Cameo and the Vampire (19 page)

Opal raised an eyebrow, somewhat interested now, as if it were a challenge that he'd like to address. "Really?"

"Yes, of course."

"Wait a minute," he said as he touched Kyrian's chest lightly. "Does this, by any chance, mean that you …."

"Yes. All the healers are chaste. We discussed this once, Opal, if you don't remember."

"Did we?"

"Yes, you made some comment about my grandfather becoming a priest."

"Oh." Opal attempted to smile apologetically. "Well, then ... I guess I forgot."

Kyrian lifted a piece of bread to his mouth.

"So then, there's nothing going on between you and Sage?"

The lad nearly dropped the bread. "Of course not! Why would you say that?"

"Because there seems like there's something going on between you two."

"Oh no, nope."

Opal watched Kyrian's rather pitiful display at denying what was obviously true. "That's such a shame. Wasting your life alone."

Kyrian glanced down at the plate before him, not quite as hungry as he had been a minute earlier.

The dandy readjusted the lace at his cuffs absently. "Did I tell you I'm going to be a father?"

"What?"

"Yes, apparently. An old friend is—Charlotte, is her name—and I'm the father."

"Is that why you're sitting out here, alone? I thought that this was about Cameo."

He smiled a fake smile, which fell from his lips as quickly as it had appeared. "I have a lot on my mind."

"Where is she? Here, in Ponth?"

"No, Hangingford. We ... ran into her at a tavern there."

"What are you going to do?"

"Run far away as fast as I can."

"Be serious."

"What makes you think that I'm not?"

"I know your heart. You do have one, I've noticed."

"Pish posh," Opal waved away that notion and glanced back out the window.

Kyrian stood, taking the plate with him. "If you want anything to eat, there's more in the other room."

Opal sat in silence. For one moment he thought that he saw Cameo in the distance, but it turned out to be one of the travelers staying the night at the coach stop, walking outside to talk to a night guard. When he realized that it wasn't her, he turned back to say something to Kyrian, but the lad had already departed.

He remained alone at the window, wondering where she might be.

* * * * *

Cameo felt that she had almost no strength left in her legs by the time the ghost was in full view again. Her face had been battered against tree branches, and she had slogged through snow and over hidden boulders for hours. Just looking at patterns of trees repeatedly while threading her way through the forest was nearly enough to make her begin to go mad, and as it was she had made the marathon run with only sore muscles and a headache.

The forest was scorched, though apparently the fire had been suffocated by more than a foot of snow.

There was a pile of smoldering lumber, nothing more than a few long pieces of what seemed to have been a lean-to, now lying on the ground. It was almost nothing but ash now. The forest was thick with a sickening smell.

Cameo felt her knees weaken as she drew near, as if they were about to buckle and send her crashing into the snow.

"Jules?" she asked again, hoping against hope that he was just wandering around within the area.

The spirit pointed to the ashes before her, and she mindlessly pulled up the pieces of wood that remained and tossed them over onto their backs. As she did so, a long strip of black leather tore away from whatever it had been attached to in the heap of ash and fell onto the ground on top of the lumber that she'd just moved.

Cameo released a short cry of unease, and then took a step toward the blackened mess before her. Long strands of scorched hair danced on the snow, freed when she had pulled up the lumber and blown away on a breeze.

She groaned, afraid of what she was about to see next.

The barrel of a pistol was sitting atop the ash, and then the thing that she had been dreading: a shriveled body, bits of blackened rib bones, and a face burned so badly that she didn't even recognize it. The skull severed from the spine.

Her stomach felt as if it had fallen out of her body. Her feet rooted to the spot. And now, for some reason, her life felt pointless. The one creature that was like her was gone forever.

