by Greg Cox
In truth, he was amazed to find himself still alive. His bruised throat ached from Viktor’s unbreakable stranglehold. Lucian tried to reach up and massage his neck, only to be halted by the shackles around his wrists. The damp floor stones sent a chill through his bones, and he trembled despite himself. Hunger and thirst added to his misery. How long have I been unconscious? he wondered. Is it day or night? All he could tell for certain was that the full moon had not yet risen.
“Lucian!”
He looked up from the floor to see Sonja only a few yards away, chained to a great oak column, her arms bound uncomfortably above her head. Her brocade gown hung in tatters on her slender frame. Iron shackles held her fast. Her chestnut eyes were rimmed with red. Crimson tears ran in torrents down her porcelain cheeks. “Thank fate you’ve awoken!” she exclaimed. “I feared my father had all but killed you!”
“Sonja!” Lucian called out to her. He could not bear to see her mistreated so. Snarling like a mad dog, he tugged uselessly against the unyielding chains. “My love! What have they done to you?”
“Quiet!” Soren emerged from the shadows, silver whip in hand. Vengeful eyes shot daggers at Lucian. “Another word, and you’ll taste my whip.” He glanced ominously to one side. “And that goes for the rest of you mangy curs!”
Sobs and muttered curses reached Lucian’s ears, and he realized that he and Sonja were not the only captives in this forsaken place. Ignoring his sore neck, he peered back over his shoulders and saw, to his dismay, his fellow lycans penned behind the iron bars of a prison cell. The caged servants yelped and whined piteously despite Soren’s warning, and the foul-tempered overseer cracked his whip against the bars of the cell, striking sparks in the murky gloom. Lucian saw that the iron bars were laced with silver alloy, the better to trap the distraught lycans inside. Along with several other mothers, Olga clutched her baby to her chest, trying her best to quiet the frightened infant’s cries. Lucian also spotted Grushenka among the prisoners, although Leyba was conspicuously missing.
No! Lucian thought. Leave them alone! His heart broke for the other lycans; it was not just that they should suffer for his crime, if crime it was. His anger rose, supplanting any lingering fears for his own safety. Was this how the vampires repaid them, after generations of loyal service?
Measured footsteps approached the dungeon from outside. A reinforced wooden door swung open, admitting Viktor, Nicolae, and various members of the Council. Their luxurious velvet robes contrasted sharply with the dismal surroundings. Viktor’s face was frozen in a somber mien, and even Nicolae appeared sobered by the gravity of the situation. Council members murmured darkly among themselves as the regal vampires took their places at the top of a set of low steps leading down to the sunken floor of the dungeon. A large brass disk, emblazoned with ancient runes, was mounted above the arched doorway behind them.
“Father!” Sonja pleaded. “Show mercy, please. We meant no harm!”
Viktor’s head turned slowly toward his daughter. His mighty broadsword was sheathed at his side. “You are my only child,” he informed her, “and the sole inheritor of my bloodline. Yet you have left me no other choice. You have broken the Covenant. You must be judged.”
The Elder’s forbidding tone filled Lucian with dread. “Lord Viktor!” he cried out, hoping to strike a bargain with Sonja’s father. “I take full responsibility. Do whatever you wish to me, but spare your daughter!”
“Soren!” Viktor barked, not deigning to answer Lucian directly. His lip curled in contempt. “Teach this vile animal a lesson!”
“With pleasure, milord.” Soren stepped forward, uncoiling his silver whip. He sneered through his thick black beard. “I should have done this ages ago.”
Lucian braced himself for the blow he knew was coming, yet no amount of preparation could have steeled him against the searing pain that raced through his body as the whip viciously lashed his back again and again. The barbed vertebrae tore through his ragged tunic and made ribbons of his hide, burning his skin even as they sliced through his defenseless flesh, paring it to the bone. The pain was unendurable.
Chained to the post only a short distance away, Sonja twisted within her bonds and shouted desperately at her father and his dire companions. “Nooo! Leave him be!” she yelled on Lucian’s behalf. “Stop it! Stop!”
