BLOODLINES
BOOK I of the BLOOD WAR TRILOGY
What people are already saying about the Blood War Trilogy.
“All you need is the adrenaline rush of a good fight.”
Shroud Magazine’s Book Reviews
“If you like your supernatural creatures savage you’ll love Dylan J. Morgan’s creations.”
Sharon Stevenson ~ Author of The Gallows Trilogy
“The raw material for your nightmares.”
Carrie Green ~ Author of Roses are Red, Violets are Blue
“A world where brutal fights and vicious lies are the norm.”
Craig McGray ~ Author of The Somnibus books
“Crisp, descriptive writing.”
Carrie Clevenger ~ Author of Crooked Fang
Do you believe in monsters?
1287 A.D.
WALLACHIA PROVENCE
ROMANIA
A harsh winter wind cut through the forest, nature’s icy breath scented with the aroma of fresh pine. Despite the sharp fragrance, Isaac’s nostrils itched with the recollection of burning woodland and acrid smoke. Eight decades would not fade the memory of blazing shrubbery and the pack’s massacre in that unforeseen onslaught; a mortal lifetime during which the pack gathered its strength and resolve, plans made and patience forged, waiting for their moment.
At last, it was upon them.
Isaac crouched by a blackened trunk—another reminder of the selfish treachery of his preternatural cousins. He scanned the forest, keen nocturnal vision picking out the shadowy forms of his lycanthropic comrades edging down the steep side of the valley. The wind called harder and ruffled the thick pelt covering his body. A fresh scent drifted through the undergrowth; a shallow coldness signaling the approach of their quarry. He sensed apprehension among his pack brothers: excitement because their opportunity for retribution had finally arrived.
Not yet. We mustn’t strike too soon.
War was now inevitable. Isaac would never let those cursed bloodsuckers get away with what they’d done, an inexcusable act of brutality with the objective to keep mortal man’s blood for themselves: burning the woodland and driving his kind deep into the forests, beheading those who fled the inferno into open spaces. The vampires had decapitated Isaac’s birth brother in an open field south of the woods. Isaac and Brutus had suckled from the same wolf mother and conversed with the same human father. They’d taken human form early in life and asserted dominance among their siblings to weed out the runts. Isaac and Brutus were feared. He saw horror on his brother’s face for the first time as the blade swung in the twilight, a look of terror frozen upon the transformed werewolf’s features as his head spun amid bitter smoke wafting from burning woodland.
Isaac would never forgive the vampires for that one act alone. He would avenge his blood-brother.
At the valley’s mouth, lights burned, and thirteenth century mortal life flickered like the flame in mankind’s street lanterns.
Those stupid mortal beliefs; leaving lights burning into the night to ward off attacking vampires.
The bloodsuckers paid no heed; they would sweep down the valley and plunder the village regardless.
Tonight, mere mortals, you can rest peacefully.
Isaac salivated. Drool ran over engorged canines and a low growl rumbled from his transformed throat. He loved the animal, its power and strength. Isaac relished the change, a time to escape the feebleness of man’s disguise. He wanted to give himself fully to the wolf and stay bestial forever—maybe the centuries would enable him to do so.
Branches snapped in nearby undergrowth. Isaac looked up, his vision piercing intense dark within the woods. A gigantic wolf stepped from the shrubbery: Cornelius, strong and wise, the eldest of all werewolves and the pack’s true leader. The large werewolf once socialized with the coven, in days when both species lived contented in the dark nightmares of mankind. Betrayal fuelled their leader, but hatred more profound than the large male’s invigorated Isaac.
Sinking to his haunches as the colossal beast walked by, Isaac’s heart pounded. Their time had come.
Silence became their ally; for once, the raucous beasts needed stealth. Cornelius crouched, his bent form an imposing shadow among the thick trunks of a ravaged forest. No howl signaled the start of their vengeance. The Alpha-Male released a scent onto the night wind that carried across the valley with as much conviction as a thunderous roar.
The rejuvenated pack swept down the mountainside.
