Cameo and the Vampire (14 page)

* * * * *

It was mid-afternoon when Carrington had hacked through the undergrowth and had his first look at the house in the distance. A weathered white farmhouse stood alone in the center of a perfectly flat open field.

The rest of the party stepped out of the dense forest that they'd traveled for the last two hours. It was wonderful to see the sunlight again.

Kyrian's eyes readjusted to the light.

"That's odd," Caith whispered. "My animal spirits just left."

"Animal spirits?"

"His guides are animals," Carrington muttered, drawing his sword.

Caith shrugged. "I just didn't expect it."

Kyrian looked out onto the acres of cleared land before him in the center of the forest. "This must be where he is."

"Could just be a farmer," Gibson scoffed and set down his backpack.

"Something feels strange." Carrington moved in front of the others protectively.

"He's awake!" Sage cried out suddenly.

"Where?" The lieutenant put a half-hearted hand on his sword hilt.

"He spoke to me!"

"Spoke to you?"

"We came to kill a vampire, and we shall," Carrington said.

"He wasn't supposed to wake up." Caith touched Sage's arm comfortingly.

"What did he say?" Kyrian's voice was grave.

She trembled. "He invited us to come in."

"He's plucky, isn't he?" Carrington laughed.

Kyrian opened his coat, revealing the amulet of the sun. Sage and Caith followed his lead.

Gibson pulled his sword finally and walked out onto the open space. Glancing down, he realized that the soil had been recently tilled. "What's this?" he called back to the youngsters. "The field has just been plowed, yet it's the middle of winter—"

"Gibson!" Sage shrieked, pointing at him frantically.

"Look behind you!" Caith yelled.

Kyrian and Carrington raced out onto the open field.

Something grabbed the soldier. He spun around to face his opponent. A ghastly skull with one eye dangling from its socket head-butted him.

Kyrian tackled it.

"Look out!" Carrington jumped onto the monster that now was biting down hard on Kyrian's arm and hacked off its head with a gleaming blade.

Gibson staggered to his feet, and as he looked up at the blackened forest in the distance, he watched as skeletal arms and moldy heads burst from beneath the newly tilled soil.

"Get out of here!" he cried.

As Kyrian pried a zombie's mouth from his forearm, he felt a sharp, sudden jolt. Another creature, one resembling Chester, was standing over him, it's hoe buried in his side. The lad fell to the ground wordlessly.

Carrington was set upon by a mob of zombies who were still wearing their peasant clothing. "Gods, it's the farmers that the vampire killed! They're all zombies!"

Hundreds of zombies were sprouting out of the ground.

Sage and Caith waded into the fray of undead, each with one hand on their amulets.

Caith could feel his pet mouse Boris scurrying fretfully around in his pocket.

One zombie hit Sage over the head with a shovel and knocked her out.

"Sage!" Caith ran toward her. With his amulet before him, he addressed the undead, "I command you to disperse!"

The crowd of zombies limped forward, silently, grabbing at his cloak, his hair, scratching his face.

He struck one of them. A cheekbone fell off.

The throng pressed in on Sage, unconscious on the ground. In the distance, the once-empty, snow-covered ground was now black with the multitudes of staggering zombies, all lurching toward them on unsteady legs.

"Carrington! Where are you?!"

"Come to me."

Kyrian heard a voice in his mind.

"Come to me."

And then malicious laughter ....

Chapter Seven

Cameo raced south with Black Opal asleep in her arms. She had been following one set of tracks for five miles when it stopped abruptly and turned off the path to the right. She slowed down and walked back to the spot where a group of people had left the path.

Holding tight to Opal's unconscious form, she slid down the sharp embankment and examined the entry point to the dark forest.

There was an odd light in the wood; a golden blob hanging there. She stared at it for a moment, unsure just what she was looking at, and then something broke away from it and moved toward her.

It was so painfully bright that she attempted to curl Opal up in her arms protectively and cover her eyes with one hand.

"Cameo."

