01 - Underworld

by Greg Cox

  Viktor and his fellow Council members perched on craggy stone pillars, like a flock of evil gargoyles looking down in judgment upon the floor of the crypt. Their luxurious velvet robes contrasted sharply with the dismal surroundings. They muttered darkly among themselves as a trio of armored Death Dealers dragged Lucian into the center of the crypt.

  The scowling vampire warriors forced him to his knees. His body, already bruised and aching from the guards’ rough treatment, was chained to the floor. The cold stones sent a chill through his bones, and he trembled despite himself. He was sore and hungry and thirsty, having been given neither food nor water since his capture. Despite this, he feared more for Sonja and her baby than for himself.

  A horrified gasp caught his ears, and he looked up to see Sonja only a few feet away, suspended above him in some diabolical torture device. Her once-pristine gown hung in tatters on her slender frame. Iron and leather restraints held her fast, stretched cruelly against her flesh. Her snowy vampiric eyes were rimmed with red, and crimson tears ran in torrents down her smooth white cheeks. Lucian could not bear to see her mistreated so. Snarling like a mad dog, he tugged uselessly against his heavy chains.

  Yet he and his princess were not the only prisoners in this forsaken place. To his dismay, he saw his fellow lycanthropes being herded into an iron cell by a superior force of sword-wielding Death Dealers. The confused servants yelped and whined piteously as the vampire soldiers locked them behind a swinging metal door. The iron bars of the cage were laced with silver alloy, the better to trap the distraught lycans inside.

  Lucian’s heart broke for his people. It was not just that they should be punished for his crime, if crime it was. His anger rose, supplanting any lingering fears for his own safety.

  Soren, Viktor’s brutal overseer, stepped forward, sporting a black beard he would eventually discard in the centuries to come.

  He uncoiled a long silver whip, its gleaming links exquisitely crafted in the semblance of human vertebrae.

  Lucian braced himself for the blow he knew was coming, yet no preparation could steel him against the searing pain as the silver whip viciously lashed his naked back again and again. The sculpted vertebrae made ribbons of his hide, burning his skin even as they sliced through his defenseless flesh, paring it to the bone. The pain was unendurable…

  In her iron prison, Sonja flailed against her bonds and shouted desperately at Viktor and his ghoulish comrades. “Nooo! Leave him be!” she cried out on Lucian’s behalf. “Stop it! Stop!”

  But the lashes kept coming. Behind him, over the thunderous cracks of the whip, his lycan brothers and sisters went berserk, enraged to see one of their own kind tortured. Though caged, they threw themselves against the silver-tainted bars, growling like the untamed beasts within them. Without the moon’s liberating glow, they could not shed their human guises, yet they raged like creatures of the wild, rending their crude woolen garments and gnashing their teeth. Angry curses gave way to lupine howls and roars as the pack voiced their primeval wrath against their one-time masters.

  We will never forget this night, Lucian vowed, even as the merciless whip shredded his flesh anew…

  In the lycan infirmary, Lucian looked on with concern as Michael Corvin spasmed in pain on the upright examination table. His head snapped from side to side, and anguished groans erupted from his cracked and bleeding lips, as though he were being flayed alive by some invisible tormentor.

  Whatever can be wrong with him? Lucian wondered, not without a twinge of pity for the unlucky American. The enzyme he’d been injected with could not provoke this reaction. It was possible that these were the early throes of Michael’s first full metamorphosis, yet he rather doubted it. Lucian had witnessed the rebirth of many a virgin werewolf, and these did not resemble the wrenching pangs of a lycanthropic transformation. Despite his obvious discomfort, Michael’s skin and bones remained distinctly human.

  I wish Singe were here, Lucian thought, wondering what had become of the old Austrian scientist, whom he had assigned to keep watch over the vampires’ mansion. It had been several hours since he had heard from Singe and his contingent of lycan soldiers, and Michael looked in need of expert medical treatment. In theory, Lucian had extracted all the blood he needed from Michael, but he preferred to keep the young American alive. Michael was now a brother lycan after all.

  The youth twisted and groaned on the table, lost in some hellish nightmare Lucian could not begin to envision.

