Death Deceives: Book Three (Mortis Vampire Series) (12 page)

A door opened
towards the far end of the hall and Igor’s shaggy head popped out. Dawn was very close when he handed the key card to Luc. “We’ll meet in your room tomorrow night,” he advised us. “It’s my turn to keep watch so you should both get some rest.”

Rest? I wish.
Luc would turn into a corpse as soon as the sun came up, reverting back to death rather than simply falling asleep. Meanwhile, I would probably toss and turn, unable to sleep due to worry and stress.

“Thank you, Igor,” Luc said with unfailing politeness. I nodded my thanks then Igor headed for the elevator.

Luc and I shared a quick shower, too keyed up to do more than wash each other’s backs. Luc was fighting against falling into unconsciousness and I was hiding yawns behind my hands. The instant his head touched the pillow, my companion was out. I lay beside him for a while, worrying about the future as I’d known I would. I was starting to wonder if we even had a future. Most likely, we would all die horribly as soon as we entered the First’s cavern of doom. A pang hit me at the thought of losing not just Luc, but all of my friends.

I can’t let them go in there,
I thought as sleep finally overtook me. There was no need for all of us to die. If someone had to be sacrificed to end the First and his horde of offspring, it should be me. After all, wasn’t that ultimately the reason why I existed?

Oppressive darkness surrounded me like a heavy blanket that I couldn’t shrug off. Turning in a slow circle, the blackness was broken by flares of orange firelight in the distance. The sight of the bonfires coupled with the unpleasant ambience was all too familiar. I had dreamed myself back into the First’s lair again.

Bracing myself for an attack,
I expected the leader of the imp army to swoop down and pull my inner imp out of me. Sensing movement at my back, I spun around. At first I couldn’t quite tell what I was looking at, it was just a jumble of movement in the darkness. Then I realized my four shadows were engaged in a fight. Slapping soundlessly at each other, they looked like little kids in a schoolyard fighting over who had the next turn on the swings.

Realizing I was
watching them, they quit fighting and immediately imitated my stance. It was far too late for that but they were trying to pretend that they hadn’t been acting abnormally. With the flames behind me, they were facing away. After a few seconds, one gave itself away by peeking at me over its shoulder.

I’d been waiting for
something like this to happen since the First had commanded my shadows to rise. Now that the moment was here, I felt cold all the way to my bones. I might only be dreaming this but my dreams had a disturbing tendency of coming true. If my shadows were becoming sentient, then I was now one gigantic step closer to becoming possessed. Dread and despair flooded through me. How could I possibly stop myself from being turned into a puppet?

Screams of torment echoed from the far side of the cavern. It
was feeding time again and a fresh batch of humans was being spitted for the roast. Knowing it was inevitable, I started drifting towards the bonfires. This time, I was floating again rather than walking but at least I had control over my direction. I caught sight of my shadows drifting along behind me. Three of them were in an elbowing match, vying for room. It cheered me up slightly that they didn’t seem to be getting along. I would have been a heck of a lot more worried if they’d been cooperating with each other.

The gigantic cavern had seemed a lot larger when it had been occupied by only a few hundred humans, vampire
s and imps. Now it almost seemed small. The cages holding the humans had grown in number and took up one whole wall of the cavern. The tents where the unpossessed vampires had once stayed were gone. A glance at the throng told me that no unpossessed vamps remained at all now. Their shadows had either ascended or they’d been turned into imps. A quick count told me there were only a couple of hundred possessed vamps left.

Thousands of grey skinned
imps stood or crouched in ragged rows, waiting to be fed. The possessed vampires had been relegated to kitchen duty since they no longer had anyone left to order around. They had ceased their usual useless posturing and grandstanding and had become subservient to the creatures they themselves would soon become.

E
ven with her shadow using her as a puppet, I recognized the white-blonde hair of the Comtesse. Looking through her hulking shadow to the form beneath, I grinned nastily at the bedraggled vampire’s appearance. Her once beautiful golden gown was now dirty and torn. Human blood stained the expensive fabric. She’d lost her shoes and tiny, bare white feet shuffled in the dirt as she reached for a new human snack.

I’d cut off her left hand the night I’d broken Luc free but it didn’t
seem to impede her at all. She grabbed the man one of her former underlings shoved forward and tucked him beneath her stumpy arm. Taking a metal rod that another lackey offered, she rammed it through the guy’s head. His screams halted instantly and she fed the pole through until it exited him through the far end.
It could have been worse,
I thought almost distantly while fighting down the urge to dry heave. Yeah, she could have started at the other end.

Working feverishly, the former members of the Court roasted humans and handed the cooked remains to the waiting army of imps.
How the mighty have fallen,
I gloated
.
Only a few days ago, the Comtesse and her fellow Council members had ruled the European vampire nation. Now they and their glittering courtiers had been reduced to being slaves for the First’s offspring. I couldn’t conceive of a more fitting end for the praying mantis.

H
elpless to resist, I skirted the bonfires and floated into the shadows beside the caged humans. All had been stripped of their clothing and of their dignity. Some had sunken to the ground in defeat, staring into space with blank eyes that held no hope. Others raged, banging their fists on the bars, screaming to be let out or begging for rescue.

My
dead heart twisted at the sight of children crammed in amongst the adults. A little girl of four or five held her tiny hands out to me through the bars. Tears welled then ran down her dirty face silently. “I’ll save you,” I whispered to her. “I promise I’ll get you out of here.” Just how I was going to accomplish that was something I hadn’t figured out yet.

Beyond the army of hungry imps, I spied the First. He sat on his throne made of human bones with
his head resting on his fist. I couldn’t be entirely sure but he seemed to be brooding.

