I unleashed a fireball at them, hot enough to melt metal. It felled another ten, and the smell was horrific. This island was paradise, and now it was being destroyed by these foul creatures’ invasion. Their simple presence defiled the island, adding to my growing rage.
Kamila was taking a page from my book. She held her hands out and turned herself into a flamethrower, spreading her fire over the endless lines of vampires advancing from her side. They shrieked terribly as they went down, collapsing into ash, but their comrades kept coming and walked right over their smoldering remains, kicking vampire dust around in a cloud of grotesque ruin.
Zarya took a more direct approach. She couldn’t cause a tsunami, not like I could. She created spikes of living water to impale the vampire army, one by one, each spike bursting from the chests of vampires, who shared two expressions: anger and surprise. It must have been exhausting, but the vampires fell all the same. The sight was enough to terrify anyone, but none of these undead seemed to be bothered until they died. It was as if everything that made them sentient had been removed and was now replaced by pure hunger.
Tess kept firing. She was like a machine. The reports from her gun echoed from the water and from the trees, but still the vampires came on, boiling over one another like an army of ants. They marched up the beach in a chaotic tangle of limbs and hissing, a plague that only stopped in small areas where our attacks thinned the herd.
I closed my eyes. It was a dangerous move, but I didn’t have a lot of options left. The first rule of warfare was to hit the enemy where they were and not let them come to you. If the vampires were going to keep on coming from the ocean, then I had to get to them there.
I focused on the water. It was warm but not unpleasant. It was exactly the kind of water tourists come to the Caribbean to enjoy during the winter months. The only problem was, I needed it to be warmer. I needed the water all the way around the island to be so hot it boiled.
There would be consequences to this. I did my best to push any aquatic life away, but I wasn’t a cartoon princess singing to the deep. I couldn’t communicate with them. I was just a guy who had a couple of special gifts that had the ability to change the world in new and terrible ways. You know, standard stuff. Once I’d done what I could, I heated the water. Then I heated it some more, and still more after that, pouring my will into every bit of open ocean.
My head ached, and I could feel blood dripping from my nose. If Tess was right about unlimited power, then I’d found a loophole. Pain began to mount in my skull, and the blood spattered freely from my nose—and eyes. I reached a little deeper into myself, looking for what I needed.
A scream made me open my eyes. A vampire had crawled halfway out of the ocean. I couldn’t see much of him as there wasn’t a lot of light, but I saw enough. He threw his head back and screeched as his body boiled. It was a miserable way to die, and I wondered how much of my humanity I’d already lost because I felt nothing but joy at his pain.
There were more like him. I had no way of knowing just how many. All I knew was the water was suddenly foamy with black ash. It would go away with the tide, dispersing the ashes and rendering them harmless.
A thrill ran through me, but I couldn’t afford to get cocky. I’d taken out waves of vampires from the ocean, but the ones already on land were still a problem. There were hundreds of them; more than I could count with just a glance, and most of our tactics were individual.
I did my tsunami trick again, this time with the boiling seawater. It took out another broad swath of the enemy, but not all of them. And the vampires, even with their higher brain functions turned off as they were, seemed to have figured out who the most vulnerable among us was.
They focused most of their attention on Tess, who relied on a shotgun. A vampire’s claws raked across her leg as she shot him in the face. Another got her in the gut. Neither injury was serious enough to kill, but I could see her pallor as she kept fighting. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around her abdomen as a kind of bandage, since it was the worst injury. I hoped it would be enough, then the vampires closed in and I couldn’t worry about her wounds any longer.
I stood over her and unleashed hell on the vampires. I turned water and fire into blades and beheaded the creatures. I burned them, and I boiled the blood in their bellies. It wasn’t kind of me, but they had hurt one of my women, and they had to die. There was nothing more complicated about it than that. It was a visceral, primal reaction that felt good. My civilized self began to atrophy, and I let the rage drive my will forward like an avenging angel.
I made liberal use of the tsunamis too. They were effective, so long as I could keep my friends out of the line of fire, and there was something satisfying about unleashing such a destructive force against monsters who’d angered me so badly. When their ash scattered, I smiled. When their heads rolled, I laughed.
Zarya saw the water blade I’d created and made two of her own. She, too, seemed to be taking revenge. I couldn’t fault her for that. These things had hurt her personally. Of course she wanted to make them pay. Head after head bounced on the sand before collapsing into black ash.
Kamila didn’t need to resort to beheading. She was perfectly happy to stick with broad planes of fire. Some of the vampires were too strong to fall to a flamethrower, and those, she burned from the inside out, their bones exploding in repulsive, satisfying pops like grapes in a microwave. She didn’t need to stop casting flames to switch tactics either. She was just that strong, just that impassioned. I loved that about her. She was beautiful in her fury.
The vampires were reduced now, from hundreds to fifty. Fifty we could handle. Kamila and I created a massive firestorm to drive them back into the boiling sea, watching as they shrieked in unalloyed pain. A twinge of guilt caressed my senses as I smiled at the chaos. The blood. The pain.
Then they were gone.
