Silvanus took each step with caution, as if the stone might creak and give warning of his approach. He pushed on the door and it swung open silently on its mighty hinges. Though there was no lock on the door, it had been designed to keep humans out. Heavy, thick, with unforgiving hinges, this door would have taken many mortals to push open, but an immortal could easily come and go.
The putrid stench from inside was overpowering. Whatever may be inside, it had a rotting corpse for company. Silvanus stepped inside with Laura close behind. She allowed the massive door to swing shut, and what little light there had been was swallowed in total darkness.
Silvanus’s eyes were as perfect as any living creatures could be, able to see in the most dimly lit places. But this mausoleum had neither cracks in the walls, nor holes in the ceiling to allow light to enter. Even the door fit in its frame like an airtight vault. In this place, he was as blind as a mortal.
“Well, this won’t do,” Silvanus said, his hushed voice echoing from wall to wall. He held out his hand before him, palm up. He closed his eyes, focusing what little strength he had. Nothing happened. He sighed in frustration, clenched his eyes shut, and concentrated harder.
“What are you doing?” Laura asked.
Silvanus shushed her, more harshly than he meant to. It was her fault he was so weak. It was one thing to be feeble if you knew death was coming to give you peace. But for him, as long as he was a captive of the other Divines, there would never be a day of rest. “Hang on. Just give me a second.”
He gathered what little life force Laura had given him, pulling it in from the tips of his fingers and toes, funneling it toward the spot between his eyes. His heart rate dropped well below what a mortal body could stand. His breathing ceased completely. A point of heat, tiny, yet intense, began to build just behind his skull. It yearned to grow, to fill up his whole being, and to be set free. He had picked up the term hellfire from the mind of a poor mortal on the day he had awakened in Purgatory. The man with the gun had only been following orders. He had no idea what Silvanus really was. “Hellfire” was the last thing that man had thought before Silvanus turned his bones to ash.
Silvanus willed the intense heat from his mind, ordering it to settle in the palm of his open hand. He opened his eyes. The result was not the hellfire he had once been capable of.
“What are you doing?” Laura said in a near panic. “Stop that. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Silvanus extended his hand toward her, a tiny flicker of fire, about the size of the fingernail on his pinky, dancing side to side. “Let’s not be overdramatic, shall we. What possible harm could I do with this? This wouldn’t even set your clothes on fire. Even if I had the strength to do more, you’re in no danger. I seem to remember three of you burning me for a day and a night straight, trying to rid the world of my heresy. Besides, you can’t make fire, and we need some sort of light to see by. Unless you have a flashlight in your pocket.”
Laura’s face unpuckered, giving way to a brief look of embarrassment. It was a short-lived moment, however, and she quickly replaced it with a look of annoyance. “I do have a cell phone in my pocket, but you go on and keep your little fire.”
Silvanus turned his attention to the interior of the mausoleum. The limestone walls were smooth on this side, the blocks so tightly laid that barely any mortar had been needed to fix them in place. The room was plain and empty except for two things. One was an ornate brazen sepulcher resting upon a raised stone platform. And behind that, crumpled on the floor, was the body of a dead man.
“Look what we have here,” Laura hissed. “Disgusting beasts. And sloppy ones at that.”
There was no denying the vampires had killed the man. Not only had they not destroyed his body to ensure he wouldn’t rise again, they hadn’t even attempted to cover up the various fang marks riddling his half-naked torso. He hadn’t been dead very long, but the air inside the mausoleum was stagnate and oddly hot, bringing on a speedy decomposition.
“They must have dragged him in here and killed him before they found the savages.”
“You still believe that story?” Laura asked with a derisive laugh. “Look around. Do you see any caves filled with savages? They lied, just like I said.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Silvanus circled the brazen sepulcher. He ran his hand along the edge of the lid, feeling the texture of the ornate vines and clusters of grapes encircling the outer rim. Tiny tendril of frigid air wafted up through his fingers, halting him in his place. “Wait. There’s something here.”
“It’s a tomb with a corpse,” Laura said. “Nothing much of interest here. Let’s go.”
