Dark Demon 16

by Christine Feehan

  Her mouth went suddenly dry and her heart rate increased. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled with unease. She was being stalked.

  Behind her shadows slipped around the trees in an effort to surround her. Natalya continued jogging at the same steady pace. As she ran she transferred her grip on the walking stick to the familiar grooves at the top of it in preparation for a fight.

  The first wolf sprang at her out of the cover of brush as she crossed a small stream. Natalya didn't slow down, but met the charge with a practiced swing of the thick walking stick. The crack was audible; the wolf yelped and leapt back as she swept past. She whirled around, drawing the sword smoothly from the stick and casting the deceptive sheath aside to face the wolf.

  «If you wish to fight me, brother, do so. I have places to go and you are delaying my travel.» She murmured the words aloud as she glided toward the animal, deliberately stepping into the wind so it could carry her scent to the pack.

  The wolf sniffed the air and backed up, suddenly wary. The pack members milled around in confusion. Natalya growled low in her throat, the warning of a wild, dangerous animal. Her vivid green eyes began to swirl with intense blue, going almost opaque as she bared her teeth at the pack. Streaks of midnight black and bright orange-almost red banded through her hair. The wolves broke off, loping away from her. Only the alpha female looked back, snarling and showing her displeasure at the unfamiliar scent. Natalya hissed a warning and

  the female fled after the pack.

  «Yeah, that's what I thought,» Natalya called after them, sliding the sword back into the scabbard. She waited to make certain the wolves were gone before continuing up the mountainside, moving steadily toward her goal.

  She cleared a downed tree covered with moss and fern and slid to an abrupt halt as a man sauntered out from behind a tree directly in front of her. He was tall with dark hair, very handsome, his shoulders wide and his smile dazzling. Natalya scanned the area with every sense on high alert. He wasn't alone, she was certain of it.

  She dropped her pack on the ground and smiled at the man. «I expected you a good hour ago.»

  He bowed from the waist. «I am sorry to be late then, lady. I arrived here to prepare for your coming.» He opened his arms wide to encompass the area around them.

  «It wasn't necessary to dress in your Sunday best,» Natalya said. «Although the alternative is rather disgusting.»

  A flicker of anger rippled across the man's face, but he hung onto his smile. His teeth weren't so white and appeared pointy and sharp. «Please put down your stick.»

  «Do you think I'm going to make it easy on you? I'm not really happy with you, Freddie boy.»

  This time the anger stayed. Brown stains appeared on his teeth. «I am not Freddie. Who is Freddie? My name is Henrik.»

  «You don't get out much do you? Haven't you ever watched the late night movies? Freddie's a regular star. A very ugly mass murderer, much like yourself. I really don't care what your name is. I care that you persist in following me and I'm damned tired of it. So take your best shot, Freddie boy, and let's get it over.»

  Henrik's breath came out in a long hiss of anger. «You will learn respect.»

  Not bothering with a retort, Natalya launched her attack, freeing her sword as she sprang at him. The sword arced through the air slicing toward his neck.

  Henrik dissolved into vapor, streaming away from her, a shriek of rage echoing through the forest. He faced her several yards away. His thick black hair was gone to be replaced by long white very disheveled strands.

  «I should have known you'd be a sissy. Vampires are supposed to be such bad asses, but you're all such babies. You wanted a fight.» Natalya continued to goad him. «I've got things to do tonight. I don't have time to play your little games with you.»

  «You go too far. I don't care what the order is. I'm going to kill you,» the vampire snarled.

  She smirked at him, giving a small salute. «Nice to know you can think for yourself. I thought your puppet master had you too well trained for free thinking.»

  The branch above her head cracked and broke off, rocketing toward her head like a missile. Natalya leapt forward, going on the offensive, ramming the sword straight at Henrik's chest. The branch slammed into the ground exactly where she'd been standing.

  The vampire parried the sword away with a sweep of his arm. He was enormously strong and the contact sent violent vibrations up and down her arm so that for a moment everything went numb and the sword slid out of her hand. She kept moving, spinning nearly in midair, already reaching for her guns. She drew both, rapidly firing as she raced at him, the bullets slamming into him repeatedly, driving him backwards away from her.

  Henrik jerked with each bullet, staggering, but staying upright. As she reached arm's distance, she holstered one gun and drew a knife, holding it low, close to her body as she drove toward him.

  He attempted to shift shape, reaching for her with contorting arms and clawed hands. She drove the knife into his chest, deep into his heart and leapt away to keep the blood from touching her skin. She'd learned from experience it burned like acid. She'd also learned vampires could rise again and again.

  She whirled around and raced for her sword. The wind rushed over her, a whirling eddy of leaves and twigs. Wings beat strongly above her head and talons materialized out of the sky, dropping at an alarming rate of speed straight toward her eyes. Natalya dove for the ground in a rolling somersault, coming up on one knee, guns in both hands, tracking the huge bird. It had already dissolved into mist. The droplets shimmered and began to take the shape of a human.

