The Last Stand -- Blood War Trilogy Book III

by Morgan, Dylan J.

  The female hybrid followed him into the night.

  Without hesitation, Anton leaped clear of the car into puddles collecting on the filthy tarmac. The vixen hybrid landed gracefully on the street. She’d transformed; her Cheongsam shredding when her body had expanded and strips of material clung to her distended form. Her hair no longer resided in a bun atop her head but flowed around her shoulders, rainwater running from it as if the strands were silken. Her small breasts resembled muscle growth across her chest, and her skin—now dampened by the persistent drizzle—seemed to glow amid the shadowy alley. The wound in her belly had closed, torn flesh knitting together as her immortal body regenerated itself.

  She hissed, leaped into the air, and came down to meet Anton with her sword swinging through the night. He blocked with his saber, sparks glinting in the darkened street, and he wondered how long it would take before she decapitated his weapon. She kicked out, her foot connecting with his chest and propelling him backwards. He lost the saber. Anton landed on the blacktop and skidded across the wet tarmac. His shoulders burned as his clothing eroded against the road, and he cried out in agony as his skin shredded.

  He took no satisfaction in the fact he’d been right to fear her the most.

  The alley appeared lighter; the sounds from Lockhart Road drifted to his ears, and Anton realized their fight had taken them close to a side street leading to the main thoroughfare.

  His body screamed in suffering but Anton kept his eyes open, needing to see the wench all the time. She left the road once again, leaping into the air to land inches from him. Her Dadao flashed with neon lighting that filtered into the alley as she swept it towards his head. Anton rolled to one side and the crack of the sword denting asphalt rang loudly in his ear.

  He punched out, his fist colliding with her inner thigh, but she didn’t flinch. With another sibilant hiss the hybrid raised the sword above her head. Anton lifted his legs, curled them around the front of her stomach, and thrust backwards. She squealed as her balance was lost, and a pulse of elation flashed through him as the back of her head smacked the tarmac. Releasing her body, he rolled away and got to his feet. His sword lay about ten yards away, its hilt protruding beneath the rounded body of an overturned trash can. He moved towards it, noticed the hybrid scrambling to her feet, and stopped while he punched her on the jaw. She collapsed to the road.

  Anton strode to the can and pulled the sword from where it lay. The hybrid’s hiss split the air around him and he ducked in time to avoid the arcing blade. He swung with his own weapon, trying to strike from below and into her torso. The female defended his attack with ease before slamming another elbow into his face. His bruised nose split, and pain surged across his forehead. Anton screamed out and staggered backwards against the rough wall of the alley.

  Her blade glinted once more, light flashing through his dazed vision as she swung the sword towards his head. He dropped his weight and slid his damaged back down the ancient building. Nerve endings howled in his body as if they had their own voices, but he held concentration.

  The female’s blow missed, her blade chipping stone fragments from the wall.

  Anton closed his eyes and swung his weapon with all the strength he could muster, the blow halted only when the saber thudded into the brick behind him.

  The female hybrid screamed, her high-pitched wail hurting his ears. Anton opened his eyes and stared at a pair of feet on the blacktop. The hybrid lay beyond them, sliding away on her rump, face distorted in agony. The stumps where her legs ended bled crimson liquid onto the road.

  Relieved satisfaction flushed through his veins, and Anton hauled himself to his feet. His wet shirt rubbed on the corroded skin of his shoulders, his face burned as the delicate bones in his nose started to regenerate. Anton’s body would heal itself before sunrise, but the pain felt good. It meant he’d worked hard to achieve tonight’s success—it meant he was still alive.

  He stood before the lame hybrid and gripped the saber with both hands. She stopped dragging herself across the asphalt and gazed at him. He saw fear in her countenance, a pleading look surfacing in her eyes. Anton ignored it all.

  “Bitch,” he whispered.

  He swung the curved saber, and her head bounced along the road.

