Death Banishes (Mortis Vampire Series Book Six)

by J. C. Diem

  Death Banishes

  J.C. Diem

  Copyright 2014 J.C. Diem

  All rights reserved.

  Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be copied, resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  Cover art: J.C. Diem

  Images: ©Veronika Vasilyuk - Dreamstime.com

  © Angela Harburn - Dreamstime.com

  Dedication

  To my immediate family, aunties, cousins, friends and the kind souls who have left such wonderful reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Thank you all for your encouragement and for giving me the inspiration and motivation to write this series.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  .~.

  Chapter One

  Floating weightlessly in the cold, dark belly of the spaceship, I was surrounded by my slowly dying kin. I’d only just woken up from a sleep that had felt more like hibernation and already the psychological burden of responsibility was wrapping around me in an invisible web. My friends and allies were counting on me to save them from eventual death by starvation and I was failing them utterly.

  We’d been banished from Earth an unknown length of time ago, rejected by a world that wanted nothing to do with creatures like us. Sure, we’d saved the humans twice from a vampire infestation that would have turned them into cattle, but they’d decided they would be better off without us anyway. I should have been used to it by now but I was still stunned by Colonel Sanderson’s betrayal. The soldier had tried his hardest to do away with me by ordering his men to toss me out into the sun. Rendered helpless by the unbearable pain of being boiled alive inside my clothes, I’d been unable to stop the men from blowing me apart with weapons that had been designed specifically to kill vampires. The sun had reduced what was left of me to ash then the colonel had swept my remains into a metal box and had thrown it into the sea.

  It had taken me four and a half months to free myself from the tiny prison. While I’d been busy trying to figure a way out of the box, my small army had been captured. I’d made my way from Bulgaria to France and had managed to discover where my kin had been taken after cornering and questioning the Comtesse. Former ruler of the European vampire nation, she had also been my arch nemesis. The Comtesse hadn’t known where my friends were and believed they were all dead.

  After unleashing my holy marks and reducing her into a messy stain on the ground, I’d descended into despair. My grief had been interrupted by the human soldiers I’d bamboozled into believing I hadn’t been slaughtering a mansion full of vampires right under their noses. One of the men had told me my kin weren’t all dead and that the survivors had been taken to the United States.

  I’d immediately travelled to Denver, Colorado and had eventually broken my small band of kin free. They’d been experimented on like lab rats but the tests had more closely resembled torture rather than scientific studies. Every single one of the survivors had turned on their captors and had fed from them to renew their depleted energy. The remaining humans had then been mercilessly torn apart. It was a fate they’d earned and had heartily deserved.

  For a few short nights after fleeing from the compound, we’d mistakenly thought we had managed to evade Colonel Sanderson. But the wily soldier had foreseen a possible escape attempt and had embedded my friends with tracking devices. We had been located, rounded up and flown back to America. Our fate had been decided by the U.S. government in conjunction with other world leaders, and we’d been kicked off the planet. Now here we were, drifting aimlessly through the void in a shiny white spaceship.

  Once our fuel had run out, the temperature had quickly begun to plummet. Within days ice had begun to cover the hull. It had spread to its undead cargo and now we were all frozen solid. My eyes were stuck shut and weren’t about to open anytime soon but I could sense my kin drifting insensate around me like deadwood on a tide.

  Wishing Gregor was able to offer me guidance, I had to figure a way out of our dilemma on my own. Even my inner voice was quiet this time. Usually when I was in trouble it would offer suggestions on how I could escape from the latest calamity I’d managed to get myself into.

  If my memory served me correctly, blood tended to be drawn inwards and away from the extremities when hypothermia was setting in. I had passed far beyond hypothermia and had reached the status of an ice cube. It appeared that escape from our icy tomb was impossible but I had learned that very little was impossible for me. I might be average in intelligence but I’d always had an active imagination and I just had to think of a way to make myself move.

  Drawing my consciousness deep inside my body, I probed my flesh and found it to be completely inert. The only way I was going to be able to move was if I could somehow break my flesh apart. When I’d been reduced to ash by the sun, I’d managed to possess a few tiny particles at a time and gradually escape from my confinement. That had been tricky but I’d managed to pull it off. This was different. My body wasn’t in teeny tiny little bits and pieces, it was whole and unharmed. How was I supposed to reduce any of my parts back to particle form again?

  Heaving a silent sigh, my subconscious finally came to my rescue once more. Don’t you remember what happened when the scientist in Colorado tried to shoot you in the face? It sent me a picture of my head splitting in two to avoid the bullet. I didn’t have any control over that, I reminded my inner voice. My body did it out of self-preservation or something. Waiting for me to put two and two together, my subconscious tapped a mental foot impatiently. Throwing its hands into the air when I remained blank, it gave me the answer to my dilemma. Your body now reacts to your thoughts, stupid! Jeez, I can’t believe I’m stuck with a numb nuts like you.

