Rebels and Realms: A Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection

by Heather Marie Adkins

  “You cannot stop us. This is justice.”

  One spoke the words like an invocation, deliberate. The next hunter repeated those same solemn words, “You cannot stop us. This. Is. Justice.”

  Then a third vampire hunter and the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth took up the rallying cry. Together, they took a second step forward and then one more, growing braver as they met no resistance. The hunters advanced.

  Still as statues, the steely-eyed armored woman and the flock of crows and vampires stood behind the ominous blade’s scratched line carved into the marble stones.

  Unchallenged by fang, weapon, or venom, the humans gained courage by the split second. Eagerly, the hunters stepped to the battle that they had been preparing to fight for hundreds of years. Across the span of generations, the hatred and fear of the shadows that lurked in the darkness had festered and grown. Now they gathered in the crypt, steadfast. The hunters’ ultimate goal came into focus right in front of their eyes.

  “Whoever you are,” one declared, “You will stand aside. Our quarrel is not with you. Once and for all, tonight, we will clear Los Angeles. At least in this city, the battle will be finished. Once and for all time, humans will be predators, never again prey.”

  With absolute conviction, the hunters closed ranks and stepped again to the battle that they wanted so desperately to win.

  I could hear their footsteps. I could taste the disturbed dust and ash as it swirled through the air. What I couldn't do was defend Celestine or myself, not for very much longer. A wave of dizziness crashed into my worn-out body.

  I couldn't run. Not even if I wanted to. Besides—there was nowhere to go. The two passageways that the crows had used would have required wings to access. Besides, my curiosity demanded that I stay, that I bear witness. One mortal man left to speak to the ghosts that would soon be the only remains of the perilous confrontation.

  Step after step, the advancing line of hunters rattled the walls.

  Their coming shook the foundations of the heavy stone floor.

  Each step broke my heart.

  I didn't know any of them but that didn’t mean I wanted them to die. Not even one human.

  I felt too keenly my own mortality.

  My blood ran to the floor by their darts and blades. I didn’t strike back. Defending who I loved, that was my only crime. A few hours ago, I might have. After all, I was a skilled warrior, trained in a dojo made by my own two hands.

  In some ways, I was like them. Except that I had only ever trained in defensive arts. Even now, I could see the unfiltered truth: no amount of study was enough to survive this conflict.

  Boots marched.

  Across the crypt’s limited space, venom waited, curled in on itself, ready to strike.

  There was no dance I had learned, no exercise that was enough to avoid their enchanted silver weapons. Fangs or blades, they all wanted me dead, just for different reasons. I knew this was the outcome when I offered them my back.

  I had too much to protect, even now.

  When I’d asked Bastet for help, I had used the only opportunity within my grasp..

  “C-celestine, Celestine, do you hate me?” I whispered, holding her to my chest, knowing that vampire senses were so teen that she heard every blink of my eyelashes.

  Conscious or not, Celestine heard the unspoken things that lay under the poor words I tried to say.

  My last will and testament.

  “I know you're tired, I was rude. I know it's too much to ask. But somehow—between us—you have to find the willpower and the magic to transform into a bat. Remember?” I begged her to listen.

  There was still time. If she left now...

  “You did it once before when you rescued us from the hunters’ fortress. If you need to lean on my life's energy, you could do it. I believe in your will to survive. Fight another day. If you hold out any hope for us, or for Peggy—you have to fly free of this terrible trap.”

  Did she hear me? Please. How do I make a vampire follow a simple request? Or a woman, for that matter? “The hunters are here.” I spoke bluntly. “There are only seconds left. Fly, Celestine. Fly.”

  Celestine’s eyelids moved. In my arms, she dreamed. I drew comfort from that. Her thoughts danced so deeply in her healing sleep, she would never feel the killing stroke. In her last moments, she would never know the terrible infinite pain of final death. Even when the hunters’ blades drained the last bit of life out of me—she would live. I swore it, until my very last breath.

  “Why? Damn it, woman, fly!”

