by Gaja J. Kos
Just as she had no commands to follow, save for those Cornelius had handed out.
Somewhat to her surprise, the lead vampire was fighting just two blocks south from where she now roamed, holding his own sector. Why she had expected him to watch everything from a distance, Ileana couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was his old-world, polished appeal, giving the impression of an aristocrat who monitored his soldiers from the safety of the sidelines, not the air of someone who didn’t mind being elbow-deep in gore and blood.
Whatever it was, she really should have known better than to judge someone based on their appearance. One didn’t become the head of a major city chapter without being ruthless.
And yet the display of such cold, lethal violence as she’d glimpsed when Cornelius had thrown himself into the turbulent waves of battle had taken her by surprise. There hadn’t been even a sliver of humanity left in the vampire’s piercing eyes as he gave his last order before all she saw was the glint of his dark red hair, echoing the moonlit crimson of the blood he went to spill.
A shiver crawled down her spine. She leaped over two parked vehicles, then turned left.
More animal than man. That was what Cornelius had been hiding behind his elegant appeal all these decades.
A savageness, terrifying enough to shake even her.
But at the same time, Ileana was glad. That was precisely the kind of force the allies needed to bring an end to this madness.
She only hoped she and Cornelius would never face each other from opposite sides.
Skirting around a corner, Ileana sliced up two vampires with her knives without as much as a single thought, then ran forward the instant their lifeless bodies fell on the ground. Scouts or stragglers, she really didn’t care which. Her mind was already hooked on the growing scent of vamps, now accompanied by a visual.
Shadowed silhouettes crowded the street up ahead. Rogues. All of them. Except—
Ileana snarled as she spotted a familiar, muscular form the moment before his scent reached her.
Ian.
Motherfucker, she thought, the anger inside her rising to dangerous levels.
The glawackus wasn’t attacking the vamps. He was speaking with them.
She bared her canine teeth, her nails instinctively lengthening into claws, but she reeled them back in and readjusted her grip on the blades. Whatever grief the asshole had with her and her daughter, it was no excuse for his actions. No excuse for letting murderers walk.
Quick on her feet and thankful for being downwind, Ileana ran through the shadows. She aimed for the right edge of the group, inching ever closer, when the shifter turned around and lunged, effectively intercepting her path.
She sliced at him with her knife, a thin, red gash appearing across Ian’s forearm where the skin parted. She wanted to follow up with another strike, but the glawackus swung his fist at her head, forcing her to duck.
Not what she had in mind, but she wasn’t going to let a gifted opportunity go to waste, either.
So as fast and as hard as she could, she punched him in the gut, then rammed the butt of her hand into the bastard’s nose. Bones crunched and blood dripped down his mouth and chin, the wetness of it touching Illeana’s skin briefly before she pulled away and growled.
“What the fuck are you doing, Ian?” She spun him around and pressed a blade to his thick neck, all the while keeping an eye on the vampires who still lurked a short distance away.
They hadn’t made a move yet, but she knew better than to drop her guard around the assholes.
“You fucking bitch,” Ian squeezed through gritted teeth, although he’d stopped struggling the instant blood welled beneath the sharp edge of her knife.
“I’ll ask this just one more time. What. The fuck. Are. You doing.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Trent. He doesn’t want to execute vampires on sight. They’re only lashing out because they don’t want the claws of death looming over them for the rest of their immortal lives.”
Ileana snorted. “My daughter isn’t making them slaughter humans.”
“But the fear of the abomination that she is, does.”
She sighed, moving them both deeper into the shadows and the remote safety of having solid concrete behind her back and the vamps in full sight. “Ian, Ian, Ian, have you been hanging out with the Vedmaks?”
He flinched. Slightly, but it was there.
She pressed the edge of her knife deeper into his skin, drawing just a small amount of blood, and clicked her tongue. “You told them where to find me, didn’t you?” She let her left-hand claws elongate, the tips sinking into the glawackus’s skin. “Sadly, I must inform you that your buddies aren’t around any longer. But I can reunite you with them, you know, if that’s what you wish…”
Ian stirred, but before he could say anything, a flash of blond hair caught Ileana’s attention. Blond hair and a whole lot of gleaming, blood-stained fangs.
“Fuck,” she breathed as she watched Trent back away from the group of vampires. Whatever the fool wanted to sell them, they certainly weren’t buying.
One moment, the rogues were gathering around Trent like a murder of crows, the next there was nothing but a pale hand swinging through the air as the group knocked down the solitary higher-up. Faintly, Ileana heard Ian swear, but her eyes were on the massacre, on the pool of blood spreading from beneath the vampires’ feet—and on that pale limb, now lying severed a few feet away.
Nausea swam through her as the vampires feasted on one of their own, snarls and rabid grunts echoing off the tall buildings while the air grew thick with the stench of fear and irreparable loss.
Trent had sentenced himself to death with his treason, but, by the gods, he didn’t deserve to die like this.
As the slurping, tearing sounds started to subside, the first pair of eyes blinked in her direction.
