Night Kings: The Complete Anthology

by Gregory Blackman

  Lukas knew he spoke to more moon god than wolf, but still he tried to reason to his friends and family. “I ask you to join me in the ways of my father and his before him. Salem is on fire. Our city is on fire and I know for damn sure that if my father were around he would be there, fighting to the death for its right to be here. Into that fire is where I’m headed, and if you accept me as master of the pack, that’s where we’re all headed.”

  It took a moment for the confused wolves to understand what was asked of them by the flesh and blood werewolf. They heard his words, approved of his smell, but these decisions weren’t made easily while the moon gods pulled their supernatural strings. It started with the lone howl from the hoary werewolf to his rear. She was soon joined the ginger wolf across from her in the circle. Then all the others joined in honor of their new pack master.

  “Leave,” he growled to the downed Kaleb Ramsey, “while I still hold them.”

  He watched as the mangled Kaleb Ramsey limped away into the smoke filled night. The wolves snapped at him as he passed by, but under the watchful eye of their new pack master, their teeth avoided contact every single time. Kaleb would never live down the shame of his actions. In that Lukas and he shared a common ground. Both their lives would forever be stained by the events that led to this night. Both would have to live with the ramifications.

  As Lukas looked around to what remained of his father’s pack he couldn’t help but notice the blood-starved eyes in all of their eyes. No matter their acceptance of him as a leader, the full moon neared its apex in the sky. Control would soon be out of their grasp, and with it Lukas’ ability to strike a chord of reason with them.

  He couldn’t let these wolves, his friends and family, loose upon the populace of Salem. They’d tear the citizens apart on the streets they sought to protect and it would all go down minutes from now.

  All the dissolution and thoughts of despair brought Lukas back to the teachings of his father. Bernhard Wendish would speak for hours on end of the ancient wolves, the ones who slew the lycans, as if they were demons among monsters. The rabid dogs around him weren’t wolves of storied legends, but they could still learn use the teachings of the past to their advantage in this world.

  “Attune both your human and wolf to me,” Lukas said to his pack of frenzied wolves. He had one shot. One last chance before the werewolves became lost to the world and to their own bloodlust. “I command you, all of you!”

  The werewolves looked to each another in confusion.

  “Respect the pack!” Lukas bellowed. The rumble from his baritone voice saw tremors pass outward from his feet to the others in the circle. “You’ll kneel before me or face the saw fate as the outcast!”

  A flood of emotion and beta waves passed from Lukas to the others. In battle, wolves could latch on to a leader, one strong enough to rule, and follow them into the most lopsided of wars. Lukas could think of no circumstance more exigent than the one they now found themselves.

  He sent the werewolves his darkest fears, his greatest triumphs, and all the love in the world he had for the werewolf race. They could be a brutish lot, unattached from the world around them, and dark keepers of all the sunlight surveyed. In the most desperate of times, when the battles couldn’t be contained under the sunlight, they could also become beacons of hope. It was those times Lukas’ father hoped to one day see for his pack, but Bernhard never got to see those dreams come true. He died on the eve of that change. Now it was up to his son to carry that burden onward.

  “Let me lead you one last time into battle,” Lukas said to all in attendance. “Let us wash away our sins in a river of our enemy’s blood!”

  The werewolves began to bow their snouts to the ground in reverence to their leader. The moon gods that pulled their strings forced them to grimace and growl as they fought to reclaim control, but the wolves under Lukas’ guidance remained steadfast. They were no more under the control of the moon gods. They were more than their own wolves. They were his.

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Night Kings: Old World Cull

  Gregory Blackman

  Evil Begets Evil

  Victor Dukane awoke to the throb of her bone, every crevasse of his body, pains that refused to heal over the rusted spikes that kept him. He didn’t remember the events that led to his capture, but there was one thing he was able to keep with him as he was beaten to near death. His daughter was lost to her light, out of control, but more importantly, she would remain so until she learned the truth of her other side.

