Reality Bites (28 page)

He was largely ignored.

Cindy spoke again to Denny this time. ‘You seem different now,’ she said. ‘If you were never really evil, at least, not since I met you, why did you seem so – so sinister and intimidating?’

‘Scared you did I?’ he asked, grinning. ‘I
had
to act that way, we were being watched, remember?’

‘It was damn convincing.’ Cindy shuddered.

‘I was working from memory, not so long before I
was
like that.  But I’m a nice guy really – honest!’ he grinned at her, and this time he did not look sinister – he looked almost goofy. Cindy smiled back.

‘Well, it’s going to take me weeks to sort all this out,’ said Stiles. ‘Thank God I don’t have to write a report about it. That’s one good thing about vampire hunting, no paperwork. I still don’t really know what the hell happened here.’

‘Something good,’ said Hecaté, appearing out of the shadows.

Stiles choked.

‘Here,’ said Askphrit, ‘how the hell did
you
get out?’

‘
I
released her,’ said Stiles, ‘although I’m not really sure how.’

Tamar smiled. ‘I think I might have an idea,’ she said. ‘Destiny.’

‘Explain,’ said Denny.

‘What Askphrit didn’t take into account when he wrote his “little prophecy” was that now he’s become a god, the prophecy will become true.’

‘It is true,’ said Hecaté.  ‘This is a divine power, to create prophecies.  Any prophecy that is made by a god is bound to come to be.’

‘There you see,’ said Tamar.  ‘You turned Jack from an ordinary man into something special; he has a great destiny now.’

‘Not to mention the end of vampire-kind,’ said Denny. ‘Betcha didn’t see that one coming, Ha!  Even if you’d won today, I think the scheme for world domination might have fallen apart.’

‘Not if I’d killed him,’ said Askphrit.

‘But you couldn’t have,’ said Tamar. ‘That’s not part of the prophecy. But I bet Hecaté is. After all, this child’s going to have to be pretty special. Hero-like, even. Half-god perhaps?’

Stiles and Hecaté were studiously avoiding each other’s eyes.

Denny nudged Stiles and winked. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You know you want to.’

‘
Denny
,’ said Tamar sharply.

‘What?’

‘Shut up!’

Hecaté suddenly slipped her arm through Stiles’. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You cannot fight destiny.’

‘My, haven’t we all changed,’ said Tamar grinning at Denny.  She and Denny were still entwined; she was hanging on to him as if her life depended on it.  Cindy thought she would never let him go again.  She, at least, understood what had happened for them, if nobody else did.

Suddenly, a dishevelled Peirce came careering into the room.

~ Chapter Thirty Three ~

T
he atmosphere in the room changed immediately.  The effect that Peirce had on people could be described thus.  If he were human, he would be the guy that, if your plane had crashed in the Andes, there were plenty of food supplies and the rescue helicopters had been sighted, you would
still
eat him.

‘I came to, to warn you,’ he gasped, ‘he’s …’ He stopped as he spotted Askphrit in the cage. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘I guess everything’s … I – I thought … oh well.’

He shifted uncomfortably, like a kid who has just walked in on his parents in bed. They were all staring at him coldly.

‘Well, I’ll just …’ He started to slide backwards out of the room.  Denny barred his way; he said nothing, just looked menacing.

‘Or I could stay – why don’t I stay?’ He sat down on a chair in the corner of the room, he kept stealing glances at the cage, he seemed more than usually twitchy, even in Denny’s presence, who he was clearly still terrified of.

‘You know,’ said Denny. ‘This might be quite a nice house,’ he strode over to the window, ‘if it weren’t so dingy in here.’ He pulled the curtains open, sunlight flooded the room. Everyone gasped.  Peirce yelped and shuffled his chair backward into a corner.

‘The sun’s out!’ said Cindy.

‘Yes,’ said Hecaté. ‘The darkness has broken.’

They all turned to stare at her.  She inclined her head. ‘Least I could do,’ she said. ‘Soon the light will spread. Now that the monster is in chains.’

‘I love the way she talks,’ said Stiles. ‘Don’t you love the way she talks?’

‘Very – goddess like,’ agreed Denny. He was looking at her in fascination; Tamar trod on his foot.

