She understood, then. This was not her golden angel, but Death come to take her, after all.
Claire opened her eyes to the dim light filtering through the hospital room's window. Night had fallen and the man sitting in the shadows across from her leaned forward. He was dressed in an elegant business suit and the flames and wings were no longer there.
"You see me, don't you?" the man asked, lifting a hand to stroke his chin, brows furrowed.
Claire replied, "I'm not blind anymore. They said so, and I see everything."
She knew her words were disconnected, barely making sense.
"It's just that I don't want you to see, me," he said, "Yet, you do."
She did not understand what he meant.
"I'm sorry...?"
"Oh, don't be sorry, Claire Sawyer. Malakh has gifted you with a vision without precedent. My brethren and I possess singular abilities, not the least of which is the ability to remain hidden, even from one another, with no more effort than a thought.
"But there you lie, seeing me. Despite me..."
She decided that the man was insane. Even if he was dressed in a gorgeous, probably custom-made suit, and everything about him spoke of elegance and charm, he was most certainly out of his mind.
"...and I want to know why," he continued, his voice pensive and reserved.
Claire began inching her hand across the pristine white bed sheet. The call button was clipped to a chromed rail running the length of the bed.
"Ok," she said, trying to sound calm, "No need to worry. I think we can find someone to help you out, mister. There are lots of people here who would be happy to help you."
She made a sudden grab for the call button, ready to plunge her thumb down when, without warning, an iron grip seized her wrist and a second hand clapped itself over her mouth.
"This is a private conversation, Claire. Just between us."
The man had somehow crossed the room in the blink of an eye, moving in an eerie and absolute silence.
Claire closed her eyes, thinking that her perceptions were skewed somehow. That the sight that had come back to her was in some way compromised, betraying her.
And there, behind her closed eyelids, the man blazed in black fire, steel gray wings rising above his shoulders.
Claire inhaled through her nostrils, about to scream against the hand upon her mouth. She opened her eyes and the scream died in her throat. The man was there, looking down at her with hard eyes, dressed in the elegant suit.
She closed her eyes and dark flames blazed. She opened them to see an otherwise normal man.
His hands relaxed as she went limp with her surprise and he nodded.
"I believe Malakh has wrought in you a tool. Always the messenger, he hunts my children and those of our brother. He harries us without ceasing, but now, I surmise that he has grown malcontent and searches for a means to strike at the source."
Claire still did not understand his words, but no longer thought that he was mad. Rather, she thought that it was she who had gone insane. Unbalanced in more ways than one after her fall.
"Are you...are you an angel?" she asked, her voice trembling.
The man's lips stretched in a grin that held no humor.
"An angel? Is that what you think?" he said. "Men have named us that. We were once called the Watchers, or the fallen Seraph. But, I have embraced the flesh of men. Long ago I chose to revel in carnal pleasure and I drink at the hot fount of humanity.
"I am no angel...not anymore. I am vrykolakas, the first and father of all vampires that walk the earth. And I have come for you, the newly forged weapon of my adversary, and I mean to turn it against him."
He towered over Claire, growing larger as shadows loomed in nightmarish relief. His lips peeled back from gleaming white teeth and she saw fangs drawing down in shining curves like scimitars as he swept her into his arms.
~~~
Bertie hated working with smokers. It was always the same story, that they needed a quick break is all. Except that Bertie knew the break would be measured in one or two minutes for the time it took them to get outside the hospital. Add in another ten or so minutes to actually smoke. Back upstairs a couple minutes later, and their quick break ran at least fifteen minutes. Which would not be so bad, except that every one of them did it half a dozen times each shift while good old Bertie dutifully remained at the nurses' station. Someone had to stick around, even if it was the dead of night, in case a patient needed her.
She felt a cool breeze drift across her ankles. She was seated at the desk she shared with the other night shift nurses. A choice situation that had taken her years to get. Not much happened at night, except for the occasional goner that passed on over.
The dead of night. There was a reason for that phrase, she reflected. Goners snuffed out their little candles most often at night, but that was not so bad. Things stayed calm and quiet for the most part.
The cool air continued to snake around her ankles, raising goosebumps on her arms. Someone had opened a window nearby.
And, that meant a patient was stirring about, someone that Bertie would need to check on since there was no one else. Since they were off on a quick break.
Bertie thought to herself, and not for the last time, that she hated working with smokers.
She stood up and stepped around from behind the nurses' station and felt a veritable breeze trailing down the linoleum corridor. Her heart quickened as she began walking briskly along.
Once in a while, goners would decide to take things into their own hands. As if choosing the precise moment of their death somehow cheated the cancer or whatever other malady that gnawed at them. There was a time that the nurses would find a patient's window flung open at night, the bed empty, and far below, six floors down, a body lay crushed and sprawling.
It was relatively commonplace. Then someone, somewhere, decided that kind of freedom could not be permitted and the upper floors had had all windows replaced by safety bolted frames, with just one small pane that could be opened at a sharp angle. Above all, nothing that would permit a goner to suicide.
But the air wafting about Bertie's legs was blowing far too strongly to come from one of those narrowly opened windows.
