The Ghosts' Release [Were-Devils of Tasmania 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Simone Sinna

  Damon had been considering the question and decided the easiest way to resolve it was to ask. “Excuse me,” he said to a buxom young woman who reminded Kadar of Bellatrix in the Harry Potter movies. More the clothes than the looks, but then she did have blood droplets trailing down her chin, which detracted incongruously from an otherwise pleasant face. “Is there a reason everyone is clad rather unusually?”

  “It’s ’alloween, ain’t it,” she said with a grin. Kadar was fairly sure the blacked-out teeth were for effect. He wasn’t sure about the accent.

  “The Goths,” added the tall, thin man next to her in more moderate accent. “They have a bit of a ‘do’ here at Halloween.”

  Damon and Kadar exchanged looks. Shit. The humans were partying, totally oblivious to the fact that real vampires might actually be here and had been for centuries. Bram Stoker had used this site for a reason and they were taking it as good an excuse as any to get dressed up and celebrate.

  “Do join us on the thirty-first,” said Bellatrix, her accent now more like her companion’s. She winked at Kadar as she handed him an invitation. “Could be a killer.”

  As they walked away, Kadar looked at the flyer and groaned. “They’re having a party actually at the ruined Cathedral on Halloween. I can’t believe the local council gave them permission.”

  Damon looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said, “we can turn it to our advantage.”

  * * * *

  Misty arrived in London on the twenty-sixth. She dumped her bags, ignored Bonnie beyond saying, “Hi,” and “Here are pictures of my sister’s wedding,” and went straight to the London Institute for Research into Genetics. It was late afternoon and she caught up with her supervisor, had a brief conversation of which she knew she’d remember nothing later, and went straight to the lab. She’d slept fitfully on the plane but was feeling fueled by adrenaline. In her waking moments she was piecing the puzzle together. In her dreams, Grandma Lyn and a man in army uniform that had to be her grandfather hovered on the edge of her subconscious, trying, she was sure, to tell her something.

  She soaked the black silk cloth and added reagents that she didn’t normally have to when retrieving DNA from blood, took the samples and entered them into the machines. It was going to be a long night.

  * * * *

  The brothers saw him at the same time, though Damon had been aware of his presence long before he made himself known. They were by the docks, looking down the narrow inlet where the fishing boats left the wildness of the North Sea for the protection of the cliffs of Whitby, Damon wondering if Dracula had truly been unloaded here. Not in his coffin, that of course being a totally human fantasy. But perhaps Bram Stoker had been a vampire and wanted to put a certain veil of fiction over fact.

  He was standing at the end of the path, alone, wind swirling around him and his dark features in shadow. But they picked him immediately as Hook-nose.

  Damon took the initiative and walked confidently toward the vampire, Kadar at his shoulder.

  “You look well, brother,” said Damon. He sent Kadar a message. Actually, he looks like shit.

  There was the slightest of twitches. Damon closed his thoughts down instantly. The test had been needed but the result unfortunate. The vampires could read their messages.

  “Do you have what we requested?”

  “Of course, do you?”

  Hook-nose bowed his head. His lips tightened. “Silas wishes to meet with you first.”

  “First?” Damon forced a smile he did not feel.

  “Before we decide whether to take you to the Oracle.”

  The Oracle? Charles and Adam had never seen anyone with that title.

  “So,” said Damon, looking at the ruined Cathedral towering above him. “Who is the Oracle?”

  Hook-nose smiled thinly. “The Oracle,” he said, “will decide whether you live or die.”

  * * * *

  When Misty finally got an answer, she was too exhausted to make sense of it. She turned off and cleaned the machines, more by remote control than any conscious exercise, and made some quick notes. It was too early or too late, depending on which end of the day you favored, and she couldn’t afford a cab, so she curled up for an uncomfortable couple of hours on the floor before finally letting herself out of the lab and heading to the tube.

