“He set you free?” the werewolf whispered. “Markus has a lot to answer for. He will pay dearly for his treason.”
Her life replayed before her eyes, memories she could not control flooding her mind to travel the wires as electrical impulses before appearing on the screen. She remembered the decades of hiding, a wretched existence as if punishment for the secrets she kept; the eventual discovery of more like her, groups of hybrids permeating the naïve, weakened world of mortal man; her acceptance within the clan and the finding of a lover, the man who would become her husband.
The rape had not only been violent and brutal, it had also been completely unexpected. The hybrid was her husband’s right-hand-man, the lieutenant he confided in the most, both on personal matters and the war effort. To watch again as the beast struck her with a clenched fist before tearing away her clothes and forcing himself upon her almost made Jennifer cry out loud.
The werewolf leader slowly dropped his gaze to hers but his eyes held no compassion.
The gargled wail of a newborn baby forced the werewolf’s eyes back to the computer, but Jennifer could not force her gaze from his rugged face. The baby boy suckled contentedly at Jennifer’s breast, its body coated with amniotic fluid that reflected the flame of an open fire.
The first ten years of the boy’s life seemed to play on the screen at double speed until a familiar voice from the tinny speakers pulled her terrified attention back to the monitor.
On the display, Jennifer’s husband stood before her. A tall hybrid, Simon Cain’s muscular form was evident even through his dark, neatly-pressed suit. He’d been in counsel tonight, she remembered, and as he never discussed the contents of his war meetings she knew his desire to see her had to be serious. He appeared strident, amplified somewhat by the large window behind him that revealed a darkening night punctuated only by the distant flashing lights of a passing plane.
It happened in the very room in which she now lay, torn and broken, and although she had no desire to relive the moment, her paralysis prevented her from looking away.
Why the treacherous hybrid who’d raped her would want to tell Simon about it, Jennifer had no idea. Simon confronted her, angered before the first words had spilled from his mouth. She remembered her urge to flee the room but knew the consequences if she had done so. Shock spiraled aggressively through her again as she watched his angered barrage, peppered by her pitiful pleas for forgiveness. When he confronted her further about the fact their last child together was not his own, it seemed to push him past the point when his own self-control could have saved her. She remembered how horrified she’d felt that Richard must have disclosed the child wasn’t Simon’s, and Jennifer wished she could close her eyes and not see her husband’s transformation—pure hatred driving him into a rapid metamorphosis—but her lids remained open.
The images on the screen became a shuddering blur under the onslaught as her own husband ripped her to pieces.
When the lead werewolf saw himself climbing the staircase from the downstairs entrance hall he tore the wires painfully from Jennifer’s brain and the computer screen went blank.
He leaned over her, his stern face inches from her own. His pupils had dilated and his breathing increased to an irritated pant.
“Where is he?” the werewolf demanded. He spat as he talked; his voice loud and distorted as if he had begun to transform but held the change back.
Inside her trapped mind she pleaded with the lycanthrope to spare her.
“Where’s Simon Cain? Where is he?”
She did not know. She would give anything right now, even her own life that now seemed destined to end, in order to see the man butchered, but she couldn’t think where he’d gone. Hated to contemplate the fact he’d probably murdered her son before leaving the mansion.
“Forget it, Trace,” the skinny werewolf said. “We’re wasting our time.”
Trace looked at his comrade. “So it would seem.”
“Besides, the drug is irreversible, she’ll never talk again. We’ve gotten what we can from her. What we don’t have, we need to find.”
Jennifer knew exactly what the gaunt lycanthrope meant, and it shattered any hope she had kept harbored in her weakened heart.
Trace sighed deeply, his frustration evident.
A second later, his countenance disappeared. His forehead flattened as his nose then jaw disintegrated and slid forward. His eyes slipped close together as long canines surged from blackened gums.
God, please have mercy on me.
