Death Deceives: Book Three (Mortis Vampire Series) (28 page)

Clam
ping its hands on my head, my enemy tried to unleash its shadow version of the holy marks. Pretending to be mortally wounded, I fell to the floor and writhed around with my hands covering my face. It might as well have tried to beat me to death with a feather duster for all the effect it had had.

“
Finally, triumph is mine!” the shadow trumpeted inside my head.

“
Guess again, stupid,” I said and grabbed the shadow by the feet. With an audible ripping sound that only I and my two remaining shadows would have been able to hear, I stood and tore the thing free from me. Hanging upside down by the ankles, the shadow screamed as it became thinner and thinner before finally melting away.

Turning, I spied s
hadow number four still huddled beneath the desk, trying to pretend it wasn’t there. “How about you?” I said to it. “Aren’t you going to try to possess me, too?”

“
Um, I hadn’t planned on it,” it replied inside my head. “Honestly, I just want to go back to being a normal shadow again. I hate having to anticipate your every move all the time.” It was hard to tell since I couldn’t read its inky expression but it sounded like it was nearly in tears.

“
That would be a pain in the butt,” I agreed. “So, what now?”

Slinking out from beneath the
desk, my shadow slumped against it. “I dunno. The other three were the brains. I’m just the original.”

Great.
My real shadow is dumber than my fake ones.
“Pretty soon I’m going to go into the First’s lair,” I reminded it. “We’re going to fight and he’s probably going to win.” We were both glum at the thought. Once I was dead, my clone would cease to exist as well.

“I don’t want to turn into one of those flesh eating monster
s,” it replied plaintively. “They smell horrible, they eat with their mouths open and they have no sense of humour.”

“You can smell?” I admit I was surprised
by the revelation.

“I can smell, taste and feel anything you
do.”

I mulled this over then came to a horrible realization. “So, when Luc and I are…”

Before I could even finish, my shadow was nodding. “Oh yeah. I felt evvvverything. All four of us did, heh heh. That Lord Lucentio is pretty good in the sack.”

It had been mortifying to discover our friends overheard us each time we got physical with each other. This was
somehow so much worse. I almost felt like an unknowing star of a porno film.
I’d better not tell Luc about this.
Then I remembered that he’d been the sexual entertainer of the Court for hundreds of years. The idea of being spied on by my four shadows probably wouldn’t bother him at all.

With far more important things to worry about, I turned my attention back to the present.
A plan had just come to me and I smiled. “I have a proposal for you,” I said to my black clone.

“I’m listening,” it replied. After I outlined what was on my mind, the thing gave a laugh that sounded eerie inside my head.
At least it spoke English and not an alien language. “It’s a deal! I just hope this works so neither of us ends up dead.” On that note, my shadow and I were in perfect accord.

Heading upstairs, my poor shadow tried its hardest to copy my every move until I took pity on it. “Don’t worry about copying me. No one else can see that you’re…alive.” I wasn’t sure ‘alive’ was the correct word but I didn’t want to offend my new ally.

“Thank G-G-G-G.” I sensed its grimace even if I couldn’t make out its features
properly. “I keep forgetting about that.”

“Me, too.”
It seemed the silhouettes had more in common with their fleshy counterparts than I’d ever imagined. Neither of us could say the lord’s name out loud.

Rea
ssured that no one would notice its weird antics, my silhouette stood up and allowed me to pull it along. Not only was it not particularly intelligent, it was also lazy. If it had been a real person, we’d probably have been the best of friends.

Knocking on the stairwell door, I heard muffled exclamations of fright from the other side.
Unlike the soldiers, I didn’t make a lot of noise when I walked. The door cracked open and one of the guards eyed me carefully. I tapped my watch to indicate we were running out of time and he hurriedly pulled the door open.

Not wanting to scare anyone into putting a bullet in my back and ruin my
leather suit, I walked at an almost normal pace towards the exit. “Where are you going?” one of the guards called, jogging to catch up.

“I left some gear
in the police headquarters that I’ll need for the cavern of doom,” I said.

“Did s
he just say ‘cavern of doom’?” the first guard said out of the side of his mouth in Russian.

“She did and I don’t like the sound of it.”
If they’d seen the actual footage of the cave, they would have liked it even less. I thought it was an apt description.

Emerging onto a street I didn’t recognize from my earlier reconnaissance of the town, I raised an eyebrow at the two soldiers. “How
far away are we from the police HQ?”

“It’
s four blocks away,” one of the men answered. That confirmed what the final remaining imp had told me after my head finished regenerating and I’d woken up in the cell.

I could have sprinted there and back quickly enough but didn’t want to risk having my head riddled with bullets again. Reattaching something that had been cut off was easy enough. Re
pairing one hole in my head took a few seconds but regenerating my entire head had apparently been a bit trickier. Since we didn’t have much time to waste I would have to play it safe. “Let’s go,” I said to them both and they broke into a jog.

“Where
are the rest of your shadows?” one of them panted after we’d jogged for half a block.

“
They had some other place they had to be,” was my vague reply.

“
Are they coming back?” the other soldier asked anxiously.

“I bloody
well hope not,” I muttered. I was down to having a single shadow again and it was my fond hope that I wouldn’t collect any more of them.
Try to avoid ingesting the blood of vampires or imps from now on,
my subconscious suggested wryly.

Both men were breathing harder than normal by the time we reached
the squat white police building. I wasn’t breathing at all, of course. They escorted me inside and I made my way up to the second floor to retrieve my backpack.

