Vampires of Maze (Part Two) (Beautiful Immortals Series Two Book 2) Page 2

  “Not any longer,” Calix said with a cocky air. He stepped further into the room and stared hard into the darkness, checking his surroundings, before holstering his gun.

  Morten sniffed the air with his long, pointed nose. “So it is true, you are werewolves like me? You smell like werewolf.”

  All I could smell was the scent of burning candles.

  “That’s right, old man,” Rea said before propping a fresh cigar into the corner of her mouth and lighting it. Smoke drifted from the end of it and up into the darkness. I wanted to ask where she had disappeared to during our search of the graveyard. I wanted to know why she hadn’t reached out and helped me as I was dragged down beneath the ground. But I sensed such questions would only lead to another confrontation between us, and now wasn’t the time. Besides, I didn’t want to waste any more time sniping and arguing with Rea. If we could, I hoped that one day we could become friends.

  “So where have you come from?” Morten asked. “I didn’t think there were any more werewolves left in England. I thought I was the only one.”

  “We’re not from England,” Trent started to explain. “We’ve come from Switzerland. Our number has dwindled too – so to save what remains of our people we left our home to go in search of others like us.”

  “Yeah, and it looks like we’ve come to the wrong place,” Calix mumbled under his breath. He looked at his friends and nodded in the direction of Morten before adding, “How are we ever gonna beat the vampires with grandad tagging along?”

  “We haven’t come to beat anybody,” I reminded him. “I thought we came here to find peace.”

  “Peace?” Morten suddenly chuckled. “If you’ve come in search of that, you truly have come to the wrong place.”

  “That’s what we keep trying to tell her,” Rea said, before taking another long draw on the cigar. The end of it blazed in the darkness.

  “I believe we can find peace…” I started, but before I’d had the chance to finish what I had wanted to say, Rea cut over me.

  “Believe what you want, Julia, but first, let’s listen to what the old man has to say,” Rea said.

  Stepping in front of Rea as if to protect me from her somehow, Trent looked at Morten and said, “So what happened here? Why are you hiding below ground?”

  Morten looked at us. He wrung his hands in his lap and his ancient knuckles popped, sounding like firecrackers exploding. “I was from a town called Maze, which isn’t too far from here. We lived peacefully with the humans who resided there. We knew of the war that had started between the Beautiful Immortals, as the humans liked to call us, but we hoped that it would have been settled – a peace found – before it reached us. But alas, our prayers went unanswered and the vampires did come. Their number was so great that we were unable to defeat them. The battle was long and bloody and we were soon defeated by them. The remaining werewolves were butchered by the vampires until none of us were left.”

  “But you survived,” Trent said.

  “Only because I took sanctuary here, beneath the church,” Morten explained.

  “Because you ran away,” Calix cut in. “Because you’re a coward and didn’t want to stay and fight.”

  Morten looked at him with his pale stare. “I’m no coward, I can assure you of that. It takes more than a coward to bury one’s race. To dig grave after grave after grave and bury the people you once loved, friends and family…”

  “Oh great,” Calix said, “we’ve found ourselves a gravedigger.”

  “Cut it out, Calix,” Rush snapped at his younger brother. “Let the man speak.”

  Without saying another word, Calix, skulked back into the shadows.

  Rush looked at Morten and nodded his head, giving him the sign that it was okay to continue and not everyone in the group would be so flippant with him.

  “It’s true, I was a gravedigger at this church,” Morten continued. “And yes, I didn’t fight in the war, but that doesn’t mean my suffering and pain was any less. Yes, I survived by hiding below ground, but what kind of life is that? I have nothing or no one. I can no longer go above ground. I’m alone in this world.”

  “Not any longer,” Trent said, stepping toward the old man. “We’re all wolves here and we should stick together.”

  Hearing this, Morten glanced at me.

  Seeing this, Rea said, “Apart from her...”

  “I know Julia is a Wicce,” Morten cut in. “I know she’s a witch. But just like the werewolves, they too were slaughtered by the vampires.”