  He wouldn’t be there while his daughter discovered herself amidst cutthroats, killers, and monsters. He would be here, buried in the remains of the Sunkeeper’s Temple, paying for a lengthy list of sins.

  “Good evening, brother,” said a muffled voice to his right. “Know that I call you brother because you are one of an ancient and sacred order that few in this world have known. Those are bonds not so easily broken, yet they’re bonds you have sought to test time and time again. I will see that at an end.”

  Victor’s right eye was swollen shut, the vision in his left shaky, at best. His head pounded away in a great deal of pain, though at this moment his entire body knew a great deal of pain.

  “You joined us willingly,” the voice droned on, “an equal partner in name and wealth.”

  Victor looked hazily around the room. It was the light from high above that drew his wounded eye first. The moon shimmered through a small crack in the cathedral roof, a moon that brought with it many possibilities both good and evil. Then his eye caught the lower portion of the inner sanctum, where at least a hundred dark robed men sat upon stone pews in the nave of the temple. A hundred heads, two hundred eyes glowing red with hate, and all of them locked on the broken mayor strung up on the pew.

  They sat in wait for his sentence. The verdict was guilty, of that Victor was assured. He spread upon a makeshift cross, in the middle of the Sunkeeper’s pulpit, where the crowded mass sat in wait of what was to come. His feet were bound and in both his wrists were large nails driven past the flesh and bone, straight into the wood framed around him.

  “This was our place once,” Hans Brackhaus said from his place next to the bloodied mayor. “Before the men of the New World came and fouled its sacred halls it stood a testament to both the men that carved its stone walls and the gods that commanded it in their honor. When that honor was sullied by these humans it sunk into the mountains to avoid further desecration at the hands of lesser man. Now it stands ready to accept the chosen ones back into its kingdom.”

  It was unbelievable for Victor Dukane to hear, who couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of their misplaced conviction while his life hung in the balance. These men were the Brotherhood of the Crescent Moon, men with deep pockets, deeper connections, and despite the added advantage of hindsight, they still didn’t know their true reasons for reclamation and genocide.

  They didn’t know of the goddess that gave them their gifts. Instead, the brotherhood named this temple to honor their ancient Norse gods, most notably the god of sunshine, Freyr, once known to them as the Sunkeeper. Victor tried to speak his mind, but the words proved difficult for a man with his throat clogged with dried blood.

  “Long have we served a power higher than the laws of man,” Hans trumpeted from the pulpit atop a chorus of mirth from the men down in the pews. “We kept ourselves constricted by those laws in fear of the world we knew and the darkness that festered like a disease upon its surface. Many years did we find for those reasons, only I don’t fear the world any longer, and neither do my brothers. I’m not the enemy you were so easy to believe me to be. I only want that place in the world I was promised in our most ancient of texts. Tell me, Mr. Mayor; after centuries of nomadic oppression wouldn’t you ask the same for your people?”

  “Not this way,” Victor croaked.

  “The heathen finds his tongue!” Hans burst into a hoarse laughter that saw his entire caucus erupted into a similar state. “There is only this
way! Or do you not pay notice to the history of the human world? This is the way of them. Not us. We only pay tribute where tribute is due, so say we all.”

  “Who are you?” Victor asked, as his one good eye lowered to Hans’ side where a small knife lay clutched in hand. “I don’t mean the man you pretended to be when you first approached me all those years ago or the man you became to weed your way into my inner circle. I need to know the man behind the pretense.”

  Hans paced in front of the cross Victor found himself nailed to as the broken moon amulet dangled from his neck. One of the broad Nord’s hands was pressed atop his bald head, the other wrapped around the short, black handle of his blade. There were slight tremors in his movement as he walked back and forth, likely ticks onset by the rage and contempt he had for the man strewn up on the cross.

  “That isn’t for you to know,” he said through clenched teeth. “You don’t deserve that right... not anymore… I’m a king among my people and I take my orders from emperors. Not dying old men without a clue to spare.”