  The trickle of rain water flowing down the old wall of the alley filled the shadows around him, a melodic sound that shifted calm into his essence. The drum of life on Lockhart Road permeated the darkness, and it seemed he’d completed the night’s task without drawing undue attention to himself. Anton gazed for a moment at the lifeless body of the female, admiring her form. He’d always liked the lithe frames of oriental women and although he despised the creature before him, Anton couldn’t help but admire her nakedness. She’d been a worthy adversary, giving him more of a problem than he thought she would. He’d expected a greater fight from the old one.

  Anton’s old ones, the Elders, would be pleased to hear about tonight’s mission. The commanders had been eliminated, and he doubted the eradication of panicked hybrid stragglers would take too long.

  Flipping aside his coattails, Anton sheathed the sword, turned on his heels, and strode with purpose to the far end of the restaurant. He hurried down a thin side alley and stepped onto the busy stretch of Lockhart Road. His colleagues standing guard at the Cheung Kee entrance noticed his approach while he was still ten yards away. Anton smiled; glad to see those who guarded his back were vigilant as always.

  “Any problems?” his comrade questioned.

  Anton shook his head. “None whatsoever.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Where?”

  Anton’s colleague pointed to his own nose. Anton raised a hand to his nostrils and touched a cold patch of blood. His nose didn’t hurt any more, its bridge straight, nasal bones repositioned by his immortal healing process. The blood must have been over-spill, residue from when the female had shattered his nose in the alley. Anton wiped across his top lip. “Is it gone?”

  His associate nodded.

  Anton slapped him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  “Thank you, sir; you too.”

  Pulling the lapels around his neck in order to appear more like a mortal human who hated the feel of rain on his skin, the superior vampire made his way east along Lockhart Road, and disappeared into the night.

  THREE

  Uspensky Svyatogorsky Monastery

  Volyn Oblast Provence

  Ukraine

  Light from forty-eight candles burning in a golden chandelier fluctuated across the walls of the Assumption Cathedral and flooded the altar with shadows. Paintings of Jesus adorned the walls, the pictures aglow with yellow and green hues, and gold plated effigies added a serene brilliance to the surroundings. High atop the altar, an ornate cross shone with resplendent intensity as if it were the original star of Bethlehem sent to guide the wise men.

  She needed some form of guidance now more than ever.

  Dressed in the black robe and dark hood of a monastery nun, Tamara Wyatt knelt before the altar with her head bowed and hands clasped together in her lap. She didn’t pray, but used this time of quiet solitude to gather her thoughts. She hated to admit it, but her worst fears were being realized.

  Counsel had been decimated by treachery and murder, with the clan now clouded in such disarray that Tamara feared her own fragile control would be broken at any moment.

  It’d been less than three years since the killing, but the memory of that night hadn’t faded and Tamara doubted it ever would. She could still remember how palpable the tension had been during counsel; her fellow commander, Simon Cain, silent and brooding as if the weight of the hybrid world pressed upon his shoulders. He hadn’t been as domineering or intense as normal, but instead stared at his wife in solemn silence. His anger contained an almost pliable substance as if it were a physical presence in the room with them. The tranquil quiet of the cathedral’s interior became a stark contrast to the images flashing thr
ough Tamara’s mind as she recalled watching the CCTV footage twenty-four hours after counsel had ended. Cain’s attack on his wife had been brutally savage; Tamara shocked to see the silhouetted forms of werewolves inside the mansion huddling around Cain’s prone wife. She couldn’t see what they’d been doing to the woman, but the image of her death at their hands remained imprinted on her memory. Tamara still didn’t know how the beasts had discovered the building’s secret location or even how they knew all the counsel members would be there that night, but she was glad counsel adjourned the meeting earlier than planned; grateful she’d been miles away from the complex when lycanthropes infiltrated what should have been the hybrids most secure locale. Cain had not been there to protect his wife, and that desertion of a fellow counsel member angered Tamara greatly. The child had gone missing too, and Tamara suspected Cain had left the boy defenseless to be ripped apart by those feral monstrosities.