I picked Tess up and cradled her in my arms. I wouldn’t have tolerated any objections, but as luck would have it, she didn’t offer any. She rested her head on my chest and let me carry her all the way back up to the house. Zarya and Kamila joined us, silent. We were all in shock, stunned by the horror of what we’d just survived. Around us, the sea began to calm. Birds returned, their cries of protest carried away by a cleansing wind.
We laid Tess down, and Zarya looked at her wounds. “I won’t deny this is pretty bad,” she said after a long moment. “She’ll recover, but she’s in bad shape. She needs rest.”
We all needed rest, but we didn’t have gut wounds. I kept my mouth shut and boiled some water so Zarya could tend to Tess’s injuries. Sure, Tess would recover in her own time, but she would heal faster with proper care.
We cleaned her up, stitched her wounds, and tucked her into bed. Then we cleaned ourselves up too. Daisy came up from hiding and curled up beside Tess, and we all moped for a little while. “I can’t believe we only got a week out of that plan,” I said when the silence got to be too much for me to handle.
Zarya sighed, and then she stroked my hair. “It’s more than we would have had if we’d stayed on the other island. What I don’t understand is how they created the new vampires. Where did all those bastards come from? There were at least a thousand of them. We’ll never know because someone decided to turn the Caribbean into vampire soup.”
She, Kamila, and a very drowsy Tess chuckled. I couldn’t see quite as much humor in it. “I don’t know,” I said. “It boggles my mind that they were just there, that they could just be right in our faces like that. I honestly expected we would have more time.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “They walked through the ocean to get to us. And I can’t be the only one who noticed they were… you know. Off.”
“No.” Tess closed her eyes for a second. “When a vampire is created, they tend to be hungry. It takes a while, a few feedings at least, before they remember their sentience.”
If I’d been horrified before, now I was nauseated. I covered my mouth and my nose. “They made new vampires by the th
ousands just to come and attack us?”
“They’re the bad guys, Jason.” Kamila’s words were harsh, but her tone was gentle, and she put her hand on my shoulder. “They don’t care. They don’t care about each other, and they don’t care about the ones they create. They don’t care about anything. All they care about is themselves and their demon master.”
“Malfas.” I ground my teeth. I hadn’t had any serious issues with demons before now. I wasn’t sure if I believed in them until the fight with Chilperic. I’d gone to Sunday school like most other kids in my time and place, but I took everything with a grain of salt.
Now, not only was I finding out that my Sunday school teacher’s fire-and-brimstone rhetoric had a kernel of truth, but that kernel of truth had a grudge against me personally. Awesome. Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to take that lying down. I was going to fight, and I was going to win.
I rubbed at my knuckles. “It must have been what, a whole suburb?”
Zarya lowered her gaze. “Something like that.” She lifted her head again. “But there’s nothing we could have done about it, Jason. They were going to die no matter what we did. They would have been slaughtered if they didn’t accept the Blood—”
“Wait what?” I did a doubletake. “I missed out on my Ferin 101 class. Can you fill me in a little bit? Pretty please?”
Zarya gave a little smile. “Vampirism is a choice, Jason. When a vampire creates another vampire, they drain a person to the point of death and then offer them a choice. They can drink the vampire’s blood and become a vampire themselves, or they can die.”
Kamila took up the narrative. “Most people, even the most moral, will take the blood. It’s a self-preservation instinct. When you’re at the point of death, most folks will do anything to get even a few more minutes. Don’t hold it against the people in the village for accepting. But once they’ve accepted that gift, they’re monsters. It’s part of their makeup. They don’t have a choice about evil anymore. Their soul is destroyed, and they’re never coming back.”
“I see. So they basically forced a false choice on the villagers, and then they put us into a situation where we had to kill them before they even finished their transition.”
Tess smiled in quiet pride. “I told you he was smart.”
I set my jaw. I couldn’t take pride in having the right answer. A whole suburb had been killed to get to me and mine. I was going to destroy the ones responsible for this.
33
We were going to be waiting for some time due to Tess’s injuries. She would make a full recovery, but she was going to need quiet and rest and safety. I hated to see her hurt. Not only was she a woman I loved, but I blamed myself for her injury. We could have gone to Patagonia to hunt down the ones responsible for this whole mess, but no, we’d stayed to train me. We could have stayed on Deadman’s Caye, but no, I’d come up with such a clever idea. I was so sure we were going to be safe by outsmarting the vampires.
And when shit came down, I wasn’t able to keep her safe.
I paced around the island, obsessively checking the coast for another invasion. I wasn’t stupid enough to think every vampire in creation had come to take us down and been slaughtered. No, the masterminds wouldn’t create an entire suburb’s worth of cannon fodder only to risk getting hurt themselves.
They were still out there. They’d have figured out their plan didn’t work. They would try again, with more vampires. More hungry drones looking for nothing but slaughter. More innocent lives destroyed and subverted for evil. I could deduce that in their minds, quantity was equal to quality.
I needed to finish this fight. It was my problem. It wasn’t arrogance on my part, or at least, I didn’t think it was. The vampires were the ones making it about me. Before I’d come along, they’d hated Ferin, but they hadn’t made it their mission to band together to hunt down and fight every Ferin in existence. Now they were joining together to hunt me down, by their own admission.
