I pouted. “But it’s so warm and comfy,” I whined. But I complied and rolled over next to her on the bed, quite exhausted myself. We both turned our heads to the side to face one another and shared an affectionate look for a long, wonderful minute.
Our post-coital bliss was interrupted too soon, however, with a knock at my door. The pair of us looked at the door and then back to each other nervously as we hastily threw clothes back on, making a very suspicious amount of noise.
“Who is it?” I shouted. “Just a sec!”
“It’s your favorite vampire girl,” came a cute sing-song voice. “Open up! I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I opened the door just as I threw the last article of clothing on that I had time for—my shirt. It was inside out, and I knew my hair was disheveled and I was covered with sweat—and other things. The same was true for Rebecca, whose cheeks were noticeably rosy and, depending on how perceptive Carmilla was, still had juices running down her thighs.
I clocked it. It took about half a second for Carmilla to see what was going on. “Holy shit it smells like sex in here.” Her eyes went to Rebecca, who was wearing a shirt but clearly no bra. “Nice.”
“Hey Car-Car,” Rebecca waved awkwardly. “What’s up?”
“His dick,” she said, pointing at a lingering bulge in my pants. “But girl, no judging here. We’re ‘cock cousins’ now,” she said with an attempted wink that was so bad it was almost offensive.
Rebecca’s eyes suddenly shot open so wide that I worried for them. “You two… you and—”
“I blew him,” Carmilla said with a dismissive wave. “And he ate my… you know what, never mind.”
“You know how she can get at the sight of blood,” I teased. Rebecca and I both laughed at her expense.
“Oh, fuck right off,” Carmilla said, punching my shoulder playfully.
I smelled opportunity here. “We could make the Cock Cousins thing official if you want,” I suggested, putting my hand around Carmilla’s back and pulling her into the room playfully.
“Calm down there, dude,” she said, gently pushing me away. “Sheath your sword. I came to ask if you’d want to be my assignment partner this weekend. Headmistress Waite has been hounding me to invite you.”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
Rebecca looked at me, stunned. “No, not ‘sure.’ You need to know the details, idiot!”
“Relax, Becca, he’s new,” Carmilla said. “Liam, it’s going to be an extermination and retrieval mission. I need to go to a temple and kill a bunch of aliens and take any magical artifacts I can find.”
I winced. “Whoa. Are they evil or something?”
Carmilla shrugged. “Huh? The aliens? I dunno. Sure. They’re evil. Does that mean you’ll help me?”
That wasn’t the most convincing line, but I didn’t want to turn Carmilla down. “Well, they aren’t, like, innocent, are they?”
“These are alien cultists worshiping Cthulhu,” she explained, leaning against the door behind her and folding her arms. “Not innocent.”
“Cthulhu?” I asked. “As in the monster from Lovecraft’s books?”
“The Great Old One, yeah,” she said. “He’s real. Lovecraft was a prophet masquerading as a writer. Some people in this school descend from people he wrote about.”
My eyes went wide. “Randolph Carter III,” I said with a wave of realization. “So, his grandpa was the Randolph Carter?”
“Bingo,” she answered. She took a big breath, about to launch into another monologue, I could tell. “Liam, here’s the truth. Nothing matters except what you choose to do with your life. Not good. Not evil. None of that matters. There are as many sentient species in the multiverse as there are humans on your version of Earth. Maybe more. The only thing that matters is what you choose to do with all of it because in terms of the scope of creation, we are less than microscopic.”
“Whoa,” I said, eyes wide.
“Unholy Lilith, Car-Car, way to unload on him.”
“Someone has to,” she said, crossing her arms. “That’s why I’m inviting you on this mission. You need to get in the thick of this shit. You need to internalize your situation fast. No more coddling.”
I gulped nervously, even as I nodded in agreement.
“You in or not?” she asked me plainly, apparently not taking nonverbal cues as gospel. I also couldn’t help but notice she seemed a little annoyed with Rebecca and me as her narrowed eyes kept looking back and forth between us and she kept a certain distance from me that was unlike any other time we’d been together.
