Simon wrenched his knife out of the back of the vampire's neck and let the body fall to the ground.
"Wait," Hamish said as the rest of them started following the fae again. They turned to watch him as he rolled the vampire over onto its back.
"Okay..." Simon said.
Hamish pulled a knife out and slashed the front of the vampire's shirt open, revealing a broad, pale chest.
Simon's eyebrows lifted. "This is getting a little weird, Hamish."
"Do you have a pen?" Hamish asked.
"No? Why would I have a pen?"
"I don't know. To keep track of where the fuck we are in these tunnels, maybe?"
Simon made a face. "Yeah, that would have been useful, wouldn't it..."
"Oh well, guess I can do this the hard way. At least it'll stand out nicely." Hamish stabbed his knife into the vampire's throat, wetting the tip with its thick, dark blood, and then began to carefully drag it across the vampire's chest.
It took Danya a moment to realise that he was writing. 'Following fae to subway — Hamish.'
"Well, that's macabre," Simon said.
"It's clever," Hamish insisted.
"Uh huh."
"And here, look." Hamish sliced through the armholes of the vampires shirt and then pulled it out from underneath it.
"I'm not sure how stripping the vampire helps us."
Hamish tore a strip from the shirt and then cut a scrap off and held it up. "We can leave a trail."
Simon frowned. "Okay, fine. Your weird plan is actually a good idea."
Hamish stood back up and began cutting the shirt up into small pieces as they started following the fae again. "I'm a genius, admit it."
"You're very good at coming up with plans that involve taking men's shirts off, anyway."
"A narrow yet surprisingly versatile skill set."
They had been down in the tunnels for about an hour now, and the fae was still leading them towards the subway lines that ran through the heart of the city. The longer they walked, the thicker the tension grew. Simon had acquired a permanent crease to his brow.
Danya held up his hand again as he felt a now familiar intrusion upon his mind. "Hold on."
"Another one?" Hamish asked.
Danya nodded and then frowned. "This feels... bigger. More intense."
"Like that one that nearly kicked my ass?"
"No, I didn't notice anything different about the feel of that one at all."
"Oh great, so this one will be—"
Hamish was interrupted by not one but three vampires running at full speed out of the darkness of the tunnel ahead.
Danya moved before he was even aware of deciding to and raised a shield just in time for the vampires to collide with it. Two of them went flying backwards and the third slammed into the wall next to them, where it was promptly taken out of the fight by Hamish's sword through its eye.
At least now it was two against two. No... two against four. Danya and Lucas weren't just here for decoration.
Danya hurled a fireball into the tunnel. The first vampire ducked low as it ran towards them, dodging under the fire, but the second one caught the full brunt of it square in its chest. Though, Danya wasn't quite sure that improved their situation. It was still running towards them, but now it was on fire.
Simon didn't seem overly concerned by it, though. He slammed his bracer into the vampire's face, knocking it to the ground, and then turned to help Hamish with the other one.
Lucas drove his knife into the chest of the vampire on the ground, but its energy wasn't silenced. He'd missed its heart. It was weakened and blinded and confused, but still too fast, too strong. Before it could turn the situation around on Lucas, Danya joined the fray, driving his knife into the vampire's chest just below Lucas'. Its body went limp and its energy dropped away.
A second later Simon and Hamish finished with the other vampire, too, and its body fell heavy to the ground next to them.
Simon took a moment to catch his breath, his parted lips revealing a red tint to his teeth. "Everyone okay?"
Danya nodded along with everyone else. "You're bleeding."
"I just cut the inside of my cheek open on my teeth. I'm fine."
Hamish shook his head. "Simon, we've talked about keeping your blood inside your body. The last thing we need is to start smelling of blood around here."
"It's inside my mouth, which is part of my body." Simon swished saliva around his mouth and then swallowed. "Inside my stomach, now."
"I might be able to stop the bleeding," Danya offered.
"Sure, give it a go."
"Wait, Danya can heal now?" Hamish asked.
"Oh, yeah," Simon said. "I forgot to mention that."
"You forgot to mention that? Kind of important, Simon!"
"It's not," Danya insisted as he adjusted his magelight to better illuminate the inside of Simon's mouth. "I can barely do it at all. Halting the bleeding of this small wound is about my limit, and it would have stopped on its own soon enough."
"Okay, well, maybe not imminently crucial information, then, but still important," Hamish said. "I thought those kinds of talents had been completely wiped out."
Danya found the ragged cut inside Simon's cheek and pushed energy into it. "Perhaps only inadvertently bred out, though who knows if the potential for a true healer still exists in our bloodline."
"I always thought of it as a kind of karmic consequence for everything we did to your kind," Hamish said. "We used to have access to that kind of life saving magic, but we fucked ourselves over because... hell, I'm not even sure I know why. Humans get to write the history books, and I doubt we're being completely honest."
