It was a thought ever present in the mind of Bernhard Wendish, pack master of Salem and all the land that surrounds. He shot an uneasy glance in Cetra’s direction before he returned to the cabinet in fear a lingered stare would cause him to go up in flames.
Bernhard heard the stories of her kind. He’d seen the proof. He believed her to be a witch, but in the city of Salem that wasn’t an accusation to be taken lightly. He had every cause to keep her at arm’s length, and yet, all the more reason to keep her close by.
“There we are,” Cetra said.
She hadn’t moved from her position, but she had a smirk pressed on her face that told Bernhard all he needed to know. She’d indeed found what they’d been looking for and she did so without moving a muscle.
“We shall have what we seek soon enough,” she said. “You’ll want to close your eyes for this.”
Bernhard heard her words, but they failed to register in time and he was struck with a burst of light that burned his canine retinas. He threw his hands up to cover from the light, but it was too late. The damage had already been inflicted. He gave a whelp in anguish and dropped to a knee.
By the time his eyes healed he was in shock at the powers that unfolded before him. Without leaving her chair, Cetra had unlocked the right, middle drawer with a powerful telekinetic energy that also saw it rise upward and on top of the mayor’s desk.
Cetra’s hands hovered over the drawer which was now upside down on the desk with its contents still very much inside. She retrieved an envelope that was taped on the bottom. When Cetra had what she wanted the drawer found its own way back to the empty hole in the desk. It was as if it had never been touched by her hands. That was the way Cetra Altaras operated and Bernard was keen to pay close attention.
Cetra peeled open the envelope and withdrew a file folder she was quick to finger through.
“What is it?” Bernhard asked.
With a glance drenched in disdain she offered up the document to the stalwart werewolf before her.
“You’re going to want to see this,” she answered as the papers exchanged hands. It was with their fleeting touch of hands that Cetra let her fear slip and seep into her friend.
“By Perun,” whispered Bernhard in thick Slavic tongue. “He knows everything…”
The two of them, conjurer and werewolf companion, stood silent in their embattled mayor’s office. Their time in this office appeared to be at an end. The sins of the past had come back to haunt them.
Chapter Nineteen
Night Kings: Sunkeeper
Gregory Blackman
Wendish Pride
To humans, possession was an affliction that would come and go without the host being the slightest bit aware once the vampire had no more use for them; succubae were known to become aroused by the emotions that it brought to the surface, and reapers were reputed to receive no effect at all. Lukas Wendish wasn’t human and wasn’t any of the former. He was the mortal enemy of the one that afflicted him and because of that he was struck the hardest.
The lady in red pulled on his strings from within, as if he was no more than a marionette to her puppeteer, and under her near absolute control; mind, body, and soul. It didn’t happen often among werewolves and required a willing host for the possession to take root. That’s exactly what Lukas did upon first arrival at the festival of the moon.
Lukas didn’t allow her into his life. He let her into his soul.
On this night, Lukas was far removed from any potential residents after the sudden burst of fire that’d enveloped him in the alcove north of Salem. He tended to his wounds with licks from his tongue in private, hidden away from the world, and not likely to remove himself until he could greet his lady in full health.
Lukas would give himself over to her when the time was right. He would kneel before her and offer up himself as sword, shield, and lover. Only now the time wasn’t right. Gemma Kohl and the tenacious Elsa Dukane had seen to that. They opposed their union and tried to keep the beast from the bat. The lady in red warned of soothsayers that would attempt to keep them apart. He just never believed it could be his own friends.
It was a warped image. Yet, it was the only image left to a man once hell bent on the death of her kind. It’s what Lukas would be for the rest of eternity if he didn’t break the hold she had over him.
He gnawed on a patch of charred skin around his paw. So consumed by the end goal Lukas was that he focused all his attention on the task at hand. What’s why he never saw the white blur until it was too late.
The serrated teeth of another were upon Lukas’ throat before he knew what was upon him. Blood and strands of ashen fur passed in and out of the corner of his eyes. He cried in agony and tried to wrestle his attacker, but there was nowhere to go for him now.
Suddenly the jaws of his aggressor became unclenched. Lukas seized the chance before him and leapt to safety, but he would soon find that safety was relative when he turned around to find out that he faced his mother in combat. Lukas snarled at his mother and she made sure to return the favor. Around in a circle they stalked one another with neither willing to make the second move.
Lukas’ mother, Aubrey Wendish, had raised him from pup to wolf. To see him in such torment brought a tear to her eye, but it was soon soaked up into her knotted fur along with any trace of the boy he once was.
Lukas charged towards his mother and leapt into the air on fast approach. He went straight for the jugular, but missed by a wide margin and crashed down onto the ground. He recovered from the ordeal and searched left and right for any signs of his mother. Had Lukas been in his right mind he would’ve known to use the inborn senses he’d been given. He was far from in the proper state of mind, however, and soon found out the hard way where his mother had been.
Aubrey struck from behind with a slanted slash of her claws that saw Lukas tumble to the ground in anguish. It hurt the aberrant werewolf as much it did his mother, but Aubrey held true to purpose and pressed on with her assault.
