The thought of her wavy blonde hair burning, of her delicate, beautiful features melting like wax, nearly took the breath out of him. “So, what is this talent you have?”
She glanced at him from the side of her eye. Her mouth was pressed into a fine line. “It doesn’t matter.” She upped her pace until she walked several feet ahead of him.
Thad caught back up as she turned to head into the lower levels of the house. He tried to take her hand again, but her fingers were as stiff as a corpse’s. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Her hand softened, her fingers weaving around his. “I’m sorry too. I’ll tell you. I promise. Just not today.”
They walked the rest of the way into the sub-basements in silence. When the light left them, and the darkness became impassable, Beth pulled a lipstick-sized flashlight out of her pocket. Thad felt like a bumbling novice. When it came to sneaking around, avoiding vampires and the snooping human staff, Beth was a Viking. He thought it a bit strange, though. She hadn’t been here that long, yet, she maneuvered the house like she’d lived here her whole life.
“Where are we going?” Thad whispered. She motioned for him to be quiet and follow her closely. He had wandered the sub-basements many times, not just searching for Debra Phoenix, but because this was where they brought the corpses to be burned. His parents had always had high hopes for him: college, football, maybe a stint in the NFL, or, at least, a master’s degree in one subject or another, good job, wife, kids. If they only knew how many bodies he’d trudged down here to cast into the fire, he’d never be welcomed home again.
He looked around, not able to see much more than the cone of light that Beth cast from side to side. He didn’t recognize this place. It looked much like all the other rooms beneath the house. The floors and walls were made of rough, hand-cut stone. The work of men that had perished three or four generations ago. The doors were made of heavy, ancient wood, designed to repel any enemy who might try to burst forth, except that these had been shattered like glass and hung on hinges frozen by centuries of rust. Too bad they didn’t anticipate vampires, he thought, remembering the vision of Sebastian’s past.
At last, they came to a corridor with many doors on either side of the hall, and at the end was a stone archway that would lead to a furnace. At one time, the mammoth furnaces had been used to heat the massive house buried in ice and snow. Now, they were used as crematoriums to dispose of the vampires’ victims and to ensure no unwanted vampires were born of the bite. But the crumbling stone and rotting door spoke of the neglect this part of the house had endured.
Where were all the servants? The vampires had fed last night. Why weren’t the humans disposing of the victims? In fact, he was a bit surprised they hadn’t passed anyone on their way down here. The infected humans in this house were always working, cleaning, or disposing of bodies. It was their punishment for being bitten by a vampire who didn’t have the courtesy to finish the job. Maybe they were in a different part of the labyrinth, twisting beneath this house, disposing of bodies in one of the other furnace rooms.
As they passed into the narrow corridor, the darkness seemed to close in around them, swallowing even the beam of the flashlight. Thad watched every door, his mind conjuring countless terrors springing forth to devour them. A small horde of savages guarded the secret caves leading in and out of this house, though that wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t out of the range of possibility for one of those savages to escape. He couldn’t imagine how the Stewards had managed to imprison the savages, anyway.
“Wait,” Thad whispered as they came to the last door on the left. “Shine your light in here. I want to see something.”
“There aren’t any pits on this side of the mansion, so don’t worry about it.” She shined her light through the open doorway to prove her statement. The room was filled with broken furniture, but not much else. No deep holes full of snarling savages.
“You know about the savage pits?”
Her light passed across his eyes, blinding him for a moment. He had a feeling that was on purpose. “Yeah, I’ve seen them. They’re kind of hard to miss when you’re paying attention. But there aren’t any savages here. There’s something else.”
Beth turned her light back to the path. She led them through the final door into the furnace room. The door was still intact, and when Beth closed it, the door swung shut without even a squeak. She bounced her light around the room, checking every corner and crevice. Satisfied that they were alone, she turned her attention to the furnace.
