Ryder considered trying to lose him, but she quickly discarded the idea. Hunters didn’t stop hunting until they made their kill. She needed to finish him before he got to her first. She pivoted to the right, taking the opposite direction to Austin. She didn’t want to lead the hunter straight to the kid.
Ryder sprinted away, leaping over fallen trees, ducking under low-slung branches. She was moving too quickly to be quiet, which wasn't good—not good at all. The man pursuing her was fast, but after a few moments, his breathing got heavier, and he slowed. She wondered who it was but figured she’d find out soon enough.
Ryder stopped in her tracks and readied an arrow. The hunter appeared from behind a tree. It was Brad, from Shane’s gang. Brad was a jerk like Shane. The idiot was grinning because Ryder had stopped, but his grin quickly faded as he spotted her aiming at him.
She released the arrow and dived out of the way just as Brad threw another knife. Brad had dived as well, but the difference was, Ryder had known he would, and she’d aimed accordingly. It sank into his chest mid-dive.
Brad was dead when he hit the ground, tumbling like a rag doll.
Good riddance.
Ryder continued her flight from the bunker. She hoped Austin would find the freedom he deserved, too.
3
Siberia, Town of Pinewood
Massimo sang with the music that filled the air as he made his way up the stairs from the vault under his home.
“Dancing bean. Had a pee… on the trampoline.”
Although Massimo looked like he was in his sixties, he was actually two hundred and fifty-seven. As far as he knew, he was the last vampire on Earth, and he liked it that way. The rest had been taken out by the Queen Bitch.
Massimo had no idea who she really was, where she had come from, or where she had disappeared to, but she had changed his world forever – and executed his father for his crimes. For the longest time, Massimo had fantasized that the Queen would find him – but she never did. He had vowed to be ready for the day she would take him away from all this.
“Pops, you know those aren’t the right lyrics,” Leandro said.
“Leandro, my little dancing bean. Sing with me – dance with me.” Massimo grabbed his son’s hands and swayed him in time to the music.
Massimo was only five-foot-five, and Leandro towered over him at six-foot-two. One thing the men had in common was that they were both more than human. Massimo was a Vampire, and Leandro was a Were.
Unlike Massimo, Leandro didn’t think he was the last Were on earth. He’d heard wolves howling at night, and in recent weeks the howling had increased. He had tried locating the animals, but every time he had gotten close, they’d sprinted away from him.
He wondered if they were Weres or just common wolves, hungry and on the hunt. He hoped that they were Weres, like him.
Maybe one day he’d be able to catch up to one of them and find out.
Leandro held still as Massimo tried to make him move to the music. He really wasn’t in the mood for this. “You know I hate Abba, so why would I sing with you?” he complained.
Massimo laughed and kept swaying. “Because it’s fun. ‘Dancing Queen’ is one of Abba’s best songs. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t agree,” Leandro scowled. “All their songs are ridiculous.”
Massimo shook his head in wonder. “And here I was, thinking I’d raised you right, with a good head on your shoulders.”
“I’m not getting into another musical debate with you.” Leandro looked at the sunlight coming in the window. “The sun is still up. What are you doing awake anyway?”
Massimo shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Over the last few months, Massimo had been having problems sleeping. Before his strange bouts of insomnia, Massimo had slept through the day like he had back when his father, David, had turned him into a vampire.
Massimo was convinced that the changes began shortly after the World’s Worst Day Ever. He knew a little about nanocytes, the tiny machines that ran through his blood, from David. What he didn’t know was why they had changed, allowing him to walk in the sun again.
The return of the sun was a gift he thought would be denied him forever. The change brought a reprieve, making Massimo a daywalker. However, he still had limits. He suspected that the drain on his energy that being out in the day caused would not be so pronounced if he was to drink human blood.
So he waited until the end of each day, when he greeted the sun like a lost lover with his arms outstretched, allowing its warm rays to caress his grateful skin for as long as he could stand it.
Leandro watched Massimo with wry amusement on his face. He had really hoped his dad would sleep in today. He loved his dad, but a full day with him was always a pain in the ass. Leandro’s shoulders slumped at the thought. He had been looking forward to relaxing alone with a good book.
To avoid the annoyance, Leandro considered turning into a wolf and spending the day running through the woods. But before he could escape, Massimo requested that his son cut some firewood for the stove. Even though they already had enough wood to last them a year he was happy to do as he was asked. It would get him out of the house, away from the music.
Listening to another Abba song would make his ears bleed.
Leandro hefted the axe and glanced down at its sharp edge. He thought about using it on the stereo to stop the songs once and for all. That would only bring more problems into his life, and his problem tank was already fucking full. If he destroyed the player then Massimo would just send him on a quest to find a new one, and guilt would make Leandro agree.
Finding a replacement for something like the stereo was close to impossible now. The only place he might find another would involve a two-day run to the abandoned underground mall, and even then it would be a crapshoot.
He’d found the last one there when he was younger, and he often wished he could go back in time and stop his younger self from bringing it back. It had only brought misery to his life.
But as Leandro looked back at their house, he knew that wasn’t true. He’d brought joy to his dad, so it was worth it.