Lukas dashed from side to side in attempt to rid himself of a troublesome menace. Despite his best efforts, he wasn’t fast enough to sway his mother from the chase and she made a snack of his hind legs.
Aubrey dug deep into the meaty portion of her son’s leg until she heard tendons snap beneath her teeth. He whimpered in pain, but she wouldn’t allow that to deter her from the task at hand. Aubrey pulled him back to the alcove she found him and threw him against a tree for good measure.
She unhinged her jaw and let a furious roar loose amongst the wooded area. She didn’t make another move against her son, but she wouldn’t allow him to leave. Instead she waited for what would come next.
It started with the contortions of the possessed wolf’s chest and spine. Lukas grimaced in agony, the pain almost too much to bear, and couldn’t help but yelp out to the moon gods above to save him from such unbearable torture.
His bones shattered only to snap back into place. All while the fur molted from his bloodied flesh. He was no longer the wolf, and yet not quite the man he used to be. Black vines snaked their way down his face, underneath his skin, down to his neck where they wrapped around his ensanguined throat, reminders of the lady and her hold over him.
The white wolf stood in front of the blood smeared Lukas and waited until she sensed that the fight had died out in her errant son. She, too, changed back into the form that housed the wolf. It was a change that lacked the ferocity of the younger wolf, but it had its share of blood and bile that would seep from open wounds to the now crimson ground below.
These were monsters born from the bowels of Hell. Somewhere along the way they found themselves, found their humanity, but the monster inside still lingered to remind them of their hellish beginnings. They would forever be man and monster, a duality of spirits that could never be separated.
Aubrey Wendish stood before her son as bare as the day she was born. For those born into the pack a state of undress was more than commonplace. It was a way of
life. Aubrey had the soft eyes and round face that one wouldn’t believe possible of holding a grudge. Yet, on this night, there rested a scowl and furled brow that warned the one before her of where Aubrey’s intentions lay.
Her hoary locks tumbled downwards past her bosom to her sinewy hips where her hands were balled up into fists. She took a step forward slowly, but when her son began to speak it turned into a full-blown dash.
“Mother,” said Lukas softly, “I can’t take any more—.”
Aubrey struck her son in the jaw and when he cried out in pain she struck him again. The louder his cry of pain, the more powerful her swing, until her knuckles her matted in the blood of her only offspring.
“I can’t take any more…”
“You can,” Aubrey said with her fist raised once more in the air, “and you will.”
She beat on her son, though it pained her with every blow. Each of his cries resonated within her and only further drove home the importance of her actions. If she failed tonight her beloved son would no more be hers. He would forever be shackled to the lady in red.
In a moment of clarity, Lukas reached out and grabbed hold of his mother’s hand. He let it stay there just out of reach of his now swollen and cracked cheek while he remained kneeled with one leg inoperable. That sudden remembrance of his mother was soon to sway back into oblivion as the lady once again took hold of his mind.
“That’s it, my boy” said Aubrey, as if she approved of his defiance. “That’s it.”
He snarled in disgust of his mother’s noncompliance and pushed her away. He rose slowly, but assuredly, and soon there was another standoff between mother and son. Neither one of them moved against the other. Neither one of them wanted to.
There are times when one must go against their wishes. That time was now for the mother of the Salem pack. Aubrey Wendish moved forward at a sluggish pace, but when she reached Lukas she leapt full speed at him and struck yet again with a forceful right hook.
She waited for a response, but when none was given, a look of disappointment washed over her face.
“Strike at me,” Aubrey bellowed as she beat on her chest as if it were a drum. “Let the lady out so that I may tear her from my son’s mind!”
She was the brains behind her husband’s rule as pack master. There wasn’t a wolf in the county that would say that aloud, but there wasn’t any that would argue its merit. It was she who sent Bernhard out to bring her son back. He was the strongest werewolf the pack had known in centuries, but he wasn’t the wolf for this job.
Aubrey knew this, but she could not dishonor her husband by refusing him the chance to set things right. She let him go and let him fail. All so she could stand here at this moment. She would bring her son back to them free of possession. And if she didn’t it would be in a corpse she brought back.
“Do it!” she cried as the tears streamed down her face. “I’m the only one standing between the two of you. Just me! Strike me down and she’s yours forever!”
Lukas balled up his fists in rage, but when he moved to hit his mother he found the anger had dissipated and the blackened veins receded. With his head sunk low he dropped to his knees and begged for an end to his suffering.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t do it.”
“No,” said Aubrey with a gentle hand atop her son’s head. “You already have. You’re going to be all right, my son.”
Lukas kneeled before his mother and sobbed into his cupped hands. She stood beside him for emotional support, but the tears streamed down her face as well. Together they wept in the silent grove, but they were far from alone. There were others in the forest and they swarmed from every angle.