“No, look.” Silvanus took his hand that held the tiny flicker of fire and ran it along the edge of the lid. The flame rippled as a thin, almost indistinguishable, breeze pushed it away.
Laura placed both hands on the lid of the vault, as though she were trying to detect a pulse from the large metal box. She slowly shifted her hands to the outer rim, moving them back and forth along the length of the sepulcher. “I can feel it, too.”
Without a word, they lifted the heavy lid and slid it away as though it weighed nothing. There was no coffin inside, nor were there any dead bodies, fresh or ancient, laid to rest within. What the sepulcher did hold, however, was a narrow, steep staircase leading down into an underground room.
Silvanus led the way down, lighting the way with the tiny flame writhing in the palm of his hand. Twisted, wretched shadows crawled along the walls of the narrow stairway like giant lizards, seemingly feasting on the spiders and cave crickets that fled the light for darker corners. At the bottom of the stairs, to the right, was another door similar to the one at the entrance to the mausoleum, only smaller. Silvanus stepped through into a room with hand cut slabs of rock for walls. The floor, made of the same stone, was covered with two inches of water that had found its way through the cracks. Pretty impressive when you considered how far below sea level they were. This place had been constructed by a vampire for daylight refuge many years ago, but now it was inhabited by a large group of snarling savages.
The room was longer than it was wide. The savages stood shoulder to shoulder, five abreast, from one wall to the other. They were ten deep, and the closest five stood no more than ten feet away. They could have covered that distance in a flash, yet they stood fast, like a troop of soldiers at attention. All fifty savages made deep, guttural growls, filling the room with the echoing thunder of murderous lust. Their eyes, the color of infected blood, darted back the forth between the two intruders. Their withered lips pulled back even farther from their deadly teeth. A few had fangs, meaning they had been vampires when bitten by a savage, but the majority had been human.
“I don’t believe it,” Laura said. “This makes no sense. Why aren’t they attacking us?”
“Maybe they are afraid of us.”
“They don’t know fear,” Laura said. Silvanus had never seen such exasperation in her eyes before. “I mean, the fully conscious ones never attacked us directly if they could keep from it. But why aren’t they flooding the city? All they know is to kill, feed, and make more savages.”
“How can you tell the mindless ones from the fully conscious?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “By the way they move. By the way they attack. You just know them when you see them.”
A twinkle of light caught Silvanus’s attention. One of the savages in the front row stood shirtless. He was a human man with a skull and crossbones tattooed on his chest. In the center of his chest, where the nose of the skull should be, there was a tiny metallic plate about the size of a cell phone. It looked as though something had been inserted into his chest. The fetid flesh puckered around the plate, holding it in place.
“Do you see that?”
“Yes,” Laura said. “They all have one.”
“Is that what’s keeping them in here?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Her voice cracked like a whip. “It’s none of our concern.” She turn
ed so fast her hair whipped into his face.
“Wait. What?” Silvanus was so shocked by Laura’s sudden exit that his concentration broke and the tiny flame in the palm of his hand extinguished, leaving him in utter darkness with the savages. He waited a moment, out of pure curiosity, to see whether or not the savages would attack him. The darkness caused their hungry growls to grow, but they remained fixed. Silvanus followed Laura up the stairs.
She stood outside, near the next closest mausoleum, her arms crossed over her chest. Her pale skin was radiant and her hair seemed to be made of the moonlight itself. “C’mon, let’s go. I’m bored of this place.”
“We can’t leave. We need to go back down there and kill those things before they decide to leave.”
“It’s almost daylight. They aren’t going anywhere.”
Silvanus laughed in disbelief. “Okay, but what about tomorrow night? Or the night after that? Sooner or later, they will crawl up out of there.” He pointed toward the great city. “And when they do, all those people will all die. Or worse, they will be turned. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Once, it did, a long time ago.” Her eyes drilled into him, but he held her gaze. “We have saved the world from those things many times over. But we made a vow to each other, after the last war, that we would no longer interfere with the humans and vampires.”
“But we can’t just leave them,” he implored. “Just give me a little more life force and I will go down there and burn them out. Please.”
