Eat Them All: Book 3- Chapter 4 (Patreon)

++When vampire elders fight, cities burn.++

Book 3: Chapter 4

“So,” Reggie smiled nervously. “We all gonna kill each other now? I want to fight the Lady if we do.” He smiled at her. “No offence, just that I’d rather take on a Blood Courtier than a wizard or a Knight.”

Nobody laughed. The Irazhtan seemed a shade amused, but his smile was dropping rather than growing. His face was more corpse-like by the moment.

“You have come to kill us?” he asked. The Lady spoke fast while the Knight started drifting to one side, and Reggie, realising what was happening, shuffled to the other. This enemy was isolated, easy prey if they could jump him.

“We have come to negotiate,” the Lady replied. “If we were here to kill you, believe me, we would be arriving in greater force.”

The Irazhtan smiled without warmth. “If you were here to negotiate, you would have brought more men, since you would not have minded giving up the element of surprise on your approach. This was an attempted assassination, and has paused only because I found you before you found me.”

Reggie loved vampires. Among them, he wasn’t even the most paranoid person in most rooms. Or woods for that matter.

Of course, this paranoid saw what Reggie and the Knight were repositioning to do as well. “Try to attack me, and this talk is over,” he snapped. 

Everybody froze, Reggie with fear, the Knight with mere strategy, the Lady with annoyance. 

“You know your sire and my history,” the Lady called out. “What do you think is going to happen here?”

“My sire will be regaining his stolen territory as best he can,” the Irazhtan explained idly. “And I will assist him, because it is my duty as his progeny to serve my elder.” He spoke mechanically, like the words weren’t his own. Some mantra he’d absorbed long ago.

“And how do I fit into this?” the Lady growled. “He doesn’t have territory anymore, he can claim a domain if he wishes but—”

—”he has one already,” the Irazhtan cut in. “The city known as Lorwick.”

The air chilled. Negotiations degenerated from there, and with every passing second Reggie became more and more certain that he’d be dragged into a much less advantageous fight than he’d been anticipating. 

“You will get one warning from me,” the Irazhtan said at last. “From me, because you are not worthy to be warned by my master. Leave. Make yourself scarce; flee this region and depart it for good, take your minions and your progeny and your allies and leave it. You have one month to allow for the difficulties of uprooting in such a way. If you do this, my master will show mercy and forgive you for having displaced him in the first place. If you do not, there will be a reckoning.”

The Lady reacted about how Reggie would’ve thought.

“You’re giving an impossible condition so you can explain why you wiped us out later. You have a massacre planned and decided on already, just admit it.”

The Irazhtan smiled again. “Am I to take it that you will not be accepting our condition?”

The Lady met his eyes and held them. Reggie took an involuntary step back. This wasn’t Royal Presence, wasn’t anything at all but finely honed instincts on his part. The hairs on his neck didn’t move, his body was dead and didn’t react in such physical ways anymore, but his intuition was as living as ever, and it told him there was danger here of the sort he’d only ever find staring down the barrel of a cannon elsewhere.

“I will not, no,” she said at last. The world seemed to pause. Reggie heard movement and spun around, his sword already whipping up. The thing that attacked him was too fast to really register much detail, but he knew it was big and dark and made of something other than meat. There was a fierce resistance against the enchanted metal and Reggie’s arm throbbed with the effort of forcing it through, but he was pretty sure he cut it. 

Only pretty sure, though. There wasn’t any blood, just wisps of black smoke from grey skin and a shriek that sounded like metal being torn by force. Claws whipped out and missed Reggie’s head by a fingerspan as he stumbled away on reflex. His backstep saved most of his leg, but the low slash that came next still took his foot—the same fucking foot—off at the ankle and left him to drop back onto his ass. He saw there were multiple creatures closing there, all as big and tough as the first. And he would’ve been in quite the sticky wicked were it not for the Knight. The Lady’s bodyguard proved his worth then a dozen times over.

His sword just darted around and sliced through shadowy limbs, spilling that smoke out everywhere until the Knight disappeared into a cloud of it. Reggie didn’t see any more than that because he was too busy turning over and scrambling up to his feet, snatching the sword up as he looked around and saw the Lady rounding on the Irazhtan. The fight was about as he would’ve expected; cataclysmic. 

The Lady surprised Reggie by actually fighting, though he’d known a vampire of her power would have some combat ability just through age and Tier alone. What she was doing with it was hard to identify. He couldn’t look at her, and neither, it seemed, could the Irazhtan. He was slinging spells like always, but none seemed to quite get near her, and they were churning up the woods something fierce in their misses.

She wasn’t fast, or at least she wasn’t just fast. Just hard to focus on. Reggie glanced over his shoulder and saw the Knight was still surrounded in that black smoke, a sure sign that he was killing enemies faster than it could dissipate. The only cause for concern was the fact that there…really were a lot of them. Trailing out of that weird, black fortress in ones and twos, all making a beeline for their party. 