Cornelius merged into darkness, and Isaac took strength from his leader’s desire for retaliation.
He wished he could shift shape further, to summon greater resources of strength and cunning. Fleet of foot, Isaac dodged trunks, drool coating his jaw. The heathen’s smell flooded his nostrils.
The pallid forms of vampires hurried down the valley from fortified constructions in the mountains, blood-lust in their eyes as they neared the human settlement on the lake’s stony shores. They’d made similar raids during those eighty years Isaac and the depleted pack used to regain their strength, but tonight their sole grip on the lifeblood of mortal man would be severed.
Isaac panted like an exhausted animal but craving drew his breath. Tongue lolling from an open mouth, eyes wide, he charged through the undergrowth of the valley’s basin towards the unsuspecting horde of abhorrent vampires.
Only when he lunged for the nearest vampire did he issue a roar of defiance.
The bloodsucker froze, like many a startled rabbit Isaac had been forced to feed on in the decades since the woods were torched. The vampire had no time to react and reach for his sword before Isaac exploded from the darkness and wrestled him to the ground.
Vampires are no match against fully transformed werewolves, and Isaac’s ears rang with the glorious sounds of baying pack brothers as the slaughter began. The ground beneath his feet shook with their attack and the valley echoed with howling wolves.
Pale, undead flesh ripped around his talons and cold blood stuck to his fur. The vampire warrior struggled as Isaac closed his jaws around his throat and the immortal creature choked on its own lifeblood. Eight decades of anger unleashed power he’d seldom felt before, and he tore the vampire’s throat away in a single shake. The bloodsucker writhed underneath his massive wolfish body. The werewolf leaned in again and tore the leech’s head from its shoulders.
Lycanthropic justice dealt at last.
He looked to the cloudless heavens—the quarter-moon resembling a slit in black fabric—and bellowed in triumph. Vampire blood trickled down his gullet.
Revenge tasted sweet and fulfilling.
1349 A.D.
LONDON
ENGLAND
The heavy air stank of rancid corpses rotting upon squalid cobblestones and cries from the dying hung in the narrow streets, suspended on the stench of death. Dusk crept through London’s twisting lanes.
Amid shadows fusing the entrance of an alley to Old Fish Street, Markus stood alone, his mind full of troubled thoughts. The war had raged for almost a century yet the reason for the conflict appeared close to extinction.
What will we do if we can no longer feast on the blood of mankind? We cannot possibly survive on the tainted blood of those dirty lycanthropes.
Deep in thought, Markus traced his finger over the sculptured hilt of the sword hidden beneath his long, black coat. The coven was outnumbered, and not even a hundred years of recruitment had shifted the balance. The moon had long since surrendered its hold over the werewolves’ transmutation, but the man-beasts held another advantage: they could call wolves in from the wild to assist in the fight, and although they were not as deadly as fully transformed lycanthrop
es, strength of numbers often prevailed. Now, Markus feared mankind would be purged before the coven could replenish its dwindling numbers and take control of the war.
Pestilence had swept through Europe with the speed of an ill wind and left death in its wake. Like a panicked animal mortal man migrated north to avoid the hunger of a deadly new predator. They carried the malady with them; Markus could see it on their solemn faces that became reddened and bloated, then frozen in death. The war had flowed northward with a matching swiftness; Italy to France, Germany to England, vampire and werewolf tracking a healthy food source as they fought a brutal conflict fuelled by bloodlust and hatred.
Markus feared it was too late. Not only was mankind riddled with filth and fleas, but they were diseased as well.
His thoughts troubled him with incessant questions: If The Great Mortality eradicates mankind, how will the coven survive? If mortal man is to fade into the darkness of history, will the war hold no meaning?
The vampire’s face resembled the moon’s pale orb suspended in the cloak of falling night. Dressed in black, dark hair slick to his scalp, the centuries-old being watched the city with a new-found anxiety. Bleak and putrid, the narrow street was flanked by unbroken lines of timber-framed houses whitewashed with lime. Each storey projected outward from the previous, as if placed by an untrained hand. A single gutter ran the length of the cobbled thoroughfare and a constant run of rainwater and human waste flowed along its length.
