sorvek had shot another with pure energy. Syne followed with a dagger to the third.

  Apranashar retreated back down the passage, and Rhys, Emric, Alurel, and Rosamund gave chase. But a cone of bitterly cold wind shot up the passage, freezing them in their tracks.

  “Potent spellcaster, don’t forget!” It was Wiggin’s voice, his teeth chattering with the cold. Invisibility did nothing to blunt the vampire’s ice magic.

  Rhys shook off the icicles that had formed on his arms and gave chase down the hallway. The passage opened onto a square room with a series of open doors around its perimeter. The doors were made of bars, and the spaces within were barely large enough for one person. Rhys slowed and spun in place, Tyrevane at the ready.

  “Please enter one of the cells and lock the door behind you.”

  Rhys barely registered the magical suggestion before obeying. The presence within Tyrevane did not stop him. He stepped into the nearest cell and pulled the bars shut with a clang.

  Emric burst into the room a second later. He was no longer playing the countercharm, and the words of the programmed suggestion struck him, too. Rosamund grabbed the back of Alurel’s shirt to keep her from entering the room. They watched Emric walk calmly into a cell and lock the bars.

  “It’s trapped,” the vampire said to Alurel. “An old trick to get unsuspecting victims to lock themselves away. Apranashar calls this room their larder.”

  “That’s right,” Apranashar said from the other side of the room. “But you know all my secrets, Samantha.” And they conjured a second blast of freezing air, which engulfed Alurel and Rosamund.

  Alurel dropped to one knee, as the air was ripped from her lungs by the cold. But she managed to stay conscious and fling her own magic into the larder. A moonbeam lanced down from the ceiling and illuminated the elder vampire with its searing light.

  For a moment, Apranashar grinned and said, “All my secrets but one.”

  And then they dissolved into a pile of snow.

  A voice rang out, filling the whole lair with its menace. Sorvek, Shonasir, and Syne heard it as they finished off the three thralls. Wiggins heard it in his hiding place behind Rosamund and Alurel. Rhys and Emric heard it in their locked cells.

  “Now that I see your true intentions, let us begin.”

  thirty-five

  Tyrevane

  What just happened?” Alurel said, gasping for breath as the intense cold constricted her lungs.

  The disembodied voice of Wiggins spoke behind her. “It was a simulacrum the whole time. The real Apranashar is still here somewhere.”

  Rosamund spun around and peered into the dark passageway, but she couldn’t see the invisible Wiggins. “You, wizard, wherever you are. Come here and dispel this suggestion magic. We don’t need anyone else locking –”

  But her voice was drowned out by a cry of alarm from Rhys as a trapdoor opened beneath his feet. A moment after Rhys disappeared, Emric dropped through the floor, as well.

  “Damn it,” Rosamund said. “Forget the dispel. If you value your friends’ lives, go get the others and come back here immediately. Follow us down.”

  Rosamund did not wait for confirmation from Wiggins. She raced into the larder with Alurel on her heels. Grasping the bars of the cell that had imprisoned Rhys, Rosamund exerted her full vampiric strength and ripped the door clean off its hinges.

  Alurel goggled at her. “You’re really scary.”

  “I know,” Rosamund said, and she jumped through the open trapdoor.

  Alurel hugged herself tightly to ward off the magical cold. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and she followed Rosamund into the hole.

  The druid dropped ten feet and landed with a crunch on a pile of something she did not want to look at too closely because she was fairly sure it was bones. She brought her moonbeam with her and illuminated the space around her. Emric crouched against the wall, his lute in his trembling hands. Rosamund stood to one side of the bone pile, magical energy pulsing in her palms. Rhys held Tyrevane in
both hands, his body tense, quivering.

  Out of the darkness across the room, Apranashar spoke, “Welcome to my sanctum, honored guests. I am disappointed that your arrival has brought such turmoil, though I am also strangely proud that my progeny has enough ambition to think she can contend with me.”

  “Quit stalling, Apranashar,” Rosamund called out. “If you think you can kill us all, then do it.”

  “If I kill you all now, what would I eat in the future? You have so conveniently come into my home and offered yourselves to me. I will put you on ice and enjoy you over the next five or ten years.” Apranashar emerged from the shadows. “All save you, Samantha. A vampire cannot find sustenance in one of our own.”

