The Hand of Grethia: A Space Opera

by Guy Antibes

  Anoria missed Tubal Proctor. He had changed his name long ago, when he withdrew from the Recovery Team. Some of them said he had lost his nerve. Anoria never pushed him for a reason, but he had always kept in touch with Lorian and her. Now he wasn’t only their last friend, Tubal was the last Valirian besides both of them. Anoria pressed her lips together and blinked her eyes. She rubbed a bit of wetness from them. This was no time to get emotional. After they had destroyed the coven, she could smile or cry and do whatever she wanted.

  The hideous Ostreyans, he said? She wondered if the Ostreyans thought of them as hideous Valirians? She knew that humans would, if they knew their true nature. His words had sobered her mood. There were aspects to living on Earth that she hated. “If we could only return to Valir and live the way we were meant to.”

  “Tubal still thinks there are escapees from other planets here, you know. Perhaps one of them actually kept their ship intact when they landed—”

  “Unlike the incompetent Valirian Recovery Team and the escaped Ostreyans, you mean?” Anoria showed half a smile. She still remembered the harrowing descent into Mediterranean Sea four hundred years ago. Earth’s protective magnetic belts had scrambled their control systems, just as it had the Ostreyans’ purloined vessels.

  Lorian shrugged. He had such a magnificent shrug. She could never stay angry or depressed around him for long “We will find a way. We are Valirians,” Lorian said, smiling. “We are incredibly rich, by human standards, and can do whatever we want. That’s all I want to say about it. Let’s concentrate on tonight’s mission. Tomorrow is another day and we will talk then, okay?” he said. He pulled her close. “A good luck kiss.”

  ~

  They tied their horses to the back of a parked carriage. No one stood watching guard on a night like tonight. If there were no clouds there would have been no moon showing. In the hour they traveled, one foot of snow had fallen. Their uniforms protected them from the cold, but Anoria blew on her frozen hands while Lorian did the same.

  No drivers or guards roamed around the ranks of carriages. The billowing breaths of blanketed horses cluttered up the air. It seemed like the Ostreyans had lit up every room in the King’s House. She could imagine all of the rooms cluttered with human bodies. She’d seen the aftermath of their blood orgies before.

  Snow spotted their black uniforms and their black hair and faces. Anoria could barely see Lorian with her normal eyes, but his light violet aura blazed, lighting the way to the back of lonely two-story mansion.

  “Dampen your aura, the Ostreyans will easily see you in the dark, Lorian,” she said as she adjusted a control on her uniform. “See? Now I’m part of the shadow and you’re not.”

  Anoria wondered whatever possessed King Ludwig II of Austria to build a house so far away from anything? The smallest of his castles, it boasted one huge room on the second floor. She could easily see the Ostreyans killing the Bavarian king just to maintain a place to meet. Lorian had suspected the Ostreyans of a close relationship with the monarch, but they had never bothered to investigate Ludwig’s untimely death.

  Lorian chuckled. “You always save me from being defeated by details.” His aura turned into a dim lavenderish haze. His uniform’s controls had weakened in the last century. “That’s going to have to be enough. Let’s go.” He checked the gun at his hip and then slid out the extensions of his fingernails from the middle and ring finger of his hands and examined his needlelike appendages. “Not frozen solid.” His face had turned grim.

  Anoria did the same. She’d take care of her share of Ostreyans tonight. “I’m ready.”

  “Here,” Lorian said, as he jiggled a window open with a knife. He opened it and slipped inside. Anoria followed.

  They exited the room and stepped over the random bodies in the hallway. The Ostreyans had finished their meeting and had commenced to feed on their servants. She had thought their enemy’s chronic impatience might have been culled from the existing survivors of their race, but evidently not. They turned a corner.

  An Ostreyan hunched over a woman’s body. He turned around and hissed. His own fingernails extended, dripping with blood. Ostreyans used their nails to siphon blood out of their victims, whereas Valirians only needed a touch to feed on a victim’s life-force.