  Within an hour of viewing the recorded evidence, Tamara ordered Cain to be detained and tried for his wife’s murder. The lies about the woman’s disloyalty and infidelity persuaded counsel to exonerate him, and even Tamara’s own vote could not reverse his acquittal. Her defiance against him cemented their personal conflict that had been building for years. Cain resented her because of the position she held among counsel: her father’s seat, a rank that gave her a majority vote in the war cabinet. In a way she understood his disdain. Cain was one of those he preferred to call The Chosen, a pure-bred hybrid, one born through a werewolf and vampire copulation. He reminded Tamara often about her ‘diluted’ lineage, even though pure hybrid blood coursed through her veins. In his eyes she didn’t deserve her seat among the other hybrid commanders.

  Tamara knew of the chatter within the ranks, even among those who claimed to be her closest aides. She needed to take control of the clan, to show them she could be the leader they needed to escort them through these dark days. It wouldn’t be easy; in recent weeks, she’d lost trust even for those of her own kind.

  The anger and frustration brought on by that whole chain of events continued to eat at her emotions, but Tamara tried to tell herself that was all in the past—besides, she now had greater worries than that.

  Taking a deep breath in the hope it would calm the turmoil raging inside her, Tamara closed her eyes and waited for the solution to her troubles to materialize like a sign from God.

  The guttural call of a wolf filtered into the cathedral’s ambient silence. The animal sounded distant, its forlorn howl carried to the monastery on the night breeze. Tamara opened her eyes. Wolf populations had begun to increase again in the Ukraine after being decimated by hunters in the 70’s and 80’s, but the creatures were still rarely found. It could easily be a lone animal seeking companionship, but the nervous tightening of Tamara’s stomach reminded her how dangerous it was to be a hybrid, especially without an army in support.

  She had good reason to be alarmed.

  Within the space of three short weeks the United States and South America had been cut off. She couldn’t contact any of her commanders and none of her lieutenants. The foot soldiers were bound to be dead; if she couldn’t reach the higher chain of command, then no doubt the lower reaches had suffered elimination. She’d left countless messages on the cell phones of her trusted companions in Australia too, without a single reply. Asia was almost overrun; she’d already had numerous phone conversations—most of them brief—with her commanders in that area of the world, but now all contact with them had been lost.

  Hybrid numbers were dwindling faster than she’d ever imagined possible.

  Fury churned her stomach and made her sick. She no longer heard reports of vampire or werewolf casualties, and not a word about the two species inflicting damage upon each other.

  She clenched her fists into tighter balls in her lap, talons forming in her anger and digging into her skin.

  Tamara knew the history: how vampires and werewolves formed a truce four hundred years ago once it became clear hybrid babies were being born, and had used that armistice to try and eliminate her race. Of course, that had all happened before she’d entered the world, but Tamara wondered if a new ceasefire had been called. Were vampires and lycanthropes working together in order to eradicate her species?

  She didn’t want to believe it but the evidence of vampire and werewolf ascendancy was all too clear.

  Tamara glanced up at frescoes of Jesus on the cathedral walls, candlelight pushing shadows across the paintings, and sighed. The answers to her problems wouldn’t come to her in divine inspiration, a fact that added to her sense of lonesomeness.

  Somewhere within the monastery grounds a man shouted, panic lacing his call. Tamara got to her feet; eyes seeing nothing in the darkness beyond the cathedral windows but her ears picked out the sounds of alarm. A rumble fractured the muffled cacophony: a throaty roar she’d heard many times during the last decade of war.

  Dread contorted her intestines, but Tamara urged the incapacitating emotion to quickly disperse.

  A heavy bolt snapped in the building’s wooden door, its hinges emitting a subtle creak as the timber access opened a fraction. Tamara stepped back into deeper shadows near the head of the altar, hoping her dark clothing would offer enough concealment to give her an edge.

  An elderly man hurried into the cathedral, his shawl billowing behind him in his haste. The man’s swiftness belied his frail appearance, his voice deep and resonant, edged with centuries of authority. “Princess; are you here?”