  She waited. It was impossible to kill a vampire without form. Already Henrik was stirring, tugging at the knife buried in his heart. He called weakly to the new arrival. She heaved a sigh. «Die already! Sheesh, the least you could do is put yourself out of your misery and get it over.»

  «Good evening, Natalya.» The voice was hypnotic, almost mesmerizing.

  «Well, if it isn't my good friend Arturo.» Natalya faced the vampire with a false smile. «How nice to see you again. It's been a long time.» She gestured with her gun toward the writhing vampire. «Your little sissy partner is making so much noise. Would you mind finishing him off so we can talk without the background music? If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a whiney vampire.» Deliberately she continued to goad Henrik, knowing the angrier the vampire, the more mistakes they made in battle.

  «You haven't changed much.»

  «I've gotten meaner.» She shrugged and grinned at the newcomer. «I'm losing my tolerance for your kind.»

  Arturo glanced at the bleeding vampire clawing at the ground. «I see that. He is rather loud, isn't he?» He walked over and yanked the knife from his partner's heart and tossed it aside, nudging the vampire with his toe contemptuously. «Get up, Henrik.»

  Henrik managed to stagger into a standing position. He shrieked and hissed, spittle and blood running down his face. «I'm going to kill you,» he snapped, glaring at Natalya.

  «Do shut up,» Natalya said. «You're becoming so repetitive.»

  «You will not escape this time,» Arturo said. «You cannot best Henrik, me and the wolves. Do you hear them? They are on their way to assist us.»

  «You take all the fun out of fighting because you never fight fair,» Natalya complained. «You have no honor.»

  Arturo smiled at her with his perfect white teeth. «What is honor after all, Natalya? It is worth nothing.»

  Vikirnoff Von Shrieder knew the moment he entered the heavy woods that something evil waited there. The warning came in the silence of the forest, the way the earth shuddered and the trees cringed. Not a single living creature moved. It mattered little. He was a hunter and he expected danger to find him. It was his accepted way of life and had been for centuries.

  He took a step and stopped abruptly as the grass shivered beneath his feet. He looked down, half expecting to see the stalks shrivel. Was the forest shrinking from direct contact with him? Had it sensed
the darkness shadowing him with every step, with each breath he took? Nature could very well be naming him monster-vampire, a Carpathian male who had deliberately chosen to give up his soul for the momentary rush of power and emotion a kill while feeding brought.

  It was a choice, wasn't it? Had he made a decision and was no longer aware of whether he was good or evil? Was there even such a thing? The thought should have distressed him, but it didn't. He felt nothing at all even as he contemplated the idea that he was no longer fully a Carpathian male; that the predator in him had consumed all but some small spark left in his soul.

  He dropped to his knees, his hands digging through layers of leaves and twigs covering the forest floor and plunging deep into the rich, dark soil beneath. He lifted his face to the night sky. «Susu,» he whispered aloud. «I am home.» His native language rolled off his

  tongue naturally, his accent thicker than usual as if somehow by just being in the Carpathian Mountains he could go back in time.

  After so many centuries of exile in service to his people, he had finally returned to his birthplace. He knelt in utter silence waiting for something. Anything. Some flicker of emotion, or remembrance. He expected the soil to bring peace, to bring him serenity, to bring him something, but there was the same barren void he woke to every rising.

  Nothing. He felt absolutely nothing. He bowed his head and sank back on his heels, looking around him. What he wanted or even needed, he didn't know, but there was no flood of emotion. No elation. No disappointment. Not even despair. The forest looked bleak and gray with twisted, malevolent shadows waiting for him. The endless cycle of his life remained. Kill or be killed.

  Hunger was ever present now, a soft seductive whisper in his mind. The call to power, to salvation, and false though he knew it to be, it had gained strength with every rising. He had fought battles, far too many to count, destroying old friends, men he respected and admired, watching the fall of his people and all for what? «Tell me the reason,» he whispered to the night. «Let me understand the complete waste of my life.»

  Had he fed this night? He tried to recall the occasion of his wakening, but it seemed too much trouble. Surely he hadn't taken a life while feeding. Was this how it happened then? Was there no real choice, but a slow indifference pervading one's mind until one kill ran into another? Until one feeding became mixed with a kill and his indifference became the weapon of his own destruction?

  He looked toward the south where he knew the prince of his people resided. The wind began to pick up speed and strength, rushing through the forest in a southerly direction. «Honor is a damnable trait and one that may not last eternity.» Vikirnoff murmured the words with a small sigh as he rose to his full height and drew back his long hair, securing it at the nape of his neck with a leather tie. Did he still have his honor? After centuries of battling to keep his word, had the crouching beast at last consumed him?

  The leaves on the trees closest to him began to tremble and the branches swayed with alarm. He was a Carpathian male, born into an ancient race now on the brink of extinction. They had few women, so all-important to the males and the preservation of life. Two halves of the same whole, darkness ruled the males while light dwelt within the females. Without women to anchor them, the males were falling into the greedy jaws of their own demons.

