The Queen of Wolves

by Douglas Clegg

  PRAISE FOR NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR DOUGLAS CLEGG AND THE VAMPYRICON

  “Clegg crafts a fitting finale ornamented with prose that modulates between the sensual and regal and that distinguishes his series as one of the more memorable modern vampire epics.” —Publisher’s Weekly

  “Action and adventure combine with traditional vampire fiction to create a book that will appeal to fans of vampires and historical fantasy.” —Library Journal

  “Well-paced fantasy adventure, and not just for hardcore vampire fans.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “An intense and grisly dark fantasy, set in the 12th century, that rivals Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain sequence in both sheer narrative scope and unbridled, violent eroticism...Clegg’s Vampyricon saga will be a blood-sucking masterpiece of truly epic proportions...” —Paul Goat Allen, BN.com

  “Douglas Clegg has accomplished a rarity in the horror vein...This book will sink its teeth into you!” —Kansas City Star

  “Clegg’s unique interpretation of vampire mythology makes for a page-turning, bone-chilling adventure. Vampire fans and horror aficionados will relish this tale.” —Romantic Times

  THE QUEEN OF WOLVES

  Book Three of The Vampyricon

  DOUGLAS CLEGG

  ALKEMARA PRESS

  THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

  The Priest of Blood, Book 1

  The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

  The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Queen of Wolves

  Contact Douglas Clegg

  Also by Douglas Clegg

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE QUEEN OF WOLVES

  Chapter 1

  ________________

  THE WOLF KEY

  1

  A small key made of carved bone, kept secret, hidden away—this was the only object I kept from Natalia Waterhouse within our resting place. I wrapped it into an old, leathered pouch and placed it in some worthless pottery amidst the debris of my tomb that no one should find it—and if they did, they would not know how to use it.

  Even the vampyres who had been with me for the past several hundred years did not know what lock existed that fit such a key—made from wolf bone, and missing one piece.

  Natalia herself had brought me the one bit of wolf bone that had been missing from the key for centuries.

  It was a long, curved tooth, taken from a mahogany box—with a silver clasp in the shape of a wolf’s head—which her mother had delivered to her only in death. A wolf’s tooth with a tiny hole drilled into it that fit perfectly into a groove of the bone key.

  The key was now complete in its hiding place.

  When she stole it, I knew it was nearly time for me to show her the lock that waited for the key.

  2

  In this twenty-first century, as the storms of war poured around us from beyond our hidden fortress, I spent long nights showing Natalia Waterhouse the treasures of Alkemara. Beyond our tomblike sanctuary, jets blazed their paths across the sky, and the blasts of bombs could be heard even at a distance of a hundred miles. A city across the desert was under siege, and its districts set afire. At night, the distant billows of smoke enshrouded the stars. You could not exist in the tomb at daylight without dreaming of the red skies of battle, and of ancient nights when the torches set the woods ablaze and the burning arrows showered the sky like a thousand falling stars, when sword and ax cut the flesh of memory.

  Within the necropolis beneath the hollow of the mountain, I shared with my mortal guest the years of the lost century of humankind while the dark hours of Earth passed over us. At daybreak, we slept side by side, or in an embrace, in the crystal bier that had once held the Priest of Blood, far below the heavy stone floors of the Temple of Lemesharra.

  I showed her much of the evidence and writing of my early life and resurrection as a vampyre, but there was one thing I held back.

  The wolf key.

  I knew the night would come when I would take that key and lead her to the one secret chamber—hidden from even the others of my tribe—and reveal to her why she, of all her bloodline, had found Alkemara at all.

  I did not expect her to steal it, and yet mortals sought knowledge and power at all times and could be tempted to their own destruction with this seeking. Even my tribe of vampyres—the Fallen Ones of Medhya—had stolen secrets and sorcery from our Dark Mother, who—in turn—had stolen from the Great Serpent who brought us immortality.

  I was sure I could trust her by our twentieth night together. She had given me no reason to mistrust her, and Natalia had revealed a keen intellect and an apparent lack of the need for power over anyone.

  When I awoke in darkness, I felt heaviness within me as some unrestful thought preyed upon my mind. She’d found it.

  As certain as the doom of sunrise, the news awaited me in the form of Vaspiana leaning over me. Vaspi had grown possessive of me since Natalia had come to us—my first thought was that Vaspi herself had done something to our mortal guest.

  Vaspiana grasped my shoulders to shake me out of the day’s rest. I smelled dusk in the damp of my tomb. My eyes quickly focused and brought up the ambient light within the darkness. Instinctively, I sniffed the air, for—upon awakening—the threat of mortal hunters hung over us like a sharpened blade at our hearts.

  Beside me, in the tomb-bed, the blanket and the pillow untouched as if Natalia had not slept there at all.

  “No one’s hurt her?” I glanced about my chamber. I briefly took in the clothes that were missing—her tan slacks, her shirt, her sandals.

  “She escaped.” Vaspi pointed to the lid of my chamber—a round stone doorway above us, from which a staircase descended. It was meant to be sealed daily, with a vampyre on guard, above, at all times. She looked back toward me, a sly grin on her face.

