by Kirk Zurosky
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 Kirk Zurosky
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Daddy Issues Publishing
kirkzurosky.com
Edited and Designed by Girl Friday Productions
www.girlfridayproductions.com
Project Management: Alexander Rigby
Cover illustration: Carly Milligan
Design: Paul Barrett
ISBN (hardcover): 978-17346252-5-7
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7346252-4-0
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-7346252-3-3
To all those learning life’s lessons.
Prologue
The hooded man picked his way along the cliffs, keeping his head down since the light from the blazing sun irritated his eyes. He was also looking down so he wouldn’t trip over an errant rock or hidden root and drop the precious treasure clutched so tightly to his chest. Above his head, a seagull squawked, and the ocean breeze brought the scent of salt to his nose, together triggering unpleasant memories from long ago. He hadn’t been to this place in years, but the irony was not lost on him that the cave he was seeking represented the lowest point in his illustrious life. Because what he held so carefully in his arms would help him achieve the greatness that he had only dreamed about before the universe consigned him to the living death of the here and now.
The familiar sight of bleached rat bones mixed in with the rocks and roots on the trail let him know he was getting close, and after a few minutes more, the cavern was finally in view. Picking his way back into the darkness of a place he knew by feel, the resting place for his prize possession became visible in the eerie light of the phosphorescent fungus on the cave walls. He kissed his treasure and set it down carefully. “I will be back for you when it is your time,” he rasped. “Together, you and I, who were joined by cruel fate centuries ago, will wreak our revenge upon this world. And, we are going to start with the downfall of the one and only Sirius Sinister.”
Chapter 1
I hurtled through the wormhole, leaving Hades’s throne room and feeling a great rush of oddly frigid air before I was flung headfirst into a snowdrift. What? How could my vampire Maltese, Garlic, and I be stuck in a blasted snowdrift? Well, Hades’s last words were to enjoy the cold and that it was to die for. The Lady of the Underworld’s dark humor had sent us on a little icy escapade before we got back to the warmth of Sa Dragonera. The harsh bite of a cold wind blew right through my breeches, and my back half was now being chomped on by the enthusiastic teeth of winter. I spit out some snow and became conscious of Garlic huddled close to me, wriggling to get free. I pushed out with my arms and freed us from our snowy tomb. My boots dropped onto a rocky ledge covered with ice and snow, and it took all of my vampire agility not to slide off the edge to a painful landing on the jagged rocks hundreds of feet below. I looked around and saw nothing but beautiful azure sky and massive snowcapped mountains in every direction. My wager was that Hades had sent me as far from warmth as possible, and with mountains this bloody high, I had to be in the Himalayas.
We had landed halfway up one of the aforementioned massive snowcapped mountains, and I could see down to where a patch of brown marked where the snow line ended. I pulled my now all too thin cloak around me, and set an unhappy, completely snow-covered Garlic down on the ice, and she promptly added a little color to it in her disgust. She opened her mouth to unleash another wormhole. “Good girl,” I said. “Sa Dragonera and warmth, here we come!” The last place we wanted to be was here!
I stepped carefully into the wormhole, hoping that it would not return us to the nether realm that we had just escaped. Family and warmth, then Hedley Edrick’s school—yes. Eternal inferno—a definite no! Instead, we found ourselves buried in the same snowdrift we had just escaped, but now we were buried even deeper. Garlic barked angrily, and I had to agree with her sentiment. “Let’s try that again,” I said, petting her softly to calm her down and get her focused. “For some reason, we cannot get to Sa Dragonera. Think of Harvis’s barn. That is the first place you ever traveled from by crystal. You have been there a lot. You know its smells as well as that barn in London where I first found you. So, either place will do! Just not here!”
