Death Deceives: Book Three (Mortis Vampire Series) (13 page)

A reporter came on and the picture of me shrank and was moved to the side. “I repeat that this…woman is extremely dangerous. If you see her, do not approach. Call the number below and
the military will take action.” A phone number flashed up on the screen in bright red letters.

I wondered how many people around the country were reaching for pens and a scrap piece of paper to jot the number down on. Feeling
the others staring at me incredulously, I kept my eyes on the screen.
Well, it can’t get any worse than this,
I thought
.
I found out almost immediately that I was wrong about that as another video began to play.

This one had been
shot from the helicopter that had been hovering over us as we’d battled the imps. The reporter spoke off camera. “This footage was taken by a military helicopter last night.” It was a nice, clear video of Gregor, Igor, Luc and I rushing towards the imps while Geordie fired Igor’s crossbow from a distance.

I watched in fascination as the imps piled on top of me. A couple of minutes later, the monster’s heads exploded and they were thrown away to land in a rough circle. The camera zoomed in, capturing my face as I glanced up at the light. “As you can see,” the reporter went on, “this is the same woman in both videos. Again, we urge you to call the number below if you see this person.”

Muting the TV, I reluctantly turned to see how my companions were reacting to the footage. ‘Stunned disbelief’ would come closest to describing their expressions. Luc shook his head slowly, lost for words. Igor’s mouth was open but nothing was coming out. Gregor clenched his hair with both hands, desperately trying to think of a solution to this unsolvable problem. Geordie’s lips trembled for a few seconds then he broke down, laughing hysterically.

“
How can you find anything funny about this situation?” Igor growled at the teen. For once, he didn’t reach out and land a blow on the back of his apprentice’s head.

Gathering himself, Geordie managed to control his laughter long enough to explain his hilarity. “After
tens of thousands of years of keeping our identity secret from humans, Natalie has managed to alert the entire world about our existence in the first six months of becoming one of us!” He howled with laughter again but none of us joined him.

I
t was possible that the army might have come up with an explanation for the five of us fighting the imps and surviving. However, the video of me munching on the soldier blew any chance of vampires remaining secret now. I said what the rest of our small group were all thinking. “I am totally screwed.”

We all heard faint screams in the distance at the same time.
They were followed by a blood chilling roar that couldn’t possibly have been made by anything native to this planet. I’d never heard anything sound so hungry and at the same time so evil.

“I think we’re all screwed,
chérie
,” Geordie said solemnly. The town we’d chosen to use as our base was under attack.

Ever practical, Igor outlined our choices. They were limited to two: “Do we run or do we stay and fight?”

My answer was to draw both of my swords. A dragon graced one of the shiny silver blades and a lion had been etched into the other.
I hoped I would do Ishida proud with the weapons he’d gifted me with. “I’m going to try to help the humans.” The thought of running away without trying to stop the coming carnage didn’t even enter my head. Ok, maybe it did for a second or two but I ignored it.

“
Where you go, I go,” Luc said firmly and I flashed him a grin.

Igor grimly pulled a machete from his belt, wordlessly telling us
that he wasn’t going anywhere. Gregor shook his head at his own folly then opened his tweed coat to reveal the axe he’d stashed inside. Geordie, plainly terrified, fumbled Igor’s crossbow across his narrow chest and accidentally shot a bolt into the wall. I snorted out a laugh then we were both giggling. There was a good chance that most of us were about to die and I had to let off the tension somehow. Even I couldn’t fight hundreds of imps without suffering injuries. My friends were nowhere near as resilient as me. I would try to save as many humans as possible but I was also going to watch out for my team.

I might lose them all right now,
I thought as first Igor then the rest of us filed out of the room. If they died and I was the only one remaining, I resolved to hunt down the First and do my best to tear him apart with my bare hands. These were the only friends I had and they accepted me for who and what I was. Before meeting them, I’d been on my own for far too long and didn’t want to return to a state of solitude again.

Watching
multiple news reports of the carnage the imps left behind after sweeping through a town didn’t prepare me for being in the centre of one of their attacks. Wails of terror, shrieks of pain and the primordial roars of the First’s offspring surrounded us as we sprinted out of the hotel lobby and onto the street. Humans fled past on foot, blindly following each other in their panic. Some drove, holding the steering wheel with panicky tightness as they barely managed not to mow their fellow townspeople down. Even as we watched, an unfortunate man detoured from the footpath onto the road. A terrified woman somewhere in her eighties mowed him down. I wasn’t sure she even noticed the tyres bumping over him.

“
There is no use confronting the beasts head on,” Gregor decided. “Not when hundreds of them are attacking the town.” From the roars and multitude of heavy, thudding footsteps that were rapidly drawing closer, I thought he might be correct in his assessment of their numbers.

“
Perhaps we should attack them from the flanks and from behind,” Luc suggested.

Gregor
stumbled back a step when another flood of fleeing humans streaked past. “We will have more chance of success if we do.”

“He means
there will be less chance of us dying straight away if we perform sneak attacks,” Geordie said to me out of the side of his mouth. I nodded in agreement. That had been my interpretation, too.

“
Quickly, into the alley,” Igor urged and gestured for us to follow him. We were all wearing dark clothing, which helped us to blend in with the shadows. That reminded me of my latest dream and I turned a suspicious eye on my four silhouettes. They were still acting normally and my unease lessened slightly.

