Death Deceives: Book Three (Mortis Vampire Series) (2 page)

The only
creatures I could sense in this fashion were imps and vampires. Humans, animals and insects were immune to my mental probe. I had the vague idea that I could sense our kin and the imps because we shared the same diseased blood. While I’d diligently read the prophecy about myself, it hadn’t been very forthcoming with the powers I’d end up with. Only some of what I could do had been written down. Maybe the Romanian prophet thought it would be wise to keep the knowledge to himself so the vampire population wouldn’t freak out. Maybe he hadn’t known just how weird I’d turn out. It occurred to me that the powers that be might be screwing with us all by not telling us everything.

Geordie pulled in his bottom lip long enough to make a snide comment
at my remark. “That doesn’t mean anything. The First can mask his offspring from you somehow. We’ll probably be surrounded when the sun comes up and killed in our sleep.” He shrivelled against the withering looks we all sent him. “I’m just saying what we’re all thinking,” the kid whined defensively.

The First was just that, the first human to be turned into a vampire. He’d made a deal with a dying
alien demi-god, our father, fifty thousand years ago for eternal life. What he hadn’t bargained on was the alien’s diseased blood changing us so that our shadows eventually became sentient.

Over
tens of thousands of years, our father’s blood gained ascendency and eventually took control of the First’s vampire body. Then the First had somehow evolved into a replica of the one who had created us. With this change, he’d become alive again and had also gained the power to convert all vampires into clones of himself.

I had no idea why he’d waited until now to start transforming his offspring
into their new forms. Maybe he was ruled by fate and had to wait for me to rise as Mortis before embarking on his mad plan for world domination. According to Kokoro, the Japanese vampire prophetess, no one could escape from our fate. Maybe the First was also inhibited by the same rules that we were. If so, then it gave us at least a fighting chance against him.

I’d had
several visions of the First but had yet to meet the creature in person. In my dreams he was about eight feet tall, had ashy skin and the face of a bat. In the same dreams, I’d witnessed him calling forth a band of possessed vampires and turning them into clones of himself. The imp clones were smaller, only seven feet tall and their skin was a slightly darker grey than his. Their heads were the same as his; bald and batlike with a rudimentary up-turned nose, large fangs, forked tongues and long ears that curled at the tips. To me they looked like something that had crawled straight out of hell, hence the reason why I called them imps.

Most disturbing of all, the
clones were also alive again and were able to reproduce at an alarming rate. The First had a regular baby factory in the underground hideout I’d dreamed myself in on several occasions. I’d come to realize my dreams were more like visions after a couple of them had come true.

The First’s
harem were able to produce offspring every ten days or so. I’d seen one of the little monsters claw its way out of its dead mother’s womb with my own incredulous eyes. As soon as the infant had spotted me, it had immediately tried to kill me. God only knew how many imps existed now. God only knew why it was my destiny to kill them all. Come to think of it, maybe God didn’t have anything to do with this whole sordid mess. It was difficult to believe a divine being would hijack an alien spaceship, force it to crash land on our planet, make it turn a human into a vampire and eventually force Mortis, aka me, to be reborn as the living dead.
If that isn’t the case then who sends the Romanian prophet and Kokoro their visions? For that matter, who sends you to the cavern of doom in your dreams?
My subconscious had me stumped and I didn’t bother trying to search for an answer. I knew my limitations and I simply wasn’t smart enough to solve this mystery.

“Four of us have the ability to remain conscious during the day,”
Gregor said to Geordie to soothe his fears. “We’ll take turns to stand guard.”

That meant Igor had to be at least several hundred years old if he could resist the compulsion of dying when the sun came up.
It was unnerving to be awake one moment then dead to the world once the first rays of sun hit the ground. Due to the truly crappy things that had happened to me since becoming the walking dead, I was far from being a normal vampire. I now slept like a human again, which meant I could stay awake if I wanted to. Most old vampires could resist the dark magic that took us down for the day but they eventually had to succumb to it again. I could stay awake for days if I wanted to, but it made me very cranky when I did.

Luc crossed his legs and made a
graceful gesture with his hand. “I suggest we launch our plan as quickly as possible and track down the First before he can send more of his offspring after us.”

Gregor
lifted an eyebrow while Igor took out a knife and began sharpening it. “We didn’t get a chance to discuss your plan in detail earlier. What did you have in mind?” Gregor was referring to the meeting we’d tried to have a couple of hours ago. We’d gathered on the top of a hill to decide what we were going to do and had ended up being attacked by a bunch of imps instead. We hadn’t even known they were there until they’d come boiling out of the night to attack us. Usually, I could sense imps when they were close. As Geordie had said, the First could somehow block this ability and mask his offspring from me.

Our small group of
vampires was all that stood between the imp army and an unsuspecting humanity. I couldn’t help but have serious doubts about our chances of saving them, or ourselves.

“
During my captivity,” Luc began and slanted a glance at me when I frowned at the painful reminder of his incarceration, “I noticed the diminishing numbers of female courtiers and grew suspicious.” He’d been held captive by the Comtesse, the most powerful of the nine Councillors who ruled the Court in France. The Court was made up of at least several hundred European vampires. The courtiers came and went on various errands for the Court so it was hard to tell exactly how many there were. I’d come to the conclusion that all were attractive, vain and a complete waste of space. I’d only had a few dealings with them but they’d left a memorable impression on me.

At first, I
believed I’d been fated to kill most of the courtiers. Apparently that was now limited to only the vamps that had been possessed by their shadows. A tiny part of me was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to wipe the entire Court off the face of the earth.
Unless the First gets to them,
I reminded myself
. Then they’ll all become damned or will be turned into imps and then I’ll get to kill them.
The thought cheered me up a little.