Leandro could still remember the look on Massimo’s face when he’d brought it home. It had been Leandro’s first visit to the mall. He knew he’d stayed too long and that his dad would be worried. Massimo had yelled at him until Leandro showed him the music system. It had been the first and only time he saw his dad cry.
For the first few weeks, the house was filled with songs and laughter, which Leandro loved. As the months went by, Leandro stopped enjoying the music. As years went by, he grew to hate it.
Leandro drove the axe into the wood, taking his aggravation out on the log instead of his dad’s music system.
Between swings, Leandro heard howling coming from the nearby Bora mountains. The wolves were near.
“Pops, I’m going for a run,” Leandro yelled. Without waiting for a response, he shed his clothes and turned into a wolf. He wasn’t going to let them get away from him again.
Ryder jumped over fallen trees and dodged branches in her rush toward freedom. Terrier had given her a head start, and she wasn’t going to waste it. She was both grateful for her friend’s sacrifice and pissed that he wasn’t with her.
She looked over her shoulder every few minutes, keeping an eye out for other hunters while trying not to run headlong into a tree or snap her ankle on the uneven ground.
She’d hunted in the forest for as long as she’d been a prisoner in the bunker, which was the last twenty years. The kitchen women helped the young children when they were first captured and brought to live in the bunker, but that luxury faded quickly.
No matter their age, males in the bunker had to hunt, or they would starve to death. Ryder had been dressed as a boy when she was captured, and she had no choice but to hunt if she wanted to survive.
Before that, she had lived a normal life with her family in a lush, green settlement, secluded from the rest of the world. Everything
had changed when Afana’s men had come to their enclave and raided it for slaves. Her people had tried to fight back, but they were no match for the brutality of Afana’s thugs.
As Afana’s men ravaged their village, Ryder’s mother had given her the order that saved Ryder’s life.
“Pretend to be a boy,” she had urged, her terrified eyes spurring Ryder to action.
Ryder did as he was told, putting on her dead brother’s clothes just before Afana’s men burst in and dragged her and her mother away.
If she hadn’t been sharp enough to obey her mother, Ryder would have been locked up in the bunker’s cells with the other women. Their very existence depended on them providing the men with sex. Ryder had no intention of doing that. She’d promised herself that if she escaped the bunker, she would free the women.
No matter what the cost.
She was looking forward to ripping the guts out of every asshole who had wronged those women, and there were a lot of them. Ryder would need to find an army to bring those men to justice, and that was just what she planned on doing.
Those fuckers wouldn’t know what hit them.
The air rippled through Leandro’s thick, white fur as he ran. He loved changing into his wolf form. He felt free.
Leandro tracked the wolves but by the time he arrived, as always, they were gone. He could still smell their trail, but that wasn’t the only thing he could smell.
There was a human nearby.
The human scent came from a female. It got stronger as he closed in on her, and he slowed his sprint so as not to scare her.
When he caught up to the human Leandro peered through the leaves, confused by the dichotomy between what his eyes and nose told him. He thought his sense of smell was messing with him. They didn’t look like a female at all.
Although if that was a male, it was the best-looking male he’d ever seen. Leandro might have to rethink some fundamental truths about himself.
He shook his head at the thought. He was all about women, and he puffed his chest out to prove it. If he were a gorilla, he’d have thumped it with his fist.
Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the human’s delicate features.
He took another sniff to make sure his nose hadn’t lied. He sighed with relief. Yup, that’s a girl pretending to be a boy, Leandro thought to himself. Feeling reassured, he allowed himself to look at her and drink in her beauty.
Her lips were full and red as a crisp apple. Her eyes were the cold blue of a Siberian tiger’s. She was breathtakingly beautiful, even with a buzz cut. Leandro wondered what she would look like with hair. It was hard to tell what color it would be since it was cropped to her skull, but he was sure she would look stunning.
He checked out the rest of the stranger’s body, and it still looked like a boy’s. Something strange was going on here, and Leandro was determined to find out what.
Ryder skidded to an abrupt halt. Something or someone else was out here with her, and she felt as if she were being hunted. She spun on her heel, taking in her surroundings. She didn’t see anything out of place, but she heard the crack of branches from behind her. Not the heavy boots of a person.
It was an animal.
She whirled around. Piercing blue eyes stared at her through the undergrowth. She instantly knew that it was a white Siberian tiger, one of the meanest bastards in the forest.
Ryder reached for an arrow and slowly nocked it as the tiger crept forward. They were both getting ready to attack.
Ryder’s arrow struck the tiger’s neck, which pissed him off royally but did little else. He growled, revealing sharp white teeth, and leapt at her, colliding with her shoulders and knocking her to the ground with a thud. She refused to be easy prey.
This fucker would have to earn his dinner.
You’re not eating me! Ugh, your breath smells like a bag of wrinkled old-man ball–sacks! She punched the tiger in the throat, trying to get it off her.
Ryder thrashed, pinned against the ground as the tiger lunged again in an attempt to sink its teeth into her neck. Saliva dripped onto her face, and she gagged on the stench of rotting flesh as the tiger’s breath assaulted her senses.