Keeping to a fast jog, Igor wound his way through the darker s
treets until we found an isolated bunch of imps. An even dozen of the monsters were herding a group of humans back towards the direction the imps had first come from.

Exchanging looks, we silently
agreed to attack. The small noises we made as we approached were covered by the frightened sobbing or terrified screaming of the food. I reached the first imp and remorselessly stabbed him in the back. He went down with a quiet gurgle. A heavily pregnant female imp turned to see what had happened to him. My sword went into her eye and she also went down.

Finally aware that they were under attack, the remaining ten grey
imps turned to engage us. Luc and I did most of the dispatching. I could have taken them all down myself but it was always good policy to share. Blocking clumsy blows, Luc and I chopped them all down until none of them were standing.

Showing a streak of ruthlessness that didn’t surprise me at all, Igor knelt
beside the pregnant imp. Her grotesquely swollen stomach bulged as the unborn foetus inside her struggled to get out. Sensing danger, the baby gave a muffled roar that was cut off when Igor plunged his sword into its dead mother’s stomach.

Geordie made gagging noises when his
mentor hacked the baby imp to pieces. Looking away, I also resisted the urge to heave. No matter how long I remained unalive, I hoped I’d never become used to seeing horrors like that.

A timid female voice addressed us in Russian. “Are you going to kill us now?” We turned around to see some of the human cattle hadn’t taken the opportunity to flee. A teenaged girl with tears still spilling down her face had asked the question.

“Of course not,” I replied in English. “We’re rescuing you.”

“But aren’t
you the woman from the news?” a shaken man in his fifties asked, switching to English for my benefit. He cradled his left arm in his right. Blood from a long cut had soaked his sleeve. “Aren’t you the person we keep seeing on the news?”

To buy time to think of an answer that wouldn’t traumatize them
all further, I bent and cleaned my swords on the loincloth of a dead imp. When I straightened, they were still waiting for an answer. None of my colleagues were about to step in and help me out. This was my punishment for allowing myself to be caught on film in the first place. “Look, unless you’re a seven foot tall grey monster, you’re safe from us,” I finally told the group.

“Liar,” sp
at an elderly woman. Her hair was almost pure white with only a few streaks of iron grey running through it. It frizzed out around her face, making her seem slightly crazy. “You are evil spawn from hell! You are vampires who drink the blood of innocent humans!”

Geordie gave a shrill giggle at that. “Believe
me, most of my food isn’t all that innocent.” He spoke in flawless Russian. “Anyway, all creatures have to eat to survive. At least we don’t kill our food like you do.” His tone was insultingly disdainful.

“What do you mean?” t
he timid girl queried.

“
You slaughter animals for food. Normal vampires like us hardly ever kill humans,” Geordie responded. “It’s the power-mad vampires who do all the enslaving and killing,” he said darkly. He was giving the girl a far too interested inspection. She was about my height and size and even our hair was similar. Maybe Geordie had a type and I just happened to resemble the sort of girl he was usually interested in. I had the fleeting thought that we might look like his poor long dead maker.

The girl frowned and took a long hard look at us all. “Are you saying
that you are the good guys?”

Geordie
grinned at the idea. “Not exactly, but the imps are our enemies and we are going to kill as many of them as we can.”

“We do not have time for this,” Igor growled. His machete was still dripping with black ooze and his head swivelled from side to side in search of more prey.

“Igor is right,” Gregor said. “More humans are being carried off to be food for the First and his army while we tarry.”

Luc addressed the shaken survivors. “I suggest you take a vehicle and leave this town before you are
captured again.”

With a last lingering glance at Geordie, the teenage girl turned and jogged off into the night, followed shortly by the others.
Notice how no one filmed us saving them,
my subconscious pointed out. It was my crappy luck that I’d only been caught on camera doing somewhat questionable things.

During
our search, we found and killed several more small groups of imps. Releasing the prisoners, we advised them to find vehicles and leave town. Most fled from us in terror when they recognized me. The footage that had been replayed over and over definitely hadn’t endeared me to the human population.

“Where is the gratitude?” Geordie grumbled when a released captive spat
at him before fleeing. The impressive wad of saliva landed a few feet short and had been in no actual danger of hitting him.

Gregor
clapped the kid on the back. “It’s not easy being the good guys.” He winked then stiffened abruptly when he glanced past Geordie. “I think it is time for us to beat a hasty retreat,” he said quietly.

I
peered past our youngest member and saw our newest threat. Instead of running through the streets, roaring savagely, a large group of imps was attempting to sneak up on us. I counted roughly forty almost identical heads and orange pairs of eyes. Now that I was aware of them, I heard their shuffling feet and the clinking of the weapons they’d picked up during their attack. Most of their armaments were long knives or meat cleavers.

“Our retreat has just been cut off,” Luc
advised us coolly. I spun to see another similarly sized group of eerily silent monsters creeping up on us. I searched in vain for a convenient alley that we could duck into to escape from the coming ambush.

Igor assessed our situation and pointed at an apartment building across the street. “
Quickly, let’s get inside. The less room they have to move, the harder it will be for them to pick us off!” He bolted across the street and burst through the door without bothering to stop and open it. All humans in this area had already fled and the building was empty as we pounded up the stairs to the first floor.

“Luc and I will hold them off,” I said over my shoulder as I
stopped on the first landing.

“We will
head upwards and search for an exit,” Gregor replied and hurried after Igor and his apprentice.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, Luc and I waited for the
small horde to attack.