  Hearing this, I stepped forward. “There are others like me here?”

  Removing the bowler hat, Morten scratched his head, which was covered with fine white hair. He frowned before speaking. “I can’t be sure of anything. It all seems like such a long time ago. But from my understanding of it, the Wicce once lived in a place called Twisted Den. If I am right in my beliefs, a coven of witches once lived in that place but like I said, it was a long, long time ago now.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about this. I knew that once the war had started between the vampires and werewolves that most of the Wicce – if not all of them – had fled through the layers and come back to my own. But I also knew that what happened in one layer, happened in the others to varying degrees. Something which is little more than a spark in one layer, could create an inferno in another.

  I looked at Morten once more and said, “Where is this place called Twisted Den? Can you show me?”

  Morten replaced the bowler hat back onto his head. “It is far from here, and even if it was closer, there would be little point in going as there are no longer witches living there.”

  “Have can you be so sure?” I persisted.

  “Because if there were witches, why wouldn’t they have come to help us?” Morten asked, staring at me with his milky glazed eyes.

  “The old man has a point,” Rea said, looking at me. “I didn’t think the Wicce would be able to throw away the opportunity of getting involved in meddling and trying to find peace – a truce.”

  “It’s a shame you didn’t get involved above ground in the graveyard,” I snapped. Almost at once, I wished I had bitten my tongue and not said anything at all. I had promised myself I wouldn’t bring up the subject with Rea.

  “It was you who wandered off,” Rea said before taking one last pull on the cigar and dropping the smouldering stump onto the floor where she ground it flat with the heel of her boot. “It was me who couldn’t find you in that snowstorm. By the time I did catch up with you, you were too far out of reach to grab hold of before being dragged underground.”

  “That’s not how I remember it happening,” I said.

  “Look, let’s all just try to stay calm,” Rush said, the constant negotiator of peace in our small group. “Whatever happened up there doesn’t matter now. We’re all safe, aren’t we?”

  “If you can call almost having my fucking brains staved in by him with a spade, then yeah we’re all safe,” Calix muttered from the shadows.

  “Put a sock in it, Calix,” Trent snapped. “Rush is right. How will we ever find peace with the vampires if we can’t find peace amongst ourselves?”

  “So, it is peace we’ve come in search of?” Rea asked, eyeing Trent.

  Trent glanced at me, then back at Rea. “Of course it’s peace we’ve come in search of,” Trent reminded her. “And even if it wasn’t, do you believe that we can defeat the vampires? There is only five of us…”

  “Six,” Morten reminded him.

  “Six, seven, ten, it doesn’t matter,” Trent said. “We only have a handful of guns between us and the ammunition is running out fast…”

  Once more, Morten cut over Trent and said, “I might be able to help you there.” Without saying another word, Morten stood up. Turning, he slid back the lid covering the coffin he had been sitting on. He moved away on his long, spindly legs and removed the lids of several more coffins. Facing the rest of us once more, and with a smile pulling up the corners of his
thin lips, Morten said, “I have plenty of guns and ammunition hidden in these coffins.”

  Chapter Three

  Calix stepped from the shadows. I couldn’t help but notice how his dark eyes gleamed as he peered down into the first of the open coffins. The others stepped forward, too, and stared down at the guns and the boxes of ammunition hidden inside the coffins. Each of my companions looked like a child staring down into the biggest box of candy they had ever seen.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “No more guns, no more war!”

  Each of them ignored me. It was like I wasn’t there anymore. All each of them could fixate on was the guns and ammunition that Morten had revealed. Calix reached inside and pulled out a shotgun. He ran one hand along the length of the barrel, as if caressing something precious, something almost delicate. Rea reached into the open coffin and pulled out a gun with a long silver barrel and a large chamber. My knowledge of guns and weapons was next to non-existent, so I didn’t know the name of the type of gun that she was now admiring. Much to my disappointment, Trent and Rush were behaving in the very same way. Each of them were plucking weapons from the coffin and inspecting them, a look of wonder and delight etched into their faces.