“Absolutely not. You would destroy them and then vanish back to your blood drinker fledgling. Let the Hunters handle them. It won’t take them long to sniff out a horde that size.”
Silvanus moved toward her. Laura dropped her arms as though she expected an attack. He stopped just out of her reach. “I understand what the Stewards did to you. Believe me, I’ve seen worse treachery from them.” His throat knotted at the thought of Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the three vampire women the Stewards had maimed for warning the Divines of their treachery. “But I’ve watched you and the other nine. You love living among the humans. You love their foods, their art, their music. I can see it in your eyes, even now. You want nothing more than for me to be dead so that you can roam that city in freedom. Do you deny it?”
“I don’t wish you dead,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps, just buried at the bottom of the sea.”
Something familiar—a phantom of a memory—passed through Silvanus’s mind, but it was gone before he could take hold of it. “Would you really let those savages out into the world, knowing what havoc they would cause? Would you really sacrifice all the beauty of this world for a vow you made from a broken heart?”
Laura’s eyes softened and the corners of her mouth turned down. “We can stay…for a while. Just to watch and see what happens. If the Hunters find the nest of savages, then we move on quietly.”
“What if they don’t find it?”
Laura didn’t answer.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jerusa woke with a start. She had been dreaming of her mother, lying in a bed somewhere in the Stewards’ Ice Sanctuary. All manner of machines filled her mother’s room with buzzing and whirring, and long, clear tubes filled poor Debra Phoenix’s body nearly head to toe. In her dreams, her mother’s eyes had been open, scared and searching, filled with pain.
“It was only a dream,” Jerusa whispered to the darkened room.
Someone stirred in the corner and she turned, expecting to see Alicia, Foster, or any other of the mob of spirits that were following her these days. A lamp filled the room with bright white light, and she shielded her eyes.
“What were you dreaming about?” a voice asked.
Jerusa blinked away the pain of the light. “My mother,” she said to the young looking female vampire in the corner. Her name was Kat or Katherine, or something like that. Jerusa couldn’t quite remember.
“That’s strange,” Kat said.
“Why is dreaming about my mother strange?”
“No. I meant dreaming at all.” Kat had been about seventeen when she had been turned, but if Jerusa had to guess, that had been more than a few centuries ago. It was difficult to judge age with vampires, but she had a strength about her, a deep knowledge nestled in her eyes, which betrayed her true age. “Not too many of us sleep, unless we’re hurt and need to heal.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve been dealing with a lot of savages lately. It’s not exactly an easy job.” Jerusa pulled the blankets away, and kicked her feet out onto the floor. She was still wearing her heavy boots, thick canvas pants, and linen shirt. The bed sheets were covered in sand, grit, and mud. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s no bother,” Kat said. “It’s an honor to host a team of Hunters, especially the Crimson Storm.” Her mouth said one thing, but her eyes told a different story. “I have prepared a bath for you, and will have your clothes cleaned if you like.”
“Thank you. That sounds nice. What time is it?”
“A couple hours past sunset.”
Jerusa jumped to her feet and Kat cringed a bit. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”
“It’s understandable.” Kat smiled. She had a sweet, almond-shaped face with dark, piercing eyes. Her black hair fell in loose curls over her shoulders. She was stunningly beautiful, as were the others in her coven. They weren’t Hunters, nor were they Stewards. Just simple vampires, if there could be such a thing. “As you said, killing savages is brutal work. Besides, it’s been too long since you last fed.”
Jerusa’s heart froze in her chest. “What? What do you mean?”
Kat pointed to her own eyes and lips, then to Jerusa’s. “You have the marks of hunger. Do Hunters not even stop their duties to feed?” She gave a little laugh that hung in the air like perfume.
Jerusa touched her face. “We feed as often as we can. I guess I just haven’t had the chance.” As if summoned, a pang of hunger rippled through her midsection, strong enough to weaken her knees. Jerusa forced herself to remain standing. “I will feed as soon as I finish my bath.”
