by Milo Spires
Regina’s eyes widened. ‘I thought that sword would never be found! I was starting to think it was just a lie that someone had created. We were searching for that damn thing for years!’ she said, looking up at him.
It was plain that he hadn’t heard her though, because he was clearly in deep thought.
He was remembering back to when he had been searching for the Silver Sword, which was at the same time as the war against the werewolves. He’d nearly been killed in that war, and had a long scar running down the entire length of his back to prove it. Three male werewolves, enormous in size, had cornered him in a classroom at a primary school. He was leaping out through a plate-glass window to get away when he had seen Regina’s father out of the corner of his eye. He had come bursting in to the room to help him, armed with a machine gun.
As he hit the ground, he barely had enough time to think about who he’d seen before he had to fight off one of the three that had followed him. Once he’d finally managed to kill it, he’d run back inside to help her dad only he was too late. Kaine had been horrified to find that her father had been completely torn to pieces. Inside himself something had then exploded, a rage that had almost hurt as it swept though his veins. He remembered the beasts looking warily at him as he had arched his neck back and felt his face swell. His arms had surged with unbelievable power. When the first beast had leapt at him, Kaine had punched his fist straight through its head before ducking and coming up underneath the second one, which he then devoured limb from limb.
As he’d looked over at the corpse, he had been surprised to see that Regina’s father had lost the fight. After checking his gun, he had found to his sadness that it had jammed on him.
Regina burst into tears, which brought Kaine out of his dark thoughts. Instantly he knew what had happened: she had just telepathically read his mind and, through his memories, she could now see her fathers face again clearly in her mind. It was so clear in fact, it was like he was there in the room looking at her.
All vampires have a certain level of telepathy, but with Kaine and Regina it was on a far stronger level. Maybe it was because of the deer blood that they drank, but they couldn’t be certain. They could happily communicate between themselves within a fifty mile radius just as if they were standing right next to each other. Others vampires could communicate telepathically too, only over considerably lesser distances, which they thought the reason for the difference must be connected to the impure human blood most vampires drank.
After Kaine comforted Regina and got her calmed down, he said, ‘In the vision I learned that thirty three years ago, in 1981, baby Jenny was left by her priest-father on the steps of an old orphanage. He never told the church about it, and neither did he give Jenny’s location to the baby’s mother, a nun called Sister Ursula.’
‘I can’t believe it!’ Regina’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Such a poor woman to be born but never to know who her father was. How could someone do that to their own daughter? That’s not very Christian, is it?’ Her jaw set in determination, and she sat up, causing Kaine to fall over to his side of the bed.
‘We must find Jenny before Rex does! We can’t allow her to be killed. I think we should tell the church so they can try protecting her, or at least tell the priest.’ She paused before saying, ‘Oh! But then Rex will be trying to contact the priest, so we had better hurry. I think we should call Raffious. He will be able to contact the priest much easier than we can. Anyway, we must tell them somehow that we will be try to save her too,’ she finished.
Kaine then leant across and kissed his wife on the head before laying back to think for a moment. Regina reached for her phone.
Raffious was their best friend. The three of them had shared many wonderful times together. His gentleness and wisdom colored their experiences, and Regina and Kaine felt that they were better beings for knowing him. Whenever the couple didn’t have the answer to something that perplexed them, he always seemed to know the right thing to do. He was a holy man and a time traveler, who was always dressed in white robes, which matched perfectly with the long, knee-length white beard on his face. Unlike vampires, who had restrictions with time travel, he could appear in any time, forward or back, and whenever he chose to do so. Kaine and Regina knew very little about him on his religious side, except that he could speak with the angels. He had told them that he often goes to see them to discuss different matters. When he moved around in time he said that he made sure he never disturbed the time lines by changing things, and he was strongly against anyone trying to alter the future. The slightest change, he knew, could have a catastrophic effect on events that would unfold in the years to come. ‘People must not be saved if we know that they are going to die,’ he’d told them. ‘Things that happen do so for a reason, and it’s God’s Will. I only jump to view and never to change.’
After a few minutes, while Regina listened to the burr of the phone ringing, Kaine swung his legs across under the sheets to the edge of the bed and sat up.
Finally, after the phone had rung for quite some time, Raffious picked up on the other end. With very little small talk, Regina got straight to the point.
She explained in full about Jenny, Rex, the Silver Sword, and the Priest. Raffious replied that he was extremely shocked--‘a child, you say?’ were his exact words--but he went on to say that, even concerning this horrific situation, he couldn't interfere. To do so would most certainly change the future in an unpredictable way.
‘But millions will die!’ Regina cried. ‘Rex doesn’t deserve to win--he’s evil!’
