"I, Vampyre" - Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE: Ambush Down Under

 

            All five of my senses were assaulted as we landed upon arid soil on the other side of the portal; consequently, it took me a few moments to realize that we had fallen into a trap.

            It was, in fact, the middle of the night, thankfully.  The first thing my eyes fell upon was the giant sandstone rock formation, the steep side of which was less than a football-field’s-length away from us.  It somewhat resembled an immense, slumbering dragon… but this was not the enchanted land of Valeria, this was Australia.  Alarmingly, there was no sign of the ersatz star that was the dimensional portal.

            The air was hot, even in the dead of night.  It was almost summer in mid-November, here in the Southern Hemisphere.  I smelled a multitude of intriguing flora and fauna, countless animals that were in the process of rapidly fleeing this particular spot.  And I smelt… death.

            Blood was in the air, both carried and brought forth by shifting, white-streaked shadows that seemed to surround me, Adrianos, Spike, and Bellissima.  I was famished, the Hunger within fully awake and unrelentingly needy, and I could almost taste the sweet promise of blood.

            And blood had already been spilled.  I remembered Siren’s terrified-sounding scream, and I spun about, trying to locate her, shaking my head as I did so.  I saw Spike holding her hands to her ears -- dropping to her knees as one of the shadows flew past her, a look of pain on her face -- and Belli and Ad seemed similarly dazed.  There was a constant, buzzing drone, coming from… somewhere… that made it hard to concentrate.

            At last, I saw Siren, and my cold dead heart beat faster and hotter with fear and fury.  She was on the ground, about twenty yards from us… lying in a pool of her own blood, black like tar in the midnight dark.  The shadows around her revealed themselves, as they fed: Aboriginal vampires, dark-skinned, but with stark white tribal markings.  Two were feeding from her outstretched arms, one suckling on each wrist.  She cried out as another crawled over her prone body and savagely bit into her neck.  And a fourth was lewdly licking the skin of her exposed thigh, searching for just the right spot.

            I started toward her, eyes burning red with rage… but I, too, fell to my knees, as I suddenly felt excruciating pain between my shoulder blades.  I reached behind my back, fingers feeling the shaft of a spear, no doubt attached to a head of accursed, debilitating silver.  Bellissima toppled to the dirt before me, and I could imagine her agony as yet another of our antagonists seemed to take cruel delight from stabbing his silver-tipped spear deeper into her ribs.

            Between the severe pain of the silver-laced wound, and the continuing monotony of the odd, maddeningly discordant tone, I could not think straight… I couldn’t do anything.  I felt fangs plunging into the back of my neck, scraping across my spine, drawing the essence out of me, and I knew I didn’t have much to give.  It wouldn’t take long to drain me -- to end me.

            Only Adrianos was left standing, and he spit out a clump of coagulated blood as a dozen or so of the shadowy undead surrounded him.  Ad removed his suit jacket and tossed it aside.  I felt an ironic smile split my face, even as I clawed frantically at my tenacious tormentor… even in his weakened condition, Adrianos was still Vampyre, and I knew that he still had quite a lot of fight left in him.

            After all, I had once been on the receiving end of it.

            I watched as the circle of our vampiric enemies collapsed, sparking Adrianos into a blur of motion.  He grabbed the most headstrong of the Aborigines by the ears, twisting violently, snapping his foe’s neck and corkscrewing the head clean off.  Two on either side of Ad backed off momentarily, but three more were charging him from behind.

            Abruptly, a pair of deep-crimson wings exploded from Adrianos’s shoulders, shredding the back of his dress shirt.  The appendages looked sickly and withered, and I doubted that he would be able to fly (or even just glide) with them… but they served their purpose at that moment, buffeting the attacking vamps backward, one of them tripping and falling down.

Adrianos whirled around, deftly disarming one of the flanking vampires and appropriating his spear in the same movement.  Ad broke the spear in half over his knee -- he hurled the silver-tipped half at the spear’s previous owner, skewering him through the face, and then plunged the jagged end of the makeshift stake into the heart of the fallen vamp.

