CHARLIE #3
As I ran, my mind raced as well. How could he be here, in this unholy place, unless—
Unless he was dead. Unless he was a ghost.
I had to catch him. To touch him. I’d lived without knowing for so long. I had to find out the truth.
And so I ran after him, feeling like if I didn’t reach him, I’d never see him again. And at the same time feeling like something was behind me, chasing me, snapping at my heels.
Then suddenly, I was in the open. The mounds gave way to a valley of sorts, a depression in the earth as large as a baseball diamond.
But it wasn’t empty. Great stones rose in the valley’s center in concentric circles.
They stood in pairs, each pair set apart at the base, then coming together at the top to form triangles that looked like sharp teeth.
My own teeth had grown as my panic rose, fangs jabbing into my lower lip as I panted to catch my breath. It should have made me feel powerful. I was a vampyre. A hunter. But I only felt hunted.
“Joey?” I called into the rising storm.
And then, in a flash of lightning, I spotted him standing stock-still in the center of the valley and the stones, watching me as thunder rolled in the distance. Rain streaked down between us. Wind screamed through the stones.
“Joey!” I called again, sprinting toward him—and he ran again, turning and bounding up another mount.
He reached the top at the same time I reached the center of the stones, and he turned to look back at me.
Even in the darkness, his face was terribly pale, as white as a marble statue, and his expression was mournful, almost apologetic.
Then as I watched, his body shifted, turning into an orb of bluish light.
And it flitted away, disappearing over the top of the mound.
“Joey!” I screamed after him into the wind.
I would have kept chasing the light—but another feeling came over me now, a dread and foreboding that shivered my whole body. The something behind me was coming closer.
I wheeled to face whatever was chasing me. For a moment, I stood there, in the center of the stones, gasping for breath, my sword in one hand and my pistol in the other. I saw nothing except the storm breaking loose above me—stinging cold rain, flashing lightning, rumbling thunder, vicious wind.
Then, they came. Lights. Not one this time, but many.
Pale blue, rising from the mounds all around me.
At first, that’s all they seemed to be, just floating, glowing orbs.
But all at once, they began to move toward me, and as they approached, I saw that they weren’t just lights.
They were blue flames, the tips of torches burning with a strange, unnatural glow.
And figures held the torches. Ghostly forms clad in the ancient garb of knights, kings, maidens.
All bearing terrible jagged swords, wicked glinting knives.
And their faces… it wasn’t that they didn’t have faces or that the faces were hidden in shadow.
It was that they were blurred, somehow. As if my brain lacked the capacity to see them.
A shiver of dread shook my body.
They’re hungry, terror whispered inside me. And what they eat is life.
I went to take a step, to run, but my legs wouldn’t move.
I looked down to find I’d sunk into the earth to my knees.
The bastards had lured me here, I realized.
Into the center of the stones. Into their trap.
Like a fly in a goddamned spiderweb. Now, all around me, the phantoms approached.
I aimed my pistol at the nearest one, a grotesquely tall, skinny figure, and pulled the trigger.
Its chest opened in a puff of shadow—but it kept coming.
“You think you can stop me from getting to Essa?” I shouted at them. “Try it. Let’s go!”
But my bravado faded as the circle of shambling figures closed in on me, as slow and inexorable as death itself.
They’re not real, I told myself. They’re just ghosts.
But the first one swung its sword at me, and my own blade clattered against it—the steel terribly solid. Another wraith lunged forward, and its cold knife buried itself in my shoulder. I fought, flailed, screamed with savage desperation.
But there was no fighting them off. The storm raged around us as they hemmed me in, their steel cutting me, their cold hands grasping, yanking, tearing at me.
And I sensed something else, too. Something coming.
Something dangerous. The same terrible thing that had been following me earlier, stalking me through the night—coming. Coming.
I swung my sword at one of the dead. It passed right through the thing’s chest.
My vampyre strength was nothing to these phantoms. My fury, useless.
I was sinking further into the earth. Knee-deep. Now, thigh deep.
My pistol cracked off shots. My saber flashed.
I fought like a demon out of hell. But slash by slash, blow by blow, touch by chilling touch, dread and pain took me, tearing my consciousness away, pulling me into the earth, and replacing everything, everything, with a terrible cold that I knew would never end.