  Lorian grabbed the Ostreyan as he tried to climb over the woman and scamper up the stairs, but Lorian’s iron grip held him fast with one hand and covered his mouth with the other. Anoria quickly put her hand to the Ostreyan’s neck and pumped a touch of her life-force into him. It never took much. Valirian life-force was a deadly poison to the vampiric Ostreyans. Death took the Ostreyan in a second. He slumped over his victim.

  Lorian checked the woman. “She’s about gone.” He shrugged and put his fingernails to the back of her neck and drank in the remainder of her life. He shivered. “I know you don’t like me doing that, but we’ll need as much as we can get tonight. Promise me you’ll do the same.”

  Anoria reluctantly agreed and followed him up the wide stairway. She had taken enough life-force in her time on Earth, but she had always dreaded stealing life. Lorian once felt as she did, but he had long since cast off any reluctance in extracting the life-force from humans. He disappointed her in so few things, but that was one of them.

  They could now hear the muffled sounds of reveling in the upper room. They reached the top of the wide stairway and stopped. Dietrich’s body had been nailed to one set of double doors. She looked at Lorian.

  “Betrayed?” she said.

  Lorian shook his head with seeming sadness, “I told him to leave Partenkirchen. If he would have only listened. Even if he didn’t willingly betray us, I don’t think he would have withheld very much information after that.” Lorian looked at the body and pursed his lips.

  “They know we’re here,” she said the obvious. “Do we proceed?”

  He flashed her one of his half smiles and nodded. “We’ll just have to be more deadly than they are.” Lorian took her by the hand and led her to a set of doors leading outside. “We’ll go outside and then invade the room in dramatic fashion from the front balcony. Even though they know we are here, we will do the unexpected.”

  Anoria nodded. Lorian had flash and style in everything he did. No lurking or stalking. He approached every problem straight on. Sometimes she wondered how he had endured so long while their companions fell to the Ostreyans. Perhaps she had something to do with that. They were such a magnificent team. Tubal had even said so.

  The Turkish Room, as the late Ludwig II had named it, had two huge doors, facing one of the largest mountains in the Alps. He led her outside, and then along the full length of the house, creeping along the slick roof that extended from the ground floor. They reached the wide balcony and climbed over. No one had challenged them as they slid along the wall.

  They couldn’t see into the room. The Ostreyans had drawn the drapes shut, although there were no dwellings about. She doubted they did it out of modesty, just out of their damned furtiveness. What an evil race!

  “Through the glass,” Lorian said, shattering her train of thought.

  Anoria took a deep breath and followed Lorian as he slammed through the window, spraying shards of glass into the room. She shook off the clinging curtains and took in the shambles of the room.

  Dead humans littered the floor. Of the forty expected Ostreyans, only a few still fed, but most sat, satiated on chairs and sofas littered about. By the angry looks on their faces, they hadn’t surprised their prey. For the barest moment, she took in the garish decorations in the style of the Levant that cluttered up the room. The large space lived up to its name. It looked like a sultan’s palace. Anoria would know, she’d been in a few over the years.

  Lorian wasted no time and began to empty out his gun. Anoria followed. Ostreyans were no less long-lived as the Valirians, but gunshot wounds would slow them up and could even kill.

  Both of them closed with their mortal enemies. It took a second, no more, to infuse an Ost
reyan with poisoning life-force. Ostreyan bodies began to join the humans as Anoria and Lorian fought without pity.

  Anoria felt a foot in her back, as two Ostreyans on either side grabbed her hands and tried to pull out her arms. She merely flexed her fingers letting her fingernails find the wrists of her victims. Anoria couldn’t fathom why the Ostreyans hadn’t brought firearms to the party. The enemy began to dwindle. Eventually, the Ostreyans began to use furniture and lamps to halt Lorian and Anoria’s murderous advances. One of the lamps broke, splashing lamp oil on Lorian and he burst into flames.