She passed darkened room after darkened room, seeing only quiet forms lying still under white sheets turned gray in the darkness.
Then she came to the room of the blind girl. Only she was not blind anymore, that one. A true miracle, people were calling it.
Bertie poked her head in the door and her mouth came unhinged.
On the floor lay a dozen bolts, that had been somehow unscrewed, and the large safety window that had replaced the original was swung wide open in its frame.
Night air flowed freely into the room and there was no one in the hospital bed.
"Oh lordy lord," breathed Bertie as she rushed to the large, impossible-to-open window. She got as close to the edge as she dared and peered down, expecting to see the small body of the blind woman lying down below.
Only there was nothing six floors down, nor any sign of the woman who was blind no more.
~~~
Claire heard the sounds of cars far below. They seemed insignificant, like children's toys as they wound their way along the highway that had become a thin, black ribbon.
The vampire's strong arms wrapped around her like iron bars and his wings beat in steady rhythm as they flew across the night sky.
Then the sound of his deep voice resonated in her ears as he said, "I would like you to meet my progeny, Claire. They are legion, and by this hour, I should think quite hungry."
Then, he laughed in great echoing bursts and Claire felt the sting of tears that came to blur her vision of the winking city lights below.
There was no sign of her guardian, the golden angel named Malakh. Never had she felt so alone, her vision restored to her, only to reveal her plight in every desperate detail.
Claire looked to the heavens as if to plead for some measure of mercy, b
ut there were only the pinpoints of stars looking back her. They burned coldly and took no notice as the vast abyss of night swallowed her whole.
Taken by the Vampire
The wolf ran with its nose close to the forest floor. Wide paws flew to the ground with unerring precision, finding firm footing in an eerie silence. If it had been observed, one might have said that the beast flowed rather than moved as it passed under and through thick underbrush.
The night made of it silver and gray. In daylight, its coat held ruddy colors tinged with an almost fox like red. But the moon overhead betrayed none of its true colors under the cloak of darkness, keeping its pact with the creatures that rendered up homage.
The animal crested a small rise then lifted its muzzle into the air. Large narines flexed as it scented the air, then its mouth dropped open, its jaw chuffing lightly over the night odors like a wine taster might savor a fine Bordeaux.
There was cold power drifting down from the sky. A power tinged in raw blood. And, within its grasp fluttered a small, warm heart, beating rapidly, birdlike.
Yellow eyes scanned the horizon and, then, swiveled hard at the same time that its great ears pricked up to the sound of muffled wing beats. Following the track of the sound, the wolf saw the dark form of a woman fall from the sky toward a country manor across the valley.
Never before had the wolf been able to discern the presence of the power that dwelt within those walls. However, this time, there was no mistake as the woman struggled in the arms of an otherwise invisible being.
The wolf knew the demesne well. It had been charged with surveilling the environs, and nothing escaped its notice. Great hounds ran within as guardians, yet daylight hours held no sound beside them. The night, however, was another matter for it was then that the blood drinkers rose to life
At the last moment, the woman that fell from the sky swooped up in a long lazy curl, then settled down behind the high stone walls that surrounded the manor.
The wolf stared, waiting with unnatural patience, and then it stretched out its forelegs like a lazy hound. The scent of musk and rich forest soil rose in the air, thick and redolent. Heavy, wide paws grew long, the dewclaws descending to oppose the lengthening digits. The muzzle of the creature drew in, flattening, while exposing the enormous canine fangs within its jaws.
With practiced ease, the animal rose up on its hind legs in the same moment that those limbs changed proportion, thighs running long and heavily muscled to knees that gave way to thickly veined calves.
The werewolf named Clash held his transformation at the midpoint, as was his preference. To pass entirely to human felt weak and pointless to him. And beside that, the signal must be given in the voice of a wolf, powered by the great lungs in his cavernous chest.
A howl rose from him to echo in mournful notes across the forest. His song held his intentions and his identity. The howl cried to the heavens and woke the smaller, mundane wolves that had been driven down from their arctic home under the ever-encroaching presence of man.
Deep in the forest, they echoed his cry without understanding, driven only by the primal desire to lift their faces to the moon as they sing. They did not remember the day that Galgallin descended in the form of great shining wheels that turned within one another, nor the multitude of eyes that saw all that lay beneath him. It was a tale poorly retold by Enoch or Ezekiel, the story of the first, the Ophanim that stood apart from the Seraph and their desire of commerce with men. Galgallin alone was the one who saw the beauty of the savage beasts of the earth, desiring nothing other than simple survival in a brutal world.
Men would come to call them all of them angels, but it was the Ophanim who stepped aside from humanity and its flaws, marrying himself instead with the life's blood of the earth and her creatures, only to lose himself, perhaps forever, within the creatures that became masters of the forest, lords of wolves, the loups-garous...werewolves.
The simple beasts only echoed what they heard, their instincts lifting them to stare at the moon as their forefathers once stared at the shining Ophanim, proud and strong then brought to their bellies by his might.