A voluble roar echoed off the study walls, and in the corner of her eye she saw the werewolf’s huge arm swinging towards her with immense power.
An extra stab of agony registered in her brain, before eternity was plunged into darkness.
Two Years Ago
VENICE
ITALY
Anton walked purposefully along the hotel’s corridor. Its patterned carpet and painted walls were dark beyond the lenses of his sunglasses and the uniformed officer a shadow silhouetted against the white door.
Loathing tensed his body; he hated dealing with cops. Anton pulled his wallet from his inside pocket and flashed his detective badge.
“Where’s Vialli?” he asked in fluent Italian.
The young officer pointed towards the far end of a hall to their left. “Down there with the maid. She found the body.”
“I’m gonna need to check the room over.”
“Officer Vialli has done that,” the cop protested. “It’s done.”
Anton lowered his sunglasses so the man could see the seriousness clouding his eyes. Anton forced himself not to grimace against the bright hall lighting. “This is my investigation.”
The other man’s fear stroked Anton like a shiver on a winter’s morning. Pathetic mortal.
“What’s your name officer?”
“Tanfi.”
“I need to check the room, Tanfi.”
“But—”
Anton stepped to the door. “No personnel in until I give them clearance. You understand?”
The officer nodded feebly and gave a quick glance down the hall to where Vialli questioned the maid. He stepped aside and allowed Anton into the room.
Anton pushed the door to and flipped the lock.
The corpses were becoming more frequent, appearing with increasing regularity throughout the decades. The murder would bear the hallmarks of the new breed: the throat savaged, carotid artery severed. Sometimes the bodies were partially consumed. They were targeting humans, and Anton feared the hybrids were building towards a new offensive in the war.
The lights were on in the room but the curtains were open and displayed the rugged wall of an adjacent property bathed in mid-morning sunshine. Anton still found it hard to believe those stupid mortals continued to harbor the idea sunlight turned vampires to dust. Sunshine hurt his eyes and felt uncomfortable on his skin, but it didn’t kill him. He rested at dawn and dusk but his days and nights were filled with his pursuit of the new breed.
Anton felt no nearer to their extinction than he did when those fools had merged the bloodlines.
Once an Enforcer embroiled in the centuries-old war against lycanthropes, Anton thought he had seen it all until procreation found a way into the coven. He still had no idea how the hybrid children had eluded his clan, but they had melted into the darkness, multiplied, and re-emerged centuries later to stake their claim in the supernatural world with savage unpredictability. He had eagerly volunteered when the Eliminators were formed—elite vampires with the responsibility of hunting down the new breed and eradicating their threat. The crossbreeds had to slip up soon, and he yearned for a moment of carelessness that would give his clan the upper hand.
Where the hell’s Lucas? Anton had phoned the other Eliminator from outside the hotel but now he couldn’t wait. He had to gather as many clues as he could before forensics turned up and purged the scene. If the slaying was what Anton expected it to be then he would need to be extra careful. He
clung to the hope of it being just an ordinary murder, but the tone of the dispatcher’s voice when he’d intercepted the call made him suspect otherwise.
A bed stood in the corner of the L-shaped room, the victim’s bare feet pointing towards the ceiling. He checked the bathroom quickly but saw nothing amiss. He pulled his Heckler and Koch from its holster and stepped cautiously into the room.
“Princess,” he gasped, legs stuttering as he tried to move towards the bed.
For a moment he stared blankly at the naked body. Supine on the bedspread, Princess Gabriella looked paler than usual, her dark hair curled in wispy tresses across a white pillow. Perpetual blood tarnished the cotton bed sheets, thickly clotted around her shoulders and head. Her throat was ragged and torn, pulled apart where the freaks had dug out her carotid artery and ruptured it. Her mouth hung open a fraction, red lips the entrance to a vacant shell. Her eyelids were almost closed but he remembered the blueness of her eyes when they had stared at him almost a hundred years ago, bright and attentive as she eagerly absorbed her training. Had they known she was an Eliminator? Had they purposely targeted the daughter of Markus, the highest Elder within the coven?