  The younger vampire snarled and released the beams of energy she had collected in her hands. “My name is Rosamund.”

  Apranashar moved with lightning speed, dodging the beams and filling the room with a third blast of frozen air even more powerful than the spells cast through the simulacrum above. Alurel threw up her hands to ward off the cold, but it was too much for her. She froze in place and tumbled off the pile of bones. Emric sent a wave of healing warmth into her body and she thawed, but her breath was shallow to the point of death.

  Rhys pushed through the freezing wind and brought Tyrevane to bear. Three times in quick succession he slashed at the tall elven vampire.

  Yes, yes, here is the blood I crave. Take it all. Take it all!

  Apranashar fell back against Rhys’s onslaught, and now the rest of the B-Team dropped into the sanctum. Shonasir had an arrow nocked before they hit the bones. Sorvek and Syne followed, weapons and magic at the ready. An illusory duplicate of Wiggins appeared walking on the ceiling.

  The elder vampire melted back into the darkness. Rosamund and Sorvek shot lances of magical energy towards their hidden foe. Shonasir shot an arrow. Syne threw a dagger. Both projectiles clattered harmlessly against the far wall.

  “Where did they go?” Syne shouted.

  Rhys whirled in place, his heart pounding at the caterwaul of the voice in his mind. Tyrevane probed the darkness, but the vampire was gone.

  Alurel opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. With the last of her strength, she cast a second moonbeam, and the darkness vanished. Apranashar was nearing a doorway, moving slowly, slipping from shadow to shadow. But now the shadows were gone.

  With all her vampiric speed, Rosamund sprinted to the doorway and blocked it. “Don’t think I don’t know where your blood room is, Apranashar. You’ve had mine long enough.”

  For a moment, no one moved. No one breathed.

  Then Apranashar cocked their head to one side, bared their fangs, and said in a deep, echoing voice, redolent of enchantment. “I am your sire. You will do my bidding!”

  From his crouched position nearby, Emric could see the threads of the domination spell slither from Apranashar’s mouth and wind their way towards Rosamund. Before they could reach her, the dwarven bard slammed his fingers across his lute strings and played a discordant series of pitches, two pairs of tri-tones a half-step apart. The dissonant soundwave raced towards the slithering threads. Apranashar felt the wave of countering magic coming, and they slashed at it with their own counterspell.

  But their counter magic never materialized. For Rosamund Steele knew that spell, too. “I will do my own bidding,” she shouted.

  And she sliced her own hand through the air, cutting the strings of Apranashar’s counter before it could disrupt Emric’s dissonant chord. The soundwave continued unimpeded and shredded the threads of the domination spell.

  Apranashar looked at Rosamund, their eyes suddenly wide and feral and afraid. The elder vampire’s mouth opened to speak. But before they could form words, Tyrevane sliced through their neck, separating Apranashar’s head from their body.

  The two pieces of the vampire turned to mist as their clothing dropped to the bone-laden ground. Their coffin was here, in this room. So close.

  But the mist never reached it. The cursed sword Tyrevane sucked the vampire’s mist into itself. The blade shook in Rhys’s hands, its blood channel brilliant with dark purple energy as it drank in the thousand-year-old vampire’s essence. Within seconds, the mist was gone.

  A wave of giddy relief washed over the B-Team. They breathed heavily, even started to chuckle.

  “That’s one way to get rid of a vampire’s –” Sorvek began to say.

  But then the purple energy throbbing within Tyrevane ignited. A flash of white hot light. The sound of metal twisting and tearing. The shockwave threw everyone against the walls and knocked them unconscious, all save Rosamund Steele and Wiggins’s illusion.

  Tyrevane remained in midair where Rhys had been holding it. But now a different hand was grasping the blade. The hand was pale and callused and attached to a heavy arm. The rest of the body materialized from the pulsing portal: ten feet tall, broad of back, with thick cords of muscle stacked from shoulder to waist. The body was hairless and covered in patterned tattoos, dark against the limestone skin. Above the smooth head orbited a ring of jagged shards of stone like a grotesque halo.

  The huge being stood hunched below the low ceiling of the sanctum. He turned slowly in place until he spied Rosamund across the room where the shockwave had flung her. He favored her with half a smile, though his eyes were cold and full of fury.

  “My time is near,” he said, his voice deep and resonant, like distant thunder.