She yelped happily and barked again, forming another wormhole. Her collar was completely covered in snow, but surely that couldn’t be messing with her focus, and we jumped through the wormhole together in our eagerness to escape this winter wasteland. I did not see Sa Dragonera, or Harvis’s barn, or even that first barn in London—just snow. Lots of snow. A forlorn vampire Maltese howled as we slowly dug our way out of the snowdrift once again. I rather think she even preferred the heat of Hell to this forsaken place. She barked even louder at the wind, and I worried her canine expression of displeasure would bring down half a mountain of snow on us.
“Easy girl,” I said, but this time she had been answered by what sounded like a rabid and hungry dire wolf. The challenge of the beast came again, but this time closer. It was quickly answered by its pack, and from the angry and guttural sound of the howls, it was a pack of big and very hungry wolves. Understandably, I was well over all things wolf. I brushed the snow off of Garlic’s collar with my bare, cold hands, and saw that the once red crystals had turned to black. Hmmm, any guess as to the perpetrator of such a dastardly deed? The chances of us seeing family and then heading to Hedley’s school were now about as remote as where we were!
“Damn you, Hades,” I said to the mountains and the heavy snow which had just begun to fall. “You just could not help yourself, could you?” There was no answer but the whistling wind announcing a blizzard was coming. We had to get down this mountain before it struck and we ended up frozen in place, preserved for all antiquity like a couple of statues, unless the wolves got to us first. We picked our way along the ledges, half sliding, half jumping down the mountain. We were making great time, and the exertion was keeping us warm—at least that’s what I kept telling myself.
The leader of the pack howled again, but this time he was farther away, and Garlic snorted happily hearing the frustration in his voice. These wolves had not tracked vampires before, and clearly they had thought us to be easy prey. I shuddered against the cold for a moment, considering stopping to confront the wolves to add a fur coat to my wardrobe. I hated to kill even one of the beasts, since they were just trying to survive in this desolation. But then again, so was I. Fortunately for the wolves, I spotted a stone-walled monastery—presumably Tibetan—down below us on the mountain, and Garlic and I doubled our pace to get to the safety and warmth it represented. The snow pelting us in the face was stinging like thousands of angry white bees, and even my vampire constitution was struggling to keep my handsome face warm and free of frostbite. I would be a whole lot less attractive without the tip of my nose, and kissing was something I preferred to do—with lips.
We reached the small plateau in front of the monastery and found a wide path had been cleared, leaving mounds of snow piled to either side. My assassin’s intuition was screaming that this was a trap, but as I looked down at the shivering Maltese by my wet, cold feet, I became willing to take my chances. A wolf howl sounded suddenly close behind us, and Garlic and I broke into a sprint, heading for the monaster
y gate.
Just as we neared it, we saw, dropping down from the wall and landing soundlessly on the snow below, a solitary figure garbed in white furs, hat, and a scarf covering all the face but leaving a small slit for the eyes. It backed away from the wall slowly and turned, freezing in place as it saw Garlic and me, who were simply just freezing. “Is the front door broken?” I called to the figure in Tibetan. In my experience anytime you left a building by climbing over a wall, you were either escaping, or murder, theft, or some other form of subterfuge was in play. “I don’t know what language you speak,” I said, this time in Spanish. “But there are some hungry wolves we are going to have to deal with unless we get back into the monastery!”
“Rakshas!” the definitely female voice shouted. She pointed behind us. “Rakshas!”
I turned and saw a pack of the biggest, nastiest, angriest, and apparently hungriest wolves I had ever laid eyes on, pacing at the edge of the plateau, just licking their chops, thinking about the prey they had cornered. It was almost enough to make me a cat person right then and there—well, almost.
“Oh right,” I said. “Rakshas.” I knew some Tibetan, but I didn’t know what Rakshas meant. But I did know how to deal with hungry wolves and drew out the Blade of Truth, which reflected the falling snow so well that it appeared to be part of the storm. But the wolves had no problem seeing it, and Garlic let out a vicious growl that belied her small stature, and showed her fangs that were more than a match for the many canines of the mountains. The pack leader yelped and fled back up the mountain, his mates sprinting behind him.
