Afterlife (Purgatory Series Part Three)

Chapter Seven: On the Road Again

Chapter Seven: On the road again

Since becoming a vampire, I had been curious about many things. How did my brain still manage to relay signals to the rest of my body without any blood flow coming from my heart? Could I still eat normal food even if I didn't particularly want it? And if my heart was technically dead, why would staking me through it be the thing to kill me?

Helena had tried to fill me in on what little she knew, but I had a lot of questions and she had very few answers.

According to her, the vampiric virus transmitted to humans from the demons had changed over the centuries to become something totally different than the original version. Originally vampires were weak, pitiful things that were forced to feed off of humans just to function normally. They hadn't been strong, ageless, or very dangerous. Humans and nephilim had been able to defeat the creatures by staking them inside their coffins and burying them. Once they were incapable of getting nourishment- human blood- they would die within days. So what had changed?

No one knew.

"Sometime around the 1800s we started seeing the new, improved vampires," Helena had explained. "Unlike the others, they didn't die without blood, they merely became weaker over time. But when they drank blood they became impossibly fast and strong. We thought at first they were a new kind of cambion, but then we managed to capture one for interrogation. The creature was practically mad with blood thirst, but we managed to ascertain that it had received some form of 'enhancement'."

And the question everyone had been asking since was, 'where did it come from?'

Had the demons found a way to up their game, and if so, why not continue to make enhancements to all of their kind? Why stop there? And if the demons hadn't been the ones to do it then who had? And why?

Altair told me that it didn't matter-that all that mattered was stopping them. I disagreed. Finding out their-my-strengths and weaknesses would be the key to ending this for good.

But there were only two ways I knew of to find out what I needed to know. Either ask the oldest vampire I could find for answers, which didn't seem likely to happen, or experiment on myself. I didn't like the second option any more than the first, but I was running out of other ideas.

I couldn't destroy entire colonies of vampires by myself, at least not without an ace up my sleeve. I had to find out a way to stop them that wouldn't get me sent straight back to purgatory.

To be honest, the goblins didn't really concern me. I had seen the extent of their evil in purgatory, and while they were bad creatures, they weren't the 'world domination' type. I didn't think I would need an ingenious plan to stop the type of creatures that couldn't even remember to lock my cage.

But vampires...I knew what they were capable of. I knew what I was capable of. And it terrified me. I wanted to be rid of them and this curse for good.

So that was why, despite Altair and Helena's insistence otherwise, I had set off on my own to find answers. I hadn't talked to Roran. I had known he would want to go with me, and I wasn't sure that was a good idea. He would be a distraction that I couldn't afford. I had to focus now. I had a mission to complete.

A mission that would more than likely end in my death. And I wasn't planning on dragging anyone down with me except those of my own kind.

A soft beeping sound pierced the air and I looked down to see my watch was flashing 5:30 a.m. Almost sunrise. It was time for me to find shelter before I got burned to a crisp.

Taking in my surroundings, I looked for an unoccupied building. The street I was on was rather nice: lots of middle class families with multiple kids and dogs. It would be tough to find somewhere to hide without being spotted. I should have been paying more attention-this could be dangerous.