A Shade of Vampire 23: A Flight of Souls (14 page)

T
he two ghouls
closest to me finally closed the gap. They shot forward and gripped my arms before dragging me down toward the tunnel with such speed that I almost missed Lucas being caught. Almost. I caught a glimpse of him in the corner of my eye, in the clutches of a ghoul who’d grabbed hold of his neck. Kailyn was already being dragged toward the tunnel in front of me. The ghouls escorted the three of us along the canal and back through the main door. As we zoomed along the winding tunnels and then headed downward, I knew exactly where we were headed. It wasn’t long until we reached the coffin chamber.

I caught Lucas’ expression, a mixture of sheer dread and terror.
Dammit!
I wished so hard that he had not volunteered and somebody else had stepped up in his stead. This would only be my second visit here, but for all I knew, this could be his last.

The ghouls milled about the chamber excitedly, lining up three coffins in a row. They flipped open the lids and wrestled us each inside. My coffin’s lid slammed shut, closing me off to the world outside. Lucas was in the coffin next to me, while Kailyn was on his other side. Kailyn screamed, Lucas grunted, and I was already expecting the gnarled hand that emerged through the lid of the box, clamping around my head.

I
thought
that the last time had been unbearable but this… this was ten times worse. The first time had been visions of the worst kind of fantasies imaginable, which had become my reality for all those hours I’d remained in the coffin, but none of the visions had linked back to the reality that I had known all my life. The only connection had been the people I loved.

This time, however, it was totally different. Scenes from my actual life replayed in my mind, all the things that I wished to forget, blasting through my mind in more vibrant color and vivid detail than I had ever experienced in real life. I was sure that I was being tortured by a different ghoul this time; perhaps they each had their own particular preference of how to torture a person.

I relived every second of the most painful times of my existence in slow motion, lurching first to my parents’ penthouse, where I’d shot from my seat at the scent of blood on the porch. Grabbing Yasmine by the neck and murdering her in cold blood. At the time, I’d been in such a daze of bloodlust that I had barely been aware of my actions, but now, with everything slowed down to a sluggish pace, everything was a hundred times more torturous. I felt Yasmine’s body grow limper and limper, heard her gargled screams as I tore through her jugular, before her final release of breath and the sudden deadness of her body.

Then I was in the submarine, rushing to the shore of holidaying humans in South America. At the time, I hadn’t even been sure how many lives I’d claimed and who they all were. Now I saw it all, every second expanded… and there… there had even been children.

No. No! I cannot take the rest. Stop!

I tried to escape the vision, but I was
there
. The experience was so vivid, I could see and hear everything, practically taste the blood flooding down my throat.

It went on mercilessly, like an ogre bludgeoning an enemy, until my mind was so thoroughly drained from being drowned in the memories I’d fought so hard to bury deep in my subconscious, I thought that I would go insane.

Then, as I felt that I could not take even a minute more, a different kind of scene trickled into my mind’s eye in slow motion. Quite different, indeed…

Two figures stood inside a large circular room with a high, conical ceiling, piled up with dusty sacks of flour. It was the inner chamber of a mill. The two figures were Lucas and a woman with large blue eyes and jet-black hair. Lucas, wearing a loose shirt and dark pants, looking very much human, had her hiked up against a mound of sacks as his mouth kneaded against hers, his hands deep within the folds of her petticoat. She returned his kisses passionately, but as his right hand hiked up higher over her thigh, she broke away.

She planted her palms against his chest, creating distance between the two of them. Her cheeks were filled with a youthful blush as she gazed at Lucas.

“Wait,” she whispered. “I need to tell you something.”

Lucas looked like he wanted nothing more than to continue ravishing her, but he paused, raising a dark brow. “What?” he asked, his voice deep and husky.

Straightening her dress, she slid down from the position Lucas had been holding her in and touched her feet to the floor. She grabbed his hand and pulled him further toward the center of the room, where she stopped, holding both of his hands in hers. She gazed intensely into his eyes before saying in a soft, unsteady voice: “We’re going to be parents.”

Her expression was a mixture of anticipation and fear as she scanned Lucas’s face for his reaction. His cheeks, also flushed like hers, became deathly pale, almost as pale as a vampire’s.

Removing his hands from hers, he took a step back. His mouth fell open. “What? Y-You’re pregnant?”

She nodded, sliding a palm down her abdomen. “I’m showing all the signs,” she whispered back, even as she looked disconcerted. Clearly, she’d been hoping for a different reaction from her lover. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes widening.

Lucas choked up as he continued to stare at her, dumbfounded. There must’ve been many things going through the man’s brain, but joy certainly wasn’t one of them.

She closed the distance between them again, this time gripping his forearms. She tried to pull him down for a kiss but he resisted. The poor woman was now looking more worried than ever.

“We must marry, my love,” she breathed.

