The Guard

  “OK. I know you’re all hurting right now, physically and mentally… we are too. Although of course, the men we lost were known to you much longer and the pain will be all the greater for it.”

  She grimaced, halting awkwardly with a half-turn towards Ysabel,

  “Um… yea, but in any case. We need to find who did this, or rather, confirm it.”

  “Confirm?” Nathan broke in, “I didn’t realise we had any suspects yet.”

  “well look around you,” Ysabel answered,

  “who’s missing?” Beth completed the sentence. Then stopped as we looked at each other, uncomprehending.

  “we’ll give you a clue.”

  “He’s a bloodsucker so slimy he deserves to be called leech.”

  Jesse. Of course.

  “Where the fuck is he, Beth?”

  I could feel the anger and guilt temporarily burning away the grief as the implications of what she had said sunk in. I had spoken for Jesse, advocated giving him a chance when Beth and even Ysabel had spoken against him. Glen’s death could be my fault.

  “At the moment, we don’t know.”

  “He could even still be in the compound, but that’s what we’re going to find out.”

  “Beth can search for him, mentally.”

  “we just wanted to bring you here because it might feel a bit, um…”

  “Weird.”

  Beth and Ysabel’s dual sentences were spinning my head a little, had they always done this?

  “Weird how?” I asked, cautiously.

  “You’ll see” Beth answered, whilst settling herself crossed legged onto a table top,

  “She’ll warn the compound too. Don’t worry, and I’ll shield the people closest” Ysabel picked up, as Beth shifted, her eyes blackening and her wings flaring out behind her to lay as a dark cloak across the table.

  She became very, very still and her eyes fixed on something unseen. Ysabel cocked her head slightly as she watched this,

  “There is a good reason, you know, that Beth was made leader of the guard so quickly” she mused quietly, almost to herself.

  A pressure began to build up in my head, but it was only slight; if I hadn’t been expecting something I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all. Then Beth’s voice whispered into my thoughts,

  “I apologise in advance for what I’m about to do. It may be uncomfortable. But it is necessary and won’t harm you, so please don’t panic.”

  The pressure lessened for a moment, then pulsed, like the throb of a headache… again and again, each throb more uncomfortable than the next. I kept my eyes on Beth, who scowled slightly, her forehead furrowing in concentration as yet another, still stronger pulse clenched my head. Her head cocked sideways slightly,

  “where are you?” she whispered to herself,

  Chapter 46

  Beth

  The waves of power rolled out from me almost automatically now, my mind settling into a rhythm, stretching over miles, testing and tasting every consciousness it encountered. The information flooded back to me, more with each heartbeat as the distance covered increased, and I had to concentrate hard to rapidly identify or discard the mental signatures. I could feel the humans closest to me beginning to waver as the stronger and stronger pulses wracked them, even Ysabel winced as each one hit. I growled slightly in frustration, limited by the endurance of the beings around me. Ysabel felt it and wrapped her shield more tightly around their minds, protecting them as best she could. Wait… there! Jesse was moving away from us, already around twenty miles away, and was in the company of several of the blank spots that indicated higher generation ferals. I narrowed my focus, ignoring the sighs of relief from the people in the room as the pressure lifted off of them, and arrowed my mind towards Jesse’s, reaching and grasping for his slimy thoughts. I didn’t pause before ripping into them, and felt his shock and the sensation of him falling whilst I riffled quickly through his memories. Surprise surprise, he was there of his own accord… abruptly I found myself blocked by one of the vampires he was with, a slick wall of consciousness pressing against my own. I let myself be pushed out, I had found what I needed. Killing Jesse would be far more satisfying if I could see the fear in his eyes and feel the crunch of my fangs though his flesh.

  Retreating back into my own mind, I took a moment to readjust myself to my surroundings and control the anger burning through me. I felt the light flicker of Yzzy’s mind against my own, her shields down again, and shared what I had found, which she responded to with a flash of anger of her own and a brief image of Jesse’s bloody head, torn from his shoulders. I smirked humourlessly. Jesse would definitely come to regret his decision to join the ferals. I normalised with difficulty; the blood lust still raging as it was, and hopped off of the table.

  “It was Jesse”, I addressed the people watching me, “he’s with several ferals now, of his own accord, heading away from us.”

  Immediately everyone burst into a furious chatter, their military minds at once starting to plan the chase. Only Michael still watched me, waiting to see what else I had to say. I could feel his guilt and grief, hanging over him like a shroud. I stopped the noise with a raised hand, the voices dying down rapidly.

  “We can’t chase him, not now - ”, I started, but was shouted down by everyone leaping to question me. I scowled and felt my eyes shift as the interruption rankled me, which at least had the effect of shutting everyone up again.

  “If you’d be so kind as to let me finish...” the sarcasm dripped from my tongue, “we can’t chase him because I don’t know exactly where he is. The ferals he’s with kicked me out before I could pinpoint his location.”

  The mood in the room turned sour. The angry, grieving faces of the men darkening as their vengeance was thwarted.

  “So what now?” asked one, seeming to direct the question into the air rather than at anyone in particular.

  “We carry on”, responded Michael quietly. “We carry on searching out ferals, we carry on killing them. Eventually we will find Jesse, and when we do, he will die as well”.

  He looked at me with steely eyes, still haunted, but simmering with rage.

  “Right?”

  Ysabel and I replied together, “right.”

  Epilogue

  In a forgotten corner of Romania stands a small, shabby castle. The walls crumbling after years of neglect, so wind whistles through the narrow halls making the dusty cobwebs that hang in every corner shiver and dance. It overlooks a tiny, but bustling market town, the residents of which have been almost completely isolated from the rest of the country for many years. They’re reliant on what they can grow or make themselves, with only a small amount of goods being brought in from outside, collected once a month using the town’s single, battered truck. Once, they had been reliant on the inhabitants of that castle, but after they all left, the townsfolk had to find new ways to survive. Over the years, they had almost forgotten those who used to live there, and almost forgotten the promise they had made to them; to keep themselves pure and clean, the perfect vessels. But still, they remained isolated.

  On the night that a candle lit up one window of the castle, then another, and another... instinct and dusty tradition, passed down in stories, took over for the townsfolk. They stared in wonder for only a minute, then began winding their way up the short path to the castle, coming to a halt in a half circle before the doorway. It wasn’t long before the large, wooden door of the castle opened, creaking and jerking on its rusted hinges as it did. Two figures stood in the doorway, stepping out to observe the people around them. A tall, red haired man with keenly blue eyes and a tiny woman, not even 5 feet tall, with dark eyes and darker hair, which was knotted into thick dreadlocks.

  “Alone among our colonies,” spoke the man quietly, his voice nevertheless carrying easily to everyone in the crowd, “you have kept yourselves to the old ways. You have remembered what we asked of you. We thank you.”

  “What do you want us to do?” a voice shouted fro
m near the back of the crowd.

  “Yield”, said the woman, as the black of her eyes seemed to bleed into the whites, “yield to us, so we can make of you an army.”

  To the reader

  If you’ve gotten this far, thank you! I hope you enjoyed reading The Guard as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  I would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to leave a review on Amazon – let me know, honestly, what you think! This is a passion project, and as an independent author, reviews are invaluable for getting my book seen and also for me to get some feedback.

  I am storming on with the next installment, so watch this space!