‘I know, Regina that you do not agree with me, but you know my beliefs. I am so sorry, but I just cannot help! You may think that not telling the church about the priest will, in the future, cause the release of werewolves and condemn millions of humans to a certain death. But that is not necessarily true. Other things will happen that may also impact on it too, I am sure!’
He sighed. ‘Regina you know I am very fond of you and your husband, don't you? Please take my word for it, the future will not be altered by this one action. Give my regards to Kaine for me. Bye for now, then,’ and he hung up.
She stared at her phone, surprised. This behavior was very strange. She wondered if maybe he had known more than he was letting on somehow, as he had never done that before in all the time she had known him.
Dropping her phone on to the sheets, she turned to tell Kaine, but he wasn’t there. He had just walked out of their bedroom to get dressed. She was about to shout out something to let him know what Raffious had said, but then found herself drifting into deep thought over the phone call that she had just had. Perhaps I might be able to contact the priest myself, she considered. Would Raffious be mad at me, though? She suddenly realized that she had never seen him angry—and something inside told her strangely that she never wanted to either.
A few minutes passed, and then the silence was broken by the sound of a glass smashing violently against the floor.
‘Are you okay?’ she shouted out, still sitting upright in bed.
Kaine appeared in their doorway, ‘It was just a glass,’ he said with a smile as he was scrolling through his iPad, checking for messages.
The smile was replaced by a look of horror. ‘Look! This sounds like a vampire attack!’ he said in an shocked voice. He could hardly believe that events were beginning to happen so quickly.
The main headline read,
‘FOUR LOCAL MEN MURDERED BY MYSTERIOUS BEAST’
Sitting down next to his wife on her side of the bed, he held his iPad out in front of her so she could see it.
It read, ‘Four local men were savagely murdered in the center of Brighton in the early hours last Sunday morning. Eyewitnesses have reported seeing a woman who was covered in blood leaving the scene in a local taxi. The men, believed to be a group of friends in their late thirties, were all savagely torn to bits. Police refuse to give out any further information at this stage. Police urge that until this attacker is caught, people sh
ould not go out at night.’
‘That woman who was seen covered in blood might be our Jenny,’ Kaine said, glancing into Regina’s eyes.
She nodded. ‘Yes it sounds like it. How terrible for those poor men who had tried to help her,’ she added.
Kaine stood up leaving Regina holding the iPad. ‘I must find this taxi company. Someone there might have a clue to where she is now. She might have taken the taxi to her own house,’ he said.
Regina interrupted him. ‘If so, aren’t the police likely to be there? I think there might be a better solution; I think we should check the local hospitals first to see if she hasn’t been admitted into one of them.’
Kaine nodded in agreement. ‘Don't you know someone in Maidstone Hospital, sweetheart? Maybe you could see if they could check admissions from the Brighton areas for us without raising too much attention.’
‘Yes I can, her name is Christine,’ she replied as she reached down and picked up her mobile again. She started to dial Christine’s number as Kaine walked across through another doorway leading into their en-suite bathroom.
‘What should I say to her though, darling? That we are looking for someone called Jenny? She must be thirty-three, I guess, as you said the baby was given to the orphanage in 1981,’ she said.
‘Is Christine, one of us?’ he asked, ‘us’ meaning ‘vampire’. He doubted it because Christine worked in a hospital, unless she was scheduled exclusively on the night shift that is.
‘She isn’t, darling,’ she replied--at the same time as he asked the question, reading his mind before the words came out of his mouth.
‘Tell your friend to look in her records for someone who has two marks on her neck. She’s probably very shook up too and…oh! By now, if she’s been turned of course, she might be very violent. I remember when you were bitten; it lasted a fortnight, the turning stage. You went through stages of being really violent and very sick, with rapidly fluctuating blood pressure, and you said you had very painful headaches. Maybe they put h…’
He was just going to say maybe the hospital had put her in a ward for crazy people, but Regina held up her hand to silence him; Christine had just answered.
Kaine was stopped in mid-sentence. He hated being cut short, but thought, oh well, I’ll just leave it to her, as Christine was her friend, women talking to women and all that.
He walked back into the bathroom and started to wash and groom himself. When he had finished, he then wrapped vampire super-flexible skin wraps around his lower arms before rubbing super-UV-resistant oil into his face and neck. This fantastic, life-saving oil somehow allowed vampires to be able to walk out in the direct sunshine for a couple of hours before the pain started.
Once he’d finished, Kaine walked out of the bathroom carrying extra oil with him. He put it inside the inner pocket of a jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair at the end of the bed. As he did though, he was distracted by his wife’s mirror, which was on her dressing table. He wrinkled his nose in disgust; he thought the thing was hideously ugly. Quite pointless actually, keeping something which humans used to look at themselves in, especially when vampires can’t see themselves in it, he thought.