  But she did not. She did not wake. “Go… please,” I begged her.

  I stifled a sob and groaned at the loss of such a wild, impossible creature. I swore to myself that the world would never know another woman this perfect, deadly, sure, or loyal. There was nothing else that held a candle to her. I knew it down to the core of my bone marrow. At the very center of the strongest muscle of my heart, I could feel that truth, beating.

  It had been only a few days and yet... It felt real. There was an actual sense of timelessness when I was with her. Forged through a series of tumultuous events, my entire relationship with a vampire was an impossibility wrapped in a to-go box. From the moment I first saw her, when I was with Celestine, it felt like we had forever.

  We didn’t.

  This moment had arrived, too soon. I saw the bitter truth. No amount of heroism could change hatred. We were going to die, on the ash-covered floor of an underground crypt. Me—slowly bleeding my life away as Celestine dreamed of distant castles.

  Her past—full of elaborate lives that I would never know. Our future died in front of my ashcovered eyes.

  “I wish you life, woman. Take yours and fly away from here,” I begged the broken vampire as she lay there cold and chill in my arms. Her unmoving body felt exactly the same way Marian’s had when she died in the hospital bed, three long years ago.

  “Fly!”

  I mourned the loss of pure perfection. Stumbling, with one knee losing strength, I knew I couldn’t go on much more. But I held on to her, resolute.

  “Celestine…”

  My last words filled the air between us. Then there was only uncomfortable silence.

  Nearby, I heard another voice repeat the one word she had uttered before: “Leave!”

  Peggy spoke with an authority that shook the core of the earth. It felt that momentous. Like my life was a tiny leaf floating on the deep ocean’s surface.

  I blinked as my thoughts spun in and out. A wave of dizziness overcame my balance.

  I tried. I struggled to keep my eyes open as my shoulder hit the floor. Like a lightning struck tree, I toppled over. Laying on the ash-covered floor, blinking back the pain, I only saw one thing: her face.

  “Celestine...”

  I whispered her name like the prayer that it was. Broken worshipper and deity tied together by magic, bound into one. As my body failed to obey my commands, she lit the dark path ahead.

  The end of the world.

  “This is your last chance to step aside,” one of the hunters snarled in reply. I could hear an uncertainty in his voice that hadn't been there before. Awe mixed with caution.

  As the hunters army advanced, there would be no doubt of the awful, alien strangeness of this crow woman. Up close she was even harder to dismiss, an opponent who defended the monstrous vampires and ignored every bit of hunter training. Imperiously, the stranger denied the bloodthirsty vengeance of the hunters of Mars Alator.

  One more time, I heard her state one simple demand: “Leave.”

  This time, though, she spoke with the roar of lava dripping down the side of a mountain. Her will was an unstoppable boulder rolling towards the hunters. The threat in her voice promised utter annihilation. Fearsome and cataclysmic, Peggy stood against their vengeance.

  The hunters must have felt the weight of her warning too, but they didn't back down. They didn't walk away. They refused to give her that authority.

  “You are no o
ne to me,” one blurted. “I've never heard of any creature like you. You clearly don’t come from Mars, defender of life and light. You look like no Greek or Roman goddess. Step aside! Our quarrel is not with you.”

  Peggy did not respond.

  “Anyways, this is no time to be interfere with the hunters of Mars Alator. We are not some heathen god's playthings. We were sent here by the defenders of the faith. We answered the call, sent here by the Elders of Constantinople before the Hagia Sophia fell. We hunt for one reason only: to clear the world of this unnatural disease!”

  His words trailed off as he gestured around the room. “Nightmare creatures made of tar and venom... These are abominations.” In disgust and fury, he spat on the ground. “There is no peace to be found in this struggle. They must all die. To the very last nightmare.”

  “We will not stop, not on this side of Heaven or Hell,” another voice declared. “We demand the right to cleanse this world of venom and distorted lives.”

  I listened, unable to respond.

  The hunters pressed forward, charging their way around the strange woman who set her will against their teaching.