Large red
eyes brightened when he saw me drifting through the crowd. “Ah, Mortis!” Sitting up straight, the First beckoned me closer. “You are here at last.”

“Yep,” I replied, “here I am.”
And I am sooooo not happy to be here.
More dread about what he was going to do to me welled up, making me want to gibber. I kept hold of my poise but just barely.

Throwing out his arms, he encompassed his
entire army. “Tell me, what do you think of my children?”

Turning my head, I took in the nearly identical monsters. The only thing that distinguished them from each other was that half had boobs and the rest didn’t.
A lot of the ones with boobs also had grotesquely bulging stomachs. An area off to the far right had been turned into a crèche. Young imps were in various stages of growing up from newly born to mostly grown. They fought over roasted human flesh like vultures over a half rotten carcass. “I think they’re butt ugly and should never have been born,” I said with utmost honesty.

“That isn’t a nice way to talk about your brothers and sisters,” the creature
said mockingly. Peering past me, he gave a start at the sight of my four shadows. “So, this is why you haven’t come to me in person yet.” He was disturbed but tried to hide it behind a veneer of nonchalance. “How is it that you have gathered such a collection of shadows?”

I didn’t see any harm in telling him
the truth. “I have the blood of four different vampires in my system.”

Lifting a hairless brow, the First pondered the dilemma. Well used to being different from every other vampire on the planet, I still felt like a freak under his scrutiny.
The being before me was the first of us all and I was a puzzle even to him. “Why did you not simply die when you ingested the blood of the second vampire?”

“I didn’t drink
it, it was poured directly onto my heart.”

Waving the explanation away, he scowled. “It should not matter how the blood was passed to you, you should have died.”

A shrug was my answer. “I am Mortis,” I said simply. “Lots of things don’t kill me that kill the rest of my kind.” I wasn’t about to recite the list to him. He might figure out what
could
kill me through a process of elimination.

Definitely brooding now, the First studied my shadows.
They hid behind me, cowering beneath his glare. “I am the First and I am your ruler,” he said to the pack ominously. Pointing a claw at the shadows, he stood to his entire eight foot height and towered over us. My shadows, knowing who their true master was, quailed. Instead of fighting amongst themselves, they were now clustered together in fright. “I command you to rise!” the First bellowed.

M
y shadows immediately fell back to slapping at each other again. Almost giddy with relief that I hadn’t become possessed, I glanced over my shoulder at the squabbling pack. “They’re like a bunch of naughty toddlers. I can’t take them anywhere,” I said with mock despair as I started drifting away. My silhouettes followed me, still childishly fighting for supremacy.

Sitting back down on his throne, the First
returned to brooding in earnest. “This means nothing,” he shouted at me as I ghosted past his army. “One shadow shall prevail against the others and then you will be mine!”

“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah,” I said as I woke from the dream. Luc, in the act of dressing, gave me a mild stare. “You won’t believe the dream I just had,” I said as I threw the covers back.

“Perhaps you should wait for the others to
join us before you tell me about it,” he suggested. Knowing Geordie might be seconds away from bursting into the room, I grabbed my backpack and headed for the bathroom. I closed the door just as I heard the elevator open at the far end of the hall. A shrill, familiar giggle emerged.

Luc let our friends in as I dressed rapidly in one of
my black leather suits. Luc and Gregor sat on the bed as I opened the door. Igor leaned against a wall and Geordie had taken one of the two chairs. “Good evening,
chérie
,” the kid said with a cheeky smile. “I hope you had pleasant dreams.”

“Actually,” I replied as I took the seat beside him, “
I did have a funny dream.” I described the fate that had befallen the Comtesse, Council and their courtiers. Geordie sniggered uneasily, Igor looked grave and Gregor ran a hand through his mane of hair. Only Luc appeared to be unaffected by the story. He hid his emotions well and I had no idea what he was thinking.

“I for one do not regret the fate that has befallen our leaders,”
Gregor said yet his expression remained disturbed. He was intelligent enough to have figured out the implications. If someone as powerful as the Comtesse could become the First’s kitchen bitch then none of us stood a chance of escaping from that very same fate.

“I am
glad that we are on your side,
chérie
,” Geordie said solemnly. “Otherwise, we might be in their shoes by now.”

“We’ll probably all end up in their shoes anyway,” I replied glumly.
The kid’s face fell but I wasn’t going to lie to him. We had to face reality. There was no use in pretending we weren’t in dire straits when we so very clearly were.

The TV had been turned on but the sound
was muted. A very familiar face caught my eye and I lunged for the remote control. “Oh, no. This can’t be happening,” I moaned.

“
Natalie,” Geordie said slowly after he turned to see what I was doing, “call me crazy but that person looks a lot like you.”

At first the footage was
too blurry to be certain I was watching what I thought I was watching. I could only make out that a woman with brown hair was accosting someone.

All of a sudden
, the picture came into focus and my face was displayed on national television in extreme close up. I’d been so intent on feeding that I hadn’t even seen the camera that must have been attached to the Russian soldier’s helmet.

I managed to get the sound on
but the soldier hadn’t been fitted with a microphone. “Sleep,” I read my own lips and the soldier’s head sagged, dropping the camera to my mouth. Twin fangs descended and my head lunged towards his neck. The camera showed a view of my leather clad back and the laces that held my suit together.

It was over quickly then
I sat the soldier down. The picture froze after I stepped back to take a look at my handiwork. I shivered at the cold, predatory expression on my face.
Wow, I look really evil when I feed.
Just how much had I changed since becoming a vampire? Uneasy at the question, I decided not to put too much thought into it. I’d worry about how evil I was if we lived through the next few days.