Danya remembered what Slone had said on the matter. Even he hadn't seemed to know why it had happened. He finished doing what he could for Simon and pulled back. The bleeding had stopped.
Simon probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue and nodded, satisfied. "I think it happened because humans are bad at sharing."
Hamish sent him a quizzical smile as they started walking again. "Bad at sharing?"
"We used to have the whole world. We don't talk about that much, but think about how big that is. The small human territories we have now barely register on a map of the world. We used to have the whole thing and still had wars over land. Can you imagine?"
"Maybe it is karma."
Simon shook his head. "No, this is a punishment and it has been thoughtfully handed out to us by conscious beings. We're told to stay on the roads, stay within this safe area, because there are dangerous things out there. And there are, because they've formed a carefully guarded perimeter around human territories. This was a war without winners, but it did have losers and that was us."
"Oh, yeah, that's kind of known," Lucas said.
"Huh?"
"Ask any bandit. We've always known there were exact borders we're being deliberately kept inside. I'm sure anyone with much power also knows the truth. Just isn't something they really want to tell the masses. Might cause unrest if people realised that we're all sort of prisoners if you really think about it."
"Why are we even allowed to keep you lot as slaves, then?" Hamish asked.
"They can maintain a border, but freeing us would mean another war," Danya explained. "And then what? I don't think we really want to be apart from humans."
"Oh, good, that's not just me," Lucas said. "Don't get me wrong, hanging out with my own kind for a while has been great, but I don't know. Being around humans just... feels good."
"Because you're skimming ambient energy from them," Danya said. "We don't need it, technically. We can keep one another balanced perfectly well. I just can't imagine going back to living without this feeling."
"Mm," Lucas agreed. "So nobody else can just give us freedom, really. Maybe they can help, but if they just swooped in and rescued us all we'd probably self-sabotage."
"Ah, fuck," Hamish said, and for a moment Danya was confused until he followed Hamish's gaze. Down the tunnel ahead of them, the outline of a doorway leading out into darkness had just come into view.
"That'll be the subway lines," Simon said.
"Yup." Hamish took a moment to pause and stretch, testing the stiffness of the joints and muscles in his arms. He sighed. "Okay. Let's do this."
"I don't feel anything," Danya assured them as they drew closer to the doorway. The others had been approaching with such caution that it looked as though they expected an immediate attack.
Hamish shot him a smile. "Thanks. I forgot we had an early warning system."
The doorway looked like it had once held a door, but now it was just an open maw leading into the more cavernous tunnel beyond. The fae stood waiting for them just to the side of where they came through, closer than it had ever allowed them to get before.
This close its limbs looked strange, and it took Danya a moment to realise it was because they had no real shape to them. Not only were its calves and thighs the same thickness, but so to were its wrists and biceps.
"Hey, buddy," Hamish said, eyeing it with cautious fascination. "You're not leading us to our deaths, are you? Because it would be really nice if you didn't."
The fae's face had no features, but somehow it still gave the impression of staring.
Simon shot Hamish a look from where he'd crouched to examine the train tracks. "I don't think it understands you."
"It doesn't have to know what I'm saying. I think we have an understanding about me not wanting to die."
The fae started moving again.
Simon sighed. "Well, let's hope so."
They followed.
"So," Lucas said after about ten minutes of walking. "I was expecting us to have been attacked by now. Like, quite a bit."
"Mm," Simon agreed. "Either some of the others have made themselves a more urgent target or the vampires are planning something."
"Well, great. Both of those possibilities suck"
Danya pushed his magelight further forward and squinted up ahead. There was something hanging in the middle of the tunnel. "What's that?"
"Oh, shit," Hamish said. "People."
Danya could see it now. Two human figures, a man and a woman, suspended upside down.
Simon swore and took off running towards them.
The rest of them had barely even begun to speed up to follow him when Simon slowed down again and announced what Danya already knew. "They're dead."
"Last night's dinner," Hamish said.
Now that they were closer Danya could see the cuts across their throats. They'd been strung up and had their throats slit to drain them of their blood. Had they been alive when it had happened?
Danya caught a glimpse of one of their faces, open mouthed in a frozen scream of horror. He looked away, but the image had already burned into his mind.
Lucas walked a slow circle around the hanging bodies. "They were bandits."
"How do you figure that?" Hamish asked.
Lucas tugged free a square of fabric that had been hanging out of the woman's pocket and held it up. It was a bright purple with an X bleached across the middle. "They use these to cover their faces. I recognise the colours."
"Oh, shit. I'm sorry. Did you know them?"
"Nah, and I wouldn't have liked to. Their group isn't the nicest bunch. Still, I'll make sure to get a message to them to let them know what happened. They deserve that much."
"Good," Simon said. "Let's keep going."
After about twenty more minutes of eerily quiet walking, the edge of their magelight caught on a change in scenery up ahead. The area widened up to provide space for raised platforms on either side of the tracks.