Time to make a decision. Help the Lady or the Knight? She was doing better but he was a long-term threat, then again she was hardly less of one unless Reggie assumed she was being genuine in her sudden change of attitude upon finding out half of how high his Tier was. No time to dawdle and agonize over the choice, Reggie just made one and hoped it wouldn’t blow up in his face. 

He lunged over for the Knight’s side of things and opened things up with a hefty swing.

***

The vampires were doing a lot more than bloody watching the town, Ludvich had known that from the start and now he had his confirmation. The Witchfinder trainees had scurried around doing their best to find any source of pine that might even theoretically exist in Norvhan, and so far they’d come up with exactly nothing.

All of them knew that this was no accident. Wherever they found the places pine had been, there were ugly tears or gaps where the stuff had been torn free of its previous home. Torn with inhuman Strength, that much anyone could tell.

Torn by vampiric Strength.

It was no surprise, of course their enemy had thought of the second obvious thing instead of just the first. Ludvich just kicked himself for not preparing his weaponry ahead of time.

“What do we do then?” one of the trainees asked. Garyl, one of the sharper and more matter-of-fact ones. He had a tendency to look past the emotions of a situation and focus only on what could be done about it. He was one Ludvich reckoned would’ve made a decent Witchfinder even within the usual talent pool and standards. 

“The obvious next step,” Ludvich grunted, “is to head farther into the woods in search of other pine trees.”

“You’re right,” Garyl hummed. “That is obvious. So they’ll be thinking of it already.” 

“Head count on the vampires?” Ludvich asked. 

It was Syca who replied now, he’d always been the most diligent one of them all.

“Eleven,” he cut in. “I was about to mention this.”

Ludvich nodded, not surprised. “They’ve got a bastard waiting out there to cut off anyone who tries to venture farther.”

They’d want to swap the bastard in question out semi-regularly, Ludvich thought. He’d been a vampire for long enough now to know that vampires still got bored, and bored guards did a shit job. 

Unless the vampires didn’t swap. Reggie had mentioned a pretty rigid hierarchy back in Lorwick, what if that meant someone was on shit-shovelling duty forever? A hopeful premise.

“Keep a watch on them, then,” Ludvich growled. “But don’t let yourselves be caught doing it.” That earned him a volley of disgruntled stares.

“We’re not idiots,” Syca sniffed. Ludvich wanted to smile, but didn’t. He’d be the friendly commanding weirdo again once they were out of the pot, until then he had to stay focused. Better to have them bristling at him than killed by his relaxation.

Reggie is in trouble.

It was Sycily, and her voice hit Ludvich like a cannon ball. 

“Where, how?”

The trainees were eying him now. It occurred to Ludvich that he’d never communicated like this in front of them, and he dimly imagined what they must be thinking. That Reggie’s madness had made the jump to him through vampiric blood, most likely. Fine, he didn’t have time to set them straight.

He, the Lady and the Knight have been engaged by…things.

“Things, what things?”

Sycily explained, as best she could, which was not very well. Ludvich listened and compiled information, asking practical questions about proven abilities. He didn’t need to know exactly what these creatures were, in the heat of things that mattered far less than what they could do and, more important still, how they could be hurt. Fortunately, in that regard, they were far less mysterious. 

But the picture being painted was not looking good.

***

Reggie and the Knight had started making some real progress on killing their way through the shadow-things. Reggie less than the Knight, he had to admit. Without transforming he just wasn’t contributing to this battle much; keeping the enemy off his temporary ally, sure. Even killing one or two, but compared to the Knight, who was dropping about a dozen every second, he may as well have been some thralled pikeman. Maybe twenty more Reggies would’ve won them the day.

But they didn’t have twenty more Reggies, and the enemy had far more than what they were throwing out already, too. 

It all went wrong when the elder Irazhtan popped up out of nowhere and went right for the Lady. He just appeared behind her, lay a hand on her shoulder and they both…disappeared, air popping around the sudden absence they’d left. Even the Knight froze at that, shock taking him, but the other Irazhtan didn’t.

He just hurled a ball of pure flame at Reggie. The time for subtlety withered and died at that; Reggie transformed, vaulted the fireball and sprinted towards his enemy. He’d gained an Attribute Point across the board since they last fought, but this time he wasn’t enjoying nearly as advantageous a position. Which edge would prove more vital? 

They smashed against each other like boulders falling down opposite cliffs, and the grass for yards around them was actually flattened with the pure force of their impact running through the air. Reggie was happy to see himself be the stronger, driving the Irazhtan back first an inch, then several more, then entire feet as he pushed and growled and dug a pair of deep trenches in the dirt where his enemy’s heels pressed down to try and lock him in place.

“You’ve gotten stronger,” the Irazhtan whispered as they locked together. “Not strong enough.” The world erupted in magic.