Thad thought the furnace he used to burn bodies was a relic, but this furnace was older even still. It really wasn’t much more than a colossal fireplace. There wasn’t a mantle to set family pictures, but there was a large steel door, ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide, covering the opening.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” Thad said a bit too loud. He winced as his voice echoed from wall to wall. “Where’s Debra Phoenix? Why would you think the vampires are hiding her here?”
She shined the light in his face again. “Just trust me. Now come over here, give me a kiss, and help me with this door.”
Purple spots still danced on the back of his eyelids, but the prospect of another kiss was too much to resist. Thad stumbled his way toward the furnace, and Beth rewarded him for his efforts. When they had finished their embrace, they both took hold of the steel door, and with a couple of good yanks, they managed to open it enough to slip inside.
The inside of the furnace was stained black with ancient soot, but the smell of fire and ash had dissipated long ago. Something rattled overhead and they both cringed in terror. Beth shined her light upward, but the only thing there was the black eye of the flue.
“It was just a rat scurrying around in the chimney,” Beth said, though the quiver in her voice left room for doubt.
Thad didn’t like being in here, even without the prospect of rats raining down upon his head. The furnace was long dead, but that didn’t mean much when you were dealing with creatures that could conjure fire with their minds and make you spontaneously combust. Maybe he smelled smoke after all.
“Why are we in here?”
“It’s over here. Come help me.”
Thad followed Beth’s light to the back of the furnace. This oversized chimney was bigger than his room. On the rear wall, fastened to the rotting stone, was a large metal grate filled with thin horizontal slots. He held his hand near to the grate and felt a constant but gentle rush of air. Bolted on the right side of the grate, halfway up, was a thick metal ring. Beth took hold of it and motioned for him to help her. They pulled and the grate swung open with a pneumatic hiss.
Thad blinked in disbelief as he beheld what lay beyond the grate. A long, perfectly round tunnel, with walls as crisp white as the furnace walls were sooty black. A single row of lights running the top center of the tunnel came to life. The light spilled into the furnace, blinding him for a moment. Thad grabbed Beth’s arm and tried to pull her toward the heavy steel door.
Beth pulled her arm away. “Wait. It’s fine. No one’s here but us.” Thad eyed the tunnel like a mouse eyes a snake hole. “The lights are on motion detectors. All the vampires are in their daytime hideouts and they don’t let any humans down here.”
“How do you know?” Thad asked. His body still faced the steel door, prepared to run at the first sign of movement in the tunnel. Not that he’d get very far if it was a vampire pursuing him. “How do you know one of the blood suckers isn’t sleeping the daylight off down here?”
“I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Or we can give up and go back.”
Thad turned away from the steel door. Shame dripped down the back of his throat and formed a cold knot in his stomach. He had been the one willing to die to find Debra Phoenix. Now that he was closer than ever before, all he could think about was running back to the false safety of his room.
“How did you find this place?”
Beth’s face grew somber. “After I was
bitten, and the vampires brought me here, I was so scared and alone. I got pretty low. I wandered down here one night, thinking that I might…”
“Kill yourself?” Thad finished.
Beth bit her bottom lip and nodded. “I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to be a slave. So I took a knife from the kitchen and found my way down here. I don’t know if I wanted to die, or if I wanted to turn. It doesn’t matter now. I was too much of a coward to do it.”
“I understand,” Thad said. And he truly did. He had tried to hang himself with a towel in another furnace room not too long after he had come here. The old lady, Dot, had cut him down before he had finished the job.
“Anyway, I was down here, hiding behind a pile of junk in the corner, crying, when two vampires—Stewards, but not any from the High Council—came in here and opened up the furnace. I ran back to my room, but not before peeking in and seeing the tunnel. I’ve come back a couple of times, always during the day, but I’ve never had the courage to actually follow the tunnel.”
“But you have the courage to go in now?”
Her mouth broke into a sweet, yet flirtatious smile. “For you, I do.” As if to prove the power of her conviction, she turned and stepped into the round tunnel.