  With that denial, most of my strength fled.

  Into the ground, into the crypt itself I fell—the stones of marble held my spirit as my body crumpled to the ground. My arms still faithfully protected the sleeping form of Celestine.

  Will wasn’t enough to stop the cloak of death that fell abruptly over my damaged body. Fading into the heavy pitch, I stumbled into the last sleep.

  I bled out.

  And then I blinked.

  With spiritual eyes, I could see the whole room. In slow motion, I could see the chain of Icarus and the link that glowed between our hearts. As my own heart slowed and faltered, I watched a dimming of the light, the magic that emanated from my chest.

  Along the metal links, that power of my soul flowed into her. And then it began to sputter and fade.

  Everything seemed so clear now, unstoppable. Celestine would die next.

  I wailed, a ghost crying in the fog. My death would kill her too, I had no doubt. There was nothing I could do to save us.

  If any of the humans in the crypt could hear my spirit, I roundly cursed them all. Screeching, I railed at the moon, at the sun, and the cats—at the unfairness of all of it.

  Without my body as an anchor, it was almost impossible not to float away. Stubbornly, I clung to the room—a helpless ghost. Still it was odd, the way the spiritual world showed the truth my mortal eyes had never imagined. All around the crypt, I saw the creatures—the spirits that were bound inside the vampire bodies. Each one was pitiful, starving, desperate.

  But it was when I looked at Peggy that I finally saw the whole truth.

  That's when I saw the wings.

  Whiter than deep snowfall in the dead of winter, each feather was perfection. Rows and rows of perfect white feathers sprung out of her back. As if the armor wasn't even there. The wings flowed around the metal and the chainmail adjusted to the new form. And those wings? Mental.

  The feathers shone. Her wings beat slowly, the arch of their movement was nearly high enough to reach the carvings on the lower ceiling. Each brilliant wing, glowed with the light of long-dead saints, with the polish of pure Truth.

  And now I saw that the murder of crows that danced around her were actual crows. Nothing fantastical about them in their souls except... These birds were uncannily intelligent.

  One looked right at me.

  I gasped.

  These appeared to be birds. That was a blatant lie.

  Their eyes glinted with the same absence of light that I had seen from the mysterious longsword. Oblivion: the kind of magic only found on the dark side of the moon, the kind of power that was needed to animate the Dead. The birds harnessed a dark magic that oozed through the air around each one, sinister, menacing. Like the forged weapon Peggy held, the power that contained the crows answered to itself.

  As I watched the anti-light that emanated from the sword and the birds, abruptly I could see the same power animated each and every vampire:

  Oblivion.

  Like smoke from dry ice, it called out to each supernatural creature, filling the air around the vampires with a shivering sense of power. Binding the spirit to the bodies, the fey power pulsed and grew stronger with each passing second. A dark magic bloomed across the crypt, a dark flower come to harvest. The harnessed and shaped force of oblivion changed each one, fostering in each monster a bloodthirst so terrible that it could never be answered. That kind of hunger could only be filled by light.

  Forced to endlessly experience that kind of twisted magic? An immortal being would be driven mad. Any creature would kill just to feed the endless hunger.

  While I watched as a spirit, I was still tethered to the clay body that slowly cooled in front of me. Caught up in my new-found knowledge, I almost missed seeing five hunters pivot to the attack.

  They began shouted insults. That stupidity did not stop. “Witch! Creature-lover! Liar! Thief!” The list went on and on. “Demon! Betrayer! Die for the pleasure of my blade! Choke on this silver! You. Are. Nothing!” A hundred other things spilled out of their snarling mouths.

  The hunters hurled their words as fast as they threw their knives, cutting everything into ribbons, slicing through the vampire horde.

  At least—that was what they had hoped would happen.

  Hunters fought because that's what they had been trained to do. That's what they expected. But Peggy denied the outcome they desired most.

  With one stomp of her perfectly-gilded boot, she rocked every stone that lined the deeply-buried crypt. Even as the hunters began their final attack, Peggy refused to step aside.

