The tall, hooded figures dispersed into inky blackness before dissipating into the cool night air. One after another, Greg slashed, punched, kicked, scratched, and bit them to death. Individually, these things were no threat whatsoever. Attacking as a group and numbering in the dozens, they were a little threat.
Perhaps more than a little threat.
Their main attack was a wide sweep from one of their noncorporeal limbs. The black shadowy substance that made up their forms passed through Greg’s skin, muscle tissue, and even bones. It didn’t hurt, necessarily. But each time a shadowy arm passed through his body, Greg felt the strength being sapped from the area affected. Not a debilitating amount, but noticeable. If this fight continued the way it was going, with more hooded figures appearing than Greg could possibly put down, he was going to be in some trouble.
Greg Van Helsing, with his centuries of experience, all of the insane things he’d seen and monsters he’d slain, had never encountered anything like these shades he now fought. As that very thought crossed his mind, a long forgotten memory came to the surface. It was in London during the late 1600s. He’d accepted a contract involving what was advertised as a lich. Though they shared a few commonalities, it was not a lich. A not-lich that was accidentally summoned to Earth from some other planet or plane of existence.
The minions raised by that non-lich looked similar to these black hooded figures. If Greg remembered correctly, they had required a living soul to create. Once created, however, it didn’t matter how many times they were destroyed. They’d just pull themselves back together within minutes. It wasn’t until Greg finished off the necromancer itself that its minions ceased to regenerate. This was only relevant if these things were summoned by a similar being or power. Greg had to find and destroy whatever was controlling these shades or get the hell out of there.
Greg’s entire form glowed with white light as his Van Helsing heritage ability blasted back the creatures of shadow and darkness with blinding pale illumination. They’d be all over him again shortly, he was sure. Still, the blast of light gave him a little space and served to light up any dark corners where someone might be hiding and watching the battle from a distance.
His eyes darted as his head swiveled. There was no sign of a summoner. There was no sign of Roma. There was nothing here but these shades…
And the guy that harpooned my bloody leg, Greg reminded himself.
The same guy who’d run into the building when Greg rushed off to help Roma. It only took a brief scan of the windows to see that very same man watching from the second floor of the old abandoned church. The shades were approaching cautiously as the light around Greg began to fade.
Greg Van Helsing was infuriated.
He knew he had to flee. His injuries were mounting. His strength sapped. His enemies numerous and ally missing. Frustrated, glaring daggers at the man in the window, Greg grimaced. And then he fled.
In his condition, weakened and bleeding, Greg was forced to use an ability he preferred to keep in his back pocket. Once he used Absconding Flight, Greg would be unable to do so again for weeks. And he would be left even more weakened than he already was for hours afterward. But it was his only chance to get out of here in one piece and he took it.
To anyone watching, Greg Van Helsing seemed to simply be standing still and glaring at the man in the window, but Absconding Flight was an ability whose name was appropriate to its effects. He was launched into the air, leaving nothing but an after image behind as he soared through the night up and into the clouds. The ability would provide a modicum of protection against the landing but it was never enough to cushion the impact enough to avoid incurring injuries.
His ascension came to an end somewhere in the middle of a cloud. With only a field of thick gray clouds in sight, Greg’s transition from rocketing upward to plummeting toward the ground was disorienting. When he dropped out of the cloud like a led brick dropped from space Greg realized he needed to adjust his trajectory. He did not have long to do so. Below, some few hundred meters on his current course, there was a residential area. If possible, he would try to avoid demolishing some poor family’s home.
Altering course while falling through the sky required precise body control. Precise body control that would take more strength and energy than Greg had. Thinking quickly, he pulled a vial from his pocket, unstoppered it, then sucked in as much of the sickly-sweet green liquid as he could. The majority of his stamina regeneration elixir was wasted, slipping through the tiny space between his mouth and the vial with each shake caused by wind or air pressure. It was enough.
Greg felt strength return to his limbs and quickly got into position with his arms and legs spread wide, stomach to the ground. From this position he would not only slow his fall but also be able to make course corrections with slight adjustments from the placement of his limbs. There was an industrial area filled with warehouses and abandoned buildings to the west of the neighborhood and Greg slightly retracted his left arm and leg, aiming to put himself down somewhere in the middle of it.
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The landing hurt. Probably. It rendered Greg unconscious so it was hard to say.
When he came to an unknown time later, though, the amount of pain he was in would cause a standard human to pass out. From the tips of his hair to his toenails Greg Van Helsing felt as though he had red-hot tingling needles piercing every square centimeter of his body. His mind swam through oceans of agony as he tried to remember how he had ended up like this.
“Roma,” he whispered softly to himself.
If they’ve hurt her…
If these cultists did hurt her, Greg would do nothing about it. Not at the moment. He could barely remain conscious as it was. Gritting his teeth at the pain of moving at all, Greg pulled a red vial from his belt and struggled with shaking fingers to unstopper it. He poured it down the hatch, swallowed, and then let his head rest against the shattered ground as the healing elixir began doing its much needed work knitting him back together.
He’d have to stay put for at least an hour or two in order to recover even the strength to stand. That’s what was going through his mind when a black hooded figure glided into the alley where Greg rested.
