The Disciple and Other Stories of the Paranormal (20 page)

“
We need to go back with a
better plan than we’ve had,” I said. “We can’t afford to be
scattershot anymore.”

“
David always said there’s
got to be a pattern,” Liam reminded us as we huddled around our
campfire. The men had found skullcaps, too, and all of us were
wearing them for warmth.

“
But we haven’t found it
in over a year,” Jonathan pointed out. “We’re finding ’Pires, yes,
but they’re in random locations.”

“
If the rumors are true,
we should have gone to Romania, not France,” Adrienne said.
“Perhaps that’s what’s wrong.”

“
No, the scientists knew
what they were doing,” Liam countered. “We’re at the point in time
when the vampires started to spread and in the general area where
the spread started – all the research shows it. We have to find the
pattern. Perhaps it’s in how they travel.”

Marcus shook his head. “Vampires don’t
wander around, especially the ones of this era. Sunlight is still
deadly to them. ’Pires of this day nest.”

“
So how are they
spreading?” Adrienne asked. “How did they leave Romania? And why
can’t we find the pattern?”

I remembered what Armand had taught me when
I’d first joined The Order. “We’re not looking in the right places
or in the right way. We’re not thinking like they think.”

Hannah nodded. “We’ve been here a year, but
we’re still thinking like ’Pires from our time, not this one. We
need to regress our thinking somehow, to match how those of this
era think, reason, and react.”

“
The only nests we’ve
found have been family groups,” Adrienne said. “If we look at it
like the plague it is, maybe it’s something passed through
bloodline.”

“
No,” Liam said. “We’ve
found plenty of solitary ’Pires. It’s not that.”

“
Then how is it
spreading?” I asked. “We can go for days without seeing another
person.” At least, another living person. The dead were all around
us any time we neared even the smallest populated area.

“
Because we’re forced to
travel through the forests now.” Hannah grimaced. “Though even when
we were safe traveling on the regular paths we could go a day
without coming to a village.”

“
So, does that mean the
vampires are traveling along the regular roads?” Jonathan asked.
“And if so, how? I haven’t seen an overabundance of coffins being
transported, and without that protection, they can only travel at
night.”

“
There are no spare
coffins to be had. The dead are in mass graves or rotting in the
streets,” I pointed out. “In fact, coffins would stand out and give
us something to investigate.”

“
The ’Pires are
spreading.” Adrienne sighed. “We need to determine how and soon.
Before they turn the few who aren’t succumbing to the bubonic
plague.”

“
We know they didn’t
overtake the population,” Liam said. “That’s not our
risk.”

Adrienne shook her head. “We’ve changed
things, by coming back in time. The history books you studied never
mentioned a small group of people accused of being demons roaming
the French countryside, but those history books won’t be written
for hundreds of years. By coming to the past we’ve changed it. We
don’t know what we’ve done, not truly.”

An animal howled in the distance. It was a
lonely sound, especially so because no other responded. A shudder
went down my spine. I looked at the five others with me. We were
all we had here. Losing David had been bad enough. I didn’t want to
lose any of the others.

Marcus took my hand and squeezed it gently.
“We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”

I nodded as the others offered reassurance I
wasn’t sure any of us believed. The animal howled again, alone in
the endless night.

Another thing we hadn’t foreseen in the far
future was that the vampire race’s fatal weakness to gold was built
over time. By the twenty-fourth century it was a certain weapon. In
this time, not as effective by far.

Fortunately, the Nightsticks still worked
well for killing vampires. However, we’d been trained to expect
just carrying a Nightstick would create real vulnerability in any
’Pire, and this was no longer so. The stunning power still worked
in the Middle Ages, but only at close range, and less effectively
if the vampire was strong.

This lesson was confirmed when we lost
Adrienne. She’d gone scouting alone. When she didn’t return as
scheduled, the rest of us went after her. We found her in a field,
crucified and drained of all blood.

We could tell from the footprints there had
been many around her. They’d taken her Nightsticks and the rest of
her gear, including her horse, but left her cloak alone.

“
How did they drink her?”
Marcus asked. “Our blood is poison to them.”

