The Fifth Clan

by Ryan T. Nelson

  That got my attention rather quickly, and my reaction was immediate, and violent.

  I grabbed the wrist that was attached to the hand that was holding the knife that was lodged in my chest…

  Sorry, still a bit baked as I’m writing this.

  Anyway, I jumped to my feet, clearing the back of the couch as I did so, the werewolf’s, for that is what they were, wrist still locked tightly in my fist. The knife lodged in my chest came out as I moved and I twisted hard. I heard bones crack and muscle tear inside the captured wolfs wrist. Reaching out I locked my free hand around his throat and crushed his windpipe. Dropping him unceremoniously to the couch I turned and snatched something out of the air as it came flying towards my face.

  The second wolf lunged at me and I lashed out with whatever it was that I held, jabbing him sharply in the throat once and again in the stomach. He made a strangled sound as his voice box was crushed by the blow and one hand wrapped around the oblong shape that I held, when I pulled it back it separated and I finally realized what I held.

  I spun the blade in my hand and stabbed the werewolf, the silver edged weapon sinking into the soft space between the shoulder and the neck. He howled and fell back, screaming in pain as his friend slowly got to his feet.

  “Beady,” I yelled.

  “I’m on it, man,” he said leaping onto the back of the first wolf, a second sword in one hand. I stalked the wolf that I’d stabbed through the room as he scrambled back away from me. He wasn’t fast enough though. I jumped on him, grabbed the hilt of the sword and ripped it out of his body. Lifting him with one hand I threw him back through the window out into the back parking lot, then jumped out after him.

  Headlights snapped on as soon as my feet landed on the blacktop and I lifted one hand to shield my eyes from the glare. Indistinct shapes moved about in front of me. I couldn’t make out how many but I didn’t really think that it mattered. I could smell them, and they’d made one fatal mistake.

  They were in human form.

  I lowered my hands, absently stabbing the moaning wolf at my feet in the head just because his incessant whining was killing my high as well as giving me a headache.

  “We’re here to bring you in, Gabriel,” Someone said from the darkness.

  “Under who’s orders?” I asked, calmly.

  “Now, you don’t need to know that,” the voice said.

  “Oh but why not?” I asked. “If I’m going to kill you and your friends I’d at least like to know who I have to thank for the entertainment, and who to repay for the work I’m going to have to do cleaning up your corpses.”

  “It’s six to one Gabriel,” the voice scoffed, it was male, sounded young too. “You’re not that good.”

  I grinned. “Second mistake.”

  “What was that?”

  “Your second, fatal, mistake,” I said. “You’ve told me how many of you there are. And you have no idea how good I am.”

  I threw out one hand, the knife in my sleeve dropping into my palm and I tossed it at the headlights, shattering one, and then a second, reducing the bright glare to almost nothing. They moved in. I circled away from the building, giving myself space to move and analyzing the situation. Grim always taught me to analyze when I was younger, it was a hard learned lesson, but one I never forgot after that night.

  “Ok,” I said, keeping up a commentary as I moved. “Six of you, one little ol’ me. Six werewolves, in human form, one, one-of-a-kind vampire. Still so sure of your odds?”Three on my right two on my left, where’s the sixth?I thought.Can’t see him but he’s gotta be somewhere behind the car. I could see now that the vehicle in question was a black SUV of some kind, cars were never really my thing.

  Two of the wolves rushed me, one from either side while a third attempted to circle around behind me. I moved forwards, rushing past the two before they could meet me and vaulted over the car, coming down behind it directly in front of the wolf, exactly where I’d thought he would be.

  “Still not going to tell me who sent you?” I asked as I sank the blade of the sword into his gut. He grunted and blood dribbled from his lips to stain the front of his expensive black dress shirt. I smirked. “I didn’t think so.” I pulled up, cutting him in half from waist to shoulder and spun around to catch the blade of a wolf behind me as their leader fell to the floor in a spray of blood and his own internal organs.

  The fight was short and simple from there. They were thugs. New wolves, poorly trained and mainly used as shock troops. There was never any chance they could have won against an opponent like me.

  Within minutes there was only one left. He was dead, and he knew it.

  “So,” I said to him. “You have a choice. You can try to fight me, and you can die like your friends. Or you can take a message back to your boss for me.”

  He looked around, surveying the destruction for a moment before his eyes came back to me. “What’s the message?” he asked.

  I grinned, and my eyes began to glow as I tapped into the power dwelling within me.

  He was thrown off his feet as I set off a small telekinetic explosion behind him. His forward momentum brought him directly towards me and the tip of my sword as I held it out towards him.

  His eyes registered shock and surprise as the tip plunged into his chest, just beneath the sternum. It severed his spine as it tore through his back and he stopped with his face inches from mine.

  “Die,” I hissed as the light in his eyes slowly faded and he went limp.

  9

  Carlsbad, California: February 5, 2005

  I wandered back into the shop. “We’ve got a mess outside,” I said to Beady as I carefully cleaned off the blade of his sword and handed the weapon back to him, hilt first. He accepted it and returned the sword to its sheathe.

