The Strigoi Chronicles Box Set

by Nya

  “Damnation, we’re going to need more guns.”

  Michel chuckled but grew serious again. “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. What else do you care about?”

  There were a shitload of answers to that, and only one that might compute: Aveline du Languedoc, my erstwhile maman. On that I would be wrong, very wrong indeed.

  The man in Armani managed to knock me speechless when he spoke, with an intensity that nearly broke me.

  “You, my son. I care about you.”

  Chapter Six

  The traverse through the first barrier went unremarked as they might say in a book. Unremarked because Michel du Velours once more threw me a curve ball, a bit of sleight-of-hand, now you hear it now you don’t…

  I care about you, my son…

  The vomiting came later, after we’d pulled over at a rest area to change and retool for whatever was waiting for us.

  Fane had put himself in harm’s way more than once, always protecting my sorry ass. He’d cared, of that I was convinced. Maybe he even loved me, but I hesitated to go quite that far because if I did, it meant I might be worth it. Worth someone’s consideration. Someone’s trust.

  If I had commitment issues, there were solid reasons behind them: a mother who bore me, then unburdened herself at the earliest opportunity under the guise of protecting me from an evil demon. In truth, Maman’s family had persuaded her to keep me on as a curiosity and potential asset. They ponied up the resources to park me at Cîteaux Abbey with an annuity that provided for my upkeep in perpetuity.

  If it had been up to Aveline du Languedoc, I’d have been pitched into the Ouche without a by-your-leave or a wicker basket.

  The thought of that still left me with watery bowels and a sullen attitude about life in general.

  Pops unloaded two duffle bags, handed me one and indicated we should head into the truck stop to avail ourselves of the facilities. A minion drove off with the Mercedes, ostensibly to fuel it, put air in the tires and run it through the attached carwash.

  We were on level one, the transparent plane, mimicking topside but with an interesting mix of demon and human. The one with a ‘Last Gas for Three Inter-dimensional Planes’ sign over the entry way. I assumed that included diesel.

  The facilities consisted of a fairly well-appointed rest/changing room with showers, condoms in dispensers and hair dryers. A raggedy couch, coffee table and a fifty-inch flat screen television rounded out the amenities.

  When the Demon King entered, the rabble left. Watching them go brought a smile. A few, no doubt, would return once we were gone, if for no other reason than to change their shorts.

  I had no shorts to change so it was with some trepidation that I held up the leather pants with a very prominent heavy-gauge zipper. Been there, done that, had the scar to prove it. I looked up to find mine Père smirking. Apparently Rafe had given him a full report, complete with PowerPoint slides.

  I was notoriously difficult to humiliate, but that one came close to winning Dreu’s personal best moment to forget.

  Pointing to the duffle, he said, “Why don’t you try the athletic supporter?”

  After rooting around, I found the device. And a set of black shorts.

  Pops said, “Those are compression shorts.”

  Of course they were. Despite being lean to the point of mean, I saw no reason why I’d need compression. I had zilch body fat and zilch muscle. What was there to squeeze?

  Then I held up the plastic thingee and moaned, “You have got to be kidding me. Nutty Buddy?”

  Working hard at keeping a straight face, my cover model father explained slowly, as if to a retarded child, “It’s polycarbonate, like what’s in bullet-resistant glass.”

  “Resistant. Not proof.”

  I was good at arguing semantics, not so good at figuring out how to mount the device without elastic or safety pins. All I saw was an anatomically correct bit of plastic that was cool to the touch, hard as granite and somewhat optimistic in the sizing. Not that I’d admit to that.

  Pops shrugged into the girdle and slid his matching Buddy between compression and well-endowed.

  I think I blushed.

  While he was smoothing on his bridle leather skin-tights, I wriggled my way into an appreciation for women’s issues, adjusted my assets and prepared for shallow breathing for the remainder of our adventure. That would satisfy demon Dreu’s need to ape human anatomy. And I thanked the fates that bladder control wouldn’t interfere with our prime directive, whatever it was. Dad had yet to share.

