Standing Before Monsters (Vorans and Vampires) (33 page)

Shedu shook his head at the girl and added, “We can pull away the spirits of evil creatures and it is easiest from the undead. A living creature like you are is much more difficult to remove the spirit from and, of course, we do not sense any true evil from you. It is why I didn’t allow the attack on Nick’s coven, since I didn’t truly feel any evil in them and, though I am unsure just why, they felt more alive, nearly human.”

Nick looked over Shedu’s shoulder as the third kasha loped along the sidewalk towards them. While they weren’t completely alone on the street, few people were shopping here anymore. Some sat on stoops or overhead on balconies of the apartments overlooking the street enjoying the nice spring weather. Unfortunately moving in on the closed store, especially in daylight had the possibility of being noticed.

“Something feels wrong,” Alad said straight off. “I smell blood and it smells old. Some even smells rotten like it has been decaying for days. There is a little that is fresher as well, but the smells all make me believe that there has been a big slaughter inside.”

Shedu frowned and asked aloud, “Did we take too long or somehow reveal that we had found their nest? Maybe the vampires cleared out after killing their stock of victims?”

Nick closed his eyes drawing on his radar like sense. The feeling of the werewolves and kasha close to him and the gray feeling of dozens of humans inside the buildings and on the walks came to him vividly. Cars passed by with more people inside; and he could have pointed to each even with his eyes closed or walked into the street managing to avoid each vehicle because of those inside. With all that precision, he could feel nothing in certain buildings.

As a group, the seven of them walked the sidewalk and waited for the light to change to cross. The storefront looked quiet as one would expect. While most of the boards appeared untouched, Nick’s acute vision noted a couple places where plywood was loose or a few boards had been spread to let someone inside through a window.

Frowning at the lack of lights in his mind, Nick said, “I don’t think anyone is in there, no one alive anyway.”

The others looked at him questioningly, but no one said anything to dispute his impressions. With the smell of old blood coming from the direction of the building and Alad’s previous report, they would all suspend judgment until they were inside and would remain ready to defend themselves as well.

Pushing in through the easiest point, they found a piece of plywood which had been separated from the window it protected and the glass was broken out as well. Vampires wouldn’t care about the temperature of their lair so a broken window was nothing to them. Neither cold nor heat could truly bother the undead very much. If they kept humans for food, they had cared little for the conditions they maintained for them as well.

The front part of the old store was darkened, but the sunlight coming in through the slat boards allowed some vision for the first twenty feet or so. Nick glanced around and thought that this had been a furniture display area near the front. Old couches and chairs, wood furniture for bedrooms and the rest had all been abandoned. The ceiling was high as well and the voran checked high and low just in case.

At the back wall, the lighting was much worse, but their sense of smell found the first of a couple dead vampires. Taking a flashlight from Charlotte’s back pack, one of the few they had brought along since Nick and Logan would do their best to keep the women behind them out of harm’s way. It wasn’t just being chivalrous, Nick was highly trained and Logan’s strength was paired with speed making him quite lethal as well. As werewolves, Kate and Charlotte could fight well enough, but they weren’t experts and would just cover them as the second line. A backpack could be dropped by them, so they were the ones with the gear like flash lights on their backs.

Seeing the desiccated corpse of the first vampire; Nick, who had seen a lot in his time, was ready to be sick. Like a raisin left in the sun, the vampire’s skin had pulled in on its bones. In places, muscles had been torn free and removed. Its abdomen had been nearly hollowed out as if animals had eaten through, though such carnage seemed nearly impossible and precise.

There was also a smell that Nick couldn’t identify along with the rest.

“What is that smell?” the voran asked even as Charlotte and Kate backed away trying to get their breath in a room filled with the smell of death.

Shedu pulled his shirt over his nose and said, “I think this is the work of reapers.”

The second body was closer to a door torn from all but its bottom hinge. Hanging askew, the door was still half opened into the next room. Darker than the previous area, there were no windows, a perfect
place for vampires to gather and the smell of blood everywhere told him that they had. Six more similarly drained vampire corpses with various levels of flesh removed were found here. A stairway leading both upstairs and down into a basement was discovered here also.

Despite the smell, Nick tried to sense any living or undead things within the building or nearby. Though he felt nothing above, the voran thought he sensed something very faint below them.

“I don’t sense anything above us, but I think there may be a survivor below. I only sense a faint impression so they are either weak or have found a way deep enough to mask their aura fractionally. Maybe Logan and Kate can join Alad upstairs. I don’t think that there is anything to fear here by day, unless someone calls the police on us.”

Shedu nodded to Alad and the man started to move towards the stairs leading up. Nick added, “Whoever returns first should start using silver to get rid of the evidence. We don’t need civilians wandering in and discovering a horror show or reporting them to the police.”

They all nodded. A brief discussion about using his silver sword or the silver nitrate spray ended with him leaving the blade buried in the chest of a corpse which began to burn away with the touch. He would retrieve it soon enough and still had his aura blades to kill vampires with should the voran need to fight.

Taking the lead as Shedu and Lam used their masks to stop repressing their cat forms and powers, the voran used his flashlight as he descended the stairs into the basement. Darkness remained a constant and the smell of blood. Scattered within the basement, both the corpses of vampires and their human victims could be found. It was a killing room, but the original killers had found their end there as well.

Nick tried to sense the essence of the single vampire remaining alive and found that it seemed to be below them still. The search for another way out commenced. A backdoor was broken and may have been the initial break in point of the reapers. With all the blood, Nick and the other hunters were still unsure of how many had made it into the nest to kill the vampires. The initial guess of a dozen inhabitants had been low in fact. Just from the sweep of the first floor and those in the basement, the dead vampires numbered sixteen. Adding eight to their total and a dozen dead humans, they found similar means of execution with both species. As Shedu had warned him, a reaper didn’t discriminate between victims, though their preference was for other vampires.