Lucas looked physically sick. “No, Anthea,” he stammered, shaking his head and brushing her away again. “No! This was not supposed to happen.”

He moved toward the mill’s exit.

She hurried after him, her expression forlorn as a lost fawn. “Lucas, what are you saying? You love me, don’t you?”

This Lucas did not answer.

“We must marry,” she said, her voice rising with despair. “We must!” Tears began to spill from her eyes. “I bear your child, Lucas. Your child!”

Her cries rang through the chamber as Lucas turned on his heel and bolted from the mill.

The scene faded out, and was immediately replaced by another.

Lucas moved through a dark, wet forest with the stealth of a vampire. The trees thinned, giving way to the edge of a cliff. A sodden graveyard lay beneath, grim and grey beneath the overcast sky. The graveyard was empty but for a lone boy with dark, shoulder-length hair. A young Jeramiah. He stood in the pouring rain in nothing but a thin cotton shirt and pants. Holed shoes gave little protection for his feet. The boy was gazing down at a white tombstone. I could just about make out a name etched into the stone: Anthea Monrov.

Pain seared through my head as the ghoul’s hand relinquished its hold. The lid to my coffin clicked open, and although my vision was hazy, I managed to make out the outline of a ghoul, standing over my and Lucas’s coffins. She had her hands above either one of them, as though she had tortured us both simultaneously. Her right hand shot out and grabbed me by the throat while her left dipped into Lucas’ box and yanked him out.

As my uncle hung by the neck, he’d become practically unrecognizable again. His eyes had lost the shine they’d started to develop and now looked utterly dead. Kailyn was lifted out by a second ghoul, and the two of them dragged the three of us not back through the entrance as I had been expecting, but through a door around the back of the coffin room, which held a small, empty pool. The ghouls thrust us inside and we were all far too weak to even attempt to rise back up again as they left us and slammed the door behind them.

I was too far gone to think much about the last two visions that I’d experienced—visions that belonged to Lucas, not me—or how I had even managed to experience them. Neither could I wonder much about why the ghouls had placed us in this small pool, all alone, rather than returning us to where we belonged. It took a Herculean effort just to focus on a single thought for more than a few seconds. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and sink… deeper, and deeper, down to the bottom of the pool…

L
ike after the
first time I’d been tortured, I knew instinctively that I had to keep my eyes open no matter what. I had to keep myself conscious. I could not sink into the deathly lull that I was fated to. I had to fight, and I had to fight hard.

As the time passed in silence, I could see that Kailyn was resisting too. Even as her eyes drooped, her expression worn and ragged, she was fighting to keep the fire alive. Watching her fight the same battle I was fighting, I found myself drawing an unexpected sense of strength from her. Her eyes locked with mine and the two of us stared intensely at each other, both of us willing and urging the other to not give in.

Whatever those ghouls did to us during that torture, it was clearly a lot more than just blasting our minds with horrid visions. It was as though they drained our minds, our very souls.

I looked past Kailyn to my uncle. His eyes were already closed.

“No, Lucas,” I tried to shout, though it came out barely louder than a breath. “Wake up!”

Why I felt so panicked at the sight of him fading, and why I wanted to help him so badly, I wasn’t even sure. But he was my uncle—and a changed uncle at that—and I guessed that should be reason enough.

“Lucas,” I said again, managing to raise my voice louder this time.

He didn’t respond in the slightest. Oh, how I wished that I could shake him. I realized that my intense focus on my uncle, on willing him to return to consciousness was increasing my own strength. Increasing my determination to not fade away myself. I attempted to raise myself into an upright position. It felt like one of the hardest things that I’d ever done, which was ironic, considering that now I was a ghost, I didn’t even weigh anything. By sheer willpower alone, eventually I managed to sit up.

My show of strength seemed to rub off on Kailyn, and she too began striving to sit up. I instinctively reached my hand down to hers to help her, but of course she was on her own. She managed it, albeit in a longer time than I had taken, and now the two of us, sitting upright, set our focus on Lucas.

“Lucas,” I said, still louder. “Lucas!”

Oh, God.
Could this really have been the fifth and final strike for my uncle? Or perhaps it had only been the fourth, but had been enough to finish off his weary soul.

“Come on, Lucas!”

“He needs to wake up,” Kailyn murmured, her voice thick and sluggish. I turned to see that a glimmer of life was slowly returning to her eyes, as I guessed was the case with mine, too.

I tilted my head slightly in question.

Kailyn blinked, clearly still struggling to stay awake, before explaining in a slow voice, “Marcilla told me that sometimes, after the ghouls torture ghosts, they bring them to a back room, to their own little pond, where they wait for a few hours… and if they haven’t fully recovered by then and made their own way back to their pool, they get shifted down to a lower level to join other demoted ghosts. She warned me that if I ever got taken to this pond, I should do whatever it takes to get back to the upper levels. I should act lively in the pool and not like a dead rock, even if that’s what I feel like. Because they come round to inspect whether you’re still attractive enough to belong in their highest, most prized ornamental waters.”