  “I’ll get it cleaned up,” he said, no traces of the high he must still be feeling showing in his voice or his actions.

  I walked over to the couch and collapsed back down onto it. The room was a little tossed, the mess from the fight actually wasn’t too bad though. The worst thing would be the blood stains on his carpet but I know Beady had an installer on speed dial.

  Rachel didn’t appear to have moved the entire time. She was still sitting on the couch where I last saw her before I jumped outside the window. She was, at that moment, staring at me.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? That means maybe?”

  “Well no, not really… I mean…” She sighed. “Hang on a second let me get my thoughts straight.” I nodded and picked up the pipe, taking another long hit while she sat and stared at me. I could almost see the gears turning inside her head. I choked back a laugh as the thought occurred to me that I could almost see the smoke escaping from her ears as the wires melted.

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?” I asked as I exhaled a huge plume of smoke.

  “Everything. Where does it come from? The drinking blood, the speed, the strength, all your powers. Where does it all stem from? How, do you do it?”

  “That’s a difficult question,” I said, thinking back to the day I’d first asked almost the same question.

  * * * * * *

  Ireland: September 24, 1697

  I was a year old. A year in vampire terms. To the rest of the world I was born nineteen years ago to the day. It was daytime, out on the moors, and I was looking into the eyes of my mentor. He was tall, topping out at six foot four inches and roughly three hundred pounds of muscle and bone, lanky brown hair flowing behind him in the wind and a big red beard jutting out of his face.

  Grim was a wolf. He was created nearly two hundred years before the alliance between the vampires and werewolves that ended the war and today he was one of the most highly skilled fighters in the Brotherhood. He had been chosen, by Threntü, to mentor me. To teach me. I loved him, respected him, and at times, I hated him.

  “Again,” he said.

  Today, I hated
him.

  I screamed and rushed him, bringing up the massive sword in my hands, trying with all the strength in my wiry frame to remove his smug head from his shoulders. It was not to be.

  He, apparently effortlessly, blocked and redirected the blow sending me stumbling past him to land on my face in the dirt. I felt the tip of his sword pressing none too gently against the back of my neck, blood beginning to well up from the pressure.

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Gabriel,” he sighed, sounding deeply disappointed in me, in my failure. “If you over extend yourself you’re going to lose to even a barely trained opponent, much less the highly trained ones you’re likely to meet in your lifetime.

  “hog mi post t’ lrn at uf uo on’t ach e’,” I grumbled my words muffled by the dirt pressed around my mouth.

  “What was that?” he asked. He stepped back and raised his sword so that I could roll over and clear the dirt from my mouth.

  “How am I supposed to learn that if you won’t teach me?” I asked again, much more clearly the second time, if I do say so myself.

  “What do you think I’ve been doing for the last year?” he asked, sounding exasperated.

  “Using me as a punching bag?”

  “I’ve been trying to get you to learn, to react, to anticipate.” He sighed and sat down, laying his sword on the ground beside him as he gestured for me to join him. Warily I did so, still keeping a bit of distance between us.

  “Gabriel, listen. What do you expect me to do to teach you?”

  “Show me how to fight?” I responded immediately.

  “How?”

  “...” I opened my mouth but nothing sprang readily to mind.

  “Yes?” He prompted.

  “Um…. Aren’t their stances or forms or exercises you can show me? Like the eastern fighters?”

  “I could. And I have already shown you a few basic exercises.”

  “Basic yes, I’ve mastered all those, I do them repeatedly over and over all the time. But there’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “Let me ask you a basic question then,” he said. “Have you ever used any of those exercises in our fights?”

  “...”

  I shut my mouth.

  “Exactly. Until you start using them against me and learn, by doing, how to apply them you can’t move on from where you are into anything more difficult or useful. You’ve got to learn to crawl before you can walk, and you have to walk before you can run. Right now you’re trying to run, and your body doesn’t know how to do it.”

  “But I’m stronger than any human I’ll ever have to face. And faster,” I protested.

  “Are you stronger than me?” he asked. “Are you faster than me? You won’t always fight humans, Gabriel. Actually you’ll be fighting your own kind, or my kind more often than not. You won’t have the full advantage of your vampiric speed and strength if you go up against someone of our type. You’ll have to rely on skill and training to win.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Why is what?”

  “Why are wolves stronger and faster than vampires? Why do we have our strength and abilities, where does it come from?”

  He sighed and leaned back. “You do love the difficult questions don’t you?”

  “I try” I said, letting a grin slide across my face.

  “No one really knows,” he said. “There are a lot of different ideas but we just can’t say exactly. The popularly accepted idea is that we’re something other than human. That’s obvious from the outset but more than just the obvious differences. Humans are weak versions of vampires and werewolves.”

  “Why do we drink blood, and why do wolves have such a taste for meat?”

  “Why do dogs like meat? Why do some bats drink blood yet others eat fruit? Why do ravens peck at corpses while eagles hunt for their own meat? It is simply a part of who we are.”