  Mentally scowling at the insult, I mulled over its advice. So, my body does what I want it to just because I ask it to, huh? Concentrating on my left hand, I silently told it to detach. I couldn’t see it since my eyes were frozen shut but I heard a faint snap through my ice clogged ears as the appendage came free. So far so good. I then commanded Lefty to break down into tiny particles. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then I felt it begin to tremble violently before it suddenly disintegrated. Hopefully, it had turned into millions of tiny specks that were almost too tiny for me to see even if my eyes ha
d actually been operational right now.

  A hand would be useful but I needed to see what I was doing before I could have any chance of saving us. Concentrating on my eyes, I instructed them to detach. With another tearing sound, they came free from my face. Eventually responding to my mental command, they broke down into much smaller components before becoming whole again. My plan worked and, for the moment, the orbs were unfrozen and I was able to see. Obeying my direction, they clumsily turned to observe each other. I’d accidentally torn my eyelids off when my eyes had detached and they perched on top of my orbs like tiny little hats. I giggled silently and noted a touch of hysteria in my amusement. I was almost glad my friends weren’t conscious to see my fumbling attempts to rescue them.

  Turning my orbs towards my kin, I gave a mental gasp of horror. Geordie floated only a few feet away from me. His young face was prematurely wrinkled and he’d turned into an old man since I had seen him last. His once dirty blonde hair was now almost completely grey. His eyes were partially open and seemed to be staring at me accusingly. The irises still showed a faint sliver of blue. The likelihood of him living long enough for all of the colour to fade as his pupils grew to their maximum size was now slim. I uneasily wondered just how long I’d been asleep for.

  Emperor Ishida was even more wrinkled and wasted than Geordie. He’d been twelve when he’d been turned and would be child sized forever. Due to the experiment the scientists had performed on him, he was missing half of the diseased blood that powered us. He’d aged during the process and had become horribly weakened as a result.

  Geordie wasn’t much older in mortal years and had been fifteen when he’d been turned. He had been undead for roughly two hundred years and was the youngest of the survivors by far, except for me, of course.

  Frost covered the rest of my kin as well. It distorted their faces and coated their clothing. Every single one of the twenty-eight other survivors of our species were in dire jeopardy but the two teens were in the gravest danger. Unless I found a way to land the ship and find them food, Geordie and Ishida would be the first to die. With my vivid imagination, I could easily picture everyone’s undead lives being snuffed out one by one as their bodies turned to sludge. Their empty clothing would continue to float in the weightlessness and so would their frozen, liquefied remains.

  Mentally shuddering at the thought of blundering through their frozen, watery ooze when I succumbed to sleep again, I very nearly broke into dry sobs. I probably would have if my body hadn’t been frozen.

  Enough whining already! I started at the sneer that reverberated around inside my head. Take a look around you, Natalie, my inner voice said more calmly this time now that it had my attention. What do you see?

  Unwillingly, I rotated my eyes and saw Luc floating a few feet away. His normally serene, handsome face was pinched and haggard. Deep lines grooved his forehead and grey flecked his black hair. My gaze fell on Gregor next. He was frowning as if deep in thought but there was no activity going on inside his head. All of my kin had shut down in self-preservation even before they had become vampsicles. Igor, at fifteen thousand years old, was weathering the forced starvation better than most yet the Russian had also begun to show signs of suffering beneath his icy visage.

  I swept my eyes across the rest of my friends and allies. Kokoro, prophetess for the Japanese vampire nation, had known that we would face death and darkness. Even so, she hadn’t been shown a vision that we would end up in the darkness of outer space. I had but I’d been unable to understand what it was that I’d been seeing in my dreams.

  Aventius, ex-Councillor for the French Court, had gathered his flock around him when he’d still been able to. They were still clustered around him now, as if he was somehow keeping them safe even in his unanimated state. Cristov, Aventius’ new right hand man, floated beside his leader. He had proven to be steady and reliable during our escape from the underground compound in Denver. The rest of the Japanese and European vampires were spread throughout the hold. A few had frozen together, unknowingly becoming unified in their comas. Some were face up and some were face down, all were unaware of what was happening around them.

  Again, my attention was drawn to Luc. He had been known to all as ‘Lord Lucentio’ before I had blundered into his unlife. Luc, as I’d quickly nicknamed him, had found me in my home town of Brisbane a couple of nights after I had been turned into a vampire. Luc had come to Australia in search of my maker, Silvius. I now had no doubt that fate had thrown us together. My beloved had taken me under his wing in the early stages of learning that I was Mortis. Even knowing that my purpose was to bring death to the damned, he had stayed by my side. Now we were the damned, sentenced to oblivion by the same fate that had brought us together.