“
They didn’t have to drink
her to drain her.” Liam pointed to the wet earth around the bottom
of the crucifix.

“
But her wards and
charms,” Jonathan protested. “They should have helped her. The
’Pires shouldn’t have been able to touch her.”

Liam and I examined Adrienne’s body. “They
sliced open her feet.” I felt bile in my mouth as I said this.
“They must have watched her blood drain, watched her die.”

“
Why?” Marcus asked. “I’ve
never seen a ’Pire in this time desecrate a body in this
way.”

“
It’s a message,” Hannah
answered. “They know about us now and they’ll fight back
differently than they have.”

“
We’re going after them.”
I wasn’t going to wait around for them to come to us. I couldn’t
allow them to do this to Hannah, to the others…to
Marcus.

The others agreed and we followed the tracks
to a secluded chateau. No lights burning, but we didn’t assume the
inhabitants were asleep.

We raided the chateau and found a clan of
twenty vampires – they looked like a group of families, probably
the chateau’s owners and their servants.

They were trying to determine what
Adrienne’s gear was, some of them playing with the metal vials of
holy water. They were avoiding her Nightsticks, but didn’t seem
bothered much by them. Two wore her jewelry, and some were
fingering Adrienne’s gold, gold that had been blessed by all of us.
The ’Pires weren’t affected at all.

We attacked, and two tried to fight back
using the Nightsticks. It took a few minutes, but their hands began
to burn away and we were able to wrest the weapons back with
ease.

They didn’t fight in an organized fashion,
and though the eldest male seemed to be the leader, he wasn’t much
of one. “Keep him alive,” I called to Liam, just before he dealt a
killing blow.

“
Why?”

“
I want to ask a
question.”

Liam shrugged but did as I’d asked. He held
the ’Pire with a stake at his heart as the rest of us dispatched
the remaining clan members. The ’Pire seemed unperturbed.

“
Who made you?” I asked as
the last of this clan were beheaded and their bodies put onto a
pyre.

He shook his head, as if he hadn’t
understood me. I’d spoken in French, but we were close to the Alps,
so I tried Italian. He looked confused. I tried German.

“
I will not say,” he
replied.

“
How long have you been
made?”

“
I was there in the first
and will be there in the last.”

“
Why did you doom your
family to this fate? You turned them into demons, abominations in
the eyes of God.”

He smiled. “Eternal life is not doom.”

“
None of them will now
have eternal life. Nor will you.”

He laughed. “Nor will
you
. You are
the abomination. Your blood and your body, they are not of this
world. We died so that we could be resurrected, to live forever.
You are the demons. We killed your sister demon and crucified her
according to the laws. We will be rewarded, in this world and the
next.”

“
What do you call
yourselves?”

“
We are those who live by
night.”

“
Vampires?”

The ’Pire shook his head. “We are not
Romanian.”

“
What are you?”

He smiled wider. “We are your death. We know
of you, and we will wipe you abominations off the face of the
Earth.”

“
I’ve heard enough,” Liam
snarled. He ripped the vampire’s head off. We tossed his remains
onto the rest and watched them burn.

“
Is he right?” I asked
Hannah as we reclaimed all of Adrienne’s gear. “Are we the
abominations?”

“
No.” She put her hand on
my shoulder. “Remember the future, the world we come from. The
vampires are the enemy, the vicious, bloodthirsty demons who
destroyed our lives and our world. Just because the ’Pires of this
time are less organized or trained doesn’t make them
holy.”

We waited until the vampires were nothing
but ash, then returned to bury Adrienne.

As with David, we wrapped Adrienne in her
cloak and buried her, with her charms and another message put into
another empty holy water vial, again telling The Order how their
warrior had died.

However, we were shaken in ways we hadn’t
been before. By Adrienne’s death, yes, but more by the fact we
weren’t as strong as we’d thought. We’d known our weapons weren’t
working as well as they had in our own time, but they were much
less effective here than we’d realized until now.

Worse than this, our faith was shaken. While
we all tried to discredit what the vampire had said, it was
impossible to ignore. And now there were only five of us left
against a vampire population that knew what we were here to do.