Werewolves were born from the fiery pits of Hell. That was many years ago and the once ghoulish lycan race mixed with those they preyed upon. It was then the modern werewolf was born; stronger, faster, and more ferocious than their hellish brethren. The lycans never had a chance and were swiftly overthrown by their younger selves. That was centuries ago and generation after generation the werewolves evolved to suit the world around.
Unlike their storied enemies, the undead vampires, this new breed of monster was cursed to a mortal life. It was seen as an inherent weakness for many years as the vampires pushed them out of their territory. They came to learn that their weakness was in fact an advantage that they held over their aggressors. Overtime they broke their more basic, hellish instincts and banded together to form packs.
Love, respect, pride; they were human emotions and foreign to those of the nightmare realm. For those shaped in hellish beginnings, emotions such as love were not born naturally. They forced it upon themselves, for the werewolves saw the true strength in the pack that ran together. Tonight the pack would run once more.
A howl tore through the woods and then another in the expanse of wood around them. Soon, dozens of howls could be heard and they were no longer in the distance. It started with the shadow of one wolf on the horizon and then it turned into many. From all sides the wolves appeared with incisors bared and eyes aflame with amber, and yet there was no anger in their hearts for the atrocities that’d been committed. There was only love for one that’d lost so much.
A flap of feathers in the night went unnoticed by those on the ground. It signaled the end for one, but the beginning for another. Lukas Wendish regained himself, his pack, and he did so in the nick of time. Yet, his pack wouldn’t be there to save him when the fires raged beyond control. That’s what the raven saw on this night. It saw the beginning of the end for the werewolf way of life.
Chapter Twenty
Night Kings: Sunkeeper
Gregory Blackman
Dust to Dust
It took hours for Sarah Matheson to lick the blood from the floor, her person, and anywhere else her blood had spilled from her once open wounds. She was far from full strength, but her vision returned and the tremors that once gripped her had eased to but a shake of her hands.
She could see better now, enough to see the stone walls that closed her off from the world. There was a small crack just above the foundation, but it was too small to escape through, too dark too peer through. She was stuck here, for the time being, until she could gather the strength to tear these chains from her flesh.
An exhausted Sarah tumbled from her knees to the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Built of a similar stone as the walls, even if Sarah could see herself from these chains, she wouldn’t get through the next obstacle in her path.
In the center of the ceiling there was a large seal that separated the stone with a ring of steel. That’s when it donned on the woman that perhaps there was a way out after all. Inside the seal was carved a crescent moon symbol where three chunks that would’ve made a full moon stood apart as if they’d drifted off course from its larger half. It was a peculiar symbol, not one she’d ever seen before, but one steeped in what appeared ancient tradition.
The sun and moon have been a symbol for the occult years prior to the aperture known now of the Hell Gate underneath Vatican City. Mankind has feared the unknown since their inception and in that time a great number of orders and brotherhoods came into existence. For those that chose to walk a path of nobility and honor it was the sun’s light that guided them. Yet, it was the moon that called to those that wished to walk a darker path. These men were the latter, learned in their subversive ways, and not above being lowered to the dark depths of a monster to catch their prey, and catch her these men did.
She laid there for some time as the nothingness of her environment seeped through her cold skin. It drove her to vengeful thoughts, not just of her captors, but of those that had banished her to a life of misery. It wasn’t an accursed cult that placed her in the dregs of Salem that night. It was another. One she needed to be halfway out of her mind to consider harm against.
Sarah Matheson was once of high standing in the kindred community and had known a life of opulence that few humans outside kings and queens were accustomed. It was Sarah’s
maker that extended her those luxuries, Cetra Petravic, a vampire believed to be of the lady in red’s lineage.
It was in the lady’s company that Sarah overhead mention of the vampire queen’s surname, a family name that would prove dangerous had it gotten out in the world. When Sarah was discovered to be in the next room over it meant the end of a life she held so dear. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it mattered not, for the secret she’d uncovered could not be unlearned.
She could die where she stood or flee and clung to what little remained of her life. To the New World she fled. A world inhabited by few of their kind at the time. A world of infinite promise to one so far removed from the rest of her kind. That’s what Sarah Matheson believed at the time. She couldn’t have been more delusional.
It took nearly a century, but the lady in red followed her overseas to the New World. This was her home now and it would never be Sarah’s again. She drifted from city to city in constant fear of what may lurk in the shadows. Little did Sarah know she’d stumbled upon the lady in red’s nest; the one who’s name must never be said.
It was at that moment the half crazed vampire realized how she’d get back at one infinitely more capable than she. When she escaped from this cell, all would know of the lady’s dark secret. That was how she would harm her vampire queen. She would do it from afar and let the crow’s come to feast.
Sarah Matheson found her last vestige of strength and wrapped her spindly fingers around her chains. She pulled with all her might, but her might wasn’t enough and she pulled to ill effect for some time before she succumbed to fatigue. She needed fresh blood.
“It won’t work,” said the voice that had spoken to her earlier. “I know what you’re doing and it won’t work. You’re not breaking yourself from those chains and yet you insist on keeping me from my sleep. How many times must you attempt an unattainable feat?”
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