Then the next, and the next, the cascade of hungry, eager gazes burning up like lighters at a concert.
Ian squirmed and she let him go, the glawackus catching himself on the wall as he struggled to regain his footing.
“We fight”—she pointed the tip of her knife at his chest—“but this is far from over.”
6
Munich
If this was a ripple, Liesl didn’t even want to think how the battlefield in Ljubljana must look like.
The police, the werewolves, and those vampires, opposing the bloody agenda of their brethren, had been fighting side by side for almost three hours now, engaging the enemy and trying to get out the humans who hadn’t already fallen victim to bloodlust. She’d heard only snippets of how they were faring in the other districts, but it wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe the situation wasn’t all that different from Maxvorstadt and Altstadt.
Not when the initial circle of vampires had already broken up formation, realizing their plan to entrap the citizens wouldn’t work quite as they had envisioned. It was then that the feeding frenzy came, carried on the wings of twisted self-preservation. The vamps knew there was only one way this would end for them, and by all accounts, they seemed adamant to go down with a bang.
The entire pedestrian zone was slick with blood and gore, the light gray stones almost unrecognizable. But with no small amount of relief, Liesl noticed it was the vampires’ bodies that were in majority, scattered about as if part of some macabre art installation.
She growled. As long as they kept falling, she really didn’t care how many sliced-up torsos she had to leap over. As for the innocents—she would mourn them when the city was purged of the last usurping vamp.
A series of gunshots boomed around her, the ones close by assaulting her sensitive werewolf hearing. But it was the rest—those she picked up from the background of Munich’s wide landscape—that made it worth weathering the noise. They assured her the force of Germany’s military was still tightening the ring, making their way from the outskirts at a remarkable pace and containing the fight to the dead center of the town.
Dead cent
er. How appropriate, she thought bitterly and, partially shifted, sank her claws into a vampire angling to ram right into the middle of a police-led group.
The warmth of blood trickled down her hands and forearms as she shredded his heart, cracking ribs in the process as easily as if they were dried sticks. The rogue vamps might believe themselves above humans, but they certainly seemed to forget that they weren’t the only predators in town.
Liesl flung the vampire aside with a sneer, then brought down two more, not even paying attention to the individual she carved up as long as she felt their life flee from the rotten shell.
Kill by kill, she made her way across the square, sensing Hans move in from the other side. Briefly, she wondered how Ludvig was doing, how Paul and the rest of the cubs were holding up at the house. But she doused the thoughts, the fears, before they could anchor themselves in her mind.
She sharpened her focus until her sector was the only thing that existed. Every one of them fighting on Munich’s streets needed to operate within the same codex—fight with single-minded efficiency and trust others to do their part.
It was their only hope of controlling this madness.
Right now, she wasn’t a mother or a wife. She was a Black were, seasoned in the art of battle. A soldier, willing to hold the line with her life.
And without any questions asked or doubts gnawing at the edges of her conscience.
Keeping her senses wide open despite the almost painful racket, she filtered through every bit of useable information she gleaned, while her body worked like a honed blade, cutting up those rogues foolish enough to set foot on these well-loved streets. Her son’s presence was a growing heat at her back, a rolling power of leashed strength, touched with a hint of gunpowder and steel.
Hans hadn’t shifted yet. He wasn’t a Black were, capable of morphing himself into a hybrid of wolf and man. But for him to choose this form—a part of her was relieved.
It meant they were still on top of the situation.
Their backs brushed against one another, sweat and heat mixing as the fabrics of their blood-soaked T-shirts touched. She listened to the heavy but calm breaths reverberating through her own body, her eyes scanning the corpses scattered like autumn leaves across the ground, then sweeping over the geared-up police engaging the hostiles at the edge of the perimeter.
It was then that she felt it. A vileness, polluting the air as if it infected the very atoms with its unnatural, lethal rot.
She spun around and looked at her son, her fears mirrored on Hans’s features with startling clarity.
The onslaught of slithering erosion could mean only one thing.
Ljubljana had failed.
They had failed to contain the chaotic magic.
7
New York
In all the years she had been a core member, Ileana had never seen the higher circles do anything but sit on their asses and talk themselves to death. Often she wondered what was even the point of having a group of supes oversee the world when they so rarely took action. The local packs were the ones who took the brunt of the work, the species meting out their differences among themselves, with perhaps only an order or two coming from above.
By all accounts, they were useless. Nothing but a bunch of supernatural politicians. Yet looking at the dim streets now, at the bodies piling up like so many heaps of carrion, she gladly admitted her mistake.
She loped past the dead vampires, monitoring the ten-block radius for any new threats. Nothing.
The New York chapter had done the impossible. They had succeeded where the Keepers had failed.
They’d protected their people.
Yet for all their strength and efficiency, there was something in which they were as powerless as the humans who had succumbed to the vampires’ bloodlust.
They couldn’t do a damned thing to prevent the wisps of ancient power rolling through Manhattan like early morning mist and seeping into every structure and being it could find.