Clash knew the tale, even if the ordinary wolves did not, and fierce pride burned within him as he counted himself a son of such a one. Eschewing what the rest deemed as desirable, Galgallin was uninterested in the Seraph nor their rapture for the flesh of men and women. For the werewolf, man was but a feast, a boon to be fooled and lured away by the wolf wearing a man's skin.
He looked back to the manor across the valley. A brother to the Ophanim foolishly made of it his home, thinking that it had escaped the notice of the wolves.
But, Clash found its denizens to be disgusting things. Shambling revenants that did no honor to their maker, unlike the race of shape shifters spawned by the Ophanim. However, the vampires' time would soon be at an end and now that a prize had been brought home, the wolves of Galgallin had but to wrest it from the blood drinkers and make of her one of their own...that, or she would be ravished unto death.
It was their one simple law, be strong or be destroyed.
Clash smiled a wolf's tooth laden grin at the beauty and simplicity of it all.
~~~
She watched as the vampire flew many miles west of the city, leaving behind its sprawling lines of twinkling lights. Beneath them now ran a thick grey carpet that would become a green forest canopy in daylight.
Claire watched as they flew over the dense trees and then she felt the vampire slow as a bare hill came into view. The forest had been cleared from its flanks and upon its crown there was a vast manor surrounded on all sides by high walls.
The vampire shifted his grip upon her and then she felt them swing slightly up as he filled his dark wings with air to slow them. Her stomach fluttered with the maneuver and as they descended gently down behind those stone walls, Claire was reminded once again of her fall in the elevator shaft only to awaken healed by the hands of her guardian angel, her sight miraculously restored.
A sight had that revealed itself to be too precise, too clear, as it pierced the disguise of the vampire and made of her a treasure in its dead eyes.
Her legs folded under her as the creature set her down. In contrast, he stood straight and powerful in the form of what could be misconstrued as a high powered businessman in a finely tailored suit. From Claire's vantage point upon the cold ground, she noticed that he wore finely tapered italian shoes, undoubtedly made to order.
Figures emerged from the shadows of the courtyard, the center of which was punctuated by a tall, cut stone tower, like those of medieval castles.
"You! What have you done?" shouted an angry voice. Claire followed the sound with her eyes and she saw a tall, young man step into the dim light afforded them by a moon that hid itself behind gauzy clouds.
The owner of the voice stomped forward, a deathly pale arm raised with his fist clenched, as he came to stand before the vampire in his fine business suit.
Claire felt more than heard the roar that erupted from the vampire's throat. It was the sound of stone cracking under the weight of time. It was the wind that rises to carry pestilence across continents. The raw power of it flattened her to the ground while the shadowy figures surrounding them shrank back, cowering.
"How dare you, youngling? How dare you raise a hand to me?" said the vampire. Claire blinked and in that split second she saw the dark flames blazing in fury around the winged form of the fallen angel become blood drinker. His strength was terrifying; his potential for violence absolute.
The young man appeared to be buffeted backward, as though a heavy wind had blown into him. He swayed, unbalanced, then dropped to one knee, head bowed as he said, "Master...Lord Kabiel, please forgive me my impertinence. It is only my anguish over our losses that drives me to such madness."
He looked up then to the vampire towering over him and Claire could see the twin tracks of bloody tears streaking his face.
"Master, the mission did not go as planned. Our numbers were su
fficient to draw the Messenger to us, but we were too few before his vengeance. Our unseen enemy and the might of his sword swept through us as if we were but wheat before the scythe."
His voice dropped to nearly a whisper as he said, "The few you see before you, Lord Kabiel, are all that are left."
They moved in then and while Claire did not try to count them, they appeared to number less than twenty.
The vampires were beaten things, some of whom were even more pale than the angry young man kneeling at his master's feet. Among them, Claire could see some with horrific rents in their flesh where a massive blade had sliced them wide. Their color was pale to the point of almost appearing clear and reminded her somehow of the weirdly stretched soda bottles from the carnivals of her childhood. Before the accident that had claimed her parents and blinded her, the family had passed happy moments while Claire rode wooden carousel horses to be followed by cotton candy and worthless baubles. Her mother had always warned Claire not to drink the colored liquid in those bottles and once safely emptied, they became hollow, twisted things that were better left forgotten in a dusty box.
The wounded ones, from whom no blood ran, reminded her of that and she shuddered as their hollow eyes continually shifted from their master to her. Some licked their lips with dry, leathery tongues and Claire caught glimpses of shining fangs in the darkness.
"No, Caim, your mission was a success," the vampire lord said, his voice calm, "The diversion was sufficient for me to pass unawares and take what Malakh surely values most."
The young man named Caim stood up slowly then shook his head.
"A diversion? Is that what it was?," he asked, "A diversion that destroyed most of the brood...and for what? A worthless human female?"
The disdain had crept back in his voice and Claire could see insolence burning in the young man's gaze once more.
"Her worth is far more than you might imagine, Caim. The Messenger has marked her and now, with her in our possession, he will no longer be able to hide from us. When we are ready, we will be able to seek him out to destroy him, or failing that, to imprison him for all time."
Divine Fornication (The Complete Collection) Page 2
