I'm on a bit of a roll today. Things will pick up a bit in this chapter. You get to meet a new character! Yaaaaaay? Ugh….I'm bored…I miss my friends. The sadness. Writing always makes me feel better so off to the Lappy I go! Things are getting intense in this chapter so rating has gone up.
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Dracula and Inmoon traveled nonstop for days, only stopping to rest briefly and eat. They avoided any towns and especially large cities. The two wandered across the occasional hiker but it was easy enough to avoid them. Their feed from the first night of their trip would last them a few more days and then the two of them would need to feed again. Something neither of them were looking forward to but only human blood would do. Only human flesh and blood could put them at full power and give them a fighting chance against the evil at their doorstep.
During the daytime Dracula flew above the clouds and the pair kept in contact via a spell that bound their minds together. Dracula felt whole again with his Tome and Sirith at his side once more. He could feel his old power returning to him and with it he felt the great shadow looming over the world. It grew darker and larger with every passing day and the cold hand of fear wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed mercilessly.
He couldn't help but think about Mavis and Johnny back at the hotel. He hoped with everything he had that he would come away from this fight and be able to see her again. He begged and pleaded that this time, this time he would come out alive. There were so many things that he didn't tell her and should have. Too many secrets to keep from his own daughter but he was too afraid to tell her anything. He was afraid of what she would think of him after she knew the things that had happened, the things he had done and the truth about him and Martha. Poor Mavis grew up believing that her parents had been bonded and he was scared to tell her that he and Martha were never bonded. They had zinged and he had asked her, nothing would have made him happier but Martha refused. Martha said no to the two of them being bonded and she never told him why.
Dracula not being bonded to Martha is the only reason that he was alive today. Vampires don't marry like humans do. When a vampire marries, or bonds, they literally merge their souls together. If one bond mate dies then the other will follow because nothing can live for very long with only half a soul. Vampires weren't meant to live alone and yet, here he was cursed to live out his days in solitude.
He rolled over midflight and snatched a bird flying by. He sank his fangs into it and quickly drained the small animal of its blood. When he was finished he dropped it and continued flying. He shook his head to get those haunting thoughts away from him. She didn't need to know any of that and Dracula didn't need to worry about his daughter anymore because Johnny would take care of her now. He pulled up higher and higher into the sky, diving through clouds and looping around and through the wispy shapes. He popped into the middle of a flock of geese and laughed as they scattered away with startled honks. Inmoon's own laughter echoed over their mental link and he sent her an amused grin. It wouldn't take much longer now to get to Scotland, only a few more days and they would be that much closer to ending this war, hopefully, before it started.
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It had been over two weeks since the incident at the dinner and neither Mavis nor Johnny had heard anything about Dracula. Mavis wasn't sleeping well and instead took to wandering the vault hidden beneath her father's coffin. She'd found a secondary staircase that led up to a shrine of some kind. There was no body, no picture and no name but it was obvious that Dracula had cared for this person dearly and whoever it was wasn't her mother. The only thing in the room other than hundreds of flowers was a simple sharpened bone knife.
All her life and she had never known about this room and had never known about any other people in her father's life other than Martha and her Uncles. She had never heard of this Inmoon but apparently Dracula knew her very well. Now her father had run off and couldn't tell her why because of some blood oath.
Blood oath!
There was another thing about this whole situation that unnerved her. She had talked to her father about magic and the subject of blood magic came up. Her dad hated blood magic, detested it in fact and he had entered a blood oath swearing himself to secrecy. What would make her father do something like that? What else had he been hiding and what else had happened to him that she didn't know about? Her Uncles didn't even have a clue what was going on and her dad told them everything. She was so scared for her father.
The vault beneath his coffin was filled with papers thrown haphazardly around, precariously stacked books, various plants, minerals, bones and preserved animal parts. There was a massive cauldron set aside by the shelves housing his supplies and a desk in the far corner. There was an entire wall covered in runes that no one could decipher and it was starting to look more and more to everyone like her father had gone crazy. There were so many rumors flying around that Martha's death had done more damage than people first thought and that he needed to be locked up for his own good. People still respected him and the entire monster population was out looking. The hotel was nearly empty and everyone involved in the search took the precautions to safely capture and restrain Dracula.
She knew her father wasn't crazy and Johnny knew it too. He was always reassuring her when she overheard a conversation about his "condition".