  Do you want to lose Luc? My subconscious asked. Of course not, I responded miserably. I don’t want to lose any of them. After a brief pause while my inner voice searched for any signs of a lie, it finally had a few words of advice. Then I suggest you get your arse into gear and save them.

  .~.

  Chapter Two

  Drifting towards each other, my eyes touched and immediately stuck together. In a few minutes my sight would become obscured as they froze solid again. Using the optic nerves that floated behind them like tiny little arms, they propelled themselves towards the hatch that separated the bulk of the ship from the cockpit.

  I’d examined the hatch countless times in the first few days that we had been banished from Earth and had never once found a weakness to exploit. I was the strongest vampire in the ship and had only succeeded in smashing my hands down into broken shards when pounding on the thick metal hatch and the walls to either side of it. I’d healed instantly each time but had given up after Geordie had begun sobbing in distress at seeing me in pain.

  Nothing had changed since then, the hatch would still be impenetrable and I would still smash my bones if I managed to unfreeze the rest of my body and attempted to try to punch my way through it. Yet here I was, anchoring my eyes by the optic nerves on the narrow, circular hatch anyway.

  My eyeballs iced over again before I could begin my exploration. It took a few minutes to break them down into tiny particles and reform them again. Using my enhanced vampire vision, I went over every inch of the hatch, searching for flaws. Again, I came up empty. If there were any defects, they were too tiny for me to see.

  Desperate to save my kin, I called Lefty over to the hatch. Some of the cells had clumped together, making them too large to be effective. It was getting easier to break them down but it still took several minutes each time. With Lefty reduced to microscopic cells again, I sent them out to search for a way through to the other side of the hatch.

  It was a long, slow and boring process. Time weighed on me heavily and I could feel it rapidly running out for my friends. I had almost fallen into a coma again from the sheer monotony of sliding my cells over the smooth metal surface when I finally found an irregularity. My eyes floated closer to watch as the cells tested the hollow. Sliding inside, they felt their way deeper inside the hole until they came to a sudden stop.

  Disappointment set in when I realized the hole didn’t extend all the way through to the other side of the hatch. Bitter at the thought of being so close to breaking through, I wished I had a drill. Make a drill, my inner voice suggested and gave me a mental picture of my particles turning razor sharp and digging away at the metal.

  Sending a swarm of particles into the shallow hole, I set them the task of grinding away at the metal. Bit by bit, the hollow deepened. Set to autopilot, the particles drilled away, swapping over regularly to keep up the momentum. I estimated that several days passed before they finally broke through. It would have been a much quicker process if I hadn’t had to keep unfreezing myself every few minutes.

  Snapping out of a semi-doze, I realized my particles had stopped grinding away and were now floating on the other side of the hatch and waiting for another command. I couldn’t do much with just a pair of eyes and one hand
but I could at least take a look around the area. Commanding my eyes to break down, they squirmed through the microscopic hole in the hatch to join Lefty.

  Both my hand and eyes reformed as ordered on the other side of the hatch. Cupping my eyes in its palm, Lefty clumsily turned in a circle to give me some idea of what lay on the other side. The brief inspection showed me a small area that tapered down to yet another hatch. Clawing at the air, Lefty gained some momentum and bumped into the wall. Leaving several layers of skin from my fingers behind on the icy metal surface, it crawled over to the second hatch. My detached eyes examined the edges and I was relieved to see the door hadn’t been welded shut this time. A circular handle barred my access.

  Leaving my orbs to float on their own, Lefty grasped the handle but it wouldn’t budge. It would take more strength than one dismembered hand owned to open the hatch. Gaining access to the cockpit was our only hope and that meant I had to shift the rest of my body through the tiny hole in the hatch. Bit by bit, I began to break my body down and reduce it to particle form. Finally, just my head remained. I wished there was some way to take my clothes through the door but I had no control over them. They remained behind, floating peacefully while my head disintegrated.

  Funnelling my head through the hole, finally my entire body was together again. I called my eyes and Lefty over as my particles turned into a swarming mass then took the shape of my body. Instead of taking hours to reform, this time it happened in seconds. Whole again, I studied my hands in amazement. The last time I had tried to rebuild my body from tiny molecules and atoms, it had taken a whole day. You’d been badly injured that time and had to heal everything from scratch, my inner voice reminded me. This time I had been reduced to microscopic particles at my own will so maybe that was why I’d reformed so quickly.