"Well, this was where we were supposed to meet the others in around..." Simon glanced at his wristwatch. "An hour and a half from now."
Lucas pulled himself up onto the side of the platform and brightened his magelight as he tossed it up high, better illuminating the space.
"A train!" Hamish announced with childlike joy. It was sitting on the tracks alongside the opposite platform.
"Huh, it must have been left here during the war," Simon said as he slowly followed Hamish over to the front of the train.
Lucas sat down on the edge of the platform. "Does anyone else smell rotting meat?"
"Yeah, it's coming from under here." Simon indicated a pile of something covered with a dirty white blanket near the front of the train.
Danya pulled himself up onto the platform next to Lucas as Simon knelt to look under the blanket. Danya sent his magelight over to give Simon a better view, but he had no desire to see for himself.
"Corpses, unsurprisingly," Simon said.
"Lynna?" Lucas asked.
Simon shook his head. "All humans."
"Well it would have been nice if they'd cleaned things up before they started rotting," Hamish commented. He was trying to find a way to climb onto the roof of the train.
"They're still fresh, actually. The smell's coming from this." Simon held up something long and thin, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. "Deer leg."
Hamish's forehead scrunched together in confusion. "A deer? Why are they fucking around with dismembering deer?"
Simon pulled his arm back and threw the deer leg down the subway tunnel, back the way they'd come. "Feeding captives, I'd guess."
"Seems like a lot of trouble to slaughter and cook a deer."
"If they're holding mages, they wouldn't get sick from raw meat."
Lucas made a face. "Gross."
Danya leant back so that he could see past Lucas to make sure the fae wasn't getting impatient with their dawdling, but it wasn't where he'd thought it was. It wasn't in the other direction, either, or anywhere he could see from where he was sitting. "Where's the fae?"
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked around, but it wasn't anywhere in sight.
"Did it go on without us?" Lucas asked.
"No," Simon said. "I think this was just where it was taking us."
"Why?" Hamish asked.
"I think we're about to find out," Danya said as that now familiar screaming energy stirred in his mind. "Vampires."
The first vampire launched itself over the top of the train and slammed down onto the platform in front of them. Before it could properly regain its balance, Hamish was already slashing his sword down its belly. A rope of intestines spilled out, but the vampire didn't even seem to notice as it struck back at him. Hamish let it get close, grabbed a fistful of slippery intestine, and then kicked it off the edge of the platform. Several more organs were dragged out of the vampire's abdomen with a horrifying slorp sound. Hamish wiped his hand on his pants and went to help Simon with the next two vampires.
It wasn't just two or three vampires this time. It seemed like as soon as they dropped one, two more would take its place. Danya used fire to weaken them whenever he found the opportunity, Hamish and Simon sliced them down, and Lucas finished off any that weren't quite dead after the rest of them were done with them.
But they were all getting tireder, and slower, and then one of the vampires dodged under Simon's defences and slammed a hand into his chest, sending him flying off the edge of the platform.
Hamish swore and tried to follow, but the same vampire had redirected its attention to him. Danya went after Simon instead.
Danya half expected to see Simon's head cracked open on the tracks, but his fall had been cushioned by the pile of bodies stacked in front of the train. He was grappling with the disemboweled vampire which had left a gruesome trail of its innards across the tracks to reach him.
Danya grabbed hold of a fistful of its hair, wrenched its head back, and finally put an end to it as he drove his knife through its eye. He rolled the body off of Simon. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Simon weazed, and then coughed and winced. "Maybe cracked a rib or two. It's fine."
That didn't sound fine, but Simon was already hauling himself to his feet with a hand on Danya's shoulder. Danya started to follow as Simon headed back towards the fight, but the glint of something on the tracks next to the train caught his eye. Simon's knife. It must have fallen free when Simon had hit the ground. Simon already had his sword back in hand, but he might have need of the smaller blade too.
"I'll be there in a second," Danya said as he went to fetch it.
That was when he felt the brush of something different against his mind. Not human, not vampire. Not the fae again. It was something wholly different, yet familiar somehow.
...Slone?
For a moment Danya thought the others were here, but he could only feel that single presence and it wasn't moving. He pursued it down the side of the train, but as he got closer he realised it wasn't Slone. It was similar enough that he was sure the being it came from was of the same kind as Slone, but it possessed its own unique rhythm.
He glanced back at the others, but they were still holding things down. They could spare him for a minute.
The next train door ahead of him was open and that was where the energy was emanating from.
"Hello?" Danya called out as he slowly moved towards it, expecting to find a person inside. Amber eyes locked with his and Danya nearly tripped over his feet as the huge, black wolf before him lifted its head, the chains that bound it clinking.
But... it felt like Slone. Danya let a slow breath out.
Slone was a fucking werewolf, wasn't he?