  “I will not tell you of myself.” Without proper cause or reason, Hans Brackhaus demeanor changed from brutal tyrant to whimsical bard, reborn with newfound enthusiasm for their gathering. “Instead you shall come to know the world that bore me. The Brotherhood of the Crescent Moon are the men descended from those that first touched the hands of the Sunkeeper. After millennia of worship our human progenitors made contact with the Asgardian capital of Valhalla in the lands of the New World, these lands, and it was good, old friend. It was right. I only wish I could’ve been there to bear witness to its blessed creation.”

  A spirited Hans beat on his chest once, which caused the others in the sanctum to respond in similar fashion. “In the old days we were the fiercest warriors in the known world. Berserkers, we were called, and our tales told to scare good, little Catholic children into a life within their borders.”

  “But as our ancestors would soon learn,” said Hans, turned to those that waited with bated breath for his verdict, “even the mightiest warriors can become more. With ships led by the only human paragon our order recognizes, Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red. He was the first to discover that, in these lands, we could become more than we ever could imagine in our homeland. We became equal measures warrior and mage, set in this world over four centuries before the Hell Gate swallowed Vatican City whole. We are the warlocks, those chosen by the gods to rule these lands, and we don’t reveal ourselves to those long for this world.”

  Not all the invaders that came to these lands stayed to witness the birth of their new race. Most of them were unworthy in the goddess’ eyes, so they left aboard the vessels that brought them and returned to the shores of Norway. The Vikings there rested on their laurels and their wealth, unaware of the true dangers that waited for them in their homeland.

  When the Hell Gate tore through the world it left the Christian faith in tatters for decades. In those fires emerged beasts of terrible strength and cunning. These were the demons, nosferatu, lycans, fiends, and many more the world would soon come to know well. They sought to weaken the world of man and the gods that dwelled there, soaked in the faith of humanity.

  It was a timeless war the gods were locked in. The humans caught in between were just along for the ride. Those that chose to fight back didn’t fight for long. Not until heavens came to reign supreme.

  The Christian faith became empowered by a great many followers, each fearful that the monsters would come to their neck of the woods. If only the faithful knew the monsters had been there since long before they’d first whispered a prayer. God and his armies of light descended upon the heathen lands where a number of monsters had been driven. They cleansed the land in what was later referred to as the Cascade amongst supernatural kind. Countless meteors cleansed the lands of the pagans and set fire to any hope they had of past glory. It was told that each ball of fire to descend upon the land was affixed with its own set of golden wings.

  The Vikings were lost to the world, all but the few that remained tethered to the ideals of false gods in the New World. The goddess, the one that kept herself concealed, saw great possibilities in the Vikings that stayed. At first they were bloodthirsty savages that lacked the moral convictions of civilized men. Because of that nature, their powers were slow to come to them, and only after the goddess deemed them worthy did she allow them access to the Sunkeeper’s Temple they built for her. The goddess thought she could temper these men into a force for good in the world. She thought wrong and the land paid for her miscalculation.

  The berserkers saw their powers increase beyond measureable scale in the temple’s innermost chamber, and it was there they became more than the men that settled this land. In their eyes they’d become the hand of gods, rulers of all they surveyed.

  They quickly turned against the goddess’ wishes and stormed the lands that surrounded with hands of steel and fire. Many tribes fell while the goddess debated her children’s fate, countless peoples that could have amounted to more. It took until the fires reached the Iroquois people in the north for the goddess to seal her temple to her children.

  Locked from their second home in less a few centuries, the warlocks became lost to the lands they walked. They built great ships to voyage home and teach their kin of what they’d learned, but when the warlocks returned home they found their land no longer belonged to them. These were Christian lands.

  “You made a liar out of me, brother,” said a scornful Hans Brackhaus, a man now visibly shaking in unrequited furor. “We took you in, made you everything that you are, and this is how you betray us, from the damned start?”

  Hans raised the knife above his head and lunged forward to plunge it into the gut of his old friend. Despite hands flush with tremors, Hans managed to push the blade deep into the mayor’s body, until the hilt of the knife was buried in his abdomen.