  Fools, thought Anoria. Their uniforms were flameproof and their skin was tough enough to protect them for a brief time from fire. That defensive talent came along with the natural camouflage that their ancestors had used to get close to animal prey on Valir. He retreated towards Anoria, who threw a vase of water over him, dousing the flames.

  Anoria and Lorian didn’t say a word while they split again and both sides fought on. The Ostreyans asked for no quarter, for they knew none would be given.

  Anoria now fought at the doors leading out to the stairway. An opponent backed her up against a door and she felt a few of the nails they had used on Dietrich gouge into her suit. The thought of the flayed informant only made her begin to fight with greater purpose. Speed was their ally in fighting Ostreyans that had just filled up on the blood of their victims.

  She turned to fight one of the few Ostreyans remaining. This one had wrapped herself up with leather. A smart woman. It meant she would live a few moments longer. Both of them performed a dance of death into a dark corner of the room.

  Her opponent pulled out a large knife and plunged it towards her arm. Her uniform turned the blade, but Anoria could feel a bone break. She screamed and then pulled the knife out of the woman’s hand. Ostreyans never appreciated how much stronger Valirians were. She used the knife to slice a long cut through the thick leather sleeve and slipped her fingers into the cut to administer her poisonous life force. The opponent dropped dead to the floor.

  One of the sets of doors burst open, revealing three Ostreyans holding double barrel shot guns. Lorian stood in front of them, his chest heaving from exertion.

  “Lorian Brodon, I presume? Dietrich told us you would visit tonight.” The Ostreyan’s aura showed a brilliant blue overshadowing his two companions. This man had to be their leader, Count Gruber. “You had me waiting downstairs. I hadn’t counted on your taking an alternate entrance.” Gruber looked about the room, surprise on his face. Anoria clung to the darkness behind them, unnoticed. “You’ve killed them all? I refused to believe the reports.” Anoria could hear fear creep into his voice, but he took a breath which seemed to pump up Gruber’s bravado. “Three against one.” Sinister intentions colored his laughter while he cast an evil grin at Lorian.

  Her partner casually brushed off his uniform as Anoria silently moved along the wall. Despite Lorian’s nonchalance, she noticed the sheen of perspiration on his black face. All three of the men had their guns aimed at Lorian. He grinned at them. “It comes to this? See here, this is hardly fair odds.”

  Gruber nodded. “What do I care about odds? You have killed most of my brothers and sisters, all by yourself, but I get the satisfaction of killing the last of your race. We know you are the last.” The count looked at the devastation. “Now you have forced me to join my brothers in America. Your dead body will accompany all of these into the cesspit, tonight.” Gruber waved his hand at the destruction.

  Anoria still clung to the wall, changing her suit and coloring to match its color. She slid closer to the men. They didn’t detect her movements from where they stood, pointing guns at her Lorian and concentrating on him. Her heart beat in her throat. Lorian had never been so exposed before and she worried for the both of them.

  “It is too bad you won’t be able to join them,” Lorian said. He made no move towards the trio and kept his eyes from Anoria as she moved closer to the Ostreyans. She finally had slid along the wall far enough to reach them. She extended her hand towards one of the men and gave him an unrequested release from his long life on Earth. The man crumpled into Gruber.

  “Move, Lorian!” she said as Gruber and the other man instantly pulled the triggers on the shotguns trained on her lover.

  The blasts jerked Lorian backwards and the recoil threw the two men backwards into her. She took care of Gruber first and, while the wide-eyed Ostreyan fumbled with his weapon trying to reload, she had no qualms about ending his miserable life.

  “Your time is up,” she said as her fingernails pressed into the man’s hand. She didn’t know if the man even heard her. She ran to Lorian.

  Blood covered Lorian’s head. Gruber must have known the Recovery suit would absorb much of the force of the shotguns, because the two Ostreyans aimed their four barrels at Lorian’s head. She gasped as she realized that Lorian’s face just didn’t exist anymore.

  The silence in the room deafened her as she knelt at Lorian’s side. She looked away from the mess the shotguns had made and grabbed his lifeless hand. The fingernails had remained extended, a sign of death. A Valirian could recover easily and quickly from a single gunshot, but Lorian’s life had ended with massive trauma.

