The Dragon Coin (17 page)

“Run!”

Chapter Seventeen

Racing to beat the collapse of the colossal fortress quickly became a stressful affair. The fact neither of us had any clue as to where my family had been taken made it especially so.

“How do we get out of this frigging place?”

I posed the question to no one in particular, since it seemed likely Roderick didn’t know. At least the anxious look on his face indicated as much. Limping as fast as he could, he had chastised me twice already for slowing down to make sure he kept up.

“Let The Almighty determine if my time amongst the living should continue, or if this is where the game finally ends for me,” he said, in irritation, and seemingly poised to succumb to exhaustion at any moment. “If it is meant to be today, know that I will always cherish our long journey together, my brother.”

He laughed weakly, and dark blood had seeped in between his teeth from lacerations to his internal organs. If he could rest, he would recover…I was certain of it. But behind us, the castle’s deeper halls had moments ago collapsed into the sea. The rocky shore was also no longer visible, and sunlight danced on the surface of the deep blue water. If the same thing was happening to the rocky bluffs in front of the dark fortress, then worse trouble loomed ahead.

We had to get out of
and
off of whatever this thing was. For the first time, I wondered if Dracul had managed to create an illusion so real I never considered it could be otherwise.

“Yes, I’m curious about the same thing,” said Roderick, wearing a wan look of admiration for the wiles of our enemy, one that I prayed had been truly vanquished. “That’s why I’m suggesting you leave me here. This place will disappear very soon, maybe in a matter of ten to fifteen minutes. Save me, and you run the risk of not having enough time to locate Beatrice, Alistair, and Amy.”

“But what if they’re not here?” I wasn’t sure I believed any differently than him. Hell, they could’ve been anywhere at that point. I had no ‘feel’, one way or another, and my biggest fear was they were already dead. “What if he had them taken someplace far away, in case we managed to escape? It seems logical he’d put them far enough to where we couldn’t reach them in time to prevent their execution. Right?”

“All the more reason for you to get going,” he said, lying down on the floor that had begun to vibrate. In a minute the tremors we had eluded would find us. Dracul’s implements of torture had robbed Roderick of his stamina. “Goodbye, dear friend….”

“Roderick? …Roderick?! Damn it, man…
wake up!”

But he wasn’t asleep. At least not in the clinical sense. His body was dying and his mind was shutting down. I could scarcely believe this was happening!

“Don’t you dare leave me!” I shouted at him.

Tremors in the floor grew worse and the familiar fissures spread rapidly through the granite walls surrounding us. The ceiling had already collapsed prior to our arrival in this section of the castle, and the fact we could still be crushed or swallowed up in whatever chasm waited below us heightened my anxiety. Forced to make a decision right then, I prayed it was the correct one.

Hoping I wouldn’t need my coin’s apparent power over any other vampires we might encounter, I shoved it into a pocket. Then I hoisted my buddy, who had become a dead weight, and threw him over my shoulder. He might be dying, and could become a stiffening corpse by the time we exited the castle, but for better or for worse he was coming along.

Running was no longer possible. I moved as quickly as I could, zigzagging to avoid new fissures extending to the floor from the walls, along with sudden granite and marble shards popping up around me. Hard to keep my balance. I thought of nothing else but reaching the large hall just inside the castle’s entrance. Since we crashed our motorcycles there, I hoped at least my bike remained drivable. Otherwise, it would take forever to reach Budva, where my instincts told me I’d find my family, either alive or dead.

Certainly, as I’m sure some would suggest, the risk existed they could be somewhere inside the castle. Perhaps dispatched to another dungeon like the one they were relegated to when we stumbled onto them. It was a valid possibility. However, glimpsing foam from sea water crashing beneath the holes in the latest corridor’s floor made finding them anywhere beneath us highly unlikely. Ditto for the chances of finding them stranded in the upstairs quarters presently disintegrating above us.

But there were vampires.

Huddled in the darkness ahead, I braced for Roderick and me to be pounced on the instant we entered the hall they guarded. It appeared to be the destination I sought…but what to do? Well, truly there was no choice. If we waited for a miracle, within the next minute or two Roderick and I would be dropped into the churning Adriatic. There was no other choice.