Markus had stood on many different street corners in London over the past few weeks, throughout morose days and into the nights, monitoring the dwindling numbers of healthy mortals. He watched them now, hurrying into their houses, wrapped in soiled garments, flowers or scented herbs in their hands. Others held handkerchiefs dipped in aromatic oils to their face—a desperate bid to ward off the pestilence. The perfumed herbs lessened the smell of decay and effluence, yet did nothing more. The plague stayed with them always, clinging unforgiving to their bodies. Markus had felt the flea bites. They itched for about two days while the bacteria tried to unleash its curse of death upon him, before the blood maintaining his immortality finally swamped the disease. The pestilence would not claim the vampire warrior, but it could wipe out his food source.
London, behind its city walls, felt like an inescapable tomb. Nothing but disease and death lingered on the city streets.
Markus stepped from the darkness. He had a rendezvous with another Enforcer, a warrior as much devoted to the eradication of the mangy lycanthropes as he. Markus decided it time to gather the forces dispatched to these shores, voyage north ahead of the pestilence, and try to recover the coven’s strength as best they could. His heavy boots clicked on old cobblestones; a rhythmical accompaniment to the muffled cries of the damned drifting from glassless windows. The city stank. He could even smell the stench from the Thames, its waters thick with waste and offal.
Another odor pricked his senses, one he had breathed countless times over the centuries. He stopped and his fingers curled around the intricately crafted pommel of his sword.
Ahead, a shadowy figure slipped from the obscurity of a lane. The man ambled to the centre of the street, and Markus looked into a darkened countenance whose eyes seemed to burn within. A werewolf! Markus knew there were battalions of the creatures in the vicinity, yet he’d never encountered one within the city walls before. Adrenaline surged with a timeless fury and his fingernails sharpened into talons. His fangs elongated and filled with toxic venom as he issued a defiant hiss.
The man shrugged off his robe and tore open his loose shirt. A thick pelt already covered the lycanthrope’s chest. The beast grimaced—in agony or concentration, Markus had never found the answer in all these years—and it growled in effort: the human sound of a tortured man. Its body extended, the contour of its limbs shifting as bone cracked and reformed. Angry stretch marks threatened to split the skin before healing in the blink of an eye, and the snap of transforming bone echoed off the wooden houses. The human countenance disappeared as its forehead slanted and eye sockets thickened. Cheekbones lifted and condensed as though they’d melted then solidified to form a protracted snout. Its canines elongated and split the gums with a spray of blood. The man-like grunt slipped into a deep unearthly growl.
During the brief standoff a knowing passed between the two preternatural beings: recognition formed centuries in the past, yet one fuelled by abhorrence born a mere one hundred years ago. Markus confronted the towering beast as it skulked in the street’s narrow gloom. Its breath came in harsh gasps as it swiftly recovered its strength. Apprehension seeped through Markus’s blood, his mouth dry. In one fluid movement he flipped his coat-tails to one side and unsheathed the steel blade. He held the weapon back behind his head, feet splayed as he awaited the creature’s onslaught. He had done it many times in the past, and knew if he angled his strike correctly he could behead the hellish creature in one graceful arc.
A growl rumbled at his back, and Markus turned to see a huge lycanthrope inch from the darkness. It stooped and studied him with hate-filled eyes.
His stomach twisted with revulsion. Caught between two evil man-beasts, he hissed defiantly then leaped from the street. Markus secured his grip on a second storey timber frame as the lane below reverberated with the enraged bellows of werewolves. With sword in hand he swiftly climbed to the third floor and slipped between the window’s wooden bars.
The large room shook as one of the demonic hounds ascended the exterior of the house with raucous speed and smashed through the feeble window.