  Armed with her will, Peggy confronted the hurtling weapons and the raging men.

  “You.”

  “Will.”

  “Not!”

  With a growl, she retorted, her firm words a stark denial of their greed for vengeance. And then—the winged creature that death revealed—Peggy finally moved. Holding the ruby-hilted sword and the shaft of the halberd of Apollo’s sunlight in front of her chest, she formed a cross. With those barred weapons, she warded off the mortal hunters.

  That shouldn't have worked. Weren't these men priests? Weren't these men and women on the side of God and his angels?

  Wait.

  Isn't she an angel? An angel wouldn’t defend murderous vampires, right? Right?

  My ability to hold on to even the thinnest trickle of my life shook and began to dissipate. Who defended Celestine now? Only one creature was strong enough. Only Peggy stood against the hatred of the hunters. Even as my spirit yearned to fly towards a growing pinpoint of light, I paused to admire her courage. She was like no other creature I had ever seen or ever would see in this life. Or the next.

  “Three times you were warned.”

  She spoke, but her admonition sounded almost nonsensical. “Three times,” Peggy confirmed the facts. “I have waited. That time of choice has passed for all of you. Now, I choose. I choose who goes to the fields of the people and who comes with me. Which of you are brave enough?”

  With those words, more statement and fact than threat, Peggy—daughter of Celestine, once a mere girl in a glittering Hollywood party dress—transformed completely.

  The diadem on her head shone with the brilliance of a captured star. Each of her wings mantled above her head, causing the wind to surge around the crypt. The beating of those glorious feathers kicked up the dust and the ash again. Everything became impossible to see for every mortal in that room—except me.

  Ghosts can see through a sandstorm apparently.

  She turned and looked around the cavernous space, staring at the vampire host. Calculating the worth of each soul, with sword and halberd she stood. A judge of death. In her gaze, a measure of worth that each creature had to answer alone.

  I heard her say, “This is mine. Death cannot be bought or rented. Death comes to those who are ready at unexp
ected times. I choose the few. Only the best warriors will follow me.”

  Wide and far, she moved the halberd-crossed sword. In one dancing spinning curve, with the darkness locked tightly within the blades, the mark she made in the air left a ghost impression.

  Solemnly, Peggy faced the vampires.

  But even that didn’t stop her next move.

  Without hesitation, using one swipe of her blades, Peggy beheaded the warriors of Mars Alator. She targeted only the ones who had thrown the weapons after her warning.

  I guess it was Justice. I guess it was Mercy. I would never know, anyway.

  I was dead.

  With silver eyes, Peggy looked back at the assembled vampires. Floating, wasted lives so many of them only recently turned by Celestine. She walked among the vampires clustered by her side, ready to defend Celestine to the death. Some she touched with the edge of the polearm.

  Others, she did nothing, scanning past their red glowing eyes.

  One by one, she touched the individual souls bound inside supernatural killing machines. Each creature stood, judged. With her breast plate, with her armor, with the halberd and sword crossed, Peggy studied each one.

  And then, she chose.

  I couldn’t see why. But stuck on the spiritual plane, holding tight to the dying light of the chain of Icarus, I watched as each of them was judged and converted.

  Peggy spoke some more serpent-like words and then made a gesture in front of their jawbone. She pulled out of their mouth a like squid ink, darkness gushed out of their eyes and ears and noses. Like it was suspended in water, the pitch-black ink formed into a cloud above their heads and then it shimmered and vanished.

  Exactly like the portal had closed when its purpose ended.

  Over and over, the strange winged woman walked among the monsters. I could never tell why she stopped or who she would choose.

  She touched the mysteriously selected vampires. Immediately, the darkness fled. Like a healing angel, she broke their captive spirits free from the venom. One by one, those she chose fell down: mortally alive——no longer vampires.

  But she didn't take all of them. She didn't change every vampire. Many in the gathered horde were still starving, waiting for the hunger in their bodies to be filled. A constant torture—never ending need, never filled.