  She needed a coffee and managed to get something barely drinkable but with adequate caffeine levels from the guy setting up outside the underground station who usually saw her much later. “Had a good night, have you, love?” he said with a laugh, and waved off her offer of money.

  Awful as it was, she wished she had a second as she laid her head against the train window. Whether it was the touch of the glass, cool against her face, or her internal instinct, she would never know, but she sat up with a start and her head turned. As the train pulled out of the station she looked directly into the cavernous recesses of the eyes of a man she had no doubt was a vampire.

  * * * *

  “We’ll need to get the maps we promised,” said Damon evenly.

  “You won’t need them for this meeting.” Hook-nose smiled, his eyeteeth revealed, long and dangerous.

  “Where and when?”

  “Now is as good a time as any, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, I’ve got a hairdresser appointment,” said Kadar. “Maybe after that? Though then I rather fancied a massage. Don’t suppose you guys have a sideline in that?”

  Hook-nose flared his nostrils. “Funny man, I see.”

  “Just one constant party around me,” said Kadar, stepping closer to the man who he outdid in both height and sheer bulk.

  Like all bullies when called on it, Hook-nose backed down, smiling ingratiatingly as he bowed. “Silas is inviting you to dinner.” He handed Damon the card, still watching Kadar warily out of the corner of his eye. “Shall we say, an hour’s time?”

  Damon nodded cordially. “We look forward to it,” he said, aware that his words were not entirely a lie.

  * * * *

  Dinner was at a private residence high on the cliffs that looked out across the North Sea. The mist had settled quickly, moving as stealthily as the dark, and though there was no wind or rain, the stillness in itself seemed ominous. When a raucous threesome of drunken would-be vampire look-alikes spilled out of the pub they were walking past, Damon and Kadar stopped still, watching them disappear until they could regain the silence and compose themselves.

  Silas was waiting for them, this time just with Hook-nose and Beaked-spectacles—the vampires’ computer expert and scientist, Damon was fairly certain. He wondered if the execution committee would materialize if they didn’t come up with the answers to the questions he was fairly sure would bombard them.

  They sat at a table and a tall, thin woman, also a vampire, poured them all wine, lips pursed and never looking them in the eye. Around them the dark-red walls and heavy drapes were lit only by flickering candlelight, eyes from the paintings staring ominously at them. Silas invited them to be seated at a long table set with Victorian silver, heavy candelabras and thick-stemmed glasses.

  “Scandinavian,” said Silas, picking up one of the glasses. “Early 1800s. My father’s.”

  He was, as they had thought, older than he looked.

  “I took the Order over from my father in 1912,” Silas continued. “When he drowned on the Titanic.”

  Damon watched the vampire and wondered at the point of the story.

  “Of course, he shouldn’t have drowned,” Silas continued. “And wouldn’t have, had he not been locked below deck.”

  Damon and Kadar nodded. A vampire, like the two of them, could easily have transformed and flown to land.

  “And as he was travelling first class, he should never have been down with the”—he sniffed, lips pursed—“the lower classes. But he’d been tricked.”

  Damon raised an eyebrow. This part of vampire history was definitely new to him.

  “You see,” said Silas. “The ghosts ha
d already left for Australia by then and, quite frankly, your lot were never all that intellectual. But those that went to America, they wanted the secret and thought they could get it. They invited my father out to discuss a proposition. But when they saw he would never give it to them, sought to destroy him instead.”

  Damon forced a smile. He now knew the point of the story. A warning. He rather suspected that the Americans had probably done no such thing. Like him, they may have wanted to stop the vampires continuing to create havoc with viral warfare, and had thought the secret had lain with one man. At least Damon now knew it didn’t. Or, if so, it was with the Oracle rather than the head of the Order. Silas had clearly already been anointed to take over, should he have needed to when his father died. Given Silas’s age, his successor must now be in place. Surely not Hook-nose? Damon stole a look at him. He just didn’t seem …intellectual enough.

  Silas looked amused. “No, definitely not.”