She was wandering the vault in the middle of the day trying to wipe the tears out of her eyes. She didn't know how she could prove to everyone that her father wasn't crazy. She was pouring over his papers and notes but she couldn't make any sense of his formulas. Every one of his books were spell books, either holding information or filled cover to cover with her father's handwriting.
There was another shelf behind the desk that gave her worry. Floor to ceiling shelves lined with human skulls. Some skulls were intact, some were fractured and some were shattered. No matter the condition of the skull each one had a number carved into it ranging from one to one hundred and six. They weren't recent and, in fact they were quite old. The last one on the shelf was at least sixty or seventy years old.
She could feel that this place held all of the secrets her father wasn't able to tell her and she knew that all she had to do was look. She had spent every waking moment in this vault and had yet to find anything. A surge of red hot anger overwhelmed her so; she grabbed the desk with both hands and flipped it end over end scattering papers everywhere. The crash echoed loudly and Johnny came running into the vault with a glass of blood.
"You ok-" He began to ask but Mavis cut him off.
"No Johnny I am not okay! Of course I'm not okay! Everyone thinks my dad's crazy and no one else but you believes me! I know the answers I'm looking for are in here but this whole vault goes against everything my dad is. This whole place is in disarray! There's no pattern, nothing is organized!" She screamed and kicked the chair into the wall sending dust flying down from the cracks in the ceiling.
"Mavis, calm down okay. Here drink this you haven't eaten in a while." He handed her the glass of blood substitute and held her in his arms as she drank it.
She saw Johnny's friends behind them in the stairwell holding that damn camera and filming everything still. She didn't care, they weren't doing anything wrong and they seemed to be just as upset about the situation as anyone else.
"Maybe that's why the place is such a mess. Maybe he wanted to make sure that no one would find anything important so he made it the exact opposite of what it should have been."
She took a deep breath after finishing off her glass of blood and turned around to look at the room again. Her eyes caught a red glow on the underside of the desk and she dropped the glass in shock when she saw what the desk held. She pushed away from Johnny and took a closer look at the red letters wiggling around on the desk.
I knew you'd want to know Mavy. Do you know how to read braille?
Her eyes widened and Johnny stepped around the broken glass to kneel next to her.
"What is it?" He asked.
"You don't see it?" She asked.
"Why what is it?"
"Get a witch down here now."
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He could feel every person in his vault and he knew when Mavis had found his first breadcrumb. He wasn't telling her, she was finding it herself and so he wasn't breaking the oath. There was always a way around everything, even a blood oath. He smiled softly to himself as he circled Inmoon below him. He dove down and landed quietly on the grassy hillside next to her and the two of them took a deep breath of the Scottish country air.
"Alright, so how the hell do we find her? Isobel could be anywhere in all of Scotland." Dracula asked.
"Can't you do some kind of a tracking spell?" Inmoon answered.
"Do you have a possession of hers?" Inmoon's head dropped. "I thought so." He paused for a moment then continued. "Well….we could always….follow the trail of dead wildlife." He couldn't hold back his laughter at the end.
"You mean…" Inmoon giggled. "You still haven't told her?"
Dracula shook his head back and forth chuckling.
"Oh God. Poor Isobel."
"If I told her she'd be crushed." Dracula defended himself.
"So she?..."
"Still thinks she has the most amazing singing voice in the world, yes." He laughed wiping the tears from his eyes.
"We really need to tell her that she's tone deaf Vlad."
"I know, I know. I'd just feel so bad about it. She loves to sing so much."
"Well I guess we roam the countryside of Scotland listening for the unmistakable sound of Isobel's singing."
"Ah, yes, the unforgettable screech of a Banshee."
"The only Banshee." Inmoon interjected.
They laughed for a bit longer before a race across the countryside commenced. They'd find Isobel by dawn for sure and then be off to Ireland to find Lorelay.
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"It's a charm honey, with a protective barrier I can't break." The witch they had brought down answered the question that hung on everyone's mind.
Johnny had run and gotten the head of the witch cleaning staff who was the most experienced with magic.
"I've never seen magic this advanced. You have the main spell which is weaved into several scramblers that completely ruin my ability to read its energy and identify the spell. The protective charm is the same way."
"Why can I see it?"
"Because it was a message meant only for you."