  Their vicarious blood lust satisfied at last, Viktor and the Council members exited silently from the crypt. They pounced effortlessly from their granite perches, then wound their way through an arched stone entrance. Their velvet robes rustled like cobwebs as they departed, and a heavy oaken door slammed shut, trapping Lucian inside the gloomy torture chamber.

  Bloodied and exhausted, he collapsed onto the floor, which was now wet and sticky with his blood. Is this the end? he wondered, praying that the torment was finally over. Perhaps Viktor would be content with Lucian’s destruction and spare Sonja and the others. He could not imagine that even the haughty Elder could condemn the beautiful princess forever, let alone her unborn child.

  The scream of protesting metal reverberated nearby, echoing throughout the cavernous chamber. What? Lifting his head, Lucian spied two grim-faced Death Dealers wrestling with a heavy iron wheel mounted against the wall. The corroded wheel did not want to move at first, but the combined strength of the two vampires finally proved enough to crank the wheel in a clockwise direction.

  As a result, time worn metal gears began to squeak and grind against each other. Panic flooded Lucian’s ashen face as he realized what the guards intended. Sonja also grasped what was transpiring. Her frightened eyes stared into his, terror-stricken.

  Please, no, he begged silently, his parched throat too dry to speak, but the relentless gears kept on grinding. Directly above Sonja’s head, a massive wooden hatch slowly creaked open. A fiery sun was carved into the underside of the oaken hatch, with a grinning death’s head at its center.

  Thunder boomed loudly outside the castle. Cold rain poured down through the open shaft, along with a deadly ray of misty sunlight.

  No, not the sun! Not on her! Lucian lunged forward desperately, and the mighty chains snapped taut, holding him back. The iron shackles cut savagely into his flesh, yet he barely noticed the pain. He strained with all his might, working himself into a lather of blood and sweat, but there was not a damned thing he could do to save the woman he loved.

  He could do nothing but watch as the first blood-red lesions appeared, popping and snapping across Sonja’s delicate white skin. The unsparing sunlight shined down upon his princess’ vulnerable flesh, which began to melt and liquefy as though she were being bathed in acid.

  “Noooo!” he screamed hoarsely, his raspy cry of despair joining hers in one final, excruciating moment of communion…

  Lucian watched in spellbound fascination as a single tear coursed down Michael’s cheek. Where is he now? the lycan commander wondered. What is he experiencing? He felt an unsettling and inexplicable kinship with the tortured American. There is more here than mere bodily pain. He grieves as though his heart were breaking.

  His gaze remained fixed on Michael’s unseeing eyes, as the American suffered beneath the illusory slings and arrows of whatever unseen demons haunted his mind.

  Lucian shuddered uncontrollably on the floor of the medieval crypt, drained of tears and emotion. Several hours had passed, and the blood beneath him had long since dried. The killing sun had departed at last, and pallid starlight poured down through the open ceiling shaft.

  Sonja was dead. All that remained of his beloved princess was a lifeless gray statue of charred bone and ash. Her powdery arms were raised above her in a futile effort to fend off the fatal daylight. A look of anguished sorrow, for both herself and her unborn child, was baked upon the statue’s agonized features. Only a single metallic glint added a touch of color to the bleak gray figure: Sonj
a’s crest-shaped pendant, still clasped around her carbonized throat.

  The heavy wooden doors slammed open, admitting a howling wind into the desolate chamber. The furious gusts tore at Sonja’s crumbling remains, causing her to disintegrate before Lucian’s eyes. He sobbed violently as her ashes swirled past him like autumn leaves. Within seconds, not a trace of his beloved remained.

  Two Death Dealers entered, the larger of the pair bearing a huge, two-handed axe. A ponderous stone chopping block was slid across the floor, and Lucian’s head was forced ungently into the bloodstained grooves, which bore the doleful scent of many prior victims of the headman’s axe. Sonja’s death was not enough, he realized. Viktor demanded his life as well.

  This came as no surprise.

  The stately Elder entered behind the executioners, garbed in somber hues of mourning. Long-faced and solemn, he made his way across the chamber to the now-empty torture device that had recently held the departed princess. Of necessity, his polished boots crunched on the minute bits of charred bone that were all that was left of the beauteous and loving Sonja. If the dry, crackling noises troubled him, his dour face bore no evidence of it.