“Well that was easy,” I said to the girl and to Garlic, this time in French. “So much for the Rakshas. They ran away like the mangy mutts they are, right Garlic?”
“No,” the girl said, shaking her head. “No.” She looked up at the wall, and put a gloved hand on it as if contemplating climbing back up the smooth surface. Then she ran to the gate and pulled on it, once, twice, but to no avail.
“Now you have the right idea,” I said in German. “Is there another way to get into the monastery?”
She did not answer but took a deep breath and sprinted down the path toward us. And that was when the plateau erupted, sending huge chunks of snow and ice skyward to crash down all around us. The girl skidded to a stop no more than a few feet from me, and her scarf dropped to her neck. I found myself looking into a very pretty face—a face with skin the color of the snow and whose big, beautiful brown eyes suddenly went wide with absolute horror.
“What?” I said. “What is it?” Garlic growled a warning and bared her teeth. From out of the snowstorm crept several white-furred, apelike creatures, easily fifteen feet tall with huge hands, massive muscles and, by the look on their fanged, crazed faces, a whole lot of bad attitude. “Oh, those are the Rakshas,” I said, pushing the girl behind me and Garlic, and raising the Blade of Truth. “Stand back! One taste of the truth, and these overgrown mountain monkeys will run like those wolves did!”
I screamed my best challenge, bared my fangs, and waved the sword wildly, hoping to scare them off and avoid a fight. The Blade of Truth glowed white and then became so bright that I had to avert my eyes. When I saw that the light from the sword had faded, I realized with horror that the Blade of Truth had disappeared from my hand, leaving me quite unarmed. “Are you kidding me?” I yelled to the cosmos. “How is this moment not one of need? Who could use the Blade of Truth more than us right now? What am I supposed to do, throw snowballs at them?” The cosmos did not answer. I turned to Garlic, seeing she was a snarling mass of small white fur and gnashing fangs ready for a fight. The Rakshas came closer, surrounding us, and I realized I was still very cold, very wet, and now I was very much in trouble.
So I did what I figured these snow monkeys would not expect from any sane, and seemingly unarmed, mountain traveler—I attacked. With a wink at Garlic, I leaped forward, sliding under the awkward grasping hands of one of the Rakshas, and placed a perfectly aimed kick to the side of its knee. It felt like I was kicking the side of a mountain, but the Raksha howled in pain and collapsed on the snow in a heap like a great furry snowdrift. Garlic hurtled forward and sliced an Achilles tendon of the nearest Raksha, dropping it to the ground. The other Rakshas froze, clearly stunned by the sight of the pure white snow now stained crimson by the blood of one of their own.
I saw our cute new friend was still smack dab in the midst of the stunned snow monkeys. “Come on,” I said to Garlic. “Now is our chance.” I took down another Raksha with a swift kick to where I guessed his furry baby-Raksha makers would be, and Garlic found the leg of another to be a tasty treat. I grabbed the girl by the hand. “Let’s go,” I said. “Down the mountain! Before they regroup! We have to outrun them!”
“You can’t!” she said to me in perfect Spanish, pulling me back toward the monastery with surprising strength in her grip. “You can’t outrun them!” She couldn’t intend to go back to the locked, gated, and high-walled monastery?
“What do you mean we can’t?” I exclaimed. “What choice do we have?”
She looked at me blankly, or as it turns out quite knowingly, as the futility of outrunning these beasts became quite clear when I turned back to the Rakshas and saw that they were changing right before my eyes. No longer furry and simian, the Rakshas that Garlic had drawn blood from rose from the snow, shimmering and shifting like a snowstorm. I could see patches of red stains where Garlic had cut them, but they were bleeding no longer. Behind them rose the two beasts I had crippled, and together with the other Rakshas, they rushed us like a great avalanche of fangs and claws.