Thad followed, and falling in beside her, took her hand. They remained as quiet as possible, but their breathing sounded like snoring dragons in the silence of the tunnel. They went about fifty yards before veering ninety degrees to the left. After that, the tunnel zigged back right before opening up into a much larger room, most of which was behind thick glass walls. Several hospital beds filled the glass room, but only one was occupied. Debra Phoenix lay in the bed furthest away.
They approached slowly. Thad’s pulse thrummed up his neck and into his ears. Debra laid on her back, motionless, with what seemed like a thousand tubes running in and out of her. There were tubes in her mouth, up her nose, littering both arms from wrist to armpit. Her bed linens looked like they hadn’t been changed in a year. The strange machines surrounding her looked more at home in a mad scientist’s laboratory than a hospital.
Though Thad had only met Debra Phoenix twice before—once before she had been attacked, and once after—she looked nothing like he remembered. Her skin had the greenish pallor of a rotting corpse. What little muscle she used to have had eroded away, leaving only a wire-thin skeleton visible beneath the skin. Her jaundiced eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but there didn’t seem to be any life left in them.
“Is she still alive,” Beth asked. Her face was pale, except for two blushed circles on her cheeks. “She looks dead.”
Thad moved back and forth along the glass wall like a wild animal that had been caged. There was no way in to Debra, at least none that he could detect. Machines buzzed and whirled with an unending, incessant song. He caught sight of something, and squatted down for a better look.
“What is it?” Beth asked. Her voice was growing steadily more jittery. She clutched one hand in the other, while shifting her weight from foot to foot.
“They’re pumping her blood out into some machine, then back into her body. Kind of like dialysis or something.”
“So they’re trying to help her?” She sounded optimistic. That lasted for as long as it took her to walk over and see for herself. “Oh my god. Is that her…” She trailed off, putting her hand over her mouth as though she might vomit.
Debra Phoenix’s blood was green to almost black, and had the consistency of well chewed cottage cheese. The machine the blood entered did seem to be filtering something out, but the blood it returned looked just as fetid.
“We need to find a way in there.” Thad started running around the room, banging on the glass walls, and manhandling anything that could even remotely pass for a switch inside. The world began to turn on a crooked axis, and it felt as though he were bouncing around the room like a pinball. Jerusa will be devastated when she finds out. This thought brought renewed fury to his panicked search.
Beth tried, several times, to grab him, but she was so small compared to him that she couldn’t keep him restrained. Finally, the tiny woman, who reminded him so much of a blonde Jerusa, shot low like an expert wrestler, wrapped her arms around his ankles, and tripped him to the ground. He failed to get his hands up in time, and cracked the side of his head on the concrete floor. The world’s most nauseating fireworks display flashed before his eyes before all fell into darkness. When he came to, he was on his back with Beth’s angelic face hovering over him.
“Can I have another kiss?” he asked with a smile.
Her look of concern melted into a sigh of relief. “I thought I’d killed you, you big idiot.” She leaned down and kissed him.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice still a bit dreamy. “I’ve been bitten. I’m infected. I’d come back.” Reality came crashing back in on him, along with a killer headache. Beth, seeing his temperament change on a dime, gently rubbed his head, careful to avoid the growing lump on the side.
“I’m sorry I tripped you, but you were kinda outta your mind there.”
“I know. But she doesn’t deserve to be in there like some lab experiment. No one does. I need to get in there and unplug her.”
Beth’s face grew serious. “We can’t do that. If we do, they’ll know we’ve been down here. If that happens, they won’t just whip us.”
She was right, or course. Thad didn’t want to see her die. And funny enough, for the first time since arriving here, he didn’t want to die, either.
Beth looked up at Debra. “What are they doing to her? Why does her blood look that way?”