  Ignoring Lucian completely, he bent low and gravely fished the shining pendant from the ashes. His eyes watered briefly, and a look of genuine grief flashed across his face, but it passed quickly as his aristocratic countenance reassumed a cold, distant expression. Rising from Sonja’s ashes, he turned toward Lucian at last. Icy contempt and hatred smoldered in his eyes.

  His callous inhumanity inflamed Lucian, and he matched Viktor’s baleful gaze with a red-hot look of his own. Lucian’s blood surged volcanically within his veins. “You bastard!”

  He pounced at Viktor like the wolf he was, but unyielding chains jerked him back once more. The outraged Death Dealers fell upon him at once, bludgeoning his lacerated body with devastating kicks and blows. Fists and feet shod in forged metal plating crashed against him like a rain of meteors until his battered form dropped back onto the damp stone floor, panting and gasping.

  But though his body lay defeated, his unquenchable fury still burned like the eternal fires of hell. “I’ll kill you,” he croaked through broken and swollen lips. “I’ll kill you, you bloodsucking devil!”

  Viktor stepped forward and grabbed his hair. He savagely yanked Lucian’s head back so that he could stare into the lycan’s pulped and bloody face. Viktor’s regal face wrinkled in disgust.

  “For you, death will come slowly. I can promise you that.” A sadistic smile revealed his heinous intentions. “Forget the axe,” he instructed his men. “Fetch me my knives.”

  At this moment, above the open ceiling shaft, the full moon slid into view from behind a bank of billowing storm clouds. The invigorating rays of the celestial lunar orb, god and goddess to Lucian and his clan, shined down upon him, and he felt the Change begin. His blood-streaked eyes dilated dramatically as the color jaded from his vision, giving way to the blurry, black-and-white perspective of a wolf. Renewed strength flooded his weary sinews as his body gained size and weight in the space of a heartbeat. Coarse black fur sprouted from his hide, hiding the ugly welt marks on his back. His hearing and sense of smell heightened immeasurably, so that he could practically taste the alarm in Viktor’s blood as the Elder suddenly grasped his mistake.

  You never should have let the moonlight find me, Lucian thought vindictively. Now my power is at its peak!

  The transformation took place in an instant, and it was as a complete werewolf that he lunged once more at his persecutor. This time, the iron chains snapped before his inhuman strength, and he leaped at Viktor, his outstretched claws preceding him. With a single swipe of his shaggy arm, he snatched the gleaming pendant from Viktor’s grasp.

  Viktor recoiled from the werewolf’s claws, stumbling backward across the crypt. He bumped into the iron bars of the adjacent cell, provoking a ferocious roar from within. The bestial noise alerted him to danger, and he threw himself away from the cell only seconds before a hairy arm clawed at him through the rigid metal bars.

  He whirled around, stunned to discover that every one of the lycan prisoners had become a full-grown werewolf. The cramped cell was now packed with growling, snapping monsters, trying like hell to chew their way through the confining iron bars. The musky scent of a score of fur-covered werewolves filled the dank, unwholesome atmosphere of the torture chamber.

  While Viktor blinked in surprise, the two Death Dealers charged at Lucian from across the room. Broken chains dangled from his wrists like decorative streamers, and he spun about with preternatural speed, sending the heavy chains slicing through the air at the oncoming warriors. The chains smacked loudly against his enemies’ midsections, shattering their ribs.

  An almost human smile distorted his wolfen snout. It felt good to be at the other end of the whip…

  Heated shouts came from outside the crypt. Lucian moved to throw the heavy wooden doors shut, but he was too late. A squad of additional Death Dealers poured into the chamber, clutching silver-plated swords and pikes. “Get him!” Viktor shouted to his soldiers. “Kill that treacherous cur!”

  There were too many of them. Even in wolfen form, Lucian could not stand against so many foes, not while his lupine allies still struggled to free themselves from their hateful cell. His eyes searched frantically for an escape route, coming to rest upon a tinted-glass window recessed in a dark alcove more than twenty feet above the floor. Eureka! he thought gratefully.

