Below is the last part of
The Blood Vault, a Damon St. Cloud short story--the same Damon St. Cloud featured in the full length novel
Devil Take the Hindmost, which is available at
Amazon,
Pulpwork Press, and in various electronic formats at
Fictionwise.
Part Three:The penthouse was swathed in silken drapes of black and red, covering the tinted windows so as to avoid even the subtlest hint of sunlight within. Velvet divans of red and gold were scattered about the room, draped with slumbering bodies still clutching golden chalices crusted with clotting crimson. Their victims of the previous night lay scattered around the vampires, clothing pulled away from their necks, scarlet ribbons trailing from the puncture wounds in their carotid arteries. A perfunctory glance told Damon that some of the victims were still alive, saved so that they might be fed upon another night, but he spotted one young man that had not been so lucky. Probably he had resisted the hypnotic lure of the vampires. Now he lay slumped against a divan, his face pale and hollow, his shirt ripped open to his waist, revealing a half dozen gaping wounds that were sucked dry of blood.
Drapes to his left and right created a hallway, through which Damon needed to pass to reach the half dozen still-sleeping vampires that lay sated on their divans. Among them, Damon noticed the aquiline visage of Makosh Veselik, a sixteenth century Russian Baron, that had fed upon the blood of his village’s children, before being driven forth from his castle by angry mobs. Now Makosh’s dark lashes fluttered as bloody dreams embroidered his sleep, his tangled black locks splaying about him like a nest of serpents.
Damon wished he could drive his dagger straight into the fiend’s black heart. He wanted to rush forward in a berserk rage, falling on the vampires and slaying as many of them as he could, perhaps quenching the desire for vengeance that burned so brightly within him since that horrific night when vampires had taken the life of his wife and son, but he fought back the urge. First he must try to save Chaney Lane and the other mortals he had discovered here. Any slaying that he attempted must be done with the utmost precision and stealth.
The entire floor was divided into compartments by vast tapestries, and Damon suspected that still more vampires lay sleeping behind them—and hopefully, somewhere in the maze of silk and cloth, he might find Chaney.
His thoughts broke off as he heard a whisper of movement from either side of him. They came like wraiths, sliding between silken tapestries, barely rippling their smooth surfaces as they passed. Petite and lithe of form they leaped, long black hair flowing behind them, long-lashed eyes narrowed, and slim hands outstretched, their long claws slicing through the air. The sister vampires attacked as one—turned in the Orient one hundred years earlier, their bodies had become lethal instruments of vampiric stealth.
Had Damon’s reflexes been a fraction slower, or had he failed to augment them with the potion in the elevator, he would have been disemboweled in the first few moments of the conflict. Instead he took a step back, his hands pulling free from his trench coat, revealing the double-bladed dagger that he held in each fist. Uncrossing his arms he snapped them outward, his right hand dagger finding the breast of the older sister and pumping a full dose of garlic compound into her body. She opened her mouth to shriek, but the cry never came. Instead her body crumbled into ash, and fell in a cloud to the stained oak floor.
Damon’s left hand dagger took the second sister in the thigh as her long nail grazed his face, drawing a long crimson scratch across his cheekbone. He slipped backward, and the Chinese-born vampire fell on top of him. She smiled and moved her compact frame across his body so that she might better reach his neck. As she leaned closer to rip his throat out, Damon smelled the coppery scent of her breath. She had fed recently, her breath smelled of blood.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” she said as she bent in.
Damon’s left hand found the hilt of the knife still protruding from the vampire’s thigh, and he released the rest of the reservoir into her body. As her fangs scraped his neck, her body burst into ash.
The vampire hunter warily came to his feet, brushing the blackened debris from his body. The vampire sisters had attacked in silence, and the den still slept. He was lucky. With soft steps he crept forward, passing through the very midst of the vampire den at the center of the penthouse. He slipped from chamber to chamber, finding vampires sleeping with blood-crusted lips, enigmatic smiles upon unaging faces.
At the back of the room, Damon found Chaney Lane. She lay slumped against a divan covered with a dark cloak, beneath which a thin figure slumbered. Her right arm was leashed to the divan by a golden chain attached to her slender wrist with a gold-plated manacle. Her blonde curly hair fell in a heavy mass over her face; her blouse torn and hanging loosely, revealed the puncture wounds upon her neck.
Slowly, Damon pulled back the black cloak on the divan so that it revealed the impossibly pale face of Congressman Tocind. Damon reached out and drew his finger lightly across the Congressman’s cheek. He looked at the greasy residue left on his finger. Damon smiled grimly. As he thought, the Congressman was painting himself with massive applications of sunscreen to shield his newly acquired vampiric flesh from the sun when he made his rare daylight appearances. Damon was relieved to find burn scars beneath the sunscreen. It was a valiant effort, but certainly not foolproof. Besides being not entirely effective, the makeup was easy to spot. He had seen such heavy makeup on performers in music videos—plastic-faced vocalists pretending they were still mortal when they feared the sunlight’s rays might reveal their taste for blood.
