Death Deceives: Book Three (Mortis Vampire Series) (27 page)

Reaching a wall of grey imps, our spy pushed his way through the milling mass. He
joined a group of other shadow possessed vampires. They were lined up before their leader, waiting expectantly.

C
lad in a tattered loincloth, the First sat on his bone throne. Surveying his throng, he noted the newest addition to his followers. As if he’d been waiting for our spy to arrive, he stood. Mutters of disgusted astonishment swept around the room behind me. Colonel Sanderson stiffened in shock at the sight of the eight foot, red eyed monster. Thanks to my visions, I was already familiar with just how hideous the First was.

This time, the First didn’t
waste time on an inspirational speech. He simply raised his clawed hands and shouted out a word. The imp shadow and I were the only ones in the room who understood his command. “Rise!” he bellowed and the vamps were instantly transformed.

H
ulking shadows were sucked deep inside, never to be seen again. In a wash of black blood, flesh and goo, a new army of imps exploded from the bodies of the possessed vampires.

Our
spy’s clothing was torn asunder during the transformation and the camera dropped to the ground. We had a few seconds to see the monsters admiring each other’s naked, slime ridden bodies before a grey foot stomped down on the camera. Then the screen went dark and the sound cut off.

Shaken, the soldiers were too rattled to say anything at first. Then the Colonel rallied himself. “How many of these creatures do you estima
te are in the cavern?” he asked the technician.

Scratching his head, the white coated man
bent over his computer. Rewinding the footage, he finally came up with a number. “It is impossible to say for sure as the footage was quite dark but I estimate there are as many as twenty thousand of the creatures inside.”

Twenty thousand?
I was aghast at the number even though I had half expected it to be high. I’d known they were breeding fast. At this rate they would overwhelm us sooner than I’d anticipated. “We have to get in there and take down the First,” I said to Sanderson. I’d seen a disturbing number of bulging stomachs as our spy had moved through the crowd. Another generation of imps was already close to being born.

“I have a plan but it will be very dangerous for you,” the Colonel said.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m pretty resilient.”
That’s a massive understatement.
There had never been anything as resilient as me before. Except cockroaches. They’d still survive long after I was finally annihilated.

“We know that bullets take them down, if we use enough of them. I was thinking
explosives might be even better,” Sanderson explained.

I waved away his concern that I could very well be blown to smithereens.
“What about the civilians that have been captured?” I could read the answer in his regretful expression even before he answered me.

“I am afraid they
will be collateral damage.” His tone reflected that he really was regretful that they would have to die.

“
You’re willing to sacrifice a few thousand humans to save several billion?” Sanderson nodded and I thought of the little girl in my dream. I’d promised her that I would get her out but that was looking less and less likely now. Sure, it had just been a dream and she would never know that I’d made her a promise. I still didn’t want to give up on the captives without even trying to get them out. “What if I create a distraction to give you enough time to free the food? I mean humans.” It was a small slip that I corrected quickly but several disturbed glances were sent my way. They didn’t need any reminders of my true nature.

“What kind of distraction
do you have in mind?” Sanderson asked.

I hadn’t really had time to come up with a plan since I’d just thought of the idea a few seconds ago. “I don’t know yet but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”

“It’ll take us two hours to reach the cavern,” he said. “Will that be long enough?”

I gaped at him in horror. “Are you crazy? You can’t attack them at night!”
The fact that he was even contemplating the idea showed just how little the soldiers knew about the imps.

“Why not?” one of the
Russian officials asked.

“Because they’re much more dangerous
when the sun is down. The imps might not be vampires anymore but they’re still nocturnal. Most of them will either be asleep or at least slower through the day.” I hadn’t seen any evidence so far that the imps needed to sleep but I was hoping they did. If not, then we might have a harder time taking them down than I’d hoped.

Thinking hard, the Colonel finally decided I was probably right. “In that case, we’ll leave two and a half hours before dawn. That’ll give us enough time to move into
position.” The soldiers in the room immediately huddled together to discuss strategy and weaponry. Drawing me aside, Sanderson spoke in a low voice. “That gives you a few hours to come up with a plan. Whatever it is, I hope it’s good.”

During the next
couple of hours, I paced up and down the room, trying to ignore the madly planning men. Finally, I decided I needed to get away from the distraction. “I’m going somewhere quieter,” I said to a Russian soldier who was guarding the door. He flicked an enquiring look at his superior, who looked at Sanderson. The American nodded and I was given permission to leave.

Taking the stairs down
to the ground floor, the stealthy footsteps of a pair of soldiers followed me. They stayed out of sight but not out of sound. Pacing up and down an empty corridor, I was distracted by the quiet conversation coming from the pair. “Will you two go away?” I called out. They immediately stilled but I could still hear them because it was impossible for humans to really be still.

“Do you reall
y think she knows we’re here?” one of the guards whispered to the other.

“Yes, I really know you’re there
,” I shouted. “I can hear you breathing and…twitching. Go away so I can think!”

After a few moments of shuffling, the
y retreated back up a floor. The stairwell door was eased shut then I heard the snick of the lock being thrown. If it comforted them to think a flimsy door might actually be able to contain me, then I wasn’t about to burst their bubble.

Alone at last,
except for the imp and four other shadows that were perpetually attached to me, I entered an empty office and sat down on a chair. The wheels squeaked in protest then quieted when I became motionless. I needed to come up with a plan that would give the soldiers enough time to evacuate thousands of humans and had little time in which to think of something. Since planning and deep thinking wasn’t my strong suit, this was going to be tough.