  “When will you get it?” I breathed.

  “Get what?” Calix said, unable to take his eyes off the shotgun that he continued to stroke like some long-lost pet.

  Feeling exasperated, I said, “When will you all start to realise that guns and killing doesn’t work? Can’t you see that’s all you’ve been doing for years and years and it’s only got you to the point where your race is almost extinct? When are you going to start to understand that you’ve got to open your minds up to another way?”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Julia Miller,” Rea said raising the gun that she held and aiming into the darkness. “I plan on opening up a whole bunch of heads with this.”

  “And what makes you think you’re going to succeed where the other werewolves have failed?” I asked her. “Didn’t you listen to a word that Morten said? Don’t you think the werewolves who lived in Maze had guns had weapons to defend themselves with? But none of it worked. Can’t you see what your greatest weapon really is?”

  “And what might that be?” Rea said, placing the gun back down into the coffin and taking another.

  “Your mouth, and the words that come out of it,” I almost pleaded with her.

  “What the fuck are you on about now?” Calix said, cocking the shotgun he held and peering down into its empty chamber.

  “We need to talk to the vampires… we need to…” I started but was cut off by Rea before I’d had a chance to finish.

  “So your grand idea is to talk the vampires to death?” Rea sneered at me. The look she had in her eyes was almost contemptuous.

  Setting down the gun that he had been holding, Trent said, “You know, Julia has a point. As I said before, there isn’t enough of us to defeat the vampires despite having all these weapons. If there is a way of trying to reason with the vampires then perhaps we should take it before each and every one of us is dead and there isn’t one single werewolf left in the world.”

  Despite what Trent had just said, Rea took the rucksack from her back and began to fill it with handguns and bullets that she had taken from the coffin. She caught sight of Trent, who was watching her. She looked at him and said, “Just in case the witch’s negotiations fail.”

  “We can’t afford to let them fail,” Trent said.

  Calix unfastened his rucksack and began to fill it. “I couldn’t give a crap what anyone says. If we’re heading into Maze, I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Maze!” Morten gasped. “Why go to Maze? There is nothing there, just vampires.”

  “And humans,” Rush said.

  “Humans?” Morten frowned at him.

  “We came across two humans, a boy and a girl,” I started to explain. “There was a farmhouse and a boy and girl were hiding out there from the vampires.”

  Looking puzzled, Morten said, “So where are these two human children now?”

  “Good question,” Rea said.

  “I sent them away,” I said, looking at Morten and ignoring Rea.

  “Sent them away to where?” Morten asked me, still looking baffled and as confused as before.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “But they’re safe and that’s all that matters.”

  Tipping back his bowler hat and scratching his forehead again, Morten said, “So what makes you think there are more humans than just this boy and girl.”

  “The boy and girl mentioned something about a human farm,” Trent said. “Do you know anything about such a thing, Morten?”

  Looking suddenly very weary and shaken, Morten once more sat on one of the closed coffins. “Then it is true, the vampires have been harvesting humans.”

  “What do you mean by harvesting?” Rush asked.

  Raising his head, Morten looked at us but not really, it was like he was looking through us, as if recalling some distant and painful memory. “There were these nightmarish rumours that the vampires had kept some of the humans alive. It was believed that the vampires had taken these humans and begun to breed them in a warehouse on the outskirts of Maze.”

  “But why?” Calix said, and despite his tough and resilient posturing, even he looked disturbed by what Morten had just said.

  “If the vampires are to survive, if they are going to outlive us all, they will need a steady and constant supply of human flesh and blood,” Trent said matter-of-factly.

  “But the vampires can survive on any kind of meat – cattle, lamb, deer,” Rush said.

