Hunter's Moon

Chapter 26

            Juli stood in the middle of the football field. It was covered with heavy brown tarps. Underneath the tarps were scores of vampires. They lay there motionless. A chill ran up Juli's spine. The older of the two vampires had told her that she wouldn't be harmed by them. The feral creatures had only instinct, not intelligence, but his word was law. So long as she did as he said, she would be able to survive the encounter.

            She didn't really care if she survived so long as they kept their word about letting Ed go free unharmed. She had been told that she needed to stand here, in the epicenter of the vampire swarm, vampire mob, what exactly was a large group of vampires called?

            The Stramos' voice played back in her mind, “When the planetary alignment is just right, a humongous swathe of cosmic energy will bathe the Earth. The most potent portion of the energy would be on the location of the earth where an exact full moon was directly overhead, somewhere over western China. But here, on the other side of the world there will still be enough residual energy for our needs.

            “Your job will be to pull that energy from the surrounding area and feed it, in a concentrated form, into the ground.” The older vampire apparently had spent some time preparing the field for just this purpose. He told her that she didn't need to do anything with the energy, just redirect it.

            “Now, girl, now! It's starting!” the Stramos demanded.

            Ed, please be all right. Juli thought. She closed her eyes and opened up what she had begun to call her aura sense. Nearly immediately an arcane focus snapped into place. She could sense a vibration of sportsmanship, competition, and rivalry. Violence and aggression were also there.

            She detected circles and patterns drawn over the field and a sickly blue pulse seemed to weakly beat through the patterns. Juli was standing at the center of the patterns. Spread throughout the entire field were human-sized areas that she could only describe as dead zones. An anti-aura? All the vampires.

            Above her she expected to see a blue sky like she would see with her naked eye, or the blank nothingness that she'd felt from her aura sense before. Instead, above her was a raging, boiling, tempest of bright yellow energy. It was heading toward her with alarming speed.

            The cosmic energy tempest soon overtook her. She could feel around her an intensity she couldn't rightly describe. Her knees nearly buckled under the deluge of overwhelming force.

            Distantly she heard the words of the Stramos, as if through a howling wind tunnel. “Now! Do it!”

            Juli shuddered at what she was about to do. She didn't understand the full details, but these beings were evil, and she was knowingly, willingly, giving them more power. Power they should not have. She was going to be removing a vulnerability, the sun, that had to have been forced upon them for a reason.

            Was Ed worth all that? Was her friend, her friendship worth how much damage these sun immune vampires were going to cause? What would Edwin say about the cost of his freedom? What would Taylor say once she learned? No. She needed to save Ed. That was first. They could fix any problems later, but his safety was what needed to be guaranteed here.

            Concentrating, she adjusted how her aura handled the surrounding hurricane. Before, she had formed a portion of her consciousness into sewing tools, allowing fine manipulation of various pieces of emotionally charged energy. Now, she adjusted her entire self to the image of a sponge, letting herself absorb the energy as it came close. She took that energy once she had hold of it and, Dear God in heaven help me,shoved that energy downward into the soil. The yellow cosmic energy emanated outward into all areas of the pattern,. turning a slight blue-green as the energy pulse spread out wider and wider.