In wolf form, Ileana cut through alleys and avenues, convincing herself that the erosion she spotted gnawing on the buildings and cracking the pavement beneath her paws had nothing to do with the festering presence of the chaotic taint.
Much like her own burning eyes.
With the vampires down and the rest of the higher-ups taking care of any stragglers, there was only one thing she wanted to do. One person she had to find before the crimson tears blinded her for eternity.
She dashed diagonally through Madison Square Park, following the growing whispers of the scent she would recognize anywhere. Even amidst crushing waves of the Upirs’ magic.
It was on the south side of the park that she saw him. A wolf with rippling fur that seemed almost as dark as hers under the blanket of night.
She shifted shape at the precise moment Garrison stood up on two legs, his human body riddled with cuts and bruises, but nothing too damaging. Nothing save for that line of blood, pooling in the corners of his eyes.
With a sob, Ileana threw herself in Garrison’s embrace and crushed her lips to his.
The werewolf hesitated only for a second, then his arms were snaking around her back, pressing her to his chest as if he never intended to let go. The kiss was wild and tender at the same time, a breathtaking blend of passion and innocence, and thoroughly filled with the long history of craving neither of them had acted on.
Until now.
Until it was already too late.
Tears mixed in with the blood trickling down her cheeks, and as her head spun—from Garrison or the oppressive magic, she couldn’t tell—she broke away from the kiss. She stifled a shudder and pressed her forehead lightly to his, savoring the touch.
“I wish we had more time.” Her words were a whisper, mixing with his warm breath. “I wish I hadn’t pushed you away.”
Garrison brushed the line of her jaw with his thumb, then lifted up her chin. She swallowed a cry as she saw the crimson, branched veins of blood marring his handsome face.
“You’re here now, Ileana. That’s all that matters.”
The heaviness of the Upirs’ taint grew heavier, suffocating. Ileana closed her eyes. Greeting death in the embrace of Garrison’s arms wasn’t such a bad way to go.
She forced herself to relax, determined to make the most of these final moments they still had together.
This would be the memory she would carry into the underworld with her.
Not fear. But love.
Just as she tasted blood on the back of her tongue, an ethereal wind brushed against her skin. It tangled with her damp strands of hair, soothing the heat, the pain, and Ileana gasped as her lungs filled with life.
With the presence she’d loved from the moment she heard the beat of her little heart.
Ileana smiled.
Rose.
Enter the New Kolovrat with Lotte Freundenberger
Werewolf. Coach. Lover. Spy.
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Pronunciation guide and dictionary
With the exception of Velin, all deities and creatures are based on actual Slavic lore.
As you may have noticed throughout the novel, names of gods can refer to actual mythological beings and their powers/positions, or they can be used as swear words—much like we do in our modern cultures.
Both will be explained below.
Baba Yaga: (pronunciation: bah-bah ya-gah) a witch who can show herself as a crow or maiden
Bauk: (pronunciation: boughk) a malevolent spirit, living in darkness
Belobog: (pronunciation: bell-oh-bogh) the god of good, the opposite of Chernobog (literal translation would be White God); can be used as a substitute for God in various expressions pertaining to gratitude, like Thank Belobog!
Chernobog: (pronunciation: chern-oh-bogh) the god of sh
adows and light, a destroying force (literal translation would be Black God); popularly used in the phrase Damn (someone/something) to Chernobog! which is the equivalent of our Damn (someone/something) to hell!
Črt: (pronunciation: chrt) the opposite of a Kresnik; more often than not also their enemy
Duševje: (pronunciation: douche-ew-yeh) the ultimate state of mind, in which one is able to sense souls; in Slovenian, the root of the word (“duša”) means soul
Gamayun: (pronunciation: gamma-yun) a creature with a woman’s head and a bird’s body, known to possess infinite knowledge
Jarilo: (pronunciation: yah-real-oh) the god of spring and vegetation; substitutes God! or Jesus! when used to express disbelief
Kresnik: (pronunciation: cress-nick) a protector who possesses magical strength; must be of a benevolent nature
Kolduny: (pronunciation: koll-doony) practitioners of (light) magic
Koliada: (pronunciation: kohl-ee-adah) divine personalization of the newborn winter infant Sun; as an exclamation, it substitutes Jesus!
Kolovrat: (pronunciation: koll-oh-wrath) Slavic symbol of the Sun
Koschei: (pronunciation: kosch-ey) an immortal being, whose body is separated from its soul
Lada: (pronunciation: lah-dah) the goddess of love and merriment
Likhoradka: (pronunciation: leek-whor-rad-kah) an evil spirit created by Chernobog who has the ability to possess people
Miška: (pronunciation: meesh-kah) a term of endearment; literally it means “small mouse”
Metulj: (pronunciation: met-ool) butterfly; in Slavic lore one of the symbols that represents vampires
Mokoš: (pronunciation: mo-kosh) goddess of fertility, the protector of women; one of her supposed consorts was Veles