Without hesitation, it lunged at Markus. Arms outstretched ready to strike, slime hanging from burly maws, the baying lycanthrope closed on its quarry in seconds. Markus turned to face the onslaught, raised the forty inch blade, and lost his footing on waste that coated the floor. He evaded the attack with mystical speed and whipped the sword down in a blur of silver metal. Hands covered in abrasive hair and tipped by talons dropped to the grimy floor. The werewolf howled in anguish and pain as it spun in the centre of the room, gazing at its stumps as blood pumped from severed arteries.
Markus silenced the wolfish demon. Hardly a ripple of vibration disturbed the sword’s hilt as the sharp blade removed the werewolf’s head from bestial shoulders.
Candlelight fluttered softly in the room, but Markus didn’t need light to see. The main fire had burnt out and a chill hung in the air thicker than death’s stench. Rats scurried from the unknown intruder, claws scraping over wood flooring as they made desperate bids for escape. Crude beds lay on the floor, the sheets soiled and threadbare. A young girl moaned and glanced in his direction but he doubted her eyesight could pick out anything other than a silhouette. She clasped a handkerchief to her mouth, the thin material stained with fresh blood. Soiled by crimson sputum and gore, the simple bed sheet barely covered her fragile form. The girl’s brother—for it could only have been her brother as he had the same flaxen mop of curly hair—lay dead beside her, his bloated face disfigured by the pestilence. Their parents were absent; either dead or dispersed to the wind, abandoning their children like so many scared mortals had done. The girl whimpered in agony, pitiful and alone.
He listened. Markus couldn’t hear the second werewolf. He guessed it would be unsafe to venture into the street again as the hound may be lying in wait. He glanced quickly through the room and spotted a door along its far wall. Keeping the sword unsheathed and crossing the room, he pressed his ear against the door’s cold wood. Silence filtered from beyond, and he opened it onto a staircase leading down to the streets.
A darkened outline charged up the stairway, wood bending under the lycanthrope’s powerful footfalls. It bellowed with loathing when it saw Markus’s form in the doorway. With no space in the stairwell to swing the blade, Markus stepped back and slammed the door closed. The beast charged into the entrance and the barrier disintegrated, shards of timber spilling into the huge room. The creature looked enraged with bloodlust, and Markus knew he needed all the vampiric agility
he possessed. He reached the window before the werewolf began to pursue with an unearthly bawl. Markus leaped into the night, landed easily on uneven cobbles, and without stopping for an instant ran along Old Fish Street.
The werewolf exited the window and hurled its brutish body across the lane. Markus risked a glance back, unable to see the creature as he tried to distinguish its darkened fur amid the somber backdrop of night. He maintained his stride, running with inhuman speed over rutted cobblestones, coattails flapping behind him like giant wings. The mortals who were on the street stepped hurriedly to one side as Markus swept past as a darkened blur of unnatural swiftness. He glanced back again. The beast wasn’t on the street. The soft rap of disturbed straw reached his preternatural ears, and in an instant that tightened his gut and added a new chill to his undead bones, Markus realized the lycanthrope crossed the rooftops above, trying to get in front of its quarry. He heard its panted breath edged with an infuriated growl. Markus sprinted harder.
London Bridge spanned the Thames on twenty stone arches, with houses and shops erected on its crossing. Life glowed from the bridge in candlelight and flames from household fireplaces, a degree of safety the vampire would have taken if he had not settled on a prior engagement. Markus headed for Ebgate on the river’s banks.
He neared the Thames, a black mass of putridity filled with human waste and rubbish. Markus’s breathing became shallow and soft: perfectly rested. His eyes searched the darkness of primordial houses, industrial properties and landing stages but saw no movement. Silence surrounded the subtle lick of polluted water against the river’s banks. The sound of the pursuing lycanthrope had ceased. A feeling of solitude strengthened.
It came from the darkness like a demon rising from hell through the gaps of London’s cobbles. Markus had no time to react. The werewolf issued a deep roar as its palm smashed into his cheek and claws ripped cold flesh from his face.
BLOODLINES -- Blood War Trilogy: Book I Page 1