But the lashes kept coming. Behind him, over the thunderous cracks of the whip, his lycan brothers and sisters went berserk, enraged to see one of their own kind treated thus. Though caged, they threw themselves against the silver-tainted bars, growling like the untamed beasts within them. Without the moon’s liberating glow, they could not shed their human guises, yet they raged like creatures of the wild, rending their crude homespun garments and gnashing their teeth. Angry curses gave way to savage howls and roars as the wronged servants voiced their primeval wrath against their masters.
We will never forget this night, Lucian vowed, even as the merciless whip shredded his flesh anew. At last, he was left gasping on the blood-slick floor. Crimson welts showed through the gaps in his rent tunic.
Soren drew back his lash once more.
“Please, no more!” Sonja begged frantically. “You’ll kill him!”
“And what of it?” Viktor glared at her accusingly. “What does this wretched creature mean to you?”
Sonja swallowed hard. “He is my husband… and the father of my child.” She stared boldly into her father’s eyes. “Your grandchild!”
“What?” Viktor stiffened in shock. A flicker of trepidation passed across his face, and he reached for the hilt of his sword. “You are with child?” he asked in a horrified tone. “By this animal?”
Scandalized gasps escaped the Council members behind Viktor. Nicolae’s jaw dropped in astonishment.
“By my one true love,” Sonja asserted defiantly. She seemed to draw strength from the memory of their times together. “Our blessed union has conceived a miracle!”
Viktor struggled to contain himself. “Heresy,” he hissed. “Abomination!” His face twitched in revulsion before congealing into a grave and rigid expression. When he spoke again, his voice was as hard and unbending as steel. “There can be no forgiveness for what you have done, not even for the daughter of an Elder.” His hand came away from his sword. “What I do now, I do for the sake of all our kind.”
Turning his back on Sonja, he marched steadfastly toward the arched stone doorway. The other vampires stepped aside to let him pass, then filed out behind him. Their velvet robes rustled like cobwebs as they departed the dungeon, leaving Soren behind to watch over the prisoners. The heavy oaken door slammed shut, trapping Sonja, Lucian, and the lycan captives inside the fetid torture chamber.
Bloodied and exhausted, Lucian lay prostrate upon the floor, which was now sticky with his own lifeblood. Is this the end? he wondered, praying that the torment was soon to cease. Perhaps, despite his unforgiving words, Viktor would be content with Lucian’s destruction and, upon time and reflection, spare Sonja and the others. Lucian could not imagine that the wrathful Elder could condemn his only daughter forever.
By fate, she is his own flesh and blood!
The scream of protesting metal reverberated nearby, echoing throughout the cavernous chamber. Lifting his eyes, Lucian saw Soren wrestling with a heavy iron wheel mounted on the wall in a shadowy alcove at the far side of the dungeon. Soren’s silver whip was draped over his shoulders as the overseer put his back to the task before him. The corroded wheel did not want to move at first, but Soren’s determined efforts finally proved enough to crank the wheel in a clockwise direction.
Timeworn metal gears began to squeak and grind in the ceiling overhead. Panic flooded Lucian’s face as he guessed what Soren intended. Sonja also grasped what was transpiring. Her wide brown eyes stared into Lucian’s, terror-stricken.
Is this what Viktor had decreed for his daughter?
“Please, no,” Lucian whispered hoarsely, but the relentless gears kept grinding against each other. Dir
ectly above Sonja’s head, at the very apex of the domed ceiling, a circular iron hatch slowly dilated. Several yards away Soren backed deeper into the shelter of the secluded alcove. Lucian saw a glint of sunshine overhead and realized, to his horror, that it was still daylight outside.
The deadly radiance poured through the widening gap, which opened onto a vertical shaft rising the entire height of the castle.
The golden beam fell directly on Sonja, who let out a bloodcurdling scream.
No, not the sun! Not on her! Lucian lunged forward desperately, and the heavy chains snapped taut, holding him back. The iron shackles cut savagely into his flesh, yet he barely noticed the pain. He strained with all his might, working himself into a lather of blood and sweat, but there was not a damned thing he could do to save the woman he loved.