“I’m in,” I said. I sat back down on the bed. The sheets were damp. “If what you said is true, then it doesn’t matter much if I live or die on the mission anyway.”
Carmilla smiled and jabbed me in the shoulder. “Hell yeah! That’s the spirit!” But then her expression turned stern, and she looked back and forth between both me and my recent sex partner. “But now I have a serious question,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Are you guys… exclusive?”
Chapter 11
First Blood
I had spent a lot of time in the stadium and in the library preparing for this mission, planning for any eventuality I could, over the last couple of days. The issue was that being constrained to only one school of magic, especially one as niche and rare as necromancy, really seemed to limit the toolkit I had available to me. There were magical workarounds for most situations. Sure, that much was true, but the necromantic solutions were often things that other schools of magic could pull off much more simply and elegantly.
I could only transmute certain items, and even then, only if I was turning something to or from flesh, bone, or blood. I could rot things rapidly, or drain life force, but I couldn’t heal others worth a damn. I could put someone in a state of undeath, from which they might later be revived, but that took immense sustained focus and couldn’t be done for long. And I could raise the dead, sure, but they became mindless, soulless minions.
But I excelled at some things, too. And the fact that my magic was so rare was an advantage. It was doubtful that my opponents, in just about any situation, would have any idea what to expect or how to counter me.
Carmilla and I stood at the edge of a cliff about a mile outside the campus and to the east.
“I’m going to open the portal,” she said, looking over the edge.
“How do you do that?”
“Mission crystals contain portal coordinates. Just shatter them and scatter their dust off the side of the cliff,” she said.
“And then a portal opens, and we walk into it?”
“We jump into it,” she corrected me, gesturing to the precipice. “Portals open horizontally, not vertically, so the crystal dust needs to be tossed over a ledge.”
I shook my head fervently. Jumping off a cliff? “Fuck that.”
“You are not chickening out now, Elloway,” she growled at me as she began crumbling the crystal in her hands. I winced at the way she called me by my last name, reminding me of awful memories of brutal elementary school teachers at Catholic school. She scattered the dust off the side of the mountain, and a fissure ripped open in mid-air, suspended by nothing. I could see red stars and another alien landscape on the other side, even weirder than the one we stood on now.
Without another word, she leaped into the air and fell off the side of the cliff, into the crack in reality, which had already begun shrinking. I could see only one option, not wanting to be left behind or known as a deserter, and I certainly couldn’t live with myself if something happened to Carmilla when I was supposed to be backing her up. With a deep breath, I summoned the courage I required to leap, and I, too, flew through the air, landing in the transdimensional gateway.
There was a paradoxical flash of darkness. It offended my eyes, as though it were blindingly bright, but it was actually an unfamiliar blackness that gripped me as I fell through space, landing roughly on the other side of the portal moments la
ter. The moments, however, felt like minutes as my mind reeled in confusion from the disorienting effects of this very unfamiliar means of transportation.
I reorientated myself and was relieved to see Carmilla already on her feet, her back to me, facing some kind of strange, unnatural structure. She looked back at me and muttered a few words under her breath, pointing her wand at me. I felt my body tingle as I saw my arms and legs go translucent. The same thing happened to Carmilla.
“We’re invisible to everyone but each other now,” she explained. “It’ll last until you cast a spell or until something hits you with force or dispels it.”
I shot her a thumbs-up as I struggled to my feet with my cane. Carmilla bent over and tapped my leg with her wand. “There,” she said. My leg suddenly felt better than ever, though it surged with coldness at first. “For an hour, or a little more than an hour, your leg will be at full strength. I can only do that once a day, though.” She averted her eyes and blushed. “I learned it just for you.”
I froze, holding my leg unbelievingly. “Thanks.” I felt terrible. I knew she did it because she cared, but all I heard was that I was holding her back, and she used hours of her own study time to figure out how to help me be less of a liability. “I’ll figure out something on my own for the next mission, though. I don’t want to be dead weight.”
“You’re undead weight, if anything,” she said, winking horrendously, making me flinch. Carmilla took off with a cautious but quick, gliding dash through the landscape. I followed behind, mirroring her movements as much as I could, but there was something eerie about her grace that I couldn’t quite keep pace with.
I looked around. The sky was a harsh crimson, the color of blood. Two moons were hanging over us with no evident sun. It must be night, I thought, but it was still relatively bright due to the light reflected by the two large moons. Tall, alien treelike vegetation was scattered across blackened earth. The soil, or what passed for it, reminded me of asphalt. But despite its rough appearance, it was soft underfoot, and tiny sharply-petaled flowers and bioluminescent mushroom-like fungi were nearly everywhere.
More important, though, was the obelisk ahead of us. In the distance stood a tall monument, elevated even higher by its presence on a staired platform that stood roughly fifty feet above ground level. The structure and the venue beneath it were both the same reflective white, a harsh contrast to the darkly stepped ground around it.
Circling the structure was a series of robed figures. I could hear their voices from where I ran, as they shouted out exultations in praise of Cthulhu, whose visage I could see carved in the monument as we grew closer. “Ia, Ia! Cthulhu ftahgn!” they cried out. Words I’d read before.
Just then, though, Carmilla stopped dead in her path. All of a sudden, heads turned toward us, and before I knew it, glowing projectiles were being hurled in our direction and exploding on impact.
“I thought we were invisible!” I said when I was close enough to Carmilla for her to hear me.
“They can’t see us,” she said, “But they can sense us.”
“What now?” I asked.
“Now we hunt,” she growled, looking over her shoulder at me with fangs bared and glowing black and red eyes. She exploded in a cloud of tiny dusky bats, shrieking terribly, and I watched as they—she—flew into the sky, drawing the attention of the cultists as they turned their assault entirely on her.
I saw my opportunity. I remained invisible, not casting a spell, and charged the platform on my own, using Carmilla’s distraction. One figure in purple robes began descending from the structure, entirely unaware of his impending doom. I reached out my cane and shouted an ancient incantation with all the power and force I could muster. The robed figure watched in horror as his own soul was ripped out of his body taking the shape of an iridescent orb, and then was molded into a powerfully explosive projectile which I redirected at the obelisk itself. The man’s body slumped to the ground—my first kill.
The obelisk came crashing down with a thunderous boom, crushing at least three, maybe more, cultists. A dozen others were now acutely aware of me, and my invisibility was gone. Just as I was about to panic, a storm of vampire bats descended on them, ravaging their flesh and picking apart their robes, exposing hideous green faces and muscular bodies that reminded me of orcs, but they had huge, bug-like eyes and mandibles coming from their mouths.
I watched the carnage unfold, readying a spell for when my next opportunity came. The bats vaporized into a red mist that swam through the air and burned the flesh of several of the cultists, but a few of them managed to escape it, screaming, and that is when I saw my opening.
With a single wordless motion, I did what necromancers were born to do, our most signature ability, and one I’d been prepping since I met with the headmistress. I raised the dead. At least a dozen corpses of cultists burst open as bloody skeletons carved themselves out of their original bodies and began charging at the survivors, hurling themselves into Carmilla’s red mist, where the agonizing screams of pain and terror only grew louder and more unsettling.
Within minutes, it was over. The red mist coalesced, gradually solidifying and taking the familiar sexy shape of Carmilla, who alluringly flipped her hair back and shot me a familiar look, biting her lip as her hands groped at her own sinfully erotic body.
“I’m so horngry,” she whined, sucking on a strand of her black hair.
“We’ve got work left to do,” I pointed out, not really sure how I’d feel about banging Carmilla in front of an alien altar to Cthulhu to an audience of a bunch of bloody reanimated skeletons.
She playfully nipped at my shoulder, just under the bite mark that Rebecca left a few days before, and tugged at my cloak, pouting. “Okay, but you owe me a proper meal and ass-pounding sometime soon.”
I smirked, “Excuse me? Why do I owe you?”
Carmilla looked like she knew what she wanted to say, like she had something planned out, and then suddenly realized she had no case to make. “Because I said so. And you think I’m hot.”
I sighed. These women were getting hard to manage. It was a brand-new problem for me. “Why not bug Randolph?” I said as we started walking toward the ruins of the obelisk and the mess of corpses.
Carmilla’s face twisted like she just bit a rotten lemon. “Yuck. Not my type,” she said. “Also, he and Brian eat a ton of garlic. And another thing, what the fuck? I thought we kind of hit it off.”
I grinned at her, “Oh, we did,” I sniggered. “So, you’re saying I’m your type, is that it?”
She blushed and bit my shoulder again, impishly licking up a couple drops of blood like a cat at a bowl of milk. “Let’s find some loot and get out of here.”
We searched the grounds with great care. We checked the platform, the obelisk, everything, but didn’t find much at first. There were a few crumbled pieces off the obelisk with interesting carvings, but nothing magical. Just when we were about to give up, though, I found an inner pocket in the robes of one of the cultists.
I reached in and pulled out a golden, bejeweled dagger, clearly meant for sacrifices of some kind from its ritualistic appearance. I brandished it for Carmilla to see, taking a few swipes at the air with it. She seemed unimpressed with my jocularity, but was pleased with the find.
“Nice job. Finally something. Let me see if it’s actually magical, though,” she said as she put a hand on it. It glowed red when she touched it—no doubt some enchantment she had to detect magic.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“It means we’re almost done here,” she answered, sighing with relief. “Check the rest of their pockets, and then we’ll go. This one, at least, is definitely magical.”
We cleared out the rest of their robes and found a talisman with a sigil I recognized as an elder sign, having read some Lovecraft and played the Call of Cthulhu RPG on a few occasions. We also found two more daggers and a wand.
“Not a bad haul,” Carmilla said. “I’ve seen better, but i
t’ll do.”
“So, what does this do for us?” I asked. “Why does the school need this shit?”
“Oh, it’s for us,” she explained. “You use it to cultivate mana.”
My eyes glazed over at the surreal terminology she’d just uttered. “Mana?” I asked. “Like in a video game?”
Carmilla nodded. “Yep, kind of like that. Extending the metaphor, it’s kind of like leveling up.”
“How does that work?”
“We use a spell to destroy the artifacts, and their power is absorbed into us. When we absorb enough, we can go into a meditative state, kind of like when you met Uther the first time. Uther will be your guide there, too. Then you can choose a spell to power up, an aspect of yourself you want to improve upon, or an ability you want to manifest. You can also customize and develop your familiar this way, too.”
My head spun at the possibilities. It explained a lot. It explained how I’d seen Carmilla demonstrate such tremendous vampiric powers. It explained how the Headmistress’s familiar was so massive and imposing and how her spells were so instantaneous yet potent. Suddenly that level of power felt attainable. There was a clear A to B progression after all.
“How often can we go on assignments?” I asked, a hunger for power stirring in my gut even as I spoke the words.
“Typically, you’re encouraged to go once a week, but you can take extra missions whenever you want,” she said.
Holy shit. The possibilities danced in front of my eyes. “How am I just hearing about this now?” I asked.
Carmilla gave me a guilty look. “I realized I forgot to tell you about it,” she confessed. “I mentioned assignments on your first day, but glossed over it. We were kind of rushed when you first got in, but now you know. So, anyway that’s why the Headmistress and I wanted to drag you on this mission. To see for yourself and finish my job.”
I did see. I came, I saw, I conquered, and I knew as I stood among the bodies of my fallen foes that this was the first of many conquests, that I would become addicted to this. My skeletal minions stood behind me, waiting for orders. I knew they would soon crumble to dust, but I now knew I could use the magic I would absorb from these items to delay their demise, perhaps one day indefinitely.
Esoterica 1: Liam's Awakening: A Lovecraftian Fantasy Harem Adventure (Esoterica Chronicles) Page 10