“I’m going to change
my clothes,” I told the pair as I motioned them out of the room. “If either of you open this door, I’ll rip your face off,” I warned them as I closed the door.

“I wouldn’t mind if she ripped my pants off,” one of the soldiers whispered. The other one sniggered.

Changing rapidly, I wormed my way into the red suit for the first time. Just like the black ones, I almost had to be a contortionist to do the laces up at the back. “Let me,” my shadow said and brushed my hands away. It was creepy that my shade was corporeal enough to be able to do up my laces. It pulled them tight enough that it would have cut off my circulation if I’d had any. Not very bright and lazy it might be, but the silhouette was efficient. I only had two more items to add to the suit but I’d wait until we were in position near the cavern before I donned them.

Opening the door, I
ignored the dazed expressions on the soldier’s wide eyed faces at the sight of me dressed in neck to toe red leather. Moving over to a window, I checked my reflection. The thick band of metal across my chest and back were contoured to my shape and didn’t stand out as much as I’d thought they would. Skin tight, the suit fit me perfectly and was almost as comfortable as being naked. Considering just how closely it fit, I might as well have been.

With my escorts following close behind me,
most likely staring at my butt, I jogged back to the squat grey building where I’d been incarcerated beneath the ground. One of my guides led the way back to the war room where the leaders of the two armies were working out their strategy.

Striding down the hallway, I ignored the heads that turned
and mouths that dropped open. There was an instant and deafening silence at my arrival when I stepped into the war room. Colonel Sanderson’s eyes popped open as wide as they could and my shadow giggled. I had to bite down on my bottom lip so I wouldn’t do the same. Men were such visual creatures that they could be rendered brain dead at the sight of a woman’s contours. Mind you, my brain went a bit numb whenever I saw Luc without his clothes so I couldn’t really criticize them.

“Good timing,” the American said when he finally managed to tear his eyes away from my
new outfit. “We’ll be leaving in five minutes.” Realizing something was different about me, he frowned. “You seem to have lost some of the shadows that have been trailing behind you. What happened to them?”

I decided to go with the truth this time.
“They had a fight to the death over which one was going to possess my meat sack. That one was the victor.” I hiked a thumb over my shoulder.

“Meat sack?” someone muttered.

“My body,” I elaborated, inwardly wincing at using my late imp shadow’s terminology.

Eying my only remaining shadow, Sanderson hesitated before asking his next question. “Has it tried to possess you yet?”

I shook my head. “No. We’ve come to an understanding. It doesn’t want to be turned into an imp and neither do I.”

Everyone in the room was struggling with the idea that my shadow was sentient. They couldn’t see it hugging itself and looking around uneasily. All they saw was a normal shadow doing normal things.

Checking his watch, the Colonel circled a hand in the air. “It’s time for us to move.”

Sanderson and his men knew
what I was but I doubted they had thought through the logistics of how to transport me once the sun came up. It seemed prudent to raise the issue. “I’ll need to ride in an enclosed vehicle without any windows in the back. I’ll also need something to cover me with. A blanket will do,” I instructed the Colonel. I’d left the long black coat Luc had stolen for me hanging over the back of a chair. Sighs of disappointment swept the room when I donned it.

“Why do you need these things?” a high ranking Russian asked. Unlike Sanderson, he couldn’t seem to raise his eyes above my
legs even after the cloak covered them.

“Because I’m highly allergic to sunlight,” I reminded them. A few of the men chuckled
. I didn’t join them because I wasn’t trying to be funny. Being boiled down to a skeleton wasn’t much fun.

A
suitable vehicle was located to transport me to the First’s lair. I watched the armoured truck pull up out front of the building and gave the driver a nod of approval. Sanderson appeared and climbed into the back of the truck with me, clutching a small bundle. I wasn’t sure if he was riding with me as a gesture of good faith on his part or if he simply didn’t trust me to be alone with any of his men.

Five
more men joined us then the truck went into motion. My shadow shifted sideways with a small huff of annoyance when one of the soldiers sat on its face. It sat by my side, close enough that we brushed up against each other when the truck took off. It was disconcerting to know that only I could see, touch and hear it. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I was going crazy.
I’m pretty sure you passed that milestone a few months ago,
my subconscious broke to me ungently.

“Here,” the Colonel handed me a
musty old blanket with several holes in it. “This is the best I could come up with on short notice.

Judging the
state of it, I nodded my thanks. “It will do.” I poked a finger through one of the holes but it didn’t look like it would tear easily.

“You’ll look just like Vincent
when you put that on,” my clone sniggered. I pictured the tall, thin, bald, crazy Romanian vampire and shuddered. He’d had a penchant for wearing long, dark hooded robes and then posing theatrically like a terrible actor in a C grade movie.

You were sentien
t even back then,
I asked it mentally.

“Sort of,” it replied uneasily
as if it was afraid I’d react badly to the news. “Right from the first night you woke up as Mortis, I’ve been…aware on some level. Over the last couple of weeks, all four of us woke up fully. We were biding our time, waiting for the right moment to try to take you over. Well, the others were anyway. I was just going along and pretending to be one of them.”

I had the feeling my original shadow had felt like an outcast amongst the others. Sadly, I knew exactly how it felt.
I mulled this knowledge over silently, quietly freaked out that my original shadow had been alive to some extent this whole time and I hadn’t even known. This meant that I’d been doomed to become one of the damned from the instant I’d become a vampire. They’d been disturbingly clever to hide their sentience from me for so long.