I wondered how Marcilla even knew all this; after all, she hadn’t been here that long. I guessed she must have picked up the tip from another ghost, perhaps one who’d been unsuccessful in escaping after torture and forced down lower in The Underworld.

I grimaced. So those ghouls would “judge” us in a few hours… If Lucas didn’t move—heck, if he was incapable of moving—I felt certain that he would be thrust directly down to The Necropolis. His home had already been in some of the deepest levels of The Underworld, and now he seemed to be even more motionless than the other comatose ghosts who shared his pool. I doubted he could be put any deeper except for one place…

“Lucas,” I persisted. I was shouting now.

We had to leave this pond before the ghouls came for their inspection, to demonstrate that we still had life in us and deserved to be kept in the upper levels. Kailyn and I could try to get back to our pool in time and force ourselves to move around and demonstrate that we deserved to remain in one of the higher pools. But my uncle… We had to force some life into him somehow. But how could we, when he wasn’t even responding to my shouting his name?

Then my mind turned back to the last two visions that I’d witnessed—the unexpected visions that did not belong to me. Perhaps, because the same ghoul had been controlling both of our minds, some of his memories had passed through her and transmitted to me. I couldn’t think of any other way it could have happened. But whatever the case, I now had more information about Lucas’ darkest secrets and fears than ever before. My own mind was still foggy but, after fighting to keep my eyes open and then to sit up, I was better equipped to attempt thinking straight.

So if those really were Lucas’ memories… he knew all along that he had a child.
Jeramiah’s mother—Anthea—had told him that Lucas never knew she was pregnant, but perhaps she had told her son that to make him feel better. Perhaps Lucas had been still in the area as a human even up to Jeramiah’s birth, but like a coward refused to have anything more to do with his lover. And I guessed not long after that, he would have turned into a vampire and been forced to leave their town.

Whatever happened, Lucas had known of his child’s existence. And then, based on his second memory, he knew that Anthea had given birth to a boy. It appeared from that last vision that Lucas had even tracked his son down after he became a vampire, in secret, without Jeramiah ever knowing. Perhaps that had just been out of curiosity to see what had become of his child, since he’d obviously made no attempt to enter his life, not even after Anthea had died.

To think that all that time, my uncle kept Jeramiah a secret
. From his father, sister and brother. Nobody had known that he had a son. Abandoning Jeramiah was a decision that clearly tortured Lucas now.

“Jeramiah,” I said suddenly to Lucas, in a last-ditch attempt to rouse him. “Jeramiah, your son, wants to meet you, Lucas. Your son!” Jeramiah was what had gotten through to him before. Maybe it was the only thing that could get through to him now.

Kailyn joined me in reciting Jeramiah’s name, our voices echoing around the small, grim cavern. Slowly a slit formed between Lucas’s lids, which broadened until his eyes were half open. Encouraged at the sight, I began talking more animatedly. “You just need to hold on, Lucas. Uncle. Hold on. We’ll get you out of here,” I went on, even though they felt like empty words after our failed escape. “You just need to keep your eyes open and sit up.”

His eyelids remained half open, though his irises were still cloudy.

“You’re not ready to leave yet,” I urged. “Your son needs you.”

At this, his eyelids lifted further, and then a slightest sparkle of consciousness lit up his eyes. His lips began to mouth the word, “Jeramiah,” although no sound came from his mouth.

“Yes, Jeramiah,” I said, nodding with as much force as I could—which admittedly was not much. My movements were still so sluggish. “Sit up, Lucas.”

Now that his eyes were alive, or at least semi-alive, I knew that if I could just get him to sit up, the rest would fall into place more easily, just as it had done with Kailyn and me. It was the first assertion towards life, a step away from giving in.

Lucas struggled to raise his head ever so slightly, but it slumped down.

Oh, dear.

For all his willpower, what if he was incapable of sitting up? What if his mind had been drained so thoroughly that even the thought of seeing his son again wasn’t enough to infuse strength in him? What if he just… couldn’t?

Couldn’t
. The word was jarring to my ear. I hadn’t grown up in a household of “couldn’ts”. The word triggered a saying my mother would often recite whenever Rose or I—or my father—admitted defeat without ever really trying:

“I know an excuse when I hear one. Don’t you dare deceive yourself into believing that you’re the victim.”

The saying was so engrained in my family’s history, it had even become something of a running joke between the four of us, like when someone refused to hang up the laundry or take out the trash. Though its meaning never lost its depth.