‘Ahem,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go through the house and round up all the vampires who are still here?’

‘Good idea,’ said Cindy, nudging Eugene, who was also staring at Hecaté.

‘What about
him
?’ asked Stiles, meaning Askphrit.

‘He’s not going anywhere,’ said Tamar. ‘That cage is unbreakable even by magic.’

‘I can watch him,’ piped up Peirce.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Denny, hauling him to his feet. ‘You can come with me.’  He grinned wolfishly. Peirce gave him a bitter look.

‘Okay,’ said Stiles. ‘So, there’s,’ he counted, ‘one, two, three, four, five, six of us and him,’ he pointed at Peirce.  ‘So shall we split up into three groups of two?’

‘Okay,’ said Denny. I’ll go with Cindy, you go with Tamar and Hecaté can go with Eugene, no couples together, we don’t need distractions, okay?’

There was a murmuring of assent. There was a deliberate distribution of power in this arrangement that everyone approved of. Cindy, for example, would be safer with Denny, than with Stiles or Eugene, who were not as powerful.  But no one felt inclined to mention it.

‘Okay,’ he distributed weapons. ‘Lock and load.’

‘Star-Trek,’ explained Tamar, when this statement engendered some surprised looks.  ‘Insurrection.’

‘Ah,’ said Stiles. ‘Not the best of the series.’ Tamar rolled her eyes, ‘Men!’

‘Peirce comes with us,’ said Denny.  Cindy’s face fell, but she said nothing.  ‘After all, she thought,’ Peirce is scared to death of him, ‘it’ll be all right.’

* * *

The house was large and gloomy, and there were plenty of vampires to be found in various dusty corners, most of which were easily dealt with by wrenching open the curtains suddenly, while saying, ‘gosh, isn’t it stuffy in here.’ – resulting in Peirce dashing for cover behind various items of furniture, as if the Jehovah’s Witnesses were at the door.

Cindy was particularly useful at luring them out for this; she seemed to have been designed by nature to be the perfect vampire bait. The east wing was almost clear.

Tamar, in the south wing, was, unfortunately, too well known to them for this to be an effective ruse, however, battering them to a pulp seemed to be working quite well for her, and Stiles was an efficient partner in this activity.

Hecaté was flooding the west wing with indoor sunlight, and Eugene was clearing out the darker corners as a dragon the size of a rocking horse.

Down in the dungeons, though, it was a different story. No windows down here, and it was not long before Denny found himself in a concerted battle with at least seven cornered vampires. Cindy was surprisingly useful; she pitched right in there and brought down at least two of them on her own. Between them and the distracting cheers of the prisoners, Cindy and Denny were a bit too preoccupied to realise that Peirce had slipped away unnoticed.

When they had cleared the house and led the prisoners blinking into the sunlight, it was Stiles, of course, who suddenly said, ‘where’s Peirce?’

Tamar looked at Denny, reproachfully. ‘You lost him?’

They all looked around; he was nowhere to be seen. ‘The chamber?’ said Cindy.

Denny swore. ‘Askphrit!’

Without exchanging another word, they all ran, leaving the bewildered prisoners, standing in the garden.

* * *

Askphrit was standing by the computer, grinning, Peirce was lying on the floor beside him, he was unconscious.

‘You’re too late,’ jeered Askphrit. He pressed “enter” just as Denny reached him, and vanished. ‘This isn’t over, sister,’ he said, as he de-materialised.

They were speechless. Tamar did not even have the heart to say ‘damn!’

They kicked Peirce until he came round.

‘How did he get him out of the cage?’ asked Stiles. ‘I thought you said it was unbreakable, even by magic.’

‘Well, it wasn’t!’ snapped Tamar. ‘There’s no such thing, if there were
he
would have used it on me. I lied so that he wouldn’t try to escape.’

Peirce claimed to have no memory of what had happened.  ‘He had control of me,’ he whimpered, plaintively.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Denny demanded to know.

‘I don’t know – ow, ow, owww, aaagh, all right, all right, he went into the past.  That’s all I know, I swear.’

Denny twisted his arm further up his back. ‘Where?’

‘Doesn’t matter, anyway,’ said Tamar. ‘He can go anywhere he wants from wherever he is; he’s not going to stay in one place, or time, is he?’

Denny let him go.  ‘There’s nothing we can do then?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

~Chapter Thirty Four ~

A
gloom had descended on the house. Cindy had left with Eugene and Stiles with Hecaté.  They had felt awkward and out of place and had made their excuses. There was nothing more they could do anyway. They had promised to keep in touch, and maybe they would. Tamar had dealt with the prisoners.  A memory modification, more for the trauma than anything else, after she and Denny had transported them to various hospitals; the official story would be a train wreck.

They had decided to put a kicking and screaming Peirce in the chapel that they had found attached to the house.  ‘I’m surprised they didn’t tear it down,’ Denny had said, but Tamar explained that that would probably have entailed going inside at some point. And besides, the very stones it was built of were blessed by years of worship. The vampires would have avoided it.

The gargoyles over the door had howled in protest, as it is their duty to warn against evil trying to enter.  But they had not howled as loudly as Peirce had. 

‘Serves you right,’ said Tamar. ‘Now shut up, or we’ll tie you to the crucifix.’

And now it was just Tamar and Denny again.

‘I suppose we should go home,’ said Denny.

‘I suppose.’

There was a silence.

‘It
is
a nice house,’ said Tamar.

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose it’ll just stand empty now. With Askphrit in the past somewhere, I don’t suppose it really belongs to
anyone
now.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘And that computer, all set up, it’d be a shame to have it just sitting there, it’d be very useful to us now, it may even have the codes to the archives on it somewhere.  Save us looking for them.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we will need those, if we’re to go after him.’

‘Uh huh.’

Tamar wandered over to the window.  ‘There’s a nice big garden,’ she said and grinned at him.

He grinned back. ‘Yes,’ he said.

They surveyed their new home; they had a lot of work to do.  They went into the garden; both of them had a longing for the sunshine.

 ‘One thing I’ve been wondering,’ said Denny, as they made a start.

What’s that?’

‘What
was
Hercules’ real name?’

‘Trevor.’

‘You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you? You’re such a liar.  Do you know what I think?  I think you just make things up half the time, because you can’t stand to admit that you don’t know everything.  ‘

Tamar turned to him and grinned mischievously. ‘Bite me’,’ she said.

THE END?

Epilogue

The tall, thin man faced his cohorts around the table.  (You had to call them his cohorts. They certainly could not be called his friends – or anybody’s friends.)  ‘Well!’ he said.  ‘What a complete and utter cock up.’

There was muttering around the table.

‘It turns out that we have been made fools of by this – this Askphrit character, and not for the first time.  We have played his game. We sent out our champion on a fool’s errand, and if she hadn’t …’
He took a deep breath.  ‘Well, a great calamity was narrowly averted.’

‘He has escaped,’ pointed out a voice from the shadows.

‘She will go after him,’ said the thin man. ‘And we must help her.’

‘We are not supposed to interfere,’ pointed out another.

‘We have
already
interfered,’ said the thin man emphatically. ‘If we had not, this would not have happened.  Now we have a dangerous lunatic loose in the past, who knows what kind of damage he will do?

‘No, we have no choice.  She
must
stop him, and we must help her. Tamar Black is our only hope.’

‘There is the prophecy, he himself wrote it, might that not…?’

‘We cannot wait. For a child to be born, grow up and destroy all vampire-kind, thus destroying he whom is now their god.  No, we cannot wait.  Imagine how much damage he will do in that time!  She has the power to kill him
now
, and she alone.  She
must
do it.’

‘It must be her own decision,’ came another voice, squeaky and high pitched.

The thin man glared ‘I
know
that, Lucien, you pedantic prat.’ he snapped. ‘And it
will
be; do you really think she will just let him
go
?  Ha! Not her!  Besides, soon she will have no choice.’

About the Author

Nicola Rhodes often can’t remember where she lives so she lives inside her own head most of the time, where even if you do get lost, it’s still okay.

She has met many interesting people inside her own head and eventually decided to introduce the rest of the world to them, in the hopes that they would stop bothering her and let her sleep.

She has been doing this for ten years now but they still won’t leave her alone.

She is married to the long suffering Mike who lives in Derby, England because he is
not
crazy (well not much anyway) and they have three girls between them.