  She stepped from the church’s recess and a sense of relief slipped into the man’s expression. Reginald Bowers stooped forward in the stance of someone who’d been alive for about ninety years, but Tamara knew the man to be at least three centuries older than that. His white hair lay thinly across a mottled scalp, gnarled fingers barely visible beyond the long arms of the monk’s robe. He’d been her closest aide since the secret of her heritage had been revealed to her, and of all her confidants she trusted him most of all. He resembled the withered old man she knew fifteen years ago and his appearance still made her wonder why certain immortals retained a youthful look while others appeared to continue aging. She hoped her own beauty would last an eternity.

  “Thank heavens you’re still here,” Bowers said. “Come; we have to hurry.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Bowers glanced over his shoulder, towards the partially opened door of the cathedral. The gloomy covering of night settled outside, monastery ramparts dark against the somber gray of overhead clouds. The belfry’s silhouette dominated their view of the inner courtyard as screams of pain and the bark of human wolves drifted over the concourse.

  “Werewolves.” Bowers’ voice wavered with a hint of apprehension.

  Tamara turned towards the cathedral entrance, her body distorting with a mixture of fury and fear. She grew four feet taller, arms and legs thickening as her skeleton cracked and reformed, muscles distending with blood ready for the fight. An undersized snout ruptured her face, fangs surging over her lower jaw. It’d been a little more than fifteen years since her first transformation, and she’d mastered the technique to perfection. The nun’s attire now resembled a short dress instead of an all-concealing robe.

  Bowers took a tentative step towards her. “No, no, my princess; we can’t fight, there’s just too many of them.”

  She cursed her own naivety; earlier, when the wolf’s call drifted across the landscape she should have heeded the twist in her stomach and readied what little troops she had with her. She’d been stupid to assume the howl came from a solitary animal, foolish to think the werewolves would never find her, when she should have known it’d been a battle cry.

  Tamara resisted her more dominant form and her body folded painlessly back into its human figure. “How many of them?”

  Bowers’ expression became urgent. “Too many, princess. We have to get out of here, now.”

  Tamara considered briefly that the idea of a counsel member abandoning the scene of con
flict could be viewed as an act of desertion, but if Bowers, a hybrid more than three hundred and fifty years her senior, decided the time had come to relinquish this location then she’d heed his advice. She’d been embroiled in the war for a mere decade and a half—the blink of an eye compared to how long the conflict had been raging—and she had yet to get used to the thought of combat. If she were honest, it terrified her. In the moments before going into battle she often found herself reminiscing about her past life: the innocence of her previous existence in New Zealand with the loving grandfather figure, the friends, and the insignificant problems of a mortal life. Sometimes she wished she could give up her immortality and the harsh realities of a supernatural war to become the young woman she once was.

  She had no choice now; her position in the clan was something she couldn’t walk away from.

  Bowers darted forward, grabbed her arm, and snapped her from her thoughts.

  He led her across the monastery courtyard and she ran with her head bowed, hoping the dark attire concealed her identity. Where the hell is my protection? In addition to Bowers and herself, six hybrid soldiers were staying at the complex, but she doubted such a small group of bodyguards would be of much use.

  Movement on the top of the monastery wall attracted her attention, and Tamara lifted her head. She recognized the loping figure of a werewolf immediately, its form crouched and running on all fours to enable better stability on the wall’s sloped roof. The lycanthrope clashed with one of her warriors midway along the stretch of parapet, both figures roaring in determined anger. They dropped out of sight into the darkness and Tamara prayed for the first time tonight, quietly asking for salvation.

  “In here, princess.” Bowers stopped running about halfway along a stretch of the nearest monastery wall, and ushered her towards a concealed entrance located in an alcove.

  She’d chosen this locality to forge her plans because the building was a stauropegial cave monastery, with two caverns running parallel into the mountain to meet at a chapel located underground. The grotto didn’t stop there, she knew, as hybrid workers had gouged an escape tunnel into the surrounding bedrock. Tamara ducked her head at the entrance and squeezed into the narrow passage.