  Before Rosamund could respond, arcane energy pulsed from the jagged halo, and the creature was gone.

  The portal closed with the roar of air rushing to fill a vacuum. The B-Team stirred and staggered to their feet.

  “Did we win?” Alurel asked.

  “We killed Apranashar,” Shonasir said.

  Syne hugged himself around the middle to keep from trembling. “What was that thing?”

  Everyone turned to Rhys, who no longer clutched the cursed sword. He held up both hands and began shaking his head. “I didn’t know the voice belonged to anyone. I thought it was just the sword talking.”

  “I know who it was,” Emric said. “It was the one whose skeleton you took the sword from in the first place. That was the warlord Wrenyvar.”

  “But he died. Ashlyra’s spirit told us so,” Alurel said.

  “No, she told us his followers tried to bring him back, but the ritual failed. I’d wager it failed because his spirit was trapped in that sword.”

  “And we just fed him a thousand-year-old vampire,” Sorvek said, his usually playful demeanor subdued and thoughtful, his earlier giddiness gone. “What do we do now?”

  Before anyone could respond to Sorvek’s question, Shonasir asked another one. “Where’s Rosamund?”

  The vampire had disappeared in the commotion. In the passageway above, the invisible Wiggins let her pass unimpeded. He had no wish to tangle with someone like Rosamund Steele ever again. The gnome sent his senses into his illusory duplicate, which still stood upside-down on the ceiling below.

  “She’s gone,” he said through the illusion. “I don’t think she wanted to stick around to see if we would honor our deal.”

  “We wouldn’t have,” Rhys said, and his hand unconsciously curled around a phantom blade. “Not with the orphans safe in the hands of my people.”

  The B-Team recovered their kaerest from Apranashar’s coffin, along with a longsword made of shimmering moonstone, which Rhys took to replace Tyrevane. The new sword did not speak to him.

  In the next room, they found a wall stacked with narrow shelves holding small vials of blood. Each vial was meticulously labeled with a name and a date. Sorvek smashed the vials with his maul, but not before Alurel found and pocketed the one marked “Samantha Esris,” just in case.

  They spent the rest of the night in the relative safety of the lair, licking their wounds and wondering what they had released. They emerged
into the gray stillness of dawn, battered and bruised, but all very much alive. Alurel was the last out. She turned and put her hand on the stone entrance. Closing her eyes, Alurel channeled her druidic magic into the mountain, churning the solid rock into liquid. She filled the lair with stone and solidified it, sealing any trace of the elder vampire’s home in the depths.

  “You can get us back to the Thousand Spires, right?” Sorvek asked Wiggins.

  “Yes,” the wizard responded. “I just need to draw the circle.”

  But as Wiggins knelt down to do so, the party heard a sizzling pop nearby. Weapons and magic flew into hands as they turned towards the sound. Imral materialized from thin air, crouched in a fighter’s stance, bo staff in hand.

  Halla’s caretaker rushed over to the adventurers, dropped their staff, and pulled Shonasir into a fervent embrace. “Come quickly,” they said. “The archmage needs you!”

  “Where is she?” Shonasir asked, and they pushed Imral out to arm’s length. It was then that they noticed Imral’s appearance, normally so clean and tidy, was disheveled and covered in dirt...and blood.

  “What happened?”

  Imral fumbled with a piece of parchment wrapped around their bo staff. Their hand shook as they held out the parchment. “It’s a spell scroll. It will bring us to Halla. Can any of you use it?”

  “I can,” Wiggins said. “I’ve always wanted to learn this spell. Do you think I could save it for study and –“

  “There’s no time,” Imral said. “Halla gave me strict orders to bring you to the Crossroads right away.”

  Wiggins quailed at the elf’s anxious fervor. “I’ll need a moment to prepare.”

  The gnome backed away from the group and began reading the complex spell. The others fixed their eyes on Imral. Shonasir asked again, “What happened?”

  Imral’s bottom lip quivered and tears welled in their eyes. “The Crossroads are destroyed. The whole town is gone, burned down to rubble. And the people…”

  Their voice trailed off into a high-pitched moan. The tears began streaming down their cheeks, twin lines washing clean the dirt on their lovely, compassionate face. “They’re all dead. Hundreds of them. And not just dead. We found their bodies arrayed in a pattern, like...like ripples in a pond...all pointing to the center where we found –”