  The leather pants slithered on, zipped up without incident and rested low on my hip bones, leaving me with an urge to pose for a fashion shoot, juvenile bare-chested and hairless.

  Ralph Lauren, eat your heart out.

  A tee-shirt, black for him, a fetching dull gray for me, followed. Leather-jacketed and Doc Marten booted, we made quite the dynamic duo.

  On the other hand, he scared the crap out of me. And that was before he unloaded the hardware.

  “Your hands are smaller,” and thanks so very much for pointing out yet again that size matters, “so the Glock 26 might suit you.” He handed it over, then flipped a holster and what looked like a flashlight device in my direction.

  Curious, I held the light up and asked, “What’s this?”

  “It’s a GTL tactical light with both a visible red dot and an infrared laser.”

  “Um, two points of interest.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, I can see perfectly well when it’s pitch black. And two, I’m not Rambo.”

  “Not where we’re going.” He turned away and continued to strap on a third world country’s complete inventory of portable armament.

  I had a vicious looking knife that might double as a razor should I ever decide stubble wasn’t a viable fashion statement. The Glock holster with straps fit nicely under my left arm, not bulky enough to ruin the lines of the jacket, and accessible after my liege-lord suggested that handle-out was a more efficient option.

  I swear he had tears in his eyes, either from trying not to laugh at dumbass Dreu or from ruing the day his volley of sperm had finally met their target. Or both.

  Obsessive to a fault, I neatly folded my jeans and other items into the duffle. Pops kicked his duds aside and motioned for me to do the same, growling, “Leave it.” He strode out to the energy drinks aisle, selected a five pack of midget bottles and a handful of shrink-wrapped deer jerky, and exited the store.

  The teenaged human clerk gawped but knew better than to demand payment. Opening my jacket I flashed the carry-concealed and scented on the whiff of urine and abject terror. There was going to be a long line for the washroom.

  Outside, the minion handed over the keys and aspirated a ‘thank you for letting me live, Sire’. Michel du Velours ignored the creature and asked me instead, “Are you quite done?”

  Ignoring his snide remark, I deviled him with, “Can I drive?” and he gave me the ‘when pigs fly’ look. I settled into the seat and gulped when he said, “Strap in.”

  Oh boy.

  The terrain was unlike any I’d ever seen, flat as a pancake but with buttes rising on either side of a four lane highway, then falling away to a featureless plain. In the distance, mountains reared up, the tops coated with snow.

  Large rigs, bigger than anything I’d ever encountered, spun by us at ridiculous speeds and Pops was no slouch with the gas pedal.

  I asked, “Where are we?”

  “Right now, we’re in Wyoming.”

  Dreu the cartographer did a quick mental shuffle through the card catalog and came up with, “No shit, we’re in America?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You want to explain that again?”

  “The walls thin along this stretch.” He pointed to the right, or starboard if we were on a vessel, and explained, “Same as up there.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Montana and Idaho.”

  Right, t
hat made perfect sense. It also explained why accusing someone of being in their own private Idaho was like pointing the finger at nutcases and survivalists. Thin walls did that. And it went a long way toward explaining the intermix of humans and demons on either side of that transparent divide.

  It also clarified what might appear to be a little problem of inbreeding but was in truth more an issue of unrestricted trolling for female partners in a demon population overrun with creatures of the male persuasion.

  Since the old man was in a sharing mood, I pestered with, “So we’re here … why exactly?”

  “I need to see a friend.”

  “You don’t have friends.” There was no need to remind myself to bite my tongue on that gaff because the ole fangs extended and rammed hard against my bottom lip, releasing a satisfying flood of tasty antigens.

  Michel du Velours did not cringe but there was no mistaking that I’d hit home with an unpleasant fact of life for a demon lord.

  I was about to sorry my way out of that verbal pickle, but Pops addressed the point as he always did, coming at it sideways.

