Risorgimento: Rebirth

by Maya Daniels

  “…Mary sacrificed herself for nothing.”

  “…she is not holding the blood down.”

  “…this can’t be good.”

  With a lot of effort, and after a very long time, I finally open my eyes. A familiar face looks down at me, smiling. I don’t know who the woman is, her blonde hair tied back and short hairs curling around her face. But I know deep down in my soul that I know her. Her hand lifts up, and she offers her wrist to me. Her skin has been cut, and the scent of her blood makes my mouth water. Encouragingly, she pushes her wrist under my nose. Flicking my tongue out, I lick her skin. Bile rises in my throat, and I turn around, dry heaving to the side. So much pain.

  “I don’t understand why she won’t take blood,” the woman says.

  “Move away, Sara. I will call you if I need you.”

  That deep voice, and that name bring everything back. Slowly turning around, I watch Sara leave Sebastian’s room. He sits on the bed next to me, his cold fingers moving the hair out of my face. It takes everything in me not to flinch. From the corner of my eye, I see Marcus leaning against the wall on one side, and Andrei with his forehead pressed on the window, staring outside. Ignoring them both, I focus entirely on the man sitting next to me.

  “Non sono degno della tua presenza, della mia redenzione. How do you feel?” His eyes soften and he cups my face.

  I am not worthy of your presence, my redemption. The words translate in my head. Reaching up to touch him as well, I smile. His eyes close on a sigh when my hand glides around his neck. He comes willingly when I pull him down. Embracing him, pressing my lips to his ear, I inhale his scent.

  “Mhhh…I think I feel used.” Sebastian stiffens at my purr.

  Sinking my fangs in his neck, I grip him tight, so there is no escape for him. My stomach doesn’t rebel at his blood. He tastes delicious.

  “Oh, fuck!” Marcus jumps away from the wall in hopes to save his Sire.

  Too bad for all of them, I’m no longer a little human.

  Rovesciamento - Overthrown

  She is deadly, unpredictable, and holds a grudge. She still belongs to him.

  Tricked and betrayed, April needs to face the facts. She is a monster.

  Unlike the rest, she can at least pretend that she’s human. That’s until night falls. When the sun disappears, so does her humanity. Her other self doesn’t really care what April thinks.

  Especially when she is thirsty.

  Accepting Sebastian’s help feels like a slap in the face, but she has a plan. Get rid of the Council, then get rid of Sebastian. Only if he didn’t taste so good, things would’ve been much easier on her heart.

  April is determined to succeed. Whoever stands in her way will see why she is the only human vampire in existence.

  From the Author

  Dear rebel,

  April’s trials don’t end just because she has fangs. They are just beginning. While she is struggling to come to terms with her new life, Sebastian needs to realize that he might’ve bit off more than he can chew when it comes to the woman he was sure will be under his thumb. Underestimating the sting of betrayal he inflicted on April, the Council might not be the only obstacle standing on his way. Book two is available for pre-order and will be released shortly.

  With permission from Michael Anderle, and LMBPN Publishing, I’ve included the first couple of chapters from “Death becomes Her”. I loved the story and wanted to share it with you, in case you haven’t come across it. Continue on the next page to start reading.

  To stay in touch and keep an eye on my new releases, giveaways and more, sigh up for my newsletter. I reply to all your emails, so don’t be shy, drop me a line. Hope I hear from you soon.

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  Maya xxx

  DEATH BECOMES HER

  MICHAEL ANDERLE

  This book is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2015 Michael T. Anderle

  Cover by Andrew Dobell, www.creativeedgestudios.co.uk

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, 2015

  Version 2.50 Revised May 2019

  The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2019 by Michael T. Anderle.

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter 1

  “May those who fight have honor, else we are doomed in the end.”

  —Unknown politician’s stump speech.

  "You know the problem with honor? Honor can be a restraining bitch. I’ve decided honor was for the last generation.”

  —Bethany Anne Reynolds, Queen of the UnknownWorld

  Virginia, USA

  The large agent cautiously entered the dilapidated wooden warehouse in old-town Virginia. Taking up most of a city block and surrounded by old weather-beaten and rusting pipes, it was an eyesore to everyone walking or driving by it.

  He spoke into his mic. “Carl, three heartbeats. Smells are incredibly pungent, with a slightly sick note—kind of like they’re going through severe body issues, or eating lots of yellow curry. I'm not sure which.”

  Carl retorted over the earpiece. “Bill, for the record, Indian food is magnificent. Your culinary bigotry is showing.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m the one who has to smell it when you go overboard eating it.” The agent stopped talking and silently squeezed his too-big body through holes which certainly were too small.

  “Okay, I’m inside the perimeter and will be making contact inside thirty. That is three–zero seconds. Smells include heavy bleach and a subtle aroma of aforementioned nastiness. Still three tangos, no heartbeat warnings, no talking.”