But now I found myself doubting my mother’s words. Of course, there were occasions when one really couldn’t do something. Where it was not an excuse and one was incapacitated. When one truly was a victim. My mother herself had been a victim on a number of occasions, even if she’d refused to act like one. But Lucas… as he struggled to sit up with what I was sure was his best efforts, he just looked so pathetic and helpless. It was gut-wrenching. If there ever truly was a victim, Lucas looked it to me now.

“What are we going to do?” Kailyn whispered in a strained voice.

“I don’t know,” I breathed. “I’ve got to keep trying, at least one more time.” As much as I hated to leave my newfound uncle behind, I still had a promise to keep to my family… and to River.

I looked at Kailyn pointedly. “You should return to the pond,” I told her. “You don’t need to stay and wait with me.”

She shook her head. “No. I can’t leave you here.”

Eyeing her determined expression, I didn’t bother wasting my precious energy trying to convince her otherwise. I knew that she was too stubborn a wolf to heed my words.

I set my focus back on Lucas. Now that we had stopped saying Jeramiah’s name, he was drifting again.

“You can do it, Lucas,” I began again. “I believe in you. Jeramiah believes in you… Jeramiah loves you.”

As soon as I spoke the last words, it was as though an electric current shot through Lucas. His eyes lifted wide open and, to my great surprise and relief, his head lifted up further than it ever had until now. His face scrunched up in concentration and determination, and slowly but surely, he raised himself higher and higher until he was sitting upright.

“My God,” Kailyn gasped beside me. “It worked! You did it, Lucas!”

The blueness of Lucas’ eyes was brightening, and although they were still very foggy, he was conscious and right now, that was all that mattered.

“Now we need to get out of here,” I breathed, fixing my eyes on my uncle in an attempt to hold his gaze. “We’ve got to head back to our pool in the upper levels, and you must follow us. Do you understand?”

It had been such a battle for him to sit up, I feared how much more difficult it would be to get him to stand. But I had to have faith in him. I’d seen how the right words could jolt him to life. If he could sit up, he could stand up. And he could walk. He
had
to walk.

But first, Kailyn and I had to stand up ourselves. I fixed all my focus on rising to my feet. It was a Herculean effort—just as difficult as sitting up was, but once I was standing my movement came much more easily. I could move through the water faster than I’d thought that I would be able to, and I wondered whether I might even be able to sprint. Kailyn rose to her feet beside me with similar initial difficulty, and then she too loosened up as I had done.

“You stand now,” I said to my uncle, embarking on yet another pep talk. “Just think of your son. Your son, who holds no grudge against you for abandoning him.” Well, it was true that Jeramiah held no grudge against Lucas… because he didn’t know that Lucas had willingly abandoned him and his mother. The only grudge he held was against my parents and grandfather. But that was a story for another day. “He loves you, and he wants to reconnect with you,” I went on, trying to use as many trigger words as I could think of that might get Lucas going. And it was working. He took much longer than Kailyn and I to stand up but that was to be expected. He managed to stand in the water, however wobbly his stance was.

“Now walk,” I said.

He moved ever so slowly, inching one foot forward, but he managed to reach the edge of the small pool without toppling over.
He’s going to have to perk up a lot if he wants to stand a chance of being kept as an ornament in the upper levels…

There was still a lot to be done. But we were making progress. For now, we just needed to make it out of this cursed chamber and get back to the pool before the ghouls arrived for their “inspection”.

Kailyn and I drifted upward and out of the water, Lucas trailing behind us. Next we had to pass through the chamber’s walls. We couldn’t pass through the same doorway that we’d come through, because that would lead directly back into the coffin room, a place we did not wish to visit again, especially not with Lucas. So we passed directly through the nearest wall. We traveled slowly through wall after wall, and I constantly looked behind me to check that we hadn’t lost my uncle. There were a number of scares along the way when I believed we had, but eventually we made it back to our comfortingly bright pool on the highest floor.

I insisted that Lucas jump in first, and then we followed after him, sinking in among the rest of the ghosts. I didn’t even bother looking at any of them and I was certainly in no mood to answer any questions. My primary concern was making sure that my uncle was hidden, the way he’d once hidden me.

We guided him toward a particularly thick cluster of ghosts and he slumped down into a corner. Kailyn followed suit, collapsing in exhaustion. I felt like joining them, but I couldn’t sit still. Not yet, at least.

Kailyn and Lucas would need to keep a watch out for the ghouls. As soon as they spotted them approaching, they needed to start moving around and acting lively. I didn’t know how my uncle would survive the scrutiny. He had practically no aura, like the rest of us in here, and with his incapacitated state, he stuck out like a sore thumb. I feared that when the ghouls arrived in an hour or so, they would immediately take him. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed and how many more hours we had until the ghouls came looking for us.

Marcilla, Nolan and Chantel hurried over to us and, predictably, asked us to tell them everything that had happened. I gave them non-answers. I had more urgent things to do now than talk.