  Hook-nose frowned. Damon looked at Silas. Surely he had just interpreted the look and had not been able to read through his mind block?

  “We must be the rulers, the wise ones. Viruset försöker alltid att bemästra oss,” said Silas.

  “Då måste vi behärska det, nu och för evigt.” The reply was out of Damon’s mouth before he’d thought about it. Kadar looked at his brother in astonishment.

  Silas nodded. “I thought so. You didn’t know you could speak Swedish, did you?”

  * * * *

  When Misty got back to her apartment, she was shaking with both cold and fear. She bolted all the windows, stuck a chair under the bedroom door and sat huddled under the blankets, aware that nothing she did would be able to protect her against the vampires if they wanted to get her. She slept fitfully, and in her disturbed dreams her grandfather came to her as clearly as if he had been in the room.

  “I tried to stop them,” he said to her. “I felt something from Larissa as she had our daughter and I knew at once I’d made the wrong choice.”

  “You were in France,” Misty tried to say to this man she had never met, whose body she had been told had gone down with his plane somewhere over France.

  “I went AWOL,” he said simply. “I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I just knew I had to find her. I never got on the plane. I looked up where they were stationed, her brothers. I wanted to talk to them, tell them I was sorry.”

  “Where did you find them?”

  “I didn’t,” Edmund said, his voice fading. “The vampires found me.”

  Misty woke, shaking and hyperventilating. There was a shadow outside her window. Her whole body, numb with cold, left her in no doubt. They had come for her.

  * * * *

  Kadar had got through the meal, managing to stay quiet, but now as they made their way back to their hotel through the darkened streets full of revelers, he couldn’t contain himself any longer. “What the fuck was all that about?”

  “They think I might be the next leader of their Order,” said Damon slowly.

  “You’re a ghost, not a vampire.”

  “I think they’ve worked that one out,” said Damon dryly. “And they aren’t exactly excited about the idea.”

  But it seemed Hook-nose, Silas’s only son, hadn’t passed the test to be anointed. So they were looking for another.

  “So apart from rabbiting on in Swedish,” said Kadar, “what other tests do you have to pass?”

  “I don’t know,” Damon replied. “But we’re into the next stage, at least. Tomorrow, at Halloween, we get to meet the Oracle.”

  * * * *

  Silas sat alone at the table long after everyone had left. His eyes went up to the portrait over the fireplace. His father, whom he still missed, stared down at him. Silas missed the closeness they had shared, shared in the way that his relationship with his son, Mordecai, had never come close to. He and his father had been like-minded, sharp and insightful, able to see ramifications far beyond those other vampires could divine. Mordecai had always been a disappointment. His impetuousness was a constant source of irritation, worse because he didn’t learn from his mistakes. He’d promised that this time he wouldn’t mess up like he had with—what was the man’s name? Edmund. Then there’d been the added disappointment of no grandchildren.

  Silas was feeling weary. He knew his time was coming to an end and the memories of his father’s drowning still haunted his dreams. But he couldn’t die until another was appointed in his place, and as yet, no one had fulfilled the criteria. The ghost had been a shock, but when he’d first met him, Silas had known that Damon had the same sharp intellect that had characterized the leaders of his Order since the beginning of time. A throwback, he had thought, but then the ghost had known about the genetic link. And he spoke Swedish.

  Did the Oracle mean for ghosts and vampires to be once again joined? It didn’t sit well with Silas. His father had died at the hands of one traitorous group. He was not about to trust another if he could help it. The edges of Silas’s mouth turned into a half smile half grimace as he relived the pleasure of watching the American group being wiped out with the influenza virus in 1919. And he already had the virus ready to wipe out the were-devils and ghosts. The vaccine he intended to give the ghosts would, sadly, not work.

  But if Damon joined them, that would change everything. Silas fingered the medallion around his neck and knew that they would have all the answers tomorrow night. Once every hundred years they were allowed to consult the Oracle. He had done it a hundred years ago, after his father died. Now, for his final time, he would consult the Oracle again.