Greg’s ability, Absconding Flight, was supposed to make pursuit impossible. To any known senses, he had simply vanished. He left no trail, nothing to follow him here. On top of that, he had a handful of passive abilities - like the one he’d mentioned to Peter on the day they met - that made him nearly untraceable. That’s why he’d given Roma, Renea, and Peter the GPS locator phones.
That’s when it hit him. Roma had one on her when she disappeared. If the cultists captured her they could have used it to find him.
“Fuck,” Greg grunted as he pushed himself into a sitting position, his back against a cracked brick wall.
A second shade followed the first into the alley to Greg’s and more followed. He turned a hopeful eye left, hoping for some kind of escape route, but a dozen or more shades were approaching from there too.
The healing elixir had repaired his internal bleeding but was not even close to repairing the damage to his bones and muscles. He could not win this fight. He couldn’t even participate in it, if he were being honest with himself. Again, Greg was forced to attempt escape. His face soured.
Greg Van Helsing did not enjoy running away.
He reached into his jacket’s inner pocket for a trump card he’d been hanging onto since the revolution. England’s revolution. In the 1640s. To the untrained eye, it was just a plain albeit elegant feather pen. When Greg blew on it, tiny bits of white dispersed into the wind like a dandelion’s seeds. With each tiny white particulate that floated away, Greg became less and less solid matter as he transitioned into a strictly spiritual entity.
The shades closing in from both sides slowed as their target began to fade into nothing. Just before transition was complete Greg pulled the GPS tracker phone out of his pocket. Before tossing it into the horde of enemies, he glanced down to see if he could get Roma’s location. Unfortunately, his hand vanished and the phone clattered to the asphalt before he saw anything useful.
The transition completed and relief filled Greg to bursting as the pain that his physical body was going through vanished instantaneously. Unbound by silly obstacles such as buildings, shades, or gravity, Greg soared away with such speed that even the eyes of a hawk would lose him. He sped directly through buildings until he was out of the industrial area and began speeding directly through people’s homes.
Greg spared a second to wonder why so many people spent their free time just staring at a television screen, and then veered to the west to spend the remainder of his time as a purely spiritual entity near the ocean. He had another trump card in his pocket, literally and figuratively, but it would be much more effective near a large body of water. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to blow his two most valuable objects in the same night, though.
Though he’d traveled dozens of miles, Greg’s time as a spiritual entity faded to an end in only 30 seconds. His hand reappeared before his eyes still holding the feather pen. Its once white feather had blackened and, much like the corpse of a slain monster, it faded away like ash on the wind. Just as his physical body came back into being, so too did the pain from Greg’s many, many injuries. He collapsed.
Lying on the wet grass on a small hill overlooking the Willamette river, Greg just stared into the clouds above. Behind him cars whirred by on the bridge. Their passing and the occasional honk of a horn were the only sounds that reached his ears. He took another healing elixir from his belt and downed it. He was beginning to run low on the life saving concoction, but abstaining for the sake of conservation wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight it wasn’t.
For long minutes, he just lay there recovering. The rain wasn’t coming down hard, just a mist of tiny drops of water that fell in a constant sheet. In only a few minutes he was completely soaked through. Greg didn’t mind much. The cold water against his skin felt nice in contrast to the searing agony beneath.
After recovering his breath and the strength to do so, Greg pulled his working mobile phone from his pocket and dialed Roma. He didn’t have the strength to hold it up to his ear so he put it on speakerphone and set it down on his chest. It rang once before going to voicemail. He wasn’t holding on to much hope of anything else, but he had to try. Maybe she’d managed to get the hell out when it became clear they’d walked right into the trap.
Next, Greg dialed Peter’s phone but was surprised when it, too, went directly to voicemail. Frowning, wheezing with the effort of simply breathing, Greg dialed his least favorite but final remaining option.
“Talk to me, Greg,” Renea’s voice came from the phone resting on Greg’s chest. She sounded a little unhinged. “Tell me Peter is with you. He took off to save you and Roma and I haven’t heard anything back. His phone is going straight to…”
“He’s not with me,” Greg interrupted. He grimaced in pain. “What do you mean he came to save us?”
“We got a guy. He told us about the trap. Peter… that stupid, caring, painfully altruistic, beautiful man insisted on saving you. And now I can’t get a hold of him.”
“Tell me he didn’t follow an address on a note you found in the pocket of someone that had a find disk,” Greg pleaded. Renea did not respond for three full seconds. “Mrs. Mayhew? Please, please tell me he did not go to that address.”
“He did,” she replied softly. “Greg, you sound… bad. What happened?”
“We went there, too. Ambush,” Greg grunted, groaning with the effort of speaking. “Roma’s gone. They got her. They kicked my ass pretty good, too. Almost didn’t make it out of there. They even used Roma’s GPS tracker phone to follow me.”
A pregnant silence hung between them as they both considered what he’d just said.
“Fuck,” they both said in perfect unison.
With Roma’s GPS tracker in hand, the cultists would have seen Peter coming their way in real time. Even without knowing when and where he and Roma would appear, their trap was effective.
Peter wouldn’t stand a chance.