Eight:
AN. This one is going to be quite gory, so be prepared.
Aliyah had given the photo to Markus, and went to jump on the bus; school had been closed for the rest of the day due to the death of the teacher. She sat next to Merry, looking out the window her thoughts drifted back to the pattern; she knew she had seen it before but where?
"Do you want to go to the, park this afternoon?" Merry piped up cheerfully.
"I didn't get much sleep last night, I kept having this nightmare, I was just going to go get some sleep." She replied. Giving her friend an apologetic look.
"Oh, common, were just going to hang, you can kip on the grass if you want to." Merry nudged her encouragingly.
"I don't know."
"Come." It sounded more like an order.
Aliyah sighed and agreed.
A while later Aliyah was lying back on the grass dozing in the heat, Merry had found them a spot under a tree, and soon afterward John had joined them.
"What are you doing here?" Aliyah asked, as John strolled up hands in his jeans pockets.
"Oh, my Mom finally let me out." He said simply.
"John's mom is a bit of a hypochondriac." Merry supplied.
"Every time I get so much as a sniffle I get locked in my room with all manner of medicines, it's a pain."
Aliyah maid an Oh sound and razed her eyebrows.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot!" Merry exclaimed, as the reason for Aliyah's change in mood dawned on her.
"Don't worry." Aliyah shook her head. "I'm over it." The look on her face said otherwise, but neither of her friends pressed it.
"Do you want to play Frisbee?" Merry asked pulling a small disk from her bag. John shrugged and moved away from the tree to play.
"Na." Aliyah shook her head. "I'm gong to catch forty winks."
As she watched her friends playing, Aliyah felt sleep pull at her. John jumped and snatched the Frisbee from the air. A soft breeze rustled through the trees, and cool air slid over Aliyah's skin as Merry caught it and threw it back to John. As if from nowhere a lightning flash slammed down into the ground, the sky, which had been clear unbroken blue, was now black with streaks of red. John dived for the Frisbee onto hard, cracked, lifeless, rock. From out of the earth came horribly mutilated corpses, who advanced on her friends. Aliyah tried to call out to warn them, but no sound came. The first of the things grabbed Merry, and drew back to strike, it's lips pulled back to reveal large fangs. As it bit down into her neck she screamed. Another of them grabbed at John, it dug claws into his throat and pulled away his windpipe in a wash of blood. Another grabbed at There were others now, men and woman running being killed, some trying to fight back, but it was all in vain. Then the shadow came, it was massive, covering the slaughter in darkness. It reached out a clawed hand and picked her up.
"All is in vain, I will rise and bring an end to your world." The voice was a deep base.
Aliyah looked down, there was something, each death, seemed to add to it, until she could see clearly, in rivers of blood, the symbol, only one small section was missing, another hand came down and swiped at her, slicing her to ribbons, and her blood completed it.
With a sharp scream Aliyah awoke and sat blot upright.
"Are you alright?" John said turning to her. He cursed as the Frisbee hit him on the back of the head.
"I'm fine." She said as they both walked over to her. She opened her bag and began digging though it for something. She had seen the symbol in her dream, and then it had clicked, she hadn't recognised it before as they weren't exactly the same, but it was close enough, she found what she had been looking for, and began leafing through the tattered book, it was so 'well used', as one of her old friends had said, that the cover was almost falling off. She found the page and looked down at the illustration, like she thought, it wasn't the same, but they looked so similar, she knew what the pattern was, it was a veve.
Merry and John trailed behind her as Aliyah dashed into Markus' room at the school.
"Hello, how can I help? Oh, Aliyah it's you. Do come into my office." Markus said walking out of a small office attached to the teaching lab.
"Doc, I think I've found something out about the symbol at the murder scene." She blurted out.
"Come, sit down and you can tell me all." He gestured for a chair.
"Ok, I had this dream, where weird, really old vampires, came out of the ground and started attacking everyone, and there was this shadow, shape, oh I don't know. Something! But, when it lifted me up I could see the symbol lade out below me in blood. When I woke up, I remembered where I had seen something like it before." She pulled the book put of her backpack and, opening it to the appropriate page, offered it to Markus.
He took it and looked at the illustration of the veve, then looked at the cover. "Yes, you're right, it is a veve!" He exclaimed as the implication sank in. "I never thought to check the voodoo angle. It makes sense, Damballa and Agris both were adopted by Voodoo so why not Odon! Also, you mentioned something about really old vampires."
"Yes they seemed so wizened they didn't look human any more, but more than that, they were partially decomposed, and had claws."
"Yes, there is a vampire legend, that one day, Their Sires and Grandsires would rise and take the earth. It is possible that the sleeper, Mathira, could bring the older more powerful vampires back to serve her."
In a dark room three men sat in a circle surrounding a pattern, the veve drawn on the floor in blood.
"Come to us, oh great master, come to us we summon you, come in your power and rule over this mortal plain." The figures chanted. "With this death we call you!" As they said the last Charity was pulled from the shadows.
AN. The Old vampires mentioned in the dream sequence are not the same as the uber-vampires in Buffy season 7. They are something else.