Then he walked across to the other side of the bedroom, into their walk-in changing room, and opened his cupboard door. All the doors in this room were hand-carved from oak, which he had constructed himself. He thoroughly enjoyed woodwork, making things like coffee tables, doors, picture frames, and staircases. Centuries before, he had been known to make cartwheels too. The cupboards in this room were slightly too low for him though, but he had been tied to the height he could work to because of the low ceilings in the building when they had moved in.
There in the cupboard, hanging lifeless but ready for action, was his battle gear.
He took out the armored trousers and gave them a once-over. To the naked eye, they looked as if they might have been made from leather, but they weren’t. They were actually created from a new material known only to but a few. It was called Nanolymer, the results of years of top-secret testing which a friend called Laouse Gerhad had been doing. He studied Macromolecular Materials and Engineering in Austria, and worked there in a secret lab, inventing super-strong fibers for battle clothing.
‘The material will not stop a .50 caliber bullet from a thousand yards, but werewolf claws? Maybe. Machine gun bullets, yes, but for a limited time. Better not stand where you can be shot,’ was Laouse's advice to him when he had gone there personally to pick the clothes up.
After putting on his trousers, he took out his vest and put that on too. It was made using the same fibers as his trousers. Then he slipped on his Nanolymer imitation of a pure-white silk shirt, which looked stunning on his well-sculpted physique. It was so good, in fact that you couldn’t tell the difference at all from real silk. It had long, sharp pointed collars and a subtle soft shine throughout.
Next, he reached in and took out his jacket before walking back into their bedroom, As he put it out flat on the bed just below his pillow, he remembered that earlier he had stupidly put his face oil in the wrong jacket. He cursed as he walked over to the chair where his other jacket was.
‘Any news yet from your friend?’ he asked, glancing across and seeing that Regina had put her phone down. Quite unusual for her; she could natter for hours, he thought.
‘Not yet baby. And I don't natter!’ she said, reading his thoughts.
Regina glanced over at him and smiled, liking what she saw. ‘Be patient, darling. If Jenny is in a hospital, Christine’s computer will show her,’ she said. Suddenly, seeing Kaine standing there in his battle gear, she felt deep physical stirrings.
‘Wow, darling,’ she purred. That shirt looks ever so nice on you, by the way Come over here and let my fingers slide up your back; they are dying for a little pleasure with their loved one.’
Kaine smiled apologetically, but not without longing in his eyes. ‘Sorry, I can’t. I must go downstairs and get ready,’ he said, not letting on that really all he wanted to do was rip his clothes off again and dive into bed with his gorgeous redhead wife.
She frowned. ‘Its 9am, baby. Surely if Jenny is in a Brighton hospital, it’s better for you to get there after five when it’s dark,’ she said hoping to be able to persuade him to come back to bed.
But it didn’t work.
‘Sorry, but we have to be ready in case the phone rings. We don't know what will happen, and my biggest fear is that those freaks in the government’s secret vampire testing department will turn up before we do. If and when Jenny’s fangs show, it’s sure to trigger their alarms. You must get up…’
Regina’s mobile started playing its melody again in the middle of his sentence, and he sighed.
‘Hang on darling, it’s Christine,’ she said, as she slid her legs out of the bed and sat up to take the call.
She answered it and almost immediately looked puzzled and shocked. At her husband’s silent request for more information, she let Kaine join in by telepathic transfer through her mind. She repeated what she had just heard from Christine to bring him up to speed.
She spoke aloud to her friend. ‘So you say that there’s a woman that fits our description and she has holes in her neck, but her name is Becky, not Jenny?’
‘That’s right--but get this. Her friend who was with her in the ambulance is called Jenny. What is all this about anyway? This hasn’t got anything to do with those murders in town last Saturday night, has it?’ she asked, deeply inquisitive.
‘No, of course not. But what made you think that anyway?’ Regina replied, gazing at Kaine with her eyebrows raised.
‘Well, it says here on the screen that this Becky woman is still travelling to the hospital in the ambulance. Upon preliminary checks, she has very deep nasty lacerations on her left hip and outside right bicep. The weird thing is though, there are two deep holes that appear to be quite infected in her neck, one above the other. The ambulance man who is with her put in his notes that the best way to
describe them is that they looked like bite marks from a vampire movie,’ Christine said with a nervous laugh in her voice.
‘Ah. Weird. No, it was just a fight in town, which I am doing a piece on for a local newspaper,’ Regina replied.