  “You’ve done nothing to harm her?”

  She offered me a look of offense, raising her eyebrows and nearly sneering. “I don’t stoop that low.”

  “You’ve checked the city?” I looked about the room—an urn had been upturned, broken, its bits swept beside a stack of unrolled scrolls. When I found the leather pouch and strap that had been hidden in the urn, it was empty of its small occupant: a key.

  I imagined her hand clutching the key, moving toward the door over which the winged serpent sculpture stood—a place where none could pass without my consent.

  Vaspi eyed the broken bits of pottery. She might have guessed its contents, given that many a vampyre wished to go into that secret chamber with me.

  She sniffed the air. “She can’t go far. Someone will catch her, I am certain of it. Mortals are easy to find. Her stink alone will leave a trail like a comet.”

  “She’s not an ordinary mortal.” I got up and checked my other belongings to see what had been disturbed.

  “If she were, you would have shared her with us,” Vaspi said.

  I ignored her comment. These young vampyres with only a century or two to their existences were full of themselves. In the early nineteenth century, Vaspiana had been preparing for her execution in some Baltic backwater for stealing a horse, but I saw potential in her when I gave her the Sacred Kiss of vampyrism.

  Nearly two hundred years later, she still had the urges of arrested adolescence; I could barely trust a word from her mouth. Yet Vaspi had saved me from my Extinguishing on more than one occasion. Without a quest of some kind—without a reason to guard the mortal realm—these young ones grew lazy and fought among themselves simply for entertainment.

  All this would change. I was the only one to feel it in the air, but each night that I rose, I sensed the slightest weakening of the Veil, and had felt i
t for several years.

  Something sought to come through again, and one of the signs of this was Natalia Waterhouse herself, though she did not know it.

  “Of course, she’s so special, she might have fooled even you. She may be out along some road, approaching a settlement,” Vaspi said as she began climbing the steps.

  “Natalia Waterhouse is still here,” I said. “She would not leave. If she had, my heart would be staked, and I doubt very much you’d be standing before me, either.”

  “I’d have cut her throat first,” the vampyre said, glancing back at me, a gentle snarl on her lips.

  “Where’s Daniel?”

  Daniel had been our guard, and slept above, at the doorway.

  “Hunting, I suspect,” Vaspiana said.

  “Don’t lie to me, Vaspi. Where is he?”

  I closed my eyes briefly, feeling for Vaspi in the stream that connected all vampyres to one another. If it was a web, I was the spider of my tribe—I plucked at the stream, drawing her close to me that I might read her thoughts.

  When I opened my eyes, I said, “If she’s dead, you will answer.”

  “If she’s dead,” Vaspi said, “I will be the first to applaud. But I won’t be the only one.”

  She reached the floor above, and I rushed after her. I leapt through the round opening of my tomb to see the gathering of the tribe along the arched doorways of the Temple of Lemesharra.

  They all watched me with indolent and empty expressions upon their faces. My tribe of vampyres did not appreciate the strange mortal allowed to live among them and not serve them or, at the very least, feed them.

  They, in fact, were made to serve her—to bring food from the outside world, to cook and clean, and to treat her as if she were above them in some way.

  I snarled at them with fury—though I did not have time to take on their foolishness. To say that all who occupied this fallen necropolis were under my command would be the ultimate in self-deception. They served me from an oath of loyalty, but this could mean nothing when they became a gang of ruffians—they did not like serving mortals, whom they considered mere vessels of blood.

  Leading these vampyres was like herding saber-toothed tigers at times. Their instincts were too rooted in the next sip of life force and not in their duties.

  I glanced up and down the halls, sniffing the air for the smell of mortality.

  Outside, on the steps of the temple, I glanced along the two-story flat-roofed dwellings that had not been occupied since the Priest of Blood ruled the city. I had lived for centuries, and knew the double-dealings of mortal and vampyre. For all I knew, Natalia Waterhouse might already be dead.

  Vaspiana had tacitly agreed to Daniel’s taking of Natalia. If I had told them why she was important to me, my own tribe might have torn her limb from limb.

  I should have known it would be nearly impossible to allow a mortal to live among us as she did—freely and without obligation or offering—not as our protectors did, who were also mortal. The protectors lived along the boundaries of the city, guarding our resting place from the living. Only a handful of them acted as house servants who slept nights within the ruins of the old city, though they were not allowed into the temples or the tombs. These mortals took care of matters of cleanliness—difficult among a pack of vampyres who did not always notice where they left the vessels’ bodies or care if their sleeping quarters grew filthy. The protectors who entered Alkemara rarely escaped with their lives, nor did they wish it. They were addicted to our tribe, and often begged to be bled so that they might experience the heightened pleasures that our bleeding them provided.

  Only Natalia had entered the Temple of Lemesharra, and had sat at the table in the Great Hall, feasting on the finest food and drink. No other vampyre or mortal shared my tomb as she had.