Anton lurched to the bed like a boxer reeling from a heavy punch. Sinking to his knees, grief wrapped unsympathetic fingers around his heart. Forcing himself to look at the beautiful princess before him, he brushed fingers through her dark hair and tracing lines over her taut, wan cheek. He remembered her enthusiasm and energy as she trained; he had known she would make a good Eliminator, if only through her fervor alone. Determined and forceful, she’d never once succumbing to her father’s pleas to seek a different path. Misery lodged in Anton’s throat as a tear found a gap under the rim of his sunglasses and tracked a path to the corner of his mouth. He looked at her carmine lips, parted slightly over ashen teeth—lips he had once yearned to taste. A bead of immobilizing poison glistened on the point of her fangs.
His own canines elongated with a deluge of anger for the hybrids.
Gabriella’s eyelids flickered and she opened her eyes.
His gasp escaped before he had a chance to catch it.
“Princess?” he whispered.
Her eyes darted around the room, searching for the source of his voice.
“I—I can’t see you,” she said, her English tinted with an American accent.
“I’m here. It’s Anton.”
He curled his fingers into her hand. It was colder than he expected.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Tell Dad I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t know he—” Her pause felt longer than Anton’s eternal life. “I didn’t know he was one of them.”
“Who? Who are you talking about, Princess?”
Her head moved, a subtle jerk to the left. She swallowed and blood oozed from the torn artery hanging from her ravaged throat. Reaching out, Anton pinched the blood vessel shut, surprised she remained alive.
She didn’t answer. Anton cursed her; deep inside his undead soul where he tried to keep all his unwanted feelings, he cursed the Eliminator for getting involved with one of the crossbreeds. Inexperienced, she had probably assumed the heathen to be a mortal human—which was bad enough—but she had crossed the divide whether she realized it or not, and Anton felt as though he had not only failed her with inadequate training, but that he had let down the coven and the Elders who controlled it.
“Where did he go?” Anton persisted.
Gabriella turned her head lethargically towards the window. Anton followed her gaze. The curtains moved slightly, lifted by a soft summer breeze.
“I bit. . . .” She swallowed, effort creasing her attractive countenance. “I bit him.”
One down, Anton thought. He hoped the freak’s death had been painful and rapid. At least Gabriella had eliminated her attacker.
“Stay with me, Princess. Lucas will be here soon and we’ll get you out of here.”
She tried to swallow once more but failed. Anton felt helpless, gripped by a deep yearning to swap his everlasting life for her own that made him feel all the more powerless knowing he couldn’t offer her such a gift.
“Princess? Please, hang on.”
Her eyes explored the ceiling for a moment, as if searching for words from an unlikely source. He wished he could find a way to reverse the death of such a glorious vampire. He looked at the bed, thick with blood, and realized its futility. His love for her burned inside like an eternal flame trying to warm his chilled blood. He feared her demise more than he feared having to face the wrath of Markus.
Gabriella’s eyes rolled into her head, her jaw slackened, and the immortal life of the princess ceased.
Anton released the ragged artery and stood from the bed. Leaning against the wall he tried to push anguish deep into his core. He didn’t need it, not now, not with Gabriella’s death to avenge. He had to find the scum who had killed her and if the creature wasn’t already dead, Anton swore to himself he would slowly cut the brute’s head off. So young, even in vampire years, Gabriella’s body already had a faded look: skin taut and ashen, bones pushed against the skin. He clung to the image of her laughing face as they shared a glass of wine and a few jokes to celebrate her acceptance into his elite band of warriors. Now, withered and decimated, she reminded him of another mortal victim of the hybrid’s latest offensive—and that sickened him the most.