“Excellent. This is a wonderful place to hunt.” Kat remained standing there as if she expected something. She cleared her throat. “I need your clothes if you wish them cleaned.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Jerusa began to undress. She unbuttoned her linen shirt, but stopped when she caught Kat staring at her scar. It wasn’t a look of disgust or pity but more of curiosity. “I had a heart transplant before I was turned.”
“Is that why you’re a Hunter?” Kat must’ve thought her own question rude, because she quickly added, “It’s just that you are very beautiful.”
“Thanks” She still felt awkward being complimented. “Yes. The High Council didn’t deem me worthy, so I had to become a Hunter.”
Kat’s eyes widened. “You were judged by the High Council? That’s amazing. I’ve never even seen any of them. Most judgments are done by the lower Stewards, or Hunters, like yourself.”
“You’re not missing much.”
Kat looked as though she wanted to say more but thought better of it. She reigned in her excitement, and returned to her demure self. “I’m sorry they didn’t judge you worthy. That doesn’t seem fair.” She whispered the last sentence.
“Thank you. I appreciate that.” Jerusa looked down at her clothes. “Do you mind if I just leave these outside the bathroom?”
“That will be fine. I will make sure they are ready by the time you are finished.”
“Wow, that fast, huh?”
“You should take your time in the bath. Relax while you can. I hear that you and the other Hunters will be moving on soon. Always more savages to kill.”
Jerusa forced a smile. “I suppose so.”
Kat led her to the bathroom. She opened the door, letting out a puff of steam that washed over the both of them. Jerusa stepped past her into the dimly lit bathroom. “You should have all that you need,” Kat said. “Please, take as long as you wish.”
“Thank you.” Jerusa closed the door behind her, then stood a moment in awe of the sheer size of the bathtub. It looked like a small in-ground swimming pool, and had to be at least ten foot square. The entire bathroom looked to be cut from marble. The fixtures were gold. A row of heat lamps, recessed into the ceiling, glowed red, turning the room into a sauna.
Alicia appeared, sitting on the edge of the massive tub, her incorporeal feet dangling in the steaming water. She kicked her legs back and forth, but the water didn’t even ripple. She turned to Jerusa and smiled.
“Not too shabby, huh?”
An intense pang of blood thirst shredded Jerusa’s insides, buckling her knees. She clutched her stomach, and would have hit the marble floor face first had Alicia not suddenly materialized beside her. The ghost snatched her up, and pulled Jerusa to her feet. Foster appeared on Jerusa’s other side, trying his best to assist Alicia in hoisting Jerusa to her feet. His hands passed right through her, leaving little more than a slight chill on her skin.
The other ghosts became visible, one by one, until the whole bathroom was filled with vampire spirits. None of them attempted to help her, just stood by, watching with eyes full of pity. All except the ghost she called the Acolyte. He looked on with a sort of demented fascination fixed in his eyes. He hadn’t seemed all that sane in life, either. He had been condemned to death by the High Council for being created by a dangerous vampire known as the Monster and burned alive while Jerusa watched.
“I’m okay,” Jerusa said through gritted teeth. “It’s easing up. I’m fine.” Foster waved the other vampires off, and they turned, vanishing through the walls. The Acolyte remained a few moments longer, but then dematerialized right where he stood.
Alicia placed her hand on the back of Jerusa’s head, then pulled her in close. Jerusa yielded to her friend, leaned in and bit into the ghost’s neck, feeding on blood that wasn’t really there and could do nothing more than stave off the worst of her hunger pangs.
When the bloodless feeding was finished, Jerusa pulled away from Alicia. The ghost, perpetually young, looked at her with a weary and apologetic face. “You should be sorry. You’re the reason I’m like this.” Alicia gave a little nod, then rubbed Jerusa’s cheek, in a gesture she took to mean it’ll all turn out okay. “I wish I knew why you won’t let me feed. We can’t keep this up much longer.” She turned to Foster. “I need a little privacy.” He nodded, then turned to leave the room. “And make sure the others don’t peep, too.” He gave her a thumbs-up, then walked through the wall.
Perpetual Creatures, Volumes 1-3: A Vampire and Ghost Thriller Series Page 67