Thad had a great throbbing knot in his chest that wasn’t his heart. It was all too much. Being taken from his friends and family, seeing poor Debra slowly rotting, knowing the pain this would cause Jerusa if only she lived long enough to find out about it. Loneliness isn’t a static pain that reaches a plateau. It’s cumulative, building upon itself day by day, minute by minute, forming a pressure that could flash-form diamonds. When that pressure is breeched, and the damn bursts forth, there is no stopping what comes next.
“I didn’t see it happen,” Thad said in a hoarse tone. “Jerusa said these two things—they called themselves umbilicus—attacked Debra. They took her blood like a vampire, but they weren’t vampires. Somehow, they swapped their rotten blood with Debra’s fresh blood. I guess the Hunters tried to burn them, but it didn’t kill them.”
“How is that possible?” Beth asked in a hushed voice.
“Because they are unnatural. They were designed in some lab by a group of people called the Light Bearers Society. They got some of Silvanus’s blood and somehow used it to make those things.”
“Who’s Silvanus? Is he another vampire?”
Thad’s head was throbbing hard now. He closed his eyes to try and ease the pain. “No. Not exactly. He’s the one that made Jerusa. He’s a Divine Vampire.”
Beth gasped. “That can’t be. They’re just a myth.”
“No. I’ve seen him. They’re real. He turned Jerusa, but for some reason, she became a blood drinker instead of like him.”
“That’s amazing!” Beth’s eyes sparkled with wonderment. “You actually met one of the Ten.”
“No, he wasn’t one of those Divines. Silvanus had just woken up. He didn’t even know what he was. That’s why he thought he could make Jerusa like him. When Kole turned savage and bit Jerusa, Silvanus drew the poisoned blood out of her. It nearly killed him.” Beth was silent with awe. He couldn’t stop. There was relief in spilling his secrets to her. “Now, Jerusa’s out there being a Hunter because the Stewards want to kill her just because of her scar. And her ghost, Alicia, won’t let her feed. If Suhail and the savages don’t kill her first, the Stewards will when they discover she can’t drink blood. And even if she escapes all of that…”
“She’ll wear the Stone Cloak,” Beth finished in a somber voice.
Thad nodded. It hurt to move his head. “And the only one that might be a
ble to help her is Shufah, but the Light Bearers have kidnapped her, and no one knows where they are. It feels like the whole world is coming to an end.”
“How do you know all of this?” Beth asked.
He started to tell her about Sebastian filling in the gaps for him, but something stopped him. “Oh, you know. When you’ve been around a while, you hear things.”
Beth laid down next to him and rested her head upon his shoulder. His fuzzy mind was starting to clear, at least enough to reason out that they needed to go soon. Still, it felt nice having her so close to him. He wrapped his arm around her and hugged her tight.
“The world isn’t ending,” she said, her breath tickling his ear. She moved her hand up his chest to his face and caressed his bearded cheek. “Everything is going to work out. I promise. It always does.”
He was about to lean in and kiss her forehead when every light in the room, and down the round tunnel, was suddenly extinguished.
Both of them jumped to their feet, clinging tightly to each other. Beth squeezed his hand so tight that his fingers began to throb. The near perfect darkness was broken only by the few blinking lights of the machines hooked to Debra Phoenix. A heavy blanket of fear surrounded them, covered them, like a physical object. There was nowhere to run. They were blind. Deafened by the roar of their own hearts. But the thing stalking them could discern them all too clearly.
Someone entered the room. They made no noise, gave off no scent—at least none a human could detect. The only thing that betrayed them was the slight, almost unnoticeable breeze they created from walking through the door.
“I know you’re there,” Thad said, his voice booming like thunder in the utter silence. There was no reply. “Whatever you’re going to do, just get it over with.” Still, no one spoke. He had the urge to reach out into the darkness, to feel what might be there. But he kept his arm close for fear that it might not return to him fully whole if he didn’t.
Perpetual Creatures, Volumes 1-3: A Vampire and Ghost Thriller Series Page 71