  Carl was viewing the video feed coming from the needle camera attached to Bill’s heavy helmet and mask. While there was no way Carl could ever make it on a takedown, he certainly enjoyed sitting in on the real-time action.

  “Okay, big guy, I have all the info coming in from the sensors outside. We have no movement and nothing out of the ordinary. We don’t seem to have any issues with flanking, so you are a go from this side. Your call, Billy Boy.”

  Bill swore to himself. If there was one thing that had gotten under his skin more in the last fifteen years of working with Carl other than being called “Billy Boy,” he didn’t know what it was. One of these days he was going to give Carl the monumental wedgie he had been asking for all that time—except he never said it when Bill was with him, and Bill never thought about it except at times like this.

  One of these days, though, God help him—and the Big Guy would be upset—he was going to make it so Carl had to be surgically removed from his shorts.

  Time to get back to business.

  “Okay, have visual. Three contacts dressed in jeans and shirts, nothing different except two have hunting vests on. One has his off and is messing with it. Can’t see what he’s doing, since his back is to me.”

  At that moment, one of the men cocked his head and gestured at the other two. They suddenly looked in Bill’s direction.

  “You’ve been made, loudmouth.” Carl couldn’t keep the concern out of his playful jibe.

  “Shit. Okay, this might get bloody. Talk to Primary and let him know we might need cleanup.”

  “Primary is already in
listen-only mode. I’m sure he’s setting up dispatches already.”

  The three guys around the card table stood up and fanned out, ready to take Bill on.

  He sighed. It wasn’t as if he was worried. He had taken down so many people in fights like this or gunfights that it wasn’t even funny. While he looked about thirty-eight, he was closer to seventy-six years old. Pretty young for a vampire, actually.

  While bullets hurt, he would mend—and the pain would remind him not to get sloppy next time.

  Bill stood up, all six-foot-four of him, and confidently strode toward the three guys, stopping about ten feet away.

  Damn if that smell wasn’t peculiar. It bothered him. The bleach was causing his nose severe issues, but he could still smell something over the chlorine.

  Carl watched through the video link as Bill asked the guys if they would like to come quietly or...

  He never got out the next word. All three rushed Bill…and the signal from his headgear suddenly stopped.

  The incoming video from a couple of the cameras outside that weren’t damaged showed the whole wooden warehouse go up in flames while smoking embers rained from the sky onto nearby buildings. Carl was pretty sure that in seconds there wouldn’t be anything left of the engulfed warehouse.

  His best friend and partner had just vanished in a big ball of superheated ferocity. Carl just stared at the screens, willing Bill to come running back out through the flames.

  Someone had known they were coming, and they knew how to take a vamp down. Three of them took their own lives to make it happen.

  The color, what little was left, drained from Carl’s face. The shock of losing his friend and being so mistaken about Bill’s safety left Carl staring numbly at the screen.

  The ringing of the phone broke through his pain and stupor. It was the primary contact.

  He hit the talk button. “Yeah?” His voice was barely a whisper.

  A gruff voice from the other end of the line began, “Tell me he has enough parts left to make it back to us, Carl.” Frank was their primary contact with the government. His solo career deep in the bowels of the darkest areas of security predated Carl by decades. “I have Spec-Ops ready to extract in five minutes.”

  “No, Frank. We’ve lost him—all of him. I just lost my fucking best friend.” Carl wanted to stab the button and terminate the call as anger and anguish directed both at those who had killed Bill and at himself boiled. “We can’t afford notice right now. We’re obviously being watched, and something is so rotten in Denmark I can’t even think straight.”

  “I’m so sorry, Carl.” Frank knew there wasn’t much he could say. Carl was his third contact on the other side of the “red line,” but this was Carl’s first loss. Frank had interacted with the agents, but he was uncomfortable around them.

  Frank knew that no matter what the protocol said, it was not “his program.”

  “What’s our next step, kid?” Frank had to get Carl thinking again. Carl wasn’t young, but compared to Frank’s near-century mark his years were a drop in the bucket.

  “Step?” Carl said blankly, his mind just idling. The take from the outside cameras showed the warehouse burning, and there were sirens in the distance.

  Probably Frank’s work.

  As much as Carl wanted to yell and scream or cry and drink himself into oblivion, there could be only one response.

  With his voice just starting to come back, Carl replied, “Do? Frank, there is only one choice. I have to wake him up.” Oh my God, he thought. What’s going to happen now?

  Frank, hundreds of miles away, had much the same thought—except his was more concise.

  It was simply, “Oh shit.”

  Washington, D.C.

  Bethany Anne Reynolds was a sight to behold. As she proceeded down the hall of “spook central,” she received surreptitious glances from a couple of the guys.

  Although her hair was jet-black, her personality came straight from a redhead at the best of times.

  The ones who were smart forced their gazes away instead of watching her walk down the hall. The view was not worth the scathing look they would get should Bethany Anne notice their interest.