A thin trail of blood disappeared under a mass of wicker furniture. The quality of the chairs was poor and much of it had been destroyed. Whether the reapers had cared to be thorough or not, this trail seemed to have been unnoticed and the voran had simply gotten lucky in catching it. With the other’s help, Nick pulled away the furniture to find a large metal grate pulled aside from an opening four by five. While not huge by any means, the shaft dropped almost twenty feet into darkness. Few things could survive such a fall without injury and less could use the opening to return. A vampire might be one of them.

Nick was the only one with the ability to slow his fall among them. From science fiction, the voran could most closely call it telekinesis though it was limited to his body and lessening the pull of gravity on him. Using his power, the voran went first to scout ahead. The others would have to risk the drop, which was easy enough for either race, but returning they would have to scale their way back up. If it was a dead end, there was no point making them go through the effort.

Landing in complete darkness that not even vampires or werewolves’ eyesight could have navigated, Nick panned the flashlight around looking at his surroundings. Though attached to the sewers and with their scent, he had to guess that this was some form of hidden room. Like something left over from the depression era and the mafia wars, he wondered if this was similar to the tomb they had once excavated expecting to find hidden mafia treasures back in the eighties. It had ended as a joke for the reporter’s career, but in spite of finding nothing important, the odds were that it had simply been abandoned as opposed to being used for a tomb or vault.

This room held a similar feel and it looked like there might be enough room leading in and out that someone desperate might have used the sewers to escape the killing rooms above him. Using his radar, the voran sensed the weak presence and it was inside of the room. There was blood here, though in smaller amounts than above. He guessed that some of it had flowed into the shaft from the basement as it functioned as a drain as well.

Panning his light on the ground around the landing, he noted both bare foot prints and those of shoes. Those with shoes made an almost straight line for the sewer line and disappeared in the sluggishly flowing waste water. Following the bloody prints of bare feet, Nick found piles of trash piled anywhere from a few feet to nearly the ceiling by the far wall.

Nearly covered by the trash, he spotted bare, white skin. Pulling a garbage bag away, a girl struggled to rise and run. Barely alive, Nick could see both bite marks on her neck and scratches on the bare girl. She was also brown with dried blood that she had crawled through or perhaps had been sprayed on her during the killings.

“P-please d-don’t k-kill m-me,” she begged ending her struggle to rise as the little strength she had left her.

Removing the other bags of garbage the girl had probably pulled over her to avoid being found, Nick noted her bare upper body. Her shirt gone, Nick noted more bite marks near her wrists and the upper forearm where blood was often taken in hospitals. One of her breasts had the marks of a vampire’s teeth as well and her jeans were unbuttoned. Whichever vampires had abused the girl, they had considered her more than just a meal. He didn’t know if the vampires had turned her intentionally or if she had absorbed some of their blood in the aftermath of the reapers’ attack. By her extremely pale complexion and lack of strength, he guessed that she had just turned and probably never had any blood.

“Don’t worry, little one, I’m not here to kill you.” He pulled her out of the garbage and sat her on the concrete floor. It was still filthy, but compared to the garbage it was nearly clean. He held his hand in
front of her mouth and the little vampire didn’t even understand the gesture. It might be too late to stop the change as the voran had discovered was possible in victims before they turned, but maybe he could start her off on a better path than the killers that had taken her.

“You need to take some blood,” he coached her gently. Green eyes, shadowed with the flashlight on the ground, looked at him almost in tears.

“What did they do to me?” the girl asked in confusion.

“They nearly killed you, but you survived,” he answered and took his thumb and forefinger pushing her lips away to reveal fangs slightly longer than a human’s should be. “Now bite down on my hand. The blood will help keep you alive.”

“But I don’t want to bite you,” the girl replied sounding dazed and he feared that she was about to pass out. A vampire who hadn’t had enough blood could die of starvation, even those on a voran’s blood he was pretty sure though no one had tested it. For a new vampire, who had never really drunk blood, she would only last a day or two at most before dying the final death.

Sighing, he was surprised that her instincts hadn’t overridden her humanity yet. Marek had been starving when he happened upon the voran, but had fed before. This girl wasn’t even able to stand up from a lack of blood.

“Just do it so we can get out of here. You’re not strong enough to even hold onto me, let alone capable of making the jump to start climbing out of here,” he stated being a little sterner with the girl.

She was young, a teenager, and probably reasonably obedient in the face of adults. He was there to save her and someone in charge. The girl bit him hesitantly, but she broke the skin on his left hand. It was the area of his hand Nicola liked to use to feed, so he knew that it would work. He could also control the situation if the little girl got out of hand on her first feeding.

Her eyes looked up at his in curiosity and she mumbled around the hand, “You tashte shweet.”

Nodding with a smile he replied, “I’ve been told that before, now take a little more. I want to make sure that you are strong enough to get out of here.”

She didn’t get greedy as her eyes continued to look at his just waiting for the man to tell her to stop. When he did, she released and wiped at the sides her mouth before licking the extra blood off of her fingers. Picking up the flashlight, he avoided shining it directly into her face, but was able to check the clarity in her green eyes. She blinked and he could tell that the girl was more lucid.

Taking his outer t-shirt off, Nick handed it to the little vampire before buttoning her pants as it was beginning to bug him for some reason. He discovered only soft skin before he cinched the zipper as if dressing a young child. The girl had his shirt pulled on and seemed completely unabashed at his touch or the fact that she had been half naked when he found her.