He could do nothing but watch as her pale face blackened and crumbled. Sonja tossed her head from side to side, but she could not escape the unsparing sunlight as it turned her vulnerable flesh to charcoal. Smoke rose from her flaxen hair moments before it burst into flame, turning the shrieking princess into a human torch. Her face contorted in agony, showing her fangs, and her blistering arms twisted helplessly above her head. His beloved bride was being burned at the stake, just as Lucian had always feared.
“Noooo!” he shouted like a madman, his raspy cry of despair joining hers in one final, excruciating moment of communion.
“Sonja!”
Lucian shuddered uncontrollably on the floor of the dungeon, drained of tears and emotion. Hours had passed, and the blood beneath him had long since dried. The killing sun slowly faded from the sky, and the purple glow of twilight shone through the circular hole in the ceiling.
Sonja was dead. All that remained of his beautiful and loving wife was a lifeless, gray statue of charred bone and ash. Her powdery arms were still raised above her, held in place by the unyielding iron shackles. A look of anguished sorrow, for both herself and their unborn child, was baked on the statue’s agonized features. Only a single golden shimmer added a touch of color to the bleak gray figure: Sonja’s crest-shaped pendant, still clasped around her charcoal throat.
As the last hint of sunlight disappeared from the sky, the prison door slammed open once more. Viktor entered the dungeon, garbed in somber hues of mourning. Long-faced and solemn, he made his way across the chamber to the crumbling effigy that was once his daughter. If the blackened ruin troubled him, his stony face bore no evidence of it.
Ignoring Lucian completely, he reached out and touched the gilded pendant embedded in Sonja’s ashes. His eyes watered briefly, and a look of genuine grief flashed across his face, but it passed quickly as his aristocratic countenance reassumed a cold, distant expression. He plucked the pendant from Sonja’s throat, easily snapping the delicate chain, and turned toward Lucian at last. Icy disdain and hatred smoldered in his eyes.
His callous inhumanity inflamed Lucian, who matched the Elder’s baleful gaze with a red-hot look of his own. His blood surged volcanically within his veins. “You heartless monster!”
He pounced at Viktor like the wolf he was, but the stubborn chains jerked him back once more. Viktor nodded at Soren, who emerged from the safety of his alcove now that the sun had set. The sadistic overseer fell upon Lucian at once, bludgeoning his lacerated body with devastating kicks and blows. Soren’s fists and boots crashed against Lucian like a rain of meteors until his battered form dropped back onto the damp stone floor, panting and gasping.
But though his body lay defeated, Lucian’s unquenchable fury still burned like the eternal fires of hell. “I’ll kill you,” he croaked through broken and swollen lips. “I’ll make you pay for her life, you bloodsucking devil!”
Viktor stepped forward and grabbed Lucian’s long hair. He savagely yanked the prisoner’s head back so that he could stare into Lucian’s pulped and bloody face. Viktor’s own features wrinkled in disgust.
“For you, death will come slowly. I can promise you that.” A cruel smile revealed his heinous intentions. “Forget the whip,” he instructed Soren. “Fetch me my knives.”
At that moment, through the opening in the ceiling, the full moon slid into view from behind a bank of billowing clouds. The bright lunar orb shone down on Lucian.
For once, he readily surrendered to the Change. His blood-streaked eyes turned cobalt blue, and a bitter laugh escaped his lips. Renewed strength flooded his exhausted sinews as his body gained size and weight in the space of a heartbeat. His bloodstained tunic and leggings came apart at the seams, and coarse black fur sprouted from his hide, hiding the ugly welt marks on his back. His hearing and sense of smell heightened immeasurably, so that he could practically taste the alarm in Viktor’s blood as the haughty Elder suddenly grasped his mistake.
You should never have let the moonlight find me, Lucian thought vindictively. Now the tables are turned.
The metamorphosis took place in an instant, and it was as a complete werewolf that Lucian lunged once more at his nemesis. This time, the iron chains snapped before his inhuman strength, and he leaped at Viktor, his outstretched claws preceding him. With a single swipe of his shaggy arm, he snatched the gilded pendant from Viktor’s grasp.
The Elder recoiled from the werewolf’s claws, stumbling backward across the dungeon. He bumped into the iron bars of the nearby cell, provoking a ferocious roar from within. The bestial noise alerted him to danger, and he threw himself away from the cell only seconds before a hairy arm clawed at him through the tightly spaced metal bars.
Viktor whirled around, stunned to discover that every one of the lycan prisoners had become a fully transformed werewolf. The cramped cell was now packed with growling, snapping monsters, trying like hell to chew their way through the confining iron bars. The musky scent of a score of fur-covered werewolves filled the dank, unwholesome atmosphere of the torture chamber.
While Viktor blinked in surprise, Soren charged at Lucian from across the room. Broken chains dangled from the werewolf’s wrists like decorative streamers, and he spun about with preternatural speed, sending the heavy chains slicing through the air at the oncoming vampire. The chains gave Soren a taste of his own medicine as they smacked loudly against the overseer’s midsection, shattering his ribs.
An almost-human smile distorted Lucian’s wolfen snout. It felt good to be at the other end of the whip.
Heated shouts came from outside the crypt. Lucian moved to throw the heavy wooden doors shut, but he was too late: a squad of Death Dealers, led by Nicolae, poured into the chamber, clutching silver-plated swords and pikes. “Get him!” Viktor shouted to his soldiers. “Kill that treacherous cur!”
There were too many of them, Lucian realized. Even in wolfen form, he could not stand against so many foes, not while his bestial allies still struggled to free themselves from their hateful cell. His eyes searched desperately for an escape route, coming to rest on a narrow window recessed in a dark alcove more than twenty feet above the floor. That will do! he thought gratefully.
It was a long way up, but his powerful hind legs were sufficient to the task; exploding into motion, he landed in a single pounce on the narrow stone ledge beneath the alcove. Mercifully, the upper reaches of the dungeon were built directly into the castle’s outer walls, so that the outside world beckoned no more than ten feet below him. The open forest called out from the bottom of a rocky slope.
For a moment, he lingered within the deep limestone shelf, silhouetted against the moonlight sky beyond. He looked back at Sonja’s charred remains and clutched her tiny pendant as if it were the most valuable treasure on earth.
Then he turned his murderous gaze upon Viktor himself, as the tyrannical Elder quivered with anger and frustration on the floor of the prison. Someday, Lucian vowed, you will pay for what you have done to my princess and my species.
Crossbows laden with silver bolts aimed upward at Lucian, and he realized he could tarry no longer. Turning his back on the dungeon below, he dove through the open window. The warm Apri
l wind blew against his face, ruffling his fur, as he fell through the air toward the ground below.
He hit the slope on all fours, then sprang up on two legs, standing as a man did despite the hairy pelt covering his body. He howled triumphantly at the savior moon even as angry cries and tumult erupted from behind the grim gray walls of Castle Corvinus.
Behind Lucian, the sinister fortress loomed ominously amidst the craggy Carpathian Mountains; before him, an impenetrable forest of dense pines held out the promise of safety and freedom. He loped full tilt toward the sheltering woods.
The night was broken by the heated cries and pounding footsteps of a brigade of Death Dealers stampeding out through the castle’s gate. The irate vampire warriors chased after him, hurling threats, curses, and unheeded commands at his fleeing back. Chain mail rattled loudly amid the towering pines. Silver crossbow bolts whistled through the air, coming to rest in the trunk of a bushy fir tree only inches from the werewolf’s head.
He ran from his determined pursuers as fast as his furry legs could carry him. Clutching Sonja’s precious pendant in his hairy paw, he escaped madly from his tragic past into an unglimpsed future.
Mark my words, Viktor, he thought vengefully You have not heard the last of me.
This means war!
* * *
Viktor stood on the parapet as his Death Dealers scoured the darkened forest below. Torches glowed like fireflies throughout the misty woods surrounding the castle. A full moon lit up the sky above Viktor, mocking his carelessness.
He found himself wishing that Sonja had died at the keep along with her mother. Better that she had perished then, an innocent victim of a mortal mob, than let herself be seduced by an unclean animal. At least then I would not have been forced to end her life myself!