The congressman began to stir and Damon hastily withdrew one of his daggers. He pushed the old cartridge out of the hilt. Before it hit the ground with a clink, Damon had pushed a replacement cartridge into place.
Congressman Tocind’s eyes snapped open at the sound of the metal cartridge against the hardwood floor, his wrinkled and pale visage bland as he took in his surroundings. Damon’s face was the last thing that he ever saw. The vampire hunter thrust his double-bladed dagger into the vampire’s heart, driving it all the way to the hilt. A full dose of allyl sulfur gushed into the senator’s body, and his flesh cracked and crumbled, falling to the floor in great chunks.
Damon reached down and took hold of Chaney’s ivory shoulder, shaking her. “Wake up!” he whispered fiercely. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
Chaney’s blue eyes snapped open, her expression of bewilderment rapidly replaced by that of fear. “Where is the Congressman?” she asked.
“He won’t be bothering you anymore,” answered Damon.
Chaney raised her right arm to show him the chain. Her eyes were scared. “Run for your life!” she urged. “They’re all around us, and there is no way you can free me!”
“We’ll see about that,” growled Damon. Sheathing his daggers he took hold of the chain with both of his hands. Muscles augmented by mystic alchemy writhed, and the links parted beneath his mighty effort.
Chaney tried to gain her feet, but her legs failed her and she stumbled to the floor. “I’m too weak too walk,” she gasped.
Damon smiled reassuringly when he saw a flash of frustration in her eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll carry you out.”
Without waiting for her reply, Damon scooped her up and brushed aside the curtain of the alcove, passing by a host of sleeping vampires as they slept on their gilt-edged divans. He wished that he could stay and slay them all, but his priority was to get Chaney out this vampire den as quickly as possible. If just one vampire sounded the warning, the others would be down on him like crows on carrion.
He crept through the clinging folds of the draperies, past partitions infested with slumbering blood-feeders, and through to the main chamber at the center. Damon looked with regret at the still-living victims that lay weakly at the feet of the vampires, but there was no way he could save them. Maybe, at least, he could give them a chance.
“Leave me here,” urged Chaney from his arms. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get the both of us out of here alive, and there’s no point in us both dying.”
“Neither of us are dying,” said Damon. He hoisted Chaney up so that she lay over his left shoulder, and hit the button to the elevator door. The plush crimson interior of the car opened up behind him like a great mouth.
Damon reached beneath his jacket and pulled loose a massive .50 caliber Desert Eagle. Nearly five pounds of gun, with a fourteen inch barrel, the pistol fired three hundred grain cartridges that delivered more than 1,200 pounds of stopping power. This kind of power was necessary when fighting vampires, because a normal bullet wouldn’t even slow a bloodsucker down. Even a direct hit with a .50 magnum wasn’t a guarantee of disabling a vampire.
In this case, Damon didn’t plan to be using it directly against the blood-feeders. He wanted to give the few mortals in the room a fighting chance.
“What are you doing?” shrieked Chaney when the giant hand cannon came out of his holster.
If Chaney’s scream didn’t wake up the vampires then the booms of the .50 magnum that followed certainly did. Damon fired directly through the tapestries that shrouded the tinted windows, blowing massive holes through the thick panes, and shattering some of them entirely.
At the sound of the gun’s report the vampires came to life, leaping from their divans, crimson drool hanging from their snarling lips. As they leapt up deadly beams of the sun’s dying light pushed through the dozen ragged holes that Damon had ripped through the tapestries with his gunfire. They lanced through the room at a myriad of angles, burning holes and rupturing vampire flesh. Screams of pain filled the room, along with the stench of burning vampire.
Damon could feel Chaney panting in fear as he backed into the elevator with her still over his shoulder. Baron Makosh Veselik, wearing a velvet jacket embroidered with gold thread rolled beneath his divan, avoiding the searing bolts of light that lanced through the room. His face contorted, his long black hair hanging in thick tangled ropes over his face, magnetic green eyes glittering from beneath the screen of hair as he eyed Damon with vicious intent.
As the elevator doors closed, Makosh judged the distance and the position of the wavering beams of sunlight that were so deadly to him. He leaped, his body shooting forward as if propelled by a jet. Damon scarcely moved aside before the vampire rocketed through the narrowing gap of the doorway and slammed into the rear wall of the elevator car, shaking it as it hung in the shaft.
Damon let Chaney slide from his shoulder, and she pulled her pale knees up to her ample chest as she huddled in the corner, fearfully awaiting the outcome of the impending battle.