  Vikirnoff coexisted with humans, living among them, trying to maintain honor and discipline in a world where he no longer saw in color or felt even the slightest of emotions. After two hundred years, his feelings had faded and over the long endless centuries the dark predator in him had grown strong and powerful. Only faded memories of laughter and love sustained him, and then only through his link with Nicolae, his brother. Now, that too was gone, with Nicolae an ocean away.

  Vikirnoff had lived too long and become far too dangerous. His fighting skills were superb, honed and sharpened in the too numerous encounters with those of his kind who had chosen to give up their souls for the momentary illusion of power, or more likely, more tragically, for a brief moment of feeling. He felt as if he were single-handedly destroying his own race. So many deaths. So many lost friends. «For what?» He asked aloud. «Moeri?» He whispered again in his own language.

  He deliberately used his own ancient tongue to recall his duty, his promises to his prince. He had volunteered to be sent out into the world. It was his choice. Always his choice. Free will. But he was no longer free. He was so close to being the very thing he hunted, he almost couldn't separate the two.

  The ground rolled gently beneath his feet and the night sky rumbled a menacing warning. Somewhere ahead of him was his quarry-a blue-eyed woman who he had pursued across an ocean. Between the woman and Vikirnoff was a vampire-or perhaps more than one.

  Vikirnoff pulled the photograph of his quarry from its place close to his heart. He saw only in shades of gray, yet he had known she had eyes as blue as the sea and Nicolae told him her hair appeared midnight black. Blue like the nearly forgotten ice lakes of his homeland. The various shades of blue in the skies overhead. He had thought-hoped-that perhaps knowing instinctively that small detail meant he was pursuing his lifemate. The other half of his soul, light to his darkness, the one woman who could restore the lost colors and most of all, his ability to feel something. Anything at all. That hope, too, had faded over time, leaving the world a bleak, ugly place.

  The air charged with electricity, crackling and snapping along with the building thunder. Cloud formations built in the sky, great towers churning upward. He drew the pad of his thumb in a small unconscious caress over the picture of the woman as he had done so many times before. He had dreams, of course, of the perfect Carpathian lifemate. A woman with this face, those eyes, a woman who would do as he bid, see to his happiness while he ensured hers. Life would be peaceful and serene and filled with joy and most of all, emotion. He slipped the photograph back inside his shirt, over his heart, where it would be protected. He couldn't even sigh with regret. He didn't feel regret, or despair. Just the endless emptiness.

  You have to stop! The words swirled in his mind, a telepathic link of unexpected strength. Your emotions are so incredibly strong I can't imagine how you don't recognize they exist. You're devastating me, ripping my heart out. I can't afford this right now. Control your emotions or get the hell far away from me!

  The feminine voice swirled in his mind, slid over and into his body, invaded his heart and lungs and rushed through his bloodstream with the raging force of a firestorm. For nearly two thousand years he had existed in the gray shadows feeling nothing at all. He had lived in an endless, starkly barren world without desire or rage or affection. In that one moment everything changed. His mind was instant chaos.

  Colors blinded him, running together in vivid, dazzling streaks his eyes and mind could barely accept. His stomach churned and rolled as he fought to maintain alertness when the very ground beneath his feet swelled and buckled. A floodgate opened and where before there had been nothing, now there was everything, a wild jumble of every emotion with his tremendous strength and power feeding the chaos.

  The trees nearest him split in two, the sound horrendous as trunks hit the ground, shaking the earth. A rift opened in the ground close to him, followed by a second jagged tear and then another. The rocks shifted and buckled and another row of trees split and flattened.

  The demon in him lifted its head and roared for release, tearing at him with great claws, fighting for the freedom to abandon honor and go after the one thing that belonged solely to him. His savior. Or maybe she was his damnation. His incisors lengthened and his blood was so hot he feared he might burst into flame.

  Oh my God! You're one of them. Terror made her voice tremble.

  Just as he had shared his loneliness, pain and sorrow with her, he shared his darkness and the terrible intensity of overwhelming emotions. She felt his edgy need for violence. The rush the kill provided. The primitive, raw, sexual hunger that ruled his body and mixed with the possessive lust to claim her. She shared it
all with him, not only the wild elation, but every fierce need and desire pouring into his body. Every questioning of his life, the gradual need to hunt and kill. The madness of his beast rising and fighting to get loose, to be unleashed for the sole purpose of getting to her.

  Fear hit him, great waves nearly amounting to terror, just as quickly building into resolve. The emotions were so strong his stomach rolled. It took a moment before he realized her feelings were pouring into him with every bit of strength as his own. He touched the stream of feminine passion and found power. She would fight. Surrounded, she had no choice but to fight and win. The fear was banished, The terror gone. She would defeat whatever, whoever came at her because it was the only way left to her to survive.

  Vikirnoff closed himself off from her, abruptly halting the sharing of the storm of emotions breaking through him. He searched for a mental path, a trail that would lead him back to the woman. She belonged to him. No other. Not another Carpathian. Not the vampires on her trail. She was his. He would have her or many-human and Carpathian alike-would die.