  * * * * * *

  Carlsbad, California: Feburary 5, 2005

  “Grim was close, but not quite there. It was over three hundred years ago though so we‘ll cut him some slack. I’d studied it. I’d had some help of course, I’m no scientist, but I’d studied the research results,” I told Rachel as I handed the pipe over to her. She took it but made no move to smoke. “Yes Vampires and Wolves were basically stronger versions of humans. We have gifts and abilities that humans do not. But it wasn’t random chance. It wasn’t otherworldly power or some form of the supernatural that gave vampires their strength and their gifts, or the wolves their resilience and regenerative powers.” I leaned back on the couch.

  “It’s genetics.”

  “Genetics?” she interjected.

  I nodded. “Basically Vampirism is a parasite. It’s like a virus but it’s smarter than we would like to think. It’s a borderline sentient parasitic being that burrows into every last piece of our bodies, even down to the DNA structure. It rewrites things to its own specifications.”

  “Think of it this way. The vampire parasite gets a host. The host has the potential, in their genetic makeup to be very strong. The parasite makes that potential reality. The host makes someone else into a vampire. When the parasite transfers it takes along specific traits from the host and rewrites its new hosts genetic code to reflect those changes, basically evolving and adding to itself with each new vampire.”

  “If that were the case then wouldn’t the oldest vampires be the weakest?” she asked. “Since they don’t have dozens, if not hundreds, of previous vampires to draw genetic possibility from?”

  “You’re forgetting something,” I pointed out.

  “What”

  “Blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Why do vampires drink blood? What’s the point really other than a food source? I can live on animal blood though as a food source and I can subsist on food, just as a human. Animal blood and a cheeseburger and I’m in good shape. I don’t need to drink human blood.”

  “Then why do they?”

  “Genetic sampling.”

  “Huh?”

  I smiled. “It’s really rather simple. The vampire drinks a bit of blood from a human, say a track star. That person has a slight genetic propensity towards good muscle growth in such a way as to make them good track runners. The vampire then gains a very small bit of strength and speed from the genetic additions gathered from that persons blood.”

  “So you mean to say that vampires literally collect DNA in order to make themselves more powerful?”

  “Bimbo!” I cried lifting one finger into the air to punctuate my point. Gods, I love movies. If you out there didn’t catch the reference, shame on you.

  “Basically the older ones usually have a greater supply of genetic samplings, as well as they’ve had longer for the DNA to incorporate itself. It’s not an immediate process. If I bit that track star a year ago there would still be a couple of more years roughly before I’d gain any benefits from it. The increase and gains are so gradual they can’t really be measured without special instruments and observation.”

  “Over a few hundred years though there will definitely be a notable increase in all aspects of a vampire. Strength, speed, stamina, regenerative powers, reflexes, and intelligence all show a marked increase over time.”

  “What about the gifts the clans have?”

  “That’s a little more complicated but still falls under the same basic theory. Genetic possibility. No new gifts have shown up though in thousands of years so there is a hole in the theory.” I shrugged. “The gifts are abilities that no one can really explain, but it is still possible there is a genetic basis for their existence. You hear about psychics all the time. People that can bend spoons or read thoughts. Who’s to say control of the wind or other elements or shape changing isn’t out there somewhere as well?”

  “What about the wolves?”

  “Same thing.”

  “Silver?”

  “I’ve met humans that break out into a rash if they wear anything made out of silver. The wolve
s could just have a severely allergic reaction.”

  “Transformations with the moon?”

  “Only very new wolves do that. After a couple years they can transform at any time. But, there is the theory that the first wolf was a woman.” I smirked at her and she glared back at me.

  “Very funny,” she drawled.

  “I thought so.”

  Beady walked back in right about then and broke up the conversation.

  “Ya should get ta bed, man,” he said. “We got employees gettin’ here in a few minutes an’ ya can’ be goin’ till tomorrow night.”

  I stood up and looked at Rachel. “Shall we?” I asked, holding my hand out to her.

  “Might as well,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” She put the pipe aside and accepted my hand. I pulled her to her feet and led her over to a side door leading to a small bedroom.

  “G’night, Beady,” I tossed over my shoulder as I led her into the room.

  “Keep it down, man. Don’ need da boss askin’ no questions.”

  I laughed and shut the door.

  * * * * * *

  Carlsbad, California: February 5, 2005

  Rachel and I crawled out of bed the next morning, bleary eyed and cottoned mouthed and went in search of something to drink. A quick glance out the nearest window told me that ‘morning’ was really closer to mid afternoon or early evening. We’d slept most of the day.

  We stumbled our way into the tiny kitchen in an out of the way corner of Beadys’ little piece of the world and raided the fridge. Three bottles of water later and Rachel was beginning to look a little less peaked, while I was starting to feel human again. Or vampiric again, you know what I mean.

  “Where to next,” Rachel asked some minutes later as I stood in the small bathroom, a brand new toothbrush in hand.

  “South,” I grunted. I squeezed a generous amount of toothpaste onto the bristles and shoved it in my mouth, brushing vigorously.

  “Isn’t much South of here except San Diego,” she said.