It knew her name!
She looked at it. She couldn't help herself.

It was Cyrus, Kyrian's dead grandfather.

She set Opal down in the snow and stood slowly.

The golden light was now opening up, and, looking at it—though it made her head pound to do so—she saw people and ... animals. It was not just a blob at all. These were ghosts—no, guides.

"Kyrian!" Her body was suddenly in motion. She tore through the spirits in her way and wove deeper into the forest, leaping over boulders and tearing branches off anything that was in her way.

And then there was a stream of light ahead of her, and in that light there was a fighter in white and blue hacking the head from something that reminded her of Chester. There was a deafening sound, and she wasn't quite certain what to make of it, although the sound reminded her of a steady moaning ... mewing.

She tore the head from the thing that the soldier was fighting as she ran past him, threw it into the trees, and found herself at the edge of a forest; before her was a writhing mass of undead. This was what Jules had described. This was where her master slept ... his home ... his zombies. For one moment, she was afraid.
The Master
would know that she had been there.

"Carrington!" came a voice.

She turned. There was a flash of color, white and blue; not a soldier's uniform, but a paladin's. A warrior came out from behind her, a paladin of the Sky God Silvius, and as he did so, several zombies attacked him.

Cameo threw herself into the throng of monsters, slashing and cutting, leaving the small group lying in parts on the ground, and then she turned and pushed the young man back, away from the field of zombies, attempting to save his life. "Get out of here!"

Carrington ignored her and moved toward Caith's voice.

The assassin was suddenly in front of him. "I'm not saving your life again." A moment later she had hacked her way through a crowd of zombies who had apparently been stabbing two young people with pitchforks.

And the smell ....
Blood.

The two of them were brilliant white, like stars in the heavens. Someone grabbed the young man's arm and forced him to his feet while he gawped at her.

Cameo turned around; it was that annoying paladin again. She spun back around with supernatural speed, expecting to catch a zombie’s hand grasping at her throat or swinging at her with a scythe, but instead she found the zombies milling in front of her, just moving in place, as if they'd reached the edge of their world and couldn't go further toward them.

"Where is Kyrian?!"

The young man who had been stabbed with a pitchfork pointed with one shaking hand out into the crowd. About twenty feet away, she saw what appeared to be a sword slashing the air.

Cameo began to push forward, and then for some reason, she glanced back to check on that warrior once more, only to see him being attacked by the zombies again. Swearing at him aloud, already engulfed by zombies herself, she raced back over to the three of them. "Kyrian will be dead by the time I'm able to get to him!" she snarled. Cameo threw a dozen undead out of her way on her path back to them, as if they were dolls.

Carrington lifted the young woman in his arms, now that they were free of the zombies for the moment.

Cameo shook her head at the soldier, wrenched the woman he was carrying out of his arms, and threw both young people over her shoulders, ignoring a rather odd sensation that their bodies were burning against hers. Hardly slowed by the two, she sprinted deep into the forest with them and laid them on the ground.

She rushed back through the forest, threading her way through the trees, and burst out onto the field.

The young soldier was fighting with five zombies now, apparently trying to press forward toward Kyrian.

"Fool," she muttered, and brandishing her blade, she sliced into the crunchy husks of undead once more. There was a wall of moldy, aggravated monsters pushing toward her.

"Get out of my way!" Cameo demanded.

Every single head turned toward her, and then, in unison, the mob parted to allow her to pass.

Without a second thought, she plunged headlong into the horde, finally halting when she found the bloodied sword still in motion, above the crowd, swinging through the air. As she approached it, the zombies in front of her moved out of her way.

Kyrian and one of the king's soldiers were standing in front of her, covered in blood and muck.

"Cameo." A glowing being collapsed against her. His skin burning painfully against hers. His blood spilled out against her leather armor. She faltered. It was such an odd sensation, the intense longing for his blood accompanying the urge to just push him away from her, and then she realized that it was Kyrian.

It was Gibson who responded first. "Cameo?" The older soldier's eyes narrowed. "The One Who Shatters."