As Adrianos continued to wreak havoc on the Aboriginal Kindred, his full martial-artistry on devastating display, I noticed a furtive flash of red on the periphery of my now-blurry vision.  At first, I thought it might be Bellissima, recovered and on the move… but Belli was still writhing on the ground nearby, wrestling in a deadly dance with her murderous counterpart.  Spike’s chest was smeared with blood, and she groaned as a vampire with white face-paint in the shape of a skull sucked viciously from her punctured breast.  And Siren had fallen still and silent -- deathly silent -- as the quartet fed on her like vultures.

Then, the background drone grew louder by tenfold, like the buzzing of millions of brain-devouring insects.  Thinking, fighting, resisting became impossible.  Spike toppled over backwards, her mad flailing against her attacker growing ever-weaker.  Bellissima cried out as she lost her own battle, the fangs of her foe sinking into her neck like twin daggers.  Even Adrianos was becoming exhausted, and the mob of vampires overwhelmed him, biting and clawing and spearing.  All I could see was colors… sable and ivory, shades of gray… all trending relentlessly toward a final, fatal black.

Yet… there was still that fleeting slash of scarlet, that thin red strand, like a tenuous lifeline.  There was a guttural shout… an answering, feminine laugh… and the mind-numbing sound of the didgeridoo (for that’s what it had been) was mercifully silenced.

In an instant, my full faculties and enhanced senses returned.  I flexed my back muscles, wincing at the fresh pain of the spear-tip, doing a quick calculation of my own internal anatomy.  Gritting my teeth in preparation, I threw myself backward with all my depleted strength.

The butt-end of the spear struck the ground, causing the serrated head to thrust forward, emerging from my chest just below the breastbone.  It hurt, better believe it, and it shredded my deflated lung… but, as a 300-plus-year-old vampire, I wasn’t too big on breathing anymore.

I wrapped my hands around the shaft of the spear, pulling it the rest of the way through my body as I reverse-head-butted the vampire still stubbornly attached to my neck.  The leech of a vamp detached with a blood-dripping ‘smack.’  I rounded on him, plunging the business-end of the spear into his heart, thus ending his foul existence.

My friends were rallying around me, likewise free, like a spell had been broken.  Adrianos emerged from the teeming vamp-pile, all-but-decapitating one with a brutal roundhouse kick and stopping another cold with a targeted poke to a precise pressure-point.  Bellissima rolled over on top of her enemy, unleashing a piercing battle-cry as she filched the hunting knife from his belt… and then proceeded to cut his face and torso to bloody ribbons.

Spike started chanting, and I had the good sense to back away a bit.  “Hold your fire,” I whispered, grinning, knowing what was coming next.  “Keep it burning bright…”

The skull-faced Aborigine was soon on fire, then dead, and then Spike telekinetically hurled the flaming corpse across the scrubland.  It landed at the feet of a nearby vampiress, the flames illuminating her graceful form… one who was standing over another corpse, holding a broken didgeridoo in her hands, with long reddish-orange hair that hung down over her flimsy scarlet dress: Aussie Donna.

            I smiled fondly at Aussie D, but she didn’t appear to have seen me yet.  And this battle was not yet over.  We had nearly evened the odds, but there were still an unlucky thirteen Aboriginal vamps left.

            The pair who had been slurping on Siren’s wrists pulled away, and charged after Bellissima.  The third ripped his fangs out of her leg and must have noticed the furious gaze I cast his way, because he came sprinting right at me.  The fourth was still gnawing on Siren’s neck… but ceased as her eyes popped open, lighting up his suddenly fearful face with a bluish-green, Glamorous glow.  Then I heard her voice, vexingly faint and weak, but with her usual unruffled self-confidence:

            “I believe you took something that belongs to me.  I’d like it back now…”

            I saw just enough of Siren tearing the doomed vamp’s throat open to know that she was going to be fine -- for now, anyway -- so I turned my full attention back to my attacker.  I backed up, beating a strategic retreat… and soon felt a shapely bottom pressed against the backs of my thighs, and long hair pleasantly prickling the nerves of my neck.

“So,” Bellissima said, a wry smile weaved into her words, “you again?”