“Run,” I shouted. “Run!” But they were on us in an instant, and despite the claws I parried and dodged, other claws raked my body all over, shredding my clothes and opening wound after gaping wound. I dropped to my knees in pain and saw my own blood run scarlet upon the snow. Garlic had shot ahead, but returned and let out a massive bark, which blasted into the storm of Rakshas, momentarily scattering them. I turned toward the girl, bracing to see her cut to ribbons by these foul beasts, but instead saw her standing there with nary a scratch on her alabaster-white and impenetrable skin. She was a faerie!
She looked at me with those beautiful brown eyes and shook back her cowl, sending waves of white hair cascading over her shoulders. Her white fur coat hung in tatters on her torso, which she discarded in one fluid motion. I gasped both in pain and admiration, for she was clad in some sort of one-piece garment that showed every inch of a muscular, voluptuous, and literally diamond-hard frame. Our gazes locked for a brief second, and I took strength from what I felt in return. All along she had not been in fear of the Rakshas, as they could not harm her, but she had known all too well what they could do to me and Garlic.
I struggled to my feet, and Garlic stood growling between me and the Rakshas that were reforming, getting ready to attack once again. On they came, and I summoned every ounce of my ebbing strength and ran toward the monastery. Garlic stayed beside me, barking volleys of sound at the Rakshas who quickly exploded into a thousand fragments of ice before reforming—this time in but an instant. But many more claws had gotten to me and done more damage. I was not going to make it to the monastery gate. I fell to the ground and rolled on my back, the hard cold rock of the plateau jagging into my back. Garlic skidded to a stop, and I saw she, too, was cut and heavily bleeding. But instead of saving herself, she leaped upon my chest, ready to defend me to the bitter, cold end. Our blood ran together, which seemed fitting if this was to be our ultimate end, and it pooled on the snow beneath me. My eyes closed of their own volition, and all I wanted was merciful sleep to come and take me. Garlic let out a low growl, but she wasn’t barking in the direction of the oncoming demons.
Groggy from blood loss, I forced my eyes open. I looked toward the edge of the plateau and saw walking toward me a little girl, her blonde hair braided into pigtails. She wore only a simple ivory tunic, and her bare feet did not s
eem bothered by the biting chill of the snow that was slowly numbing my pain. She dragged behind her a rag doll, and the barest trace of a smile creased her lips. Was I deliriously imagining meeting Maria?
An angry shout from the faerie drew my eyes from the child, and I saw that the faerie had pulled a jeweled dagger from her belt. She did not attack the Rakshas with it, but merely glared angrily at me—like she thought this attack from the snow demons was my fault—before she hurled it high in the air over the monastery, where it disappeared in a great explosion of golden light. I raised my head, and I could almost feel the cold, fetid breath of the Rakshas as they rushed Garlic and me to deliver their killing strokes, but they simply had stopped the moment the faerie threw the dagger.
I could not believe it! The Rakshas had not randomly attacked us. They were the guardians of the temple. It seemed the beautiful faerie was a thief! She had clearly gone through great lengths to steal the jeweled dagger from the temple. But why did she return it? Why not escape with her prize and leave me to the Rakshas? The thief darted to the side of the plateau. She shook her head as if in disbelief and smiled, blowing a kiss to me before she jumped over the edge, with the Rakshas now in pursuit. If I lived one thousand years, I would never understand women.
With the Rakshas gone, the storm abated immediately, and I could see the sun setting behind one of the mountain peaks, and with every second the air seemed to grow colder and colder. I could feel my heart beating strong, but every beat was pushing more and more of my blood upon the snow. That thousand years was about to be a thousand seconds. Garlic whimpered and curled up on my chest, licking my many wounds as best she could. Then, the triumphant howls of the wolves echoed as they made their return. It was only going to be minutes before they wrought their revenge on Garlic and me and tore us to shreds in a victory feast that we would never recover from.