The
Comtesse was one vampire I was itching to put an end to. She was Luc’s maker and a truly unpleasant monster. I’d only realized the praying mantis was Luc’s true master after she’d ordered him to chop off my head. I still hadn’t understood completely until his sword had separated my head from my shoulders. The truth had sunken in pretty quickly when it became apparent that he was unable to refuse her order.

I didn’t want to rehash the horror of waking up to find myself
reduced to being a head in a box again so skipped ahead to the main point; the Comtesse had broken our laws. One of the rules enforced by the Council was that the lords and ladies could only have one servant each. It helped to control our undead population as well as aiding us in keeping a low profile. Of course, there was a clause to the rule. All nine Councillors, being so much more important than the rest of us lowly minions, could have up to twenty servants each.

Luc and
the others were fairly certain that the Comtesse had created over a thousand servants. This included lords, ladies, guards and the various other lackeys who helped run both her white marble mansion in the UK and the French mansion. She’d managed to keep this fact a secret for so long because she was ancient, evil and fiendishly clever.

I was almost impressed by how the praying mantis
had pulled this off. She forced lords and ladies, who she herself had turned, to pretend to be the masters of new vamps she had also turned. Being beneath her control, they were unable to blow the whistle on her. So, while every vamp that had been turned by her knew the truth, they couldn’t come out and admit it.

I didn’t want to kill
the Comtesse just because she’d breeched the rules so badly. I wanted to end her lengthy unlife because she had been tormenting Luc for seven centuries. I’d rescued him from her clutches a couple of nights ago but he wouldn’t be truly free of the hag until her head was separated from her body. I was a firm believer in an eye for an eye. Unluckily for her, I’d gained the ability to reattach any body parts that I misplaced. It was just another one of the mysterious talents that alienated me from the rest of vampirekind. Unlike me, once the Comtesse lost her head, she would become a stain on the ground and her reign of terror would finally be over. My lips curved upwards slightly at the thought.

“I
began keeping watch for any unusual activity,” Luc continued his explanation. “I noticed a white van appearing every few nights. Each time it showed up, one less courtier was seen the next night.”

“You think we should wait for the van to show
up and then follow it?” Igor guessed.

Luc nodded.
“Exactly.”

“How long
has it been since you last saw the van?” Gregor queried.

“
The last time was three nights ago. It is due to arrive again tonight or tomorrow night,” Luc replied.

Luc,
Gregor and Igor immediately launched into a detailed plan of how we could best track the van without being noticed by the guards patrolling the mansion. My eyes glazed over pretty quickly from boredom. I was more of a doer than a planner. Lengthy discussions like this tended to make me sleepy. Meeting Geordie’s gaze, I saw he was equally disinterested in the conversation. His lips quirked when I rolled my eyes then we were both laughing silently.

“Why don’t you two children go
upstairs and get cleaned up?” Igor said with a dark frown. Luc shook his head wearily at our antics and Gregor hid a smile of what I took to be fond amusement. Compared to them, we were toddlers. Especially me. My irises had already disappeared and my pupils had become enlarged thanks to being cut into eleven pieces and then buried in consecrated dirt in a cemetery. I’d gone through some pretty radical changes during that short and unpleasant period. So, while I might look ancient in the eye department, I was still fairly new.

Seizing the excuse
to flee, I bolted off the couch and raced Geordie to the set of stairs in the hallway. The kid beat me but only because he cheated. Tripping over the foot he stuck out, I sprawled on my face at the base of the stairs. Planting a foot on my back, he leaped over my prone body then raced to the top and down the hall with me right on his heels. I could have beaten him by using my unnatural speed but that would have been unfair.

As I’d suspected
, there was only one shower in the house so I was forced to wait for my turn. “You could always join me,
chérie
,” Geordie said and batted long, girly eyelashes at me.

“
No thanks, I’ll wait,” I replied grumpily. The clumps of ooze in my hair and clinging to my suit didn’t smell very nice and I desperately wanted to clean up.

While
Geordie showered, I prowled through the upper floor. Apart from the bathroom, there were three smaller bedrooms and one larger one. Placing my backpack on the bed of the master bedroom, I claimed it before anyone else could. Luc and I would be sharing a bed so it made sense for us to have the bigger room.

It was late autumn in Europe and it was a lot colder than I was used to.
I’d lived in Australia my whole life and it had a very warm climate in Queensland most of the time. Thankfully, a small pile of wood was waiting to be lit in the fireplace. Matches were on the mantle so I struck one then used a heavy iron poker to coax the pitiful flames to life. I couldn’t blow on it since I no longer had the ability to draw a breath let alone to force any air out of my lungs.

Geordie took his sweet time showering but finally emerged in a cloud of steam.
I was waiting for him by the time the door opened. I hastily shifted my eyes away as he flashed his thin body at me in the pretence of adjusting his towel.

He opened his mouth to make some kind of
inappropriate comment then cowered away when I lifted my hand to palm his face away. “There is no need to threaten me, Natalie,” Geordie said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I will go, for now.” With a soulful look over his shoulder, he disappeared into one of the smaller bedrooms.

L
ike all sensible vampires, Geordie was afraid of the holy marks on my palms. The marks were twin indentations that I’d received from holding onto a cross too tightly. The outline had become embedded in my palms on both occasions. They were deadly weapons that could kill the undead but only if I willed them to.

Being able to withstand holy objects and holy water
were two of my many talents. Fire also reportedly had no effect on me. I hadn’t tested that theory yet and had no desire to do so. The flames might not kill me but it would probably hurt like hell anyway.