  “Constantin operates a chain of gambling establishments, nominally owned by certain Native American tribes currently unrecognized by the Federal government.”

  “The topside government, you mean, right?” It wasn’t clear how far this transparency thing extended.

  I expected him to say ‘of course’ but he didn’t.

  He continued, “Without official recognition those groups are little more than private associations and thus subject to federal statutes and federal taxing agencies.”

  For me that sounded like a big ‘so what.’ I asked, “What exactly does this Constantin do?”

  “He provides assimilation opportunities, allowing the groups in question to become wards of the government and therefore having their interests fall under the aegis of federal welfare.”

  “Not following.”

  “That’s not important.”

  The traffic had picked up so Pops took a few minutes to guide us around some unwieldy-looking recreational vehicles caravanning westbound. When we found a clear section, he set the cruise control and stretched to relieve his bunched muscles. As nice as the vehicle was, the interior space was still on the small side for a demon armed to the teeth.

  To show I wasn’t completely useless, I offered, “Would I be wrong in guessing that you provided that venture capital to Constantin?”

  He nodded yes and said, “Constantin is a hybrid, half-demon, half-human. The human half is Arapaho.” When he glanced at me, it was clear I didn’t have a clue, so he explained that the tribe shared a reservation with the Eastern Shoshone and that’s where we were headed. More or less.

  He finished up with, “It’s complicated.”

  I was getting that.

  An overhead sign indicated a turnoff at Rawlins. We took it and sped up a narrow two-lane, angling roughly north-northwest. Pops had backed off to eighty, the hairpin turns and grades shutting down all conversation.

  It was a good thing. The scenery was jaw-dropping stunning and untamed, even for someone weaned on the Alps and the Carpathians. The UV was also getting to me, the altitude enough to let in sufficient unfiltered wavelengths to cook me to medium rare. My hands and face were nearing second degree burns and it hurt like a sonofabitch.

  So I complained, “I’m getting burnt to a crisp,” and it was just a wee exaggeration, “so do you mind if I crawl in the back and go into stasis for a while?”

  “No, shit, damn it to hell!” Pops swerved to avoid a rig taking up more than its half of the middle of the road. “Damn tandem tankers. Son of a fu—”

  I thought about asking him if we were there yet. Or telling him I had to pee. Either of those would have landed me at the bottom of the steep canyon whose walls we labored up, even with three hundred and two horsepower and upgraded torque.

  Burying my face and hands against the rear bench seat, I let myself fade to black, protected by the darkened windows from the worst of the glare. He’d wake me when we arrived. But if I was very lucky, he’d forget I was back there and go off to deal with his mystery mission with Constantin, leaving me and my Glock in peace.

  My last memory was imaging this hybrid creature intoning, “You will be assimilated,” and thinking maybe I did watch far too much TV.

  ****

  “Dreu.”

  “Wake up.”

  “Now, dammit!”

  Stasis was like doing heroin for the first time, euphoric and warm and comfortable but a burn out when coming down, bottoming onto a plateau of pain that took both my halves, vamp and demon, into epic fail territory if I couldn’t grab control fast enough.

  I was at that point, disoriented and tingling with nerve endings flashing like a miasmic furnace hot enough to melt glass.

  “Wh-what’s happening?”

  My tongue felt thick, like I’d licked coal dust. Sulfurous and throat-gagging. There was a heartbeat but so slow as to be nearly non-existent and I wondered if I was dying. I’d been close enough too many times not to recognize the symptoms, yet this was different. There was an awareness of self that made no sense, a clarity of focus and a desperation to survive without knowing or understanding the particulars. Out-of-body. And if I couldn’t regain control, I might end up out of my mind.

  “It’s all right, boy. Just breathe.”

  Breathe? With what? Lungs that didn’t function? A heart gone muscle-dead, refusing to siphon platelets into capillaries that fired off electrical charges, allowing me to mimic movement and establishing some resemblance to being alive?