  “That was before the war,” Rea said, closing the top of her rucksack, which was now bulging with guns and ammunition. She took a belt from the coffin that was laden with glistening bullets. Rea strapped it about her waist. Then looking at me she added, “There are no more rules to keep the vampires in check. Now that most of the werewolves and humans are dead, the vampires live by their own laws. They are not answerable to anyone other than themselves. Perhaps if the witches had stayed around long enough, things wouldn’t be as desperate as they are now.”

  I broke her stare. I had nothing to say. I could only guess as to why the witches had fled Twisted Den and my heart felt squeezed as if being gripped by a fist.

  Wanting to break the frostiness that had suddenly filled the room, Morten said, “So what now?”

  Trent looked at us. “We rest and then go in search of this warehouse – this human farm.”

  “Are you mad?” Morten asked.

  “No one is asking you to come with us,” Trent said right back. “Although, if you did come you would be able to show us where it is. It would save us the risk of being caught by the vampires…”

  “The warehouse is full of vampires,” Morten said in disbelief. “Who do you think is forcing the humans to breed there? Who do you think it is holding them captive? Who do you think is butchering them and cutting them up? You’re not going to be able to just stroll in there. The place is guarded, surrounded by walls with razor wire and fencing on all sides.”

  “I could get us in there,” I said.

  “How did I know you were gonna say something like that,” Calix sighed. “What you gonna do – cast some magic spell that makes us all disappear? Or perhaps you can levitate us over the walls and into this human farm. Or maybe…”

  “Enough already,” Trent said to him. “Just give Julia a break.”

  Rea spoke up. “I think Calix is right this time.”

  “And what makes you think that?” Trent asked her.

  “Well, Julia didn’t exactly make us all disappear when we were being chased through that tunnel as we fled the farmhouse,” Rea reminded Trent and the rest of my companions. “If anything, she nearly got herself killed back there. If it hadn’t been for Calix shooting that vampire who had taken hold of Julia, she would be dead already.”

  Seething inside, I clenched my fists. I looked at Re
a and said, “If you must know, I had everything under control back there. But it doesn’t help when you have someone pawing your arse the whole time, trying to spoon you in the back…”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart. I wasn’t trying to grab your arse or anybody else’s,” Calix said looking indignant. “I was trying to shove you up the goddamn rope. You were taking so much time, you were gonna get us all killed.”

  “That’s not how I remember it and you don’t either,” I said, remembering the conversation Calix and I had shared in the woods after fleeing the farmhouse. He had practically confessed that he liked me – more than liked me – and that he couldn’t keep his hands off me.

  Trent took a deep breath and said, “Enough of this. How many ways have I got to tell you lot? We can’t keep arguing amongst ourselves.”

  “She started it,” Calix said, jabbing one finger in my direction.

  Springing across the room and standing toe to toe with Calix, Trent stared hard at him. Through gritted teeth, Trent said, “And I’ll finish it in a minute if you don’t shut your face. Do I make myself clear?”

  Calix said nothing. He stood in defiance, trying to match Trent’s stare. But it wasn’t the first time since joining this ragtag group of individuals that I sensed it was Trent who was in charge, not Calix, and not even Rea. I guessed that however much it pained Calix to know this, he did in some way revere Trent. He knew that Trent was the leader of the group and the one who called the shots.

  “Do I make myself clear?” Trent asked Calix again.

  “Yes,” Calix eventually said, averting his stare and stepping away from Trent.

  There was a drawn-out silence which became almost unbearable. In it I could hear the drip drip drip sound of water coming from the tunnel and the sound of my own thumping heart. It was Rea who finally broke the silence.

  “So?” She was staring at me.

  “So, what?” I said, not wanting to sound too cocky.

  “You never explained to us how you intend on getting us into this human farm,” Rea said, lighting another cigar.

  I took a deep breath before speaking. There was a part of me, despite what Trent had already said, that feared I would be belittled by Calix and Rea again. But despite my reservations, and once I’d steadied my thumping heart, I looked at my companions and said, “I can’t make us disappear exactly, but I can make us harder to detect or to be seen.”