Mustering a primal yell from deep within my soul, I ran with Roderick on my back, which amounted to a quick, awkward approach on stumbling footsteps. But the increased speed proved fortuitous when the floor behind us began to crumble and fall into the water.

Logically, I thought it would be the last lucky break for us. It should’ve been. But having watched the rest of the castle vanish into the sea seemed to sap these young vampires of their courage, and definitely any sense of meaningful servitude to their deceased master. The vamps hovered around us, but never attacked. And, by the time we made it back to my Suzuki, all but one had withdrawn. The one named Markita glowered at us from striking distance, as I laid Roderick down on the cool floor near where I ditched the bike.

I expected her to say or do something. However, when the onslaught of destruction caught up to this final area of Dracul’s wretched home, she and the others disappeared. Sunlight followed the dissolution of the tall ceilings. I heard several shrieks and caught a glimpse of a female younger than Markita erupt into a ball of flames. As before, in the cathedral, within seconds all that remained of this forlorn soul was a stream of ashes floating to the floor.

“Rod?…Roderick, can you hear me?” I shook him to the point of abuse. When he didn’t respond, I hurried over to the Suzuki. A busted fender and broken headlight were the most obvious damage to the motorcycle. I quickly checked all the vitals for it, and when satisfied it still ran well enough I tried to rouse Roderick again. “Come on, man, we’ve only got a minute to get out of here!”

I couldn’t carry him and drive the bike, and there wasn’t anything handy to secure him to the passenger seat. He would have to hold on to me. He made a slight noise in response. Without any time or choices left, I told him to hang on to my waist, hoping he could hear me. It would be a cruel twist if I got him this far, and he still died.

The walls fell in on themselves and the immense gate crashed through the disintegrating floor. There didn’t seem to be a way to get around the part that stuck out ahead of us. But then I noticed a small opening nearly five feet in width and almost as high. The floor was an imperfect zigzag to reach it.

“I…I will try,” he whispered, when I set him on the bike.

“Try nothing…just make damned sure you do!” I told him, sternly. The floor behind us began to give way, and as the bike’s engine returned to life, I sped out of there, leaning toward the front wheel to help us climb above the collapse. “Hang on, Rod!”

The gap was smaller than anticipated. I didn’t have enough warning to adjust the bike, and the zigzagged portion of the floor we followed began to buckle. I opened the throttle and ducked down, worried sick Roderick would be decapitated as we passed through.

We made it. Rather than look to see how close it had been, I sped onward. Elation filled my heart as Roderick’s listlessness gave way to a powerful grip around my midsection.

“Next time, I’m driving!” he shouted as we raced down the one lane highway toward the beach. “Better hope the road holds up!”

He reached over my shoulder to point to an area a hundred feet ahead of us. I damned near slammed the brakes. There was nothing but blue water in front of us.

“Don’t stop, Judas! The road isn’t disappearing!…It’s
forming!”

Immediately, images from the past two nights came to mind, and I recalled how the road appeared just ahead of the speeding Jaguars. But that was when Dracul was alive and well, and wanted us to join him for our dreaded face-to-face meetings. Now he was dead.

“Someone else is behind this,” said Roderick, in answer to my latest silent musing. “Someone I should’ve sensed before, and to whom Dracul was a mere pawn.”

“What? How in the hell is any of this even possible?!”

“I don’t know,” he murmured, to where I barely heard him. “But his life force hasn’t completely left the earth plane. You know what it’s like when any immortal older than three centuries leaves us…we all sense it. Without fail it works that way.”

He was right. I couldn’t recall anyone dying during the past millennium without some sort of psychic fanfare. No one ever merely slips away from our dysfunctional fraternity. Same for the ladies, too. And, why a three hundred year qualifier for this? It has something to do with the carbon in an immortal’s body, which breaks down differently than a mortal. Sounds like bullshit, but Roderick has the documented research compiled by Comte St, Germain detailing how it happens. Some normal human beings are susceptible to a smaller version of this, but it generally doesn’t happen except to those who make it past their one hundred and twentieth birthday. Yeah, not a big membership for the alumni in that group, I’m sure.