  My vamp half was drowning in sorrow and contrition, the demon half had yet to wake up.

  I whispered, “I’m screwed,” and made to say my goodbyes but the man in Armani jerked me out of the vehicle and hurled me to the ground.

  I bounced and lisped, “Fuck, why’d thu do that?”

  My sire knelt beside me, taking my chin in his fingers and pinching. Hard. The pain was nearly enough to reassemble the bits that were me. If ever someone wanted to know what it was like to be transported, Star Trek style, I had chapter and verse at my fingertips.

  “Come on, sit up. You’ll feel better.”

  Fangs retracting enough to allow coherent speech, I grimaced and complained, “Better than what exactly?”

  “Better than being disapparated.”

  He lifted me off the ground and propped me against the vehicle. We were no longer outside in the conventional sense, but rather in a space that bubbled between the dimensions, neither topside nor on tier number one. It also appeared to be night time, judging from the shimmering wall of stars dancing about in an overhead aquarium of stellar species pulsing with energies I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  I wondered if mine Père had drugged me with some psychotropic substance because stoned didn’t touch how spaced-out and high I felt. My consciousness ping-ponged between vamp and demon, never staying long enough to count as a conversation between my errant halves.

  I also had a ginormous erection.

  Pops said, “You’ll get used to it.”

  “What, the supersized cock or feeling like shite?”

  That both predicaments presented a problem spoke to my state of disorientation and dismay. It felt a lot like someone had attached a bicycle tire pump to my phallus and inflated it to maximum allowable dimensions.

  “That’s why you have the extra-large Nutty Buddy.” He said it with a perfectly straight face, but he did glance away quickly. I assumed to compose himself.

  I cogitated on that for a bit, until he said, “Stay here,” and moved away, leaving me and my disapparated self to argue over re-assimilation.

  If I was dreaming, I needed to wake up, stat. If I wasn’t, I wanted Michel du Velours to do the honorable thing: kill me, mercifully and with finality. Fane would understand. Especially if he saw my inflated assets.

  My whole revenge scenario faded into the background. I was sorry to see it go but needs must as th
ey say. What replaced it was an insistent demand to ditch the compression panties and my Mr. Nutty Buddy, find an orifice large enough to accommodate my new dimensions and have at it for as long as it took. Grizzlies, bison, small mine openings… The vamp half eeuwed at the notion of bestiality, demon-me perked with interest.

  Pops handed me spare clips for my diminutive Glock. I stuffed them into jacket pockets, no longer feeling quite as inadequate with my size. What did it matter if I was a rotten shot? I could always club my quarry to death with my phallus.

  He asked, “You ready?”

  “For what?”

  He turned and strode toward the shimmering gelatinous wall. The last thing I heard was him saying, “We’re going in hot.”

  Chapter Seven

  I went in tentatively, mincing like a drag queen on stilettos, the Glock snugged securely in its holster with the safety on.

  Michel du Velours strode ahead of me, confident. And tall. Very, very tall.

  I wondered at the ‘we’re going in hot.’ The odds were good mine Père wasn’t talking about the weather, though in truth the scorching heat from the daytime had turned the asphalt, over which we trod with purpose, into a gummy consistency, sucking on the soles of our boots with a grim determination. A hot wind blew in swirls, picking up speed in the mini-canyons between oversized duallys and muscle cars that were nothing more than junkers.

  Whispering, “Where are we?’ brought the expected silence.

  Where was a largish building with cinder block walls, no windows and a revolving door toward which we moved at the speed of oh shit. A canopy of sorts provided improvised shade for the daytime; during the night hours it seemed superfluous. A few minions lounged against the wall, smoking, scratching their balls. They’d yet to notice their liege-lord.

  It was entertaining when they did.

  Inside, the air turned sharply cooler, to be replaced by light pollution, a din of Wagnerian proportions and a concierge who not only recognized Michel du Velours but had the good sense to press the ALARM! button.