During the next hour, my mind remained distressingly blank. Previously, the only planning I’d ever done was to decide how I was going to arrange the dummies in my store windows. There was a lot of pressure on my scrawny shoulders and I wasn’t entirely sure they could take the strain.

“Ok,” I said to myself at last. “Pretend
that you’re a fifty thousand year old, eight foot tall monster who eats humans. What are you afraid of?”

At first,
I couldn’t think of anything. Then a memory tickled the back of my mind and a picture of a red mask floated to the surface. For reasons that I couldn’t define, the First had been disturbed when he’d torn off my black mask and saw a red one beneath it in one of my visions. How would he react when he saw me in my full red leather suit? Kokoro had suggested to Ishida that he should gift me with the suit. Maybe something had sent the idea to the prophet. Maybe that something was working through her in my favour.

Catching movement out of the corner of my eye, I whipped my head around and caught one of my shadows scratching its nose. Seeing me seeing it, the thing froze. “I knew it!” I hissed. Surging to my feet, I whirled around but my shadows moved too quickly
for me to focus on them and point out their errors. No matter which direction I turned, they slipped behind me. Sadly, they were still trying to act as if they weren’t sentient.

“Why are they still pretending?” the imp asked
me. “We all know that they have ascended.”

Going stock still, I
waited for a minute then turned in a slow circle. The shadows moved in a stealthy circle as well, always remaining behind me. “The jig is up, guys. You’re supposed to be in front of me right now,” I said and pointed up at the light. One of the shadows looked up, following my finger. “I saw that!” I cried. The culprit received a smack in the head from one of its clones.

Finally g
iving up on its pretence, one of my silhouettes slid up from the floor to the wall. The other three followed suit until they were standing side by side like a prison line up. All we needed was the victim of a crime to point out which shadow was the perpetrator. Identical in aspect, I had no idea which one was my original shadow.

“You must submit to the inevitable, Mortis,” the first shadow to stand up said in my head suddenly. It was weird to hear my own voice speaking in an alien language.

“One of us
will
possess you,” said another.

“It is your destiny to
first become a child of the First and then one of his brides,” a third pointed out.

Scratching its head, the fourth shadow jumped when it was elbowed in the side.
“Yeah, what they said,” it said belatedly.

Nodding thoughtfully, I rubbed my chin. The fourth shadow automatically copied me then cringed away when one of the others took a swipe at it. “How are you going to decide who gets to possess me?” I asked them.
As I thought, they hadn’t planned their takeover yet.

“We
will decide who gets to inhabit your body once we have disposed of that.” I followed the inky finger the silhouette pointed with to see the final imp hiding behind me.

“You mean you guys are responsible for the missing imps?”
I was appalled at the idea that they’d managed to pull this off without my knowledge. Either they were incredibly stealthy and clever or I hadn’t been paying anywhere near enough attention to my surroundings.

“Did you really think we’d let one of them take control of you?” another of my shadows sneered. “They are interlopers and must be destroyed.”

Sensing their intentions, the imp attempted to run. Unfortunately, it forgot that we were attached by the feet. Tripping, it sprawled on its face and the other shadows attacked. Moving back out of the way, I tried to follow what was happening but they merged together into a mass of heaving blackness.

Finally, they pinned the imp down.
One of the shadows wrapped itself around the imp’s head, silencing its frantic screams. Two others held it still as the fourth oozed down towards my feet and grabbed the imp by the ankles. It tore the foreign shadow free and the imp instantly winked out of existence. One second it was there and the next it was gone.

Shaken by the display, at least I now had an answer to what had happened to the other imp silhouettes. I couldn’t say I was sorry to see them go but I was highly disturbed that I had a group of assassin shadows
to battle now.

“
Ok, you got rid of the competition, what now?” I asked them. “Are you going to flip a coin to see who gets me?”

Shuffling its feet silently, the first shadow scratched its head while the second one cut suspicious glares at the other three. It was the third shadow that reached a decision. Balling up a fist, it punched the second shadow in the face.
Three of my shadows instantly became a furious clawing, biting whirlwind. No other human or vampire would have been able to hear them cursing each other in our father’s alien language. I wished I couldn’t hear them myself. I was amazed that beings that had come from me knew such foul language.

Stepping back
further to keep out of their way, I watched in fascination as two of the shadows ganged up on a third. One grabbed it around the waist as the other bent and somehow managed to tear it free from me just like it had with the imp. Wailing in either pain or terror, the shadow immediately lost its shape and began to dissipate. Unlike the imp, this one took longer to fade.

Wisely, shadow number four had
scurried off to one side to avoid getting caught up in the fray. The other two silhouettes circled each other, looking for an opening. Knowing my time was running out before I had to face the First, I took matters into my own hands and reached for the closest of my dark clones. It began to shriek as my holy marks settled on either side of its head. Expecting some degree of pain as a consequence of unleashing the dark power, I winced when the shadow became a wispy, insubstantial ghost before disappearing completely. As far as I could tell, killing it in this manner had had no effect on me. The last time I’d unleashed the holy marks on a shadow, the diseased alien blood had oozed out of the vampire host. A dry husk had been all that remained.

Now I was left with
only two contenders for my body. The boldest, shadow number one, sized me up. We both ignored the last silhouette. It was busy cringing beneath the desk and didn’t appear to be much of a threat. Moving suddenly, my opponent leaped at me. We fought silently, punching, clawing and slapping at each other.