  Or the ass-kicking during a martial arts workout later. She was only five-foot-three, and that gave most of the guys a significant height and reach advantage. She had a long upper torso and her legs were a little short for her height, so she tended to wear higher heels to compensate.

  It was obvious she was angry, and when Bethany Anne was angry, her better nature took a sabbatical. While she might apologize later, it was better not to risk the twins in the first place.

  Some guys never understood the danger or decided just to chance watching the agent go down the hall. No matter how many HR training classes on appropriate behavior some guys took, it never overcame their natural predilection to be asses.

  Today, however, was their lucky day. She didn’t glance in anyone’s direction, just strode down the corridor in a carefully-tailored and expensive dark suit. She had a piece of paper in her hand, and her blue eyes were flashing a warning to keep the hell away.

  It worked.

  Martin Brennan, her boss (or at least her advisor, no matter what the org chart said) for the last five years, heard her coming from thirty feet away. There was no mistaking those very loud, very determined footfalls.

  He sighed. It wasn’t like this had been his plan. He loved her like a daughter—and just like fathering a teenager, he was about to get ripped for something he’d had nothing to do with.

  This discussion was so going to suck.

  Military Base, Colorado

  The klaxon was sounding somewhere way in the back past all the pipes, and Matthew Wainright was getting very annoyed that apparently it had become his shit duty to go and see about it.

  He had been relegated to this out-of-the-way floor deep underground some three days ago to deal with some of the really antique and really useless scientific equipment from the war—not even from recent decades. This equipment was the serious relic-style 1940s stuff.

  He felt like he was doing research on the Philadelphia Experiment and had somehow pulled the shortest straw.

  To top off his growing frustration with dust, grease, faded pencil-covered forms, and boxes full of useless crap, he had to be the one on duty when some fuse finally shorted and the stupid klaxon started up.

  God hated him. He really did.

  With disgust, he dropped the handfuls of old paperwork he was digging through in the box on the old gray metal workbench that had seen better centuries.

  Time to go through Junkyard City and beat some sense into something that really shouldn’t have been built this robustly, he thought.

  Matthew grabbed a huge flashlight and a heavy wrench and started traversing the lanes created by the pipes that ran everywhere. Sometimes it felt like he was in the oversized engine room of a battleship rather than beneath hundreds of feet of rock in the mountains in Colorado.

  Next time he talked with his parents, he was going to let them know the recruiter’s promises about “seeing the world” should have conjured up thoughts of seeing the Earth’s sphincter rather than Europe.

  Although the buzzing from the old fluorescent fixtures couldn’t be heard over the klaxon, the crappy light they produced let him see well enough. He had gone down two lanes so far, only to have to backtrack because they were dead-ends.

  He was able to snake between two pipes and get onto a path with yellow stripes on the edges and a red line down the middle.

  Huh, he thought, I’ve never seen any lanes with red lines.

  Since it led in the direction of the noise, he decided it would be easiest to take the path of least resistance.

  General Lance Reynolds, Base Commander, was talking with his secretary Patricia when his phone lit up on a landline from inside the base.

  She reached across the desk and picked it up before he could so much as bat an eye…or appreciate the view.

  Da
mn, but he was getting slow in his old age.

  “General’s office, state your case.” She was ever so not-by-the-book. But if efficiency had a middle name it was “Patricia,” so he didn’t push the issue.

  “Klaxon, uh-huh, Level Five, right. Won’t shut off. Yes, I can hear it. I’m surprised you have a working phone down there. Wait, say that again? The door was opening when you arrived? Yes, it’s right outside the door. I get that. It’s hurting my ears right now.”

  “There’s an envelope attached? Mmmhmm. I’ll let him know. Right, you won’t touch anything.”

  She hung up, and Lance raised an eyebrow.

  “Seems like we have a little shakeup down on Five. We have an old-time vault that suddenly activated, with an envelope attached to the inside of the door. It’s addressed, ‘To the Base Commander.’”

  Lance continued the single raised eyebrow, but she said nothing more. Damn, that used to work.

  He sighed. “Okay, what else?”

  She seemed confused. “It says, ‘On your honor,' sir.”

  Washington, D.C.

  Bethany Anne rapped on the door and waited half a second before barging into Martin’s office, face red and eyes furious.

  He put up a hand to forestall her bitching. “Close the door without breaking it, and I’m not at fault.” He had chosen this particular order for the two phrases because he didn’t want to replace the glass...again.

  The last time hadn’t been Bethany Anne’s fault, but he was sure her previous efforts to reduce his glass to shards had been.

  After a significant effort to restrain her desire to slam the door, Bethany Anne turned back around and didn’t give Martin a chance to get a word in edgewise. “What is the meaning of this? I have a few months, a few months, Martin, to finish my cases, and dammit, I can! There is no proof I’ve only got six months left to live. That’s only the doc’s best guess. Otherwise, I am fine. Nothing even comes back on any of the physicals. I’m doing better, if anything! Who made this bullshit request and took my case and shipped me out?”