“Another has imprisoned Dracul’s life force for a new purpose,” Roderick continued, after nearly a minute in silence. “I hear his screams. Wherever his soul is, he is in agony, which is exactly what this other person wants. It is someone we have met in passing, familiar, but not a friend.”

“Another immortal?”

“Yes.”

“But one you can’t identify yet?”

“Correct,” he said, and I sensed his fear. “I sense the power of this one, and whoever it is can be so much worse than Dracul in his prime.”

“Oh, shit,” I muttered, pushing the bike’s speed to its max.

It was too much to take in and assimilate, and so I focused my attention instead on the road ahead—a road that kept forming, seemingly out of nothing—and the whereabouts of my family. I didn’t allow myself to consider they might already be dead.

Soon, the beach came into view. I think we both wondered how this would work. Would the thousands of patrons present see the strange phenomenon racing toward them? And, if so, would it be as the familiar cloud-like mist embracing the beach as we made our approach?

The speedometer was approaching two hundred kilometers per hour, and the mist steadily thickened, making visibility an ever-increasing problem. I could only see the front of the bike and nothing else. Then, without warning, the highway ended. Instead of landing on Budva’s famed sandy beach, the bike fell into shallow water, where it rolled and skidded into a reef. I took the brunt of the impact, and by the time we broke the surface of the water, I was mostly healed. Roderick could stand up, though still painful to do so, and after a few steps toward the beach I could stand as well. I assumed we were near the dilapidated pier, but it had changed.

“Oh my God, there they are!” shouted Amy, excitedly.

“What in the hell are you two doing in the water?” added Alistair.

At first I couldn’t see either one. Everything was mostly blurred until we stepped onto the beach. Roderick gasped first, though I admit my response was similar. Somehow, the pier from the past two evenings had been transformed into a pier fully intact and much bigger, and crowded. People were everywhere, surrounding street performers and a handful of venders with pushcarts.

What the…?

But the mind-fuck grew worse when Beatrice, Alistair, and Amy stepped into view. They were dressed as we had seen them the previous night, but instead of soiled garments streaked with each one’s blood, their clothing was clean. And the wounds to their faces were missing. I could smell Alistair’s favorite Dolce-Gabanna cologne, as well as a Chanel scent from Amy when we met them at the base of the pier. Beatrice followed behind them, with her hair pinned up to where the delicate contours of her slender neck were exposed—an even younger ‘her’ than the woman I said goodbye to just hours earlier.

I wanted to run up the intact wooden stairs and throw my arms around them all! They were safe, and most importantly, they were
alive!

But, all I could do was stare in stunned silence.

It looked and felt like another of Dracul’s illusions—only worse—and when I looked over at my near-naked druid companion, his expression revealed the same confusion and wariness.

“Well, what in the hell have you two been up to?” Alistair asked. “Hey, Roderick...this isn’t the nude beach, man. That one’s up the road apiece.”

Roderick simply nodded in response to my son’s joke, wearing a wan smile that told me the wheels were turning as furiously inside his head as they were in mine. He scarcely noticed that his trousers had fallen off in the water. Instead, he glanced around himself, surely taking in everything and on the lookout for whatever, or whomever, was behind this latest trick. I removed my shirt and asked for Alistair’s sunglasses, promising him their return or a new pair as soon as we were safe enough to do so.

“Safe enough from what?”

“Not sure, but I’d like to return to our hotel immediately,” I said. I handed my shirt for Roderick to tie around his waist and to shelter his eyes with the glasses. The makeup he had caked on earlier had also washed off in the water. He had already drawn a number of curious looks from passersby on the beach, and surely his powder white complexion drew many more looks from the pier above us. “Someone’s watching us. We can explain more from there.”

“The Astoria?”

“Yes, but how in the hell did you know we were staying in that hotel?” An icy chill traveled down my spine, despite the sun beating down hotly upon my shoulders and back. I reached into my pocket, relieved my coin was still there.