She sat back on her heels. Her mind was spinning with so many thoughts, returning to them again and again: turning each moment they had together into a memorial, blaming Haffef for knowing exactly how to hurt her yet again, and hating him more than she thought possible. Thinking of how she and Jules were going to outlive her friends and figure a way to escape the M
aster
, and then realizing that that was not going to happen—ever. And then she settled back on that one moment in time, the kiss ... and wondered why he had kissed her, and what that meant, and why she'd never asked, and how she was going to ask, but then a pain struck her, and she realized that she could never ask. That she was going to ponder all of this forever, for the rest of her undeath.

For one moment she thought that maybe she could put him back together. Maybe ... maybe if Edel were there to explain it all to her ... but he was dead.

She reached into the ashes and pulled out one broken piece of rib and held it close to her.

* * * * *

Haffef held one bone close to his heart, and then set it into Ivy's skeleton. He stepped back and surveyed the bones perfectly arranged on his kitchen table. They were so small and covered with dirt.

He turned and went to the large, black book on the counter; it was battered, its pages yellow and dog-eared. After consulting the literature within, Haffef lifted the large glass container, full of blood, Cameo's blood. By now it had become coagulated, but it didn't matter; there would be enough to coat Ivy's bones with it. Cameo was much taller than her long-dead little sister.

He began to pour the blood out into the girl's skull as he remembered what Cameo had said before she went unconscious. Something about Ivy running away from her fiancé.

"I don't believe that." Haffef said with a hint of tenderness in his voice. "I know you.... You could never have changed your mind. Never." And then he thought that Cameo had lied only to bring him more pain, and that thought enraged him. He realized that he had let her go too easily. Long, slow torture ... that was what she deserved. A long life of misery—exactly what she had forced upon him—that's what she should endure.

He took a deep breath—his hands were covered in her blood—and he painted Cameo's life-force onto her sister's bones. He smiled a little when he thought of Jules, that stupid thrall. He was dead, and Haffef knew that had some effect on Cameo. He knew that those two had been quite attached to one another, whether they had figured it out themselves. He chuckled when he thought of how easily it had been to push Jules over the edge. The thrall had wanted to die for such a long time, and all it took was one simple
suggestion
on his part. Jules had been too fragile.

"Fool," Haffef muttered, and then he looked down into Ivy's skeletal face. "Oh no, not you, my love. I was just talking of someone else ... a fool that you'll never have to meet. So no need to worry about it at all. No, I'll take care of everything. All of the annoyances of this world. I'll fix it all for you, Ivy."

* * * * *

The former assassin wandered out of the forest and through someone's back pasture in the moonlight.

Cows that had been milling in the frozen field lifted their heads as she approached. Their eyes were wide and frightened, and then suddenly they bolted, racing from their spot atop a hill and running as fast as they could to escape her.

Cameo crept in closer to the farmer's house, upsetting the chickens that had been asleep.

"Cameo?"

She waved away the disembodied voice at her ear and stumbled haphazardly through a family graveyard.

"Cameo ...."

"Stop talking to me!"

The ground rumbled beneath her feet. She stumbled over a small fence that someone had erected around the graves and walked out of the cemetery.

A ghost materialized in front of her.

"Edel ...."

This was not the ghost she had wanted to see, but there he was, all in one piece. Not the way she'd seen him last, with one arm lying on the floor across the room from her, and the other, presumably severed once she had left his apartment.

"What do you want?"

He said nothing, just smiled at her for a minute, standing directly before her and seeming to be solid, completely alive again.

"I don't want to see you," Cameo said, feeling somewhat guilty for her part in his demise.

His smile drooped, and he pointed at something behind her before he faded away.

Once she was convinced that he was gone and not coming back, she turned around—

There was a corpse standing behind her.

Cameo took a faltering step backward, noticing how dirty it was, and then saw the empty grave, the one that she had just walked over.

"What the?" She drew her sword. "Get away from me!"

A child's swing creaked in the farmer's front yard.

The zombie staggered backward several paces.

"That's right," Cameo commanded, the fear evident in her voice now. "Get ... get back in your grave!"

As the words left her lips, the corpse tumbled backward into the soil that it had crawled out of.