“Hello, Bellissma,” I replied, shaking my head in bemusement, as time seemed to rewind and replay itself.  I paused a beat as the riled-up clan of Aborigines closed in.  “That doesn’t really seem…”

Adrianos interrupted me with a painful-sounding cough, as he backed into us as well, forming the third point of a defensive triangle. “If you two are done flirting,” he said, grimacing, “we have some unfinished business here.  ¿Me entienden?”

Belli nodded, her fine hair tickling up and down the back of my neck.  I wondered if she had spied her ‘sister’ yet.  “Si, querido… we understand.”  She glanced back at me, her blue eye piercing me like the silver spear had.  “Nevik, you once said that you’d stopped fighting your ‘inner-demons’… that you were on the same side now…”

I nodded dumbly, trying to recall when I had said such a thing.  And then I remembered… the battle with the great dragon, Bahamut, the first time that the five of us -- Spike, Bellissima, Adrianos, Aussie D, and me -- had all fought together.

“If that’s true…” Bellissima continued, hesitating, as if she wasn’t sure she should give voice to her next words, “we could use a little demonic intervention right about now…”

I was astounded, as my heart skipped a beat.  Bellissima had always feared my demon-form (and for good reason, no thanks to a fateful night atop a certain Cathedral), but now she was effectively giving me the thumbs-up to use it, to embrace it?  I felt the Hellfire flare in my veins, my heart rebooting and beating strong.

“Ha!  These cretins aren’t worth it,” I said.  As if to corroborate my assertion, a jagged lightning bolt arced down from the cloudless, moonlit sky, flash-frying one of the remaining vamps bearing down on Adrianos.  Ad still had access to one of his more formidable abilities, apparently… but a violent shudder passed through him, and I saw blood dripping out of his nose.

“Adrianos… did your ‘man’ Renfield put my weapon where I asked?”

“Of course.”  Ad growled out his reply, jerking his head toward the still-distant Siren with obvious concern.  “He’s infallible.  If you ordered it done, it was done.”

In my experience, there was no such thing as ‘infallible,’ be you human or vampire, android or other.  But now wasn’t the time to quibble or quarrel.  I rent open a new ether pocket, envisioning the exact look and location of the desk in Ad’s study.  The scribbled-upon scraps of paper, with the names of the erstwhile Heirs to the ‘Council, the Scions -- that old memory stirred… “V”… V… Vo… the Scion I once encountered, once fought when I was still a human ‘Slayer, it was Vo… something… -- and my whip, Kindred’s Bane, coiled neatly in its center, the holy-symbol grip dangling just-so over its edge.

My right hand sizzled painfully as I pulled the ‘Bane out of the ether-fold, and I belatedly realized that I had failed to don my protective leather glove.  Ah, well… what was the worst that would happen, I scarred my blackened palm even more?  Undeath’s a b***h, and then you don’t die.

One of the undead Aborigines didn’t like the look (and/or repulsive smell) of the whip, so he turned tail, leaping at Spike’s blind side instead.  Spike sensed his charge, and she turned, fire flickering at her fingertips… just in time to hear an echoing KEE-RACK, the vamp falling to the ground in two pieces as the ‘Bane cut clean through his waist.  Spike pulled her foot back, and then booted his head away from his upper-body like she was kicking a soccer ball.

We grinned at each other as I pulled the whip back, but then we both pointed behind each other.  Spike turned to face the vamp that was misting into solid form close at hand, her talons flowing and lengthening like quicksilver.  She stabbed all ten fingers into multiple fairly important parts of the vampire, and he fell, truly dead.

In the next instant, I turned to see what Spike had frantically gestured toward.  The pair of vamps, Siren’s blood still glistening on their bared fangs, were engaging Bellissima.

I could scarcely comprehend what happened in the next few seconds.  Belli tossed the pilfered knife into the air… she unknotted Ad’s necktie from her arm… sprung forward, her streak of red hair dissolving into her red Mist Form… passed between the suddenly-confused vamps, coalescing just long enough to bind their arms to each other with the tie… turned to mist again, thus dodging the frantic swipes of their weapons… then rematerialized again, catching the knife just in time to perform an impromptu, roadrunner-fast dissection of the two.