  “You should’ve told us what the hell you were when I came to you all those years ago!” Hans withdrew from the cross and turned to his gathered mass of followers, but left his blade behind as a grim reminder of the pain yet to be inflicted. “I opened my arms to you and you stabbed me in the back! You made a fool out of me, our brotherhood, and our way of life!”

  “I should’ve told you,” Victor said as a slight chortle arose to block up his blood ridden throat. “I should’ve told you… so you could butcher me… my wife, and my newborn daughter? If you take me for that brand of fool then I’ve done my job better than I thought possible.”

  Victor’s head sunk from the loss of blood, but he fought to remain conscious all the while. There were things left this world he needed to see done, things that would prove difficult if he were to fall here and now.

  “So we could watch you more closely,” Hans replied. “You might’ve even been considered an asset, whatever you are, had to disclosed your abilities and their measures. We needed to know you were committed to the cause and in that regard you failed us miserably.”

  “While I didn’t agree with your methods for dealing with the wretched lot of demon kind,” said Hans as he ripped the knife from Victor’s belly, “I still considered you my brother in arms. I even pretended to let you wear the mayoral crown. How do you accept my friendship and hospitality? You spit in my face and lie behind my back! Yet, no matter what I say, or what I do, as far as the monster in you is concerned, I’m the goddamn enemy here. Isn’t that right? After everything I’ve fucking done for you? You were a cockroach when I found you and that’s how I’ll see you finished—as a filthy, squished up cockroach.”

  Victor lowered his gaze from Hans Brackhaus in front of him, but his sudden turn in composure didn’t come from anything said by the crazed leader of an ancient cult. It came from the actions he committed in the name of such madmen.

  When Victor was approached by Hans to work in tandem with the Brotherhood of the Crescent Moon it was an opportunity he could ill afford not to take. They offered him a life out of the shadows, a life where he’d never have to w
orry where his next mile would come from and one where he could make a difference for the others of his kind.

  Those others never came and Victor was left alone with the humans and the monsters. He thought he could curtail their dark habits, prevent a scene such as this from playing out, and with a little luck, carve out a small place in this world for his seemingly human family. Then everything began to unravel and all he wanted was to save the daughter he drove away.

  “How can I trust you ever again?” Hans asked as he traced his knife slowly down from his point of incision. “You were my friend! I gave you everything, and what did you return to me? Nothing! Do you hear me? Do you? Because I don’t think you understand the anguish you’ve put me through… but you will.”

  Hans grasped the knife firmly in both hands and moved to Victor’s bruised and bloody feet. He stabbed downward with the blade, but his aim wasn’t meant for flesh. His knife cut through the rope that bound the mayor’s feet, which now lifelessly hung in the air.

  “We’re going to set fire to Salem and then place the blame squarely upon your shoulders, Mr. Mayor,” said Hans Brackhaus as his knife remained precariously by the feet of his old friend. “Once the fires die down and life returns to your precious city we’ll reclaim Salem the proper way; the American way. We’re going to buy the land out from under them and we’re going to get it at considerable discount. My gods, Victor, if you could only witness the damage you’re about to bring to this undeserving city.”

  Victor tried to speak his peace, but blood inched up his esophagus and he found the words unavailable to him. His screams were similarly muted when Hans Brackhaus took the knife to his large toe.

  Hans carved away with his knife until he got past the flesh to where Victor’s toenail took root. There the blade cored his nail from its fleshy binds, and with the bloody nail in his hands, Hans looked up to the distraught politician, and said, “You know, there’s a fortune to be pillaged from Salem’s charred remains. I hear Collard Industries has more than a few samples worth a king’s ransom on the black market. Anything to aid the cause, am I right? Of course, one broken vial and the biological agents contained within could wipe up every human within a hundred mile radius. What am I saying? Who cares if the humans suffer as a result? Let the dogs fight amongst themselves. We serve a higher purpose.”