That was an old epithet.
She studied his face for a moment, wondering if she knew him, and then without warning she simply took away his sword, fast, before he had the opportunity to object. "Go."

He stumbled out in front of her, back through the pathway that the zombies had opened to let her in.

She lifted Kyrian into her arms and walked past the hundreds and hundreds of stinking, rotten corpses. Eyes dangling, mouths hanging ... they swayed in place.

Haffef must be responsible for this. He must have let me in
,
s
he thought, fear gathering in the pit of her stomach.
Why did I ever agree to accompany Jules to see the Master? He'll kill me now for certain.

"Into the forest," she commanded the man ahead of her, "and let's get moving."

He shot her an irritated look over his shoulder as he sped up.

Minutes later they had entered the forest. Somehow they had managed to leave the monsters behind them. The rest of Kyrian's friends were lying around on the ground, bleeding or staunching wounds.

"What in the name of the gods were you people doing?!" She grabbed Carrington by the shoulder and spun him around, holding Kyrian over her shoulder with the other hand.

"Who are you, lady?" he asked angrily. Her eyes glittered in the dark of the forest. "What are you?"

"I'm the person who just saved your life."

"Yeah, you helped us, I'll give you that, but you aren't a
person
. You're something unholy. Similar to those things we just fought—"

"I am one of them," she said darkly.

He shook his head. "No, you aren't. You're no zombie."

Taken aback by the lack of knowledge in his comment—given his age, his immaturity—she felt the rage draining out of her. A smile played on her lips. "All right, young man, believe what you'd like."

"I'm not a fool. I've been trained. I don't know what you are, yet." He pointed back at where they had just come from, "But you aren't one of those, either."

"Yeah, thanks for the insight."

"Where are you going with Kyrian?" he called after her as she moved back toward Cyrus at an unnatural pace.

Opal was sitting up now. Snow in his hair. Dazed from the drug.

Cameo lowered Kyrian onto the snow beside him.

Cyrus' golden form moved beside him, concerned.

She watched the spirit as he drew near, wondering why he had ever left Kyrian alone to face an undead army, but Cyrus disappeared from her view, which was just fine as far as she was concerned. Just looking at him was mind-numbingly painful. Just being near Kyrian was a trial. His aura was awful. She felt sort of ill around him.

"Kyrian?" Opal whispered, directed cloudily at Cameo and not actually to Kyrian at all.

She glanced back down the hill into the woods, and at the blob of golden spirits still lingering there. All the rest of the people from the shrine were down there, wounded. Cameo would be forced to dive through the blob of unpleasant-feeling spirits to get back down there again, but they were some stupid, innocent kids. She sighed, resigning herself to bring them all back up to the path, and then that was it. She would've done her good deed for the ... well, for a while anyhow.

"Don't go anywhere," she admonished Opal and dove headlong back into the dreary forest.

* * * * *

It was dusk. Cameo had convinced the healers to move on to Ponth, which wasn't very far down the road now, perhaps only one mile, to rest up there in the shrine and recuperate. She hoped that the shrine would also keep them safe from Haffef's wrath, and that he wasn't planning on waking early and taking his revenge on them, but she knew in all likelihood that was exactly what he would have in mind.

So the group of them—healers, revolutionaries, soldiers, and zombies—trooped on as darkness descended upon them, toward the small town of Ponth. She couldn't remember being in such odd company before, but then she remembered her other past living arrangements: herself, a vampire, and two zombies; herself a witch, and many assassins; herself, two dandies, an assassin, and Kyrian. Nothing really had made any sense at all unless she went back to that point before she had been turned into the
creature
that she now was. Normalcy really wasn't something she should expect anymore, although she supposed that it was very human to hope for that. She couldn't imagine what the rest of the people in the crowd were feeling right about now. It almost embarrassed her to view herself the way that they must be viewing her ... something dark and supernatural. Something that haunted graveyards at night. Something melodramatic at best, and at worst—a bloodthirsty, soulless abomination.