The seven that were left went down quickly, if not quietly.  The last that had dared to feed on my dear Siren must’ve had a thing for femoral arteries, because he made a clumsy move for mine.  I took a significant degree of pleasure from tilting his head back like a PEZ dispenser, and thirstily slurping up the blood that gushed forth. 

I looked up from my sudden snack and watched with wicked glee as Adrianos cleaved his upturned palm like a blade through the left side of an Aborigine’s torso, presumably cutting his heart in half.  His compatriot sprouted brown, bat-like wings, and made as if to fly off in full retreat… but Ad took a superhuman leap, grabbing the vampire and tearing deeply into his neck with his fangs as they both tumbled back to earth.

I took another long, noisy drink from the fountain of blood, and then looked the other way.  Bellissima, Spike, and Aussie Donna were corralling the last four, deranged-looking vamps.  Aussie D bellowed a friendly “Oy!” and waved when she finally saw Bellissima.  Spike also waved her hands… which resulted in the somewhat-less-friendly crashing together of three of the vamps, their bodies fatally fusing together into a largish, fleshy mass.

            The last Aboriginal vampire left let loose an insane-sounding scream, and ran, sprinting like mad across the rocky brushland -- at Siren, out of all of us.  Newly infuriated, I shoved the now well-dead corpse aside and again grabbed the Kindred’s Bane.

            However, a different kind of whip beat me to it.  At least a dozen vibrant green vines -- serrated with nasty-looking thorns, looking like they belonged in a tropical rainforest rather than the Australian Outback -- erupted from the soil, ensnaring the batty vamp and slicing into him like buzz-saws as they pulled him to the ground.  His eyes bored into mine, until the last of his unlife was squeezed out of him.

            “G’day, Nevik,” came a voice from behind me.  I dropped the ‘Bane, almost guiltily, and turned to see Aussie Donna standing there.  She tried to smile at me, I believed, but her lips refused to cooperate.  Lips I had once loved to kiss, for many years… years ago.  Another continent, another ex-girlfriend.

Bellissima bounded over and enveloped Aussie D in a bear-hug.  Although not related by ancestry -- human or vampire -- they fancied themselves blood-sisters, a girlish mutual conceit.  And Spike was poking curiously at the stinking mass of bloody protoplasm, as if surprised that her magic had caused such a thing to happen.  I took that opportunity to jog over to where Siren was now crawling on the ground on her hands and knees.

            I heard her voice in my head: ‘Where is it…?’  “Where is it!?” she repeated as I drew near, aloud and more urgently.

            “Where’s what?” I asked, more concerned about her well-being after being attacked than whatever trivial thing she’d apparently lost.

            “My necklace!” Siren answered, shooting a thoroughly unfair glare of irritation up at me.  “I… I need it…”

            I looked around then, but not at the ground; I was acutely worried that we hadn’t seen the last of the vampiric Aborigines.  My ears twitched at a distant sound, and I wondered if it was another bewitched didgeridoo.

            “Siren, forget about it…”  I recalled the necklace she’d had on earlier.  Gold chain, with an opal gemstone, a gift from Draconus.  Didn’t seem terribly fancy, either… I would have figured Drac for more of a platinum-and-diamonds sort of guy.  “We need to talk to Aussie Donna and get out of…”

            “I need it!” Siren insisted, and abruptly her strength fled her as she fell chest-first to the dirt.  I knelt down to help her, but then suddenly felt myself being pushed out of the way by… well, who else?

            “Dani,” Adrianos whispered, rolling her over with the utmost care.  “Daniela…” He brushed dirt and dried blood from her face.  He had her opal necklace in his hand, naturally.  She smiled up at him.

That was my cue to leave.

            I walked slowly over to the remains of the last vampire to die.  The vines slid back into the ground as I approached -- like they were retreating from me, I mused bitterly " and a tiny scroll of brownish-yellow parchment next to bloody, tattered clothes caught my eye.

            I picked up the bit of parchment, carefully and warily unraveling it.  It was a contract for a vampiric bounty… with a name written on it that again stopped my heart:

            Daniela “Siren” Obermeier

 

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