"What does it say?" Johnny asked.
"It says, I knew you'd want to know Mavy. Do you know how to read Braille?"
"Hey, what's this?" Johnny leaned down to a small crevice in the wood and tried to grab a slip of yellow paper when he touched it there was a loud crack and Johnny was launched onto his back.
"Johnny!" Mavis screamed and darted over to him.
Johnny let out a loud groan of pain and clutched his hand to his chest. The witch maid kneeled down and gently took a hold of his hand to reveal blisters popping up all over his hand and smoke rising from the burned flesh. He moaned again as she looked his hand over. She waved her fingers over his burns and they vanished.
"Nasty little protection spell, painful but easy to fix. Mavis why don't you try and grab that, your father's smarter than any of us gave him credit for."
Mavis reached for the slip of paper and grasped it with no problem. She pulled it out of its hiding place and unfolded it. She laughed when she read it.
"It's a code." She smiled. "He put a code into the runes. He doesn't tell me what they all say but the number of lines and corners on each rune equals a letter."
She dashed over to the wall and ran over the entire thing, every single rune, as fast as she could. It took her thirty minutes to read over everything and then she found what she was looking for in the farthest top corner.
"Aha! According to dad's code this word is braille. The rest is gibberish." She shouted out.
"Okay…so now what?" She asked. "I don't know what to do next."
"Well." Johnny said quietly. "It's braille, touch it."
"What?"
"He asked you if you know how to read braille. You read braille by tracing the words so trace the words."
She lifted a finger and slowly traced each rune. When she had finished there was a loud clunk and an even louder scraping noise as the entire wall slid back and retracted behind the wall.
The muffled screeching was like red hot steel scraping across their brain and they screamed at the pain.
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She had opened the door. He felt it like a kick to the gut, tripped and ate dirt before rolling a few feet. He sat up and spat out wads of dirt and grass while Inmoon laughed at him. He glared at her and stood up to give her a shove. She grabbed his arms and used his momentum to send them both tumbling down the hillside. They bit and clawed and shoved each other into the grass. They laughed and growled and threw each other around, playing like they hadn't played in centuries.
"Here am ur oot roamin and whit do I find but ye two bampots and acting like wee bairns at that. Am gonnae wallap ye wan if ye dinnae shut yer geggies!"
Inmoon looked up from chewing on Dracula's arm and Dracula paused in his gnawing and yanking on Inmoon's left ear to see a thin pale woman in a blue cloak, her brown hair billowing down by her waist. The two immediately jumped up from their positions feeling duly chastised for their behavior. Yes, they felt like immature little bastards.
"We've been looking for you Isobel." Dracula informed his old friend as Inmoon took to rubbing her tongue along her teeth.
"Aye, ah kin ya dobber!"
"Wow…you really took to Scotland didn't you?"
"Aye. Ye up fer a wee bevvy?"
"Speak so we can all understand Isobel."
"Any of ye wannae head back te my house fer a drink?"
"Sure and we have quite a lot to talk about."
"Hope ye like scotch!"
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For a few second no one could move then Mavis opened her eyes and saw what she assumed was the object of her dad's little scavenger hunt. A large book hung on a rope in front of a shelf that had three jars with runes written all over, like the ones on the wall. Behind the runes something black and inky with long teeth and piercing eyes thrashed and squirmed in its confines. She grabbed the book and as soon as the rope broke the door slammed shut again muting the howling things in those jars.
"This is it." Mavis said as she made her way back up the stairs and into her room.
Johnny closed the door behind him, after telling his friends to get lost. He sat next to Mavis on the bed and listened to her take a deep shaky breath while clutching the book in her lap. He reached forward and gently grabbed Mavis's hand. She looked at him and straightened. Her face hardened and she opened the book to the first page.
It's been nearly a year exactly since mom died and as the Winter Solstice approaches I realize that it would be a good idea to record the important things.
My name is Vladislav Dracula I am thirteen years old and this is the most important thing I will ever write. If I remember nothing else I need to remember this.
When dark creeps in and eats the light
Bury your fears on Sorry Night
For in the winter's blackest hours
Comes the feasting of the Vours
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Whooie! This chapter was FUN! Things are getting intense but I'm still trying to put some humor in there for you guys. I'm on a roll baby! Two chapters posted in two days! Can I get a WHOOP WHOOP!?