A blur of white fur streaked into the corner of her vision. The new arrival slammed into the tiger, knocking it away from Ryder. She blinked in surprise, seeing a huge white wolf attack the tiger. She rolled away from the snarling beasts, unable to bring herself to flee as they went head-to-head.
The wolf attacked over and over, the white of the tiger’s fur turning pink from the blood seeping from his wounds.
The wolf is protecting me?
The tiger arched his neck, snapping its jaws and kicking wildly with its back legs, trying to fight back. The wolf had the tiger pinned but it was forced to leap back to avoid the snapping jaws of the murderous big cat.
The tiger twisted out of the wolf’s grip and turned on its attacker. The tiger shrieked, making the hair on Ryder’s neck stand up. She wanted to help but she couldn’t get a clear shot at the tiger — who was now circling the wolf, looking for an opportunity to strike.
The tiger spun and charged at Ryder instead. The cat was lightning fast, and Ryder froze, bracing herself for the attack but the white wolf leapt on the tiger’s back, stopping it before it could reach her.
The wolf sank its teeth into the tiger’s back, tumbling the tiger down into the dirt.
Ryder edged away slowly as the two animals locked in battle once more. Blood spattered both animals’ white fur, but the wolf was winning the fight. It finally gained purchase, clamping its jaws around the tiger’s neck, and the massive beast went limp.
This was Ryder’s opportunity to get away, and she didn’t waste it. She sprinted away in case the wolf turned on her once it had killed the tiger. Deep down she didn’t think that it would, but there was no way to know for sure —so she ran.
She pushed herself hard, the thought of Terrier and the others back at the bunker driving her through the pain and exhaustion. She had to stay alive for him.
For all of them.
4
Massimo stood on his porch and slapped at a fly buzzing around his face. The World’s Worst Day Ever and the resulting nuclear fallout had screwed the climate seven ways from Sunday. Siberia, for example, had changed from a winter wonderland on steroids to a Florida-like swamp.
He had come to Siberia long ago, filled with disgust at the way David had treated humans like livestock. It was anathema to Massimo, who couldn’t even countenance the taking of animal life for sustenance.
Massimo had hated Florida because of all the damn bugs, which was the other reason he had decided to live out his life in Russia’s frozen north. With the vampire blood in his veins, wintry weather didn’t affect him too badly.
Unfortunately, right about the time he got settled in the world went to shit.
Now he was stuck in a Siberian bog fighting off annoying-ass bugs.
He listened on the porch until he couldn’t hear Leandro panting anymore. He knew Leandro had gone to the mountains. He always went to the same place as he hunted for the answer to who he was.
Once Massimo knew his son was a few miles away, he got to work on the thing he loved to do when his son was gone. Leandro could be a pain at times with his rules: eat this, don’t eat that... Anyone would think Leandro was the parent and Massimo the child.
I’m a vampire, and I can eat whatever the hell I want, Massimo thought. He planned to do just that once he’d gotten his music sorted out.
Massimo rubbed his hands together in anticipation as he reached for one of his favorite CDs. Carefully, he held it by the edges so he didn’t scratch it. There was no way to replace this album without letting Leandro in on his secret, guilty pleasure. He glanced out the window again, double-checking that Leandro was nowhere around.
Abba was his favorite band, but diversity was the spice of life. It was time for another classic from a different era: “N.W.A.”
This had been cut when Dr. Dre was
a true rap artist, Massimo thought. Those angry young whippersnappers thought they were the baddest-assed gangsters around. Oh, how wrong they were.
Vampires were the true badasses.
Massimo placed the disc in the player. Electricity was rare in this part of the world, but years ago he’d installed solar panels to generate power. They worked wonderfully thanks to the global warming problem the planet now suffered. One small mercy.
He pressed “play” and waited for his musical blast from the past. And the music did blast, since he’d had the volume on high when he played Abba to drive Leandro out of the house.
He quickly turned it all the way down and opened the front door, listening for any indication that Leandro was returning. He’d be back in an instant if he heard the music and Massimo would never hear the end of it.
Massimo breathed a sigh of relief when he couldn’t hear Leandro. He went back inside and raised the volume to just above a whisper — which was totally not the right way to enjoy N.W.A. Back in the day, he’d have the music cranked while he enjoyed a feast of crispy bacon, sausage, and black pudding. He had been fond of an English breakfast.
But that had all ended years ago, when he had seen the way that other vampires, the Forsaken, had treated humans — like they were cattle, there for the eating. He saw the monster that he himself could turn into and it reviled him.
Massimo didn’t want to be like that. He respected life. He hoped the Queen Bitch and her people had taken care of all the Forsaken for humanity’s sake.
The thought of ingesting blood now made his stomach turn. There was no way Massimo would be like those vampires. He’d rather eat onions for the rest of his life. Massimo had become a vegetarian, a decision that weakened his body but strengthened his soul.
He sang along happily to Straight Outta Compton as he prepared his breakfast of fried eggs and toast. If Leandro could only see me now, he’d have his own heart attack.
Madness Unleashed_Age Of Madness_A Kurtherian Gambit Series Page 3