  Daniel may have been the most offended by her presence. He was barely more than a boy, and to me, he was a son. But as a son, he desired to be an only child and could not stand having a rival, in friendship or in love.

  Natalia was a threat to him—I should have recognized this. Yet, in all her nights with me, I had watched him. I had believed him, based on his demeanor. Daniel had been nothing but helpful. He had made sure that her food and water were fresh, and her wine was among the best of the cellars of the Earth.

  And yet, I should not have completely trusted him; he had been too solicitous of her.

  Daniel was a jealous youth, not more than a handful of years from his resurrection into the tribe. Even when I had drunk from him in the alleyway where I’d found him, I’d sensed a dangerous nature. I was blinded by his resemblance to someone from my own youth, someone who had extinguished long ago. I could not resist bringing him the breath of vampyrism and resurrecting him from the dead.

  I had put too much trust in him. Now, I would pay the price of this trust. If Natalia had been murdered, all of my existence would be for nothing.

  All I had dreamed, and all I had done, would be as the fallen statues of gods in some dig of an ancient city—the dust of the past and no more.

  I shouted to Vaspiana and the others to find Natalia and Daniel. “No harm shall come to them, but you must bring them both to me. She must be alive. If you have hurt her, or drunk from her, you will be drawn from the grave at morning’s first light and left beyond Alkemara’s protection!”

  I pulled Vaspi to my side using the strands of the stream. She resisted, fighting against the pressure she felt at her shoulders and back. Like a fly caught in the silk strands, she struggled against the pull, but eventually gave in and stood before me. Her long, thick braid of hair came undone, and her dark tresses fell across one side of her face.

  Her eyes were like a wolf’s as she glared at me.

  “You know where they are,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Tell me now, and I will forgive you. If you wait but another moment, I will set the protectors upon you at tomorrow’s sunrise, and you will feel the fire of Extinguishing.”

  She spat. “You love mortals too much, Falconer.”

  “Vaspi,” I said.

  She curled her lips downward as she said, “The cave, above the serpent stair.”

  “She will be alive,” I said as if in warning.

  I drew wings out from my body and rose in the great hollow mountain. I saw other vampyres rise from their tombs, their beds, their dark places. Like falcons, they flew out into the night sky, high above—and if I were to call any of them, they would return swiftly to my side.

  I would find Natalia—and Daniel—myself.

  I followed the tunnels and wormholes and caverns that snaked and curved beyond the city. I crawled across the great boulders that jutted out from the rock cliffs—they formed the serpent stair, a series of ledges that led to narrow caves. I sniffed the air—the faint mortal aroma seemed to linger there. I sensed Daniel very close—and then saw movement in one of the narrow mouths of a cave on the ledge above.

  Yes, he is here, I thought.

  3

  As I drew myself up to the cave, I saw his muscular, pale back—a rippling of alabaster—and his red hair like a beacon in the dark.

  He leaned over Natalia, his face buried at her throat.

  He was too busy with his task to sense my arrival. I only hoped I was in time to stop his thirst from taking her life. My heart seemed to beat too slowly. My fears overcame me. If she were dead, all was lost.

  If she were dead, it would be too late.

  I scrambled over to him, and wrapped my arms around his neck, and drew him from her. I knocked his head against the jagged rocks. I glanced at Natalia—she pressed her hands to her throat.

  Daniel let out a keening wail as I dragged him out of that cave onto the ample ledge beyond it. I threw him down at my feet.

  His shirt was a brown-red and his face shiny from her blood. He growled like a mad dog, and I struck him with the back of my hand. He tried to rise, but as he did so, I grasped him by the collar and threw him down again.

  “After all I did
to take you from your miserable life in Prague,” I said. “Begging for death in an alley. I made you a guardian of this world.”

  “This underworld!” He spat at me. “We could live in palaces. We could rule over men, and they would sacrifice to us, Falconer. You made me a wolf but hold against me the nature of wolves.”

  “Spoken like a foolish young man.” I slapped him across the face. “You are no wolf. Why did you do it?”

  “She tried to escape,” he whimpered.

  “Did she?” I asked. “Or did you plot for many nights, and imagine that you might lure her up just at twilight, before I would rise? Risk the last of the sun, perhaps, and drain her, as you have done to others before?”

  “That wasn’t it! She...she...” He wiped his bloodied mouth against his sleeve as he tried to come up with a lie that might convince me. “She’s a deceiver!”

  “You had to drink from her,” I said. “The one person I told you was not for any here. The one person all the tribe knows they are not to bite.”

  “They all wanted to. They did. Ask Vaspi. Ask any. They longed for her blood. I held them back. I fought them, for you. For you.” He nearly smiled, and his eyes gleamed. “I can see why you keep her for yourself. Private stock. Her blood...it’s rich. It’s not like other blood.”

  “I would stake you for such an act,” I said.

  “You taught me such acts,” he snarled, and when I moved toward him again, he flinched.

  “Jackal,” I said. “I should have expected this.”

  “A dog perhaps,” he whispered. “But a loyal dog, my master.”