  It was a long way up, but his powerful hind legs were sufficient to the task; exploding into motion, a single pounce landed him on the narrow stone ledge beneath the alcove. For a moment, he lingered on the limestone shelf, silhouetted against the darkly tinted glass. He looked back upon the ash-strewn site of Sonja’s hideous demise, and he clutched her tiny pendant as if it was the most valuable treasure on earth.

  Then he turned his murderous gaze upon Viktor himself, as the tyrannical Elder cowered behind his horde of vampire warriors. Someday, the werewolf’s hate-filled eyes assured him, you will pay for what you have done to my princess and my people.

  Crossbows laden with silver bolts aimed upward at Lucian, and he realized he could tarry no longer. Swiftly turning his back on the dungeon below, he dived headfirst through the blackened window. Shards of broken glass, flashing darkly in the moonlight, exploded outward as he fell through the air toward the ground below. Mercifully, he saw that the oppressive dungeon was located directly beneath the castle’s outer wall. The open forest beckoned before his eyes.

  Fragments of black glass rained down upon the rocky soil outside the fortress. Lucian hit the ground on all fours, then sprang up on two legs, standing as a man did despite the hairy pelt covering his body. He howled triumphantly at the savior moon even as angry cries and tumult erupted from behind the grim gray walls of the vampires’ castle.

  Behind him, the sinister fortress loomed ominously amidst the craggy Carpathian Mountains; before him, an impenetrable forest of dense mountain pines held out the promise of safety and freedom. He loped full tilt toward the sheltering woods.

  The winter night was broken by the heated cries and pounding footsteps of a brigade of Death Dealers stampeding out through the castle’s gate. The irate vampire warriors chased after the werewolf, hurling threats, curses, and unheeded commands at his fleeing back. Armor clanked loudly amid the towering pines, and silver crossbow bolts whistled through the air, coming to rest in the trunk of a bushy fir tree only inches from Lucian’s head.

  He ran from his determined pursuers as fast as aching hind legs could carry him. Clutching Sonja’s precious pendant in his hairy paw, he escaped madly from his wretched past into the unglimpsed future…

  Michael’s eyes rolled back into place as the nightmarish visions let him loose at last. He blinked groggily and took several deep, ragged breaths before looking up into Lucian’s watchful eyes. The bearded lycan regarded Michael with obvious curiosity and concern; he had no idea that Michael had just lived
through the most harrowing hours of his life.

  Michael felt sick to his stomach. I understand now, he realized numbly. “They forced you to watch her die. Sonja. That’s what started this war.”

  Lucian’s jaw dropped. He looked as if he’d just been hit by Selene’s Jaguar all over again. The crest-shaped pendant—Sonja’s pendant—glittered upon his chest. “How do you know this?” he asked in an awestruck whisper.

  “I’ve seen it,” Michael confessed. “Your memories. As if I were actually there.” Obviously, Lucian’s bite somehow had transferred more than just the virus that caused lycanthropy. “But why? How could he do that to her?”

  Lucian’s voice took on a bitter edge. “I was just a slave, of course, and she… she was Viktor’s daughter.”

  His daughter? Michael’s brain scrambled to make sense of all this new information. Selene had spoken highly of Viktor, claiming that he had saved her life after the werewolves killed her family. Could this possibly be the same vampire who had condemned his own daughter to death?

  “They kept lycans as slaves?”

  Lucian nodded. He slumped back against the edge of a rough-hewn lab counter, clearly shocked to be having this conversation. “We were their guardians during the daylight hours, the hellhounds of ancient lore. At one time, we had run wild, stalked by the vampires’ relentless Death Dealers, who feared that we would incite the mortals’ fury against both lycan and vampire alike, but by the fifteenth century, when Sonja and I dared to love each other, we had been thoroughly domesticated. We protected the vampires by day, and in return, they took us in, fed us, clothed us, and kept us under lock and key during the nights of full moon, when our unchecked depredations might have endangered us all.”

  He sighed, remembering. “It was an age of distrust and superstition. Suspected werewolves were being burned alive throughout Europe, while innocent corpses, and some not so innocent, were being staked and beheaded by fearful priests and peasants. We were forced to work together to survive, but they took advantage of the situation.”