A knock on the hotel door pulled him from his thoughts. He lifted his sunglasses, wiped the stray tear away, and walked to the door. Through the concave shape of the peephole he saw a man wearing a dark suit, sunglasses shielding his eyes as he argued with the officer at the door. Anton flipped the lock and opened the door.
“Detective,” the young officer said. “Sorry for the disturbance, but I’ve told this detective he can’t enter.”
The policeman—like all men—could not be compared to the six hundred year-old vampire standing before them. Lucas was the oldest of the Eliminators.
“Everything’s under control, Officer Tanfi.” Anton ushered Lucas in from the hall, shut the door, and slipped the lock again.
Lucas stood motionless by the foot of the bed as if he had grown roots into the carpet. “Jesus fucking Christ. Did you know it was her before you called me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Markus is gonna tear the walls of the coven apart when he hears about this.”
Don’t remind me. Anton strode past the superior Eliminator and looked out the window. The sounds of Venice greeted him; bus-boats chugged on meandering canals and the murmur of tourists and classical music from café orchestras tainted the sultry air in ignorance of the war raging within the immortal world. The summer morning was well advanced, the burning sun high in a cloudless sky.
“How the fuck did this happen?” Lucas asked.
“She befriended a mangy hybrid.” Anton looked towards the hotel roof. There were balconies on the upper floor and decorative stones protruding from the building’s façade would make it easy to scale. He glanced down and noticed a crimson droplet on the window-ledge. He touched it with a finger and a knot of abhorrence twisted his gut. “There’s blood here, hybrid blood. It’s gone to the roof.”
“Let’s go,” Lucas said.
Anton swung from the window.
He scaled the building’s façade with speed and agility. On the roof of the hotel, Anton gazed across the skyline. Red slate roofs stretched around him, with the unmistakable outline of Saint Mark’s Square immediately to his left. Vaporetto’s painted white lines in their wake on the Grand Canal and Anton found his eyes drawn to the domed church of the Santa Maria della Salute. Erected to celebrate the end of the plague, he remembered its construction and marveled once more at its architecture.
There’s a new plague sweeping the city and it’s just as merciless.
He never imagined the war would stretch as far as it had, nor that he would return to wage secret combat in the city where he was first recruited into the
coven. Foreboding gripped him. The hybrids had become strong, the conflict finely balanced, but he knew Markus wouldn’t rest until the Eliminators avenged his daughter’s death and the last drop of hybrid blood had dried in the sun.
Lucas stood at his side. If the older vampire felt troubled, he didn’t show it. “You’re right; the hybrid did come this way.”
A body lay on the outer roof of Saint Mark’s Square, at its furthest corner. Anton hoped the remains couldn’t be seen by tourists in the bell tower.
“We’ll have to get over there and investigate,” Lucas said.
They screwed silencers into the barrels of their weapons and edged gracefully along properties parallel to the square until they neared their quarry. Lucas leaped across the divide to the slate roof of the square and crouched at its apex, directing the business-end of the silencer at the immobile figure. Anton didn’t break stride and flung himself into space between the buildings.
The Eliminators surveyed the scene. The pyramid atop the Campanile jutted towards the blue firmament, and Anton could almost feel the gaze of mortal eyes on his back. Summer haze draped the city, light sparkling on the surrounding lagoon. Sunlight heated his skin with the touch of a hot iron.
“Come on,” Lucas whispered.
Anton’s fangs pushed against the inside of his lower lip and a sensation wrapped the Eliminator like dead arms in a raw embrace. He felt suffocated, strangled by a figurative putridity wafting off the hybrid. The abomination must still be alive! Only after the bastards were eliminated would the hard fingers of revulsion release their grip. The crossbreed was naked, the soles of its feet dark with grime, its body a pale rose color as if it had been in the sun for too long. The half-breed had metamorphosed back to its human form before it had died, and Anton noted the wounds on the male hybrid’s neck.
BLOODLINES -- Blood War Trilogy: Book I Page 14