  But if it told him Damon was the new leader, he was not sure that he would listen, and wondered what the cost of his defiance might be.

  Chapter Eight

  There were storms predicted for Halloween night and Damon looked to the horizon where ominous black clouds were gathering. The air was still and revelers oblivious to the pending weather change were already heading to the cliff top. Tarpaulins had been strung out between the ruined walls of the cathedral but Damon doubted that even the extra ropes would be enough when the storm hit. The worried look on the faces of the security guards suggested they thought the same.

  Silas had said Hook-nose, who they now knew to be called Mordecai, would meet them there. Damon, having avoided the drug, knew that near where the pulpit had once been was a trapdoor that led straight down into the interior of the rock, to passages that went for what to Damon had seemed miles. How they were going to get through it unseen, amidst more than two hundred partygoers, remained to be seen. But their plan was for Damon to go alone with the vampires. Kadar was planning to attach himself strongly to some of the humans as soon as he had taken the drink—and the antidote—presuming they would leave him rather than create havoc. As soon as it was safe, Kadar would, of course, follow them with the map Damon had made earlier.

  Mordecai glided through the crowd toward them, four other vampires, real ones as opposed to the humans in white makeup and false plastic teeth, were encircling them. One bared his teeth to a party reveler in his way, who shrieked, “Oh my God! They look so real. Wherever did you get them?”

  Mordecai stood before the brothers and offered them each a glass of the same viscous brown liquid that was full of morphine.

  “Can I have one?” asked the woman Kadar had put his arm around.

  “Certainly,” said Mordecai, giving the group the bottle.

  Kadar exchanged a glance with Damon. This was not going according to plan. Worse was to come. This time as they downed their drinks, a vampire came behind each of them and gripped their hands while another raided their pockets.

  “Well, well,” said Mordecai sarcastically. “What do we have here? And my father thought you were so intellectual.” He leant into Damon, eyeteeth at his neck as he whispered, “Not so smart after all, hey?”

  * * * *

  They’d given him an extra dose, Damon was sure, as he felt the drug go straight from his empty stomach to his blood and then brain in w
hat seemed like seconds. Without the antidote he was at the drug’s mercy and his mind took him on a wild journey, flying high over his homeland, winding through dark tunnels and through what seemed to be multicolored spaces where people from past and present wandered up to him, whispering in his ear. In the background he could hear the sea and the wind, and as he was fighting the effects, he heard, too, the cries and knew, panicked, that they came from Misty.

  As if swimming through quicksand, he tried to find her. In his mind were many doors and each one he opened was either empty or full of fear so great he had to slam them shut, panting and shaking as he did so. Finally, through one door he felt the same fear but heard Misty and kept going, desperate to find her. He never did, but as he finally surfaced, her meaningless words were imprinted on his mind.

  “My apologies for the narcotic,” said Silas. “But you understand, there is a lot at stake here. If you pass all the tests, then one day you will have to guard all this, as I have.”

  Damon forced his eyes to open. He had expected to be back in the meeting room, but he was somewhere unfamiliar, this time a long room with stone walls, from which heavy drapes hung. He and Kadar were both tied to chairs.

  “Apologies also for the chains,” Silas continued, “which we will remove as soon I am…certain.”

  Damon’s eyes regained their focus and he looked around the room. Only Mordecai and the spectacled scientist were with them. Mordecai was poring over Kadar’s computer maps. At the end of the room was a sunken pit, the nature of which Damon couldn’t quite make out.

  “So, Kadar,” said Silas. “Tell me about what will happen with the virus when you release it.”

  Kadar looked more alert than Damon felt, confirming his belief that he had been given more.

  “Using your specifications,” said Kadar, “and because were-devils live in a close community, it will affect all the women and girls bar only a few who live elsewhere, a small enough number we could access directly. Because it sticks in the blood, and presuming it remains undetectable, then even when those who are currently babies try to reproduce, they will fail.”