Panicked, she leapt over a stone fence and dashed through a field, sword still in hand. She ran to the next farmhouse, and the next, until she found a grove of trees, and stopped there briefly, pressing her face against a tree.

Cameo wiped sweat from her brow and hazarded a frightened glance over her shoulder, then slowly slid to the snowy ground. She felt nauseous and bathed her face in the heavy snow.

What was that? Another of Haffef's zombies?

She closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down, to breathe normally.

"You know it's not," a man's voice stated, somewhat sarcastically.

Cameo leapt to her feet and sliced her blade through a man that she did not recognize who was leaning against a pine beside her.

Her blade passed right through him.

He smiled.

Another ghost.

"You can talk?"

He rolled his eyes, and she realized he was not a kind ghost. His face was dark, and malicious.

"Why are you here? To warn me?"

"Just drawn to you."

"What? Why?"

"Drawn to your energy. Your dark aura. It's like mine, and I like it. I like to drink it in."

"What are you talking about?" Her tone hardened.

He grinned at her.

"I've never seen you before. Where did you come from?"

"Oh, I've been around. For years. Every time you do something ... negative, I feed on that energy. I like it. It makes me strong. And since I've been following you, I've been getting stronger and stronger."

"I've never seen you. You're lying."

"You've seen me. You have sent me ahead of you many times, Cameo."

The way he said her name startled her. It was so eerie ... so dark ... and then she thought about it. He was enjoying her fear a little too much. She straightened. "So I've commanded you in the past."

"That's right."

"Fine then. Go away and never come back."

He looked shocked for a moment and then seemed pulled away on the wind.

"You going to send us all away?" came a voice from behind her.

Cameo spun around.

There was a spirit behind every tree. People she did not recognize at all.

She ran one hand over her face, weary. "All of you shut up. I don't want to hear a word out of any of you."

The grove was silent, all but the sound of tree limbs rubbing together as the trees swayed in the breeze.

"And," she said, standing up straighter, "I don't want to see any of you."

The spirits all vanished.

She heaved a sigh of relief, reaching for her flask and downing a gulp of whiskey out of habit. It was terrible. Cameo shoved the flask back into her boot. It really wasn't whiskey she wanted.

Sometimes farmhands slept in the barns.

* * * * *

Kyrian joined Carrington, Caith, and Sage at the kitchen table for a secret nighttime meeting while Black Opal and Alerkat slept.

Carrington had a tattered, bluish tome before him with a prayer card as a bookmark.

"What's that?" Kyrian asked. He was apparently late, although it was midnight, and that was when they had said the meeting was to be held.

The three turned toward him, knowingly. Apparently the meeting had started earlier, and he was simply not privy to the information that they'd been discussing.

"So," he began again, amicably, "is there a new plan? When are we going to take on the vampire again?"

"Two nights from now." Carrington spoke for them. "That's what we've decided on. We'll go at dawn."

"Dawn? But Haffef will be awake, not to mention those zombies."

"That's where your friend comes in."

"Opal? I doubt he'd really be much help. He doesn't believe in any of this—"

The young warrior waved away that notion. "No, I mean Cameo. She could be a strong ally."

"Oh, well. I have asked her," he glanced at Caith, hoping the other acolyte would back up his story.

Caith nodded, "He did. She refused. But I've already told Carrington all of this."

"Yes, but now we know. She is
essential
for the plan to work. So, Kyrian, you have to convince her. If you don't, we'll be going into a hornet's nest, and we're all going to die needlessly fighting the undead. And I want you to tell her that."

Kyrian looked at their staring, naive faces, and then he laughed a little because they had to be kidding. "She doesn't have the power to kill her master. He nearly killed her one time because she disobeyed his orders. I know; I saw what was left of her with my own eyes. Her skull was crushed."

"But she's still alive ... undead, I mean," Sage insisted.

"He didn't want to kill her. It was just a warning." He lowered his voice as if he'd said too much, perhaps betrayed Cameo's trust. "Her body healed itself, and that's why she's still alive—undead, whatever."