I knew what I had to do, but I would keep my own counsel. The last fight had left them all shaken, and as a group, we were worn thin. They wouldn’t want me to go alone, but I couldn’t let them leave Tess to fend for herself. Tess would want to come with me. Tess would be the one I’d want with me the most, but she wouldn’t be in any condition to fight for a while yet.
I needed to strike while they were still weak. Their failure meant my opportunity.
The others were used to me pacing around the island and disappearing for hours at a time, so I had a window to exploit. I used it, taking the life raft and using my power to urge the little craft forward to Belize City.
There were unique risks for me now in the city. I could be seen by the police. If the vampires had manipulated the local police force or if they were part of the local police force, I would be screwed. I found a place that sold club-appropriate clothes and changed in a bar bathroom, regretting my fashion decisions almost as much as my oncoming fight against a horde of vampires. If I survived, I intended to issue an order that our home would be free of leather pants and other fashion atrocities, but for now, I headed to the wretched nightclub to carry out my plan.
Security was light. The bouncer was so new his badge was blank, and his pallor came from makeup, not any lack of blood. He barely glanced at my ID and seemed nervous. I didn’t have any trouble getting in. I bought a drink, just like before, and no one seemed to feel anything was amiss. There was only one bartender on duty, and I thought the poor girl would be miserable once things got busy. She looked new, and her movements were uncertain.
The club filled up. I milled around until there were enough people to distract her and any other staff, and then I slipped downstairs toward the restrooms.
I didn’t know what I expected to find down there. The women and I had gotten into a fairly involved fight in that very corridor not too long ago. No one would ever guess to see it, though. The walls were freshly painted, the doorway newly rebuilt, which made a grim kind of sense. This was a place of business, and no one would expect to find signs of a recent slaughter in the bathroom hallway. I walked right past the bathrooms and toward the VIP area, guarded by two bouncers.
One of them blocked the door with his arm. “VIPs only.” He stared straight ahead.
I could feel no water in either of the guards. That made them vampires and, therefore, fair game. “Oh, but, my friend, I am a very important person.” I exhaled, and as I did, I raised the body temperature of both guards well past a thousand degrees. They collapsed into ash without a sound.
Maybe there is something to what Tess said about unlimited energy. When I first started using fire, that would have given me a grinding headache. Now I didn’t even notice the expenditure.
I opened the door to the VIP area and walked inside. I’d been this far before, but they’d repaired it after the damage Kamila and I had done. Our spot-welding job had been undone, and I walked right into the catacombs. The camera booth was unmanned. I truly had caught them on an off day.
Good. Maybe there was a chance of getting through this alive.
I crept down the dark hallway as silently as I could. I felt a little ridiculous creeping along in the dark, but I couldn’t make any other light source. I didn’t want to give myself away. Using my thermal vision wouldn’t help because vampires didn’t give off heat.
I’d thought the tunnel just went straight to Morning Star, but it turned out there were a few different corridors leading away from the main tunnel. The first one I took led to an empty cave, filled with scraps of clothing and a handful of old shoes. This might have been one of the places where they kept the villagers after turning them. The thought made my gorge rise, but I went on in silence.
I found a few more cells like that one, stinking of piss and fear. I also found the usual treasure horde of cash. The old legends about dragons sitting on piles of gold must have come from vampires, because they piled up cash like it was going out of style. Granted, it wasn’t as though they were going to spend money
on food, or clothing, or heat. I stuffed my pockets with a twinge of regret, not from the act of theft but from the origin of the money. I knew it had come from crime, and pain, and loss, but it would do no one any good moldering away in the darkness. Not after I killed all the vampires and left the place a husk.
I found another guard a little way down. This one was stronger than the ones I’d found at first. She moved fast and hit like a truck, but I was able to hit her with a shot like a blast from a smelter. She collapsed into a stinking, fetid heap. When she didn’t dissolve into ash, I kept my distance and hit her again, this time boiling the blood in her stomach. That did the trick. She dissolved in a whirlwind of dust, and I stepped over her remains without a hint of guilt.
I knew the vampires had lost a lot of men recently. They’d attacked us in huge numbers, and they’d died in huge numbers. I could live with that, but so far, my passage into the vampire nest had been too easy. I expected a diminished presence. I didn’t expect a near empty lair.
The little resistance I’d met had been laughable, and vampires just didn’t operate like this. I knew I hadn’t been Ferin very long, and my experience was limited, but vampires always had a plan.
And they had a backup plan. And they had a backup plan for the backup plan.
Since the vampires could not have sent everything they had after us, something was wrong. I needed to figure out what it was before I found myself trapped with no way out.
I considered returning to the surface and to the island. Whatever the enemy had cooked up, it could wait. I thought of living to fight another day and found the concept not just appealing, but mature.
It wasn’t arrogance. It was responsibility. I had an obligation. Sure, the vampires probably hadn’t sent everything they had at us, but they’d almost certainly sent most of what they had. They would never be this vulnerable again. If we had a shot, we should take it. All of this—the war, the running, the hiding, the fear—could be over.
Forever Young - Book 2 Page 21