  Anoria collapsed to the floor, not able to see through the tears that flooded her eyes. She wailed among the carnage and pounded her fists on the floor again and again. She clutched Lorian’s lifeless figure, willing her life-force into his body, but his dead flesh wouldn’t accept it.

  She sobbed, not even thinking, until her mind returned to the present. Her tears seemed to be an unstoppable stream. She took deep, shuddering breaths to regain her sanity. She finally wiped her eyes and face and rose to her feet. She couldn’t stop sobbing as she checked every single body. A few humans retained shreds of their life-force, not fully succumbed. She slurped that up to heal her broken arm. Her normal reticence was forgotten in her intense grief. She emptied flowers from a vase and washed her hair and body of blood, most of it Lorian’s.

  Her gaze kept returning to his body. When she had made a round of the room, she collapsed next to his side, once more. His hair and skin had returned to the paleness that came natural to a Valirian. She didn’t want to look at his ruined face and put a bloody tablecloth over his head and torso.

  She remembered his words, ‘Tomorrow is another day and we will talk then.’ Tomorrow would not be another day. Never again would they talk to each other, or laugh. They would never make love, continuing their centuries-long partnership. She cried for what she had just lost. Now her future looked like a bleak eternity without Lorian.

  Not knowing what else to do, she walked outside and found the cesspit Gruber had mentioned and put every body, Ostreyan and human into the foul hole. How many humans had the Ostreyans dumped into that hellhole over the years the House had been built? She shivered in the cold air, not because she was cold, but because of the innate cruelty that had caused the incarceration of all Ostreyans in the first place.

  She had a last, grisly task. Anoria picked up Lorian’s body in her arms and walked downstairs. She pulled a blanket from a bed on the bottom floor and wrapped up his body, after having taken off his Recovery suit, and then rode back to Partenkirchen in the dark. The snow had stopped and the stars illuminated the ground enough for her to make her way down to Partenkirchen with her sharp Valirian eyes. The clouds rolled back in and, by the time she saw the lights of Partenkirchen, fresh snow had covered her tracks. She buried Lorian’s body in a corner of a churchyard cemetery. No cesspit for her Lorian. The ground wasn’t frozen solid, but it was hard enough so that she didn’t finish until the sky had begun to lighten up. She scattered snow on his grave.

  She dropped the horses off at the deserted stable. Anoria felt so heavy and so burdened when she sneaked up to their room. She washed her face and changed back into the outfit she had worn the previous evening. Anoria altered her face and hair before she left the room and only took one satchel that contained their ready money, their uni
forms and a few personal items. She would buy whatever she needed elsewhere.

  They had been betrayed. That had happened so many times over the centuries. The Ostreyans were good at manipulating humans. The legacy of their evil actions would be felt for generations to come.

  Her eyes were caught by the scenery that appeared as the sky lightened. She made her way to the picturesque train station. The last train into Partenkirchen had stayed to become the first train back to Munich in the morning. The train rattled, twisted and turned through the mountains on its descent. The Alps that surrounded the tracks brought back the horrid thoughts of the King’s House and the windows glowing in the dark. Her mind returned to recall every move she had made in the Turkish Room and the awful moment when Lorian died. Her life had seemed to end at that moment, but she still breathed. She didn’t regret burying Lorian back in Partenkirche but that couldn’t lighten up her thoughts. They seemed so heavy, so full of grief. How could they not? She had lost her life’s partner. She didn’t care about the few Ostreyan covens in America. Ostreyans couldn’t reproduce on Earth any more than Valirians. Time would take care of them both. Just like it had for her dear, dear Lorian and the rest of the Recovery Team.

  Anoria broke into another of the endless pulses of grief that brought with it heaving sobs and tears that never seemed to end. She would immediately head for London and hoped Tubal would give her the comfort she so desperately sought.

  END OF CHAPTER ONE OF

  THE VAMPIRIC MENACE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN