Cogs in Time Anthology (The Steamworks Series) (26 page)

Stills of Leander with his human wife, laughing and embracing, covered the walls. Hand in hand, images of their love filled the room. Mordecai’s eyes scanned through Leander’s history, visually projected in the room. Each image was a critical memory or event, but they would soon be forgotten. The stills of his past would cease to exist for him, for as each image was pulled from his mind, it would never return.

Draegan watched Mordecai as he selected memories to destroy. He walked along the projections, popping any image involving the human woman with his talon-like fingernail, as if it were a bubble in the air. The dust of the projections fell like glitter to the floor.

“We must change all images of his past that led him to this woman,” charged Mordecai. “A crucial act, if we are to control the future.”

After Mordecai destroyed Leander’s memories of his human wife, he emitted another low hum. The veins that had wrapped around Leander’s limbs retreated to their natural state, his skin unfolded back to place, and the ties that bound Leander to the chair unraveled.

The vampires hummed as Leander remained still. A small suction device, a brass tube on wheels, with a clock timer, rolled into the room to sweep up the discarded memories, like offal that had fallen to the floor. As the hum of the vampire’s changed melodic keys, Leander stirred.

“Mordecai, my friend,” said Leander as he instantly opened his eyes. “What are we doing in this private library?”

Draegan was shocked at Leander’s change of demeanor. Every molecule of his being that had rebelled against Mordecai lay in submission. He appeared and behaved as a loyal member of the Society.

“What happened to my robes?” Leander continued, as he was dressed as a human man, in a black suit with a white buttoned down coat. A paisley vest completed his ensemble.

“You had mentioned a holiday…” Mordecai suggested gently.

“A holiday?” Leander laughed. “I don’t need a holiday. No one takes a holiday from the Society.”

“Ah, Leander,” Mordecai continued, a strange look played in his eyes. “A lady named Nicola came to the Society this morning. Do you know her?”

A thick cloak of anticipation covered the room as they waited for Leander’s response.

“Nicola? I don’t believe I know anyone by that name. Did she ask for me?” asked Leander.

Mordecai maintained a straight face, but Draegan saw a hint of a smile and victory dancing in his eyes. Nicola had been Leander’s human wife. The Society had successfully erased her from his life. They had won. The capsules were a success.

“No, she did not,” answered Mordecai. “She was wandering about like a mental patient. Typical human woman.” Mordecai sounded calm and compassionate, a strange juxtaposition to moments ago. “Unstable and clinging.”

Draegan stood enraptured. He knew vampires were powerful, but he was just beginning to understand how powerful. Most of all, he understood how much he wanted to possess this highest level of power and control.

***

Draegan picked up speed and hovered over the train station, moving in excess of twenty-five miles per hour, hoping to evade the capsules that had been sent after him. Visions of Leander’s transformation filled his mind as he made his way from one platform of the dark and soot-ridden station to another. Not another entity was in sight. The station looked as empty as a graveyard. The train tracks stood in vacated lines, waiting for new souls. The moon shone through the iron gates as the escalators suddenly sprung to life, cutting through the silence.

Take your leave! I will not give in to you!
 His defiance cloaked him with bravado in the deathly silence. Behind him, heard the gentle buzz of the capsule as it flew invisibly towards him.

“Give in,” he heard the voice inside his head resonate. “Accept surrender.”

Draegan picked up speed, trying to outrun the voices as they chased him. “Go away. I have seen you use the capsules,” he hissed into the wind. “I will overpower the Society! I am stronger!”

“You have seen nothing,” replied the voices of the High Table.

“Go away!” Draegan yelled to the sky. “I know what you did to Leander. I will not suffer the same loss.”

“Leander? Nothing happened to Leander,” spoke the voice.

“Lies! I saw!”

“Merely figment of a childish dream…”

“No. I saw it all. I smelled the capsule, I saw his memories, and I watched you erase them into the aether with a flick of your finger. Gone, all gone.”

Draegan felt the wind rush through his clothes and hair. Self-doubt began to overtake him.
 
It is the Society, taking over my mind. Ignore the doubts. You know the truth. But was it a dream? Could it have happened as I slept? No! I was awake and I smelled the capsule. Hold on to the truth!

“It was the day I scolded you,” Mordecai said in a soothing voice. “You were playing in the rain with your wooden cart. It crashed on the damp and slippery pavements and you came into my office, soaking wet and crying. You fell asleep, crying. Capsules? You dreamt it all.”

The voice sounded very convincing, Draegan remembered the rain and the wooden cart. His cart crashed into the Headmaster’s house due to the wet slick roads. He remembered crying in his office. 
This may not be true. This may be a planted memory. Be on your guard, believe nothing.

Draegan stopped at the gate. “I will believe nothing I hear from you. Nothing. The Society is a ship of lies.” From behind the trees, which lined the iron gates, two shadowy vampires emerged.

“Hello, Draegan.” Mordecai’s voice shattered the darkness.

“Hello, Mordecai.” Draegan spoke as if it was quite natural to see Mordecai materialize as the day broke.

“You are needed, my son. We need our boy genius back in the flock.”

Draegan was unsure which sentence seemed stranger. Mordecai calling him his son in a fond manner, or openly insinuating he was needed? Was the Society in trouble? Draegan felt and uncomfortable shiver on the back of his neck. Knowing he must safeguard himself against something, he slowly drew his retractable laser guns from his wrists.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, my son,” said Mordecai as he walked cautiously towards Draegan. “You can trust me, Draegan. I brought you into this world. I planned you and created you.”

As Mordecai reached out, his eyes closed and the sleeves of his robe stretched as if to wrap Draegan within their folds. Draegan jumped before Mordecai could complete his embrace. Draegan flew backwards upon the roof of the station and immediately crouched down. He stretched out on the cold metal, feeling himself merge with the ceiling. Every pore, his entire body thinned, and liquefied into the roof.

In less than a second, Mordecai jumped to follow, expecting Draegan’s desperate flight. The capsules had been used six times before, only in the direst of circumstances and they had never failed. Yet, Draegan was born to be a perfect creature, with both strains of vampire strength.

Perhaps that would limit the effectiveness of the capsule.
 
Mordecai feared exactly this, that Draegan would be impervious to the method of submission.

Mordecai merged his own essence into the metal also, wading through its coldness to follow Draegan. Each was aware of the other, yet they both belonged now to the metallic sheet covering the ceiling. The unity enabled Mordecai to exert a different force on Draegan’s mind, trying to convince him from within Mordecai’s own mind, to give himself up. Draegan in front, Mordecai followed him like a shark in the water, slipping along, stretching through the silvery tin roof.

When they reached the edge, Draegan leaped from the metal roof and began to hover over the city. He was weakened from his bodily re-emergence from the metal, combined with the after effects of the tranquilizing ray.

Turning his body windward, he tried floating. He looked back at the station house to see Mordecai, a weaker vampire, still re-establishing his physical essence after leaving the metal.
Draegan felt his own systems shutting down as he drifted slowly towards the ground, like a leaf in the wind. 

I will die before I give up. I will rule this world and all who remain in it.
 He closed his eyes and everything became dark and quiet. As his body fell through the air, he could only hear his own breathing. He grew weaker and weaker as he fell. As he was about to hit the ground, he felt peace.

“Will you help us?” It was the voice of Mordecai, again.

“No.”

“Think of all you have yet to do. You could take over the Society one day. But you must come back with me.”

“Me? Not Luca?” Draegan challenged. But even in his weakened state, Draegan felt greed wrap itself around him.

“You are ambitious,” Mordecai continued.

Draegan opened his eyes as he lay on the ground and Mordecai knelt beside him.

“Ambition is good. Look at me! I head the High Table and both clans. They look up to me, and I keep the peace.”

“Keeping the peace keeps you a prisoner of your desires. This peace is unnatural.”

“Luca would bow to you,” appeased Mordecai. “Make your decision now and live to see that day. Otherwise, you will perish a cold, deserted, nameless vampire.”

Draegan’s mind spun. He knew his options were few in his weakened state. “I will return with you. I will obey you for now, in return for this place of power you have promised me.”

Mordecai’s wrinkled countenance smiled. He picked up Draegan in his arms and peered at his deathly face. It would be Draegan’s ambition that would be his end.

Mordecai blew gently across Draegan’s face to fully revive him. He blew air into his mouth and over his eyes. The thin translucent skin over Draegan’s eyes twitched as his mobility and strength returned.

Mordecai then placed Draegan on the ground, under a tree. He and the other vampire each took one of Draegan’s immobile hands in theirs. Mumbling in a low monotone groan, Mordecai raised his face to the sky. As his voice rose in decibel, a small tornado formed from the ground around Draegan. The tornado grew, expanding towards the clouds, forming a giant wall of dust and air that whirled around the three vampires in the otherwise deserted stillness.

Mordecai’s voice rose with the tornado, becoming equal with its strength and force. The cyclone broke into three smaller ones, two balanced on either side of Draegan. The third twisted into a small line of violent air, spinning quickly as it forced itself between Draegan’s parted lips.

The force jolted Draegan and his lungs expanded painfully. His face contorted in a silent scream and his eyes bulged as he rose slowly from the ground. The dual winds carried the vampires over the city. Draegan’s eyes sparkled with a strange vitality as Mordecai’s chants strained into the dusty wind. The winds died to a slow breeze as they approached the Society’s main offices.

“He will remember nothing,” chanted Mordecai, blowing into the face of Draegan. Mordecai closed his eyes, confident of his success.

Draegan looked at the serene, confident face of his leader and smiled.
But I do, I will remember everything…foolish old man.

Chapter Seven

The Birth of Death

The building hung on to life by a shred. Its exterior decayed and damp, the brownish gray paint peeled back from the brick and concrete wall like a fungus. Steel rods jutted out of the crumbling corners, exposed and sharp. The rods stood like sentries, sticking their sharp corners into the foggy air, ready to stab into any hapless visitor wandering about unaware.

Between the Romanesque flying buttresses of the front façade, hung a broken but blood curdling face of a carved demon. Sections of the gargoyle’s stone profile had crumbled into dust on the street below, lying unrecognizable along the walk. The demon’s eyes were intact, rage and violence still strong in the stylized remains of its face. The corner of its mouth was sculpted into a feral snarl, its lips curled back, sneering with demonic amusement. The cheeks hollowed from vandals smashing the stones. The face stood still in the hazy night, threatening whosoever dared to come near it.

It was not for that reason alone that nobody visited the building that had been, not so long before, the headquarters of the Society. It lay in such a part of town that it would take anyone, human or vampire, far off the usual paths of Gravesend to get to it. Yet once, it had been the center of Vampire Law—the birthplace of the Vow of Peace.

It stood as a monument to the emergence of the vampire as a god-like creature. It was in the gloomy, gothic reliquary that the document had been penned asserting Vampire’s rights as Guardians of Science and Genetics, in exchange for a life of peaceful co-existence with the human race. Secrets remained buried deep in the deserted headquarters, still haunting the rooms of the decrepit building, guarded by the decrepit demon.

“How much longer?” begged the woman, shouting into the air. Her voice screeched through the halls, pleading to be answered. Yet, she lay alone, and her voice bounced back to her from the night sky. She lay in the empty gray room, away from civilization, behind the thicket of the gardens that hid the smog-smeared windows.

Her forehead dripped with the sweat of her labor, each bead lay side by side on her brow like a delicate tiara. Her eyes were wild with pain and her fists clenched in controlled hysteria. Her naked body shined in the moonlight, glimmering like storm tossed waters. Her abdomen rose and fell, contracting and pushing, as she lay alone.