The gun was empty and Damon let it drop from his hand and to the floor of the elevator. As it fell Damon moved with a swiftness only possible because of his alchemy-enhanced muscles. He went to the vampire’s throat, clutching it with one hand, compressing the neck with one powerful hand, and threatening to snap the spine. A snapped spine wouldn’t slay a vampire, but it might slow him down.
Damon's vice-like grip didn't slow Makosh. A vampire didn’t need to breath, and as the elevator plunged downward toward a private lobby on the ground floor, the bloodsucker, in turn, grabbed hold of Damon’s neck with both hands and began to twist.
With growing horror, Damon realized that his strength paled in comparison to that of the creature whom he was fighting. Slowly, inexorably, his head bent backward, twisting toward its breaking point. Makosh grinned, because he knew that victory was within his grasp.
He had only seconds to live, and as the elevator lurched to a halt Damon realized that it was pointless to match his strength against the Baron’s. He needed to use the vampire’s strength against him. As the doors opened into the empty lobby shielded with darkly tinted windows Damon gave up resisting, and instead he pulled the vampire toward him.
They rolled out of the elevator and onto the cold marble tiles of the lobby floor, and for one brief moment Damon broke free of his attacker. They both came to their feet, and with lightening speed the vampire closed for the kill, the long tangled ropes of his black hair flying out behind him, and his blood-encrusted fangs bared.
“I’ve slain little children tougher than you!” snarled Makosh.
The cartridges in the hilts of Damon’s double-bladed daggers were empty, and a normal dagger was nearly useless against a vampire. A few stakes rattled inside his trench coat, but accurately plunging a stake through the heart of a vampire as fast as this was nigh to impossible even with enhanced reflexes.
As Makosh leaped in close Damon took his last thermite bomb and shoved it into the vampire’s gut. As he was bowled over by the supernatural strength of the undead creature’s rush, he pinned the already ticking bomb in place by shoving a dagger through the bomb and into the vampire. Then, mustering every bit of strength he could find, he pushed the beast away with his legs, using the vampire’s fearsome momentum to propel him over his own head and against the bulk of a massive marble pillar.
As the vampire attempted to stand a fearsome blast of flame spurted from the thermite bomb, ripping through his abdomen—2,400 degrees of heat melting the flesh and bone as if they were made of butter. The vampire gave a fearsome cry that echoed in the hollow lobby, before he collapsed, a flaming mass, against a cracked and charred pillar.
Damon’s breath had been knocked from him by the vampire’s assault, and he came to his feet gasping for air. He staggered quickly to the elevator car and found Chaney desperately trying to use the chrome railing near the button panel to pull herself to her feet. Yet she didn’t have the strength.
“It’s okay,” said Damon. “We’re almost home free.”
“I can’t escape…” she whispered weakly, her words trailing off.
Damon scooped her up in his ash-covered arms. “We can, and we will,” he told her as he strode toward the tinted double doors of the lobby. He planted his foot firmly at the center of the double doors, and they sprang apart, the tinted glass shattering, and raining down across the cold concrete outside.
The chill air of the out of doors washed over them and Damon's breath came in hard, steaming gouts. Yet no fog of breath passed between Chaney's red lips. As stark realization struck Damon, the last rays of the falling sun filled the lobby and Chaney Lane screamed, her flesh blistering and smoking as the sunlight touched her. “You fool!” she cried. “I’ve already been turned, can’t you see that you’ve doomed me!” Her body turned to flame in his arms, and jaw agape he dropped Chaney’s flaming body to the ground, and fled down the street. Onlookers stopped in their tracks and gaped, wondering what the fleeing man in the flapping trench coat might have to do with the burning body that writhed outside the doors of the Crestline Building’s private lobby—a body that soon turned to ash.
Damon escaped the public’s judgmental stare by ducking into the same alley where he had started his journey. He cried out in anguish. Just like that night he lost his wife and son, he was once again too late. He had seen the signs, but failed to recognize them. Even as he had been hunting down Henry Atkins for information Chaney had been turned. Whatever good that might have been in her was extinguished—gone. The vampires had left her chained while the metamorphosis of the turning took place, until the process was finished, and they could be assured of her loyalty. The reason she was too weak to walk was that she had not yet fed on human blood—something necessary for a fledgling vampire in order to gain strength.
The effects of the potion in his blood began to fade, and Damon St. Cloud staggered, lurching against the wall of the overshadowing tenement building. Exhaustion took over him so that he could barely lift his legs, and he slid down the wall until he sat slouched in the dirty snow. He would rest for a little while—just a little while, and then before sunlight failed he would make his way home to his lonely apartment.
It wasn’t safe on the Chicago streets at night.
I recently finished a section of my fantasy novel, Through the Groaning Earth, and though I've still got a few portions to write to complete the entire novel it's currently sitting at a fairly respectable 98,000 words.
